Variety is a cool utility available for Linux systems which makes your dull desktop look great, every day. This free wallpaper changer utility replaces your wallpaper in your desktop in an interval. You can set it to change wallpaper in every 5 minutes also!
It’s been sometime since we saw a Chromebook from Google. Although the Chromebook series didn’t do well with consumers, Google didn’t stop development on it.
Multiple codes uploaded on Gerrit (web-based team code collaboration tool) on Chromium OS has given us a lot of information on the next Chromebook or the Pixelbook previously. The device is codenamed Cheza (As seen on the Code on 14th line).
Linus Torvalds has merged a rather significant set of patches for improving the CIFS/SMB3 support in the mainline kernel.
The SMB3/CIFS advanced network file-system support provides the VFS module supporting the SMB3 family of NAS protocols for dealing with Samba/Azure/etc. With Linux 4.19 a lot of new feature code has been merged.
SUSE's Takashi Iwai sent in the pull request this morning of the sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.19 kernel and it includes a lot of new hardware support and other improvements for Linux's audio capabilities.
AFTER A WEEK'S DELAY, Linux kernel 4.18 stable has arrived.
Announcing the release on Sunday, head of Linuxing Linus Torvalds said: "One week late(r) and here we are - 4.18 is out there. It was a very calm week, and arguably I could just have released on schedule last week, but we did have some minor updates."
One notable change is that there's been a lot of code ditched - around 100,000 lines of obsolete code has been slashed.
Intel's Rafael Wysocki has submitted the ACPI and power management updates today for the Linux 4.19 kernel which were subsequently merged by Linus Torvalds.
Another round of commits regarding anti-Spectre security have landed up in the Linux 4.19 kernel git tree, which may have possible performance impacts for the kernel.
While Spectre is still only a somewhat theoretical threat, as its entirely too slow to be used in a serious attack, many folks are taking its future potential quite seriously and arming up against it.
Linux audiophiles may have something to rejoice about, as a recent pull request from SUSE’s Takashi Iwai focuses on a plethora of sound subsystem updates for the Linux 4.19 kernel, including a lot of latest hardware support and overall improvements for Linux’s audio capabilities.
ACPI and power management updates are never ending work, and today Intel’s Rafael Wysocki has submitted some note worthy updates for the Linux 4.19 kernel, which were merged thereafter by Linus Torvalds.
For starters, this adds a new framework for CPU idle time injection, which will be used by all of the idle injection code in the kernel in the future. It also fixes a few issues and adds a number of fairly small extensions in a few places.
Linux systems provide many ways to examine partition information. Which is best depends on what you're looking for. Some commands look only at mounted file systems, while others provide copious details on the hardware.
Diversity and inclusion are hot topics as projects compete to attract more talent to power development efforts now as well as build their ranks to carry the projects into the future. The Diversity Empowerment Summit co-located with Open Source Summit coming up in Vancouver August 29-31, will offer key insights to help your project succeed in these endeavors.
Although adoption of diversity and inclusion policies is generally seen as simply the right thing to do, finding good paths to building and implementing such policies within existing community cultures continues to be challenging. The Diversity Empowerment Summit, however, provides hard insights, new ideas, and proven examples to help open source professionals navigate this journey.
The launch of the ASWF is almost like creating a GitHub for the developers behind motion pictures, but open source is nothing new to the film industry. It dates back about 20 years, Andy Maltz, managing director of the Science and Technology Council at the Academy, told CIO Dive.
Film "is the only art form that has a fundamental reliance on technology," he said. The film industry's use of tech dates back to photochemical technologies and proceeds to today's digital image capture.
The second RC for libinput 1.12 is now available.
First a heads-up, this is probably going to be a longer RC cycle than usual, just look at the commit count for rc1..rc2 below. I don't have any additional large features planned for 1.12, so the rest should just be bugfixing and polishing now.
We've known libinput 1.12 is going to be a significant release and that's still holding true in looking at the second release candidate for this Wayland/X.Org input handling library.
Libinput 1.12 RC1 was working on replacing its udev "hwdb" hardware database with its own quirk handling system, migrating documentation from Sphinx to ReadTheDocs, FreeBSD support, improved trackpoint code, various touchpad fixes and improvements, and other input handling tweaks.
The xf86-video-v4l v0.3.0 driver was announced today as the first new release for this DDX driver in ten years.
In case you don't have any recollection of this DDX driver, this "Video 4 Linux adapter driver" is used for registering generic X-Video (Xv) adapters that can be used in turn by any graphics driver.
An Intel engineer has published the "Intel FPGA Video and Image Processing Suite" DRM driver today for Linux. This Direct Rendering Manager is intended for use with their Arria 10 FPGA system when combined with Intel DisplayPort IP.
For helping out the RADV Vulkan driver in cases where no shader cache is available, this open-source Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver now supports the on-demand compilation of built-in shaders.
On cases like Android, ChromeOS, or sandboxes where no on-disk shader cache is available due to write/security permissions, RADV can take a while to start-up for some programs due to having to compile all of the built-in pipelines at start. RADV co-founder Bas Nieuwenhuizen says this process can take one to four seconds for the creation of a device.
Back in May AMD posted initial open-source "Vega 20" patches and support for that yet-to-launch graphics processor was subsequently merged for the Linux 4.18 kernel. More of the Vega 20 AMDGPU kernel driver enablement has now been posted.
This latest 69,910 lines of code -- before fretting, most of that is auto-generated header files for the GPU -- notably adds PSP (Platform Security Processor) and SMU (System Management Unit) for Vega 20. With the SMU enablement code, it's also now wired in to enable Vega 20 PowerPlay support as well as related power/clocking-functionality like OverDrive overclocking is also available.
Phoronix has done a performance comparison of the AMD Threadripper 2990WX in Windows 10 Pro and Linux and the results show Threadripper numbers significantly lower under Windows 10 Pro than in Linux. In some tests such as 7-Zip Compression, the Threadripper 2990WX posted almost 58% higher scores in Linux compared to Windows 10 Pro implying that Linux is a better OS of choice when testing high core count CPUs.
A list of FOSS alternatives to popular proprietary software was compiled in to what is now a popular infographic by anonymiss@despora.de. We've contributed by making a text list of the infographic. Now it's your turn-- tell us what FOSS alternatives you recommend in each category and we'll add them to this master list.
Blackmagic Design yesterday announced the release of DaVinci Resolve 15. You can download this "professional editing, visual effects, motion graphics, color correction and audio post production software" for free from the Blackmagic Design site. This release is "a massive update that fully integrates visual effects and motion graphics, making it the world's first solution to combine professional offline and online editing, color correction, audio post production, multi user collaboration and now visual effects together in one software tool".
