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Links 1/10/2019: Linux 5.3.2 and LibreOffice 10/20 Logo Community Contest



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop

      • Huawei Laptops coming with Linux Replacing Windows

        Huawei even though is a huge company and a worldwide known name is having a hard time this year. After the ban on its trade selectively it’s been a turning point for Huawei as they have to tackle many of the things now. Any new product that the Chinese company comes up with now is prohibited to use Windows on it now. It’s not a good phase for Huawei and finding alternative might be possible for the brand but having the customers face it might be troublesome. They are said to work on their own operating system to replace Windows on the new products and are calling it Hongxing. The project itself is a substitute for windows but can work as a bit mobile and computer giving high hopes to users.

      • Chrome OS 79 to throttle CPU usage on background Linux apps, improving web, Android performance as needed

        The Chromium team is working on a new feature for Chrome OS 79 that should improve general Chromebook performance when using Linux apps. If the code changes are completed and succesfully tested in time for Chrome OS 79, any Linux apps running in the background would see “throttling” down by the CPU, allowing more processing power applied to foreground apps such as the web browser.

    • Server

      • IBM

        • Stephen Smoogen: Attention: Removal of python36 from EPEL-7 on 2019-10-03

          With the release of RHEL-7.7, many of the packages for python36 in EPEL were replicated in the release as python3-3.6 packages. The normal pattern when this is seen is to remove the packages from EPEL so that they do not cause problems. However, this did cause problems for users of CentOS-7 who did not have access to the newer packages. Two weeks ago, CentOS-7.7.1908 was released and should have flowed out to users as needed.

        • Red Hat Announces CentOS Stream

          Red Hat has announced a new Linux distribution called CentOS Stream for better synergy among RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux), Fedora and CentOS.

          Those who don’t know, CentOS is a clone of RHEL (minus Red Hat branding) which is compiled from the source code that Red Hat releases publicly. CentOS is funded by Red Hat but is a purely community driven project, thought most lead developers of CentOS are employed by Red Hat.

          CentOS Stream will sit somewhere between Fedora and RHEL to offer a bride to developers who want to get their packages in RHEL. So far Fedora was used as a fast moving upstream project for RHEL. Red Hat forks code from Fedora to build the next version of RHEL.

        • Behind the artwork and Easter eggs of Command Line Heroes third season

          Command Line Heroes is more than a podcast—we have developed a broad creative ecosystem to support and enhance the audio experience. One of these branches of production is the artwork that accompanies the show. We produce episodic artwork to help Command Line Heroes stand out on podcast platforms, and to promote the podcast online and at events. It’s taken a creative team with diverse skill sets to build the Command Line Heroes web and event experiences—and we think it gets better every season.

          In this series, we’re going to take you behind the curtain with Red Hat’s Open Studio to learn more about our process, how this program comes to life—and point out some easter eggs you might have missed.

        • The Business Benefits of Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated: A 3x return on investment

          Red Hat commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study1 to examine the value that customers could achieve by deploying Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated. Forrester interviewed OpenShift Dedicated customers about the benefits, costs, risks, and flexibility they experienced using the platform. The companies interviewed had annual revenues of over $1 billion and used Red Hat for over three years.

          A composite organization representative of these real-world customers experienced a 343% return on investment (ROI), realized benefits with a net present value (NPV) of $3.4 million, and recouped its initial investment in fewer than six months.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • Linux 5.3.2

        I'm announcing the release of the 5.3.2 kernel.

        All users of the 5.3 kernel series must upgrade.

        The updated 5.3.y git tree can be found at:

        git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.3.y

        and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

        https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...

      • Linux 5.2.18
      • Linux 4.19.76
      • Linux Security Module officially adds a lockdown to Linux

        A new feature is being added to the kernel. Details are sketchy, but all soldiers are reminded to be vigilant. Here is the information received from Commander Torvalds who has personally overseen this change.

        Civilians will see the lockdown (WE ARE IN LOCKDOWN) as a new module called Linux Security Module or LSM.

        Although the LSM only serves to formalise a process that has been naturally built into most Linux distros all along. Documents from the kernel dossier explain: "The majority of mainstream distributions have been carrying variants of this patchset for many years now, so there's value in providing a doesn't meet every distribution requirement, but gets us much closer to not requiring external patches."

        As your puny cannon-foddered brains will not be able to understand the words of our Commander, I shall explain. The LSM means that, when activated, user code cannot interact to make changes to the kernel.

      • Linus Torvalds Agrees To Kernel Lockdown

        The feature will restrict users with root access to interact with the kernel and make changes to it.

        Linus Torvalds has finally agreed to implement lockdown feature to the Linux kernel. The features was proposed several years ago but was rejected by Torvalds.

        The upcoming release of Linux, version 5.4, will include this feature as a Linux Security Module (LSM). It will have two lockdown modes: “integrity” and “confidentiality.”

      • zfs-0.8.2 releases with support for 2.6.32 – 5.3 Linux kernels and major bug fixes

        Last week, the team behind ZFS released zfs-0.8.2, an advanced file system. This release comes with support for 2.6.32 – 5.3 Linux kernels and comes with a list of changes.

      • Linux Security Simplified: How To Make Linux More Secure (With Less Work)

        Linux is a versatile operating system. Its use cases vary greatly, from hosting hundreds of containers across a complex network, to running a single desktop, to the operating systems of TVs, Android phones and most Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

        However, its adaptability in a wide variety of settings means it can easily be used insecurely. Servers face the constant threat of online attack. To keep Linux secure, a security team would typically have to routinely perform many processes, including writing custom scripts to scrape logs off servers, manually creating SIEM integrations and parsing rules, and then further manipulating the data to visualize and report on everything they need to monitor. This is complex and time-consuming.

      • Intel

        • Intel's OSPray 2.0 Enters Alpha With Many Changes For This Ray-Tracing Engine

          OSPray 2.0 brings API-breaking changes that will require developers using this ray-tracing engine to adjust their programs. Besides various API changes, OSPray 2.0 Alpha also now integrates the Intel Open Volume Kernel Library (Open VKL) for better volume sampling, rendering features, and performance performance. The Open Volume Kernel Library is one of the newest Intel open-source projects we've been looking forward to seeing and will also be used for other high-end workstation visualization tasks.

        • Intel's Clear Linux Upgrades Its Performance-Optimized Desktop To GNOME 3.34

          For those that had been interested in GNOME 3.34 for Intel's Clear Linux when running their developer-focused, performance-optimized desktop those packages have now landed.

          With the newest builds of Clear Linux (Build 31130), the desktop components have been upgraded to the GNOME 3.34 series. I did the upgrade already on my main production system and with its swupd bundles the process was effortless and smooth without any issues to note so far.

        • Intel Releasing FSP For Xeon Scalable Skylake-SP For Coreboot Support

          Intel in cooperation with Facebook have announced they are releasing a Firmware Support Package (FSP) to allow Xeon Scalable "Skylake-SP" to boot with Coreboot.

          From the latest Open Compute Project event, Intel announced the FSP server package for Xeon Scalable to boot with Coreboot.

