This year marks my 20th anniversary of using Linux. I discovered it when applying for a position at a startup called Stormix Technologies. Stormix long ago had its moment of glory and flamed out, but working for it left me a dedicated Linux user. I didn’t know at the time, but my entire relationship to computing changed permanently as a result.
To begin with, it’s been sixteen years since I bought a piece of software — and that was reluctantly, in order to complete work for a client. It’s been even longer since I was tempted to pirate software. Both facts imply the same thing: unlike most computer users, I stopped being a consumer of software. What I became instead was part of an ecosystem of users, and a potential partner in development if I chose to be. These days, purchasing and pirating software alike seem like a quaint custom of the past, like cranking a car before driving. I look with pity on those who purchase or pirate, regarding them as unnecessarily trapped in a toxic relationship.
Having stopped consuming software, I also changed my relationship with the manufacturers of software. As a consumer, I had almost no contact with those who wrote the software I used. Mostly, I would get news of updates (read: another chance to spend money). If I ran into troubles, I might contact technical support, and more often than not, endure being asked a series of obvious questions while I fumed with impatience waiting to be given a fix. Tinkering on my own was forbidden by license, and mostly impossible since I had no access to the source code.
Anyone looking to finally get their hands on an early release of the PinePhone, can now do so as of November 15.
Created by Pine64, the PinePhone is an affordable Linux phone with a price tag of only $149.00. This phone is targeted at Linux enthusiasts and developers looking for privacy-centric open source software and hardware kill switches.
The specs for the PinePhone are humble (to say the least). The device includes an Allwinner A64 1.2 GHz quad-core A53 CPU, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of storage, a 5.9” IPS LCD display, a 2MP front-facing camera and a 5MP rear-facing camera, a Mali 400 MP2 GPU, a 3000 mAh battery, and a USB C port.
Linux certifications present an interesting mix of distribution- and brand-agnostic credentials, as well as vendor-specific ones. Many of these offerings provide data center professionals with defined pathways to learn, use and master Linux OS management, features and potential Linux use cases.
Other programs are more ad hoc and specific to certain IT roles, such as systems engineers or IT administrators, but they go beyond self-taught curriculums and forums. Each program includes coursework and an exam. Depending on the certification, admins can buy everything as a bundle or pay separately for study materials and exams.
From System76 setting up their own manufacturing facility for Linux desktops to Dell offering more Linux laptop options, the demand for pre-loaded Linux PCs continues to increase. One of the smaller Linux PC vendors also now expanding is German-based TUXEDO Computers.
TUXEDO Computers shared that they are moving into new (and larger) offices in the lovely city of Augsburg, Germany. Up to now the company had been located in Königsbrunn, a quaint town in Bavaria, but now they are relocating to the town of Augsburg itself.
Well, that was three interesting articles on the same topic on the same day, namely, billionaires. And read in turn they explain exactly why the Linux Desktop is still at such a marginal market share, and why that’s not because we, who work hard on it, are failures who have been doing the wrong thing all the time. It is in the first place policies, bought with money, that allowed people to build monopolies, taxing individuals and so becoming even more rich and powerful.
However, what it is about, is the question: why is Bill Gates not in jail for life with all his wealth stripped off? He’s a criminal, and his crime has directly harmed us, the people working on free software, on the Linux Desktop.
So, to make things painfully clear: Bill Gates made it so that his company would tax every computer sold no matter whether it ran Windows or not. If a manufacturer wanted to sell computers running Windows, all the computers it sold were taxed by Microsoft. He would get paid for the work a Linux distribution was doing, and the Linux distribution would not get that money.
The impact of High-Performance Computing (HPC) goes beyond traditional research boundaries to enhance our daily lives. SC19 is the international conference for High Performance Computing, networking, storage and analysis taking place in Denver November 17-22. SUSE will once again have a strong presence at SC19 – and if you are attending we would love to talk to you! Our SUSE booth (#1917) will include our popular Partner Theater as well as a VR light saber game with a Star Wars themed backdrop. We will showcase SUSE’s HPC core solutions (OS, tools and Services) as well as AI/ML, Storage and Cloud open source products. Plus, during the gala opening reception we will premier our new mini-movie “Sam the IT Manager in The Way of the Chameleon: The Quest for HPC” which you don’t want to miss (we’ll provide the popcorn)!
Software can be an enabler for healers. At Red Hat, we’ve seen this first hand from customers like Boston Children’s Hospital. That venerable infirmary is using Red Hat OpenShift and Linux containers to enhance their medical capabilities, and to augment their doctors cognitive capacity.
In last week’s issue, we did a competitive analysis of the entry, single-socket Power S914 machines running IBM i against Dell PowerEdge servers using various Intel Xeon processors as well as an AMD Epyc chip running a Windows Server and SQL Server stack from Microsoft. This week, and particularly in the wake of IBM’s recent acquisition of Red Hat, we are looking at how entry IBM i platforms rate in terms of cost and performance against X86 machines running a Linux stack and an appropriate open source relational database that has enterprise support.
Just as a recap from last week’s story, the IBM i matchup against Windows Server systems were encouraging in that very small configurations of the Power Systems machine running IBM i were less expensive per unit of online transaction processing performance as well as per user. However, on slightly larger configurations of single socket machines, thanks mostly to the very high cost per core of the IBM i operating system and its integrated middleware and database as you move from the P05 to P10 software tiers on the Power S914, the capital outlay can get very large at list price for the Power iron, and the software gets very pricey, too. The only thing that keeps the IBM i platform in the running is the substantially higher performance per core that the Power9 chip offers on machines with four, six, or eight cores.
Such processors are fairly modest by 2019 standards, by the way, when a high-end chip has 24, 28, 32, or now 64 cores, and even mainstream ones have 12, 16, or 18 cores. If you want to see the rationale of the hardware configurations that we ginned up for the comparisons, we suggest that you review the story from last week. Suffice it to say, we tried to get machines with roughly the same core counts and configuration across the Power and X86 machines, and generally, the X86 cores for these classes of single socket servers do a lot less work.
Steam gets support for Linux namespaces, some distributions are struggling with the shift from Python 2, Arch Linux supports reproducible builds, and GNOME has a new app in beta.
Europe (led by Germany and France) is contemplating Gaia-X, its own cloud infrastructure to create interoperability among clouds and also allow local companies to compete in the cloud market dominated by US companies like AWS, Microsoft and Google. It’s an ambitious effort, but will it work? We sat down with Frank Karlitschek, founder of Nextcloud to discuss.
