If you are used to a menu-driven user interface in Linux or find the Chrome OS application launcher not quite to your liking for accessing Crostini Linux applications then one option you could try is LXPanel.
The panel generates a menu for installed applications automatically from '*.desktop' files and can itself be incorporated in its own '.desktop' file which if pinned to the Chrome OS shelf can also be used as a means to start the 'penguin' container after booting.
Unfortunately it is not quite perfect as the panel is displayed in the middle of the screen and doesn't respond well to changing its position under geometry in its panel settings. However you can toggle its visibility by clicking the panel's icon on the shelf. Also closing the panel (by right clicking the icon) only closes the 'LXPanel' application in Chrome OS so to terminate it fully you need to use 'killall lxpanel' in a terminal session.
We’ve been tracking a device known only as ‘Mushu’ for about a month at this point, and it brings with it a very specific and interesting addition to the Chrome OS ecosystem: a discrete GPU (or dGPU for short). When we first reported on this device being in development, I suggested that I don’t see a ton of use cases for a Chromebook with a dGPU for most users. Without a proper video editor or tons of ways to play locally-stored games, its hard to make a case for dGPUs when existing Chromebooks are already so fast at what they do.
Network and API connectivity project Cilium has been released in version 1.7, providing users with a UI for observability platform Hubble and the option to apply cluster-wide network policies.
Cilium is an open source project developed by US startup Isovalent to provide and secure network connectivity and load balancing for workloads such as application containers or processes. It is based on a virtual machine-like construct called Berkeley Packet Filter (BPF) which can be found in the Linux kernel.
FSCRYPT as the file-system encryption framework for the Linux kernel and is currently wired up for EXT4, F2FS, and UBIFS to offer native encryption capabilities is currently seeing improvements so the separate casefolding (case-insensitive) file/folder support can work on encrypted directories.
Going back to the start of 2020 we've been seeing a few patches here and there around AMD Family 19h, almost certainly Zen 3. That patch work has continued with a few more bits out this week while hopefully more bring-up is on the horizon ahead of the Linux 5.7 merge window opening in just over one month's time.
Like the earlier Family 19h EDAC bring-up, this week's work isn't too juicy besides it being refreshing to see AMD punctually getting out Linux kernel patches for forthcoming hardware. The patches this week involve a few additions to AMD's perf subsystem code around the uncore bits. No enticing details of Family 19h are revealed but just shifting code around for supporting the L3 thread mask for the forthcoming CPUs and also the L3 PMU.
Broadcom developers have been recently volleying open-source Linux driver patches for enabling their "VK Accelerators" on the platform.
Broadcom VK Accelerators are PCI Express offload engines for supporting video transcoding on multiple streams in parallel. These VK Accelerators offer various video offload processing features and are exposed to user-space via specialized /dev/bcm-vk.X devices. We haven't yet seen user-space patches to see if Broadcom intends to support any of the common APIs or will be developing their own customized solution.
This Broadcom VK offload engine relies upon seemingly closed-source firmware files to be loaded for running the logic on these accelerators.
QOwnNotes is a cross-platform plain text and markdown note taking application. By itself, it wouldn’t be something to talk about, we have vim and emacs and everything in between. But QOwnNotes integrates nicely with the Notes application from NextCloud and OwnCloud, as well as providing useful integration with NextCloud like old version of notes, access to deleted files, watching changes, etc.
In our day to day activities, we need to search for specific files in our Linux systems. These can be documents, texts, and even multimedia data including video and audio files.
Linux comes with a powerful command-line tool (Terminal), that enables users to search for data and text using various command-line arguments. One advantage of using the Terminal is it supports the use of regular expressions and scripting.
Having said that, not everyone is well-versed with the many Linux commands; this brings forth the demand for having an interactive and reliable Graphical User Interface. One of such powerful tools is the Searchmonkey application.
Remote Touchpad is an open-source utility allows to remote control the mouse and keyboard connected to your computer from the web browser of a smartphone or any other device with a touchscreen.
Remote Touchpad supports Flatpak’s RemoteDesktop portal (experimental), Windows and X11.
Simply run the utility on your machine. It outputs an URL along with QR code in a terminal window. To take control open the displayed URL or scan the QR code in your phone.
Download managers are great. They make the downloading process a lot easier and faster. However, the most popular download manager is IDM which is only available to Window. That is why in this quick guide, You will learn about the fast download managers for Linux that are alternative to IDM and even better in some cases.
Having a fast download manager in your system is very essential as we tend to download files from the internet and the default downloader that we have got with the browsers. These download managers are not very efficient and do not provide any modern needed features.
Here I have compiled a list of best and fast download managers for Linux. Let’s get started with the first one.
After a long span of four years, a new stable version of open-source drawing program MyPaint 2.0 with major changes. v1.2 was the last stable version released on Jan 15, 2016.
Being one of the best MS paint alternatives, MyPaint 2.0 comes up with a new layer mode for combining multiple layers of images and brush settings and inputs.
[...]
To tweak the artwork with more control options, v2.0 avails new brush settings and symmetry modes such as smudge transparency, offsets multiplier, the angular offset, and GridMap Scale.
With Ubuntu 20.04 "Focal Fossa" being released in the next few months, the team over at Canonical are looking for a little help testing their updated Steam package.
To be clear, this is only for the 20.04 release, they're not looking for feedback for earlier versions of Ubuntu.
It's not a drastic change to the Steam package with it pulling in an update from Debian, but this newer build does have updated udev rules for some devices. Canonical also did some of their own tweaks for NVIDIA due to the differences between Ubuntu and Debian.
You will need to use a temporary PPA which will be removed when the test is over, found over here. They need people to try clean installs without any Steam, upgrading from an existing Steam install and purge removals of the steam package. Additionally, testing with a Steam Controller and supported VR devices would help them too.
osu!, going under the current development name of osu!lazer is a very popular free rhythm game and they're now doing official builds for Linux gamers.
It's actually inspired by an older game called Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, which was released in 2005 for the Nintendo DS. osu! was originally only available for Windows, then ported to macOS and eventually they started work on osu!lazer as an open source remake of the original client to eventually replace it. There's been various unofficial builds out there, since it's open source and up on GitHub but they're now making Linux a bit more official.
With Ray Tracing becoming ever more popular, NVIDIA have written up a technical post on bringing DirectX Ray Tracing to Vulkan to encourage more developers to do it.
The blog post, titled "Bringing HLSL Ray Tracing to Vulkan" mentions that porting content requires both the API calls (so DirectX to Vulkan) and the Shaders (HLSL to SPIR-V). Something that's not so difficult now, with the SPIR-V backend to Microsoft's open source DirectXCompiler (DXC).
Since last year, NVIDIA added ray tracing support to DXC's SPIR-V back-end too using their SPV_NV_ray_tracing extension and there's already titles shipping with it like Quake II RTX and Wolfenstein: Youngblood. While this is all NVIDIA-only for now, The Khronos Group is having discussions to get a cross-vendor version of the Vulkan ray tracing extension implemented and NVIDIA expect the work already done can be used with it which does sound good.
NVIDIA has written a new technical blog post on bringing HLSL ray-tracing to Vulkan with the same capabilities of DirextX Ray-Tracing. This effort is made feasible by Microsoft's existing open-source DirectXCompiler (DXC) with SPIR-V back-end for consumption by Vulkan drivers. Last year NVIDIA contributed to the open-source DXC support for SPV_NV_ray_tracing. This in turn with the open-source tooling allows converting DXR HLSL shaders into SPIR-V modules for Vulkan.
LunarG, the software company that Valve sponsors who work on building out the ecosystem for the Vulkan API recently conducted a Vulkan developer survey with the results out now.
Before going over the results, just a reminder that Vulkan just recently turned four years old! The 1.0 specification went public on February 16, 2016. Since then, we've seen some pretty amazing things thanks to it. We've had Linux ports that perform really nicely, the mighty DXVK translation layer advanced dramatically, to the vkBasalt post-processing layer and so on—there's been a lot going on. However, as a graphics API do remember it's pretty young and has a long life ahead of it.
As for the LunarG survey: there were 349 replies to it, and while not a huge amount it gives us an interesting insight into what some developers think and feel about how Vulkan is doing as a whole. Overall, it gives quite a positive picture on the health of Vulkan with over 60% feeling the overall quality of the Vulkan ecosystem as "Good" and almost 20% rating it as "Excellent".
AMDVLK 2020.Q1.2 is out as the first official AMD open-source Vulkan Linux driver code drop in one month.
AMDVLK has been off its wagon this quarter with their previous weekly/bi-weekly code drops of AMDVLK but that just means the v2020.Q1.2 is quite a big one. First up, AMDVLK 2020.Q1.2 now is supporting Vulkan 1.2 that debuted back in January and with Mesa's RADV Radeon Vulkan driver already having supported it for weeks.
AMD's Radeon Pro Software for Enterprise 20.Q1.1 Linux driver release was made available this week as their newest quarterly driver installment intended for use with Radeon Pro graphics hardware.