        • Significant Performance & Perf-Per-Watt Gains Coming For Intel CPUs On Linux Schedutil

          Sadly not making it for the just-closed Linux 5.4 merge window but hopefully something we could see in Linux 5.5 is recent patches on "frequency invariance" in optimizing the Schedutil frequency scaling governor that will really benefit Intel CPUs and improve their performance by double digits.

          In September there were revised patches from Giovanni Gherdovich based on work proposed earlier by Peter Zijlstra around frequency invariance with the x86 scheduler code to correct some behavior in the code that's surprisingly lasted this long. "For example; suppose a CPU has two frequencies: 500 and 1000 Mhz. When running a task that would consume 1/3rd of a CPU at 1000 MHz, it would appear to consume 2/3rd (or 66.6%) when running at 500 MHz, giving the false impression this CPU is almost at capacity, even though it can go faster. In a nutshell, without frequency scale-invariance tasks look larger just because the CPU is running slower."

      • Graphics Stack

        • QEMU's Assortment Of Virtual VGA/GPU Options & What To Pick For Desktop Virtualization

          The virtual GPU/display landscape particularly for having accelerated guest graphics was once non-existent and then suffering for the open-source Linux virtualization stack around QEMU, but that is no longer the case. There are options these days to rival the GPU/display offerings of VirtualBox and VMware albeit to newcomers may not be so clear.

          Longtime QEMU/virtualization developer Gerd Hoffmann has written a blog post outlining the VGA/display devices for QEMU and the recommended options. The options he covers at length include the standard VGA device, Bochs display device, VirtIO VGA, VirtIO GPU, Vhost-user VirtIO GPU, QXL VGA, QXL, Cirrua VGA, ATI VGA, and RAMFB.

        • Intel's Inaugural Release Of OpenVKL Ties Into Their Promising oneAPI Rendering Toolkit

          While announced some months ago, today in-step with the OSPray 2.0 Alpha ray-tracing release is the inaugural development release of the Open Volume Kernel Library (OpenVKL).

          Intel's Open Volume Kernel Library is a set of volume computation kernels optimized for AVX/AVX2/AVX-512 and leverages their SPMD Program Compiler. OpenVKL ties into Intel's other open-source render components like OSPray for what will form their oneAPI rendering tool-kit. We're now in Q4 and that is when the beta release of Intel's oneAPI is expected.

        • LuxCoreRender 2.2 Released With Intel Open Image Denoise Yields Faster Render Times

          LuxCoreRender, the open-source physically based renderer for execution on CPUs as well as OpenCL accelerators / GPUs, is out with version 2.2 and now integrates Intel's open-source Open Image Denoise.

          LuxCoreRender already made use of Intel's Embree library (as happened to be covered this morning with benchmark results in The Xeon vs. EPYC Performance With Intel's oneAPI Embree & OSPray Render Projects) while now they have also pulled in Intel's Open Image Denoise.

        • Unofficial Radeon ROCm Packages Re-Enable APU Support

          Over a year ago the AMD APU support in the Radeon Open Compute (ROCm) stack was quietly removed and has yet to be re-enabled in the upstream ROCm packages. But should you be wanting to use ROCm for their compute APIs or OpenCL on APUs, unofficial Ubuntu packages are now available to provide this capability.

          Engineering firm Bruhnpace AB has resorted to providing their own ROCm packages for Ubuntu 18.04 with AMD APU support enabled to make up for AMD's lack of official packages handling APUs in the different ROCm libraries. The repository doesn't provide its own rocm-dkms package but rather recommends users run the latest upstream kernels for the AMDKFD kernel driver support.

    • Benchmarks

    • Instructionals/Technical

    • Games

      • No Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation for Linux but Ashes II and future Stardock titles should be

        Good and bad news to share this Tuesday morning. Stardock Entertainment have given an update on the status of porting Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation to Vulkan and Linux.

        It's been a long road! After Stardock CEO, Brad Wardell, opened a forum post on Steam asking to see Linux requests to bring Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation to Linux back in May 2017 we've been waiting to finally see the port. That ends now though, as the latest update has basically said it's not happening.

      • Beautiful sci-fi action platformer MegaSphere just got a massive update, needs a workaround on Linux

        You've played a lot of action platformers before but not many come close to the breathtaking design work going into MegaSphere and it just got a lot bigger in the Anomaly update out now.

        This is the first major update to MegaSphere in a long time, it's an Early Access game so it's still not finished but the level of attention being put into crafting it from AKGames is truly spectacular. The Anomaly update adds in new areas, mechanics, enemies and improvements to game throughout.

      • Monthly Games I've Played In Linux | September 2019
      • New Steam Client Beta up with an updated Steam Linux Runtime and memory leak fixes

        Have you been having issues with Steam recently since the new Library Beta? This latest Beta update should make it a much better experience.

        The newer Library (and Friends UI) are a bit heavier on your PC, as a lot of people noticed. However, you can enable GPU acceleration to make everything quite a bit smoother. That came at a cost though, as there was an unfurtunate memory leak and it sucked away performance from gaming. Valve have made attempts to address these issues in the new Beta update out.

      • SCS Software are doing a Breast Cancer charity event in Euro Truck Simulator 2 and American Truck Simulator

        This is pretty sweet to see. SCS Software are running an event from now until Sunday, October 20 at 23:59 UTC to raise funds for Breast Cancer Awareness Month.

      • Valve updates Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for French players to deal with loot boxes

        Rather than doing away with the loot boxes system, Valve are going with whatever loophole they can it seems. They've updated Counter-Strike: Global Offensive just for French players to include an X-ray Scanner.

        It's no secret that many countries are looking into the issues surrounding loot box gambling, something I am happy about because it's a terrible system. Valve also have issues with France, especially considering the recent legal ruling about reselling your digital games.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Akademy! 2019 Edition

          My trip was shortened again due to flight availability, but I still got in some great BoF sessions. We were able to achieve some tasks and goals with the Fundraising Working Group. I hung out with the Neon team for a few, and it was decided I will continue the Debian merge and continue to keep the delta between Debian and neon as minimal as possible. This helps all deb based distributions in the end. I was also happy to see snaps are coming along nicely! There was a great BoF on user support, where we discussed trying to get users connected with the people that can answer questions. I believe we landed on Discourse, we are on the technical stage of making that happen.

          The core of what makes Akademy so important is the networking of course. I was able to see many old friends and meet many new ones. I was so happy to see so many new faces this year! With each year our bunch has become more and more diverse, which is always a good thing. Face to face collaboration is very important in an environment where we mostly see text all day.

      • GNOME Desktop/GTK

        • GNOME 3.34 is now managed using systemd

          If you are already using GNOME 3.34, then most likely your session is managed using systemd right now. For a long time now we were already running a systemd instance for every user, which is used to launch DBus and for DBus activated applications. So, with GNOME 3.34, we finally took the next step and moved the rest of the session over to run using systemd.

          From a user’s perspective nothing should have changed and at this point I believe that most regressions have been dealt with. Neither will this change affect application developers for the time being as XDG autostart files continue to be supported and are prefered at least for the time being.