Google steps up support for older Chromebooks, Microsoft Edge is coming to Linux, and the App Defense Alliance teams up to fight Android malware.
Plus Google Cardboard goes open source, and a neat machine-learning tool to pull songs apart.
The seventh 5.4 prepatch is out for testing. "Nothing looks _bad_, but there is too much of it. So I'm leaning towards an rc8 being likely next weekend due to that, but I won't make a final decision yet. We'll see."
I'm announcing the release of the 5.3.10 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...
Both Intel and Nvidia have released graphics driver updates to enable integer scaling options this year. Intel made a big song and dance out of the development process with Tweets and blog updates trailing the graphics driver feature. Then integer scaling became available for Intel Gen11 graphics users after a September driver update. Nvidia actually pipped Intel to the post by implementing integer scaling (for Turing GPUs) in its Gamescom driver release in August - it snuck in the update without much fanfare as it simultaneously boosted a number of AAA games performance and added some new image sharpening features.
With the Linux 5.4 kernel set to be released in the next week or two, here is a look at the performance going back to the days of Linux 4.16 from early 2018. At least the Linux kernel continues picking up many new features as due to security mitigations and other factors the kernel performance continues trending lower.
With this round of Linux kernel benchmarking on Ubuntu 19.10 and with an Intel Core i9 7960X the tests were done from Linux 4.16 through Linux 5.4 Git. Linux 4.16 was as far back as the system would go while running stable with the Ubuntu 19.10 user-space components -- Linux 4.15 ran into stability issues and Linux 4.14 or older wouldn't boot properly due to systemd or other user-space conflicts. But additional article(s) will be running with an older Ubuntu LTS stack for user-space as well as similarly looking at the performance on AMD hardware too.
The official Gscan2PDF PPA has made the new release packages for all current Ubuntu releases, and their derivatives, including Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 19.04, Ubuntu 19.10, Linux Mint 18.x and 19.x
2. Gimp
Unlike Tailor Brands, GIMP is more of a photo editor which means that it comes with way more tools and features.
If you want to do more than logo designing, then GIMP is your right choice. It comes with a customizable interface that not only covers cosmetics, but also the behavior of the various tools that it has. There are photo enhancement tools that help you to get rid of image distortions, colors, and other imperfections. Another benefit is support for multiple file formats viz. JPEG, PSD, PNG, and GIF.
Edge may face a rocky reception. "I am not feeling a tingling all over at the thought of Edge coming to Linux," posted one commenter on Beta News. "It's not really necessary to bring Linux down to the level of Windows 10."
At Microsoft Ignite last week, a slide announced that Microsoft's project to rebase its perennially unloved Edge browser on Google's open source project Chromium is well underway. Release candidates for the new Chromium-based Edge build are available on consumer and server versions of Windows (including Windows 7 and Server 2008, which have already left mainstream support), as well as MacOS, Android, and iOS.
[...]
It seems unlikely that the Linux world is going to go ga-ga for what seems to essentially be a reskinning of Chromium—but that might be missing Microsoft's real thrust here. Many developers—including Linux developers—choose Azure over rival cloud services like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud, and bringing Edge to Linux may represent little more than a way to offer those developers deeper ties into Microsoft's profile and identity management services.
Ubuntu 19.10 gives the ability to install use ZFS on root. What is ZFS filesystem and how to use it? This tutorial answers your questions.
The terminal is one of the most efficient ways to interact with a Linux computer. When you type a command into the shell, you tell your computer exactly what you want it to do, specifying both the source and destination of what you need done, and then there's no further interaction required. Every time you type a valid command into a shell, you're essentially programming, even though your program may only run for a millisecond.
Graphical interfaces have one perceived advantage, though: they encourage meandering. You can sit in front of a computer GUI and explore aimlessly until you stumble upon something productive to do. With a Linux terminal, you have to know what command to use before you can explore. Having a cheat sheet with the most common commands can be both relieving and empowering.
My job – and sheer curiosity – compels me to distro hop a lot. You know, endlessly trying out new desktop Linux distributions to see what’s new and shiny, and learn stuff along the way. But I found myself repeatedly installing the same set of software after each “nuke and pave.” Along the way I discovered a solution that saves bunch of time: writing a simple bash script!
Basically it’s a text file that contains a series of commands that you can run as a program. It’s a great way to automate things that would otherwise get pretty tedious.
In my case, I have a ton of staple software I like to have (like Audacity, Kdenlive, Spotify, Discord, Telegram, Steam, OBS Studio) no matter what PC or Linux distribution I’m using. Sure, I could go to the software store and install them one by one, or batch install them in a Terminal windows, but let’s streamline the process!
With the Stadia streaming service from Google launching on November 19th for those with the Founder's Edition or Premiere Edition, they're finally revealing what will be available.
It will only have 12, yes 12, titles at launch and a few of them are sequels. They are: Assassin's Creed Odyssey, Destiny 2, GYLT, Just Dance 2020, Kine, Mortal Kombat 11, Red Dead Redemption 2, Thumper, Tomb Raider + Rise + Shadow and lastly Samurai Showdown.
The only title you will get included in the Stadia Pro subscription (three months free with the Founder/Premier Edition) is Destiny 2, all others you have to pay for. If you stop paying for Stadia Pro, you lose access to any free games claimed and only keep those you've paid for normally.
Yet another chance to grab a game or two from your wishlist perhaps? The Armistice Sale on Steam supports the War Child UK charity and there's also a Singles Day sale.
For the Armistice Sale, Valve are promoting games with non-violent gameplay (or they got an update for the sale) to support children affected by the world’s deadliest conflicts.
Always on the lookout for the new and interesting, BorderDoom came across the GOL news-desk recently adding a little Borderlands flavour to Doom.
It's quite a basic mod, once that would likely work well with the many others out there. The basic idea of it is to add in weapons with random properties like damage, number of bullets fired, firing speed and so on, plus shields that recharge and enemies that have levels to give you more of a challenge.
Another quality mashup here, with BlooM merging together elements from both Doom and Blood into something quite different. The team behind it recently put up a fresh demo while they work on the full release which includes new maps, enemies, music and more.
Releasing with Linux support in December, The Sapling looks like a nice casual sim where you design your own plants and animals.
Probably one of the most difficult types of games to get right, many have attempted some sort of evolution sim and it's always great to see more.
I will admit this is quite a surprise, Red Eclipse is a first-person shooter I haven't seen mentioned in a long time and it seems they're closing in on a big revamped release with Red Eclipse 2.
