I found Kezz on Twitter and I’m so glad I did because this is a wonderful interview. First of all, I love the KDE details. Because while I don’t use KDE, I respect it. I wish I could tame it the way Kezz has. Instead, I tend to bow to its will, when really, if I knew how, like Kezz, I could bend it to mine. I also appreciate the screencasting information. I don’t do it very often anymore, but I do know that at some point, there were concerns about the lack of a good Linux screencasting program. Apparently that’s no longer an issue, which is great to hear.
I’m an avid Linux user who ditched Windows for some unknown reason, trying to make my life fully compatible with free and open source software. I’m a distro-hopper, a hardware enthusiast, blogger, and, in my leisure time, a console gamer. I was introduced to Linux back in mid-2008 by a school friend. I’m a senior support networking specialist currently working on the outskirts of Navi Mumbai, India.
Next to this, Linux based servers have proved to be stable and capable of handling numerous requests at the time. Because no one wants a site that crashes when visitors are trying to get to it. It can be very annoying and bad for business. Linux has a very dedicated community and on the various forums, you can find useful information in dealing with a certain problem that you may encounter.
David Egts, chief technologist of Red Hat's (NYSE: RHT) North American public sector business, has said that open-source procedures can help organizations meet digital transformation goals while promoting mobility and addressing a skills gap.
In a Fedscoop interview posted Monday, Egts noted that Red Hat’s Open Innovation Labs works with government customers to help them reduce workload processing time through new software development methods.
Red Hat invests heavily in open source communities, offering our employees' time and skills in many upstreams to advance the pace of innovation and support our customers' interests. And when Red Hat purchases a company, it ensures that any proprietary software becomes available as open source. For instance, just this month, Red Hat shared Quay, the formerly proprietary container registry and security scanner software, as an open source upstream available to all.
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Awareness of open source in the Middle East is growing in many sectors, particularly in the telecommunications sphere. As operators seek to evolve from physical to digital players, open source ecosystems and solutions are being implemented to optimise and simplify operations, reduce costs, and facilitate digital transformation agendas. From Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, to everywhere in between, open source solutions are being unlocked as cost-effective, flexible, reliable, secure, and alternative foundational systems to drive innovation and digital transformation. For telecommunications organisations, open source will enable improved delivery of digital services, the ability to introduce new digital services faster, and the capabilities to leverage insights from data to create new revenue streams.
The film, produced by IBM and directed by Austin Peck, centers on the increasing incidents of the devastation of natural disasters, and a cadre of coders who've dedicated their attentions and tech talent to help facilitate and expedite the responders' response to natural disasters. The social-activist developers serve as a frontline defense against some of the society-at-large greatest dangers.
The Kubernetes with OpenShift World Tour is a series of in-person workshops around the globe that help you build the skills you need to quickly modernize your applications. This World Tour provides a hands-on experience and teaches the basics of working with the hybrid-cloud, enterprise container platform Red Hat€® OpenShift€® on IBM Cloudââ¢. You learn coding skills in the world of containerized, cloud-native development with expert developer advocates, who have deep technical experience building cloud microservices and applications with Red Hat OpenShift.
Moore and his team of open source developers work with open source communities such as the Apache Software Foundation, Linux Foundation, eClipse, OSGi, OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, Docker, JS, Node.js and more.
We've had a normal merge window, and it's now early Sunday afternoon, and it's getting closed as has been the standard rule for a long while now.
Everything looks fairly regular - it's a tiny bit larger (in commit counts) than the few last merge windows have been, but not bigger enough to really raise any eyebrows. And there's nothing particularly odd in there either that I can think of: just a bit over half of the patch is drivers, with the next big area being arch updates. Which is pretty much the rule for how things have been forever by now.
Outside of that, the documentation and tooling (perf and selftests) updates stand out, but that's actually been a common pattern for a while now too, so it's not really surprising either. And the rest is all the usual core stuff - filesystems, core kernel, networking, etc.
The pipe rework patches are a small drop in the ocean, but ended up being the most painful part of the merge for me personally. They clearly weren't quite ready, but it got fixed up and I didn't have to revert them. There may be other problems like that that I just didn't see and be involved in, and didn't strike me as painful as a result ;)
We're missing some VFS updates, but I think we'll have Al on it for the next merge window. On the whole, considering that this was a big enough release anyway, I had no problem going "we can do that later".
As usual, even the shortlog is much too large to post, and nobody would have the energy to read through it anyway. My mergelog below gives an overview of the top-level changes so that you can see the different subsystems that got development. But with 12,500+ non-merge commits, there's obviously a little bit of everything going on.
Go out and test (and special thanks to people who already did, and started sending reports even during the merge window),
Linus
The two week-long merge window that opened with the release of the Linux 5.4 kernel series last month ended today with the launch of the first release candidate of Linux kernel 5.5, which was announced by Linus Torvalds himself. That's right, Linus Torvalds has officially kicked off the development cycle of the next major Linux kernel series, Linux 5.5, which is now available for public testing from the kernel.org website. Linux kernel 5.5-rc1 is the first milestone in many to come and gives the community a first look at the new features and changes.
"We've had a normal merge window, and it's now early Sunday afternoon, and it's getting closed as has been the standard rule for a long while now," said Linus Torvalds. "Everything looks fairly regular - it's a tiny bit larger (in commit counts) than the few last merge windows have been, but not bigger enough to really raise any eyebrows. And there's nothing particularly odd in there either that I can think of: just a bit over half of the patch is drivers, with the next big area being Arch updates."
Linus Torvalds has just issued the first release candidate of the Linux 5.5 cycle following the traditional two week long merge window.
See our newly-published Linux 5.5 feature overview to learn about all of the new changes and improvements in this kernel -- there's a lot.
Linux 5.5-rc1 is on the way to mirrors and with that the Linux 5.5 merge window is now over. Here is a look at the lengthy set of changes and new features for this next Linux kernel that will debut as stable in early 2020. Among the many changes to find with Linux 5.5 are support for the Raspberry Pi 4 / BCM2711, various performance changes still being explored, support for reporting NVMe drive temperatures, a new Logitech keyboard driver, AMD HDCP support for content protection, wake-on-voice support from Chromebooks, the introduction of KUnit for unit testing the kernel, new RAID1 modes that are quite exciting for Btrfs, and much more. Below is a more detailed look based upon our original monitoring and reporting.
After not being merged for Linux 5.4, the new sizeof_member() macro as a unified means of calculating the size of a member of a struct has been volleyed for Linux 5.5 for possible inclusion on this last day of the merge window.
The Linux kernel to now has supported SIZEOF_FIELD, FIELD_SIZEOF, sizeof_field as means of calculating the size of a member of a C struct... The new sizeof_member looks to clean-up that code cruft that has accumulated over the years with converting all usage of the old macros over to this new unified macro.
A news aggregator is software which collect news, weblog posts, and other information from the web so that they can be read in a single location for easy viewing. With the range of news sources available on the internet, news aggregators play an essential role in helping users to quickly locate breaking news.
There are a number of different file formats which information publishers use. Popular formats are RSS and Atom. RSS is an acronym for Really Simple Syndication. It’s a defined standard based on XML with the specific purpose of delivering updates to web-based content. In other words, RSS is a Web content syndication format.
For individuals that read lots of weblogs, a news aggregator makes keeping track of them effortless, and particularly useful if the weblogs are only updated occasionally. If you follow specific writers, publications and channels, an RSS reader app helps you see all new content that interests you in a central source.