    • Distributions

      • How to use Slax Linux? A Portable Linux distribution that doesn’t require installation

        If you want to use or get a flexible computer, want to play with new programs or simply want to tinker around with them, Linux is the best platform for you. As Linux is an open platform, you can find a lot of recipes to make your computer exactly the way you want. One of the advantages of Linux systems or more importantly most Linux distributions is that you can run the live version of distribution so that you can understand whether it will work for you. Once you start using the live version of some Linux distribution, become satisfied with that, you can always proceed with the installation of it on your system.

        Though the live version of distributions is available for most Linux distributions out there, the changes that you make on the live version will not be retained next time you boot your computer. Besides that, you can’t even install new programs as it runs in kind of a read-only mode. However, I recently came across a Linux distribution which is a perfect portable distribution of Linux that you can use. I am talking about Slax. Slax is a distribution of Linux, which can run right from your USB or thumb drive and the changes that you make will be retained, next time you boot your computer with Slax. Not to mention, Slax doesn’t require any installation as well.

        I really liked the concept of Slax, and in this tutorial, we see how we can set it up on your USB flash drive to run it on any computer you get physical access to. The best thing the changes that done during the Live usage of Slax can be saved by this lightweight Linux distro for the next usage. In this way, the user will not lose its data and will be saved on the Slax installed USB drive for next usage.

      • Screenshots/Screencasts

      • Fedora Family

        • Fedora Join is trying a new people focused workflow for newcomers

          When a newcomer, let’s call her “Jen”, comes to Fedora and looks for where to begin, the general workflow she is introduced to is quite task-oriented. “Find something to do, get started, learn along the way, ask if you have a question” we say. We have easyfix and What Can I do for Fedora (wcidff) designed to quickly help Jen find something to do, for example. The idea, of course, is that Jen will familiarise herself with the tools, the processes, and the people while she works on this task. This works sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t. It depends on what Jen has picked to do. Sometimes the learning curve is too steep—there are too many tools and processes to learn. Sometimes Jen works on her task in isolation and is too scared to ask questions they think are “silly”. Sometimes Jen just gets too busy to keep working on it.

        • Reto Gantenbein: My free software activities (2019-09)

          I’m starting a new series of blog posts summarizing my various activities regarding free software projects. There might not be every month something worth mentioning, but this month I was quite busy what might be interesting for some of you.

      • Debian Family

        • Mike Gabriel: Install ActivInspire Smart Board Software on Debian 10

          From one of my customers, I received the request to figure out an installation pathway for ActivInspire, the Promethean smart board software suite. ActivInspire is offered as DEB builds for Ubuntu 18.04. On a Debian 10 (aka buster) system the installation requires some hack-around (utilizing packages from Debian jessie LTS).

        • Ben Hutchings: Debian LTS work, September 2019

          I prepared and, after review, released Linux 3.16.74, including various security and other fixes. I then rebased the Debian package onto that. I uploaded that with a small number of other fixes and issued DLA-1930-1.

          I backported the latest security update for Linux 4.9 from stretch to jessie and issued DLA-1940-1 for that.

        • Abhijith PA: Debian packaging session

          Last week I conducted a workshop on Debian packaging at MES College of Engineering, Kuttipuram in accordance with Frisbee 19, yearly conference by IEEE cell of this college. Thanks to Anupa from ICFOSS who contacted and arranged me to take this session. I was accompanied by Subin and Abhijith from FOSSers. The time span was from 9:30 AM to 04:30 PM. Since it was a big time slot we took from the Free software evangelism –> GNU/Linux –> Debian –> how contributing to community projects can help your career.

        • Norbert Preining: 10 years in Japan

          After loosing my job at JAIST, and six months of unemployment, a lucky coincidence gifted me with a great job at an IT company in Tokyo, that allows me to work remotely from my home. I am incredibly thankful to everyone there who helped made this happen. It is a complete new world for me. After 25 years in academics being thrown into a Japanese company (all Japanese, I am the only foreigner), with business meetings, client support, etc was something unexpected for me. Maybe I count it as one of the big achievements that I manage to function properly in this kind of environment.

          I still try to keep up my research work, publishing articles every year, and as far as possible attending conferences. My OSS activities haven’t changed a lot, and I try to keep up with the projects for which I am responsible.

          What the future brings is even less unclear: Now that we have to think about the education of our daughter, moving is getting more and more a point of discussion. I really detest Japanese education system, in particular junior high school which I consider a childhood and personality killer. OTOH, we have settled into a very nice place here in Ishikawa, and at my age moving is getting more and more burdensome, not to speak of another job change. So I feel torn between returning to Europe, or remaining here in Japan. Let us see what the future brings.

      • Canonical/Ubuntu Family

        • Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 to Be Dubbed "Debbie," New Linux Mint Logo Unveiled

          Clement Lefebvre has revealed today the codename of the upcoming LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) 4 operating system series as "Debbie," which he said it suits the Debian base quite well. As you know, the LMDE edition is based on Debian GNU/Linux instead of Ubuntu as the regular Linux Mint OS is, providing a rolling release model. No release data was announced for Linux Mint Debian Edition 4 though.

          Meanwhile, work on the recently announced Linux Mint 19.3 release, which should hit the streets later this year based on Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, is ongoing as the development team managed to improve the localization of the default date format in the Language configuration tool for both the Cinnamon and MATE desktop environments.

        • Monthly News – September 2019

          Many thanks to all our donors, our sponsors, our partners and to everyone involved in supporting our project. Before we get started with the news, I’d also like to thank the people who helped us troubleshoot the Update Manager tray icon bug last month. It was an important bug, which we couldn’t easily reproduce, and thanks to you we were finally able to fix it.

          Date Format

          Last month we announced the Language configuration tool would let people choose the locale for the date format. In their feedback some users indicated this wouldn’t be enough, and they were right.

          We looked into this and identified a design flaw in the way the default date format is localized. Although the names of the days and months are localized according to the LC_TIME environment variable, we were fetching the format itself using gettext according to the desktop’s language.

          We will get this fixed in Cinnamon and in MATE for 19.3.

        • Full Circle Magazine: Full Circle Weekly News #147
        • 5G Core implementation: Challenges in the field

          In order to overcome the challenges associated with 5G Core implementation, BT, one of the biggest telcos in Europe, has recently turned to Canonical.. Having years of experience in private cloud deployments, Canonical will not only provide BT with the basis of a cloud but also help them to spread the power of Juju across their telco-specific use cases. By utilising Juju for NFVI deployment purposes, BT is aiming to use it as an NFVI / VIM (Virtual Infrastructure Manager) installer.

          To build NFVI for their 5G Core, BT will use Charmed OpenStack and Canonical’s open source tools to automate the deployment and operations. The whole stack includes MAAS for bare metal provisioning, Ubuntu Server LTS as the operating system, Juju for application modelling and orchestration, LXD for control services containerisation, and various charmed applications. Charms will be used to deploy not only OpenStack, but also a variety of supporting services, such as the whole logging and monitoring stack.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Streamlit launches open-source machine learning application development framework

        Streamlit, a new machine learning startup from industry veterans who worked at GoogleX and Zoox, launched today with a $6 million seed investment and a flexible new open-source tool to make it easier for machine learning engineers to create custom applications to interact with the data in their models.

