First a bit of background before we get into reviewing. I’ve used a laptop as my primary computer for 20+ years, and since I do things on-line most of my waking life, this means I spend a lot of time in front of my laptop typing or reading away. So, it’s pretty important to me that my laptop works well, is nice to use and is under support in case anything happens.
For the last 3.5 years or so, my laptop has been a Lenovo Yoga 920. It’s been a great laptop and I have enjoyed using it. Unfortunately, it’s support is going to be up in a few months and I really don’t like my primary laptop to be out of support. In the last 3.5 years, Lenovo has: replaced the LCD panel when it fell off a table and broke, Replaced the motherboard when a sound connector became loose, replaced the keyboard when it became mushy, and most recently replaced the battery because it started to swell up. So, warentee is pretty important to me.
I was starting to worry that none of the current crop of laptops would really be any better than my 3.5+ year old yoga 920, but dell managed to announce their xps 13 9300 and it had some better stats, so I decided I would jump to it and see how things went. One kind of anoying thing was that dell announced the new laptop in January, but the model with the good specs I wanted wasn’t available to order until April, and the “developer” edition still isn’t available with the high end specs (I got the normal windows one).
Earlier this week I highlighted the Dell XPS 7390 "Ice Lake" ultrabook seeing a big performance drop on recent versions of the Linux kernel. Intel engineers seem to have sorted it out and now have a solution in place, which affects those running Linux 5.4 or newer.
Ubuntu releases 20.04 LTS, Kdenlive picks up support for the OpenTimelineIO interchange format, Mozilla expands its community analysis program with a new blog, Lenovo and Fedora announce a partnership for pre-installation on some ThinkPads, and Intel gives a boost to The Linux Foundation’s mentorship program.
Are you interested in building REST APIs with Flask and SQLAlchemy? This week Christopher interviews Doug Farrell about his four-part Real Python series on Python REST APIs. They discuss the various Python tools and libraries used in the series. Doug also shares his practices for continuous learning. Doug has worked in process control, embedded systems, and has a long background in software development. He's currently a developer at ShutterFly, and discusses developing tools for his internal customers. He also teaches Python to kids at a STEM school near where he lives. Currently Doug is writing a book for Manning Publications, "The Well-Grounded Python Developer".
Software Freedom Podcast Special about GNU Health with Dr. Luis Falcón and Dr. Axel Braun For our Software Freedom Podcast we talk with people who have inspiring ideas about software freedom. In this special episode, we talk with Dr. Luis Falcón and Dr. Axel Braun about the Free health and hospital information system GNU Health.
Unfortunately, as we had to do this podcast remotely this time, we cannot provide the same level of audio quality as you are used to in this podcast. We apologise for this and will look into better solutions for remote recordings for future episodes.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.6.7 kernel.
All users of the 5.6 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.6.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.6.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
Intel's performance-optimized Clear Linux has made some inroads in the desktop space over the past two years with providing a nice desktop installer last year, enhancing their documentation, and making available more desktop packages. Clear Linux has offered some of the fastest performance even for desktop workloads like web browser performance and has worked out equally well on AMD hardware. But moving forward they are going to be shifting back to their roots on focusing on server and cloud workloads.
Intel's ISPC compiler (Implicit SPMD Program Compiler) for targeting its C-based single-program, multiple data language is out now with a new feature release.
ISPC already advertises performance speed-ups of three to six times faster depending upon the AVX configuration of the CPU being tested and core count. But with ISPC 1.13 they are continuing to work on making this SPMD program compiler even faster, particularly for AVX-512.
arlier this month I reported that Linux developers were reviving work on the Intel FSGSBASE patches as a performance helper going back to Ivy Bridge CPUs but for which past patch series never got over the finish line for mainlining. On Thursday a new version of the FSGSBASE patches were sent out.
One of Microsoft's Linux kernel hacker, Sasha Levin, has taken up the patches in trying to get the mainlined with Intel seemingly not in a rush to get the patches merged that have been sent out a few times in recent years.
Due to unclear communication over patches queued for a given Mesa point release and ensuring all relevant patches are included, Mesa developers will begin making use of Gitlab's "milestones" functionality for tracking the work to be included in the next point release.
Mesa release managers in the past would send out a list of queued patches for a given Mesa point release, effectively as a release candidate so fellow Mesa developers could see the queued list in case any patches were missing or incorrectly applied. That practice hasn't been going on for a while and given Mesa seeing a number of botched releases in recent times, Gitlab Milestones functionality is being trialed.
While there has been the CPU-based "Kazan" Vulkan driver (formerly Vulkan-CPU as a Google Summer of Code project) and Google's SwiftShader has been implementing CPU-based Vulkan support, it turns out Red Hat's David Airlie has been working on a Mesa/Gallium3D-inspired Vulkan software renderer.
NVIDIA has released their latest weekly-ish beta update to their Vulkan Linux driver.
With today's NVIDIA 440.66.11 beta driver, several synchronization bugs have been addressed with PRIME Sync configurations, namely multi-GPU/Optimus laptops. The synchronization bugs could lead to momentary lock-ups of the X.Org Server when moving/resizing/focusing not only Vulkan windows but also OpenGL too.
Last week NVIDIA released a new Vulkan Beta Driver which came with some issues, a new build has gone out today fixing some of the most pressing.
Collabora has been working on Panfrost open-source Arm Mali GPU driver for over a year. The drive aims to support both Midgard and Bifrost families. But so far, the company had mostly focused on Midgard (Mali-T6xx/T7xx) GPUs with for example experimental OpenGL ES 3.0 support announced last February.
Collabora engineers, such as Alyssa Rosenzweig, have now started to work on Bifrost support, and some good progress has been made since they managed to have Panfrost render the first 3D graphics with basic texture support using a platform with an Arm Mali-G31 GPU.
 With last week's release of Radeon Software for Linux 20.10 as AMD's first packaged graphics driver update for Linux of 2020, here are some benchmarks showing how the performance compares to what is shipped by Ubuntu 18.04.4 LTS as well as when using the newer Mesa and Linux kernel releases for the very latest open-source performance, including switching over to RADV+ACO for Vulkan gaming.
Today's AMD Radeon Linux graphics driver comparison is looking at...
For simplicity, we will use qmake to deploy the app on other platforms than GNU/Linux, and for GNU/Linux cmake.
Streamlink 1.4.0 has been released with support for low latency streaming on Twitch, fixed YouTube plugin, and more.
Streamlink is a free and open source command line utility which pipes live video streams to players like VLC, mpv, MPlayer, OMXPlayer or MPC-HC, with the purpose of avoiding resource-heavy websites (and on Linux, to use hardware-accelerated video playback). It was forked over 3 years ago from Livestreamer, which is no longer maintained, and runs on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
HomeBank is a free software (as in "free speech" and also as in "free beer") that will assist you to manage your personal accounting. It is designed to easy to use and be able to analyse your personal finance and budget in detail using powerful filtering tools and beautiful charts. If you are looking for a completely free and easy application to manage your personal accounting, budget, finance then HomeBank should be the software of choice.
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Cross platform, supports GNU/Linux...
The Wine development release 5.7 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - Wine Mono engine updated to 5.0.0, with upstream WPF support. - More progress on the WineD3D Vulkan backend. - Beginnings of a USB device driver. - Support for building with Clang in MSVC mode. - Builtin modules no longer depend on libwine. - Support for configuring Windows version from the command line. - Various bug fixes.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/5.x/wine-5.7.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/5.x/wine-5.7.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
The Wine compatibility layer has another development release out today with Wine 5.7 adding in some new features.
Wine 5.7 is out as the newest bi-weekly development release and it's a fun one with multiple interesting advancements.
As reported a few days ago, there has been progress on the WineD3D Vulkan back-end for allowing D3D9/D3D10/D3D11 calls to go through Vulkan rather than OpenGL. It's similar aim to DXVK but not nearly as mature. The Vulkan support for WineD3D is still being brought up and isn't yet ready for end-users/gamers but progress is being made.
Halo : Master Chief Collection running through Steam Play (Proton 5.0-4) Runs great. As mentioned, EAC is no good, so MP is best avoided currently on this.
LudoNarraCon has returned, with another digital event now live on Steam to celebrate narrative games. Organized by Fellow Traveller, publisher of unusual narrative games.
From now until April 27, there's a lot of narrative games on sale and the developers will be doing something of an exhibition where they will livestream to their Steam store page. These streams will typically last between 1-3 hours on a loop, so you don't have to worry about missing one. Given how everything has been cancelled lately, it's a brilliant thing to do and Steam is well-placed for such an event.
Iratus: Lord of the Dead from developer Unfrozen and publisher Daedalic Entertainment has now left Early Access, with it full Linux support is now also up.
Half-Life: Alyx, Valve's return to the Half-Life franchise in VR-only form released for Windows last month and it appears they're now preparing a Linux version. You can see so on SteamDB.
Good news, although not unexpected. When we spoke to Valve a few days before release, they did mention their plan was to hopefully have a Linux version of Half-Life: Alyx with Vulkan API support out post-release.
Taking place between the events of Half-Life and Half-Life 2, you play as Alyx Vance instead of Gordon Freeman in a seemingly impossible fight against the alien Combine. It's already managed to hit an Overwhelmingly Positive user review score on Steam, with that being from over twenty thousand players. Considering it's a Virtual Reality game, which requires you buy the VR kit on top of a PC good enough to run it, it's an impressive number.
Currently in development with it classed as being in an "alpha state", Verdant Village seems like a sweet and promising high fantasy alternative to Stardew Valley with some new themes.
The developer has been working on it for some time already and they have plans to add in some big content to it like a combat system, hunting, a bigger world, alchemy and more fantasy themes. Exodus Software have been regularly updating it since it appeared on itch.io back in February but it's still clearly early on with plenty of bits not available yet.
XCOM 2, likely one of my absolutely all-time favourite strategy games can be played for free until April 30.
Originally developed by Firaxis Games, it acts as a sequel to XCOM: Enemy Unknown although you can easily play XCOM 2 without playing the first. It was ported to Linux by Feral Interactive and it was a day-1 release for us which doesn't happen too often for bigger titles.
Rover Wars strips down the RTS genre to some of the basics and makes it a competitive local multiplayer game, it's actually pretty darn fun and it's out now.
Valve continue to improve Steam at quite a rapid pace lately. Recently, they not only released a new beta of Steam Audio but they also put up a new experiment.
For Steam Audio, Valve's cross-platform full-featured audio solution that integrates environment and listener simulation, it had the first Beta release in over a year on April 22. This pulled in better Android support, support for spatial blend in the binaural effect, support for custom distance attenuation and air absorption curves and plenty of fixes. They also updated their Unity and FMOD Studio plugins.
Friday marked the release of LXQt 0.15, the first big update to this lightweight Qt5-based desktop environment since January 2019. There comes a fair number of improvements with this desktop that was born out of the LXDE and Razor-qt initiatives.
The LXQt project has released today the LXQt 0.15.0 update for their open-source and lightweight desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.
Arriving three months after version 0.14, the LXQt 0.15.0 release packs many improvements and new features. The most prominent one being LXQt Archiver, a brand-new and a fully functioning archive manager that integrates with the PCManFM-Qt by default and it’s based on its LibFM-Qt core library.
Talking about PCManFM-Qt, the default file manager of LXQt, it received several improvements. These include better keyboard navigation, support for single window mode, the ability to save mount passwords, richer file tooltips, as well as smarter extension handling on the LXQt file dialog.
Version 20.04.0 of KDE’s apps has been released! Go check it out; there’s amazing stuff in there.
Work proceeds on the Breeze Evolution task for Plasma 5.19. In particular, the System Tray visual overhaul subtask is nearly complete and our tray popups are looking better than ever...
In addition to this week seeing the slew of KDE Apps updates, developers working on the applications, Plasma, and other areas of the KDE ecosystem have remained as busy as ever during the COVID-19 crisis for continuing to improve this open-source desktop.
Some of the highlights for the KDE week besides shipping the 20.04 Apps include:
- KDE System Settings' KWin rules page was rewritten and now has a better UI.
- Taking screenshots on HiDPI setups under Wayland now have the correct resolution.
Before looking at how widgets do their own drawing, it is worth pointing out that GtkDrawingArea is still a valid option if all you need is some self-contained cairo drawing.
The only difference between GTK 3 and GTK 4 is that you call gtk_drawing_area_set_draw_func() to provide your drawing function instead of connecting a signal handler to the the ::draw signal. Everything else is the same: GTK provides you with a cairo context, and you can just draw to it.
  The Deepin Desktop Environment is very elegant and comfortable to use. Its simplicity, coupled with improved functionality and configurability over earlier versions, makes it a nice choice for those looking for something new.
The Deepin desktop’s integration into the Ubuntu 20.04 base masks some of the stumbling blocks new users encounter when learning about the Linux OS in general and Ubuntu in particular. Ubuntu DDE works right out of the box with nothing to adjust or configure.
Beta releases are not good products to use on a production machine, but this beta version is a strong demonstration of what UbuntuDDE’s performance will be in its final form.
UbuntuDDE uses the Calamares installer. The process includes disk-partitioning options and an easy click-to-choose graphical display.
 This is the official release announcement for IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 144. This contains a number of security fixes in OpenSSL, the squid web proxy, the DHCP client and more. We recommend to install it as soon as possible and reboot.
The OpenSSL team has issued a security advisory for the 1.1.1 release with "high" severity.
Applicants on client or service side that call SSL_check_chain() during a TLSv1.3 handshake may crash the application due to incorrect handling of the signature_algorithms_cert" TLS extension.
CVE-2020-1967 has been assigned to track this vulnerability and an immediate installation of this update is recommended.
Since Public Release Candidate 1 is released more than 2 months after the release of the Public Beta, tons of fixes and enhancement is included in this milestone.
We are pretty excited to announce SUSE Manager 4.1 Public Beta 3. As usual, we have prepared tons of updates and we hope you will like it. We also now have a new Public Mailing List, so you can share your feedback with our Public Beta Community, our Engineering and our Product Managers.