Supported workflows for example include visiting a restaurant website where dropping them a call to ask for a table should be no more than two clicks away, or when surfing a trade show website, adding the dates to your calendar should be straightforward. If you want to read more about how the data gathering and processing in the background works, check out my previous blog post on the subject.
If you want to give it a try, install a recent kitinerary library (something along the lines of libkpimitinerary5), check out the itinerary branch of the plasma-browser-integration repository and follow the “How to install” instructions from source code on its wiki page. Once up and running, visit your favorite event, restaurant, and hotel sites and see if they have any structured data we can process! If you click “Inspect Element” in the popup’s context menu, the developer console will have some basic debugging information on the extractor.
With the steady rise of cybercrimes, companies and government agencies are involving themselves more in setting up cyber investigation labs to tackle the crime happening over the Internet.
Software tools are like arms that play a significant role in the investigation process. Hence, Computer Forensics, Incident Response, and Competitive Intelligence professionals have developed a Cyber forensics focussed operating system called CSI Linux.
The present review on Linux distributions for low resources computers isn’t oriented to Linux users only, but to anyone with an old hardware PC with possibilities to be recycled. This includes regular Windows users who have not this possibility with OS offered by modern Windows OS, without Linux distributions oriented to low resources devices Windows users could only install old, outdated and unsafe Windows versions such as XP with a lot of compatibility issues with modern software and hardware.If Linux is a great, and maybe the best option for everyone, Linux distributions for low resources devices seems to be the only well-supported option for old computers.
Sometimes, I wonder if I should stop testing Linux distributions for good. The soul toll is immense. Not just the fact that things can fail, which can be okay now and then, but the whole unnecessary rollercoaster of pointless regressions and unpredictability. My expectation is that systems should be simple, reliable - and more than that, they should be a product. A complete box of functionality that allows the user to work and have fun. Alas, every year, we're getting farther and farther away from that. It's not even the question of the Year of the Linux, or anything like that. It's the question of basic stability without which there's no foundation for anything meaningful. It's depressing me, and it's self-inflicted.
Solus 4.1 has some really cool points. I liked what I saw last year. But in 2020, things are different. Clear fonts are no longer clear. Go figure. Some library or something got changed without any testing. The problems I raised back then remain. New problems abound. And then, it killed GRUB and left my machine unbootable. All in all, Solus 4.1 is pretty, and offers reasonable connectivity out of the box, and comes with some unique features against the vastness of mediocrity that grips the Linux desktop. But these are more than offset by glitches, bugs and the installation trouble. It's a no-go. Dedoimedo, sad and out.
The software behind planet.archlinux.org was implemented in Python 2 and is no longer maintained upstream. This functionality has now been implemented in archlinux.org's archweb backend which is actively maintained but offers a slightly different experience.
IBM wants to help developers identify and classify archietypes in data with the release of a new code pattern.
Archetypes are formally defined as a pattern, or a model, of which all things of the same type are copied. According to the company, its Watson natural language understanding helps users discover archetypes in their text corpus.
“When we read through a set of these records, our mind naturally groups the records into some collection of archetypes. For example, we may sort a song collection into easy listening, classical, rock, etc. This manual process is practical for a small number of records (e.g., a few dozen). Large systems can have millions of records, so we need an automated way to process them,” IBM wrote in a blog post.
Red Hat has been a recognizable name in the open-source community for decades. Now, Orange Egypt is utilizing the open-source provider as a basis for its horizontal cloud development. The telecommunications provider opted for the open-source solution based on reliability and cost-effectiveness. Red Hat states that Orange Egypt is the first Orange affiliate to offer management of all of its customer traffic using a software-based platform covering several sites within the geographic area. The company has invested in Red Hat technologies and already utilizes the Red Hat OpenStack Platform alongside Red Hat Ceph Storage.
After securing a lofty position in enterprise applications and databases, Oracle has fixed its eyes on data science. And though analysts have expressed doubt about whether Big Red is producing technologies new to the field, its shiny Cloud Data Science Platform might appeal to those already heavily invested in Oracle's software.
Big Red's pitch is that it will bring cohesion to efforts in data science, allowing practitioners to "collaboratively build, train, manage and deploy machine learning models".
Via the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Data Science service, data scientists will, the vendor said, be able to automate algorithm selection and tuning, automate predictive feature selection, evaluate models and make machine-learning models explainable to the outside world.
Open-source software has evolved to be integrated into every part of our lives. Even if we don’t necessarily know it. Proprietary software will likely become almost redundant as we move into cloud-accessible open-source options. Toby Shapshak speaks to Red Hat’s Lee Miles to delve into more accessible software.
“When development is distributed, the risk of failure goes down.” Red Hat provides open-source solutions and software options to businesses and individuals. It focuses on high-performing Linux, cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies — but the portfolio is growing as the software industry ‘opens’ up. The top areas where open-source software is being applied within the enterprise are security, cloud, database, and big data and analytics. Enterprises that use this software like to leverage open source for specific industry needs, like IT infrastructure modernisation, application development, and DevOps.
Red Hat's annual research report The State of Enterprise Open Source has found a big rise in the use of enterprise open-source software, and, to a lesser extent, community-based open-source solutions...
As more enterprises embrace open source software for applications ranging from security and cloud management to databases and analytics, the steady shift away from proprietary software is coalescing around a “community-based” open source movement.
According to an annual snapshot on the state of enterprise open source tools released by open source leader Red Hat, expensive proprietary software licenses and fear of vendor lock-in are driving the enterprise embrace of open source code.
As more hyper-scalers contribute code to cloud management and other projects, the Red Hat survey estimates that community-based open source software usage will reach 21 percent of companies surveyed by 2022.
The survey finds higher quality of software (33%) was the top reason they chose open source, followed by lower total costs of ownership (30%) and better security (29%). Gordon Haff, a technology evangelist for Red Hat, said the survey makes it clear that open source adoption is now being driven from the top-down as well as the bottom-up in most organizations. What’s changed is that open source software is now being used more broadly as more organizations appreciate how open source approaches to building software not only lower costs but also improve overall quality. The survey identifies the top three use cases for employing open source software to be IT infrastructure modernization (60%), application development (53%) and DevOps (52%). As part of that shift, 56% of respondents said they plan to increase usage of containers over the next 12 months. In fact, on average respondents said cloud-native applications already make up 25% of their portfolio, compared to an average of 36% for cloud-enabled applications and 39% for legacy applications. The combination of cloud-native and cloud-enabled applications (61%) already outnumber legacy applications (39%). Over the next two years, 47% of respondents plan to either modernize (17%), rearchitect as cloud-enabled (16%) or rearchitect as cloud-native (14%) their legacy applications. Another 16% said they would sunset or decommission those applications.
Open-source adoption is not slowing down within enterprises. A recent report found 95% of enterprises are taking open source seriously, with 75% of them reporting that open-source software is extremely important to their IT strategies. That number is up from 69% last year.
The 2020 State of Enterprise Open Source by Red Hat is based off of 950 interviews conducted with IT leaders worldwide.
“For our second annual report, we wanted to know more. With 95% of IT leaders agreeing that enterprise open source is important to their enterprise infrastructure software strategy, it’s safe to say we don’t need to ask ‘if’ anymore. We need to ask ‘why’ and ‘how,’” Jim Whitehurst, president and CEO of Red Hat, wrote in the report.
In case you were wondering what’s going on with OKD, Red Hat’s Christian Glombek delivered an update on the project, its current state and its roadmap. Here’s the full talk in video form.
PipeWire is the Red Hat engineered project aiming to offer better audio/video stream handling on Linux that integrates well with Flatpak and can optimally handle use-cases currently covered by the likes of PulseAudio and JACK. This week marked the release of PipeWire 0.3 as another big step forward for the effort.
PipeWire 0.3 comes with redesigned scheduling mechanisms that should now offer its JACK compatibility layer performance that is comparable to JACK2.
Intrinsyc’s “Snapdragon 865 Mobile HDK” runs Android 10 on the 7nm, octa-core, 2.84GHz Snapdragon 865 with 15-TOPS AI. The kit offers 6GB LPDDR5, WiFi-ax, and an optional 6-inch touchscreen and triple camera board.
In its first product announcement since being acquired by Lantronix, long-time Qualcomm hardware partner Intrinsyc has launched a Mobile Hardware Development Kit (HDK) that showcases Qualcomm’s latest, greatest mobile SoC, the Snapdragon 865. The Snapdragon 865 Mobile HDK runs Android 10, which will soon be followed by Android 11, featuring a Conversations tool and improved security. Android 11 was released a few days ago in a developer preview.
Creating the same apps and software for different platforms is not an easy task for the developers. To make an app run on desktops, developers need to write a source code. However, to make the same app run on mobile devices, the developers have to write a different source code. With the new MauiKit, developers would be able to build convergent apps, that can run on both platforms with the same source code.
Do you have an iPhone? Did you migrate from Android? In case you did, you can probably reminisce the first few weeks. It might have been difficult for you to get along with the whole ecosystem with limited customisation options.
