Summary: Richard Stallman’s talk from May 10th, 2021
Duration: 1 hour 36 minutes
License: Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA-ND 4.0)
We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux releases with Nitrux OS 2021.05.28, ALT Linux 9.1 “Simply”, and Makulu Linux Core 2021-05-28.
May you have a great week and stay safe!
In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new application and distribution versions release in the last few days. This keeps you informed with the latest developments in the Linux world.
It took about five minutes to unbox and set up the reMarkable from receiving the box from DHL to actually scribbling on the screen to verify that it worked. A bit longer if you count the inevitable account creation and so forth.
The tactile experience is great. The supply of pen tips included with the tablet concerns me a bit. Just how often are these used up?
Weight-wise, it’s comfortable. About the same weight as a Moleskine or similar-sized iPad.
I’m curious to see how much of a pain it is (or isn’t) using the reMarkable 2 with Linux. My first impressions aren’t stellar. But we’ll see if a few days of use help smooth out the rough edges. Making a template and uploading it, etc. were not hard but took a little fiddling and googling to figure out. Copying files over took trial and error, and the initial experience left something to be desired.
Collaborating and partnering with over 10 Linux distributors to make a seamless virtual desktop experience, Alex is CEO of shells.com, a new virtual desktop cloud computing solution that is simplifying the virtual desktop experience.
The platform lets anyone access their cloud computer from any device with a browser so you can have a Linux desktop on your Apple iPad or your Windows computer on your XBox!
The team are also the previous founders and operators of Private Internet Access, one of the world’s best and most trusted VPNs. This Slogging thread by Alex Lee, Justin Roberti, Golda Velez, Zlatan Todoric and Akasha Rose occurred in slogging’s official #amas channel, and has been edited for readability.
Yesterday I upgraded both of my laptop of their respective memory and wifi card. For Lenovo Thinkpad, I upgraded the memory from 4 to 6GB. For Acer Aspire One, I upgraded the wifi device from the nonfree to the free one that I had proven works with Trisquel. Here’s how I did it with pictures and some story. Now I can run Ubuntu and other operating systems smoother than ever.
In the May 2021 survey we received responses from 1,218,423,991 sites across 259,596,021 unique domains and 11,051,830 web-facing computers. This reflects a gain of 6.28 million sites and 112,000 computers, but a loss of 4.87 million domains.
nginx gained the largest number of hostnames, active sites, and computers this month; but also suffered the largest loss of 4.73 million domains. Its most notable gain was of 78,900 computers (+2.03%), which increased its leading share to 36.0%. It also continues to lead in the hostnames and domains metrics, while Apache is top in active sites.
Apache also maintains its lead amongst the top million websites, with a 25.4% share compared to nginx’s 22.9%. Cloudflare’s share of the top million sites is now up to 17.0% after increasing its presence by a further 3,090 sites, and Microsoft added 1,840 sites to bring its share up to 6.85%.
OpenResty saw the largest decrease of 8.10 million hostnames (-9.88%), which has taken its market share down to 6.06% (-0.7 pp). Microsoft also suffered a large loss of 6.92 million sites (-10.3%), which took its share down to 4.95% (-0.6 pp).
One of OpenResty’s most prominent users is Automattic, which uses it to serve millions of Tumblr microblogging websites that can be found under the tumblr.com domain – for example, icontherecord.tumblr.com.
Automattic is also responsible for the popular WordPress.com blogging service, where it instead uses nginx to serve millions of blogs. These WordPress-powered sites can either use custom domain names, or free blogs can be created directly under the wordpress.com domain – for example, catsbeingcats.wordpress.com.
The underlying WordPress blogging software reached its 18th birthday this month. Automattic continues to contribute to this open source project, and the software is freely available from wordpress.org, allowing anyone to download and install the software on other compatible web server platforms. Although Apache and nginx are recommended, any server that supports PHP and MySQL ought to be capable of running a WordPress site. Such is the popularity of WordPress, some hosting providers also provide one-click installers and other tools that make it easy to manage WordPress sites.
It’s unclear here where something went wrong… but boy did something *actually go wrong.* There is a long and storied history of Linux ISOs being legally distributed via BitTorrent by the copyright holder.
Stop using TLP, indicator-cpufreq, and powertop! This new package will blow your mind and SAVE POWER on ANY linux laptop!
Josh and Kurt talk about AI driven comments. We live in a world of massive confusion and disruption where what is true and false, real and fake, are often widely debated. As AI grows and evolves what does it mean for this future? We don’t really have any answers, but we ask a lot of questions. This isn’t easy, nor will it be solved quickly, but solving it is not optional.
Fedora Silverblue revisited, remapping the caps lock key in Wayland, and other musings.
The fourth 5.13 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “So after two small rc releases, the other show finally dropped, and rc4 is fairly sizable.”
Simple CPU throttling isn’t sufficient for cooling some NVIDIA Tegra devices running the upstream Linux kernel so thermal cooling integration into the device frequency “devfreq” scaling code is in the work for such high performance NVIDIA SoCs.
Various developers working on the NVIDIA Tegra / Arm Linux support found that some Tegra SoCs / devices are producing much more heat than others. The old ASUS Transformer TF700T with Tegra 3 SoC for example when running the mainline Linux kernel is found to be running very hot and the initial target of these new patches.
In recent months there has been a lot of Linux kernel patches for bringing up Alder Lake S and Alder Lake P while more recently the enablement patches for Alder Lake M low-power mobile has begun.
The Linux support bring-up for Alder Lake M has been trailing the ADL-S and ADL-P but not by much and in most cases the ADL-M amounts to adding additional PCI IDs.
So far in the mainline Linux kernel for Linux 5.13 there is Alder Lake M support with the intel_th PCI and USB DWC3 drivers but with the Linux 5.14 cycle this summer is when it looks like more of that initial enablement will happen.
A collation is a set of rules that defines how to compare and sort character strings in a database server. In this tutorial, we are discussing about an error faced during database restore on other server.
The read command is a built-in shell command for reading data from a file or keyboard.
The read command receives the input from the keyboard or a file until it receives a newline character.
SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) is a secure file protocol used to access, manage, and transfer files over an encrypted SSH transport session. Here SFTP only user means to create an account to access server via SFTP only. That user doesn’t have SSH shell access. This allows you a secure channel to provide limited access to specific files and directories.
This guide describes you to create SFTP only user without shell access on an Ubuntu and Debian systems.
Did you forget your MySQL database root user password? No worries! This step by step guide explains how to reset root password in MySQL 8 on Ubuntu 20.04 operating system.
The day-to-day tasks of the sysadmin are always different for everyone; however, there are simple tasks that are executed equally on managed systems. In the days when disk space was a risk factor in the administrator’s day, it was vitally important to locate the directory or filesystem to debug.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Synfig Studio on Deepin 20.2.
Nginx (Engine X) is a most popular, powerful and high-performance open-source HTTP web server and reverse proxy server with a scalable event-driven (asynchronous) architecture. It can also be used as a load balancer, mail proxy, and HTTP cache due to its speed, stability, feature-rich set, easy configuration, and low resource utilization.
We have crossed halfway through this series and by this time you might have a good understanding of what Vagrant does and how to use provisioners in vagrant.
Till now you are using prebuilt vagrant boxes downloaded from the vagrant cloud site. Some boxes are preconfigured to serve different purposes like the scotch box which comes with a LAMP stack, trusty64cdh which comes with a single node CDH Hadoop distribution. You can also create your box like the one mentioned and share it with the community or fellow geeks working with you on the same project.
Today we are looking at how to play Among Us on a Chromebook with GeForce Now – Epic Games. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
LibreOffice is a free and open-source office suite and often considered a good alternative to the Microsoft Office suite. It offers impressive features, a user-friendly interface, comprehensive, and compatible with MS Office files. Here we let you know how to install LibreOffice on RHEL based AlmaLinux 8.x or Rocky Linux 8.
Being a fork of Apache OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice also contains all the essential components need to deal with daily document and calculation needs. It comes with a Word file created called Writer, the spreadsheet program is known as Calc, which competes with Excel; for MS PowerPoint alternative it has Impress; the Base, a database administrator software tool and Draw program for drawing and diagram. Although both OpenOffice and LibreOffice are the same, LibreOffice is much popular because it receives frequent updates, which means new features and early bug fixing.
PHP, an acronym for Hypertext Preprocessor, is an open-source scripting language used in web development. PHP runs on the server-side and is the powerhouse behind many popular web-based solutions such as WordPress and Moodle.
On Ubuntu 20.04, PHP 7.4 is the version available in the default package repository at the time of this post. However, PHP 8.0 is the latest version of the PHP language.
In this tutorial, our focus will be on the installation of PHP 7.4 for Apache and NGINX web servers running on Ubuntu 20.04.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install ExpressJS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, ExpressJS is a minimal and flexible Node.js web application framework that provides a robust set of features for web and mobile applications.
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 ExpressJS web application framework on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
One of the primary roles of any systems administrator is viewing and analyzing log files. Web server log files from other Apache and Nginx can build up over time and examining them can prove to be a tedious and time-consuming activity. Thankfully, GoAccess can alleviate all that stress and enable you to seamlessly monitor and analyze web server log files.
Written in C programming language, GoAccess is an opensource, terminal-based real-time web log analyzer. It’s fast, interactive, and displays the logs in an elegant and intuitive fashion. It provides support for a wide variety of web log files including Apache, Nginx, Caddy, Amazon S3, and CloudFront to mention just a few. It can render the results in HTML format, JSON, and also generate a CSV report.
Have you forgotten your AlmaLinux or Rocky root user password, then here is the step-by-step tutorial to rest the root password using the command terminal.
AlmaLinux / Rocky are the two latest RedHat-based Linux distros meant to use for Servers as well as on Desktops. However, in case after some time you want to log in root user and you couldn’t remember its password then the only way is to recover the root password is by resetting it. Yes, we cannot get our old password at all, instead, we manually have to change it.
Fanatical aren’t a store we cover often but they’re actually great, and they currently have a few bundles going that you should check out if you need some new games this week.
With all the sales going often on the likes of GOG, Humble, Steam and more we’re never short of new experiences. Fanatical though, have also been around a long time now, previously known as Bundle Stars. Based in the UK, Fanatical offer up a store with tons of games and they do regular bundles too. We shall highlight in bold text the games that have Linux native builds available.
