Breaking down NetMarketShare’s figures in to Linux versions reveals that Ubuntu usage alone leapt from 0.27% of all desktop OSes tracked in March to 1.89% in April.
That’s an almost 7x increase for one distro in one month.
Naturally plenty of (very sensible) reasons have been put forward to explain the influx of Linux users, with the “people not being at work which forces them to use Windows software” excuse sounding the most plausible.
Of course, as seen a few years back, it possible that this spike is simply an error. Heck trying to discern a precise figure on the number of desktop computers out there running some flavour of Linux is …Well, how long is a piece of string?
It appears that during the Coronavirus lock-down, the Linux market share according to website NetMarketShare has seen quite a large bump.
While calculating the market share of a desktop operating system is never going to be exactly correct, sites like NetMarketShare are one of the best ways to look at it. According to their stats the Linux share has bumped between around 1.5% and 2% for some time. That changed when they recently put up April's stats, which shows the Linux market overall according to them at 2.87%.
The biggest winner appears to be Ubuntu when looking over what Linux versions they track. Ubuntu alone seemed to go from 0.27% in March up to 1.89% in April.
What's really the most popular operating system? That depends on how you look at them and who's doing the looking. For example, Net Applications shows Windows on top of the desktop operating system mountain with 88.14% of the market. That's not surprising, but Linux -- yes Linux -- seems to have jumped from 1.36% share in March to 2.87% share in April. Has the Linux desktop seen a sudden surge in popularity?
I doubt it. I'm writing this story on a PC running Linux Mint and I've been a Linux desktop user since Bash, rather than KDE or GNOME, was the Linux desktop interface.
  Chromebooks can now run Linux-based applications, and even though the feature is mostly intended for use by developers, it can also benefit regular Chromebook owners. There are some tasks that websites and Android apps still aren't great at, which is where Linux applications might be able to help.
This isn't a simple compilation of the best Linux apps, because plenty of those exist already. Instead, the goal here is to recommend solutions for tasks that cannot be adequately filled by web or Android apps. For example, serious photo editing isn't really possible through the web, and options on the Play Store are limited, but Gimp is perfect for it.
It's only been a few short days, but Pop!_OS 20.04 has quickly made its way up my list of all-time favorite Linux distributions. Although the operating system, created by System76, is based on Ubuntu 20.04 and contains a (mostly) generic GNOME desktop interface, there are certain things Pop!_OS does that keep it from being just another spin on Canonical's baby.
Sure, Pop!_OS starts with the usual updates to Ubuntu 20.04: There's the new kernel, GNOME, and all of the other bits that come along with the latest iteration. But System76 has taken 20.04 to a completely different level.
It all starts with System76 truly knowing its audience. That alone sets this company—and the Linux distribution it creates—apart from all others. System76 fully understands who they serve: Developers, creators, and anyone who demands a highly productive environment.
Usually, my articles about Kubernetes administration are full of kubectl commands for administration for your clusters. Recently, however, someone pointed me to the k9s project for a fast way to review and resolve day-to-day issues in Kubernetes. It's been a huge improvement to my workflow and I'll show you how to get started in this tutorial.
Installation can be done on a Mac, in Windows, and Linux. Instructions for each operating system can be found here. Be sure to complete installation to be able to follow along.
I will be using Linux and Minikube, which is a lightweight way to run Kubernetes on a personal computer. Install it following this tutorial or by using the documentation.
Late last summer, SIG Docs started a community conversation about third party content in Kubernetes docs. This conversation became a Kubernetes Enhancement Proposal (KEP) and, after five months for review and comment, SIG Architecture approved the KEP as a content guide for Kubernetes docs.
Anchore might make you think of anchovies, anchors, chores, s’mores or perhaps even a nicely chilled bottle of Piat D’Or.
It is of course none of those things, Anchore is a container compliance and security platform.
On May 4th, IBM Developer hosted the Build Smart on Kubernetes Challenge, revolving around various components of open source and cloud native development.
Firefox 76 arrives with improvements to its built-in password manager and picture-in-picture support, The Linux Foundation launches a new effort to build a common global trust framework, Microsoft seeks security stress-testing for its Linux-powered IoT platform, and nominations open for the latest round of Fedora elections.
Presto is an open-source distributed SQL query engine for running interactive analytic queries against data sources of all sizes ranging from gigabytes to petabytes. Presto allows querying data where it lives, including Hive, Cassandra, relational databases, or even proprietary data stores. A single Presto query can combine data from multiple sources, allowing for analytics across your entire organization.
window managers, allan, good stuff, movies
I'm announcing the release of the 5.6.11 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...
For as long as operating systems have had kernels, there has been a need to extract information from data structures stored within those kernels. Over the years, a wide range of approaches have been taken to make that information available. In current times, it has become natural to reach for BPF as the tool of choice for a variety of problems, and getting information from kernel data structures is no exception. There are two patches in circulation that take rather different approaches to using BPF to dump information from kernel data structures to user space.
When your editor first encountered paleolithic Unix systems, tools like ps would obtain their information by opening /dev/kmem and rooting around directly in the kernel's memory space. This approach had the advantage of requiring no direct kernel support, but there were also some disadvantages, including security issues, lack of atomicity in the collection of complex data, and occasionally returning random garbage. This behavior was perhaps acceptable in the early days, but contemporary users have become strangely less tolerant of it. So digging around in kernel memory has long since fallen out of favor.
In current Linux systems, this problem is solved with a collection of system calls and virtual files in /proc, sysfs, debugfs, and beyond. This approach works, but has some challenges of its own. The kernel must be modified whenever the information to be output changes, "debugging" information in debugfs ends up being needed for normal system operations (where debugfs should not be enabled), and changes can be hard to make without breaking existing applications. So there is a natural desire for something more flexible and adaptable.
The realtime scheduler classes are intended to allow a developer to state which tasks have the highest priorities with the assurance that, at any given time, the highest-priority task will have unimpeded access to the CPU. The kernel itself carries out a number of tasks that have tight time constraints, so it is natural to want to assign realtime priorities to kernel threads carrying out those tasks. But, as Peter Zijlstra argues in a new patch set, it makes little sense for the kernel to be assigning such priorities; to put an end to that practice, he is proposing to take away most of the kernel's ability to prioritize its own threads.
In the classic realtime model, there are two scheduling classes: SCHED_FIFO and SCHED_RR. Processes in either class have a simple integer priority. SCHED_FIFO processes run until they voluntarily give up the CPU, with the highest-priority process going first. SCHED_RR, instead, rotates through all runnable processes at the highest priority level, giving each a fixed time slice. In either class, processes with a lower realtime priority will be completely blocked until all higher-priority processes are blocked, and processes in either class will, regardless of priority level, run ahead of normal, non-realtime work in the SCHED_NORMAL class.
The kernel pushes a large (and increasing) amount of work out into kernel threads, which are special processes running within the kernel's address space. This is done to allow that work to happen independently of any other thread of execution, under the control of the system scheduler. Most kernel threads run in the SCHED_NORMAL class and must contend with ordinary user-space processes for CPU time. Others, though, are deemed special enough that they should run ahead of user-space work; one way to make that happen is to put those threads into the SCHED_FIFO class.
But then a question arises: which priority should any given thread have? Answering that question requires judging the importance of a given thread relative to all of the other threads running at realtime priority — and relative to any user-space realtime work as well. That is going to be a difficult question to answer, even if the answer turns out to be the same for every system and workload, which seems unlikely. In general, kernel developers don't even try; they just pick something.
Recently we noted the latest revision to AMD's Programmer Reference Manual points to PCID and MPK/PKEY support coming on future CPUs. New Linux patches now confirm that the MPK support is on the way with next-gen EPYC processors.
The Memory Protection Key (PKE) support has been supported by Intel processors since Xeon Skylake and allow for page-based memory protections with the RDPKRU and WRPKRU instructions. As noted in the PRM, the feature "provides a way for applications to impose page-based data access protections (read/write, read-only or no access), without requiring modification of page tables and subsequent TLB invalidations when the application changes protection domains."
The end of this massive article posits a very interesting question. What init system does Chrome OS use? And Android? Do you know, without looking it up? Probably not.
What does that tell you?