The last week was filled with success. The major change was surely the removal of python2-FOO modules from the distro. Not exactly all are gone yet (packages that fail to build do also not change the published modules), but we went form 2564 (Snapshot 0417) modules down to 203 (0422). But of course, that’s not all that has happened. After all, we released 6 snapshots in the last week (0415, 0416, 0417, 0419, 0421 and 0422).
Is Fedora Linux your daily driver? Well, then here’s the big news for all Fedora lovers. The folks at Red Hat who work on Fedora desktop have joined hands with the Lenovo team to bring Thinkpad laptops with Fedora Workstation pre-installed.
You may think that I’m already running Fedora OS on my Lenovo system, so what’s all the fuss about?. But as mentioned by Matthew Miller, Fedora’s project leader, in his latest blog pre-loaded Fedora on ThinkPad is quite a different experience. Plus, Lenovo will fix several issues that you face while running Fedora Linux on Lenovo laptops.
Lenovo will follow in the footsteps of Dell and launch a series of Linux laptops as part of an experiment which could then be expanded to further models should everything go according to the plan.
The Fedora Project and Lenovo are partnering to offer customers the option to buy a ThinkPad laptop with the Fedora Linux distribution pre-installed.
After many trials and tribulations, Lenovo is finally becoming a part of the Open Source and GNU/Linux ecosystem. More specifically, they are patterning with the Fedora Project to offer laptops with Fedora Linux pre-installed.
Fedora Project leader Matthew Miller announced the exciting news earlier today, saying that users will soon be able to purchase a ThinkPad laptop from Lenovo that comes pre-installed with the Fedora Workstation distro, which features the popular GNOME desktop environment.
For starters, the only Lenovo laptops that will be available with Fedora Linux are the ThinkPad P1 Gen2, ThinkPad P53, and ThinkPad X1 Gen8. But Matthew Miller is hopeful that Lenovo will give users the option to buy other models in the future.
So you have probably seen the announcement that Lenovo are launching a set of Fedora Workstation based laptops. I am so happy and proud of this effort as it comes as the culmination of our hard effort over the last 6 years to drain the swamp and make Linux a more viable desktop operating system. I am also so happy and proud that Lenovo was willing to work with us on this effort as they provide us with an incredible opportunity to reach both new and old Linux users around the globe with these systems, being the worlds biggest laptop maker with the widest global reach. Because one important aspect of this is that Lenovo will provide these laptops through all their sales channels in all their markets. This means you can of course order them online through their website, but it also means companies can order them through Lenovos business to business channels and it means that in any country where Lenovo is present you can order them, so this is not a North America only or Europe only, this is truly a global offering.
There are a lot of people who has been involved here in helping to make this happen, but special thanks goes to Egbert Gracias from Lenovo who was critical in making this happen and also a special thanks to Alberto Ruiz who spearheaded this effort from our side.
Our engineering team here at Red Hat has also been hard at work ensuring we can support these models very well be that by bugfixes to kernel drivers or by polishing up things like the Linux fingerprint support. As we go forward we hope to build on this relationship to take linux laptops to the next level and I am also very happy to say that we got Jared Dominguez on on team now to help us develop better work practices and closer relationships with our hardware partners and original device manufacturers.
As a nice win for open source, hardware vendor Lenovo are going to begin offering Fedora Linux on their ThinkPad line. This was announced today over on the Fedora Magazine by Red Hat's Matthew Miller.
You will be able to select Fedora Workstation as your operating system when customizing a Lenovo ThinkPad, as part of a pilot in Lenovo’s Linux Community Series. They're going to be starting with the ThinkPad P1 Gen2, ThinkPad P53, and ThinkPad X1 Gen8 laptops and if it's a success likely more. Sounds like it's been a good partnership too, as Miller said Lenovo has been "following our existing trademark guidelines and respects our open source principles" with it shipping exactly as the Fedora team want.
Fedora Magazine announces that Lenovo will start offering three laptop models with Fedora Workstation preinstalled.
When it comes to finding laptops with Linux pre-loaded by the OEM, it's mostly Ubuntu or its derivatives found most often on these devices. But Lenovo and Red Hat are announcing today that Fedora Workstation 32 will begin appearing soon on select ThinkPad laptops.
Fedora will be offered as a pre-install option with a new "Fedora Edition" of the ThinkPad P1 Gen 2, ThinkPad P53, and ThinkPad X1 Gen 8 laptops. Other models with Fedora are expected in the future.
Most of Lenovo’s laptops ship with Windows 10 software. But soon you may be able to buy one that comes with Fedora 32 Workstation Linux pre-installed instead.
  Today, I’m excited to share some big news with you—Fedora Workstation will be available on Lenovo ThinkPad laptops! Yes, I know, many of us already run a Fedora operating system on a Lenovo system, but this is different. You’ll soon be able to get Fedora pre-installed by selecting it as you customize your purchase. This is a pilot of Lenovo’s Linux Community Series – Fedora Edition, beginning with ThinkPad P1 Gen2, ThinkPad P53, and ThinkPad X1 Gen8 laptops, possibly expanding to other models in the future.
The Lenovo team has been working with folks at Red Hat who work on Fedora desktop technologies to make sure that the upcoming Fedora 32 Workstation is ready to go on their laptops. The best part about this is that we’re not bending our rules for them. Lenovo is following our existing trademark guidelines and respects our open source principles. That’s right—these laptops ship with software exclusively from the official Fedora repos! When they ship, you’ll see Fedora 32 Workstation. (Models which can benefit from the NVIDIA binary driver can install it in the normal way after the fact, by opting in to proprietary software sources.)
 We learned this week of the passing of John McDonough (jjmcd). John was a long-time contributor to the Fedora Project, and we are sad to hear of his passing. John contributed heavily to the Documentation team, sharing his knowledge with a global user community. John didn’t just write documentation, he also mentored new contributors. He was a patient and caring mentor, and our community is worse for his loss.
When I first became a Fedora contributor 11 years ago, John was one of the people who welcomed me into the Docs team. His guidance helped me become a better contributor. Although he stepped back from contributing a few years ago, his impact continues.
Hey folks! It’s that time of year where we start thinking about Flock. I am going to lay it out up front: based on the severity and ever-changing nature of COVID-19, we have to cancel this year’s edition of Flock to Fedora. We worked with our events team to evaluate the situation. No one can say at this point if conditions will support having a conference in August. Even if the public health situation improves, we understand that many of you won’t feel comfortable traveling and participating in large events.
Let me be the first to express how sad this news is to hear, and to deliver. Flock is one of the best ways we have to express our gratitude for all of the hard work our contributors do throughout the year. It is also an irreplaceable event, because in a lot of ways we work together online as if we were side-by-side on a regular basis.
Open Liberty 20.0.0.4 provides support for MicroProfile 3.3 which includes updates to MicroProfile Rest Client, Fault Tolerance, Metrics, Health, and Config. Improved developer experience is also achieved with support for yum/apt-get installs and the ability to track use patterns with JAX-RS 2.1.
Since you’re reading this post, you have likely heard of efforts towards automation, DevOps practices, and/or Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) directives. Looking beyond the buzzwords, the underlying core concepts of IaC can help with speed, risk reduction and advanced deployment capabilities in any organization’s technology journey. This post will elaborate on this and provide some insight from Arctiq's real-world experience.
As we all adjust to our new normal, Code @ Think is your opportunity to tap into a multitude of resources from your laptop to stay sharp on current coding methodologies, and learn new skills to boost your productivity. With so much excitement surrounding this digital event, here are just 5 reasons why you should attend.
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As open source finally begins to permeate inside your company, it’s time to skill-up on the technologies you’ve been waiting to use. Attend Code @ Think to learn from IBM open source rockstars as they pull back the curtain on Kubernetes, Knative, TensorFlow, istio, OpenJ9, Open Liberty, Node.js, Quarkus, and many other open technologies that you’ll need to be well-versed in understanding.
Red Hat OpenShift Serverless 1.5.0 (currently in tech preview) runs on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform 4.3. It enables stateful, stateless, and serverless workloads to all operate on a single multi-cloud container platform. Apache Camel K is a lightweight integration platform that runs natively on Kubernetes. Camel K has serverless superpowers.
Look what systemd is up to now... taking over home directories. Perhaps augmenting home directories is the better way to put it. Here's the info straight from the horse's mouth.
The popular lightweight Ubuntu derivative – Xubuntu recently released Long Term Support (LTS) Version supported until April 2023. Powered by the Xfce desktop environment, this release based on the solid Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. However, there are lots of Xubuntu specific changes in this release which makes it a great Linux distribution for older hardware PCs, Laptops as well as high-end machines.
The most awaited Linux distribution of the year, Ubuntu 20.04 “Focal Fossa” stable has been made available to download. Ubuntu 20.04 is an LTS release which means it’ll receive maintenance updates for 4 years until April 2025. Ubuntu flavors will be supported for 3 years.
We recently covered the improvements and new features it’s going to have in this article.
In brief, Ubuntu 20.04 “LTS” has both visual and core changes. The biggest visual changes include the redesigned Yaru theme that now supports Dark mode.
I am a new Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS server system administrator. How can I set up an OpenVPN Server on an Ubuntu Linux version 20.04 LTS server to shield my browsing activity from bad guys on public Wi-Fi, encrypt all traffic while connecting to 4G LTE network, and more?
Canonical announced the general availability of the Linux distribution Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Long Term Support) on April 23, 2020. Development put a focus on security and privacy according to Canonical, and it shows as the release includes WireGuard VPN client and Secure Boot support.
WireGuard support will be backported to Ubuntu 18.04 LTS according to Canonical.
Downloads are already available on the official Ubuntu website. Interested users may download Desktop and Server versions of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS from the site to run them directly or install them on systems.
Canonical have announced the latest release of Ubuntu 20.04 Long-Term Support (LTS) as Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa).
I’ve respun the desktop ISO using my ‘isorespin.sh‘ script and created ISOs suitable for Intel Atom and Intel Apollo Lake devices...
  In the past, codenaming of new Ubuntu releases was done by Mark Shuttleworth, but these days it looks like it’s decided by the entire team. And the codename of Ubuntu 20.10 will be “Groovy Gorilla.”
A draft release schedule was published as well, suggesting that the development will start at the end of April with the toolchain update. But, as with all past releases, development will be based on the current stable release, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
The Ubuntu 20.10 development cycle will continue the tradition of providing optional Ubuntu Testing Weeks to members of the community who want to help shape the upcoming release.
Two Ubuntu Testing Week events are planned, one during the week of July 2nd and the other one during the week of September 3rd.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was officially launched this week as one of the most-anticipated updates in a long time, and now Canonical is working on the next important release due later this year.
Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla will thus be the next major Ubuntu update after 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), 19.10 (Eoan Ermine), and 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver).
Ubuntu 20.10 Codename Revealed: The month of April 2020 is full of surprises. It is not less a day since the latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS codenamed Focal Fossa was released, the codename of Ubuntu 20.10 has been revealed today. Following the lineup E(Eoan Ermine), and F(Focal Fossa), Ubuntu 20.10 gets the following codename.
  The Ubuntu Studio team is pleased to announce the release of Ubuntu Studio 20.04, code-named “Focal Fossa”. This marks Ubuntu Studio’s 27th release. This release is a Long-Term Support release and as such, it is supported for 3 years (until April 2023).
Since it’s just out, you may experience some issues, so you might want to wait a bit before upgrading. Please see the release notes for a complete list of changes and known issues.
 Ubuntu developers are working with the libfprint project to improve support for biometric authentication methods in GNOME-based Linux distros, including its own, Ubuntu.
‘Many devices are now shipping with fingerprint readers, and this has become a natural way to unlock the user session,” says Ubuntu desktop lead Martin Wimpress in a blog post to showcase the work that’s gone in to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Canonical has released the latest version of Ubuntu only a few hours ago, and now this update is also live for Windows 10 users who want to download it from the Microsoft Store.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS comes with a long list of improvements, including notable security enhancements like Secure Boot to protect against low level attacks and rootkits.
Furthermore, this is the first release to come with Fast ID Online, or FIDO, to power universal multi-factor and passworldless authentication in the operating system.
LUbuntu 20.04 LTS “Focal Fossa” ships with a built-in dark theme. You can activate the dark version of Ubuntu’s standard Yaru theme and get a dark GNOME desktop in just a few clicks. Here’s how.
First, click the system menu button on the panel at the top-right corner of Ubuntu’s GNOME desktop and select “Settings.”
You can also click the “Show Applications” button at the bottom-left corner of your screen, search for the “Settings” application, and launch it from there.
The newest version of Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distributions, is finally here.
Ubuntu 20.04, known as “Focal Fossa,” dropped this week with a ton of new features. Built on the Linux 5.4 kernel, there are some major enhancements. Primarily, the integration of WireGuard, a fairly popular VPN, means Ubuntu users will now have a VPN service from the outset. Additionally, the new version of Ubuntu can now read the Z File System (ZFS) and ExFat file systems. The former is an Oracle-based file system, while the latter is typically used in Windows and Microsoft devices.
There are a few other features of note as well, including a new kernel lockdown mode that divorces the root account from the kernel in some instances. This offers another layer of protection for users by preventing a compromised root account from mucking about in the system kernel without the user’s knowledge (for the most part).
Canonical has released the newest version of its Ubuntu Linux distribution, Ubuntu 20.04. This long-term-support (LTS) version is more than just the latest version of one of the most popular Linux distributions; it's a major update for desktop, server, and cloud users
  CTI’s compact “Rudi-NX” embedded computer runs Linux on a Jetson Xavier NX module for up to 21 TOPS AI at 15W. Features include 2x GbE, 4x USB 3.0, 3x M.2 with NVMe, 4x GMSL cam inputs, and -20 to 80€°C support.
Guelph, Ontario based Connect Tech Inc. (CTI) recently announced the Rudi-NX Embedded System along with its Quark Carrier board, which supports Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier NX and Nano modules, but does not power the Rudi-NX. The 135 x 105 x 50mm mini-PC is available only with the Jetson Xavier NX.
