In conversation with Nick Mailer, founder of The Positive Internet Company, a company that’s been in the free and open-source camp ever since its start. We discuss why every desktop’s a Linux desktop, how the “potting shed” mentality of the British psyche led to ARM’s world domination, and the fact that Positive’s green credentials are usually an afterthought for many of its clients, but a central tenet of the company.
When it was founded, Positive Internet decided that open source software was the way to go. More than 20 years later, they seem to have been right about that particular choice (although Nick’s love of Perl and Vim may be more debatable). The company was founded in the same year a certain American startup opened shop, though Google has, it has to be mentioned, taken a rather different trajectory.
With land dedicated to rewilding projects and a data center in the fenlands of Cambridgeshire (where wind power is pretty much unlimited), Positive Internet now has a global reach, with international offices and clients (including a one R. Stallman Esq.) all over the world. We spent an hour with Nick chewing the fat; this podcast is just some of the conversation’s many highlights. Enjoy!
The voice mail line gets some use. Bill has some distro and podcast recommendations for exploration during isolation. We help with some issues and we highlight an embarassing mistake. Episode 391 Time Stamps 00:00 Going Linux #391 €· Listener Feedback 00:55 Bill participates in Ubuntu 20.04 test week 02:24 Testing colors other than green 03:23 Ubuntu DDE 05:38 Arco is a no-go for new users 10:05 Background noise generator 11:16 Nofications: Do Not Disturb mode 12:01 Bill's list of podcasts for sheltering at home 14:18 Vic: More workflow topics, hardware compatibility, LHS 23:26 Mike: Converting audio files from WMA 27:27 Ralph: Educational content for charitable organization 30:27 Labdoo 31:02 David: An OpenOffice update and a question 34:13 Highlander: Installing apps on live Kali Linux 36:18 Adrian: A Solus on a 2011 Macbook Pro 38:11 JackDeth: Colors and themes 41:32 David: Problem printing PDFs 47:56 goinglinux.com, goinglinux@gmail.com, +1-904-468-7889, @goinglinux, feedback, listen, subscribe 48:54 End
Last year, Paolo Bonzini, a Distinguished Engineer at Red Hat, proposed a new file system named statsfs for Linux kernel. Unlike other conventional file systems, statsfs aims to gather and display statistics for the Linux kernel subsystems.
Later, Greg Kroah-Hartman, lead Linux kernel maintainer, liked the idea and gave a nod to proceed further. Then, at the end of last month, Emanuele Giuseppe Esposito, Engineer Intern at Red Hat, finally pushed a series of implementation patches for review.
One of the long sought after features for AMD Zen (and Zen 2) processors on Linux has been the ability to monitor the CPU package power consumption on Linux, similar to what's long been available for Intel CPUs on Linux and similarly for older AMD Bulldozer era CPUs with a power monitoring driver. Now on Friday evening a patch series was posted by a Google engineer to provide this long sought after functionality.
  Probably the biggest change in this latest HPLIP (HP Linux Imaging and Printing Driver) release is the fact that you can now install it on the recently released Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa) operating system series.
Two other distributions are supported as well by HPLIP 3.20.5, namely Debian GNU/Linux 10.3 “Buster” and Manjaro Linux 19.0, but Debian GNU/Linux 10.4 and Manjaro Linux 20.0 are already out at the moment of writing and I have no idea if the printing driver supports these latest versions too.
While there aren't yet any Arm SoCs we are aware of at least offering Thunderbolt connectivity, that will eventually change with at least USB4 being based on Thunderbolt. But in any case Thunderbolt software support can work on Arm today if using a Thunderbolt add-in PCIe card.
Queued for Linux 5.8 is the change to allow Intel's Thunderbolt driver code to be built on non-x86 platforms.
Today the latest and greatest in Direct3D to Vulkan translation for the Wine (and Proton) compatibility layers has released with DXVK 1.7.
What's new? Well this release answers the age old question of "ah, but can it run Crysis?". Yes, it can, and they've improved it too. DXVK 1.7 now makes use of VK_EXT_custom_border_color a new Vulkan extension introduced with Vulkan 1.2.140, which fixed multiple Direct3D 9 issues with titles like Crysis and Halo 2 Vista. Additionally the VK_EXT_robustness2 extension is also now used, introduced in Vulkan 1.2.139 which they use to "handle out-of-bounds access to resources the same way as D3D11 does".
Since both of those are newer extensions, you not only need a brand new version of Wine with the 5.8 release that went out last week, you also need development drivers for AMD / Intel with Mesa 20.2 and NVIDIA with 440.66.12. Note: neither of those drivers are recommended for daily use, may be best to wait for stable driver updates.
DXVK 1.7 is out this weekend as the important library translating Direct3D 9/10/11 usage into Vulkan API and is leveraged by the likes of Steam Play for running modern Windows games on Linux.
DXVK 1.7 makes use of the new VK_EXT_custom_border_color extension to fix issues in games like Crysis and Halo 2 Vista. The VK_EXT_robustness2 as a new extension as of last month is also used now for better matching the out-of-bounds access semantics of Direct3D 11. Supporting these new extensions requires Wine 5.8+, the latest Mesa 20.2-devel code or the latest NVIDIA Vulkan beta.
Intel's open-source graphics driver team on Friday sent in a final set of kernel graphics driver updates targeting the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle.
Already sent in via earlier pull requests include Rocket Lake support, Tiger Lake workarounds and various power efficiency improvements, and many other changes sent in over the past several weeks.
For now at least the in-person X.Org Developers' Conference is still on with plans for X.Org/Wayland/Mesa developers to meet in Gdaà âsk, Poland for their annual conference.
While many conferences in 2020 have converted to virtual events as a result of the coronavirus, the X.Org Foundation is hopeful that come September they will still be able to host their physical event as planned in Poland and organized by the local Intel Poland staff. They are not ruling out though the possibility of having to shift it to an online event or a hybrid physical/virtual event depending upon how the COVID-19 situation plays out in the months ahead. Months ago there was also talk of possibly relocating outside of Poland due to unrelated matters but that seems to have faded down. The event organizers are expected to decide by July about the prospects of the September event if it will go virtual, continue as planned, or be postponed to a later date.
Several days back was the proposal to "remove AGP support" from Radeon/Nouveau/TTM. This did formulate into a set of patches that would disable the AGP mode in the Radeon driver and deprecate the AGP code in TTM memory management. However, as was pointed out in the ensuing discussion, AGP graphics cards will still be operable on Linux with this level of deprecation by using the PCI GART mode.
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As of writing this code hasn't yet been queued up in DRM-Next for Linux 5.8 and that cut-off is coming up quickly, so it's possible this AGP deprecation might not take place until Linux 5.9.
This week I began benchmarking the AMD Ryzen 7 4700U on Linux using the new Lenovo IdeaPad featuring this new Zen 2 "Renoir" APU. The initial CPU benchmarks were quite positive as were the Vega graphics comparison tests. Amid other follow-up articles for AMD Renoir Linux support/performance, for your weekend viewing pleasure are a large set of data points between the Ryzen 7 4700U up against the Intel Core i7 1065G7 "Ice Lake" processor.
We’re pleased to announce release of Audacity 2.4.0 which replaces all previous versions for Windows, macOS and Linux.
We’ve put a lot of time and work into it.
Catalina?
We have now caught up with Apple’s ‘notarization system’. Audacity on Mac is notarized and runs on Catalina.
Time Toolbar:
We have split the recording/playing time off from the selection toolbar and it can now be dragged to make it larger. This is particularly for people recording themselves playing a musical instrument, where they will typically be further from the screen when playing, and benefit from a larger numerical display.
Audacity 2.4 has arrived for any of your audio and music production and editing needs from this powerful, free, open-source and cross-platform audio editor software.
The development team has put a lot of time and work into this release, bringing you the ability to enlarge the “Time Toolbar” by undocking/splitting the recording/playing time toolbar from the bottom of the screen.
The team said that this change should be useful to people who record themselves playing a musical instrument as they usually sit further from the monitor, so the larger numerical display would benefit them.
Another interesting change introduced in Audacity 2.4 is an optional multi-view mode that lets you view both the spectrogram and waveform at the same time.
A USB stick set up in this way is recognised by common filemanagers (e.g. Thunar, PCManFM) - it shows up as an encrypted device in the side bar, a password dialog pops up, and the twofold decrypt/mount process happens on one click.
We will be using LUKS. The "plain dm-crypt" method might be faster, but it does not offer that convenience.
Terraria was a game that shaped up childhood for many of us. The 2D sandbox game made titles filled with extraordinary graphics and visuals look mediocre with its beautiful development and design. The game not only gave the 2D sandbox genre a new hope but also proved that 2D can still be fun with its unique action-adventure playstyle.
The developer Relogic recently revealed that the work being done on the sequel was just not going through and that the project had been abandoned. Named “Terraria: Otherworlds” the game just never got to see the light of the day and fans were more than just saddened. He revealed that if fans were that invested in a sequel he’d willingly make the game open source if we were to manage 100,000 petitions.
