  ePaper is an interesting thing, providing a non-backlit viewing experience that is much more akin to reading a book than staring at a screen. The reMarkable tablet is a device designed around just such a display, and [davisr] has been hacking away at the platform. His latest work brings full-fat Linux to the fore.
The work builds upon [davisr]’s earlier work, installing a microSD slot in the tablet to make development easier. Getting Linux running required a custom kernel, but once sorted, working with the reMarkable is easy. apt is available for easy software installs, and the tablet is demonstrated using several different pieces of software, like mtPaint and Xournal.
We are living through interesting times that present challenges in a number of areas, including running a business. While we think of LWN primarily as a community resource, it is also a business that is not unaffected by the ongoing pandemic. It is, we figure, a good time for a status update, especially since we have some news to share. Never has our 2002 decision to move to a subscription model looked like a better idea. Revenue from advertising has reached a level that is essentially indistinguishable from zero, with little sign that it will improve anytime soon. But we didn't depend on advertising because we work directly for our readers; as long as you all support us, we will be in good shape.
Subscriptions have definitely fallen off a bit in the last few months, and we've had subscribers dropping off with a note saying that they had lost their job and needed to cut expenses. But the drop-off has not yet reached a point where we are seriously concerned about it; for that, we can only say "thank you!" to all of you for continuing to support us as the world gets weirder. A special thank-you is due to all of you subscribing at the Project Leader or Supporter levels; it really does make a difference.
[...]
Back in 1997 when work began on what eventually became LWN, we were driven by a strong sense of optimism about the future of Linux and free software. That optimism has been tested by ups and downs over time, but it has largely been borne out; Linux has been more successful than any of us could have imagined, and LWN is still here at the center of it. And we are still optimistic; we have managed to pull together an outstanding community of readers that will continue to support us for as long as we keep doing good work.
 In homage to the revolutionary age of 1776, System76 revolutionizes open source technology and declares independence from our proprietary rulers. But what are the key ingredients that go into making a computer so revolutionary? The following delicious details outline the qualities we value in all of our computers. Note: Licking your screen is not an effective way to taste the deliciousness of this blog post.
System76 users depend on heavy computational power to get their work done, and in some cases require a literal heavy computer. Our hardware is designed to support top-line processors and graphics cards, allowing you to consistently plow through your workload. We’re not going to call on a sedan to do a bulldozer’s job.
When Kubernetes was formed in 2014, Google undertook the task of building and maintaining the infrastructure necessary for keeping the project running smoothly. The tools itself were open source, but the Google Cloud Platform project used to run the infrastructure was internal-only, preventing contributors from being able to help out. In August 2018, Google granted the Cloud Native Computing Foundation $9M in credits for the operation of Kubernetes. The sentiment behind this was that a project such as Kubernetes should be both maintained and operated by the community itself rather than by a single vendor.
A group of community members enthusiastically undertook the task of collaborating on the path forward, realizing that there was a more formal infrastructure necessary. They joined together as a cross-team working group with ownership spanning across multiple Kubernetes SIGs (Architecture, Contributor Experience, Release, and Testing). Aaron Crickenberger worked with the Kubernetes Steering Committee to enable the formation of the working group, co-drafting a charter alongside long-time collaborator Davanum Srinivas, and by 2019 the working group was official.
windowmaker, covid, 3d printing, homebuilt systems, usb, thunderbolt
We announce the Ubuntu Podcast crowd-funder on Patreon and why, after 13 years, we are seeking your support.
It’s Season 13 Episode 8.5 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
Sysdig is an open-source system monitoring and troubleshooting tool for Linux, with cross-platform capabilities on Windows and Mac OS. You can manage security and compliance for Kubernetes and have an open platform with embed security and validate compliance.
Ardour 6 is out with major changes under the hood, CoreOS Container Linux is officially unmaintained, TeleIRC version 2.0.0 lands with a complete rewrite, the FIDO Alliance launches an instructional campaign, and PeerTube outlines its newest fundraising goals.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.6.15 kernel.
All users of the 5.6 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.6.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.6.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
Linus Torvalds is the most famous programmer in the world, father of the Linux operating system. and maker of the near-universal Git distributed version control system. He also builds his own developer workstation and recently upgraded his PC to a speedy AMD Threadripper 3970x-based processor. But a computer is more than a CPU.
While choosing a new Linux desktop or computer hardware, we always search and ask for advice if anyone can recommend the best setup for us. But have you ever wondered if you could build your Linux PC like the one the father of Linux uses?
If you really admire Linux founder Linus Torvalds and want a PC with similar specifications, you’re now all set to go. Yes, in the latest exclusive conversation with Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols from ZDNet, Linus disclosed all his PC hardware specs and Linux desktop information. So, let’s get to know how to build Linus Torvalds’s like PC.
Of the many features coming for Linux 5.8 one of the new drivers we are very much looking forward to is the AMD energy driver for finally exposing per-core and per-socket/package energy reporting of Zen/Zen2 CPUs under Linux. It's working out well so far in my evaluation.
CPU energy/power reporting is something that I and many other Linux users have long wanted to see under Linux for Zen CPUs, since it's exposed after all on Windows with Ryzen Master and other software. In the past AMD also maintained the "fam15h_power" driver for power reporting back on Bulldozer CPUs. But until Google sent out RAPL Zen patches recently and this "amd_energy" driver was then sent out by AMD engineers, there wasn't much public activity on getting this capability for existing Zen processors. There has also been the out-of-tree "Zenpower" driver for offering this based on public MSR data for Zen, albeit that driver isn't mainline, not maintained by AMD, and conflicts with k10temp when loading.
I got a bit behind on this blog post series! Let’s get caught up. Here are a bunch of security things I found interesting in the Linux kernel v5.5 release:
Kees Cook takes a look some changes improving security in Linux 5.5. Topics include restrict perf_event_open() from LSM, generic fast full refcount_t, linker script cleanup for exception tables, KASLR for 32-bit PowerPC, seccomp for RISC-V, and more.
Statsfs is a new RAM-based file-system proposal by a Red Hat engineer that is designed for exposing kernel statistics to user-space.
Currently when kernel subsystems want to expose different statistics to user-space, it's done via DebugFS (or sysfs). In the case of DebugFS, users generally need root privileges to access the data and users are often left to implement their own tools for each different subsystem exposing the statistics differently.
Red Hat's Emanuele Giuseppe Esposito has hacked together Statsfs in order to reduce kernel duplication of different subsystems working on their statistics reporting, avoid dirtying DebugFS with different statistics code, and making it easier for user-space to aggregate and display different kernel statistics.
As a result of at least "a few AArch64 platforms" lacking firmware support for mitigating Spectre Variant Two, Google engineers are evaluating the possibility of Retpolines for the 64-bit Arm architecture.
Google's Anthony Steinhauser raised concerns that with these 64-bit Arm systems lacking their firmware support for mitigating Spectre V2, they could be compromised. Steinhauser noted, "In particular, on those systems, we believe the speculated targets of indirect branches in kernel code could potentially be controlled by userspace code."
Developers of safety-critical systems tend to avoid Linux kernels for a number of fairly obvious reasons; Linux simply was not developed with that sort of use case in mind. There are increasingly compelling reasons to use Linux in such systems, though, leading to a search for the best way to do so safely. At the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel summit (OSPM), José Martins described Bao, a minimal hypervisor aimed at safety-critical deployments.
The kernel's CPU scheduler does its best to make the right decisions for just about any workload; over the years, it has been extended to better handle mobile-device scheduling as well. But handset vendors still end up applying their own patches to the scheduler for the kernels they ship. Shipping out-of-tree code in this way leads to a certain amount of criticism from the kernel community but, as Vincent Donnefort pointed out in his session at the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel summit (OSPM), those patches are applied for a reason. He looked at a set of vendor scheduler patches to see why they are being used.
The MMTests benchmarking system is normally associated with its initial use case: testing memory-management changes. Increasingly, though, MMTests is not limited to memory management testing; at the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel summit (OSPM), Dario Faggioli talked about how he is using it to evaluate changes to the CPU scheduler, along with a discussion of the changes he had to make to get useful results for systems hosting virtualized guests.
A task's "nice" value describes its priority within the completely fair scheduler; its semantics have roots in ancient Unix tradition. Last August, a "latency nice" parameter was proposed to provide similar control over a task's response-time requirements. At the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel summit (OSPM), Parth Shah, Chris Hyser, and Dietmar Eggemann ran a discussion about the latency nice proposal; it seems that everybody agrees that it would be a useful feature to have, but there is a wide variety of opinions about what it should actually do.
Over the years, the kernel's CPU scheduler has become increasingly aware of how much load every task is putting on the system; this information is used to make smarter task placement decisions. Sometimes, though, this logic can go wrong, leading to a situation that Valentin Schneider describes as "utilization inversion". At the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel summit (OSPM), he described the problem and some approaches that are being considered to address it.
Linux is not heavily used in safety-critical systems — yet. There is an increasing level of interest in such deployments, though, and that is driving a number of initiatives to determine how Linux can be made suitable for safety-critical environments. At the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel summit (OSPM), Michal Sojka shone a light on one corner of this work: testing the thermal characteristics of Linux systems with an eye toward deployment in avionics systems.
Life gets complicated for the kernel when there is nothing for the system to do. The obvious response is to put the CPU into an idle state to save power, but which one? CPUs offer a wide range of sleep states with different power-usage and latency characteristics. Picking too shallow a state will waste energy, while going too deep hurts latency and can impact the performance of the system as a whole. The timer-events-oriented (TEO) cpuidle governor is a relatively new attempt to improve the kernel's choice of sleep states; at the 2020 Power Management and Scheduling in the Linux Kernel Summit, Pratik Sampat presented a variant of the TEO governor that tries to improve its choices further.
Hi all,
I'd like to announce Mesa 20.1.0, the first release for the 20.1 branch.
Being the first release of this new branch, there can be issues that will be discovered now that the new code will be widely used, so you may want to stay on the 20.0.x releases until the 20.1.1 release, scheduled for 14 days from now on 2020-06-10.
