Video download link | md5sum a5018dcb5915a5edebc4045370a3bb8f A Week of Patent Boredom
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Team UPC has become rather quiet lately (just the occasional shameless self-promotion) and there’s no press coverage about the real affairs or the true state of the EPO, where Benoît Battistelli‘s friend António Campinos is doing no better than the predecessor; this serves to shows what happens to a system or to a supposed democracy when there’s no functional media, just state propaganda and Public Relations
THE state of Wikipedia when it comes to articles about patents is truly appalling. It’s like a bunch of religious screeds, nothing that even resembles factual, objective information. The media is, by itself and at large, not doing anything to correct this. It’s a very frustrating situation.
Many European Patents (EPs) continue to perish, but the media barely bothers mentioning that. EPO goes on strike in record numbers (biggest in more than half a decade), but over the past month we saw just one single mention of it, as noted by SUEPO 3 days ago. All the new information is in the comments there; people who observe the EPO very well know what’s going on, but complicit media says nothing at all. As I demonstrate in the video above, over the past month IP Kat published just one or two posts about patents (in general) and the second part (below) shows that Managing IP hardly covered patents this past week. Heck, it never mentioned the EPO’s industrial action and strike. I’ve checked carefully; not even a sentence was devoted to that!
Video download link | md5sum 50f52a7a33b99a6a78e274e9ed939146 A Week of Patent Boredom – Part 2
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
The above part was recorded separately as I underestimated how tired I would get. I needed a nap. In any case, this is the last long video in this series. The principal lesson or conclusion that can be reached is, the media doesn’t cover patents properly (we saw just one article in Nature which resembled actual investigation), Google News has become Gulag Noise — in effect a noise/marketing machine of patent litigation firms — and the EPO’s site perishes along with its social control media accounts (as shown at the end of the second video). We’re taking here about an office whose YouTube channel — the official channel of Europe’s largest patent office — attracts the following number of views. Its followers or subscribers are mostly fake. Some of these videos received less than a dozen views in almost half a year. █
Pay close attention to the age and number of views
Summary: The only coverage of the EPO strike came a week after the strike had ended and relegated to a blog post; most of the actual facts are sheltered away in comments while the World Wide Web is basically a pool of disinformation from Team UPC
Reproduced below for preservation purposes.
Attentive Observersays:
The dismantling of the EPO by the actual president of the EPO continues unabated.
For a start, he intends to push his teleworking scheme at any cost, although it is manifestly against the Centralisation protocol, even in its amended form.
The document on ‘professional mobility’ (CA19/12 and CA 19/12 Corr. 1) was to be submitted for information to the latest AC on 23.03.2022.
If was certainly also part of the discussions at the “Board of the Administrative Council (B28)” which is actually the decision instance. In general, what is decided at a B28 meeting is normally rubber stamped at the following meeting of the AC.
According to an open letter to the members of AC, the Central Staff Committee drew the attention to its members that under the pretext to “support to deliver high-quality patents” (sic) the President intends to use Seconded National Experts (SNEs) to work in the patent granting process, in particular within divisions without formally being part of those divisions. Such a way of working of examining divisions is certainly not compatible with the EPC.
Here again, only the teleworking scheme pushed by the actual president would enable those SNE to contribute to examining divisions of the EPO, whilst they are still sitting in their national offices.
The Central Staff Committee suggested to hold a conference of ministers of the Contracting States under Article 4a EPC.
In view of the diligence of his predecessor and of the present incumbent to convene such a conference, it is doubtful that such a conference will ever been held.
One thing is however abundantly clear: the tail is till wagging the dog and the AC has completely given up its role of controlling the actions of the president.
One wonders what could well be the hidden agenda of the last two tenants of the 10th floor. Could it be dismantling the EPO?
At least the present tenant, although called in order to restore peace at the EPO, has done everything in order to increase the conflicts between staff and management.
By reducing the salaries, reducing all other advantages or allowances, on the basis of a very shoddy financial study, everything is made to render a job less attractive at the EPO.
It might well be that in the end it could be a good solution to second to the EPO national examiners to actually do the job of examiners.
It is to be hoped that examiners will be able to sustain the pressure from management, which in the last years was always very prompt in threatening sanctions which can end up rather quickly with sanctions up to dismissal for incompetence if the target is not achieved. Legal means to this effect have been created.
Concerned observersays:
Attentive, it does not take a genius to discern the “hidden” agenda of the President and the AC. This is because almost all of their “controversial” decisions seem to me to be designed to increase the “profit” that the Member States, AC delegations and EPO senior management can extract from the coffers of the EPO.
The trouble for applicants and EPO (non-senior) staff is that to keep the trough of “profit” full enough for all of the greedy snouts feeding from it, the pips have to be well and truly squeezed … regardless of the seriously negative effect that might have on the EPO’s quality of service, or any illegalities / immoralities regarding degraded employment conditions, etc.
The direction of travel is clear enough. The scandal has been ongoing for well over a decade now and shows no signs of slowing. In fact, the pace seems to be picking up under the current President. The question is, what on earth could possibly persuade the EPO to reverse course and start paying attention to the rule of law, and to get back to providing a proper quality of (public) service?
If you can answer that question, then you will have solved a puzzle that has baffled the rest of us (who pay attention to these things) for a very long time.
Patent robotsays:
If France and the Netherlands opened the PCT national route, the EPO might start paying attention…
Attentive Observersays:
Dear Concerned Observer,
As far as quality of work is concerned, one has just to look at the decisions published by the BA.
The number of patents maintained in amended form or even revoked is steadily increasing.
Although oppositions are not evenly distributed over all technical areas, some seeing hardly any, but if one extrapolates the 5% of opposed patents to the rest of the granted patents, the number of patents in force which are not really valid must be extremely high.
It is only if patents are used in infringement proceedings or if a declaration of non-infringement is thought, that the validity of the patents is considered in detail. It would be interesting to have the figure of the number of patents nullified or amended in national proceedings. The EPO does probably have the figure, but for obvious reasons it will not be published.
The problem is that industry, and especially the big one, is happy with the situation. As long as the quality of EPO patents is somehow better than that of US patents, it will be satisfied. It enough to threaten competitors. As long as the number of patents opposed or subject to national litigation remains at the present level, nothing will probably change.
There is no doubt that the quality of the work delivered by the EPO was much higher in the past, but as long as the users are satisfied with the output of the EPO, why bother?
In this respect, what will be happening at the UPC, which is primarily conceived for the big industry, is symptomatic. Why is it that the basic fee for an action in nullity is nearly double of that for infringement? This is not a coincidence.
With an opposition, the quality of a patent can be tested relatively early. If one has to wait a national procedure, or before the UPC, the latency time is much longer.
In any case, the examiner in charge has in the meantime achieved his target and the EPO and the national offices have cashed fees, so that everybody is pleased.
It is only if the industry, large or small, wakes up and realises that it is spending money which could as well be thrown out of the window that the situation may change.
Professional organisations, like epi, could do something about it as well, but the danger here is that they could well saw the branch on which they are sitting.
Lawyers are also happy charging fees.
At the end of the day, as long as the cow can be milked, why change something?
I would thus claim that the notion of “public service” is grossly misused. It is as public as the British “public schools” are actually public.
It might all sound cynical, but in this day and age, paying attention to the rule of law is not a priority for many. Here again see what is happening at the UPC.
LightBluesays:
Attentive, would you file an opposition against a patent if, after diligent research, you had identified no convincing arguments?
Attentive Observersays:
Dear Light Blue,
It is clear that without a better state of art than the one revealed during search/examination it does not bring much to launch an opposition.
And yet there are oppositions in which the value of the documents cited in the search report has not been properly evaluated.
Furthermore, when the opponent files state of the art which is in the same class as the one of the patent, or which the search has allegedly taken place, one wonders what was the subject of the search. That with such a document an independent claim as granted lacks novelty, the value of any X document mentioned in the search report established by the EPO can be queried.
The same applies if the opponent comes with a combination of documents which leads to a manifest lack of inventive step in spite of plenty of X or Y documents in the search report established by the EPO. What can be the value of such a search?
When the search report only mentions A documents and the opponent brings highly relevant documents in, again, the same classes as the one which a search was carried out, it is inevitable to query the quality of the search.
When an Art 54(3) prior art from the same applicant/inventor is filed by the opponent, one wonders what has happened at the moment of the top-up search.
The number of cases in which the patent is revoked or maintained in amended form on the basis of documents which were not available in the search files, like PhD dissertations or public prior uses, is very small compared to the number of cases in which the search was manifestly sub-optimal as the documents were not found in the available search files.
