A look at the **diffstat**, **cmp**, **diff**, **diff3**, and **sdiff** commands.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.6.9 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...
thanks,
greg k-h
OBS Studio is software designed for capturing, compositing, encoding, recording, and streaming video content, efficiently. It is the re-write of the widely used Open Broadcaster Software, to allow even more features and multi-platform support. OBS Studio supports multiple sources, including media files, games, web pages, application windows, webcams, your desktop, microphone and more.
Valve has published their Steam Survey results for April, which is the first full month where the US and still much of the world has been in lockdown over the coronavirus, and thus interesting to see how it has impacted the gamer metrics.
The Steam Survey results for April 2020 put the Linux gaming marketshare at 0.89%, or a 0.02% increase over the month prior. While still sub-1%, the Linux gaming marketshare is consistently hitting in this 0.8~0.9% area even while Valve is reporting record number of users. The Steam Linux percentage at 0.89% for April is while macOS increased by 0.25% to 4.05% and then the Windows percentage pulled back 0.27% to 95.06%.
Champions of Regnum (Regnum online previously) is a multiplayer 3D medieval fantasy online RPG video game, produced in Argentina by NGD Studios (currently NGE), for free to anyone, with the option to pay for premium content.
It is available in Spanish, Portuguese, German, English and French. The game has 3 servers and an experimental one (for testing), which are "Ra" (international server) "Haven" (international server, mainly in English) "Valhalla" (Germany) and the experimental "Amon". The word "Regnum" comes from Latin and means kingdom.
The game focuses on the conflict between three kingdoms, with gameplay revolving around realm versus realm combat. Players fight in groups against players from opposing factions and capture forts and castles. In addition, the usual character development, typical in other games of the genre, is present, as well as battles between players and monsters.
Note: Enlightenment 0.24.0-alpha depends on EFL v1.24.0 or newer.
The first alpha release of the Enlightenment 0.24 window manager / Wayland compositor with new features and other improvements.
Enlightenment 0.24 Alpha 1 is shipping with an improved screenshot module, support for external monitor backlight/brightness controls, an improved restart experience, a smoother start-up thanks to using an I/O pre-fetch thread, switching over to BlueZ 5 for Bluetooth, and various other changes.
Following the post about what happened in KDE PIM in January and February let’s look into what the KDE PIM community has been up to in March and April. In total 38 contributors have made almost 1700 changes. Big thanks to everyone who helped us make Kontact better!
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The Google Calendar and Google Contacts backends have been merged into a single Google Groupware resource (Igor Poboiko, D28560). The change should be mostly transparent to users, the old backends will be migrated to the new unified backend automatically after update. During this Igor also fixed various bugs and issues in the backends and the LibKGAPI library, big kudos to him!
The DAV resource is now able to synchronize the calendar color from KOrganizer to the DAV server (David Faure, D28938). Related to that, the menu to configure calendar color in KOrganizer has been simplified by removing the “Disable Color” action.
It is now easier to recognize and set the default calendar and the event editor now respects the settings correctly.
This quick release is to fix the setup of NVIDIA driver on the installed system. The NVIDIA driver was not setup properly in the ISO build. Sorry for the inconvenient to our NVIDIA users.
Shotcut is a non-linear video editor, which I always wanted to use. But first, I would like to disclose my background with audio-visual production.
I started making videos for YouTube, with PCLinuxOS, first with Openshot and all the tools that are available in PCLinuxOS repos: Audacity, Openshot, Rezsound, SSR and others.
Openshot was my choice because it has a direct interface and is super simple to operate. In fact, Openshot is simple, but very complete. It has features that are not accessible right from the start, having to be activated, either through different menus or video clip properties. But, it shows the intelligence of the programmer, who decided not to scare his would be users with an intimidating interface.
Then I started using VSDC, from the Windows platform, but thanks to Wine and Play-On_Linux, working perfectly on Linux, to add more effects and other capabilities with characters and fonts that Openshot doesn't have. VSDC also has a very clear and straightforward interface, and its resources are accessible through MS Office ribbon-style menus (now a well spread paradigm among several applications).
What specific equipment do currently use with PCLinuxOS? 2016 System76, Gazelle laptop, i7 cpu, 2.6 - 3.5 GHz, 16GB, 240 GB SSD, KDE5
Do you feel that your use of Linux influences the reactions you receive from your computer peers or family? If so, how? None really, except people who I've converted from Windoze to PCLinuxOS.
What would you like to see happen within PCLinuxOS that would make it a better place. What are your feelings? To keep current with new hardware/software. The PCLinuxOS Magazine is great. For Tex to keep as healthy as possible (I lost my partner to cancer 2017). For the community to remain/become more cohesive and tolerant (lots of past rancor about systemd, and dropping 32-bits). Appreciate the time we have, and use it wisely and productively.
Looking through the Monthly Screenshots section of the PCLinuxOS forum, it's apparent that there are many individuals who know how to find great looking wallpapers for their desktops. But for others, finding high quality images for their desktops isn't so easy. Plus, with so many of us spending so much time at home, quarantined to help prevent the spread of coronavirus (or to help flatten the curve), it's inevitable that many will be spending an increasing amount of time on their computers. You might as well have some nice wallpaper to look at while spending all of that extra time in front of your computer.
Let me help you with that. There are several places on the web where you can find high quality images for your desktops ... that are free! So, let's take a look at some of them.
Before we start, though, let me give you one word of advice: be cautious! Collecting cool and unusual wallpapers can be a very addicting pursuit. It won't take long for you to wonder where all your hard drive space went!
The Fedora Project, a Red Hat, Inc., sponsored and community-driven open source collaboration, today announced the general availability of Fedora 32, the latest version of the fully open source Fedora operating system.
Fedora 32 includes new features aimed at addressing issues facing modern developers and IT teams. Highlights include key updates to Fedora’s desktop-focused edition, Fedora 32 Workstation, and a new computational neuroscience lab image, aimed at bringing those working in science fields to open source software.
Cormier used his opening to focus on the history of open source, virtualization, hybrid, and cloud. While all of these concepts began as ideas, they are now integrated deeply into our daily lives, especially hybrid cloud .
"All of us live in a hybrid heterogeneous world," Cormier said during the keynote. "Hybrid requires a common development operations, security and automation environment. This is essential in order to scale. Hybrid isn't a trend. It's a strategic imperative."
Red Hat partners including Ford Motor Company, Verizon, Intel, Microsoft, and Credit Suisse made on screen appearances, discussing their partnerships with Red Hat and the importance of innovation during such an unprecedented time.
With innovation in mind, Red Hat hosted a panel after the keynote focusing on new announcements that will help customers easily optimize and scale IT operations in hybrid cloud environments.
Businesses that were behind on the cloud journey before the novel coronavirus-19 are really feeling the heat right now. Transitioning to a digital workflow is hard in the best of times, but the almost instantaneous shift to work-from-home and online operations has sent shockwaves through the corporate world.
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This is an area where Red Hat is comfortable — the company has an ongoing message about how its solutions “go everywhere.”
IBM deepened its commitment to Red Hat OpenShift with enhancements to the container platform on IBM Cloud, including a handful of security and productivity capabilities that will be available to OpenShift 4.3 users.