One already known issue that I want to point out is that Unreal Engine 4 has a bug in its usage of glDrawRangeElements() causing it to be called with a number of vertices in place of the `end` parameter, that was recently revealed. This is an annoying bug that we haven't worked around yet. For more details: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/issues/2917
Eric
---
Andrii Simiklit (1): i965/vec4: Ignore swizzle of VGRF for use by var_range_end()
Bas Nieuwenhuizen (4): radv/winsys: Remove extra sizeof multiply. radv: Handle failing to create .cache dir. radv: Do not close fd -1 when NULL-winsys creation fails. radv: Implement vkGetSwapchainGrallocUsage2ANDROID.
D Scott Phillips (1): anv/gen11+: Disable object level preemption
Danylo Piliaiev (3): meson: Disable GCC's dead store elimination for memory zeroing custom new mesa: Fix double-lock of Shared->FrameBuffers and usage of wrong mutex intel/fs: Work around dual-source blending hangs in combination with SIMD16
Dave Airlie (1): llvmpipe: compute shaders work better with all the threads.
Eric Engestrom (4): .pick_status.json: Update to a91306677c613ba7511b764b3decc9db42b24de1 tree-wide: fix deprecated GitLab URLs docs: Add release notes for 20.1.0 VERSION: bump to 20.1.0 release
Erik Faye-Lund (1): zink: use general-layout when blitting to/from same resource
Gert Wollny (1): r600: Fix duplicated subexpression in r600_asm.c
Hanno Böck (1): Properly check mmap return value
Icecream95 (1): panfrost: Fix background showing when using discard
Jason Ekstrand (3): nir/lower_double_ops: Rework the if (progress) tree nir/opt_deref: Report progress if we remove a deref nir/copy_prop_vars: Record progress in more places
Kristian Høgsberg (1): freedreno: Use the right amount of &'s
Nataraj Deshpande (1): dri_util: Update internal_format to GL_RGB8 for MESA_FORMAT_R8G8B8X8_UNORM
Pierre-Eric Pelloux-Prayer (1): amd/addrlib: fix forgotten char -> enum conversions
Rhys Perry (1): nir: fix lowering to scratch with boolean access
Rob Clark (1): freedreno: clear last_fence after resource tracking
Samuel Pitoiset (2): radv: handle different Vulkan API versions correctly radv: update the list of allowed Android extensions
Timothy Arceri (2): glsl: stop cascading errors if process_parameters() fails glsl: fix slow linking of uniforms in the nir linker
Vinson Lee (3): r600/sfn: Initialize VertexStageExportForGS m_num_clip_dist member variable. r600/sfn: Use correct setter method. freedreno: Add missing va_end.
git tag: mesa-20.1.0
Mesa 20.1 has managed to release on time today as this quarter's feature update to this collection of open-source user-space graphics driver components.
The latest in open source graphics drivers for Linux has released, with Mesa 20.1.0 now out with tons of changes and improvements everywhere.
Info for new users: if you're using AMD / Intel, you're likely using something in Mesa, which includes a bunch of different drivers. Unlike NVIDIA, they use open source drivers which will be bundled with your Linux distribution. With this being the first release of a new branch, the Mesa team do advise you either stick with your current Mesa version or wait at least until Mesa 20.1.1 when they clean up any pressing issues. Mesa 20.1.1 is current scheduled for June 10. The first big new release is usually classed as a development release.
Linux 5.8 features for the Radeon "AMDGPU" kernel driver include the likes of Navi soft recovery and better handling of critical thermal faults on Radeon GPUs as well as enabling TMZ support. With feature work being capped off already on the DRM graphics front for Linux 5.8, AMD developers have been tidying up the code and readying more fixes for all of the new code set to premiere with this imminent merge window.
  Given the release last week of GraalVM 20.1 as well as last month's release of Eclipse OpenJ9 0.20, here are some fresh JVM benchmarks up against multiple OpenJDK releases.
For this fresh round of Linux benchmarking are numbers off the latest OpenJDK 8, OpenJDK 11, OpenJDK 14.0.1, OpenJDK 15 EA24, GraalVM 20.1 CE Java 8, GraalVM 20.1 CE Java 11, OpenJ9 0.20 Java 8, and OpenJ9 0.20 Java 11 for reference purposes. Note while Oracle made some OpenJDK 15 Java performance improvements stemming from our earlier testing, those changes don't appear to have been incorporated yet into OpenJDK 15 EA24. As usual, all of this testing was done with each configuration in its out-of-the-box/default settings.
  Following our initial Core i5 10600K and Core i9 10900K Linux benchmarks last week, here is a much larger comparison I have been working on since then in looking specifically at the Ryzen 9 3900X and 3950X against the Core i9 10900K. It's the largest to date with nearly 400 benchmarks being tested, most of them real-world test cases.
The past number of days I have been running this Core i9 10900K vs. Ryzen 9 3900X vs. Ryzen 9 3950X comparison with 381 benchmarks out of 138 distinct applications/workloads on both systems. With this round of benchmarking the Gigabyte Z490 AORUS MASTER and ASUS ROG CROSSHAIR VIII HERO were at play with 2 x 8GB DDR4-3600 Corsair memory, Samsung 970 EVO NVMe SSD, and Radeon RX 5700 XT graphics. Benchmarking was run off Ubuntu 20.04 LTS while upgrading to the Linux 5.7 Git kernel for the very latest kernel bits. All other Ubuntu 20.04 packages were at their respective defaults.
 Package management is one of the important features of any Linux distro that eases the method of Linux apps installation and maintenance. Different Linux distros follow different methods to package and distribute software.
But the same feature sometimes becomes a stumbling block for some people switching to different Linux distributions. They find it hard to understand the new package manager and fail to install the applications. To resolve such issues with multiple package managers, Linux distro has evolved to produce universal package management systems such as Snap, Appimage, and Flatpak.
  The internet is a fickle beast. Just when you think a company or community of developers have come out with a bit of technology that could help an operating system or piece of software rise above, that wacky internet sneaks up to say, "Nay, nay!"
I remind myself over and over to not read the comment sections. But I do, and I see the flame wars that once threatened to slice and dice the heart of Linux rise back up. Once upon a time it was vi vs. emacs and GNOME vs. KDE.
Screenkey is a tool that shows keystrokes on the screen, great if you're recording screencasts, video reviews or demos.
Small and highly customizable twin-panel Sunflower file manager released version 0.4 after many years of development.
Sunflower 0.4 brings new interface based on GTK3. The code is ported to Python3. As a result of this rewrite performance has gone up as well.
There are still many issues in the new release. Emblems are completely missing, drag and drop is broken and keyboard shortcuts are broken due to some upstream problems. And these will be fixed in upcoming weeks.
If you read this blog regularly enough you’ll be familiar with scrcpy, an ace root-free way to mirror your Android smartphone on your Ubuntu desktop and interact with it.
Scrcpy is free, it’s open source, it’s awesome.
Oh yeah, and it’s updated regularly!
Which is what this post is about: telling you what’s new and notable in the latest release, scrcpy 1.14 — so let’s get to it!
The sound-tinkerers among you will be pleased to learn that Ardour 6.0 is out, representing a major upgrade of the open-source digital audio workstation for Linux, macOS and Windows.
Ardour is a full-featured audio mixer and editor with unlimited tracks and non-destructive editing, patching and routing, video sync for soundtracks, and plugin support for AudioUnits on macOS, VST on Windows and Linux, and LV2 on all platforms. Automation is possible with Lua scripting. It is an alternative to the popular Audacity, another cross-platform audio editor, but Ardour has a more complete set of features for audio engineers.
While not so visually different from the previous 5.x series, Ardour 6.0 comes with many under-the-hood changes to make this powerful DAW software more reliable and usable for any musician or sound engineer.
Highlights include full latency compensation that works everywhere, no matter the routed signals, global varispeed through a new a high-quality resampling engine, which also lays the groundwork for making Ardoud sample-rate agnostic, as well as cue monitoring, which lets musicians listen to the input signal and hear themselves performing at the same time.
  A webcam is a video capture device that is either connected to a computer directly (typically by USB) or over a computer network. Many modern netbooks and laptops have a built-in webcam.
Webcams spice up online communication by offering real-time video chat and webcasting. These tiny cameras enable users to chat in realtime with friends and family, send video email around the world, to videoconference with co-workers and clients, and even to broadcast a TV-like channel over the net. Other people use a webcam as part of a security system, making use of motion detection to receive image and video intrusion alerts, both interior and exterior, of a building or home.
  Here is a next update for my ‘Digital Audio Workstation’ (DAW) software collection.
Today, 28th of May 2020, the Audacity multi-track audio recorder turns 20 years old! This is a nice moment to also release the Slackware packages (only targeting -current, sorry) for their latest and greatest, Audacity 2.4.1 which was released a week ago as a quick bug-fix to the long-awaited 2.4.0.
Along with this new Audacity release, I also have new packages for wxGTK3 (3.0.5.1) which you’ll need for Audacity to show its graphical user interface...
Our digital/online world is blooming with all sorts of amazing internet audios and videos, Whether you are a YouTuber, Singer, Dancer or any casual user, you need to have a quality audio recorder and editor to do your stuff.
There is no comparison of some of the coolest and reliable apps on the internet when it comes to recording and editing, one such app is Audacity, which offers a cross-platform for editing and recording.
AudacityAudacity is capable of recording and playing sounds as well as import and export to different formats. Do whatever you want to with this app as it is equipped with unlimited features to edit sounds using features like cut, copy, paste, tracks mixing and effects application to the recordings, etc.
Many are happy with Audacity and looking for no other option. But, as they say, everything comes with limitations so it’s important to always keep a check on alternatives too.
Through this article, we will introduce you to some of the best Audacity alternatives for Audio recording and editing which may convenience you to try them at least once!
It has been a while we did not get in touch with Ethan Lee directly, also know as ‘flibitjibibo’ on the interwebs. The man needs no introduction as he is behind the ports of numerous games on Linux (including Transistor pictured above), and the author of FNA, an multiplatform FOSS framework made to be compatible with the now-abandoned XNA from Microsoft. We had a long conversation back with him in the days (check out our podcast from that time). We thought it’s a good time to check with him what is going on now that Proton has been out for quite a while and we now have sufficient perspective on how it impacted the market of porting games on Linux.