Does your Godot-made game or tool (published or work in progress) make you proud? Would you like to showcase it in the upcoming 2021 showreel? Please send us a short video of it!
One of Valve’s many open-source projects is GameNetworkingSockets as a basic transport layer for games to handle UDP-based messaging, P2P networking, encryption, IPv6, and other network handling functionality of particular use to games / game engines.
GameNetworkingSockets 1.3 was released on Sunday as the newest feature release. Notable with GameNetworkingSockets 1.3 is better performance thanks to a new fine-grained locking strategy to reduce locking contention. GameNetworkingSockets previously suffered from major locking contention issues that hampered its scalability especially across multiple threads. This long-standing issue with GameNetworkingSockets should now be addressed.
Signus: The Artefact Wars, originally a commercial release in 1998 was later open sourced in 2002 and it just got an updated re-release with all the data too. It’s similar to the Battle Isle series, which some of you will probably be a bit more familiar with.
“Earth sent a fleet of colony ships to a distant planet called Arkonis. When the fleet arrived, they found the planet inhabited by an alien race advanced beyond human comprehension. All attempts to communicate with the aliens failed and the colonists had no choice but to settle down on the planet. Their ships could not make another interplanetary journey. So they attacked the peaceful aliens.”
MechWarrior 5: Mercenaries, the first single player MechWarrior game for a long time has jumped from the Epic Store over to Steam and it runs well on Linux.
The Piepacker team gave us early access to take a look, so we took it for an initial spin and it worked perfectly on Linux. As long as you have a Chromium/Chrome based browser (Firefox support is to come).
Solus, a popular standalone Linux distribution has announced they’ve joined Open Collective as they attempt to pull in funding to push ahead with it.
Talking about their aims for the distribution, developer Joshua Strobl mentions how Solus has been on a “multi-year endeavor to build and curate a unique and modern desktop experience for home computing platforms”.
Now that Core is released, We are Hard at work on the new MakuluLinux flash Edition, We hope to have it ready for release soon, but enough Talk, lets take a look at the new Flash in the video below…
The release manager of openSUSE Leap is finishing up the release of Leap 15.3, but wants to keep contributors and developers informed about an early feature request deadline for the Leap 15.4 release.
Early feature requests are important since Leap is compatible with SUSE Linux Enterprise and the early feature request deadline for Service Pack 4 is June 26.
“This is very important to openSUSE Leap 15.4 contributors as 1/3 of Leap 15.4 binaries will be re-used with SUSE Linux Enterprise and therefore submit requests are accepted there,” wrote release manager Lubos Kocman on a project email list. “Just to clarify, this deadline is the same for everyone, be it a largest partner, community contributor or an employee.”
openSUSE Leap and Package Hub exclusive packages will have similar deadlines as described in the roadmap.
It’s a rationally acknowledged fact that openSUSE has a reputation for community-driven projects. Buckle up, here’s your chance to contribute to this community event! Since the inception of openSUSE.Asia summits, logos have perfectly illustrated the organizing country. Following the suit, a logo-designing competition has been organized for openSUSE.Asia Summit 2021, India.
The organizing team will send “Geeko Mystery Box” as a token of appreciation for the best logo design, voted on by the openSUSE Asia committee.
Red Hat’s Olivier Fourdan has landed the latest XWayland improvements into X.Org Server Git for primarily benefiting the NVIDIA proprietary driver stack.
The code pushed to X.Org Server Git today is adding the GLVND (OpenGL Vendor Neutral Dispatch Library) vendor to the XWayland screen. This change is ultimately about ensuring the proper GLX library gets loaded when using the XWayland EGLStreams back-end.
Kubernetes is turning 11, so I’ll be celebrating its birthday by giving you some open source tools that will help you cause chaos. Chaos engineering is part science, part planning, and part experiments. It’s the discipline of experimenting on a system to build confidence in the system’s capability to withstand turbulent conditions in production.
Before I start passing out the gifts, in this introductory article, I will explain the basics of how chaos engineering works.
Upstream will kick off Maintainer Week, a series of events we’re hosting alongside our pals at GitHub to celebrate the vital work of open source maintainers and highlight some of the heroes behind the movement.
Recently, Outreachy announced selected Interns for May 2021 to August 2021 round and we have 4 interns with us. This blog introduces them to the community. If you see them around, please welcome them and share some virtual cookies.
Outreachy is a paid, remote internship program that helps traditionally underrepresented people in tech make their first contributions to Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) communities. Fedora is participating in this round of Outreachy as a mentoring organization. We asked our Outreachy interns to tell us some things about themselves!
Java developers are usually required to take many actions before we can begin developing and deploying cloud-native microservices on Kubernetes. First, we have to configure everything from the integrated development environment (IDE) to build tools such as Maven or Gradle. We also need to configure the command-line tools used for containerization and generating the Kubernetes manifest. If we don’t want to spin up a Kubernetes cluster locally, we also must connect to a remote Kubernetes cluster for continuous testing and deployment.
Developers should spend less time on configuration and more time accelerating the inner-loop development cycle of building, testing, and deploying our applications. Ideally, we should be able to continuously develop applications in a pre-configured Kubernetes environment.
This article is a guide to configuring Java applications using Quarkus quick starts in the Developer Sandbox for Red Hat OpenShift. As you’ll see, using quick starts in the developer sandbox lets you focus on the inner loop of development, without needing to configure the Kubernetes cluster or development tools.
Whether you are an analyst, a business operations pro, an upwardly mobile team lead, or a senior executive, working with data is now a critical success factor to advancing your career. While hardcore data skills like being good at math and computer science are key, softer skills are equally important and sometimes harder to master.
Soft data skills involve being able to communicate your vision and persuade stakeholders with a compelling story. Unfortunately, most data science courses don’t teach these skills, which makes obtaining these types of skills a challenge.
However, I see in latest build of EasyOS that binary executables are still showing as mime type “application/x-sharedlib” in package ‘shared-mime-info’, though ‘file’ executable shows them as “ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable”.
Chased the cause down to the build using an older /usr/share/mime/packages/freedesktop.org.xml, instead of the one that comes with the ‘shared-mime-info’ package.
Also fixed a couple of other things…
A change rather than a fix… the keyboard layout and password entry in the initrd are now gtk GUI apps. That is, nice GUI apps before the switch_root to the main filesystem.
Previously, was only doing that for non-English builds, then not at all as Xorg was not working with the /dev/fb0 framebuffer — solved by rolling back to xserver 1.19.7, from 1.20.8.Note, in the EasyOS Buster-series had this problem, and compiled a very cutdown xserver 1.19.6 and made it into a PET. Used that to run GUI apps in the initrd.
Dubbed “Uma,” Linux Mint 20.2 will be the second major point release in the Linux Mint 20 series, which is derived from the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series and supported until 2025. Most probably, Linux Mint 20.2 will be based on Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS.
The even better news is that a beta version will be ready for testing as soon as mid-June, in about two weeks from the moment of writing this article, so we can have an early taste of the new features and improvements.
Enclustra, a company headquartered in Switzerland specializing in FPGA solutions, has recently announced the launch of the Mercury+ XU6 system-on-module based on Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ MPSoC.
The module is optimized for I/O-intensive applications with up to 294 user I/Os, up to eight 6/12.5 Gbps multi-gigabit transceivers, and available with six different variants of Xilinx MPSoC. The company also offers Mercury+ ST1 and PE1 baseboards for evaluation and early software development.
Genode OS as the from-scratch open-source operating system framework built atop a micro-kernel abstraction layer and various original user-space components is out with its version 21.05 update.
Given the amount of work being carried out by Genode OS and not just relying on the Linux kernel or a platform with existing device driver support, Genode for some areas is late to the party… Such as with today’s Genode OS 21.05 release now introducing web camera support. Genode OS 21.05 features initial web cam support that they began working on last year given the pandemic. This ended up being quite involved even with leveraging libuvc and libusb. They do have webcam support working now though including having developed integration for VirtualBox and QEMU.
When you use the name localhost in a URL, what does it mean? Where does the network traffic go when you ask curl to download http://localhost ?
Is “localhost” just a name like any other or do you think it infers speaking to your local host on a loopback address?
Huawei has been using the invites for its HarmonyOS event to tease upcoming products – first the Huawei Watch 3, then a new M-Pencil for the upcoming MatePad Pro 2 tablet and now the Huawei P50 series. The latest invite shows two circular camera bumps seen at an angle.
We have seen these bumps several times before in leaked renders and hands-on photos. They are supposed to house an impressive Sony IMX800 1” sensor, however, the trade sanctions and the delays they brought have caused Huawei to lose some of its thunder.
You get plenty of open-source web browsers available for Linux. Not just limited to chrome-based options, but chrome alternatives as well.
[...]
Nyxt is a keyboard-oriented open-source web browser available for Linux and macOS.
Of course, not every power user utilizes keyboard shortcuts, but this aims to cater the needs of users who prefer to navigate via the keyboard.
It is inspired by how the keyboard shortcuts in Vim and Emacs work — so if you are comfortable with those editors, the shortcuts will feel familiar to you.
Unlike mainstream web browsers, you do not have to navigate your way inside multiple settings and menu, you will get all the functionality that you need to access with a quick shortcut or a command.
In case you were wondering, it is web engine agnostic, but it currently supports WebEngine and WebKit.
So, it saves time and improves your browsing experience if you are a fan of navigating around using the keyboard.
It offers a fair share of useful features which I shall highlight below.
Firefox 89 has been in public beta testing since April 20th, when I took it for a test drive to get an early taste of the fresh new look called “Proton,” which Mozilla prepared for us in summer 2021. It took a little longer to release this version as Mozilla extended the beta testing cycle to 6 weeks instead of 4.
But it’s finally here, and you can enjoy the fresh new look that introduces simplified browser chrome and toolbar, a new tab design with floating tabs, streamlined menus, updated infobars and modals prompts, a refined color palette, a brand-new first-run welcome page, as well as a more consistent styling and lighter iconography.
No more installing additional extensions. You can get the Firefox Translation feature – right at the browser window natively. You can easily translate to English and other available languages. Here’s how.
Many projects in the LibreOffice community use IRC (Internet Relay Chat) to communicate. This is a real-time text-based communication protocol that’s popular amongst many free and open source software projects.