Instagram accounts are being attacked—even those using 2FA. Mashable reports that users are being locked out of their accounts, their profile avatars are being changed and bios deleted. Restoring account access is evidently quite difficult.
The open platform Nativ Vita Hi-Res Music Server has been updated, adding serious new functionality, such as multi-room streaming, support of up to 10TB, playing music from a NAS or computer and CD ripping.
This series will explain the purpose of git, how to clone GitHub repository, GitLab repository, or otherwise. How to view the changelog and how to revert to an older version of the repository, add and remove files, commit changes, update remote repositories, fetch most recent versions of a repo, and more. GUI front-ends will also be covered, as well as troubleshooting and how typical IDEs will handle source code files belonging to a git repo.
In addition to the many technical accomplishments of Khronos this week at SIGGRAPH 2018, they were also celebrating the milestone of crossing 140 members to this industry standards group.
The Khronos Group membership count has largely stayed about the same in recent years as while they get new members, it's largely been through acquisitions within the industry that their headcount hasn't grown too much. But recently they welcomed several new members to this standards group developing Vulkan, OpenCL, OpenGL, OpenXR, SPIR-V, etc.
Sikanda seems like a pretty interesting top-down action-adventure, one that gives you a shape-shifting weapon that takes inspiration from some well-known titles.
It's another that's currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter, although it primarily seems to mention Nintendo Switch it is also planned to release on Linux too according to the FAQ page. When digging a little further, they said this in the comments on their Kickstarter page:
Time Traveling Raptors looks all kinds of nuts, an action-platformer where you're facing people as well as dinosaurs as you attempt to fix a broken timeline. Currently crowdfunding on Kickstarter and planned for Linux.
After being in Beta since April, Picaresque Studio have now given the Linux version of the seafaring strategy game Nantucket some official support.
UniverCity from developer Matthew Collins who develops on Linux is a new in-development university management game, it's now available in Early Access on Steam. Note: Steam key provided by the developer to our Steam Curator.
The Amiga community remains one of the most passionate and inventive we have ever seen, even now, decades after Commodore’s demise. A couple of weeks back, we featured just a few recent projects that were designed to breathe new life into aging Amiga systems, or at the very least ensure they remain repairable for the foreseeable future. Our article explaining how to build a cheap Amiga emulator using a Raspberry Pi was immensely popular as well. Today, however, we stumbled across a video that encapsulates the ingenuity of many of the more technical folks in the Amiga community. What it shows is an Amiga 3000UX, equipped with a Voodoo 3 card and BigFoot Networks Killer NIC M1, running some software – including Quake – on the Killer NIC’s on-board Power PC processor.
Linux is a very powerful operating system, and that explains why it powers most of the servers on the Internet. Though it may not be the best OS in terms of user friendliness, its diversity is commendable. Everyone has their own need for Linux. Be it for coding, educational purposes or the internet of things (IoT), you’ll always find a suitable Linux distro for every use. To that end, many have dubbed Linux as the OS for future computing.
Because the future belongs to the kids of today, introducing them to Linux is the best way to prepare them for what the future holds. This OS may not have a reputation for popular games such as FIFA or PES; however, it offers the best educational software and games for kids. These are five of the best Linux educational software to keep your kids ahead of the game.
We already knew that the second and third parts of The Banner Saga wouldn't be coming to Linux, but now the original The Banner Saga is no longer supported on Linux.
Hyper Fox Studios [Official Site] announced today that their sweet action RPG Reynard, which also has elements of Tower Defense now supports Linux.
If you love your horror games, keep an eye on Ellen as it looks pretty spooky. Turns out Red Mount Media will be doing a Linux version and they require testers.
They're bring out a teaser of the game, they're calling 'Ellen Teaser: The Fall' which will have around 40 minutes playtime to give you a feel for the full game.
Big Evil Corporation have released their puzzle-platformer that really is rather retro and not just because of the style. It was released today for Linux but it's also a SEGA Mega Drive game too. The Steam release even includes a Mega Drive ROM file.
The action RPG Moonlighter [Official Site] seemed really interesting with the shopkeeper element to it, so it was sad the Linux release was delayed.
It looks like Valve is working behind the scenes on enabling Linux game compatibility tools to work on Steam.
These compatibility tools allow games developed for Windows to work on Linux, similar to how the popular tool Wine has been doing for years on Linux and other Unix-based operating systems.
Earlier this week, strings of code were discovered by SteamDB in Steam’s database.
The code appears to be referencing an as yet to be revealed compatibility mode, complete with several UI elements, a settings menu, and what looks like the ability to force it on.
Reddit seems to be buzzing with information from SteamDB (full credit to them for finding it) showing indications that Valve might be adding support for compatibility tools to enable you to play games on operating systems they weren't designed for, like Wine.
I won't copy all of it, but a few interesting bits do certainly stick out like the string named "Steam_Settings_Compat_Info" where the description reads "Steam Play will automatically install compatibility tools that allow you to play games from your library that were built for other operating systems.".
There's also "Steam_Settings_Compat_Advanced_Info" which reads as "You may select a compatibility tool to use with games that have not been tested or verified to work on this platform. This may not work as expected, and can cause issues with your games, including crashes and breaking save games."
The last Akademy I attended was in 2015, in A Coruña, Galicia, Spain. I skived off Berlin 2016, when I was burned out working as a consultant at Quby, and again Almería 2017, when I was struggling with the Krita Foundation’s tax problems. But this year, we could afford to go, and Akademy is in Vienna this year… And I’ve always wanted to see some works in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum — Cellini’s Salt Cellar, Rogier van der Weyden’s Crucifixion, Cranach’s Saxon Princesses... Things I’d only ever seen in books.
Tuesday continued the Akademy BoFs, group sessions and hacking. There is a wrapup session at the end of the day so that what happened in the different rooms can be shared with everyone including those not present.
During the conference part of this year's Akademy, I tried myself for the first time at live sketchnoting of all the sessions I attended. I didn't do it only for a handful of them mainly because I was chairing and you can't really sketchnote at the same time.
In this version of dialog I got rid of the icon label. The dialog has three sections displaying information about signature validation status, signer, and document revision.
During Akademy there was finally enough time to finalize the porting of KTextEditor to KSyntaxHighlighting.
Thanks to the help of Dominik and Volker, the needed extensions to the KSyntaxHighlighting framework were done in no time ;=)
Thanks for that!
The branch for the integration was merged to master yesterday, unit tests look OK and I am using that state now for my normal coding work. Beside minor glitches that should now be corrected, no issues came up until now.