Setting the price aside, the main advantage of having an Android device is numerous options to change the default features. In order to gain an elated level of privilege, you can even go through a few steps to root the phone.
PickNik Robotics is pleased to announce today the release of a much anticipated new version of MoveIt for use with the industry-advocated ROS 2. PickNik Robotics and its partners Intel, Amazon, Open Robotics, and many worldwide contributors to MoveIt, are excited to see this big step forward in providing next generation open source robotics. MoveIt 2 will enable many compelling advantages over its predecessor, namely faster, more reactive planning through realtime control of robot arms. The new platform version will enable more reliable robot behaviors, based on industry feedback.
Join us for the Open-Source Neuroscience Hardware Hack Chat this week where we’ll discuss the exploration of the real final frontier, and find out what it takes to invent the tools before you get to use them.
A new project soon to launch via Crowd Supplied is the Glasgow Interface Explorer, offering a highly capable and extremely flexible open source multitool for digital electronics. Created for embedded developers, reverse engineers, digital archivists, electronics hobbyists, and anyone else who wants to communicate with a wide selection of digital devices.
The Glasgow Interface Explorer development board has been designed for “maximum reliability and minimum hassle” science creators and can be attached to most devices without the need for additional active or passive components.
ADLINK Technology has just announced the Industrial-Pi (I-Pi) SMARC Development Kit to help engineers quickly design prototypes for industrial applications using peripherals and sensors.
Bluetera II is an open hardware IoT solution powered by 9-axis motion sensors, an MCU with support for BLE 5.0, and an SDK based on Google’s Protocol Buffer technology. The small development board will be soon available to purchase via the Crowd Supply website. Offering a full stack development board using protocol buffers for motion-based IoT applications and has been created to fill the gap for an open source platform that satisfies the following requirements :
Yes, you’re reading that right, it is apparently possible to put the MATE desktop environment on the PinePhone, and surprise, surprise, it runs very well, that if you can get used to the desktop experience on a small screen, of course.
Disappointed by other distributions available for the PinePhone, a YouTube user apparently managed to put the MATE desktop on the mobile device the pmbootstrap installer from postmarketOS, a GNU/Linux distribution designed for phones.
In the video below, you can see the MATE desktop in action on the PinePhone, running the Mozilla Firefox web browser and the Onboard on-screen keyboard.
Huawei isn't letting the last-minute cancellation of Mobile World Congress stand in the way of its 2020 launch plans. Amid the extraordinary circumstances stemming from the novel coronavirus now dubbed COVID-19, Chinese telecom giant Huawei is pushing forward with plans for its latest generation of flagship phones, the Huawei P40 and P40 Pro, reportedly to be unveiled in Paris in late March, with an expected release date soon after. Just like its predecessor the P30 series, the upcoming premium phones won't feature Google's suite of services (which includes Google Play Store, Gmail, Google Maps and so on) nor will it have the full might of Google's Android operating system behind it due to the ongoing trade ban with the US. Instead, the phones are expected to operate yet again on Android's generic open-source operating system and consumers will have to download apps via Huawei's App Gallery as a substitute for the Google Play Store.
It has been a mere four months since Google unveiled the Pixel 4, and it's already time to be on the lookout for Pixel 5 leaks. Over in the Android Open Source Project (AOSP), a Googler has added a seemingly innocuous comment that confirms what we already expected: Google is working on a Pixel 5.
The comment doesn't tell us much about the device—it's associated with a low-level optimization feature called UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer (UBSan). It's apparently causing some bootability issues, so developer Elena Petrova is fiddling with it. The comment also notes that the "Pixel 5" is currently running Linux kernel 4.19, whereas the Pixel 4 is on 4.14. Here's the full text.
Playnite is a free open source PC application designed to be an all-in-one answer to the growing number of game launchers we've all got on our desktops. In other words, it combines libraries from the likes of Steam, Epic Games Store, Uplay and GOG Galaxy, and then lets you organise them however you see fit. Jody tried it last year and came away impressed.
I should emphasise the "free" above: it is available straight from the source here and, according to the site, "no features are locked behind a paywall and the complete source code is available under the MIT license". The MIT license basically surrenders the software to any kind of use with no restrictions, including resales.
The GUI has four panes, a menu bar and a toolbar. The Status pane in the top left corner displays all downloads and the ones which are Active, Queuing, Finished, and Recycled (deleted). The total number of downloads for each category is displayed next to its name, and you can click on any of these to see the list of items contained.
Switch to the Category pane to jump between the default and the ones you have created. You can use the Category menu to add new sorting options, set the default download folder for each category, maximum active downloads, and also the maximum upload and download speeds.
The pane below the toolbar is the download list pane; anything that you select in the status pane is displayed here. It shows the name, the file size of the download that has been completed, the total size, the progression percentage, time left to complete the download, and the upload/download speeds of each file. The View menu can be used to customize the columns that are displayed in the list pane, and the other visual elements of the program. Highlighting an item in the download list brings up its summary on the bottom pane.
Free and Open source MusicBrainz announced the point release of Picard 2.3 with major changes to the user interface, tag, and desktop integration support.
MusicBrainz stores all the metadata of the music and Picard is the official tag editor that helps in identifying and organizing the digital audio recording.
When Jack Dorsey founded Square in February 2009, Bitcoin was all of one month old. In fact, Satoshi Nakamoto and Dorsey were likely laying the groundwork for their respective creations concurrently in the year prior. Ten years later, the two would converge in what now seems like an inevitable collision.
Square launched its Venmo-like payment service, Cash App, in 2013. The application features common stock investing, and i
Recognizing this analogy with the precious metals industry, researchers at Delve Labs have developed Batea, an open source tool that leverages machine learning to find valuable information in network device data.
Sri Ambati, chief executive and founder at H2O.ai, told Markets Media that the firm’s open source platform can perform one billion regressions in less than five seconds.
The way we consume video has changed a lot over the course of the last decade. We now watch videos on our mobile devices from anywhere and because of this, video content comes in a wide variety of formats. Google recognizes this shift and so last week their AI team announced ‘AutoFlip’ an open-source framework for “intelligent video reframing.”
Many times when we see a video on mobile devices is badly cropped, it is not much you can do about it. Understanding this problem, Google’s AI’s team has built an open-source solution on top of MediaPipe, Autoflip, which can reframe a video that fits any device or dimension (landscape, portrait, etc.).
AutoFlip works in three phases. The first phase includes scene detection; the second is the video content analysis, and the third is reframing. For this tool, if a video and a target dimension are given, it analyzes the video content. Later it develops optimal tracking and cropping strategies, which finally enables it to create an output video at the same time limit in the desired aspect ratio.
It’s a new week and another opportunity to meet up with like-minded people, become better in your chosen field and seal those deals for your startup. And we at TechNext want to help with a list of tech events happening around you this week.
Privacy-focused Brave browser launched late last year after almost four years of being in the works. The browser is based on the Chromium open-source project and joins the likes of Microsoft Edge that is built on that platform. However, while Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft’s offering currently support ARM64 PCs natively in the stable channels, Brave does not.
That might change, as Windows Insider MVP Jeremy Sinclair was able to compile an unofficial build of the open-source Brave browser that natively supports ARM64 PCs. The recompiled build (version 1.6.33) uses Microsoft’s ARM64 Chromium libraries and can run natively on those PCs like the Surface Pro X. Samsung Galaxy Book S. Native support results in improved performance and efficiency since the browser will not have to run in emulation.
The creator of Brave, Brendan Eich, also created JavaScript and co-founded the Mozilla Project that led to the development of the Firefox browser.
Brave is based on the open-source Chromium browser that’s also the basis for Google’s Chrome, Opera and most recently Microsoft’s Chromium Edge browser.
Open-source means that anyone can take the source code and build whatever they’d like out of it, but it doesn’t mean that all the browsers are the same.
In the case of Brave, they chose to focus on user privacy by blocking trackers, scripts and ads by default.
The natural by-product of blocking all this activity that usually goes unnoticed by the average user is faster load times.
Brave can also make use of the wide variety of extensions for Chromium-based browsers via the Chrome Web Store at chrome.google.com.
A touch webpage is far more of use with an internet map. This guide shows the top 10 best Google maps plugin for WordPress. A traveling site will be that more pleasure for those who (and also you subscribers ) may view in a glance most of the locations you have already been. You will find a lot of motives to incorporate maps onto your own WordPress website, regardless of what your explanation is that you have to have a simple and effective means to perform nothing but that.
Greenpeace is working with open source software firm Red Hat to scale and revamp its grassroots engagement platform, Planet 4.
The project marks a complete re-design of Greenpeace.org’s backend content management systems (CMS), which are now designed to put content on the web and provide a vehicle for driving grassroots environmental action.
In 2016, Greenpeace International decided to try a new way of stimulating grass-level environmental activity via something it called ‘Planet 4’ - a global content management system (CMS) it defined as its new engagement platform. In its original mission statement, it also outlined its expectations for the tool: that it would foster more engagement “when we present ourselves to our supporters, and our potential supporters, through a clear representation of our values with a clear proposition for why we exist, how people can become change agents through our work, and what they can do with us right now”.
