Active State Power Management (ASPM) is an enhancement of Peripheral Component Interconnect Express (PCIe) that saves a lot of power by setting a device in idle state. The Linux kernel has also enabled ASPM support for the PCI Express interface.
Now it seems like removal of a few lines of code that were ignored for the last 12 years can bring more power saving to some Linux system. Kai-Heng Feng from Canonical reported a bug for disabled ASPM L1 on TI PCIe-to-PCI Bridge. While pushing the patch to Linux, he also stated that disabled ASPM on the device prevents the Intel SoC from entering deeper Package C-State like PC8.
TPAUSE is the new instruction supported by Intel's Tremont microarchitecture and beyond. TPAUSE allows for an optimized state that can provide low wake-up latency compared to existing delay mechanisms. With Linux 5.8, the kernel will begin making use of TPAUSE where supported.
The Timed Pause instruction already saw patches for enabling new instructions like TPAUSE and UMONITOR/UMWAIT back for Linux 4.19. But now queued in x86/timers ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.8 cycle are the changes for the kernel to actually begin making use of TPAUSE for more power efficient suspension of execution. TPAUSE supports modes of low-latency but with less power savings or aanother state for greater power savings but with longer wake-up latency. That is configurable via an MSR while the default behavior is the greater power savings.
Streaming media is causing, by far, the most DNS queries with a Roku that gets used perhaps 2 hours a day showing almost 2x the queries. The 2nd offender is our Plex Media Server, which is used for storage and LAN streaming. We don’t watch content directly on that system. The 3rd offender is an Amazon Fire 8HD tablet. That tablet has been rooted and has a huge adblocking and “bad guys” /etc/hosts file, so most of those DNS queries shouldn’t show up on the Pi-Hole at all. Without that hosts file, I can only imagine how many “phone home” requests it would send to Amazon and Amazon partners.
Armed with a very relevant quote We've moved away from [imagemaps] to a certain extent these days (in 2004!!), the article goes on to demonstrate how even back then image maps were still relevant for at least for the author's annotation library purposes. Sixteen years later in this article, we're gonna agree with the presumption and reimplement our own imagemap-powered image annotations.
Yes, level editing is really cool, but the big news here is native support for Half-Life: Alyx, a VR video game, on Linux.
Half-Life: Alyx has been out for around six weeks, and it’s been very well received. It’s something of a surprise, given that Valve isn’t really known for developing games anymore, but it’s welcome. (Perhaps we’ve probably got the former Campo Santo team to thank for that.)
But when Valve does develop games, one thing that’s universally lauded is the company’s support for tinkering. While the likes of Konami and Nintendo are playing copyright whack-a-mole with fan projects, Valve flings open the doors to its engines, level editors, and modding tools. Even fan-made remakes like Black Mesa get a curt but approving nod from Papa Newell.
Prepare for unforeseen consequences, then, as Valve throws open the doors to Steam Workshop for Half-Life: Alyx.
Why is June 5 so important? It's because it's the day EA will be launching Command & Conquer Remastered Collection. But EA making good with the modding community before the day the C&C Remaster comes out is glorious news. Jim Vessella, the Producer on the C&C Remaster at EA took to Reddit, where he said:
"This is a key moment for Electronic Arts, the C&C community, and the gaming industry, as we believe this will be one of the first major RTS franchises to open source their source code under the GPL. Along with the inclusion of a new Map Editor, these open-source DLLs should assist users to design maps, create custom units, replace art, alter gameplay logic, and edit data".
Vessella continued: "Overall, we are incredibly excited to see what the community creates over the coming months. We anticipate some fantastic content for the Remastered Collection itself, some great updates in current community projects as they incorporate the source code, and perhaps we'll even see some new RTS projects now made possible with the source code under the GPL".
With some fun sounding 4CPT physics (4-way contact point traction technology), DRAG looks to be a great racer and it's getting a demo soon.
As the Steam Game Festival comes closer, more developers seem to be announcing their confirmed participation in this huge online event. Taking place between June 9 - 15, Orontes Games announced DRAG making the cut on Twitter. DRAG only got a Steam page a few months ago, after being in development for a few years now using their own custom tech.
Today there's an undeniable truth that in a short window of time we've gained a wealth of games to play on Linux, but instead of the current dialogue focusing on finding common actions - how to capitalize on that potential, how to generate growth or even how to prevent too much damage being done, it too often ends up distracted in arguments that only focus on the past. These are fruitless. There's nothing to be gained but the ego boost of a hollow personal victory. "Is Proton good or bad for Linux gaming?" is a tired old question, that was thrown around in slightly different forms long before Proton even existed. There's a far more interesting topic: "Proton is here, so what next?". Finding answers to this, collectively, should be our urgent priority, because there's one thing seldom brought up in all these discussions: Proton's current success is the child of impeccable timing, and it may not last.
Powkiddy specializes in handheld gaming consoles, and if their latest Powkiddy X2 portable game console looks familiar, it’s because it looks just like a Nintendo Switch.
But the comparison stops there. The NVIDIA processor is replaced by a quad-core Cortex-A7 processor, the display has a lower resolution, the controllers aren’t detachable, and unsurprisingly you can’t play any Nintendo Switch games.
Civilization VI - New Frontier Pass went live yesterday, well the first part anyway and it appears it's launched without Linux and macOS.
This is despite both platforms being supported for Civilization VI, and when we enquired about (see the bottom update) it before release we were told the plan was to have it "sim-ship" (ship simultaneously). With the first part, Maya & Gran Colombia Pack, out now along with a patch for everyone and both Linux and macOS missing we again asked about what's happening.
When I switched to using Linux full time in the spring of 2007, my first recourse for gaming was either emulation or playing many of my old ported favourites from id Software. It did not take me long to start looking further afield in search of other quality Linux native titles, but in a time when digital distribution was in its infancy, and the Indie revolution that it would bring had not quite started yet, new games were few and far between.
At the same time, a small startup in Sweden was hard at work trying to expand their original Penumbra tech demo into a series of full fledged episodic horror games. The Penumbra Collection would be the ultimate result of that effort, with Linux support being provided by Edward Rudd. It would even go on to have its first instalment included as part of the original Humble Indie Bundle. The game soon caught my eye due to its strong graphics and advanced physics engine.
Nine Noir Lives asks the question, "how many things need to be licked to solve a murder?". A comedy point and click adventure that looks genuinely good. Appears one we missed too as we've not covered it before!
The developer, Silvernode Studios, recently announced that they've been approved for the upcoming Steam Game Festival that runs from June 9 -15. This means they will have a playable demo during this time, to showcase their game to a bigger audience. When asked on Steam, Silvernode confirmed that there will be a Linux demo available.
The non-profit XPRIZE Foundation has announced XPRIZE Connect, a new "learning initiative" with the first being Code Games: A Global Game-Making Challenge to get kids coding.
For ages 10 to 18, they want them to design and/or developer a video game with a theme across either Exploration, Environment, and Human Equity. It's being supported by Endless Network, who focus on empowering a younger generation with tech skills. Also in collaboration with E-Line Media, a video game developer and publisher involved in titles like the upcoming Beyond Blue and Never Alone.
To sweeten the pot a bit, they're offering a prize of $1,000 to multiple entries, plus $2,000 will be awarded to the best games/designs. You've got quite a while to enter too, as nothing is needed until October 14 2020.
How often have you scanned a letter, a certificate or whatever and looked for the right way to call $UTILITY to convert it to a PDF that can be shared via internet?
For this very common use case I could not find a tool to make that really easy for the Linux desktop. Given my mission to help making the Linux desktop more common in the small business world (do you know Kraft?) I spent some time starting this little project.
Please welcome PDF Quirk, the desktop app to easily create PDFs out of images from storage or directly from the scanner!
App Icon Preview is the very first utility made by the GNOME Design Tooling team, created originally by Zander Brown a year ago. Since then, we have been crafting other small yet useful utilities for the GNOME design team.
In 2019, the GNOME Foundation was sued by Rothschild Patent Imaging (RPI) for violating its "wireless image distribution system and method patent" (US Patent No. 9,936,086)." Rothschild, a Non-Practicing Entity (aka a patent troll), had filed 714 lawsuits over the past six years.
Now, in a surprise move, GNOME, makers of the popular Linux desktop of the same name, won not only a release and covenant not to be sued for any Rothschild patent but a release and covenant to any software that is released under an existing Open Source Initiative (OSI) approved license.
  If you’ve ever thought of building your own Linux-based operating system, you must have come across the Linux from scratch (LFS) project. It’s one of the best guides that teaches you to build your own customized Linux system from sources.
NuTyX is one such complete GNU/Linux distribution inspired by LFS and BLFS (Beyond LFS) that gives you full control of your OS. Continuing the development, the NuTyX dev team has released a new point version NuTyX 11.5 with minor improvements and package updates. So, let’s take a look at the new features and enhancements in NuTyX 11.5.
The COVID-19 crisis caused Google to change its release calendar for the Chromium browser sources, and they decided to skip the 82 release altogether, in order to focus on keeping the 81.x versions as safe as possible while working on their upcoming 83 release.
And so this week, Chromium 83.0.4103.61 was introduced to the “Stable Channel” with lots of bugs fixed, of which 38 are security fixes. There’s also a lot of new and improved features which are introduced in this release but it seems that many of those are only available in Google’s official Chrome binaries. One of the notable changes for Chromium users (as opposed to Google Chrome users for which it has always worked this way) is that the Widevine content decryption module is now an official component of the browser. Like with Mozilla Firefox, the Chromium browser will now automatically download the Widevine library into your personal profile and enable access to DRM-protected content. In the URL “chrome://components/” you’ll see Widevine listed as a component, displaying its current version and a “Check for update” button.