To get an idea of the problem it is very simple: just look at published decisions of the boards of appeal after an appeal on opposition and compare the documents used in appeal with the documents mentioned in search reports established by the EPO. The conclusion is flabbergasting.
As oppositions are not evenly distributed over all technical areas and are only filed for roughly 5% of granted patents, oppositions are not an absolute measure. However it gives a good idea of what is going one, whether you like it or not.
The blame is not on the examiners. They are faced with a constantly increasing production pressure. The targets are distributed top down and not reaching the target can have dire consequences going up to dismissal for incompetence. On top of it the training time has been reduced and 5 year contracts do not incite to go against management. .
The problem actually lies in the adoption of plans which look very much like the plans which were in force in Easter Europe a while ago. In those countries, like at the EPO, the plan is/was always fulfilled. If the plan was to manufacture 5000 coffee grinders, they were all on the shelves at the end of the plan, whether they were able to actually grinding coffee was actually secondary……
The last quality report for 2020 is a very a nice brochure with a lot of management buzzwords, but it reveals on page 43 that the quality of granted patents has been declining from 85% in 2017 to 76% in 2020. How a search compliance of 97,6% in 2020, cf. page 42, could be achieved is not really understandable.
Concerned observersays:
Question: given that ILO AT judgement no. 4430 declared Circular 347 unlawful, and set it aside, what was the legal basis for the EPO’s “strike registration tool”? More pertinently, why would EPO management persist with providing a tool that had no formal legal standing?
To my knowledge, the EPO has not formally rescinded Circular 347, and replaced it with rules that comply with fundamental human rights. Thus, whilst the ILO AT would almost certainly find the provisions of that Circular to be unenforceable, the EPO’s rules for staff still formally include a requirement to use the strike registration tool.
Thus, could it possibly be that, by providing a registration tool, and by (deliberately?) making that tool unreliable, the management were trying to make staff think twice about going on strike? If so, that would demonstrate a complete contempt for both the ILO AT’s rulings and fundamental rights guaranteed under EU law (and the ECHR).
francis hagelsays:
@lightblue
It is typical for a « convincing argument » in the eyes of a potential opponent to be absolutely not convincing for the patentee. Paraphrasing military strategist Clausewitz, an opposition is the continuation of competition by other means. A purpose of opposition may be a transaction with the patentee : I accept to withdraw the opposition if you undertake not to sue me for infringement. This is a desirable outcome for the opponent since this implies a competitive advantage vs other third parties.
@attentive observer
A conception of « quality « which relies on revocation or nullification decisions is inadequate, for many reasons. For industrial users of the patent system, major factors of quality are the predictability of the rules as defined by the case law of the BOAs and the Guidelines, the comprehensiveness of search reports, the informative content provided by the description of applications/patents, the compliance with procedural rules, the participation of third parties in the process. When these factors are considered, the EPO does a fairly good job. Promotion of third party observations and complaints proceedings are unquestionably positive. However, there is room for improvement in some areas. A major issue in my view is that the EDs do not review compliance with Art 83, the EPO’s attitude is that this is an issue which is only for third parties to be raised. T 0161/18 is a case in point, the BOA raised Art 83 ex officio.
That being said, I agree with you that the EPO’s proposal to allow NPOs examiners to be seconded to the EPO is worrying as it would lead to dismantling the EPO into a network of franchised agencies each under the influence if not control of local NPOs and jeopardise the cohesiveness and sense of belonging of the staff.
Attentive Observersays:
@Francis Hagel
It is clear that “the predictability of the rules as defined by the case law of the BOAs and the Guidelines, the comprehensiveness of search reports, the informative content provided by the description of applications/patents, the compliance with procedural rules, the participation of third parties in the process” are important factors of quality.
As far as case law of the boards is concerned, when looking at decisions of the boards, one cannot refrain to note that a kind a lottery effect as it depends which boards are dealing with a case.
One recent but notable example is the difference between boards when it comes to the adaptation of the description. In T 1989/18 the board decided that the description does not need to be adapted to the claim. In T 1024/18, the board, referring to T 1989/18, made clear that the decision has to be adapted to the claims.
Another example is dealing with the absence of a measurement method for a parameter. Some boards consider that it is a problem under Art 84, which thus allows to vacate the problem in opposition appeals. Other boards consider that it is indeed a problem of sufficiency.
Last but not least, when looking at decisions it appears that the boards are exercising the vast discretion which has been granted to them by the RPBA20 in quite different ways. There is no instance to check whether a board has exercised it discretion correctly or not. This is an absence for which the boards are not responsible, but it remains a problem.
I agree that comprehensiveness of search reports is also important in this matter. By looking at decisions it appears that only in very few oppositions a revocation or a maintenance in amended form is due to a document which was not available in the search files. Conversely it becomes clear that in all the other cases, the documents were available in the search files but were not retrieved for whatever reason. This is becoming more and more apparent.
The searches at the EPO might still be better than that of other searching authorities, but when a patent is revoked or severely limited after opposition, it is not necessarily enjoyable for the proprietor.
When the proprietor owns lots of patents, the loss of the odd one might not weigh much, but should it be a commercially important one, like for a blockbuster medicine, the loss of the patent is certainly not so easy to swallow.
I therefore beg to disagree when you claim that a notion of quality which relies on revocation or nullification decisions is inadequate. To me it is exactly the contrary. It should not be overestimated, but to consider it inadequate, is also inadequate.
francis hagelsays:
@attentive observer
Assessment of « quality « which relies on revocation or nullification decisions seems logical when taking a legal approach. But it can only be based on a very small percentage of granted patents and takes place years, sometimes many years after the grant. In addition, the context in terms of the resources devoted by the parties and thoroughness of the review by the BOA or the court is quite different from the context of examination proceedings. This is why I do not think such an assessment can yield meaningful conclusions.
I agree with your concern regarding the difference between T 1989/18 and T 1024/18 over the requirement to adapt the description to the claim as granted. This is important practically speaking for applicants since it affects a great deal of applications. My personal view is that the adaptation is useless but entails additional costs and delays and opens up potential 123(2) issues.
Another recent decision, T 0550/14 relating to a business method (Managing funding of catastrophe relief efforts), while it suggests an interesting approach to the assessment of what is « non-technical », does not seem to comply with the approach of the case law of the BOAs (2019, 1.4.1) which rejects the approach of the contribution to the prior art, and is at loggerheads with T 2101/12 (Vasco) over the definition of the skilled person and of the closest prior art. T 2101/12 was issued by BOA 3.5.06, not by BOA 3.5.01 which has issued T 0550/14.
Attentive Observersays:
The number of patents opposed and/or subject of national litigation is indeed relatively low. This does however not allow to conclude that the assessment of the documents used in opposition cannot yield meaningful conclusions.
The number of patents revoked or maintained in amended form on the basis of documents which were truly not available during the search, like PhD dissertations or public prior uses, is very small compared with the number of patents revoked or maintained in amend form on the basis of documents which were in the search files but not found.
As a former president of the EPO has once said, a patent is an insurance in case of success. At filing and even later at grant, no applicant/proprietor knows whether his application/patent will be a success or not.
The applicant/proprietor cannot guess whether it will be opposed or later subject to national nullity proceedings.
When the patent is opposed or subject national nullity proceedings, it means that a priori the patent has been a success, at least in that it warrants a third party to act against it.
When then the patent is revoked or maintained in amended form on the basis of documents which were not found during the original search but available in the search files, it implies directly and unambiguously that the original search was sub-optimal.
Without over interpreting the figures stemming from oppositions, as in some technical areas there are no oppositions, it nevertheless allows to draw some conclusions about the value of the original search, whether you like it or not.
It certainly does not allow to draw the conclusion that most of the searches are as compliant as stated by the EPO in its Quality Report of 2020.
Why should the context in terms of the resources devoted by the parties and thoroughness of the review by the BOA or the court be quite different from the context of examination proceedings? I do not see the logic in your statement.
That an opponent will look primarily at documents not in the search files of the EPO is an acquired fact. That he then comes up with documents which were classified in the classes where the search was carried out or the patent was classified, it is legitimate to ask question the original search.
When for example you see that features of the description are used to limit the claims as filed and that the opponent later comes with the document showing that this limitation was not valid in view of documents not found in the search files, it is again legitimate to question the original search.
That you find the adaptation of the description to be useless is your right, and nobody will have problems with it. However, it does not allow to ignore the legal requirements as interpreted according to a long lasting line of case law.