Windows 7 hit its end of service deadline on January 14 and things have since got interesting. From free Windows 10 upgrade offer that was supposed to have expired back in 2016 to people demanding Microsoft to open source the operating system, who knew pulling the plug would end up giving Windows 7 even more life.
We reported a few weeks back that the Free Software Foundation along with some other groups were asking Microsoft to open source Windows 7 to "undo past wrongs." The Foundation has now delivered a hard drive to Microsoft asking the company to copy the source code and give it a license note to prove that "they really do love free software."
On January 14, Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows 7 closing the chapter on what was one of the most popular Operating Systems in the world. Even though Windows 7 has reached the end-of-life, the OS is still used by millions around the world.
Ever since Microsoft decided to end the support for Windows 7, several groups have been asking the company to release the source code of Windows 7 to allow to independent developers to work and provide support to the existing users. A couple of weeks back, we reported about an online petition demanding Microsoft open-source Windows 7. The petition was penned by Greg Farough, Campaigns Manager at the Free Software Foundation. The petition gained a lot of traction from Windows 7 fans and it had more than 13,000 signatures. Now that the petition has closed, Free Software Foundation has sent the signatures along with an empty hard drive. The foundation wants Microsoft to copy the source code of Windows 7 along with the license notice on to the drive and send it back. Not only that, but the foundation has also offered Microsoft to help with the transfer of the code.
Windows 7 crossed its End of Life Support date about a month ago. Since then, 0Patch has come forth with a micro-patch for a security vulnerability. In fact, even Microsoft sent out a patch to address an issue the company caused through the last official security update. However, with the operating system still currently running on millions of computers, there has been an increasingly vocal demand about making Windows 7 Source Code as Open Source. This would allow third-party software vendors and security companies to better develop solutions for the now obsolete operating system.
Even though Windows 7 has reached the end-of-life, the OS is still used by millions around the world. While the actual numbers vary, about 12 to 14 percent of computers are still actively running Windows 7. This is despite the fact that Microsoft has confirmed that it won’t send out any security patches even if new vulnerabilities are discovered. Hence, independent developers and several groups have now begun to ask Microsoft to make Windows 7 Source Code as Open Source.
GNU Parallel 20200222 ('BrexitDay') [stable] has been released. It is available for download at: http://ftpmirror.gnu.org/parallel/ No new functionality was introduced so this is a good candidate for a stable release. GNU Parallel is 10 years old next year on 2020-04-22. You are here by invited to a reception on Friday 2020-04-17.
As part of clearing up the relationship between the FSF and GNU and seeking to add more clarity to the GNU Project, Richard Stallman has announced a document outlining the structure and administration of the project.
The document authored by Richard Stallman and Brandon Invergo outline the Chief GNUisance position as led by Richard Stallman, assistant GNUisances, and the role of package maintainers as appointed by the GNU Project. The GNU Project also consists of a software evaluation team for evaluating proposed GNU packages, a security team, platform testers, mentors, and proofreaders.
Practices and expectations that one may have developed in working with conventional software licensing may lead to frustration when confronting open source software. The modest request, "Please, just show me the license" may be met with an unsatisfying response. While sometimes the response is very simple, often, the license information for open source software is more complicated and does not match the expectations set by conventional software licensing.
What's up? Is open source software licensing broken? No. Differences, not just in the type of license terms, but in how the software is developed, lead to differences in how software license information is conveyed. In part, this results from tradeoffs between lawyer convenience and developer convenience.
Empowered by the Paris Agreement and a lack of national leadership on climate policy in the United States, state and local governments are leading on their own climate initiatives. California, New York and Colorado have set ambitious greenhouse gas emission and renewable energy targets for 2030. Just last week, Massachusetts introduced sweeping climate legislation targeting net zero emissions by 2050.
As these environmental and energy policies move ahead, experts need to invest in economic data and tools that allow them to conduct robust economic analysis, to better inform policymakers, stakeholders and the public on how to design robust alternative climate and energy policies.
The Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences is a humanitarian/bioethics award presented annually by Bioinformatics.org to an individual who has, in his or her practice, promoted free and open access to the materials and methods used in the life sciences.
At the end of August, JavaScript package registry NPM Inc said it intended "to finalize and launch an Open Source funding platform by the end of 2019."
But instead of a platform, what's available at the moment might be better referred to as a feature of the npm command-line interface (CLI).
The announcement was received with some skepticism at the time and the project hasn't managed to defy that expectation: There was a minor milestone last November with the addition of the "fund" command to npm v6.13.0. But not much has changed since then.
RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic simdjson library by Daniel Lemire which truly impressive. Via some very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in persing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. I highly recommend the video of the recent talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon (which was also voted best talk). The best-case performance is ‘faster than CPU speed’ as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle use per byte parsed.
This release syncs the simdjson headers with upstream, and polishes the build a little by conditioning on actually having a C++17 compiler rather than just suggesting it. The NEWS entry follows.
The specification for web browser native support for lazy-loading images landed in the HTML Living Standard a week ago. This new feature lets web developers tell the browser to defer loading an image until it is scrolled into view, or it’s about to be scrolled into view.
Images account for 49 % of the median webpage’s byte size, according to the HTTP Archive. Lazy image loading can help reduce these images’ impact on page load performance. It can also help lower data costs by clients that never scroll down to images far down on a page.
Historically, lazy-loading was implemented by responding to changes in the scroll position and tracking the image element’s offset from the top of the page. This could degrade page-scrolling performance. Comparatively, the new native lazy loading for images is easier to implement and doesn’t degrade scrolling performance.
Jama Aden, who has been photographed with Farah on multiple occasions, was led away in handcuffs in June 2016 when Spanish anti-doping officials allegedly found three different types of the banned drug EPO and 19 pre-loaded syringes at his training group’s hotel.
At the time, Farah’s spokesperson insisted, “Jama has nothing to do with Mo as an athlete or his training”, and asked about Aden at the Rio Olympics, Farah claimed he was simply a fan who had asked for a “selfie”, despite UK Athletics already confirming that Aden had previously worked as an “unofficial facilitator” when Farah trained in Ethiopia. Farah has now admitted to not telling the truth.
[...]
Farah’s build up to last year’s London Marathon saw the four-time Olympic champion involved in an extraordinary feud with Ethiopian long-distance legend Haile Gebrselassie, who claimed that the dispute stemmed from his refusal to allow Farah to have Aden stay at the hotel Gebrselassie owns.
Farah’s spokesperson responded to that allegation stating, “the claims are disputed and are an attempt (a successful one so far) to deflect the media’s attention away from the facts”.
Two Russians were targeted, biathlete Alexander Loginov, who won 10 kilometre sprint gold on February 15, and his personal coach Alexander Kasperovich, the head of Russia's biathlon federation Vladimir Drachev told Russian news agencies.
In 2019, the IFF initiated a total 93 doping controls and there were no anti-doping rule violations in the IFF initiated tests.
Out of these 93 IFF tests, 54 tests were conducted in the IFF Events (in-competition tests) and 39 were IFF out-of-competition tests including five samples analysed for ESAs (urine) and five samples analysed for GHRFs (urine).
When Nvidia Corp. abruptly dropped Activision Blizzard Inc. games from its new GeForce Now service earlier this week, it left customers wondering what happened.
Nvidia said on Tuesday that Activision had asked to have its titles removed from GeForce, but didn’t explain why. It turns out that the video-game giant wanted a commercial agreement with Nvidia before they proceeded -- and the situation stemmed from a simple misunderstanding, Nvidia said on Thursday.
"It's fair to say Democratic leadership fails to understand how much everyday Americans hate their private healthcare coverage."
South Korea reported an eight-fold jump in viral infections Saturday with more than 400 cases mostly linked to a church and a hospital, while the death toll in Iran climbed to six and a dozen towns in Italy effectively went into lockdowns as health officials around the world battle a new virus that has spread from China.
One of the Chinese factories that’s been hardest hit by the coronavirus appears to be returning to activity, signaling that China’s government is allowing people to return to work there, The Post has learned.
Located about 20 miles outside of Wuhan — the epicenter of the deadly virus — the Daye Hubei copper plant where more than 1,000 employees had been quarantined since late January is no longer dormant, according to RS Metrics.
Big open source transparent value-adding collaborative projects are already proven in other industries. Where is ours? Why don’t we have this?
Imagine if we could all see which fuel filter manufacturer provided the best bang for our buck. How much would we reduce our waste by not going through cheap fuel filters? Imagine if we could see which lube oil provider had the best life cycle of lube oil provision; how much could we reduce our scope three emissions? What about collaborating and sharing on infrastructure projects within the countries and the ports that we operate on? How quickly can we address the issue of not having power and a shore base. I think the days of holding on to data and trying to work in silos is absolutely behind us.
ith the growing scare of the deadly coronavirus, companies in China are pushing hard to limit its spread. In one such effort, the country’s leading search engine Baidu has open-sourced an AI model to detect people not wearing face masks.