With more than 500 millions od download, more than 30 mirrors in the world, my "little" repository, created 15 years ago, have became (I think) one of the reference pour PHP and RPM users, providing
7 versions of PHP from 5.6 to 7.1 with security backports from 7.2 to 7.4 8.0.0-dev 150 extensions 6 distributions RHEL / CentOS 6, 7 and 8 Fedora 30 to 32 3 distribution modes Base packages, 1 repository per version Software Collections for parallel installation Modules
“Innovation happens at the intersection of functions; it organically comes from people closest to a problem,” says Red Hat CIO Mike Kelly. That’s one reason why he co-locates some of his technology staff with the business units they support.
We are very excited to announce that Debian has selected nine interns to work under mentorship on a variety of projects with us during the Google Summer of Code.
Here are the list of the projects, students, and details of the tasks to be performed.
Techbase has launched a #CoronaIoT project that plans to build a wireless-enabled, open source Smart Delivery Box for contactless package delivery based on the Raspberry Pi and ESP32.
Embedded Linux has already begun to play a role in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic in products such as open source ventilators and fever-ID equipment. Even beyond products aimed at coronavirus-related applications, the embedded tech product pipeline has continued apace, although a looming global recession will likely have an impact. Meanwhile, as explored in this recent Wind River Covid-19 survey, tech vendors and their customers are evaluating different strategies for adapting to the times, including taking advantage of this transitional period to accelerate digital transformation.
A new #CoronaIoT project recently launched by Techbase envisions one such transformation. The Polish embedded firm aims to use open source embedded hardware and software to address various Covid-19 related Internet-of-Things applications. The initial project is a Smart Delivery Box that would reduce the need for contact between package delivery personnel and customers. Techbase is seeking ideas and participation from the open source and industrial communities.
As we mentioned in our Dogwood update post, we have been busy testing the significant changes that have gone into the Dogwood batch. In the previous post we just showed a few pictures of the board with some testing wires attached but we figured you’d like to see more. Now that we are about ready to wrap up testing we wanted to share some additional Dogwood pictures. Like with previous batches Dogwood is a small batch process. We’ll see mass-production processes with the next batch Evergreen.
Tinkergen offers pre-trained model to recognized objects like humans, books, pens, or smartphones, as well as traffic signs, numbers from 1 to 9, as well as domestic and wild animals. As such, the company also provides signs, as well as optional illustrated and numbered cards together with magnets and card stands to facilitate various AI recognition applications.
Earlier this year, we noticed some RealTek RTK8720DN dual-band WiFi and Bluetooth 5.0 IoT modules, and quickly mentioned Ameba RTL8722DM development board available for under $50.
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It ships with one IPEX antenna, as well as two Arduino female headers that you’d need to solder if you plan on using Arduino shields. Seeed Studio also explains the final version of the board will have all the GPIO pins bent at an angle of 90€° from the board to allow convenient access to the Arduino pins.
  In this series, we look at a range of home activities where Linux can make the most of our time at home, keeping active and engaged. The change of lifestyle enforced by Covid-19 is an opportunity to expand our horizons, and spend more time on activities we have neglected in the past.
Police have said crime has fallen by 28% since the UK was locked down to battle the coronavirus with a a 37% drop in burglary. People are now encouraged to return to their workplace if it’s impossible for them to work from home. In light of this, the fall in burglary is unlikely to be maintained. So what can we do?
A Linux-based surveillance system can dramatically increase the security of your property and keep your family protected. The surveillance can be set up at various blind spots around your home that you can’t see from your windows so that if you hear an unusual noise or would like some extra peace of mind, you can check the perimeter of your property without having to leave your home. Home surveillance is not just a preventative system, it can also help bring criminals to justice.
On the whole, Argo Tunnels create an encrypted tunnel between your server and the Cloudflare network using the `cloudflared` daemon. Because of this, users won’t directly connect to your server, instead they will connect via proxy trough Cloudflare’s network. This brings a few benefits worth mentioning.
A shared filesystem is a great way to add versatility and functionality to a homelab. Having a centralized filesystem shared to the clients in the lab makes organizing data, doing backups, and sharing data considerably easier. This is especially useful for web applications load-balanced across multiple servers and for persistent volumes used by Kubernetes, as it allows pods to be spun up with persistent data on any number of nodes.
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I am running Fedora Server on a Raspberry Pi, but this project can be done with other distributions as well. To run an NFS server on Fedora, you need the nfs-utils package, and luckily it is already installed (at least in Fedora 31). You also need the rpcbind package if you are planning to run NFSv3 services, but it is not strictly required for NFSv4.
Grafana 7.0 is now generally available with enhancements to simplify the development of custom plugins and increase the power, speed and flexibility of visualization. This latest release helps organizations realize their monitoring, visualization and observability goals even faster, Grafana Labs said.
Grafana 7.0 is an accumulation of effort commencing after 6.0 spanning nearing 18,000 commits and 3,699 pull requests from 362 contributors around the world. Additionally, there are hundreds of company, commercial and community data-source plugins and thousands of sample dashboards.
  Thanks to the coronavirus, technology events have been canceled left and right. This, in turn, is damaging the finances of companies and groups that depend on these events. Some open-source groups, such as The Linux Foundation, can deal with it. Others aren't so fortunate. Some, such as Drupal Foundation, the Open Source Initiative (OSI), Open Source Matters (Joomla), and Ajv JSON Schema validator, are in real trouble. FOSS Responders is trying to help these and other groups and individuals.
While open source powers billion-dollar businesses, many open-source projects operate on a shoestring budget. Groups such as Sustain, Open Collective, and the Core Infrastructure Initiative try to help these groups and the code they create stay above water.
Apart from being open-sourced, Jitsi benefited from endorsements by a few highly-regarded names in the security community. In March, a privacy-focused browser Tor tweeted about the product as an alternative to Zoom.
To date, the Covid-19 pandemic has affected over 170 technology events worldwide. Some of them have been postponed and others have moved online, but the majority have been cancelled outright.
This has had a significant impact on the open source community, placing high-profile organizations and projects under mounting financial pressure.
The VideoLAN, VLC and FFmpeg communities have been working on a new AV1 decoder, dav1d, in order to create the best and fastest decoder.
The VideoLAN team responsible for the dav1d AV1 video decoder have just released dav1d 0.7 as the newest feature release and it comes with more performance optimizations.
Dav1d 0.7 is bringing around 10% faster decode performance on x86_64 systems while seeing memory usage reduced as much as 25%. Additionally, dav1d 0.7 completes its Assembly code for 8-bit bit-depth content as well as introducing more AVX-512 Assembly.
TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 23 beta 1 is now available (downloads, hashes, release notes). This version brings various oddiments of image tags up to spec, fixing issues with broken or misdimensioned images on some sites, and also has a semantic upgrade to Content Security Policy which should fix other sites but is most important to me personally because now TenFourFox can directly talk to the web BMC interface on Raptor Talos II and Blackbird systems -- like the one sitting next to the G5. There is also a minor performance tweak to JavaScript strings and the usual security updates. Assuming no major issues, FPR23 should go live on or about June 2nd.
The business networking platform LinkedIn uses MySQL extensively as a back-end data store for both internal and public-facing assets.
LinkedIn has a centralized MySQL site reliability engineering (SRE) team that provides MySQL as a managed service inside of the company, which uses about 2,300 MySQL databases currently.
LinkedIn engineer Karthik Appigatla, during a technology keynote session Wednesday at the 24-hour Percona Live Online conference, outlined how the business networking site has managed to scale and secure its MySQL deployment.
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Meanwhile, e-commerce platform vendor Shopify has seen firsthand some of the problems when deploying database services in the cloud. The Ottawa-based vendor deploys its fleet of MySQL services on the Google Cloud Platform at large scale.
Shopify engineers Akshay Suryawanshi and Jeremy Cole, outlined some of the challenges they faced with cloud deployment during a technology keynote session at the Percona conference on May 19.
Suryawanshi noted that Shopify is used by more than a million merchants during the peak Black Friday through Cyber Monday shopping period (Nov. 29 to Dec. 2 in 2019) and it can handle hundreds of millions of queries across its MySQL infrastructure.
A key promise of the cloud is the concept of elastic scalability that enables users to start up new servers on demand to handle traffic. Cole noted that sometimes the instant, on-demand promise doesn't actually always work out as expected.
These icons are called the Mimetype Icons and they were used in the main applications desktop icon, and in the document files created by LibreOffice. My contribution was little, but it was very well received by the original author, and by the others developers. After many adjustments done together with the design team, and many icon sizes individually created, the final result became the official icons in the 3.3.1 release of LibreOffice, and stayed as that for many years.
As you an see, my style was more decorative and shaded, full of degrades, highlights, outlines and shadows... And then, very shortly after that, the so called Flat Design became a thing, and a big thing. With its minimalism, lack of complexity, it made the life easier, both for users to understand, and for developers to create icons. It was quickly adopted by most software.
So, Flat Design became the norm in the early 2010s, and with that, my styled icons for LibreOffice became more and more obsolete through the years. And yet they lasted in the official icon set, as far as I could find out, until the 6.1 release in 2018. After 7 years, they were finally replaced by a simpler and much more modern version made by Andreas Kainz.
Often, a proprietary software company's silence can speak as loudly as their latest campaign against a computer user's right to freedom. This is the case with Microsoft's developer-centric "Build" event. While Microsoft announced a few more welcome additions to its free software output, it missed the opportunity to demonstrate a real commitment to user freedom by upcycling its recently abandoned Windows 7 operating system under a free software license.
The predictable failure here here fits together well with the corporation's complex history of mixed messaging on freedom, which once compared copyleft to "a virus that gobbles up intellectual property like a Pac-Man," and yet now would have you believe that it "loves [free software]." Our Upcycle Windows 7 petition has given Microsoft the perfect opportunity to take the next step in its promotion of free software, to show that its "love" was real. We are disappointed, but not surprised, that they have ignored this call from us and thousands of potential users.