The latest features are primarily designed to cut down on the time spent by IT administrators on routine maintenance tasks including updating, scaling and provisioning. Other new features offer better resiliency that protects against unexpected power surges as well as against attacks that increase possible breaches and outages.
Tying OpenShift more tightly to the IBM Cloud came as little surprise to analysts who said the integration has been in the works for some time -- possibly before IBM acquired Red Hat in July of last year.
Red Hat today at the Red Hat Summit online conference announced it is making technology previews available for a control plane for managing Red Hat OpenShift deployments dubbed Red Hat Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes along with an instance of open source KubeVirt software that makes it possible to deploy legacy virtual machines on top of containers.
In addition, version 4.4 of OpenShift adds a developer-centric view of metrics and monitoring tool for application workloads, monitoring integration for Red Hat Operators and tools for assessing the cost of deploying applications in the cloud versus in an on-premises IT environment.
A push to reinvent the way developers create applications for the internet has gathered significant momentum, catching even some of its most ardent supporters by surprise.
But even as the popularity of infrastructure based on the Kubernetes platform and microservices surges, the adoption has inevitably brought to light the massive challenges big businesses and large organizations face in overhauling unwieldy infrastructure. To help IT managers navigate this transition, products and services that enable simultaneous management of legacy and new systems are gaining in popularity.
Red Hat’s OpenShift 4.4 is here. This update builds upon Kubernetes 1.17 and aims to improve the developer’s experience. It includes new developer previews of upcoming features and some performance upgrades.
As the world tackles a global pandemic, the conversation around the practical implications of virtualization and scaling of enterprises is being tested like no other time. Companies are wrestling with many questions such as, how much consistency does there need to be from all of the options within cloud, hybrid cloud, multicloud, and on-premises environments? And how can all of this be managed, especially when teams are scattered like never before?
In the theatrical world, a central actor might be the lead role in a film or play. In the enterprise, it’s the role technology can perform in bridging the gap between value creation and value capture.
“We think of it in terms of bringing data to applications,” said Chris Wright (pictured), senior vice president and chief technology officer at Red Hat Inc. “Bringing data sources and data processing and model development all onto a common platform is a really powerful thing that’s happening in the industry today. We’re bringing data to be a central actor.”
Wright spoke with Stu Miniman, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Red Hat Summit Virtual Experience this week. They discussed ways that data is transforming business, future technologies that will be affected, developer access to tooling and Red Hat’s role in bringing the open-source ecosystem together.
Red Hat transformed its popular annual user conference into an online virtual experience this year, for obvious reasons. The socially distanced, two-day digital summit, wrapping up today, went off without a hitch, and the leading enterprise open source software provider, longtime Java community leader and IBM subsidiary laid out its hybrid cloud strategy and product news to an estimated 38,000 distant attendees.
The organization's new CEO, Paul Cormier, gave the conference keynote from his home office in Boston. He opened his talk with a (long) history of open source and the cloud, and ended at the open hybrid cloud, which is central to Red Hat's vision.
When it comes to the edge and 5G, things are moving from the theoretical to actual reality. And as important transformations happen across the technology industry, Intel Corp.’s 25-year-old history of partnership with Red Hat Inc. is helping to meet these challenges head on with advanced software-defined infrastructure platforms that improve agility and flexibility.
“Our customers and that developer community need us to go together because … of the combination of our hardware work and the open-source software work that we do with Red Hat,” said Lisa Spelman (pictured), vice president and general manager of Intel Xeon products and data center marketing at Intel. “And we see that every year increasing in value as we expand to more workloads and more market segments that we can help with our technology.”
Red Hat had its annual summit this week and chose to go virtual as the Covid-19 pandemic is causing more and more shows to cancel or try to get their message out through different avenues. Red Hat and Partners made a handful of announcements. These announcements include OpenShift 4.4, OpenShift Virtualization, Advanced Cluster Management for Kubernetes, Supermicro announced new systems validated with Red Hat Hyperconverged Infrastructure, and MemSQL is available on Red Hat Marketplace.
When Cloudera ships the on-premise version of its latest Hadoop distribution later this year, it will work with a Kubernetes container orchestration system from Red Hat, the company announced today. But the introduction of Kubernetes in CDP Private Cloud doesn’t mean that YARN will completely disappear, the company says.
Even in normal times, it would be unlikely that IBM Corp. and Red Hat Inc. would make news this week for the usual reasons.
Red Hat kicked off its virtual Summit on Tuesday in an online format after being forced to cancel plans for its annual gathering in San Francisco due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Although the open-source company made a number of product announcements, industry analysts were more interested in Red Hat’s impact on IBM, both from a financial standpoint and in terms of strategic direction.
TrilioVault for Kubernetes supports applications provisioned via Operators, Helm or Labels within upstream Kubernetes or Red Hat OpenShift environments. Additionally, the platform is cloud agnostic, offering customers the agility to move with the application across public and private cloud infrastructure.
Red Hat announced that the Argentine Ministry of Health has implemented a National Digital Health Network to vastly improve accessibility of universal healthcare coverage services and initiatives using Red Hat open hybrid cloud technologies.
With a complete digital transformation to modernize its healthcare system and infrastructure, the Argentine Ministry of Health has increased access to imperative healthcare information and services, with more than 2.4 million people currently registered on its network and a goal to reach 15 million by the end of this year. This has been especially critical as the government has used this system to help keep Argentinians up-to-date on pandemic developments and track local and global COVID-19 cases.
Red Hat has baked in virtualisation features in OpenShift amid the growing rivalry between the open source bigwig and virtualisation giant VMware to draw enterprises to their respective Kubernetes platforms.
During its virtual summit this week, Red Hat said the virtualisation capabilities, derived from the upstream KubeVirt open source project, will enable enterprises to develop, deploy and manage applications running in virtual machines (VMs) alongside container and serverless deployments.
Kaloom announced today it has partnered with Red Hat to make it easier to deliver network services to edge computing applications built using the Red Hat OpenShift Platform.
Company CTO Suresh Krishnan says most of the applications built for the edge will be based on microservices running on a distribution of Kubernetes in the form of Red Hat OpenShift. Each of those microservices will now be able to access the Cloud Edge Fabric from Kaloom, which is a set of network services that run on a virtual instance of a switch that runs natively in a Kubernetes platform, he says.
Unveiled during the Red Hat Summit online conference, the alliance provides a framework for running microservices-based applications capable of accessing both 4G and 5G wireless networking services at the edge, adds Krishnan.
Kaloom today announced an expansion of its partnership with Red Hat to provide network operators with a more comprehensive approach to distributed edge computing. By integrating its Cloud Edge Fabric with Red Hat OpenShift, Kaloom aims to reduce the costs of edge infrastructure and further facilitate its use for 5G use cases.
The new offering will allow network, compute and storage nodes to share the same underlying container-based execution environment.
By integrating Kaloom’s Cloud Edge Fabric with Red Hat OpenShift helps the platform to simplify complex next-generation networks and accelerate time to market of new services while reducing the costs of edge infrastructure.
Others, like IBM (NYSE: IBM) and its high-flying Red Hat subsidiary are taking a more egalitarian tact, dubbing their Linux-based approach the “open, hybrid cloud.” That was theme of this week’s virtual Red Hat summit event.