Our roundup of RSS readers recommends FeedReader, Liferea, and Akregator. And there’s other alternatives available. One RSS reader we’ve not previously covered is gorss. It’s first release was only a few months ago.
HandBrake is a quite useful tool which helps you to convert a video from one format to some of the widely supported codecs (.mp4/.m4v/.mkv/.webm)
It can support any video format and help you convert it. In addition to that, you have several features on board to customize the video attributes while converting.
If you are looking for a Format Factory alternative, this is your best bet.
Customer satisfaction is arguably among the most critical tasks for emerging businesses. It’s hard for companies to find success without providing excellent customer support. Thankfully, a plethora of modern CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution is available to make this job easy for enterprises. And, companies need to choose the perfect CRM for their business if they want to be successful. If you’re a new business, we suggest you go with an Open Source CRM. Moreover, they can also be useful for established enterprises due to their extendibility. Continue reading to find out the 20 best free CRM for your business.
brand new emoji picker tool is currently in development for KDE Plasma 5.18. This smorgasbord of smilies will be accessible through a meta + . key binding (one assumes ‘meta’ is KDE speak for the super key, but you may want to check).
And below is a currently glimpse at what the glyph selection palette currently looks like...
This will be a new series of blog posts explaining different ways to contribute to KDE in an easy-to-digest manner. I plan for this series to be parallel to my keyboard shortcuts analysis so that there can be content being published (hopefully) every week. I was also feeling a bit bad about the fact that this blog is available over planet.kde.org (a feed for blog posts made by KDE contributors that also shows a bit of their personal lives and projects), but my other series was focusing more on other DEs, despite also being a project to improve KDE.
The purpose of this series originated from how I feel about asking users to contribute back to KDE. I firmly believe that showing users how contributing is easier than they think is more effective than simply calling them out and directing them to the correct resources; especially if, like me, said user suffers from anxiety or does not believe they are up to the task, in spite of their desire to help back.
It is true that I had the initiative to contact Nate Graham and Carl Schwan through Reddit, but it is also true that, had they not shown me how contributing back can be done in several small, feasible ways too, I would likely not have started contributing back.
Out of respect and due to the current need for help with updating the KDE websites, my first post on this subject will document how to help Carl Schwan port older websites to Markdown, despite there being easier tasks than that. Currently, and as to my knowledge, Carl Schwan and Adrián Chaves Fernandez are the only two main KDE websites contributors, with help and mentorship from other KDE contributors such as Jonathan Riddell and, of course, the whole Promo team, who handles websites as well. This is quite the low number of contributors for such a huge amount of websites to be updated, you see; that’s why your help would be much appreciated!
Once again this year I attended the GStreamer conference and just before that, Embedded Linux conference Europe which took place in Lyon (France). Both events were a good opportunity to demo one of the use-cases I have in mind for GstWPE, HTML overlays!
As we, at Igalia, usually have a booth at ELC, I thought a GstWPE demo would be nice to have so we can show it there. The demo is a rather simple GTK application presenting a live preview of the webcam video capture with an HTML overlay blended in. The HTML and CSS can be modified using the embedded text editor and the overlay will be updated accordingly. The final video stream can even be streamed over RTMP to the main streaming platforms (Twitch, Youtube, Mixer)! Here is a screenshot:
As one should expect with an initial alpha release, Trident's Void branch is not yet ready for the general public. At the moment it is more of a proof of concept - that Void's base can be set up with an alternative installer and use ZFS on root. It's a good beginning, but I suspect there are still a few months to go before Trident's new branch will provide a live desktop and boot environments. When that happens, I think Trident will offer a good experience, and the ZFS snapshots will provide insurance against broken updates from Void's rolling repositories. For now Trident's Void branch is an interesting idea and I hope it gets rounded out by the time a stable release happens early in 2020.
This week, on Tuesday December 3, 2019, Co-founder Cassidy James Blaede announced in an extensive blog that the 5.1 successor to the previous elementary OS Juno 5.0, which was already introduced more than a year ago, is immediately available for download. The new Linux distribution elementary OS 5.1 has been named Hera. Hera is a Greek goddess and also the wife of the God Zeus. This is nicely in line with Juno, which is the Latin name that the ancient Romans used for this same goddess Hera. Many of the improvements in Hera have, due to the somewhat rolling nature of elementary OS, been released to users in various interim updates in recent months. But this official new major update offers many more improvements in addition to these already released changes. In this blog post I will only give a global overview of what this release has to offer. When I have been able to work productively with this latest version for a while I will come back with a blog post with a more in depth and detailed description of everything that this distribution has to offer. So let’s see if the update to elementary OS 5.1 Hera is a valuable addition to the Linux landscape.
Another release of EasyOS Buster series, versions 2.1.9 and 2.1.9.1. The reason for the two version numbers, is the 2.1.9 build is with the 5.2.21 kernel, and 2.1.9.1 is with the 5.4.2 kernel.
And the reason for building with two different kernels, is that audio does not work on some hardware with the 5.4.x kernel (so far, 5.4, 5.4.1 and 5.4.2).
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 19.10. Enjoy!
"It's been five years already since the vote to transition to systemd in Debian over Upstart," reports Phoronix, noting that the Debian developer community has now begun a 20-day ranked-choice vote on eight different proposals for "'init system diversity' and just how much Debian developers care (or not) in supporting alternatives to systemd."
buntu Cinnamon Remix Released: The team behind the Ubuntu Cinnamon Unofficial flavour announced the release date after many months of development. This is the first-ever remixed Ubuntu Cinnamon version released by the Team! Ubuntu is one of the major distros of the Linux Operating system. The official version of the Ubuntu comes with the major essential environments like Gnome, KDE Plasma & Mate, Budgie. The team behind the Ubuntu cinnamon remixed version decided to add the “Cinnamon Flavour” to the Ubuntu operating system.
The creator of the Remixed Flavour version of Ubuntu is “UbuntuCinnamon“. After many months of developing, the Ubuntu remixed version comes with the Ubuntu-based open-source environments like Gnome, KDE plasma, Budgie, Mate & Xfce. The creator named this edition as “Ubuntu Cinnamon Remixed” version. You can find the official download version from the Sourceforge.net website.
Traditionally, we would have a physical computer and expect to run a single operating system on it. One way to go over this limitation, is to use virtualization, which allows us to run multiple operating systems (virtual machines) on a computer. For virtualization to work efficiently, we would need special virtualization support from the CPU (Intel CPUs: VT-x, AMD CPUs: AMD V). Relevant virtualization software include KVM, Xen, VirtualBox, Hyper-V and VMWare.
Virtualization is good, but takes lots of system resources because you boot up a full operating system for each virtual machine. Can we have an additional option for lightweight virtual machines that do not require to boot their own Linux kernel but can reusing the running Linux kernel of the host? Well, we can, and these are the Linux Containers.
With LXD, you can create system containers. These system containers are similar to virtual machines, while at the same time they are very lightweight.
In a VM, you boot a full Linux kernel and you run your favorite Linux distribution in a virtualized environment that has a fixed disk size and dedicated allocation of RAM memory. To get a graphics application to run in a VM, you need a virtualized GPU, such that will have hardware accelerated access to the host graphics driver.