As coronavirus can spread through close contact with an infected person via their coughs, sneezes, or respiratory droplets, China has made it mandatory to wear face masks in several regions. People are instructed to wear masks in public places such as restaurants, shopping malls, and public transport.
The Linux Foundation has, together with Harvard’s Lab for Innovation Science, released its second go at a FOSS census, attempting to identify the most used open source components and their potential vulnerabilities.
The preliminary report titled “Vulnerabilities at the core” is a product of the foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative, which was started in 2014 in the wake of an OpenSSL security bug, which had an impact on about half a million secure web servers. Members of the CII now provide funding and support for critical open source infrastructure projects in the hopes of preventing a rerun of the so-called Heartbleed vulnerability.
“Changes to code under the control of these individual developer accounts are significantly easier to make, and to make without detection”
Of the world’s top 10 most-used open source packages, seven are hosted on individual developer accounts, the Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative has warned, saying this could pose a security risk to code at the heart of the global economy.
The finding came as the CII delivered the first major census of the free and open source software (FOSS) components that are most widely used in production applications.
With modern applications now composed of 80 to 90 per cent Free and Open Source Software (FOSS), the Linux Foundation and Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard University (LISH) on Wednesday published their second open-source census to promote better security and code management practices.
The first such report appeared in 2015, and focused on enumerating critical components in the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. The latest one, "Vulnerabilities in the Core, a Preliminary Report and Census II of Open Source Software," examines the most commonly used FOSS packages in production applications with an eye toward potential vulnerabilities so organizations can develop better management and security tools
The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) is a project designed to support best practices with a key eye on the security of critical open source software projects.
The CII team has this month worked with the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).
The Linux Foundation’s Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII), a project that helps support best practices and the security of critical open source software projects, and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH), today announced the release of ‘Vulnerabilities in the Core,’ a Preliminary Report and Census II of Open Source Software.`
This Census II analysis and report represent important steps towards understanding and addressing structural and security complexities in the modern day supply chain where open source is pervasive, but not always understood. Census II identifies the most commonly used free and open source software (FOSS) components in production applications and begins to examine them for potential vulnerabilities, which can inform actions to sustain the long-term security and health of FOSS. Census I (2015) identified which software packages in the Debian Linux distribution were the most critical to the kernel’s operation and security.
Founded in 1901, the Copenhagen, Denmark-based company provides cleaning, support, property, catering, security, and facility management services for offices, factories, airports, hospitals, and other locations all around the world.
At the moment, the company’s employees don’t have access to corporate systems, as they were taken offline following a malware attack earlier this week.
According to Romano, a second-order PHP object injection vulnerability (CVE-2020-8800) in SuiteCRM could be “exploited to inject arbitrary PHP objects into the application scope, allowing an attacker to perform a variety of attacks, such as executing arbitrary PHP code”.
SuiteCRM versions 7.11.11 and below are said to be vulnerable.
[...]
“We have put a notice on our open source community channels and advice via social media. We have a dedicated community that works around the clock to spot vulnerabilities and produce suitable fixes, which is one of the key benefits for a business when choosing to use open source software.”
The surface area of website and web application attacks keeps growing. One reason for this is the prevalence of third-party code. When businesses build web apps, they use code from many sources, including both commercial and open-source projects, often created and maintained by both professional and amateur developers.
Web application creators take advantage of third-party code because it allows them to build their websites and apps quickly. For example, companies are likely to add a third-party chat widget to their site, instead of building one from scratch.
But third-party code can leave websites vulnerable. Consider the July 2018 Magecart attack on Ticketmaster. In this data breach, hackers were able to gain access to sensitive customer information on Ticketmaster's website by compromising a third-party script used to provide chatbot functionality.
The challenge is that this third-party functionality runs directly on the customer's browser, and the browser is built to simply render the code sent down from a web server. It assumes that all code, whether first-party or third-party, is good.
BluBracket, a new security startup from the folks who brought you Vera, came out of stealth today and announced a $6.5 million seed investment. Unusual Ventures led the round with participation by Point72 Ventures, SignalFire and Firebolt Ventures.
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Albuquerque claims Google is using its education services package that is marketed to school districts, teachers and parents as a way to spy on children and their families.
Attorney General Hector Balderas said that while the company touts Google Education as a valuable tool for resource-deprived schools, it is a means to monitor children while they browse the internet in the classroom and at home on private networks. He said the information being mined includes everything from physical locations to websites visited, videos watched, saved passwords and contact lists.
The state is seeking unspecified civil penalties.
All of this is a long-winded way of saying that I have joined a company called Inrupt that is working to bring Tim Berners-Lee's distributed data ownership model that is Solid into the mainstream. (I think of Inrupt basically as the Red Hat of Solid.) I joined the Inrupt team last summer as its Chief of Security Architecture, and have been in stealth mode until now.
The idea behind Solid is both simple and extraordinarily powerful. Your data lives in a pod that is controlled by you. Data generated by your things -- your computer, your phone, your IoT whatever -- is written to your pod. You authorize granular access to that pod to whoever you want for whatever reason you want. Your data is no longer in a bazillion places on the Internet, controlled by you-have-no-idea-who. It's yours. If you want your insurance company to have access to your fitness data, you grant it through your pod. If you want your friends to have access to your vacation photos, you grant it through your pod. If you want your thermostat to share data with your air conditioner, you give both of them access through your pod.
Inrupt, the start-up company founded by Sir Tim Berners-Lee to redesign the way the web works, is expanding its operational team and launching pilot projects in its quest to develop a "massively scalable, production-quality technology platform."
Since 2015, Niger has struggled against a wave of jihadist attacks near the borders with Mali and Burkina Faso in the west, exacerbating needs in the Tillaberi and Tahoua regions, where nearly 78,000 people have been displaced.
France this year said it would boost its military presence in the troubled west African region by deploying 600 fresh troops to its 4,500-strong operation.
At this week’s presidential debate in Nevada, Sen. Amy Klobuchar doubled down on a particularly concerning position: that natural gas, a fossil fuel, is a “transitional fuel.” If you’ve been paying close attention to climate issues, you know that selling natural gas as a bridge fuel is an idea cooked up by the oil and gas industry.
There’s no doubt about it: Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP is one of the most prestigious law firms in the U.S. Its attorneys rake in millions representing some of the most powerful corporate actors in the world. Its leaders serve as donation bundlers for major presidential candidates and Trustees for some of the nation’s most prominent universities. Last year, The American Lawyer named Paul Weiss “Law Firm of the Year” and “White Collar Litigation Department of the Year.” The firm’s New York City headquarters are just a skip away from Rockefeller Center and the Museum of Modern Art.
Researchers used ice core measurements from Greenland from 1750 to 2013, plus previous data from Antarctica. They melted the ice to release the small quantities of ancient air trapped inside. These act a bit like time capsules, allowing us to get a snapshot of the methane in the atmosphere at the time. They used the isotope carbon-14, which comes from living things, as a proxy to determine whether the methane they found came from biological sources. Until 1870, around the time we started using fossil fuels, almost all methane came from these sources. After that, there was a rise in methane that didn’t have any carbon-14, from ancient fossil sources in which the isotope had disappeared. That allowed the researchers to compare natural methane with methane caused by human activity.
Talking about it. Michael Bloomberg is just the latest deep pocket to laud how much he personally labors.
"This administration will not stop until it takes away all workers' rights to form and join a union."
In 1970, Janice Johnson, a Black single mother in Philadelphia, was facing eviction from an old apartment building condemned by the city. She was desperately seeking a place for her and her 8-year-old son to live, and her attempts to rent nearby apartments were coming up short. A landlord suggested she buy rather than rent a home, and just two weeks later, Johnson was approved for a Federal Housing Administration-backed mortgage loan of $5,800.
In the e-krona project, which the Riksbank is conducting with Accenture, simulated users will be able to hold e-kronor in a digital wallet as well as make payments, deposits and withdrawals via a mobile app. Users will also be able to make payments via wearables such as smartwatches, and cards.
The pilot project runs until the end of February 2021, with an option to extend and further develop technical solutions, according to the Riksbank.
Nearly a decade before former Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada would become the powerful Democratic majority leader under President Obama, he won a tight reelection race against a Las Vegas Republican by a razor-thin margin of a few hundred votes. Elveda Martinez of the Walker River Paiute Tribe in western Nevada said Native voters were quick to remind Reid that their turnout was crucial to his win.
"I've got news for the Republican establishment. I've got news for the Democratic establishment. They can't stop us."
Trump's willingness to avenge himself for actions taken he perceives to be hostile to him is not limited to individuals. He can also exact revenge on an entire population.
Many Russian politicians and pundits are convinced that Sanders cannot win. They are wrong in this glib conclusion.
Bribes to get what Washington and giant multinational corporations want from fragile countries merits more reporting.
"This misogynoir is disappointing, but not surprising from Dr. Jason Johnson," said Briahna Joy Gray, national press secretary for the Sanders campaign.