David Airlie's "multi-sample support extravaganza" for the LLVMpipe software driver has been merged into Mesa 20.2-devel.
This big set of patches for LLVMpipe enables working 4x multi-sample anti-aliasing and includes window system multi-sampling and support for the OpenGL extensions of EXT_framebuffer_multisample, ARB_texture_multisample, ARB_sample_shading, and ARM_shader_texture_image_samples.
Airlie noted in the merge request this support has been tested with the Piglit test cases as well as Unigine Heaven.
 
Given the recent releases of Fedora 32, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Manjaro 20.0, and others, here is a fresh eight-way Linux distribution benchmark comparison.
The Linux distributions benchmarked this round included Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Fedora Workstation 32, openSUSE Tumbleweed, CentOS Stream, Manjaro 20.0, Debian Testing, Clear Linux 32910, and EndeavourOS Rolling.
Open-source, cross-platform vector drawing package Inkscape has reached its version 1.0 milestone after many years of development.
Inkscape can be seen as an alternative to commercial products such as Adobe Illustrator or Serif Affinity Designer – though unlike Inkscape, neither of those run on Linux. The native format of Inkscape is SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), the web standard.
We took a look at the release candidate last month. The release has been three years in the making, and comes more than 16 years after the first tentative release in 2003. A member of the development team, Marc Jeanmougin, told us that the long development time was because "it's just volunteer work", combined with technical challenges related to the migration from GNOME's GTK+ library 2 to GTK 3.
Many improvements, including HiDPI support, come as part of this transition. The team has also worked on performance, especially on complex SVG objects that have a large number of nodes.
Inkscape 1.0 is most significant for Mac users. Previous releases for macOS required a compatibility component called XQuartz, which enables applications designed for the X windowing system to run on macOS Quartz, part of Apple's Core Graphics framework. This is no longer required and Inkscape 1.0 is now a native macOS application – though it is not all good news. The announcement noted: "This latest version is labelled as 'preview', which means that additional improvements are scheduled for the next versions."
Terraria is set to come to a close with the almighty Journey's End update coming out on May 16, with that comes a huge new game mode with Journey Mode that was detailed today.
Re-Logic said that their goal with Journey Mode is to "provide a more accessible experience by providing the player unprecedented control over the gameplay experience". They make it sound like it's a Creative Mode like seen in many others but it's a lot more than that, it's an entirely different way to play. So different in fact, Journey Mode has its own character saves and you can't mix characters between modes.
Valve has ended SteamVR support for Apple’s MacOS, in an abrupt but not entirely unexpected move.
SteamVR for MacOS was introduced in June 2017, after an announcement at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference that year. However, after less than just three years, the program is shutting down.
“SteamVR has ended MacOS support so our team can focus on Windows and Linux,” according to a SteamVR update, Legacy builds will continue to be available, allowing developers to continue building virtual reality apps for the platform, though Valve will no longer work on new features and bug fixes.
Songs of Syx blends quite a lot of genres together. It's part city-builder, real-time strategy, grand strategy and more. Thankfully it's also been funded with a successful Kickstarter campaign that ended yesterday with about €£23K in funding from over 800 backers.
This one I'm particularly excited about because of the scale. As you're building a kingdom you will be dealing with different races, cultures, night and day, climate change, pirates and bandits. As you expand further you also then deal with other kingdoms, and perhaps even war with massive battles.
DOSBox is about to get more advanced, with the community-made 'soft' fork dosbox-staging have a first proper release out. Made as an attempt to reinvigorate DOSBox development, it has a very admirable aim.
The point, they say, is to provide a better experience than the standard DOSBox and hopefully get their work into the upstream project to improve it for everyone.
We will release a Cores Progress report soon going over all the core changes that have happened since the last report. It’s an exhaustive list, and especially the older consoles will receive a lot of new cores and improvements.
The RetroArch team have put up another fresh release of their front-end for emulators, game engines and more. RetroArch 1.8.6 comes with some big new tricks.
A major optimization is included with this releasing to do with their config system. They've reduced disk I/O overhead, by ensuring RetroArch doesn't write to the config when it's just not needed so you might find it feels a bit snappier and nicer on SSDs.
Steamdolls - Order of Chaos was announced recently from developer The Shady Gentlemen, giving a metroidvania a steampunk style with some brutal action. Due to launch sometime soon on Kickstarter with Linux support (confirmed), it looks like fun.
Blast your way to your objective or stick to the shadows and perform violent assassinations on unsuspecting guards as you struggle with the haunting apparitions of a mesmerizing witch trying to reveal the truth about a conspiracy that could shake the very foundation of the world.
Thorium Entertainment along with publisher Fandom have announced the final major update to UnderMine, an action-adventure roguelike with a bit of RPG tossed in, before it leaves Early Access.
With the Golden Core update, you will be entering UnderMine's fifth and final zone. Here, deep within the mine, peasants search for gold in a danger zone, surviving streams of molten metal and omnipresent fire to pick and chip away at the dark secrets lying at the heart of this cavernous shaft.
It's not just aimed at veteran players though, there's more than 150 new encounters spread across the whole game.
Volcanoids is a fantastic idea for a survival game, that lets you build and customize a great big moving drill and this month on May 20 it's getting online co-op support. The most requested feature for the game, according to the developer, and something they've been working on for some time now.
LazyGemsGames are working on Bullet Express, a new 2D action-RPG shooter where you level up and merge guns together to create their ultimate form. You do this while running, gunning and rolling through a moving train know as the Bullet Express.
The train appears to hold certain rare gems, which give you the power to merge weapons. However, they can also increase ones size and strength tenfold, so naturally that's what your enemies are doing and so you will need to face certain monstrosities.
In the release notes for the recent Ubuntu Studio 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) release, the development team talked a bit about what we should expect from future releases.
Ubuntu Studio, an officially recognized Ubuntu flavor designed for general multimedia production, has been using the lightweight Xfce as default desktop environment for a long time now.
However, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu Studio 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) release, the default desktop environment will be switched to the beautiful and modern KDE Plasma.

After writing my article on how to style the Plasma desktop to look like Unity, I received a fair deal of emails from readers, including the author of Latte Dock, offering various tips and suggestions on how to improve my work. This included changes to my panel and dock configuration, the use of other widgets that do not require compilation, some other ideas, and such.
Well, since we're after perfection, a true form of art, it's only natural that I write a sequel. This isn't a comprehensive compilation of all the tips and tricks I received, just a selection of the ones that made most sense to me. Of course, I had to make sure everything actually works, and some things are far from trivial, hence this article. Let's begin.
Hi there! I’m very excited to share that my proposal to work on improving MMS support to the KDE-Connect’s SMS app has been accepted into GSoC 2020. I’m very excited to work on this project. The official coding will begin 1st June and will end on 24th august. To know more about GSoC and KDE click on the given below links.
GSoC is an open-source program hosted by google in which accpted students from all over the world works on an open source project with the assigned mentor for three months. GSoC
Hi everyone! It’s been so long since I started this site, back in July 2017. It’s been mostly to showcase my open source work and have a place for potential business contacts, and I’ve never ever blogged a bit because long prose is kind of difficult for me. (Also, I’m very fearful of our dear internet trolls.)
Today, I’m finally getting out of my shell. I’ve been selected as a participant for Google Summer of Code 2020, working with KDE on the Krita painting suite.
Looking back on my logs, it was in October 2016 (shortly before my graduation) that its maintainer, Boudewijn Rempt, and Pepper & Carrot’s author, David Revoy, welcomed me with open arms to the FOSS world. In the four years that passed, I’ve learnt a lot: graduated, started my MSc, almost finished it, and landed my first job in the industry. I can’t express how deeply thankful I am for their help and advice, so the only way I could think of returning the favor was to tackle a Big Thing in Krita.
For some time now, the GNOME desktop has had the ability to launch specific games and applications using a more powerful GPU if you're in a multi-GPU environment and now it's advancing further.
Improved desktop notifications and a Wayland-compatible battery testing tool are among the 14 projects selected by GNOME for this year’s Google Summer of Code (GSoC).
The yearly, three month long initiative from Google is a mainstay of the free software calendar. Under the guidance of community-based mentors students get paid to work on achievable and practical efforts that benefit users within the open source sphere.
