We try out what might be the most fun Linux distribution around. It started as a laugh, but now we’re in love.
Plus, the reunion road trip hits a bump, some community news, feedback, picks, and more.
Hello and welcome to the 427th installment of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short topics episode, the hosts discuss the attrition present in CW contesting, grants for youths getting their ham radio licenses, the Election Day radio contest, Docker, SuperTuxKart, Fedora, Linux on Macs and much more. Thank you for listening and have a great week.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.14.2 kernel.
All users of the 5.14 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.14.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
OverlayFS continues to be used by Linux IoT/embedded devices and other use-cases as a union mount file-system. With Linux 5.15 the OverlayFS file-system continues to improve.
OverlayFS on Linux 5.15 should deliver some performance improvements thanks to RCU look-ups now being enabled. While no performance figures were provided as part of the patch, OverlayFS' lack of RCU usage for getting ACLs had yielded "a big performance hit in certain situations." That should now be squared away with Linux 5.15.
Last month Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver engineers began posting patches working on DisplayPort 2.0 support for their driver with DG2/Alchemist now set to be Intel's first GPU supporting the newest DP standard. DP 2.0 enablement work continues with Panel Replay being the latest feature being worked on for their Linux driver.
In addition to Linus Torvalds dealing with the -Werror fallout, separately in kernel land there were also some significant performance regressions introduced during the Linux 5.15 that led to Linus reverting some of the changes.
The newest performance regressions for Linux came from some new memcg accounting support additions merged last week. Intel's kernel test bot found some sizable performance regressions from the new code.
NVIDIA continue their usual upgrades to their special NVIDIA Vulkan Beta driver with a fresh release out with version 470.62.02 now available to test.
Are you looking to improve your Linux experience by installing some more applications? If so, this article should give you a few ideas to consider. Look at the list below and figure out which of the mentioned applications you want on your computer.
Let’s start with image editors. If there is a quick edit that you want to do for an image that you need for work, studies, or another matter, you can definitely find tools for that while running Linux.
Among the most popular choices right now, Gimp and Inkscape are the go-to options among Linux users.
With Gimp, you have an open-source tool that one can improve after installing various plugins. Like other image editing tools, Gimp also requires some time to get used to.
Changing the IP address on your Ubuntu system can be necessary for various situations, such as in the port forwarding process or when you want to run a media server on your network. In most cases, your router’s DHCP server dynamically assigns IP addresses to your network interface. However, you can easily change the assigned IP address on your system by using “netplan” or through the Ubuntu GUI Network settings.
In Ubuntu, the tool utilized for managing and configuring the network settings is known as “netplan”. netplan interacts with the kernel through the systemd-networkd and NetworkManager daemons which are also known as renderers. You have to choose any one from both of them. Netplan reads the network configurations from “/etc/netplan/*.yaml” files, saving the configuration settings for all network interfaces. If you use the netplan command in the Ubuntu terminal, it becomes easy to restart and change network settings.
The brain of any computer known as CPU may fall into one of the categories 32bit or 64bit processing powers. It is foreseen that; the early days of computing used 32bit operating systems, and in that era, only supercomputers functioned on 64-bit architectures. However, as the technology evolved, PCs and laptops started to deliver a CPU that supports 64-bit architectures. The computing devices operating on 32-bit architectures can handle 232 bytes of RAM; contrary to this, a 64bit operating system can process 264 bytes of RAM that is way greater than that of 32bit processors. This basic comparison of data handling makes the ground to prove that 64bit operating systems are more effective than 32bit. According to the CPU’s architecture, the software or programs that are developed today are available for both kinds of processing powers. However, it is observed that a 32bit OS can handle only 32 bit applications, whereas a 64bit OS can also run 32bit supported programs alongside 64 bit. Several representation standards are used to differentiate both; like 32but CPUs are labeled with Ãâ86-32 or Ãâ86, and similarly, 64bit OS can be identified by finding Ãâ64-32 or Ãâ64. The 64bit based OSs are more powerful and effective than 32bit OS as they can handle more data on RAM, and users can enjoy exhaustive applications on their systems. In this article, we will demonstrate the possible ways to check if the Linux system is 32bit or 64bit. First, let’s understand the basic difference between 32 bit and 64-bit architectures:
A symbolic link is a shortcut file for any directory or file. The symlink or soft link are the other names of the symbolic link. In Ubuntu, symbolic links work like a string that generates paths between various files and directories. These links are frequently utilized for linking libraries. It also ensures that files exist in consistent locations. Symbolic links are used for storing numerous copies of the same file in several locations while still referring to the same file.
Docker is a virtualization platform that automates the process of application deployment. Containers and Images in Docker are used for this purpose. Docker containers offer a lightweight and portable environment for the deployment of applications. These containers are based on Docker images which assists in packaging an application with all of its runtime dependencies inside a Linux container.
You can use Docker to automate the application deployment in your organization; it will boost employee productivity and create a more agile development environment to manage resources better. That’s why we are here to demonstrate how to install and configure Docker on the Ubuntu system. So, let’s start!
If your business has multiple personal computers in the network which need to print, then we need a device called a print server. Print server act intermediate between PC and printers which accept print jobs from PC and send them to respective printers.
CUPS is the primary mechanism in the Unix-like operating system for printing and print services. It can allow a computer to act as a Print server.
In this tutorial, we learn how to set up CUPS print server on Ubuntu 20.04.
Apache-Spark is an open-source framework for big data processing, used by professional data scientists and engineers to perform actions on large amounts of data. As the processing of large amounts of data needs fast processing, the processing machine/package must be efficient to do so. Spark uses DAG scheduler, memory caching and query execution to process the data as fast as possible and thus for large data handling.
The data structure of Spark is based on RDD (acronym of Resilient Distributed Dataset); RDD consists of unchangeable distributed collection of objects; these datasets may contain any type of objects related to Python, Java, Scala and can also contain the user defined classes. The wide usage of Apache-Spark is because of its working mechanism that it follows:
The Apache Spark works on master and slave phenomena; following this pattern, a central coordinator in Spark is known as “driver” (acts as a master) and its distributed workers are named as “executors” (acts as slave). And the third main component of Spark is “Cluster Manager”; as the name indicates it is a manager that manages executors and drivers. The executors are launched by “Cluster Manager” and in some cases the drivers are also launched by this manager of Spark. Lastly, the built-in manager of Spark is responsible for launching any Spark application on the machines: Apache-Spark consists of a number of notable features that are necessary to discuss here to highlight the fact why they are used in large data processing? So, the features of Apache-Spark are described below:
The database management system is a very useful and widely used tool among several organizations that work on computing platforms. The data inside traditional databases are saved in a tabular-like structure. However, another trending type of database named graph database is committed to handling the relations between data graphically; some examples of graph databases are Neo4j, ArangoDB, OrientDB, and FlockDB. Among the above-listed graph databases, Neo4j has emerged as a handy graph database management system since its deployment in the industry back in 2007. With an extensive range of features, Neo4j offers two versions and is named as community edition and enterprise edition. Community edition operates on an open-source license and includes basic features of the database like full-text search, data types. Contrary to this, the enterprise edition contains some advanced features for the customers that pay for the subscription; the extra features include auto cache reheating, faster and restorable, etc.
Elasticsearch is an open-source, freely available, distributed analytical engine for geographic, numerical, textual, structured, and unstructured data. It was released in 2010 by Elasticsearch N.V and is based on Apache Lucene. The foundation of the Elastic Stack is Elasticsearch is, which is a collection of open-source technologies for visualization, analysis, data storage and its ingestion. It is also known for its easy Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs, speed, scalability, and distributed nature. Beats are a collection of lightweight shipping agents currently available in the Elastic Stack. The data is transferred to Elasticsearch using these beats.
Elasticsearch collects unstructured data from many sources, organizes it according to user-defined mapping, and indexes it in real-time. It is a well-known search engine designed for applications with sophisticated search requirements. You can use Elasticsearch for creating a complicated search engine that works similar to the Google search engine.
The scalability and speed of Elasticsearch, as well as its ability to index a wide range of content types, makes it suitable for various purposes, including Website search, Application search, Enterprise search, monitoring performance of an application, Business analytic, Security analytic, log and logging analytic, analysis and visualization of Geo-spatial data.
Atom is an open-source as well as free text and code editor developed by GitHub for several operating systems. Initially, Atom was introduced by GitHub but later, Facebook extended the ATOM and developed ATOM Integrated Development Environment (IDE). It is widely used because of its distinctive features; for instance, the developers of ATOM usually call it a “hackable” tool, which means that it is customizable. Although a text editor or source code editor is just a tool, users have their priorities to choose; like few developers may prefer interface or aesthetic look, and some users may prioritize functionalities provided by code editors. Atom provides extensive support to install third-party themes and enhance the aesthetic looks of the editor to offer an interesting interface. In this article, we will guide you to install Atom editor on Ubuntu:
Apache Hadoop is a Java-based, open-source, freely available software platform for storing and analyzing big datasets on your system clusters. It keeps its data in the Hadoop Distributed File system (HDFS) and processes it utilizing MapReduce. Hadoop has been used in machine learning and data mining techniques. It is also used for managing multiple dedicated servers.
This tutorial shows the installation of ISPConfig 3.2 on a CentOS 8 (64Bit) server. ISPConfig is a web hosting control panel that allows you to configure the following services through a web browser: Apache web server, PHP, Postfix mail server, MySQL, BIND nameserver, PureFTPd, SpamAssassin, ClamAV, Mailman, and many more.
phpMyAdmin is a free and open-source tool that enables you to manage MySQL and MariaDB databases from the web browser. The phpMyAdmin is a fully capable web application written in PHP with the main purpose to handle the administration of MySQL/MariaDB over the web. It provides a robust and user-friendly interface for managing databases, tables, database users, basic crud operations (create, read, update, delete), and so much more.