If you consider that a recent decision is at loggerheads with one or more former decisions, there is the possibility to draw the attention of the differences to the president of the EPO. He might then decide to refer a question to the Enlarged Board. In a similar case in front of a board, observations of third parties are also possible.
A referral to the Enlarged Board is a heavy procedure and the boards are only willing to go this route if they have clear difficulties with existing divergent case law. The boards have a great discretion in deciding whether or not to refer a question to the Enlarged Board. Whether this discretion is always correctly exercised remains a problem as the EPC does not foresee a body which will check the discretion of the boards. But this is a different problem.
Video download link | md5sum 70ea0f9ea4cf595dea1913731f6ca4c3 Protestware is Newspeak for Malware
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: After dozens of highly misleading ‘news’ pieces blaming “open source” for the actions of malicious/misguided Brandon*, shipping malware to many people through Microsoft servers, it is probably time to explain what really happened; it’s part of a pattern of blame-shifting by Microsoft and so far this year we’ve seen many waves of dishonest Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) tactics utilised for dramatisation and soon weaponised to create/reinforce a stigma
THE noise cancellation has been set up and now we should be able to make videos more rapidly, albeit much more is left to be configured later (like a proper Web browser that blocks ads).
This video is a belated repsonse to last month’s FUD that even reached SJVN at ZDNet. The media was too eager to misportray and misattribute a “supply chain” (typically means Microsoft) attack. It’s really quite ridiculous, but we haven’t — until now at least — done a proper rebuttal. It may seem like old news already, but it’s never too late to correct falsehoods. There’s also racism involved.
“If the media fails to earn people’s trust, this is why.”Basically, in recent years we keep seeing NPM issues blamed on the victims, or on the recipients who got malware infections from Microsoft’s own servers. The media never bothers mentioning that Microsoft controls NPM and is therefore responsible for it. We’ll certainly get back to this topic some time in the future, as part of our Microsoft GitHub Exposé series.
We’d rather not link to any of the misleading pieces in this case (we found not a single accurate one, or any piece that got the narrative/culpability right), but it is explained briefly in the video above. If the media fails to earn people’s trust, this is why. █
What is it, Brandon?
____ In the words of bnchs in IRC, “Brandon turned his library into malware for nothing but to seem like a “hero” to people; it didn’t take too long for Snyk, and eventually CVE, to catch on to his hidden malware [and] after people discovered it, he has attempted to delete the commit and any evidence of his malware [...] of course, it was too late [...] but I personally wouldn’t trust NPM.” (NPM is Microsoft)
Summary: The above talk “is about recipes that go beyond GUIs, even when creating visible outcomes. Their cookbook includes exotic ingredients like ImageMagick, PDFtk, FFmpeg, Makefiles or Git, with a dash of Python and Bash scripting to bind flavors together.” This very much relates to the reason we’ve never used — let alone installed — a video editor. A lot of stuff can be scripted instead.
On this episode of This Week in Linux: Fedora Linux 36 Beta, Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Beta, Rolling Rhino Remix (Ubuntu Derivative), Google Chrome 100, Lutris 0.5.10, Parrot OS 5.0, openSUSE’s New D-Installer, GParted 1.4, Deepin 20.5, Linux Support for Wacom Pens & Tablets, Drawing 1.0 and KNotch of KDE Plasma. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Coming almost ten months after the major Claws Mail 4.0 release, which added OAuth2 support for IMAP, POP, and SMTP accounts using custom, user-generated client IDs, the Claws Mail 4.1 release is here to add more improvements to the storage implementation of OAuth2 refresh tokens.
Claws Mail is a GTK+ based, user-friendly, lightweight, and fast
email client.
New in this release:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
* Text zooming in the Message View is now possible, using CTRL+mouse
wheel up/down, CRTL+touchpad two-fingered vertical swiping, or
the Message View's right-click menu.
* GtkColorChooser is now used in the Spell Checking preferences,
Colour Label preferences, and the folder Properties pages.
* 'Default From:' has been added to the Compose page of the folder
Properties. This allows setting an email address which will
override the Account's email address.
* An option has been added to the 'General' page of the folder
Properties, 'Skip folder when searching for unread or new
messages', so that the folder can be skipped when using Go To
next/previous unread/new message.
* 'By Sender' has been added to '/Tools/Create filtering rule/...'
and '/Tools/Create processing rule/...'
* The option 'Run processing rules before marking all messages in a
folder as read or unread' has been added to
'/Configuration/Preferences/Display/Summaries'.
* It is now possible to add a toolbar button to 'Run folder
processing rules'.
* The Actions configuration list now has 'Top' and 'Bottom' buttons.
* In '/Tools/List URLs' it is now possible to CTRL+c or right-click
a list item and 'Copy URL'; copying multiple selections is also
possible.
Phishing URLs are now indicated in red by default. This uses the
colour defined in the hidden preference, log_error_color.
* The method of handling Tags has been improved.
* When using the separate Message View the Enter key will open the
currently selected message in the Message List. So, for example,
if you delete the current message, pressing Enter will open the
next message without having to leave the separate Message View.
* The quicksearch type-ahead keypress delay is now customizable
using a hidden preference ("qs_press_timeout").
* Improvements to the storage of OAuth2 refresh tokens.
* A "View all" button has been added to the Themes preferences page
in order to preview all icons of a theme.
* The term 'master passphrase' has been replaced in the UI with
'primary passphrase'.
* The label 'SSL/TLS' has been replaced with 'TLS' in the UI.
* chmod 0600 is set on log files, history files, saved parts, etc.
* "Keyword Warner" plugin has been added. This shows a warning when
sending or queueing a message and a reference to one or more
user-defined keywords are found in the message text.
* Adding a new RSSyl feed or subscribing to a Webcal will
automatically suggest using any suitable URI found on the
clipboard.
* The user manuals have been updated.
* Updated translations: Brazilian Portuguese, British English,
Catalan, Czech, French, Indonesian, Polish, Romanian, Russian,
Slovak, Spanish, Turkish.
* bug fixes:
o bug 4312, 'litehtml plugin loops (hangup)'
o bug 4346, 'Error: Certificate is for invalid2.invalid, but
connection is to imap.gmail.com'
o bug 4442, 'vcalendar segfault if in invitation email and
switch to another folder'
o bug 4495, 'Improve text strings for OAuth2'
o bug 4496, 'Fancy crashes when opening an email'
o bug 4511, 'Uses deprecated ghostscript operator'
o bug 4513, 'msg window too small in 3 column layout'
o bug 4517, 'Thread safety issues in signature checking code'
o bug 4524, 'Problems exiting/closing Claws Mail'
o bug 4534, 'Address book causing claws to terminate
unexpectedly'
o bug 4535, 'Setting msgview_date_format=1 does not work'
o bug 4536, 'Tab for address selects second entry'
o bug 4556, 'Filesize in kilobytes versus kibibytes'
o bug 4577, 'Fancy plugin with GTK3 seems to ignore content
encoding'
o when using 'hide_timezone' use UTC when generating
MessageID
o non-translation of some button labels
o the initial position of the (X-)Face image
o return receipts from accounts without a name
o folderview pixmaps not being updated after icon theme
change until restart
o spell checker underlining when black is chosen
o text on various buttons
o scrolling in a message's attachments bar (scrolling left or
right were scrolling down).
o scrolling not working when GTK smooth scroll is set
o scroll to next/prev page in pdf_viewer
o build error with -Werror=format-security
o invalid crypto engine (gpgme_op_verify failed)
o vCalendar tooltip in Day View showed the wrong month.
o View Log button
o when closing Compose window dialogue requesting choice from
user is not shown and some options are lost in drafted copy
o weird logic with the 'Edit filter action' dialog
o resource leaks; memory corruption
For further details of the numbered bugs and RFEs listed above
see https://www.claws-mail.org/bug/[BUG NUMBER]
---------------------------------------------------------------------
See ChangeLog for full information regarding changes in this release.
Ubuntu is the world’s most popular Linux distribution thanks to its extensive app store and robust hardware support. Whether you use it as your main operating system or you primarily use Windows, being able to remote desktop into Ubuntu from time-to-time is super useful.
Thankfully, Ubuntu has great built-in support for remote desktops, so you can easily use some of the best remote desktop software, specifically the best remote desktop for Linux, to remotely access your Linux computer.
Before the invention of the World Wide Web (WWW), the earliest internet users were mainly researchers and military personnel. The network was complicated and, although it was possible to share files and messages, the interface was not user-friendly.