  Banana Pi’s “BPI-F2P” SBC runs Linux on a quad -A7 SunPlus SP7021 and offers dual LAN with PoE plus 40-pin GPIO. Also new is a “BPI-EAI80 AIoT” SBC with a dual Cortex-M4 Edgeless EAI80 MCU with 300-GOPS NPU.
SinoVoip’s Banana Pi project has posted specs for its second development board based on SunPlus Technology’s SP7021 SoC after the Banana Pi BPI-F2S, which we covered back in November. The new Banana Pi BPI-F2P has a similar layout and feature list as the BPI-F2S. The biggest difference is the addition of two serial ports, as well as a new Power-over-Ethernet function on one of the two 10/100 Ethernet ports. Meanwhile, the FPGA connector for an optional Artix-7 FPGA module has been removed.
Over the last few years, several companies have come up with 64-bit Arm workstation to allow developers to test Arm code natively which may be important to avoid network delays or test applications requiring video or graphics.
Those started to become available in 2018 from the relatively low-end 24-core Cortex-A53 Linaro “Synquacer” Developerbox to the much more powerful (and expensive) GIGABYTE ThunderXStation Workstation powered by up to two 32-core ThunderX2 processors.
Axiomtek’s fanless, rugged “eBOX640-521-FL” computer runs Linux or Win 10 on 8th Gen Coffee Lake CPUs with all front facing I/O including dual displays, 6x USB, 2x SATA, 2x GbE, 2x serial, mini-PCIe and M.2, and “flexible I/O.”
Let’s take a look at what the Librem 5 software team were busy with in March 2020 (weeks 10-13). Some items are covered in more detail in separate blog posts at https://puri.sm/news. The idea is to summaries the coding and design efforts for the month and showcase how we’re standing on the shoulders of giants. Reusing existing free software allows contributions to flow back and forth between communities. These reports are usually rather link heavy pointing to individual merge requests on https://source.puri.sm/ or upstream (e.g. GNOME’s gitlab).
Starting today, every app you use to access your ProtonMail inbox is open source and has passed an independent security audit.
One of our guiding principles is transparency. You deserve to know who we are, how our products can and cannot protect you, and how we keep your data private. We believe this level of transparency is the only way to earn the trust of our community.
A team from Taiwan’s National Yang-Ming University has developed a videoconferencing platform with free access based on the open-source software Jitsi Meet.
Led by Chen Yu-chun (éâ¢Â³Ã¨â²ç¾¤), an assistant professor at the university’s School of Medicine, the team has incorporated new features to the application for improved security. Through a one-time encryption key, users will be able to convene virtual meetings without the need to sign in.
OpenSSH is on a roll. In February, OpenSSH 8.2 introduced first-class support for FIDO2 (née U2F) security keys, making hardware backed keys accessible for less than $20.
This is not some complicated PAM setup, or some janky cryptographic trick, but a proper public key type, where the private key is protected by the hardware token.1 And it just works out of the box for USB security keys! No more tedious and unreliable gpg-agent setups, PKCS#11, or third-party agents.
I’m a big fan of hardware tokens because they allow a few things you can’t do with just software cryptography: compromise recovery, because an attacker can’t exfiltrate the key from the hardware to use it after losing access to it; explicit consent, where the user has to physically allow each operation by e.g. tapping the key; and short PINs that can’t be bruteforced, because the retry counters or delays are enforced in hardware.
Let’s cut to the chase, here’s how you generate an SSH key backed by your security key: [...]
I have to confess that aside from New Year and family birthdays, SUSECON is my favorite diary date. Where else could I combine the job I love with renewing friendships, meeting new friends and immersing myself in a welcoming global community? The difficult global circumstances we currently find ourselves in have caused me to look back a little wistfully at my great experiences at previous SUSECON events where I, like other attendees, have enjoyed the outstanding technical content, open access to subject matter experts, and a true feeling of community.
If you’re going to stare at a screen, you can binge-watch Netflix – or you could attend one of these online open source conferences, most of which are now free or at a significantly reduced price.
DeepSpeech 0.7 is the new release from Mozilla for this open-source speech-to-text engine. Among the many changes to find with this update are changes around their TensorFlow training code, support for TypeScript, multi-stream .NET support, a new format is available for training data that should be faster, support for transfer learning, ElectronJS 8.0 support, and numerous other changes.
More details: The Glean Python SDK, which mozregression now uses for telemetry, requires Python 3. This provided the impetus to port the GUI itself to Python 3 and PySide2 (the modern incarnation of PyQt), which brought with it a much easier installation/development experience for the GUI on platforms like Mac and Linux.
It's still WIP, but I can show you pair of images with a new branding in LibreOffice 7.0. And you can look at it yourself when you'll download a current daily build by link.
A number of additional game controllers / gamepads / input devices have been added to the SDL2 code-base in recent days.
Sam Lantinga of Valve has been adding a number of new devices to SDL2 for proper mapping.
PHP is well known as a general-purpose scripting language or open source scripting language that is used for the development of websites, either static or dynamic. Being easy to learn and use, fast performance, availability of online support, stability, security, and the open source advantages of the language, it has become a fascinating language for new and expert programmers. However, learning this language needs a good starting, continuation, and guidelines. So, we are here to provide a handful list of PHP books to serve the purpose of learning PHP.
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For SDL2 on Windows, there is also now a Windows Gaming Input joystick driver for initially supporting the Razer Atrox Arcade Stick.
The changes are currently staged in their development repository ahead of the next SDL2 update, likely later this year.
Last month Marvell announced the ThunderX3 server processors with up to 96 ARM cores per SoC and with 4-way SMT means up to 384 threads per socket. This 7nm Arm server processor also supports eight DDR4-3200 memory channels, 64 lanes of PCIe 4.0, and other advancements to provide more competitiveness in the Arm server space. Marvell is now working on getting the ThunderX3 software support ironed out, including for the GCC compiler.
No, I really don’t care about C++. I’ve never been a C++ developer, I started using Qt 25 years ago through PyQt, and only started using Qt and C++ after a couple of years of Java.
Back then, there was no standard library for C++, and from what I saw back then, there was an idea that to be successful a library needed to look like what seemed the biggest thing in software development back then: Java. I guess that’s where the original developers of Qt got their inspiration from, what with the Java-like iterators, QObject and QMetaObject so you could have an object hierarchy like in Java…
An in the years since I started maintaining Krita, most people who came to the project, came without any knowledge of the C++ standard library. They tended to have used C# or Java at university, maybe Python or Ruby. Java-like Qt was easy to grasp, learn and use, even for people who really had never coded before.
But of course, over the times, C++ evolved, to a point where I, since I’m just a linguist who has programmed for about forty years, cannot read “modern” C++ code anymore, not really. I mean, Ivan ÃÅukić’ Functional Programming in C++ is wonderfully clearly written, but I’d be lying if I said I understood it, and it doesn’t seem to contain much that’s relevant for my day to day work on Krita.
I have to say for full transparency up front that Golang is not my favourite programming language, even less after using it for a while. Nevertheless with a lot of help from Dan Berrangé we now have Golang bindings for libnbd and nbdkit which are respectively client and server software for the Linux Network Block Device protocol.
The Golang bindings for libnbd let you connect to a server and read and write from it. This is all pretty straightforward so read the manual page if you want to find out more.
The Golang bindings for nbdkit are considerably more interesting because you can use them to write pretty natural and high performance NBD servers to expose “interesting things”.
I’ve listed my next Higher Performance Python public class, it’ll run online for 3 mornings on June 1-3 during UK hours. We’ll use Zoom and Slack with pre-distributed Notebooks and modules and you’ll run it using an Anaconda environment. Here’s the write-up from my recent class.
ActionChains are ways provided by Selenium to automate low-level interactions with the website such as mouse movements, mouse button actions, keypress, and context menu(right-click menu) interactions. These special methods are useful for doing more complex actions like mouse over and drag and drop that is not possible by direct web driver actions.
Using ActionChains object, we call methods that perform specific actions sequentially one by one. selenium training Actions called are pushed into a queue. When performing () method is called, the events are fired in the order they are queued up.
Encapsulation is an act of deliberate limiting access to certain software components. The most common usage is to hide certain attributes of objects from other objects that use it.
The Bridge Design Pattern is a Structural Design Pattern, which splits the abstraction from the implementation. In this article, we'll be covering the motivation and implementation of the Bridge Design Pattern in Python.
Design Patterns refer to a set of standardized practices or solutions to common architectural problems in software engineering.
A great number of you watched the conference part of Montréal-Python 76 – Tonic Glacier. Thank you!
Our spectacularly virtual combo is now proceeding with the cyber hackathon. Here is all the information.
For many weeks now, our challenging times gave birth to projects to help us face the COVID-19 crisis. The Tonic Glacier Cyber Hackathon organized by Montréal-Python is an opportunity to move forward existing projects and to start new ones. This online gathering will take place from May 1st to May 3, 2020. To your calendars!
Java has been in a bit of an awkward spot since containers took off a few years ago. In the world of Kubernetes, microservices, and serverless, it has been getting harder and harder to ignore that Java applications are, by today’s standards, bloated. Well, until now. In this article, I explore the basics of Quarkus, a Kubernetes-native Java framework built to specifically address Java’s bloatedness problem.
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Not to mention, as a language, Java gave organizations pretty much everything they needed to maintain software for a long time using a large team of professionals with varying levels of skills.
Father’s and sons have been at it since the beginning of time — since an outraged God told Adam to get out of Eden and take his side rib (Eve) with him, and go fuck himself, after His Satan-driven brat ate of the iMac tree, and started thinking for himself; and Adam screamed back over his shoulder, “You go Yahweh and I’ll go mine; and, He riposted to Them, “See ya, Totem and Taboo.”€ They went into Exile, and many many many many many many illicit light thoughts later, to make a long story short, here we are.
As we've been discussing, esports is having something of a moment during the COVID-19 shutdown. While it's been interesting to see the general uptick in interest for esports globally, it's been equally interesting to watch professional sporting organizations and leagues, that can longer operate in real life, shift quickly to putting professional players behind gamepads and broadcasting esports matches instead. NASCAR was the first to jump on this and has certainly set the quality standard, but racing was quickly followed by other major professional sports leagues.
News came last week that James Weaver was claimed by the Corona Virus in Rochester, New York at the age of 82. One should use words like “towering” or “pioneering” to describe his contributions to the twentieth-century project of bringing antique keyboard instruments and the techniques used to play them back to sounding life. Though tall and handsome into his ninth decade, Jim did not tower or daunt: he was warm and generous, polite and encouraging. He listened and laughed; he did not bluster and loom. Gracefully and without showy self-modesty he diverted attention away from his own impressive talent and lasting accomplishments. For countless hours as a teenager I listened and listened again to recordings he made on two of the most beautiful extant eighteenth-century harpsichords—one French, one Flemish—in the collection of the Smithsonian, where Jim was long a vital force. What made these performances so compelling and will make them endure is his taste and technique that could flash when called on, but was especially marked by poise and restraint. There is brilliance, but what remains with me most strongly is the beauty.
Since campuses began shutting down across the country in early March, college students have been speaking out about the economic uncertainty, lack of food, and housing insecurity the nationwide upheaval has brought on. Despite this, many colleges have been reluctant to take measures to ensure student safety and comfort—most schools have not changed their grading policies, for example, and many campuses have not provided alternative resources after forcing students to evacuate dorms or cancel meal plans, prompting further uncertainty and stress.
In response, college students across the country are going on strike.
In a stormy week of denunciation and discrimination, the Trump administration sent a blaring announcement to America’s college students: you shall not be in this together.
The think tank also recommends immediately revising state requirements for teachers to allow people without teaching certifications to educate students.
According to official statistics, St. Petersburg had 424 confirmed cases of COVID-19 on April 17. A day earlier, there were just 154. The authorities attributed this sharp increase to an outbreak at the city’s “Vredena” Orthopedics and Traumatology Research Institute.
For weeks, pandemic-induced overbuying has resulted in shortages of staple foods and sanitation products. With their shelves stripped, supermarkets are donating€ much less€ to food banks just as those services are being overwhelmed by a surge of newly jobless clients. Disinfectant wipes are selling for extortionate prices online — if they are available at all.
I don’t know how you’re spending your quarantine, but I’ve spent the past few weeks wondering how to legally obtain marijuana.
President Donald Trump on Thursday made alarming comments about the possibility of using disinfectants in order to treat the coronavirus that were immediately dismissed by both medical professionals and the companies that create such products.
Donald Trump’s political strategy during the coronavirus pandemic is simple: insist the federal government only plays a backup role when it comes to providing needed services and supplies, but take credit for directing the reopening of the economy. Governors should “call your own shots,” he says (April 16), as though they were chomping on the bit waiting for his instruction.
Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin has asked Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin to send senior medical students to work in coronavirus hospitals.€
Russia's public health authority, Rospotrebnadzor, has come up with a plan that will allow beauty salons, dry cleaners, laundromats, non-food stores and auto repair shops to resume work “in the next few days,” Vedomosti reports. The newspaper cites a government representative as its source.
While the whole world is consumed with the disastrous coronavirus pandemic, little attention is being paid to that sector of our economy whose existence had heretofore represented humanity’s greatest threat: the fossil fuel industry. But now may be the best time to pay heed. Oil and gas prices recently fell so low that they bizarrely plummeted to negative values. This is an industry clearly in crisis, and therefore now is the perfect time for the climate justice movement to strike.
Sweden's intake of refugees—from Syrians five years ago to Somalis ten years ago—may not seem like an obvious place to start, but it is.
When a 27-year-old critical care nurse volunteered for Santa Clara Valley Medical Center’s COVID-19 unit last month, she knew that caring for patients with failing lungs and an untreatable disease would be frightening and heartbreaking. What she didn’t expect was to be shunned by fearful workers in other departments, surrounded by uncollected trash and forced to use up health benefits on a technicality.