        The seed round was led by Gradient Ventures with participation from Bloomberg Beta. A who’s who of solo investors also participated, including Color Genomics co-founder Elad Gil, #Angels founder Jana Messerschmidt, Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross, Docker co-founder Solomon Hykes and Insight Data Science CEO Jake Klamka.

      • Events

      • Web Browsers

        • Mozilla

          • Steps you can take to protect your identity online

            Data breaches are one of many online threats.

            [...]

            You can get Wi-Fi almost anywhere these days, but open networks are the most vulnerable and tend to be the least secure. This includes the free Wi-Fi at restaurants, libraries, airports and other public spaces. If you can avoid it, don’t use public Wi-Fi. Most importantly, don’t use these networks to log in to financial sites or shop online. It’s possible for someone to scan the Wi-Fi traffic to see what websites you visit. If you happen to log in to a phony public Wi-Fi without realizing it, the person who set it up could intercept your traffic and potentially gather important info like your usernames and passwords. Instead, we recommend using a secure network proxy for a browser connection or a Virtual Private Network (VPN) for full device network connection. These services let you use public Wi-Fi more securely and can help keep more of your online activities private.

          • Video Shorts from Mozilla Developer

            We’re excited to launch a new resource for people who build the web! It will include short videos, articles, demos, and tools that teach web technologies and standards, browser tools, compatibility, and more. No matter your experience level or job description, we’re all working together towards the future health of the web, and Mozilla is here to help.

            Today we’re launching a new video channel, with a selection of shorts to kick things off. There are two in our “about:web” series on web technologies, and one in our “Firefox” series on browser tools for web professionals.

            Get started with an intro to Dark Mode on the web, by Deja Hodge — and check out her dark mode demo.

      • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

        • LibreOffice 10/20 Logo Community Contest

          The year 2020 will be the 20th anniversary of the free office suite (OpenOffice.org was announced on July 19, 2000) and the 10th anniversary of LibreOffice (announced on September 28, 2010). We have the opportunity to celebrate both during the year, to reaffirm the fact that LibreOffice today is the leading free office suite available in the market.

          For the anniversary project, we need a specific logo which celebrates the 10/20 anniversary without making a difference between the two dates, as the concept is that LibreOffice was born 20 years ago as OpenOffice.org, and evolved into LibreOffice 10 years ago.

          The 10/20 logo should be easy to associate to the current LibreOffice logo (with tagline), and follow TDF design and style guides (Corporate Image) published on the wiki: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Marketing/Branding.

          The 10/20 logo will be used for presentations, event signage, swag and gadgets (like stickers). It should be easy to recognize and read at small sizes.

        • Interview with Ilmari Lauhakangas, Development Marketing

          Ilmari Laukahangas, based in Helsinki (Finland), is in charge of Development Marketing.

          We have asked him a few questions, about his relationship with free software and his role in the community.

          [...]

          This is more of a political question. If money and resources are lacking in education, teachers will not have time to offer structured introductions to free software projects. Likewise, if higher education is not free, students will have to work alongside their studies and will not have the energy contribute to FOSS.

          On our part, we need to provide students with software they can rely on. In Finland, thirty thousand students in advanced secondary education use LibreOffice every year. If they find the software enjoyable, surely they are more inclined to contribute.

      • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

        • Daniel Martin Gomez: Hacking GNU for the first time

          Hi, my name is Daniel. I'm from Spain, where I'm currently studying baccalaureate in sciences before entering university next fall. I was first introduced to GNU/Linux and free software when I was in primary school, and since my last year there I've been using only GNU/Linux distributions on my computer. I started learning programming (a bit of Python) about five years ago, but I quickly moved to C. I had worked on some of my own projects before I joined the FSF this September.

          This fall, as part of my internship, I've been contributing to GNU Wget2, a reimplementation of GNU Wget, working on different tasks, most of them from the issues list of the wget2 repository at GitLab. I started with some issues marked as "Junior" in order to get used to the source code, and after some weeks, I went to more difficult tasks like adding some features from wget1.x, such as the speed reporting support to the progress bar or the --use-askpass option (I simply ported the original source code) which calls an extern application given by the user, for instance ssh-askpass, that requests for a username and password. In this way, sensible data is hidden from the command line and the ps output.

        • GNU Guix: Join GNU Guix through Outreachy

          We are happy to announce that for the third time GNU Guix offers a three-month internship through Outreachy, the inclusion program for groups traditionally underrepresented in free software and tech.

      • Programming/Development

        • Introduction to microservices observability with Eclipse MicroProfile

          Eclipse MicroProfile provides several solutions to microservice challenges, including various specifications to promote observability in our microservices. With these specs, we can use MicroProfile with Jaeger, Zipkin, Prometheus, and other tools to promote better observability and monitoring. I will provide more details of these specs and how to use them in upcoming articles.

        • Building A Modern Discussion Forum In Python To Support Healthy Communities

          Building and sustaining a healthy community requires a substantial amount of effort, especially online. The design and user experience of the digital space can impact the overall interactions of the participants and guide them toward respectful conversation. In this episode Rafał Pitoń shares his experience building the Misago platform for creating community forums. He explains his motivation for creating the project, the lessons he has learned in the process, and how it is being used by himself and others. This was a great conversation about how technology is just a means, and not the end in itself.

        • Tryton News: Newsletter October 2019

          Now we prevent to set a value for an unknown field in proteus scripts and in Tryton modules model definitions. For that we add __slots__ automatically on each model. A positive side effect is that it reduces also the memory consumption of each instance.

          The PYSON Eval now supports the dotted notation. This feature is a common expectation from beginners. So we decided it is good to support it.

        • Install Python PIP: A python package manager
        • Analyzing API Data with MongoDB, Seaborn, and Matplotlib
        • KDTableToListProxyModel: a flattening proxy model

          With this blog post we are going to kickstart our brand new blog series about KDToolBox. The first class we’re exploring is KDTableToListProxyModel, a table-to-list proxy model.

          The main use case for KDTableToListProxyModel is exposing tabular models to Qt Quick. Qt Quick has a certain number of “view” elements that only support list models: for instance, ListView, PathView, Repeater, and so on. Multiple pieces of data for a given index (row) in the model are provided by using multiple roles for that index.

        • Writing a simple Pytest hook

          Pytest is my go to Python testing framework due to it's flexibility. One of the great features it has is the ability to write hooks into various points of the test suite execution. These can all be references via the API docs. At work we can have hundreds of tests and sometimes changes can cause tens of tests to fail. Now let's not too far into the "When you make changes only a few tests should break. You shouldn't be seeing 30-40 test failures." Well sure that is great with an ideal test suite but sometimes you're just not going to have that. Or you'll be making a change to a middleware which affects all calls and you have a mass of failures. When you have 30-40 tests failing, if not just 10, you'll find yourself sifting through lots of pytest output to just find the tests that failed. Because of that let's just hook into pytests execution and write all of our test failures to failures.txt so we can see very clearly which of our tests have failed.

        • EuroPython 2019 - Videos for Friday available

          In this batch, we have included all videos for Friday, July 12 2019, the third conference day.