Noting that the “Linux innovation cycle” has so far delivered virtual infrastructure, application containers, Kubernetes cluster orchestration and, lately, edge computing, Red Hat said 31 percent of its growing roster of customers are deploying hybrid clouds. Hence, the IBM unit sees another opportunity to leverage those Linux-based tools to “bridge traditional datacenter technologies to the hybrid cloud world,” according to Red Hat CEO Paul Cormier.
Red Hat and its competitors primarily seek to move cloud computing and storage to the network edge, where all the big data resides.
The Red Hat Summit was supposed to be held in San Francisco this year, but instead took place online.
The open source company’s in-person events are grand affairs - the conference centre seems to be stained red as thousands of customers, partners, staff and the media flock to what must be the largest gathering of open source enthusiasts on the planet.
One benefit of holding the conference online is that more people can attend; 38 000 signed up for Red Hat Summit 2020 Virtual Experience, which took place from 28 to 29 April.
Unsurprisingly, open source has come a long way since Red Hat first came about, but according to the company's APAC office of technology vice president Frank Feldmann, there could be more coming out of the Asia Pacific region.
"The general sense, we have come a heck of a long way, right, and we just imagine when Red Hat as a company started, open source wasn't really that well understood," he told ZDNet during Red Hat Summit.
"Today it is a default for pretty much any area of technology innovation, the majority of programming languages and products out there are either built or derived from open source initiatives, even the practices around open source in terms of how we innovate and collaborate."
With a focus on Asia Pacific, however, Feldmann said contributions out of the region could be improved.
"I think in Asia specifically, we can always do better in terms of open-source adoption, I think the contributions out of Asia for open source is an area that can be improved and Red Hat certainly tries to influence it and drive it where we can," he said.
Red Hat’s new CEO says his appointment won’t change the company’s ongoing “open hybrid cloud” strategy.
Paul Cormier, a long time Red Hat employee who took over as CEO following Jim Whitehurst’s departure to new owner IBM, used this year’s virtual keynote to recommit the open source giant to meeting its customers wherever and however they want to work.
“It’s what we’ve been building in and around our platforms for many, many years. Open hybrid cloud is what we are delivering to our customers and building with our partners every day. Today and tomorrow.”
Red Hat, the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, announced new offerings to help organizations of all sizes and industries optimize, scale or simply protect IT operations in the face of shifting global dynamics.
Red Hat has long championed technology evolutions and wants to enable customers to build any application and deploy everywhere with the consistency and flexibility an open hybrid cloud foundation provides.
Building on this vision, Red Hat’s new offerings are designed to improve the delivery, accessibility and stability of critical services and applications on a worldwide scale on the backbone of the hybrid cloud.
While everyone in the world is separated from their friends, families, and co-workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, Red Hat wants to remind us about the importance of staying connected and collaborating. The company kicked off its first virtual Red Hat Summit this week to talk about its open hybrid cloud vision, products and partnerships.
“We still think it is really important for us to gather and exchange ideas on the state of open source and the state of enterprise IT industry and where it is all going,” said Paul Cormier, keynoting his first summit as president and CEO of Red Hat. “It may be even more important at this time to take this time to be with you, listen to you and figure out how we can help each other.”
Cormier opened the virtual event by talking to Jim Whitehurst, former Red Hat CEO and now president of IBM, about Red Hat and IBM’s new dynamic. Red Hat was acquired by IBM last year for $34 billion, and since then the two companies have worked to keep Red Hat separate.
In the last couple days, Red Hat was able to demonstrate that an online technical conference can succeed. The Summit, normally held in Boston or San Francisco, was held online thanks to the Covid-19 pandemic still gripping the world.
The fact that 80,000 people attended the online event warrants a huge applause. By comparison, last year’s in-person conference broke the record with only 8,900 attendees.
Leannart Poettering is proposing homed to alter the way Linux systems handle user management. All user information will be placed in a cryptographically signed JSON record, such as username, group membership, and password hashes. The venerable /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow will be a thing of the past. One of the claimed advantages will be home directory portability.
"Because the /home directory will no longer depend on the trifecta of systemd, /etc/passwd, and /etc/shadow, users and admins will then be able to easily migrate directories within /home," writes Jack Wallen at TechRepublic. "Imagine being able to move your /home/USER (where USER is your username) directory to a portable flash drive and use it on any system that works with systemd-homed. You could easily transport your /home/USER directory between home and work, or between systems within your company."
Understanding the relationships between Fedora, CentOS, and Red Hat can be a little confusing. This guy does a fairly good job of explaining it.
After installing Debian buster on my GnuBee, I set it up for receiving backups from my other computers.
This is a tutorial to install Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa operating system into your computer. You can do this to computer either with bios or uefi, in either single or dualboot mode and optionally put it into external hard disk drive if you wish. This tutorial should be sufficient for most users and is intended for people without deep knowledge in computing. You will prepare a bootable media, two partitions, and go through ten steps until everything finished. This article recommends you to install on an empty computer with the specification at least Intel or AMD 64-bit processor and 2GB memory and 20GB hard disk partition. Happy installing!
While it’s under evaluation by the federal government, the design is now on the National Institutes of Health open-source design exchange so that anyone from across the country can apply it to their own manufacturing effort in response to the global pandemic.
Researchers from Michigan Technological University are applying chemistry to 3D printing, detailing their recent study in ‘Open-Source Colorimeter.’ A basic sensor, the colorimeter is made up of a simple light source. Light is controlled and transmitted, filtered so that only a slight band near the absorbance peak is allowed.
While the general public may not be aware of or use these types of sensors commonly, they are often used in major applications with food (bread, chocolate, and milk), along with monitoring nitrates, metal, phosphates and materials present due to commercial production like that of paper or other goods. Colorimeters are used in medical applications too for measuring protozoa in lab cultures, measuring UV radiation through skin color transformation, and even for studying the age of bruises. Colorimeters may also be used for evaluating waste waters and water quality.
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused an enormous amount of changes in how people work, play, and communicate. By now, many of us have settled into the routine of using remote communication or video conferencing tools to keep in touch with our friends and family. In the last few weeks we've also seen a number of lists and guides aiming to get people set up with the "right" tools for communicating in hard times, but in almost every case, these articles recommend that people make a difficult compromise: trading their freedom in order to communicate with the people they care about and work with.
In times like these it becomes all the more important to remember that tools like Zoom, Slack, and Facebook Messenger are not benign public services, and while the sentiment they've expressed to the global community in responding to the crisis may be sincere, it hasn't addressed the fundamental ethical issues with any piece of proprietary software.
After taking the LibrePlanet 2020 conference online, we received a number of requests asking us to document our streaming setup. As the pandemic grew worse, this gave way to more curiosity about how the Free Software Foundation (FSF) uses free tools and free communication platforms to conduct our everyday business. And while the stereotype of hackers hunched over a white on black terminal session applies to us in some ways, many of the tools we use are available in any environment, even for people who do not have a lot of technical experience. We've started documenting ethical solutions on the LibrePlanet wiki, in addition to starting a remote communication mailing list to help each other advocate for their use.
In the suggestions that follow, a few of the tools we will recommend depend upon some "self-reliance," that is, steering clear of proprietary network services by hosting free software solutions yourself, or asking a technical friend to do it for you. It's a difficult step, and the benefits may not be immediately obvious, but it's a key part of preserving your autonomy in an age of ubiquitous digital control.
