09.06.21
Posted in News Roundup at 5:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Félim is trolled about the cloud, our first impressions of elementary OS, your feedback, and more.
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Like everyone else on Linux I’ve been using sudo but when I tried out doas on my gentoo install I really liked it so I thought why not try it out over on my main Arch install and I’ve really been liking it.
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Recently, I went a little over three months without having a home computer. For the first two months, I just did without having a computer. The third month though, I tried to use a Raspberry Pi 4 as a desktop replacement. How was the experience? It was a mixture of good and bad.
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Bill’s laptop is in computer hospital. Our listeners have suggestions, answers, and feedback on Office file formats, running Wine and Crossover, using AppImages, gaming on Linux and more.
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Kernel Space
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The linux.conf.au organizers have put out a second, extended call for proposals for the 2022 event, which will be held online starting January 14.
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The RISC-V architecture updates have landed in the Linux 5.15 kernel with more software features now being supported.
RISC-V with Linux 5.15 supports new features like the Undefined Behavior Sanitizer (UBSan) now working on the architecture for detecting undefined behavior within the kernel. There is also now support for PC-relative instructions in KProbes, support for the hlt/nohlt kernel command-line options, and a lot of clean-ups.
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Graphics Stack
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The implementation of Wayland by NVIDIA has been one of the greatest technological battles ever seen in Linux. The graphics processing giant did not give its arm to twist by maintaining its bet on EGLStreams as a buffer for Wayland, while the rest, including Intel and AMD, bet on the GBM standard.
After many years of tug of war , Intel’s future return to the dedicated graphics market, the precipitous demise of Xorg, and above all the failure of EGLStreams itself forced NVIDIA to rectify to adopt GBM , further seeing the high odds that Wayland will be set by default in the next Ubuntu LTS.
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Applications
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HPLIP 3.21.8 is here almost two months after version 3.21.6, which only added support for the Fedora 34, Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo), openSUSE Leap 15.3, and Debian GNU/Linux 10.9 “Buster” operating systems, and version 3.21.4, which added support for the HP Envy 6400 printer series, to add support for the Linux Mint 20.2 “Uma”, Manjaro Linux 21.0.7, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 distributions.
On top of that, the HPLIP 3.21.8 release adds support for several new printers, including the HP Smart Tank 500 series, HP Smart Tank 530 series, HP Smart Tank Plus 570 series, HP Smart Tank 7600, HP Smart Tank 750, HP Smart Tank 790, HP Smart Tank Plus 710-720, HP Smart Tank Plus 7000, HP Smart Tank Plus 660-670, HP Smart Tank Plus 6000, as well as the HP DeskJet Ink Advantage Ultra 4800 All-in-One Printer series.
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Instructionals/Technical
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This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to download and install Mozilla Firefox browser 92 in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Linux Mint 20.1, and RockyLinux.
Mozilla Firefox is a free and open-source web browser developed by the Mozilla foundation and generally utilized by thousands and thousands of individuals in their daily actions.
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This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install HPLIP 3.21.8 in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, RHEL 8.4, LinuxMint 20.2, and Manjaro 21.0.7.
HPLIP – HP Linux Image and Printing, developed by HP for Printing, scanning, and faxing with HP inkjet and laser-based printers in Linux platforms.
The latest version of HPLIP 3.21.8 contains new printer support and added support to the new Distro’s and the hplip installer is available for download from SourceForge.
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Developers of PostgreSQL call this platform “The world’s most advanced open-source database”. PostgreSQL is available for Linux including for other common operating systems such as macOS, Windows, and BSD. PostgreSQL implements the 2008 SQL standard very comprehensively. In addition to common data types, the database can also natively handle XML and version 9.2 with data in JSON format. Here we learn the steps to install PostgreSQL on Amazon Linux 2 running on AWS ec2 instance.
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We are using our Kubernetes homelab in this article. We will continue with the pii-demo application for blue/green that we had deployed some time ago with Istio mTLS.
Basic familiarity with Istio is required.
Blue/green deployment is an application release model that transfers user traffic from a previous version of a microservice to a new release, both of which are running in production, without downtime.
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How to Install GitHub CLI on Linux [Ed: Do not download or use this. This is an "embrace, extend, extinguish"-type attack on Git, on Git projects, and pm Git users; Microsoft is already in the second "E" here]
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Hello everyone! It’s officially the end of my Outreachy internship. I can’t believe this is the last blog post I am writing on it. It seems like yesterday, when I received the selection mail and was about to begin my journey as an Outreachy intern with the GNOME organisation.
[...]
At the beginning of the internship, I was not familiar with writing blogs, which scared me. I thought that the internship will be very hectic with all these, and I will not manage the time properly. But the opportunity to document my internship in the form of blogs and everyone’s appreciation has motivated me to carry on with the writing and having people read them.
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New Releases
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We have 2 versions for experienced users to try. These iso files default to using SysVinit.
antiX-21-b2-x64-full and antiX-21-b2-386-full are beta quality releases for experienced testers of antiX to test and provide feedback before final release.
Do not use this as your main OS, though it *might* be possible to upgrade to final (no promises).
* customized antiX 4.9.0-279 and 5.10.57 kernels on the 64 bit live iso. Please try both in your tests.
* customized antiX 4.9.0-279-486-non-pae kernel on the 32 bit live iso. (pae versions available in the repos)
* grub/UEFI live boot changes. Select live boot options (persistence, etc…) from the boot menu and sub menus rather than using the previous console menus. Please check localisation.
* New installer partition selection area, including some lvm support if lvm volume exists.
* no virtualbox-guest packages so best to test on real hardware – live, frugal or installed.
* added mesa vulkan drivers
* improved localisation of apps and live system
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Today marks the release of Finnix 123, the LiveCD for system administrators. Expanding on Finnix 122 from six months ago, this release includes a number of fixes, new packages and new features.
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Finnix 123 is here almost seven months after Finnix 122 and brings a major change, namely the fact that the sysadmin-oriented distro is now based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series rather than tracking the Debian Testing repositories.
While the distribution is still powered by the Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series, the Finnix 123 release adds several goodies for system administrators, such as the sshd and passwd kernel command-line options (e.g. sshd passwd=foo or sshd passwd=root:foo or passwd=finnix:bar), as well as a basic “command-not-found” handler that provides users with explicit instructions on how to install certain packages.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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In this video, we are looking at MX Linux 21 Beta 2.
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Today we are looking at MX Linux 21 Beta 2, the KDE edition. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.11, based on Debian 11, KDE 5.20, and uses about 800MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
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Debian Family
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There are about 30,000 packages in sid, and it usually takes a couple of weeks for the janitor to cycle through all of them.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Open Source is increasingly used in digital technologies. This required an in-depth analysis of its current role, position and potential for the European economy. Open Source Software (OSS) has become mainstream across all sectors of the software industry over the past decade. Conversely, the level of maturity of Open Source Hardware (OSH) currently appears far lower. However, the business ecosystem for OSH is developing fast. If OSH is to follow the same development as OSS, it could constitute a cornerstone of the future Internet of Things (IoT), the future of computing and the digital transformation of the European industry at the end of the digital decade.
The objective of the study was to investigate and quantify the economic impact of OSS and OSH on the European economy. The study also identified strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and challenges of open source in relevant ICT policies, such as cybersecurity, artificial intelligence (AI), digitising European industry, the connected car, high performance computing, big data, distributed ledger technologies, and more.