          In total, we now have 133 videos available for you to watch.

        • Python Pune Meetup September 2k19

          “If there’s a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it.” ― Toni Morrison

          It’s a pleasant morning and I was looking at my calendar and bang its Saturday time to have some fun to meet new peoples ( #meetup_day ).

          It’s 9:00 AM I got a call from my friend Akshay Gaikwad and he informs me that how we are driving to our destination Shoptimize India Private Limited.

          then around 9:15 AM I meet Chandan Kumar and Bhusan and book our Ride. now it’s a road trip of 30-40 min and we discuss about talks that are going to be held in the meetup and I am very excited about them because it’s my first time for #Pythonpune.

        • Django bugfix releases: 2.2.6, 2.1.13 and 1.11.25

          Today we've issued the 2.2.6, 2.1.13, and 1.11.25 bugfix releases.

        • 14 Excellent Free Books to Learn Prolog

          Prolog is a general purpose, declarative, logic programming language, often associated with artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, intelligent database retrieval, and problem solving. It’s widely used in research and education for natural language processing.

          Automatic backtracking is one of the most characteristic features of Prolog. It’s a form of searching, fundamental to all artificial intelligence techniques. Prolog also supports multi-directional reasoning; arguments to a procedure can freely be designated inputs and outputs in different ways in different procedure calls. This is a powerful theorem-proving technique. Another key feature of Prolog is that its syntax and semantics are closer to formal logic than say Lisp.

          Prolog is generally regarded as a difficult language to get to grips with. But learning the fundamentals of Prolog is definitely worthwhile.

        • Rene Dudfield: post modern C tooling - draft 2

          This is a post about contemporary C tooling. Tooling for making higher quality C, faster.

          In 2001 or so people started using the phrase "Modern C++". So now that it's 2019, I guess we're in the post modern era? Anyway, this isn't a post about C++ code, but some of this information applies there too.

        • Strings and Character Data in Python

          In this course, you’ll learn about working with strings, which are objects that contain sequences of character data. Processing character data is integral to programming. It is a rare application that doesn’t need to manipulate strings to at least some extent.

        • Test Driven Development with PyTest - Part 1

          This will be a 3 part series for anyone who is looking to get up to speed and integrate TDD testing practices using Pytest.

          When I first started to learn about TDD, it was one of my software engineering classes at University.

          The professor was introducing TDD through the use of JUnit which back then I find it was a pain to set up and configure.

          Plus not seeing the value of having it as a developer practice. I just chuck it away as a good to have skill but not necessarily used during software development.

        • Python for NLP: Deep Learning Text Generation with Keras

          This is the 21st article in my series of articles on Python for NLP. In the previous article, I explained how to use Facebook's FastText library for finding semantic similarity and to perform text classification. In this article, you will see how to generate text via deep learning technique in Python using the Keras library.

          Text generation is one of the state-of-the-art applications of NLP. Deep learning techniques are being used for a variety of text generation tasks such as writing poetry, generating scripts for movies, and even for composing music. However, in this article we will see a very simple example of text generation where given an input string of words, we will predict the next word. We will use the raw text from Shakespeare's famous novel "Macbeth" and will use that to predict the next word given a sequence of input words.

          After completing this article, you will be able to perform text generation using the dataset of your choice. So, let's begin without further ado.

  • Leftovers

    • Science

    • Health/Nutrition

      • These Sheriffs Release Sick Inmates to Avoid Paying Their Hospital Bills

        Michael Tidwell’s blood sugar reading was at least 15 times his normal level when sheriff’s deputies took him to the hospital. But before they loaded the inmate into the back of a car, deputies propped up his slumping body and handed him a pen so he could sign a release from the Washington County Jail.

        “I could barely stand up or keep my eyes open,” he recalled.

    • Security (Confidentiality/Integrity/Availability)

      • Hey Doordash: Why Are You Hiding Your 'Security Notice' From Google Just Days After You Revealed A Massive Security Breach?

        As you might have heard, late last week, delivery company DoorDash admitted via a Medium post that there had been a large data breach exposing info on 4.9 million users of the service. The breach had actually happened months earlier, but was only just discovered earlier this month.

      • Mitigate “tabnabbing” without breaking window.open() features

        The security issues and performance hit of websites opening a new window are fairly well understood. However, applying the rel=noopener mitigation has its own drawbacks and isn’t backward-compatible.

        In this article, I’ll focus exclusively on the problems introduced along with support for rel=noopener in Google Chrome version 49. The above links were your queue to read-up on it if you’re unfamiliar with the issue.

      • Guess what? You should patch Exim again!

        CVE-2019-16928 is heap-based buffer overflow in string_vformat found in string.c, and affects Exim versions 4.92 – 4.92.2 (but not v4.91 or earlier). It was discovered and reported by the QAX A-Team.

        “The flaw can be exploited by an unauthenticated remote attacker who could use a large crafted Extended HELO (EHLO) string to crash the Exim process that receives the message. This could potentially be further exploited to execute arbitrary code on the host,” Tenable researcher Scott Caveza pointed out.

        Exim maintainers say that the currently known exploit uses a extraordinary long EHLO string to crash the Exim process that is receiving the message, but that other paths to reach the vulnerable code may exist.

      • SUSE and the New IBM z15 - Securing the World

        From my very early days in this industry as an IBM VM/CP programmer, I never would have thought I’d still be talking about this and be a part of the evolution of modern-day innovative value of the mainframe. Its architecture is resilient, its performance and efficiency are world-class, and its data protection and privacy capabilities are revolutionary.

        The latest IBM z15 system was designed to support your mission-critical initiatives and allow you to be innovative as you design and scale your environment. Combined with SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for IBM Z and LinuxONE, these state-of-the-art systems provide an ultra-secure data serving platform to support the global economic growth we are seeing today.

      • Real Python: Preventing SQL Injection Attacks With Python

        Every few years, the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) ranks the most critical web application security risks. Since the first report, injection risks have always been on top. Among all injection types, SQL injection is one of the most common attack vectors, and arguably the most dangerous. As Python is one of the most popular programming languages in the world, knowing how to protect against Python SQL injection is critical.

      • Canonical Outs Major Linux Kernel Security Patch for Ubuntu 18.04 and 16.04 LTS

        The new Linux kernel security update fixes two vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-20976 and CVE-2019-15538) in the Linux 4.15 kernel used in both Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, discovered in the XFS file system, which could allow a local attacker to either execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service (system crash). The CVE-2018-20976 issue was also fixed in the Linux 4.4 kernel.

        As for the security issues addressed in the Linux 4.4 kernel used on some Ubuntu 16.04 LTS systems, we can mention a race condition (CVE-2016-10905) in the GFS2 file system, an integer overflow (CVE-2019-11487) in the Linux kernel discovered when reference counting pages, as well as a race condition (CVE-2019-15215) in the CPiA2 video4linux device driver.