A lot of people are keeping their eyes on Terraria, but a Terraria: Otherworld open source petition is focused on something else entirely — getting a canceled game released to the public for free. Best of all, Re-Logic has signaled that they may be open to doing just that.
A recent comment, by Terraria creator Andrew Spinks, on the official Terraria Discord suggests that, for a price, cancelled spin-off Terraria: Otherworld could be released for fans to complete.
It’s not even much of a price. Responding to one of the usual comments about finishing Terraria: Otherworld, Spinks wrote: “100,000 signatures and $15 and I’ll open source it” – what a tease. Terraria: Otherworld was announced in 2015 as a role-playing, strategy game spin-off of Re-Logic’s Minecraft-adjacent Terraria. Otherworld was officially cancelled in 2018, because Re-Logic was unable to commit to the massive amount of time it was going to take for the game to reach its potential.
There was a time when Re-Logic was going to hang up the hat on Terraria years ago, instead of bringing years of updates and content to fans as it morphs into the modern Terraria that we know today. The older version of Terraria definitely isn’t bad, per see, but it absolutely lacks the miasma of content and discovery that the modern version presents for Metroidvania lovers.
Terraria, the side-scrolling sandbox exploration and crafting game from Re-Logic is finally done, with the Journey's End update that's out now.
With it out now, Terraria has officially smashed every player record it's ever set. Right now (at time of writing), there's 452,536 players online which is absolutely insane.
If you want to see everything that's changed, it's over here on the official forum. It's ridiculously big. There's new…well—everything? New items, enemies, entirely new game modes and so much more. Along with this massive update, the Linux version will be getting an additional patch once things calm down to focus on any optimization issues.
LIT: Bend the Light is a puzzle game about bouncing and bending around beams of light, and eventually finding a solution to each puzzle. Developed by Copperglass, 3 students of Game Design from Berlin and this being their first release together.
This is probably one of the most genuinely surprising releases for me in some time. It just seemed to come out of nowhere and it's absolutely fantastic, shockingly beautiful actually in quite a few ways. Amazing in its simplicity and yet so engrossing as you send beams of light bouncing off everything possible to hit something somewhere and find the solution.
Ubuntu GamePack is also one of the best gaming Distro where you have more than 6000 games available to play. This distro aims to fill the gap in games availability between Linux and Windows. You don’t get any game out of the box, but you can access games available on several platforms including Linux, Steam, Windows, and consoles. This OS comes with Steam client, Lutris, Wine, and PlayOnLinux pre-installed. There are several tools for running games and applications made for Windows. These tools include PlayOnLinux, wine, CrossOver, and DOSBox. It also supports Adobe Flash and Oracle Java. So, you can play online games that run on the browser.
Gamers all around the world were extremely excited when Half-Life: Alyx was announced. After many years, fans were able to get back into the Half-Life universe. The game has been updated recently to include Steam Workshop support along with a beta release of community development tools. One of the best things about the update for fans is that it brings a native version of the game for the Linux, and optional support for Vulkan on Windows.
To enable Vulkan on Windows, go to the main menu, then Options > Performance > Advanced (gear icon) > Rendering API, and choosing Vulkan. While support for Linux is welcome, the big news is that the tools in the Steam Workshop update allow players to create new levels, models, textures, and animations. Steam Workshop also lets fans browse what modders have built and play those custom mods. With support for community modding, the gates are open for everything from entirely new districts for City 17 to designing new combat encounters.
Love electronics? Love puzzle games? You may want to keep an eye on R.E.E.L., as not only does it combine the two and looks incredibly stylish - it also has a demo up now.
With a plan to release in full next year, it's a while to wait but thankfully the demo gives an interesting slice of what's to come and it's a fun puzzle mechanic trying to get power from one side of a circuit board to another.
SuperTux, classic 2D jump’n run video game inspired by Super Mario Bros, released 0.6.2 a few days ago to celebrate its 20th anniversary.
Official support for Half-Life: Alyx modding has finally arrived. Not only has Valve enabled the Steam Workshop for Alyx, it has launched the entire development suite of tools for the Source 2 engine into beta. Alyx itself now also supports Linux, thanks to the inclusion of the Vulkan rendering API.
Valve announced the releases through the Alyx Steam page. At the time of writing, only hours after launch, there are already 62 mods released on the workshop. As with any other game, installing mods through the Workshop is as simple as clicking "Subscribe", and then they will become available in-game. Some of them look interesting, such as XenThug, and endless wave survival mode, and others… others give a butt to the famous Half-Life Garden Gnome. There's also an example mod made by the Alyx development team that gives a basic demo of things that can be created with the newly released Source 2 tools.
More importantly, Valve has released the complete community creation suite for the Source 2 engine for the first time. Currently available as a beta, it includes everything from popular tools Hammer (a level editor) and Source Filmmaker to more specific tools like Particle Editor, AnimGraph (for animations) and ModelDoc (for making 3D models Source 2 engine-ready). It's important to note that, while Source 2 has already been used to a limited extent in Dota 2 (which also has its own modding tools), Dota Underlords and Artifact, these tools are specifically geared towards Alyx content creation at the moment.
Want to ensure the next stable release of the KDE Plasma desktop environment is as good as can be? Plasma 5.19 Beta is out.
I have to say, I'm loving the attention to the small details overall consistency that the KDE team having been doing for the last year or so. KDE is my daily driver, and there have been lots of rough edges to it and they're making great progress on cleaning it all up. They said their actual priority for this release is exactly that, to make it "more consistent" by "correcting and unifying designs of widgets and desktop elements". Additionally they "worked on giving you more control over your desktop by adding configuration options to the System Settings; and improved usability".
We just released the first bugfix version for the 20.04 Kdenlive version. Despite our continued work, many issues were still affecting the 20.04.0 version. A lot of work has been done to fix crashes and other annoying issues, so the 20.04.1 version should be much more reliable and stable. We have a long list of fixed issues.
The next major enhancement release of KDE Plasma 5.19 beta is now available for download and test. There is a huge list of changes and fixes are coming up. I have extracted the major changes here in terms of both visual changes and core updates.
The ZFS file-system has long offered transparent file-system compression via the likes of LZ4 and Gzip and while now Zstd compression is under review for OpenZFS and seeking testing from the community.
Zstandard compression is already supported by the likes of F2FS and Btrfs as a modern compression algorithm backed by Facebook and hugely popular across many different areas. One of the newest pull requests for OpenZFS/ZFSOnLinux would extend the ZFS compression capabilities to include this new option.
On Monday 18 May 2020 at 07:00 UTC, we will switch over all remaining openSUSE services to the new authentication system. At the same time, the openSUSE forums will also move to the new setup in Nürnberg.
 Lenovo has updated its ThinkCentre desktops and ThinkPad laptops with Intel's latest processors.
The new ThinkPad P14s and P15s are ideal for an increasingly mobile workforce as they boast up to 14 hours of battery life with improved performance thanks to the inclusion of 10th Gen Intel Core processors. The new laptops can even be outfitted with a Core i7-10810u that features a turbo boost clock speed of 4.9GHz.
Additionally, these updated ThinkPads are equipped with Nvidia Quadro professional graphics, Wi-Fi 6, up to 2TB of storage and Ubuntu and Red Hat Linux support. The 14-inch P14s and 15-inch P15s both offer up to 4K UHD displays with Dolby Vision HDR and X-Rite Pantone Factory Color Calibration for a clearer picture with truer colors.
  In VirtualBox 6.1.8, Oracle added Guest Additions support for the recently released Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, CentOS Linux 8.2, and Oracle Linux 8.2 (only with the Red Hat compatible kernel) distributions. In previous releases, the Guest Additions failed to compile on these distributions.
The Guest Additions were also improved with proper support for resizing X11 guests and better handling of multi-monitor configurations, as well as the re-implementations of the “VBoxClient–checkhostversion” functionality to check the host version of the VirtualBox client for debugging purposes.
David Egts, chief technologist of the North America public sector at Red Hat, said the government could help accelerate the adoption of artificial intelligence through the use of open-source tools and a "light-touch approach to regulating AI."
Machine learning can result in bias and Egts wrote how open-source technology could help agencies identify and eliminate that bias by providing the needed transparency.
“In addition to having source code that is open, the models and data must be accessible to third parties so they can independently replicate the results,” he noted.
Chuck Mosher, director for public sector enterprise domain architects at Red Hat, has said that open-source development can help government agencies quicken emergency response and simplify coordination.
Mosher wrote in an opinion piece published Monday that efforts spearheaded by the open-source community such as the Emergency Response Demo address urgent needs while leveraging emerging capabilities like cloud, agile integration and business process automation.
The web-based interface was meant to serve as a virtual base of operations that enables real-time alerts and visibility into missions, incidents and actions taken. In addition, the application quantifies data on individuals and locations while identifying “priority zones” in need of immediate response.
Discussions about open values in the workplace often focus on leaders creating high-level strategies and visions for their teams and organizations. But a unique set of leaders, managers, bears additional responsibilities, such as generating business performance, creating work environments, representing the larger organization to the associate, and coordinating day-to-day operations—and they do this through their relationships with employees. Managerial relationships are integral to the employee experience, because they have a direct impact on retention, meaningful work, social support, and more. So managers need to be especially aware of the values and principles that guide their practice. To highlight this special kind of leader, the Open Organization community is creating a special article series, "Managing with Open Values."