A classic free and open source shooter, Red Eclipse hasn't seen a released update since 1.6 back in December of 2017. Two years later, they're launching the massive upgrade for it free on Steam. Not a simple update either, they've completely changed the rendering engine to bring in Tesseract so they can support more advanced graphical features.
Crash World is an upcoming comedy pizza delivery game with some really silly physics and you can try an early demo right now.
Releasing on Steam next year, it's a pretty wacky game. Bouncy physics, terrible vehicle handling, a car you can upgrade and an ever-changing city should provide plenty of amusement. This isn't some GTA-style open-world game though, it's mission-based but going off-mission is something that will happen often. It did to me anyway, I just couldn't help myself.
Currently crowdfunding (successfully!) with a few days left, Cyberpunk Bar Sim takes elements inspired by both Game Dev Tycoon and VA-11 Hall-A to create a new mix of cyberpunk bar ownership.
Starting off with nothing but a small dive bar with five stools, a counter-top and a handful of customers you will need to grow the business and expand your reach. Eventually you will pull in regulars, who will get chatty and tell you their story.
Currently in development and quite early on, The Farlanders is a tile-based city-builder set on the red planet Mars. Created by developer Angry Kid, the same behind Undervault a free roguelike dungeon crawler.
Even though it's not finished, it's starting to really look good and it's already engrossing enough for me to recommend taking a look at it if you're in the mood for a city-builder that's a little different to the rest.
There are a lot of features that make me love Krita.
First, a lot of those features are very useful for game arts, such as clones array, grid and guide, these make making tiles extremely smooth. I can also make a bunch of clone layers with transform mask to generate spritesheets easily.
Second, the brush engine is powerful. It has masked brush and texture. The soft round brush also allows you to draw your own intensity curve to make an interesting result.
Third, the developer support is excellent. Whenever I report a bug, the developer will respond quickly and will solve the problem. The team really cares about the program and user experience.
And many more…
KDE Frameworks 5.64.0 brings more than 200 hundred changes to the open-source software suite used by the KDE Plasma Desktop environment and the KDE Applications software suite, in an attempt to improve the overall performance, stability, security and reliability of the KDE Plasma desktop and related apps.
Highlights of this release include initial support for the upcoming Qt 5.15 open-source and cross-platform application framework, support for CMake 3.5 series of the open-source and cross-platform package building tools, new and updated icons, as well as fixes for several memory leaks and crashes.
With the KDE Plasma 5.17 release out the door last month, it's time to take a closer look at the new features and improvements coming to KDE Plasma 5.18, which will be released early next year as the next LTS (Long Term Support) version of open-source desktop environment designed to run on GNU/Linux distributions.
Among the enhancements of the KDE Plasma 5.18 LTS desktop environment, we can mention the ability to select and remove multiple Bluetooth devices simultaneously, support for KSysGuard to display stats for Nvidia graphics hardware, and a new "Home" button in System Settings that will take users back to the main page.
On my last post I talked about the new async simplemail-qt API that I wanted to add, yesterday I finished the work required to have that.
SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) as the name says it’s a very simple but strict protocol, you send a command and MUST wait for the reply, which is rather inefficient but it’s the way it is, having it async means I don’t need an extra thread (+some locking) just to send an email, no more GUI freezes or an HTTP server that is stalled.
The new Server class has a state machine that knows what reply we are waiting, and which status code is the successful one. Modern SMTP servers have PIPELING support, but it’s rather different from HTTP PIPELING, because you still have to wait for several commands before you send another command, in fact it only allows you to send the FROM the RECIPIENTS email list and DATA commands at once, parse each reply and then send the mail data, if you send the email data before you are allowed by the DATA command the server will just close the connection.
Earlier this year I announced Shortwave, the successor of Gradio. Now, almost 11 months later, I’m proud to announce the first public beta of Shortwave!
Shortwave is an internet radio player that lets you search for stations, listen to them and record songs automatically.
When a station is being played, everything gets automatically recorded in the background. You hear a song you like? No problem, you can save the song afterwards and play it with your favorite music player. Songs are automatically detected based on the stream metadata.
Shortwave, the successor of Gradio, had it first beta release over the weekend. This is a GTK Internet radio player written in Rust, which uses radio-browser.info as its radio stations database.
Background: The Gradio developer wanted to rewrite Gradio using Rust, but later started a completely new project called Shortwave. There will be no major Gradio releases, but don't worry as Shortwave will include all important Gradio features and more.
Using Shortwave you can search for Internet radio stations, listen to them, automatically record songs, and even stream to Google Cast-enabled (Chromecast) devices.
In this video, we are looking at OpenIndiana 2019.10. Enjoy!
OpenMandriva Association announced the release of the first pre-release version of the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 operating system, the first major update to the OpenMandriva Lx 4 series.
OpenMandriva Lx 4.1 is now officially in development, and a firs alpha release is ready for public testing with the latest KDE Plasma 5.17.2 desktop environment, which is accompanied by the KDE Applications 19.08.3 and KDE Frameworks 5.64.0 software suites, all built agains Qt 5.14. It also ships with the Linux 5.3.9 kernel and an updated toolchain built with Clang 9.0 and Glibc 2.30.
As OpenMandriva Lx is one of the first and few GNU/Linux distributions to use Clang as the default compiler instead of GCC (GNU Compiler Collection), the development team decided that's it time to ship a Linux kernel that's also compatible with the Clang compiler.
SUSE and other companies like DigitalOcean have been working on Linux core scheduling to make virtualization safer particularly in light of security vulnerabilities like L1TF and MDS. The core scheduling work is about ensuring different VMs don't share a HT sibling but rather only the same VM / trusted applications run on siblings of a core.
SUSE's Dario Faggioli presented at the KVM Forum 2019 at the end of October in Lyon, France. Dario's presentation covered the latest work on core-scheduling for virtualization.
Arch Linux has updated the behavior when installing the linux, linux-lts, linux-zen, and linux-hardened kernel options on this popular distribution.
The actual kernel images for their official Linux, Linux LTS, Linux Zen, and Linux Hardened flavors will no longer be installed to /boot by default. By not having the actual kernel reside on /boot should help those with separate boot partitions that are quite small and avoid running out of space when keeping multiple kernels installed.
Dear all, today I released KDE-5_19.11 and it comes with some upgrades to official Slackware packages. Don’t worry – Pat Volkerding kindly added the shared libraries of the official Slackware packages to aaa_elflibs, so if you have been updating your Slackware-current installation properly then nothing will break when you update Slackware’s exiv2 and LibRaw packages to the newer versions contained in the November release of ‘ktown‘. Official Slackware package updates for exiv2 and LibRaw will come sometime soon, but it will require Pat to recompile several other packages as well that depend on exiv2 and/or LibRaw. I needed the new exiv2 to compile the latest digikam, so I was pleased with Pat’s cooperation to make this a smooth ‘ktown‘ upgrade for you.