Do you remember when trying a new OS meant burning a CD? Not merely downloading an ISO and mounting it on a USB drive, but taking a circle of polycarbonate and hoping you didn’t get a buffer underrun as the file you’d spent an entire day downloading was burned onto it. A couple of decades ago that was how we’d take a look at a new Linux distro, and at the time we considered it to be nothing short of incredible that such a thing was possible. One of the ISOs I remember downloading back then was an early version of ReactOS, a project with the lofty aim of creating an open-source equivalent of Windows NT. You might think that in the nearly two decades since then it would have become an irrelevance and its contributors moved on to other work, but no. ReactOS is very much still with us, and indeed has just seen a new release. Version 0.4.13 is the latest in a long line of incremental updates, and remembering those early ReactOS ISOs when I saw their announcement, I thought I’d give it a spin. The result was both a peek at the current state of the project, and a chance to think about the place of a Windows clone in 2020.
Discontent is running high among an increasing number of YouTube creators and users these days, due to a seemingly never-ending series of questionable policies and decisions this Google company has been making. But the pull of the gargantuan platform that has both the audience and the money is proving too powerful to allow much meaningful competition.
That is, at least in YouTube’s own category, as a centralized corporation built in obscurity, i.e., as a closed-source app.
This is why much of the effort to provide alternatives to YouTube and other dominant social networks is today focused on decentralization and open source as a value proposition for those creators and users eager to protect their ever-more at risk privacy and free speech.
WebGPU is a new graphics and compute API designed on the grounds of W3C organization (mostly) by the browser vendors. It’s designed for the Web, used by JavaScript and WASM applications, and driven by the shared principles of Web APIs. It doesn’t have to be only for the Web though. In this post, I want to share the vision of why WebGPU on native platforms is important to me. This is highly subjective and doesn’t represent any organization I’m in.
Story
The story of WebGPU-native is as old as the API itself. The initial hearings at Khronos had the same story heard at both the exploration “3D portability” meeting, and the “WebGL Next” one, told by the very same people. These meetings had similar goals: find a good portable intersection of the native APIs, which by that time (2016) clearly started diverging and isolating in their own ecosystems. The differences were philosophical: the Web prioritized security and portability, while the native wanted more performance. This split manifested in creation of two real working groups: one in W3C building the Web API, and another - “Vulkan Portability” technical subgroup in Khronos. Today, I’m the only person (“ambassador”) who is active in both groups, simply because we implement both of these APIs on top of gfx-rs.
Intel's OpenCL Intercept Layer remains focused on debugging and analyzing OpenCL application performance across platforms. It hadn't seen a new release, however, in two years but that changed last month.
In April there was the release of the Intel OpenCL Intercept Layer 2.2.2, which may not reflect much from the version number but comes with two years worth of changes. New to the release is a cliloader utility to simplify installation and usage of this layer, fixes for operating on ARM Linux environments, Android support fixes, the ability to dump and disassemble ISA kernel binaries, collecting more performance counters on Intel hardware, hint support for command queues, logging improvements, better Chrome tracing abilities, and other changes.
This started out as a simple status report following my first report on the revival of the Getting Things GNOME project, but turned out into a full-fledged article that, I believe, would be relevant to many community managers and FLOSS project maintainers out there. Particularly if you have an established open-source project looking for sustainable development but don’t have the luxury of paid developers, it should be worth investing the 7-9 minutes to read this.
As the world came to a standstill and as I finished my tax season accounting (two unrelated things, really), this month I have completed a major overhaul of the “developer experience” for GTG.
On one project I wrote, my first user base was very small. It consisted of developers and hackers who were very involved with feedback, design, and testing. Those original users moved on to other responsibilities, and new users have replaced them who are unfamiliar with the code. They have very different expectations and want your project to "just work".
This is an entirely different scenario. Documentation and regression testing are critical to sustaining the growth of the project. The new user base does not share the initial users' tolerance for breaking changes.
Bug reports will continue to come in. On one recent bug report, once I identified the root-cause and the exact function that is buggy, the next question I ask is "Do the unit tests cover this method?" Code coverage tools can quickly answer this question. This makes it easier for me to confidently modify the method because I know that I'm not introducing regressions.
The "open-source Windows" ReactOS project has upgraded its build environment leading to much newer versions of key compiler toolchain components.
The biggest change with the new ReactOS Build Environment is moving off the vintage GCC 4.7.2 compiler to now using the GCC 8 stable series. In this move of updating the GNU Compiler Collection are several years worth of improvements from newer C/C++ language support to many optimizations and new CPU microarchitectures being supported to better error reporting and a while lot more as we have covered over the years.
Kotlin and Swift are two popular open source programming languages, both designed to offer speed, safety and concise app development. These two languages have traditionally been associated with mobile development, but they're capable of server-side and web development as well.
Kotlin shares several attributes with Java and was designed to streamline Android app development. Apple's Swift, on the other hand, was designed to interface with C-based code and libraries, providing an open source approach for iOS and OS X app development. However, both languages boast the ability to delve into both the world of Android and iOS, leaving many developers at a crossroads where they must choose one language over the other.
Ibis 1.3 was just released, after 8 months of development work, with 104 new commits from 16 unique contributors. What is new? In this blog post we will discuss some important features in this new version!
First, if you are new to the Ibis framework world, you can check this blog post I wrote last year, with some introductory information about it.
In both unittest and pytest, when a test function hits a failing assert, the test stops and is marked as a failed test.
What if you want to keep going, and check more things?
There are a few ways. One of them is subtests.
Python's unittest introduced subtests in Python 3.4.
pytest introduced support for subtests with changes in pytest 4.4 and a plugin, called pytest-subtests. Subtests are still not really used that much.
When you look up the Python documentation for Graphical User Interfaces, you find TkInter. The package is part of the default Python install. You can use this for the simplest applications just fine. You can also seek out frameworks that implement something else or put stuff on top of TkInter.
Some of the big, or rather, much used systems for Linux are QT and wxWidgets. These are so common, both on Linux, unix-like systems, Mac OS X and Windows, that you must be aware of them if you are creating GUI programs.
QT is one of the standards for the desktop. It also includes classes to handle most functions of the computer. This include sockets, threads, Unicode and its own web browser. PyQt has bindings to all the parts of this framework.
wxWidgets Has a very big API with many widgets and functions. These include the same as QT, as they are competing technologies. There are differences but the important part is that if you aim to do something big you must keep the two in mind. You may want to switch when and if your project grows.
We had to develop a machine learning pipeline combined with an android application that will take images as input and send the data about the image, telling us whether this image has service cancer or not with certain confidence(probability).
Five years ago I wrote an article about my first interactions with this practice, back in the beginnings of my professional life, in the Canary Islands, Spain. The article describes the basics of any team or project logbook. You would benefit from reading it before you keep reading this article.
I would like to provide some additional insides about the diary, together a few tips and practices I have used throughout the years.
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I always recommend to use a git-based tool for the logbook. It is not just that collaboration is easier, especially for developers, but also allows to integrate the habit of writing in their workflow easily. It will also be easier to structure and visualize the information through tags. Git is specially convenient for distributed teams too, which are the ones who benefit the most from this practice in terms of alignment.
Often the diary is used by people who does not know how to use git or is not part of their day to day workflow. I have had jobs in which I did not use git on regular basis. In such cases, a wiki can be the best option. Make sure you use a wiki with conflict resolution capabilities. Otherwise, the logbook will not scale. If you use a wiki that structure pages in editable sections, that might work too.