Economic evidence of the footprint of open source in the EU has been collected. A list of policy options to maximize the benefit of open source supporting a competitive EU software and hardware industry, which in turn supports the twin environmental and digital transformation of the EU economy is also proposed.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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pg_dbms_job 1.1.0, an extension to create, manage and use Oracle-style DBMS_JOB scheduled jobs, released.
dbForge Data Compare for PostgreSQL v3.4 released
pgmoneta 0.5.0, a backup and restore system for PostgreSQL, released
pgspider_ext, an extension to create a cluster engine for distributed data based on PostgreSQL foreign data wrappers, released.
psycopg2 3.0.0 beta 1, a Python connector for PostgreSQL, released.
postgresql-wheel, a Python package containing an entire compiled PostgreSQL server in a single pip installable file, released
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Devart, one of the leading developers of database management software, ALM solutions, and data providers for the most popular database servers, announced an update of dbForge Data Compare for PostgreSQL, a GUI tool for data comparison and synchronization.
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pgBadger is a PostgreSQL performance analyzer, built for speed with fully detailed reports based on your PostgreSQL log files.
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Programming/Development
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Intel Compute Runtime 21.35.20826 is available today with initial support for oneAPI Level Zero v1.2.
Today’s Intel Compute-Runtime update is their latest for this open-source stack supporting OpenCL 3.0 and Level Zero support going back to Broadwell~Skylake processors with integrated graphics. Notable in this update is adding release support for Level Zero v1.2 (though the documentation still notes Level Zero 1.1 pre-release support).
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Notcurses as an open-source library designed for complex and “blingful” text user interfaces and character graphics, now works not only on Linux but also Windows and macOS. Notcurses makes it easy for CLI-based programs to support a wide range of colors, multimedia, Unicode, and other features not normally associated with command-line applications.
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Perl/Raku
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The Perl compiler wants to help us write clean code. One of the ways that it does this is to issue warnings when a global variable appears ony once: Name “main::Foo” used only once: possible typo at …
The thing is, sometimes this is not an error. For example, we may want to refer to a global variable in another package, one that was not imported into our namespace.
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Defence/Aggression
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THE HAGUE, Sept 3 (Reuters) – Safe in Europe after escaping from Kabul, an Afghan woman judge describes how she was hunted by men she had once jailed, now freed by the Taliban fighters who took over the country.
“Four or five Taliban members came and asked people in my house: ‘Where is this woman judge?’ These were people who I had put in jail,” she told Reuters in an interview from an undisclosed location, asking not to be identified.
Afghanistan has around 250 women judges. A few were able to flee in recent weeks, but most were left behind and are still trying to get out, said international colleagues and activists who have formed networks working around the clock to help them escape.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Forward Pharma A/S (NASDAQ:FWP) (“we,” “Forward” or the “Company”), today announced that the Technical Board of Appeal (the “TBA”) of the European Patent Office (the “EPO”) has dismissed Forward’s appeal of the previous decision of the EPO Opposition Division to revoke the EP2801355 patent (the “’355 patent”) following the oral hearing.
The TBA made its decision after considering Forward’s appeal against the decision of the Opposition Division and third-party submissions from several opponents. The TBA will issue detailed reasons for the decision in written form in due course, and following receipt and review of these, Forward will announce future plans for the Company. Such plan may involve a petition for review at the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the EPO in an effort to overturn the unfavorable outcome, but the likelihood of a petition for review being successful is low. The denial of a petition for review would end the Opposition Proceeding in favor of the opponents. For all practical purposes, such denial or the absence of a petition for review would represent an unsuccessful outcome of the Opposition Proceeding, resulting in no royalties being due to the Company from Biogen based on Biogen’s future net sales outside the United States, as defined in the Settlement and License Agreement by and among Forward, subsidiaries of Biogen Inc. and certain other parties thereto.
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Kernel, Microsoft at 2:18 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum f9c6121d6e92ec01e0771201e4491580
Summary: Linus Torvalds, the founder of Linux and Git, isn’t having it with Microsoft and its partners; 3 years ago dishonest monopolists worked to oust him over his supposedly ‘rude’ messages and the exploitative Linux Foundation sent him to therapists over it as if he was 'ill' for daring to protect his work (they still try)
THE EFFORT to impose Microsoft file systems on Linux users — with or without patent tax (see Tuxera) — goes well more than a decade back. It dates back to pre-GitHub days and we wrote many articles about it, even in recent years [1, 2, 3].
“Towards the end of the video I discuss why GitHub is also a legal threat and an attack on all of us…”Last year we cautioned about ongoing attempts to push Linux from Git to GitHub (from free-as-in-freedom software and autonomy to Microsoft proprietary software oppression) and now we see attempts to impose GitHub and at the same time Microsoft file systems on Linux users. They want to make that part of the core of the kernel’s storage-related code. In the video above I discuss the reaction from Torvalds (screenshot below with highlights added), who has long opposed GitHub, mostly for practical reasons. Towards the end of the video I discuss why GitHub is also a legal threat and an attack on all of us — putting aside these latest arguments about quality and security aspects. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 12:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new application and distribution versions release in the last few days. This keeps you informed of the latest developments in the Linux world.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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SUSE’s new era kicks off this week, CentOS users get some relief, and how Docker managed to piss off their users.
Plus RISC-V gets a surprising benefactor, and the kernel feature we never thought would get merged that was just approved by Linus.
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Kernel Space
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Since April 2020, we are offering our training courses online, both in public sessions available to individual registration and in dedicated sessions for specific customers.
So far, our public sessions have always been organized from 2 PM to 6 PM Paris time, which was a good fit for our customers in Europe and in the US East Coast, but not so much for our customers in the US West Coast, in the Middle East and Asia.
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Tachyum has successfully executed the Linux boot process on the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) prototype of its Prodigy Universal Processor.
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The platform-drivers-x86 area of the kernel continues to be quite active with particularly offering better support for modern Intel/AMD laptops. With Linux 5.15 there is another big batch of improvements that landed at the end of last week.
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A microservice team asked me for help with a mysterious issue. They claimed that the ZFS file system was consuming 30% of CPU capacity. I summarized this case study at [Kernel Recipes] in 2017 and have shared the full story here. ## 1. Problem Statement The microservice was for metrics ingestion and had recently updated their base OS image (BaseAMI). After doing so, they claimed that ZFS was now eating over 30% of CPU capacity. My first thought was that they were somehow mistaken: I worked on ZFS internals at Sun Microsystems, and unless it is badly misconfigured there’s no way it can consume that much CPU. I have been surprised many times by unexpected performance issues, so I thought I should check their instances anyway. At the very least, I could show that I took it seriously enough to check it myself. I should also be able to identify the real CPU consumer. ## 2. Monitoring I started with the cloud-wide monitoring tool, [Atlas], to check high-level CPU metrics. These included a breakdown of CPU time into percentages for “usr” (user: applications) and “sys” (system: the kernel). I was surprised to find a whopping 38% of CPU time was in sys, which is highly unusual for cloud workloads at my employer. This supported the claim that ZFS was eating CPU, but how? Surely this is some other kernel activity, and not ZFS. ## 3. Next Steps I’d usually SSH to instances for deeper analysis, where I could use mpstat(1) to confirm the usr/sys breakdown and perf(1) to begin profiling on-CPU kernel code paths. But since Netflix has tools (previously [Vector], now FlameCommander) that allow us to easily fetch flame graphs from our cloud deployment UI, I thought I’d jump to the chase. Just for illustration, this shows the Vector UI and a typical cloud flame graph.