Although the petition signatures and "special gift" were signed, sealed, and delivered safely to their Redmond, WA headquarters, the FSF has not received any response from a Microsoft representative. Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted the operations of even the largest companies, but as of yet, we haven't heard anything from Microsoft suggesting this was the reason for the lack of response. They certainly seem to have had the resources to put on a 48-hour video marathon about proprietary software.
As a backend developer at the Railwaymen, a software house in Kraków, Poland, some of my tasks rely on models that manipulate and customize data retrieved from a database. When I wanted to improve my skills in frontend frameworks, I chose Vue, and I thought it would be good to have a similar way to model data in a store. I started with some libraries that I found through NPM, but they offered many more features than I needed.
As someone with many friends who worked at the legendary corporate research labs of the past, including Bell Labs and Xerox PARC, and who myself worked at Sun Microsystems' research lab, this is personal. Below the fold I add my 2c-worth to Arora et al's extraordinarily interesting article.
The robustness principle doesn’t necessarily result in robust software. I made one change to increase compatibility (good) but that allowed another fault to be introduced reducing compatibility (bad).
These are some answers to the Week 61 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.
We've just launched a new interactive online course that'll take you from zero to pro with NumPy in the context of data engineering — dive in!
In this episode, I replaced the default Django test runner to use pytest. We walked through installation, configuration, how to change tests, and the benefits that come from using pytest.
We started by looking at the current state of the test suite to provide a baseline to compare against. After that, I went to PyPI to find the version of pytest-django that we wanted to install. I added the package to my requirements-dev.txt and installed the update.
One of the exciting additions of the upcoming Zato 3.2 release is the ability to invoke services through OpenAPI endpoints without a need for creation of REST channels explicitly - read more for details.
Python code
Supposing we have a service such as below - note that it is uses SimpleIO and that each of its input/output attributes is documented in the docstring - we would like to invoke it from an external application while delegating to Zato as much effort involved in it as possible.
And he also tries Cython on this benchmark. However, for whatever reason, he tries it on the second version, where the Python runtime is doing all the work, not on the first one, which is the one that is computationally heavy in user code. Unsurprisingly, compiling the second version gives almost no speed-up compared to exercising the exact same implementation of the built-in range(), str(), map() and list() functions in the interpreter.
Many people find instructional books useful, but I do not typically learn by reading a book front to back. I learn by doing a project, struggling, figuring some things out, and then reading another book. So, throw away your book (for now), and let's learn some Python.
What follows is a guide to my first scraping project in Python. It is very low on assumed knowledge in Python and HTML. This is intended to illustrate how to access web page content with Python library requests and parse the content using BeatifulSoup4, as well as JSON and pandas. I will briefly introduce Selenium, but I will not delve deeply into how to use that library—that topic deserves its own tutorial. Ultimately I hope to show you some tricks and tips to make web scraping less overwhelming.
One of the main appeals of using asyncio is being able to fire off many coroutines and run them concurrently. How many ways do you know for waiting for their results?
There’s quite a bit of them! However the different ways have different properties and all of them deserve their place. However I regularly have to look them up to find the right one.
On Unix — the progenitor of Linux — there was /bin/sh. It was simple, by comparison to today’s shells, but it allowed you to enter commands and — most importantly — execute lists of commands. In fact, it was a simple programming language that could make decisions, loop, and do other things to allow you to write scripts that were more than just a list of programs to run. However, it wasn’t always the easiest thing to use, so in true Unix fashion, people started writing new shells. In this post, I want to point out a few shells other than the ubiquitous bash, which is one of the successors to the old sh program.
Since the 7th Edition of Unix, sh was actually the Bourne shell, named after its author, Stephen Bourne. It replaced the older Thompson shell written in 1971. That shell had some resemblance to a modern shell, but wasn’t really set up for scripting. It did have the standard syntax for redirection and piping, though. The PWB shell was also an early contender to replace Thompson, but all of those shells have pretty much disappeared.
You probably use bash and, honestly, you’ll probably continue to use bash after reading this post. But there are a few alternatives and for some people, they are worth considering. Also, there are a few special-purpose shells you may very well encounter even if your primary shell is bash.
From one open source community to another, Oracle’s Linux team would like to congratulate the Java community on its 25th anniversary! Java has an impressive history. It was a breakthrough in programming languages, allowing developers to write once and have code run anywhere. And, it has enabled developers to create a myriad of innovative solutions that help run our world. Read Georges Saab’s post to learn more.
Both open source technologies, Java and Linux benefit from communities that collectively drive their advancements. While the technologies aren’t similar, there are areas where both work together and complement each other.
One area is Java’s support for Linux HugePages. Using Linux HugePages can improve system performance by reducing the amount of resources needed to manage memory. The result of less overhead in the system means more resources are available for Java and the Java app, which can make both run faster.
The Java programming language celebrates its silver anniversary this week, with May 23, 2020, marking 25 years from the day Sun Microsystems first introduced Java to the world. The venerable language has remained popular with enterprises even as a slew of rival languages, such as Python and Go, now compete for the hearts and minds of software developers. But Java is not standing still, with a revamp designed to address longtime pain points now in the offing.
Arising out of the “Oak” project begun in 1991 and spearheaded by James Gosling, object-oriented Java gained fame for its “write once, run anywhere” portability, as the Java Virtual Machine supported multiple hardware platforms and operating systems, and Java applets could be run from a webpage. Java applets offered better performance than JavaScript for many years, but eventually fell out of favor with browser makers and were removed from Java in 2018.
Death comes to us all but this is one that I feel acutely. For many years, I lived across from Frances on New York’s East 11th Street, but I was not very familiar with her long history of housing activism. Our relationship began in 1981 when, overnight, little green trucks began towing cars supposedly illegally parked all along the Silk Stocking District (on Manhattan’s East side) and dragging them into a garage directly across the street from my apartment building. The business sprouted abruptly like a mushroom. It was a Mafia operation, and had no variance to permit it to operate. It totally disrupted the street, between Second and First Avenues. There was a grade school at the end of the bloc at the intersection of 11th Street and First Avenue, so this also posed a danger to small children. This was a safe street, thanks to the presence of the mob, which ran a parking garage adjacent to my building, and had a “social club” at street level directly under my fourth-floor apartment. There was never a lock on the door to the building because a Puerto Rican woman on the first floor ran a numbers bank, so there was a constant coming and going of clients, as well as her Italian boyfriend. The building was owned by Ivan Nazarkewyc, a Ukrainian. I once complained to him that we needed a lock on the front door for security. But he said that was impossible, without going into details. He had an arrangement with the numbers bank and the mob. I liked living there.
Beauty is intimately and evolutionarily connected to the urge to live.€ It is the value associated most keenly with experiences that affirm our vitality in relation to the vitality of other beings.
The ultimate way to experience the pub at home, Thursday Night Knock Offs will showcase some of this country’s best female bands and solo artists live from Sparkke* at the Whitmore’s stunning rooftop in Adelaide, South Australia.
While there are some interested customers, e-commerce players require much higher levels of mainstream consumer adoption and retention to build viable businesses in a space where most still remain comfortable with shopping offline or are not yet fully convinced by the benefits of online shopping including wait times for delivery or the trust factor needed for online payments. But lockdowns across the continent during the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic are helping to accelerate a change in attitudes with consumers in many pockets exploring e-commerce out of necessity.
We've gone down this road before, of course, with products like the Dell Wireless D5000, which forged a wireless connection between your PC and a wireless dock for all of your peripherals (including your monitor). It sounds like Intel's goals this time are more ambitious.
After my reinstatement following a won suit, I returned to Intel. Immediately after my return begins a continuous workplace mobbing by my managers towards me.
With the support of the human resources, which will give me disciplinary measures on the basis of facts built artfully by Intel, with the support of a complacent Intel’s works council.
Intel proceeds with the systematic falsification of my work results, and the sabotage of all my work activities. it’s a long-term preparation work for my layoff in October 2018.
My complaints and my requests to stop the workplace mobbing to Intel’s guarantee bodies, the legal department, the personnel department, the general manager of Intel Deutschland GmbH Christin E, have been totally ignored.
So I decided to write to Intel’s new CEO, Bob Swan.
The first email receives no reply. The second email within a few months is equally ignored.
In my emails, I briefly describe workplace bullying and sabotage that I’ve been subjected to for almost a year.
These are short emails, no excuse for him, the CEO will not have much time to read my emails.
I offer to provide evidence of what I say. Offer that will not interest Intel CEO Bob Swan, who will never react to my emails.
[...]
What about Intel’s Code of Conduct someone could ask?
Intel’s code of conduct, is a mere statement of beautiful ethical and moral principles, which serves to advertise externally the image of an Intel company attentive to ethics and morals.
In reality, the code of conduct is very far from a company (Intel Mobbing Company) that has derailed towards an abyss of immorality, which manages to make a mess of any recognized ethical principle.
Intel Corporation is a company that denies fairness and legality. Who scoffs at the laws, because he knows only one law, those of the strongest.
The question remains: does Bob Swan, CEO of Intel Corporation, with his smiling face and friendly bald head, know of this rot inside Intel Corporation?
This spring, the novel coronavirus pandemic has raised the issue of the relationship between the blindest kind of religious faith and rational skepticism — this time in two countries that think of themselves as polar opposites and enemies: Supreme Leader Ali Khameini’s Iran and Donald Trump’s America.
The pandemic and federal education policy.
Labor rights group United for Respect released new polling data regarding Covid-19 precautions as employees demanded to be able to serve on Walmart's board of directors.
An employee of the Olimpiada Gold Mine in the Siberian region of Krasnoyarsk Krai died of the coronavirus on May 21. This is the first death from the disease among the mine’s workers, hundreds of whom became infected with COVID-19 over the course of the last few weeks. The gold mine’s coronavirus patients make up about a third of the cases in the Krasnoyarsk Krai — a region that is home to 2.8 million people.