The phpMyAdmin is a PHP web-applications that can be run under any operating system, including Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSDs. The main components that you must install before installing phpMyAdmin are PHP packages and a web server, you can be Apache, Nginx, etc.
The default terminal looks good enough if you want to get things done.
But, if you want a unique terminal experience or something that suits your taste, you can also change the color of your Ubuntu terminal.
In this quick tutorial, I shall focus on tweaking the color scheme of the terminal in Ubuntu. Ubuntu uses GNOME Terminal so the steps should be valid for most other distributions using GNOME desktop environment.
If you are spending a lot of time using the terminal on Ubuntu, you may want to adjust the font and size to get a good experience.
Changing the font is one of the simplest but most visual way of Linux terminal customization. Let me show you the detailed steps for changing the terminal fonts in Ubuntu along with some tips and suggestions on font selection.
Rust is an open-source systems programming language that focuses on speed, memory safety, and parallelism. Developers use Rust to create a wide range of new software applications, such as game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components, and simulation engines for virtual reality. Rust is syntactically similar to C++ but can guarantee memory safety by using a borrow checker for validating references.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Eclipse IDE on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Eclipse provides IDEs (Integrated Development Environment) and platforms for nearly every language and architecture. We are famous for our Java IDE, C/C++, JavaScript, and PHP IDEs built on extensible platforms for creating desktop, Web, and cloud IDEs. These platforms deliver the most extensive collection of add-on tools available for software developers.
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 Eclipse IDE on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OBS Studio on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, OBS (Open Broadcaster Software) is free and open-source software for video recording and live streaming. You can use OBS studio Screen-cast included screen recording, camera image, and sound record. It can be used to stream content on various servers such as Twitter, Twitch, YouTube, and many more. OBS is also available for Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux distributions.
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 OBS screen recording software on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
In this tutorial, we will discuss the installation and usage of Python virtual environment on Ubuntu 20.04. Python virtual environment is a directory that contains a complete Python installation for a specific version of Python, including a number of additional packages and modules.
how to set up a python virtual environment on ubuntu 20.04 This allows users to have an unlimited number of different Python versions and modules, independent of the main version of Python installed on the system. This means that Python-based applications such as Odoo, Django or Flask, can use different Python versions and modules on a same server.
For those don’t like the Flatpak package, here’s how to install GIMP 2.99.6 from PPA in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
The popular GIMP image editor is working on the next major 3.0 release. For testing purpose, GIMP 2.99.6 was released as the latest development version. It provides the official Linux package via Flatpak package. However, some users don’t like it, since Flatpak is an universal package format needs separate daemon to run in sandbox.
In this tutorial you will learn how to install OpenVPN access server software on all linux distros that OpenVPN supports. OpenVPN supports Ubuntu, Debian, RHEL, CentOS and Amazon Linux 2.
You can install OpenVPN access server software via official repository or manually download the package files to your server/computer and manually install them, in this tutorial I'll cover both methods.
Let's start with the first option and the recommended option by OpenVPN, by downloading and installing OpenVpn access server software via official repository.
File sharing and collaboration is one of the key functions that users leverage on the Cloud in order to streamline workflows. This enables teams and users to get their projects done in a timely and convenient manner regardless of geographical distance.
Compressing files is an excellent way to save storage and bandwidth while transferring files swiftly. There are numerous file compression formats like ZIP, RAR, and TAR. Undoubtedly, ZIP is the most commonly used compression format, especially within the Windows and Linux ecosystems.
Since this guide is for Linux-based OSes only, you can use unzip, a popular command-line tool for zipping and unzipping files within your system.
Although the catalog of games for Linux is not yet equal to that of Windows in quantity, there are indeed many available. One of the best is 0AD and today you will learn how to install it on Ubuntu 20.04.
How do I install docker and docker-compose using the yum command on Amazon Linux 2 running on the EC2 or Lightsail cloud instance?
Kali Linux is a popular Debian-based Linux operating system designed to use for security and penetration testings of IT systems. Out of the box, this Linux distribution offers numerous tools for carrying out a wide variety to test networks or systems against hacking or finding out loopholes.
To make use of this distro friendly, Kali Linux is based on Debian and uses the popular Gnome Linux desktop environment as a desktop interface. It is an open-source project, operated and financed by Offensive Security, and is aimed primarily at professional users but can also be used by private individuals.
Ansible is an open-source IT automation tool for continuous deployments or zero downtime rolling updates, software deployment, configuration management, and orchestration of more advanced IT tasks. Ansible minimizes the workloads and saves a lot of time during server configuration and application deployment.
In some scenarios we do have to maintain a large number of servers at a time then, on executing ansible-playbook it might take a longer time to finish up the playbook tasks. According to ansible official documentation, we can accelerate its playbook speed using various methods which we will be discussing in this article. Using these methods we can reduce the huge ratio of its actual time consumption by changing the ansible configuration.
Most of us use love and use the jq command. It works on Linux or Unix-like systems to extract data from JSON documents. Recently I found htmlq, which is like jq and written in Rust lang. Imagine being able to sed or grep for HTML data. We can search, slice, and filter HTML data with htmlq. Let us see how to install and use this handy tool on Linux or Unix and play with HTML data.
Have you ever needed to migrate a WordPress website to a new host? I have done it several times and found the process to be quite easy. Of course, I don't use the recommended methods for doing most things, and this is no exception–I use the easy way, and that is what I recommend.
This migration is non-destructive, so it is simple to revert to the original server if that should be necessary for any reason.
I am posting this Howto due to currently available instructions on the Internet don't focus the user's attention on installation packages "ovmf" and "virt-viewer" on the most recent release Manjaro KDE . Skipping mentioned packages causes issues with Remote Viewer ( Cockpit Console ) and the ability to deploy KVM guests in UEFI mode
Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 4 with the XM Global Broker on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
SCP (secure copy) is an advanced version of the CP command, and allows you to securely copy files or directories between two machines via SSH.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Telegram on Linux Lite 5.4.
What is really odd is that a Google search has only a couple of hits. Meaning, this is a problem that has (almost) only occurred to me!
Debian 11.0 was released on August 14th, 2021. The codename of Debian 11 is Bullseye. Debian is one of the widely used Linux operating systems and a popular choice for setting up and configuring servers for businesses has just got the latest release called Bullseye. Bullseyes come with tons of new packages, support for the exFAT file system, and an enhanced manual page.
The continuous usage of phpMyAdmin as a GUI frontend for managing MySQL/MariaDB databases for sites like WordPress is making website administration achievable even by newbie users. You do not need to arm yourself with the prowess and accuracy of highlighting and implementing long SQL queries to unlock some meaningful strides in database management.
One key aspect of any database management system in a production environment is its ability to create and accommodate users. MySQL/MariaDB RDBMS accommodates two types of users; the Admin user and the normal user.
There seems to be some confusion brewing on what games will actually run on the Steam Deck, so let this serve as a reminder on keeping expectations in check. Here's a quick refresher.
Some of the confusion seems to appear from an IGN interview, where Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais mentioned how "we haven't really found something that we could throw at this device that it couldn't handle" that we covered before. Here's the thing though: even though the Steam Deck will ship by default with the Arch Linux based SteamOS 3, they have also been testing Windows 10 and they've been working with AMD to get it supported on Windows 11 too. So speaking from a hardware standpoint, yes it probably will work with the vast majority of games on a performance level.
Originally based on an ancient mini PC, with a 1080p flat panel LCD and a touch overlay, they would have been mind-blowing for small children back in the day, but nowadays we expect somewhat more. YouTuber [BigRig Creates] got his hands on one, in a less than pleasant condition, but after a lot of soap and water, it was stripped down and the original controller junked in favour of a modern mini PC. To be clear, there isn’t much left beyond the casing and display from the original hardware, but we don’t care, as a lot of attention was paid to the software side of things to get it to triple-booting into Windows 10, Android x86 and Linux running emulation station, covering all those table-gaming urges you may have.
Do you love JRPGs and the classics? You're going to need to check out Quartet from Shadows of Adam developer Something Classic.
Covering all the mechanics you might expect from a retro-looking RPG, except the story. Interestingly in Quartet it begins with four separate stories but you play them in whatever order you want. As they come together it builds up your final party of eight characters. Sounds pretty sweet and looks great too.
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Full Linux support is confirmed and there's already a demo available to see if it might be your thing. The demo offers around 30-45 minutes gameplay.
American Truck Simulator - Wyoming is the latest paid expansion to the very popular trucking sim from SCS Software and it's out now. It also appears to be doing rather well for SCS.
With it out now it's currently trending as number 1 on Steam's Global Top Sellers list for Linux games, and when taking Windows into account too it's still in the top 5. Impressive for a DLC release on a multiple year-old game. Goes to show there's a lot of fans around ready and waiting for more content.
Direct Hit is the name of the latest massive update to War Thunder, the free to play online war sim. As always for War Thunder upgrades, there's absolutely masses new from new vehicles to new visual effects and plenty more.
A big overhaul for the already excellent sandbox space sim Avorion is out now bringing with it lots of new features. The work that has gone into Avorion as a whole and the 2.0 update specifically is impressive. Building a ship block by block never gets old when it looks as good as this.
DayZ has received its second update for the 1.14 experimental client after a server shutdown and maintenance period. This time it looks to add Linux Server support so that PC users running Linux can experiment and give feedback on the matter. Furthermore, the developer has fixed a couple of known issues caused by the first 1.14 update.