The aim of GSoC is as much about each student learning, maturing and developing their software development skills as it is delivering a ‘tangible’ result at the end of the process.
Projects chosen for the initiative also need to meet a certain set of criteria, and be achievable within the time frame — hence no pie-in-the-sky “build a free and open source 1:1 clone of Adobe Photoshop CC in GTK” type wishes!
DragonFly 5.8.1 is released, a bugfix update for 5.8.0.
I worked on HamBSD today, still looking at improvements to aprsisd(8). My focus today was on gating from the Internet to RF.
In the morning I cleaned up the mess I made yesterday with escaping the non-printable characters in packets before uploading them. I ran some test packets through and both Xastir and aprs.fi could decode them so that must be the correct way to do it.
I also added filtering of generic station queries (?APRS?) and IGate queries (?IGATE?). When an IGate query is seen, aprsisd will now respond with a station capabilities packet. The packet is not very exciting as it only contains the “IGATE” capability right now, but at least it does that.
Third-party packets are also identified, and have their RF headers stripped, and then are unconditionally thrown away. I need to add a check there to see if TCPIP is in the path and gate it if it’s not but I didn’t get to that today.
RetroPie 4.6 is the first official release of the popular retro-gaming platform to officially support the Raspberry Pi 4.
This video goes over the various ways you can install programs on Linux Mint.
System76 has announced the release of Pop!_OS, 20.04. This version is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS codenamed Focal Fossa. Pop!_OS 20.04 features a new Pop!_Shell auto tiling feature, new workspaces shortcuts, and Flatpak support with the Flathub. See the complete details in this video.
F1 2019 running through Steam Play (Proton 5.0-4) Game runs very good, wheel worked with FFB and online works!
In this video, we are looking at KaOS 2020.05
SUSE Linux is one of the oldest Linux distributions still in existence today, with a history that starts in 1994. Today it exists in a few forms, including the commercial SLE offering, which mainly targets the server market.
The openSUSE project creates a community version of the SUSE distribution; its work is largely sponsored by SUSE (the company). OpenSUSE produces two main variants, the relatively stable openSUSE Leap and a rolling version called openSUSE Tumbleweed. Leap is built on packages from SLE, which form a stable base made up of relatively old software releases. For example, the Leap kernel version is the same as in the corresponding SLE version. The openSUSE team adds some changes to the SLE packages, then rebuilds them for Leap; the team also adds newer versions of some packages, such as desktop environments, from Tumbleweed. The current version of Leap is 15.1 (as of April 2020).
There are other types of browser vulnerabilities that are more dangerous; "I know this happens with Firefox occasionally, but when it does, I don't think a next-day response is so bad". There is definitely a need to get updates out in a timely manner, he said, but he thinks "a couple weeks" is timely enough in most cases. "At least with WebKit, regressions are not uncommon and a few days of testing is important to ensure quality user experience."
Kernel updates are also not good candidates for blanket "security update fast-track" treatment, Michel Alexandre Salim said. Kernel updates often do introduce regressions, so it is important to distinguish those that address a critical vulnerability from others that can get additional needed testing, he said. While it is not mentioned in the thread, the upstream kernel policy that obscures the security nature of patches, as described in this article and elsewhere, may make that harder than it needs to be. On the flipside, though, Fedora regularly updates from the stable kernel stream, which fixes lots of security problems—often before they are even known to be vulnerabilities.

As you may know, the Community Platform Engineering (CPE) team that helps manage both infrastructure for both Fedora and CentOS is trying to improve how the different initiatives or requests for changes we receive are planned and prioritized. This effort to improve has led us to look at planning our work in three-month windows. By planning, limiting, and focusing our work every three months, we can dedicate a substantial team around each initiative, driving it to completion before working on the next. Overall this helps us finish and deliver work faster.
The prioritization work involves the Fedora Council, the CentOS Board, a representative of the Red Hat Business Unit, and the CPE team for each three-month window. Initiatives are considered against the team’s mission statement and weighed against each other to ensure that the most valuable initiatives are properly prioritized. This way of working is quite new for us so any feedback on the overall process is greatly appreciated.
The global COVID-19 pandemic has crippled medical systems and left patients worried, particularly when they think they might have symptoms. The “Are You Well?” app is designed to address this problem by using an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot to gather information from individuals who are facing a new normal with stay-at-home or quarantine orders, and providing information to medical professionals to help them understand patterns of the virus in their immediate area.
From the mom-and-pop bakery down the street, to the tech start-up looking to change the world, each small business has its own unique story, with one common chapter. This common chapter is the COVID-19 pandemic, a force that has quickly battered the economy and all businesses within it. As big businesses continue to endure the leaks in their revenue with shifts in portfolio and resource allocations, small businesses suffer an accelerated declination, and yearn for guidance tailored to their situation that can potentially reduce the onslaught of financial blows from COVID-19.
One of the bigger impacts on us as a society has been how we social distance when waiting in line for a service, whether that is visiting a grocery store or picking up a prescription. Enter Safe Queue, a simple app from developer and entrepreneur Dave Chura from Los Angeles, California, that takes the pain out of this process.
  Oracle is pleased to announce the general availability of Oracle Linux 8 Update 2. Individual RPM packages are available on the Unbreakable Linux Network (ULN) and the Oracle Linux yum server. ISO installation images will soon be available for download from the Oracle Software Delivery Cloud, and Docker images will soon be available via Oracle Container Registry and Docker Hub.
Starting with Oracle Linux 8 Update 2, the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel Release 6 (UEK R6) is included on the installation image along with the Red Hat Compatible Kernel (RHCK). For new installations, UEK R6 is enabled and installed as the default kernel on first boot.
Synced with the Debian Sid repository as of April 28th, 2020, Clonezilla Live 2.6.6 is here to switch the kernel to the Linux 5.5 series, even if it reached end of life. This new stable release ships with Linux kernel 5.5.17, though the latest version is 5.5.19.
One important change in this release is a fix for an issue with sfdisk’s “last_lba” line causing Clonezilla to fail to clone a larger hard disk to a smaller hard disk using the -icds parameter -ICDS. The developers warn that the -k1 parameter is not required in this case.
  It's only been a few short days, but Pop!_OS 20.04 has quickly made its way up my list of all-time favorite Linux distributions. Although the operating system, created by System76, is based on Ubuntu 20.04 and contains a (mostly) generic GNOME desktop interface, there are certain things Pop!_OS does that keep it from being just another spin on Canonical's baby.
Sure, Pop!_OS starts with the usual updates to Ubuntu 20.04: There's the new kernel, GNOME, and all of the other bits that come along with the latest iteration. But System76 has taken 20.04 to a completely different level.
It all starts with System76 truly knowing its audience. That alone sets this company—and the Linux distribution it creates—apart from all others. System76 fully understands who they serve: Developers, creators, and anyone who demands a highly productive environment.
While Ubuntu 20.04 LTS was released less than two weeks ago, attention by Canonical and the Ubuntu development community has already turned to Ubuntu 20.10 as the Groovy Gorilla. With it being the first release past an LTS debut, they tend to be a more liberal in the changes in allowing plenty of time to stabilize before the next Long Term Support cycle. On the ZFS front it looks like we could be in for some more exciting changes.
Ubuntu 19.10 added the experimental root file-system on ZFS (OpenZFS/ZFSOnLinux) to their desktop Ubiquity installer as an experimental option. For Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, using ZFS as the root file-system remains an experimental option but they made some refinements to the installer's user-interface, updated the ZoL snapshot, and also more improvements around their Zsys daemon including automated ZFS snapshots on APT transactions. That paired with the GRUB boot-loader support allows easily rolling back to earlier versions of the system should there be any severe package troubles.
Ubuntu 20.04 is an LTS (long term support) release that will be supported for five years. This means if a person uses the 20.04 version, they can use it till April 2025 without having to upgrade the to a new Ubuntu release. For people using Ubuntu 18.04 or Ubuntu 19.10, they will be able to upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 from the system. Ubuntu 20.04 codenamed Focal Fossa is now available. Since it’s an LTS release, stability is essential.