In 1993, a researcher at CERN called Tim Berners-Lee started building a layer on top of the internet to make it easier to access, according to the World Wide Web Foundation.
Berners-Lee’s idea was to make information available as pages, written in a shared language called Hypertext Markup Language (HTML). This eventually became the World Wide Web, which is the platform used by billions of internet users around the world.
ALFA Network AHPI7292S is a Raspberry Pi HAT with WiFi HaLow (802.11ah) offering low power connectivity, up to one kilometer line-of-sight range, and that’s mostly useful for security cameras, but it can also be used to extend the range of the network for other purposes.
The Newracom NRC7292 expansion board adds to be few WiFi HaLow hardware we’ve seen in the past year including an M.2 card, a WiFi HaLow development board, and a gateway kit to extend the range of IP cameras.
Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS, the next in the line of Long Term Releases for Pop!_OS based on Ubuntu LTS releases, is finally here and available for Pop!_OS users to upgrade to. The release has seen the Pop team focus more on building their resources and moving away from Launchpad PPA’s to their repositories with better packaging systems, and hybrid graphics support, and much more. Currently, the Pop!_OS Roadmap lists quite a lot of information regarding the features and what is planned.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to upgrade to Pop!_22.04 LTS based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal. The tutorial can be used for all current Pop!_OS versions, which include 20.04 LTS and minor versions.
Note, Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS is in beta mode at the time of the tutorial; following the developments and contributing if you find any bugs on the Github project page.
Java is a general-purpose, class-based, object-oriented multipurpose programming language that is popular due to the design of having lesser implementation dependencies, meaning that the compiled Java code can be run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java is also fast, secure, and reliable, therefore. It is widely used for developing Java applications in laptops, data centers, game consoles, scientific supercomputers, cell phones, etc.
The tutorial will look at installing the OpenJDK version instead of the default Oracle JDK. The difference between these two is licensing. OpenJDK is an entirely free, open-source Java with a GNU General Public License, and Oracle JDK requires a commercial license under the Oracle Binary Code License Agreement. Other differences are release schedules and other factors that come into play; however, performance is the same.
Plex Media Server is software to store all your digital media content and access it via a client application such as your TV, NVIDIA Shield, Roku, Mobile App, and many more platforms. Plex Media Server organizes your files and content into categories. It’s extremely popular with people storing TV Shows and Movie Libraries, and if your connection is good enough, share it with your friends and family. Over time Plex Media Server has grown much and now supports many platforms.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Plex Media Server on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish by securely importing the GPG key and official Plex repository and some tips on basic sets and creating a reverse proxy with Nginx.
Videos can hook the audience instantly, and featuring videos can be a great way for your website to reach more people. This is why we have come up with the ultimate guide to how to embed a video in WordPress blog posts.
If you need to install an operating system from USB or flash storage, you first need to copy the ISO image file to the media.
But simply copying the old-fashioned way isn’t enough. You need the ISO file to be bootable, and for that, you need dedicated ISO file writing software.
While operating systems have the feature built in, it is difficult to use. That’s where Etcher from Balena comes in. This guide will show you how to write an ISO file to USB with Etcher, whatever operating system you use.
[...]
Developed by Balena, Etcher is available free for macOS, Windows (installed and portable), and Linux (32-bit and 64-bit AppImage).
MusicBrainz Picard is an open-source software application for identifying, tagging, and organizing digital audio recordings. Developed by the Metabrainz Foundation with backing from record companies like Sony Music Entertainment Japan Inc., it was created as part of a project called “MusicKB,” which aimed to build tools that would help people discover new music more easily through data analysis.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest version of MusicBrainz on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using a recommended Launchpad PPA repository with optional stable or daily builds choose from to provide the most up-to-date version using the command line terminal.
Videomass is a tool designed to make it easy and fast for you, the user. The program’s interface allows users of all skill levels (even those with no experience)to quickly navigate various features found in most modern-day video editing programs like Final Cut Pro or Adobe Premiere Elements without any hassle whatsoever!
Users can easily modify conversion profiles with Videomass to automate processes like transcoding or subtitles editing. The interface is designed for those who use custom FFmpeg settings and offers output files in different formats, such as MP4/H264 video containers; MKV container that supports Blu-ray discs’ playback capabilities – all this without losing quality.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest version of Videomass on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using a recommended Launchpad PPA repository to provide the most up-to-date version using the command line terminal.
With Tasksel, you can use a simple interface to configure your system for any task. This program is used during installation, but users also have access at any time through the Ubuntu package managers like Sudo or APT-GET. You might think that there are few differences between tasks available in this menu versus meta-packages since they both provide similar capabilities. However, some tasks will only work if installed with specific desktop environments (such as GNOME), while others depend on software installations outside of Canonical’s control.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Tasksel on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish using the command line terminal and bring up the task manager.
SteamOS 3.0 is a Linux distribution based on Arch Linux, mostly designed to play your Steam games on non PC machines. It is mostly open source with some proprietary components, meaning a port for exploited devices such as a Jailbroken PS4 is a possibility.
Valve’s Steam Deck will soon not only be a portable PC and emulator, but also a powerful cloud gaming device, thanks to Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge developers working on getting the two internet browsers compatible with the Deck’s Linux operating system. Some bugs are still getting worked out, so we’ll be adding updates to this article as time goes on—but here’s how you can game in the cloud with the Steam Deck now.
When you are not in a mood to work but still have to be in front of your PC, some stress-releasing games sound amazing. Some of the puzzles games come with soothing and exciting puzzles that you can enjoy in your busy schedule for having a break. Even kids can enjoy such puzzle games to increase their cognitive and thinking power. However, getting an addictive puzzle game for Linux is not particularly an easy task. But we manage to make a list of puzzle games you can flawlessly enjoy on your Linux system.
Probably the biggest release in March 2022 for Xfce users was the Orange 4.16, a major release that finally ports the Xfce calendar to GTK3 and also adds a new application icon, as well as numerous bug fixes. With this major release, the GlobalTime and Orage panel plugins have been deprecated and will be removed in a future release as their features will be integrated in existing Xfce components.
Multiple segments of the automotive industry have embraced open-source software, especially Linux-based code, over the past decade. Here, we focus on an open framework called the robotic operating system (ROS). Apex.AI is leveraging ROS, adding new automotive capabilities.
ROS has been around for more than a decade and is increasingly used by autonomous-vehicle (AV) developers. Apex.AI has greatly improved ROS for automotive applications. With its focus on the automotive industry and software-defined vehicles, the company is gaining support, making it a future player in AV development and a likely acquisition target.
If you search for Ubuntu Touch on Google, you still get a lot of results related to when the OS was developed by Canonical, the company that publishes and promotes Ubuntu. That was almost ten years ago. Since then, the job has been taken over by UBPorts, a non-profit foundation.
The number of supported devices has grown: you can now run the OS on relatively recent devices such as the Google Pixel 3a, the Xiaomi Redmi Note 9 Pro, the One Plus 6T. Installation is quite fast: just enable USB debugging on your smartphone, unlock the bootloader, download the UBPorts installer from their website, plug your device in and follow instructions.
Not to actually paint, but I rely a tremendous amount on open source content for research materials, museum databases for historic painting references, and other channels that have a similar concept driving them.
In a way, I see the Strangeling Public Domain Project as an attempt at democratizing fine art and commercial image licensing as a sort of “Open Source Art Project.”
The face-to-face event of the year, Postgres London 2022 gives community members the opportunity to get together in-person in Central London to share ideas and learn more about the world’s most advanced open-source database.
The makers of the Chromium-based Brave web browser have released Brave 1.37 to the public. The new stable version of Brave adds a new optional sidebar to the browser among other new features.
A lightning talk is a five-minute presentation on any topic that you think would be interesting to a group of free software users, hackers, and activists. Anyone can give a lightning talk at LibrePlanet.
A lightning talk is a five-minute presentation on any topic that you think would be interesting to a group of free software users, hackers, and activists. Anyone can give a lightning talk at LibrePlanet.
Previously we have lookedbuilding the O3DE and Godot game engines with Meson. To keep with the trend let’s now look at building the Unreal engine. Unfortunately, as Unreal is not open source, I can’t give out any actual code. The license permits sharing snippets, though, so we’re going to have to make do with those.
This post is just a very shallow look in the engine. It does not even attempt to be comprehensive, it just has a bunch of things that I noted along the way. You should especially note that I don’t make any claims of fitness or quality of the implementation. Any such implications are the result of your own imagination. I used the release branch, which seems to contain UE4.