Starting with the KDE Frameworks 5.50 release we decided to remove the capability in Kate/KTextEditor to download / update syntax highlighting files from the Kate homepage.
GNOME has been my favorite desktop environment for quite some time. While I always make it a point to check out other environments from time to time, there are some aspects of the GNOME desktop that are hard to live without. While there are many great desktop environments out there, GNOME feels like home to me. Here are some of the features I enjoy most about GNOME.
People have asked for more advanced session restore for quite some time, and now Builder can do it. Builder will now restore your previous session, and in particular, horizontal and vertical splits.
Like previously, you can disable session restore in preferences if that’s not your jam.
Zorin OS has been around for a while, with the avowed goal of weaning Windows and Mac users off their respective operating systems and into the world of Linux. The Ubuntu-based distribution has now hit version 12.4, the last version until the platform is shifted to Ubuntu 18.04 towards the end of the year.
In the meantime, Zorin OS remains one of the easiest ways to get into Linux for users fearful of leaving their closed source ways behind. Version 12.4 gets version 4.15 of the Linux kernel, expanding the hardware compatibility of the operating system as well as some patches and performance tweaks.
Installation from an ISO image remains straightforward – The Register was up and running in minutes, first simply booting from the ISO image itself, and later committing a few GB of disk space to the thing.
I'm not a Microsoft "hater" at all. With that said, I am not a fan of the state of Windows 10. The privacy issues alone are a reason to avoid the operating system, but that is hardly the only concern. For instance, Microsoft has been pre-loading tiles for games like Candy Crush and other apps -- a move that shows major disrespect towards its customers. Not to mention, the "Insiders" program is just a way for the company to get free beta testing -- Microsoft is all too happy to treat Windows 10 users as guinea pigs. It is all very shameful.
These days, if someone asks my advice on buying a computer, I recommend purchasing a Mac, Chromebook, or PC with a traditional desktop Linux distribution, such as Ubuntu. If you are happy with your current computer, but hate Windows 10, installing a Linux distro is very easy nowadays. I often suggest that Windows switchers try Zorin OS as it has a familiar interface. Today, that excellent operating system reaches version 12.4.
The famous AUR helper `packer` has been renamed to `packer-aur` in favor of the Hashicorp image builder `packer` (community/packer)
I took the train from dresden to frankfort and then on to Utrecht. It was about a 10 hour journey, but it was nice. I went with Patrick and Randy and we had a bunch of discussions and watched the landscape go by. In Utrecht I got a hotel for overnight and we went to a great little resturant along the canal. Great place. My only regret it that it got too late for me to see Patrick’s place, so I just went to bed and got up the next morning for my flight.
The latest wpa_supplicant package for Fedora 28 includes compile-time support for PMF (Protected Management Frames). This is a good thing, as it protects against a set of WiFi replay attacks. However, a small number of users reported WiFi connectivity problems after an upgrade to Fedora 28. If you read this post, you can learn how to troubleshoot that connection, and possibly feel less frustrated.
Disabling PMF can be a viable workaround. But it’s possible to understand more deeply where the failure is happening. Ideally, you can find a software fix for those issues, and still keep the advantage of improved security.
The kernel team is working on final integration for Kernel 4.18. This version was just recently released, and will arrive soon in Fedora. This version will also be the shipping kernel for Fedora 29. So it’s to see whether it’s working well enough and catch any remaining issues. It’s also pretty easy to join in: all you’ll need is an iso (which you can grab from the wiki page).
My name is Christian Glombek and I am a student of Electrical Engineering & Business Management at RWTH University in Aachen, Germany. About three years ago I had my open source awakening. I started looking into Linux and set out to find the distro that was best suited for me. Containers were the hot new thing back then and the Fedora Community was already on the leading edge of development in this area, so I made my choice for it quite quickly. I eventually joined the Fedora Community to be able to write bug reports and to stay in the in loop in general (you can join here!). My Open Source journey had begun.
The Debian GNU/Linux project will turn 25 on Thursday, with the Linux distribution having made its debut on 16 August in 1993 under the leadership of the late Ian Murdock.
In its original manifesto, Murdock stated: "Many distributions have started out as fairly good systems, but as time passes attention to maintaining the distribution becomes a secondary concern."
Maintaining a Debian system was made simple after some developers created a package management system known as apt.
Apt — and its derivatives like aptitude and synaptic — have served to make the task of updating a Debian system simple. With apt, the secondary concern that Murdock referred to was effectively taken care of. Incidentally, there are now about 29,000 packages available in Debian.
This project aims at developing tools and packages which would simplify the process for new applicants in the open source community to get the required setup. It would consist of a GUI/Wizard with integrated scripts to setup various communication and development tools like PGP and SSH key, DNS, IRC, XMPP, mail filters along with Jekyll blog creation, mailing lists subscription, project planner, searching for developer meet-ups, source code scanner and much more! The project would be free and open source hosted on Salsa (Debian based Gitlab)
I created various scripts and packages for automating tasks and helping a user get started by managing contacts, emails, subscribe to developer’s lists, getting started with Github, IRC and more.
Axiomtek has released a rugged, Ubuntu-ready “eBOX627-312-FL” embedded PC with a dual-core Celeron N3350, 2x GbE, 6x USB, and 4x serial ports plus mini-PCIe, HDMI, SATA, and “Flexible I/O.”
Aaeon is rolling out a new EPIC form-factor “EPIC-KBS9” SBC with 6th or 7th Gen Core S-series chips, 4x GbE ports, up to 32GB DDR3, and mini-PCIe and PCIe x4 expansion.
Aaeon’s EPIC-KBS9 follows two other EPIC-KBS SBCs to support Intel’s 6th “Skylake” or 7th “Kaby Lake” generation S-Series processors: the EPIC-KBS7, which emphasized real-world ports, and last month’s EPIC-KBS8, which is a bit more feature rich but with fewer coastline ports. Unlike these earlier models, the KBS9 offers 4x GbE ports, up to 32GB DDR4-2133, and a full-size PCIe x4 slot, which supports NVMe storage.
Open Source Evolution, visionaries and creators of enterprise custom software, announced today that former OSS founder, Eren Niazi has been named CTO. A 20-year technology veteran, Niazi has been focused on developing custom enterprise open source software for corporate transformations to open source.
Eren is the original visionary/creator who pioneered the OSS movement and envisioned a world where the enterprises used open source software for large scale data center deployments. Consequently, the OSS technologies Niazi developed have become the model for global industry storage solutions.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk has told a hacker conference in Las Vegas that he plans to “open source” the software his company uses to secure autonomous-driving features from hacks or takeovers, eventually allowing other carmakers to use it.