Through the lens of an enthusiast, Linux gaming is healthy. Valve and Codeweavers (the company behind Wine) have boosted its profile significantly since introducing Proton, a compatibility solution that lets you play literally thousands of Windows-only games across dozens of Linux distributions. Ditto that for great services like Lutris, which employs Wine and pre-configured scripts to make installing games from Epic, Origin and Blizzard a mostly painless click-and-go affair. But the real problem with Linux gaming in 2020 has nothing to do with actual games.
Electronic Arts (EA) says it will allow players to mod its upcoming Command & Conquer Remastered Collection by making the game open source.
The video game company's creative director Jim Vessella announced that due to popular demand, EA will be "releasing the TiberianDawn.dll and RedAlert.dll and their corresponding source code under the General Public License (GPL) version 3.0 license".
He added that the move "to open source their source code under the GPL" was a first for EA, and possibly for any major real time strategy (RTS) franchise.
With this, modders would have access to a new Map Editor as well as the ability to design maps, create custom units, replace art, alter gameplay logic and edit data.
“Our goal was to deliver the source code in a way that would be truly beneficial for the community, and we hope this will enable amazing community projects for years to come,” Vessella said, in a blogpost.
Iconic interactive entertainment producer Atari€® and developer Nickervision Studios are delighted to announce today that Missile Command: Rechargedââ¢, the neon-lit reimagining of the beloved classic, is now available on Nintendo Switchâ⢠and PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam, with an Epic Games Store release coming soon!
Based on the 1980 arcade classic, Missile Command: Recharged delivers a visually captivating, deliciously difficult experience designed for modern gamers and fans of the original, alike. Following a highly successful launch on iOS and Android mobile platforms, Missile Command: Recharged brings the fun to a broader audience for even more classically-inspired and fully-charged fun.
Currently in development and crowdfunding on Kickstarter, The Last Faith looks like an impressively styled pixel-art dark gothic metroidvania.
The Last Faith is a Metroidvania that promotes a deep exploration style gameplay with non-linear levels. While you travel around the giant map, you have control over the way you want to be next. Every single spot counts, as you can discover new items, new secret areas, particular puzzles to solve and unique enemies.
Snowtopia, currently in development with a free version available while it's early on continues to be a promising new building sim that has you build a ski resort.
You've built theme parks, massive roller coasters, zoos and all sorts but a ski resort is another slightly different twist on the building and management sim. A genre I love because they're great fun to relax with and zone-out somewhat while you what everything. Snowtopia definitely has that enticing feel to it, the appreciation for people-watching as they all slide around on the snow.
[...]
A lot more is planned to come before it has a traditional Early Access release, which should hopefully be later this year. Going by a roadmap they shared you're going to need security personnel, there will be a research system, new animations for the skiers, more buildings, more objectives and so on. Impressive so far though and seems to work wonderfully already.
Growing crops on Mars is no easy task as you're about to find out with Red Planet Farming, a new and free strategy game.
You take on the role of the Agricultural Director of Mars, your job is to ensure the survival of various outposts across the barren planet by producing food in various shelters. Not an easy job, due to the extreme and constantly changing weather patterns on Mars. You will be with dust storms, radiation, extreme cold, meteor showers and other terrible things.
[...]
Developed by a group of graduates and current students of the NYU Game Center in Brooklyn, New York. They received funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Games Production Grant, a yearly award to fund game development at the NYU Game Center to support and help raise understanding of science, technology and economics. You can read a little more on that here. They even had NASA lend a hand for some technical support and advice.
  Gaming on Linux got a thorough kickstart in 2013 when Valve announced that their own SteamOS would be written on top of Linux. Since then, Linux users could realistically expect to play high-grade games that, in the past, required the purchase of a Windows computer or gaming console. The experience got off to a modest start, with just a few brave companies like CD Projekt Red, Deep Silver, Valve itself, and others putting the Linux penguin icon in their compatibility list, but eventually, even Gearbox and Square Enix were releasing their biggest titles on Linux. Today, Valve's Proton project helps ensure that even titles with no formal Linux release still work on SteamOS and other Linux distributions.
Northgard, the excellent real-time strategy game about warring viking tribes from Shiro Games just got another huge free update to expand what's possible with it.
With the all-new Map Editor you can create, alter, and transform custom battlefields. Various parts of maps can be changed like placing resources, strategic structures, terrain elevation and more. It's a full built-in tool that's going to be a map makers dream for Northgard. Shiro said you can externally modify other parts of the game too like unit data and scripting to make entirely new parts like victory conditions. This also comes with Steam Workshop support for easy sharing and downloading.
According to new Steam documents, Valve will be launching Steam Cloud Gaming soon with a Beta of Steam Cloud Play.
It will require developers to opt in, and they're required to support Cloud Saves (or another online save method), otherwise gamers will lose their data. Developers will continue to be paid the same way, since users still need to buy the games on Steam.
Before you get too excited though, the documents say the first service connecting with it will be NVIDIA GeForce NOW. For Linux gamers then, it means next to nothing since NVIDIA have been silent on any plans for Linux support with it. However, it's clearly early on and Valve are still building features and adding to their server capacity.
I love Linux, and I love retro-gaming, and in this video I show you how to create your very own retro-gaming console with RetroPie on the powerful new Raspberry Pi 4.
Coming soon is Drox Operative 2 from Soldak Entertainment, a starship action RPG with warring alien races, fierce space battles, a dynamic, evolving galaxy.
It was supposed to be releasing yesterday, May 27 but with delays to the Steam review process everything has been a bit delayed. On top of that, Soldak had their build rejected initially according to a blog post due to some minor issues that needing sorting. Drox Operative 2 might release this week, next week or later. Sometime soon, whenever Valve get to approvals again.
The latest game from ShotX Studio has been announced with Dungeons of Clay, an ever-changing action-platformer dungeon crawler and it looks great.
Explore the ever-changing dungeons in the surreal world made of clay. Unlock the hidden secrets, overcome the dangers, defeat dreadful creatures and reap the treasures to acquire almighty power.
[...]
It's coming to Linux, just like their previous titles...
You've built cities, managed theme parks and run across kitchens to prepare dishes but have you managed a hot spring before? I sure haven't and Onsen Master looks and sounds amusing.
With gameplay that seems to resemble the idea of Overcooked that looks like it could be a lot of fun, as you rush around to prepare ingredients to heal up your visitors across the fantasy island of Izajima. You're tasked with reconnecting "the communities that surround each onsen, and discover the supernatural world that they've long since been disconnected from".
  Announced earlier this year in January, the Cinnamon 4.6 desktop environment saw the light of day a couple of weeks ago. While there’s no official announcement for this major release, I did some digging to highlight the most important changes.
Probably the biggest new feature of Cinnamon 4.6 is support for fractional scaling on HiDPI/4K displays. The feature was finally implemented in the Display Settings panel under the Zoom Level drop-down.
Users will be able to choose values between 100% and 200%, such as 125%, 150%, 175%, for each of the connected monitors. Also in the Display Settings panel there’s now the ability to change the frequency of monitors.
  Since GNOME 3.38 is on house to ship in Ubuntu 20.10 (barring any tradition-flattening calamities …Which, given how things are going atm, is a distinct possibility) these are changes which you and I, as Ubuntu users, will likely benefit from come October.
So what’s cooking?
First up: the Applications screen drops the “Frequents” button that sira at the bottom of the grid. The apps grid is now just a single, vertically scrolling pane of application icons arranged in alphabetical order by default.
  We are almost half of the year 2020, we thought it right to share with Linux enthusiasts out there the most popular distributions of the year so far. In this post, we will review the top 10 most popular Linux distributions, the ones with most page hits during the last 6 months as per Distrowatch.
First published on 31 May 2001, DistroWatch has been the most reliable source of information about open-source operating systems, with a particular focus on Linux distributions and flavors of BSD. It collects and presents a wealth of information about Linux distributions consistently to make it easier to access.
Although it is not a good indicator of a distribution’s popularity or usage, DistroWatch remains the most accepted measure of popularity within the Linux community. It uses Page Hit Ranking (PHR) statistics to measure the popularity of Linux distributions among the visitors of the website.
  System76 regularly updates this distro without requiring constant reinstallation. The developer updates POP!_OS on a rolling release cycle.
The operating system gets updates, security patches and updated releases as they are ready. Rolling releases ensure that you never have to handle ISO installations again with configuring settings to recreate the same look and feel of the current version.
Linux Kodachi OS 7.0, a secure, anti forensic, and anonymous operating system, has been released with new tools, new features, and many improvements.
Coming nine months after version 6.3, the Kodachi OS 7.0 release is dubbed “Katana” and it’s here to introduce a new kernel series, namely the long-term supported Linux 5.4 from the latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) release, which arrived in late April 2020.
However, Kodachi OS 7.0 is still based on the Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) series, most precisely Xubuntu 18.04 LTS as it uses the lightweight Xfce desktop environment by default. Of course, the new kernel stack brings better support for newer hardware.
OpenSSH 8.3 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at https://www.openssh.com/ shortly.
OpenSSH 8.3 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at https://www.openssh.com/ shortly.
OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support.
Once again, we would like to thank the OpenSSH community for their continued support of the project, especially those who contributed code or patches, reported bugs, tested snapshots or donated to the project. More information on donations may be found at: https://www.openssh.com/donations.html
In January, a pair of researchers published details of the first practical chosen prefix collision on SHA-1, showing that the aged hash algorithm, which had already far outlived its usefulness, was now all but useless. All of the major browsers had already abandoned SHA-1, as had most of the large certificate authorities, but it is still in use in many other places, including embedded systems and some cryptography systems. One of the more widely deployed applications that still supports SHA-1 is OpenSSH, the open source implementation of the SSH protocol that is included in a huge number of products, including Windows, macOS, many Unix systems, and several popular brands of network switches. On Wednesday, the OpenSSH developers said that a future version of the app will drop support for the use of the RSA public key algorithm, which uses SHA-1. “It is now possible to perform chosen-prefix attacks against the SHA-1 algorithm for less than USD$50K. For this reason, we will be disabling the "ssh-rsa" public key signature algorithm by default in a near-future release,” the OpenSSH developers said in the release notes for version 8.3 on Wednesday.