She had graduated from nursing school in 2017 and worked for a year at an urban hospital in the Midwest. Last fall, she joined the staff of Santa Clara Valley, a public hospital in San Jose, California. She had barely acclimated to her new job before patients began testing positive for COVID-19 in February.
On April 15th, Smithfield closed down its pork factory in Sioux Falls, South Dakota after 640 employees became sick from COVID-19. They constitute 44 percent of all COVID-19 cases in the state, making it the epicenter of the pandemic locally.
The elephant in the Covid-19 infected room is Medicare for All. Maybe it really, finally is time for it. With at least 26 million people suddenly unemployed and many of those losing their health coverage during a deadly plague – how are people supposed to pay for a doctor if they get sick? And many will get sick. Covid-19 is highly contagious. For some it’s fatal, others mild, but for many it’s like being hit by a Mack truck. Currently, stimulus money will cover the medical bills of uninsured Covid-19 patients. But if the government can pay for this, why not cancer and heart disease? Why should the nature of a person’s illness determine whether they go bankrupt, or whether they try to spare their family the bills by foregoing treatment and dying? The U.S. spends more on health care than any other industrialized nation, but as is well known, our health outcomes are much worse.
I’m Ash Ngu, the news applications developer at ProPublica Illinois. What’s a news apps developer? Well, part of my job is to take unwieldy, wonky datasets and polish them into something that helps readers make sense of the world. Today, I want to share with you a tracker we released that keeps tabs on ventilator and hospital bed capacities in every region of the state, and tell you a bit more about the story of getting the data behind it.
First, some context. At the beginning of March, before coronavirus case counts really began to climb in the U.S., the big question was: Will hospitals be overwhelmed by COVID-19 patients? To answer that question, a few colleagues and I built an app that let readers look up projections for how hospitals in their region would fare under nine different pandemic scenarios.
By and large, US Americans are in denial about a lot: the brutality of our militarism, the ecological cost of our lifestyle, the ethical vacuum where our communal heart should be. But denying the reality of a contagion is a whole ‘nother level of blindness.
Using a war narrative to talk€ about€ COVID-19 plays into the hands of white supremacist groups. U.S. officials and the media should stop it.€
"Anyone who does this will not die from #COVID19 because they will have already poisoned themselves to death."
Even as the scientific case for regulation grows clearer and more urgent every year, the EPA under€ President Trump€ delays and obfuscates.
It’s time for a confession. Not long ago, I was sitting on the floor in a remote part of India and was given a plate of rice and meat. As a daughter of the Western world, I couldn’t stop myself asking where the meat originated. My hosts gave each other a sidelong glance (never a good sign!) before answering with a smile, “Tribal meat.” It was bat. What local people took for granted as part of their way of life, seemed to me at the time another tale to embellish my adventurer status among friends in Europe. Then, a few months ago, something happened, something that seemed to be from a movie, which no ordinary member of the public expected would ever happen for real.
For everyone dying to go back to work I ask for extreme caution. You might actually die, or someone you know and love might actually die.
I cannot afford to die while waiting for a green card.
Two and three-quarters of a million—that's the number of cases worldwide as of this morning.€
"It's despicable to risk irreversible harm to spectacular wild places by propping up uranium companies that can't compete in global markets."
On April 14, 2020, U.S. President Donald Trump addressed a news conference at the White House, where he said that his administration would “halt [all] funding” for the World Health Organization (WHO). The WHO, founded in 1948, is the principal United Nations agency tasked with the improvement of the health of the world; it is also widely acknowledged as an agency that is best suited to deal with health emergencies.
One by one, toward the end of March, residents of Enumclaw Health and Rehabilitation Center outside of Seattle started coming down with symptoms of COVID-19.
On March 22, residents in Rooms 503 and 522 were moved to a wing for COVID-19 patients. Another resident began showing symptoms, too, and was also moved.
In a world engulfed by the coronavirus pandemic, “The Naked Pravda” travels back in time to the carefree 1980s, when Americans and Russians worried about simpler things like World War III. Fears in U.S. popular culture that the Cold War might turn hot culminated in 1984 with the film “Red Dawn,” starring Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen, about a group of high school students resisting occupation by invading Soviet, Cuban, and Nicaraguan troops. Even if you haven’t seen the movie, you’ve probably seen people on the Internet shouting “Wolverines!” at each other — a reference to the name Red Dawn’s protagonists adopt for their guerrilla group.€
On the morning of April 24, Russian officials announced that the country recorded 5,849 new coronavirus infections in the past day, bringing the nation’s total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases to 68,622 patients. A day earlier, health officials reported 4,774 new cases.
Before he was officially named to the post last week, Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Michael Caputo scrapped most of the posts off of his Twitter account, deleting a number of questionable and racist content.
As the House passes a new $484 Billion coronavirus relief bill, Congressmember Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is the sole Democrat to vote no, saying it falls far short, failing to protect those at greatest health risk, including essential frontline workers, and could let millions go hungry. We get response from The American Prospect’s David Dayen.
We go to Georgia, which is reopening nonessential businesses today — hair and nail salons, tattoo parlors and massage therapists — despite a rising number of COVID-19 deaths. The governor is opening the state over the objections of mayors in Savannah, Atlanta and Augusta. “This order has nothing to do with public health. It has everything to do with the financial health of the state,” says George Chidi, columnist for Decaturish, and public policy director for PadSplit, an Atlanta-based affordable housing organization.
This week on CounterSpin: Before millions were unemployed, before Covid-19 began its sweep, healthcare was already a crisis, and the arguments against overhauling it were already visibly tired and specious. Here’s an interview about that from March 2019 with Just Care USA‘s Diane Archer.
the coffin of Adobe's Flash technology with the removal of an export filter from the suite.
Noted by Phoronix, the death knell of the tech that, frankly, most had forgotten was even there in the first place was noted not with fireworks but with a terse commit stating that with Adobe retiring the tech by the end of 2020, there was little point in keeping the functionality to export to .SWF in the project anymore.
The release notes also highlighted the deprecation: "Macromedia Flash export filter was removed."
A look at the LibreOffice timeline shows the technology dates back to 2003, with OpenOffice.org 1.1 boasting the ability to export presentations to Flash as well as a one-click export to PDF. A fork of the code brought forth LibreOffice in 2010. Version 7.0.0 is scheduled for early August.
Vulnerabilities that can be exploited for zero-click attacks are rare and are prized by attackers because they don't require tricking targets into taking any action—an extra step that adds uncertainty in any hacking scheme. They’re also valuable, because less interaction means fewer traces of any malicious activity. Zero-click exploits are often thought of as highly reliable and sophisticated tools that are only developed and used by the most well-funded hackers, particularly nation state groups.
The ZecOps research suggests a different story, though: Perhaps attackers are willing to settle in some cases for using less reliable, but cheaper and more abundant zero-click tools.
"I think there are more zero-clicks out there. It doesn't have to be 'nation state-grade,’” says ZecOps founder and CEO Zuk Avraham. "Most wouldn't care if it's not 100 percent successful, or even 20 percent successful. If the user doesn't notice it, you can retry again."
Messaging app Telegram is developing a group video calling service that’s due to be launched later this year, the company announced today. It says that current options offer either security or usability, but that its version will offer both. Telegram announced the plans alongside news that it reached 400 million monthly active users, doubling its user base in two years.
Telegram’s claim that current group video calling services offer either security or usability is a not-so-subtle swipe at user-friendly Zoom, which has been hit by multiple security scandals in recent months. Critics pointed out that the service’s claims about offering end-to-end encryption were false, and that its default privacy settings made it easy for uninvited users to tap into video calls. That said, Telegram has also faced its share of criticism from the security community in part because its end-to-end encryption is not enabled by default.
Another software company, data graph vendor Apollo, based in San Francisco, is one of the founding members of the GraphQL Foundation and also has a commercial Data Graph Platform based on GraphQL.
The Linux Foundation announced it’s expanding its Mentorship Program in response to COVID-19 with seed funding from Intel. The Program will grow to support interns who have been displaced as a result of the global pandemic and to give individuals an opportunity to reskill for some of the most sought-after, highly paid careers in the world. Intel is leading funding for this expansion with a $250,000 commitment. The Linux Foundation is investing an additional $100,000 and is calling on leaders throughout the industry to match this support in order to provide opportunities to aspiring technical talent during these unprecedented times.
OSChina, a leading media outlet and event host for the Chinese open source community, will partner with Linux Foundation APAC to launch a new initiative, the LF Open Source Software University. This initiative will combine OSChina’s reputation and contacts in the Chinese open source community with The Linux Foundation’s expertise in training and certifying open source professionals.
With the COVID-19 pandemic affecting every aspect of life across every population and industry around the globe, numerous conferences, events, and meetings have been canceled or postponed. The Linux Foundation events team has been working in overdrive negotiating to cancel or postpone events that were or are impossible to operate this year safely. The health and safety of our communities and staff is our top concern.
The good news is that for those events that can no longer safely take place in person, virtual events still offer the opportunity to connect within our communities to share valuable information and collaborate. While not as powerful as a face-to-face gathering, a variety of virtual event platforms available today offer a plethora of features that can get us as close as possible to those invaluable in-person experiences. Thanks to our community members, we’ve received suggestions for platforms and services that the events team has spent the past several weeks evaluating.
Docker has made the quick deployment of software much simpler, but also introduces a few legal challenges. What the solutions to some of these legal challenges are is currently not clear.
Evaluating compliance challenges requires a basic understanding of the technical specifics of how containers work and how they are built. With this understanding, it becomes evident how the distribution of containers bears some similarities to more historical means of distributing software while making clearer the aspects that can be obscured.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (lib32-openssl), Debian (git), Gentoo (chromium, firefox, git, and openssl), Oracle (kernel and python-twisted-web), Red Hat (python-twisted-web), Scientific Linux (python-twisted-web), and SUSE (file-roller, kernel, and resource-agents).
The US National Security Agency (NSA) and the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) have released a joint security guidance on techniques that can be used detect and prevent web shell malware from affecting web servers.
Malicious web shells have been a threat for several years, according to NSA, and can be deployed on a compromised internal or internet-facing server to gain or retain access on compromised networks.
Hackers use these programmes to execute arbitrary system commands, which are usually sent over HTTPS. They also allow threat actors to deliver additional malware payloads on infected servers and to pivot to other machines within the network.
Home hubs are a double-edged sword when it comes to security. They let you access any device in the home. At the same time, anyone who breaches the hub’s security can also do the same. This makes a central hub key in defending a smart home, as a compromised hub is a critical flaw in any setup. Unfortunately, ESET IoT Research has recently found that three home hubs have severe security flaws. As such, owners of these home hubs should consider updating or replacing their devices as soon as possible.
No one wants their systems to be breached. No one wants their data stolen. And no one wants to recover a breached system. Neither discovery nor recovery are fun activities. In fact, I'd have to say that of all the horrible tasks facing you as a sysadmin, recovering a system from a malicious attack is the worst. In this article, I give you 12 steps to system recovery, some post-mortem tips, and a last resort option after you find that one or more of your systems has been compromised or breached.
Manufacturers of Internet of Things (IoT) devices require an embedded operating system that is feature-rich, scalable, and — most importantly — secure. Built from the ground-up to meet these requirements, Ubuntu Core represents a comprehensive ecosystem for large-scale IoT deployments that solves many of the security challenges associated with traditional Linux distribution models — while also empowering developers with unprecedented flexibility and control.
This whitepaper from global cybersecurity experts, Rule4, provides an independent, third-party evaluation of Ubuntu Core’s security capabilities. Following a data-driven approach, all aspects received extensive testing to validate the strengths of its cybersecurity controls.
Private Internet Access is proud to announce a second year of Silver Sponsorship of Let’s Encrypt. Private Internet Access believes that every website should be served encrypted over HTTPS for the privacy and security of internet users. Let’s Encrypt makes it possible for that vision to come true by providing free TLS certificates to over 200 million websites around the world. With the help of their corporate sponsors, this number will only grow. Josh Aas, the Executive Director of Let’s Encrypt, commented on the importance of corporate sponsorship to their mission:
Techdirt has just written about France's incredibly hypocritical attitude to privacy when it comes to contact tracing apps for COVID-19. The European Commission seems to be rather more consistent in this area. As well as pushing privacy legislation like the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive, it has released a series of documents designed to help EU Member States create tracing apps without compromising on citizens' privacy. For example, on April 8, it adopted a "Recommendation to support exit strategies through mobile data and apps", which called for "a joint toolbox towards a common coordinated approach for the use of smartphone apps that fully respect EU data protection standards". Details followed a week later, when the European Commission announced a pan-EU toolbox for "efficient contact tracing apps to support gradual lifting of confinement measures". A 44-page document spelled out in some detail (pdf) the "essential requirements" for national apps deployed in the region -- that they should be:
The Investigatory Powers Act was passed in 2016 and mandated that internet service providers and mobile data providers in the UK store internet connection records for twelve months. Internet connection records include the metadata that are tied to all internet connections – examples include the internet activity timestamps, internet history, IP addresses used, etc. Dubbed the “Snooper’s Charter,” the Investigatory Powers Act is a great example of supposedly first world countries looking with envy on the civil liberties violating internet control in authoritarian countries like China. While the Investigatory Powers Act has actually been ruled against by UK court, the government is now seeking to expand access to their internet surveillance trove.
Earlier today, Nintendo confirmed that a recent hacking attempt on its system compromised the login IDs and passwords of some 160,000 Nintendo Network ID accounts. In the wake of the hack, the company is temporarily disabling the ability to log in to Nintendo Accounts through the NNID system, which, in the labyrinthine world of Nintendo account authentications, is only one method of doing so. We'd explain in more detail, but, honestly, we don't understand Nintendo's online infrastructure either.
Facebook launched a new live video conferencing service on Friday, as millions of people remain confined to their homes amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The Messenger Rooms service lets up to 50 users participate in a video chat at once, a feature similar to Zoom and Houseparty, two apps that have exploded in popularity over the last few months.