Something that has struck me when I’ve been working with the search engine is how unfinished the metaphor for accessing physical disks is in most programming languages. It feels like an after-thought, half left to the operating system to figure out, a byzantine relic of the days when computers had tape drives and not SSDs.
Reading and writing files is clunky and awkward no matter how you do it. Objects and classes are representations of bytes in memory, effortlessly integrated in the language. Why can’t they be representations of bytes on a disk? Between mmap and custom allocators, this seems extremely doable.
It’s a jarring contrast to the rest of almost any programming language other than perhaps C. In fact, what you’ve got is effectively C, with all of its problems and more.
In the rest of the languages, there may be some token effort toward reading files structured as streams of objects, but in general, you are stuck filling buffers with bytes. There is a marked lack of expressiveness in this type of programming.
During that time of *integrity*, it was still the ones that came from families with money who were regarded as la creme de la creme. In concentric circles moving away from the tantalising centre, were the athletes, then the academically successful. The amount of social interaction, another indicator of success, waned with distance from the centre, or existed because of that distance. Or were in balance.
Researchers from Lehigh and Ohio State will leverage the existing Presidential Nano/Human Interfaces (NHI) Initiative for an innovative collaboration on the development of two novel metallic alloys.
Lehigh University, in partnership with The Ohio State University (Ohio State), has entered into a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Army Research Lab (ARL) to develop novel structural materials for high-strength applications. The agreement, effective Feb. 10, 2022, provides up to $25 million over five years.
Another thing about electrons is that they’re not exactly sticky. As in they don’t stay where they are much. Send an electric charge through a string of atoms and electrons will hop from one atom to another. The same in case of ions and a number of other atom-to-atom interactions. How would antiprotons mix with ordinary matter in that case? Maybe we would end up with mostly hybrid atoms which have both electrons and antiprotons.
Now let’s play with the whole annihilation thing. Yes, matter and antimatter are mutually exclusive. However we’re not talking about anti-atoms colliding with ordinary atoms! In this scenario antiprotons and ordinary protons are enemies that should never meet. One is confined to the nucleus while the other orbits. Assuming that electrons never enter the nucleus the same should apply to antiprotons in orbit. Remember that a full anti-atom interacting with a full atom could result in nuclei attempting to merge, much like ordinary atoms do to form new materials. That’s where we get a collision.
Dr Lynn Woods, Professor in the Department of Doctoral Programs, School of Nursing, Azusa Pacific University, provides further analysis of Latinx & dementia, including systems of healing & the challenge of behavioural symptoms
The Federal Trade Commission accused Intuit of deceiving customers with misleading claims about free tax preparation services through TurboTax.
The agency asked the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to order Intuit to stop “disseminating the deceptive claim that consumers can file their taxes for free using TurboTax when in truth” many consumers end up being charged a fee for the service.
Network equipment maker Ubiquiti on Tuesday filed a lawsuit against infosec journalist Brian Krebs, alleging he defamed the company by falsely accusing the firm of covering up a cyber-attack.
On March 30, 2021, Krebs reported that Ubiquiti had disclosed a January breach involving a third-party cloud provider, later revealed to be AWS, and that an unnamed source within the firm had claimed the company was downplaying a catastrophic compromise.
On December 1, 2021, the US Department of Justice charged former Ubiquiti software engineer Nickolas Sharp, accusing him of attempting to steal data from the company and to extort $2 million from the firm in Bitcoin ransom as part of an effort to reduce the price of Ubiquiti shares. The DoJ said that after Ubiquiti refused Sharp’s payment demand, he tried to sink the company’s shares by publishing stolen files and engaging in a media campaign to plant damaging stories about the firm.
The widely used Zlib data-compression library finally has a patch to close a vulnerability that could be exploited to crash applications and services — four years after the vulnerability was first discovered but effectively left unfixed.
Google Project Zero bug hunter Tavis Ormandy alerted the Open-Source-Software-Security mailing list about the programming blunder, CVE-2018-25032, which he found while trying to pinpoint the cause of a compressor crash.
“I reported it upstream, but it turns out the issue has been public since 2018, but the patch never made it into a release,” Ormandy wrote. “As far as I know, nobody ever assigned it a CVE.”
Plus, when the issue was reported in April 2018 by Eideticom’s Danilo Ramos, it was already 13 years old — meaning this bug has been around, and awaiting potential exploit, for 17 years.
Vault Vision, a leading technology provider of identity and authentication management solutions announced a partnership with OpenID Foundation and the FIDO alliance. Vault Vision’s new partnerships come at a time where 40 percent of American users have had their online data compromised, according to Google. The shift away from password-based authentication is accelerating with the total market for expected to reach $53.6 billion by 2030, a staggering increase from $15.6 billion in 2022, according to Statista.
User data collected by Russian search engine Yandex may be visible to the Russian government, according to a Financial Times report. Yandex’s software development kit, used by makers of iOS and Android apps, was found to harvest metadata that is sometimes routed through servers in Russia. Privacy watchdogs are concerned this metadata could be accessed by the Kremlin and used to track users.
Games, location-sharing tools and messaging apps use Yandex’s SDK, as do many VPNs, seven of which the Financial Times reported are created specifically for Ukrainians. Hundreds of millions of users’ IP addresses, device and network data could be vulnerable, as the data is stored in centers both in Finland and Russia.
Imagine needing to use a different email account for Gmail, Microsoft and Yahoo just to be able to send messages to the people who use Gmail, Microsoft or Yahoo. That would be annoying; email thankfully lets us use one service to get in touch with people on different services. But that’s an issue for messaging, and one the Digital Markets Act is trying to solve, specifically with “gatekeeper” companies like iMessage and WhatsApp. But making those apps play nicely isn’t simple.
Following the Malaysian government’s plan for the continued usage of MySejahtera, personal data protection advocates and lawyers say there is nothing wrong with data collection.
ON May 19, 2021, riding through the lanes of Shahran, Hyderabad, S.Q. Masood was heading home with his father-in-law when police officials stopped him. The pair was asked to step aside and remove their masks, despite being amidst the brutal second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, so that the police officials could take their pictures. Masood refused to remove his mask but his picture was taken regardless. Many riders were pulled over for the same purpose of clicking their pictures. When asked why they were doing this, the police murmured amongst themselves and took a picture of his vehicle’s licence plate number, without answering him.
Three Twilio software engineers were charged with insider trading by the SEC on Monday. The employees, along with family and friends, allegedly made more than $1 million in profits by trading Twilio stock prior to the company’s earnings announcement in May 2020.
According to the SEC, Hari Sure, Lokesh Lagudu and Chotu Pulagam wrote in a chat that Twilio’s stock price would “rise for sure,” after accessing company databases in the early days of the pandemic that showed increased use of Twilio’s products and services by customers.
The SEC’s complaint alleges that based off this confidential knowledge Sure, Lagudu and Pulagam either tipped off or used the brokerage accounts of family and friends to trade Twilio stock and options ahead of the earnings announcement. Twilio reported a 57% jump in first-quarter revenue in May 2020, which far surpassed Wall Street estimates and caused the company’s stock to jump 25%.
Opposes Halt to Gas Tax or Criminal Justice Reform, Opposes Public Funds for Buffalo Sports Stadium
The Green Party today said that the accelerating climate crisis calls for the state to enact the Green New Deal as part of this year’s state budget, with at least $30 billion devoted to the state building out renewables and enactment of an economic bill of rights including universal single payer health care, a guaranteed living wage job and income, universal child care, affordable housing and tuition-free public education from pre-K through college.
Rather than halting the state’s taxes on gas, the Greens would provide a large rebate to low-and-middle income New Yorkers funded through a carbon tax (polluter penalty), and tax on the profits of gas and other fossil fuel companies.
Transportation is one of the two largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions and emissions have continued to rise in New York from cars and vehicles over the decades. “What we are seeing at the gas pumps is price gouging and we need to halt it. We need to accelerate the move away from fossil fuel vehicles while also dramatically improving and expanding mass transit and safety for bicyclists and pedestrians,” added Mark Dunlea, co-chair of the EcoAction Committee of the Green Party of the United States.
Meta is losing younger audiences to TikTok. In an effort to slow its rival in the social media war for young eyeballs and creators, the company paid a major Republican consulting firm to paint TikTok in a bad light, according to a report by The Washington Post.