Musk tweeted, “Great Q&A @defcon last night. Thanks for helping make Tesla & SpaceX more secure! Planning to open-source Tesla vehicle security software for free use by other car makers. Extremely important to a safe self-driving future for all.”
Previously only available from Progress Services, the Spark Toolkit was created in collaboration with the Progress Common Component Specification (CCS) project, a group of Progress€® OpenEdge€® customers and partners defining a standard set of specifications for the common components for building modern business applications. By engaging the community, Progress has leveraged best practices in the development of these standards-based components and tools to enable new levels of interoperability, flexibility, efficiencies and effectiveness.
[...]
It is compatible with the latest version of OpenEdge, 11.7, and is available under Apache License 2.0. More components are expected to be added in the future.
The current version of Rustfmt, 0.99.2, is the first 1.0 release candidate. It is available on nightly and beta (technically 0.99.1 there) channels, and from the 13th September will be available with stable Rust.
1.0 will be a huge milestone for Rustfmt. As part of it's stability guarantees, it's formatting will be frozen (at least until 2.0). That means any sub-optimal formatting still around will be around for a while. So please help test Rustfmt and report any bugs or sub-optimal formatting.
Amy joins Mozilla from Twitter, Inc. where she has been Vice President, Legal and Deputy General Counsel. When she joined Twitter in 2012, she was the first lawyer focused on litigation, building out the functions and supporting the company as both the platform and the employee base grew in the U.S. and internationally. Her role expanded over time to include oversight of Twitter’s product counseling, regulatory, privacy, employment legal, global litigation, and law enforcement legal response functions. Prior to Twitter, Amy was part of Google, Inc.’s legal team and began her legal career as an associate at Bingham McCutchen LLP.
Please meet Oriol Brufau, our newest Friend of Add-ons! Oriol is one of 23 volunteer community members who have landed code for the WebExtensions API in Firefox since the technology was first introduced in 2015. You may be familiar with his numerous contributions if you have set a specific badge text color for your browserAction, highlighted multiple tabs with the tabs.query API, or have seen your extension’s icon display correctly in about:addons.
While our small engineering team doesn’t always have the resources to implement every approved request for new or enhanced WebExtensions APIs, the involvement of community members like Oriol adds considerable depth and breadth to technology that affects millions of users. However, the Firefox code base is large, complex, and full of dependencies. Contributing code to the browser can be difficult even for experienced developers.
As part of celebrating Oriol’s achievements, we asked him to share his experience contributing to the WebExtensions API with the hope that it will be helpful for other developers interested in landing more APIs in Firefox.
After a quick pause in July, your primary source of localization information at Mozilla is back!
Even better, as we said, LibreOffice can open and edit the documents you made in Office and can save new files in Office formats. LibreOffice is also compatible with the most popular document formats, not just Office documents. It's also compatible with OpenDocument Format (ODF) and you can even sign PDF documents without having to involve your printer!
Nowadays it has been said that the enterprises rely extensively more on the open-source software in their application projects, but the time saved by using ready-made components comes at a cost which can easily be saved. Incorporating outside code into the mix can potentially introduce some of the new security vulnerabilities.
Gaming on Linux doesn’t have to mean buying a ludicrously priced GPU (thanks crypto miners!). Nor does it require a beefy CPU. There’s a real resurgence in retro style gaming going on right now. We’ve pulled together a selection of retro-inspired games for you to play today, on your beloved Linux machine.
The term “open source” was coined 20 years ago this month by some software engineers who had the radical idea of allowing their code to be freely shared, copied and modified by anyone else. They realized they could make more money by giving away their product instead of selling it, and selling the support services instead. The open source model is a growing part of the arts, and nowhere more than in music. Recordings make so little money that creators now offer them for free and make their money from live shows instead.
Hobbyist and Reddit 3D printing community contributor Marioarm has built an “almost fully” 3D printed CNC machine for milling electronic chipboards.
Marioarm built the Cyclone PCB CNC machine with 3D printed parts downloaded from file sharing sites such as Thingiverse and the GitHub repository Cyclone PCB Factory. With minimal, prefabricated parts, the project in total cost Marioarm under $200 to build.
Today Julia Computing announced the Julia 1.0 programming language release, “the most important Julia milestone since Julia was introduced in February 2012.” As the first complete, reliable, stable and forward-compatible Julia release, version 1.0 is the fastest, simplest and most productive open-source programming language for scientific, numeric and mathematical computing.
Look up “panacea” and you’ll find a bunch of C programming tools. Everyone and his dog has ideas about how to create better, more reliable C code. Use an ISO-certified compiler. Follow MISRA C guidelines. Write the comments first. Agile Programming. Energy crystals. The late-night remedies never end.
Or, you could learn from the master. Michael Barr does embedded programming. He’s got a Masters in electrical engineering; was an adjunct professor of EE/CS; was Editor-in-Chief of Embedded Systems Programming magazine; founded consulting company Netrino to teach people how to write better code; then founded Barr Group to do it again. The man knows a few things about writing embedded software, mostly by watching his clients and students doing it badly. There’s no substitute for experience, and this guy has collected decades worth of it.
So it’s no surprise that he’s come up with his own little black book of programming pointers. These are the rules, guidelines, and suggestions gleaned from years of reviewing other peoples’ bad code and then fixing it. Best of all, a PDF download of the book is free. If you’re a traditionalist, you can buy the paperback version from Amazon.
Many years back, I remember seeing Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch, being interviewed about that site (which at the time was on its way to becoming the first "mainstream" tech news blog). I'm paraphrasing, and possibly misremembering, but what stuck with me was that he suggested that, as a blog, you basically had to focus on one of three things to succeed: being first, being funny, or being insightful. And he had chosen "being first" as the strategy for TechCrunch -- trying to break news as quickly as possible. And while that makes sense as a business strategy if you can do it, it had absolutely no appeal to me for how we ran Techdirt. We always hoped to focus on adding more insight into various issues, than breaking news. That's not to say we don't break news every so often, but it's certainly not the focus.
Perhaps the biggest lesson to take away from Flint's water crisis is this: Don't for a second think this couldn't have been your town. This didn't happen on some faraway island or in a Third World country, but right in America's own backyard. "From every objective measure that is out there, Flint's water is like any other US city with old lead pipes," adds Virginia Tech's Siddhartha Roy, one of the researchers who brought the scandal to light. So take note and stay in the fight, because if you don't and your elected officials one day decide that your water looking and smelling like orc blood isn't their problem, you'll spend a really long time picking chunks out of your teeth after every brushing. And if that sentence isn't enough for you to take an interest in local politics, we don't know what will.