Have you ever heard about the bi-directional HART communication protocol? I haven’t, but I should probably have as there’s an installed base of over 40ââ¬Â¯million HART-enabled instruments according to FieldComm Group who owns the protocol and the organization is comprised of 375 corporate members working on process automation instrumentation, systems, and services. HART stands for Highway Addressable Remote Transducer.
The organization is also maintaining the more recent (2009) HART-IP IP-enabled version of the HART field communication protocol and just launched HART-IP Developer Kit whose hardware is comprised of a Raspberry Pi 3B+ SBC and off-the-shelf add-on boards mounted on a DIN Rail mount.
  TQ-Embedded is launching a “TQMa8Xx” and SMARC form-factor “TQMa8XxS” module that run Linux on NXP’s i.MX8X. TQ is also deploying a i.MX8M Mini/Nano based “TQMa8MxML” LGA module.
TQ-Embedded, the embedded unit at Germany-based TQ-Systems, has launched several modules that run Linux on NXP’s i.MX8 processors. The company just announced two new modules — the TQMa8Xx and SMARC 2.1 compatible TQMa8XxS — that run on the low-power i.MX8X. In March, TQ announced a TQMa8MxML module that supports either the i.MX8M Mini or Nano. All three modules will ship on May 15, which TQ says is the date the i.MX8X officially begins volume shipments.
So you got that awesome new Raspberry Pi High-Res camera that they released last week but you don’t really know what to do with it ?
Well, there is salvation, Ubuntu Core can turn it for you into a proper streaming device and help you with using it for your Zoom meetings giving you a really professional look !
OKdo has apparently developed a passive companion PCB that allows users to leverage Arduino shields and provide Digilient Pmod connector, but we were unable to find any precise information at the time of writing.
Gole11 ships with Windows 10 Pro (activated) but it has also been tested to work with Linux. The company does not make any promise about Linux support and a $20 refund might be obtained if you do not need the Windows license.
Almost all smartphones lock you into expensive, pretty prisons. They look great, but you can't repair them, and they watch your every move. But now there's the Fairphone 3, which lets you fix the hardware yourself, paired up with the privacy-first Android /e/OS operating system.
Besides being repairable by any handy person, the Fairphone uses ethically sourced materials and is built by well-paid workers, Many smartphones, such as the Apple iPhone, are built by poorly paid temporary workers.
 
When we started planning Android 11, we didn’t expect the kinds of changes that would find their way to all of us, across nearly every region in the world. These have challenged us to stay flexible and find new ways to work together, especially with our developer community.
To help us meet those challenges we’re announcing an update to our release timeline. We’re bringing you a fourth Developer Preview today and moving Beta 1 to June 3. And to tell you all about the release and give you the technical resources you need, we’re hosting an online developer event that we’re calling #Android11: the Beta Launch Show.
PeaZip is an open source file and archive manager. It's freeware and free of charge for any use. PeaZip can extract most of archive formats both from Windows and Unix worlds, ranging from mainstream 7Z, RAR, TAR and ZIP to experimental ones like PAQ/LPAQ family, currently the most powerful compressor available.
VPN is essential, whether all of your workers are remote or whether you have only a few key personnel who need to log in to headquarters. It’s a foregone conclusion now that your organization offers remote access. Unfortunately, VPN is famously complex for an IT department to configure and maintain.
The strength of open source is its adaptability, though, and to fill the gap between the dire need for secure remote access and the pain of setting it up, there’s WireGuard. Wireguard securely encapsulates IP packets over the UDP protocol. You add a WireGuard interface, configure it with your private key and a remote computer’s public keys, and send data between the two.
How you manage and distribute keys and configurations is left up to you, so your site admins can integrate that process into whatever framework they already have established, or whatever works best for them.
It’s VPN connectivity with the simplicity of SSH.
Red Hat and others in the global open source community are doing their part to develop tools and other initiatives to help the world tide over the coronavirus outbreak
After many years of pushing all computing from on-site to the cloud or huge data centers, there is a new trend: edge computing. There can be many reasons, legal or practical, why data should be processed locally instead of being sent to a central location as soon as it is created. Edge computing was a central theme of last week’s Red Hat Summit. Luckily syslog-ng is well prepared for this use case right from the beginning. While most people only know that syslog-ng can act as a client or a server, it can also collect, process and forward log messages. In syslog-ng terminology it is called a relay, but on the edge you might want to combine server and a relay functionality into one.
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Earlier I’ve mentioned the syslog-ng relay functionality. It is just part of the story. A syslog-ng relay collects log messages, optionally processes them and then forwards the logs to a central server or the next relay in the chain. From the syslog-ng Premium Edition (PE) point of view, a relay does not store incoming log messages, only forwards them. You can find more information why you should introduce relays in your infrastructure in my earlier blog.
When using syslog-ng on the edge, in most situations you not just forward log messages but also store them. The disk-buffer of syslog-ng is good for short term storage, but when the next syslog-ng is unavailable for an extended period of time, it is more practical to save logs locally. And in many situations you want to forward only a fraction of your log messages anyway and store the rest locally. From the syslog-ng PE point of view it means a separate server license.
Firefox just published its latest now-every-fourth-Tuesday release, bringing numerous security fixes, including three denoted critical.
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Lockwise is Firefox’s combined mobile phone and browser-based password manager that now alerts you if it thinks you may have been affected by a data breach.
Mozilla says that Firefox will tell you automatically if it thinks one of the websites where you have an account has been hit by a data breach.
At the end of January this year the Taskcluster team was alerted to networking issues in a user’s tasks. The first report involved ETIMEDOUT but later on it became clear that the more frequent issue was involving ECONNRESET in the middle of downloading artifacts necessary to run the tests in the tasks. It seemed it was only occurring on downloads from Google (https://dl.google.com) on our workers running in GCP, and only with relatively large artifacts. This led us to initially blame some bit of infrastructure outside of Taskcluster but eventually we found the issue to be with how Docker was handling networking on our worker machines.
In less than two weeks, Mozilla received more than 160 applications from 30 countries for its COVID-19 Solutions Fund Awards. Today, the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) is excited to announce its first three recipients. This Fund was established at the end of March, to offer up to $50,000 each to open source technology projects responding to the COVID-19 pandemic.
VentMon, created by Public Invention in Austin, Texas, improves testing of open-source emergency ventilator designs that are attempting to address the current and expected shortage of ventilators.
The same machine and software will also provide monitoring and alarms for critical care specialists using life-critical ventilators. It is a simple inline device plugged into the airway of an emergency ventilator, that measures flow and pressure (and thereby volume), making sure the ventilator is performing to specification, such as the UK RVMS spec. If a ventilator fails, VentMon raises an audio and internet alarm. It can be used for testing before deployment, as well as ICU patient monitoring. The makers received a $20,000 award which enables them to buy parts for the Ventmon to support more than 20 open source engineering teams trying to build ventilators.
Previously I wrote about the use of mobile apps for COVID contact tracing. This idea has gotten a lot of attention in the tech press — probably because there are some quite interesting privacy issues — but there is another approach to monitoring people’s locations using their devices that has already been used in Taiwan and Israel, namely mobile phone location data. While this isn’t something that people think about a lot, your mobile phone has to be in constant contact with the mobile system and the system can use that information to determine your location. Mobile phones already use network-based location to provide emergency location services and for what’s called assisted GPS, in which mobile-tower based location is used along with satellite-based GPS, but it can, of course, be used for services the user might be less excited about, such as real-time surveillance of their location. In addition to measurements taken from the tower, a number of mobile services share location history with service providers, for instance to provide directions in mapping applications or as part of your Google account.
If what you are trying to do is as much COVID surveillance as cheaply as possible, this kind of data has several big advantages over mobile phone apps. First, it’s already being collected, so you don’t need to get anyone to install an app. Second, it’s extremely detailed because it has everyone’s location and not just who they have been in contact with. The primary disadvantage of mobile phone location data is accuracy; in some absolute sense, assisted GPS is amazingly accurate, especially to those old enough to remember when handheld GPS was barely a thing, but generally we’re talking about accuracies to the scale of meters to tens of meters, which is not good enough to tell whether you have been in close contact with someone. This is still useful enough for many applications and we’re seeing this kind of data used for a number of anti-COVID purposes such as detecting people crowding in a given location, determining when people have broken quarantine and measuring bulk movements.