The principle behind contact-tracing apps is fairly simple. Once installed, they use Bluetooth low-energy (LE) technology to record when a phone has come into close proximity with anyone else using the app. If either person later reports coronavirus symptoms, the other party is notified, so they could self-isolate or seek health advice. An alert could also be sent if a medical authority certifies the other person tested positive for the virus – this would be one way to avoid users trolling the system by falsely claiming symptoms. In theory, the apps work anonymously and only store data temporarily, without collecting location.
Now let’s talk about what might be the most challenging piece in the entire stack: contact tracing. Public health experts tell me that getting in touch with people who may have been exposed to a known COVID-19 case is one of the most important steps we’ll need to take to contain future outbreaks. But the how of it is complicated. While we’ve seen a Cambrian explosion of contact tracing apps around the world, it remains unclear how good or effective any of them have been. And as US government officials consider asking big tech companies to consider working on contact tracing solutions — and I’m told that they have already made inquiries with Facebook — that’s worth keeping in mind.
In Hong Kong, location-tracking wristbands are given to those put under quarantine. In Singapore, the government uses text messages to contact people, who must click on a link to prove they are at home.
Bluetooth LE has a rough range of 10 to 30 metres, depending on your smartphone and the Bluetooth chipset. The NHS recommends that we stay two metres apart from each other, but with Bluetooth being able to ping other phones within a 30-metre range, without precision, there’s an increased chance of the app alerting you to false positives of people who have never even come into contact with you.
Paul Patras, reader at the school of informatics at the University of Edinburgh says that interference could be an issue when it comes to these contact-tracing apps, which could cause the amplification of false positive reports. “You can conceivably receive a packet with good signal strength from a transmitter that is not necessarily nearby; due to reflections,” he explains. “Multiple copies of the same signal may arrive at the receiver and amplify the message. This can negatively impact the correct assessment of the range.”
U.S. states promoting apps that could prove essential to ending the coronavirus lockdown may be headed for a showdown with the two Silicon Valley companies that control key software on 99 percent of smartphones over the collection of sensitive GPS location data.
On Thursday afternoon, I hopped onto a short video call with Mark Zuckerberg to discuss the news. Highlights from our discussion follow. The transcript has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
Two US lawmakers spearheading an antitrust investigation into Amazon are looking into whether a top company official lied before Congress about whether the e-commerce giant uses independent seller data to create its own products and unfairly compete on its platform.
“This is yet another example of the sworn testimony of Amazon’s witness being directly contradicted by investigative reporting,” Cicilline said. “First, Amazon said it does not favor its own products, which extensive reporting later revealed to be untrue. Second, Amazon said it does not use individual seller data to create competing private label products. According to this report, the company used individual marketplace sellers’ sensitive commercial data for its own benefit to enter markets, reverse engineer products, and compete directly with these sellers that rely on Amazon’s platform. At best, Amazon’s witness appears to have misrepresented key aspects of Amazon’s business practices while omitting important details in response to pointed questioning. At worst, the witness Amazon sent to speak on its behalf may have lied to Congress.”
Venezuela is under siege. The USA and its allies unleashed unjust economic sanctions against the country that have resulted in Venezuela unable to sell its oil (its main source of revenue), and to buy food or medicine in the international market. It has stopped airlines traveling to Venezuela and the country is unable to make financial transactions in international banks. The loss to Venezuela’s economy is calculated at $130 billion and rising.
It’s such a played-out cliché that it’s downright corny, but if you were born sometime before the mid-Nineties, you really do remember exactly where you were on 9/11. It was an event too cataclysmic to not happen on a normal day because everything before that surreal shit-show seemed almost Norman Rockwell normal by comparison. I was a 13-year-old 7th grader at Saint John’s the Evangelist Catholic School. Hardly a simple time for a painfully closeted obsessive-compulsive misfit, but a time before the heavy issues war, liberty and empire ran my life. I was too busy writing down Korn lyrics, washing my hands fifty times a day, and struggling to ignore the nagging suspicion that my feelings for Caitlyn Feelow were anything but heterosexual.
We Have Always Been Unsafe
Trump's debt stems from his 30% ownership stake in a 43-story New York skyscraper at 1290 Avenue of the Americas, the documents show. Trump has bragged that he "got" the building from China in a "war."
"I beat China all the time," he said when he announced his presidential campaign in 2015. "I own a big chunk of the Bank of America building [in San Francisco] and 1290 Avenue of the Americas that I got from China in a war. Very valuable. I love China."
But The New York Times reported in 2016 that Trump only owned 30% of both buildings. And Trump's financial ties to the country do not end with his ownership stake in the building. Chinese state-owned companies are developing two luxury Trump buildings in Indonesia and the United Arab Emirates. The president and his daughter, Ivanka, have also been granted numerous trademarks by the Chinese government since he took office. His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, has sought Chinese investment in at least one real estate deal.
The [attackers] replaced one of the articles posted with the website with a false letter by the War Studies Univeristy’s Commander. The letter, targeted at U.S.-Polish relations, called on the Polish soldiers to fight against American occupation”. The content of the letter matched the main narratives Russian propaganda constantly pushes against Poland and the United States.
“As we guard our borders, we cannot let people die, moreover they are the victims of tyranny by their own government,” Anwar said, referring to the Rohingya. “I hope the government will consider keeping them in the form of limited controls but not evict them, leaving them to drown or leave them starving,” he said.
If the Democratic leadership is serious about uniting the wings of the party for a decisive November victory, then it must recognize that AOC is a necessary part of this effort.€
"We are so grateful for the unapologetic moral clarity and political courage," said Sunrise Movement, questioning when House Democrats will "use their leverage to fight for us."
For the past 30 years, national climate groups have focused their education, energy, and financial resources organizing in urban communities and mostly on the coasts. Their outreach has yielded amazing results—from shuttering coal plants in cities to blue-state governors signing historic climate change laws. Yet most of our fights against fracking, pipelines, and other fossil fuel infrastructure are happening in rural communities. The land needed to build out projects to provide the massive amounts of renewable energy we’re going to need to kick our fossil fuel addiction is in rural communities. And the unlikely alliance we need to build for a true climate change movement is in rural communities.
This story is a part of Covering Climate Now’s week of coverage focused on Climate Solutions, to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Covering Climate Now is a global journalism collaboration committed to strengthening coverage of the climate story.
“Now, more than ever, we need our elected officials to stand on the side of public health and safety. We celebrated the leadership that Governor Newsom showed last November when he placed a moratorium on fracking as part of a broader effort to strengthen health and safety protections for communities near oil extraction. We continue to applaud him as he bravely acts on the recommendations of scientists and public health professionals around the COVID-19 pandemic.
To a growing portion of the public, this is the existential question of our time: How do we significantly slash greenhouse gas emissions before it’s too late?
In the past few years, the Trump administration has signaled that it wants to€ vastly expand offshore drilling, including lifting drilling bans in parts of the Arctic and Atlantic oceans.
When I was single and moving frequently, I didn’t put much effort into decorating my dingy apartments. But now that I’m married, with two kids, and officially settled down, that’s changed. I’ve transformed our basement into something of a shrine to Star Wars and The Legend of Zelda. I hope to add a Quentin Tarantino section next!
"We keep getting clear signs that the way we live and the actions we take are having severe consequences."
"If Summers were to land a top job in the Biden administration it would signal a clear shift to the right."
There’s an old saying in the black community I’ve heard my parents and grandparents repeat many times: “When white people catch a cold, black people catch pneumonia.”
They are rather good at raking in the cash; rather poor at sharing it. Google and Facebook have radiated, strafed and shrivelled hundreds of news outlets across the globe with their information sharing platforms while celebrating choice, advertising revenue and traffic. The idea of whether such content is news is irrelevant: what is shared, be it news, rumour or supposition, is what matters.
The Yaroslavl region is one of the few places left in Russia (along with the Tver and Tula regions and the Nenets Autonomous Okrug) where the local authorities’ containment measures against the spread of coronavirus haven’t gone beyond verbal recommendations to self-isolate. For weeks, Yaroslavl’s incidence rate of COVID-19 was one of the lowest in the country, but the number of cases spiked in mid-April, roughly around the time that major enterprises started returning to work after a mandatory three-week shutdown and beauty salons, car washes, and other small- and medium-sized businesses began reopening. The authorities say the situation is under control, but the local opposition argues that Governor Dmitry Mironov — Vladimir Putin’s ex-security guard and a former deputy interior minister — lacks the necessary experience and understanding to respond properly to the coronavirus crisis.€
As the global pandemic of the novel coronavirus rages around the world there are copious amounts of finger-pointing and blame. There is value in considering what leadership steps were successful or failed. China should have shared information at least three weeks earlier than they did. The World Health Organization should have been more robust in alerting the world on January 5, sounding the alarms may have saved lives. President Donald Trump could have listened to expertise and taken steps to contain the virus before it spread. He could have mitigated the impact after it had spread—too little too late was effectively meaningless.
The strike, sick out, and slowdown are among the most effective weapons in the arsenal of class struggle. They disrupt production and interrupt the flow of profits. But the most effective weapons are also the most demanding. Strikes require discipline, sacrifice, and struggle. Strikes are short-term pain for long-term gain. It’s not a coincidence that as strikes fell out of use over the last few decades the US working class fell too.
"I was finally able to sit on hold almost four hours. Then I got disconnected," said one Arizona man attempting to apply for benefits.
I was a child when I understood my immigrant family was wanted for labor — and for labor only.
The anger isn’t focused solely on Booking.com. Stricken airline Air France-KLM has also come under fire for its executive bonus policy. In response, CEO Ben Smith said on Thursday he was forfeiting the variable component of his pay.
The public outcry shows how governments are walking a tightrope by handing taxpayers’ money to support jobs in the private sector and cushion the economic shock from the pandemic. It’s an especially sensitive issue in the Netherlands, a country that mixes a strong welfare state with a liberal economic tradition and some of Europe’s lowest effective corporate tax rates.
Facing criticism from political rivals, Prime Minister Mark Rutte told members of parliament on Wednesday it was “obvious” that companies applying for a second round of financial help from June should stop paying shareholders and forfeit management bonuses in the near future.
The 200,000-member American Postal Workers Union accused President Donald Trump of plotting to “sacrifice our public Postal Service at the altar of private profit” after the Washington Post reported late Thursday that the White House is considering using a $10 billion relief loan approved by Congress last month to impose long-sought changes on the popular agency.
This article has been updated from one that originally ran in 2012.€ Please consider emailing it to friends and family members who have given up hope on their ability to create change in America.
Last week, a group of angry and desperate Citi Tax Financial customers gathered outside the company’s storefront in Augusta, Georgia. Millions of Americans had received a big deposit from the IRS in their bank accounts, but they had not. The IRS website told them their coronavirus stimulus checks were deposited in an account they didn’t recognize.
With an officer from the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office beside him and another officer shouting for people to be quiet, the tax preparation company’s owner told the crowd of about 60, only a few of whom wore masks, that he didn’t have their money.
The challenges that millions of Americans are facing right now are real, life-threatening, and demand immediate, far-reaching action by our elected officials. It shouldn't be too much to ask that they act like it.
"If these are truly legislative priorities for members of Congress, as they should be, they need to start fighting for them."
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.
Something to consider while suffering through the daily barrage of fabulist blather from Donald Trump is that if the Democrats thought it would benefit their cause, they would be putting Joe Biden front and center to counter this pain. That they aren’t suggests that they understand exactly how politically tenuous Mr. Biden is. In turn, that Joe Biden is their choice suggests that all isn’t what it could be in duopoly-party land. And coming in the midst of serial trillion-dollar bailouts, capitalism is looking a bit iffy as well.
As soon as it passed, Congressional lawmakers realized the $2.2 trillion CARES stimulus package to help the country through the COVID-19 pandemic would not suffice. Yes, U.S.-born workers would eventually get $1,200 checks and significantly expanded unemployment insurance. But some essential workers have been left out in the cold.
On March 19, 2020, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, spurred to action by the coronavirus pandemic, issued a memorandum that identified the nation’s 2.5 million farmworkers as “essential” workers. Soon thereafter, agribusinesses began distributing formal letters to their farm laborers, also declaring that they were “essential.”
"For the first time a federal agency is saying€ we likely face a major economic downturn for well over the next year and a half."
Such a move, say critics, "would be a disaster for millions of Americans who rely on USPS."
As I write this (on April 22, 2020), the United States has been ravaged by COVID-19: over 827,000 confirmed cases and over 45,000 deaths. Though the U.S. comprises just 4.2% of the world’s population, it has 32% of the world’s confirmed COVID cases and 25% of COVID deaths worldwide. The especially heavy toll COVID-19 has exacted on the U.S. can, of course, be largely attributed to the egregiously poor leadership displayed by Donald Trump. Trump initially dismissed the COVID threat as a “Democrat hoax” ginned up by his political opponents to embarrass him. Many precious weeks were wasted in inaction until Trump was forced to bow (somewhat) to the reality of exponential COVID infections and deaths. Even so, the government response to date has been haphazard and ineffectual, as evidenced by woefully inadequate testing and a scandalous lack of ventilators and PPE supplies. But it wasn’t Trump’s infantile narcissism alone that rendered American society especially susceptible to the COVID pandemic. The patient, if you will, was already saddled with a number of preexisting conditions that made the sickness much worse: rampant income and wealth inequality that has left tens of millions of Americans extremely vulnerable to the economic disruption caused by forced sequestration; a costly and inefficient for-profit health care system ill-equipped to handle a pandemic; an outmoded system of employer-provided health care insurance that has rendered millions of the suddenly unemployed also without any medical coverage. Obviously everything is still in flux right now but it’s clear that COVID-19 will take a devastating toll in lives while it lays waste to the economy. What isn’t clear is how this new plague will play out socially and politically.