Over the last few years, I have seen the Linux kernel team working on Control Group (cgroup) v2, adding new features and fixing lots of issues with cgroup v1. The kernel team announced that cgroup v2 was stable back in 2016.
Last year at the All Systems Go conference, I met a lot of the engineers who are working on cgroup v2, most of them from Facebook, as well as the systemd team. We talked about the issues and problems with cgroup v1 and the deep desire to get Linux distributions to use cgroup v2 by default. The last few versions of Fedora have supported cgroup v2, but it was not enabled as the default. Almost no one will modify the defaults for something as fundamental as the default resource-constraint system in Fedora, causing cgroup v2 to languish in obscurity.
There are new live/install media of Sparky 2019.11 “Po Tolo” Special Editions available to download: GameOver, Multimedia & Rescue. The live system is based on the testing branch of Debian “Bullseye”.
GameOver Edition features a very large number of preinstalled games, useful tools and scripts. It’s targeted to gamers.
Multimedia Edition features a large set of tools for creating and editing graphics, audio, video and HTML pages.
The live system of Rescue Edition contains a large set of tools for scanning and fixing files, partitions and operating systems installed on hard drives.
We covered Firewalla based on NanoPi NEO board in mid-2018. The device is a tiny firewall, parental control, ad-blocker, and VPN appliance for end-users.
Since then they’ve launched Firewalla Blue based on NanoPi NEO2 SBC with Gigabit Ethernet and a faster processor, and now the company has just introduced the even more powerful Intel-based Firewalla Gold.
The device runs Ubuntu Linux so the users will have full access to the operating system with SSH, and will be allowed to install their own packages. Just like the original Firewalla (now Firewalla Red) and Firewalla Blue, Firewalla Gold comes with a web interface to let users easily control what happens on their networks with features such as cyber threats protections, VPN, DDNS, SSH, Adblocker configuration. Additionally, the Firewalla app for Android or iOS enables users to set-up parental control, VPN, monitor bandwidth usage (Monthly / Daily / Hourly), and more…
Released in April 2018, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) is the latest LTS (Long Term Support) version of the popular Ubuntu Linux operating system, supported by Canonical with software and security updates for 5 years, until 2023, but reaching end of life in April 2028.
As all Ubuntu LTS series, the Bionic Beaver will receive up to five point releases that bring a new installation medium with up-to-date components to make the deployment of the operating system less painful. The latest point release in the series being Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS, released on August 8th, 2019.
Carl Richell, CEO of System76, sent me a message this morning that only reinforces why I appreciate that company: they’re nimble and they act as quickly as humanly possible. Here’s what Richell had to say: “We pushed updates to Mutter Friday morning and users have reported that it resolved the issue for them. The same updates will be in Ubuntu soon as well.”
I can happily confirm that installing the latest update on my Oryx Pro running Pop!_OS 19.10 resolved the issue, so a solution is definitely headed your way.
The goal for Ubuntu 20.04 is to ship with Python 2 removed since Py2 will be end-of-life after the after the start of the year and this next Ubuntu Linux release is a Long-Term Support release, but there still are many Python 2 depending packages left currently in Debian unstable and Ubuntu's "Focal Fossa" archive.
Ubuntu/Debian developer Matthias Klose who has been doing much of the wrangling for getting Python 2 removed for Ubuntu 20.04 LTS sent out the latest update overnight. There still are around 3,300 bugs filed in Debian related to Python 2 packages and of those some 1,500 closed while around 350 packages are only available in Ubuntu's Focal repository and not upstream Debian.
The removal of an older Python implementation from an entire operating system system and its software repositories is a major deal for any OS vendor as it raises many severity issues due to the fact that numerous packages have not been ported to a newer branch, in this case we're talking about the removal of Python 2 and its replacements with Python 3.
For Debian and Ubuntu, whose communities work closely together since the latter is based on the former, the transition from Python 2 to Python 3 started a few years ago, but now it's time for their next major release to ship without any Python 2 packages, though this appears to be a major deal even for some of the biggest GNU/Linux distributions in the world.
Well, first things first: I’m not much of a distro hopper these days. I’m old and don’t like the hassle of reinstalling.
But I do like to keep an eye on what’s happening out there, in the wider Linux community, especially around Linux distros based on Ubuntu.
This year I’ve spotlighted Regolith Linux, Enso, Peppermint OS 10, and Zorin OS 15 (among others), all based and built on a solid Ubuntu foundation.
Earlier this week a reader (thanks Ricardo) suggested I take a look at Voyager Live, specifically the LTS release.
So what’s it like?
LFA (Linux For All) Build 191111 is now available to download based on Canonical's latest Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, but shipping with a much newer kernel, namely Linux 5.4 RC6. As such, LFA is one of the first distros to adopt the upcoming Linux 5.4 kernel series.
LFA (Linux For All) Build 191111 is not just an update to previous releases of the Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux distribution, but a total rebuild that now uses packages from the latest Ubuntu LTS (Long Term Support) release instead of those used in the latest Ubuntu Linux release.
The TechWeek Frankfurt trade show will explore solutions to technology challenges organisations face across cloud computing and security, DevOps practices, Big Data management and more.
OpenStack remains a big thing and its adoption is constantly growing. According to the 451 Research Market Monitor (Open Source Software, OpenStack) from September 2019, its combined market size worldwide is $7.7B. This is much more than the combined market size of application containers which is $4.38B.
During that last development cycle for OpenStack Train, 1,125 developers from 165 organisations contributed their patches and 25,500 of them were accepted. This makes OpenStack one of the three most active open source projects in the world.
Moreover, by coming to China the OpenStack Foundation clearly declares its openness for the Asia markets and cooperation with local organisations on driving the future of the OpenStack project.
The company does not currently sell the board barebone, and instead, NanoPi R1S is sold as a router with a yellow enclosure (no other colors available) running either FriendlyWrt based on OpenWrt or FriendlyCore based on Ubuntu 18.04, both shipping with Linux 4.14.
FriendlyElec’s Linux-driven, $20 “NanoPi R1S-H3” router uses a modified version of the Allwinner H3-based NanoPi R1, upgrading the second LAN port to GbE while removing a USB port. There’s also a similar, $23 “NanoPi R1S-H5” with a quad -A53 H5.