The LibreOffice Documentation Team proudly announces the immediate availability of the LibreOffice Getting Started Guide 6.4, the introductory guide for the latest LibreOffice 6.4, aimed to the general public interested to quickly get familiar with the software.
In 2019, LibreOffice celebrated its ninth birthday. Two new major versions of the suite introduced a variety of new features, while minor releases helped to improve stability as well.
Throughout the year, several Bug Hunting Sessions were held in preparation for the new major releases. These typically took place on a single day between set times, so that experienced developers and QA engineers could help new volunteers to file and triage bugs via the IRC channels and mailing lists. The Bug Hunting Sessions for LibreOffice 6.3 were held on May 9 and July 8 – while those for LibreOffice 6.4 took place on October 15 and December 18.
So, I just show you two screenshots with current view of LibreOffice's 7.0 windows installer...
We're happy to announce the initial release of kiwitcms-robotframework-plugin! This package allows you execute your Robot Framework test suite and report the results into Kiwi TCMS! This plugin is the brain child of our contributor Aniello Barletta and has its roots in the Robot Framework Milano user-group.
This blog post is to announce a change of hands in the Guix co-maintainer collective: Ricardo Wurmus is stepping down from his role, and Mathieu Othacehe will be filling in to ensure continuity, after being elected by the other Guix co-maintainers.
Ricardo has been around since the start, and has been invaluable to the project. He has been key in maintaining the infrastructure Guix runs on, contributed countless packages, core APIs and tools (importers, build systems, and Docker image creation to name a few). Over the years, he's also brought us a fair share of cool hacks such as a nifty issue tracker, and generously spent time helping Guix users in the IRC channel and mailing lists. Equally important was his taking care of many administrative tasks such as expanding the build farm and organizing Outreachy participation. We're sad to let him go, and hope he'll stick around as time permits :-).
Guix includes a mechanism called grafts that allows us to provide users with security updates in a timely fashion, even for core packages deep down in the dependency graph. Most users value the benefits of grafts, but newcomers were also unavoidably struck by what turned out to be the undesirable side effect of our graft implementation on user experience. This had been a well-known problem for a while, but 1.1.0 finally addressed these issues.
This article recaps how grafts are implemented, what problems that caused, and how we solved it. It’s a deep dive into core Guix, and I hope it’ll be insightful to all and intriguing to the functional programming geeks among us!
Today we’re announcing a new release of the Dart SDK, version 2.8. We’re continuing to see amazing growth in the Dart community; we now have millions of Flutter developers using Dart as their client-optimized language for building fast apps on any platform. While we’re still working hard on completing our upcoming null safety feature to make Dart an even more optimized language for building fast and stable user interfaces, we have a few exciting new features focused on making developers even more productive when managing dependencies. The Dart platform comes with built-in support for package management via the pub client tool and the pub.dev package repository, which has grown 200% over the past year and now is home to nearly 10,000 packages. As part of our ongoing work to improve the Dart ecosystem, the Dart 2.8 SDK brings two improvements to the pub client tool: much better performance in pub get, and a new tool for ensuring your package dependencies are kept up-to-date. Dart 2.8 also brings a set of small breaking changes in the Dart language and libraries. These changes lay the groundwork for our first version of the null safety feature.
It's been a while since hearing much out of the Google-backed Dart programming language for designing UI-focused cross-platform applications and its ability to compile to JavaScript or native code. But out today is Dart 2.8 as the latest step forward for this language.
Qt 5.15.0 RC is released today. As usual you can get it by using online installer (for new installations) or by using maintenance tool (existing online installation). Delta to beta4 as an attachment.
Target is to release Qt 5.15.0 19th May so please test RC now & report all new release blockers immediately. Also make sure those are visible in release blocker list (https://bugreports.qt.io/issues/?filter=22327). But remember that Qt 5.15.1 is also coming soon so we can fix most of findings there and fix only real blockers in '5.15.0'.
Jani Heikkinen of The Qt Company just announced the availability of Qt 5.15.0 RC1. They are looking for last minute testing and to report any blocker bugs. They hope to ship around 19 May while acknowledging that Qt 5.15.1 will come soon afterwards for collecting any fixes not making it into this forthcoming release.
Template Haskell (TH) is a meta-programming system: you write programs that are executed at compile time and can output code to be spliced into the parent program. The approach used by TH is really nice: you perform your meta-programming in real first-class Haskell, and it integrates really well with the main program.
The remote talk to Budapest was slightly hampered by a chunk of the Virgin internet backbone disappearing just before I spoke, thankfully we got it back a few minutes later (else I was going to live present, with a live Dask demo, tethered via a 4G mobile connection!). I had some great questions from the Budapest audience – thanks for having me!
For PyDataUK, our inaugural event this week (a week after the two talks above) I gave a variant of Making Pandas Fly to 250 live streamers, oragnised by the lovely crowd at PyDataManchester. The YouTube link is available (via the meetup page), Paige Bailey of Google was the lead speaker on TensorFlow Probability which was an intriguing talk (sadly yet another thing I’ll run out of time before trying).
Thanks to James Powell for his CallGraph code (uploaded here) to show how many extra calls Pandas might add onto a NumPy operation on a column.
Proper error handling can make your Python code simpler, more readable, and idiomatic.
The map(), filter() and reduce() functions bring a bit of functional programming to Python. All three of these are convenience functions that can be replaced with List Comprehensions or loops, but provide a more elegant and short-hand approach to some problems.
Well, mid-next-week note I guess. I gave another variant of my higher performance Python talk last night for PyDataUK to 250 live streamers, we had some good questions, cheers all.
On Friday Micha & I heard that the 2nd edition of our Higher Performance Python book has gone to the printers – we’d said we’d do 1 person-month each on it last summer and 9 months later (with many-person-months invested each) we’re finally there. Phew.
I now have an open PR on the dabl project to add ordinal-sorted y-axis box plot items in place of the default always-sort-by-median, which I think makes some of the exploratory process more intuitive. This also involved figuring out a new weird matplotlib rendering behaviour and writing my first unit test where I make up a dummy matplotlib figure in a test which is rendered but never displayed. There’s always a million new things to learn, right?
PyCharm 2020.1 comes with new Database export features that make exporting data easier. You can now see previews of the data that you want to export, letting you have a quick glance of what the data will look like.
We can think of a dictionary in python the same as a normal translation dictionary where we see the meaning of any word. In simple language, we can think of a dictionary as a key-value pair as we look in the dictionary meaning of a word that goes with the dictionary used in python. Dictionary is a data type in python which is very useful. Dictionary will have a key and a value associated with it. In this tutorial, I help understand setting default dictionary python values and you can try on any system which have python installed. We can search for the key in a dictionary and we can fetch the value associated with the key.
4 Digit 7 Segment Display is a simple electronic display, similar to Single 7 segment display, but composed of 4 digits than can show at the same time 4 chars. It also has dot leds, but in different confiurations (single for each digit, central colon, etc).
It is used within a wide number application, usually to diplay time.
Its operation is based on persistence of vision principle: you can drive one digit at time, so you must drive each digit at a speed so that human eye cannot perceive power off moments.
When using 4-digit 7-segment display, please notice that if it is common anode, the common anode pin connects to the power source; if it is common cathode, the common cathode pin connects to the GND. This guide is based on cathode one, nut anode works with the same code by inverting digit selection logic.
As developers and technologists, it's easy to think that powerful and unique ideas will percolate to the top. If we build something amazing, enthusiastic users will find and share our creations.
Sometimes this happens. But more often, success is an iceberg, on so many levels. We are going to look at one of those icebergs on this episode. Join me and Cristian Medina as we discuss SEO, search engine optimization, for developers. Some of your search ranking is out of your control, but as you will see, there are many tools in the developer's toolbox that will directly affect your search rank. Let's dive in!
Sponsoring EuroPython guarantees you highly targeted visibility and the opportunity to present yourself and your company in a professional and innovative environment.
We have updated our in-person conference sponsor packages to the new online format and lowered the prices, giving you an excellent opportunity to reach out to attendees and even run your own virtual rooms, text channels, talks and training sessions throughout the conference and sprint days.
You will also be able to post job ads on our website and the conference chat system, as well as get a mention and opportunity to give away digital swag via our virtual exhibit page.