      • Security updates for Tuesday

        Security updates have been issued by Debian (apache2, linux-4.9, netty, phpbb3, and poppler), openSUSE (chromium, djvulibre, ghostscript, python-numpy, SDL2, and varnish), Oracle (nodejs:10), Red Hat (httpd24-httpd and httpd24-nghttp2, kpatch-patch, and rh-nodejs10-nodejs), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, linux-oem, linux-oracle, linux-raspi2, linux-snapdragon, and SDL 2.0).

      • USPTO removable media policy [Ed: Because they still use Microsoft Windows with its back doors.]

        If you are visiting the USPTO, do not bring a “personal removable media storage device.” U.S. Gov’t computer security has been compromised on numerous occasions based via USB drive viruses. The solution is to email the file to the examiner (and yourself); bring in a “finalized CD/DVD“; or connect via a secure file sharing service (PTO suggests Kiteworks).

      • Visitor Rules for USPTO
    • Defence/Aggression

      • The Wounds of War in Afghanistan

        Its economy gutted by war, Afghanistan’s largest cash crop remains opium. Yet farmers there do grow other crops for export. Villagers in the Wazir Tangi area of Nangarhar province, for example, cultivate pine nuts. As a precaution, this year at harvest time, village elders notified the governor of the province that they would be bringing in migrant workers to help them collect the nuts. Hired laborers, including children, would camp out in the pine nut forests, they informed the officials. They hoped their letter could persuade U.S. and ISIS forces, which had been fighting in or near their villages, not to attack.

      • Just as Iraq Begins to Find Peace, It Once Again Becomes the Battleground for an American Proxy War

        People in Baghdad are fearful that the next war between the US and Iran will take place in Iraq, which is only just returning to peace after the defeat of Isis. Alarm that Iraq will be sucked into such a conflict has increased here because of recent Israeli drone attacks on the bases of the Iraqi paramilitary group€ known as the Hashd al-Shaabi, which is accused by the US and Israel of acting as a proxy of Iran.

    • Environment

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • California to Let College Athletes Sign Endorsement Deals

        SDefying the NCAA, California’s governor signed a first-in-the-nation law Monday that will let college athletes hire agents and make money from endorsements — a move that could upend amateur sports in the U.S. and trigger a legal challenge.

      • For Trump, Regime Change Begins at Home

        A month after he won the 2016 presidential election, Donald Trump gave a speech in North Carolina where he declared that “we will stop racing to topple foreign regimes that we know nothing about, that we shouldn’t be involved with.”

      • Trump—Will He Implode with Lies Before He is Impeached?

        Donald Trump said he believes the Constitution lets him do “whatever I want as President.” In over two and a half years, Trump has been a serial violator of the Constitution, unmatched by any president in American history. Just about every day he is a constitutional outlaw.

      • Impeachment is on the Rails, But That’s Not the Hard Part

        On September 24, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) elbowed her way to the front of a parade she’d been trying to disperse since early 2017. “Today,” she said, “I’m announcing the House of Representatives is moving forward with an official impeachment inquiry and directing our six committees to proceed with their investigation under that umbrella of impeachment inquiry.”

      • My Russia Hot-Air Balloon

        Wouldn’t you like to ride in my Russia hot-air balloon? Wouldn’t you like to malign in my Russia hot-air balloon? We’ll rig the vote with media folk together, you and I, For we can LIE!!!

      • Ralph Nader: Trump Can't Be Impeached for Ukraine Alone

        Donald Trump said he believes the Constitution lets him do “whatever I want as President.” In over two and a half years, Trump has been a serial violator of the Constitution, unmatched by any president in American history. Just about every day he is a constitutional outlaw.

      • Scott Morrison’s China Thesis

        China has rattled Western observers for centuries, and the idea that it might be approaching a level of formidable heft is troubling to those who, condescendingly, see it as a naughty child who aspired to economic growth but could only do so as long as it behaved. In other words, they achieved success because we let them, and profited from our generosity. (The “we” here constitutes a good number of rapacious powers that stripped the country bare in the nineteenth century and turned the country into a giant opium addict.)

      • The New Evil Empire

        The US seems to have decided that it can’t take on China and Russia at the same time, so its principal geopolitical rival in the coming decades will be China. Trump’s Republican administration and the Democrats agree on this, though they are campaigning vigorously against each other ahead of next year’s presidential election. China has replaced the ‘evil empire’ of the Soviet Union and ‘Islamic terrorism’ as the US’s main adversary. But China, unlike the Soviet Union, has a dynamic economy, with which the US has an enormous trade deficit. And China’s strength is far more impressive than that of a few tens of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist fighters wandering the deserts of ancient Mesopotamia or the mountains of Afghanistan.

      • U.K.'s Johnson Denies Wrongdoing as Personal Allegations Mount

        U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson battled to fend off allegations of improper patronage and groping a woman as he prepared a final push Monday to fulfill his pledge to lead Britain out of the European Union in just over a month.

      • The Real Lesson of Ukraine-gate: Trump Will Do Anything To Win in 2020

        Regardless of how the impeachment turns out, Trump’s predation can be constrained as long as his presidency can be ended with the 2020 election. If that election is distorted, and if this man is reelected, all bets are off. € 

      • The Democratic Party Couldn't Care Less About Whistleblowers

        All of a sudden, MoveOn wants to help “national security” whistleblowers.

      • A 75-year-old Russian scientist spent a year in jail awaiting trial for treason. Now diagnosed with lung cancer, he's been released to his family.

        On September 27, 75-year-old Viktor Kudryavtsev was released from Moscow’s Lefortovo Pretrial Detention Center after more than a year behind bars. The government-employed engineer stands accused of sending confidential data from a state research center to a group of his Belgian colleagues via email. His attorneys have argued that he hadn’t had access to the data in question for more than 20 years.

    • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Ring Considered Using 911 Calls To Trigger Automated Streaming Of Camera Footage To Local PDs

        Amazon's Ring doorbell/camera venture hasn't met a news cycle it can't fill with unintentionally-bad PR. Every time someone thinks they've heard the last odious effort by this company to become an unofficial extension of police department surveillance networks, another set of documents obtained through public records requests resets the counter to "zero days since last PR black eye."

      • No, The New Agreement To Share Data Between US And UK Law Enforcement Does Not Require Encryption Backdoors

        It's no secret many in the UK government want backdoored encryption. The UK wing of the Five Eyes surveillance conglomerate says the only thing that should be "absolute" is the government's access to communications. The long-gestating "Snooper's Charter" frequently contained language mandating "lawful access," the government's preferred nomenclature for encryption backdoors. And officials have, at various times, made unsupported statements about how no one really needs encryption, so maybe companies should just stop offering it.

      • New treaty will allow UK to request data, not backdoor, from US social media companies like WhatsApp

        Social media apps like WhatsApp will be obligated to share what they share with the US with the UK under a proposed United States, United Kingdom treaty called the CLOUD Act. From what security experts are gleaming from the law, the CLOUD ACT opens up data requests that WhatsApp usually fills for the US for the UK. More specifically, it allows a path for legitimate requests for data, the kind that are already filled for US law enforcement, from UK law enforcement. Currently, other countries can only officially request basic information, such as IP address, during an investigation. This most recent Act can be seen as a continuation of recent talks by Five Eye nations to plan how they will deal with the “scourge” of end to end encrypted messaging.