"This is what happens when you and your network are in a complete panic-riddled meltdown."
"That's not just a savvy coalition for winning the Nevada caucuses, it's how Bernie Sanders becomes president. Face it, establishment Democrats—it's his party now."
There’s no denying Latinx voters are falling in love with “Tío Bernie.” As a supporter of Bernie Sanders myself, I’d been reading indications of this phenomenon for many months “con mi corazón en la boca,” a Spanish saying that translates roughly to “with baited breath.” Sanders has led the Democratic field among Latinxs in poll after poll, with a recent survey showing 48% favor the Vermont senator nationwide. In Nevada, that number climbs to 64%.
President Donald Trump’s new acting intelligence director, Richard Grenell, used to do consulting work on behalf of an Eastern European oligarch who is now a fugitive and was recently barred from entering the U.S. under anti-corruption sanctions imposed last month by the State Department.
By now, we’re used to this president naming unqualified loyalists to high positions. But this is not just another disparagement of the separation of powers. Within the executive branch itself, it is a calculated insult to the integrity and professionalism of the U.S. intelligence community, one that threatens to further impair the function of sound intelligence collection and analysis — that is, to inform U.S. policy — and to politicize the relationship between the White House and intelligence agencies.
Thanks to the Supreme Court, the federal government cannot place limits on the self-financing of campaigns by ultrarich candidates. Bloomberg, who has already spent $400 million in just a few months on the trail, has a net worth north of $60 billion, an unfathomable sum that has bought him alliances and silence in equal measure. This is what oligarchy looks like: mayors, members of Congress, and various officials thirsty to endorse Bloomberg in the hopes his endless cash can aid their future endeavors. And for those who may criticize him, there is the always the threat of the stick outweighing the carrot: the cash spigot can always be turned against you.
The political scientist Hélène Landemore asks, If government is for the people, why can’t the people do the governing?
Imagine being a citizen of a diverse, wealthy, democratic nation filled with eager leaders. At least once a year—in autumn, say—it is your right and civic duty to go to the polls and vote. Imagine that, in your country, this act is held to be not just an important task but an essential one; the government was designed at every level on the premise of democratic choice. If nobody were to show up to vote on Election Day, the superstructure of the country would fall apart.
So you try to be responsible. You do your best to stay informed. When Election Day arrives, you make the choices that, as far as you can discern, are wisest for your nation. Then the results come with the morning news, and your heart sinks. In one race, the candidate you were most excited about, a reformer who promised to clean up a dysfunctional system, lost to the incumbent, who had an understanding with powerful organizations and ultra-wealthy donors. Another politician, whom you voted into office last time, has failed to deliver on her promises, instead making decisions in lockstep with her party and against the polls. She was reëlected, apparently with her party’s help. There is a notion, in your country, that the democratic structure guarantees a government by the people. And yet, when the votes are tallied, you feel that the process is set up to favor interests other than the people’s own.
What corrective routes are open? One might wish for pure direct democracy—no body of elected representatives, each citizen voting on every significant decision about policies, laws, and acts abroad. But this seems like a nightmare of majoritarian tyranny and procedural madness: How is anyone supposed to haggle about specifics and go through the dialogue that shapes constrained, durable laws? Another option is to focus on influencing the organizations and business interests that seem to shape political outcomes. But that approach, with its lobbyists making backroom deals, goes against the promise of democracy. Campaign-finance reform might clean up abuses. But it would do nothing to insure that a politician who ostensibly represents you will be receptive to hearing and acting on your thoughts.
The scholar Hélène Landemore, a professor of political science at Yale, has spent much of her career trying to understand the value and meaning of democracy. In recent years, she has been part of a group of academics, many of them young, trying to solve the problem of elected democratic representation—addressing flaws in a system that is widely believed to be no problem at all. In her book “Democratic Reason: Politics, Collective Intelligence, and the Rule of the Many” (Princeton, 2012), she challenged the idea that leadership by the few was superior to leadership by the masses. Her forthcoming book, due out next year and currently titled “Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century,” envisions what true government by mass leadership could look like. Her model is based on the simple idea that, if government by the people is a goal, the people ought to do the governing.
It's the army of sobrinos and sobrinas — the Spanish words for nephews and nieces — who should strike fear in the hearts of Bernie Sanders' rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination and party elites after he ran up the score among Latino voters in the Nevada caucuses Saturday. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and other Latino backers of Sanders refer to him fondly as their "tío," or uncle.
Sanders was the choice of 54 percent of Hispanic caucus-goers Saturday on his way to steamrolling to the most convincing victory of the primary season, according to an NBC entrance poll. His closest competitor, former Vice President Joe Biden, racked up 14 percent, with no other candidate cracking double digits.
Husain, a presenter on Radio 4’s Today programme, was lead moderator at last week’s Oslo Energy Forum, a three-day, invitation-only event for fossil fuel executives. She moderated the annual networking event on at least five previous occasions and gave an after-dinner speech in 2018, according to documents reviewed by The Times.
Environmental groups said that the BBC’s reputation for impartiality would be at risk if it let journalists “profiteer” from polluters.
Speaking on Friday to promote the protest, Waters dismissed the charges against Assange as “nonsense” and claimed he faced a “kangaroo court”.
Waters said: “He (Assange) has committed no crime, he published something, he’s a journalist, he did what journalists are supposed to do. There was no threat to national security.”
Waters previously called for the release Assange during a rally outside the Home Office in central London in September, when he played his former band’s hit track Wish You Were Here from a makeshift stage.
Musicians and politicians are planning to lead thousands of supporters of imprisoned WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange in a march and rally in central London [...]
Assange’s defense will include evidence from the Spanish investigation into the surveillance of UC Global, a private security company which spied on Assange’s legal, medical, and personal visits in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, including the DiEM25 co-founder Srećko Horvat, and sent recorded material to the CIA.
UC Global director David Morales has been arrested in Spain in connection with the illegal surveillance, an astonishing intrusion of Assange’s privacy. Assange is due to testify by video link in the Spanish trial tomorrow.
Assange’s next extradition hearing is scheduled for February 24, 2020.
Hundreds of supporters of Julian Assange marched through London on Saturday to pressure the U.K. government into refusing to extradite the WikiLeaks founder to the United States to face spying charges.
Waters suggested Assange should not be held for a “minor bail infringement”.
Tim Dawson of the National Union of Journalists, which also supports Saturday's protest, said it was "troubling" that Assange's case had not raised more concern from the British media.
"If his deportation to the United States is successful, the implications for media freedom are profound," Dawson said.
The US Justice Department said it charged Assange with conspiring with former US military intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to leak a trove of classified material in 2010.
Manning was jailed for seven years for leaking documents, including State Department cables and military videos, to WikiLeaks to draw the public's attention to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The family of Harry Dunn has urged the government to refuse the extradition of Julian Assange until the US returns the suspect in his death back to the UK. Dunn family spokesman Radd Seiger accused the US of "hypocrisy" in seeking Assange's extradition, despite rejecting the return of Anne Sacoolas. She is suspected of causing the teenager's death by dangerous driving. The family said the foreign secretary told them he is "reviewing all options".
Leaking the Guilty Secrets of Power is not a Phrase, it is a Sentence. And no one is facing a longer one today than JA. Julian has GAINED the right to quote another past prisoner, another enemy of Empire, Mahatma Ghandi. Like Ghandi Julian could say: “You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”
He may very well say that.
[...]
Dan Ellsberg and Noam Chomsky have warned journalists who fail to oppose Assange?s extradition to the US: You are next on the hit list of a President who considers you the ?enemy of the people.? When you turn a blind eye to Julian?s torture you consent to your own emasculation!
Of course, by being here you have already proven that you know all this. That WE know all this. It also means that you, we, have accepted the duty to let into the secret those who are not here.
You see, Julian?s greatest enemy, the greatest enemy of freedom, does not come from evil men in smoke filled rooms plotting against good people. No, rational, self-conscious evil is not the worst enemy. The worst enemy is APATHY. It is the APPALLING SILENCE OF GOOD PEOPLE. Of tired people too exhausted and disheartened to have the energy to campaign for others. FATIGUE is the enemy, the oligarchs? greatest ally. Along with BANALITY ? with people in some authority, neither good nor bad, yet too banal to act.
[...]
Their message to Julian is: We are all Wikileaks. Each one of us is a tiny MeLeaks exposing abuse of power and letting light in wherever power seeks to grow in the darkness that makes it monstrous, hideous, misanthropic.
As my friend, and Julian’s friend, Phillip Adams said recently, we shall not let them turn Julian into a latter-day Man in the Iron Mask, into the Man forgotten in an Iron Cell.
So, stiffen your upper lip folks. We are here so that unarmed truth has the final word. So that Julian’s sentence ends neither neither with a bang nor with a whimper – but with a majestic, a marvellous full stop.