We are happy and pleased to welcome LibreOffice Handbooks printed version being published just yesterday. Now everyone can purchase them online at LuLu Store (the book store that established by Red Hat co-founder) and they are shipping to more than 200 countries worldwide. Schools, universities, governments, enterprises, Free Libre Open Source Software activists, individuals, teachers and students now can have these guide books for their computing activities with LibreOffice Writer, Calc, Impress and Base. Finally, for people switching from proprietary to free software, these are the books you are looking for. Finally, a ton of thanks and respects to LibreOffice Team for writing these great books. Happy reading!
ConvertiGo is a No-Code, Low-code platform for full-stack mobile and web application development. It helps developers to keep a huge amounts of time and money instead of waste them by writing and maintaining complex code.
ConvertiGo currently used by more than 150K developers worldwide, building enterprise class mobile apps.
I am starting a new blog series, for covering my GSoC’21 journey with GNOME Foundation. This is going to be an introductory blog where I will talk about the project on which I’ll be working this summer. Before we get started let me introduce myself to the folks reading from the GNOME planet. I am Nishit Patel, an undergraduate Computer Engineering student from India.
I began my pre GSoC journey back in November 2020 when I opened my first MR in tracker project. It was a small bug fix in the README.md file which I came across while setting up my local environment. Later, I began keeping a watch on the #tracker IRC and used to ask maintainers for help whenever I was stuck at something. Maintainers were very helpful and polite with their prompt replies even if I was asking some stupid question that was already addressed somewhere in the documentation. One thing that I noticed is it is better to first google, and check the docs before asking the question as it saves the maintainers precious time, and you also get to learn something new in the process.
A new release of the inline package got to CRAN today, following and further updating the recent update from earlier in the month. inline facilitates writing code in-line in simple string expressions or short files. The package was used quite extensively by Rcpp in the days before Rcpp Attributes arrived on the scene providing an even better alternative for its use cases. inline is still used by rstan and a number of other packages.
This release builds on and extends the work of the recent 0.3.18 release and tweaks some of the test. We cannot fully test all platforms used by CRAN so some times iterations such as this one are needed. The package was uploaded a few days ago, but it sometimes takes a few days to clarify changes over email to the CRAN maintainers whose work is still greatly appreciated.
We are happy to announce that Qt Online Installer 4.1.1 has been released today.
I don’t know where it’s likely to go better.
Technology Innovation Institute (TII), the applied research pillar of Abu Dhabi’s Advanced Technology Research Council (ATRC), today announced that it has joined Dronecode, a US-based non-profit run by Linux Foundation, to foster the use of open-source software on flying vehicles.
TII obtained membership in the global organisation through its Secure Systems Research Centre (SSRC).
Armed groups carrying out kidnapping for ransom are blamed for a series of raids on schools and universities in northern Nigeria in recent months, abducting more than 700 students for ransom since December.
We must ensure that rich companies and nations stop this destruction of life in the oceans, which not only impoverishes wildlife but also the coastal communities that are truly dependent on small-scale fishing for survival.
Recycling and manufacturing “green” medical supplies seems not to be an issue for environmentalists. But it should be.
Facing deunionization efforts and the existential threat of climate change, oil refiners in Beaumont, Texas, seek a fair contract.
As The Both of Me makes clear, the self-destruction of Appalachia has never ended.
Two years after the government first promised to abolish Section 21 “no-fault” evictions, tenants must wait some more.
Texas’ bill, and similar GOP legislation elsewhere, began as a knee-jerk reaction to the popularity among educators of the New York Times’ 1619 Project and right-wing media click-bait stories of the horrors of multicultural workshops and diversity training. Conservatives have lumped all these approaches to analyzing the dynamics of racism under the umbrella of “Critical Race Theory” (CRT) which Idaho has legally condemned for “inflame[ing] divisions on the basis of sex, race, ethnicity, religion, color, national origin, or other criteria in ways contrary to the unity of the nation”. When the legislative template for these bills was crafted it came to reflect certain novel aspects of the conservative mind as it has been shaped by evangelicalism, Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, Fox News, Trump, and Q-anon.
Texas’ HB 87 declares that the purpose of social studies education is to “develop each student ’s civic knowledge” of “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations of the American experiment”. The key word here is “the”, as in “the fundamental moral, political, and intellectual foundations”, strongly implying that there was some unity, some sort of consensus about moral and political principles at the founding. To view American society in 1776 as having anything approaching agreement about what constituted morality or the proper basis of government requires ignoring the deep factional fights within patriot ranks that eventually festered into America’s first party system, the many dissenting religious groups, and the views of the one in five Americans who were legally property. Lurking in this idea of “civic knowledge” is a mandate to consider only land-owning whites as constituting “the American experiment”.
Turning simple signature issues into a potential criminal matter would discourage people from voting.
The state legislation has been slammed by voting rights advocates nationwide—including President Joe Biden, who said that “it’s part of an assault on democracy that we’ve seen far too often this year.”
Tesla is building a factory in Texas to make some of its cars, but when it’s up and running, the cars made there may have to go on a roundabout journey to get to Texan buyers (via The Drive). Because of state laws banning car companies from selling directly to consumers, Tesla could end up shipping the cars from its Austin factory to other states, before they’re sent back to their Texan buyers. The state’s lawmakers were debating legislation that would have prevented the situation, but they’ve now missed their chance to pass it before they have to go on break until 2023 — the factory is expected to be completed by the end of 2021.
This is how America does regime-change propaganda, every time: lies.
These lies come from the regime that spends around half of all of the entire world’s military spending, and the regime that imprisons the world’s highest percentage of its subjects (or ‘citizens’). It’s the ‘land of the free’, and exports its ‘freedom and democracy’ everywhere.
And that’s how America does regime-change operations: by sheer lies.
Like all imperialism throughout history, it’s based on lies — propaganda. And, like in all imperialistic regimes throughout history, their public believe these lies, every time, time after time. They don’t learn the truth, because they’re never taught the truth. (Dissenters are suppressed, not hired. In any dictatorship, the financial incentives support the liars, not the truth-tellers.)
Rights groups say Malaysian authorities are ramping up the use of criminal investigations into journalists, protesters and opposition lawmakers to harass the government’s critics, shrinking the space for free speech and a free press in the Southeast Asian country.
While analysts from Amnesty International and Citizen Lab said they were unable to say who targeted Malcolm Bidali, the phishing attack mirrored others previously carried out by Gulf Arab sheikhdoms targeting dissidents and political opposition. It also would require access to confidential information stored by telecommunication companies typically only released to government or security force officials to be able to be useful as well.
U.S. President Joe Biden is headed Tuesday to Tulsa, Oklahoma, to commemorate the centennial of the Tulsa Race Massacre, a white mob’s terrifying 1921 destruction of a Black community that left 300 people dead and 10,000 homeless.
To this day, it is an episode in the country’s fraught history over racial violence that many Americans have little awareness of, even as the country grapples with a current-day racial reckoning to confront accusations of police abuse of minorities, racial economic inequity and contentious debates over newly enacted voting restrictions that critics say are aimed at curbing the turnout of Black and Hispanic voters to limit their influence.
At least at 4,100 students died while attending the schools, a National Comissión of Truth and Reconciliation report.
The big picture: The discovery of the Tk’emlups te Secwépemc First Nation children’s remains has renewed calls for the Roman Catholic Church to apologize for its role in Canada’s policy of the 19th and 20th centuries that saw Indigenous children removed from families to attend state-funded residential schools.
The discovery of the remains confirms the many comments from school survivors about children disappearing, he said.
“I think it speaks to those stories of those children who said, ‘There were always stories of these burials, and whatever happened to this kid who went missing in a supposedly random way,’ ” he said.
Illinois lawmakers took sweeping action Sunday to limit the use of seclusion and restraint in schools, following through on promises made after a 2019 ProPublica-Chicago Tribune investigation revealed that school workers had regularly misused the practices to punish students.
The House voted unanimously to pass legislation barring school workers from locking children alone in seclusion spaces and limiting the use of any type of isolated timeout or physical restraint to when there’s “imminent danger of physical harm.” The legislation requires schools that receive state funding to make a plan to reduce — and eventually eliminate — the practices over the next three years. Schools that develop plans more quickly can receive priority for new grant funding for staff training.
The Islamic Republic? George W. Bush? Both answers feel like evasions.
Dozens of people have died during the past month of demonstrations, which have been met with deadly attacks by the nation’s law enforcement.
Safe Orthopaedics (FR0013467123 – ALSAF), a company specialised in the design, manufacture and marketing of ready-to-use technologies for back surgery, with a particular focus on the treatment of emergency vertebral fractures, announced the judgment of May 28, 2021 rendered by the 3rd Chamber of the Judicial Court of Paris in the infringement case against Neo Medical.
Having discovered that the French and Swiss companies Neo Medical were importing and offering for sale on French territory products which, according to Safe Orthopaedics, reproduced the characteristics of the claims of one of its patents, Safe Orthopaedics sued the companies Neo Medical in front of the Paris Court of Justice for infringement and unfair competition.
The legal basis for compulsory licenses under Canadian Patent law is the Canadian Patent Act (hereinafter “Patent Act”) Chapter 9.
Additionally, Part 12 of Bill C-13 amends the Patent Act to permit the Government of Canada, upon the application to the Commissioner of Patents to make, construct, use and sell a patented invention to the extent it is necessary to respond to a public health emergency.
[...]
Section 19.2 of the Patent Act grants the patentee the right to appeal the Commissioner’s decision to the Federal Court, including application and remuneration. However, section 19.2 does not apply to section 19.4.
The new regulation grants the Federal Court the right to make an order requiring the Government of Canada or any authorized person to cease making, constructing, using or selling the patented invention only in a manner that is inconsistent with the granted authorization.
Glasgow can lay claim to many inventions that helped revolutionise the modern world: television, the steam engine, antiseptic and cash machines. One lesser-known invention is the chicken tikka masala.
Remember when Apple and Qualcomm were suing each other every day over alleged patent infringements? Apple was getting so desperate to find a source of 5G modem chips that it was willing to bet the farm on a 5G modem chip that Intel was developing even though it really wanted the component made by Qualcomm. So right in the middle of opening statements during a trial between the two firms, an announcement was made that changed everything.
Patent troll goes after both Apple and Qualcomm
Apple and Qualcomm said that they had reached a settlement that included the dropping of all lawsuits on both sides. Additionally, the parties agreed on a six-year chip licensing agreement with an option for another two years, and a multi-year chip supply contract. Apple paid Qualcomm a sum reported to be $4.5 billion and everyone was happy.