In contrast, in a system container, you keep using the running Linux kernel of the host, and you just start the container image (runtime, aka rootfs) of your favorite Linux distribution. Your container uses as much disk space are needed from a common storage, and the same goes with the memory (you can also put strict restrictions, if you need). To get a graphics application to run in a container, you need to pass a Unix socket of your existing X server (or a new isolated X server).
Remember the times when Canonical was working on a Qt-based desktop and mobile phone? Remember Unity, the default Ubuntu desktop that was about to be rewritten in Qt under the name as Unity8 shortly before Canonical killed the project and switched to GNOME? And Remember Ubuntu Touch, the Linux-based operating systems for tablets and smartphones based on Ubuntu with a QML-based user interface? Turns out that the Ubuntu-based mobile operating system is living on and thriving in an independent community under the auspices of the UBports project. Quite possibly, being driven by a community of passionate volunteers may be turning out as one of its strongest points. Time to try it out!
Wouldn’t it be cool if besides Android and iOS there was a mobile operating system that was truly open source not only by license but also by spirit, one in which you you could actually be in full control over your device and personal data, one which you could change as you please, one which you wouldn’t have to “jailbreak” and fiddle around with to get at a Linux root shell and to install a system-wide ad blocker? One where you could send a pull request on GitHub with a realistic change of it being reviewed and merged?
Raxda ROCK Pi 4 is a single board computer (SBC) powered by Rockchip RK3399 hexa-core processor and inspired by Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+.
Makers, hobbyists, engineers and developers looking for an open source development board to create Internet of Things projects may be interested in the aptly named Smart Board. At the heart of the OpenSensIOT main board is a STM32F4 microcontroller which is based on Arm Cortex-M4 32-bit RISC core, operating at frequency up to 180 MHz.
“We fully believe in industry standards and the importance of open-source,” says UltraSoC CEO Rupert Baines (pictured), “by donating this encoder we can help industry adoption of RISC-V, strengthen the ecosystem and support compatibility and consistency. Open-source is a familiar model in the software world, but in hardware we’re just beginning to unlock the possibilities of this powerful approach. The RISC-V ISA has provided initial momentum, and industry bodies such as the OpenHW Group are now taking it a step further. At the same time, the legal framework has developed to allow hardware IP companies to confidently license their technologies.” The open-source movement is creating a new wave of IC customisation, reckons Baines, leading to a more disaggregated chip industry as more companies want to make their own chips which leads to more companies emerging to help those companies which are getting into developing custom silicon. ”We’re in the customisation cycle of Makimoto’s Wave,” Baines told EW, “car companies are designing their own chips, basestation companies are designing their own chips, the big Silicon Valley guys have huge silicon teams. We can help all of them.”
The RISC-V Foundation is moving its headquarters from the U.S. to Switzerland after concerns among its members of potential restrictions on the core technology that could arise from the U.S. China trade war.
Speaking to Reuters, the RISC-V Foundation’s CEO Calista Redmond said she wants to ensure that universities, governments and companies outside the United States can maintain access to and develop the open-source RISC-processor core technology. She said that its members, which include Qualcomm, NXP Semiconductors, Huawei and Alibaba, are concerned about possible geopolitical disruption.
UltraSoC today announced it will offer an open-source implementation of its industry-leading RISC-V trace encoder via the OpenHW Group. The availability of a production-grade, standards-compliant processor trace solution is a key enabler for developers, and supports the OpenHW Group’s aim of creating an open, commercial grade ecosystem for development based on open-source processors.
Rupert Baines, CEO of UltraSoC, said: “We fully believe in industry standards and the importance of open-source; by donating this encoder we can help industry adoption of RISC-V, strengthen the ecosystem and support compatibility and consistency. Open-source is a familiar model in the software world, but in hardware we’re just beginning to unlock the possibilities of this powerful approach. The RISC-V ISA has provided initial momentum, and industry bodies such as the OpenHW Group are now taking it a step further. At the same time, the legal framework has developed to allow hardware IP companies to confidently license their technologies.”
If you hadn’t noticed, we had a bit of an FPGA theme running at this year’s Superconference. Why? Because the open-source FPGA toolchain is ripening, and because many of the problems that hackers (and academics) are tackling these days have become complex enough to warrant using them. A case in point: David Williams is a university professor who just wanted to build a quadruped robotics project. Each leg has a complex set of motors, motor drivers, sensors, and other feedback mechanisms. Centralizing all of this data put real strains on the robot’s network, and with so many devices the microcontrollers were running out of GPIOs. This lead him to become, in his words, “FPGA-curious”.
An open letter to Git Hub demanding that it drop its controversial contract with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency was heading towards 400 signatures from open source maintainers and developers as of Friday.
The open letter, posted, naturally, on GitHub, referenced a previous open letter four years ago that lit a fire under the company and forced to fix a range of issues that had been troubling users.
“Now, we are asking you to help again,” the signatories wrote, going on to say that as it enforces the Trump administration’s immigration policies, ICE “is actively committing numerous crimes and human rights violations, in contravention of both US and international law”.
“At the core of the open source ethos is the idea of liberty,” the letter writers say. “Open source is about inverting power structures and creating access and opportunities for everyone.”
GraalWasm is a WebAssembly engine implemented in GraalVM. It can run WebAssembly programs in the binary format, generated with compiler backends such as Emscripten.
“Supporting WebAssembly expands the set of languages GraalVM can execute with a whole other set of languages to the ones supported by GraalVM and further step towards making it a universal platform for programming language execution,” the developers behind the project wrote in a blog post.
Given that every animal species sees colors, patterns, and brightness differently due to their unique eye adaptations, there are countless modes of vision that humans have never experienced. That’s why scientists have developed free, open-source software that can be run on photos taken with an average smartphone to simulate the perspective of animals. The platform is described in a paper published on Tuesday in Methods in Ecology and Evolution.
Called the Quantitative Colour Pattern Analysis (QCPA) framework, the platform enables people to customize digital photos to match properties associated with animal visual systems.
Doccano is an open-source text annotation tool for machine learning professionals. It sets annotation features for sequence labeling, text classification and sequence to sequence tasks. It has multiple applications like creating labeled data for sentiment analysis, named entity recognition, text summarization and so on.
The cycle of open source software (OSS) development and gender representation is, perhaps, unsurprising—women are vastly underrepresented among OSS developers. As a result, women miss out on development and professional opportunities, and as jobs in OSS development open up, women lack the experience to get them. And the cycle continues.
It’s so pervasive that it’s likely built right into the software itself, say four researchers, which is an entirely separate problem—one they’re aiming to resolve through finding these bugs and proposing redesigns around them, leading to more gender-inclusive tools used by software developers.
Based on the data collected and patterns determined (such as purchasing a specific orange juice in every grocery order), virtual assistants can identify our preferences and help their vendors build a profile of ourselves, and users collectively.
From one perspective, this could lead to the development of personalized customer experiences as a result, on the other, it can raise concerns over the privacy of a system consumers trust to put in their own home and uncertainty around what the end uses are for the data it collects.
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The virtual assistant is also embedded with Genie, a deep learning model that trains Almond to understand more complex commands across more domains. Presently, Almond has achieved an accuracy of 68 percent of the user’s input and the continuous training of Almond would allow the virtual assistant to acquire more skills, on par with today’s commercialized virtual assistants.