Today I move from the centre of London down to Woolwich and have to get to Belmarsh Magistrate’s Court (which is entered through Woolwich Crown Court) before dawn to try to queue for one of the 14 public seats in the courtroom. Holding the hearing in such a tiny court is a deliberate act of censorship by the British government. If any readers can offer practical advice on where to queue precisely in terms of access to the building it would be extremely welcome. There is of course no guarantee that the authorities will respect any queue, or have not reserved some of the public seats for the US Embassy etc.
I promise this is the last time I shall repeat this appeal:
With great reluctance, I am obliged to ask for donations to help this blog cover the Assange court case. We have rented a house close to the court and I will be trying to queue in the early hours of the morning to get one of the tiny number of seats available to the public at the hearing. The last year has seen constant travels down to London to support Julian in one way and another, and funds for the blog are running very low at the moment – very substantially less than 1% of readers subscribe (I am grateful to and humbled by those who do subscribe – and was very touched to meet so many subscribers at yesterday’s rally. Please don’t feel reticent to introduce yourselves, it gives me heart). I generally do not seek one off donations, as long term income is required to keep things on the road, but for the Assange – and Salmond – cases to be covered properly an exception is needed. With humility and reticence, I therefore ask if a few people could put some small donations forward using the standard payment details below.
Barrister Geoffrey Robertson shuffles into the entrance to Ecuador's embassy in London, a camera recording the sound of his shoes echoing on the hard tiles.
Key points:
A security company embedded in the Ecuadorian embassy during Julian Assange's residence is under investigation Recordings and other surveillance were allegedly passed on to 'American intelligence', according to statements from former workers Australian lawyers were among those surveilled in 'Operation Hotel' It's just after 7:00pm on January 12, 2018.
The camera rolls as Robertson stops at the front door, unbuttons his overcoat and removes his cap.
Once inside the embassy, other cameras follow him as he's ushered into a meeting room, where the storied Queen's Counsel is offered a cup of tea.
After a few minutes, he is greeted by the embassy's most famous resident, Julian Assange.
The camera continues to roll, recording every word of the confidential legal conversation which follows.
While this may be typical surveillance at a secure diplomatic property, what Robertson did not know was he and a handful of other lawyers, were allegedly being targeted in a remarkable and deeply illegal surveillance operation possibly run at the request of the US Government.
Even before the #metoo movement trained the spotlight on gender inequity and its impact across the globe, there were organizations doing the hard work to address these at-times violent failings.
President Donald Trump on Thursday quietly issued a memo granting Defense Secretary Mark Esper the power to abolish collective bargaining rights for the Defense Department’s 750,000 civilian workers, a move unions decried as part of the administration’s far-reaching assault on organized labor.
Employees at crowdfunding platform Kickstarter voted Tuesday to form a union, the first of its kind in the technology industry, after an 18-month battle with the company’s management.
Kickstarter United will now be formally recognized by the management after a vote held by the National Labor Relations Board, in which workers voted 36 to 47 in favor of unionizing. It is the first union comprised of white-collar, full-time employees in the technology industry.
Kickstarter’s employees will be affiliated with the Office and Professional Employees International Union and begin negotiating a contract with management over equal pay and inclusive hiring practices. The bargaining committee will include employees who opposed the union as well as those who supported it.
The decision to unionize came after several months of conflict between the company and its workers, with two employees fired in September who say their termination was linked directly to their union organizing efforts.
Clarissa Redwine, one of the fired employees, told CNN Business that she began to receive "unprecedented negative feedback" from Kickstarter management a few weeks after becoming a public union organizer last year, despite a good performance record. "The timeline and evidence is quite clear," she added.
Tamika Montgomery-Reeves made history last fall when she was confirmed as the first Black justice on the Delaware Supreme Court. It was a small step toward improving diversity on state supreme courts nationwide, but it also highlights a glaring problem.
As Canada considers how to renew its broadcasting and telecommunications regulatory regime, it should steer clear of recent recommendations that would impact key Internet properties that foster Canadian innovation online.
On Jan. 29 the Broadcasting and Telecommunications Legislative Review (BTLR) panel handed the Canadian government 97 recommendations to consider as it prepares new legislation to update the decades-old Telecommunications Act, Radiocommunication Act and Broadcasting Act.
While it has laudable advice on how to improve access to rural and remote Indigenous communities in Canada, the report’s major flaws would inhibit the same Canadian innovation the recommendations intend to promote.
For those who missed my prior post, the "eBay-meets-trade-secret-law" issue is: should a court grant an injunction as a matter of course in trade secret cases, or should it require plaintiff to prove it suffered irreparable harm; that damages would be inadequate to compensate that harm; and that plaintiff's future harm isn't outweighed by the costs an injunction would impose on others like competitors or employees, who'd be prevented from engaging in market activity or from pursuing a new job, or by considerations of the "public interest."
Varadarajan explains that the the Tenth Circuit has "explicitly" rejected a presumption of irreparable harm and that other circuits like the Third and Ninth have moved in a similar direction. (This reflects Rowe's observations as well). Meanwhile, some other circuits have behaved differently, with the Second, Fifth, and Federal Circuits presuming irreparable harm and appropriateness of an injunction. The Second Circuit, Varadarajan points out, stresses, in particular, circumstances where there's a risk of disclosure or widespread dissemination of the trade secret. (15-17).
[...]
The broader suggestion here, that eBay isn't one-size-fits all, is compelling, and reminiscent of Mark Lemley's concerns in the trademark context. For the most part, I agree with Varadarajan's specific conclusion that disclosure or widespread dissemination is the key risk that justifies a presumption. The need for secrecy is what makes trade secrets different from any other form of IP; keeping that secrecy should be a pivotal consideration in crafting the remedy.
That said, elsewhere I've critiqued Varadarajan's and Joseph Fishman's somewhat liberal distinction between "use" and "disclosure" cases. I argued that "use" of a trade secret by anyone other than plaintiff or a licensee almost always involves a risk of disclosure, not least because another's "use" places the trade secret in the hands of someone who's not necessarily employing the same "reasonable measures" to preserve secrecy as plaintiff. So we should be cautious in letting even non-competing uses of live trade secrets get off Scot-Free.
Still, in this context, I think I agree with Varadarajan's proposed distinction between "use" and "disclosure," to the extent it's applied at the remedy stage, not the liability stage. In these cases, plaintiff has won on the relevant evidentiary standard: likelihood of success on the merits for a preliminary injunction or preponderance of the evidence for a permanent injunction. The court has found there was a trade secret at the time of the misappropriation, and that misappropriation occurred or is at least "threatened." So the court should be able to presume "irreparable harm" when the record shows (again, on the relevant evidentiary standard) that there's a risk of a very public disclosure or of widespread dissemination even absent a very public disclosure. This would likely be more administratively efficient and would avoid rendering trade secret law obsolete--which I think might be the case if we had a rule that said: "maybe you get an injunction to protect secrecy, but maybe not."
Non-use defense within the framework of oppositions filed against the Turkish designations of IRs has been among the controversial issues in the Turkish IP world since the enactment of the Industrial Property Law. No. 6769 ("Law") in 2017.
The practice of the TPTO so far has been to evaluate non-use defense raised by applicants of both national and IRs only during the response term within the opposition stage. The non-use defense that is not raised within this term has been deemed not filed.
This practice of the TPTO was criticised since holders of national applications enjoyed this opportunity, as they were notified by the TPTO and were asked to submit their response to an opposition, whereas the holders of the Turkish designations of IRs faced a risk to miss this opportunity, since they did not receive a similar notice from the TPTO.
The article 85(3) (c) of the Industrial Property Law, which excludes the marketing authorization application from the scope of the patent right, is interpreted by the IP courts against the patent holder in a disproportionate way. The exemption here is the procedures that generic companies required to perform before the Ministry of Health in order to obtain a marketing authorization. Thus, for example, it enables the generic pharmaceutical company that applied for marketing authorization 7-8 months before the expiration of the patent protection period, to continue its procedures before the Ministry of Health and to launch their generic product to the market as soon as the patent expires.
However, by interpreting this provision very broadly, the court may reject patent infringement and/or discovery of evidence requests before the sales permission or reimbursement before the Social Security Institution or even before the launch of the generic pharmaceutical company to the market. The exemption provision of the Law includes only the procedures related to the marketing authorization and this exemption ends once the marketing authorization is granted.
A joint agreement was announced by the EPO and the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) to provide patent applicants filing an international patent application, in English, at the CNIPA as Receiving Office, the option to select the EPO as their International Searching Authority (ISA).
Three parties, three approaches to calculating FRAND. Conversant (who bought this patent portfolio from Nokia) says that the Court should follow the calculations in Unwired Planet and scale accordingly. Huawei says to use a comparable licence approach - using a 2017 licence between it and Nokia. ZTE says to use a "top down" approach and also take into account the rates arrived at in disputes in other jurisdictions (e.g., Judge Selena in TCL v Ericsson).
Last summer, Huawei amended its pleading to argue that Conversant was barred from using the Unwired Planet judgment following the rule in Hollington v Hewthorn [1943] 1 KB 587. This states that unless relating to issue estoppel, decisions of tribunals and inquiries are not admissible in other civil proceedings. ZTE contend that their reliance on other judgments did not breach this rule because they are not using a judgment as proof of its contents, but as a factor that any negotiating party would take into account during licence negotiations.