Developers of two open source code libraries for Secure Shell—the protocol millions of computers use to create encrypted connections to each other—are retiring the SHA-1 hashing algorithm, four months after researchers piled a final nail in its coffin.
The moves, announced in release notes and a code update for OpenSSH and libssh respectively, mean that SHA-1 will no longer be a means for digitally signing encryption keys that prevent the monitoring or manipulating of data passing between two computers connected by SSH—the common abbreviation for Secure Shell. (Wednesday's release notes concerning SHA-1 deprecation in OpenSSH repeated word for word what developers put in February release notes, but few people seemed to notice the planned change until now.)
It is with great disappointment that we were forced to conclude it is not possible to run the conference as usual. As such, there will be no EuroBSDCon 2020.
There will be no virtual conference, as we feel we can’t provide much in that area not already provided by BSDCan.
We hope to resume our conference next year, in Vienna. We will try to announce the relevant dates as soon as possible.
The last week has produced a total of three openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots bringing the total amount of snapshots for the month to 18.
All 18 snapshots have recorded a stable rating above 91, according to the Tumbleweed snapshot reviewer. With 14 of them, recording a rating of 99 and the last two snapshots trending at a 99 rating.
The most recent 202000526 snapshot provided the 3.2.4 release of Wireshark. The new version fixed a Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures where it was possible to make Wireshark crash by injecting a malformed packet onto the wire or by convincing someone to read a malformed packet trace file. Linux Kernel 5.6.14 re-established support for RTL8401 chip version. DNS server and client utilities package bind 9.16.3 fixed to security problems and added engine support for OpenSSL Edwards-curve Digital Signature Algorithm implementation. Document viewer evince 3.36.1 updated translations, fixed an incorrect markup in the Czech User Interface and updated the French help image. SSL VPN client package openconnect 8.10 installed a bash completion script and fixed a potential buffer overflow with security communications library GnuTLS. GNOME’s 0.30.10 image organizer shotwell, which was the subject of a recently settled a patient lawsuit, modified web publishing authentication to comply with Google’s requirements.
Due to an invalid TLS certificate on MITRE’s CVE request form, I have — ironically — been unable to request a new CVE for a TLS certificate verification vulnerability for a couple weeks now. (Note: this vulnerability does not affect WebKit and I’m only aware of one vulnerable application, so impact is limited; follow the link if you’re curious.) MITRE, if you’re reading my blog, your website’s contact form promises a two-day response, but it’s been almost three weeks now, still waiting.
[....]
We could have a debate on TLS certificate verification and the various benefits or costs of the Firefox vs. Chrome approach, but in the end it’s an obvious misconfiguration and there will be no further CVE requests from me until it’s fixed. No, I’m not bypassing the browser security warning, even though I know exactly what’s wrong. We can’t expect users to take these seriously if we skip them ourselves.
IBM Wazi for Red Hat CodeReady workspaces simplifies hybrid application development. Developers can leverage open and familiar development tools, deliver a CI/CD pipeline that integrates z/OS into a multi-cloud architecture, and transform testing on mainframes by shifting left transaction-level testing. Be sure to catch the June 10 webinar, Cloud Native Development for Continuous Integration with IBM Wazi, to learn about this new technology. Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM Distinguished Engineer in System Enterprise DevOps, and Mitch Ashley, CEO and Managing Analyst of Accelerated Strategies Group, Inc., give you all the details.
In our last post we talked about using Multi-Category Security (MCS) instead of Multi-Level Security (MLS) to provide isolation on systems with different levels of sensitivity. In this post we'll cover creating a more secure pipeline via containers.
A common pattern in MLS environments is to have a series of processes to guarantee the flow of information between networks at different levels, but to guarantee that no information gets accidentally leaked. These pipelines are sometimes called dirty word filters.
Imagine an MLS environment, where you have two networks connected to a machine. One of the networks is at Top Secret and the other network is at Secret. Now you might have a process downloading content from the Top Secret Network, another process, the filter process, examining the downloaded content and moving approved data from the Top Secret content to the Secret content. Finally you have a third process that is taking the Secret content and sending it out the Secret network.
Forces ranging from technological disruption, to demographic shifts, will change the way banking is done, according to the 2020 Banking and Capital Markets Outlook from Deloitte Insights. The report says that banking will increasingly be more open and transparent, more intelligent and tailored, and more secure and seamless.
Achieving this state of financial services - one in which there is greater internal collaboration and is synchronized to market demands - won’t be without challenges, the report says, pointing to "technical debt, or the lack of technology system modernization, which is a huge impediment to transformation."
Red Hat Summit 2020, like most things this year, looked a little different than in the past. This year's theme was "From here, anywhere." But the shift from an in-person to a virtual event resulted in a Summit perhaps better characterized as "From anywhere, here." While we weren’t able to gather in San Francisco as originally planned, the virtual event gave us the privilege of connecting with so many more open source enthusiasts (56,063* so far, to be exact) worldwide.
In my work as a Red Hat Technical Account Manager (TAM), one of my responsibilities is ensuring my customers are aware of the roadmap for various Red Hat products. This includes informing customers of upcoming changes to products, such as features being deprecated, and helping them plan for these changes.
The Satellite 6.7 release notes listed that several items are deprecated and would be removed in a future release of Satellite. This post will cover several of these items, and what customers can do to prepare for these changes. I would recommend reviewing the release notes to see if any of the other items might affect your Satellite environment.
The virtualization industry is full of proprietary and open source products that provide IT administrators with a variety of options for deploying their virtual environments. One product in particular that has not received as much attention is Proxmox VE, an open source virtualization management platform that tightly integrates both the KVM hypervisor and Linux container (LXC) technologies. Proxmox VE's most recent release, 6.1, includes the latest updates to the product, such as new container features, easier management, better security and improvements in availability.
Admins might choose a propriety product to get a system that's highly polished and well supported, or they might opt for an open source offering in order to have access to the codebase and reduce operating costs. Proxmox VE 6 released in July of 2019 and was quickly followed by version 6.1 that following December.
[...]
Proxmox Virtual Environment, or Proxmox VE, is a complete server virtualization platform based on the Debian GNU/Linux distribution. Proxmox VE is a free, open source OS and is known for its ability to manage both KVM and LXC in a single, unified platform. By incorporating both KVM and LXC into its platform, Proxmox VE can deploy a wide range of use cases.
According to Proxmox VE documentation, the platform supports the most demanding Linux and Windows application workloads, while still delivering performance and high availability (HA). For example, admins can scale out compute and storage resources as their requirements change, starting with a single node and expanding to a large cluster to accommodate growing workloads.
  Reload is the process refreshing the information of download sources in an Ubuntu system. If you observe, you will find that actually Ubuntu downloads several dozen megabytes of data when reloading and in fact you can reduce up to half size. This article supplies you information to tinker with that with sources.list configuration and APT command. You will see best of this in an experiment-dedicated system if you have. Lastly, I practiced this on Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa and you can practice this also on other versions. Enjoy tinkering!
  After our previous general presentation of ZSys, it’s “”“time”“” to deep dive to one of its main predominant feature: state management!
A little technical detour first. as this question will necessarily arise, especially from those familiar with ZFS concepts.
We have purposively chosen the “state” terminology to prevent system administrators and in general, all those familiar with ZFS to confuse if with snapshot datasets.
Basically a state is a set of datasets, all frozen in time (apart from the current state), which regrouped together forms a system “state” that you can chose to reboot on.
Those group of datasets can be either made of snapshot datasets (read only) (which is what most of advanced ZFS users will expect), but it can also be filesystem datasets (read write), made of filesystem datasets clone of the current state datasets. You can boot to any of those.
The web team here at Canonical run two-week iterations. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
[...]
My name is Bartek (also known as bartaz around the interwebz). I live in Poznaà â in Poland and I’m a web developer. I’ve been a software developer for over 10 years now, working in front-end related technologies for most of this time. IE6 was still a thing when I started trying to make browsers display what I want them to, jQuery was not a thing yet, and nobody even dreamed of React.
I joined Canonical four years ago as a front-end developer to work on snap store dashboard and after about a year I moved to the Web and Design Team, where I continued working on snap related projects such as snapcraft.io and build.snapcraft.io. A couple of months ago I moved to Vanilla squad where I develop and enhance our Vanilla framework.
While there are plenty of ad-blockers that can banish adverts from your laptop or computer, these rarely work on other devices, such as smartphones and tablets. This article will show you how to transform your Raspberry Pi into a network-wide ad blocker, using Pi-Hole. Once completed, you’ll be able to block ads across your laptop, computer, smartphone, tablet, and any other device that’s connected to your network.
With the upcoming Linux 5.8 kernel merge window one of the features you still won't find in the mainline kernel is the VC4 DRM kernel driver supporting the Broadcom BCM2711 SoC and in turn the Raspberry Pi 4 open-source display support.
Going back to February have been the VC4 DRM patches for the BCM2711 / Raspberry Pi 4. Sent out today is the third iteration of those patches albeit too late for seeing it hit DRM-Next in time for Linux 5.8.
With the launch of the 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 computer, the Raspberry Pi Foundation also unveiled today the renaming of their Debian-based Raspbian Linux operating system as Raspberry Pi OS.
Developed in-house by the Raspberry Fi Foundation as the primary operating system for the popular Raspberry Pi single-board computers, Raspbian is based on the well-known Debian GNU/Linux operating system and uses a modified LXDE desktop environment called PIXEL or simply the Raspberry Pi Desktop.
In an attempt to make Raspbian more popular and bump its adoption amongst the ever-growing Raspberry Pi community, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has decided to change the name of their GNU/Linux distribution after more than five years to Raspberry Pi OS.
  The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B was launched in June 2019 with Broadcom BCM2711 Arm Cortex-A72 processor coupled with either 1, 2, or 4GB LPDDR4 RAM.
But there were expectations that a Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM or an 8GB eMMC flash may be eventually launched, as some of the user guides read “Product name: Raspberry Pi 4 Model B 1 GB, 2 GB, 4 GB + 8 GB variants”. We now know the answer as the Raspberry Pi Foundation has just introduced Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM.