Under normal circumstances, unsheltered people face enormous obstacles to getting necessary medical care. During the coronavirus pandemic, this assistance has become even harder to obtain, thanks to formal limitations (unsheltered people often lack passports and state health insurance policies) and simple neglect. In Russia, so-called “street medicine” is largely responsible for providing healthcare to the unsheltered. Meduza looks at how these volunteers have built an unofficial infrastructure to protect one of the country’s most vulnerable communities.
A newly released study from Columbia University concludes that tens of thousands of Americans likely died from COVID-19 due to the initial inaction and slow response to the disease from the Trump administration.
COVID-19 doesn’t care about your opinions regarding its threat. It can come into your house, fluff your pillows, breathe on your toothbrush, lick your doorknobs, rearrange your furniture and settle down for a nice long visit before you even know it’s there.
On the morning of May 21, Russian officials announced that the country recorded 8,849 new coronavirus infections in the past day (85 more new cases than the day before) bringing the nation’s total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases to 317,554 patients.€
The head of Chechnya, Ramzan Kadyrov, is suspected of having the coronavirus.
A new report finds 1.1 million children under 5 could die the next six months from secondary impacts of the pandemic, like disruptions to health services and access to food. Mothers are also imperiled. We speak with Tim Roberton, lead author of the study and assistant scientist in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, and with infectious diseases pediatrician Dr. Beate Kampmann.
We look at the coronavirus threat to millions of refugees across the globe, where social distancing is often impossible and healthcare is extremely limited. We’re joined by Dr. Miriam Orcutt, executive director of Lancet Migration.
In 2016, along with domestic pro-Trump propaganda campaigns, Russian operatives spread conspiracy theories and disinformation online in an attempt to sow political chaos and sway the presidential election. Now, the misinformation and conspiracy theories swirling around the COVID-19 pandemic provide a grim reminder of how disinformation continues to shape public discourse, with the 2020 elections only months away. Media watchdogs say homegrown disinformation is now a much bigger problem than foreign interference, thanks to President Trump, his reelection campaign and right-wing extremists fueling viral media content shared widely by the president’s supporters.
It seems that, ever since the COVID-19 pandemic hit the US in March, pretty much all that I’ve been blogging about has been COVID-19, be it quackery used to treat it, pseudoscientific claims and conspiracy theories about it, bad science concerning potential treatments, and antivaccine propaganda launched preemptively even before there’s an actual vaccine. For all the misinformation, pseudoscience, and conspiracy mongering over COVID-19, even I never thought I’d see the resurrection of one of the most abusive treatments I’ve ever come across for autism. I’m referring, of course, to “Miracle Mineral Solution” or “Miracle Mineral Supplement” (MMS) a.k.a. chlorine dioxide, a.k.a. a form of industrial bleach. The difference? Now the quacks are using it to treat COVID-19, because of course they are. Hilariously and bizarrely, it’s one of biggest über-quack grifters of all, Mike Adams, touting the use of bleach to treat the disease, with a story entitled Researchers claim 100 percent cure rate vs. covid-19 in 100+ patient trial conducted in Ecuador, using intravenous chlorine dioxide:
“Nobody’s seen this I would say since 1917, which was the greatest of them all, the greatest of this kind of battle,” the self-dubbed “wartime president” said. It’s reassuring, no doubt, to a grateful nation on course to lose over 100,000 of its citizens to COVID-19 by month’s end, to know that their health and wellbeing is the hands of a “wartime president” who once stated that avoiding STDs was the equivalent of the tour of duty he never did in Vietnam. When coronavirus deaths on his watch surpassed US fatalities in that war, he didn’t even muster a Tweet of feigned empathy.
The 2020 corona virus pandemic is not merely killing countless people. It is also having invisible but deleterious effects: psychological, political, and intellectual. Some people cannot cope with the severe economic effects of the plague, the constant barrage of bad news, and of being alone and isolated. They probably commit€ suicide. Others enter realms of fantasy and conspiracy. And still others, who know how to oil the wheels of power and influence, are taking advantage of America’s corrupt Trump administration.
Implementing social distancing policies two weeks earlier could have saved nearly 54,000 lives, the new study found.
The global pandemic has brought a new urgency to the need for political alternatives to status quo politics, a need for socialist politics, and organization and a vision of a future beyond capitalism.
"If he retains stock in companies that are investing in the development of a vaccine," said government watchdog CREW, "we can't be confident of the integrity of any process in which he is involved."
On March 20, just after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared a global pandemic on March 11, the U.S. National Security Council (NSC) sent a cable to U.S. State Department instructing officials how they should speak about China and the novel coronavirus, according to the Daily Beast, which obtained the cable. One section of the cable is called “NSC Top Lines: PRC [People’s Republic of China] Propaganda and Disinformation on the Wuhan Virus Pandemic.” The cable says, “Chinese Communist Party officials in Wuhan and Beijing had a special responsibility to inform the Chinese people and the world of the threat, since they were the first to learn of it.” Instead, U.S. officials were instructed by the cable to contend, the Chinese government “hid news of the virus from its own people for weeks, while suppressing information and punishing doctors and journalists who raised the alarm. The Party cared more about its reputation than its own people’s suffering.” The cable suggests the NSC instructed U.S. officials to trumpet this narrative, and to say instead that the United States must be thanked for its “extraordinary humanitarianism.” “The United States and the American people are demonstrating once again that they are the greatest humanitarians the world has ever known,” the cable continued.
"The AHA should immediately leave the PFAHCF and redirect that money to supporting patients and frontline healthcare workers."
If you’ve read a recent social media posting that offers some questionable advice or dubious news about COVID-19, you’re not alone. In fact, users on Twitter have, on average, about a 50 percent chance of reading information regarding the disease that most likely came from a bot, according to findings from a recent study.
Unfortunately, that’s not how our society works. That’s not how communicable diseases work. That’s not how any of this works. Cell phone data shows that the small groups of largely white confederates who have attended anti-lockdown protests spread themselves across hundreds of miles, even into neighboring states, within 48 hours of attending one of their Covid parties. And, of course, the people most likely to congregate in large groups without wearing a mask are also the people most likely to show up at your local grocery store or Costco without wearing a mask, sneeze on your potential purchases, and then amble off in search of more “freedom” while leaving sickness and death in their wake.
Quite simply: It’s the people who are most vocal about wanting the country to reopen who are making it too dangerous to reopen the country. It’s the people who are least concerned about their own health who are putting everybody else’s health at risk.
Measuring exactly how much bunk is out there to begin with is a challenge, in part because so much misinformation is shared through social media, said Gordon Pennycook, a behavioral psychologist at Canada’s University of Regina who studies fake news. It’s possible to measure, for instance, the number of tweets linking to specific fake news websites, but no way to see every instance a particular false claim is made on Facebook, especially when those claims can take many forms, including memes, Pennycook said.
Remember the song “Over There”?
Calls for a general strike are growing as millions of people consider going back to work after months of quarantine. Could a mass work stoppage be on the horizon? What about waves of local and regional general strikes as more cities and states move to reopen businesses during a global pandemic? Let’s consider the conditions of our current moment.
Beyond gaming and AI, Huang is targeting the market for self-driving vehicles, which require similar chip capabilities. Still, the majority of sales come from PC gaming, where Nvidia’s graphics chips create the most realistic experiences.
Just two weeks ago, Belkin announced to shut down one of its cloud services, effectively transforming its several product lines of web cameras into useless bricks. Unlike other end-of-support announcements for IoT devices that (only) mean devices will never see an update again, many Belkin cameras simply refuse to work without the “cloud”. This is particularly disconcerting as many see cloud-based IoT as one possible solution to improve device security by easing the user maintenance effort through remote update capabilities.
In this post, I would like to introduce three papers, each talking about different aspects of IoT security: 1) consumer purchasing behaviour, 2) vendor response, and 3) an assessment of the ever-growing literature on “best-practices” from industrial, governmental, and academic sources.
CrowdStrike, a leader in cloud-delivered endpoint protection, announced the CrowdStrike Falcon platform is bolstering its Linux protection capabilities with additional features, including machine learning prevention, custom Indicators of Attack (IoAs) and dynamic IoAs.
LFW211, developed in conjunction with the OpenJS Foundation, is geared toward developers who wish to master and demonstrate Node.js specialization, in particular for creating Node.js applications. The course provides core skills for effectively harnessing a broad range of Node.js capabilities at depth, equipping developers with rigorous foundational skills and knowledge that will translate to building any kind of Node.js application or library.
Note that we previously wrote about an open-source Raspberry Pi 4 UEFI+ACPI firmware to make the board SBBR-compliant and support features such as UEFI secure boot, but Swissbit secure boot is completely unrelated and instead is a custom security and access control solution.
Safe-Linking had the potential to block several major exploits that Check Point has investigated over the years, that turned ‘broken’ software products to ‘unexploitable’ products. “In the case of our research into smart lightbulb vulnerabilities, this would have blocked the exploit and attack.”
While Safe-Linking is not a magic bullet that will stop all exploit attempts against modern-day heap implementations, the company says, it is another step in the right direction. “By forcing attackers to have a memory leak vulnerability before they can even start their exploit, we have raised the security bar and made exploitations harder to execute. This, in turn, helps to better protect users globally.”
If passed as is, the USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act of 2020 will expand the infamous Section 215 of the Patriot Act to allow the FBI to view your internet search history without a warrant. This new surveillance capability was added to the Act by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in a sneaky amendment. Another amendment by Senators Wyden and Daines would have removed the ability of the FBI to access internet history without a warrant; however, the vote to adopt that amendment was lost by a single vote. These are the 37 Senators that voted to let the FBI have warrantless access to your search history.
EFF submitted a letter to the United Nations’ Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance to testify to the negative impacts of mass surveillance on vulnerable communities at the U.S. border. The Special Rapporteur called for submissions on “Race, Borders, and Digital Technologies” that examine the harmful effects of electronic surveillance on vulnerable communities and free movement at the border. These submissions will inform the Special Rapporteur’s 2020 thematic report to the U.N. General Assembly about how digital technologies used for border enforcement and administration reproduce, reinforce, and compound racial discrimination.