Illinois lawmakers Tuesday heard testimony from nearly a dozen doctors and child welfare advocates describing circumstances facing children who languish in psychiatric hospitals even after they had been cleared for discharge — circumstances so harrowing that some children chose jail over another night at a psychiatric facility.
State Sen. Julie Morrison, a Democrat from Deerfield, called for the Senate Human Services Committee hearing following a ProPublica Illinois investigation that revealed that hundreds of children in care of the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services spent weeks or months at a time locked in psychiatric hospitals after doctors had cleared them for release.
The investigation, published in June, found that children in DCFS care were trapped inside psychiatric hospitals between 2015 and 2017 for a total of more than 27,000 days beyond what was medically necessary. During that time, the state spent nearly $7 million on unnecessary psychiatric care for children as young as 4.
And the problem, ProPublica Illinois found, has only been getting worse. In 2014, only 88 psychiatric admissions were not medically needed compared with 301 last year.
"The Speck [Spectre slang, not to be confused with the controversial NSA algo] brigade sadly provides yet another large set of patches destroying the perfomance which we carefully built and preserved," began the latest x86/pti pull request by kernel maintainer Thomas Gleixner.
Details are still light but a new vulnerability is coming out called the L1 Terminal Fault. It's been described as a "train-wreck" and is another big deal in the security space as the latest speculative side-channel attack vector.
The CVEs are CVE-2018-3615, CVE-2018-3620, and CVE-2018-3646 but as of writing they have not been made public yet. I just noticed the code hitting the mainline Linux kernel to this "L1TF - L1 Terminal Fault" vulnerability.
Today Intel announced a new side channel vulnerability known as L1 Terminal Fault. Raoul Strackx, Jo Van Bulck, Marina Minkin, Ofir Weisse, Daniel Genkin, Baris Kasikci, Frank Piessens, Mark Silberstein, Thomas F. Wenisch, Yuval Yarom, and researchers from Intel discovered that memory present in the L1 data cache of an Intel CPU core may be exposed to a malicious process that’s executing on the CPU core. Processors from other vendors are not known to be affected by L1TF.
Earlier this month, Bugcrowd launched a new reporting framework that aims to further protect security researchers, create a “safe harbour” for ethical hackers, and address legal risks when it comes to disclosures.
The Disclose.io project is a new set of open-source vulnerability guidelines written with both researchers and organizations in mind.
In an increasingly digital world, companies and vendors are turning to white hat hackers to help bolster their security measures and protect their business.
With the ability to generate synthetic clicks, an attack, for example, could dismiss many of Apple's privacy-related security prompts. On recent versions of macOS, Apple has added a confirmation window that requires users to click an OK button before an installed app can access geolocation, contacts, or calendar information stored on the Mac. Apple engineers added the requirement to act as a secondary safeguard. Even if a machine was infected by malware, the thinking went, the malicious app wouldn’t be able to copy this sensitive data without the owner’s explicit permission.
Attackers are compromising Instagram accounts and locking out users, so take a moment to lock down your account.
When she tried to log back in, she got a message that her username didn't exist. She soon realized her handle and photo had both been changed, as had the email address and phone number associated with her account. She tried to request a password reset, only to see the new email linked to her account was now a .ru email: she had been hacked.
In our last post, Jon Masters offered an overview of L1 Terminal Fault aka Foreshadow. In this video blog, Jon offers a deeper technical explanation of the vulnerability.
Things can be pretty scary out there today. There are a lot of things that could occur that make even the calmest amongst us take pause. Everything we do is a series of risk-based decisions that we hope leads to happy outcomes. “Should I get out of bed today?”, “Should I eat this sushi they are selling in this gas station?”, “Can you hold my beverage?”. The challenges of modern-day existence can be very daunting.
With this blog, I’m sharing how I’d advise organizations to consider IT-related risks and how Red Hat Product Security aims to help customers make informed decisions with data.
Rebecca Crootof at Balkinization has two interesting posts:
- Introducing the Internet of Torts, in which she describes "how IoT devices empower companies at the expense of consumers and how extant law shields industry from liability."
- Accountability for the Internet of Torts, in which she discusses "how new products liability law and fiduciary duties could be used to rectify this new power imbalance and ensure that IoT companies are held accountable for the harms they foreseeably cause.
Below the fold, some commentary on both.
“The funny thing about people is that even when we type random stuff we tend to have a signature. This guy, for example, likes to have his hand on the ends of each side of the keyboard (e.g., 1,2,3 and 7,8,9) and alternate,” Burnett wrote in his thread.
Olsen, who served as the counterterrorism head under President Obama until 2014, will replace Joe Sullivan as the ride-hailing company's top security official.
Sullivan was fired by Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi over his handling of a massive cyber breach last year that happened during former CEO Travis Kalanick’s tenure.
Cybersecurity boffins from Chinese firm Tencent's Blade security research team exploited various vulnerabilities they found in the Echo smart speaker to eventually coax it into becoming an eavesdropping device.
Microsoft and Adobe have teamed up to deliver more than 70 patches with this month's Patch Tuesday batch released today.
Microsoft contributed the bulk of the fixes emitted this month, kicking out updates for 60 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its products. These should be installed as soon as you're able to test and deploy them.
Today we are publishing a new EFF white paper, The Cautious Path to Strategic Advantage: How Militaries Should Plan for AI. This paper analyzes the risks and implications of military AI projects in the wake of Google's decision to discontinue AI assistance to the US military's drone program and adopt AI ethics principles that preclude many forms of military work.
The key audiences for this paper are military planners and defense contractors, who may find the objections to military uses of AI from Google's employees and others in Silicon Valley hard to understand. Hoping to bridge the gap, we urge our key audiences to consider several guiding questions. What are the major technical and strategic risks of applying current machine learning methods in weapons systems or military command and control? What are the appropriate responses that states and militaries can adopt in response? What kinds of AI are safe for military use, and what kinds aren't?
Militaries must make sure they don't buy into the machine learning hype while missing the warning label.
We are at a critical juncture. Machine learning technologies have received incredible hype, and indeed they have made exciting progress on some fronts, but they remain brittle, subject to novel failure modes, and vulnerable to diverse forms of adversarial attack and manipulation. They also lack the basic forms of common sense and judgment on which humans usually rely.
Nebraska’s fentanyl execution was only possible because the state delayed Moore’s execution for nearly four decades — depleting his will to fight.