Back in February, FriendlyElec launched the community-backed NanoPi R1 router SBC, which still sells for $29. Now it has followed up with two more affordable NanoPi R1S routers based on upgraded versions of the NanoPi R1 that that give you dual GbE ports instead of 10/100Mbps and 10/1000/1000Mbps. The mainboards are smaller than the R1 at 55.6 x 52mm, and the board and the case have been entirely redesigned.
The vast majority of smartphones in the world ship with some version of Google’s Android operating system. And most of them are only supported by their manufacturers for a few years.
Have a phone that’s 3-4 years old? Then you’re probably not getting any Android updates anymore. No more security patches. No new features.
Of course, some folks can run custom ROMs such as LineageOS, which lets you install updates indefinitely… but want to break out of Android altogether? There are a handful of other GNU/Linux-based operating systems including Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, and Maemo Leste that are designed to, among other things, help give your phone a longer lifespan.
One tricky thing can be figuring out which phones are supported. That’s where a new Can My Phone Run Linux database from TuxPhones comes in.
IEI’s rugged, “ITG-100AI” DIN-rail PC runs on an Apollo Lake SoC and a new “Mustang-MPCIE-MX2” mini-PCIe card with dual Myriad X VPUs. The system ships with 8GB RAM and a 128GB SATA SSD plus GbE, serial, USB, and M.2.
IEI has launched a compact, Intel Apollo Lake based “ITG-100AI” computer for industrial AI that showcases its Mustang-MPCIE-MX2 AI acceleration card. The fanless, 137 x 102.8 x 49.4mm ITG-100AI supports DIN-rail or desktop mounting and offers a 0 to 50€°C range with airflow, as well as 5G shock resistance compliant with IEC68-2-27 and vibration resistance per MIL-STD-810G 514.6C-1.
Nowadays, Android is the most used platform, and Android gaming is one of the biggest parts of it. From the children to the elders, almost all Android users love to play different types of games on their Android devices. Some of them are so fond of games that free version of some exotic games is not enough for them. This is why they spend some of their pocket money to buy the premium version of those games. If you are looking for a worthy Android game for which you can pay, I suggest you follow a list of best paid Android games.
A couple of weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to attend the Mutter & GNOME Shell hackfest in Leidschendam.
PyCon Africa was a wonderful, inspiring, and technically enlightening conference that took place in Accra, Ghana from August 6 to 10, 2019 at the University of Ghana. This conference was the very first pan-African conference for Python developers and was attended by 323 Pythonistas from 26 different countries. Most of the attendees traveled from countries around Africa, and a number of speakers came from the US, the Netherlands, Germany, Brazil, and Italy.
Python is becoming more and more adopted all across the globe. In Africa, Python is earning a special place for itself, where it’s used extensively for web development and data science. African businesses are looking for developers with Python skills in these areas, and having a PyCon in Africa provides a foundation to help support African programmers.
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The day after the main conference was dedicated to sprints! This is where people group up to work on various open source Python projects. I was part of a team that worked on Cookie Cutter and other related projects. I submitted a PR that got merged into the project and I also helped mentor other team members.
I highly recommend anyone who has not attended a sprint before to do so! It’s a great way to practice your skills, contribute to an open source project, and meet the developers involved with the project.
Chrome has successfully shamed web-sites not supporting HTTPS and now they are looking to call-out websites that do not typically load fast.
Google announced today that they will begin marking websites that are often either loading slow or fast. Chrome developers are experimenting with ways to show whether a website typically loads fast or slow so the user is aware even before they navigate to a given web page or web app. The changes will be rolled out in future Chrome updates.
I am a Mexican old-guard user of Linux since 2001. I studied Electronic Engineering, and I have been working in that field since 1989. I learnt all sorts of Linux stuff because I love to learn by myself. In addition, I love to read historical detective novels, lots of science fiction, and go to the movies with my husband.
I love philosophy, symbolism and many alternative ideas about everything. I also like to have long, friendly debates about everybody’s presumptions (or assumptions?). I try to be open-minded, specially in this times when everyone’s getting polarized Mexico about our President. I used to be an athletic gal, but now I am a total coach-potato! Thanks, Netflix!
In April 2019, South Korea became the first country to adopt 5G networks on a large scale, marking the beginning of what promises to be a period of radical change in the telecoms industry. For the operators, the 5G era opens a range of opportunities, both in delivering the ultra-low latency that retail customers increasingly expect, and in the enormous capacity and bandwidth that business customers require to push boundaries in IoT, enterprise networking and critical communications.
However, being able to offer 5G capabilities alone is not enough to safeguard an operator’s market position through the next wave of connectivity. For all the potential 5G use cases that it presents, the business models that worked in the 4G era will continually be challenged by fiercer competition and tighter margins. To grasp the 5G opportunity, telecoms companies will need to develop and deploy new capabilities, leveraging a far greater depth of network insights in order to differentiate their customer offering with innovative services that translate into new revenue opportunities.
The Free Software Foundation's Respects Your Freedom program provides a certification for hardware that supports your freedom. A new website listing certified products has been launched. "In 2012, when we announced the first certification, we hosted information about the program and retailers as a simple page on the Free Software Foundation (FSF) Web site.
Interested in getting started with Kirigami development in a few minutes? Since version 5.63 of the Kirigami framework, there is an easy way to do so: an application template. The template facilitates the creation of a new application, using CMake as the build system, and linking to Kirigami dynamically as a plugin at runtime.
Let’s see how it works. As a starting point, we will use a virtual environment running the latest KDE Neon User edition. This is by no means a requirement, any Linux distribution with Kirigami 5.63 or later perfectly fits our needs. KDE Neon has been chosen just because it provides -by design- the latest Qt, KDE frameworks and applications. Moreover, a virtual machine will let us play fearlessly with the system directories.
JBoss Tools 4.13.0 and Red Hat CodeReady Studio 12.13 for Eclipse 2019-09 are here and waiting for you. In this article, I’ll cover the highlights of the new releases and show how to get started.
This week we welcome Vuyisile Ndlovu (@terrameijar) as our PyDev of the Week! Vuyisile is a contributor to Real Python and a Python blogger on his own website. He is also active in the Python community in Africa. You can find out more about Vuyisile on his website or by checking out his Github profile. Let’s take some time to get to know him better!
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I don’t have a favorite language yet because I haven’t been programming for a long time and I know that different languages are suited for different things. I’m learning JavaScript and back in college, I took C++ and Visual Basic classes. I teach programming classes at a High School using VB.Net because I find that using Visual Basic makes building GUIs in a Windows environment easy and the language is relatively simple to teach to beginners.