The application of war metaphors only serves to mask what’s truly at stake.
A powerful industry is making workers choose between their lives and their jobs.
They’ve gotten to know New York City in a way many have not, through the low-wage work of cleaning its skyscrapers, serving its restaurants and crisscrossing its streets on bicycles, through long subway rides very early in the morning and very late at night. The saying goes: You’re not a true New Yorker unless you’ve lived here for a decade. They’ve done their time and felt a deep sense of belonging in this city of immigrants.
Many people across the country experienced COVID-19 symptoms but could not get a test to confirm if they actually had the virus. Now some are looking to a different kind of coronavirus test for answers.
Antibody tests are meant to recognize a past infection. Many of these have hit the market in recent weeks and are being offered at local clinics. Officials have touted the tests as crucial for reopening the economy and developing public health strategies to contain the virus.
They’ve gotten to know New York City in a way many have not, through the low-wage work of cleaning its skyscrapers, serving its restaurants and crisscrossing its streets on bicycles, through long subway rides very early in the morning and very late at night. The saying goes: You’re not a true New Yorker unless you’ve lived here for a decade. They’ve done their time and felt a deep sense of belonging in this city of immigrants.
But, in the epicenter of a pandemic, the undocumented have never felt more alone.
The collapsing economy is a rude awakening, but its fragility hides a transformative power.
In a study published in the journal Ecotoxicology and Environmental Safety (open access), a team at the University of Sheffield’s Institute for Sustainable Food found 28 out of 55 rice samples sold in the UK contained levels of arsenic that exceeded European Commission regulations for rice meant for the consumption for infants or young children. The research is the first to measure differences in human health risks from arsenic using a substantial number of rice varieties marketed in the UK.
The results showed that brown rice contained higher levels of the carcinogen than white or wild rice because it contains the bran – the outer layer of the grain. Meanwhile, organically grown rice was found to contain significantly higher levels than non-organically grown rice. White rice contained the lowest levels of arsenic.
This account of the virus is based on interviews with law enforcement and investigators involved in the original case, contemporaneous CNN reporting and reports by the FBI, Philippines police and the Pentagon.
Multiple attempts to reach Onel de Guzman for this article, including through his family and former lawyer, were unsuccessful. De Guzman has not commented publicly on the case since 2000, and his current whereabouts are unknown.
The Cloud Foundry Foundation, home to open source projects simplifying the developer experience, announced today it has launched a hub for Cloud Foundry-related tutorials to streamline the discovery and learning process for developers interested in learning more about the family of open source projects.
“We picked a common MLPerf model, ResNet-50, and chose a batch size of 1 and a data precision of FP16 to focus our study on runtime related op dispatch overhead. In comparing the performance of GPU inference over TFRT to the current runtime, we saw an improvement of 28% in average inference time. These early results are strong validation for TFRT, and we expect it to provide a big boost to performance,” explained TFRT product manager Eric Johnson and TFRT tech lead Mingsheng Hong in a blog post.
Google today made available TensorFlow RunTime (TFRT), a new runtime for its TensorFlow machine learning framework that provides a unified, extensible infrastructure layer with high performance across a range of hardware. Its release in open source on GitHub follows a preview earlier this year during a session at the 2020 TensorFlow Dev Summit, where TFRT was shown to speed up core loops in a key benchmarking test.
Google LLC has released the code for Tapas, an internally developed artificial intelligence that can take a natural language question such as “What’s the name of the latest iPhone?” and fetch the answer from a relational database or spreadsheet.
The search giant’s researchers detailed the AI on Thursday. Tapas is based on BERT, a natural-language processing technique Google uses in its search engine.
Google today open-sourced a machine learning model that can point to answers to natural language questions (for example, “Which wrestler had the most number of reigns?”) in spreadsheets and databases. The model’s creators claim it’s even capable of finding answers spread across cells or that might require aggregating multiple cells.
Google is reportedly working to acquire enterprise cloud software company D2iQ for over $250 million. Currently, Google has partnered D2iQ for company’s Cloud Platform and G Suite service, and acquiring D2iQ could help Google compete with Amazon.
"Google originally developed Kubernetes, the open source server-management technology that D2iQ has integrated into its software offerings," The Street reported on Monday.
D2iQ investors include Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Khosla Ventures, Koch Disruptive Technologies, Microsoft, Andreessen Horowitz and T. Rowe Price Associates.
Earlier this month, D2iQ was awarded a US Department of Defense Enterprise Software Initiative contract.
Facebook open-sourced Blender, which contains a diverse set of conversational skills including empathy, knowledge, and personality together in one system.
Blender is an open-domain chatbot developed at Facebook AI Research (FAIR), Facebook’s AI and machine learning division. According to FAIR, it is the first chatbot that has learned to blend several conversation skills, including the ability to show empathy and discuss nearly any topic, beating Google's chatbot in tests with human evaluators.
Facebook’s AI has built an open-sourced Blender, the largest, open-domain chatbot, the tech giant's blog noted.
It has been trained on 9.4 billion parameters -- nearly 4 times as many as Google’s Meena and more than 10 times as many as the previous largest OS chatbot available on the internet, Engadget reported.
Facebook AI Research (FAIR), Facebook’s AI and machine learning division, today detailed work on a comprehensive AI chatbot framework called Blender. FAIR claims that Blender, which is available in open source on GitHub, is the largest-ever open-domain chatbot and outperforms existing approaches to generating dialogue while “feel[ing] more human,” according to human evaluators.
IOTech is commercializing the EdgeX Foundry software developed in 2017 at Dell. The goal with EdgeX Foundry was to create a library of the different proprietary software options used in industries ranging from manufacturing to retail, and to provide a middleware layer that could stitch the data coming from those different platforms together so customers could get a unified view of their operations.
Kong Inc., a cloud connectivity company, is releasing a new open source tool called Insomnia Designer, offering a collaborative API design editor.
Building on Insomnia Core, which Kong acquired in 2019, the software works natively with Insomnia’s testing capabilities to accelerate the development, performance and stability of REST and GraphQL services, the communications backbone of the modern applications and services people rely on each day.
Kong Inc., the leading cloud connectivity company, today announced the release of a new open source tool called Insomnia Designer. Building on Insomnia Core, which Kong acquired in 2019, Insomnia Designer provides a collaborative API design editor that makes it easier for developers and DevOps teams to create and edit API specifications. The software works natively with Insomnia's testing capabilities to accelerate the development, performance and stability of REST and GraphQL services, the communications backbone of the modern applications and services people rely on each day. Insomnia Designer is available now at https://insomnia.rest/download or can be downloaded by Kong Enterprise customers as part of Kong Studio.
Insomnia Designer is Kong’s recently open sourced collaborative design editor for APIs that aims to make it easier for developers and DevOps teams to create and edit API specifications.
The software works natively with Insomnia’s testing capabilities to accelerate the development, performance, and stability of REST and GraphQL services.
Open source encourages standards setting and pooling of resources to address audacious problems in finance. “Over the last few years, FINOS successfully created a community of buy-side, sell-side, fintech and tech companies who work together on a wide range of open source projects and standards, “ said Dov Katz, FINOS vice chairperson and distinguished engineer at Morgan Stanley.