In the next few articles, we'll investigate different perspectives on what it means to "manage according to open values." We'll explore the importance of doing it and ask experts for their practical ideas on actually doing it..
But first, we'll take a look at why you'd want to let open principles guide your management practices in the first place. For that, we begin with the end in mind: Employee engagement.
The distri research linux distribution project was started in 2019 to research whether a few architectural changes could enable drastically faster package management.
While the package managers in common Linux distributions (e.g. apt, dnf, …) top out at data rates of only a few MB/s, distri effortlessly saturates 1 Gbit, 10 Gbit and even 40 Gbit connections, resulting in fast installation and update speeds.
This release of my general utility libraries and support code includes a large grab bag of fixes and improvements.
portable/system.h now defines explicit_bzero in terms of memset if it is not available. The memset version is unlikely to have the same security properties since the compiler may optimize it away, but that allows me to use explicit_bzero to erase security data where it is available.
For packages with Kerberos tests, generating a test krb5.conf file now works properly even if the system krb5.conf file does not set a default realm, and a krb5.conf file dropped into the test configuration directory now works properly. Thanks to Jeffrey Hutzelman for the latter fix.
This is a relatively small feature release of my tool for managing software documentation and releases.
This is a small bug fix release to my testing framework for C packages. It picks up a change to the test suite so that it won't break when C_TAP_VERBOSE is already set in the environment, and fixes new compilation warnings with GCC 10.
I would like to start with the wonderful idea the Debian Brasil community had! Why not create an online Debian related conference to keep people’s minds busy and also share knowledge? After brainstorming, we came up with our online conference called #FiqueEmCasaUseDebian (in English it would be #StayHomeUseDebian). It started on May 3rd and will last until May 30th (yes, one month)! Every weekday, we have one online talk at night and on every Saturday, a Debian packaging workshop. The feedback so far has been awesome and the Brazilian Debian community is reaching out to more people than usual at our regular conferences (as you might have imagined, Brazil is huge and it is hard to bring people at the same place). At the end of the month, we will have the first MiniDebConf online and I hope it will be as successful as our experience here in Brazil.
Toradex is now bringing Torizon (https://www.toradex.com/operating-systems/torizon), its easy-to-use industrial Linux software platform, to its System on Modules (SoMs) based on the i.MX 8X applications processors from NXP€®. Toradex offers the i.MX 8X-based SoMs in two form factors: the small Colibri iMX8X (https://www.toradex.com/computer-on-modules/colibri-arm-family/nxp-imx-8x) and the powerful Apalis iMX8X (https://www.toradex.com/computer-on-modules/apalis-arm-family/nxp-imx-8x), with optional ECC memory. Toradex was among the first few partners to be part of NXP’s Early Access Program for the i.MX 8X applications processors and was shipping early samples of the Colibri iMX8X in 2018.
As the coronavirus hit, staff at the Texas Children’s Hospital raced to invent a new device that would better protect doctors, nurses and patients during intubation procedures. The hospital then open-sourced their novel product design for others to use, and found a manufacturing partner called Sawbones that put their "Airway/Respiratory Containment System" up for sale.
We’ve covered several ESP32 watches over the last year include TTGO T-Wristand, Watchy, and DSTIKE ESP32 watch. Those don’t really have the nicest looking design, and some people complained about various shortcomings including the difficulty to customize/program the watch.
Last year, Lilygo introduced TTGO T-Watch smartwatch that, due to support for expansion boards, was relatively thick, but at least documentation and Arduino code samples can be found on Github. The company has now launched a slicker version with Lilygo TTGO T-Watch-2000.
A team of researchers at the University of Bath, UK, have developed an open-source design for a 3D printable “laboratory-grade” microscope, costing as little as $18.
The OpenFlexure microscope is a fully automated device with motorised sample positioning, focus control and a precise mechanical stage.
As well as being easy to use, the microscope has also been designed to be more affordable than a commercial microscope. Its open-source, 3D printable design gives labs across the world the opportunity to 3D print their own precision microscopes as well, equipping them with the means to analyse samples and detect diseases.
Give your grizzled and cramped hands a break from stuffing boards with surface mount components. This is the job of pick and place machine, and over the years these tools of the trade for Printed Circuit Board Assembly (PCBA) have gotten closer to reality for the home shop; with some models diving below the $10,000 mark. But if you’re not doing it professionally, those are still unobtanium.
Raman spectrography uses the Raman scattering of photons from a laser or other coherent light beam to measure the vibrational state of molecules. In chemistry, this is useful for identifying molecules and studying chemical bonds. Don’t have a Raman spectroscope? Cheer up! Open Raman will give you the means to build one.
The “starter edition” replaces the initial breadboard version which used Lego construction, although the plans for that are still on the site, as well. [Luc] is planning a performance edition, soon, that will have better performance and, presumably, a greater cost.
The Android-x86 project is glad to announce the release of 7.1-r4, the fourth stable release for Android-x86 7.1 (nougat-x86).
Both devices are powered by a Mediatek MT6875 chipset, which is an unannounced SoC and very likely the oft-rumored Dimensity 820 that we're expecting in a couple of days. Its octa-core CPU base frequency is listed at 2.0GHz in the benchmark files, while the TENNA entry specified 2.6GHz but the second number could very well be the ceiling that the chip will reach. Both versions seen on GeekBench have 8GB of RAM and run Android 10.
In March, amateur scientists in Sydney announced they had created a COVID-19 test kit that is simpler, faster, and cheaper than existing tests. While the test has not yet been approved by regulators, if effective it could play a role in scaling up the world’s coronavirus testing capability.
The test’s creators, associated with a “community lab for citizen scientists” called Biofoundry, are part of a growing international movement of “biohackers” with roots stretching back 30 years or more. Biohacking, also known as DIY biology, takes cues from computer-hacking culture and uses the tools of biological science and biotechnology to carry out experiments and make tools outside any formal research institution.
The public cloud and open source software are pretty much coupled these days. No matter if you’re running Kubernetes-as-a-service, MySQL, Linux, or that open source text editor you’ve used since college, it’s all there for the taking, as-a-service.
Maitrik and Justin here from the NEW CloudMagic/ Newton team. Like you, we LOVE Newton and are excited to take the best professional email client to the next level.
[...]
We promise to open-source Newton and find a way for self-hosted servers to support the product indefinitely so that your contribution is not wasted.
Newton Mail has had a rough couple of years. The cross-platform email app offered a bunch of nifty features and earned itself a bit of a fan base — but the company must have had a tough time making money because it announced plans to double its price in 2018… then announced it was shutting down.
Then phone maker Essential acquired the company and kept Newton Mail alive… until earlier this year, when Essential announced it was shutting down and that it would pull the plug on Newton Mail on April 30, 2020.
NVIDIA said it is collaborating with the open-source community to bring end-to-end GPU acceleration to Apache Spark 3.0, an analytics engine for big data processing.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today the tenth Anniversary of Apache€® HBaseââ¢, the distributed, scalable data store for the Apache Hadoop Big Data ecosystem.
"The success of Apache HBase is the success of Open Source," said Duo Zhang, Vice President of Apache HBase. "Ten years after graduating as a TLP, HBase is still among the most active projects at the ASF. We have hundreds of contributors all around the world. We speak different languages, we have different skills, but we all work together to make HBase better and better. Ten year anniversary is not the end, but a new beginning, I believe our strong community will lead the project to a bright future."
We've highlighted apps from Simple Mobile Tools before as great, open-source, data-light alternatives to the basic tools Google provides for your Android phone. Now you can notch another one into that belt as the developer has just come out with a Simple Dialer app. And it's free.
The Polish Press Agency (PAP) and GovTech Polska, a Polish government technological agency, have decided to offer an open source code to their landmark #FakeHunter fake news-busting software to anyone interested.
Following the success of the #FakeHunter project, its creators, PAP and GovTech, have decided to offer the source code to the disinformation-fighting tool to other entities under an open licence that allows for copying, development and further distribution of the software.
The Open Container Initiative (OCI) has announced the general availability of Harbor 2.0. The latest release makes it the first OCI-compliant open-source registry capable of storing cloud-native artifacts such as container images, Helm charts, OPAs, and Singularity. In addition, it enables pulling, pushing, deleting, tagging replicating and scanning artifacts.
Harbor, the open-source container image registry, has reached version 2.0, becoming the first open-source registry to fully support the Open Container Initiative (OCI) image specification.
There are quite a few registries that allow you to store container images – which represent blueprints for launching containerized applications – and other cloud app artifacts that describe related metadata like Helm charts, OPAs (Open Policy Agents), and other configuration-related files.
Perhaps the best known is the open source Docker Registry and Docker Hub, a hosted implementation of that code.
There's also Portus, an authorization server and front-end for Docker Registry made by SUSE. And there are variou
A MAJOR weapon in combating the transmission of Covid-19 is contact tracing. In March 2020, Singapore launched TraceTogether - the world's first consent-based contact tracing app which utilises a privacy preserving protocol to anonymise and encrypt BlueTooth proximity data...