Ms. E. Tendayi Achiume was appointed the 5th Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimiantion, xenophobia and related intolerance in 2017. In the United Nations, Special Rapporteurs are independent experts appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council who serve in a personal capacity and report on human rights from a thematic or country-specific perspective. Special Rapporteurs also report back annually to the U.N. General Assembly (which is made up of 193 Member States). With the support of the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner on Human Rights, Special Rapporteurs undertake country visits, intervene directly with States on alleged human rights violations, and conduct thematic studies like this report.
We've talked for many years now about the overreach of the GDPR and how its concepts of "data protection" often conflict with both concepts of free expression and very common every day activities. The latest example, first highlighted by Neil Brown, is that a Dutch court has said that a grandmother must delete photos of her grandkids that she posted to Facebook and Pinterest, because it violates the GDPR. There is, obviously, a bit more to the case, and it involves a family dispute involving the parents and the grandmother, but, still, the end result should raise all sorts of questions.
RE: Vote “NO” on H.R. 6172, USA FREEDOM Reauthorization Act of 2020
FBI Director Chris Wray's potshots at Apple during the joint press conference about the Pensacola Air Base shooting weren't the only ones delivered by a federal employee. Famous anti-encryptionist/current DOJ boss Bill Barr made even more pointed comments during his remarks, mostly glossing over the FBI's brilliant discovery that the shooter was linked to al Qaeda -- something al Qaeda had claimed shortly after the shooting took place.
You would think that House Democrat leaders like Speaker Pelosi and Reps. Adam Schiff and Jerry Nadler, who helped lead the impeachment effort against President Trump, would leap at the chance to stop Trump and the FBI from conducting warrantless searches of Americans' internet browsing habits. Instead, they seem to be supporting it and are trying to scapegoat Rep. Zoe Lofgren -- who is trying to safeguard our internet surfing -- because she's dared to push for a fix to the law. At issue is the FISA renewal bill, in which Congress has decided to take the FBI's "backdoor searches" out of the backdoor and moved them around the front: explicitly allowing the FBI to go trawling through internet/browsing/search histories collected without a warrant by the NSA.
The Wyden Siren is blaring. If you're unfamiliar, Senator Wyden has a pretty long history of what is generally known as Wyden Siren letters to the Director of National Intelligence. Wyden, one of the few Senators who has consistently shown a belief in protecting the civil liberties of Americans, has spent over a decade sending letters to the Director of National Intelligence that always ask questions about how often certain very sketchy surveillance techniques are being used. And, every time he does so, it tends to be a signal that the method in question is used to a massive degree, while the intelligence community is running around insisting that it's nothing to be concerned about. If we've learned one thing, however, in all these years, it's that when Wyden asks these types of questions, it means you'd best pay attention, and the activity in question is happening way more than anyone thought before.
If you're visiting our site today (and I guess, forever into the future if you don't click "got it") you will now see a notification at the bottom of the site saying that this site uses cookies. Of course, this site uses cookies. Basically any site uses cookies for all sorts of useful non-awful, non-invasive purposes. We use cookies, for example, to track your preferences (including when you turn off ads on the site, which we let you do for free). In order to make sure those ads are gone, or whatever other preferences stay in place, we use cookies.
All of that pales, though, next to the announcement Zuckerberg made Thursday morning in a live stream to his employees. Beginning today, the company is making most of its open roles in the United States available for remote recruiting and hiring. And later this year, many of Facebook’s 48,000 employees around the world will be able to request a switch to remote work. Within the next decade, Zuckerberg predicts, Facebook — a company that until recently paid new hires a bonus of up to $15,000 to live near its Menlo Park headquarters — could be a largely remote workforce.
Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg said the company plans to “aggressively open up remote hiring” starting immediately with the U.S., particularly for engineering talent. Based on internal employee surveys, he believes remote workers could make up as much as 50% of Facebook’s workforce in the next five to 10 years.
Hong Kong will soon have a new national security law implemented without a single vote by a Hong Kongese politician. If that doesn’t sound democratic, that’s because it isn’t. The National People’s Congress (NPC) in China is starting its bimonthly meetings and at the top of the agenda is a new national security law for Hong Kong. Specifically, the agenda mentions a bill “on establishing and improving the legal system and enforcement mechanisms for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region to safeguard national security.” According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP), such safeguards would include forbidding the following:
Unlike in mainland China, Hong Kong maintains an open [Internet] and relatively loose constraints on online speech because of the city’s semi-autonomous status. VPNs and U.S.-based messaging apps like Twitter and WhatsApp, which are banned on the mainland, are legal in Hong Kong.
The national security law is expected to pass in China’s parliament before the end of its annual session next Thursday, but it would still take several procedural steps before being implemented. The law could lead to increased surveillance and censorship in Hong Kong, privacy advocates said.
The company has released several models since then, including devices with displays. Its latest model, announced on Wednesday, costs 549 yuan ($77.28) and comes with a 10-inch screen.
Alibaba competes with Xiaomi Corp and Baidu Inc in the smart speaker sector.
In 2019, Alibaba shipped 16.8 million smart speakers to consumers, while Baidu shipped 17.3 million, according to research firm Canalys.
Bart Gellman's long-awaited (at least by me) book on Edward Snowden, Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State, will finally be published in a couple of weeks. There is an adapted excerpt in the Atlantic.
It's an interesting read, mostly about the government surveillance of him and other journalists. He speaks about an NSA program called FIRSTFRUITS that specifically spies on US journalists. (This isn't news; we learned about this in 2006. But there are lots of new details.)
One paragraph in the excerpt struck me: [...]
This coming Monday will mark two years since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect. It prompted an initial wave of cookie banners that drowned users in assertions like “We value your privacy”. Website owners hoped that collecting user consent would ensure compliance and ward off the lofty fines.
Article 6 of the GDPR describes how organisations can establish a legal basis for processing personal data. Putting aside a selection of `necessary’ reasons for doing so, data processing can only be justified by collecting the user’s consent to “the processing of his or her personal data for one or more specific purposes”. Consequently, obtaining user consent could be the difference between suffering a dizzying fine or not.
Whether the port scan is used as part of an infection or part of e-commerce or bank "security checks", it is clearly malicious behavior and may fall on the wrong side of the law.
If you observe this behavior, I encourage you to complain to the institution performing the scans, and install extensions that attempt to block this kind of phenomenon in your browser, generally by preventing these types of scripts from loading in the first place.
The GDPR does not apply to the "purely personal" or "household" processing of data.
However, that exemption did not apply because posting photographs on social media made them available to a wider audience, the ruling said.
"With Facebook, it cannot be ruled out that placed photos may be distributed and may end up in the hands of third parties," it said.
Men and women often claim that they are joking when they objectify one another. However, the back and forth has created a debate about sexism among Generation Z and whether the phrases are, in fact, meant to be humorous or are an incarnation of misogyny.
The war in Syria has dropped out of the news, like almost everything else, in a time when the Coronavirus seems to dominate all discourse and reporting. But the regime of Bashar al-Assad continues to strangle its own country. The Russians continue to bomb on his behalf, terrifying civilians and hospitals. The Americans work semi-clandestinely to undermine both the regime and its Russian backers.
We need to start over: set down the guns and strip this system down to the bone, with the intention of rebuilding our social infrastructure on a foundation of trust, cooperation and a belief in the sanctity of life.
"Once again, Donald Trump's belligerent approach to foreign policy has put us all at risk."
There’s a meme that appears now and then on Facebook and other social media: “Those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. Yet those who do study history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everyone else repeats it.”
Covid-19 and Trump’s war on the U.S. intelligence community.
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif warns that the U.S. government "must give up bullying on the world stage and respect the rule of international law, especially free shipping in the high seas."
The Trump administration will withdraw from a post-Cold War treaty that enabled signatories to keep tabs on member nations’ arms developments.
On Thursday, the day after the interview was published, Perkins posted a statement to Twitter denying that she endorsed the conspiracy that she has repeatedly promoted throughout her primary. “I’m disheartened that less than 24 hours after my win, my words were already being spun through the fake news machine and taken out of context. I was not endorsing Q/Anon, but rather stating that I appreciate the fact that there is still free speech in this country that allows for voices — including whistleblowers from both sides of the aisle — that may, or may not, bring to light issues Americans need to be aware of.”
Trump administration officials have been quietly lobbying diplomats from France and the United Nations to appoint David Gressly, a veteran American U.N. official who has held a number of senior posts at the world body, as the U.N. special representative for Mali, overseeing a force of more than 11,000 African and European blue helmets. If selected, he would replace a former Chadian foreign minister, Mahamat Saleh Annadif, who is scheduled to step down at the beginning of next year after five years on the job.
But France—which maintains a counterterrorism force of more than 4,500 troops in the semiarid West African Sahel region—has been cool to the prospect of an American leading the mission, preferring that the post be filled by an African candidate from a French-speaking country, according to Western and U.N. officials familiar with the matter. The U.N. mission, known as MINUSMA, constitutes a critical pillar of French ambitions to ultimately extricate itself from costly counterterrorism operations in the wider Sahel. France has urged the U.N. to expand its role in the region, providing logistical support to a coalition of regional governments, the G5 Sahel, that Paris hopes can fill the gap when French forces begin to depart.
MCDP1 1 Strategy
MCDP1 2 Campaigning
MCDP1 3 Tactics
MCDP1 Warfighting
MCDP2 Intelligence
Nevertheless, her victory — which came by a significant margin — is emblematic of the conspiracy theory’s influence among conservative voters, as is the way Perkins highlighted it in her victory speech.
According to the data, compiled by the ADL’s Center on Extremism, there were a total of 30 arrests linked to domestic Islamist extremism in 2019, nine of which were for terror plots.