LF Networking (LFN) has extended its tentacles further into the open source underbelly of telco cloud strategies with the launch of a new project, the curiously-named XGVela.
LFN, the arm of the Linux Foundation that is focused on open source R&D for next generation networking in projects such as ONAP, OPNFV and OpenDaylight, says the formation of the project, based on work contributed by China Mobile, is part of its efforts to “accelerate telco cloud adoption.”
At the heart of XGVela is code designed to enable a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) frame upon which 5G network services (and other applications) can be designed and developed. The initial work has focused on bringing existing open source PaaS functionality from other open source working groups (such as Grafana and Zookeeper – love these names!) and developing that functionality to meet telco requirements.
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In a nutshell, the project (contributed by IBM), “simplifies the job of getting the right applications and machine learning onto the right compute devices, and keeps those applications running and updated. It also enables the autonomous management of more than 10,000 edge devices simultaneously,” which would be very handy.
LF Networking, a group spearheaded by the Linux Foundation, today introduced what it describes as the first open source platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for 5G network functions. XGVela was donated by China Mobile and has also gained support or interest from China Unicom, China Telecom, ZTE, Ericsson, Nokia, Intel, and Red Hat.
Micron Technology has announced what is claimed to be the first open-source, heterogeneous-memory storage engine, created particularly for SSDs and SCM. Legacy storage engines born in the era of HDDs failed to architecturally cater for the expanded performance and decreased latency of next-generation nonvolatile media. HSE, originally developed by the company and now offered to the open-source community, is perfect for developers utilising all-flash infrastructure who need the benefits of open-source software, including the capability to customise or enhance code for their unique use cases.
Micron recently announced that its HSE (Heterogeneous-Memory Storage Engine) platform designed for SSDs, storage-class memory, and other storage applications, is now available to the open-source community. The company claims this is the world's first open-source storage engine built for SSDs and storage-class memory.
Growing enterprise demand for object-based storage along with the proliferation of all-flash memory infrastructure has prompted one hardware vendor to release an open source version of its memory-class storage technology.
Micron Technology, Inc. (Nasdaq: MU), today announced the first open-source, heterogeneous- memory storage engine (HSE), designed specifically for solid-state drives (SSDs) and storage-class memory (SCM). Legacy storage engines born in the era of hard disk drives (HDDs) failed to architecturally provide for the increased performance and reduced latency of next-generation nonvolatile media. HSE, originally developed by Micron and now available to the open-source community, is ideal for developers using all-flash infrastructure who require the benefits of open-source software, including the ability to customize or enhance code for their unique use cases.
Fresh from a report (PDF) jointly published by authors from The Ohio State University, New York University, and CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security comes word that 12,706 apps surveyed with a new static analysis technique called InputScope had hidden backdoors, hidden master passwords, secret access keys, hidden blacklist words, and secret commands embedded within them. These vulnerabilities allow users to access admin-only functions, or attackers to gain access to user information and user accounts.
An article on ZDNet dug further into the report. The authors had surveyed 100,000 of the most popular apps in the Google Play store (based on the number of installations), the top 20,000 apps hosted on third party app stores, and 30,000 apps that came preinstalled on Samsung handsets.
Overall, they found that nearly 6,900 apps from the Google Play store had hidden backdoors or functions. Nearly 1,100 apps from the third party app stores had hidden backdoors. Meanwhile, nearly 4,800 preinstalled apps from Samsung handsets (almost 16%) featured hidden backdoors.
More than 4,000 apps (total) featured hidden "bad word" filters to filter out curse words, racial slurs, political words (even the names of some political leaders), gambling, cult references, pornography, and drugs.
The authors of the report did not divulge the names of the apps where they found these security issues, in order to protect the users of those apps from malicious actors. The app developers were all notified of the findings, but not all of the app developers responded.
The weakness could allow cyber criminals to delete files and cause crashes on your machine – allowing them to install malware. Dubbed “Symlink Races,” the technique uses symbolic links to align malicious files to legitimate ones on your PC.
This happens during the brief time after the software has scanned a file for viruses, but before it has been removed by the anti-virus.
It's a clever way of scamming the very applications designed to keep your machine safe from malware and scams. Most worrying of all, Rack911 has warned anti-virus users that taking advantage of the bug to attack a Windows 10, macOS or Linux machine is "trivial".
Researchers discovered a .git folder exposing passwords and more for a website that gives advice to organizations about complying with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules.
A website that gives advice on privacy regulation compliance has fixed a security issue that was exposing MySQL database settings — including passwords — to anyone on the internet.
The website, GDPR.EU, is an advice site for organizations that are struggling to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) laws that were imposed by the EU in 2018. The website is operated by Proton Technologies AG, the company behind end-to-end encrypted mail service ProtonMail. While it isn’t an official EU commission site, it is partly co-funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Union, an EU research and innovation program.
Big Tech, no stranger to tracking your smartphone, wants to make sure governments are doing it carefully. Apple and Google released a beta API this week that health authorities can use to develop such apps. It uses Bluetooth, a proximity-based approach meant to reduce privacy fears by keeping data decentralized and the identity of disease carriers anonymous.
But critics note that even Bluetooth has shortcomings and security risks. And they’re even more skeptical of contact-tracing systems that use location data and centralized databases, as they do in China, India, South Korea, and even Norway.
Five of these Facebook Groups — Wisconsinites, Pennsylvanians, Ohioans, Minnesotans, and New Yorkers Against Excessive Quarantine — are being run by a single family, the Dorrs. Facebook displays the administrators for both public and private Groups.
As the Washington Post points out, the groups run by the Dorr family have a combined 200,000 members and counting. All were created in the past week.
The trio created the groups "Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantine," "Pennsylvanians Against Excessive Quarantine," "Ohioans Against Excessive Quarantine" and "New Yorkers Against Excessive Quarantine" in recent days.
Many of the groups' members have pushed false information about the coronavirus, claiming that the threat was overhyped and disputing directives from public health officials to wear masks in public.
Pakistan’s minister of state for parliamentary affairs has called for the beheading of people who commit blasphemy.
“Beheading is the only punishment for those who mock Prophet Muhammad,” Ali Muhammad Khan tweeted in the Urdu language.
Khan made the controversial comments in response to conflicting reports that Ahmadis had been given representation on a newly established National Minorities Council. Ahmadis do not believe that Muhammad was the last prophet.
On Jan. 30, Christian Solidarity International (CSI) issued a genocide warning for Nigeria, calling on the Permanent Member of the United Nations Security Council to take action. CSI issued the call in response to “a rising tide of violence directed against Nigerian Christians and others classified as ‘infidels’ by Islamist militants in the country’s north and middle belt regions.’”
Nigeria ranked 12th on Open Doors’ 2020 World Watch List of countries where Christians suffer the most persecution but second in the number of Christians killed for their faith, behind Pakistan.
Overall, renewable power capacity is expected to grow by another 50 percent by 2024 with solar leading the way, according to the International Energy Agency. It's also the only part of the energy sector the agency projects to grow in 2020, while fossil fuels are expected to take a major hit because of the decline in energy demands stemming from the pandemic.
Cancel rent.