The work projects I work on are web projects and I enjoy using Python and Django to build those out.
On behalf of Twisted Matrix Laboratories, I am honoured to announce the release of Twisted 19.10!
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Many thanks to everyone who had a part in this release - the supporters of the Twisted Software Foundation, the developers who contributed code as well as documentation, and all the people building great things with Twisted!
We are soon going to practically answer how to open a Stata file in Python? In Python, there are two useful packages called Pyreadstat, and Pandas that enable us to open .dta files. If we are working with Pandas, the read_stata method will help us import a .dta into a Pandas dataframe. Furthermore, the package Pyreadstat, which is dependent on Pandas, will also create a Pandas dataframe from a .dta file.
The Python Software Foundation Packaging Working Group is receiving funding to work on the design, implementation, and rollout of pip's next-generation dependency resolver. (We'll be able to publicly name the funders later this month and in early December.)
pip is the official package installer for Python. pip aims to make it easy for the millions of people who use Python to download and install Python libraries and applications (open source and closed source, source and binary, globally and within isolated virtual environments). It's a foundational component of the Python ecosystem and broader computer software and technology landscape.
This project aims to complete the design, implementation, and rollout of pip's next-generation dependency resolver. This will lower the barriers to installing Python software, empowering users to get a version of a package that works. It will also lower the barriers to distributing Python software, empowering developers to make their work available in an easily reusable form.
Because of the size of the project, funding has been allocated to secure two contractors, a senior developer and an intermediate developer, to work on development, testing and building test infrastructure, code review, bug triage, and assisting in the rollout of necessary features.
CV Radhakrishnan, a typesetting veteran and free software enthusiast, has a neurological disorder called perennial muscular dystrophy.
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As Radhakrishnan’s words jumps between the years – the 1980s when it all began for him and the present – he reminisces about the ‘old days’ with his friend. Like when he became one of the first people in Thiruvananthapuram to read an email on a Unix server (using Unix-to-Unix Copy or UUCP). Or when he got a 20 MB hard disk in the early 1990s and thought it was such a big deal.
“Today a photo would be that size,” he laughs. He is 67, and obviously one of the pioneers of computing in Kerala. He was 31 when he was introduced to the idea of computers, working at the University. Staying at the university hostel in Karyavattom, he’d see Professor Nambooripad coming to play badminton and the two began talking technology. Nambooripad introduced Radhakrishnan to computing, to Tex the typesetting tool whose manual and software came to him in two floppy disks (for kids today – yes, there was such a thing).
Security updates have been issued by Debian (ampache, chromium, djvulibre, firefox-esr, gdal, and ruby-haml), Fedora (chromium, file, gd, hostapd, nspr, and rssh), openSUSE (bcm20702a1-firmware, firefox, gdal, libtomcrypt, php7, python-ecdsa, python3, samba, and thunderbird), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, libssh2_org, and rsyslog), and Ubuntu (bash).
We are making some changes to the submission flow for all add-ons (both AMO- and self-hosted) to improve our ability to detect malicious activity.
These changes, which will go into effect later this month, will introduce a small delay in automatic approval for all submissions. The delay can be as short as a few minutes, but may take longer depending on the add-on file.
If you use a version of web-ext older than 3.2.1, or a custom script that connects to AMO’s upload API, this new delay in automatic approval will likely cause a timeout error. This does not mean your upload failed; the submission will still go through and be approved shortly after the timeout notification. Your experience using these tools should remain the same otherwise.
Arch Linux has been involved with the reproducible builds efforts since 2016. The goal is to achieve deterministic building of software packages to enhance the security of the distribution.
After almost 3 years of continued effort, along with the release of pacman 5.2 and contributions from a lot of people, we are finally able to reproduce packages distributed by Arch Linux!
This enables users to build packages and compare them with the ones distributed by the Arch Linux team. Users can independently verify the work done by our packagers, and figure out if malicious code has been included in the pristine source during the build, which in turns enhances the overall supply chain security. We are one of the first binary distributions that has achieved this, and can provide tooling down to users.
That was the TL;DR! The rest of the blog post will explain the reproducible builds efforts, and the technical work that has gone into achieving this.
A black hat selling vulnerabilities can make as much money as a white hat researcher using bug bounty programs, or a grey hat working for a nation state doing reverse engineering.
Speaking at a Tenable conference in London last week, director of research Oliver Rochford said that to have people do vulnerability research is expensive, and all of the white, black and grey markets are symbiotic, as despite the difference between being legal and illegal, the different factors “mirror each other as it starts with vulnerability discovery.”
Rochford said that this “shows how professional cybercrime has become,” pointing to the fact that the main difference between criminal and legal sides are ethics. In one slide, Rochford pointed out vulnerability discovery, exploit research and development are the same for both offense and defensive sides, while the differences fall at the "operationalization" side, where offensive sides look at espionage, sabotage and fraud, while defense sides look at threat intelligence and compensating control adaptation.
In his research, Rochford showed that in some cases you can earn more as a white hat vulnerability manager than as a black hat, with a black hat able to earn around $75,000 in this sort of work. Rochford said this “is achievable and attractive” and while it was more lucrative to do it legally, if it is not “it is a way to make a living.”
If you’re poor in America, climate change is your issue.We’ve already seen why. In 2004, Hurricane Katrina ravaged the Gulf Coast, leaving many thousands displaced and unemployed. In 2017, Hurricane Maria fell upon Puerto Rico, destroying homes and disabling the power grid for more than two years.
Fires are raging everywhere in California these days, and firefighters are having enormous trouble keeping up. Chronically understaffed local fire departments simply don’t have the resources to handle act one of what climate change has in store for us.
“The system was suffering a crisis of legitimacy: nobody believed the official narrative anymore.”Bernie Sanders’ campaign has finally gone full-throat with the obvious: the Democrat-aligned corporate media have thrown all journalistic principles to the wind to impose a “Bernie Blackout.”€
That shut her up real horrorshow and lovely. —A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
"This is a moment in American history where the arc of justice will either be bent forward or it'll be bent backward. So everyone who wants to see it should have the chance to see the whole story."
Cancel culture constitutes a practice of acting on an accusation of problematic behavior or speech by socially ostracizing the accused individual and/or their professional, artistic or academic practices. Cancel culture goes against some of the ideals and morals that make up the fabric of modern, post-colonial South Africa. From free expression to the principles of Ubuntu. Those who perpetrate it tend to do so with a self-righteous outrage which they believe gives them the right to silence and shut-down any one who disagrees with them.