Mirror of RMS/FSF
The stream is currently offline. Please check back (and refresh the page) at the time of the presentation mentioned above for the live stream video feed.
It’s live now!
You can submit questions from #debxp:matrix.org via Matrix, or #debxp on Freenode via IRC.
Examples of free IRC clients include: HexChat, Quassel, Irssi, and WeeChat.
Summary: Instead of promoting Linux, which it named itself after, the “LF” (or so-called ‘Linux’ Foundation) is promoting Microsoft's proprietary software, surveillance and racist monopoly, with an extra touch of openwashing and greenwashing; it’s time for the community to treat “LF” people accordingly
THIS may sound utterly counter-intuitive or absurd, but something called after “Linux” need not be pro-Linux or stay true to Linux ‘philosophy’ (if it has any).
“The “Linux” brand no longer means what you might think it means (or what it used to mean).”Not many actual users of GNU/Linux would be happy to see what’s happening to the brand “Linux”. It’s morally wrong to hand it over the the actors that try to undermine GNU/Linux and replace it with Windows.
The video explains why it is such a big deal; links from this video can be found here and some background about the Linux Foundation is in our wiki.
For those of us who still care about truth, freedom and integrity there’s the GNU talk scheduled for tonight (Richard Stallman targets an audience in Brazil). We need to talk more about Software Freedom and GNU. The “Linux” brand no longer means what you might think it means (or what it used to mean). It means nothing to freedom. █
Millions of people who use and support the software deserve greater transparency
Summary: StarOffice, OpenOffice, LibreOffice and the languishing AOO (Go-OO is dead already) are still the go-to office suites for Free software users; they’re based on similar if not the same codebase (in the same sense many of today’s Web browsers are based on Chromium) and the business objectives of the main stewards (whose corporate DNA goes into the code) need to be understood because even longtime volunteers aren’t sure what’s going on
During the weekend, amid postings about the Annual Report 2020, TDF or LibreOffice published a blog post entitled “Get printed copies of LibreOffice handbooks!“
Of course there’s nothing morally wrong with selling printed copies of something that’s online, but one reader asked us, “I am curious about where the funds from printed books for LibreOffice go… to the project or to the documentation volunteers?”
“We’ve always been supportive of LibreOffice because unlike Go-OO it had a real purpose, seeing the threat of neglect by Oracle.”So we’ve decided to ask around and research for a bit, as we have some key contacts. “I have not been doing anything there nor following it for ages,” one person told us. “Last I checked, most of the developers had gone over to LO from AOO anyway…” (from Apache OpenOffice to LibreOffice)
Every now and then, maybe a few times per month, the official LibreOffice account interacts with me in Twitter. In fact, we were one of the sites to first announce the LibreOffice project way back in 2010. We’ve always been supportive of LibreOffice because unlike Go-OO it had a real purpose, seeing the threat of neglect by Oracle.
“Having volunteered with both libre and apache openoffice.org, (majority of AOO documentation team going to Libre and not returning) I had felt as though Libre documentation team was all about selling manuals,” said our reader to us. “Just a feeling I had while there. When I went over to AOO (after Libreoffice’s rudeness toward AOO), and we were discussing licensing (cc by 3.0 then libre used cc 4.0), it seemed like the AOO documentation lead person was also moving in this direction (selling printed manuals) or had some work relation with Jean Weber, formerly of AOO, and now at Libre. I’m just curious if the funding for the printed books go to Libre project or to the authors. There are mailing list posts of Jean Weber and AOO where Lulu login/accounts are discussed.”
An informed person whom we spoke to, one who was involved in LibreOffice but especially in AOO, noted that the “latter was languishing.”
“It would be important to know how their finances are arranged,” the person noted. “They have a foundation based in Germany, but as mentioned I have not followed it nor know what their economic sources and priorities are. Perhaps that is published somewhere.”
I noted, based on my understanding, that there are companies like Collabora throwing some “added value” at it and now there’s some introduction of “community edition” or something along those lines… (they called it "Personal Edition" several months back)
“That sounds like it might be an unfortunate change of direction,” the person added. “It could end up “open core” instead soon in one of the worse scenarios.”
Are we moving back in the direction of StarOffice? Hopefully not…
As far as we’re aware, the TDF/LibreOffice folks never fully or entirely withdrew from this ambition of theirs. We’ll be watching this situation closely. The most important thing, or the aspect of utmost importance, is the freedom (libre) in LibreOffice. Dual licensing is one of the worst possible outcomes. █
Summary: We’ve been technically experimenting and laying the groundwork for project communications more self-hosting and truly self-governing rather than outsourced to outside parties; the key thing is, how do we make it integrate with large networks or other networks where most people are (the ‘network effect’)? These technical endeavours are ongoing.
THE aspects of Free Speech or Free Will or self determination etc. aren’t typically spoken about in the context of technology but of military, territorial sovereignty (e.g. what if this nation invaded us or that other nation annexed a part of us?). In the case of technology, what’s to be done when a service you rely on (e.g. clown computing) decides to change policies, shut down, start charging, increase fees etc. and you have no say on the matter?
“We’d rather focus on issues such as patents instead of IRC ‘drama’.”Self-hosting isn’t easy, but it gives one autonomy and control. Here in Techrights we explored and researched what it would involve self-hosting an IRC network and channels. We did this last year, well before any actual controversy.
As the video above explains, we’re in the process of offering more options, one of which is self-hosted. We’re not leaving anything, we just add an option which is one we control. At the moment, based on our understanding, promising work is also being done to make networks interact and work together. That can help prevent or overcome some of the current conflicts, which distract technical projects from the things they really ought to focus on (mostly coding).
We’ve tried to abstain from getting involved in all those IRC wars (in effect a form of infighting, distracting us from real growth opportunities, such as crushing proprietary copycats of IRC). From now on we’ll try to advocate projects and sites taking control of their communications rather outsourcing them to outside (competing) groups. This is all doable given the declining cost (and increasing power) of hardware, as well as improved network capacities all around the world.
As the video above notes, it should now be possible to communicate with us more securely in real time, with a potential of whispering about EPO tyrants like António Campinos. On Friday we made a giant leap towards abolishing European software patents. We’d rather focus on issues such as patents instead of IRC ‘drama’. Let’s revolutionise rather than destory one another. █
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| CID | Description | Object type |
QmYmjyPj7CLm3iXWhJTSvQmGJ6Vfta4ZrN9zSTJ8iVd8hT |
IRC log for #boycottnovell(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmYiSTV3Y6xZQD9FpZbUWNewzu87877ioDC8NUA6UdyULZ |
IRC log for #boycottnovell(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmcYNr7iSoHEEGi3Fb9YdPmyfXS5ZGEwAXACRwDwDc61Rw |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmPqHYh2oZMQyR3zVNtkLfJ7B6X1Z6EZYpYFKNFSSig2CC |
IRC log for #boycottnovell-social(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmZa9qSJtK5isiu9yyb3NzoXSk3iYrwzaNKfsXBwvuC3jA |
IRC log for #techbytes(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmbNULPN1HNdokrsofVh7nGBdmDqfmECKWV5y1VhNupafz |
IRC log for #techbytes(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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QmPjf2Zy9D7FTWzmH8NoFKcqwoe5fchJTn2vH7UPajPn7X |
IRC log for #techrights(full IRC log as HTML) |
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QmTugbpBxgMjz7rvSXh69Ed4jAwAkSWRgmzX19EqiAeiiC |
IRC log for #techrights(full IRC log as plain/ASCII text) |
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Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmYKVHe1pyFzVZ8TfvkCzXCv6TKortjhutGHHghWLaQegL
This article supplies the reasons on why some of your hardware like wifi or GPU does not work with libre software distro like Trisquel GNU/Linux, Debian and others. In short, it is because the difference between the operating system and the device requirements. The solution relies on either the manufacturer or the users to solve this issue. This is a compilation and summary of several important resources in Libre Software Community where GNU/Linux is a fundamental part of. This also includes Glossary at the end. Read the explanation below.
Time to round-up some of the smaller items we unfortunately didn’t get time to go over this week, grab a coffee and relax with a short read of some good stuff.
First up – Flatpak 1.11.1 officially solves the issue of newer Proton versions not running correctly inside Steam Flatpak, look out for distribution updates. Linux gaming with compatibility layers just got even better – nice!
On the subject of compatibility layers for running Windows games on Linux, the community-built Proton-6.9-GE-2 has been released as a quick follow-up to solve issues with Resident Evil Village. If you want to know more about Proton and Steam Play, see our dedicated area.
The KDE camp have been continuing their mass clean-up of Plasma to improve all aspects of it. Developer Nate Graham released the usual blog post to go over recent works done. One of the huge and exciting bits from this week is that Plasma has seen a major reliability improvement for Wayland on NVIDIA hardware!
7 Days to Die got a Alpha 19.5 release bringing Twitch Integration along with: Voxel mesh pooling, Chunk decal and model dither fading, Distant terrain decreases mesh detail when farther, a gfx dtmaxlod console command and also allowing selection of steering mode on controllers by pressing DPad down. The performance improvements should make it smoother than ever. You can buy it from Humble Store and Steam.
Thank you everyone for the love you showed during this week by retweeting, liking, commenting, and whatnot. Thank you to everyone who followed us on social media, and a big thank you to everyone who donated so far. If you want to donate too, you can do it here (any amount is welcome).
This week has been really interesting, but slow in Linux news. We only saw new releases of AlmaLinux, Oracle Linux, and Nitrux, and a new major release of the Inkscape SVG editor. Other than that, Fedora Linux 34 users received the latest Linux 5.12 kernel, and StarLabs adds Coreboot 5 support to two of its Linux laptops.
Bug tracking is useful for any project regardless of it’s size and today we’re looking at a bug tracker that integrates directly into git and fits inside your existing git workflow.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got a new announcement from DLN regarding the Fedora Podcast. In Distro News, we’ve got new releases from AlmaLinux OS, Lakka and a new Floppy related distro. We’ve got some legal news to discuss this week as Audacity is back in the news with some more controversial stuff going on. A user was informed by their ISP that apparently downloading Ubuntu is somehow bad. In Security News were going to talk about Firefox’s new security architecture Firefox Fission and apparently FBI is going to begin sharing breach / password data with the public. I’ll you know what that’s all about as well as so much more coming up on this week episode of TWIL, Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
So after two small rc releases, the other show finally dropped, and
rc4 is fairly sizable.