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Josh and Kurt talk about GitHub Copilot. What can we learn from a report claiming 40% of code generated by Copilot has security vulnerabilities? Is this the future or just some sort of strange new thing that will be gone as fast as it came?
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Linus Torvalds will pull Paragon Software’s NTFS driver into the 5.15 kernel source – but he complained about the use of a GitHub merge in the submission, saying that GitHub “creates absolutely useless garbage merges.”
Early last month Torvalds gave Paragon Software a nudge that it really should submit a pull request – an actual submission of code to be merged into the kernel source – in order for its read-write NTFS driver to be included in the forthcoming 5.15 release, for which the merge window is currently open. NTFS is the native Windows file system and Paragon’s implementation will improve interoperability, versus the existing driver which has limited write support.
On Friday Paragon duly submitted its pull request, saying: “Current version works with normal/compressed/sparse files and supports acl, NTFS journal replaying.”
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Applications
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HPLIP, Hewlett-Packard’s Linux imaging and printing software, released version 3.21.8 with new printers support.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install SQLite on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, SQLite is a C-language library that implements a small, fast, self-contained, high-reliability, full-featured, SQL database engine. It’s a popular solution for applications that need to use on-disk files formatted as lightweight databases to run efficiently.
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 SQLite on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
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This simple tutorial shows how to install Virtualbox Guest Additions in Ubuntu based systems, e.g., Linux Mint, Zorin OS and Elementary OS, with fix or workaround for common issues.
Guest Additions is a set of device drivers and system applications to install in Guest OS. It’s useful when you try to share folder and/or clipboard between guest and host, enable USB support etc. Installing the software suite is easy via a menu option. However, it might not function in some cases.
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Even if we have native Linux applications available for several tools, many end up using web applications.
Maybe in the form of an electron app or directly through a web browser, native experiences are becoming an old-school thing.
Of course, running web applications, no matter the platform, needs more system resources. And, considering every service is going for a web-based approach instead of a native experience, we need solutions to manage the web apps efficiently.
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of Linux Lite 5.6 and some of the applications pre-installed.
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ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source office suite distributed under GNU AGPL v3.0. It comprises web-based viewers and collaborative editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations highly compatible with OOXML formats.
ONLYOFFICE Docs can be integrated with various cloud services such as Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, Alfresco, Plone, etc., as well as embedded into your own solution. The editors can also be used as a part of the complete productivity solution ONLYOFFICE Workspace.
If you want to ditch MS Office, but not ready to do it abruptly, you can try ONLYOFFICE Docs integrated in the SharePoint content management system. This combo allows you to edit and collaborate on docx, xlsx, and pptx files directly within the CMS.
In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to connect these two applications using WOPI, a Web Application Open Platform Interface protocol intended to standardize the integration process.
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Radicale is a free and open-source CalDAV (Calendars, to-do lists) and CardDav (contacts) server. It aims to be a small and lightweight (CalDAV and CardDav) server application, yet powerful and works out-of-the-box. Radicale allows you to shares calendars and contact lists through CalDAV, CardDAV, and HTTPS. And most importantly, it can be secure through TLS connection and authentication. Also, it works with many CalDAV and CardDAV clients such as gnome-calendar, evolution, Mozilla thunderbird, DAVx (for android), etc.
Radicale comes with a simple configuration, and it’s easy to configure and install. Radicale is written in Python, it runs on operating systems like Linux, BSD, macOS, and Windows.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and configure Radicale on Ubuntu 20.04.
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Reveal.js is a free and open-source HTML presentation framework that enables users to create free, fully-featured, and attractive presentations using a web browser. Users can use web technologies in the presentations using the reveal.js framework. This tool helps to add more CSS styles, add an external web page, include <iframe>and custom user behavior using different JavaScript APIs.
We will see in this article how to install the Reveal.js HTML presentation framework on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS system.
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Ubuntu and its derivatives often affected by the initramfs issue. As far as I know, it occurs usually on the disks that are formatted with ext4 filesystem. I haven’t had this problem in BTRFS though. Until today, I thought only the Ubuntu-based systems are affected by this issue. I was wrong! Today, I encountered with the initramfs issue in my Fedora 34 desktop system. I already knew how to fix Initramfs error on Ubuntu Linux. In this guide, I will show you how to solve initramfs error in Fedora.
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VirtualBox is a free and opensource virtualization tool which allows us to run multiple operating systems at the same time. As the name suggests, VirtualBox creates a virtualized environment for installing and running operating systems. It is available for Windows, Linux, macOS and Solaris. VirtualBox is generally used at desktop level where geeks create test environment in the guest virtual machines.
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Most modern Linux Desktop systems come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, along with lacking the newest features, software technology, and support for the latest graphics card hardware. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.
In the following guide, you will know how to install Nvidia drivers on your AlmaLinux 8 desktop.
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Want to install Linux but think it might be a disaster? Installing Linux on a PC or laptop is easier than you think – here’s what you need to know.
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In easy terms, a service is a program or application in Linux that runs or expects to run in the background. That is, it is running without the need for
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It’s amusing how the simplest of the things could be complicated when you are new to something.
The other day, I found my friend could not figure out how to exit the top command. Instead of stopping the command, he closed the entire terminal application.
That’s not only unnecessary, it is a not good thing to do.
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Developing applications for regulated and high security environments can be challenging. There is a plethora of software following diverse development methods and standards, but not always targeting a particular data protection standard. How can a large organization be assured that the cryptographic applications and libraries used implement cryptography correctly and follow best practices? FIPS 140 tackles the cryptography validation problem from the perspective of the U.S. regulator. To learn more about FIPS check the first article on this topic. In essence the FIPS 140 standard ensures that cryptography is implemented using well known secure designs, follows certain best practices, does not involve obscure algorithms, and that there is a due process in attestation.
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Linux kernel 5.14 is out and is quite popular for people to test out with many new features, support, and security. The Linux 5.14 kernel release has gone through seven release candidates over the last two months and benefits from the contributions of 1,650 different developers. Those that contribute to Linux kernel development include individual contributors and large vendors like Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle, and Samsung.
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August 2021 was another record-breaking month for Enable Sysadmin. We published 22 articles and had over 670,000 read articles from over 459,000 readers. Today, we are looking back at our top 10 articles to give readers a chance to catch up on any of the great content they might have missed. In this list, you will see various topics covered, and we are confident that some, if not all, will be of interest to you.
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This guide lists out all the top most used basic Linux commands every day on your Linux system. You can use the following commands on any Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Debian, CentOS, Fedora, RedHat, ArcLinux.
The following commands are executed in Command Line which is referred as Linux-shell. Let’s get to the common commands used everyday.
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ImageMagick is a handy multipurpose command-line tool for all your image needs. ImageMagick supports a variety of image types, including JPG photos and PNG graphics.
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I often use ImageMagick on my webserver to resize images. For example, let’s say I want to include a photo of my cats on my personal website. The photo from my phone is very large, about 4000×3000 pixels, at 3.3MB. That’s much too large for a web page. I use the ImageMagick convert tool to change the size of my photo so that I can include it on my web page. ImageMagick is a full suite of tools, one of the most common is the convert command.
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Games
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Imagine cramming an RTX 3080, a Ryzen 9 5900HX, and 16 GB DDR4 RAM into a slim chassis that’s barely thicker than an inch and weighing in at less than five pounds. That’s what the Tuxedo Stellaris laptop by Tuxedo Computers is (the name is not to be confused with the game).