That’s why open-source software development has quickly become indispensable to defense missions. With open-source maps and search engines, users can drop layers from unique indices into a single dashboard and filter across them in real time to search for all kinds of location data—from geopoints (like longitude and latitude) to geoshapes (like polygons, circles and lines)—enabling speedier analyses that scale through dynamic visualizations. Now, defense analysts can query geodata faster than ever before, resulting in improved situational awareness, monitoring, tracking and spatial analysis capabilities essential to the missions of our troops.
Technology should be carefully selected to actively grow business over the long term, so it requires careful consideration and foresight. Open source has been gaining popularity or a long time due to the benefits it comes with. Those who don’t know the difference between the two, open source software’s source code is available to everyone. Anyone can modify its code while proprietary software is owned by enterprises or individuals and its source code can only be modified by its owners. Enterprises that use open source software enjoy many advantages over those using proprietary software. These are enumerated below.
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Compared to proprietary software, open-source software is inexpensive. In an enterprise environment, it is more affordable than proprietary software of similar capabilities. Furthermore, in enterprise environments, the capabilities of open source software often exceed those of proprietary software. Using such software also makes sense for enterprises because as they scale the software scales with them. Because fledgling enterprises have modest budgets such software is ideal for them.
TIBCO Software Inc., a global leader in integration, API management, and analytics, announced its plans to add Apache Pulsar as a fully supported component in TIBCO€® Messaging. Continuing its commitment to open source technologies, this addition will ensure that users of the highly popular Apache pub-sub messaging system can now leverage TIBCO Messaging to create a single, fully integrated application integration infrastructure, giving developers the freedom to choose the right messaging tool for the job at hand.
Software integration and analytics company Tibco has added Apache Pulsar as a fully supported component in its own messaging brand, TIBCO Messaging.
By way of definition and clarification then…
Apache Pulsar is a distributed ‘pub-sub’ messaging platform with a flexible messaging model and an intuitive client API.
Just so you know, the Fedora-fr community will be present at the 2019 edition of Paris Open Source Summit. This year, POSS will be held on December 10th and 11th from 9am to 6pm and, like every year, will be held at Dock Pullmann, in Aubervilliers. We will have a stand on the associative village (booth A34, to be quite exact).
We will be there to answer any questions about Fedora, offer to burn an image of Fedora 31 on your USB key. We will have Fedora goodies for people who are interested. Feel free to come to the Salon if you have time during the 2 days in question and drop by to say hi if you're there!
My work does not involve that much coding any more. I probably spend more time doing email, attending meetings, and preparing presentations than anything else these days. Still, my fingers itch if I don’t get to write some code now and then.
This has resulted in small apps such as Mattemonster, where I pushed myself to get it into a presentable state so that I could publish it to Google Play. Any one with kids starting with maths should try the app – my son loves it!
A nascent web API called getInstalledRelatedApps offers a glimpse of why online privacy remains such an uncertain proposition.
In development since 2015, Google has been experimenting with the API since the release of Chrome 59 in 2017. As its name suggests, it is designed to let web apps and sites determine whether a corresponding native app is installed on a user's device.
The purpose of the API, as described in the proposed specification, sounds laudable. More and more, the docs state, users will have web apps and natives apps from the same source installed on the same device and as the apps' feature sets converge and overlap, it will become important to be able to distinguish between the two, so users don't receive two sets of notifications, for example.
DeepSpeech 0.6 currently achieved a 7.5% word error rate for this open-source speech-to-text engine. The new release has various API changes, better training performance with TensorFlow 1.14 cuDNN RNN support for their training graph, trimmed down their language model to be using the top 500k words, adding various data augmentation techniques, a tool for bulk transcribing large audio files, and various other changes.
Using Firefox gives you peace of mind and keeps you away from the advertising companies constantly following you around, profiling you and tempting you to purchase their products.
A beta of the photo-transfer tool is rolling out today in Ireland with a wider release expected during the early months of 2020. The tool will move photos and their related metadata—including the folders they are in, file names, and any other information attached to the image. Transferring to Google comes first, with other services to follow at a later date.
But Facebook isn't doing this out of the goodness of its own heart. Data portability, as its known, is a key part of GDPR. And that means being able to easily shift your Facebook photos to another service. They're your photos, after all, so why not? "We're increasingly hearing calls from policymakers and regulators, particularly those focused on competition, that large platforms should be doing more to enable innovation," Satterfield says. "Including by allowing people to move their data to different providers."
Facebook is releasing a new tool today that will allow its users to transfer photos directly to Google Photos. The tool is being released initially in Ireland, and will be available worldwide in the first half of 2020. “For almost a decade, we’ve enabled people to download their information from Facebook,” explains Steve Satterfield, director of privacy and public policy at Facebook. “The photo transfer tool we’re starting to roll out today is based on code developed through our participation in the open-source Data Transfer Project.”
Do you have thousands of photos uploaded to Facebook that you'd like to move onto another app or website? Now the social media company will let you do just that.
The new image transfer tool will let users copy all their photos and videos from Facebook to Google Photos, and eventually other social networking sites.
It was built as part of the open-source Data Transfer Project - a technology partnership between major social networking and digital companies designed to make information hosted on one social media service available on other services.
The new Facebook tool will only be available in Ireland initially, but will be rolled out worldwide in 2020.
Many government branches rely on proprietary software to power their websites and digital services. Using licensed technology can leave users locked in to costly and outdated platforms that are not easily updated, says Chris Smith, the CEO of Ottawa digital agency OPIN Software.
Several government organizations have teamed up with OPIN over the past year to make the switch to Drupal, providing a more streamlined and functional experience for Canadians and giving government IT managers more flexibility.
Chang, who started farming eight years ago and works full-time in information technology off-farm, searched for a different solution for his 14-acre organic vegetable and cut flower farm in northeastern Connecticut, finding software aimed at CSAs, which he doesn’t run, or marketing and sales, which he didn’t need. Then he discovered farmOS, a free, open source record-keeping software built on the web platform Drupal.
Robert Chang’s fellow small-scale farmers turn to each other when they need low-cost tech to stay organized as they plant dozens of varieties of vegetables each season and seek to consistently fill their community-supported agriculture (CSA) boxes each week.
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In the case of farmOS, on the other hand, Chang says, “Nobody is mining it or monetizing it in any way. It’s yours. You can export it in whatever way you want.” And it is infinitely customizable, if you’re tech savvy. “Since it’s open source, you can change the code, if you want to do your own customizations.”
Researchers at UT have developed a free open source computer program that can be used to create visual and quantitative representations of brain electrical activity in laboratory animals in hopes of developing countermeasures for opioid use disorder.
The program is described in a paper published in JoVE. Lead author Christopher O'Brien is a UT graduate who manages the research laboratory of Helen Baghdoyan and Ralph Lydic, both co-authors on the paper and professors in UT's Department of Psychology and the Graduate School of Medicine's Department of Anesthesiology.
In the paper, the researchers describe the steps they took to create a multitapered spectrogram for electroencephalogram (EEG) analyses with an accessible and user-friendly code. They validated the program through analyses of EEG spectrograms of mice that had received different opioid treatments.
"There is a misconception that opioids promote sleep, but in quantitative studies of states of sleep and wakefulness using electroencephalographic recordings of brain waves, opiates are shown to disrupt sleep," Lydic said. "Additionally, drug addiction studies show that abnormal sleep is associated with increased likelihood of addiction relapse."