In addition, as a sponsor of EuroPython 2020, you will directly help promote the work of a great open-source community which has become a powerhouse of technological development and innovation.
Capital One has been an invaluable and generous supporter of the PSF and PyCon since 2015 and a Principal Sponsor for the last two years. They've stepped forward and made a big investment in PyCon and its community.
We chatted recently with Steven Lott, Lead Software Engineer, about what it was like for a big company like Capital One to migrate to Python 3. Here is what he had to say.
So, like any Python developer who likes to play with these things, I tried to write a class that would implement object attribute access and dict indexing at the same time. The latter should allow for using as input for yaml.dump() and json.dump() transparently.
I wrote 110 lines of heavily tested code. All went fine until I found a bug in __deepcopy__() that meant to, once more, do recursion in case of lists or other dicts. To be honest, I have a lot of work load right now, and I didn't have the energy to factor out this recursing code from other methods.
Meanwhile, a few weeks ago I saw a new package in Debian called python-box, which promised implementing exactly that. I wrote a note about testing it and moved on. This looked like the right moment to do exactly that.
If you’ve ever thought about refactoring your Django app, then you might have found yourself needing to move a Django model around. There are several ways to move a Django model from one app to another using Django migrations, but unfortunately none of them are straightforward.
Moving models between Django apps is usually a very complicated task that involves copying data, changing constraints, and renaming objects. Because of these complications, the Django object-relational mapper (ORM) does not provide built-in migration operations that can detect and automate the entire process. Instead, the ORM provides a set of low-level migration operations that allow Django developers to implement the process themselves in the migration framework.
Python's SimpleNamespace class provides an easy way for a programmer to create an object to store values as attributes without creating their own (almost empty) class. While it is useful (and used) in its present form, Raymond Hettinger thinks it could be better. He would like to see the hooks used by mappings (e.g. dictionaries) added to the class, so that attributes can be added and removed using either x.a or x['a']. It would bring benefits for JSON handling and more in the language.
I last wrote in December 2019 about my work on speeding up the Rust compiler. Time for another update.
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Last year I noticed from profiles that rustc spends some time compressing the LLVM bitcode it produces, especially for debug builds. I tried changing it to not compress the bitcode, and that gave some small speed-ups, but also increased the size of compiled artifacts on disk significantly.
Then Alex Crichton told me something important: the compiler always produces both object code and bitcode for crates. The object code is used when compiling normally, and the bitcode is used when compiling with link-time optimization (LTO), which is rare. A user is only ever doing one or the other, so producing both kinds of code is typically a waste of time and disk space.
In #66598 I tried a simple fix for this: add a new flag to rustc that tells it to omit the LLVM bitcode. Cargo could then use this flag whenever LTO wasn’t being used. After some discussion we decided it was too simplistic, and filed issue #66961 for a more extensive change. That involved getting rid of the use of compressed bitcode by instead storing uncompressed bitcode in a section in the object code (a standard format used by clang), and introducing the flag for Cargo to use to disable the production of bitcode.
The part of rustc that deals with all this was messy. The compiler can produce many different kinds of output: assembly code, object code, LLVM IR, and LLVM bitcode in a couple of possible formats. Some of these outputs are dependent on other outputs, and the choices on what to produce depend on various command line options, as well as details of the particular target platform. The internal state used to track output production relied on many boolean values, and various nonsensical combinations of these boolean values were possible.
The Unix operating system was created at Bell Labs in 1969. Today, it rules the world. Both Android and iOS are flavors of Unix. So is MacOS. So is GNU/Linux in all its flavors, like Ubuntu and Debian. So is Chrome OS. Virtually every "smart" gadget you own is running some flavor of Unix, from the no-name programmable Christmas lights you put up in December to the smart light-bulb and smart-speaker in your living room.
Over the years, many companies have marketed versions of Unix: Apple and Microsoft, HP and IBM, Silicon Graphics and Digital. Some of the most popular Unixes that came from universities (like BSD, from UC Berkeley) and from hobbyists (the Linux kernel was created by a 22-year-old hobbyist named Linus Torvalds).
But there's one company that never marketed Unix: AT&T, the company that paid for Unix's development. They never got into the Unix business.
In 1949, Harry Truman's Department of Justice launched an antitrust complaint against AT&T, alleging that the company had engaged in anticompetitive conduct to secure a monopoly for its hardware division, Western Electric.
But when the US entered the Korean War, AT&T was able to secure a break by citing its centrality to the US military. With the Pentagon fighting to keep AT&T intact, the Eisenhower administration let AT&T off the hook: in 1956 the US dropped its lawsuit in exchange for a "consent decree," through which AT&T promised to get out of the general electronics business and to share its patents and technical documentation with existing and new competitors.
Despite the consent decree, AT&T continued to fund a large and rollicking research and development department, the Bell Telephone Laboratories (BTL) in New Jersey. BTL was home to some of computing history's most storied pioneers, including Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the principal inventors of Unix, who basically created the project out of intellectual curiosity.
Thanks to the consent decree, AT&T couldn't do much with Unix, and so it remained an internal project until Ken Thompson gave a talk on his work at a 1973 Association for Computing Machinery conference. His paper stirred interest from academic and commercial computer science, and AT&T's lawyers decided that the consent decree meant that they couldn't start a new business based on Unix.
It seems right that I should mention the pandemic on my personal blog; I doubt very much that I will say anything original or interesting, but it would seem strange to look back on my writings from 2020 and see nothing about COVID-19.
I had to check this, but I have been staying at home since Monday 15th March, save for occasional walks around the park. (UK schools closed on 20th March, and we officially announced the lockdown on 23rd March, but our house started a bit early due to having a mild cough.) That’s 52 days at home for me so far, or 7 weeks and 3 days.
Yet, due to the miracle of modern technology, I have been working full-time over this period. This has not been stress-free.
We do not suddenly have copious free time; but, still, there have been some highlights. Recently I dug out a couple of Raspberry Pi boards and tackled some challenging (for me) projects - I got seL4 to run, and now I’m learning ARM assembler to debug it (but have concluded I will need a JTAG interface to make progress). At the weekend I programmed a set of red/amber/green LED traffic lights using Scratch while my daughter ignored my feeble attempts at home education.
On May 5, 2020, the Linux Foundation plans to announce they will be hosting the Trust over IP Foundation (ToIP), which is a project with one goal—enable the trustworthy exchange and verification of data between any two parties on the internet.
This is long overdue.
Effectively, what the ToIP Foundation will do is provide a common standard to ensure data is coming from a trusted source. This standard is being developed with global pan-industry support. Founding members include Cloudocracy, Continuum Loop, CULedger, esatus, Evernym, The Human Colossus Foundation, IBM Security, IdRamp, kiva.org, Lumedic, Mastercard, MITRE, Province of British Columbia, and SICPA. Contributing members include DIDx, GLEIF, iRespond, Marist College, Northern Block, R3, Secours.io, TNO, and the University of Arkansas.
The Linux Foundation will host the Trust over IP (ToIP) Foundation, an independent project “to enable trustworthy exchange and verification of data between any two parties on the Internet”. The ToIP Foundation aims to provide a common standard that gives people and businesses the confidence that data is coming from a trusted source, allowing them to connect, interact and innovate at a speed and scale not possible today.
Founding Steering members of the ToIP Foundation include Accenture, Cloudocracy, Continuum Loop, CULedger, Dhiway, esatus, Evernym, Finicity, Futurewei Technologies, IBM Security, IdRamp, kiva.org, Lumedic, Mastercard, MITRE, the Province of British Columbia and SICPA. Contributing members include DIDx, GLEIF, The Human Colossus Foundation, iRespond, Marist College, Northern Block, R3, Secours.io, TNO and University of Arkansas.