Without further ado, you can find all of the patch notes as posted by Bohemia Interactive below. I have had so much fun in DayZ 1.14 so far, especially in the new Toxic Zone, and I cannot wait for the servers to come back up and experience the changes. Who needs modded servers when you have all this?
Yaru, the default Ubuntu (GNOME) GTK theme, has received an update which adds support for Xfce (Xfwm4). Here's how it looks and how to give it a try right now.
The PR which adds Xfce support to Yaru GTK theme was merged yesterday, and it was tested on Xubuntu 21.04. On Xfce, Yaru is available in light and dark variants (GTK and window decorations), both using a dark Xfce panel (but with light panel menus in case of the light variant):
Just about a month after the first official release of QCoro, a library that provides C++ coroutine support for Qt, here’s 0.2.0 with some big changes. While the API is backwards compatible, users updating from 0.1.0 will have to adjust their #include statements when including QCoro headers.
QCoro 0.2.0 brings the following changes...
I am happy and surprised - and happy - that I managed to revive the Pavilion. I wasn't sure what would happen with neon, and I still don't know why, for several months, different modern distros refused to boot on this box, and now again, everything is fine. Must be a wonky driver blacklisting or some incompatibility in the kernel somewhere. Doesn't matter, I have a working machine.
Overall, it's still usable. Don't forget - FDE plus the latest and greatest from Plasma. Nifty. But up the challenge we must. I now intend to do the same exercise with an even older 2009 LG RD510 laptop. This one doesn't even an "eye" generation processor, but an ancient Core2Duo, and a slower disk. It manages just fine with MX Linux on it, mind, including HD on Youtube and all that, but then, let's see if it can cope with neon. Of course, it also comes with an Nvidia card. Ought to be interesting. More on this soon.
One of the best things about using Linux is that you get access to tons of desktop environments. But on the flip side, with so many desktop environments (DE) to choose from, it can get real confusing real quick as to which DE is right for you. Furthermore, the Linux community is always engaged in a heated argument around which DE is the best.
Now, here at FOSSLinux, we don’t believe that a particular DE reigns supreme over other alternatives. Instead, we think that every DE has its own place and caters to different user groups.
As such, for this read, we have put together a list of 10 reasons why you should use Gnome. By the end, you should get a clear idea of what Gnome brings to the table, so you can decide for yourself whether the Gnome desktop environment is right for you.
The hype about Linux may seem to be way past its prime but only seem. With an increasing number of users, this versatile platform has something for everybody. If you are a college student and would like to learn about free Linux distros that may best work for you, read on for the best of the best Linux distros for Students in 2021.
Linux is a single platform or a single OS that encompasses incredible abilities for customization, and this makes it the most versatile OS there is today. Linux does not only power PCs - it can also be found in a number of devices requiring very specialized software, such as the local ATM on your campus. Since there are many different needs to be covered by a single system, Linux comes in the form of Linux distribution packages or Linux Distros.
Computers are becoming an integral part of all realms of life. More and more people are connecting with technology; with this thought in mind, why should disabled people be left behind?
Accessing computers is not as simple for such a niche population, as it might be for a visually capable user. The former set of people have to deal with complex learning curves, given their physical limitations. However, with the use of accessibility tools, a distro like Accessible-Coconut can make many dreams come true for the disabled group.
Accessibility tools are no longer an additional feature since they have become the entire point of such specialized distros. Distros like Accessible-Coconut are an excellent choice for operating systems for visually impaired people who are not very tech-savvy but want to get their jobs done by machines.
Linux distros are known for their simplicity and ease of use, but Arch Linux challenges this notion by letting users choose everything while keeping the functionality intact. For beginners, this power of choice might make Arch Linux even more daunting, but for advanced Linux users, it's icing on the cake.
Arch Linux is very popular amongst Linux users due to several reasons. In this article, let us take a look at Arch Linux and who benefits the most from using it.
In this quick post, we round up the new features and updates of Fedora 35.
The concept of distroless is a popular idea in the world of containers. The idea is to package applications in container images while at the same time removing as much of the operating system as possible (package managers, libraries, shells, etc). This does provide some security benefits, but these benefits are often blown out of proportion because of a naive understanding of what an operating system is, how it works, and in particular what a Linux distribution is and how they work.
This article will try to give a clearer understanding of the actual benefits of Distroless while at the same time tempering the over-hyped marketing of Distroless. Let’s explore some fallacies.
In previous posts, we showed you how to enable Simple Content Access (SCA), register your Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) with Insights, and tag and review systems. In this third part of our series on Subscription Manager and SCA, we will look at reviewing your RHEL instances in the Red Hat customer portal.
Attitudes about hybrid work continue to evolve. In March, just under half (49 percent) of businesses said they planned to bring employees back to the office by fall 2021, but that’s since grown to nearly three-quarters (74 percent), according to the Office Re-Entry Index, published by staffing and recruiting firm LaSalle Network.
But not everyone will be leaving home to work. The majority of respondents to the most recent LaSalle Network survey (77 percent) say they are planning a hybrid office for the future with employees in the office two to three days a week. Recent surges in COVID-19 infections have made it clear that a well-functioning hybrid workspace will be required for the foreseeable future.
That sounds like consensus. However, the road ahead could be rocky as employers and employees negotiate what that looks like. Nearly four out of ten respondents (39 percent) to LaSalle’s June survey expect some conflict between leaders and staff regarding return-to-office policies.
In today’s business environment, speed is a competitive advantage when delivering quality software products to the market: The faster companies can meet evolving needs, the better the overall customer experience. That’s one reason why the use of DevOps teams has grown in popularity. Organizations know that when software development and operations teams work together, they can innovate faster, bring applications to market more quickly, and grow their businesses.
The current global technical talent crunch makes it difficult to recruit DevOps talent. But that doesn’t mean you should employ just anybody that presents a resume loaded with technology experience. Hiring technical talent that isn’t a good fit for your team can set back your efforts in the long run. It’s important to get it right the first time.
Red Hat has joined OS-Climate (OS-C), a Linux Foundation-backed open source project, to provide technical acumen and resources to help OS-C build a “Data Commons” that serves as an open data ingestion, processing and management platform for members to collaborate on standardizing and improving the accuracy of corporate climate and environmental, social and governance (ESG) metrics.
rpminspect 1.6 is now available. This release includes a lot of fine tuning and bug fixing for the various tests across multiple Fedora, CentOS, and RHEL releases. The GitHub Actions testing has expanded to cover many more distributions.
The main feature present in the 1.6 release is the handling of what I call the Product Security workflow. The idea is that any finding that says the Product Security team needs to investigate the change should not be something a developer can automatically waive. For example, a package adding a setuid root executable that the product does not already know about. The workflow for this should be the developer adds the new file to the appropriate fileinfo/ file and sends a pull request to the rpminspect-data project containing that data. The Product Security team would then review that change and approve it or not. If it’s approved, the change would be merged and the rpminspect-data package updated and rebuilt.
There are instances where some security findings should be reported slightly differently or even ignored. To handle that on a case-by-case basis, librpminspect supports the security/ rules files that allow you to specify a different reporting level for these findings. The match is performed by path glob(7) specification, package name, and package version. For the package name and version you can specify * to indicate any.
Automation is a big part of a sysadmin's job—any time you can avoid manual intervention means you can save time and decrease the risk of human error. Ansible is one of the most popular tools for automation, so if you want to learn new ideas and best practices around automating IT, AnsibleFest is an excellent place to start.
Version 4.22 of The Amnesic Incognito Live System, better known as Tails, rolled out recently. Let’s see what’s new.
Tails (The Amnesic Incognito Live System) is a Debian-based GNU/Linux distro which it’s a little bit different than all other Linux distros, because it’s a live system, entirely focused on having the ultimate privacy. It’s not really a daily driver OS. Tails isn’t something that you’re going to want to go if say you’re a Windows or Mac user that’s looking to switch to Linux as a daily driver.
Tails 4.22 available to download, tails stands for “The Amnesic Incognito Live System” and uses the Tor network to anonymize the network through whose node computer the network traffic is routed. It is designed as a live system for use on USB sticks or DVDs and specializes in anonymity and the protection of the privacy of its users. Linux 5.10 LTS and Debian 10.10 €»Buster€« serve as the basis for Tails 4.22.
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With the updated software, the Tor Browser is now version 10.5.6, while Thunderbird is 78.13. The firmware for AMD graphics cards has been raised to version 20210818 and should improve support for some cards. The changelog provides an overview of all changes made.
Hi there! I’m MariaPaula and I’m a Web Engineer. I recently joined the Web Squad where I help maintain Canonical’s websites such as ubuntu.com. Even though I’ve only been with the team for a couple of weeks now, everyone has been very helpful, welcoming and supportive which has made me feel right at home.
I have a B.A in International Relations from Florida International University and completed Lambda School’s full stack web development curriculum in 2020. Before Canonical I was an ESL teacher with a clientele mostly based in China, South Korea and Japan.
Outside of work I like to cook, travel, dance, and take care of my house plants. I’m based in a small town in Germany near the Dutch border where I live with my husband and our two cats.
Advantech, a leading provider of intelligent IoT systems and automation technology, is pleased to announce that its UNO-420 data gateway is certified on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS and Ubuntu Core 20. UNO-420 is a PoE-powered data sensing gateway powered by an Intel€® Atomâ⢠E3815 processor, characterized by its high compatibility with diverse data acquisition devices and Power-over-Ethernet (PoE) permitting local data processing and cloud connectivity. By certifying Advantech’s UNO-420 for Ubuntu 20.04, Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, guarantees 5-years of maintenance updates and 5-years of extended security maintenance(ESM) software update support that give enterprises a stable and secure IoT platform for device management and service reliability.
KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is the leading open source virtualisation technology for Linux. It installs natively on all Linux distributions and turns underlying physical servers into hypervisors so that they can host multiple, isolated virtual machines (VMs). KVM comes with no licenses, type-1 hypervisor capabilities and a variety of performance extensions which makes it an ideal candidate for virtualisation and cloud infrastructure implementation. But what are the benefits of KVM hypervisor and how do you get started?
In the following blog, we present the beginner’s guide to KVM on Ubuntu.
At this point, there are no shortage of impressive hacks for the Raspberry Pi. [Dilshan Jayakody] recently documented his experience in designing and building an inexpensive FM Stereo Receiver for the Pi platform, and the results are impressive.
Quite a few FM receiver projects center around the RDA5807 or TEA5767 ICs, however [Dilshan] has used the QN8035 by Quintic Corporation in his build. A handful of discrete components on a pleasing single-sided PCB is all that is needed to interface the QN8035 with the Pi’s I2C bus.
After demonstrating that the FM tuner could be, well, tuned at the command line, [Dilshan] then coded a smart looking GUI application that makes tuning a breeze. The software allows the listener to manually and automatically scan through FM stations, decode program service data, control the volume, and display the RSSI and SNR readings from the tuner.
This article is a list of several stuffs that can help you selfhosting simple, quick and easy so that even your family and parents would be able to use. Selfhosting means making your own online services at home rather than borrowing someone else's server, for example, you can build your personal website, search, video broadcasting, even email, social media network and file sharing too. This list includes all-in-one hardware and software solutions, like Freedombox and Yunohost, and excludes individual components like RaspberryPi and Apache. All tools mentioned here are free libre open source software explained at the end. These technologies hopefully can save you time and resources to setup to achieve just work as close as possible. Finally, you are hoped to have the basic knowledge in server computing. Enjoy!
The Open Source Initiative €® (OSI), stewards of the Open Source Definition that sets the foundation for the open source ecosystem, is excited to announce Stefano Maffulli as its first Executive Director. The appointment is a key step for the transformation of OSI into a professionally managed organization, a process that the Board of Directors started in 2020.
After an expansive search led by OSI’s purpose-built staffing committee, the Board of Directors appointed Maffulli, an experienced international leader in enterprise and open source environments. OSI is grateful to Deb Nicholson, interim general manager, for her outstanding work in this transitional year.
“Bringing Stefano Maffulli on board as OSI’s first Executive Director is the culmination of a years-long march toward professionalization, so that OSI can be a stronger and more responsive advocate for open source,” says Joshua Simmons, Board Chair of OSI. “We can now deprecate the role of President transitioning to Chair of the Board with confidence about OSI’s future.”
The Open Source Initiative (OSI) has announced Stefano Maffulli as its first Executive Director. After an expansive search led by OSI’s purpose-built staffing committee, the Board of Directors appointed Maffulli, an experienced international leader in enterprise and open source environments.
The appointment is a key step for the transformation of OSI into a professionally managed organization, a process that the Board of Directors started in 2020.
Back in August, I wrote about how I was tired of QtWebEngine and that I was switching to Firefox with Vimium to emulate a similar mouse-less workflow. Well. That didn’t last long.
It took me about a week before I was back with qutebrowser again. The Vimium addon is a good addon (for what it is), but it’s simply not good enough for me. While I could use keybindings for a lot of things, unfortunately, some basic things didn’t work at all.
You may occasionally need to make adjustments to your website and check the results simultaneously. For this purpose, Google has created a utility that is pre-installed in the Google Chrome browser. Chrome DevTools or Chrome Development Tools permit users to repair bugs in their code without leaving the opened current tab.
Microsoft’s stance for decades was that community creation and sharing of communal code (later to be known as free and open source software) represented a direct attack on their business. Their battle with Linux stretches back many years. Back in 2001, former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer famously tarnished Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches”. Microsoft also initiated its “Get the Facts” marketing campaign from mid-2003, which specifically criticized Linux server usage, total cost of ownership, security, indemnification and reliability. The campaign was widely criticized for spreading misinformation.
However, in recent years, there has been a partial shift by Microsoft to embrace the open source software paradigm. For example, some of their code is open sourced. Examples include Visual Studio Code, .NET Framework, Atom, and PowerShell. They have also made investments in Linux development, server technology and organizations including the Linux Foundation and Open Source Initiative. They have made acquisitions such as Xamarin to help mobile app development, and GitHub a hugely popular code repository for open source developers. And they have partnered with Canonical, the developers of the popular Ubuntu distro. But many developers remain hugely sceptical about Microsoft and their apparent shift to embrace open source.
Obviously migrating rendering functionality into its own class is not something to take lightly, so I have been writing smaller patches that test out the code. When I say "small", I really mean this. Currently I am testing out a bunch of code that sets state in OutputDevice, which can be found in the outdevstate topic branch in gerrit.
Along with test the state functions of OutputDevice, I am also adding some tests to the bitmap functionality of OutputDevice. I recently landed a patch to move GetDownsampledBitmap() out of OutputDevice and into BitmapTools.cxx because it really didn't need to completely rely on OutputDevice. This bit of code will hopefully one day migrate it's way into the VCL backend modules. You can monitor the progress I'm making via the bitmap topic branch in gerrit.
I have to say that writing tests is not always easy. Often there is no easy way of accessing the functions, especially if they are private, but luckily most of the functions are protected so I can at least write a mock class to expose these functions without having to modify the code.
Accessibility is a key factor for the inclusiveness of digital transformation, but only a few people are really competent in the topic. To learn more about accessibility, we interviewed Hypra’s co-founder, Jean-Philippe Mengual.
- I for one am interested in alternatives to Microsoft Office. Microsoft's product has become so bloated that basic functionality has suffered to some extent. I've covered Open Office recently and with a new release from the Document Foundation of LibreOffice, the Libre meaning free, it is time to look at this and some other offerings.
- LibreOffice has a new Windows update and a tentative new build for those using Apple silicon products. The latter is in the early stages so it's a case of use at your own risk for now. The other major change is a try at matching more closely to Microsoft document formats. Libre uses the Open Document Format (ODF) which like Microsoft's is XML based. Microsoft departed from this standard with OOXML, the Office Open XML, where "open" here means with some proprietary bits included. Microsoft always seems to have a problem with the definition of the word "standard."
A Flat-file CMS is a content management system that does not use any database, in other term "Databaseless". It stores its content in text files like: Markdown, TXT, JSON or even XML.
In this article, we listed a neat collection of Flat-file publishing systems which serve many purposes starting from blogging, documentation projects to enterprise websites.
I have always been fascinated by databaseless solutions, which I tend to use and recommend to my clients, and flat-file CMSs are not an exception.
Many popular Python modules are written in the C language, and bugs in C extensions can cause nasty crashes that Python's error-catching mechanism won't catch. Fortunately, numerous powerful debuggers—notably, the GNU Project Debugger (GDB)—were designed for the C language. In Python 3.9, developers can use these to debug Python programs, and particularly the C extensions included in Python programs.
This article shows how to use the improved Python debug build in Python 3.9. I'll first discuss how we adapted Python to allow developers to use traditional C debuggers, then show you how to use the debug build and GDB to debug C extensions in a Python program.
While working in Bash, you may need to add conditions in your script. Depending on whether a programmer-specified boolean condition turns out to be true or false, Bash conditional statements perform specified operations based on the conditions. These conditional statements are utilized to execute specific sections of your shell program. The if, if-else, if-elif-else statements are used in Bash scripts for executing blocks of code based on a condition outcome, just like they work in any other programming language.
This article will go through the fundamentals of the Bash if-else Statement and will show you how to utilize these conditional statements in your Bash script. So let’s start!
Maybe cops are too close to the action? Perhaps that's why it always seems it takes an outside entity to discover the problems (and problem officers) in police departments. The US Department of Justice frequently does this (less frequently from 2017-2020), although the long-term effects of its consent decrees and investigations seems to be pretty much negligible.
We’re being divided by the Republicans committed to canceling CRT, preventing it from being discussed and taught in schools, since it contradicts their claim that America is not a racist society. Given the extreme of this pro-active assault, there can be no debate over CRT’s purposes and outcomes, so in effect there is only one side. The Republicans are essentially debating with themselves over the nuances of cancelation.
Kendi speaks for a significant swatch of minds, attested by his lumping together of the voices other to the Republicans as a “we.” These of course are the liberal, Democratic voices, and the same complaint could be lodged here, that they’re essentially debating with themselves over nuances of a script that has become self-evident and mostly unchallenged. Racism is systemic, embedded in the very structures that organize society; diversity, the inclusion of more blacks and “people of color,” is a most-valued policy to ameliorate racism. On the face of it these are positive proposals, but in terms of outcomes—Kendi’s overriding concern versus intentions and assertions—they leave many issues undeveloped. Debates would intensify and complicate them, place them in context, and give the masses of people from a variety of races and ethnic groups who don’t grasp academic theory, insights into what this controversy is all about. This is because there are citizens out there who are curious and trying to survive empirical existence who support anti-racism, even many progressive causes, but are highly skeptical of the script that’s passed down to them for an up or down vote. And to date they’ve been afraid to speak up for fear of being labeled racist.
Fulton Leroy Washington, 66, is one of the most intriguing artists in Los Angeles. Many of his paintings, such as Mr. Rene # MAN POWER or Mondaine’s Market, depict people in federal prison. His work brings to life the communities, families, and loved ones that incarcerated individuals leave behind, while also depicting the despair and fears that people grapple with as result of their imprisonment. Those who want to understand the Black experience—and how that experience has been so fundamentally skewed by mass incarceration—can learn from Washington’s story and artwork.