Following the ongoing global digital revolution, the continuously evolving role of information technology (IT) in the healthcare sector is only set to gain more weight going forward. While new-age technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), and big data have already started making headway within healthcare, IT continues to play a vital part from an administrative point of view, enriching the quality and efficiency of healthcare. Healthcare IT practitioners can choose from options such as open-source tools, licensed vendor tools, hybrid software environment or in-house tools to fulfill their operational requirements. Of these options, open-source technology is often the most affordable and accessible solution. Built upon the concept of collaboration, open-source software deploys publicly accessible code, allowing constant engagement with a vast developer community. This results in a well-designed, reliable and constantly evolving software product that can prove to be vital for healthcare IT infrastructural needs.
Kevin Eliceiri, professor of medical physics and biomedical engineering at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, plans to improve the architecture and infrastructure of üManager, an open-source software package for control of automated microscopes.
Open-source software is crucial to modern scientific research for advancing biology and medicine while also providing reproducibility and transparency. Yet, even the most widely used research software often lacks dedicated funding.
From the deck of the HMS Surprise pirate ship at the Maritime Museum of San Diego, on the eve of Kubecon, Codefresh announced the establishment of a $100 Million Open Source Fund offering grants up to $1 Million. This “heave-ho” is designed to foster the growth and expediency of open source projects from development and deployment to ongoing maintenance.
“Open source is part of every project and drives change in the modern world at an incredible pace,” said Dan Garfield, Chief Technology Evangelist of Codefresh. “Codefresh has contributed to open source projects related to Kubernetes such as Helm and Chart Museum, and many open-source projects have used Codefresh to power their CI/CD and software delivery supply chain. The Codefresh $100 Million Open Source Fund is a way to give even more back to the community that has embraced and empowered Codefresh from the beginning.”
The 2€° Investing Initiative (2dii) and Beyond Ratings have launched an EU-backed open source tool which they say can help investors become Paris-aligned and assess their risk of stranded assets.
As detailed above, open-source PIM systems are an absolute blessing for SMBs looking to move toward an Omnichannel customer engagement strategy. This is especially true for organizations that have strong IT teams or partners because successfully customizing and implementing open source software often requires specialized IT knowledge. Luckily, even if you don’t have the right skill sets on hand, you can simply outsource the implementation to the PIM system provider or a third party IT services firm. At the same time, you may also consider nurturing software development talent in-house to achieve the best results at optimal costs.
Intellegens, an artificial intelligence (AI) start-up, and, Optibriumââ¢, leading providers of software and services for drug discovery, today announced joint success in the Open Source Malaria (OSM) global initiative aimed at identifying the best predictive models for antimalarial compounds. Together, the companies developed one of the top models, deploying a cutting-edge deep neural network algorithm, Alchemiteââ¢, to accurately predict active compounds with novel mechanisms of actions that could be critical to future malaria control and elimination. As one of four prizewinning models selected, the project will now progress through the next phase of the initiative that includes the proposal of new compounds that are predicted to be active, for synthesis and testing against the malaria parasite.
Leaked documents and interviews with whistle-blowing sources will always be a part of investigative journalism. But thanks to the rise of digital technology, and the easy availability of data that has gone with it, reporters have more ways to get stories than ever before.
“You can be on your couch in front of your computer and solve a mystery of a missile system downing a plane,” said Aliaume Leroy, a journalist who is part of the BBC’s Africa Eye team.
As news media skepticism grows worldwide and digital tools become increasingly robust and available, reporters and news organizations are engaging more proactively in open-source journalism—a practice in which reporters investigate and construct stories based on publicly available data, including via social media, per The New York Times.
India Observatory, country’s first socio, economic, ecological open source integrated Geospatial data platform, was launched on Tuesday at Hyderabad in GeoSmart India conference.
Surprisingly, despite our extensive knowledge of the chemical compounds found in nature, there has never been a comprehensive, open-source database for researchers to store information on the chemistry produced by bacteria and fungi. Until now.
Simon Fraser University associate professor Roger Linington and a team of international collaborators have created the Natural Products Atlas, which holds information on nearly 25,000 natural compounds and serves as a knowledge base and repository for the global scientific community.
With the widespread use of smartphones, the use of emojis has increased to a new level. The new open source emoji system OpenMoji has been released with a collection of 3,180 characters to improve this language.
If you’re looking for an open-source, good-looking emoji set, OpenMoji with 3,180 emojis is just for you.
According to OpenMoji’s website, OpenMoji is the first open source and standalone emoji system. The project involved more than 50 students and two professors from the Hochschule für Gestaltung Schwäbisch Gmünd University in Germany. All emojis are approved and licensed Creative Commons.
According to OpenMoji’s website, the project is the first open-source and independent emoji system. The project is the team-effort of over 50 students and 2 professors at the HfG Schwäbisch Gmünd (Design University). All the emojis are approved and are available with a Creative Commons (Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International) license.
Open source offerings are an easy way to bring automation into your organization. When selecting software, evaluate the user experience, main features offered and Linux support.
Google frameworks lead Nicole Sullivan praised Next.js at the October JAMstack_conf_19 in San Francisco. Though React started within Facebook (and AngularJS started within Google), developers are less concerned with origins and more focused on direction. Google Chrome has a mandate to make the web faster, she said, and React-centric Next.js is part of that mandate. Rauch was also featured with a walk-on presentation during the keynote address at Google's Chrome Dev 19 conference in San Francisco last month.
If you're thinking about building your own test automation framework, think again. In most cases, you'd do better to consider one or more of the open-source options available.
That's because, in general, a framework is a set of best practices, assumptions, common tools, and libraries that you can use across teams. You simply don't need to build one that's unique to your dev environment. A framework will help make your test automation code reusable, maintainable, and stable.
Teams that take these benefits to the extreme by building their own elaborate automation frameworks from scratch drive me crazy. That's because they could have easily made use of existing open-source tools and libraries that would have met their needs without writing any code—and, in most cases, with better results.
Google Code-in (GCI) is a unique opportunity for students to work on real open source software projects and for open source projects to gain extra help as well. Over the past nine years, more than 11,000 students from 108 countries have successfully completed over 55,000 tasks in GCI and this year 29 organizations, all of which have participated in Google Summer of Code, are devising over 2,500 task for teenager to choose to work on.
Nine years later, developer corrects code snippet.
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An academic paper [PDF] published in 2018 identified a code snippet Lundblad posted on the site as the most copied Java code taken from StackOverflow and then re-used in open source projects.
A few weeks ago I received NVIDIA Jetson Nano for review together with 52Pi ICE Tower cooling fan which Seeed Studio included in the package, and yesterday I wrote a getting started guide...
This week we welcome Sebastian Steins (@sebastiansteins) as our PyDev of the Week! Sebastian is the creator of the Pythonic News website. You can find out more about Sebastian by checking out what he’s been up to over on Github. Let’s take a few moments to get to know him better!
Debugging is a painful but necessary practice in software development. The tools that are available in Python range from the built-in debugger, to tools integrated with your coding environment, to the trusty print function. In this episode Ram Rachum describes his work on PySnooper and how it can be used to speed up your problem solving in complex or legacy applications. Summary
Debugging is a painful but necessary practice in software development. The tools that are available in Python range from the built-in debugger, to tools integrated with your coding environment, to the trusty print function. In this episode Ram Rachum describes his work on PySnooper and how it can be used to speed up your problem solving in complex or legacy applications.