If you ever wanted to have more RAM on your tiny Raspberry Pi computer, now you can. The Raspberry Pi Foundation and Micron have partner up once again to bring you a Raspberry Pi 4 variant with no less than 8GB RAM.
It appears that the lack of an 8GB RAM Raspberry Pi 4 offering was in fact the missing 8GB LPDDR4 package, as the BCM2711 chip that ships with the latest version of the popular single-board computer can handle up to 16GB LPDDR4 SDRAM.
From its launch in 2012 up until 2019, the Raspberry Pi wasn’t regarded as a serious PC replacement. Sure, you could play a few games, run office apps and surf the web with even the $5 Raspberry Pi Zero, but most people don’t want to do that with just 512MB or 1GB of RAM. When the Raspberry Pi 4 came out in June 2019, it changed the game by offering up to 4GB of RAM, more than enough for real multitasking and productivity.
Now, Raspberry Pi Foundation has upped the ante by releasing a Raspberry Pi 4 B with a generous 8GB of RAM. Launching today for $75, the Raspberry Pi 4 B (8GB) is identical to other Raspberry Pi 4 B models in every way, except for its RAM capacity. So what do you do with all that memory, and is spending $20 more than the price of the $55, 4GB model worth it?
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM.
The Raspberry Pi 4 2GB variant has dropped from $45 to $35 and now for complementing the existing 1GB / 2GB / 4GB models is an 8GB model. The rest of the RPi4 specs remain the same.
The Raspberry Pi 4 8GB version is launching at $75 USD with immediate availability. The BCM2711 SoC employed by the Raspberry Pi 4 can address up o 16GB of LPDDR4 memory, but the delay in seeing an 8GB Raspberry Pi was until an 8GB LPDDR4 package could be sourced. The 8GB memory chip is being supplied by Micron.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has released an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 that's available for $75 along with a beta of an official 64-bit operating system it's calling 'Raspberry Pi OS' instead of Raspbian.
Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading and co-founder of The Raspberry Pi Foundation, says when the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B launched a year ago, the foundation had an 8GB variant in mind.
Raspberry Pi Ltd. has launched a version of the Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB DDR4 for $75. It also released a beta of Raspbian — now called Raspberry Pi OS — with a 64-bit architecture that can fully exploit the 8GB RAM.
A new Raspberry Pi 4 Model B with 8GB of RAM has touched down for $75, making it the first under $200 Arm SBC we know of that provides 8GB entirely for the CPU, as opposed to sharing the RAM with a built-in NPU. The new model is joined by a new 64-bit version version of Raspbian to make the most of all that memory space. Like the 32-bit version, the 64-bit distro has a new name: Raspberry Pi OS. The news follows a beta firmware update last week for the RPi 4 that lets you boot from a USB device directly (see farther below).
Here’s a slice of juicy news for single-board computing (SBC) fans amongst you: the Raspberry Pi 4 is now available with 8GB RAM.
Yes, 8GB. That’s double the max memory that had, until now, been available.
The Raspberry Pi 4 launched just under a year ago and is, to quote our own headline of the time, it’s a beast of a SBC. Now it boasts double the memory to play with the potential possibilities and capabilities provided just increased substantially.
Back in June 2019, the Raspberry PI 4 model was released, and it was an incredible update over the older model with up to 4GB ram. Today we see the long-rumored 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 released and priced at the just US $75. Here are the complete specs for an updated 64-bit credit card size Raspberry PI 4 8GB model with Linux desktop computer level of performance.
  Artila’s compact “IoT Gateway Matrix-704” runs Linux on a Microchip SAMA5D35 and provides GbE and Fast Ethernet, mini-PCIe and micro-SIM slots, a USB port, and 4x isolated, surge protected RS-485 ports.
Artila has introduced several of its Matrix IoT gateways with isolated serial ports, including the Matrix-710 and Matrix-713. Its new Matrix-704 can have its 4x RS-485 ports configured with optional isolation and it also comes standard with surge protection. The Matrix-704 has the same 536MHz, Cortex-A5 Microchip ATSAMA5D35 SoC as the more feature rich Matrix-710 and Matrix-713, as well as the recent Matrix-702, which lacks serial ports.
  Advantech has launched a “VEGA-8300E 8K Broadcast Video Encoder” and streaming appliance for 8Kp60, 10-bit 4:2:2 HEVC real-time encoding. The system runs Ubuntu on a 7th Gen Kaby Lake CPU and offers 2x hot-swappable SATA bays.
We realize that most of you are not in the market for an 8K video encoder, but we occasionally like to check in on the high-end video world where Linux is steadily making inroads. Normally Advantech’s VEGA-8300E 8K Broadcast Video Encoder would have been showcased at the NAB Show, which has been cancelled due to the pandemic. (Some NAB content is available on the online NAB Show Express.) We heard about the VEGA-8300E from an Advantech announcement on Businesswire that revealed the product has won a 2020 Best of Show Special Edition Award presented by TV Technology.
The build tools for Linux include the highly optimising IAR C/C++ Compiler, IAR Assembler, Linker and library tools, and runtime libraries. The tools are validated to run on the Ubuntu Linux distribution version 18.04.3 and later, and currently supports Arm and Renesas RH850.
IAR Systems announced its portfolio of embedded development tools has been extended with build tools that support implementations in Linux-based frameworks.
Imago’s Linux-ready “VisionBox AGE-X5” computer has an Intel 6th Gen CPU plus 2x 5GbE ports for driving new 5GBase-T cameras. Also onboard: 2x GigE, 4x USB 3.0, DIO, LED controllers, and camera triggers.
In recent years we have seen a growing number of embedded boards and systems with 2.5GbE and 10GbE ports, but no 5GbE ports that we can recall. However, the networking standard is now ready for the spotlight with the arrival of 5-Gigabit Ethernet bandwidth 5GBase-T cameras from Teledyne Dalsa and Lucid Vision Labs. Imago, which sells a line of VisionBox machine vision systems including the Jetson TX2 based VisionBox Daytona, announced a new VisionBox AGE-X5 model that can be preconfigured with either 5GBase-T camera.
Since today’s people love to take pictures, gallery apps are essential for all. There are more than hundreds of gallery apps available for android devices. Choosing among them is difficult. To make your choice list short, here are the best 20 gallery apps for android. Let’s see which are the best performing gallery apps for android devices.
  Now is a great time to say “Thank you” to all our supporters, as you will see from the timeline recap video, it takes an immense amount of dedication and support to accomplish great things.
Purism has since 2014 been dedicated to bringing the world new kinds of devices, in 2017 Purism started on the long journey of building a mobile phone hardware with accompanying software, this is the timeline of the Librem 5 journey. The Librem 5 has a built-in ecosystem that corrects the issues that have cropped up in other platforms. We want to build secure products that protect your digital privacy without you needing to change a single setting.
Keep in mind that hardware is hard, changing the world for the better is arduous, and that it takes an entire team of dedicated experts working with a supportive community who persevere through many obstacles to create innovative and unique products. This timeline attempts to enshrine both how difficult the challenge is to make a secure phone from scratch, write a mobile operating system that can run on a laptop, desktop, or mobile device. All of that while maintaining a firm idealistic approach to user freedom, privacy, and security.
  PeerTube (developed by Framasoft) is a free and open-source decentralized alternative to YouTube somewhat like LBRY. As the name suggests, it relies on peer-to-peer connections to operate the video hosting services.
You can also choose to self-host your instance and also have access to videos from other instances (a federated network, just like Mastodon).
It is being actively developed for a few years now. And, to take it up a notch, they have decided to launch a crowdfunding campaign for the next major release.
  About a decade ago, the JavaScript developer community began to witness fierce battles emerging among JavaScript frameworks. In this article, I will introduce some of the most well-known of these frameworks. And it's important to note that these are all open source JavaScript projects, meaning that you can freely utilize them under an open source license and even contribute to the source code and communities.
If you prefer to follow along as I explore these frameworks, you can watch my video.
  I recently reviewed the Beaker Browser. About a week after that review was published, the devs released Beaker 1.0 Beta. And that changes almost everything I had observed in the previous article.
This made me do an entire article on the new Beaker Browser.Here’s what’s been changed!
One of the most significant changes to Beaker is the introduction of a new protocol. Up to now, Beaker has used the Dat protocol to distribute content. Beta 1.0 replaces Dat with Hypercore.
One of the components is Hyperdrive version 10, which was released the same days as Beaker. Hyperdrive is “a POSIX-like filesystem implementation, written in Node.js, that’s designed to be the storage layer for fast, scalable, and secure peer-to-peer applications.”
 I typically use LibreOffice Impress for my talks, much to some folks' surprise. Yes, you can make slides look okay with free software! But there's one annoying caveat that has bothered me for ages.
Impress makes it nearly impossible to enter presenter mode with a single display, while also displaying slides. I have never understood this limitation, but it's existed for a minimum of seven years.
I've tried all sorts of workarounds over the years, including a macro that forces LibreOffice into presenter mode, which I never was able to figure out how to reverse once I ran it...
I’m more of a “meeting the Buddha on the road” kind of guy. However, influences along the way have been the usual suspects like Alan Turing and people such as Richard Stallman who promoted open source.
The foundation of the Android OS is built on top of the Linux kernel, thus Android device makers are obliged to provide the source code (upon request) for any Linux kernel binaries that ship on their devices. Besides the source code release for the retail release software, OEMs should also publish the updated Linux kernel source code for any future software updates in order to comply with the GNU General Public License v2. Motorola, for example, is quite good at releasing Linux kernel source code for all the updates they roll out, and they have now published the kernel source code for the Moto G7’s Android 10 update. OPPO, on the other hand, has shared the initial kernel sources for a bunch of phones from the Find X2 lineup.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today Apache€® Subversion€® 1.14.0-LTS, the latest release of the popular centralized software version control system.
For those making use of the Subversion centralized version control system as an alternative to Git, SVN 1.14 LTS is now available.
With Subversion 1.14 being an LTS release, a particular emphasis was put on fixing bugs in this open-source VCS but there are also some new features. Subversion 1.14's Python bindings finally support Python 3 while maintaining Python 2 support, a new tool to support deduplication (svnadmin build-repcache), and more.
Qt M2M Protocols is now automatically included for free to every new Qt Device Creation subscription. The additional distribution license price has been removed as well.