“The death penalty is not about whether people deserve to die for the crimes they commit,” as Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Equal Justice Initiative, frequently explains. “The real question of capital punishment in this country is, ‘Do we deserve to kill?’” For those of us who are most familiar with the legal deficiencies and human cruelties of capital punishment, the answer is a resounding no.
Nebraska’s execution of Carey Dean Moore this morning proves the point.
As a society, we have determined that a death sentence requires that our process for determining who is guilty, for determining whom should be executed, and for executing humanely are transparent and above reproach. By any standard, Nebraska should not have had the authority to kill Moore today with an experimental fentanyl drug protocol.
Moore’s case is remarkable for several reasons. First, he has spent 38 years on death row, the longest known period between death sentence and execution in American history. Second, six years ago, he gave up all appeals and refused to fight for his life.
On the surface, it may appear that Nebraska could execute Mr. Moore without judicial oversight or safeguards because Moore agreed to be executed. But looking more deeply, we know Moore’s decision to stop fighting for his life is the result of Nebraska holding him for decades on death row without executing him.
The Department of Defense’s internal watchdog is launching an investigation into the military’s heavily polluting practice of open burning and detonating hazardous explosive materials on its properties, as well as its frequent reliance on federal contractors to carry out that work.
The inquiry, announced Aug. 10 on the website of the department’s Office of Inspector General, will examine whether the department’s practices are legal, and whether the contractors charged with handling dangerous materials — often close to the public — have proper oversight.
“Robust oversight of these contractors is essential for protecting the health and well-being of all who work and live near these installations,” Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter of New Hampshire wrote to ProPublica in an email. “But it is clear that this oversight did not take place.”
Findings raise questions about decision-making process that led to shooting at children when they didn't pose a threat. This requires clarification on use of drones, IDF's open-fire policy and responsibility of those involved
Police have taken the statement of the former Malaysian External Intelligence Organisation (MEIO) director-general Datuk Hasanah Abdul Hamid on a letter she wrote to the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Without revealing when Hasanah’s statement was taken, the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) Tan Sri Mohamad Fuzi Harun said police had also called several other MEIO officers to assist investigations.
He said police would also be taking the statements of several MEIO officers in Washington.
“We will later send the investigation papers to the deputy public prosecutor for further action,” he told reporters after Bukit Aman Monthly Assembly here yesterday.
The Democratic National Committee has used Twitter to serve a lawsuit against WikiLeaks that accuses the website of participating in a conspiracy to hack into DNC emails and denigrate Hillary Clinton.
U.S. District Judge John Koeltl of Manhattan granted the motion to serve via Twitter and mail on Aug. 6. The DNC’s law firm, Cohen Milstein, served the suit on Aug. 10 through a Twitter account that was apparently created for that purpose, report CBS News, Gizmodo and TechCrunch.
The DNC had told the court in a July 20 motion to allow the alternate service that WikiLeaks “has more of a virtual than a physical presence.” The motion cited a California case in which a federal court allowed service via Twitter of a suit against a Kuwaiti national accused of financing ISIS activities.
The DNC had not been able to serve the lawsuit by other methods, the motion said. DNC lawyers tried sending emails to an address provided on the WikiLeaks website and contacting lawyers who had represented WikiLeaks in other matters. The emails were returned as undeliverable, and the lawyers who responded said they no longer represented WikiLeaks and were not authorized to accept service.
The investigation headed by Special Counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller into alleged “collusion” between the Trump campaign and Russia during the 2016 presidential election has entered a new stage.
Mueller is seeking to substantiate the case he advanced last month—as part of the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officers—that Trump campaign insider Roger Stone and WikiLeaks editor Julian Assange were part of a conspiracy to hack and publish emails sent by the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairperson John Podesta (see: “In run-up to Trump-Putin summit, Mueller charges 12 Russian officers with DNC email hack”).
Last September, elite media were heralding numbers suggesting that incomes were up among middle class Americans, but tiptoeing around the fact that the rising tide was not lifting all boats. Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is Senior Fellow, Racial Wealth Divide, at the group Prosperity Now. He told CounterSpin about a report he co-authored, called The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide Is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class, from Prosperity Now and the Institute for Policy Studies. I asked why they chose to focus on racial disparities in wealth.
But the official rate hides more troubling realities: legions of college grads overqualified for their jobs, a growing number of contract workers with no job security, and an army of part-time workers desperate for full-time jobs. Almost 80% of Americans say they live from paycheck to paycheck, many not knowing how big their next one will be.
Blanketing all of this are stagnant wages and vanishing job benefits. The typical American worker now earns around $44,500 a year, not much more than what the typical worker earned in 40 years ago, adjusted for inflation. Although the US economy continues to grow, most of the gains have been going to a relatively few top executives of large companies, financiers, and inventors and owners of digital devices.
…then the person observing gets to decide what collusion is, right?
A daily trickle of revealing internal conversations between staffers. Growing anxiety about what one might have once said. No sense of how long it will go on.
Omarosa Manigault Newman’s slow release of secretly taped conversations from inside the Trump campaign and White House is having the same effect on staffers as the daily dumps from WikiLeaks had on Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign, when chairman John Podesta’s emails were trickled out during the final stretch of the race.
Omarosa Manigault Newman declared "I will not be silenced" by the Trump campaign.
Manigault Newman spoke to The Associated Press hours after the president's campaign announced it was filing an arbitration action against the former aide alleging she broke a secrecy agreement.
In an interview with AP, Manigault Newman said she believes the action was intended to keep her from telling her story. She says she "will not be intimidated."
In most of the civilized world, at least where there exists a modicum of free expression and idea exchange, one may take issue with the opinions and utterances of others without implying at the same time that those with whom we disagree must be censored from saying what we don’t like or that with which we find no common ground. In public politics, we take a position, either as a candidate, officeholder or exponent of some set of ideas, and those who don’t like it are free to say so and support what they think—or don’t think.
Enter the fourth estate, that which is variously known as the mainstream media, the “legacy” press or the like. What it really means is those organs of reporting and opinion that are represented by persons whose words and conclusion, no matter how obtuse or unsupported by fact, are to be embraced as some kind of secular grail (if unholy).
They of that “estate” long ago wrapped themselves in something akin to Harry Potter’s Invisibility Cloak, so that no matter how far from reality, how skewed and oppressive their conclusions and how widely divergent from fact it might be they were to be immune from criticism or objection. But when those of differing opinion, mostly conservative or independent mindset rise up to speak in opposition to their faux orthodoxy the whole game changes, and they instantly scream that their hold on the First Amendment and free speech is being abridged.
This statement was originally published on rsf.org on 2 August 2018.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on Google to not yield to Beijing's demands by agreeing to launch a censored version of its search engine in China, as this would deal a serious blow to the freedom to inform.