The energy and utility industries are known to be conservative and slow moving in adopting new technology. Cooperatively sharing information is something that utilities don’t do.
But that is changing. As sustainable energy sources, like solar and wind become more cost competitive, and as regulations related to the reduction of carbon emissions require stricter compliance, the industry is being forced into the corner and being made to accept change.
Open machine learning model representation ONNX has hit version 1.7, previewing training support, and including additional operators as well as some model checker and documentation enhancements.
Since the last update, the ONNX team has been busy adding features to represent the various stages of training, to facilitate the distribution of the process between various frameworks in future releases.
Some projects actually eschew external contributions. For Roy Rubin, founder of Magento, the project was built in tandem with his company, and he worried that inviting outside contributions to the core of Magento would make it harder to support for customers.
Altitude Angel is releasing an open-sourced project, Scout, consisting of hardware and firmware to enable drone manufacturers, software developers and commercial drone pilots to quickly connect to its global UTM.
First published on 2014-05-12, the newsletter started as a fully-automatically generated weekly summary of activity on the IndieWeb’s community wiki: a list of edited and new pages, followed by the full content of the new pages, and then the recent edit histories of pages changed that week.
Since then the Newsletter has grown to include photos from recent events, the list of upcoming events, recent posts about the IndieWeb syndicated to the IndieNews aggregator, new community members (and their User pages), and a greatly simplified design of new & changed pages.
These improvements were designed and delivered by a global community of upstream developers and operators. OpenStack software now powers more than 75 public cloud data centers and thousands of private clouds at a scale of more than 10 million compute cores. OpenStack is the one infrastructure platform uniquely suited to deployments of diverse architectures—bare metal, virtual machines (VMs), graphics processing units (GPUs) and containers.
For the Ussuri release, OpenStack received over 24,000 code changes by 1,003 developers from 188 different organizations and over 50 countries. OpenStack is supported by a large, global open source community and is one of the top three open source projects in the world in terms of active contributions, along with the Linux kernel and Chromium.
ScyllaDB today announced Scylla Open Source 4.0, the latest major release of its high-performance NoSQL database for real-time big data workloads. This release marks a significant milestone, as the company has moved beyond feature parity with Apache Cassandra, now also serving as an open source drop-in, no-lock-in alternative to Amazon DynamoDB.
Scylla Open Source 4.0 builds on Scylla’s close-to-the-hardware design, which enables optimal use of modern server infrastructure. Written from the ground-up in C++, Scylla delivers performance of millions of OPS on a single node, scales out to hundreds of nodes and consistently achieves a 99% tail latency of less than one millisecond.
While many factors go into choosing the ideal database management system, flexibility and interoperability should be non-negotiable.
In agile projects, especially at the beginning of the project, not everything is known – not even the cloud infrastructure. Being locked into a platform or vendor inhibits developers from considering specific database capabilities, such as stored procedures, data types and advanced operators.
To overcome this issue, many developers now limit themselves to standard ANSI SQL and Object Request Brokers, and recreate many database capabilities in the application logic, such as transactional consistency, data management and queries.
This approach, however, may lead to large portions of custom code, significantly lowering performance and introducing transactional inconsistencies.
What organizations and developers need are flexible and interoperable systems, or, open source databases – but not just any type of open source databases.
Moodle is the world’s most popular learning management system (LMS), used by countless schools, universities, not-for-profit organisations and companies to respond to their education and training needs. To date, Moodle is being used by almost 200 million learners worldwide Many of these users are supported by our Certified Moodle Partner Network.
GNU Health 3.6.4 patchset has been released !
Scheyder said the class will contain hands-on work including using Photoshop and GNU Image Manipulation Program to digitally manipulate photographs. A midterm project will require students to create their own digital media — a fake or forgery — and present it to the class, explaining how they produced the fake.
I've been a fan of Raspberry Pi since the original Pi 1 so it's always exciting for me to see how these boards evolve with each new model. The newest Raspberry Pi 4 is no exception and it certainly raises the bar for Single Board Computers.
While the older models were mostly only useful as educational boards or for DIY/maker projects, the Pi 4 finally packs a real punch in terms of performance. With a 64-bit quad core ARM processor and up to 4GB of ram, I expect these boards to end up in all kinds of applications, ranging from home media centers to actual home desktop use.
Now that GCC 10 is out the door, the C++ coroutines functionality is being enabled by default when running in C++20 mode (std=c++20). Thus for next year's GCC 11 release will be working coroutines functionality when C++20 is enabled. And by then the remaining bits of C++20 support in the GNU Compiler Collection should also be ironed out.
So, if you never access the data, Tardigrade is twice as expensive as the centralized competition. If you access 50% of the data each month, it costs $32.50/TB against Wasabi's $5.99, so more than 5 times as expensive. What exactly is the value Tardigrade adds to justify the extra cost to store data? Simply "decentralization"?
But, like all these cryptocurrency-based systems, Tardigrade's "decentralization" is more a marketing term than a practical reality. The money isn't decentralized, because customers pay Storj, who then pays a little of that money to the storage node operators (SNOs): [...]
Since last year's GCC 9 release the C++17 support has been considered stable and with the changeover to it as the default C++ dialect having not happened for the recent GCC 10 release, developers are now looking at increasing the default C++ version to 17 for next year's GCC 11 release.
Red Hat's Marek Polacek sent out the patch this weekend that would change the default dialect to C++17 from the existing C++14 default. This only affects the GCC C++ compiler behavior when no other -std= is specified whether it be C++17 or even the in-progress C++20 support as well as falling back to older C++ versions.
I am not sure about you guys but I found writing blog is very nice feeling. I get nice ideas to clean up the code. This week, I even found a bug that even unit test couldn’t catch. I would rather not share it, quite embarassing. The bug was in my Perl solutions to the “Find Numbers” task. My git commit tree might disclose it, if you really want to know.
Back to the weekly challenges, I liked both tasks and I finished the Perl solutions to both task on day one i.e.Monday itself. Generally I go slow on Monday and Tuesday to recover from the weekend hangover, the most busiest time of the week because of Perl Weekly Challenge and Perl Weekly Newsletter. When I am editing the Perl Weekly Newsletter then it is double whammy for me. I am glad that I only edit alternate week. So I get a breather in between.
Once I am done with Perl solutions, I find myself little relax as I know I can easily get the Raku version quickly. Because of my fasting, I find it hard to do any coding during the day. After breaking the fast, I feel sleepy and take quick couple of hours of nap break. I then wake up midnight to perform night prayer and eat the Sehar. It is the time after morning prayer, I find myself full of energy. On saturday morning after prayer at 3:20 am, I started preparing the ground for Raku solutions. By 10:00 am, I had both the tasks done. Not a bad attempt. I did throw few questions when I was struck at one point. I will talk about it in detail later.
Since I started working from home, my daily routine has gone upside down. During the Ramadan, my office working hours is 8:00 am to 3:30 pm without lunch break, obviously. From 3:30 pm to 8:50 pm (time of breaking fast), is for me to perform regular prayer and relax. Sometimes I watch movie on Netflix. Couple of days ago, I watched 6 Days, nice movie. Before that I watched Bodyguard. I am new to Netflix and therefore most of the movies are new to me.
beagle is a command line tool for querying a hound code search service such as http://codesearch.openstack.org
The program is intended to let Python-based projects easily create and share smaller and more secure Python distributions for multiple operating systems using the ActiveState Platform. ActiveState will choose a small set of projects to participate in the early-access program
The Rust programming language celebrated its fifth birthday on Friday and says the future looks bright.
Long beloved by those who care about such things – since its 1.0 release in 2015, Rust has been voted the "Most Loved" programming language four years running in Stack Overflow's annual developer survey – the language has attracted enough fans to be considered for projects that might otherwise have used C/C++, Go, or Java.
Microsoft, for example, discussed its exploration of Rust in July 2019, motivated by the company's desire to move its developers toward memory-safe programming.
"If only the developers could have all the memory security guarantees of languages like .NET C# combined with all the efficiencies of C++," said Gavin Thomas, principal security engineering manager for the Microsoft Security Response Center in a blog post last year.
The latest version of the Gradle open-source build automation tool, just announced, comes with a number of upgrades, bug fixes, and highly anticipated support for building and testing Java modules, precompiled Groovy DSL script plugins, and a single dependency lock file per project feature.
With this release, Gradle supports the Java Module System with everything needed compile and execute tests for Java modules. Devs can also build Javadoc and run applications. "While there is some overlap with Gradle's dependency management features," the release notes state, "Java Modules offer additional features, like module boundaries, that are enforced by the Java runtime."
Valimail says a total of 933,000 domains had published DMARC records in January 2020, up from 784,000 domains in July 2019. The adoption of DMARC increased by 70% compared to the previous year and by 180% compared to two years ago.
However, only 13% of the 933,000 domains are configured with the quarantine or reject enforcement policies.