Nash recently announced that it has released a simple, open-source bot designed to help traders perform automatic market-maker strategies. Written in Python 3, the Makerbot is set up to allow for trading on Nash in its default configuration.
Trading bots are commonly used to improve liquidity on an exchange. The Nash Makerbot uses a symmetric market-maker algorithm, aiming to take advantage of the concept of “intrinsic volatility” in a market. Makerbot will watch the order book for a programmed trading pair until it is triggered to trade within a fixed price range.
A few weeks ago, I was doing some refactoring of Friendly-traceback and had some minor difficulty in avoiding the creation of circular imports. For some reason (age perhaps), I could not visualize the file structure properly. Enter pydeps. After I used it to generate a graph for all the files internal to Friendly-traceback, I was able to use that graph to figure out a better way to structure my program.
Today, as I stared at that graph, after including it in the newly styled documentation, I noticed that the "version" file I had created early on, was really redundant since its content (a single variable) could easily be incorporated in the Public API file.
I mean it this time, coverage.py 5.0 is nearly ready. I’m putting out coverage.py 5.0 beta 2 for a week before declaring it really done. Please try it.
For part two of the TDD with Pytest.
I would be covering the project structure where your test cases will reside.
The creation of test cases as a class or function under pytest.
Do head to part 1 of the series before proceeding with part 2.
It is assumed that a Linux system is used for this series.
Please use a Linux variant like Ubuntu or a cloud IDE like Codenvy running a Linux virtual container.
One of the funny outcomes of this half-mobile half-desktop world is where our de facto file system remerged. In absence of a coherent, logical file system across these two worlds, we trampled down a desire path and made our own: our email inboxes.
It should be noted that in a secret experiment conducted at the National Center for Credibility Assessment (then called the Department of Defense Polygraph Institute), 80 percent of subjects succeeded in beating the Test for Espionage and Sabotage after an hour-long training session.
There is no documented instance of the Test for Espionage and Sabotage ever catching a spy or saboteur.
Anyone who has walked past a nail salon is familiar with the noxious odors that emanate from acrylic nails, polishes and removers. Customers getting manicures and pedicures endure the smell temporarily, but manicurists who inhale these evaporating chemicals for hours expose themselves to health risks.
Multiple sources affected say their IT provider, Englewood, Colo. based Complete Technology Solutions (CTS), was hacked, allowing a potent strain of ransomware known as “Sodinokibi” or “rEvil” to be installed on computers at more than 100 dentistry businesses that rely on the company for a range of services — including network security, data backup and voice-over-IP phone service.
Reached via phone Friday evening, CTS President Herb Miner declined to answer questions about the incident. When asked about reports of a ransomware attack on his company, Miner simply said it was not a good time and hung up.
Netflix announced that it is open sourcing Metaflow, a human-centric framework that applies data science to hundreds of use cases across the company including content delivery and video encoding.
Most of the commercial projects today actively engage in open source projects since it lowers the barriers to adoption and collaboration.
Broadband Forum today announced it has become an ‘open’ organization – making all of its work visible to the industry.
Communications Service Providers (CSPs) must transform their service delivery and management infrastructure to remain competitive. At the forefront of this transformation is the modernization of the systems that enable the management of network services, the operations support systems (OSS) and the systems for managing the customer and the overall business operations, the business support systems (BSS). Modernization of these systems is essential for business imperatives today: agility, elastic capacity scaling, and service velocity.
The O-RAN (for open radio access network) Alliance was created by the merger of the xRAN Forum and C-RAN Alliance. It caused a stir when announced at MWC in 2018 by its founding members – AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DOCOMO and Orange. They had two intertwined goals: to evolve the RAN through virtualised radio network elements, white-box hardware and standardised interfaces to gain greater interoperability and reduce costs.
Bottom line: open-source phone systems are very attractive to cost-conscious IT leaders. And for companies that truly know what they’re getting into and have the resources to support those systems, they may be a good option. But evaluate costs carefully: you may end up paying more for that open-source phone system than you would have if you went with a turnkey solution.
The cloud has become a giant profit machine for much of the tech world. It’s pushed both Amazon. com (ticker: AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) to stratospheric valuations. But the next big thing in the cloud is, ironically, being enabled by a non-profit.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is the non-profit foundation that owns the Kubernetes trademark and hosts the Kubernetes open source project. Kubernetes, as Barron’s explained recently, is making the cloud far more useful for running cloud-native applications. The Greek word for helmsman or pilot, Kubernetes is accelerating the transition from legacy client-server technology to the cloud.
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Dan Kohn: The history here is that Google originally created the [Kubernetes open source] project back in 2014. The company brought in developers from a number of other companies – Red Hat, IBM (IBM), Huawei and others. They wanted to get more adoption. So they said, who can we transfer the trademark to to ensure that there would be neutral governance around this project and there’d be a fair way of deciding to use it for other sorts of things. So they came to the Linux Foundation and the Linux Foundation set up CNCF.
The company is also active in open-source communities, such as the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, Alliance for Open Media, Cloud Foundry, Hyperledger, Open Container Initiative, Continuous Delivery Foundation, The Apache Software Foundation, MariaDB Foundation and The Linux Foundation.
18 AGL members including DENSO, DENSO TEN, Mazda, Panasonic, Renesas, NTT DATA MSE, and Suzuki, will show instrument cluster, infotainment, connected car, and cybersecurity applications running on AGL technology
In a flourish of open source sesame-ness, Alibaba Cloud has announced that the core codes of Alink, its self-developed algorithm platform, have been made available via open source on Github.
The most important of the OpenBSD vulnerabilities is the authentication bypass flaw CVE-2019-19521. The vulnerability existed in the authentication system making it prone to remote attacks. Nonetheless, the vulnerability did not affect all systems alike.
Josh Santa and Kurt talk the border nightmare Santa Clause has to deal with as he traverses the globe. Questions we explore include: Are the reindeer farm animals? Is the North Pole a farm? Is Santa an intellectual property thief? Does Krampus eat politicians? Does Santa have a passport? Does Santa have an emergency radio?
As part of a recent initiative at ForAllSecure to analyze more open source software with Mayhem, a next-generation fuzzing solution, we decided to investigate some cryptographic libraries.
Kaspersky has presented analysis of open source Virtual Network Computing (VNC), which uncovered memory corruption vulnerabilities that have existed in a substantial number of projects for a very long time.
Big Tech is moving into health care. Google has announced an intention to buy Fitbit and is also poised to collect health data on tens of millions of patients through a deal with the St. Louis-based hospital chain Ascension. In March, Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and J.P. Morgan announced their health venture, Haven. Apple is using its devices to help academics run studies with millions of participants. And Microsoft and IBM are using artificial intelligence and machine learning to help researchers develop better cancer treatments.
The use of digital technology in health care has enormous promise, to be sure. But, as the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of Google’s Project Nightingale revealed, there is also a potential dark side to these projects. Ascension, it noted, “also hopes to mine data to identify additional tests that could be necessary or other ways in which the system could generate more revenue from patients, documents show.”
That detail raises a key question that’s largely overlooked in our health care debates: should the drive to maximize corporate revenues determine how health information technology develops and becomes integrated into medical practice, or should that be determined by medical science and the public?
As Democratic presidential contenders gear up for the next debate on December 19, they are addressing many issues around foreign policy. However, it seems that all of them are neglecting to even discuss one major issue.