That same summer, Conversant applied for disclosure of ZTE 's and Huawei's 2G, 3G and 4G licences entered into with third parties. The judge - His Honour Judge Hacon sitting in the Patents Court - refused the application. He considered that Birss J's judgment in Unwired Planet was that third party licences were of no help in that case and that it was not proportionate given the work and costs required to deal with those licences. The third party licences applied for were considered to be of "no help" because they were not licences from Conversant (the current patent owner) or Nokia (the previous patent owner).
The European Patent Office (EPO) and the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) recently tackled an issue that has sparked much discussion involving artificial intelligence (AI) innovation. Two patent applications were recently filed via the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, China, Korea, and Taiwan, naming DABUS—an AI machine—as the inventor. For a brief summary of the issues, see the author’s previous post here.
First and foremost, the central issue to be resolved surrounded the question of whether AI can be named as an inventor on a patent application. Both the EPO and UKIPO refused the two DABUS patent applications. The EPO reasoned that under the European Patent Convention (EPC), the term “inventor” refers only to a natural person. They further argued that there is “clear legislative understanding” that an inventor is a natural person, not a machine. Therefore, DABUS could not be named as an inventor.
Many readers will be aware that the European Patent Office’s most recent Guidelines for Examination contain specific sections on machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI). An interesting question has now been considered by the EPO relating to an invention that was said to be derived from artificial intelligence.
The case in question was European application number 18275163.6. The EPO Examining Division handling the case decided to refuse the application because the alleged inventor was a computer and not a natural person. In parallel with their decision the EPO released a news statement stating that “an inventor designated in the application has to be a human being, not a machine”
While the EPO appear quite confident in their decision (coming to a decision in oral proceedings after only 16 minutes of deliberation), a number of interesting moral and social arguments were raised in the proceedings of the application which will become ever more relevant as AI matures as a technology.
The European Patent Office has denied two patent applications on the grounds that an AI system cannot be listed as the inventor.
For the first time, the European Patent Office (EPO) has issued a ruling on its approach to patent applications that designate artificial intelligence (AI) systems as inventors. In January 2020, the EPO published its reasons for rejecting two patent applications where the inventor named on the applications was an AI system called “DABUS.” The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has also rejected the applications on similar grounds.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has announced an increase in the official fees charged for European patent applications which will take effect from 1 April 2020. This is the first significant fee increase in four years, as the EPO did not apply its usual biannual fee increase in 2018.
The majority of the official fees are increasing by approximately 4%, but there are some notable exceptions. The excess page fee due on filing, currently 15 Euro per page over 35, is increasing to 16 Euro, which will increase the filing costs for longer applications. The official fee for obtaining a certified copy of a priority document or granted patent is more than doubling from 50 to 105 Euro. Finally, the standard appeal fee (as payable by the majority of appellants) is increasing by 450 Euro to 2705 Euro.
The management and staff of the European Patent Office express their deepest solidarity with the people of Germany, sharing their deep sadness over the recent attack on fellow citizens in Hanau this week.
How #Hoe and firmly believe that equality, cultural diversity, tolerance and mutual respect are inviolable principles of a free and pluralistic society. We are convinced that this attack will never be able to destroy these principles.
* CARBIOTIX RECEIVES PRELIMINARY APPROVAL FOR EUROPEAN PATENT APPLICATION
* GETS ‘INTENTION TO GRANT’ FROM EPO REGARDING ITS PATENT APPLICATION FOR AXOS INGREDIENT Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage: (Gdansk Newsroom)
The European Patent Office (EPO) has rejected arguments filed in opposition to European patent No. EP2800811, ERS Genomics Limited has announced. The patent is held jointly between Dr Emmanuelle Charpentier, the Regents of the University of California, US and the University of Vienna, Austria and was formed to provide broad access to the foundational CRISPR-Cas9 intellectual property held by Dr Charpentier.
The claims of the patent are directed to the widely-used single-guide CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system and cover uses in both cellular and non-cellular settings, including use in bacteria, plants, animals and cells from vertebrate animals such as humans.
Todos Medical Ltd. (OTCQB: TOMDF), a clinical-stage in-vitro-diagnostics company focused on the development of blood tests for the early detection of cancer and neurodegenerative disorders, today announced that it has received a notice of allowance from the European Patent Office (EPO) covering the use of Todos’ proprietary Total Biochemical Infrared Analysis (TBIA) platform to identify solid tumors using peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs). The specific claims being granted cover the use of Fourier Transformed Infrared Analysis (FTIR) spectroscopy and using artificial intelligence on the infrared (IR) data obtained to build algorithms based on the IR spectrum that are predictive of the presence of different types of solid tumors with different tissues of origin. The Company expects the patent to be issued in the coming weeks.
The eagerly awaited appeal proceedings (T 0844/18) focused on entitlement to claim priority from an application filed by multiple applicants. As we reported previously, EP2771468B claimed priority from multiple US provisional applications, the earliest two of which included an applicant-inventor (Professor Luciano Marraffini) who was not an applicant of the subsequent PCT application.
According to standard EPO practice and established case law of the Boards of Appeal, all applicants of the priority application, or their successors in title, must be applicants of the subsequent application for a valid claim to priority. In addition, any transfer of rights to claim priority must have occurred in advance of the filing date of the subsequent application. However, no evidence that Professor Marraffini had assigned his rights to an applicant of the subsequent application before its filing date was submitted in the proceedings.
For these reasons, the Opposition Division decided that the patent’s claim to priority from the earliest two priority documents was invalid. Consequently, the patent was revoked in light of novelty-destroying intervening disclosures.
Software, is a collection of data instructions that allow the computer to function and perform the commanded task. While the term itself is a collection of computer programs, libraries and any related data, software is often used identical to computer programs. In some jurisdictions, the term ‘computer program’ is used, to indicate its functionality. (Often categorized with application and system software). The components of the software are codes, which a programmer can write as source code in the programming language and derive into machine code via compliers/assemblers or interpreters. The methods for problem solving (calculation/manipulation) via coding is defined as algorithm. Algorithms are the functional elements of computer programs that may be subject to patent protection if patentability machine (object) codes are only written expressions in the programming language and are only subject to copyright protection against copying, if the code has been written in a tangible form. Algorithms ‘as such’[1] may not be patentable subject matter, therefore the main strategy to obtain patent protection of the software is to protect the algorithm against independent developments within the duration of patent protection.
European and US Software Patentability Requirements
The European Patent Office (‘EPO’) formed under European Patent Convention (‘EPC’) defines the patentability of computer programs under Art.52(2-c), which are excluded from patentability along with business methods ‘as such’. This ambiguous term has been clarified with the European Case law (from the EPO Technical Boards of Appeal (‘The Board’) to prevent innovative backslash in Europe against software implementation to emerging technologies, in contrast to the liberal US software patentability approach. Concerning Art.52 patentability requirements, the Board’s T 0931/95 Pension Benefit System (PBS), Decision became the turning point for software patentability in Europe.
With the new wording of Article 28, patenting a computer program as such will not be given the green light because computer programs will still not be treated as an invention. Schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or conducting business activities will also not be considered inventions. Furthermore, the scope of protection has been defined differently.
Long-time Slashdot reader zoobab shares this update from the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, a Munich-based non-profit opposing ratification of a "Unified Patent Court" by Germany. They argue such a court will "validate and expand software patents in Europe," and they've come up with a novel argument to stop it.
Marchi Storici (historical trademarks, Italian) refer to historical trademarks which can be registered in a dedicated registry before the Italian Patent and Trademark Office (UIBM) if they meet the following definition: "Italian trademarks registered or used for at least 50 years for the marketing of products or services made by an Italian production company of excellence, historically connected to the Italian territory." Trademark owners that intend to "close the original or main production site" for the "termination of the activity or the delocalization of the same outside the national territory" must notify the Ministry of Economic Development of their intentions, under penalty of administrative fines ranging from €5,000 to €50,000. The ministry then "starts the procedure," aiming at stopping or avoiding the termination or delocalization of the production.
The Trump administration's Justice Department has filed a brief in support of Oracle in its Supreme Court battle against Google over whether Java should have copyright protection.
The Justice Department filed its amicus brief to the Supreme Court this week, joining a mighty list of briefs from major tech companies and industry luminaries – including Scott McNealy, co-founder of Sun, which Oracle bought in 2010, acquiring Sun-built Java in the process.
The Polish branch of entertainment company CANAL+ is warning pirate sites not to make an upcoming TV-series available. The company's anti-piracy department sent a letter to a popular torrent site, noting that it may be held liable if it doesn't expeditiously remove or disable access to potential future uploads.
TeaTV is one of the most popular 'pirate' video apps around, providing ready access to movies and TV shows. The app received mainstream media attention in 2019 and following on from that exposure, the MPA has been trying to disrupt the application. The movie industry group is now asking code platform Github to take down three versions of the application while considering its repeat infringer policy.