16.8 million Americans applied for unemployment insurance over a three week period. Will the shock of the Covid-19 pandemic be a one time bump the world will get over and continue as it was, or will this be a permanent change, and if so, to what? Of course these millions of Americans are only those who had jobs with unemployment insurance. Many others are designated “independent contractors,” for example real estate agents and other salespeople. They will not be unemployed, but they won’t have jobs or money coming in, because unable to work or make deals because of the pandemic. Then there are the small business owners. I think it is fair to say that these events were a wake up call to everyone who needs to work to pay the bills. Your income may not be there tomorrow.
On Election Day 2020, millennials face a difficult choice: vote or stay home. Either way, their decision will need to be accompanied by wide-spread activism, something they regularly engage in more than voting. The reason is that millennials, those born between 1981-1996, and Gen Z, those born since 1996, are facing the second recession of their lifetime and the political class remains disinterested in creating economic opportunity for them. This is especially odd considering that millennials are now the largest generational chunk of eligible voters. Although an economic slump was developing prior to the pandemic, the current recession is being largely attributed to the COVID-19 outbreak, and is the second in 12 years. Not since the early 20th century, during the Great Depression, has America had two large economic collapses occur in such a short span. So far, Wall Street has lost the gains made during the Trump presidency and experts predict a 14 percent decline in GDP and a 20 percent unemployment rate will follow. Needless to say, millennials need a transformative political agenda in 2020, not another opportunity to engage in the “lesser of two evils” electoral strategy.
The coronavirus may offer the Bank of Japan justification to scrap what has become an obsolete, largely symbolic bond-buying target as it takes stronger action to cushion the economic blow from the pandemic, analysts say.
[...]
The central bank also has loose guidance to buy government bonds so its balance of holdings increases at an annual pace of roughly 80 trillion yen ($743 billion) - a remnant of the previous quantitative easing policy.
The BOJ will discuss scrapping that guidance at its policy meeting on Monday, the Nikkei newspaper reported, in a show of resolve to buy unlimited amounts of bonds.
Finance Minister Taro Aso knocked down the report, telling reporters on Friday that nothing had been decided on how the finance ministry could cooperate with the BOJ.
A government official declined to confirm or deny the report. But the official, who was familiar with the bank’s thinking, told Reuters that YCC was already an “almighty program” that allows the BOJ to ramp up or scale down bond buying flexibly.
The US is hurtling into uncharted waters as a polity, with the two likely candidates for president this November both clearly suffering from significant cognitive impairment and evidence of continuing mental decline.€
The 12-18 states that will decide the presidency this fall are already being primed for voter suppression and election theft by the Trump GOP. Our ability to overcome will decide the fate of the Earth.
A prominent Koch network group that is helping to organize protests calling for states to reopen is tied to a campaign that promoted misleadingly optimistic information about a drug it claimed could effectively treat Covid-19.
Thursday’s White House coronavirus rally will go down in history as the day the president directed the scientists to investigate whether ultraviolet light can somehow be put inside COVID-19 patients to kill the virus, or whether disinfectant can be injected into their lungs to clean them. He was very proud of himself, obviously believing that he’d discovered some kind of breakthrough after hearing a briefing about how ordinary people can kill the virus in their homes.
It has been known that Fox Populism relentlessly enforces the four-legged stool of US conservatism: national defence, an ideological code-word for aggressive attacks on other countries (e.g. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq); anti-communism, another code-word for the uncompromising persecution of anyone suspected of not supporting the prevailing system of capitalism; the engineering of anti-government attitudes that follow Ronald Reagan’s dictum of “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem”; and finally the free-market ideology – the much-used euphemism for neoliberal capitalism even though the odious free market has never been seen.
Police in Moscow detained several members of an Orthodox volunteer group during the evening of April 23, as they were handing out food to the homeless. The volunteer organization in question, “Kursky Vokzal. Bezdomny, Deti” (“Kursky Railway Station. Homeless, Children”), reported the detentions on its Facebook page.
Last year, the Australian government decided journalists just weren't feeling chilly enough. In response to the publication of leaked documents detailing the government's plan to allow more domestic surveillance, the Australian Federal Police started raiding journalists' homes.
Here we go again. Now that Bernie Sanders has completed his predictable circuit of loss and capitulation, leftists—those who stand for socialist and anti-imperialist, or even serious social-democratic and antiwar, politics—again confront the quadrennial quandary: Must one vote for the thoroughly neo-liberal and imperialist Democratic presidential nominee?
In what we now look back upon as “normal” times, a presidential candidate’s choice of a running-mate mattered in theory because the Vice President is only, as the saying goes, “a heartbeat away” from the presidency.
"ALERT! Please do not ingest, inject, inhale, or otherwise use any disinfectant outside of its labeled instructions. And do not start using tanning beds or sunning without sunscreen."
"This administration is committed to fulfilling the decades-long pursuit by some to sacrifice our public Postal Service at the altar of private profit."
The long U.S. tradition of providing equal time to the opposition party after a president’s yearly State of the Union (SOTU) address must now apply to Trump’s daily COVID-19 “briefings.”
The Lieutenant Governor of Texas is happy to€ sacrifice€ the lives of old people for “the economy.” A Congressman from Indiana doesn’t discriminate; he’s willing to let anybody€ lose their life€ to maintain what he calls their “way of life.” How they can have a way of life without a life becomes clear when he explains that by “way of life” he means the economy. The President of the United States is afraid that the cure of isolating ourselves is worse than the disease, even though the latter is€ deadly€ for some who get it. Trump also tries€ claiming, though€ nobody€ believes him, that protecting ourselves from a deadly disease will result in more deaths, not fewer.
China is putting financial, political and diplomatic pressure on British universities to comply with Beijing's political agenda, both directly and indirectly, the U.K. parliament warned in a November 2019 report.
Everywhere people are scared. Many wish to be led to safety. Wannabe strongmen are grabbing coercive tools they have always craved—in order, they say, to protect public health. Large gatherings can be sources of infection; even the most liberal governments are restricting them. Autocrats are delighted to have such a respectable excuse for banning mass protests, which over the past year have rocked India, Russia and whole swathes of Africa and Latin America. The pandemic gives a reason to postpone elections, as in Bolivia, or to press ahead with a vote while the opposition cannot campaign, as in Guinea. Lockdown rules can be selectively enforced. Azerbaijan’s president openly threatens to use them to “isolate” the opposition. Relief cash can be selectively distributed. In Togo you need a voter ID, which opposition supporters who boycotted a recent election tend to lack. Minorities can be scapegoated. India’s ruling party is firing up Hindu support by portraying Muslims as covid-19 vectors.
Around that misinformation, a cottage industry of fake coronavirus treatments has emerged.
Facebook pages created in late March sold UV “sanitizer” lights, promising “a proven impact on COVID-19” and to be the “most effective way to kill viruses.” The companies, which had names like “Beam Sanitizer,” ran ads on Instagram and Facebook in March, according to Facebook's ad library. Some ads, including ones from companies including UV Sanitizers, and Uvlizer, were still active as of Friday morning. The products apparently evaded the company’s ban of ads for coronavirus miracle cures instituted last month.
"It's not just Trump's words but his actions that reveal his utter inability to discharge the duties of his office."
I am uneasy writing about Jorge Luis Borges (b.1899, Buenos Aires, d. 1986, Geneva). Borges wrote so much that I have not read; yet his world of myth and fantasy and magic and metaphysics has so influenced me that since I am here in his city where I can feel Borges the man rather than only Borges the artist and writer I have known from afar, I feel I have to record something about him in flesh and blood.
If someone were to tell you that major and influential business sectors like the fossil fuel and health insurance industries simply don’t exist, or imply that major corporations like ExxonMobil and Cigna don’t try to manipulate public opinion and advance a political agenda in order to protect and maximize their profits, you might find it hard to contain your laughter.
I noted over a month ago that the COVID-19 pandemic, which has disrupted the lives of so many people all over the world with severe illness and death, stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of SARS-CoV-2 (the virus causing COVID-19), and economic devastation, with massive job losses, business closures, and worse, has been a golden opportunity for quackery. This is not surprising, as any new disease that is killing many thousands of people will always be a magnet for quacks. Even if the overall case fatality rate turns out to be a lot lower than originally estimated, when hundreds of millions are infected, hundreds of thousands to millions of people can die, and when there are no effective disease-specific treatments for such a disease the quacks run wild. That’s why we have antivaxxers claiming that the influenza vaccine increases the risk of contracting COVID-19 (a conspiracy theory that appeared very early in the pandemic, as did the false claim that SARS-CoV-2 arose as a result of a failed SARS vaccine or as a failed attempt to make an HIV vaccine) while anti-GMO cranks are blaming glyphosate and 5G cranks blame—surprise! surprise!—the rollout of 5G networks. Meanwhile, quacks are promoting herbal “cures,” while a “brave maverick scientist” named Didier Raoult is promoting an unproven drug combination, hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin, as a “silver bullet” treatment for COVID-19 based on the thinnest of evidence, aided and abetted by President Trump, Dr. Mehmet Oz, and the whole Fox News propaganda machine, led by Laura Ingraham. Last night, President Trump was at it again. In an appearance even more unhinged than his usual appearances on the nightly COVID Clown Show, he, well, just look at the video and news story for yourself:
Bernie Sanders claimed to have won the war of ideas in his unsuccessful quest for the Democratic Presidential nomination by introducing new concepts like class struggle to our political vocabulary and making universal health care and debt-free higher education subject to mainstream debate. If this is victory, then we have a long road ahead. America will only be where it should have been a generation ago if, by some miracle, a more robust political debate results in these and other humane policies becoming law.
We've discussed in the past the various court rulings that say that public officials (such as the President) cannot block users on social media as it violates the 1st Amendment. There has been vigorous debate on this (as well as plenty of confusion) but the basic concept is that the courts view the space beneath a social media post -- where people comment -- as a "designated public forum" and as such, bars any content-based discrimination.
If there's one thing that nearly everyone can agree on while locked down during this COVID-19 pandemic, it's that Netflix's show Tiger King is the most batshit thing to watch. Everything about the documentary series played as if it was a Christopher Guest mockumentary, except in real life (and, incredibly, with characters even more colorful than Guest's usual crew). I watched it about a week after it came out (i.e., a week after everyone else in the world had watched it) and was surprised that no one mentioned to me that amidst all the other craziness regarding various competing keepers of "big cats," there was a copyright lawsuit.
George Orwell wrote in his novel, 1984: “If you want to keep a secret, you must hide it from yourself.”
The last time that flogging in Saudi Arabia hit the headlines was in 2015 when blogger Raif Badawi was subjected to the punishment in public, reportedly after being convicted of cybercrime and insulting Islam.
He had been due to receive 1,000 lashes in weekly beatings but global outrage and reports that he nearly died put a stop to that part of his sentence.
The education ministry seems to have issued another order after a meeting of the Joint Prevention and Control Mechanism on 25 March, according to a second notice that also appears to come from the MOE and has been posted on Pincong, a Chinese-language forum. This notice, dated 7 April, states that studies on the virus’s source must be approved by a university academic committee and the education ministry’s science and technology department before being published in a journal or posted on a preprint server or blog. Academic committees must evaluate all other COVID-19 papers for “academic value and timing”, the notice states. It also warns that studies must not exaggerate the efficacy of vaccines or treatments.
On April 21, the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) therefore launched the OONI Probe App.
The app allows users to discover various forms of Internet censorship and at the same time, to control network speed and performance as well as video streaming performance.
"The goal is to detect website blocking worldwide," says DW IT-expert Oliver Linow.
In an editorial posted on the newspaper’s website, journalists complained that Acting Editor-in-Chief Andrei Shmarov had banned the publication of opinion polls carried out by a research firm that has irritated the Kremlin.
A day earlier, Vedomosti’s media reporter, Kseniya Boletskaya, had publicly complained that Shmarov had banned negative coverage of President Vladimir Putin’s plans to change the constitution to allow him to extend his rule until 2036.
Anyone who flouted the ban would be fired, she said.
The Vietnamese government said Thursday that Facebook should operate according to local laws, just a day after the social media giant was called out by human rights organizations for caving to Hanoi’s demands to remove unfavorable content.
Reuters news agency reported Tuesday that Facebook’s local servers in Vietnam were taken offline earlier in the year until the company gave in to the demands of the government to remove posts, a period of about seven weeks when the website was often not usable by Facebook’s 65 million users in Vietnam.
The Julian Assange saga is due to reach some sort of conclusion today when Woolwich Crown Court begins hearing a request from the US government to extradite him on charges of publishing classified documents. The Wikileaks founder was arraigned almost 10 years ago under a European Arrest Warrant issued by Sweden alleging rape and three sexual assaults. Rather than surrender himself to the British police he sought sanctuary in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for eight years. Mr Assange and his followers said the warrant was a ruse to get him into custody, whereupon he would be sought by America over the leaking of cables and other diplomatic papers connected to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Sweden has now dropped the charges against him and yet he still faces removal to the US which suggests that his suspicions were well founded. However, the Swedes say they only discontinued the case because the memories of witnesses had faded and they still regarded the evidence as credible and reliable. Assange has always denied the charges. His supporters detect “dark forces” at work to mete out punishment for the role
Wikileaks played in exposing American abuses during the conflicts. When Assange was trying to evade the charges against him in Sweden he was placing himself above a law that applied to everyone else. But now that these have been dropped, is he any different to a journalist publishing secret documents that exposed state shortcomings and wrong-doing? The issue is how he came about the documents. The US allege he conspired with Chelsea Manning, then a US intelligence analyst, to hack into a secret Pentagon network to access classified material.
Were a journalist to do that in Britain it would be illegal, though a public interest defence could be mounted. This case will raise questions over the balance of power in the 2003 Extradition Treaty between the UK and the US. The family of Harry Dunn, killed in a collision with a car allegedly driven by Anne Sacoolas, an American claiming diplomatic immunity to avoid extradition, are angry at what they see as the lack of reciprocity.
Julian Assange’s lawyers will return to court on Monday to argue that his extradition trial should be postponed.
The hearing is due to resume in the court attached to Belmarsh prison on 18 May. But Assange’s lawyers will argue that they have not had full and unfettered access to their client.