You may recall earlier this year I had done a review of the Polaris laptop by the same company. Well, after getting in touch with them again, they offered me the Stellaris. I was blown away by the specs looking at the web page for it. There was no way I was going to reject this!
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Recently it was announced by developer Snoozy Kazoo that their (rather great) game Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion was ending Linux support but they’ve now restored it.
Initially their announcement on August 19 mentioned that “it has been a struggle to reliably build and test the Linux version”. However, after numerous replies from Linux fans the developer ended up adding a Beta version for testing on August 30 and later on September 2 they restored the support in full.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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I have been using the awesome window manager for 10 years. It is a tiling window manager, configurable and extendable with the Lua language. Using a general-purpose programming language to configure every aspect is a double-edged sword. Due to laziness and the apparent difficulty of adapting my configuration—about 3000 lines—to newer releases, I was stuck with the 3.4 version, whose last release is from 2013.
It was time for a rewrite. Instead, I have switched to the i3 window manager, lured by the possibility to migrate to Wayland and Sway later with minimal pain. Using an embedded interpreter for configuration is not as important to me as it was in the past: it brings both complexity and brittleness.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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My full name is Mohammad-Ali Bahabadi, but I sign with my shortened version of my name, Ali Bahabadi. I was born in 1983 in Iran. I got a master’s degree in art conservation but I have been working as graphic designer for several years.
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I am new to digital painting, but I think that digital painting has made it easier for me to paint, and in a short time it has made me a better artist. Although this change might be small, I can easily feel it myself. Almost every day I paint a new painting, which I believe it is not so easy be achieved in the traditional way. I need to thank everyone who contributed to the development of Krita. I have had the possibility of digital painting for many years. I had both a good graphic tablet and the most expensive graphic software available to me. But I think there was something in Krita that encouraged me to paint every day. Krita has a friendly spirit that accompanies me in painting.
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EasyOS, and all the pups, login as root, but with capability of running apps as user “spot”. I am planning to create a Chromium or Chrome browser PET or SFS, and intend to run the browser with user spot.
Before doing that however, spot has to be relocated to a more rational path. spot’s home has been /root/spot, same as the early pups, however, have now relocated to /clients/spot, see snapshot:
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New Releases
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New version of Lakka has been released!
We are happy to announce new and updated version of Lakka.
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Lakka 3.4 Available to Download, Lakka is a lightweight Linux distribution that transforms a small computer into a full blown game console. The project’s latest release is Lakka 3.4 and it updates RetroArch support, the Mesa package, DOS support, and popular console support.
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OpenWrt 21.02 has just been released with higher security with WPA3, HTTPS & TLS enabled by default, as well as initial support for the Distributed Switch Architecture (DSA), the Linux standard for configurable Ethernet switches.
OpenWrt is the most popular open-source Linux distribution for routers and entry-level Linux-capable embedded systems, and the latest release includes over 5800 commits since the release of OpenWrt 19.07 in January 2020.
WPA3 was already supported in OpenWrt 19.07, but not enabled by default, OpenWrt 20.02 changes that, together with TLS thanks to trusted CA certificates from Mozilla. That means LuCi interface, wget, opkg package manager can all support HTTPS out-of-the-box. Note that HTTPS redirection can be disabled for LuCI in the configuration files. Another security change is that SELinux is now supported by OpenWrt, but not enabled by default.
OpenWrt 21.02’s DSA implementation replaces the current swconfig system, but not all targets have been ported, so some are still using swconfig. Since the two solutions are much different, a system upgrade will not be able to convert an existing swconfig configuration to DSA configuration.
The new release also updates the syntax of configuration files including board.json. OpenWrt 21.02 will still support the old convention and the LuCI interface can migrate your config automatically to the new syntax.
Various packages have been updated with OpenWrt relying on Linux 5.4.143, busybox 1.33.1, gcc 8.4.0, and the operating system switched from mbedTLS to wolfSSL as the default SSL library. Both mbedTLS and OpenSSL can still be installed manually. New hardware targets have been added from realtek, Broadcom (bcm4908), and Rockchip RL33xx which should be good news for Rockchip RK3328 and RK3399 boards such NanoPi R2S, Rock Pi 4, Pine64 RockPro64, or which are already supported, but hopefully others like Orange Pi R1 Plus will be added to the list.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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GIMP is an acronym for GNU Image Manipulation Program. It is a freely distributed program for such tasks as photo retouching, image composition and image authoring.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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The openSUSE Project participated in this year’s Google Summer of Code along with several mentoring organizations.
Six of the seven accepted projects were successfully completed and mentors of the participating projects helped students improve their programming skills and knowledge of open source over the 10-week program.
Let’s review the contributions!
The first contribution we will cover involves the Uyuni Project. The purpose of the project was converting the JSP code of virtual systems pages to ReactJS. Improving the User Interface of freshly created virtual systems page resulted in a Pull Request 4152 that is listed as work in progress and is nearing completion.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Earlier this year, we shared the 7 business leadership conferences to explore in 2021. If you’re looking to work in a few learning opportunities before the year ends, we’ve rounded up some fall conferences worth exploring.
Conference organizers are hoping to attract CIOs and IT leaders by putting together a mix of in-person events, virtual sessions, and hybrid-models in an effort to consider the comfort level of all possible attendees. There’s a wealth of knowledge to be gained, not to mention the potential networking opportunities.
Some of the conferences we’ve highlighted offer an in-person option for attendees who are ready to get back to (masked) face-to-face connection. Other events will take a hybrid-approach with a certain number of participants joining in person and the rest engaging digitally. Virtual events have presented a more affordable option for attendees who may not have been able to engage otherwise. Additionally, when you consider the year-plus of experience organizers have had hosting virtual conferences, digital events will offer plenty of perspectives, thoughtful sessions, and inspiration that CIOs can take home and implement into their own organizations.
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Red Hat recently conducted a Customer Empathy Workshop series that included two virtual workshops focused on continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tooling within Red Hat OpenShift. The Red Hat User Experience Design team partnered with Product Management and Engineering to engage 22 OpenShift customers from seven different companies.
During each workshop, we used digital whiteboards and video conferencing to virtually engage customers in hands-on activities. We used the first three steps of the classic design thinking—empathize, define, and ideate—to identify and understand problems as well as suggest solutions. Let’s take a look at what we learned.
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I like history, and I like computers, so I enjoy hearing stories about computing before computers were an everyday household appliance, much less a personal accessory. One tale I hear often is about how the computers of long ago (in computer years, anyway) were pleasantly basic. They were so basic, in fact, that it was relatively trivial for a curious user to figure out how to program one. Looking at modern computers, with object-oriented programming languages, complex GUI frameworks, network APIs, containers, and more, there’s genuine concern that the tools of the computing trade have become essentially inaccessible to anyone without specialized training.
From the day the Raspberry Pi was released in 2012, it has always been intended as an educational platform. Several third-party vendors support the Pi with add-ons and training kits to help learners of all ages explore programming, physical computing, and open source. However, until recently, it’s largely been up to the user to figure out how all the pieces on the market fit together. And then I got a CrowPi.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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While RISC-V garners most of the interest these days when it comes to open-source processor ISAs, OpenRISC continues pushing forward with its Linux kernel support.