The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996 enshrines in the Bill of Rights the ‘Right to Freedom of Expression’ under s16. This free expression extends deeply, even to those who may be expressing so-called ‘problematic viewpoints’. The only check on this freedom of expression is in s16(2) which prohibits war propaganda, incitement to violence and incitement to cause harm based on race, gender, ethnicity or religion. All of these restrictions are carefully put in place to maximise the rights of all involved. Something being ‘problematic’ or ‘offensive’ is not enough to be deemed as breaching these provisions, and any response that attempts to forcefully silence people who are not in breach of s16(2) is, in itself, contravening these constitutional values.
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Even if we disregard these points – we must question the morality of simply ‘cancelling’ someone based on accusations of misconduct. To refuse to engage with an individual and hear their side of a story, or offer them a fair trial is immoral and unjust.A common argument is that the crime they are being accused of is even more immoral or unjust, and that is as may be. However, the fact that one wrong has been committed is not justification to retaliate with another wrong – especially if the accusation is unproven. So it appears that whichever way we unpack it, cancel culture is immoral, it does not achieve justice and it is against the values of the constitution.
Today the UN Human Rights Council will hold a€ Universal Periodic Review€ (UPR) session to examine Iraq’s€ human rights records. The rash of killings of protestors by Iraqi security forces over the past month should at the front of diplomats’ minds as they shape their recommendations.
The Supreme Court is taking up the Trump administration’s plan to end legal protections€ that shield 660,000 immigrants from deportation, a case with strong political overtones amid the 2020 presidential election campaign.
The United States recently hit a new low in its demonstration of inhumanity. During relief efforts in the Bahamas in the wake of hurricane Dorian, people who didn’t have a US visa were told to leave a rescue ship that could have taken them to Florida. Even a temporary suspension of document requirements during the crisis of a deadly category 5 hurricane was rejected. | By
More than three weeks have passed since the start of the protests in Lebanon, and things are beginning to show signs of change on the ground. The protestors are more organized (in general), more goal-oriented. They are protesting in areas known to be dens of corruption, in the neighborhoods of corrupt officials, banks, ministries, etc…
Ren Zhengfei doesn't think 5G is such a big deal.
The Huawei boss told one of his public seminars last week that he thinks the importance of the new standard has been exaggerated. His perspective from the eye of a geopolitical storm may be partisan, but he can't be the only telecom industry exec bemused by the intensity of sentiment over next-generation mobile.
For most of its development over the past decade, 5G has proceeded as unremarkably as the previous technologies, albeit with richer and broader functionality.
The intersection between patent law and family law principles has the potential to create an irreconcilable conflict in the area of patent ownership. These two legal worlds operate by virtue of different statutory provisions of automatic vesting of title that appear to be unable to coexist. Under U.S. patent law, ownership of a patent automatically vests, as personal property, in the individual inventor. Many, if not most, inventors are employees who, under some written obligation (such as a routine employment agreement), assign their ownership rights to the inventions created as part of their jobs to their employers. At the same time, however, property acquired by a married individual (in most, if not all states) is considered marital or community property of the married couple. In that case, then, when an employee invents something and acquires an interest in a patent (which the employee does automatically upon invention under U.S. law), that patent may become marital property of the couple before the employee assigns the employee’s interest to the employer. In other words, an employer who receives an assignment from the employee alone of only the employee’s interest may end up owning the patent jointly with the spouse who has his or her own undivided interest in the marital property.
This problem is particularly acute when, as is commonly the case, the assignment from the employee to the employer is a present assignment of an expectant interest which transfers legal title in the patent to the employer as soon as the patent arises. In that case, the two property regimes — patent law and marital property law — have competing, incompatible automatic vesting regimes. Patent law automatically vests ownership of patents in inventors and, by virtue of most common employment agreements, their employees; marital law, at least in community property states, automatically vests ownership of property in the spouse. The result, never previously explored, is that vast corporate patent portfolios may be subject to co-ownership with thousands of individual employee spouses (or ex-spouses).
Federal courts may not be able to resolve this conflict without wading into family law, an area traditionally left to the states. In addition, federal courts have long maintained that patent ownership is a matter of state property and contract law, making a judicial remedy on the basis of preemption unlikely. In Spousal Rights to Inventions: A Latent Threat to Corporate Patent Portfolio, we propose new federal legislation is necessary to create predictability in corporate patent ownership. Additionally, we provide some practical suggestions for employers confronted with this dilemma.
This piece reviews Stefania Fusco's “Murano Glass Vase" and "Lessons from the Past." In Murano Glass Vase, Fusco recounts the history of the glassmaking industry in Venice, framing it as the natural experiment from which the patent system sprang into the world. Fusco emphasizes the mix of exclusionary rights and trade secrecy that formed the backbone of Venetian innovation policy against the backdrop of a heavily regulated and protectionist economy. In “Lessons from the Past,” Fusco draws on original research performed at the Venetian State Archives to further the Murano narrative by looking at how the Venetian government fueled an ad hoc patent regime across industries by tailoring it to specific technologies.
In Bilski v. Kappos (2010), this Court explained that its interpretation of 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101 has been guided by over 150 years of historical practice. Yet two years later in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Laboratories (2012), the Court triggered the most radical redefinition of patent-eligible subject matter in U.S. history by engrafting an inventive application requirement for patenting practical applications of scientific discoveries.
Mayo based this requirement on three critical assumptions: (1) Congress has never addressed the question of the patentability of scientific discoveries; (2) foundational precedent of the English courts and of this Court excluded scientific discoveries and demanded inventive application as a condition of patent eligibility; and (3) a new extra-textual limitation on patentability was necessary to address the undue preemption of laws of nature and other scientific discoveries. Unfortunately, inadequate briefing in Mayo led the Court astray.
The Nation’s patent statutes, stretching back to the founding era, unmistakably afford patent protection to technological innovations and scientific discoveries. Congress has expressly sought to encourage both technological inventions and scientific discoveries. The legislative concern has not been with preemption of inventive fields, which the durational limits and disclosure constraints of the Patent Act address, but rather with “min[ing]” the “exhaustless” “treasures” and “unlimited reach of science.” Specific legislative enactments in 1930, 1952, and 1954 refute any requirement of inventive application for patent eligibility.
Furthermore, the Mayo briefs failed to address critical context and meaning of key cases bearing on patent eligibility of applications of scientific discoveries. Both Parker v. Flook (1978) and Mayo relied on a mistaken reading of Neilson v. Harford (1841) to conclude that English and American courts restricted patents to inventive applications of new discoveries. To the contrary, Neilson became the primary authority in England and the United States for the position that practical applications of discoveries were patentable without any invention in the means of application.