The onset of the coronavirus crisis has reduced that already restricted access to unacceptably low levels.
Julian Assange will not even be able to appear by video link at Westminster court on Monday because he has been advised on medical grounds that moving to, and using, the video link room in the prison is too great a risk.
Two prisoners have already died in Belmarsh and inmates are now locked down 23 hours a day. The government has halted its prisoner release programme which was already too restricted to reduce the prison population to safe levels.
Chronic overcrowding and underfunding have left prisons around the world vulnerable to being ravaged by coronavirus, criminal justice experts have warned.
The challenges of a record global prison population of 11 million have been brought to light in a report published by Penal Reform International (PRI) which found that 102 countries have prison occupancy levels of more than 110%.
Social distancing and personal infection control are almost impossible in overcrowded settings where poor ventilation and sanitation are likely increase the speed at which the virus spreads.
Florian Irminger, executive director of PRI, said: “Prison systems globally were at crisis point before the coronavirus pandemic. Now prisons across the world are ticking time bombs set to be devastated by this virus because of overcrowding, lack of basic healthcare, limited access to clean water … and inhumane living conditions.”
In Bangladesh 10 doctors serve 68 prisons, while Ghana has two doctors covering 46 prisons with 15,000 inmates.
This is the story of a person who should have never been allowed to be a law enforcement officer. He wasn't one for long, but he was one long enough to do something so batshit crazy, it nearly requires the suspension of disbelief asked of us by fiction writers.
I had this fantasy that the New York Times would follow up its 1619 Project look at slavery with a comparable examination of Settler Colonialism. Instead, they made a pivot from slavery to what they are calling the “Inequality Project.
Law enforcement officers and officials are given a considerable amount of discretion. Too bad they so rarely use it.
In the past, Russian writers who achieved success in the United States have had little in common with each other. Ayn Rand, Vladimir Nabokov, Joseph Brodsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Sergey Dovlatov — each belongs to a separate era, and each has a distinctive biography. Since the turn of the 21st century, however, an entire generation of writers has appeared in the U.S. who all have Russian roots but rarely write in Russian. Almost all of these writers immigrated as children or adolescents in the 1980s and 1990s at the end of the third wave of Russian emigration, when large numbers of Jews were leaving the Soviet Union. By the mid-2000s, they had collectively become a notable phenomenon in American literature. Meduza asked journalist Svetlana Sachkova to profile a few of this literary generation’s most prominent members.
"Amazon is one of the world's wealthiest companies and its profits are surging as a result of this crisis. It is repugnant that the company's workforce feel their safety is not being taken seriously."
Instilling fear is a tactical choice by this society. We’ve all seen those tactics put on display: the raids and the deportations, the walls and the cages, the ripping apart of families and the separations of children from parents. These tactics are familiar to anybody with a working understanding of how apartheid was enforced in South Africa or how slavery was enforced here in America. These are the tactics of terrorism: the physical, well-publicized violence against some to carry out psychological violence and trauma against all.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court affirmed the validity of these terror tactics yet again when it ruled against an immigrant named Andre Barton in a 5-4 ruling that broke along the standard ideological lines. The case is a purposeful reminder that white people can reach into your life and destroy it, if they feel like it.
The Moscow police have been sharply criticized since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic. Police routinely arrest citizens under questionable circumstances for violating the quarantine and permit rules. Police action in mid-April resulted in huge lines at subway entrances — at a time when social distancing is particularly important. At the same time, police officers themselves are increasingly falling ill with COVID-19. Meduza spoke with Mikhail Pashkin, the chairman of the Moscow Interregional Police Union, about how the epidemic is affecting the work of law enforcement.
We live at a time when the terrors of life suggests the world has descended into darkness. The COVID-19 crisis has created a dystopian nightmare which floods our screens and media with images of fear. Bodies, doorknobs, cardboard packages, plastic bags, and the breath we exhale and anything else that offers the virus a resting place is comparable to a bomb ready to explode resulting in massive suffering and untold deaths. We can no longer shake hands, embrace our friends, use public transportation, sit in a coffee shop, or walk down the street without experiencing real anxiety and fear. We are told by politicians, media pundits, and others that everyday life has taken on the character of a war zone.
Federal Judge Randal Hall rejected NSA whistleblower Reality Winner’s request for release from a federal prison. Hall contended Winner is in a “medical prison, which is presumably better equipped than most to deal with any onset of COVID-19 in its inmates.” “Winner has not carried the burden of demonstrating that her specific medical conditions under the particular conditions of confinement at [Federal Medical Center] Carswell place her at a risk substantial enough to justify early release,” Hall declared [PDF]. Repeating an argument put forward by the Justice Department, which opposed her request, Hall added, “The court would be remiss not to point out Winner’s incongruous complaint that she is at greater risk because of the preventative measures undertaken by the prison in response to COVID-19.”
Migrant child detention is in the national spotlight again. Because of COVID-19, a U.S. District Court is considering mass release of children from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) custody. Like many times before, coverage of this story has not included voices of community and family members who have resisted migrant child detention for years. My organization, Little Village Solidarity Network (LVSN), a Chicago-based group fighting migrant child detention, obtained copies of the judge’s initial opinions. The opinions do not inspire trust that the court will ensure the children’s safety, and community groups will continue direct pressure on ORR and ICE facilities. However, this court case is a rare moment – advocates have said “free them all” for years, and this is the first time we are seeing that possibility debated in court, though centered on COVID-19.
Federal prosecutors are fighting efforts to release Reality Winner, a former National Security Agency contractor, from a prison where inmates have contracted COVID-19.
Bobby Christine, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia, argued against commuting the remaining 19 months of the sentence for Winner, who was convicted for tipping media about Russian efforts to hack the 2016 election.
Christine argued that District Chief Judge Randal Hall has no jurisdiction to consider the motion, because Winner has not yet exhausted administrative remedies with the U.S. Bureau of Prisons.
Prosecutors also argued that 30 days have not elapsed since Winner first requested release to home confinement, after two fellow inmates at Federal Medical Center-Carswell, in Forth Worth, Texas, contracted the virus.
A former diplomat has been charged with contempt of court over his blogs on the trial of Alex Salmond.
Proceedings have been brought against Craig Murray, former ambassador to Uzbekistan, who attended two days of the trial in the public gallery and blogged on the proceedings.
Mr Salmond was acquitted of the various sexual offence charges made against him by nine women.
I know of four pro-Independence folk who were last week phoned or visited by Police Scotland and threatened with contempt of court proceedings over social media postings they had made weeks back on the Alex Salmond case. Then on Monday, a Scottish journalist I know had his home raided by five policemen, who confiscated (and still have) all his computers and phones. They said they were from the “Alex Salmond team” and investigating his postings on the Alex Salmond case. He has not to date been charged, and his lawyer is advising him at present to say nothing, so I am not revealing his name.
Julian Assange is an Australian hacker, famous for revealing US secrets relating to war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan. A whole cache of classified information was published by Assange’s organization WikiLeaks, which revealed the details of the ruthless murders of innocent civilians and the capture of hundreds of innocent civilians in the US’s Guantanamo Bay Prison. Assange was able to do this with the help and assistance of whistle-blower Chelsea Manning, a former US Army Intelligence analyst. She had access to the classified information and passed it on to WikiLeaks.
Assange was able to procure such confidential information through a program he developed. As a programmer, he created a platform for whistle-blowers to send information to WikiLeaks anonymously. This technological finesse helped him get his hands on top-secret information without compromising the security and identity of the information provider. Chelsea was exposed not through WikiLeaks, but through online correspondence, Adrian Lamo sent this information to the US Army’s Criminal Investigation Command. Chelsea was arrested and tried on twenty-two separate charges and subsequently jailed for them. She may be considered a hero since her original sentence was commuted and she preferred to go to jail again rather than testifying against Assange.
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange will make a bid to postpone his US extradition hearing due to ongoing lack of access to his lawyers in London's locked-down Belmarsh prison.
The Australian met his lawyers in person for the first time in a month in the holding cells of Woolwich Crown Court earlier this week.
Assange directed them to ask District Court Judge Vanessa Baraitser to postpone his next hearing, which is set for May 18.
Notifications Run Your Life - Turn Them Off I have faced a difficult challenge this past year with productivity. I didn't realize all the notifications I had, so let's go over them and which ones you need to never have on!
At this point in time, the internet is a boon for all of us. It has made everything more convenient and better: exchanging files, messaging, and even being social. It has also added a few more services that now look like they have always existed, like video calling, social networking, blogging, etc. While it does seem all good, is it, really?
Let me begin by taking an example here.
Suppose you send an image to one of your friends through an online service. What is happening here? The image that you sent is actually uploaded to a central server of the service that you are using. Your friend basically gets a link to that file and can see it or download it from there. While it looks like the image is just between you and your friend, the image is really on the server of the service provider. Now, one may wonder what the problem is in such communication? There are a few, actually. Let us see what those are and how decentralization provides a solution.
If you have spent any amount of time in the world of the internet, you should have heard about the IPv4 and IPv6 protocols that our computers use every day.
One question that you might be asking is: Why there is no IPv5? Why IPv6 came after IPv4 and not IPv5? Was there ever a IPv5 and if yes, whatever happened to IPv5?
The answer is yes, there was an IPv5…sort of. Let me quickly explain a few things around it.
"Health is a human right. Medical knowledge is a public good. No one should be left behind."
By and large, most major ISPs have handled the labor angle of COVID-19 relatively well, with giants like Comcast and AT&T offered hazard pay, and Verizon slowing new broadband, phone, and TV installations altogether.
Uber has informed residents of San Francisco’s Treasure Island neighborhood it will no longer make Uber Eats deliveries to the area because of new city regulations temporarily capping delivery commissions.
Uber, which is headquartered in San Francisco, said its delivery service just added Treasure Island on April 3 — meaning Uber Eats was available there for only three weeks. It said that the island is the only part of its San Francisco service area affected now.
Haney blasted the move, noting that Treasure Island is 10 minutes from downtown without traffic and includes low-income communities of color.
“This isn’t about cost. This is retaliation,” he tweeted. “And it is blatantly discriminatory. I’m disgusted by this. ... This is redlining for political intimidation so they can make bigger profits in a global pandemic.”
Courts, lawyers and legal scholars in many places across the globe have adjusted to the new normal that COVID-19 has imposed. It's far from ideal but with a range of special measures, from extended deadlines [here] to virtual hearings [here], we make do as well as we can. At the end of the day, we are fortunate to be able to continue our work despite the unfolding of a global crisis of near-Lovecraftian proportions and that, for many of us, it's business as usual—even in unusual circumstances.
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Disclosed but not claimed is disclaimed? The principle that, where the specification discloses several ways in which a particular technical effect can be achieved only one of which is claimed, the other ways to achieve the technical effect cannot amount to infringement ("disclosed but not claimed is disclaimed") seems settled in German case-law and is followed by Arnold LJ in this decision. Indeed, describing an embodiment but failing to claim it will normally be a strong indication that the patentee chose not to seek protection for that embodiment.
But this rule should not be applied mechanically and exceptions can arise. In this respect, two of this Kat's former colleagues have advanced the following hypothetical [Den Hartog & Blomme, BIE 2016/15 – in Dutch]: suppose a claim protects a nucleotide sequence with 600 base pairs, and the specification states that deviations in some of the pairs have no influence on the effects of the claimed amino acid. In such a case, it seems unreasonable to deny the patentee protection against sequences which deviate minimally from the claimed sequence.
From vaccines to ventilators to diagnostic tests, technology has dominated response strategies to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Where technology leads, patent law and policy follow. Recently, some attention has turned to federal government patent use under 28 U.S.C. ۤ 1498. Jamie Love of KEI has called on the federal government to explore use of section 1498 in its response to COVID-19, to reduce prices, expand supplies, and ensure widespread, equitable access to patented technologies. (We have, too.) There is a long line of scholarship, including Amy Kapczynski and Aaron Kesselheim, Hannah Brennan et al., Dennis Crouch, Daniel Cahoy, and others discussing the relevance of section 1498 in a variety of contexts.
Yet others have encouraged the government to “tread lightly” and described use of section 1498 as a “nuclear option”—potent but dangerous—because it can be used to make massive interventions in the market for patented products—e.g., by issuing compulsory licenses to patents on high-priced brand-name drugs, “breaking” patent monopolies and accelerating the entry of numerous generic competitors. One recent example: a few years ago, Gilead’s high prices on hepatitis C drugs exacerbated a different public health crisis and prompted a chorus of voices, including Senator Bernie Sanders and the New York Times editorial board, to call on the federal government to exercise its section 1498 power to “break” Gilead’s patents in just this way, which might have saved tens of billions of dollars in public spending. (The federal government did not do so.)
The granted patents are those that are enforceable, which means that Samsung has exclusive rights to 1,728 of its 2,795 5G patents. Samsung has 905 patents which are filed in at least EPO, PCT, or USPTO. The company also has 162 patents that are declared in the 5G patent families. You can see the complete graph in the infographic below.
The joint study, which was cited by Samsung, was commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) in Germany. Samsung has been working with various cellular network operators in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, the US, and various other countries in rolling out 5G networks to consumers. It was recently unveiled that Samsung will use Xilinx’s chips in its 5G network equipment for beamforming technologies.
The company has also launched various high-end and mid-range smartphones with 5G connectivity and plans to launch even more 5G products, including the Galaxy Z Flip 5G, in the future.
Effective immediately, Oral Proceedings before the Examining Divisions will be held by videoconference (see here). Oral Proceedings in person will now only take place in exceptional circumstances. So far, this announcement only relates to Oral Proceedings held by the Examining Divisions. It remains to be seen if the Boards of Appeal follow suit for examination matters.
While this will allow the work of the Examining Divisions and representatives to continue during the lockdown, the EPO recognizes that there may be technical difficulties when attending and hosting virtual Oral Proceedings. Consequently, the EPO announcement notes that if such technical difficulties cannot be overcome, a new Summons will issue with a new hearing date. However, in the case of non-attendance for non-technical reasons, the Oral Proceedings will continue in the absence of the Applicant as before.