Yesterday, the Caddy Web server reached an important milestone, with its 2.0.0 release. Caddy bills itself as "The Ultimate Server," with no dependencies, automatic TLS certificate obtainment and renewal, and much smaller configuration files than Apache or Nginx.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (libmicrodns and salt), Debian (graphicsmagick, salt, sqlite3, and wordpress), Fedora (java-11-openjdk), openSUSE (chromium and sqliteodbc), Red Hat (firefox, squid, and squid:4), Slackware (firefox and thunderbird), SUSE (ardana-ansible, ardana-barbican, ardana-cluster, ardana-db, ardana-designate, ardana-input-model, ardana-logging, ardana-monasca, ardana-mq, ardana-neutron, ardana-octavia, ardana-osconfig, ardana-tempest, ardana-tls, crowbar-core, crowbar-ha, crowbar-openstack, memcached, openstack-ceilometer, openstack-cinder, openstack-designate, openstack-heat, openstack-ironic, openstack-ironic-image, openstack-manila, openstack-neutron, openstack-nova, openstack-octavia, openstack-octavia-amphora-image, python-cinderclient, python-glanceclient, python-ironic-lib, python-ironicclient, python-keystonemiddleware, python-manila-tempest-plugin, python-novaclient, python-octaviaclient, python-openstackclient, python-os-brick, python-oslo.config, python-oslo.rootwrap, python-oslo.utils, python-swiftclient, python-watcherclient, release-notes-suse-openstack-cloud, rubygem-crowbar-client, rubygem-puma, zookeeper, openldap2, and python-Pillow), and Ubuntu (php7.4).
This is a public service announcement (PSA) from the Wordfence team regarding a security issue which may impact some of our customers. On May 4, 2020, GoDaddy, one of the world’s largest website hosting providers, disclosed that the SSH credentials of approximately 28,000 GoDaddy hosting accounts were compromised by an unauthorized attacker.
SSH, while extremely secure if configured correctly, can allow logins with either a username/password combination, or a username and a public/private key pair. In the case of this breach, it appears likely that an attacker placed their public key on the affected accounts so that they could maintain access even if the account password was changed.
It is unclear which of GoDaddy’s hosting packages were affected by this breach.
On April 30, 2020, two critical security vulnerabilities were identified with the SaltStack open source project (github.com/saltstack/salt). These vulnerabilities are critical and must be patched to avoid potential take over of your systems.
This vulnerability has been assigned the highest severity rating, 10.0, according to the Common Vulnerability Scoring System, an open framework for communicating risk. Chef InSpec is extremely effective at inspecting a system, including identifying vulnerable versions of software, so we wrote a quick profile to test your systems. We recommend running this on every Salt Master in your environment to identify vulnerabilities and verify they have been remediated once patches are applied.
Welcome to the April 2020 report from the Reproducible Builds project. In our regular reports we outline the most important things that we and the rest of the community have been up to over the past month.
A new botnet has been infecting internet of things devices and Linux-based servers, to then leverage them in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The malware, dubbed Kaiji, has been written from scratch, which researchers say is “rare in the IoT botnet landscape” today.
The Kaiji malware has the capability of launching distributed denial-of-service attacks, according to researchers from Intezer as well as MalwareMustDie - an independent white hat security research group. But it does not appear that any attacks stemming from this botnet have been launched so far, the reports note.
What makes Kaiji unusual is that its operators created the botnet from scratch using the Go or Golang programming language, according to the researchers. In most other cases, botnets are created by building on top of existing source code, such as the code used to create Mirai, or by using black-market toolsets.
Hungary is no longer a democracy, Poland is about to go down the same path, democracy in the Balkans is eroding because of Chinese and Russian influence, and the EU is doing nothing to stop it all, according to the NGO Freedom House's latest Nations in Transit report, out Wednesday.
In the study, which covers 29 countries from Central Europe to Central Asia, the authors describe "a stunning democratic breakdown," saying that there are "fewer democracies in the region today than at any point since the annual report was launched in 1995."
 According to the report's methodology, Hungary is now a "hybrid regime," having lost its status as a "semi-consolidated democracy" due to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's continued assaults on the country's democratic institutions.
The adoption of an emergency law that allows the government to rule by decree indefinitely, brought in after the coronavirus pandemic struck, "has further exposed the undemocratic character of Orbán's regime," the authors wrote, adding that "Hungary’s decline has been the most precipitous [they have] ever tracked."
Poland isn't far behind, according to the report, which says there have been spectacular attacks on the judiciary by the ruling Law and Justice party.
As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, patent offices worldwide are taking steps to minimize negative impacts that patent and trademark filers may suffer.
Many offices have asked their employees to work from home, potentially causing delays. Most or all offices, including the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and European Patent Office (EPO), are conducting oral proceedings via telephone or videoconferencing.
The Bicentennial Man is out of luck.* The Patent Office recently issued a ruling that only a human can be an inventor.
The application at issue listed “DABUS” as the sole inventor. DABUS is a collection of neural nets designed as a “creativity machine” by Stephen Thaler, who is also the assignee of the application. The application was filed with the help of a team to serve as a test case for categorizing machines as inventors. The team filed the application not only with the United States Patent and Trademark Office but also with the European Patent Office and the United Kingdom Patent Office. The EPO and the UKIPO both rejected the application by stating that an inventor must be human.
The efforts of Stephen Thaler are worth following. He, along with a team of researchers and academics, has spent the past decade developing DABUS, an artificial intelligence (AI) system that "invents."
Unlike specialized AI systems, DABUS is fed general information and is not trained to solve a particular problem – rather, DABUS is given free rein to develop anything it wants. Thaler claims that DABUS has designed, without having been given instructions on what to create, a food container that is easier to transport and a warning light that blinks in a pattern that is difficult for humans to ignore.
Thaler then teamed up with attorneys to test the question of whether an AI system can be credited as an inventor on a patent. Thaler and his team filed several patent applications around the world for these two inventions, crediting DABUS as the formal inventor and forcing patent offices around the world to address the issue of whether a non-human intelligence system can be named as an inventor on a patent application. Some of the hurdles were procedural and did not deal with the key issue.
Last week representatives of the EPO's member states, and two future member states discussed their co-operation and how to best serve Europe's innovators during the current crisis at their 14th annual meeting on co-operation.
In his opening address at the conference, which for the first time took the form of a virtual meeting, EPO President António Campinos highlighted the importance of close co-operation in times of unprecedented challenges: "Common challenges need common solutions. It's the very raison d'etre of this organisation. This is a test that we can face, and overcome, together. IP and patents, and IP-intensive industries, have a central role to play in Europe's recovery, by creating jobs, by generating GDP and by boosting our exports. So now - more than ever - we have to support our users."
In this case, the Federal Circuit held that an IPR petitioner did not have a right to raise the Arthrex appointments issue on appeal unless the issue was first raised before the PTAB.
In 2018, Wirtgen petitioned the USPTO Director to institute an inter partes review (IPR) against Caterpillar’s US9045871 (paving machine). The PTO initiated the IPR, and eventually concluded that the challenged claims (as well as proposed substitute claims) were all unpatentable.
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The theory of Arthrex is that the court’s cancellation of PTAB judge job security instantly cured the Constitutional appointments problem (making them inferior officers rather than principal offiers). Here, the Arthrex cure (Oct 2019) came just before the Caterpillar final judgment (Nov 2019). Caterpillar argued that it suffered under “a year’s worth of constitutional violations.” On appeal, however, the Federal Circuit ruled that the inoculation was complete against any IPR that had not yet reached final judgement.
The Federal Circuit, in reversing a court’s decision to grant summary judgment of invalidity of claims of three design patents, held that the identification of multiple differences between the claimed design and a cited reference created a factual issue as to “whether [the cited reference] is a proper primary reference” to support an obviousness inquiry for design patents. Spigen Korea Co., LTD. v. Ultraproof, Inc., 2019-1435 (Fed. Cir. Apr. 17, 2020) (patents-in-suit are U.S. Design Patent Nos. D771,607; D775,620; and D776,648). This was a precedential opinion authored by Judge Reyna and joined by Judge Newman. Judge Lourie dissented without opinion.
The court first noted that “[s]ummary judgment of obviousness is appropriate if “the content of the prior art, the scope of the patent claim, and the level of ordinary skill in the art are not in material dispute, and the obviousness of the claim is apparent in light of these factors.” MRC Innovations, Inc. v. Hunter Mfg., LLP, 747 F.3d 1326, 1331 (Fed. Cir. 2014). Spigen argued that “there is a material factual dispute over whether [U.S. Design Patent No. D729,218] is a proper primary reference that precludes summary judgement.”