In the face of tens of thousands of lives lost, trillions of dollars spent, and countless communities destroyed, pointing out that early critics of the U.S. “war on terror” were accurate seems crass and cruel, sanctimonious and self-serving.
But it’s also dangerous to ignore the dissenters. Those of us who were active in the€ anti-war/anti-empire movement€ before September 11, 2001, came together almost immediately to organize resistance to what was coming. Anyone aware of basic post-World War II history could see what was coming.€ And the wars came.
In unsurprising news, the McDonald's McFlurry machine is down. In actual surprising news, the FTC is looking into it. (Paywall ahead, but here's another option.)
Recently, a Deputy Commissioner in Karnataka said that those without vaccines would not receive ration or pension entitlement. After significant public outcry, the decision was withdrawn. We wrote to the Deputy Commissioner, appreciating the recall and asking him to ensure that access to essential government benefits is not made conditional on vaccination status.
[...]
This statement generated widespread outrage, as several decried the campaign for linking vaccinations with the receipt of essential government welfare benefits such as rations and pensions. Subsequently, the DC clarified that no order linking vaccination with the provision of welfare benefits was given. The Chief Secretary to the Government of Karnataka also clarified that government benefits were not linked to vaccination status, and that if any such linking had taken place in any district then it must be withdrawn.
Women will have to finish their lesson five minutes before men so that there is no mingling after the classes, the Taliban diktat said.
The notion that if libraries didn't exist already, the publishing industry wouldn't allow them to exist at all is both a grim joke and a depressing truth, as continually evidenced by the opposition of publishers to seemingly unobjectionable technologies like controlled digital lending, which aim to allow libraries to carry their mission forward into the digital age. This week, we're joined by Jennie Rose Halperin, executive director of the Library Futures Institute, to discuss the institute's new paper on the subject and the legality of and opposition to controlled digital lending, and what it tells us about the future of libraries.
It is not just the Chinese companies alone that are facing tough times. With growing chip wars between the U.S. and China, the global supply chain for electronic chips has been affected, leading to chip shortages across several sectors. Semiconductor chips are used in almost every product, from household equipment—microwave ovens and toasters—to the automotive and defense industries. The auto industry’s biggest bottleneck today is the chip shortage, which has badly hit their production. If the chip wars continue, the crisis of the chip shortage may affect other industries as well.
This crisis, meanwhile, has raised several questions: Is the crisis of the semiconductor industry the precursor to the fragmentation of the global supply chains? Will it lead to warring blocks, with the U.S. at one pole and China at the other? With this fragility of the supply chain, are we seeing the end of globalization as a paradigm?
Joe Maga heard the anti-vaxxers say Dewormer, not the vaccine, kills those germs. Joe Maga died of Covid. Joe is gone. His body, though, remains quite free of worms.
Large areas of the city, including my neighborhood in Brooklyn, were sprayed over the last few weeks.
The NYC spray program was initiated by Mayor Giuliani in 1999, who ran it from his bunker on the 23rd floor of World Trade Center #7 under the auspices of the Office of Emergency Management. It continued under Bloomberg, and now by de Blasio. The spraying program has never been publicly reviewed by any city agency.
A coalition of more than 1,500 global civil society organizations demanded Tuesday that the upcoming COP26 climate talks in Scotland be postponed due to persistent inequities in coronavirus vaccine distribution, which are threatening to bar the nations most impacted by the climate emergency from participating in the crucial summit.
"If COP26 goes ahead as currently planned, I fear it is only the rich countries and NGOs from those countries that would be able to attend."—Mohamed Adow, Power Shift Africa
Vaccine costs have pushed many developing countries to the end of the COVID-19 vaccination queue, with most low-income ones not even lining up. Worse, less vaccinated poor nations cannot afford fiscal efforts to provide relief or stimulate recovery, let alone achieve Agenda 2030.
All societies have a genre of narrative known as the “just-so story,” which exists to furnish a question about the world—“What makes the seasons change?”; “Why is the US military budget so large?”—with a tidy answer: “The seasons change because the god of the underworld kidnapped the harvest goddess’s daughter”; “Our military budget keeps democracy safe around the world.” The point of a just-so story is to explain not only why things are the way they are but also why they couldn’t be any other way. Floating somewhere outside of history, with all of its contingencies and struggles for power, the just-so story sparkles with the structure of myth.1
United Nations experts tasked with monitoring human rights abuses across the globe are condemning Texas' near-total abortion ban as a clear violation of international law, characterizing the state's newly imposed restrictions as "profoundly discriminatory" and dangerous.
Melissa Upreti, a human rights lawyer and the chair of the U.N.'s working group on discrimination against women and girls, told The Guardian on Tuesday that the Texas ban "violates a number of rights guaranteed under international law" and represents "structural sex and gender-based discrimination at its worst."
Standing in stark contrast with a newly effective anti-abortion law in neighboring Texas, Mexico's Supreme Court on Tuesday unanimously ruled that a state law criminalizing abortion is unconstitutional, setting a precedent that advocates say is likely to ultimately lead to full legalization in the nation with the world's second-largest Roman Catholic population.
"Today is a historic day for the rights of all Mexican women."—Chief Justice Arturo Zaldivar
Get ready to kiss goodbye to Roe v. Wade.
These conservative demagogues are building on the authoritarian, anti-democratic highway to hell paved by a despicably unorthodox former president and would-be dictator to the point of denying women their constitutional right to abortion and curtailing the voting rights of Blacks, Latinos and other minorities who vote Democratic.
After the Supreme Court refused last week to block Texas’s extreme new abortion ban, Senate Bill 8 (SB 8), Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a scathing dissent: “The Act is a breathtaking act of defiance—of the Constitution, of this Court’s precedents, and of the rights of women seeking abortions throughout Texas.”
As we look at the public health crisis that followed the September 11, 2001, attacks in New York City, we speak with Lila Nordstrom, a student in 2001 at Stuyvesant High School, which neighbors ground zero and was reopened while the site was still burning and releasing toxic smoke and dust. “Our school wasn’t just next to the World Trade Center site, but we were also in the center of the clean-up operations,” says Nordstrom. “There were not any safety precautions being taken to protect us as we walked to and from school. The building that we were attending school in smelled like smoke 24 hours a day for the entire length of time.” Nordstrom is one of the voices in the new PBS documentary “9/11’s Unsettled Dust” and author of a new book titled “Some Kids Left Behind: A Survivor’s Fight for Health Care in the Wake of 9/11.”
As we look at “9/11’s Unsettled Dust” and the massive environmental and public health crisis that followed the 9/11 attacks in New York City 20 years ago this week, we speak with Joe Zadroga, father of New York police officer James Zadroga, who died of a respiratory illness after assisting in rescue efforts at ground zero. He says government officials spent years denying his son’s symptoms were related to ground zero rescue efforts. “We spent five years trying to get Jimmy help,” says Zadroga. “Everyone refused to help us.” Congressmember Carolyn Maloney said she faced extreme pressure to change the name of the James Zadroga Health and Compensation Act, which provides billions in healthcare for them.
As this week marks the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we look at an enraging new documentary, “9/11’s Unsettled Dust,” on the impact of the toxic, cancer-causing smoke and dust that hung over ground zero and how the Environmental Protection Agency put Wall Street’s interests before public health and told people the air was safe to breathe. One of the key figures in the film is Democracy Now! co-host Juan González, who was among the first to expose the public health and environmental crisis at ground zero in a series of reports for the New York Daily News. He says the intense backlash from the mayor’s office and federal officials “cowed” the newspaper, but he has no regrets. “My only mistake was believing that it would take 20 years for people to get sick,” González says. “It took about five years for the deaths and the severe illnesses to really become apparent.” Director Lisa Katzman says she made the film because she was a resident of Lower Manhattan who saw the attack and its aftermath up close and wanted “to address the lack of accountability” from city and federal officials. “The same people that were always touting 'Never forget! Never forget!' and constantly reminding us of the heroism of these responders were unwilling to do anything to actually help them,” notes Katzman.
Email isn’t just a communication tool; it’s also an identifier and a security measure. Companies use it to create profiles of you when you start accounts with them and it often doubles as your username. Your email can also serve as your account recovery tool when you forget your username or password. All of this from something that doesn’t require you to verify your ID and that most people get to use for free, provided by a giant corporation that wants to harvest our data. In premium email provider Hey’s words, email is the “skeleton key to your digital life.” Well, I have a skeleton key to a lot of other people’s digital lives, too.
OpenSSL 3.0 is now available for download as a major update to this widely-used cryptography and SSL/TLS toolkit.
The OpenSSL Software Foundation released a completely refreshed version of the OpenSSL software, that handles much of the encrypted communications on the Internet. After over 7,500 commits and contributions from over 350 different authors, OpenSSL 3.0 is finally here.
OpenSSL’s reputation took a serious hit 7 years ago with the Heartbleed bug. In short, in 2012 the German programmer Dr. Robin Seggelmann added a new feature and forgot to validate a variable containing a length. And then for about 2 years the defective code was used, at one time or another, by almost ever Internet user in the world. A fixed version was released in April 2014, on the same day Heartbleed was publicly disclosed.
OpenSSL 3.0 has just been released after three years of development, and over 7,500 commits and contributions from over 350 different authors with a new FIPS module that awaits FIPS 140-2 validation by the end of the year, improved documentation, and a change to an Apache License 2.0.