OpenRISC doesn’t have any readily available commercial implementations available but so far is still left running OpenRISC on FPGAs. OpenRISC developers have been working on upstreaming more of their OpenRISC LiteX drivers for such “build your hardware” scenarios. More details on the LiteX project for those interested via GitHub.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Adobe Lightroom is a non-destructive photo editing software. It’s part of the Adobe ecosystem and comes with great photo editing features. However, it doesn’t come cheap.
Its price tag is a bit off-putting if you’re looking for affordable editing software, but don’t worry. There are several free, open source alternatives that you can use to edit your images.
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Programming/Development
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Another release of the tidyCpp package arrived on CRAN earlier today. The packages offers a clean C++ layer on top of the C API for R which aims to make its use a little easier and more consistent.
The vignette has been extended once more with a new example, and added a table of contents. The package now supports a (truly minimal) C++ class for a numeric vector which is the most likely use case.
The NEWS entry follows and includes the 0.0.3 release earlier in the year which did not get the usual attention of post-release blog post.
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Perl/Raku
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The Rakudo Core Developer team (more specifically Jonathan Worthington, Stefan Seifert, Daniel Green, Jan-Olof Hendig, Nicholas Clark and Oleksandr Kyriukhin) have reached a milestone on the new-disp branch: all 117K+ spectests are now passing! Focus for the coming week is now on fixing module breakage in the ecosystem (some of which is caused by them being naughty referring to internal features that have been refactored), and improving the performance of Rakudo. Great to see such advances!
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Rust
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After the stabilization of the const generics MVP in version 1.51, the const generics project group has continued to work on const generics. Large parts of this work were gated behind the feature gates const_generics and const_evaluatable_checked. As time went on, the const_generics feature became fairly useless on its own while the name of const_evaluatable_checked didn’t really capture what this feature was intended to do.
To improve this, we have recently removed the features const_generics, lazy_normalization_consts, and const_evaluatable_checked. They have been replaced by feature(adt_const_params) and feature(generic_const_exprs).
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Hardware
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When a VGA monitor does not start at all, a common reason is that one or two capacitors are damaged. All you need to do to repair it is to replace them, and you’re good to go. It’s quite easier than you think, and I’ll show you how.
I was tasked with repairing a VGA monitor, namely an LG Flatron W1934S, that would not turn on anymore. All I could see what the blue power LED blinking regularly, about every two seconds. Since so far, I had a 100% success rate in failing to repair TVs, I was not confident, and I thought maybe the monitor is some special state making it not turn on, as it happened to me with another monitor a few years ago.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Security
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There are some situations when running an antivirus on Linux makes sense, but the average Linux desktop isn’t one of them.
For Windows users, installing an antivirus software on their system has become one of the first steps over the years. But for a Linux system, the choice is not as clear. A big question usually asked by those who just have switched to Linux is: “Why Linux doesn’t need antivirus?”.
In this article, we will answer your questions and give you a few tips depending on your system usage.
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (btrbk, pywps, and squashfs-tools), Fedora (libguestfs, libss7, ntfs-3g, ntfs-3g-system-compression, partclone, testdisk, wimlib, and xen), Mageia (exiv2, golang, libspf2, and ruby-addressable), openSUSE (apache2, dovecot23, gstreamer-plugins-good, java-11-openjdk, libesmtp, mariadb, nodejs10, opera, python39, sssd, and xerces-c), and SUSE (apache2, java-11-openjdk, libesmtp, mariadb, nodejs10, python39, sssd, xen, and xerces-c).
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Yet another article on the privacy risks of static MAC addresses and always-on Bluetooth connections. This one is about wireless headphones.
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The Taliban takeover in Kabul, the frantic evacuation efforts of foreign nationals and vulnerable Afghans, and the fear among those left behind of being targeted by the new regime are shining a spotlight on the double-edged nature of government data collection as well as digital communication tools in times of crisis.
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Confidentiality
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Last Thursday, an american judge ruled that Apple will have to continue fighting a lawsuit brought by users in federal court in California. The case is one of several that have been brought against Apple, Google and Amazon that involve allegations of violation of privacy by voice assistants.
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Monopolies
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Last week I was part of a meeting with the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority, the regulator, to talk about Apple devices and the browser choice (or lack of it) on them. They’re doing a big study into Apple’s conduct in relation to the distribution of apps on iOS and iPadOS devices in the UK, in particular, the terms and conditions governing app developers’ access to Apple’s App Store, and part of that involves looking at browsers on iOS, and part of that involves talking to people who work on the web. So myself and Bruce Lawson and another UK developer of iOS and web apps put together some thoughts and had a useful long meeting with the CMA on the topic.
They asked that we keep confidential the exact details of what was discussed and asked, which I think is reasonable, but I did put together a slide deck to summarise my thoughts which I presented to them, and you can certainly see that. It’s at kryogenix.org/code/cma-apple and shows everything that I presented to the CMA along with my detailed notes on what it all means.
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Patents
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Last month, the Supreme People’s Court (SPC) of the People’s Republic of China affirmed on a definitive basis a decision by the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court that OPPO is in its right to seek a global FRAND determination against Sharp from a Chinese court. Sharp had brought a jurisdictional appeal of the decision below. Last week, Chinese media reported on the ruling.
According to Counterpoint Research, OPPO shipped well 33.6 million smartphones during the last quarter, making it number four in the global market in its own right–though if you throw in the 32.5 million units sold by vivo and the volumes of other subsidiaries of the BBK Electronics group (such as OnePlus), we’re actually talking about the world’s largest smartphone maker (well ahead of Samsung and Apple). OPPO already has significant traction in various markets outside China, and increasingly has to fend off patent royalty demands and infringement assertions. Landmark rulings are an effective way to earn the respect of actual or potential adversaries.
At a time when the European Commission is challenging the Chinese stance on global standard-essential patent (SEP) dispute resolution by means of a set of questions raised at the WTO level, this ruling by China’s top court is particularly important. It took me a few days to obtain an unofficial English translation. While I don’t claim to know Chinese law, the ruling is, thankfully, self-explanatory.
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Trademarks
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The Tenth Circuit’s analysis in Hetronic v Hetronic Germany expands a circuit split, which could lead SCOTUS to accept cert if the defendants appeal
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The Turkish Patent and Trademark Office has upheld Red Bull’s opposition against an application for a composite mark intended for energy drinks.
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Posted in News Roundup at 7:12 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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If you are in the market for a new Linux laptop you will be pleased to know that the team over at System76 have recently announced the availability of its new Pangolin Linux laptop equipped with a choice of AMD Ryzen 5500U or 5700U CPUs depending on your budget and performance preference. Equipped with a 15.6 inch full HD display the laptop comes with a choice of Ubuntu or Pop!_OS operating system is and supports up to 64GB of RAM and 2TB of onboard storage.
“Feast your eyes on System76’s first laptop powered by AMD Ryzen mobile processors. Get up to the Ryzen 7 5700U CPU for fast and nimble everyday computing. Round out your AMD experience with integrated AMD Radeon graphics. This one-two AMD punch makes our Pangolin outshine all others! (Apologies to any pangolins reading this.)”
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This is a series that offers a gentle introduction to Linux for newcomers.
A desktop environment is a collection of disparate components that integrate together. They bundle these components to provide a common graphical user interface with elements such as icons, toolbars, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. Additionally, most desktop environments include a set of integrated applications and utilities.