Finally, contrary to Mayo’s supposition that a new extra-statutory doctrine was necessary to limit undue preemption of scientific discoveries, this Court has long held that this role was served by patent law’s express disclosure requirements. See O’Reilly v. Morse (1854) and subsequent cases. As reflected in the eight opinions in Athena Diagnostics, Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Services, as well as clear signals in numerous other cases, the Patent Office’s frequent revision of examiner guidance documents, and legislative hearings, the Federal Circuit, district courts, Patent Office, and inventors have struggled unsuccessfully to apply the Mayo/Alice decisions coherently and predictably. These decisions have imposed massive costs upon all of these institutions and the public, thereby undermining the patent system.
Canada is shortening the time multinational companies have to apply for patents there after applying in another jurisdiction, under new rules that Canadian officials say could save applicants millions of dollars over the next decade.
Canada’s new patent rules, which take effect Oct. 30, align the country with the international Patent Cooperation Treaty, which Canada joined in 1990, and the Patent Law Treaty, which it signed in 2001.
On October 18th, Junior Party (the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Vienna; and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") filed its authorized opposition to Substantive Motion No. 1 from Senior Party the Broad Institute (and its partners as Senior Party, Harvard University and MIT), which asked for judgment in Interference No. 106,115 on the basis that CVC was estopped by prior judgment of no interference in fact in Interference No. 106,048 between these parties.
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The Broad argued that CVC had the opportunity in the '048 interference to file a responsive motion to the Broad's motion of no interference-in-fact to add claims directed to eukaryotic applications of CRISPR technology but did not. The Broad argues that this was a strategic decision by CVC to have only its "environment-free" claims in the interference. Furthermore, the Broad contends that it was intentional, citing to CVC's colloquy before the Board when the parties discussed which motion the Board would authorize, where CVC expressly "reserved" the ability to file such responsive motions.
Everyone will admit that a lot has changed in patent law since Collabo’s U.S. Patent 5,952,714 issued in September 1999. Although ex parte reexamination was available, the American Inventors Protection Act (AIPA) authorizing inter partes reexamination was not enacted until November 1999. However, inter partes reexamination only applied to patents issued from applications filed after November 1999. Pub. L. 106–113 Then, in 2011, Congress created inter partes review — and this time made it retroactive.
After Collabo sued Sony for infringement, Sony responded with petitions for inter partes review. The PTO instituted review and found the claims unpatentable by a preponderance of the evidence and the Federal Circuit affirmed. With regard to Collabo’s due process and takings claim, the court found itself bound by a parallel decision in Celgene Corp. v. Peter, 931 F.3d 1342 (Fed. Cir. 2019). Celgene is pending petition for en banc rehearing on the question...
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The basic setup here is that the AIA makes it easier to invalidate patents with its lower presumption; lower standard of proof; and (until recently) broader interpretation of patent scope.
Murphy J dismissed both claims, finding that there was no infringement as Triangl did only use the name Delphine as a style name and not as a trade mark, and Triangl did not establish any prior use by another person of Pinnacle's DELPHINE mark. The judge stated that the proceedings brought by Pinnacle were ‘ill-advised’ and that, even if Pinnacle had been successful, any damages awarded would have been far outweighed by the legal costs it incurred in bringing the infringement proceeding.
The claimants in the case were Brandlogic, a family firm which sold clothing under the brand ‘Bentley’, as well as Bentley 1962 Ltd, which held the IP rights it claimed to license exclusively to Brandlogic (the two referred to collectively in proceedings as ‘Bentley Clothing’). The Bentley clothing business had been acquired from a line of predecessors - the original business beginning in 1962 - with the business and associated trade marks (the oldest of which was registered in 1982) eventually being assigned to Bentley Clothing in 1998.
Sometime around 1987, Bentley Motors began selling a limited range of clothing, featuring the B-in-wings logo, but not ‘Bentley’. In 1998, Bentley Clothing made itself known to Bentley Motors, offering a licence to the car maker. However, sporadic discussions at various times after 1998 did not yield results. From 2000, Bentley Motors began to expand its clothing range and to use ‘Bentley’ (mainly as part of the ‘Combination Sign’) on the clothes.
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Despite the large amount of publicity that this case received for its somewhat ‘shocking’ outcome given the relative fame of the parties, on the basis of law the conclusion reached is not surprising, and indicates the strength of current trade mark protection, such that even a renowned car brand like Bentley Motors cannot win if the odds are against it.
But what will this decision mean in the long run? Bentley Motors has suggested that it may appeal. There is also the separate issue of damages - given how long proceedings have gone on between these two parties, it will be interesting to see what the actual amount will come to.
Out of curiosity, this InternKat looked to see if she could find clothing on the Bentley (Motors) website following this decision, but instead was greeted with a message informing that: “...there are no products in this collection”. It seems as through the consequences of this decision are already being felt (and that this InternKat will have to look elsewhere for Christmas ideas...).
Elizabeth Rowe has a highly informative new empirical paper, called “eBay, Permanent Injunctions, & Trade Secrets,” forthcoming in Washington and Lee Law Review. Professor Rowe examines—through both high-level case coding and individual case analysis—when, and under what circumstances, courts are willing to grant permanent injunctions in trade secret cases. (So-called “permanent” injunctions are granted or denied after the trade secret plaintiff is victorious, as opposed to “preliminary” injunctions granted or denied prior to on-the-merits review. They need not actually last forever).
Rowe assesses cases spanning a fifteen-year period. Rowe designed this study from her prior study on damages. She assesses only federal court cases; only Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA) claims, no federal Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) claims; and has 157 usable cases total. The cases run from around the years 2000 to 2015. (pp. 16-17).
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The upshot is that—as usual in trade secrets—it's sort of the Wild West. There aren’t enough published opinions. Courts are granting or denying injunctions based on sometimes unrevealed reasoning. There are divided rules across the different states and federal circuits. Entry of DTSA claims is unlikely to make this less of a mess. I am grateful for Rowe’s empirical work and clear writing to help shed some light.
Donald Trump often uses the term "fake news"—especially, critics might say, when he is the subject of a story he does not like. Now one ad agency and a journalist have attempted to take a legal stand against the practice.
Calgary advertising agency Wax Partnership and the Florida Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists have teamed up and applied for a trademark on the term.
They sent a cease-and-desist letter to Trump, in a tongue-in-cheek move they hope will spark a conversation about the difference between credible news and the mountains of incorrect information being disseminated, according to CBC.