Even as the death toll in the U.S. from COVID-19 climbs to 63,583 and increasing numbers of Americans are forced to decide whether to forgo potentially life-saving treatment or face bankruptcy, we are bombarded daily with pro-corporate rhetoric opposed to universal health care systems. We are told that the market is the most efficient mechanism for distributing goods and services, including health care, and that social democratic policies like Medicare for All are a fiscal “fantasy” that would leave us with inferior quality care.
The ousting of "America's #1 climate denier" from the leadership position on the board of the largest global lender of fossil fuels is being welcomed by the climate movement.
Workers from Amazon, Instacart, Target, Shipt and Whole Foods launched a nationwide May Day strike Friday, protesting treatment and working conditions amid the coronavirus pandemic.
The global pandemic is forcing us to examine our relationship to the world around us.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. — On her first day at her new warehouse job, Daria Meeks assumed the business would provide face coverings. It didn’t.
She assumed her fellow workers would be spread out to account for the new coronavirus. They weren’t.
A home health aide who earns just under $13 per hour is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed Thursday against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, whose department has continued garnishing the wages of hundreds of thousands of student loan borrowers in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
"Don't let anyone tell you that the Trump administration is wholly incompetent. They are really good at undermining independent oversight and democratic norms."
Here's a brief guide to understanding trumpian sarcasm.
In an April report that warns of the risks of fraud in mail-in voting, a conservative legal group significantly inflated a key statistic, a ProPublica analysis found. The Public Interest Legal Foundation reported that more than 1 million ballots sent out to voters in 2018 were returned as undeliverable. Taken at face value, that would represent a 91% increase over the number of undeliverable mail ballots in 2016, a sign that a vote-by-mail system would be a “catastrophe” for elections, the group argued.
However, after ProPublica provided evidence to PILF that it had in fact doubled the official government numbers, the organization corrected its figure. The number of undeliverable mail ballots dropped slightly from 2016 to 2018.
After three indecisive elections, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his opponent Benny Gantz agreed to form a unity government in light of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Reporters Without Borders suggested in a statement that Mr. Hussain’s death could have followed an abduction “at the behest of a Pakistani intelligence agency.” Taliban and Islamic State militants operate in Mr. Hussain’s home province in Pakistan, as do criminal groups.
Pakistan has long been a dangerous country for journalists, who regularly face threats, intimidation and attacks from a vast array of forces, ranging from the country’s powerful intelligence agencies to its militant groups. The Committee to Protect Journalists has documented more than 60 instances in which Pakistani journalists have been killed in direct relation to their work over the past three decades.
Pearl was South Asia bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal when he was abducted in Karachi in January 2002 while researching a story about religious extremism.
A graphic video showing his decapitation was delivered to the US consulate nearly a month later.
According to the petition, the Sindh High Court has failed to note that this was a brutal murder as a result of international terrorism and the principle of the standard of proof, as well as the benefit of doubt in cases of international terrorism, has to be applied keeping in the context that the nature and type of evidence available in such terrorism cases cannot be equated with cases involving non-terrorism crimes.
"Therefore, it is obvious and apparent that the impugned judgment is clearly erroneous because it is fundamentally based on a misinterpretation of law and misreading of the entire record of Special Case No. 26 of 2002," the petition stated, and added that the impugned judgment is liable to be set aside.
Three alleged accomplices also had their convictions overturned.
But Pakistan's interior ministry said late Friday the four would remain in jail while prosecutors appeal their acquittals in the country's Supreme Court.
The men have been rearrested and will be detained "for a period of three months pending filing of the appeal", the interior ministry said.
The statement reiterated the government's "commitment to follow due process under the laws of the country to bring terrorists to task".
An annual human rights report released this week gives Pakistan a failing grade, charging that too little is being done to protect the country’s most vulnerable, including women and children.
The 264-page report by the Independent Pakistan Human Rights Commission laid out a litany of human rights failings. They include unabated honor killings, forced conversions of minority Hindu under-age girls and continued use of a blasphemy law that carries the death penalty to intimidate and settle scores.
In December, Pakistan was ranked 151st out of 153 by the World Economic Forum on the Global Gender Gap Index.
Now, anyone in Sudan who performs female genital mutilation faces a possible three-year prison term and a fine under an amendment to Sudan’s criminal code approved last week by the country’s transitional government, which came to power only last year following the ouster of longtime dictator Omar Hassan al-Bashir.
“This is a massive step for Sudan and its new government,” said Nimco Ali of the Five Foundation, an organization that campaigns for an end to genital mutilation globally. “Africa cannot prosper unless it takes care of girls and women. They are showing this government has teeth.”
Genital mutilation is practiced in at least 27 African countries, as well as parts of Asia and the Middle East. Other than Sudan and Egypt, it is most prevalent in Ethiopia, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Djibouti and Senegal, according to the United Nations Population Fund.
An amendment of the country's criminal code was passed outlawing FGM, the Sudanese Foreign Ministry said in a statement, adding that the action fell under the government's commitment to international human rights agreements.
According to United Nations data around 88% of the female population in Sudan have suffered FGM, making it one of the world's most-affected nations.
A Manhattan federal judge has ruled the Federal Communications Commission must provide two reporters access to server logs that may provide new insight into the allegations of fraud stemming from agency’s 2017 net neutrality rollback.
As most of us are cooped up in our homes due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, it's somewhat natural that we turn to online movies, music, and other media to help pass the time. For most people, this involves turning to Internet streaming for convenient, "all-in-one" services that promise an endless array of recommendations to while away the hours. "Binging" is all well and good every once in a while, but we should remain careful that the ways we're getting our media don't come with compromises to our freedom. As we've mentioned before, Netflix and other giant media providers are responsible for keeping the practice of DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) alive, and it's important not to provide them with the subscription fees they need to keep going. It's also important, even under less dire circumstances, to support businesses and websites that provide DRM-free media, and to promote them to our friends. So to help provide you with a plethora of DRM-free and often gratis places to stream from while keeping your rights, here's a few choice selections from our Guide to DRM-free Living.
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Time under quarantine is also the perfect opportunity to learn about new topics -- even the fight against DRM itself! The [LibrePlanet video library][17] is an excellent place to find talks covering issues relating to the Defective by Design campaign, such as Cory Doctorow's keynote presentation on the "software you can go to jail for talking about", this 2019 session from the Library Freedom Institute, and a talk given on the Right to Repair movement.
No matter what types of media you enjoy or what your favorite genres are, your friends at Defective by Design sincerely wish you the best in this difficult period. And if you've found the information we've listed above helpful, visit this link to learn how you can support the campaign. In addition to our Twitter account, a platform we recommend only with caveats, the Defective by Design campaign is now on Mastodon at @endDRM. To show your support of the campaign publicly, you can use the #drmfree or #defectivebydesign hashtags from your own favorite microblogging service.
Last year, Tesla initiated a lawsuit against Guangzhi Cao, a former Autopilot engineer who quit to join Xpeng’s autonomous driving team.
In the lawsuit, the automaker claims that Cao downloaded the Autopilot source code to his personal device through Airdrop before leaving and selling it to Xpeng when joining the company.
Tesla also made similar accusations against its former head of Autopilot, Sterling Anderson, when he went on to launch his own startup, but Tesla ended up dropping the lawsuit.
Today is the day of the "launch" of the opposition procedure before the French Patent Office ("Institut National de la Propriété Intellectuelle" or "INPI").