“Worse, that percentage has generally declined over time, although it has remained level in the past twelve months. The inescapable conclusion: interest in DMARC is growing, but DMARC expertise is not keeping pace,” Valimail wrote in its report.
Keynote presentation during maritime digitalisation webinar highlights the challenges and benefits of producing industry-wide open data exchange standards
Education privatizers are already planning to capitalize on the vacuum these budget cuts will create. Nathaniel Davis, the CEO of K12 Inc., one of the largest for-profit online schools in the country, spoke to investors last month about the “upside of the pandemic on our business.” The company has joined the right-wing Heritage Foundation’s National Coronavirus Recovery Commission, which promotes free-market solutions including expanded virtual learning.
Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos recently told Glenn Beck that the pandemic was an opportunity to “look very seriously at the fact that K-12 education for too long has been very static and very stuck in one method of delivering and making instruction available.” DeVos has already used over $300 million in discretionary federal grants to launch a new virtual education program that will most likely favor charter schools.
In order to pay for those programs and help the country get back on its feet, we need to tax the wealthy and invest in our common good.
Dinah Jimenez assumed a world-class hospital would be better prepared than a chowder house to inform workers when they had been exposed to a deadly virus.
The good idea, which appears on the Times‘ “Coronavirus in the US” page, is to sort states in terms of how well they’re controlling the coronavirus outbreak, using graphs of the daily count of new cases in each state. This seems like a good choice of metric and a useful thing to keep track of, especially given how fragmented the US response has been.
On May Day, food service workers led a socially distanced protest at the campus of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, taking part in the international day of action to defend workers and highlight the disparate impact COVID-19 is having across the country. Donning masks, the workers read the names of their 188 colleagues who have been laid off amid the pandemic, 98 percent of whom are Black, according to UNITE HERE Local 7.
In times of crisis, who we are is revealed. That is true of people and of nations. What COVID-19 has exposed — not created — is a deeply flawed and inequitable society. The truths of how race and class intersect to shorten the existence of some in our society are now laid bare for all to see. The collapse of structures that were barely holding on have revealed how inadequate they were to begin with. The failure of many states to prevent, protect against and help contain an illness that was known about for months shows how concerns over loss of capital took priority over our lives. And it is this capitalist approach to administering government that is perpetuating the same harms and ensuring a continuous crisis for communities most devastated by the pandemic of our lifetime.
By March 14, London Breed, the mayor of San Francisco, had seen enough. For weeks, she and her health officials had looked at data showing the evolving threat of COVID-19. In response, she’d issued a series of orders limiting the size of public gatherings, each one feeling more arbitrary than the last. She’d been persuaded that her city’s considerable and highly regarded health care system might be insufficient for the looming onslaught of infection and death.
“We need to shut this shit down,” Breed remembered thinking.
“Some mosques spread this rumor that this disease is only for non-believers,” said the medical worker, who wished to remain anonymous in fear of societal backlash, in an interview with Al Arabiya English.
mParticle, the Customer Data Platform (CDP) of choice for multi-channel consumer brands, today announced the release of a new open-source developer toolset to give engineering teams instant data quality protection and feedback in their integrated development environments (IDE).
Governments across the world have been working to deploy contact tracing apps in order to curb the spread of Covid-19. But many experts have raised concerns how such applications can potentially breach the privacy of citizens. Privacy concerns could be real, and personal data collection could be problematic. This may prevent a lot of people installing it.
RespiraWorks, a nonprofit innovator of ventilators for developing countries, and Integrated Computer Solutions (ICS), creators of sophisticated embedded and touchscreen-enabled devices, announced a partnership to collaborate on RespiraWorks’ open source ventilator. The medical-grade device, which can be assembled for under $500, is being designed for long-term vs. crisis use and for developing countries with the intent to source and manufacture locally.
There are some fundamental changes on the way for Kubernetes… and one of them is that it’s going to go serverless. It’s happening already in AWS with Fargate, the serverless compute engine for containers that works with Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) and Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). At the moment, a developer needs to specify how many machines and what size they should be. Soon there won’t be that need to specify up front: Kubernetes will go and figure it out, with resources negotiated as and when you need them.
The next step is load balancing, whereby Kubernetes will manage the loads running in the hardware that the developer doesn’t control. All this represents a fundamental change in how companies use the cloud, a phase 2 where the customer can trigger an application and AWS will automatically adapt the hardware, freeing them from having to think about the underlying infrastructure. The core benefits of serverless in terms of operational efficiency and developer experience are magnified when deployed on Kubernetes.
The OpenFabrics Alliance (OFA) is an open source-based organization whose mission is to develop and promote software that enables maximum application efficiency by delivering wire-speed messaging, ultra-low latencies and maximum bandwidth directly to applications with minimal CPU overhead. The OFA develops, tests, supports and distributes open-source Advanced Network Software – a suite of high-performance APIs and associated software for current and future HPC, cloud and enterprise data centers.
The traditional relationships between telcos and their suppliers, and between the standards bodies and open source community, need to be revamped to enable faster innovation and more suitable development and procurement processes, according to key panellists who participated in the DSP Leaders World Forum 2020 discussion Expanding and Coordinating the Open Telecoms Ecosystem.
The report also mentioned the latest progress of OKChain. Only two months after the launch of its testnet, OKChain achieved 100% open-source in April and pioneered the concept of a business alliance. As of today, the first batch of ecological partners has been assembled, including public chain, wallet, explorer, mining pool, and others.
The Open Networking Foundation (ONF), working with the Open Compute Project (OCP), today launched a program that will continually test and certify compliance with ONF open source software projects and OCP-recognized open hardware.
Linux Foundation’s JDF pushes for better open source compliance
The Linux Foundation’s “Joint Development Foundation” (JDF) has won formal approval to submit open source software (OSS) projects for recognition as international standards, in a landmark move — with an open source compliance project first to be submitted for approval.
The move comes as the Linux Foundation continues a push to boost the transparency, security and credibility of OSS across the business community, amid concerns about a lack of standardisation, sub-par maintenance of many widely used OSS components, and security fears.
Its new approval is for ISO/IEC JTC standards submissions. (The two are co-creators of ISO/IEC JTC 1, which sets IT standards.)
Romanian authorities said Friday they had disrupted a cybercriminal group that planned to conduct ransomware attacks on hospitals in the country.
The [attackers] intended to pose as government officials and send malicious emails to public health institutions that purported to contain information on the coronavirus, according to the Directorate for Investigating Organized Crime and Terrorism (DIICOT), one of Romania’s top law enforcement agencies. Such ransomware attacks could disrupt the IT systems of hospitals, DIICOT said.
Research conducted by Vanson Bourne and commissioned by security firm Sophos shows that ransomware victims that refused to pay a ransom reported, on average, $730,000 in recovery costs. However, organizations that did pay a ransom reported an average total cost, including the ransom, of $1.4 million, according to the report, The State of Ransomware 2020.
“Paying the ransom doubles the overall clean-up costs,” researchers wrote in the report.
According to Diebold, on the evening of Saturday, April 25, the company’s security team discovered anomalous behavior on its corporate network. Suspecting a ransomware attack, Diebold said it immediately began disconnecting systems on that network to contain the spread of the malware.
Sources told KrebsOnSecurity that Diebold’s response affected services for over 100 of the company’s customers. Diebold said the company’s response to the attack did disrupt a system that automates field service technician requests, but that the incident did not affect customer networks or the general public.
“Diebold has determined that the spread of the malware has been contained,” Diebold said in a written statement provided to KrebsOnSecurity. “The incident did not affect ATMs, customer networks, or the general public, and its impact was not material to our business. Unfortunately, cybercrime is an ongoing challenge for all companies. Diebold Nixdorf takes the security of our systems and customer service very seriously. Our leadership has connected personally with customers to make them aware of the situation and how we addressed it.”
Tor 0.4.3.5 is the first stable release in the 0.4.3.x series. This series adds support for building without relay code enabled, and implements functionality needed for OnionBalance with v3 onion services. It includes significant refactoring of our configuration and controller functionality, and fixes numerous smaller bugs and performance issues.
“The Internet Society is thrilled to be joining forces with the Center for Democracy and Technology and Global Partners Digital to form the Global Encryption Coalition,” said Jeff Wilbur, Senior Director of Online Trust at the Internet Society. “With a global health pandemic driving more of our daily activities and communications online, encryption is more important than ever to help keep people and countries secure. We look forward to working with a global movement of coalition members focused on promoting and defending the use of strong encryption policies and practices worldwide.“
The company oozes of the slime that is the military-industrial complex, and counts the Central Intelligence Agency as an exclusive customer, though its client list has ballooned to include other government agencies, hedge funds and big pharma. In 2003, it got off the ground with US information analysts, among them Peter Thiel, champing at the bit to use data mining tools developed for Paypal.
Ramadan, a professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford’s St. Anthony’s College and grandson of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, is currently facing four charges of rape in France. The two initial charges were made by feminist activist Henda Ayari, with the other one being a disabled woman identified only as "Christelle."