Desktop environments (now abbreviated as DE) provide their own window manager, system software that controls the placement and appearance of windows within a windowing system. They also provide a file manager which organizes, lists, and locates files and directories. Other aspects include a background provider, a panel to provide a menu and display information, as well as a setting/configuration manager to customize the environment.
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Instructionals/Technical
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There are several reasons why you would want to have a new WordPress Admin user to manage and customize your site in relation to privileged actions related to the site’s layout, appearance, and content.
The most common reason is that you underestimated what WordPress could achieve and now you are dealing with impressive user web traffic towards your site.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Splunk on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Splunk is the most used software technology platform for analyzing, searching, and monitoring system-generated log databases in real-time. Splunk supports all major operating systems including Windows, Linux, and Mac OS. It is easily scalable, fully integrated, and supports both local and remote data sources.
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 the step-by-step installation of the Splunk data platform 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.
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Today we are looking at how to install Funkin’ Kepler Observation Unit mod on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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Like everything is file in Linux, everything is string in bash.
Yes! Technically, there are no data types in Bash. Essentially, Bash variables are just character strings.
And that creates a problem when you are trying to do arithmetic operations in bash. The numbers you try to add give you weird results.
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Docker is an open-source project that allows you to easily and quickly build, test, and deploy applications. Docker organizes software into containers that contain everything the software requires to run, such as libraries, system tools, code, and runtime. Docker allows you to quickly deploy and scale applications in any environment. Developers can use the development environments on Windows, Linux, or macOS.
In this tutorial, we learn how to install Docker CE on AlmaLinux 8. The steps are also applicable to Rocky Linux 8, CentOS 8, and REHL.
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If you frequently use Linux on your Chromebook, then you must have seen programs coming in tar.gz, AppImage, and DEB packages. While DEB programs can be installed easily and AppImage programs run well on a Chromebook, it’s a bit tricky to install a tar.gz file in Chrome OS. So to make things easier, we bring you a handy guide on how to install a tar.gz file on your Chromebook. You need to run a couple of commands, and you will be all set.
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Few ways to check Network Interface details in Linux such as interface name, associated IP address, MAC address and interface speed etc.
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This guide will show you how to work with the inventory file, variables, and facts in Ansible. Understanding these concepts in Ansible is critical. Generally, Ansible uses the information provided in the inventory and variables to discover information about your remote systems. And, the information gathered is then stored as facts.
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Games
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Emulation just got even more interesting as the RetroArch team have released another major update. This release adds in AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) support.
RetroArch is a frontend for emulators, game engines and media players. It enables you to run classic games on a wide range of computers and consoles through its slick graphical interface. Settings are also unified so configuration is done once and for all.
On September 5 the developers released RetroArch 1.9.9 which among other things, added in FSR. While the developers mention that FSR is supposed to be used in a compute shader, which they don’t have in RetroArch, they instead “used it in a fragment pass anyway and it Just Works!”. As always, people working on emulators come up with pretty clever solutions to improve how old games look. FSR with RetroArch will work with both OpenGL and Vulkan on Linux (and other APIs on other platforms).
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Sir, You Are Being Hunted is a 2013 classic sandbox stealth experience from Big Robot Ltd. They’ve teamed up with Den Of Thieves Games to bring a huge overhaul to the game and a new Sir, You Are Being Hunted: Reinvented Edition has been announced for 2022.
The Reinvented Edition is actually being made for the Nintendo Switch as a “comprehensive remaster” but it’s also coming as a standalone game for Linux, macOS and Windows in 2022 with “enhanced visuals, new gameplay options, a modern engine, bigger islands, faster procedural generation, and more”.
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fheroes2 is a game engine reimplementation for the absolute classic that is Heroes of Might and Magic II. It’s free, open source and a new release is out now. Written from scratch much like OpenMW for Morrowind, OpenRA for classic Westwood RTS games, openXcom for for the X-COM and more it’s another great example of a community of people reviving old games for modern platforms.
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Totally Reliable Delivery Service is a comedy physics game from We’re Five Games and publisher tinyBuild about terrible package delivery couriers.
You and up to three others (you can play solo) can join together to deliver some packages by land, air, sea and any possible way you can come up with that might possibly get a package delivered with odd machinery, useful gadgets, and the wonders of physics to reliably deliver packages to their destination.
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Probably one of the best Early Access games, Last Epoch, has an almighty upgrade out now with Sands of Majasa. This update adds in the 9th Chapter of the story to expand the campaign.
“To stop the Void from ensuring the dark fate of the world, you must destroy the Immortal Emperor, who is believed to be the one who unleashed it. This quest takes you to the Divine Era to search for The Lance of Heorot, an ancient weapon Heorot once wielded against his son Morditas.”
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Dwerve mixes together elements of a dungeon crawling RPG with tower defense and you can now try it out with the new release of the Dwerve: Prologue. Funded on Kickstarter back in 2020, Dwerve is a very promising upcoming indie game you should be keeping an eye on.
The Prologue is very similar to the older demo except it’s gone through some more QA with “bug fixes, better balancing, design improvements, new HUD art, full controller support (including menus), difficulty options, graphics settings, new dialogues and other improvements”. Check out the new trailer:
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Reviews
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Think of elementary OS as the distro that – in a perfect world – would carry Linux to desktop domination. It’s slick, it looks good, it’s surprisingly nimble, and its developers have only the best of intentions.
So why doesn’t it come with a word processor?
One would think, in the second decade of the 21st century, that a word processor would be standard equipment, showing up next to the email, calendar, and other apps after installation. But not in the new elementary OS 6, code named Odin. Yes, with a little bit of command line keystroking, you can add LibreOffice or Calligra or even AbiWord.
But an office suite, just because almost everyone uses a word processor or a spreadsheet or a presentation app these days?
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Debian Family
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It’s major upgrade time again! The Debian project just published the Debian 11 “bullseye” release, and it’s pretty awesome! This makes me realized that I have never written here about my peculiar upgrade process, and figured it was worth bringing that up to a wider audience.
My upgrade process also has a notable changes section which includes major version changes (e.g. Inkscape 1.0!), new packages (e.g. podman!) and important behavior changes (e.g. driverless scanning and printing!).
I’m particularly interested to hear about any significant change I might have missed. If you know of a cool new package that shipped with bullseye and that I forgot, do let me know!
But that’s for the cool new stuff. We need to talk about the problems with Debian major upgrades.
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Geniatech NVJ100AI/NVJ100AIX is a carrier board fitted with either Jetson Nano or Jetson Xavier NX SoM with good expansion capabilities thanks to three M.2 sockets and ten RS232 and/or RS485 interfaces, plus the usual Gigabit Ethernet, USB ports, HDMI video interface, etc…
On the software side of thing, it’s the usual story for Jetson hardware with support for the Ubuntu-based NVIDIA JetPack, CUDA-X software stack with NVIDIA DeepStream and the Transfer Learning Toolkit for intelligent video analytics, NVIDIA Clara for healthcare imaging, genomics, and patient monitoring, as well as NVIDIA Isaac for robotics.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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The new features and improvements implemented in the Firefox 92 web browser include the ability to automatically perform HTTPS upgrades when HTTPS RR is available (using HTTPS RR as Alt-Svc headers), updated bookmark toolbar menus to follow Firefox’s visual styles, and redesigned certificate error pages for a better user experience.
In addition, this release promised an improved Firefox PDF viewer with support for filling more forms, such as XFA-based forms used by various governments and banks, during the beta phase, so this might be available in the final release as well.