This procedure is a new way to challenge the validity of a French patent, alongside the claim for invalidity.
Opposition may be filed against any French patent which mention of grant has been published in the Official Bulletin of Industrial Property as of 1st April 2020.
On the face of it, this "French-style" opposition procedure seems relatively similar to that of the EPO.
[...]
Due to its specific features, the new opposition procedure requires the assistance, as early as the procedure before the INPI, of a counsel having both technical and scientific competence, experience of the opposition procedure before the EPO and experience of patent litigation in France, in order to determine the best possible strategy with regard to other options (invalidity, limitation, infringement, etc.) in terms of time, cost and chances of success, and to best anticipate the procedural rules applicable before the Court of Appeal, in particular inadmissibility .
The question of who, or rather what, can be an inventor has taken a front-row seat as use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes increasingly prominent in research and innovation. On April 22, 2020, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a decision stating that inventorship under U.S. patent law is limited to natural persons and rejecting an application for an invention by DABUS, an AI machine. We review the reasoning behind this decision, its relation to decisions in other jurisdictions, and some implications of this outcome.
In the filed application,[1] the transmittal documents listed the sole inventor’s given name as “DABUS” and the family name as “Invention generated by artificial intelligence.” At the time of filing, Stephen Thaler, the individual who submitted the patent application, explained to the USPTO that DABUS conceived the invention through use of trained neural networks and without human intervention. The USPTO issued a document known as a “Notice to File Missing Parts,” indicating that the application failed to identify the inventor by his/her legal name. Thaler subsequently filed a petition requesting supervisory review of inventorship of the application in question. Thaler claimed that DABUS independently and autonomously created the claimed invention and that DABUS was not specifically trained in the relevant area of the invention. Accordingly, Thaler’s arguments continued, DABUS should be recognized as the inventor of the subject application.
Less than four years after the substantial structural reform of the Boards of Appeal ("Boards") of the European Patent Office, the new Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal ("RPBA2020" or "New Rules") entered into force on January 1, 2020. The main aim of the New Rules is to improve efficiency and increase predictability of appeal proceedings. Compared to the old RPBA, RPBA2020 emphasize the judicial review nature of the appeal proceedings. Stricter restraints are applied on the introduction of new requests, facts, objections, arguments, and evidence at the appeal stage, which will make the proceedings more frontloaded.
Previously, submissions including requests, facts, objections, arguments, and evidence—that do not form the basis of the first instance decision or that are changed during the appeal procedure—may be admissible at the discretion of the Boards. Under the New Rules, the admission of such changes will become more difficult as they are to be considered as an exception to the general principle that a party may not change its case at second instance.
The appeal proceedings under RPBA2020 are characterized by "three stages of convergence" with Stage 1 (filing of grounds of appeal and the reply thereof), Stage 2 (before summons to oral proceedings), and Stage 3 (after the summons) imposing increasingly stricter restrictions on introducing amendments to the proceedings. The scope of an appeal case is defined by the requests, facts, objections, arguments, and evidence —including minutes of first instance oral proceedings—upon which the first instance decision under appeal is based. Any submission of a party during appeal proceedings, that does not form a basis of the contested decision, is now regarded as an amendment unless it can be demonstrated that such submission was timely filed, substantiated, and maintained at the first instance. At Stage 1, a party is required to clearly identify any amendment to its case and provide reasons for submitting such amendment on appeal. The decision lies within the Boards' discretion, after such factors as complexity of the amendment and its suitability to address the relevant issues, as well as the need for procedural economy have been fully considered. In particular, the Boards will likely not admit submissions which were not admitted, should have been submitted, or were no longer maintained at first instance.
At Stage 2, the party must thoroughly reason and justify any intended amendment to the case. The admittance of any amendment at this stage is solely at the discretion of the Boards. Particularly, applicant/patentee bears the burden to demonstrate not only that the amendments prima facie overcome the objections on file, but also that such amendments do not give rise to new objections. Stage 3 applies the most stringent restraints, establishing that any amendment will in principle no longer be taken into account unless, under exceptional circumstances, justified with cogent reasons by the party concerned.
This may sound like a utopian fantasy, but it is actually a description of how the flu vaccine has been produced for the past 50 years. Through the World Health Organization’s Global Influenza Surveillance and Response System, experts from around the world convene twice a year to analyze and discuss the latest data on emerging flu strains, and to decide which strains should be included in each year’s vaccine. As a network of laboratories spanning 110 countries, funded almost entirely by governments (and partly by foundations), GISRS epitomizes what Amy Kapczynski of Yale Law School calls “open science.” Because GISRS is focused solely on protecting human lives, rather than turning a profit, it is uniquely capable of gathering, interpreting, and distributing actionable knowledge for the development of vaccines. While this approach may have been taken for granted in the past, its advantages are quickly becoming clear. In responding to the pandemic, the global scientific community has shown a remarkable willingness to share knowledge of potential treatments, coordinate clinical trials, develop new models transparently, and publish findings immediately. In this new climate of cooperation, it is easy to forget that commercial pharmaceutical companies have for decades been privatizing and locking up the knowledge commons by extending control over life-saving drugs through unwarranted, frivolous, or secondary patents, and by lobbying against the approval and production of generics. With the arrival of COVID-19, it is now painfully obvious that such monopolization comes at the cost of human lives. Monopoly control over the technology used in testing for the virus has hampered the rapid rollout of more testing kits, just as 3M’s 441 patents mentioning “respirator” or “N95” have made it more difficult for new producers to manufacture medical-grade face masks at scale. Worse, multiple patents are in force in most of the world for three of the most promising treatments for COVID-19 – remdesivir, favipiravir, and lopinavir/ritonavir. Already, these patents are preventing competition and threatening both the affordability and the supply of new drugs. We now have a choice between two futures. In the first scenario, we continue as usual, relying on the big pharmaceutical companies, hoping that some potential treatment for COVID-19 will make it through clinical trials, and that other technologies for detection, testing, and protection will emerge. In this future, patents will give monopoly suppliers control over most of these innovations. The suppliers will set the price high, forcing downstream rationing of care. In the absence of strong public intervention, lives will be lost, particularly in developing countries.
Dallas Invents is a weekly look at U.S. patents granted with a connection to the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area. Listings include patents granted to local assignees and/or those with a North Texas inventor. Patent activity can be an indicator of future economic growth, as well as the development of emerging markets and talent attraction. By tracking both inventors and assignees in the region, we aim to provide a broader view of the region’s inventive activity. Listings are organized by Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC).
The Smithsonian launched an open-access website that removes any copyright restriction from 2.8 million images on its digital collection, labeling them with the Creative Commons “Zero” designation.
Smithsonian Open Access allows users to download, share, and reuse millions of 2D and 3D digital items, including images and data from 19 museums, 9 research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.
The mystery surrounding the sudden shutdown of pirate streaming site Nites.tv seems to be over, with the platform's domain name now in the hands of the Motion Picture Association. Out of the blue the site began receiving a lot of press lately but the party ended mid-April when the platform shut down after pledging respect for copyrights.
Last year, a group of major record labels failed to hold two popular YouTube rippers liable for copyright infringement in the US when a district court dismissed the case due to a lack of jurisdiction. The music companies appealed the verdict and this week both parties were back in court, portraying the sites as either innocent tape recorders, or mass copyright infringement hubs.