Major League Baseball may be on hold, but the next inning of baseball patent litigation has just started. Sportvision, Inc. v. MLB Advanced Media, LP, No. 18 Civ. 3025 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 23, 2020). Like several other courts recently, the Court denied a motion to dismiss a software patent on the pleadings as ineligible under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101.
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Defendant filed a motion to dismiss the patent infringement claim, arguing that claim 31 is invalid under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101. Plaintiffs argued that claim 31 is valid under the two-part Alice test. For the first step, Plaintiffs alleged that claim 31 is directed to a “particular way” to generate the strike zone image that is not abstract. For the second step, Plaintiffs alleged that the claimed method to determine the strike zone using the position of the batter and inserting the strike zone image into live video feeds is an unconventional improvement over prior technology.
Patent claims directed to a communication system recite a technical solution and therefore, the Federal Circuit held, are not patent-ineligible under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101 and the two-part Mayo/Alice test. Uniloc USA, Inc. v. LG Electronics USA, Inc., No. 2019-1835 (Fed. Cir. April 30, 2020) (precedential) (opinion by Judge Moore, joined by Judges Reyna and Taranto). The court thus reversed Judge Koh in the Northern District of California, who had found that claims of U.S. Patent 6,993,049 were not patent-eligible, and had granted a Rule12(b)(6) motion to dismiss.
Should eligibility under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101 ever be decided on the pleadings? The Western District of Texas says that such decisions should be rare because of the deep factual requirements for a proper ۤ 101 analysis. Slyce Acquisition, Inc. v. Syte-Visual Conception, Ltd., W-19-cv-00257-ADA (W.D. Tex. Jan. 10, 2020).
Plaintiff Slyce sued Defendants for infringement of U.S. Patent No. 9,152,624. The ‘624 patent is directed to uploading images and searching for recognized objects in the images without text labels. Defendant initially filed a motion to dismiss under 12(b)(6), alleging that claim 1 of the ‘624 patent is invalid under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101. The motion was denied, briefly noting that, in light of MyMail, Ltd. v. ooVoo, LLC, the Court would wait until claim construction to consider eligibility on €§ 101. No. 2018-1758 (Fed. Cir. 2019). Surprisingly, the Court “takes no position on whether there are any factual disputes that preclude dismissal at the pleadings stage.” At the very least, this is unusual because courts typically find a factual dispute in the pleadings as justification to deny motions to dismiss, but the Court did not explore the specific claim language at all.
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board recently invalidated a patent related to remote optometry in a Post-Grant Review proceeding. 20_20 Vision Center, LLC v. DigitalOptometrics LLC, PGR2018-00100 (April 15, 2020). The PTAB invalidated the patent as anticipated by an earlier remote-optometry patent, but the challenges for indefiniteness and lack of enablement were rejected.
The petition for review by the PTAB was brought by 20/20 Vision Center against U.S. Patent No. 9,980,644, held by competitor DigitalOptometrics. Both companies provide optometrist appointments in which the optometrist can be in a separate facility from the patient.
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20/20 first argued that some terms in the claim were indefinite, namely “diagnostic center” and “different location.” For both terms, the PTAB determined that the patent provided sufficient context to render the terms clear to a person of ordinary skill in the art. A “diagnostic center” must include equipment and cannot be merely a room because of the importance of the equipment to performing the diagnosis ascribed to the diagnostic center. “Different locations” cannot merely be different spots in the same room because the patent consistently discusses videoconferencing or other electronic communication.
In granting a motion to dismiss based on lack of patent-eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101 and the Alice/Mayo test, a court held that patent claims directed to “granting permission to access personal information in exchange for enhanced functionality…[of] a routine piece of software” are abstract ideas, and “merely stat[ing] that the claims teach a technology-based solution, which improves the functionality of the prior art” does not provide an inventive concept. Veripath, Inc. v. Didomi, No. 19-civ-1702 (GBD) (S.D.N.Y. Mar. 30, 2020) (patent-in-suit is U.S. Patent No. 10,075,451).
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The court applied the two-step Alice framework when considering Didomi’s Rule 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss. The court noted that, in software cases, Alice step one “‘often turns on whether the claims focus on “the specific asserted improvement in computer capabilities…or, instead, on a process that qualifies as an ‘abstract idea’ for which computers are invoked merely as a tool.’” Ancora Techs., Inc. v. HTC Am., Inc., 908 F.3d 1343, 1347 (Fed. Cir. 2018). Further, the court noted that “[s]uch asserted improvement in computer functionality must have ‘the specificity required to transform a claim from one claiming only a result to one claiming a way of achieving it.’” SAP Am., Inc. v. InvestPic, LLC, 898 F.3d 1161, 1167 (Fed. Cir. 2018).
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However, as this case further illustrates, merely stating that the disclosure provides a technical solution to a technical problem is not enough to establish patent eligibility under €§ 101. Further, merely using “software to achieve [a] desired result” does not elevate an abstract idea to a patent-eligible invention. Instead, draft the claims and specification for a software application towards how “an improvement in computer functionality” is achieved to show a technical solution to a technical problem.
The court also rejected the testimony of the patent owner’s expert because it had no support in the intrinsic record. Nor did the patent file histories provide any further guidance. And it was not persuasive that patent examiners had not found the claims indefinite. The court declined to rely on Sonix Technology Co., LTD. v. Publications International, LTD (Fed. Cir. 2017), which reversed an indefiniteness holding based on guidance in the intrinsic record, noting that “Sonix expressly states that ‘application [of the disputed claim terms] by the examiner and an expert do not, on their own, establish’ definiteness.”
Two editorial comments. First, this case demonstrates that, in patent drafting, consistency is far more than merely the hobgoblin of little minds. (Sorry, couldn’t resist – and it’s true.) Second, it will be interesting to see what the Federal Circuit will do if and when it conducts its de novo review of the present holding.
The court found that “the claims themselves do not warrant limiting the phrase ‘decelerating and torque enhancing force’ to require a single force” because “the claims on their face refer to ‘a’ force.” The court further found that neither the specification nor the prosecution history “requires that a ‘decelerating and torque enhancing force’ be limited to a single force.” Therefore, the court rejected Plaintiff’s proposed claim construction.
Since Plaintiff’s argument regarding validity was “premised on the rejected claim construction that the phrase ‘decelerating and torque enhancing force’ can only encapsulate a single force to move the cover panel,” the court held that the ‘169 and ‘930 Patents are invalid as anticipated by the CN ‘882 Patent.
Once again, a court has denied a motion to dismiss a patent infringement suit, holding that the question of patent-eligibility under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101 could not be decided on a Rule 12(b)(6) motion. The Court held that the pleadings alleged an unresolved question of fact of whether the asserted claims contain inventive concepts sufficient to transform an abstract idea into a patent-eligible invention. Nice Ltd. v. Callminer, Inc., No. 18-cv-2024-RGA (D. Del. March 30, 2020).
Plaintiff Nice asserted fourteen patents against Defendant Callminer, the patents directed to data collection and classification from phone calls between customers and salespeople. Defendant filed a motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6) on nine of the patents as ineligible under ۤ 101. A Magistrate Judge considered the motion and recommended to deny it because Plaintiffs had pled sufficient facts to present a factual dispute of whether the claims recited an inventive concept, and thus the claims were eligible under ۤ 101. The Court followed the recommendation of the Magistrate Judge.
According to a recent report by the USPTO’s Chief Economist, the Federal Circuit’s 2018 Berkheimer decision and the USPTO’s January 2019 patent-eligibility guidance have reduced both the frequency and uncertainty of examiners’ patent-eligibility rejections under and 35 U.S.C. €§ 101 and the Alice/Mayo test.
Anecdotally, for a number of months it has seemed that examiners were making fewer patent-eligibility rejections than they had been in the years following Alice. The January 2019 guidance in particular, as I wrote at the time, seemed designed to reduce Alice rejections. As this graph illustrates, that has proven to be true. Alice rejections peaked prior to Berkheimer; the USPTO points to its April 2018 memorandum modifying ۤ 101 examination procedure in light of Berkheimer as accelerating the downward trend. But again, the dramatic downturn in patent-eligibility rejections occurred after the January 2019 guidance.