OpenSSL’s reputation took a serious hit in 2014 with the Hearbleed bug that allowed attackers to steal the information protected by the SSL/TLS encryption used for most secure Internet communication. The bug was introduced in 2012, and it took almost two years to be fixed. Yet, despite the fix, many projects switched to other SSL libraries like LibreSSL, WolfSSL, or mbedTLS.
More bad news for Israeli malware purveyor NSO Group. Despite its contradictory and simultaneous claims that it does not allow its customers to abuse its products and that it has no way of monitoring use of its products, more evidence continues to surface that shows the company's customers are deploying NSO's malware to target journalists, activists, prominent politicians, and religious leaders.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (haproxy), Fedora (libguestfs, ntfs-3g, ntfs-3g-system-compression, partclone, testdisk, vim, and wimlib), Mageia (kernel and kernel-linus), openSUSE (haproxy), Oracle (kernel), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and kpatch-patch), SUSE (haproxy), and Ubuntu (cpio, haproxy, libapache2-mod-auth-mellon, libgd2, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, openvswitch, python-pysaml2, and sssd).
When Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a new “privacy-focused vision” for Facebook in March 2019, he cited the company’s global messaging service, WhatsApp, as a model. Acknowledging that “we don’t currently have a strong reputation for building privacy protective services,” the Facebook CEO wrote that “I believe the future of communication will increasingly shift to private, encrypted services where people can be confident what they say to each other stays secure and their messages and content won’t stick around forever. This is the future I hope we will help bring about. We plan to build this the way we’ve developed WhatsApp.”
Zuckerberg’s vision centered on WhatsApp’s signature feature, which he said the company was planning to apply to Instagram and Facebook Messenger: end-to-end encryption, which converts all messages into an unreadable format that is only unlocked when they reach their intended destinations. WhatsApp messages are so secure, he said, that nobody else — not even the company — can read a word. As Zuckerberg had put it earlier, in testimony to the U.S. Senate in 2018, “We don’t see any of the content in WhatsApp.”
Securus and GTL have spent the last several years inventing new and improved ways to extract money from incarcerated people, violate human rights, and surveil not only prisoners but their families, and friends.
Over the next two weeks we will be shedding light on some of the patents and technologies these companies have been working on, which either are already actively used or may soon be coming to prisons across the country.
Our hope is that through this project we will expose some of the horrifying technologies that Securus and GTL are working on, exposing these ideas to the public and not allowing them to flourish in the obscurity of patent documents.
Securus is one of the prison telecommunications companies notable for overcharging inmates for the privilege of communication with their loved ones. They have filed a patent application describing a method of “linking controlled-environment facility residents and associated non-resident telephone numbers to ... e-commerce accounts associated with the captured telephone number” and “information about purchases made by a non-resident associated with the accessed e-commerce account.”€ € €
In other words, Securus wants to capture the phone numbers of everyone a prisoner talks to, including friends and family, and use that information to scrutinize their e-commerce purchases.€
In their patent application, Securus provides the following example of how prisons might use this invasive and dangerous technology.€
According to the tweet announcing the test, you can remove followers from the follower list on your profile page. You just click the three-dot menu next to a follower’s name, click “Remove follower,” and your tweets will no longer automatically show up in their timeline.
This is different than blocking someone, which keeps them from viewing your tweets and direct messaging you (and keeps you from doing the same with them). Twitter’s new remove follower feature is more of a remote unfollow button, a gentler way to create some distance between you and someone else on Twitter.
On September 3, 2021, Apple paused the implementation of two highly controversial new child safety features that would both algorithmically and manually surveil the devices of Apple users for Child Sexual Abuse Material (CSAM).
Kabul—Throughout the last week of August, I was asked constantly about the situation outside Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. It’s all any TV station, radio, or podcast wanted to talk to me about. The grim images of devastation and desperation coming from there managed finally to gain the attention of people in the West, who for years had ignored the two-decade-long occupation, which was presumably launched for their safety. Or for Afghan women. Or for democracy.1
The ugly scenes of the Taliban takeover and the US retreat from Kabul underscored an uncomfortable truth about foreign military adventures: If you bet big, you can lose big—and it had better be worth it. The war in Afghanistan wasn’t.€ Still, the barrage of indignation from establishment politicians and the mainstream media exposed their continued refusal to confront the real issue: that invasions and occupations invariably provoke resistance, rarely work, and are hardly ever worth the cost.1
A republic that wages unending war beyond its frontiers sets itself up for decline and fall. Its intractable military skirmishing is like the drip-drip-drip of water slowly eroding the sturdy foundations of an edifice before it collapses. Buffoons soon take their turns as mob rulers, coarsening and dividing a once-free society, before a barbarian horde tries to topple it.1
Meanwhile, in a bankruptcy ruling that makes a farce out of “equal justice for all,” a judge has just granted the multibillionaire Sackler family immunity from all future lawsuits stemming from the role of their company, Purdue Pharma, in a drug overdose epidemic that has killed at least 1 million Americans. The Sacklers were not only enriched by their company’s lawbreaking. As board members, they were legally responsible for the company’s actions. They will remain free, and will remain billionaires. The people killed by their products will remain dead.
What is a narco-state? Here’s what historian Alfred McCoy wrote in 2018, as the American-backed state continued its process of collapse:
I wanted to share some thoughts with you on Afghanistan, as it sits atop the rubble of another indifferent imperial folly with the dread of once again living under a fundamentalist authoritarian regime on the horizon. And especially on the American public’s disconnect from its own government’s culpability in spreading misery there and throughout the Global South. I wanted to talk about reflection too.
I wanted to talk about twenty years of drone bombing civilians, like a grandmother picking okra in her field, incinerating people, even in hospital, of Marine night raids on terrified civilians, including women and children. kicking in doors, torching villages. Twenty years supporting and propping up a corrupt Afghan proxy government despite US intelligence agencies being informed countless times of their corruption. Even though the Taliban will likely be worse, let’s not pretend that these last 20 years under American occupation has been a bucolic 4th of July picnic for the Afghan people.
Opponents of Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro took to the streets and to social media Tuesday to counter large pro-government, anti-judiciary demonstrations, and to condemn what they called the "genocidal" right-wing leader's attempt to subvert democracy and foment a coup d'état.
A day after Bolsonaro supporters violently broke through police barricades near the National Congress in Brasília and threatened to invade the Supreme Federal Court (STF), many tens of thousands of demonstrators rallied in the capital to back the president's continued targeting of the judiciary and integrity of the upcoming election.
The White House on Tuesday called on Congress to urgently pass a stopgap spending measure that includes billions of dollars for providing relief from recent disasters and resettling Afghans who left their country as the U.S. withdrew after nearly two decades of war.
"With the end of the fiscal year rapidly approaching, it's clear that Congress will need to pass a short-term continuing resolution (CR) to provide more time for the FY 2022 process to unfold," wrote Shalanda Young, acting director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), in a memo.
Speaking from the White House on August 31, President Joe Biden lied to the people of the U.S. and to the world: "Last night in Kabul, the United States ended 20 years of war in Afghanistan—the longest war in American history." The U.S. war on Afghanistan did not end—it has only adapted to technological advances and morphed into a war that will be more politically sustainable, one more intractable and more easily exportable.
"When we hear messages from the World Bank—whether they say that they have put our funds on hold, or they've frozen them—what that means to me is 3,700 health facilities will collapse. That the health of 35 million people will collapse."—Dr. Wahid Majrooh, Public Health Minister
Airstrikes conducted by the United States have killed between 22,000 and 48,000 civilians since September 11, 2001, according to a report published Monday by Airwars, a military watchdog that monitors and seeks to reduce civilian harm in violent conflict zones.
The new analysis, released ahead of€ the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the retaliatory launch of the so-called "War on Terror," came just days after a U.S. drone strike€ killed€ at least 10 members of a single family in Kabul amid the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
The Taliban observed the 20th anniversary of 9/11 in startling fashion. Within a week of the United States’ announcement that it would withdraw its forces from Afghanistan on September 11, the Taliban had taken over large parts of the country, and on August 15, the capital city of Kabul fell. The speed was astonishing, the strategic acumen remarkable: a 20-year occupation rolled up in a week, as the puppet armies disintegrated. The puppet president hopped a helicopter to Uzbekistan, then a jet to the United Arab Emirates. It was a huge blow to the American empire and its underling states. No amount of spin can cover up this debacle.1
Turning points in history usually come by surprise because, if the powers-that-be of the day could see those turning points coming at them, they would take steps to avoid them. Governments and the public like to believe that there is more inevitability in history than there really is. Unexpected events of great significance, such as the fall of France in 1940, the overthrow of the Shah in 1979 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 were followed by inquiries into why experts did not foresee them.
These investigations dig down deep in search of root causes of historic change and always find them. But, as Lord Northcliffe said, one “should never lose one’s sense of the superficial”. Key ingredients in important historic developments may be decisions and actions occurring that could easily have gone the other way. For instance, there were long-standing reasons for Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait in 1990, but none of these would have mattered if the Iraqi leader had changed his mind at the last minute.
On April 24, 2021, Joe Biden became the first sitting U.S. president formally to acknowledge the Armenian Genocide. What was this genocide about, and what is its significance for today?
The biggest trial in France's modern legal history begins on Wednesday over the November 2015 attacks on Paris that saw 130 people killed at bars, restaurants and the Bataclan concert hall.
The suicide bombing and gun assault by three teams of jihadists, planned from Syria and later claimed by the Islamic State group, was France's worst post-war atrocity.
As the climate crisis sent thousands fleeing wildfires in Northern California, CalSTRS, the nation's second largest public pension fund, postponed full divestment from fossil fuels for nearly 30 years.