The social media behemoth enlisted Targeted Victory, a firm founded by the digital director of Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, to create and run a nationwide campaign of op-eds and letters to the editor targeting TikTok as a threat to young people. Emails obtained by the Post show how the campaign has unfurled. Targeted Victory staffers worked to promote stories to regional news outlets about harmful trends that allegedly started on TikTok, when in fact they actually began on Facebook in some cases.
The consulting outfit created a Google document called “Bad TikTok Clips,” which included links to local news stories citing TikTok as the center of several harmful trends. In one example, the firm pushed stories about a “devious licks” challenge that involved students vandalizing school property. Clips of that trend spread across several states, leading Sen. Richard Blumenthal to call for TikTok executives to testify. In reality, that trend originated on Facebook.
For a while now I’ve been handling wiki spam by reverting changes and banning the entire IP range where the spammer comes from, based on the assumption that almost all of these are commercial ISPs. That is, chances of blocking people are small (those would be residential blocks). Also, I’m lucky and all the spammers seem to be using IPv4 which makes it easy for me to reverse lookup their IP range. Now I want to confirm or deny my prejudice that Russia and Ukraine are the lead spammers (and no longer China).
The Dutch complaint claims that Apple’s 30% cut of app and in-app purchases on the App Store amounts to monopolistic behavior and forces developers to increase their prices.
According to the Consumer Competition Claims Foundation, the potential harm could add up to nearly 5 billion euro, or about $5.5 billion.
The U.S. Supreme Court will review a ruling that an Andy Warhol print infringed a photo of Prince as it weighs non-software fair use for the first time in decades.
The Andy Warhol Foundation told the high court that a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decision threatened “draconian consequences” for creations deriving inspiration from other works. The court held that use of Warhol’s stylized color print on the cover of Vanity Fair in 2016 infringed photographer Lynn Goldsmith’s 1981 photo of Prince.
Posted in Site News at 11:21 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 0e5601e1f1edcba7c0d294b0e2888f0a Recording Differently
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: After weeks if not months of struggles with a deteriorating drive (degraded mode of operation) we’re finally making baby steps and moving the video setup to another machine; the picture quality will improve somewhat and sound quality is still work in progress
TODAY we’ll publish the final part of The Patent Distortion (later today, some time before midnight). It’s a series of very long videos which demonstrates what happened to the Web, especially news coverage regarding patents.
“The quality of the picture is far from great, but what matters isn’t the number of pixels but the content of the videos.”In the meantime, in my spare time (it takes almost 10 hours to encode and upload the installment; some took as much as 15 hours), I’ve taken the liberty to move everything to another computer, especially due to a failing/dying SSD. It cannot be relied on anymore. It’s highly risky. It can fail at any time. So the video above, still with noise in the background, was a first go at the new setup. Spectrograms and NoiseTorch had not been installed prior to the recording above, but I’m halfway there now. The next few videos won’t have this problem.
Our plan is to produce more videos, shorter views, more frequently. They’re quite adequate for rebuttals. They are accessed quite a lot. The quality of the picture is far from great, but what matters isn’t the number of pixels but the content of the videos. █
Summary: This talk was uploaded less than two days ago. It’s very short because it is “a five-minute presentation on any topic that you think would be interesting to a group of free software users, hackers, and activists.” This talk is about Haven. For more information see Haven’s site at havenweb.org.
OpenStack’s 25th release brings the usual crop of new features to the open-source cloud platform, including support for DPUs, better integration with Prometheus and Kubernetes, and a handy un-delete feature for file system shares.
Way back in the early days of the Internet, web applications were hosted on specific server machines. That is, when you wanted to host a web application, you had to purchase a physical machine, install Linux or some other operating system on it, and then pay an Internet Service Provider to put your machine on their network. This process was both time-consuming and expensive, often costing hundreds of dollars a month just to rent the space where you install your own server.
Every good language needs a powerful IDE to help programmers develop their applications correctly. Python is no exception because we have Wing at our disposal. Today you will learn how to install Wing Python IDE on a system like Ubuntu 20.04, but it should also work on any derivative of it.
How to Fix “MySQL ERROR 1819 (HY000):” In Linux: your password does not satisfy the current policy requirements
Are you having an error like the “your password does not satisfy the current policy requirements” message then you must be creating a MySQL user with a relatively weak password? You will see this error if you are using a password that does not meet the recommended password policy requirements.
LMDE is a Linux Mint project which stands for “Linux Mint Debian Edition”. Its goal is to ensure Linux Mint would be able to continue to deliver the same user experience, and how much work would be involved, if Ubuntu was ever to disappear. LMDE is also one of our development targets, to guarantee the software we develop is compatible outside of Ubuntu.
Tomorrow will be four years to the day that I started this site. And every day since then I’ve kept coverage to Chrome OS and Chromebooks, along with the occasional bit about Chromebases or Chrome OS tablets. As Google’s effort to unbundle the Chrome browser from the Chrome OS platform nears completion, I think it’s time to include more Google Chrome browser coverage.
Michael Barker surveys some of the alternative APIs available on various platforms, discussing some of the implementation pitfalls. He also looks at the impact of using these APIs.
In recent years, Johnson & Johnson has successfully defended itself against many of these baby powder claims but has also lost on occasion.
After one baby powder trial in Oklahoma in 2018, J&J was eventually forced to pay 22 women with ovarian cancer more than $2 billion. That award survived an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court last year.
But with most of the cases — including Wilt’s — still pending, the company found a way to stop the legal process in civil court, using a complex bankruptcy strategy known in legal circles as the “Texas two-step.”
Consider this a PSA: The owner of the verified Twitter @willsmith account is not the disgraced actor Will Smith who just resigned from the Academy after slapping Chris Rock at the 94th Academy Awards.
The actor Will Smith does not have an official Twitter account.
With the web of undersea cables lacing the continents together now, it’s hard to imagine that it wasn’t until 1956 that the first transatlantic telephone cable was laid. Sure, there were telegraph cables under the Atlantic starting as early as the late 1800s, but getting your voice across the ocean on copper was a long time coming. So what was the discerning 1930s gentleman of business to do when only a voice call would do? He’d have used a radiotelephone, probably at an outrageous expense, which as this video on the receiving end of the New York to London radio connection shows, was probably entirely justified.
Despite great progress over the past century, more than a billion people still don’t have access to clean drinking water today. Much of the water on Earth’s surface is polluted, but it’s not always easy to tell a dirty stream from a clean one. Professional kit for water analysis can be expensive, which is why [kutluhan_aktar] decided to design a portable, internet-connected water pollution monitor.
If you’re looking to add a little more sci-fi authenticity to your gaming setup, you could do much worse than this functional control lever replica that [ZapWizard] has entered into the Hackaday.io Sci-Fi Contest.
Restoring a vintage radio receiver has the potential to be a fun weekend project, but it pays to know what you’re up against. Especially in the case of vacuum tube electronics, running down gremlins in the circuits isn’t always a straightforward process (also, please mind the high voltage that is present in old vacuum tube equipment). [Mr Carlson] has a knack for getting old radios humming once again, and his repair of a 1960s General Electric barn find radio receiver is a thorough masterclass in vintage electronics servicing.
This year’s Hackaday Prize is off to a roaring start. And that’s fantastic, because this year’s challenge is a particularly important one: reducing mankind’s footprint on the earth through better energy collection, better resource use, and keeping what we’ve already got running a little bit longer. Not only is this going to be the central challenge for the next century, but it’s also a playground for hackers like us.
There are plenty of gaming laptops on the market these days, but none quite fit the requirements of one [ParticularlyPippin]. Thus, they set out on building their own portable computer, ending up with a rig in a briefcase with a decidedly cyberpunk feel.
Doing the rounds among motorcycle enthusiasts for the last week has been a slightly unusual machine variously portrayed as running on water or sea water. This sounds like the stuff of the so-called “Free energy” fringe and definitely not the normal Hackaday fare, but it comes alongside pictures of a smiling teenager and what looks enough like a real motorcycle to have something behind it. So what’s going on? The answer is that it’s the student project of an Argentinian teenager [Santiago Herrera], and while it’s stretching it a bit to say it runs on sea water he’s certainly made a conventional motorcycle run on the oxygen-hydrogen mix produced from the electrolysis of water. The TikTok videos are in Spanish, but even for non-speakers it should be pretty clear what’s going on.
When I want to charge my wireless mouse now, I don’t need to plug in a cord or place it on a dock. In fact, I don’t think about charging at all. It just… does. Because this past Christmas, a very generous brother-in-law effectively bought me a wireless mouse that charges itself.