It's not the biggest rc4 we've ever had, but it's certainly up there,
believably competing for the title.
That said, exactly because of the calm rc2 and rc3, the size of rc4
doesn't worry me, and I think the 5.13 release looks fairly normal.
This bump is just because we had some stable work finally hit my tree.
Notably the networking tree, but there's a lot of driver tree fixes
too.
The fixes are fairly spread out, and mostly small. Some of the bigger
chunks are for new self tests (both bpf and kvm), and outside of those
new tests the diffstat looks nice and flat (ie lots of smaller changes
rather than big peaks). Networking (both core and drivers) does stand
out, but there are filesystem fixes too (xfs, nfs, cifs), various
random driver subsystems (sound, i2c, tty, usb, iio, scsi, spi..). And
some arch updates (mostly kvm-related, but small arm64, s390, MIPS
fixes - and some powerpc perf event descriptions too).
Please do go test, and let's make sure 5.13 is solid.
Linus
Linux 5.13-rc4 is out this US Memorial Day weekend and it has ticked up to being a rather large weekly test release.
We are now mid-way through the Linux 5.13 cycle and 5.13-rc4 has ticked up to being a larger release compared to the prior small release candidates.
RenderDoc 1.14 was released on Friday as the newest feature update to this open-source, cross-platform / cross-API graphics debugger.
Notable with RenderDoc 1.14 is now supporting Vulkan’s debug printf functionality for printing values / debug statements from shaders. RenderDoc 1.14 supports displaying print statements from shaders in Vulkan. Simple but very useful for debugging while writing shaders in being able to “printf” as desired.
The AMD Radeon “AMDGPU” kernel driver for Linux is poised to report more graphics throttling status information to user-space.
For those wondering if their graphics card is throttling and if it’s due to power, current, or temperature reasons, the AMDGPU open-source kernel driver is being equipped with a throttler status field to be reported to user-space via the gpu_metrics data.
The Cairo 2D vector graphics library used by the likes of GTK, Mozilla, WebKit, and many other open-source projects is seeing some big strides made on its SVG back-end.
While there are no signs of X.Org Server 1.21 shipping anytime soon, being merged today to the Git code-base is bumping X Input to version 2.4 with the introduction of touchpad gestures.
The X Input work to support touchpad gestures with the X.Org Server are now merged in place for the X.Org Server. The libXi support has already landed while the xf86-input-libinput driver handling has yet to be merged.
With May quickly drawing to a close, here are some fresh Linux gaming benchmark figures for the latest AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on their respective latest Linux graphics drivers while looking at the performance across a variety of OpenGL and Vulkan games/workloads.
The latest AMD Radeon RX 6000 “RDNA2″ and NVIDIA RTX 30 “Ampere” graphics cards were tested based on the cards I have available.
Off an Ubuntu 21.04 install, on the NVIDIA side was the NVIDIA 465.31 latest driver while on the AMD side their newest open-source stack is made up of using Linux 5.13 Git and Mesa 21.2-devel via the Oibaf PPA.
Sublime Text has soared in popularity as one of the most loved GUI text editors across multiple platforms. After over three years of Sublime Text 3′s release in 2017, the much-loved text editor is back with its newest release.
Sublime Text 4 is here, and it brings many improvements and new features to the table, but what’s new for Linux devices? Let’s find out.
ARM64 Linux Support
Before this release, Sublime Text 4 was not available for devices that use ARM processors like the Raspberry Pi. Although ARM64 builds were available for experimental use through a private beta program earlier, you can get yourself an ARM64 build right from the install page and enjoy programming on the go.
Want to play a video as animated background wallpaper? There’s now a new tool to do the job via GPU rendering.
Gpu Video Wallpaper is the project. As the name indicates, it uses GPU for rendering video with low CPU usage.
The software uses MPV to play video file. So mp4, mkv, flv, gif, and large list of video formats are supported. And it plays video animated wallpaper in Dual- or Multi-monitors.
I habve only one piece of unrequested advice for anyone who thinks about running (or owning, I guess) an IRC network and/or *using* an IRC network: pick one or the other, but never both.
If you run the servers, don’t hang out on channels and chat.
If you hang out in channels and chat, don’t run the servers.
Otherwise, there’s a good chance you will end up in some kind of squeeze, whether from other people, or inflicted by yourself (and ON yourself) in some fit of prideful stupidity.
About a year ago I found out about Gemini protocol. For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a new Internet protocol (which together with its accompanying gemtext format) aims to build an alternative “web, stripped right back to its essence”. It appealed to my love for minimalism and I built a few things for its ecosystem.
Regardless of your views of Gemini, or familiarity, the greater lesson here is that even with a simple protocol, useful programs almost never are. Similar messages are echoed by others such as Text Editing Hates You Too (2019).
This post requires no knowledge of Gemini protocol specifications. Each section focuses on one project, explaining why and how it was built. Feel free to skip “How” sections as it can go deep into technical details.
I wanted to make it easy for more people to try the new Chart of Accounts discussed in my previous blog.
Therefore, I’ve published it as a Debian package for users of the current stable version of Debian 10, buster.
Wifi usually just works. In the past I haven’t had to worry much about performance as for home use things have always been bearable and at work it’s never been my job so I just file a bug report with the relevant people when things go wrong. But a few years ago I had some problems.
For my home network I got a free Wifi AP which wasn’t performing well.
My AP supported 802.11 modes b/g or g/n (b, g, and n are slow, medium, and fast speeds). I initially had the AP running in b/g mode because I had an 802.11b USB wifi device that I used. When I replaced that with one that did 802.11g I tried changing the AP to g/n mode but performance was even worse on my laptop (although quite good on phones) so I switched back.
For phones it appeared to work well giving 54Mb/s while on my laptop (a second hand Thinkpad X1 Carbon) it was giving 11Mb/s at best and often much less than that. The best demonstration of problems was to start transferring a large file while pinging a system on the LAN the AP was connected to. Usually it would give ping times of 1s or more, sometimes 5s+ ping times. While this was happening the “Invalid misc” count increased rapidly, often by more than 100 per second.
The results of Google searches suggest that “Invalid misc” is due to interference and recommend changing the channel. My AP had been on channel 1 which had performed poorly, channels 2-8 were ok, and channel 9 seemed reasonably good. As an aside trying all channels manually is not a good idea, it takes a lot of time and gives little useful data. After changing to channel 9 it still only gave about 500KB/s when transferring large files with ping times of about 100ms, but that’s a big improvement. I tried running “iwlist scanning” to scan the Wifi network for other APs, that showed that channel 1 was used a lot but didn’t make it clear what I should do other than that.
Apache Tomcat is an open-source web server that allows you to run web applications written in Java. Just like the popular Apache web server, Tomcat is also developed and maintained by a free community of developers.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Polr on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Polr is a free and open-source link shortener written in PHP and Lumen. It allows you to host your own URL shortener, brand your URLs, and gain control over your data.
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 Polr open-source link shortener on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Linux commands are a great way of interacting with the system using the terminal. However, sometimes it can take a while to finish the task at hand. This forces users to wait for a considerable time or spawn a new shell altogether.
Luckily, you can run Linux commands in the background by following some simple methods. The rest of this article illustrates some of these methods.
I bought this is because the ML350p Gen8 turned out to be too noisy for my taste [1]. I’ve just been editing my page about Memtest86+ RAM speeds [2], over the course of 10 years (high end laptop in 2001 to low end server in 2011) RAM speed increased by a factor of 100. RAM speed has been increasing at a lower rate than CPU speed and is becoming an increasing bottleneck on system performance. So while I could get a faster white-box system the cost of a second-hand server isn’t that great and I’m getting a system that’s 100* faster than what was adequate for most tasks in 2001.
HP makes some nice workstation class machines with ECC RAM (think server without remote management, hot-swap disks, or redundant PSU but with sound hardware). But they are significantly more expensive on the second hand market than servers.
This server cost me $650 and came with 2*480G “DC” grade SSDs (Intel but with HPE stickers). I hope that more than half of the purchase price will be recovered from selling the SSDs (I will use NVMe). Also 64G of non-ECC RAM costs $370 from my local store. As I want lots of RAM for testing software on VMs it will probably turn out that the server cost me less than the cost of new RAM once I’ve sold the SSDs!
tl;dr: use a serial terminal which can buffer input and send it all at once, lines should end with \CR\LF.
I’m am currently working on bringing up a LoRa network in BahÃa Blanca. Parts of the nodes I need to set up are made by RAK Wireless.
According to their documentation the nodes can be configured by using a serial connection to them. So I quickly turned to minicom for it, with no avail. Somehow I could read whatever the device was writing to my machine but could not write any commands back to it.
Installing Python using Anaconda is very easy. Let us first install the latest version of Anaconda.
For most of us who didn’t do well in high school English class, spell checkers are a real game-changer. Sure, you can still swap a “to” and a “too,” but a spell checker will catch a lot of typos. But what about in your source code? You usually don’t spell check source code and even if you did, the rules are funny. After all, “my_proejct” is a perfectly fine variable name, but you probably meant “my_project.” That’s where a program called typos comes in. It aims to be a spell checker for source code that is fast enough and with a low enough false positive rate that you can run it against changed code and reject spelling problems.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Vim Text Editor on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Vim is an open-source and free tool with a command-line interface and a Graphical User Interface. It is especially useful for editing config files and programs written in shell, python, Perl, c/c++, and more. The latest release of Vim includes a few new features, bug fixes, and documentation updates.
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 Vim command line text editor on a Debian 10 (Buster).
Apache Tomcat is an open-source web server that allows you to run web applications written in Java. Just like the popular Apache web server, Tomcat is also developed and maintained by a free community of developers.
AnyDesk is a popular remote access program that can be used to gain access and control over another device that also has AnyDesk installed. Available on all devices, you can also run AnyDesk on Ubuntu.
AnyDesk is actually perfectly suited to the Linux operating system. This makes it a valuable program that allows you to also gain cross-platform control over different devices when you need to. But how do you run AnyDesk on Ubuntu?
In this tutorial we learn how to install and use Speedtest CLI on Ubuntu. Running speedtest CLI can be beneficial in hosting environment to check whether the provided bandwidth is as advertised.
Speedtest CLI can also be used to check our own internet connection. Running from command line should provide better test compared to browser based test since command line will have cleaner test environment, for example no browser plugins.