It was 39 years ago Sunday that John Lennon was murdered by a deranged fan in front of his apartment - or, in the bitter words of Jimmy Breslin that night, "became another person who died after being shot with a gun on the streets of New York." He was 40. Yoko Ono posted a searing tribute: Alongside her devastating photo of John's blood-spattered glasses, she described his loss as "a hollowing experience" and mourned that 1,400,000 Americans have been killed by guns since his death, or roughly 100 a day. It's difficult to confirm the number - in 2015, other sources cited the figure of 1.15 million - but the proximate reality is, regardless, horrific. A final, lengthy interview a few days before his death reveals the buoyant, conscientious, sometimes dark, always forthright human being we lost - on being an imperfect father: "I'm doing me best." We can only imagine the art we lost as well. These dark days, God knows we could use his voice, heart, wit and enduring hope: "Imagine all the people/ Living life in peace/ You may say I’m a dreamer/ But I’m not the only one/ I hope someday you'll join us/ And the world will live as one." RIP.
Winston Churchill once said that “in wartime truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” If Britain’s election is anything to go by, these days lies are so precious that they need to be attended by a bodyguard of further lies. This election has been marinated in mendacity: big lies and small lies; quarter truths and pseudo-facts; distortion, dissembling and disinformation; and digital skulduggery on an industrial scale. The public is so disillusioned with the political process that, when a member of the public asked Boris Johnson during a televised debate whether he valued truth, the audience burst into laughter. Mr Johnson is the favourite by a substantial margin.
Agriculture’s past sometimes is separated from its present by the barest degree, and the glaring story of soil loss in North Dakota, highlighted by the efforts of researcher Dave Franzen, is a signpost account of cost and consequence, with relevance for the entire farming industry. Even today, after a grower works a Dakota field and looks in the back window—the soil appears as black as it did in years past. It is not. As Franzen bluntly summarizes: “People can’t believe how much soil we once had in this state. The really rich stuff is long gone and some farmers never realize that.”
Danish researchers have settled a problem of US disaster accounting, confirming that in the last century€ North America’s worst hurricanes€ have become three times more frequent – and significantly more destructive.
Into the late afternoon hours, the blistering light gave way to soft, horizontal rays that crisscrossed over Lebanon’s Beqaa valley. The rays played with the children, casting long silhouettes of their forms, while they chased each other. As the temperature subsided, the elders of the community descended to the lowest level of the mosque-turned-refugee shelter.
Failing to address wealth inequality means only one thing for a civilization: the end is near.
New reporting by Politico reveals that Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Administrator Seema Verma filed a claim for over $40,000 for items stolen while she gave a speech bashing Medicare for All.
The Senate’s top Democrat said Sunday that congressional leaders have reached a “real breakthrough” deal to give 12 weeks of paid parental leave to millions of federal workers as part of the annual defense policy bill.
A special agent for the FBI interviewed Griffith back in May 2019. It was a consensual interview and he talked about his presentation titled “Blockchain and Peace” with the agent. He showed photos of his trip and said he would like to attend the same conference next year.
Griffith discussed his presentation with another individual via a messaging app. “Individual-1 asked, in sum and substance, what interest North Koreans had in cryptocurrency. Griffith replied, in sum and substance, ‘probably avoiding sanctions… who knows,’” the complaint says.
No US components is an improvement over Huawei's previous flagship, the P30 Pro. We did our own version of this analysis back in May for the P30, where we looked over teardowns for US components. The P30 Pro is Huawei's previous flagship smartphone, and while it was designed and launched before the US export ban, it still didn't have a heavy reliance on US manufacturers. Huawei says it has been working to reduce its reliance on US companies for some time, with Huawei's deputy chairman, Ken Hu, writing in May that "The company has known [a US export ban] could be a possibility for many years. We have invested heavily and made full preparations in a variety of areas, including R&D and business continuity, which will ensure that our business operations will not be greatly affected, even under extreme conditions." So far, Huawei's preparations seem to be working.
On the older P30 Pro, Huawei already had its own SoC, thanks to its HiSilicon chip design division. HiSilicon was also responsible for several smaller chips, like audio, the RF transceiver, power-management, and mid-band 5G chips. From there the P30 components were a whirlwind tour across the world: a display from BoE in China, cameras from Sony in Japan, RAM from SK Hynix in South Korea, an NFC chip from NXP in the Netherlands, and a battery from Huizhou Desay Battery Co. in China. The biggest US components were the flash memory from Micron, LTE antennas from Skyhook and Qorvo, and SMPS (switched-mode power supply) chips from Broadcom.
CHARLESTON, S.C.—Elizabeth Warren said Sunday she believes Americans are ready for a presidential ticket with two women at the top, rejecting concerns from some Democrats that a woman can’t beat President Donald Trump.
When the media and both political parties represent the interests of the oligarchy, attempts to prop up corporate centrists will fail, and surprises like Trump will be inevitable.
Problems continue to mount for one of Trump’s fiercest defenders in the House, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-California). On December 3, the House Intelligence Committee revealed in its impeachment report that Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani and Giuliani’s indicted associate Lev Parnas made calls to Nunes on April 10 and April 12. The report only states the existence of the calls, not their content, but highlights that they occurred four days after an opinion piece containing disinformation about Joe Biden was published in The Hill. The Intelligence Committee report alleges this was part of a “coordinated effort by associates of President Trump” to push “false narratives publicly.”
If we have another Obama-type presidency, without real change, we will eventually get Trumpism without Trump
When powerful players in politics and media gather in secret and their meeting is exposed, is it any wonder that people would see straight through the stagecraft to the leading actors rehearsing their parts? In today’s growing political authoritarianism, there is little doubt that control and consolidation of communications is necessary to manage an agenda and major narratives. In light of the recent meeting between President Trump and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, what new productions are now on the horizon for the people to parse?
On Jan. 3 of this year, the first day of the 116th U.S. Congress, the new Democratic majority in the House introduced as its first bill a sweeping reform of the country’s elections. H.R. 1, the For the People Act, a bold package of measures aimed at improving voting access, tackling Big Money’s corrupting influence in politics, and bolstering ethics rules. The Washington Post called it “perhaps the most comprehensive political-reform proposal ever considered by our elected representatives.”
"Trump's antisemitism and his racism are two sides of the same coin."
Meduza has learned that one of the members of the hacker group “Evil Corp,” which U.S. official say is “behind the world’s most egregious cyberattacks,” is Andrey Kovalsky, the son of former Khimki Mayor Vladimir Strelchenko.€
Prince Charles has ordered a crisis meeting with brother Andrew — demanding he comes clean about his dealings with Jeffrey Epstein before a potentially damaging TV special, according to a report Sunday.
Charles, the 71-year-old heir to the throne, has ordered the meeting with his scandal-scarred brother before Monday night’s BBC special with key accuser Virginia Roberts Giuffre, the Sunday Mirror said.
“Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins”
[...]
This is how Alex Tizon starts his deeply personal essay, “My Family’s Slave.” The article ran in The Atlantic after his sudden death in 2017, and is the centerpiece of a collection of Tizon’s works called “Invisible People: Stories of Lives at the Margins.” He was hardly a household name. Tizon was one of three Seattle Times reporters who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for “their investigation of widespread corruption and inequities in the federally-sponsored housing program for Native Americans, which inspired much-needed reforms.” Despite this towering professional achievement, Sam Howe Verhovek, a friend and colleague of Tizon when he worked at the Los Angeles Times, thinks he deserves more, and has edited this collection of Tizon’s stories and articles. Through a diverse catalog, Verhovek showcases Tizon’s unique gift for giving voice to those invisible people whom the world has chosen to ignore.