The US House of Representatives voted Friday to approve a bill that would decriminalize cannabis at the federal level. It’s a first step toward making the drug legal and attempting to undo some of the damage caused by punitive drug laws, particularly among communities of color. The voting happened along party lines, with 220 votes in favor and 204 opposed. The bill faces an uncertain future in the Senate, but advocates say with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, they’re more hopeful that the legislation will finally become law.
And the court went even further. In March 1972, it ruled Michigan’s marijuana laws unconstitutional, and since the revised law that was passed the previous December didn’t go into effect until April 1, open consumption of marijuana was legal in Michigan for about three weeks that spring.
[...]
Then, on April 1, when the new law took effect, the first Hash Bash was held on the Diag “to let them know that we’d still be smoking even though they were putting this law back in,” Sinclair said.
Microsoft’s attempts to have a 2021 lawsuit’s claims regarding anti-competitive practices struck out were this week contested in UK courts.
During the hearing on March 30-31, counsel for ValueLicensing requested Microsoft’s applications be dismissed. While the software giant appeared to accept that there were issues around competition law to be tried against its US and Ireland operations, its lawyers reckoned there weren’t reasonable grounds for a claim against its UK tentacle.
According to legal website Law360, Microsoft’s lawyers said in court that its UK tentacle just marketed the licenses and “nothing else.”
Both Apple and Meta handed over users’ addresses, phone numbers, and IP addresses in mid-2021 after being duped by these emergency requests, according to Bloomberg.
EDRs, as the name suggests, are used by law enforcement agencies to obtain information from phone companies and technology service providers about particular customers, without needing a warrant or subpoena. But they are only to be used in very serious, life-or-death situations.
As infosec journalist Brian Krebs first reported, some miscreants are using stolen police email accounts to send fake EDR requests to companies to obtain netizens’ info. There’s really no quick way for the service provider to know if the EDR request is legitimate, and once they receive an EDR they are under the gun to turn over the requested customer info.
In its most insane attack yet against Microsoft, Google this week claimed that using Microsoft technologies made governments less secure. But it has no data to back up that claim at all.
Viasat did not provide technical indicators-of-compromise nor a full incident response report, the researchers noted. Instead, the satellite biz said malicious commands disrupted modems in Ukraine and other European countries. The SentinelOne duo questioned how legitimate commands could cause this level of modem chaos. “Scalable disruption is more plausibly achieved by pushing an update, script, or executable,” the researchers said.
They suggest the ukrop executable, which they dubbed AcidRain, could do the trick.
[...]
So, by destructive commands, Viasat meant: modems were commanded by their compromised support servers to run destructive malware.
Apple has released updates for its mobile and desktop operating systems to patch security holes that may well have been exploited in the wild.
On Thursday, the iPhone giant issued macOS Monterey 12.3.1; iOS 15.4.1 and iPadOS 15.4.1; tvOS 15.4.1; and watchOS 8.5.1 to address vulnerabilities in its software.
The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) has partnered with Linux Foundation Training & Certification to release a free online training course, Developing Secure Software. The two organisations say the training course will help elevate these security issues and improve access to cybersecurity training for everyone from developers to operations teams to end-users.
The Linux Foundation’s SBOM contributions provided all of us a head start to begin addressing issues with software supply chain management. With widespread adoption, SBOM equips software projects and users to assess and address Spring4Shell as well as any other as-yet-unknown vulnerabilities and prepare us for what is undoubtedly a season of high-impact infrastructure software vulnerabilities.
But asking someone if they’re vaccinated isn’t actually a HIPAA violation. That’s a fine and not-illegal thing for one non-doctor to ask another non-doctor. What is a HIPAA violation is what U. Phillip Igbinadolor, a dentist in North Carolina, did in September 2015, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. After a patient left an anonymous, negative Google review, he logged on and responded with his own post on the Google page, saying that the patient missed scheduled appointments. “Does he deserve any rating as a patient? Not even one star,” Igbinadolor wrote, according to the notice of proposed determination outlining the violation. (For the curious, the redacted HIPAA-violating Google post is on page 3.)
The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) has accused an NSA employee of sharing top-secret national security information with an unnamed person who worked in the private sector.
According to a DoJ announcement and the indictment, an NSA staffer named Mark Unkenholz “held a TOP SECRET/Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI) clearance and had lawful access to classified information relating to the national defense.”
The indictment alleges that on 13 occasions between 2018 and 2020, Unkenholz shared some of that information with a woman identified only as “RF” who was not entitled to see it. Unkenholz did so despite allegedly having “reason to believe [the info] could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”
It is tough for leftists to be on the same side as the mainstream. We can easily feel at those times that we’re missing something, that we’re letting down the struggle, that by ganging up even on an admittedly bad actor we’re helping strengthen the nemesis at home, allowing it to appear as the good guy. Ever since 1917, that has been the case with regards to the western Left and Russia. Before 1917, the Left saw the tsarist autocracy as the pinnacle of authoritarian reaction, an attitude that eased the path for the socialist parties of Russia’s enemies to embrace World War I. But ever since the Russian Revolution, the Left has been wary of joining with any western bourgeois condemnations of the country, despite its own often fierce objections to Stalinism or the clampdown on internal democracy.
Last year, a former federal prison near Folkston, Georgia was emptied after President Biden signed an executive order phasing out the use of private prisons. So why is business now booming at the same facility for GEO Group, one of the nation’s largest private prison firms? Because the administration has pulled a sneaky sleight-of-hand: Rather than fully halting the incarceration of people in such facilities, it has allowed them to simply be converted into immigration detention spaces.
Dozens of progressive lawmakers in the United States and Japan are urging President Joe Biden to make a “sensible” shift and commit the U.S. to a policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons “at any time or under any circumstances.”
“It is never too late to commit to a no-first-use policy.”
On the afternoon of Aug. 26, 17-year-old Shabir Ahmad Mohammadi huddled with his family by a mosque near the Kabul airport. It was one of the final days of the American evacuation from Afghanistan. Their time to flee was running out.
Shabir volunteered to go to the airport alone. He hoped he could weave his slender frame through the crowds and persuade the American troops to help his family leave.
The 2022 parliamentary election campaign is over, and on Sunday we will elect the next parliament. Hungarians are voting for individual constituency candidates and party lists, and – almost forgotten – they are also voting in the government-initiated referendum on „child protection”. The 2022 campaign was no ordinary one, with plans largely overturned by the Russian-Ukrainian war and a new campaign essentially starting at the end of February. But what was the main theme? What happened to the scandals? And what will the Hungarian voters be deciding about? Who do the polls show as the winner? As the campaign comes to a close, let us take a look at what campaign ’22 has brought.
‘The Shock Doctrine’ reveals how power elites under the pretence of crisis use the threat of impending or present doom and fear to introduce policies that satiate the needs of vested interests in society. She gives examples of paradigmatic shifts in policy in Chile, Russia, Britain and other states to show how policies that under ‘normal’ conditions would be resisted, but because a population has been subject to shock it is willing to or is amenable to further manipulation. This is happening in Finland concerning NATO membership.
My phone rang off the hook as soon as the news hit. According to reporting from The Washington Post, internal White House phone records turned over to the House Jan. 6 committee included a gap of seven hours and 37 minutes. A lot can be said in 457 minutes.
Comparisons to the 18.5-minute gap in a crucial President Richard Nixon recording were immediately obvious to me. After all, I was the prosecutor who cross-examined Nixon’s secretary, Rose Mary Woods, about how that gap came to be. And I am not the only one to make that connection.
Those similarities — and the differences — are illuminating as lawmakers continue to battle apparent obstruction in their investigation of the events leading up to and during the Capitol [insurrection].
New readings showed the water in California’s mountain snowpack sat at 38% of average. That’s the lowest mark since the end of the last drought in 2015; only twice since 1988 has the level been lower.
“Human-induced climate change and the war on Ukraine have the same roots: fossil fuels and our dependence on them” said Ukrainian climate scientist Svitlana Krakovska as Russia, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers, was invading her country.
Scientists with the United Nations weather agency on Friday expressed fresh concern over the climate crisis following recent extreme events in Antarctica—an area they say should not be taken “for granted.”
“The Antarctic ice sheets hold almost 60 meters of potential sea-level rise. Understanding and properly monitoring the continent is therefore crucial for society’s future well-being.”
The inclusion of gas in the EU sustainable investment taxonomy is incompatible with its own goal of net-zero emissions by 2050.
The European Union’s labelling of fossil gas as ‘sustainable’ undermines its own goal of net-zero emissions by 2050, goes against the advice from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and exposes households to energy shortages, rising costs of living and economic instability.