However, Ramadan's supporters reportedly uncovered Christelle's identity in 2018 after hiring an active member of France's internal intelligence agency Direction Generale de la Securite Exterieure (DGSE), identified only as "Haurus," to comb through the Dark Web for information. This agent has reportedly fallen into disgrace for selling information, according to a report accessed by Le Parisien, and the agent has since been indicted.
Three heavily armed Fulani militants broke into a Christian high school in Plateau State, Nigeria and shot its headmaster, Pastor Bayo Famonure, his wife, and two sons as they took part in evening prayers on 5 May.
Carrying AK47s and machetes, the gunmen stormed the family’s quarters at Messiah College Mission, Gana Ropp, and demanded money from the pastor. When he replied there was no money, they shot him in the head and leg, and left him for dead. His wife, Naomi, was shot in the back, and their sons, Adua and Victor, were shot in the feet. The gunmen then fled.
According to him, “Fulani herdsmen kill more people in ONE WEEK in Nigeria than COVID 19 has done in 2 months.
Mohammadi is just one of many young Iranians who have been sentenced to time behind bars for protesting against the IRGC shooting down the civilian airliner. Just after Mohammadi’s judgment, two other Iranian students were sentenced to prison time for participating in the January protests.
Organizer Ashley Phibbs of Metro Detroit has used her Facebook page to suggest a broad “agenda” behind the pandemic. She has urged people to “NOT GET TESTED OR GIVE NAMES” because “corona cops” could remove children from parents, a claim based on a link Facebook flagged as “false information” originating from a voluntary contact tracing program in Ventura County, California.
Protest organizer Erica Pettinaro is a lead organizer for Informed Choice of Michigan, a group that opposes vaccine mandates and is planning its own rally at the state Capitol this summer. Organizer Allison Claire describes herself as a mom, military spouse, domestic violence victim advocate and a “devoted activist for medical freedom,” a phrase commonly used by activists opposed to government vaccination mandates.
Larner, one of the Michigan protest organizers, also has shared on Facebook what he called “extremely insightful” videos purporting to expose “Bill Gates’ role in this plandemic.”
"In the name of 'small business,' we're shoveling out billions of dollars to big corporations and rich guys."
"Major smoke screen, ash is raining for blocks."
Earth Overshoot Day – the day that marks the point where yearly consumption exceeds nature’s capacity to regenerate – fell on July 29 last year, the earliest date ever recorded since Earth Overshoot Day started 50 years ago.
In 2018, Earth Overshoot Day fell on August 1; the year before that it was on August 2 and in 2016 it was on August 8. The date for 2020 has yet to be announced, but if the trend continues, we can expect Earth Overshoot Day to fall in late July or August.
In fact, at this point, we would need 1.75 earths to meet our insatiable demand for its resources.
We often talk of spending within our limits. Similarly, there is a budget for Earth too. ‘Earth Overshoot Day’ marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year. Needless to add, each passing year, we are on a deficit budget – which means we are borrowing from our children’s future.
If we look back at why the Earth Day was needed, it is amply clear that the humans have not taken the lessons from the past seriously. According to Earth Day website, ‘Earth Day’ was a unified response to an environment in crisis. It was on April 22, 1970, that 20 million Americans — 10 per cent of the US population at that time — took to the streets, college campuses and hundreds of cities to protest environmental ignorance and demand a new way forward for our planet. The first Earth Day is credited with launching the modern environmental movement and is now recognised as the planet’s largest civic event.
Fifty years later, we are at a crossroads once again. As reported by the Guardian, even in the US, polluted areas are among the worst-hit by coronavirus. It is a lesson not just for the US but for the whole world. Air pollution and water pollution add to the global disease burden and hence it is imperative that the planet does not go back to ‘business as usual’. The economic stimulus offered by the Government of India should not cut into the environmental gains made during the lockdown period. The government will need to strengthen its monitoring of polluters and take stringent actions against them.
Reminds environmental activist Manoj Misra of Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan: “All economic stimulus must also be environmental stimulus. Example – a big boost to rooftop solar. There cannot be business as usual anymore.”
Among the toxic contributors to the financial crisis of 2008, few caused as much havoc as mortgages with dodgy numbers and inflated values. Huge quantities of them were assembled into securities that crashed and burned, damaging homeowners and investors alike. Afterward, reforms were promised. Never again, regulators vowed, would real estate financiers be able to fudge numbers and threaten the entire economy.
The Democrat majority House of Representatives passed a massive, $3 trillion coronavirus relief stimulus package known as the HEROES Act roughly along party lines on Friday night despite progressive concerns over the bill’s provisions.
"We must give people real relief and certainty before this crisis gets worse—because if we fail to do so, it will."
One would be foolish to count out the left.
Over the course of 30 years, the taxpayers of Illinois gave Sears the equivalent of more than a half-billion dollars in tax breaks and incentives to locate its headquarters in Hoffman Estates. In return, the retailer agreed to provide good-paying corporate jobs and return millions of dollars in tax payments.
Now, as Sears is struggling to survive, the question is whether the deal was worth it.
Elon Musk's successful bullying has vividly revealed that our duly elected leaders and the governments they lead cannot, when push comes to shove, adequately safeguard the health and well-being of average working people.
Those lobbying Pine64 to rethink using BitPay included several high-profile Bitcoiners including Lightning Torch organizer Hodlonaut.
Nicholas Dorier, founder of open-source payment processor BTCPay, took the opportunity to highlight his product’s advantages, something that Pine64 itself subsequently retweeted.
“I strongly advise AGAINST using Bitpay and instead advise that you present your engineers with the option to use BtcpayServer for free and have complete control over your online commerce,” another well-known commentator, Vortex, added.
"What checks and balances do we have left?"
Earlier this week, the Trump administration started hinting that the president’s “temporary” ban on immigration, rushed into effect in late April as a part of the pandemic response, was about to be extended indefinitely.
"These people don't even have an ounce of shame."
The lie that gave rise to the current dilemma was a lie told not to the parent by the consumer of a purloined ice cream bar, but a lie told to an entity known as the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Time for a Yiddish lesson: Shanda, meaning a shame or disgrace; a scandal.
Election experts warn that states are dangerously under-equipped to handle the likely surge of mail-in voting in the Nov. 3 presidential contest and facilitate in-person voting in a hazardous environment. Without more assistance, some experts say the U.S. is hurtling toward a potential disaster that could bring about a delayed or disputed election result.
[...]
In a country riven by political tribalism and expecting a close election, Weiser and others say the current path is a recipe for chaos that could prevent ballots from getting to voters on time and leave election officials with inadequate resources to process them, as states are already facing budget strains.
The rally was led by Michigan United for Liberty, a conservative activist group that has participated in several protests since early April.
Big League Politics, founded by past Breitbart News staffers, quotes a founder of Michigan United for Liberty as saying: [...]
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo urged President Trump to fire the official responsible for fighting waste and fraud in his department, a White House official said Saturday, a recommendation certain to come under scrutiny after congressional Democrats opened an investigation into what they said “may be an act of illegal retaliation.”
Mr. Trump told Speaker Nancy Pelosi late Friday night that he was ousting Steve A. Linick, who led the office of the inspector general at the State Department, and replacing him with an ambassador with close ties to Vice President Mike Pence.
Iran “must stop their absurd practice of imprisoning journalists solely for speaking to foreign media outlets, especially during a pandemic, when any jail term could be a potential death sentence,” said Sherif Mansour, Middle East and North Africa program coordinator at the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).
Fathi was detained in May 2018 after he gave an interview with the BBC’s Persian service about the reelection of President Hassan Rohani, according to an interview with the journalist by Iran International.
On May 6, Fathi, a freelance columnist and former editor of the Iranian daily Ettelaat, began an 18-month prison term in Tehran’s Evin Prison after his appeal in a 2018 criminal case for speaking with the BBC Persian service was denied, according to a report by the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), a U.S.-based outlet that covers news in Iran.
The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit against Education Secretary Betsy DeVos that would block parts of her department’s new Title IX rule, saying the guidance will “slash schools’ obligations to respond to reports of sexual harassment and assault.”
Trump considers himself above the law.
On this edition of the “Dissenter Weekly,” host and Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola joins various media organizations in highlighting the testimony of Rick Bright, the former deputy assistant secretary for preparedness and response at Health and Human Services (HHS) and former director of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, or BARDA.
Bright was retaliated against by officials in President Donald Trump’s administration after he recommended in January that the administration take the coronavirus pandemic more seriously. He also challenged cronyism, including the manner in which certain drugs were fast-tracked for approval to address COVID-19 simply because a company had political connections to Jared Kushner or others. “Most Americans want the same thing–a return to normal,” Bright testified to the House Energy and Commerce Committee. “The normal of 2019 is not going to return, but we all have an opportunity to shape the new normal of 2020 and beyond.”
Zimbabwe’s main opposition party said on Thursday three of its activists were missing a day after taking part in a protest over food shortages and police denied holding them after initially telling local media they had been arrested.
The southern African nation has a history of enforced disappearances of government opponents and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) said it feared its members, including a member of parliament, had been abducted by state security agents.