We will install the official speedtest command line application provided by ookla.
After our recent interview with the creator of GamerOS, we are back with a new guest, the now famous GloriousEggroll for his magnificent contributions to the Proton’s ecosystem in the shape of ProtonGE. If you are not familiar with ProtonGE, we introduced it before, but in short, it’s a build of Proton that integrates the latest patches that make it to WINE development (and much more…) before Valve usually does. You can see it as the bleeding edge version of Proton, the one that you can use with the latest games and usually have better luck than vanilla Proton. Thanks to ProtonGE it was possible to play Forza Horizon 4 right on release on Linux, for example.
Bans happen for many reasons in games. Whether it’s cheating, exploiting a bug, or simply harassing other players, the list goes on and on. Games and the companies that develop and serve them have a duty to protect the integrity of the game and the safety of their players. However, when the ban reason is for something that seems superficial, fans will begin to question the results.
Instances like this can happen when a player is running an unknown program in the background. The game’s anti-cheat client sees something that could be registered as a program assisting with cheating and the player catches a ban for something that wasn’t their fault. While not the entire story, this was part of the reason Blizzard banned 5,000 accounts this past week.
A Twitter user and former pro-Overwatch player named @Carter_OW reported that 5,000 accounts for Overwatch had been banned due to playing on Linux. This composed everyone that had been playing the game on Linux for the week. While Overwatch is not capable of running on straight Linux, players utilize a program called WINE (“Wine Is Not an Emulator”) to run Windows applications, which includes Overwatch. Evidently, this occurred to any user using version 5.x of WINE, whereas users had reported issues running the game in version 6.0. The latest stable version of WINE has players reporting the game crashing.
It’s not exactly that straightforward, but you get the picture. The price of hardware isn’t the only reason that Mac gaming isn’t a bigger deal. But on PC you can also install Linux, and in recent times Linux gaming has strong support from the likes of Valve alongside the thriving community.
For me, I’m in the position of trying to learn Linux but also love gaming. So how hard can it be to combine the two? Not nearly as bad as you might be thinking.
[...]
This is the part that really surprised me the first time I started looking seriously at using Linux to game on. Drivers are enough of an issue on Windows 10 at times, but surprisingly the situation on Linux could be considered better.
Take my gaming PC, for example. At the moment it’s running an AMD Radeon GPU, and I don’t even have to install drivers. An open-source driver, Mesa, is built into Linux Mint (and many other distros) and it just works out of the box. There are newer drivers out there, but updating to these isn’t difficult with access to a web browser and a search engine.
Nvidia graphics cards are a little different, but there are both open source and proprietary drivers to use with these. Trying Linux Mint on a gaming laptop with an Nvidia RTX 2060, imagine my delight when the built-in driver manager popped up at first boot with a choice between the latest versions of each. It just knew what I needed on that specific machine and made it easy to install.
Tok is now equipped with a quick switcher for fast and efficient keyboard navigation between chats. Simply Ctrl+K, type in your chat’s name, and press enter.
After gaining some experience being a GSoC (backup) mentor last year I am mentoring a GSoC student again this year. As it worked out to have a co-mentor, I could convince Ralf to join me in this role to support Suraj Kumar Mahto in his project to replace the current KMyMoney online quote support with the general online quote functionality found in the Alkimia library. The Alkimia version provides a lot more functionality for the end user and is already found in the KMyMoney version based on KDE4. Suraj already brings some experience of working in and with the KDE community and contributed to multiple projects in the last year.
Vice versa, I am co-mentoring Ralf’s student on his quest to add pretty printers for debugging support of Qt/KDE applications. Ebuka is currently using the Community Bonding phase to get acquainted with the KDE community, its procedures, infrastructure and alike.
GNOME Gingerblue 0.4.1 is available and builds/runs on GNOME 40 systems such as Fedora Core 34.
It supports immediate, live audio recording in compressed Ogg encoded audio files stored in the private $HOME/Music/ directory from the microphone/input line on a computer or remote audio cards through USB connection through PipeWire (www.pipewire.org) with GStreamer (gstreamer.freedesktop.org) on Fedora Core 34 (getfedora.org).
See the GNOME Gingerblue project (www.gingerblue.org) for screenshots, Fedora Core 34 x86_64 RPM package and GNU autoconf installation package (https://download.gnome.org/sources/gingerblue/0.4/gingerblue-0.4.1.tar.xz) for GNOME 40 systems and https://gitlab.gnome.org/ole/gingerblue.git for the GPLv3 source code in my GNOME Git repository.
We will redesign the Health app and add a few more features. The motivation for this redesign is to display important information on the main view and the other data must be easily accessible to the user.
Data can be step-count, calories burnt, weight measurements etc.This project is written in rust and it uses gtk-rs.
This was one of the existing project ideas.
The following sections describe the subparts of the project.
Developers and testers, it’s the day you’ve been waiting for: elementary OS 6 Beta is available now! We first started talking publicly about elementary OS 6 in August of last year. In the time since, we’ve been hard at work tackling the ambitious scope of work we laid out for ourselves while also dealing with the fallout of a global pandemic, travel restrictions, and loss in our own circles of family and friends.
Despite all of that, we’re proud of the work we’ve done and are excited to get it into the hands of developers and testers as we work to complete the stable release.
Endeavour ran quickly for me, offered me just enough tools to get up and running, was stable, and worked with all of my hardware. I feel like Xfce is a suitable desktop for the audience Endeavour is reportedly targeting (users with enough experience to be comfortable with the command line) as it balances performance with features. Plus people can install alternative desktops if they wish.
The one piece I felt was missing from Endeavour was a graphical package manager. The distribution previously featured one and I think removing it was unfortunate. When running distributions that start with a minimal number of desktop applications I appreciate the convenience of being able to quickly browse and install popular applications and items I use most days. Thanks to Arch’s large collection of up to date software Endeavour can provide everything I want, but installing all of these packages through pacman gets tedious compared to a nice, point-n-click experience.
This concern aside, I really like what the Endeavour team is doing. I’m already finding it faster and more reliable than Antergos was and the project is offering a pleasant, up to date platform without distractions or clutter. I don’t think I encountered a bug during my entire time with the distribution, which is a pleasant change of pace. People who like the appeal of Arch’s rolling release model while also appreciating a convenient system installer and pre-configured desktop environments will feel right at home with this distribution.
This is a minor (point) release in the 4MLinux STABLE channel, which comes with the Linux kernel 5.4.115. The 4MLinux Server now includes Apache 2.4.47, MariaDB 10.5.8, and PHP 7.4.18 (see this post for more details).
You can update your 4MLinux by executing the “zk update” command in your terminal (fully automatic process).
The new MakuluLinux Core 2021 is now Live and ready for Download, Grab your Copy CLICK HERE
Last month, BlankOn, a Indonesian GNU/Linux distro and computer operating system, represented by release coordinator Slamet Santoso launched Alpha Development version of XII Verbeek after the previous version XI Uluwatu released three years ago. BlankOn was featured on Ubuntu Buzz for years (see here, here, and here) then seemed to be dormant since 2018 but this year it proves it’s alive. This Alpha 1 version can already be downloaded by anyone and the team invites all to report issues, bugs, and errors to improve the development. Most notable changes are the switch to GNOME from Manokwari as the user interface as well as Calamares as the system installer replacing Partoedi among other changes. BlankOn users also got a new bootloader displaying all historical codenames. Finally, this invitation is mainly for people who know or willing to learn Indonesian language.
The lightweight Linux distribution antiX was released in the new version 19.4 “Grup Yorum” after seven months. The distribution based on Debian Buster is primarily intended for older computers with AMD64 and 32-bit x86 processors, but it also runs on the latest hardware.
Instead of systemd, which is often criticized as heavy and too complex, antiX relies on classic System-V-Init and alternatively on runit. This means that the distribution differs from its parent Debian.
antiX can be run as Live Linux from DVD / CD and USB memory, but can also be installed on the hard drive of the computer. Media are available for the pure text console and for the graphic desktop.
Today we are releasing a LibreELEC update to primarily fix Widevine, its that piece of software that allows playback of Netflix, Amazon Prime and other paid video services.
The new version of widevine (4.10.2252.0 or newer) is mandatory to keep it working after May 31, 2021.
With that new version (that is taken from ChromeOS) all ARM devices need additional libraries to make it work again.
Sadly its not that simple and some not too nice workarounds came in place to keep it working due changes at ChromeOS.The Generic (PC / Intel / AMD / Nvidia) images need no changes.
This is my third month of working for LTS. I was assigned 12 hrs and worked all of them.
I have bumped glibc from 2.31 to 2.33 in the Dunfell release of OpenEmbedded, and recompiled everything for EasyOS. Some packages needed fixes, it was pretty straightforward — search my OE tarball (not yet uploaded) for files with “#20210528″ or “# 20210528″ string in them.
A problem arose with the ‘rust’ package requiring glibc 2.32 or 2.33. Very annoying, as rust is required to compile Firefox and SeaMonkey. So I bit the bullet and got the glibc recipes out of the “hardknott” release of OE (the latest), and did a complete recompile.
I’m a bit late on this one, but here it is.
The US ISP Comcast, or as I call them, Comcrap (and yes, I’m a subscriber, because they are the only ISP option in my area due to government sanctioned monopoly), sent a subscriber a DMCA threat for having downloaded the Ubuntu GNU/Linux operating system. For those who may be unaware, Canonical, the company that produces Ubuntu, encourages people to share as many copies as they want to.
That’s also the terms of the licenses under which the OS components themselves are licensed, which is why Canonical can do this.
The only time that Canonical has sent anyone a DMCA notice that I am aware of, was that time that the Motion Picture Association of America used Xubuntu to create a spyware program that universities could run that would report students directly to the MPAA if they downloaded a movie.
Ironically, the MPAA violated the GNU GPL and other licenses in the process, effectively managing to commit piracy, and when they didn’t respond to the DMCA letter, their hosting company stepped in and took it down. (Sony also violated the LGPL license of LAME in their “XCP” Windows rootkit malware in 2005.)
Elephant Robotics’ MyCobot robotic arm was introduced last year with M5Stack Atom & Basic ESP32 modules with 6-degrees of freedom, a 250 grams max payload, available now for $599. The company has launched a new $699 version – MyCobot-Pi – with most of the same features, except for an upgrade to Raspberry Pi 4B which offers more performance and flexibility.