This is what Muslims who have fled the tyranny of Islamic regimes such as Iran and Pakistan had feared. And it happened sooner than anyone expected: the use of megaphones around mosques to spread hatred and to do so under the protection of city by-laws rushed through by a scared bunch of politicians worried that they might be slurred by the obnoxious word Islamophobia that is simply a sword of Damocles hanging over the head of anyone who dare critique the actions of certain Muslims or their clergy.
As tensions run high in eastern Ladakh, official data show there has been a marked increase in the number of Chinese transgressions into the Indian side of the Line of Actual Control (LAC) in Ladakh.
The first four months of this year, according to official data, witnessed 170 Chinese transgressions across the LAC, including 130 in Ladakh. There were only 110 such transgressions in Ladakh during the same period in 2019.
Kathmandu also claims the highly strategic areas of Limpiyadhura and Kalapani, although Indian troops have been deployed there since New Delhi fought a war with China in 1962.
Nepal's move to release the new map came after a new road was inaugurated on May 8 by Defence Minister Rajnath Singh connecting the Lipulekh pass in Uttarakhand with the Kailash Mansarovar route in China. Nepal has protested against the new road and is said to be considering a security post in the area.
Six months later, Nepal has now released its new political map. Its old map obviously did not show Kalapani, Lipiyadhura and Lipulekh as its territories. These areas have not been under Nepal's administration.
There is more to Kalapani story and Oli's anti-India stance. During his first term as Nepal's prime minister, there was a constitutional crisis in Nepal fueling anti-India sentiments with India unofficially imposing blockade for months. To counter India, Oli had signed a series of agreements with China.
"Hurricane season is about to start and its risks will only grow and potentially compound any impacts from the pandemic."
Emergency response officials need to develop COVID-19-safe evacuation plans, with safe locations and enforced social distancing, taking into consideration those most vulnerable socially and economically.
"The time for rhetoric and baby steps is long gone. BlackRock has to make substantial changes to its entire investment model in order to be the climate leader it claims to be."
When Stan Cox was€ writing€ his book,€ The Green New Deal and Beyond: Ending the Climate Emergency While We Still Can, he scripted these prophetic words: “The oft-predicted national decline in use of fossil fuels is nowhere to be seen, and it is unlikely to occur on its own, at least until the next economic meltdown.” He became one of those few people who dare predict the future; but it was unfortunate for humanity that his prediction came true. Between the time that Cox€ foresaw€ the conditions under which€ fossil fuel usage€ would€ go down€ and his book appeared in print, the COVID-19 pandemic spread across the globe, production crashed in country after country, and CO2 emissions dropped even more than they did during the 2008 financial crisis.
Many have heard talk of coal miners finding new jobs installing rooftop solar panels. It’s less often mentioned, but it seems just as likely that at least some coal miners will transition to new jobs in the metals mining basic to building those solar panels.€
The two crises do not just resemble each other. They interact. Shutting down swathes of the economy has led to huge cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. In the first week of April, daily emissions worldwide were 17% below what they were last year. The International Energy Agency expects global industrial greenhouse-gas emissions to be about 8% lower in 2020 than they were in 2019, the largest annual drop since the second world war.
The facility uses more than 170,000 devices called heliostats, each consisting of two mirrors that direct solar energy onto boilers found on the three centralised solar power towers. The boilers then use the sun’s heat to produce steam that drives turbines to generate electricity.
Sea levels will go on rising, because of human action. By how much, though, depends on what humans do next.
The research data show that the expansion of oil palm in some regions of the world—especially Indonesia and Malaysia—contributes significantly to tropical deforestation and the loss of biodiversity. Clearing forestland also leads to substantial carbon emissions and other environmental problems. "However, banning palm oil production and trade would not be a sustainable solution," says Professor Matin Qaim, agricultural economist at the University of Göttingen and first author of the study. "The reason is that oil palm produces three times more oil per hectare than soybean, rapeseed, or sunflower. This means that if palm oil was replaced with alternative vegetable oils, much more land would be needed for cultivation, with additional loss of forests and other natural habitats."
The new poll shows 73% of the group's members would be more likely to vote for the former vice president if Sen. Elizabeth Warren is his running mate.
"Calling this peanuts is an insult to peanuts, an immediate tangible thing people could eat."
"While millions risk their lives and livelihoods as first responders and frontline workers, these billionaires benefit from an economy and tax system that is wired to funnel wealth to the top."
Germany’s highest court issued a ruling that could threaten the existence of the euro with a constitutional court decision that said the European Central Bank’s bond-buying operations exceeded the ECB’s legal remit, and violated German constitutional law. The U.S. equivalent of this would be a state Supreme Court limiting the ability of the U.S. Federal Reserve to conduct purchases or sales of Treasury securities.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed in a private call with House Republicans Wednesday that the enhanced unemployment benefits keeping millions of people afloat amid Great Depression-level joblessness will not be extended in the next coronavirus stimulus legislation, effectively endorsing a major income cut for a large swath of the U.S. population.
The push to re-open, get the economy up-and-running has the momentum behind it of people who’ve been starved for normal socializing, outings and cultural events, and even, if not felt in the same way, from the routine of going to work. But, for those willing to see, at the top where the decisions are being made by leaders who are supposed to have the peoples’ welfare front-and-center, the cold-hearted evil of neoliberal capitalism is being blatantly exposed. There’s no smiley-face on it when leaders are offering COVID-19 responses like the “herd immunity” approach (UK’s Boris Johnson) to essentially cull the old and vulnerable while the rest – in theory – develop “herd immunity.” But not only the evil ones – Trump, Bolsonaro, Johnson, etc., are to be held accountable. Does anyone believe we have in our representative government any who will fiercely oppose the too-rapid opening process, and stand up for the people being told they must go back to work or lose their job and unemployment payments? Who will take up the hopeless task of arguing for the good of all? And, more to my point, can we expect leaders to take up a (social) cause we (the people) have largely abandoned?
"We cannot continue to allow tens of millions of Americans to lose their jobs, income, and health insurance during this horrific pandemic," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, one of the bill's lead sponsors.
A new report finds that as many as 60 million people could be reduced to living on less than $2 a day as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
Nearly one in four workers has applied for unemployment benefits.
While negative coverage of Donald Trump has been common due to his handling of the pandemic, media outrage has been muted in relation to the magnitude of the dying in our midst.
"Cutting back federal assistance at the height of the crisis would mean self-inflicted disaster, devastation, and additional deaths. That must not happen."
For the past eight years, Johnathan Bo-o has worked on and off in the service industry, starting as a dishwasher at a restaurant in an Atlanta suburb when he was 17.
The restaurant Bo-o was serving at prior to the pandemic was better than his previous workplaces. He thought to himself, “I’m doing fine for right now.”
In April, after Shadowproof put out a call for pitches from journalists, Clare Busch proposed a report on labor and organizing among restaurant workers in Georgia. We are really glad she did because the impacts from the coronavirus outbreak remain intense.
Restaurant workers have endured some of the worst aspects of the coronavirus crisis, with eight million or more workers fired or furloughed.
It was the day after April rent was officially due — April 6 — and Kevin Maddox was officially late. The week before, he had lost both of his jobs within a few days of each other. Both were at food-service warehouses. “My job is to get the food to the restaurants, and if no one’s going to the restaurants, then I’m out of a job,” Maddox said. So he filed for unemployment and now stood outside his small rental row house just beyond the Baltimore city line watching his young daughter as she rode around in her plastic car.
His spirits were relatively high, all things considered. Both employers told him they’d take him back, as soon as things opened back up. That maybe helped explain why he still wore the cap from one of the warehouses: Maines Paper & Food Service Inc.
Despite being an eternal disappointment to the majority of people, the capitalist-allied political establishment is able to remain in power in part by maintaining the illusion that politics is for experts, people with Rolodexes full of professional contacts, people who went to elite schools. Since the myth of meritocracy maintains that people get ahead professionally because they’re smarter or better than others, the people who are in charge (both as candidates and behind the scenes) are presumed deserving of their pedestal — and the proof of their deservingness is precisely that they’re in charge. It’s a dizzying tautology.
We could actually be on our way to a very different and promising future. But, count on it, the deficit hawks will soon be circling menacingly overhead, hell-bent on preventing any diversion from the austerity they’ve confined us to for decades.
"This is the worst economic crisis in 100 years and Donald Trump is doubling down on Herbert Hoover's economic playbook and pushing workers to risk their health for his political benefit."
Taxing robots sounds unnatural, almost sci-fi like. While I use “robots’ to personalize automation, the reality is that workers, human beings, are being replaced by automation, often in the form of robotic functions in our major industries.
"Five states already have all-mail elections—Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Utah, and Washington."
At the outset, let me be absolutely clear that I have a particularly heightened level of sensitivity to matters of gender and violence against women. Almost everyone has either met someone with some kind of #MeToo story or, alternatively, has experienced gender-based violence in some form.
If the Trump administration has its way, the US State Department–funded news organization Voice of America may pivot further right. Senate Republicans today moved closer to installing reactionary media executive Michael Pack as head of the US Agency for Global Media, which governs Voice of America and other US state-run media. The decision follows Trump’s recent rebuke of the outlet for being inadequately nationalistic.
The “gate” suffix has been wearing thin since the break-in scandal that gave it its birth.€ Since Watergate, virtually anything dubious and suggestive, and much more besides, is suffixed.€ Which brings us to the issue of President Donald Trump’s predecessor, Barack Obama.€ Finding himself in hot water (did he ever leave it?) Trump has been sowing the seeds of “Obamagate”, a fairly grotesque measure that serves to fill the shallow spaces of the social mediaverse.
The Montana Public Service Commission is far from living up to its name. Instead of public service, we get a highly regrettable rat’s nest of in-fighting among its all-Republican members. Now, even more regrettably, not only is this public agency refusing to honor Montana’s constitutionally guaranteed “right to know” about our own government, but actually filed a lawsuit against media outlets that ask for information.
The longtime activist has set her sights on the party's platform, fossil fuel industry donations, and a climate debate in the next presidential race.
"Voting isn't a gift given by leaders. Citizens have the right to vote."