But according to some top environmental economists, we have good reason to believe the true cost of emitting carbon is actually a lot higher than that price tag suggests.
There are a couple of reasons for that. First, until now, the economists who calculated the SCC had barely factored in one of the biggest harms that climate change can cause: human mortality. Second, the way the SCC had been calculated rested on a problematic premise: that damage in the future counts for significantly less than damage in the present.
Let’s look at each of these issues in turn to understand why some experts now say the true cost of carbon per ton should really be much, much higher than we’d thought. In addition to having major policy implications, this discussion has major moral implications: It goes to the heart of our ethical responsibility to care for future generations.
Headwaters Alliance, a local non-profit organisation, wants to create a “dark-sky reserve” in aptly named Mineral County, which includes Creede. The campaign is not unique to southern Colorado. Dark-sky communities are cropping up around the American West. The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA), based in Tucson, wants towns to curb their light pollution, which harms nocturnal wildlife and obscures the stars. The IDA has certified more than 130 dark-sky places globally since 2001; 14 of them are in Colorado.
January 9, 2010, the day before the massive earthquake hit Haiti, Dahline was washing clothes by the river at the far end of the island in a town called Abricots. Her face bore the scars of various epileptic seizures she had suffered. On her right forearm was a deep bluish scar from when she fell into an open fire while cooking. Another on her forehead, when she had fallen during a bout in the latrine. That day, Dahline suffered another seizure. She fell in the river and without a sound, she drowned.
"There's going to be a bigger Katrina, there's going to be a bigger Sandy, there's going to be a bigger Hurricane Maria, and they're going to be right around the corner." —Commanding General Thomas Bostick, US Army Corps of Engineers, June 17, 2021
A report released Tuesday by European campaigners highlights how the global industrial animal farming sector, backed by billions from major financial institutions, is fueling the intertwined climate and biodiversity crises—and what policymakers can do to better protect people and the planet.
"The food and farming sector in industrialized countries, which accounts for about one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, is far from doing its fair share to reduce them."—Meat Atlas 2021
The fossil fuel industry's role in environmental destruction is under renewed fire this week after the U.S. Coast Guard announced reports of nearly 350 oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico in the aftermath of Hurricane Ida.
"350 spills,"€ the Louisiana Bucket Brigade tweeted Tuesday. "This is the petrochemical industry's responsibility, so it should foot the bill for a total cleanup—not the taxpayer."
Anti-coal campaigners gathered in Westminster today to call on the government to scrap what they called “insane” plans for a new coal mine in West Cumbria.
Activists left messages opposing the mine on cut-outs of yellow canaries outside the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, where a four-week public inquiry into the opencast mine begins today.
When President Joe Biden on Tuesday toured communities in New York and New Jersey devastated by the remnants of Hurricane Ida last week, he was greeted by protesters pointing to the deadly storm as just the latest proof of the need to immediately phase out fossil fuels.
"Fossil fuels are destroying our climate with direct impacts in our own backyard," said Food & Water Watch Northeast region director Alex Beauchamp in a statement. "It's time President Biden doubled down on his campaign commitments to end our reliance on fossil fuels by stopping the leasing of public lands for fossil fuel extraction and halting the construction of fossil fuel infrastructure projects."
Iraq, the planet’s sixth-largest oil producer, urges the world to move from fossil fuels and focus on renewable energy.
Today, Bitcoin is becoming an official currency in El Salvador, and the markets and [cryptocurrency] exchanges seem to be struggling. On Tuesday morning, the price of Bitcoin plunged from around $50,000 down to under $43,000 according to Coinbase — it seems that the country’s official Bitcoin app also hasn’t been able to keep up.
The price action comes on the day El Salvador is set to adopt the largest cryptocurrency by market cap as legal tender, becoming the first country to do so. Bitcoin dropped as much as 16% on Tuesday morning. It was last down about 9.5% and trading at $46,892.04, according to Coin Metrics. Ether fell 12% to $3,441.21.
The leader of the nearly 100-member Congressional Progressive Caucus made clear Tuesday that she's not willing to accept cuts to Democrats' $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation proposal, a sweeping climate and social spending package that conservative members of the party are currently attempting to scale back.
"There is no flexibility on the price tag, and it's not because I care about what the top line is," Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), the chair of the CPC, told the Washington Post. "It's because I care about delivering on these benefits."
They weren't kidding when they called Afghanistan the "graveyard of empires." Indeed, that cemetery has just taken another imperial body. And it wasn't pretty, was it? Not that anyone should be surprised. Even after 20 years of preparation, a burial never is.
A strange but consequential fight over the future of the Federal Reserve has been brewing among progressives. The left is split on whether President Joe Biden should reappoint Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve whose term is up in February, or replace him with someone more aggressive on climate change and financial regulation.
Senator Manchin gives us a great example of this pattern in his Wall Street Journal column complaining about President Biden’s plan for a $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, which would increase federal spending by an amount equal to roughly to 1.3 percent of GDP over the next decade. Manchin complained that he was worried that this spending would add too much to the debt and could spur higher inflation.
While the proposal would address many issues, such as extending Medicare to include dental and hearing coverage, to expanded support for child care, most of the items in the bill fit clearly under the definition of investment. Much of the spending goes to combat global warming, either by promoting electric cars, conservation, and clean energy or increasing the resiliency of our infrastructure to deal with extreme weather events, like Hurricane Ida.
This activism, epitomized by memorable protests when trade negotiators convened in Seattle in 1999, and Montreal and Cancun in 2003, catalyzed exciting proposals for inclusive, people-centered alternatives. A few of those ideas have found their way into trade regimes, but far from enough. Meanwhile, global inequality has reached an unprecedented level.
It’s time to renew our calls for equity in light of the Biden administration’s stated commitment to worker-centered trade policy — and foreign policy for the middle class.
Jason Miller, ex-adviser to former U.S. President Donald Trump's 2020 re-election campaign and current CEO of right-wing social media platform Gettr, was detained and released by Brazilian police on Tuesday.
Brazilian law enforcement officials questioned Miller at the airport in the capital city of Brasilia, reportedly as part of an investigation into "anti-democratic acts." Miller had traveled to Brazil to speak with the country's far-right President Jair Bolsonaro and others involved in planning nationwide rallies against the Supreme Court and Congress for Tuesday, September 7, which is the country's Independence Day.
The voter suppression law signed€ by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott Tuesday already faces legal challenges that were promptly filed€ by a number of civil rights groups, which argue the restrictive measure is transparently aimed at keeping people of color from casting€ ballots and violates federal law.
"Make no mistake—S.B. 1 is designed to disenfranchise voters of colors, and strip them of their voice in our democracy...€ This is a troubling day for voting rights."—Jon Greenbaum, Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law
There’s a worldwide pandemic that is even killing our children; climate change has drowned the East Coast while the West Coast is on fire; emergency workers and firefighters are struggling with Covid; and a group of rightwing billionaires and religious freaks have seized control of one of our political parties and are hell-bent on pushing us back to the 19th century, crushing democracy and rolling back voting rights while taking ever-more control over women and minorities.
Many Americans are being crushed by this. People losing their homes to wildfire or floods; losing their jobs to an economy battered by recession, pandemic and environmental crisis; facing huge medical bills simply because they got sick in America. Others are caught in doom-scrolling loops, obsessing on all the bad news that fills our airwaves.
A few weeks ago, Elizabeth Dwoskin, Will Oremus and Gerrit De Vynck from the Washington Post published one of the most fascinating -- and in some ways, most important -- discussions of social media and dealing with "disinformation" that I've seen in a while. It touches on two things I've written about recently -- how the way we talk about disinformation is not helpful and the difficulty in determining how to deal with bad faith actors.
The backlash against scientific advice during the coronavirus pandemic follows the same dynamics as the debate over climate change and shows that “scientifically formed political decisions will always be fraught”, according to a [NASA] scientist.
Gavin Schmidt, senior climate adviser to the US space agency, said that he previously believed that the debate around climate change was unique, but that Covid-19 “has shown that people come up with the same nonsense and bullshit” to support their own agendas.
It's been over three years since Backpage.com was seized (the week before FOSTA was signed into law -- which is notable since every conversation about the need for FOSTA claimed it was because existing laws were useless to stop Backpage). However, in the intervening years we've seen that the loss of Backpage, rather than "protecting" women, seems to have put women at much greater risk. The recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report highlighted how the loss of Backpage, combined with FOSTA, has made it difficult for law enforcement to track down actual sex traffickers.
One of the many preposterous claims coming from supporters of the vicious new Texas law against abortion is that bounty hunters -- standing to gain a $10,000 reward from the state—will somehow be "whistleblowers." The largest anti-abortion group in Texas is trying to attach the virtuous "whistleblower" label to predators who'll file lawsuits against abortion providers and anyone who "aids or abets" a woman getting an abortion.
The debate over content moderation at the infrastructure (rather than edge) layers of the internet stack is heating up again. For what it's worth, we'll be hosting our next Techdirt Tech Policy Greenhouse on this very subject later this month (if you're interested in contributing, please reach out). Last week Reuters claimed that Amazon was going to more aggressively police sites that rely on AWS (which created a bit of a furor earlier this year when the company booted Parler). Amazon has denied these claims, but it certainly raised some eyebrows.
Hollywood films are ever more dependent on earnings in China. Over 80% of the country’s theaters, as of Friday, are still operational despite sporadic closures due to outbreaks of the delta coronavirus variant.