Any inclusion of fossil gas in the sustainable investment taxonomy will only serve to embed the status quo, rather than deliver the radical action that is needed to truly transform our economies, and the energy systems upon which they depend, and reach the critical goal of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees.
A cryptocurrency, in the broadest sense, is a digital asset presented as a token or coin. While certain cryptocurrencies have entered the real world via traditional means of payment like credit cards, the vast majority remain completely intangible. The term “[cryptocurrency]” refers to the complex encryption required to create and handle digital currency and its operations throughout decentralized networks.
Thanks to decades of car-centric policy in the United States, it is nearly impossible to get around in most cities and towns without a car. As a result, emissions from transportation have skyrocketed, and Americans have few alternatives when the price of gas rises.
European Union lawmakers on Thursday backed tougher traceability rules for transfers of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, in a move the industry said would erode privacy, hinder innovation and expose users to a higher risk of theft.
The draft legislation, part of a broader fight against money laundering and financial crime, would require [cryptocurrency] firms to collect and share data on transactions in a business that has so far thrived on its anonymity.
Russia says it will end cooperation with other nations on the International Space Station until the sanctions put on the country are lifted. Dmitry Rogozin, the head of Russian space agency Roscosmos, announced in a thread on Twitter that the “restoration of normal relations between partners” on the ISS and other projects is only possible with the “complete and unconditional lifting of illegal sanctions.”
In translated versions of his tweets, Rogozin says he appealed the sanctions in letters to NASA, the European Space Agency, as well as the Canadian Space Agency. Rogozin also posted images of what appears to be each country’s response — the CSA confirmed the letter’s authenticity to The Verge but declined to comment any further. The Verge also reached out to NASA and the ESA but didn’t immediately hear back.
Chinese search giant and AI cloud company Baidu has landed on the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s provisional list of companies it might de-list because of opaque disclosures.
The name of the law that permits such listings is the Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act (HFCAA). The act requires some companies that issue securities in the USA to allow local auditors to understand how many of its shares are owned by governments, if governments exercise control over the company, and whether any officials or regulations are connected to the Chinese Communist Party.
If she is confirmed by the Senate next week, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson would become arguably the most accomplished Justice on the Supreme Court, and the first to have served as a public defender. It’s no surprise that the first Black woman nominated to the highest court in the country would face intense scrutiny in her confirmation hearings, and indeed, the questioning she endured was not only aggressive but often vicious.
This is extremely significant because ACT was essentially founded by Microsoft more than two decades ago. When Microsoft got into antitrust trouble (over conduct that was laughably negligible compared to what we’ve seen from Apple and Google in recent years), it set up ACT according to none other than The New York Times, which wrote in June 2000 (according to a Wikipedia article): “[...] Microsoft has also created new trade groups, the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) [now called ACT | The App Association] and Americans for Technology Leadership (ATL), to generate support for the company through Web sites and a sophisticated and largely hidden grassroots lobbying campaign.”
Dr. Roy Schestowitz is the #1 Microsoft hater. I sometimes agreed with him on particular industry issues but he is really obsessed with Microsoft, while other companies are now the problem and Microsoft is on the right side of history with respect to app distribution. Dr. Schestowitz has written extensively about ACT’s (past) ties with Microsoft. On this page of his TechRights blog you can find a number of links going back to the late 2000s. For him it must be like hell freezing over to see Microsoft abandon ACT.
I first encountered ACT when I was campaigning against a piece of software patentability legislation in Europe. At the time, Microsoft was very much in favor of strong patent enforcement, even including SEPs–but a few years later I already noticed that Microsoft was becoming more and more balanced, especially with respect to injunctive relief and, generally speaking, the balance between patent plaintiffs and defendants. As Microsoft became a moderate in patent policy, ACT changed direction, too, and warned against SEP abuse–after many years of taking a “the stronger, the merrier” position on anything involving patents, regardless of whether they are standard-essential or not.
That about-face on SEPs must have attracted Apple to the group. Intel already had an interest in ACT’s advocacy when it faced some antitrust issues itself, and Intel–like Apple, to be fair–has also been very consistent about patents on industry standards.
At some point, ACT renamed itself. ACT (Association for Competitive Technology) became ACT | The App Association–and in such contexts as Philips v. Thales they make submissions to courts that suggest it’s an IoT startup group. In reality, the way all those “members” became members appears to be that they just signed up for a newsletter, never paying any dues or undergoing the slightest vetting.
For consumers, influencers are at once a walking advert and a trusted friend. For intermediaries that sit between them and brands, they are a hot commodity. For the brands’ corporate owners, they are becoming a conduit to millennial and Gen-Z consumers, who will be responsible for 70% of the $350bn or so in global spending on bling by 2025, according to Bain, a consultancy. And for regulators, they are the subject of ever closer scrutiny. On March 29th news reports surfaced that China’s paternalistic authorities are planning new curbs on how much money internet users can spend on tipping their favourite influencers, how much those influencers can earn from fans, and what they are allowed to post. Taken together, all this makes them impossible to ignore.
Elizabeth García Vilchis, a government spokesperson who presents the “Who’s who in the lies of the week” segment at President López Obrador’s morning press conferences, mocked media outlets and “experienced journalists” such as Joaquín López-Dóriga, Hannia Novell, Azucena Uresti and Carlos Loret de Mola for reporting on the supposed shootout without verifying that it actually occurred.
Investigators later discovered that the gun was someone else’s, Mata said. The person who originally brandished the weapon was arrested on suspicion of being a felon in possession of a firearm, he said.
A Bay Area college football player who disarmed a gunman was shot by police at a San Jose taqueria early Sunday, police confirmed.
At about 3 a.m. Sunday, 20-year-old Oakland resident K’aun Green was eating at La Victoria Taqueria with his friend when a separate group started harassing him, attorney Adante Pointer told KGO on Tuesday.
Smalls had led a walkout at the start of the pandemic in 2020 to protest working conditions at the Staten Island, N.Y., warehouse where he worked. He was fired the same day.
The memo that contained those biting words was leaked just a few days later. But the words would stay with Smalls. They became the fuel that would drive him to lead one of the most dramatic and successful grassroots union drives in recent history.
Not only acute questions such as obtaining work permits or residence permits in Germany, but also a very different highly important topic has now been addressed by WDR Cologne – namely: How do you get your second wife to Germany? The situation is explained in Arabic and German in the programme with the German-Iranian presenter Isabel Schayania, so that everyone is sure to understand.
Almost a month after approving $1 billion in funds to address urgent needs in Afghanistan, the World Bank has reportedly suspended four projects after the Taliban denied girls the right to attend school beyond the sixth grade.
International donors have struggled since the Taliban’s August 2021 takeover of Afghanistan to balance the needs of Afghans against concerns about inadvertently supporting (and funding) the Taliban.
If anyone had any doubts about Amazon’s determination to prevent this from ever happening, its scorched-earth anti-union campaign last fall in its Bessemer, Alabama warehouse should have put those doubts to rest.
On August 5, 2019, the Government of India revoked Article 370 that gave special status to the erstwhile state of Jammu and Kashmir, making it a centrally-administered union territory. Article 370 allowed the residents of the region to enjoy a certain degree of autonomy in political affairs compared to the rest of the country. Explaining the move to restrict the law in parliament, the government argued that the move would help overcome the corruption, terrorism and underdevelopment that had flourished there. Following this decision, the government imposed a complete communication blackout in Jammu and Kashmir. Reports suggest that local political leaders were detained, regional media curtailed, and public gatherings disallowed. Based on the limited information available, it appears that a few protests took place as restrictions were gradually lifted, though the ruling establishment disputes this.
In a case that could help clarify when and how artists can make use of the work of others, the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide a copyright dispute between a photographer and Andy Warhol’s estate over Warhol’s 1984 paintings of rock star Prince.
The justices took up the Andy Warhol Foundation’s appeal of a lower court ruling that his paintings – based on a photo of Prince that photographer Lynn Goldsmith had shot for Newsweek magazine in 1981 – were not protected by the copyright law doctrine called fair use. This doctrine permits unlicensed use of copyright-protected works under certain circumstances.
The RIAA’s legal campaign to crack down on tools and sites that utilize YouTube to provide unlicensed MP3 song downloads looks set to expand. A DMCA subpoena application filed in the United States reveals that the music industry group is trying to identify the operator of 320ytmp3.com, a huge YouTube-ripping service with an estimated 60 million visits per month.
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