      • Welcome To A World Of 500-Megapixel Cameras, And Surveillance Systems Able To Zoom In On Small Objects A Kilometer Away

        Here on Techdirt, we love digital technology. We love how Moore's Law and its equivalents help drive continual innovation and open up interesting new uses and possibilities. But powerful technology is just a tool, and like any other tool it can be used in good and bad ways. Which brings us to this latest piece of high-tech wizardry: a 500-megapixel cloud-based camera system with built-in AI, developed in China. The English-language Global Times, which is closely aligned with the views of the Chinese government, explains one possible use of such a system:

      • California: Tell Governor Newsom to Stop Face Surveillance on Police Body Cams

        Communities called for police officers to carry or wear cameras, with the hope that doing so would improve police accountability, not further mass surveillance. But today, we stand at a crossroads: face recognition technology is now capable of being interfaced with body-worn cameras in real-time—a development that has grave implications for privacy and free speech.

        If California Governor Gavin Newsom signs A.B. 1215 before October 13, he affirms California should take the opportunity to hit the brakes on police use of this troubling technology in the state. This gives legislators and citizens time to evaluate the dangers of face surveillance, and it prevents the threat of mass biometric surveillance from becoming the new normal.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Facetime Stunt Reminds Iranians Abroad of Forced Separation from Loved Ones

        On Friday, media€ reported€ the US State Department had rejected the request of Iran’s Foreign Minister, Javad Zarif, to visit his country’s UN Ambassador, Majid Takht-Ravanchi, who is currently in hospital in the US for cancer treatment.

      • Bangladesh: Halt Plans to Fence-In Rohingya Refugees

        The Bangladesh government’s plans for barbed wire and guard towers around Rohingya refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar violate refugees’ rights to freedom of movement.

      • Russian actor whose arresting officer dislocated his shoulder gets suspended sentence on appeal

        The Moscow City Court has replaced actor Pavel Ustinov’s 3.5-year prison sentence with a one-year suspended sentence on appeal. However, the ruling found the lower court justified in convicting Ustinov of violence against a Russian National Guard officer. When Ustinov was arrested during Moscow’s August 3 election protest, one of the officers who forcibly subdued him allegedly suffered a dislocated shoulder.

      • When Welfare Checks Turn Deadly

        Think twice before you call the cops to carry out a welfare check on a loved one.

      • Trafficking of Females Goes Beyond Sex

        Nadja was brought to Germany from Bulgaria almost two years ago, at the age of 19. She told me that before arriving in Germany, she was told she would be working in either a beauty salon or a jewelry shop specializing in watches, that her housing would be paid for, and that her salary would allow her to send money home to support her family. Coming from the EU’s poorest country, where four out of 10 people are at risk of poverty or social exclusion, she was tempted by the promise of free professional training—something she would never have received in Bulgaria.

      • Trans Behind Bars: Homophobia Persists At Shakopee Prison After End To No-Touch Policy

        Incarcerated LGBTQ+ people at Shakopee, a state prison in Minnesota, ended a no-touch policy and have pushed for trans men to receive hormones. Still, a homophobic, transphobic culture persists, especially among the staff and administration. A person can still be punished for a simple high-five at Shakopee.

        Located in Scott County, the only “women’s” facility in the state implemented a no-touch policy eight years ago that punished any incarcerated person who touched another incarcerated person. The facility invoked the policy to police platonic gestures, like helping someone out of a wheelchair, but more troubling, it is also used to target anyone who is an LGBTQ+ prisoner.

      • Donald Trump Is Finished

        I’m not going to bury the lede: Donald John Trump, the 45th president of the United States, is going to be impeached. Not only that, but whether or not the GOP-controlled Senate convicts Trump of “high crimes and misdemeanors,” his presidency is drawing to a close. Unless a political deus ex machina comes to his rescue, he will not serve a second term.

      • Facebook Touts Bans While Taking Hate Groups’ Cash

        Facebook has made a point of announcing anti-hate speech policies that include the blocking of white nationalist posts and outright bans of people like Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan for their hateful content, However, the social media giant has taken millions in advertising fees from hate groups and their leaders, according to Sludge’s Alex Kotch, who reviewed Facebook advertising data.

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

    • Monopolies

      • Senate Antitrust Hearing Explores Big Tech’s Merger Mania

        The Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Antitrust, Competition and Consumer Rights held a hearing€ last week to explore the competitive impacts of big tech companies’ massive string of mergers with smaller companies in the last handful of years. Before the Senate committee were experts in venture capital spending, the Federal Trade Commission (the agency tasked with merger reviews), and legal experts in antitrust law.€ 

        EFF believes a hard look and update of mergers and acquisitions policy is one of many actions needed to preserve the life cycle of competition that has been a hallmark of the Internet. In the past, the Internet was a place where a bright idea by someone with modest resources was able to be leveraged from their home into the next big innovation. We have lost track of that as a small number of corporations now control a vast array of Internet products and services we all depend on and now appear to have formed a kill zone around their markets where the incumbents target the new entrants through an acquisition or substitution by the incumbent.

      • Patents and Software Patents

        • U$PTO

          Likely PTO budget for FY2020 (starting Oct 1, 2019) is $3.45 Billion. 2.4% increase over FY2019. As in years past, the spending is limited by PTO collections — it cannot spend more than it collects.

        • Patent Grants Per Year

          FY2019 is over and the numbers are out. The USPTO has issued 336,886 utility patents during the fiscal year. This is a big increase over both FY2018 (306,912) and FY2017 (315,367).

        • University of California/Berkeley et al. Authorized to File Motion Opposed to Broad Substantive Motion No. 1

          The Order sets a deadline date of October 18, 2019, for filing an opposition, and extends the page limit from 25 to 32 pages (equivalent to the extended page limit the PTAB permitted the Broad to file in its Substantive Motion No. 1. This Order is neither unexpected nor particularly informative; any decision other than outright denial of the Broad's Substantive Motion No. 1 requires granting CVC the right to have their say (and the Broad's motion is too substantive for that to occur). But these circumstances make possible a reprise of the outcome in the earlier interference between these parties (No. 106,048), wherein CVC will be prevented from having the opportunity to have the PTAB determine on the merits whether CVC's inventors (including recognized inventors of CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier) or Feng Zhang et al. were the first to invent applications of CRISPR for use in eukaryotic cells.

      • Copyrights

        • Nintendo play ISP blocking to win

          Nintendo is a well-known Japanese company that designs, manufactures and sells video games consoles, accessories and software. One of its most successful products is the Nintendo Switch, having sold millions of consoles in the UK. Nintendo brought a claim, in the UK High Court (Chancery Division), for an injunction seeking that five UK ISP’s block access to four target website that advertised, distributed and offered for sale devices that allowed technical protection measures on the Nintendo Switch games console to be circumvented.

          [...]