Qt Application Development license holders can buy Qt M2M Protocols separately.
In the last blog post we saw an essential, C++ oriented, Visual Studio Code setup. That was enough to get going right away, but we can still definitely do more and better. Here I’ll show you how to get a complete setup for your qmake and CMake projects, all this while also wearing a Qt hat (on top of my C++ hat) and having a deeper look at the Qt side.
Build qmake Qt projects
Qmake is not integrated with Visual Studio Code the way CMake is, so setting up a qmake project for build is slightly more convoluted than doing the same with CMake. This means we’ll have to define our own build tasks. We’re going to do this in two stages: build steps definition and build steps combination, leveraging the fact that Visual Studio Code implements task dependencies and ordered sequential execution of dependencies.
Computers were supposed to be “a bicycle for our minds”, machines that operated faster than the speed of thought. And if the computer was a bicycle for the mind, then the plural form of computer, Internet, was a “new home of Mind.” The Internet was a fantastic assemblage of all the world’s knowledge, and it was a bastion of freedom that would make time, space, and geopolitics irrelevant. Ignorance, authoritarianism, and scarcity would be relics of the meatspace past.
Things didn’t quite turn out that way. The magic disappeared and our optimism has since faded. Our websites are slow and insecure; our startups are creepy and unprofitable; our president Tweets hate speech; we don’t trust our social media apps, webcams, or voting machines. And in the era of coronavirus quarantining, we’re realizing just how inadequate the Internet turned out to be as a home of Mind. Where did it all go wrong?
Unfortunately products like the latter seem quite common. Most things in my house are still rather dumb because regrettably few products are actually the same thing, but smarter. Instead smart devices are inevitably some inscrutable machine intelligence physically manifested in my house. So no thanks. Battle lines drawn, everybody pick a side, good idea or bad implementation, and fight!
Dave Cross, long-time Perl user, trainer, and author, recently released The Best of Perl Hacks, a curated collection of his best posts from his Perl Hacks blog. His imprint, Perl School, has published six e-books, including two that I wrote.
There’s an unrelated book, Perl Hacks: Tips & Tools For Programming, Debugging, And Surviving, by chromatic, Damian Conway, and Curtis “Ovid” Poe. It’s also very good, but completely separate from Dave’s.
With the release of Python 3.9.0b1, the first of four planned betas for the development cycle, Python 3.9 is now feature-complete. There is still plenty to do in terms of testing and stabilization before the October final release. The release announcement lists a half-dozen Python Enhancement Proposals (PEPs) that were accepted for 3.9. We have looked at some of those PEPs along the way; there are some updates on those. It seems like a good time to fill in some of the gaps on what will be coming in Python 3.9
In the Django framework, a project refers to the collection of configuration files and code for a particular website. Django groups business logic into what it calls apps, which are the modules of the Django framework. There’s plenty of documentation on how to structure your projects and the apps within them, but when it comes time to package an installable Django app, information is harder to find.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to take an app out of a Django project and package it so that it’s installable. Once you’ve packaged your app, you can share it on PyPI so that others can fetch it through pip install.
Python is a powerful programming language for mobile and web development projects. It is also the most popular programming language for AI in 2020. RedI Python development’s use cases in scientific computing, statistics, and education make it one of the highly preferred programming languages for Python programmers.
The open-source programming language launched in 1992 is now on the verge of becoming the most popular and used programming language. Due to the rise in demand for AI and ML applications, Python web programming is now the first thing that comes to mind for coding such applications.
But is Python for web development even worth it? It definitely is. Some of the top companies use Python web programming in their technology stack.
Plotly is a plotting ecosystem that allows you to make plots in Python, as well as JavaScript and R. In this series of articles, I'm focusing on plotting with Python libraries.
So you want to start a blog, but you don’t have a masters degree in computing? I think that everyone should be able to blog, regardless of their technical ability. This post will give you everything you need to get going.
Today we're introducing something very new: the Tech Policy Greenhouse. This is a project that I've been working on for about two years now, and I'm both thrilled and relieved to finally be getting it out the door. It starts from this basic premise: many of the biggest issues facing technology and innovation today are significant challenges that have no easy answer. Every possible approach or solution (including doing nothing at all) has tradeoffs. And yet very few people seem willing to admit that, as admitting to tradeoffs in policy proposals is seen as a sign of weakness or giving in. But the issues facing innovation policy today are too big and too important to not have a truly open discussion.
I had long heard rumors from academicians about how “online teaching is a nightmare,” “online teaching ruined my life,” “online teaching sucked the brains out of my head,” “online teaching is a new and insidious form of labor degradation,” and the like.
"The fact that we are displacing people in a global pandemic is immoral."
Americans must make it known that we can’t fight a war and then simply go on to live flourishing lives without a basic guarantee to quality medical care.
"If you are going to contract Covid-19, you'd better hurry up or you're out of luck!"
Kevin Smith, the mayor of Helena-West Helena, Arkansas, feels abandoned by the federal government. On Easter Sunday, a storm hit his city of 10,000, one of the poorest in the state. It knocked out power for most residents; those who’d used SNAP benefits to stock their refrigerators saw their groceries spoil. Streets flooded. Sewers overflowed. In the thick of a pandemic, debris blocked roads to the hospital.
Against a nationwide medical consensus, the FDA is forcing patients to endure life-threatening risks to access medication to end an early pregnancy or treat a miscarriage.
Russia’s Health Ministry is now recommending that officials refrain from counting COVID-19 patients “without complaints,” apparently meaning that infected persons without symptoms will no longer be included in Russia’s coronavirus patient population statistics.
Kelly talks with author and organizer Cindy Milstein about reclaiming collective grief and resisting fascism.
During a video conference with Russia President Vladimir Putin, Moscow Mayor Sergey Sobyanin announced that the country’s capital is set to begin easing its lockdown restrictions.€
A recent episode of NPR's Fresh Air ran an amazing interview with Dr. David Fajgenbaum, who was diagnosed years ago with the rare Castleman's Disease, about which very little information was known (and the general prognosis was grim). Fajgenbaum talks about how he ended up in hospitals believing that he was about to die five separate times (he even had his last rites read to him), but then set up his own organization to try to crowdsource a cure. He details the full story in his book that was published last fall, called Chasing My Cure.
According to official data, 101 medical workers in Russia have died from the coronavirus, reports Lyudmila Letnikova, the director of the Health Ministry’s department of public health, communications, and medical expertise.
We were promised no more deaths by May 15th, but that hasn't happened. With no one 100% sure what the best options are going forward, this is how states are handling the task of (lol) cautiously "reopening." A long press conference held by the Trump administration said states could reopen if they hit a number of checkpoints, including a certain amount of testing and a plateau/drop in positive cases.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order in late April requiring all meat processing plants in the U.S. to remain open, despite reports of coronavirus infections and related deaths being prevalent at a number of the plants.
Centuries ago, back in the Middle Ages, battles against plagues seldom went well. Medieval public health warriors had little scientific knowledge about their viral assailants. And what little knowledge they did gain, they couldn’t easily share. Kingdoms had no vehicles for rapid and reliable communicating.
You can’t please everyone, especially those who do their utmost to find fault with a country that has distinguished itself as a national role model in the midst of a global pandemic. Earlier this month, Foreign Policy (FP) published a slanderous and mean-spirited op-ed with the clickbait title Vietnam’s Coronavirus Success Is Built on Repression by Bill Hayton (BH) and Tro Ly Ngheo (Trợ Lý Nghèo translates as “poor assistant.”)
On the morning of May 27, Russian officials announced that as many as 142,208 people in Russia are known to have recovered fully from COVID-19, including 11,079 in the past day. Also in the last 24 hours, another 161 people reportedly died from the disease, raising Russia’s total number of fatalities officially caused by coronavirus to 3,968.
The pandemic proves once and for all that this president is the enemy of the people.
A firm set up by a former telemarketer who once settled federal fraud charges for $2.7 million. A vodka distributor accused in a pending lawsuit of overstating its projected sales. An aspiring weapons dealer operating out of a single-family home.
These three privately held companies are part of the new medical supply chain, offered a total of almost $74 million by the federal government to find and rapidly deliver vital protective equipment and COVID-19 testing supplies across the U.S. While there’s no evidence that they obtained their deals through political connections, none of the three had to bid against competing firms. One has already lost its contract for lack of performance; it’s unclear if the other two can fulfill their orders on time, or at all.
West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a billionaire and the state’s richest man, says his business experience qualifies him for the post. Despite a long list of debt-collection cases, the governor maintains his companies always pay what they owe.
But in the most complete analysis of Justice’s legal record to date, ProPublica found hundreds of lawsuits, including many brought by workers, vendors, business partners and government agencies, all alleging they weren’t paid. In all, plaintiffs have won judgments or reached settlements worth more than $128 million in cases against the Justice business empire.
Raymond Dye had a buildup of blood behind his left eye that prevented him from seeing. David Polk had an abnormal heartbeat, and his wife had high cholesterol. Roger Wriston’s wife had a bad back.
All the men had worked for a collection of coal companies owned by Gov. Jim Justice and his family, which had pledged to provide health insurance after the miners retired. Last year, though, the retirees learned that those firms had stopped paying their premiums. And as a result, their coverage had been terminated. Polk skipped doctor appointments.
The Indian Health Service acknowledged on Wednesday that 1 million respirator masks it purchased from a former Trump White House official do not meet Food and Drug Administration standards for “use in healthcare settings by health care providers.”
The IHS statement calls into question why the agency purchased expensive medical gear that it now cannot use as intended. The masks were purchased as part of a frantic agency push to supply Navajo hospitals with desperately needed protective equipment in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
The United States has now recorded 100,000 deaths due to the coronavirus.
It’s a moment to collectively grieve and reflect.
The president's "chaotic and incompetent response has fueled the spread of the coronavirus in the U.S. and beyond, causing tens of thousands of preventable deaths."
"It's not about free speech. It's about money."
The federal government's decision "results in discrimination in access and threatens to harm patients and their clinicians during a time of national crisis."
"There is no question in my mind that Larry helped change medicine in this country," said Dr. Anthony Fauci. "And he helped change it for the better."