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Education
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[...] An analysis published in his book “Trois leçons sur l’école républicaine” ( Publisher Seuil). To reach this conclusion, Eric Maurin analysed the success rate of Muslim girls in the baccalaureate according to their year of birth. [...]
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Remember Proctorio? They’re the “remote proctoring” company that boomed during the pandemic by promising that they could stop exam cheating through gross, discriminatory privacy invasions and snake-oil machine learning.
In case you’ve lost the thread (it’s been a minute), Proctorio is a tool that transforms students’ personal computers into surveillance tools.
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Health/Nutrition
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Canadians were treated to a sickening display this past week, as anti-vax protests physically blocked hospitals and accosted patients and healthcare workers. This certainly was not the first time these selfish and scientifically illiterate protesters have made themselves the story during the campaign.
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Within 24 hours the site had moved to Epik, which has made a name for working with extremist websites that other companies have deemed too toxic: neo-Nazi propaganda, QAnon home base 8chan, Alex Jones’ conspiracy theory network InfoWars, as well as right-wing social media sites Parler and Gab.
But even Epik founder Robert Monster appears to have his limits: late Saturday night it appeared the Texas Right to Life website disabled its anonymous tip submission form.
“We received complaints about the site,” a representative for Epik told The Daily Beast, saying the website “violated Epik’s Terms of Use,” an apparent reference to the collection of third-party personal information without consent.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Confidentiality
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Digital analyst Ismail Fahmi said the leak showed how easy it was to view or potentially use another individual’s vaccination certificate, even that of a head of state.
“If there was protection, there would be an investigation into why this problem persists, why personal records can be easily mined,” he said.
“But there is no such protection.”
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Defence/Aggression
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Last Sunday, at a Republican event in Franklin, North Carolina, Congressman Madison Cawthorn, repeating Trump’s big lie, called the rioters who stormed the Capitol on January 6 “political hostages.“
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The biggest trial in France’s modern legal history begins on Wednesday over the November 2015 attacks on Paris that saw 130 people slaughtered at bars, restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall.
The suicide bombing and gun assault by three teams of jihadists, later claimed by the Islamic State group, was France’s worst post-war atrocity.
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Court case over terror attacks that killed 130 to begin Wednesday, will see 20 defendants tried, including one of the gunmen who has so far refused to cooperate with proceedings
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Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of State designated ADF as a Foreign Terrorist Organization and categorized them as ISIS-DRC. The group has the primary aim of creating an Islamic Caliphate in Central Africa. While a large majority (85-90%) of DRC’s population is Christian, violence rooted in Islamic extremism continues to worsen, putting the country at number 40 on the 2021 Open Doors World Watch List for Christian persecution. “These predominantly Christian communities are attacked by an Islamic extremist group with a clear Islamic expansionist agenda,” Open Doors spokesperson Illia Djadi stated in reference to the rebel group.
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The Public Prosecutor’s Office and the State Security of the State Criminal Police Office are investigating the details of the crime and its background – also from the perspective of a possibly Islamist-motivated attack. The police arrested the suspect at the scene of the crime. He has been in Germany since 2016.
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Since 2019, Kurenbach has headed the newly established Islamist-Motivated Terrorism/Extremism Department of the BKA. Around 500 criminal investigators, scientists, translators, and analysts work there to investigate Islamists, monitor dangerous individuals, and try to prevent attacks. Just recently Germany arrested a major suspected fund raiser for the “Islamic State.”
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The former FBI special agent had pursued Mohammed for nearly three decades, yet the alleged 9/11 mastermind is yet to face justice.
A lawyer for Mohammed has told the BBC it may be another 20 years before the case is concluded.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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Since our last report for the month of July, IFF has filed 64 RTI requests, 5 First Appeals and 1 Second Appeal. Here, we give you an overview of the requests filed and an analysis of the responses we have received from the different public authorities. This report highlights why demanding transparency and accountability from Government authorities is one of the key elements in our fight to protect digital rights.
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Environment
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I’m a climate scientist and on Wednesday night, I watched the rain outside my New York City window break the local record for the most accumulation in an hour. It was an event that caused catastrophic flooding and infrastructure failures across both the New York Metro area and a wide swath of the Northeast US, delivered by the remnant of a powerful hurricane that had visited even greater destruction on Louisiana a couple of days ago.
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Developed countries must do “much more, much faster” in their efforts to tackle the climate crisis, over 200 health journals have said in a statement warning of the unequal health impacts of rising global temperatures.
The editorial, published today in over 230 medical, nursing, and public health journals across the world, demands international coordinated action to limit global temperature increases, restore biodiversity, and protect health.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Finance
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The place of honor in President Biden’s Oval Office is reserved for a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From above the fireplace, FDR looks down upon the efforts of a president whose plans for responding to contemporary challenges facing the United States are frequently compared with those of the 32nd president.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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For more than twenty-one years, as a television and film historian and critic focusing on the intersection of politics and entertainment, I’ve covered many talents who use their star status to speak out on larger issues: They oppose war, fight oppression, and support a wide variety of causes and candidates. Seven-time Emmy Award winner Ed Asner epitomized this breed—an actor-activist who used his celebrity to raise public attention, awareness, and funds for social justice issues.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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A free and independent media will not be possible in Afghanistan, despite assurances from the Taliban, say some journalists at privately owned news outlets.
“A murky future lies ahead for the media in Afghanistan,” a former TOLO network journalist told VOA.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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American papers are filled with pundits speculating about the horrors the Taliban may inflict on the people of Afghanistan, particularly its women. Less attention has been paid to the horrors Texas Republicans — the Taliban wing of the Republican Party — are inflicting on the State of Texas. In total control of the state, Republicans have a free hand that they’ve used to enforce extremism.
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No one is quite sure yet what Taliban leaders mean when they say women and girls will be given “all their rights within Islam”.
Many women, including Rajaee, were told in no uncertain terms, “don’t come back to the office”. Many fear they’ll never be allowed to return to the life they lived in a city they no longer feel is their own.
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Arizona Police arrested six members of a devout Islamic family that tried to kidnap and murder their pregnant 20-year-old relative because they disapprove of her non-Muslim boyfriend. The Iraqi immigrant family, including the victim’s parents, had been harassing and hunting the girl, her boyfriend, and his family for several months.
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Asel and many of her international team-mates are in hiding. Asel isn’t her real name. In Kabul members of the Taliban have already come looking for Afghanistan’s women’s cricket team.
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We should not lose sight of the notion of the ‘continuum’ referred to by my friend in Jeddah. The precepts of Islam and strict Sharia law, for example death to converts from Islam to Christianity, remain. In fact, in Islam generally the bar is set quite low for punishment by death as exemplified by the weekly public slaughter by beheading and removal of other body parts in the major cities of Saudi Arabia. We are lucky to live in a country where our Muslim compatriots largely take these precepts more figuratively.
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But attitudes in many communities have changed and Kenya is seen as being among the more progressive countries in Africa on the issue. Just over one in 10 adolescent girls aged between 15 and 19 are now estimated to have undergone FGM, down from almost 50% in 1974.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Everyday IP: Who owns the internet? [Ed: Lawyers who profit from blackmail and litigation have a hard time grasping the fact that not everything has "owners" and in the Internet "IP" isn't the propaganda term they like to misuse]
It is fascinating — and more than a little bit complicated — to think about a system as vast and multifaceted as the internet from an Intellectual Property (IP) perspective. We must first examine some critical points of the internet’s early history and take a look at its present-day makeup to answer any question regarding “ownership.”