Tizon brings a wide breadth of subjects to life, from a native woman at the edges of civilization to a man in search of UFOs, from a teenage gang member in prison for murder to a Khmer Rouge survivor facing lifelong trauma. But Tizon was no ordinary reporter: In every story, Tizon lifts the voice of his subject with an eloquence and dignity that reflect a deep human respect for each of them.
When Disney+ was first launched, Linux users who attempted to watch shows and movies were shown an error stating "Something went wrong. Please try again. If the problem persists, visit the Disney+ Help Center (Error Code 83)."
As explained by Hans de Goede, this error was being caused by the Disney+ service using the highest level of security for the Widevine Digital Rights Management (DRM) technology. As some Linux and Android devices did not support this higher DRM security level, they were unable to stream Disney+ shows in their browsers... Yesterday, Twitter users discovered that Disney+ had suddenly started working on Linux browsers after the streaming service tweaked their DRM security levels...
Of all nations, China has been perhaps the most aggressive in stealing intellectual property, especially from U.S. companies—a key issue in U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade war with Beijing. Now, Beijing has its sights on leading the global organization that is supposed to protect IP, and which sets international standards for patents, trademarks, and copyrights.
Earlier this month, China nominated a candidate to head the United Nations’ World Intellectual Property Organization, or WIPO, signaling its desire to more actively shape the international system for defining intellectual property rights.
Given China’s long track record of corporate espionage, rampant IP theft, and support for U.S. enemies, many trade experts are wary, to say the least. Several years ago, the United States even opposed the creation of a patent office in China on the grounds that stringent safeguards for protecting the confidentiality of trade secrets in patent applications might be subject to intrusions in China, according to James Pooley, a former deputy director-general at WIPO who managed the agency’s international patent system. A WIPO official said the agency has no intention of opening a patent office outside the agency’s high-security office in Geneva.
Under WIPO rules, patent applications remain confidential for 18 months before they are approved and then made public.
For the U.S. to “win” we need to compete smarter and more aggressively. We must get far better at multilateral leadership campaigns, anticipating leadership changes, and identifying and placing qualified Americans or others who will champion the U.S. reform agenda in roles in these organizations.
This is not a Republican or Democratic problem. This is an American problem.
The multilateral system, for all its faults, is an effective vehicle for collective action and burden-sharing. The U.S. created the World Bank, regional development banks, the UN, and other multilateral organizations to advance broad U.S. interests. If we didn’t have these institutions, we would have to invent them — or, worse — they would be invented and led by others, such as China.
It doesn’t help our credibility when we don’t pay our dues and owe a massive amount of arrears to the UN. Not paying our dues could work 20 or 30 years ago, but in a world where we have less influence than we used to, this strategy impacts our ability to project U.S. influence and instead tempts others to fill the financial and leadership void.
There is a sense in Washington that these institutions are not “ours” and thus we tend to favor bilateral solutions to problems. However, while bilateral engagement can be uniquely effective, we cannot underestimate U.S. leverage in the multilateral system and miss opportunities for low-cost and high-impact engagement.
Right now, it seems the Chinese are “winning” the UN appointments game. For example, in May, the Chinese at the World Health Organization (WHO) barred Taiwan from participating in the WHO assembly, where Taiwan has observer status. In 2015, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) was taken over by Chinese national, Fang Liu. The leadership position has historically been held by Europeans or Americans. The ICAO, with the appointment of Liu, now follows China’s “One China” policy and refuses to allow Taiwan to attend ICAO meetings.
Economists generally agree that innovation is important to economic growth and that government support for innovation is necessary. Historically, the U.S. government has supported innovation in a variety of ways: (1) a strong legal system for patents; (2) direct support through research performed by government agencies, grants, loans, and loan guarantees; and (3) indirect support through various tax incentives for private firms. In recent years, however, we have seen a weakening of the U.S. patent system, a decline in direct funding of research, and a weakening of tax policy tools used to encourage new innovation. These disruptive changes threaten the future of innovation in the United States, potentially driving innovation activities offshore to Europe and China. This Article concludes that the current innovation crisis demands changes to both the patent and tax systems in order to instill confidence in the innovation landscape.
On Friday, the United States filed its brief in response to the March 18, 2019 order of the Supreme Court inviting the Solicitor General to express the views of the United States on the petition for certiorari filed by Petitioners Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. and Hikma Pharmaceuticals International Ltd. in Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. The Solicitor General concluded that "[i]n the view of the United States, the petition for a writ of certiorari should be denied," stating that the case was "not an optimal vehicle for bringing greater clarity [to the Court's recent ۤ 101 precedents] because the court of appeals majority arrived at the correct result."
[...]
The District Court determined that Hikma's proposed products would infringe Vanda's patent, rejecting Hikma's argument that the '610 patent claimed a patent-ineligible natural law. The Federal Circuit affirmed, with the majority (Judges Lourie and Hughes) concluding at step one of its Mayo/Alice analysis that the claims of the '610 patent are patent-eligible because they are not directed to a patent-ineligible natural law, but rather are "directed to a novel method of treating a disease." As explained in the Solicitor General's brief, "[t]he majority explained that, although '[t]he inventors recognized the relationships between iloperidone' and genetically linked side effects, they had not claimed the relationship itself, but instead had 'claimed an application of that relationship' that requires the administration of a specific dosage, 'depending on the result of a genotyping assay.'" The brief also explained that Chief Judge Prost, writing in dissent, "stated that, '[w]hatever weight can be ascribed to' Mayo's suggestion that 'a new way of using an existing drug' may be patent-eligible, lower courts 'remain beholden' to what she described as Mayo's contrary 'holding.'" Following the Federal Circuit's denial of rehearing en banc, the Hikma filed a Petition for a Writ of Certiorari, offering the following Question Presented...
A U.S. appeals court on Friday voided a jury’s calculation that Apple Inc (AAPL.O) should pay $503 million for infringing patents owned by licensing firm VirnetX Holdings Corp , setting the stage for another potential trial in a decade-old legal battle.
In a partial victory for VirnetX, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit left in place a Texas jury’s finding that Apple iPhones infringed two VirnetX patents relating to secure communications technology.
Apple Inc. failed to convince an East Texas federal district court to move a patent infringement dispute involving its Apple Wallet application to a court closer to its California headquarters.
The Nov. 27 ruling is a win for Marshall, Texas-based Quest NetTech Corp., which is suing Apple for allegedly infringing its U.S. Patent No. RE38137 that describes a electronic credit card system to store financial account and transaction data.
The RIAA, IFPI, and Music Canada teamed up earlier this year to shut down file-hosting platform DBR.ee, claiming it infringed their members' copyrights. A replacement site, that later appeared at a new URL, is now being targeted by the RIAA after it obtained subpoenas against Namecheap and Cloudflare.
Copyright holders are increasingly targeting Google with DMCA anti-circumvention notices. The number of complaints has already doubled compared to last year, and skyrocketed compared to the years before. The notices are particularly effective as there is no standard mechanism to file a counter-notification.
Rapper Juice WRLD (aka Jared Higgins) was pronounced this dead this morning after suffering a massive seizure at Chicago’s Midway Airport.€ The rapper was 21.