According to an article citing internal Google sources that the US investigative news website The Intercept published yesterday, the tech giant is on the edge of launching a censored Android version of its search engine in China that blacklists certain search terms and websites in exchange for access to the Chinese market.
If this norm continues, it will lead to more firings of increasingly questionable justification, and then everyone with something to lose is just going to stop tweeting.
It’s good to have a lively social media discourse, and it’s good to have interesting writers making provocative arguments, and it’s good to have cool Marvel space movies with wild soundtracks. So maybe the people we should be angry at are the people who keep trying to destroy all these things over nonsense.
One huge benefit of having a wired security camera system is that you don’t need to connect it to the internet to use it—unlike most Wi-Fi cams, which require an internet connection to do anything.
The downside to an off-the-grid camera system, however, is that you won’t be able to access it remotely from your phone if you’re away from home. Instead, you can only view and manage your camera system from the DVR box and the connected monitor and peripherals.
The Australian government is looking to revamp its compelled access laws to fight encryption and other assorted technological advances apparently only capable of being used for evil. It's getting pretty damn dark Down Under, according to the Department of Home Affairs' announcement of the pending legislation.
[...]
There's the limitation of lawmaking. Lawbreakers break laws and they're not going to stop just because you've told them not to with a government mandate. Legislation [PDF] like this does little more than make life more difficult for service providers and device makers while undermining the privacy and security of millions of law-abiding citizens.
The explanation sheet [PDF] notes the government is not seeking to mandate encryption backdoors. That being said, it would like providers of encrypted services/devices to leave the door cracked open so the government can step inside whenever it feels the need to look around.
HTTPS Everywhere! So the plugin says, and now browsers are warning users that sites not implementing https:// are security risks. Using HTTPS everywhere is good advice. And this really means "everywhere": the home page, everything. Not just the login page, or the page where you accept donations. Everything.
Implementing HTTPS everywhere has some downsides, as Eric Meyer points out. It breaks caching, which makes the web much slower for people limited to satellite connections (and that's much of the third world); it's a problem for people who, for various reasons, have to use older browsers (there are more ancient browsers and operating systems in the world than you would like to think, trust me); domain names and IP address are handled by lower-level protocols that HTTPS doesn't get to touch, so it's not as private as one would like; and more. It's not a great solution, but it's a necessary one. (Meyer's article, and the comments following it, are excellent.)
The "location history" option on Google accounts claims in its description to be responsible for collecting data on a user's movements, but it turns out that switching it off still won't help if someone wants to track you down via your account.
Australia's government will debate proposed legislation before the end of this year that could force Apple and other companies to introduce backdoors into their products and services, such as the iPhone or iMessage, under the guise of assisting with national security and law enforcement investigations.
The Iowa Supreme Court has decided to lower standards for law enforcement officers in its state. The ruling [PDF] issued earlier this summer gives state officers the opportunity to dismiss lawsuits against them by asserting qualified immunity. Prior to this decision, there was no qualified immunity defense state actors could raise in court. They were actually forced to actually defend themselves in court, making it easier for plaintiffs' claims to survive an early motion to dismiss and bringing them closer to justice. (via Bleeding Heartland)
The case -- Baldwin v. City of Estherville -- involves an arrest for a crime that didn't exist. It involves driving an ATV through a city-owned ditch, something that's illegal under state law but not under the City of Estherville's laws. An arrest for something that wasn't actually illegal was followed by this lawsuit. It's a weird origin for a Fourth Amendment lawsuit, but the outcome makes holding officers accountable for their misdeeds much more difficult with the court's addition of qualified immunity to local government's litigation toolbox.
So FCC boss Ajit Pai will need to don some tap-dancing shoes this Thursday, when he'll be forced to explain to a Senate oversight committee why his agency not only made up a DDOS attack, but lied repeatedly to the press and Congress about it.
As we recently noted, e-mails obtained by FOIA request have proven that the FCC completely made up a DDOS attack in a bizarre bid to downplay the fact that John Oliver's bit on net neutrality crashed the agency website last year. A subsequent investigation by the FCC Inspector General confirmed those findings, showing not only that no attack took place, but that numerous FCC staffers misled both Congress and the media when asked about it.
Pai initially tried to get out ahead of the scandal and IG report by issuing a statement that threw his employees under the bus while playing dumb. According to Pai's pre-emptive statement, the entire scandal was the fault of the FCC's since-departed CIO and other employees who mysteriously failed to alert him that this entire shitshow was occurring (you can just smell the ethical leadership here)...
Today, four Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee sent a letter to Pai "demanding to know when he and his staff learned that the Commission had provided inaccurate information about why its comment system went down during the net neutrality repeal public comment period," the Democrats said in an announcement.
For a while now we've been noting that while Ajit Pai professes to be a huge proponent of "closing the digital divide," most of his policies are doing the exact opposite. Pai's attacks on net neutrality, for example, will likely only act to drive up broadband prices for everyone as ISPs enjoy their newfound ability to creatively abusive captive customers in uncompetitive markets. And Pai has repeatedly attempted to fiddle with FCC data collection methodology with an eye toward obfuscating the industry's competitive failures (be that skyrocketing prices or poor coverage).
That's of course when he hasn't been busy slowly-but-surely gutting programs designed to help bring broadband to the nation's less affluent areas.
One of Pai's core policies has been a relentless attack on the FCC's Lifeline program. Lifeline was created under the Reagan administration and expanded under the George W. Bush administration, and provides low-income households with a measly $9.25 per month subsidy that low-income homes can use to help pay a tiny fraction of their wireless, phone, or broadband bills (enrolled participants have to chose one). The FCC under former FCC boss Tom Wheeler had voted to expand the service to cover broadband connections, something Pai (ever a champion to the poor) voted down.
Traditionally this program had broad, bipartisan support and was never deemed even remotely controversial. But ever since Trump and Pai stumbled into town, the current FCC has slowly waged war on the program. For example Pai's FCC voted 3-2 last November to eliminate a $25 additional Lifeline subsidy for low-income native populations on tribal land. Pai's FCC also banned smaller mobile carriers from participating in the Lifeline program, a move opposed by even the larger companies (Verizon, AT&T) Pai's FCC normally nuzzles up to.
A while back, I suggested here that defendants start thinking, early on, about joining sole-shareholders (and the like) of asset-less patentees if 285 liability was an issue. In a recent case, the district court allowed joinder of such a person, finding he was a necessary party under Rule 19. (I seriously doubt that is correct (what is the claim against the person being joined?), but Genentech managed to convince a judge to join such a person in Phigenix, Inc. v. Genentech, Inc., (N.D. Cal. Aug. 13, 2018) (here). (I’ve also written about counsel’s liability under 285, and the conflicts it can create, here.)