Well, it is really happening. It is something of a shock to see yourself listed as a criminal for writing the truth. I have a tiny extra glimpse now into the way my friend Julian has been feeling.
The Russian Investigative Committee has arrested a 38-year-old entrepreneur from Moscow, suspected of disseminating false information about the sale of masks received as humanitarian aid during the coronavirus pandemic, the department stated on its website.
“ALAM NA PATTERN, MOSALIDA SI GO KONUHAY SIYA MOHANGYO SA BUANG NGA PANGULO, DIGONG G***. BUANG SI DIGONG,” Orcullo wrote on Facebook.
(We already know the pattern. Go will create a scripted demand to that foolish Digong. Digong is a fool.)
Members of Regional Anti-Cybercrime Unit (RACU) 13 and Nasipit Municipal Police Station arrested Orcullo at his residence at 3 p.m.
All things are cyber these days, including handy government tools meant to shield thin-skinned leaders from criticism. For a guy who goes around bragging about killing drug dealers, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte seems oddly unable to handle being called what he is.
[...]
Good old libel, but with 100% more "cyber." Whatever due process might have been in place for regular libel is pretty much gone now that it's been stapled to an abusive "cybercrime" law that allows the government to punish critics with impunity. Truth is no defense when charged with "cyberlibel." Nor are opinions considered protected, even though the country's constitution says otherwise. Call the president an "asshole" and you get to go to jail, even it's an opinion that's arguably true.
Trump is not telling the truth about Michigan’s plans. Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson plans to mail an absentee ballot application to voters, not an actual ballot. Several Republican-led states plan to do the same thing. (Nevada, by contrast, will provide actual ballots to voters.)
There’s never been a single podcasting company that sells ads, makes shows, has an already-popular podcast player, and offers the tools to make new series. Spotify now has all of that, and the Rogan deal means it also offers a hit show that guarantees millions of people will regularly use its platform for podcast listening.
The deal also, however, might foreshadow a future for the broader podcasting industry in which two sects develop: one that values privacy and an open ecosystem and another that’s closed-off and built around locked-down shows and targeted ads, like Spotify.
"Trump's corporate-friendly executive order aimed at rolling back even more regulations that protect the public is just the latest sign that his solution to the pandemic is the opposite of what the public needs."
So if the First Amendment protects site moderation and curation decisions, why are we even talking about “neutrality?”
Earlier, Twitter had given the option to users to hide the replies from their timeline to give people some control over the conversations on the micro-blogging platform. It also redesigned its app a bit by including threaded replies, this gives a better view to users about who posted what. Twitter has also been trying out a feature called fleeting thoughts, which is similar to the Stories on Instagram. The posts will come with a time period and it will diminish from the site after the said time frame.
Eight organisations jointly signed a letter to police chief Chris Tang, including the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA), the Hong Kong Press Photographers Association (HKPPA), the Independent Commentators Association, Journalism Educators for Press Freedom, CitizenNews Staff Union, Ming Pao Staff Association, Next Media Trade Union, and the RTHK Programme Staff Union.
The statement condemned officers who “attacked, interfered and caused unbridled humiliation to journalists” on the night in question. It made six requests to the force: stop all “verbal and physical abuse” of journalists; suspend the officers involved in the Mong Kok incident; ensure officers abide by the “Police General Orders,” “Police Force Ordinance,” and “Police (Discipline) Regulations” and other rules; publicly apologise to the journalists injured and humiliated in the incident; stop making unfounded accusations of ‘fake journalists’ and ‘fake journalist IDs’; provide specified plans for improvement of the force.
The sons of murdered Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi said Friday that they "forgive" the killers of their father.
"We the sons of martyr Jamal Khashoggi announce we forgive and pardon those who killed our father," the Washington Post columnist's son Salah Khashoggi said on Twitter.
The legal ramifications of the announcement from Salah, who resides in Saudi Arabia, were not immediately clear.
When foreign journalists would ask me if I thought that Antonio González Pacheco, alias “Billy el Niño” (BILLY THE KID), would ever be tried, I would answer no, that I never expected that there would ever be justice in Spain around the crimes committed during the Franco years. But deep down, I held on to the childish hope that an Argentine extradition suit against him would actually move forward and that one day we would see that criminal tried in a court of justice.
Newspapers must be for the people. It’s worth investing our tax dollars in them.
It’s painful to speculate how different our history might have been, the altered quotient of human suffering in this country, and the world, if Jefferson, Washington and Madison had freed their slaves.
Over the past five years, based on public procurement data, law enforcement agencies in Russia have spent at least 7.3 billion rubles ($103 million) to acquire and maintain special non-lethal means of riot control, according to a new report by the “Agora” human rights group.
Many Americans now recognize the racism at multiple junctures of the criminal punishment system. Especially now, as our leaders refuse to release the disproportionately black and brown incarcerated people from prisons and jails, despite their being sites of serious COVID-19 outbreaks across the country.€ But even before the pandemic, some media have played a significant role in that recognition.
Dr. Ahmad Al-Farjabi, a shari'a expert from the Qatari Ministry of Religious Endowments, said in a May 6, 2020 interview on Al-Jazeera Network (Qatar) that Muslims are not the only people who beat their wives and that when a man suspects his wife might turn out to be rebellious, he should take the measures prescribed by the Quran, the third of which is beating his wife. Dr. Al-Farjabi added that even Western psychologists have said that wife-beating is "inevitable" for women who had been beaten while they were growing up and for women who have no respect for their husbands. He said that these kinds of women must be "subdued by muscles," and that some kinds of women "may be reformed by beating." Al-Farjabi also said that he has even heard from women at his lectures that it preferable to beat one's wife than to allow her to ruin the home and lose her children. For similar statements from Dr. Ahmad Al-Farjabi, see MEMRI TV Clip No. 226
The girls were gunned down on May 14 in Shamplan Garyam village of North Waziristan tribal district after their ‘objectionable’ video footage went viral on social media.
North Waziristan district police officer Shafiullah Gandapur said suspected killer Mohammad Aslam, who was a cousin of the two girls, was held during a raid in an unidentified location.
Groups and relatives advocating for the release of prisoners at risk from the virus say they don’t begrudge well-connected people achieving that goal. The problem, they said, is that many other people who could meet Barr’s criteria languish in prison, without legal help, unable to understand the complex process or lacking connections to help them as the pandemic spreads. As of Wednesday, the official tally had 59 federal prisoners dying from COVID-19 and more than 4,600 testing positive, though health experts believe that’s almost certainly an undercount.
The Georgia man who recorded the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery was arrested Thursday on charges of murder and attempted false imprisonment, authorities said.
The man, William "Roddie" Bryan, 50, is the third person to be arrested in the death of Ahmaud Arbery, 25, on Feb. 23. Bryan will be booked into the Glynn County Jail, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said.
A mother giving birth to a child right in the midst of the road with other women covering the space with sarees stretched around her is no more limited to the Bollywood movies; they are real stories of the modern India. The other day a migrant woman gave birth to a child on the roadside while walking from Maharashtra province to her home in neighbouring Madhya Pradesh province. The lady and her family walked 150 kilometres after the delivery of the baby. Did it shake our conscience? Not really. After the nationwide lockdown was announced, many such incidences have happened with the interstate migrant workers and the central and state governments have shown their thick skins to it. Just a day before the above incidence a train rammed over and killed 16 migrant workers in Aurangabad of Maharashtra province when they were exhausted and resting on the railway track (They may have thought that no trains would come as it’s a lockdown) while walking back to their homes. And wait, much more such incidences are going to happen as many migrants are still on the road, walking, cycling, and going by an auto rickshaw or by a truck.
"The only way to avoid executing an innocent person is to abolish the death penalty altogether."
For 25 years, Shakespeare Behind Bars, an organization whose charter states, “All human beings are born inherently good,” has entered prisons and cast people convicted of serious crimes in Shakespeare’s plays. The most notable effort so far has been at the Luther Luckette Correctional Facility in Kentucky, where a production of The Tempest became the subject of a 2005 documentary, Shakespeare Behind Bars. It was because of this film that Melissa Tanis, who grew up in Kentucky, rediscovered her father, Leonard, when she was in her 20s. Sentenced to 50 years for child sexual abuse, her father had disappeared into prison when Melissa was a child herself. A few weeks ago, I talked with Melissa, via FaceTime, about her father, about forgiveness, and the reasons that Melisa works now with Release Aging People in Prison, in New York City.
For the better part of two years, Verizon has insisted that fifth-generation wireless (5G) would revolutionize everything. Simply by upgrading from 4G to 5G, Verizon repeatedly insisted, we'd usher forth a "fourth industrial revolution," resulting in smarter cars, smarter cities, and an endless array of innovation. 5G technology was so incredible, Verizon insisted, that it would also quickly usher forth incredible new cancer cures, allowing doctors to conduct remote heart surgery while wearing VR/AR headsets from the back of a rickshaw.
In recent weeks, the telecom sector and FCC allies have been busy trying to claim that the only reason the US internet still works is because the FCC killed net neutrality rules in 2017. That repeal, you'll recall, not only killed net neutrality protections, but the FCC's ability to hold giant telecom monopolies responsible for pretty much anything, be it obvious billing fraud or kicking disabled people offline during a crisis.
One of the most frustrating aspects of discussing the internet, business models, and privacy is how many otherwise intelligent people continue to insist that Google and Facebook are "selling your data." It's a concept that is widely considered accurate, but has never been true. It's so ridiculous that it leads to silly Congressional exchanges between elected officials who are sure the tech companies are selling data, and the people from those companies themselves. Doing targeted advertising is not selling data. There are many, many things you can reasonably and accurately complain about regarding big internet companies and their use of data, but "selling" the data is not one of them.
When Pitas and Sticks, a Greek restaurant in Brooklyn, New York, gets an order from Grubhub, owner John Stamos gives each bag a personal touch, printing out a small note with a simple message: Grubhub orders are killing his business.