Both versions of MyCobot arm robotic arm support accessories such as a gripper and a suction pump attachable through a LEGO connector, but while the original version – MyCobot-M5 – relies on Arduino programming, the new MyCobot-Pi runs Debian/Ubuntu and ROS operating systems with image recognition algorithms that can work with a variety of cameras. Since we’ve missed last year’s announcement, we’ll cover both models in this article.
Today in our Project section we got a submission of a MIX computer implementation on iCE40HX8K-EVB by Michael Schroeder.
The project is hosted on Gitlab:
https://gitlab.com/x653/mix-fpga
Well, after months of delays due to part shortages, both DFRobot and Seeed Studios have come out with their 2-port Gigabit router board designs, and I was happy to receive a sample of each for testing: [...]
There are plenty of new features and fixes that are coming up in the next LibreOffice 7.2. Some of them are much needed and long-awaited. Here are some of the major new features that LibreOffice 7.2 brings for you.
LibreOffice’s infrastructure team is responsible for maintaining the hardware, virtual machines and services that enable the wider community to develop, market, test, localize and improve the software. The public infrastructure is powered by around 50 kernel-based virtual machines (KVMs) spread across four hypervisors, plugged to an internal 10Gbps switch, hosted at Manitu in St. Wendel (Germany), and managed with libvirt and its KVM/QEMU driver. The virtual disk images are typically stored in GlusterFS volumes – distributed across the hypervisors – except for some transient disks (such as cache) where the IOPS requirement is higher and the redundancy less important.
In 2020, the infra team added various new services, such as the new SilverStripe-based Extensions and Templates site. Some background to the technical and design decisions behind the site are here on the blog.
Meanwhile, Discourse was investigated as a likely AskBot replacement, while several VMs for deployment tests outside the scope of infra were handed over (such as decidim). The infra team worked on Moodle (an e-learning platform), build bots, integration of the Weblate translation platform into the TDF development dashboard, and a crashtest box (sponsored by Adfinis).
LibreOffice’s Documentation Team writes, updates and translates many handbooks. These are full of tips, tricks and tutorials covering the whole office suite. You can find PDF and ODT versions on this page – but sometimes it’s nice to have a hard-copy, printed version, right?
GNU M4 1.4.19 has been released. This stable release is a minor update, collecting several years of portability improvements, as well as a couple of minor optimizations to performance. Notable improvements in this release include translations of output in various languages, and better stack overflow detection on several systems that previously required the use of GNU libsigsegv. GNU 'm4' is an implementation of the traditional Unix macro processor. It is mostly SVR4 compatible, although it has some extensions (for example, handling more than 9 positional parameters to macros). 'm4' also has built-in functions for including files, running shell commands, doing arithmetic, etc. Autoconf needs GNU 'm4' for generating 'configure' scripts, but not for running them.
Dear all, I am happy to announce the 15th official release of GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro). Gnuastro is an official GNU package, consisting of various command-line programs and library functions for the manipulation and analysis of (astronomical) data. All the programs share the same basic command-line user interface (modeled on GNU Coreutils). For the full list of Gnuastro's library, programs, and a comprehensive general tutorial (recommended place to start using Gnuastro), please see the links below respectively: https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-library.html https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Gnuastro-programs-list.html https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/General-program-usage-tutorial.html Many new features have been added in this release and many bugs have been fixed. For example, two new installed scripts now allow 1) creation of radial profiles (written and maintained by Raúl Infante-Sainz) and 2) making SAO DS9 "region" files from a catalog to visualize objects in SAO DS9 (written with the help of Samane Raji). The Table program now has more very useful options (for example to randomly select rows from a large table) and the Query program can now access Galactic extinctions from the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED). For a very complete review of the new features, please see [1] below. Here is the compressed source and the GPG detached signature for this release. To uncompress Lzip tarballs, see [2]. To check the validity of the tarballs using the GPG detached signature (*.sig) see [3]: https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.15.tar.lz (3.6MB) https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.15.tar.gz (5.8MB) https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.15.tar.lz.sig (833B) https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gnuastro/gnuastro-0.15.tar.gz.sig (833B) Here are the MD5 and SHA1 checksums (other ways to check if the tarball you download is what we distributed): 40edf2537bdbefd795d1b87bcdbec461 gnuastro-0.15.tar.gz 849cbb80ac0ccd165f723576fc71f212 gnuastro-0.15.tar.lz 541b04d8d3c03da96c20ca79c703deadef811e7e gnuastro-0.15.tar.gz 3ed75e80babbb4e1cc7568243d980c53af217a8a gnuastro-0.15.tar.lz For this release Pedram Ashofteh Ardakani, Natáli D. Anzanello, Raul Infante-Sainz, Carlos Morales-Socorro, François Ochsenbein, Samane Raji and Zahra Sharbaf directly contributed to the source of Gnuastro. I am also very grateful to Mark Calabretta, Sepideh Eskandarlou, Raul Infante-Sainz, Clotilde Laigle, Alberto Madrigal, Juan Miro, Carlos Morales-Socorro, Sylvain Mottet, Francois Ochsenbein, Samane Raji, Zahra Sharbaf, Leigh Smith, Alfred M. Szmidt, Ignacio Trujillo and Richard Wilbur for their very useful comments, suggestions and bug fixes that have now been implemented in Gnuastro. If any of Gnuastro's programs or libraries are useful in your work, please cite _and_ acknowledge them. For citation and acknowledgment guidelines, run the relevant programs with a `--cite' option (it can be different for different programs, so run it for all the programs you use). Citations _and_ acknowledgments are vital for the continued work on Gnuastro, so please don't forget to support us by doing so. This tarball was bootstrapped (created) with the tools below. Note that you don't need these to build Gnuastro from the tarball, these are the tools that were used to make the tarball itself. They are only mentioned here to be able to reproduce/recreate this tarball later. Texinfo 6.7 Autoconf 2.71 Automake 1.16.3 Help2man 1.48.3 ImageMagick 7.0.11-13 Gnulib v0.1-4650-gc45faf7f4 Autoconf archives v2021.02.19-1-ge68e8f6 The dependencies to build Gnuastro from this tarball on your system are described here: https://www.gnu.org/s/gnuastro/manual/html_node/Dependencies.html
This second quiz may sound like the first one, but in fact, the approach used is completely different. The point is to gather some elementary statistics from a series of experiments performed under different conditions, but with several repeats at the same conditions.
The still recent-ish td package for accessing the twelvedata API for financial data has been updated on CRAN yesterday, and is now at released version 0.0.3.
A few URLs were updated to please the lint checker, and a Depends: on R 4.0.0 or later was added. We then realized (as always just after the release …) that the core issue was an incorrect version comparison which we already fixed in the git repo.
Do you have 1 more websites that you want to check to see if they are up? Sick of paid services or of the limited capability of free services? Well this article will teach you how to create your own free website checker.
It personally has been incredibly useful for me to be able to check my own websites, as often as I want, for free. I have many domains and many subdomains, and while I to maintain the sites well, occasionally they will go down, or have their SSL certificates expire etc, which will prevent users from seeing the site.
This article will teach you how to check your own websites using a little bit of Python code.
I’ve seen people recommend XML::LibXML on sites like PerlMonks and mailing lists, so I thought I’d give it a try for a new personal project. It’s mostly a drop-in replacement, with familiar syntax: [...]
Amidst the covid19 pandemic, almost all conferences and meetings have been taking place online. Among them, there is a series of events held by free software (foss) communities, social and solidarity economy cooperatives and groups that defend human rights. Throughout this post, I will refer to them as TGFs (the good folks). No doubt, a critical part of an online conference is the bundle of platforms and tools that power the conference – from registration and presentation to interaction and streaming. Just a moment, is it really a critical part?
Looking into the set of tools adopted by many TGFs you may deduce that the medium does not matter. In many cases, proprietary tools and platforms notorious for censoring and abusive moderation have been used. So, the end justify the means, isn’t it? People will eventually judge us by the great things we are going to say and do during an event, not by the medium we have chosen, right?
First, the end does not justify the means; this is a slippery slope that in many cases throughout the history of the humankind has led well-intention causes to catastrophic results. But let’s avoid dramas and too much of an abstraction.
Using messenger RNA to make vaccines was an unproven idea. But if it worked, the technique would revolutionise medicine, not least by providing protection against infectious diseases and biological weapons. So in 2013 America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) gambled. It awarded a small, new firm called Moderna $25m to develop the idea. Eight years, and more than 175m doses later, Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine sits on the list of innovations for which DARPA can claim at least partial credit, alongside weather satellites, GPS, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the [Internet].
This page has summaries of some USB limits [1]. USB 2.0 has the longest cable segment limit of 5M (1.x, 3.x, and USB-C are all shorter), so USB 2.0 is what you want for long runs. The USB limit for daisy chained devices is 7 (including host and device), so that means a maximum of 5 hubs or a total distance between PC and device of 30M. There are lots of other ways of getting longer distances, the cheapest seems to be putting an old PC at the far end of an Ethernet cable.
I recently fell into a YouTube rabbit hole looking for Commodore 64 SID music based on classic 80s hits. There are a lot of great compositions out there of various production quality. In my searching, I found this particular d64 download that was well put together that I have greatly enjoyed. I am continually impressed by what people are able to do with this wonderfully charming, old, hardware. I hope that the fun people have with it continues for many years. I look at it as just another art form and personal expression which I find to be absolutely incredible.
If you have the Versatile Commodore Emulator (VICE) installed on your computer, you can easily enjoy the music with a custom media player interface. I, personally, enjoyed it on The C64 Maxi in my living room but it will certainly run on the actual hardware as well.
Where once criminals had to play psychological games to trick people into handing over bank passwords and have the technical know-how to siphon money out of secure personal accounts, now virtually anyone can obtain ransomware off the shelf and load it into a compromised computer system using tricks picked up from YouTube tutorials or with the help of groups like DarkSide.
Global security vendor Sophos claims to have discovered a new strain of Windows ransomware which is the final executable payload in a manual attack where every other stage is delivered through a PowerShell script. One of the entry points was an on-premise Microsoft Exchange Server installation.
The KDE-FreeBSD team has moved its primary communications channel (on IRC) in with the rest of the FreeBSD world. You can now find us on Libera.Chat, in the #freebsd-desktop channel.
Due to the unfortunate situation regarding changes in administration on freenode.net, and the resulting chaos, we have decided to move the public NetBSD IRC chat channels from freenode to irc.libera.chat.