The number of officers reprimanded for the improper use of information has remained more or less stable over the past few years, the police said. But making sure officers are careful with confidential information, remains a major concern. "Police officers have daily access access to valuable information. That is extremely useful for their work, but there is also 'danger' in that special position. Working with sensitive data can become so ordinary that its value is underestimated," said Lonneke Soudant, head of Security, Integrity and Complaints at the police.
Unfortunately, her concerns are not farfetched. According to the Movement for Solidarity and Peace (MSP), a human rights organization in the country, around 1,000 Christian and Hindu women and girls are kidnapped each year, forced to convert and marry Muslim men. The victims are usually between the ages of 12 and 25. Despite these shocking statistics, the number of victims may be even higher as many cases remain unreported, often due to the girls’ families limited financial means.
If anyone doubted the importance of the Internet before the COVID-19 pandemic, those doubts have vanished like toilet paper at Kroger. During this time, the Internet has proved to be a lifeline, delivering the latest coronavirus health and emergency updates, connecting people to coworkers and bosses, and facilitating online classes.
But this is only the case for those lucky enough to have access. The American Library Association says seven in 10 residents on rural tribal lands remain without access to fixed high-capacity broadband. Making matters worse, massive swaths of tribal land don’t even have a cellphone signal, much less a broadband Internet connection.
No Internet access means no access to the economic opportunities the Internet holds. In 2018 alone, the Internet sector accounted for $2.1 trillion of the U.S. economy. But during this pandemic, many residents of rural Indian Country don’t have the luxury of dreaming up online business plans.
They are instead fearful for their lives and the lives of their loved ones who lack access to solutions like telehealth or online counseling during this time of isolation.
Is the Internet Getting Slower? With everything going on, is the internet getting slower? Well lets go over an article and show you my speed tests and discuss the changes.
“Facebook keeps looking for even more ways to take our data,” Hawley said in a statement to The Verge. “Just like Google purchased DoubleClick because of its widespread presence on the internet and ability to collect data, Facebook wants Giphy so it can collect even more data on us. Facebook shouldn’t be acquiring any companies while it is under antitrust investigation for its past purchases.”
James Donato says he will seek to permanently institute online hearings and expert ‘hot-tubbing’ after the lockdown, and to stop the ‘death of the trial’
We have for our readers today an invited guest post from Neha Mishra, currently a post-doctoral fellow at the Centre for International Law, National University of Singapore. Neha earned her BA.LLB degree from NLS Bangalore several years ago (where we were classmates) after which she practised law briefly in London and India. She then went on to collect degrees in law and public policy from the London School of Economics, National University of Singapore and finally a PhD from Melbourne University on how international trade law and internet policy can be better aligned with cross border data flows.
Neha’s PhD thesis which can be accessed over here, won the Harrold Luntz Graduate Research Prize for the best thesis by a graduate student at the Melbourne Law School. Her research comes at an interesting time for India which is currently in the process of creating its own data protection regime. At some point of time in the near future, the world will have to decide on an international regulatory framework for cross-border data flows failing which we are going to see increased trade tensions on issues such as data localisation. India is already facing heat on this aspect from the United States.
In this post, Neha provides us with a snapshot of one of the areas of her research. It is an abridged version of her article Building Bridges: International Trade Law, Internet Governance and the Regulation of Data Flows, which was published in the Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 2019. While she has taken pains to point out to me that it is not related to intellectual property, I did pester her for this piece because as an IP blog we do end up covering data protection issues quite often and the issues raised in her thesis are likely to end up influencing some aspects of IP policy in the near future.
Yesterday, the German Federal Court of Justice ruled that Haier is infringing an SEP of Sisvel and acted as an unwilling licensee in FRAND negotiations. The ruling could significantly raise the bar on FRAND rules for implementers. The judgment is considered a game-changer in FRAND law in Europe.
Infringement under the doctrine of equivalents (as a basis of a successful cause of action having renewed vigor before the Federal Circuit recently (see, e.g., "Galderma Laboratories, L.P. v. Amneal Pharmaceuticals LLC") is most frequently rebutted by the doctrine of prosecution history estoppel ("Pharma Tech Solutions, Inc. v. Lifescan, Inc."). This is not the only defense available to an accused infringer; its sister doctrine, of dedication-disclosure, can be equally effective under circumstances where a patentee has disclaimed aspects or embodiments that could fall within the scope of equivalents but was disclaimed to avoid prior art, for lack of utility, or insufficiency of disclosure under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 112. Last Friday, the Federal Circuit applied the dedication-disclosure doctrine to affirm the District Court's dismissal on the pleadings of plaintiff Eagle Pharmaceuticals' infringement allegations under the doctrine of equivalents in Eagle Pharmaceuticals Inc. v. Slayback Pharma LLC.
Yesterday, in Idorsia Pharmaceuticals, Ltd. v. Iancu, the Federal Circuit affirmed a decision by the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia granting summary judgment in favor of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, finding that the District Court had correctly concluded that the Office properly calculated the Patent Term Adjustment for U.S. Patent No. 8,518,912. In particular, the District Court had determined that the Examiner's issuance of the first of three restriction requirements during prosecution of the application that issued as the '912 patent satisfied the notice requirement of 35 U.S.C. ۤ 132, and thus ended any further accumulation of "A Delay" for the '912 patent.
Actelion Pharmaceuticals, Ltd. -- Plaintiff-Appellant Idorsia Pharmaceuticals' predecessor in interest in the '912 patent -- filed U.S. Patent Application No. 12/745,358. On March 14, 2012, the Examiner issued a restriction requirement, identifying six invention groups. Actelion notified the Examiner by telephone that the invention groups omitted subject matter from the scope of the claims (but without electing any of the invention groups). The Examiner agreed, indicated that a new restriction requirement would be issued, and then issued a new restriction requirement on April 18, 2012 (35 days after the first restriction requirement). In the second restriction requirement, which superseded and replaced the first restriction requirement, the Examiner identified eight invention groups. Acetelion again notified the Examiner by telephone that the invention groups omitted subject matter from the scope of the claims (but without electing any of the invention groups). The Examiner again agreed, indicated that a new restriction requirement would be issued, and issued a new restriction requirement on June 21, 2012 (64 days after the second restriction requirement).
The '358 application eventually issued as the '912 patent, and the Office determined that the PTA was 314 days, which included 229 days of A delay. Actelion requested reconsideration of that PTA determination, and the Office issued a final decision determining that the PTA for the '912 patent was 346 days, including 261 days of A Delay, with the Office determining that the Examiner's second restriction requirement stopped the accrual of A delay. Actelion filed suit in the Eastern District of Virginia, challenging the Office's PTA determination, and the District Court remanded the case to the USPTO to reconsider its PTA determination in light of Pfizer, Inc. v. Lee. On remand, the Office determined that Actelion was entitled to 311 days of PTA, including 226 days of A Delay, with the Office determining that the Examiner's first restriction requirement stopped the accrual of A delay.
The bar on appeal of institution decisions is intended to keep IPRs a relatively quick and efficient process. Instead of permitting parties to challenge the decision to proceed to a final decision, dragging IPRs out for years, they can only appeal the final decision. In many ways, it’s analogous to how courts disfavor interlocutory appeals.
But there’s really two kinds of decisions at the institution stage that parties might want to challenge—decisions about how the relevant rule applies to the present case, and decisions about what the relevant rule is supposed to be.
[...]
This is, in large part, a problem created by the Patent Office’s decision to create precedential rules by an informal process as part of a single IPR, instead of conducting notice-and-comment rulemaking to set the rule and then applying it in IPRs.
And it’s a problem for everyone—patent owners, petitioners, and the public. Whether you’re faced with an IPR that’s allowed based on a voluntarily dismissed complaint not triggering the time bar or an inability to challenge a rule that prevents government contractors from challenging patents, an inability to challenge incorrect rules isn’t good for anyone. And it’s bad for the Patent Office as well—an inability to fix problems harms the perception of fairness that Director Iancu has championed.
The solution is simple and already within the power of Director Iancu. Instead of the ad hoc Precedential Opinion Panel process the PTAB currently uses, just require that all rules pertaining to IPR be made via notice-and-comment rulemaking. Given 35 U.S.C. €§ 316(a)’s command that “[t]he Director shall prescribe regulations,” including regulations governing inter partes review, this clearly seems to be what Congress intended.
Doing rulemaking via Administrative Procedure Act procedures ensures that the entire public has proper notice of the proposed and final rule and a chance to participate in the process of setting it. And if someone thinks the PTAB sets the wrong rule, they can bring a challenge to the rule under the APA. That allows parties to challenge the kind of broad rules on institution that should be appealable, while avoiding the problem of parties appealing every single institution decision that doesn’t go their way because of disagreement over the facts of the case.
If an individual IPR requires the creation of a new rule, whether at institution or at final written decision, that IPR can be paused until the rulemaking is completed. At that point, the PTAB judges will be applying a properly promulgated rule created via normal agency procedures.
European Patent Office (EPO) - All-time limits expiring on or after 15 March 2020 are thus extended until May 4, 2020. More info.
European Union Intellectual Property Institute (EUIPO) - Deadlines between May 1 and May 17, 2020, postponed until May 18, 2020. More info.