The political standoff between China and the U.S. has already gummed up film industry negotiations. Now there's the possibility that, in a tit-for-tat move following U.S. moves against ZTE, TikTok and Huawei, China may be deliberately hobbling one of America’s biggest export industries. Several seemingly uncontroversial Hollywood titles are without release approvals or dates, including “Jungle Cruise” and “The Suicide Squad.” Sci-fi spectacular “Dune” has the advantage of being backed by the Wanda-owned Legendary Entertainment, but some online commentators are still cool about its prospects.
Possibly the most complicated calculation is whether policy or economics will guide the Chinese government’s thinking about the film industry through the last third of the year.
The proposed Film Censorship Ordinance gives the city's censors wider powers and increases the maximum jail sentence to three years for illegal screenings.
The would-be jihadist was intercepted by police from the RAID and taken into police custody, where he refused to answer. He was immediately charged with ” justifying terrorism ” and then released by the prosecution. Pending his trial, he will therefore only be subject to simple judicial review. This is enough to drive the unfortunate Mila mad.On her Twitter account, the last way she communicates with the outside world, she comments succinctly: “Under our eyes, the judiciary is opening the gates for terrorist acts”. Before calling on her followers to launch a campaign on social networks under the keyword ” Overcome terrorism “.
"They made me rub my nose on the ground and apologize for covering the protest," he said, speaking on condition of anonymity because of fears for his safety. "Journalism in Afghanistan is getting harder."
If you listen to the media of the privileged elite, or what we generally just call “the media,” or sometimes “the liberal media,” you might easily develop the impression that the history of the US was all about privileged white people oppressing people of color.€ You’d be forgiven for not realizing that ours is a class society, with an overwhelmingly working class population, which has always been thus, and has been mostly white ever since each state became a state.€ In the US model of settler-colonialism, for a territory to become a state, it first needed a white settler majority — what they call the “pioneers” in the history books on the west coast.€ The next wave of migration were the poor workers in all fields, from all racialized backgrounds, some more oppressed than others, on that racialized basis, among other bases, such as nationality, religion, political persuasion, and gender.
The narrative of the lying history books we force the children to consume throughout this country tells us our ancestors leaving “the Old World” (Europe) for “the New World” (the colonized world, the Americas, or specifically the United States) were “seeking a better life for themselves and their children.”€ In fact, you can frequently catch them saying the same thing about the Afghans coming in now, as if they were not fleeing their homes for fear of death.
Four activists from the Hong Kong pro-democracy group that organizes the city's annual Tiananmen Square vigil were arrested early Wednesday morning, after the group refused to comply with a police order to submit information on national security grounds.
The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China had openly challenged the enforcement of a 14-month-old national security law, saying police were arbitrarily labeling pro-democracy organizations as foreign agents.
The Hong Kong Alliance is known for organising the city's famed annual vigil for victims of the deadly 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
If China expresses willingness to open peace talks, the Tibetan government in exile will appoint an envoy to conduct the negotiations, its leader said Monday (Sept. 6).
Automated resume-scanning software is contributing to a “broken” hiring system in the US, says a new report from Harvard Business School. Such software is used by employers to filter job applicants, but is mistakenly rejecting millions of viable candidates, say the study’s authors. It’s contributing to the problem of “hidden workers” — individuals who are able and willing to work, but remain locked out of jobs by structural problems in the labor market.
The study’s authors identify a number of factors blocking people from employment, but say automated hiring software is one of the biggest. These programs are used by 75 percent of US employers (rising to 99 percent of Fortune 500 companies), and were adopted in response to a rise in digital job applications from the ‘90s onwards. Technology has made it easier for people to apply for jobs, but also easier for companies to reject them.
"We don't have a labor shortage — what we have is a wage shortage," he added. "Too many [employers] are offering too little to make it viable for them to take those jobs."
According to the transcript, ACLU attorney Kevin Riach asks Dwyer at the hearing, "And you just decided, shortly after the George Floyd protests, this would be a good time to clean out my inbox?"
Dwyer admitted to the deletion of communications during a court case brought against the state of Minnesota and state police by the Minnesota American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) chapter on behalf of journalists.
The Minnesota State Patrol purged emails and texts messages immediately after protests over the death of George Floyd last year, according to testimony in a lawsuit that alleges the agency targeted journalists during the unrest.
During a July 28 hearing, State Patrol Maj. Joseph Dwyer testified that he and a “vast majority of the agency” deleted the messages after the protests and riots, according to a transcript published Friday on the court’s docket.
This file destruction "makes it nearly impossible to track the State Patrol's behavior, apparently by design," said attorneys for Minnesota's chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing the State Patrol and Minneapolis police on behalf of journalists who say they were assaulted by law enforcement while covering the protests and riots.
"The purge was neither accidental, automated, nor routine," said ACLU attorneys, in a court motion that asks a judge to order the State Patrol to cease attacks on journalists who are covering protests. "The purge did not happen because of a file destruction or retention policy. No one reviewed the purged communications before they were deleted to determine whether the materials were relevant to this litigation."
It all began when Ahamed Aathil Mohamed Samsudeen, a Sri Lankan, Muslim migrant in New Zealand, began stabbing people at random while screaming “Allahu akbar” in a supermarket in Auckland, New Zealand. But the story of Samsudeen in New Zealand actually began long before that. Associated Press reported Saturday that Samsudeen was imprisoned in New Zealand for three years after being caught with a hunting knife and jihadi videos. Nevertheless, he was released from prison “despite grave fears he would attack others,” because authorities believed that “they could do nothing more to keep him behind bars.”
Guatemala’s top court eliminated prison sentences for some corruption crimes by public servants, including justice officials like judges, a court ruling showed.
While streaming providers and hardware companies see significantly higher consumer satisfaction rates that traditional cable TV, their privacy practices still leave something to be desired. That's according to a new breakdown of streaming service privacy policies by Common Sense Media, which doled out terrible grades to pretty much everybody not named Apple:
Today, PulPac celebrates that the European Patent Office has announced its intention to grant one of PulPac€´s most general patents. Europe is thereby the third major region, after the USA and Japan, to confirm PulPac€´s ownership of the process of dry molding cellulose fibers, a breakthrough technology that enables replacement of single-use plastics on a global scale.
JW Pharmaceutical’s manufacturing technology of URC102, its experimental drug for gout treatment, has been cleared for patent registration with the European Patent Office (EPO). The oral formulation designed to help lower uric acid in gout patients proved efficacy, safety and tolerability in Phase 2b clinical trials conducted in March in Korea.
Patents – method of diagnosis – manner of manufacture – sufficiency – fair basis – infringement
This case involved an appeal from the decision of Beach J in Sequenom, Inc v Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc [2019] FCA 1011, concerning Sequenom’s patent for a method of detecting the presence of a nucleic acid of foetal origin in a maternal serum or plasma sample. The method used “cell free foetal DNA” (“cffDNA”) – that is, non-cellular DNA from a foetus.
The first appellant (“Ariosa”) conducts and licenses others (including the second and third appellants) to conduct a non-invasive prenatal test called the Harmony Test. Sequenom sued Ariosa for infringement of claims of its patent (which is now expired). At trial, Ariosa cross-claimed seeking revocation. Ariosa convinced the Court to revoke one claim on the ground of fair basis. Sequenom otherwise succeeded in its infringement claim.
After decades of discussion, the implementation of a so-called "Unitary Patent Package", i.e. the establishment of a Unitary Patent (UP) and a Unified Patent Court (UPC), has reached its final stages. The Unitary Patent (UP) aims to provide a single approach to patent protection and enforcement across 24 European Union Member States with a combined population of more than 350 million.
Forward Pharma's ADRs closed 20% lower at $6.35 after the company said the European Patent Office's technical appeal board dismissed the Forward's appeal of a previous decision to revoke its EP2801355 patent.
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.
Can AIs create patents? One U.S. judge says no. The original issue stemmed from a company called Imagination Engines based in Missouri. Imagination Engines had filed two patents in 2019 under DABUS, the company’s neural network engine. The patents were rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark office as according to the organization, only “natural persons” can be named as patent creators. Stephen Thaler, the founder of Imagination Engines, then sued the director of the patent office at the time in federal court. The case ultimately ended with the judge siding with the patent office, but Thaler plans on continuing to advocate for AIs’ rights as patent creators.
On September 7, 2021, four weeks after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the USPTO granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,047,564, owned by PacSec3, an NPE. PacSec3 was formed in 2020 with NACAR IP LLC as its managing member. NACAR IP was also formed in early 2020 with Dynamic IP Deals, LLC (d/b/a DynaIP), a patent monetization company, identified as its managing member. The ‘564 patent has been asserted against F5 Networks, NetScout Systems, Palo Alto Networks, McAfee, Cisco, Juniper Networks, and Watchguard Technologies.
On September 3, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 10,621,228, owned by MemoryWeb, LLC, an NPE. The '228 patent generally relates to content management systems. It is currently being asserted against Apple and Samsung.
On September 3, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against US Patent 10,326,987, owned by DivX, LLC, a subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp., as part of Unified's ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone. The '987 patent is being asserted against Hulu and is directed to encoding alternative streams of video for use in adaptive bitrate streaming.
Based in: Brisbane, Australia
In May, Triller sued the popular H3 Podcast for $50m claiming that the people behind it had pirated the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren fight and displayed it on YouTube. In a scathing motion to dismiss, the defendants describe Triller's complaint as "fatally flawed" and a "mangled and mangy mess", noting that they are fully protected under the doctrine of fair use.
Based in: Barrie, Ontario – Canada
A federal court in Indiana has awarded the bare minimum of $200 in copyright infringement damages in favor of a photographer whose work was used without permission. The legal paperwork, however, shows that legal threats can be quite lucrative. The photographer earned $135,200 in settlements, compared to just $825 from selling licenses of the contested photo.