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies Announces That It Has Been Granted an H-P2A Patent in Europe [Ed: Wanna bet these patents too were granted in a rush and would likely not withstand (not easily anyway) an actual court's scrutiny? They need to read up on the collapse of the EPO (the media is paid to turn a blind eye)]
Hoffmann Green Cement Technologies (ISIN: FR0013451044, Ticker: ALHGR) (Paris:ALHGR) (“Hoffmann Green Cement” or the “Company”), a pioneer in clinker-free low-carbon cement, today announces that it has been granted a European patent for its H-P2A technology.
This issuance of a second patent for the Company’s H-P2A technology, following the one granted in the United States in 2020, further strengthens the protection of Hoffmann Green Cement’s intellectual property and therefore intensifies the barriers to entry on the decarbonized cement market. Following over five years of appraisals, the H-P2A patent was validated by the European Patent Office under number 3274315.
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The patent is the company’s method to prepare a compound that works as the main ingredient and intermediate of URC102. URC102, developed as a new oral drug, inhibits uric acid transporter-1 (URAT1) and is effective for gout patients caused by abnormally elevated uric acid levels in the blood, JW Pharm said.
The company licensed out the rights to develop and commercialize URC102 in China, including Hong Kong and Macau, to China’s Nanjing Simcere Dongyuan Pharmaceutical in 2019. In addition, it is pursuing global technology transfer based on the results of phase 2 clinical trials conducted in Korea.
With the recent EPO’s decision, JW Pharmaceutical plans to take steps for necessary procedures to fully acquire the patent in major European countries in the future.
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Last month, we covered a historic moment. For the very first time, the patent office in South Africa allowed artificial intelligence (AI) to be an inventor on a patent. However, subsequent patent applications in the UK, the EU, and the US were rejected by their respective patent offices. Now, a US court has upheld the US Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) decision and ruled that AI cannot be an inventor, simply because it is not an individual, yet, The Verge reported.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 15de6b2c9bf58f3539aa36a7f27a371b
Summary: This morning we begin to take a look at Lithuania’s officials who play (or played) a role at the EPO
THE Lithuanian Patent Office does not have many patents. It does, however, have a very potent vote at the Administrative Council of the EPO (a vote equal to Germany’s in terms of its weight) and as we’ve just mentioned in part 15 of the ongoing series there’s opportunity for mischief, which Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos have been more than happy to exploit.
The video above runs though this morning’s publication and contains some more personal thoughts. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 1:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Series index:
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part I – More Captured Delegates?
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part II – Old Wine in New Bottles…
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part III – Introducing the Finnish “Facilitator”
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part IV – Martti Enäjärvi and His “Good Brother” Networks
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part V – A Man With a Conviction…
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part VI – “A Good Friend of Estonia and a Steady Cooperation Partner”
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part VII – A Self-Appointed “Select Committee”
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part VIII – Pulling for the Portuguese Pretender?
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part IX – António’s Faithful Acolyte in Alicante
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part X – A Pan-European “Good Brother” Network Celebration?
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part XI – With a Little Help From My Friends…
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part XII – Battistelli and His Baltic Fiefdoms
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part XIII – Out With the Old, in With the New?
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part XIV – Business as Usual in Tallinn
- You are here ☞ Worse Than “a Backward Kolkhoz“…
Rimvydas Naujokas [PDF] offering his congratulations to Matti Päts and Margus Viher at the ceremony to mark the 25th anniversary of the Estonian Patent Office in March 2012.
Summary: The Lithuanian Patent Office has enabled the Benoît Battistelli regime at the EPO and it continues to do the same under António Campinos; we take a closer look at Lithuanian scandals too
Rimvydas Naujokas was in charge of the Lithuanian Patent Office for twenty three years from April 1991 to June 2014.
In terms of job longevity he more or less matched his Estonian counterpart Matti Päts, although he was seventeen years younger [PDF] than the elder statesman of the Baltic “IP” world.
The Lithuanian Patent Office comes under the remit of the Justice Ministry.
Naujokas got on quite well with most of his minsters.
He did particularly well under Gintautas Bužinskas, who was in charge of the Justice Ministry between 14 December 2004 and 18 July 2006.
In 2006, on the occasion of the Lithuanian national holiday to commemorate the coronation of Mindaugus (on 6 July 1253), Bužinskas distributed over LTL 273,000 (approx. EUR 79,000) in bonuses to employees of the Justice Ministry.
Senior officials like Naujokas received a 100% salary bonus.
In the same year, Naujokas also received a salary bonus at Easter and on the occasion of the 15th anniversary of the reestablishment of the Lithuanian Patent Office.
At the time in question, Naujokas’ monthly salary as Director-General of the Patent Office was around LTL 6 000 (approx EUR 1750). This was at a time when the average monthly in Lithuania would have been around EUR 400 to 500.
By the standards of the local economy, Naujokas was on a relatively good salary but it doesn’t seem to have been enough for him. To top up his basic salary, he awarded himself a bonus of 5% for representation at the European Patent Organisation, even though this was a direct function of his job as the head of the Latvian Patent Office.
He also didn’t skimp on travel expenses. In 2005, Naujokas spent as many as 84 working days on business trips at a cost of over LTL 38,000 (approx. EUR 11,000). Although he was cautioned by his ministry, he failed to curb his enthusiasm for travelling. In the first half of 2006 he spent 48 days on business trips, costing the Lithuanian tax-payers almost LTL 57,000 thousand (approx. EUR 16,500).
But things started to get uncomfortable for Naujokas when a new minister took over after a change of government in 2006.
Petras Baguška, who took over as Justice Minister on 18 July 2006 was less impressed by Naujokas. In September 2006, the Lithuanian media reported that Naujokas had been at the receiving end of “scathing criticism” from Baguška.
In 2006 Minister of Justice Petras Baguška (left) had some harsh words of criticism for the management of the Lithuanian Patent Office under Rimvydas Naujokas (right).
Amongst other things, Baguška was angered by his predecessor’s decision to award a 100% bonus to Naujokas on the occasion of the national holiday despite the fact that the Ministry’s internal audit service had identified numerous shortcomings in the management of the Patent Office.
Baguška was appalled by the findings of the audit which – according to Lithuanian media reports [PDF] – concluded that the management of the Lithuanian Patent Office was “worse than in a backward kolkhoz [collective farm]“.
But, somehow or other, Naujokas managed to survive the new Minister who departed in December 2008.
As a matter of fact, despite his close shave with Baguška in 2006, Naujokas remained in charge of the Lithuanian Patent Office for another eight years until June 2014 when it was announced that the incumbent Justice Minister Juozas Bernatonis had decided not to renew his appointment. [PDF]
No reasons were given for the decision but at that point Naujokas was 64 so the minister had probably decided that it was time to look for someone new to take over.
But even though he was no longer Director-General, Naujokas hung around in the background for another two years as a “Chief Advisor” and continued to head the Lithuanian delegation on the EPO’s Administrative Council until June 2015. He finally retired as “Chief Advisor” in June 2016.
Arūnas Želvys was appointed as head of the Lithuanian Patent Office in March 2015.
In March 2015, Arūnas Želvys was appointed as Naujokas’ successor at the head of the Lithuanian Patent Office.
In the next part, we will see how the new whizz-kid got off to a promising start but subsequently ran into difficulties because of an administrative cock-up in 2019. █
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