On March 27th, 2018, the Court of Appeal of Paris issued a decision on withdrawal of the seizure order on the grounds that the principle of impartiality had been violated since the patent attorneys (“CPIs”) assisting the bailiff wrote a report on the probability of the infringement annexed at the seizure request.
It will thus be advisable to rely on a patent attorney which did not know the case at all in order to practice a seizure without taking the risk of a withdrawal of the order.
[...]
The decision of the Court was appealed. We will see if the French Supreme Court will follow the reasoning initiated by the Court of Appeal regarding the lack of impartiality of the patent attorneys who previously acted as experts in the context of the seizure.
The scope of this decision could be moderated since, in this case, several factual arguments on the drafting conditions of the expert report with the assistance of the seizing party were raised as reported above. In this context, if the patent attorney who prepared a preliminary report for the seizing party had access to some information about the alleged infringing material may not be considered impartial, we may ask ourselves what the measure of impartiality should be. The decision of the Court of Appeal does not set a clear limit on this point; it does of course reiterate that patent attorneys are independent and from that point of view are allowed to assist during seizures.
Therefore, in order to avoid withdrawal of a seizure order, the seizing party will not refer in its request to a patent attorney who intervened previously as an expert in the same case, e.g. as an expert having participated in a private expert report filed as supporting evidence for obtaining the seizure as in the present case. The risk would be the characterization of the impartiality of the designated patent attorney and, correspondingly, the possible withdrawal of the seizure order. Whether this position would extend to any type of private expertise is unknown; hopefully the Supreme Court will provide guidance.
We would recommend to use a patent attorney who had no relationship with the seizing party beforehand for assisting during seizures.
The day-to-day tasks of managing a global IP portfolio form the backbone of any IP strategy. The most high-level corporate IP policy can falter if a company lacks robust operations processes for securing and maintaining patents and other rights. In a recent survey, Clarivate Analytics set out to investigate how organisations approach these management tasks, and what challenges they face. This month's guest piece from the firm breaks down some of the key findings and what they may mean.
A Markush claim is a type of claim commonly used in chemical and pharmaceutical fields. On December 20, 2017, in Beijing Winsunny Harmony Science & Technology Co., Ltd. v. Daiichi Sankyo Co., Ltd, (“Daiichi Sankyo Case”), the Supreme People’s Court (“SPC”) resolved a long standing-split among Chinese courts regarding the interpretation and amendment of Markush claims. In combination with examination practice in China, this article will discuss the guidance of the Daiichi Sankyo case and provide strategic suggestions for readers’ reference.
Though this is not the only lawsuit fought out between Wi-LAN and Apple, this particular action began in June 2014 when Apple filed a complaint seeking a declaratory judgment of invalidity on the ‘145 and ‘757 patents along with three other Wi-LAN patents.
Jeff Risher has left his post as Tesla’s head of IP to join rival electric car manufacturer Faraday Future as vice president, technology and IP. According to his LinkedIn profile he joined Faraday last month after a little more than two years at Tesla where he was chief IP and litigation counsel. Prior to that he spent almost a decade at Apple, most recently as director of patent licensing and strategy.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has granted BioDelivery Sciences International, Inc.’s motion to remand to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board a consolidated appeal of the Board’s final decisions upholding the patentability of three Aquestive Therapeutics patents for water-soluble drug-dosage films incorporating anti-tacking agents.
Following remand, the court granted defendant's motion for summary judgment to preclude plaintiff from seeking pre-suit damages and rejected plaintiff's argument that the jury's willful infringement finding satisfied plaintiff's obligation to establish actual notice.
A design is defined in the Community Design regulation and in the Design directive as the outward appearance of a product or a part of a product which results from the lines, contours, colours, shape, texture, materials and/or its ornamentation. In order to qualify for protection, designs must be new and must have individual character. Furthermore, a design shall not subsist in features of appearance of a product which are solely dictated by its technical function. Designs make a product attractive and appealing; hence they may add significantly to the commercial value of a product and increase its marketability. Design protection is a significant element of IP law. Designs as unique creations with individual character require and deserve protection against imitators just as copyrighted works or trademarks.
Chinese competitor Elec-Tech found to have stolen trade secrets related to Lumileds technology for making high power LEDs used in flash phones and headlights
Those steeped in ownership culture often have the wrong idea when it comes to trademark laws. In the minds of some, trademark laws can be used like publicity rights laws, wherein a famous somebody -- or that somebody's heirs -- can use that fame to control all uses of references to that somebody for ever and ever. That, of course, is not how trademark laws work. Instead, trademark law is designed to protect the public from confusion by allowing some monopolistic use of names and terms in some markets and only if actual commerce is taking place.
This is a lesson the management company of the late renowned martial arts star Bruce Lee has now learned the hard way. Bruce Lee Enterprises attempted to both block the trademark registration for production company Barisons in the UK, which applied for a mark covering its forthcoming Jun Fan: the Bruce Lee Musical, and also to apply for a "Jun Fan" mark in the theatrical designation itself. Jun Fan, if you're not aware, was the birth name of Bruce Lee.
Kodi has gained quite a notorious reputation as the users continue to stream illegal content from it. Recently, Facebook expressed their criticism of illegal video streaming content by banning Kodi boxes and other jailbroken or loaded devices.
Adding Kodi to the list of the prohibited content, Facebook has put up a post explicitly stating that posts promoting the sale of illegal video streaming devices, jailbroken devices, wiretapping devices would not be entertained on the platform.
The disappearance of websites in the torrent world is very common. While many services shut down and pirates move on to their alternatives, sometimes sites also transfer their data to other sites.
A similar retirement development (Via: TF) has recently taken place in the case of SevenTorrents. If you’re only familiar with biggies like The Pirate Bay, YTS, or KAT, let me tell you that SevenTorrents has been around for more than ten years; just last year only, it served more than 5 million visitors.
On the other hand, they're right, and this is exactly what fair use is for: to allow for third parties to comment on copyrighted works and their creators, especially when the creators object. Sure, maybe Disney could buy licenses to the Michael Jackson videos they're quoting in this doc, but if the Jackson estate objects because Disney is portraying Jackson in an unflattering light, do we really want to give them a veto? Shouldn't the discussion of culturally significant figures be the subject of legitimate debate, without partisans (whose own income is dependent on maintaining the reputation of the dead entertainer) being able to decide who can criticize that figure and how?