Security updates have been issued by Debian (drupal7 and unbound), Fedora (libEMF and transmission), Mageia (dojo, log4net, nginx, nodejs-set-value, sleuthkit, and transmission), Red Hat (rh-maven35-jackson-databind), SUSE (dpdk and mariadb-connector-c), and Ubuntu (thunderbird).
Security vulnerabilities are quite commonly found in autonomous and semi-autonomous vehicles that feature a number of smart technologies and applications to improve vehicle safety and driving experience. Last week, security researcher Till Kottmann discovered a misconfiguration in the Git web portal of Daimler AG, the automotive company behind the Mercedes-Benz car brand, that allowed him to create an account on Daimler's code-hosting portal and download more than 580 Git repositories containing the source code of onboard logic units (OLUs) installed in Mercedes vans.
According to Kottmann, there wasn’t any account confirmation process in the company's official GitLab server, which allowed him to register an account using a non-existent Daimler corporate email. He was able to download 580 Git repositories from the company's server and made it publicly available by uploading the files in several locations such as file-hosting service MEGA, the Internet Archive, and on his own GitLab server.
Last year, researchers at Pan Test Partners uncovered critical security holes in popular car alarms that could have been exploited by cyber criminals to unlock car doors, activate car alarms, and turn on car engines, all of which could allow criminals to steal cars with great ease.
The firm found how certain third-party car alarms, whose sellers claim to offer enhanced security to owners of keyless entry cars, featured gaping security holes that allowed criminals to geo-locate cars in real time, find out the car type and details of their owners, disable car alarms, unlock cars, disable immobilisers, and even kill car engines when they were running.
Unc0ver, by contrast, works on any device running any version of iOS released since September 2017 or later. The flaw the new jailbreak exploits is located in the OS kernel. That means that unc0ver is less capable then Checkm8 is of disabling or bypassing certain iOS restrictions and security mechanisms. For example: the unc0ver provides no access to JTAG, an interface for debugging and emulating processors.
This blog post originally started out as a way to point out why the NVD CVSS scores are usually wrong. One of the amazing things about having easy access to data is you can ask a lot of questions, questions you didn’t even know you had, and find answers right away. If you haven’t read it yet, I wrote a very long series on security scanners. One of my struggles I have is there are often many “critical” findings in those scan reports that aren’t actually critical. I wanted to write something that explained why that was, but because my data took me somewhere else, this is the post you get. I knew CVSSv3 wasn’t perfect (even the CVSS folks know this), but I found some really interesting patterns in the data. The TL;DR of this post is: It may be time to start talking about CVSSv4.
It’s easy to write a post that made a lot of assumptions and generally makes facts up that suit whatever argument I was trying to make (which was the first draft of this). I decided to crunch some data to make sure my hypothesis were correct and because graphs are fun. It turns out I learned a lot of new things, which of course also means it took me way longer to do this work. The scripts I used to build all these graphs can be found here if you want to play along at home. You can save yourself a lot of suffering by using my work instead of trying to start from scratch.
Nothing has made the FBI more irritated than its ability to break into phones it swears (often in court!) it cannot possibly get into without the device maker's assistance. The agency doesn't want third-party vendors to offer solutions and it doesn't seem to want its own technical staff to find ways to get stuff from encrypted devices. It wants the government to tell companies like Apple to do what they're told. It will accept any solution that involves a mandate, whether it's from a federal court or our nation's legislators. It will accept nothing else.
For decades the internet has flourished on the back of innovation, creativity, adaptation, and hard work. But while this technological revolution spurred no limit of incredible inventions, services, and profit, a drumbeat of scandals have highlighted how privacy and security were often a distant afterthought — if they were thought about at all.
As Facebook's lawsuit against Israeli malware purveyor, NSO Group, continues, more facts are coming to light that undercut the spyware vendor's claims that it's just a simple software developer that can't be blamed for the malicious acts of its customers.
A few weeks ago, this blog noted that there were questions hanging over the GDPR, not least the fact that no major fines had been issued against top Internet companies. The GDPR has just passed the two-year mark, and many have taken the opportunity to weigh in on this issue. For example, the data protection agency in Ireland, which would be responsible for issuing fines against the main online players, has just written a post on its GDPR enforcement plans. It says that the country’s Data Protection Commissioner (DPC) has submitted a draft decision about a Twitter data breach to the other data protection authorities in the EU, as it is required to do under the GDPR. This means a public statement on the case should follow fairly soon.
This week I also got two AMP links sent to me via Telegram and to see those Google URLs replacing unique domain names made me a bit sad on behalf of the owners of those sites. As a site owner myself, it feels like sovereignty of a website being taken away.
Other than people sharing links with me, I rarely encounter AMP in the wild. It is possible to restrict Google AMP from your life both as a web user and as a web developer. Here’s how you can fight back against Google AMP.
Security researcher Charlie Belmer is reporting that commercial websites such as eBay are conducting port scans of their visitors.
With the location tracking setting turned off, the Alphabet Inc. unit collects information deceptively through other user settings, such as “Web & App Activity,” according to a lawsuit filed in state court Wednesday by Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich.
“Google makes it impractical if not impossible for users to meaningfully opt-out of Google’s collection of location information,” according to the lawsuit, which is based in part on a 2018 report from the Associated Press.
The engineering team from Waterloo, Ontario-based Inductiv joined Apple in recent weeks to work on Siri, machine learning and data science. Apple confirmed the deal, saying it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time and we generally do not discuss our purpose or plans.”
Inductiv developed technology that uses artificial intelligence to automate the task of identifying and correcting errors in data. Having clean data is important for machine learning, a popular and powerful type of AI that helps software improve with less human intervention.
The City of Portland, Oregon, and Multnomah County, are doing the best job in the country at kicking the can down the road.€ Now is the time to push for a real solution to the housing crisis, here and across the USA.
The world is supposed to be pulling together to defeat the Coronavirus and to some extent it is. Earlier on Russia sent special equipment to the US and recently the US has sent some to Russia. China has aided Italy and Africa with doctors and equipment.
According to the African Command of the US Armed Forces, AFRICOM, Russia has deployed a military fighter aircraft to Libya.€
General Naravane is correct to say that face-offs are not unusual. Because the border between India and China is undefined, encounters between patrols on the “line of actual control” (LAC) are common. Beyond the demarcation issue lie vast, intricate and unresolved territorial disputes that led to a war in 1962. What makes the present imbroglio unusual is three things. One is the scale of forces involved. Another is the fact that encounters have twice deteriorated into fisticuffs in the past month; first at Pangong lake, and later at Naku La in Sikkim, over 1,000km away in the eastern part of the border.
Third, and perhaps most important, some of the alleged land-grabs seem to have occurred in the Galwan river valley area, beyond China’s own claim-line, ie, in territory which was not thought to be disputed. The valley is fraught with historical baggage: it was overrun by China in the lightning war in 1962, though later handed back. On May 25th the Global Times, a state-run tabloid in Beijing, stated baldly that “the Galwan Valley region is Chinese territory”.
The ADF have killed hundreds of people since late October last year when the army began an operation to oust them from their bases near the Ugandan border. The fighting has hampered efforts to end an Ebola epidemic.
While the insurgents, who are originally from Uganda, have pledged allegiance to Islamic State and the group has endorsed some attacks by the ADF, researchers say there is no evidence of close collaboration.
Although politically motivated crimes represent only a tiny fraction of the 5.3 million crimes recorded in Germany last year, they are "significant" in terms of their importance to the stability of democracy, the political system, and of the constitutional order, Seehofer said.
Let us be clear: We are not talking here about future warming, which is already of great concern. We are talking about the effects of a rise of 1oC that we have already experienced. Even with such “modest” warming, a stunning barrage of extreme events have happened in recent years, many of which cannot be explained in the absence of climate change.
Capturing it remains a challenge. But there should be no lack of€ permanent safe carbon storage underground.
This article is a call-to-arms on global warming. But before I turn to my main concern, I need to express some thoughts about the 2020 presidential campaign and the way we understand it. After I lay that out, I’ll connect those campaign-related thoughts with the issue of climate change.
"A tremendous victory in the fight to hold Big Oil accountable for lying about climate change and leaving communities to pay for the damage."
"Fossil fuels are a bad investment, not only from an environmental and human rights perspective, but also from a financial one."
"Government money must instead support a just transition from fossil fuels that protects workers, communities, and the climate."
Right after the mostly-rich and powerful G2O countries signed the Paris Agreement with the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5ۼC, they went home and continued with the business-as-usual public finance policies that directly undermined this goal.
The Wilderness Society just teamed up with Yale University to release a reportpromoting renewable energy development on public lands, and like the recent Michael Moore documentary Planet of the Humans, it’s stirring up controversy. The report suggests we should ramp up utility-scale renewable production on federal public lands, with a particular focus on Nevada’s desert wildlands, to help stem the damage to our planet’s climate. At Western Watersheds Project, we strongly agree that humanity needs to break its catastrophic addiction to fossil fuels. But even though the federal government holds title to millions of acres of public land, our western wildlands aren’t the best place to start.
The first oil tanker that came from Iran’s Bandar Abbas port into the Caribbean is called Fortune. The tanker entered Venezuelan waters on May 24 and was then escorted by the Venezuelan Navy and Air Force to the Puerto Cabello oil terminal; the gasoline will supply the El Palito refinery. A second tanker entered Venezuelan waters on May 25, and three others are on their way. The Venezuelan government paid for the gasoline at market rates; in another world, it would be an ordinary commercial transaction. Not in this world.
But on March 31 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the€ National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued a final rule requiring only minimal fuel economy increases of 1.5% annually, which the agencies’ own analyses showed would result in more pollution and premature deaths.
Ball, a retired geography professor who for almost two decades has been giving lectures and media interviews in Canada and around the world denying the science of climate change, actually “won” this case when it was decided in the British Columbia Supreme Court in 2018. In January 2011, Ball had attacked Weaver on the populist website,€ Canada Free Press,€ in an article that BC Supreme Court Justice Ronald Skolrood later€ described€ as “poorly written,” and “rife with errors and inaccuracies, which suggests a lack of attention to detail on Dr.€ Ball’s part, if not an indifference to the€ truth.”