The Supreme Court of Brazil declared on 6 May 2021 that part of article 40 of Brazilian Law 9,279/96 (“IP Act”) is unconstitutional. This article sets forth the way patent and utility model terms are calculated in Brazil.
In a controversial judgment that changes patent protection in Brazil, the Supreme Court has ruled it is unconstitutional to grant patents and utility models with terms calculated from grant date (10 years for patents and 7 years for utility models), one of the two ways of calculating patent term according to the IP Act. Therefore, from this judgment onwards, patent and utility model terms can only be calculated from filing date: 20 years term for patents and 15 years term for utility models.
The impact of this decision cannot be underestimated as it will affect all patent and utility model applications moving forward as well as certain patents already granted, particularly patents in force with a term of 10 years from grant protecting pharmaceutical products and procedures, healthcare equipment and devices.
Chief Legal Officer Song Liuping has promised that the company will charge lower rates than rivals Qualcomm, Nokia, and Ericsson. In fact, Huawei is capping royalties at $2.50 per smartphone.
The aim is to generate between $1.2 billion and $1.3 billion from patent fees and licenses issued from 2019 to 2021. That will be reinvested into 5G research in the hope of maintaining Huawei’s position as a leading 5G network equipment provider.
When the Apple iPhone was first introduced by Steve Jobs in January 2007, the question on everyone’s mind was how will people be able to type using a virtual QWERTY keyboard. Research in Motion (RIM), the company that produced BlackBerry handsets, was probably one of the firms most impacted by the touchscreen iPhone. RIM co-CEO’s Jim Balsillie and Mike Lazaridis refused at first to give up the physical QWERTY keyboard.
Balsillie said in November 2007, four months after the iPhone launched, that “as nice as the Apple iPhone is, it poses a real challenge to its users. Try typing a web key on a touchscreen on an Apple iPhone, that’s a real challenge. You cannot see what you type.” In May of the following year, Lazaridis stated, “The most exciting mobile trend is full QWERTY keyboards. I’m sorry, it really is. I’m not making this up.”
Nike and Puma appeared before the High Court of Justice in London on Monday for an appeal hearing in their bi-national battle stemming from Nike’s quest to register the word “footware” as a trademark – including with the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (“UKIPO”) – for use in connection with “computer hardware modules for receiving, processing, and transmitting data in Internet of things electronic devices; electronic devices and computer software that allow users to remotely interact with other smart devices for monitoring and controlling automated systems,” among other hardware and software products and services.
Puma lodged an opposition to the trademark application that Nike filed with the UKIPO in March 2019, arguing that the “footware” mark is an “ordinary descriptive term for the goods and services” at issue (i.e., those in classes 9, 38 and 42), and an “obvious combination” of the words “footwear” and “hardware” or “software,” and as a result, merely informs consumers that the goods/services at play relate to footwear-specific hardware/software, instead of indicating their source. More than that, the German sportswear company claimed in its opposition filing that Nike’s use of “ware” had already become “customary in the relevant trade,” removing the chance that the term would serve as an indicator of source.
TheFashionLaw discussed a trade mark fight between Nike and Puma, which is unfolding simultaneously in the US and in the UK. In both jurisdictions, Nike seeks to register “footware” as a trade mark for smart electronic devices. Puma has opposed this application, claiming that it is a descriptive term, resulting from the “obvious combination” of “footwear” and “hardware” or “software”.
Recently, the Annual Special 301 Report on IP Protection (the ‘Report’) was released by the Office of the United States Trade Representative. In our earlier posts, we have discussed the US’s relaxed stance on compulsory licensing (here) and the India-specific copyright and enforcement related issues (here) as discussed in the Report. In continuation of the same, in this post, we shall analyse the discussion of three other key aspects in the Report: India-specific trade secrets and patents issues, and the general stance on technology transfers.
[...]
As far as patent issues are concerned, the Report had most of their same old consistent objections to the Indian regime that have been highlighted in earlier reports. These include issues such as narrow patentability criteria under the Patents Act, threat of patent revocations, costly and time consuming procedural formalities, and an objection to Section 3(d) of the Act that seeks to prevent evergreening of patents (discussed here, here, and here on the blog). There are, however, four interesting developments to note in this year’s report on patents as discussed below.
First, the Report notes “Stakeholders continue to express concerns over vagueness in the interpretation of the India Patents Act”. This statement, however, is made in abstract without indicating in any manner what these uncertainties in interpretation are. This is similar to the broad brush objection made with respect to copyrights wherein the Report just broadly blames court cases and government memoranda to raise concerns regarding copyright protection in India without going into any specificities as discussed in the earlier post here. Notably, this objection regarding vagueness of interpretation was not present in last year’s Special 301 Report despite noting it to be a continuous objection by stakeholders. In doing so, the credibility of such an exercise also becomes questionable as it is using broad brush strokes to criticize intellectual property regimes of a country without exactly highlighting what it disagrees with.
Second, the Report praises the amendment which dilutes patent working disclosure norms through Form 27. Pankhuri has discussed in great detail why these changes are detrimental to the patent regime. What is worth noting is that they want the information submitted through Form 27 to be kept confidential. The purpose of disclosing local working details of patents is not to keep only the government abreast of the patentee’s operations. It is to make information regarding the patent’s working available, especially for generic companies who can potentially manufacture the products either through a voluntary license or by applying for a CL. This month, Delhi High Court’s directions to Roche revealed how little of the drug was available to Covid-19 patients due to absence of local manufacture and sole reliance on imports, underscoring the importance of working information in meeting public health needs. Making all of Form 27 information confidential would defeat the very purpose that disclosure norms are meant to achieve.
Third, the Report raises concerns regarding the “lack of presumption of patent validity,” referring to the judicially reinforced statutory provision that the grant of a patent does not create any presumption of validity in favour of the patent, despite the fact that it has passed the IPO’s examination. This concern presumably arises from a recent refusal of interim injunction to AstraZeneca for the infringement of its patented anti-diabetic drug Dapagliflozin, where the claim of presumption of validity on the basis of the age (17 years), commercial success and lack of Opposition proceedings against the patent was outrightly rejected by the court. Unlike India, US law presumes the validity of an existing patent. While this is not surprising from the jurisdiction that considers “anything under the sun made by man” to be patentable, in recent years this policy has been criticized for creating a patentee-favouring environment, especially after research has revealed that patent examiners at the USPTO effectively rely on a miniscule section of the prior art available to them to determine an application’s patentability. Moreover, a bill had also been introduced in the US Congress in 2019 that seeks to weaken the presumption of patentability in case of pharma patents. The Report thus shows a lack of self-awareness, recommending a policy that has come under question in US itself. As regards the Indian patent regime, considering the number of errors that the Patent Office data reveals every year (see here and here), there seems to be no need for a presumption of patent validity.
Fourth, while discussing issues surrounding effective adjudication of intellectual property disputes, the Report notes that “the United States is closely monitoring” the shutdown of the IPAB. It, however, does not specify any particular opinion on the development. As the readers might be aware, the IPAB has been a hot topic of discussion on the blog with its inefficacy constantly highlighted and its abolition considered to be a positive step. A compilation of the various posts published on the blog over the past decade discussing issues surrounding IPAB is available here.
Lost in the shadow of the US’s historic change of position on Waiver of IP rights in Covid-19 vaccines, the USTR’s latest Annual Special 301 Report has its own share of surprises to offer. The Report, as is known, is a much criticized annual exercise in ‘calling out’ countries for adopting IP policies that the US does not approve of – regardless of the fact that they’re made by sovereign nations to suit their own local realities. India, which enjoys the distinction of being featured in the ‘Priority Watch List’ for the 29th year in a row, shares the glory with 8 other countries this time. The report follows the usual pattern of criticizing various TRIPS compliant aspects of India’s IP laws which make it harder for American companies to sustain monopolies in India. While a detailed examination of the country report will be undertaken in a different post, this one looks into the more general issue of US’s relaxed stance on compulsory licensing, the strong criticism of which has characterized nearly every previous Special 301 Report in recent years.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative (‘USTR’) recently released its Annual Special 301 Report on Intellectual Property Protection (‘Report’). To borrow Swaraj’s description of an earlier Report, the Special 301 Report “is a unilateral measure taken by the USTR which essentially ranks countries according to how much the US appreciates their IP regimes, and this is used as a kind of [political] ‘shaming’ mechanism to coerce countries into ‘strengthening’ their IP regimes to match the TRIPS-plus standards that the US tries to promote.” As always, India has found its place in the ‘Priority Watch List’ indicating that the US does not agree with the IP law regime of the country at several points. Adyasha has analysed the softened stance towards compulsory licensing in the Report. In this post, I shall analyse India-specific copyright and enforcement related issues discussed in the Report.
Zoe Roth is the little girl (now full-grown adult) that many of us remember from the meme where a house was on fire in the background, and in the foreground, you could see this little girl with a devilish eye (could she be the one who burnt the house, many wondered at the time). Zoe became famous because of this photograph that her dad took when she was only 4. After years of being used as a meme, Zoe has now figured out a way of making profits from the original photo by selling it as an NFT.
I am by no means an expert on the subject, but an NFT is a non-fungible token (unique, as opposed to Bitcoins) that uses the same blockchain technology as cryptocurrency. That way, the original photo is encrypted and tokened as the one and only original, allowing it to be identified and valued. It is the digital version of a Picasso if you want.
[...]
Based on all the above, and pretty convincing testimony, the Court agreed with the BoA, concluding that Hasbro’s intention “was indeed to take advantage of the EU trademark rules by artificially creating a situation where it would not have to prove genuine use of its earlier marks for the goods and services mentioned”. Indeed, by claiming or opposing based on its 2010 trademark, said obligation (the obligation to use the trademark within the 5 following years of registration) was bypassed. As a result, the April 2010 filing was made in bad faith insofar as it covered goods and services already covered by the earlier marks, annulling registration for the goods and services already covered by the earlier trademark.
We know all the above might sound confusing but be prepared for a post of what constitutes bad faith when it comes to trademark this month.
The MPA, acting on behalf of the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, has obtained DMCA subpoenas to unmask the operators of more than two dozen pirate sites. The platforms, all of which use Cloudflare, stand accused of offering major movies including Tenet, Godzilla vs Kong, and Mortal Kombat. Included is IPTorrents, a private tracker that has proven elusive for a number of years.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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