"Small businesses like us need your support in this time of crisis," Stamos writes in each note. "Online apps such as GRUBHUB ARE CHARGING US 30% of each order and $9 or more on orders made using phone numbers on their app or website … please help save the restaurant industry by ordering directly with us."
The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) decided[1] on April 22 that the artificial intelligence (AI) known as DABUS (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) could not be named as an inventor on an application for a patent on an improved beverage container. The USPTO rejected this bid for AI inventorship, citing a panoply of statutory language, including 35 USC €§€§ 100, 101, and 115; the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure; and Federal Circuit cases[2] holding that “only natural persons can be ‘inventors.’”
While acknowledging that these prior rulings dealt with issues of corporate inventorship, the USPTO concluded that the holdings are equally applicable to issues of AI inventorship since the discussion of “conception as being a ‘formation in the mind of the inventor’ and a ‘mental act’ is equally applicable to machines and indicates that conception—the touchstone of inventorship—must be performed by a natural person.”[3]
The petitioners argued that AI inventorship should be recognized because both the European Patent Office (EPO) and the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) had determined that DABUS “created the invention at issue.” But the USPTO rejected this argument because regardless of UK or European law, “[US] patent law does not permit a machine to be named as the inventor in a patent application.”[4] Moreover, the UKIPO and EPO determinations nonetheless concluded—like the USPTO—that regardless of whether DABUS “created” the invention, “DABUS cannot be named as the inventor.”
On the occasion of its 100th anniversary, the Patent Office of the Republic of Latvia (LPO) is hosting the international conference “Intellectual Property – Vision Without Illusion” on 21 May 2020.
The event, which was initially planned to take place in Riga, has been changed to an online conference due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
A wide range of experts from the IP field will be sharing their views about the importance of intellectual property in economic growth, taking into account the new challenges that the future will bring.
The conference will bring together top representatives from the EUIPO, the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO), the European Patent Office (EPO), and the
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), among others. The agenda is available on the conference website.
This study aims to identify the profile of the filing of patent applications before the European Patent Office (EPO), wherein at least an applicant is domiciled in Africa, and to acquire more information about the main technological fields and applicants from Africa that seek patent protection within the member states of EPO.
We have evaluated the European Patent Applications filed from 2009 to 2019 having an applicant domiciled in Africa (“EP Africa patents applications”) by means of the EP Bulletin search database, wherein 1227 documents were retrieved. Below is listed a Top 10 counting of the number of hits according to the Applicant’s country. It is remarkable the predominance of applicants from South Africa. Moreover, a significant amount of patent applications has associations of African applicants and from other countries, for example the U.S., France, Germany and United Kingdom.
[...]
Despite small fractions of “EP Africa patent applications” having applicants from Seychelles, Egypt, Morocco, and Tunisia, most African corporations do not seem to seek protection by means of a European patent. Considering that the examination criteria have not changed significantly in the last few years at EPO, it is possible to assess that the quality of the “EP Africa patents applications” has been improving, in view of the respective growing tendency of European patents granted.
The highest judicial authority at the [European Patent Office] EPO issued their opinion …. in the controversial G3/19 (Pepper) case. Contrary to previous decisions in G2/12 and G2/13 (Tomato/Broccoli), the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) has found that plant and animal products produced by essentially biological processes should NOT be patentable.
This U-turn is the end result of significant political pressure from across Europe in favor of farmers and breeders who consider that patents on plants obtained from conventional breeding methods will hinder their activities.
Importantly, this new interpretation will not have retroactive effect on European patents granted before 1st July 2017, or pending European applications that were filed before this date.
On 14th May the Enlarged Board of Appeal issued its opinion on the questions referred in case G3/19, otherwise known as the 'Pepper' case1. HGF have been following the case with interest, and attended the original Board of Appeal hearing which lead to the referral, our last update can be found here.
The opinion marks the potential end to a saga which has created legal uncertainty in the field of plant and animal breeding and selection for over a decade. The issues began back in 2007 when the first referral to the Enlarged Board was made on the subject. This case became known as the infamous 'Broccoli I' decision of G2/072 and the subsequent related decision of 'Tomatoes I' of G1/083 . Enlarged Board of Appeal decisions usually produce final and binding decisions on issues of legal interpretation, however the tale of broccoli and tomatoes rumbled on to create two more subsequent referrals; G2/12 and G2/134 were consolidated and the decisions were issued together in 2015. These decisions, however, created controversy in that they essentially stated that the exclusion of essentially biological processes for the production of plants in Article 53(b) EPC does not have a negative effect on the allowability of a product claim directed to plants or plant material produced from an essentially biological process.
Last week the EPO issued another decision (G 3/19, “Pepper”) from the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) regarding the patentability of plant and animal products. The decision is from the “extreme dark and bulky peppers” application and is the latest decision in over 2 decades of EPO case law relating to “essentially biological processes” for the production of plants and animals.
The decision sets out detailed and fundamental principles for interpretation of the European Patent Convention (EPC) in the context of changing political and legislative circumstances. It is notable because it essentially overturns a previous decision of the EBA, uses a form of legal interpretation not previously adopted by the EBA, and discusses the powers of the Administrative Council (AC) of the EPO to amend the European Patent Convention (EPC).
In this article of two halves, we first set out the practical consequences for the Agri-Tech sector, before summarising how we got here and examining some of the relevant legal principles in detail.
[...]
Our article from 2019 discusses the decision set out in T 1063/18 and can be found here. As a quick recap(sicum), here’s how the protection of plant and animal varieties has evolved over the years:
Article 53(b) EPC states European patents shall not be granted in respect of plant or animal varieties or essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals.
1999 – EBA decision G 1/98 was published and confirmed a claim directed to plant varieties was excluded from patentability, but “a claim wherein specific plant varieties are not individually claimed is not excluded from patentability under Article 53(b) EPC even though it may embrace plant varieties”.
2010 – Combined EBA decisions G 2/07 and G 1/08 (“Tomatoes” and “Broccoli”) were published. They related to the patentability of claims relating to essentially biological processes (not products), and stated the exclusion to patentability set out in Article 53(b) EPC extended to “essentially biological processes for the production of plants”, as literally stated, and not just essentially biological processes for the production of plant varieties. Among other things, the decision confirmed processes that “contain or consist” of the steps of sexually crossing the whole genomes of plants are not patentable.
2015 – The EBA published combined decisions G 2/12 and G 2/13 (“Broccoli II” and “Tomato II”, respectively), which related to the relevance of Article 53(b) EPC to the patentability of plant products obtained by the excluded “essentially biological processes”. In that decision, the EBA stated Article 53(b) EPC did not exclude such products from patentability, other than plant varieties specifically.
July 2017 – Rule 28 EPC was amended by a decision of the Administrative Council (AC) to include an interpretation of Article 53(b) EPC under new Rule 28(2) EPC. The amended rule states, under Article 53(b) EPC, European patents shall not be granted in respect of “plants or animals exclusively obtained by means of an essentially biological process”. This clearly conflicts with the EBA’s interpretation of Article 53(b) EPC in G 2/12 and G 2/13.
February 2019 – EPO Technical Board of Appeal (TBA) decision T 1063/18 was published. In that decision, the TBA concluded that Rule 28(2) EPC was in conflict with Article 53(b) EPC as earlier interpreted in G 2/12 and G 2/13. The TBA therefore disregarded Rule 28(2) EPC pursuant to Article 164(2) EPC, which states in the situation where any conflict arises between the Articles and Rules of the EPC, it is the Articles that prevail over the Rules. It seemed then the amendment to Rule 28 EPC by the AC was null and void.
April 2019 – In light of legal developments since G 2/12 and G 2/13, namely interpretations and statements of the European Commission, the EU Council, the European Parliament and the EPO's AC (all of which concluded there should be no patentability in the case of plants or animals obtained as a direct product of essentially biological processes), the President of the European Patent Office referred a point of law to the EBA. The questions posed aimed to clarify whether Rule 28(2) EPC as amended by the AC should be followed or not, with the President arguing it should be followed as written. The referral was not without controversy, and the proceedings relating to G 3/19 attracted no fewer than 41 amicus curiae briefs arguing both sides of the case.
May 2020 – The present decision G 3/19 is published, and addresses that last question. In short, the answer is: yes, Rule 28(2) EPC as amended by the AC decision should be followed.
There are a variety of opinions concerning the Internet Archive's National Emergency Library in response to the pandemic. I've made it clear in multiple posts why I believe the freakout from some publishers and authors is misguided, and that the details of the program are very different than those crying about it have led you to believe. If you don't trust my analysis and want to whine about how I'm biased, I'd at least suggest reading a fairly balanced review of the issues by the Congressional Research Service.
Grant for the Web, the $100 million fund for efforts that utilize and build upon the Web Monetization standard, today announced $250,000 in funding for a small group of projects: Free Music Archive, Coronavirus Tech Handbook, DEV, and Grant for the Web Ambassadors. These “early grantees” represent the wide array of endeavors that this project is designed to support.
[...]
Creative Commons is proud to work alongside Coil, Mozilla, and Loup on Grant for the Web, which is is working to “fund individuals, projects, and global communities that contribute to a privacy-centric, open, and accessible Web Monetization ecosystem.” We’re especially excited that Grant for the Web is committed to awarding at least 50% of all grant dollars to projects that will be openly licensed.
Pirate sites regularly get into trouble for breaching copyright law. However, a new case filed in Hawaii is of an entirely different order. A well-known anti-piracy lawyer has filed a lawsuit against several YTS sites because the company he represents obtained a similarly-named trademark this year. The complaint mostly targets 'clones' and the real YTS is not named.
A court in New York has ordered Boom Media, a prominent reseller of 'pirate' IPTV subscriptions, to pay $3.3m in damages to TV broadcaster DISH Network. The judgment states that Boom's former operators, mother-and-son team Debra and John Henderson, should be held jointly and severally liable after failing to mount a defense.