          Nintendo relied on sections 296ZD and 296 CDPA88, which implement Article 6 of the Information Society Directive 2001/29/EC and Article 7(1)(c) of the Software Directive 2009/24/EC. In Case Nintendo v PC Box C-355/12 [Kat Posts here], the CJEU explained that Art 6 is to be interpreted broadly and "includes application of an access control or protection process, such as encryption, scrambling or other transformation of the work". Arnold accepted Nintendo's submission that this included the TPMs in this case, which encrypt the video games including their artwork, text, and soundtracks to prevent unauthorised copies being created or played on the Nintendo Switch console.

          [...]

          There are four threshold conditions which need to be satisfied in order for a website-blocking injunction to be granted: 1) the defendants are intermediaries within the meaning of Art 11 of the Enforcement Directive, 2) the users and/or operators of the website are infringing the claimants' IP rights, 3) those users and/or operators are using the defendants' services to infringe; and 4) the defendants have actual knowledge of this (which may be as a result of notification by the rights holder)

          It was accepted that 1) the Defendants were intermediaries; 2) the operators of the target websites were infringing Nintendo's rights in the UK; 3) the operators were using the Defendants' services to do this; and 4) the Defendants had actual knowledge of this, because they had been notified by Nintendo.

          In deciding whether to grant a website-blocking injunction the court must consider eight criteria over and above the threshold conditions. The injunction must be (1) necessary, (2) effective, (3) dissuasive, (4) not unduly costly or complicated, (5) avoid barriers to legitimate trade, (6) a fair balance between the fundamental rights engaged, (7) proportionate and (8) safeguarded against abuse. Of these factors, proportionality is the key one, since consideration of the other factors feeds into the proportionality analysis.

        • New Study On Effects Of Manga Piracy Show Piracy's Effects Are More Nuanced Than Good Or Bad

          In all of our years and years of discussions on piracy and copyright infringement, one sweeping issue with the public discourse on the topic is how bereft of nuance it is. It's as though the world has been confronted with a massively complicated topic, the internet and digital piracy and their effects on content makers, and decided to make the conversation binary. Piracy is fine. Piracy is horrible.

        • Nintendo Takes Down Facebook-Tooled Donkey Kong Remake

          Nintendo is continuing to home in on those who copy its classic gaming creations. In a new DMCA complaint filed at Github, the gaming giant targets a remake of Donkey Kong that was created by the technical director of an Australia-based technology consultancy company. The creation, which utilizes tools developed by Facebook, was publicly documented more than a year ago.

        • Facebook Blocks Users from Sharing Pirate Bay Links

          Facebook no longer allows its users to share links to The Pirate Bay on their timelines or in chat messages. The blockade follows similar measures taken against other pirate sites in previous weeks. This is not the first time Facebook has taken against against The Pirate Bay but the current measures go substantially further.

        • Top Oracle Lawyer Attempting To Gaslight Entire Software Community: Insists APIs Are Executable

          Last week, the Solicitor General of the White House weighed in on Google's request for the Supreme Court to overturn the Federal Circuit's ridiculously confused ruling in the Oracle/Google case concerning the copyrightability of APIs (and whether or not repurposing them is fair use). Not surprisingly, as the Solicitor General has been siding with Oracle all along, it suggests that the Supreme Court not hear the case. Of course, it does so by completely misrepresenting what's at stake in the case -- pretending that this is about whether or not software source code is copyright-eligible:



Recent Techrights' Posts

"Journalism in Twitter" is a Paradox
"I am writing an article" is not the same as "I am writing a set of tweets" (usually random thoughts and unverified assertions, citing other unverified assertions)
The Future of the World Wide Web is Just 'Webapps' in Chrome, Not Web Pages in One's Browser of Choice
The monoculture gets worse, not better
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What's happening here is, they rip off people using their "stolen" (GPL-violating) product
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Today's Slopwatch
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No, Mr. "Journalist", You Might be Corrupt (But Denying It to Yourself and to Others to Pacify Your Consciousness)
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Coming soon
Anonymity for Sources
At the moment we can learn about stories in person or in encrypted voice chat
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"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world"
Oligarch-Owned Media Twists the Narrative and Demands More Surveillance
Corruption is the real issue here
Windows Falls to Single-Digit "Market Share" in Benin
Windows has fallen even further
[Meme] Doing Online Activism in Social Control Media
Dictators have always loved lists
Gemini Links 13/12/2024: Creative Moods, Berkeley DB, and More
Links for the day
Microsoft Windows Falls to New All-Time Low in Guatemala (Less Than a Quarter)
When it comes to operating systems, we don't think we've mentioned it before
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, December 12, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, December 12, 2024
[Meme] Leave My /home Alone
A new version of Systemd
There's a New Version of Lagrange (Gemini Reader) and Its Developer is Making an IDE/Editor
I share or reciprocate almost anything I can through Gemini Protocol
International Troll Alert by Helen Plews
Helen Plews from Cybershow has this new article
Nick's Job at OSI: Promote Microsoft, Promote Proprietary Software
This is what Microsoft pays him to do
[Meme] Award-Winning Back-stabbing Opportunists
part of the rebel alliance
The FSF (Free Software Foundation, Inc.) Can Reach Its Funding Goal of $400,000. This Bothers the Imposters and Foes of the FSF.
Software Freedom is something we must perpetually fight for
Azerbaijan Rejects Microsoft
Azerbaijan seems to have very little interest in Microsoft
Linux Foundation Pays for LLM Slop (Puff Pieces Made by Bots) About the Linux Foundation
The so-called Linux Foundation is responsible for the production of spam and slop
[Meme] You Just Grab Him by the CoC
Sponsors of Python Software Foundation... "You don't like Python's corporate sponsor?"
Explaining What Deb Nicholson Does to the Python Software Foundation
Of course the OSI, which Nicholson also occupied, still helps Microsoft attack copyleft
IBM Said to Be Firing People Days Before Christmas
IBM is entering taboo territories
Microsoft Falls to Just 11% in Ivory Coast
Microsoft tried hard to catch up in mobile
General Consultative Committee (GCC) Meeting at the European Patent Office (EPO) Shows Existing Problems
the "real problems" and why "digitalisation" doesn't solve them
Links 12/12/2024: Shell Settles With Greenpeace, DOJ Whistleblower Pilot Program
Links for the day
Gemini Links 12/12/2024: AuraGem TV and Advent of Code 2024
Links for the day
Fake "Linux" News, Produced by Microsoft Chatbots in 'Brittany Day' or "LinuxSecurity" Clothing
She's back at it
Microsoft OSI Promoting GitHub, Which is Proprietary and a Massive GPL Violator
OSI works for Microsoft, speaks for Microsoft, promotes proprietary software
Links 12/12/2024: Another 'Self-driving' Cars Dead End, Infowars Sale Blocked by Court
Links for the day
Links 12/12/2024: "Hey Hi" Hype Debunked, ActivityPub and Gemini Software on Same Server
Links for the day
Google Has Only Solidified Its Search Monopoly in Africa Since Microsoft's Chatbot/LLM Hype Started
Africa is basically a "Failed Market" to Microsoft
[Teaser] EPO is Running Out of Brains
EPO has been in the business of offering fake patents
South Korea Has Its Own Alternative to IBM's Proprietary RHEL
Owing to the Open Enterprise Linux Association (OpenELA)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, December 11, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, December 11, 2024