The EPO has recognized that both the Applicant and their representative may wish to be present at the Oral Proceedings, and on request will allow both parties to connect from different locations. If the members of the Examining Divisions are in different locations, they will hold a separate videoconference for their deliberations.
Oral proceedings before examining divisions ("EDs") of the European Patent Office ("EPO") will now be held by videoconference pursuant to the April 1, 2020, decision by the EPO president. The decision applies to all oral proceedings with a summons date of April 2, 2020, or later.
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The ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis has undoubtedly been a catalyst for the digital transformation of hearings before EDs; however, the April 1 decision is not a temporary one due to the current disruptions caused by the pandemic. The shift to videoconference as the standard for all examination proceedings is a permanent measure intended to promote a modern, efficient, and sustainable EPO. In a year-long pilot project starting on May 4, 2020, oral proceedings may also be held by videoconference in first-instance opposition proceedings if all parties and the opposition division agree.
Under the new practice, an applicant can still request oral proceedings to take place on the EPO premises in Munich, The Hague, and, in the rare occasion, Berlin. Such requests may be allowable only where "serious reasons," such as direct taking of evidence, necessitate a vis-à-vis hearing. Furthermore, where serious technical problems cannot be overcome, the ED will issue a new summons to ensure the applicant's right to be heard.
The company TELEMATIC has developed a patented technology of touchless payment for transport which allows ticket payment with any smartphone at point of payment at the entrance to a bus or underground while the phone is situated in a passenger€´s pocket or his bag.
As the world reels from the impact of the current Covid-19 pandemic, Unified Patents decided to examine the past to see if it could be any indicator of the future. Though no two economic cycles are the same, Unified Patents surprisingly found that the results showed (controlling for changes in measurement) that the number of Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs) and Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs) nearly doubled. There could be a number of reasons, but some factors could be investors looking for alternative or non-cyclical vehicles to get a return, cheaper and higher quality portfolios available, and more attorneys willing to take contingency or lower fees. One takeaway is that if the economy weakens further, NPE assertions will likely increase significantly if the previous pattern repeats.
Using the Stanford NPE Litigation Database, Unified Patents examined the number of lawsuits brought by NPEs and PAEs. The database accounts for the America Inventors Act (AIA) joinder rules, by using the total number of defendants rather than lawsuits. Using this method, researchers were able to detect a spike of NPE activity in 2011 that other studies simply missed. By missing this spike in 2011, most attributed the jump in assertions to the AIA joinder rules. However, with this spike in NPE activity, before the AIA was enacted, would mean NPE activity was on the rise despite the joinder rules. In general, the Stanford NPE Litigation Database found that the number of distinct patent disputes nearly doubled between 2000 and 2015. 21 Stan. Tech. L. Rev. 235 (2018).
The Federal Circuit has been keeping me unusually busy this week with a number of remedies-related opinions. Today's entry is Verinata Health, Inc. v. Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc., nonprecedential opinion by Judge Reyna, joined by Judges Wallach and Hughes. Verinata, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Illumina (also a party plaintiff), makes and sells tools for DNA analysis. Illumina owns the ’794 patent, directed to DNA assay optimization techniques, and Verinata owns the ’430 patent, "which is directed to methods for NIPT screening of fetal chromosomal abnormalities."
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As readers of this blog are aware, I believe that the eBay standard is an improvement over the near-automatic injunction rule that preceded it; but I believe that an even better standard would be one that focused on economic substance, rather than a slog through the eBay factors. For that reason, I've long had some reservations over court's analysis in ActiveVideo, which is reaffirmed here. Here's my reasoning. On the one hand, I can see the logic of assuming that, where the plaintiff licenses its patent to third-party licensees, the infringement deprives the plaintiff of the royalty it would have earned from authorized sales by those licensees; so there's no uncertainty over the amount the plaintiff lost. But I'm not sure that the presence of third-party licensees necessarily dictates that result. I would want to know, for example, whether the plaintiff licensed to any company that wanted a license; if so, whether it charged them all the same rate; whether the licenses were exclusive or nonexclusive; whether the plaintiffs considered licensing this defendant on the same or similar terms, or on other terms; and whether there was any reason to think that patent holdup was a serious concern (e.g., the defendant was unable to bargain prior to launch, the product embodies numerous other patented features, etc.). To be fair, the lower court opinion does appear to address some of these issues (see here, pp. 57-61), finding that Illumina did want to license the defendant and others on a nonexclusive basis. I just wish the Federal Circuit had noted these points too (though I recognize this is a nonprecedential opinion).
On March 23rd Senior Party The Broad Institute, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (collectively, "Broad") filed its Reply to Junior Party the University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") Motion No. 4 in Opposition to Broad's Substantive Motion No. 4 for priority to U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/736,527.
Broad in its substantive Motion No. 4 argued that it had satisfied the standard for priority to USSN 61/736,527 to Zhang (termed "Zhang B1" in the motion).
When inequitable conduct is asserted, often it is bifurcated from validity/infringement. Where either a jury finds invalidity, or as in CleanTech the judge did on summary judgment, and that finding is based upon allegedly withheld art, the patent owner will need to appeal (to avoid CleanTech). But, there is, under those circumstances, no final judgment.
Nor will any judgment fall within any exception — at least not very often. The patentee likely won’t be able to seek appeal under Fed. R. Civ. P. 54(b), because it only applies if there are multiple claims or multiple parties, so in a single-patent-single-defendant case, it wouldn’t likely be available. While possibly a trial court could certify a case for appeal under 1292(b), that requires there be a controlling question of law and substantial ground for disagreement, that won’t often be the case and the Federal Circuit has to also agree to certification. The collateral order exception won’t apply because the order won’t be separate from the merits. Any judgment will not (unless a preliminary injunction was granted and then dissolved because of an invalidity finding) grant or deny, an injunction (it will decide no liability and that’s not the same as denial of an injunction). Mandamus won’t be available.
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But what does make sense is that any litigator representing a patentee who loses on invalidity must do whatever is reasonably possible to appeal because otherwise the CleanTech approach will apply. And, of course, it will permit creative defense lawyers to argue to trial courts that (somehow) determining the propriety of summary judgment is not conducted as the Supreme Court has repeated admonished (most recently in Tolan v. Cotton).
I hope the full court realizes the panel decision — whether the result is right or not — is from a procedural view irreconcilable with Therasense and settled standards of review, and, further, will result in efforts to try piecemeal appeals that will waste judicial resources and, if uncorrected, lead to improper findings of inequitable conduct.
Did Microsoft file a patent application with the number 060606 for body-interfaced cryptocurrency to be implanted in humans, as well as include 5G wireless technology and vaccines? No, that's not entirely true: Microsoft did file a patent application for "cryptocurrency system using body activity data" and was given the number W020200060606, but the application was actually filed in 2019 and does not mention implants, 5G or vaccines.
Microsoft has proposed a method to generate cryptocurrency by monitoring people’s brain activity and other personal biometric data.
Since its passage in 2011, the America Invents Act has been subject to numerous Supreme Court decisions. But thus far, the major constitutional challenge to the Act in Oil States Energy Servs v. Greene’s Energy Group has failed. But while the Court the, upheld the AIA’s post-issuance review system against an Article III challenge, left a major question open. The Oil States Court stated that it was not resolving whether the application the AIA-created procedures to patents issued prior to the AIA’s effective date violates the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment. This question is now squarely presented to the Court in Celgene v. Peter. (There are also pending cases that in addition to the Takings issue raise a Due Process challenge).
Celgene owns two patents “generally directed to methods for safely distributing teratogenic or other potentially hazardous drugs while avoiding exposure to a fetus to avoid adverse side effects of the drug.” These patents were issued in 2000 and 2001, or more than a decade prior to the enactment of the AIA. These patents were challenged before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in 2015 in an Inter Partes Review (IPR), and the proceeding resulted in cancellation of all but one of the challenged claims in both patents. As with other post-issuance proceedings, but unlike district court litigation, Celgene’s patents enjoyed no presumption of validity, and could be cancelled upon preponderance of evidence. Furthermore, in construing Celgene’s claims, PTAB utilized the “broadest reasonable interpretation” (BRI) approach, as was called for by the then-current rules. The interplay of lower standard of proof for cancellation and the BRI standard, combined with the lack of a meaningful opportunity to amend the claims, left patents challenged in IPR particularly vulnerable. (Since that time, the Patent Office issued new rules to amend its procedures and now measures the claims under the Phillips framework—the same standard in use by Article III tribunals).
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Before closing, it should be acknowledged that there is a significant issue that is antecedent to the question presented in Celgene’s petition. That is whether the Federal Circuit has jurisdiction to hear such claims absent filing of a claim for compensation in the Court of Federal Claims (CFC) and if so, how the Claims Court is supposed to evaluate the value of property lost. That question is embedded in a separate petition before the Supreme Court. The Federal Circuit has recently concluded that the CFC does have jurisdiction to hear such claims, even if on the merits it must reject them. The Government has advanced a contrary view (which the CFC endorsed, though this endorsement is at odds with the Federal Circuit’s later opinion). It may be that this issue may need to be resolved before (or concurrently with) the issue presented by Celgene.
In sum, the Supreme Court should answer the question whether retroactive application of the AIA’s post issuance review procedures to patents issued prior to the passage of the AIA, and which results in their invalidation, constitutes a taking within the meaning of the Fifth Amendment—a question the Court explicitly left open in Oil States. And in my view, the answer should be “yes.”
On April 24, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $5,000 cash prize, seeking prior art for at least claim 4 of US Patent 8,929,552, owned by SaveItSafe, LLC, an NPE. The '552 patent relates to securement of electronic information and cryptographic keys. SaveItSafe is currently asserting the '552 patent against Oracle and Ultra Electronics Holdings in the Western District of Texas. However, the prior owner, No Magic, Inc., previously asserted the patent against Futurex, Atos IT Solutions and Services, SafeNet, Townsend Security, and Thales e-Security in 2015 through 2017. Litigation history can be found here.
Discovery Limited, a holding company of Discovery Life Limited (Discovery Life) and Discovery Vitality (Pty) Limited (Discovery Vitality), is the proprietor of two trademarks, “Discovery” and “Vitality” - registered in relation to insurance services, among others. Discovery Life offers life insurance services while Discovery Vitality offers a vitality wellness and rewards programme. Under the vitality wellness programme, members of a medical scheme offered by Discovery Life may pay a monthly membership fee to Discovery Vitality and are required to lead a healthy lifestyle to gain vitality points with status rising as more points are earned. The vitality status will enable a Discovery Life policyholder to receive discounts on her premium and also a refund of a percentage of premiums paid.
In 2019, Liberty Group Limited (Liberty) – a direct competitor of Discovery Life - introduced an insurance offering called the “Wellness Bonus”. The Wellness Bonus refunds Liberty’s customers a portion of premiums paid on their life insurance policies if they are members of an existing wellness programme recognised by Liberty. Liberty’s Wellness Bonus recognises two external wellness programmes: Discovery Vitality, and Momentum Multiply. The amount refunded is dependent on a wellness score determined by the policyholder’s status on her external wellness programme.
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The Court correctly identified the elements that must be proved in actions for trademark infringement and unlawful competition, respectively.
15 U.S.C. €§1117(a). The statute appears to require willfulness as a prerequisite to profit disgorgement in the dilution context, but not for typical trademark infringement. However, the award must also conform “to the principles of equity.”
In this case, Romag proved its €§1125(a) TM infringement case against Fossil, but the District Court refused to disgorge profits — holding that willfulness is a prerequisite to profit disgorgement in TM cases based upon a long line of pre-and-post Lanham Act decisions. The Federal Circuit then affirmed.
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I will note that IP Remedies Professor Thomas Cotter has posted a short note about the opinion with the following to-the-point statement: “To say I am disgusted would be an understatement.” Prof. Cotter recalls that the Patent Statute also doesn’t say anything about willfulness, but that the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed that willfulness is a requirement for enhanced damages under Section 284 (“the court may increase the damages up to three times the amount found or assessed.”).
Yesterday, Dennis Crouch provided an overview of the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Romag Fasteners, Inc. v. Fossil, Inc. and the various opinions of the Justices.
Today I consider the implications of Romag for whether juries or only judges can decide about disgorgement of a trademark infringer’s profits in trademark cases. None of the Justices addressed that issue directly. Yet, the majority opinion repeatedly characterized disgorgement of profits as an equitable remedy and emphasized transsubstantive principles of equity as lodestones for the exercise of equitable discretion in granting this remedy. Because of this, I believe the Court implicitly decided that disgorgement is a matter for courts, and not for juries, to decide. This has very important implications for disgorgement awards in intellectual property (IP) cases more generally.
This implicit ruling in Romag is consistent with the Court’s ruling in Petrella v. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc., 572 US. 663 (2014). Although holding that laches was not a complete defense to copyright infringement, the Court in Petrella stated that disgorgement was an equitable remedy. Id. at 668 n.1. It opined that “the District Court, in determining appropriate injunctive relief and assessing profits, may take account of [Petrella’s] delay in commencing suit. In doing so, however, that court should closely examine MGM’s alleged reliance on Petrella’s delay.” Id. at 687. The Court was, moreover, receptive to “any other considerations that would justify adjusting injunctive relief or profits.” Id. at 687-88.
Popular torrent site YTS has 'settled' another piracy lawsuit, this time with seven movie companies. The site's operator and an associated business agreed to a consent judgment totaling $1,050,000 in damages. YTS removed the relevant movie torrents from the site but remains online. The site's users are not in the clear though, and risk being sued as well.
Keeping children occupied during the global coronavirus pandemic is a daily struggle for millions of parents around the world. Services like Netflix and Disney+ are obvious entertainment choices but there are other, less legal options too. A popular fork of the famous Popcorn Time software has now released a special edition - Popcorn Time Kids - which only offers family-friendly movies and TV shows.