THE rights granted to a patent holder are amongst the strongest of intellectual property rights because they include the monopoly right to utilise or license the patent for a stated term.
However, patent rights may be lost before the normal term expires. Under the current Patent Act (which dates back to 1857!), the term is 14 years but will be 20 years under the new Act.
The new Patent and Designs Act (passed but not yet in force at the time of writing) provides for the revocation of patents on much broader grounds and with greater clarity than the old Act.
Under the new Act, any interested person may apply to the Registrar of Industrial Property (at JIPO) for the revocation of a patent.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is the latest patent office to confirm that inventions by artificial intelligence (AI) are not patentable. This is a potential issue for all industries and probably most pressing in Life Sciences, given the growing use of AI in drug discovery.
The USPTO denied an application for a patent that named an AI, called DABUS, as the inventor. The USPTO held that the US patent statutes preclude interpretation of "inventor" to cover machines. The decision does not cite any express statutory limitation, but relies on "the plain reading" of words such as "whoever", "himself", "herself" and "individual" and a statement that an inventor who executes an oath is a "person". The decision cites US case law that inventors cannot be states or corporations. It relies on these cases as authority for the proposition that the "conception" of an invention must be performed by a natural person and it notes that this is consistent with the approach to inventorship in the USPTO's Manual of Patent Examining Procedure.
Lawyers explain how the recent Federal Court of Justice’s decision will level the playing field in FRAND negotiations
In what came as a shocker to the AI community, both the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) with regards to the petition to grant patents for an AI system called DABUS for invention, have quashed the application. They have reasoned that (AI) cannot be identified as an inventor because AI is not a “natural person” or a “legal person.”
The US is not too patent friendly, and Section 101 and low-quality patents are the most important issues, according to 54 respondents to a Managing IP poll
One of the general principles applicable in this kind of cases is that the mere registration of a domain name that incorporates someone else’s trademark shall not be regarded as trademark use. A trademark is deemed to be used only if it is used in relation to the goods and services for which it is registered. This position is expressed in two upheld judgments of the Kyiv City Commercial Court issued in 2010 and 2011, available here (case No. 20/68) and here (case No. 20/296). In case No. 5011-39/8538-2012, resolved by the High Commercial Court of Ukraine in 2013 and initiated by the owner of the trademark Kaeser against the owner of the domain name kaeser.com.ua, the courts found that on pages of the web site the mark KAESER was used, as well as information about activities of a codefendant in connection with the sale of compressors and components, similar to the products produced by the plaintiff. The courts ascertained that the mark in the domain name was similar to the extent of confusion with the trademark owned by the plaintiff and might mislead consumers regarding the source of the goods or services. Based on these findings, the courts prohibited the use of the plaintiff’s trademarks in the domain name and the defendants’ email addresses. Later, in 2015, Ukraine adopted the Law on Electronic Commerce, which clarifies trademark rights exceptions related to the resale of goods or services put on the market by the trademark owner. In its art. 3 the Law states that domain names, email addresses should not be regarded as part of commercial proposals, which means that even resellers of original products should obtain trademark owner’s consent if they want to use the trademark in the email address, whenever use is related to the goods or services for which the trademark is registered.
Ling ZHAO of the MARQUES China Team discusses the latest guidance from China’s SPC on the issue of trade mark infringement of OEM goods for exportation.
China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) has recently announced 10 significant cases and 50 typical cases, all intellectual property related. These significant cases and typical cases, though not binding on local courts, are important references to be taken into consideration when similar cases are tried.
From 1 May 2020, under ۤ 51 Trade Mark Law, a request for a declaration of invalidity and cancellation of a registered trade mark Рor for withdrawal of protection of the part of an international registration covering Germany Рmay also be filed at the DPMA on the basis of an earlier conflicting right within the meaning of ۤۤ 9 to 13 Trade Mark Law. Up to now, these proceedings could only be conducted before the ordinary courts; now, under Part 2 of the MaMoG, this is also possible before the DPMA.
Moreover, ۤ 51 (2) to (4) Trade Mark Law contains special provisions according to which a declaration of invalidity on the basis of conflicting earlier rights is excluded in certain cases (e.g. in case of acquiescence of the younger trade mark or non-use of the earlier trade mark).
High fashion brands’ logos have followed a path to marked similarity in recent years. Yves Saint Laurent – sans the “Yves” – swapped its skinny, slightly angled word mark for a bold and largely pared down “SAINT LAURENT.” Burberry traded in its serif font and accompanying cursive (for the “London, England”) for an almost identical sans serif type as YSL’s. Balenciaga did away with its super-thin font in favor of a bolder, block letters, and Balmain gravitated away from its stylized font for … you guessed it, a bold, sans serif type. The movement came to be characterized as “blanding,” as an array of brands relied on a handful of the same creatives to revamp the appearance of their trademark-protected names and logo. Looking beyond the shift from stylized marks to an overload of bold, geometric sans-serif font, websites are on something of a similar journey. “Why are all websites starting to look the same?” That is the question that has prompted a growing number of articles and blog posts over the past few years, most of which point to a common design elements, from large images with superimposed text, to hamburger menus, which are those three horizontal lines that, when clicked, reveal a list of page options to choose from. Such claims have even appeared in lawsuits, such as the one that Daily Harvest recently filed against a fellow DTC frozen health food company.
Several companies and individuals involved in the manufacture and sale of pirate IPTV devices into the United States are being sued by DISH Network in a Texas court. In a lawsuit alleging direct and contributory copyright infringement, the TV provider states that despite sending dozens of takedown notices, including to Amazon and Walmart, the illegal activity continued.
Google no longer highlights movies from pirate sites such as YTS and Fmovies in its 'movie carousel.' The top search position, which is part of the search engine's featured snippets, still works for official movie studio releases. Google hasn't commented publicly on the matter but it likely never intended the feature to work for pirate releases.
CREATe presents the second entry in our series of working papers released in 2020: “The Fundamental Right to Property and the Protection of Investment: How Difficult is it to Repeal New Intellectual Property Rights?”.
This working paper by Martin Husovec, (CREATe Fellow, Assistant Professor, Tilburg School of Law & Affiliated Scholar, Stanford CIS) is a pre-print of a chapter due to be published in the Research Handbook on Intellectual Property and Investment Law (edited by Christophe Geiger) in June 2020. The paper was also delivered as a CREATe public lecture at the University of Glasgow on 6 February 2019 (read the full report here).
Following the preliminary ruling by the CJEU in the Funke Medien case, the German Federal Supreme Court found that the publication of military reports by the German press did not infringe the copyright of the German state. The court found that the publication was lawful under the exception for reporting of current events by the press (ۤ 50 UrhG, implementing Article 5 (3) c) InfoSoc Directive).
The court explicitly left open the question whether or not the military reports were subject to copyright protection in the first place, arguing in its press release that this question does not change the result of the ruling. Unfortunately, this limits the generalizability of the judgment to other German copyright cases related to freedom of communication. The German state has been known to rely on copyright to suppress the publication of information obtained through a freedom of information request, a practice that has been referred to as “Zensurheberrecht” (a neologism combining censorship and copyright) by German freedom of information activists. Demands to use the ongoing copyright reform to clarify that official government works fall in the public domain have so far fallen on deaf ears with the responsible Justice Ministry. The ruling by the German Federal Supreme Court guarantees the non-infringing status of publication of such documents as part of press reporting, but leaves open the question whether the publication of state documents for other purposes is lawful under German copyright law.
Fashion models and burgeoning young fashion brands are not the only ones landing on the receiving end of lawsuits for using others photos without permission, Fendi is, too. The LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton-owned Italian luxury brand was named in a copyright infringement complaint this week after the brand published an image of Blake Lively in January wearing a mustard yellow look from its Spring/Summer 2020 collection on Facebook and Instagram that is “owned and registered by Eva’s Photography, a professional photography company” without the company’s authorization. According to the complaint that New York-based Eva’s Photography filed in a New York federal court on Thursday, its suit against Fendi “arises out of [the brand’s] unauthorized reproduction and public display of a copyrighted photograph of actress Blake Lively arriving at the Good Morning America show in New York” in January. Much like nearly all of the other paparazzi-filed infringement lawsuits, which have flooded court dockets with marked frequency in recent years, Eva’s alleges that while it is “the sole owner of all right, title and interest in and to the Photograph, including the copyright,” Fendi, nonetheless, “posted the photograph on [social media] as tool to promote its brand and clothing” without licensing it from Eva’s or otherwise “receiving permission or consent to publish it.”
Viacom didn't respond to a request for comment, but a spokesperson for Internet Archive confirmed that the archive received a copyright takedown request from Viacom.
The archivists are now making sure these can't get taken down forever regardless of any copyright takedown requests. They have created and seeded torrent files of the videos to decentralize their hosting, and have uploaded copies of it to private accounts and to archival sites hosted abroad.
There is, unfortunately, nowhere else online to view these broadcasts other than the places the archivists have saved them. Because of Viacom's persistent takedowns—which the company issues every day, not counting what's on Internet Archive—a huge part of television and music history is missing from the [Internet].