At the upcoming June meeting of the OPEC+ countries, Russia is planning to propose prolonging the reduced oil production levels set for May–July 2020, Kommersant reports, citing sources in the industry.
"People are struggling to find rent money for next month, but thank god the Trump€ administration is providing relief for the millions these poor, vulnerable corporate€ polluters owe."
Any effort to immunize corporations from responsibility to ensure workers a safe workplace will only lead to fewer protections for working people.
A decade ago, loan filings showed Trump Tower in New York City had a reported profit of about $13.3 million. But when the tower refinanced its debt soon after, the profits for the same year — 2010 — somehow appeared higher. A new lender listed the profits as $16.1 million, or 21% more than they had been recorded previously.
The next year’s earnings for the building also “improved” between the two filings. Profits for 2011 were listed as 12% higher under the new loan than the old, according to reports by loan servicers and data provider Trepp.
Last week, a piece of news put another dent in the Swedish government’s claims that it’s been able to get Covid-19 under control without stay-at-home orders.
On April 24, Russia’s Labor Ministry published amendments to the rules governing work in the country’s psychiatric care homes. These changes could seriously improve the lives of all Russian citizens with mental disabilities, including those living outside of these types of facilities. That said, the new regulations only apply to group homes that are currently under construction or undergoing renovation. The director of the Center for Curative Pedagogy, Anna Bitova, worked on developing these amendments — for Meduza, she helps break down the changes that Russia’s psychiatric care homes are set to undergo.€
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Tuesday said that he would not take up the next round of coronavirus relief for a “month or so.”
"Gilead did not make this drug alone. The public has a stake and must have a say in setting the price."
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov announced that he is absolutely healthy, during an Instagram Live stream with the director of Grozny.tv Akhmed Dudaev.€ This comes after media reports that he was hospitalized in Moscow for a suspected case of COVID-19.
Joe Biden, presumptive Democratic Party presidential candidate, thinks he knows what€ American values€ are. Here are some of them: “inclusivity, tolerance, diversity, respect for the rule of law.” Biden defines these as among the “democratic values that define us.”
It's hard when someone you like, someone you think is a good man or woman, is accused of rape. Our first instinct is to not believe it. That's normal. But that cannot be the end.
Donald Trump had quite a day for himself on Tuesday. During a Rose Garden event intended to promote protections for senior citizens with diabetes, the man who recently pondered the possibility of injecting COVID-19 patients with disinfectant mused audibly on the potential virtues of insulin… for himself.
A new Morning Consult poll finds that nearly three-quarters of all voters — including 63 percent of Republicans — agree that COVID-19 testing should be required for workers returning to their jobs as states lift stay-at-home orders and businesses reopen, but don’t expect to see any such requirement come from the Trump administration or Republicans in Congress. The GOP has consistently sided with employers over issues of workplace safety as pro-business forces push to reopen the country and jump-start the economy, which Trump sees as crucial to his reelection.
Leaving crises to Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s management skills will never disappoint those who favour chaos and the attractions of vague direction.€ The double standard is to be preferred to the equal one.€ With the United Kingdom sundered by death and the effects of COVID-19 (the PM himself having had his battle with the virus), the population was hoping for some clarity.€ When, for instance, would the lockdown measures be eased?
Vote-by-mail makes voting easier. And when voting is easier, Republicans have a much harder time suppressing the vote.
"He constantly talks about how the Trump administration is dangerous and authoritarian. But time and time again he has done everything in his power to ensure that the Trump administration has essentially limitless domestic surveillance authority."
Content moderation at scale is impossible to do well. But, also content moderation of a world leader spewing blatant conspiracy theories may be just as difficult, and that's not even at scale.
After weeks of tweeting misinformation about mail-in voting, Twitter on Tuesday decided to slap a small disclaimer on some of President Trump’s posts on the subject. “Get the facts about mail-in ballots,” reads a link to a string of reputable reports about proxy voting, which is practiced in both Democratic and Republican states, and has not been proven to lead to widespread fraud, contrary to what the president has claimed repeatedly.
Trump’s response was to threaten to cancel the First Amendment.
President Donald Trump is threatening that his administration “will strongly regulate, or close” social media sites that attach disclaimers to inaccurate or misleading content, following an incident in which Twitter fact-checked his tweet about mail-in voting.
Twitter fact-checked Trump’s tweets late on Tuesday afternoon by attaching information designed to clarify common lies and misinformation on mail-in voting resulting in rampant voter fraud, which is untrue and unsupported by any evidence. According to a Twitter spokesperson, the tweets “contain potentially misleading information about voting processes and have been labeled to provide additional context around mail-in ballots.” Tapping or clicking the link attached to Trump’s tweets that says “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” leads to a series of news articles and links debunking the lies.
President Trump is not happy with Twitter. But a lot of other people were already unhappy with Twitter. As his tweets have grown more abusive by the day, and the non-insane public has naturally grown more outraged by them, there has been an increase in calls for Twitter to delete his tweets, if not his account outright. But what's worse is the increase in calls that sound just like what Trump now demands: that Section 230 must be changed if Twitter is unwilling to take those steps. Both are bad ideas, however, for separate, although related, reasons.
The online attacks against Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of site integrity, came after the social network on Tuesday added a fact-checking label — for the first time — to a pair of Trump’s tweets that contained several falsehoods about mail-in ballots.
For years, Donald Trump’s fight against social media companies has been a one-man boxing match. He calls them out over bias, and they rewrite policies making him the one exception to their rules, taking care never to punch back. But on Tuesday, Twitter slapped back for the first time ever, labeling two tweets as making false and misleading claims about mail-in voting.
The lawmakers began work on legislation following Twitter’s decision to add warnings to two tweets by President Trump this week in which he railed against California’s decision to expand mail-in voting. Trump tweeted without evidence that mail-in voting could increase voter fraud.
Both Hawley and Gaetz argued that Twitter’s decision to flag the tweets called its legal liability protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act into question. Section 230 protects social media platforms from facing lawsuits over what users post.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly lied about the coronavirus pandemic and the country’s preparation for this once-in-a-generation crisis.
Here, a collection of the biggest lies he’s told as the nation endures a public-health and economic calamity. This post will be updated as needed.
President Donald Trump tangled the facts when he asserted Tuesday at a White House Rose Garden event that “Obamacare” raised prescription drug costs for older people — the opposite is true.
Twitter has been reluctant to enforce its own rules against Trump’s tweets in the past. Although Trump has tweeted and retweeted many seemingly rule-breaking posts, a few loopholes protected him, including exceptions for tweets from government entities and considerations for the “newsworthiness” of an otherwise rule-breaking tweet. Last year, Twitter announced that in rare cases it would limit the reach of tweets from large accounts held by government officials that were in violation of its rules. The covid-19 “infodemic” has forced most social-media platforms to change how they enforce their rules as potentially dangerous misinformation about the pandemic spreads.
Seemingly terrified of losing his reelection bid at least in part due to mail-in voting, President Trump continued to be dishonest about the process’s legitimacy in a tweet so packed with lies it’s surprising he was able to fit them all within the character count.
Trump’s Sunday morning factless tweet began with a proclamation: “The United States cannot have all Mail-In Ballots.” What followed was a greatest hits list of falsehoods, conspiracy theories, doctoring of documents and physical intimidation, all topped with something seemingly straight from a QAnon forum: “Trying to use Covid for this Scam!”
In fact, the Tampa native has voted by mail in every Florida election she has participated in since 2010, according to a Tampa Bay Times review of her voting history. Most recently, she voted by mail in the state’s March 2020 presidential primary, just as Trump did after he made Florida his new permanent home.
McEnany, who like President Donald Trump is a resident of Florida, has cast ballots by mail in every election in the state in which she has participated, according to the Tampa Bay Times. That tally includes the March 2020 Republican primary, in which Trump also voted by mail.
The press secretary has nonetheless attempted to defend Trump's false claims that proposals to expand mail-in voting will "substantially" increase voter fraud and result in a "rigged election."
Those false claims led Twitter to flag the president's tweets with fact-check labels for the first time.
As she spent the better part of last week defending President Donald Trump’s constant attacks against mail-in voting, White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany apparently failed to disclose that she herself had engaged in the practice with great frequency.
Boris has a new slogan, “Move on”, which he deployed repeatedly today in his appearance before the House of Commons Liaison Committee. Remembering short slogans is fairly well the extent of his political skills, and he contrived to look pleased with hmself for remembering this one. The public, he solemnly informed those watching, now wanted the narrative to “Move on” from the Dominic Cummings debacle.
Every time I ask anyone associated with Facebook’s new Oversight Board whether the nominally independent, separately endowed tribunal is going address misuse of private information, I get the same answer—that’s not the Board’s job. This means that the Oversight Board, in addition to having such an on-the-nose proper name, falls short in a more important way—its architects imagined that content issues can be tackled substantively without addressing privacy issues. Yet surely the recent scandals that have plagued Facebook and some other tech companies in recent years have shown us that private information issues and harmful-content problems have become intimately connected.
The American Civil Liberties Union said the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution limits any action Trump could take. Facebook and Google declined comment. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
The Bill authorises an Inspector of Publications to issue a take-down notice for objectionable online content. The take-down powers are aligned with current powers of seizure of objectionable publications under the Act.
Take-down notices will be issued to an online content host, directing the removal of a specific link, so that the relevant objectionable material is no longer viewable in New Zealand. An online content host that does not comply with a notice to take down content as soon as is reasonably practicable (without reasonable justification for delays) will be subject to civil pecuniary penalties. It is intended (but not required by the Bill) that the authority to issue a take-down notice will only be exercised in situations where other options for seeking the removal of objectionable content online have proven ineffective. The current collaborative practice of requesting online content hosts to voluntarily remove identified objectionable content will continue to be the first and preferred approach.
The President for years has spread lies about voter fraud in the US and has recently ratcheted up his attacks against mail-in ballots. He falsely insisted that there is "tremendous fraud involved and tremendous illegality," even though Trump himself has voted by mail in Florida.
“Vietnam must stop treating independent journalists as enemies of the state, and must allow the press to work freely and without fear of trumped-up charges and prison time,” said Shawn Crispin, CPJ’s senior Southeast Asia representative.
Journalist Pham Doan Trang told RFA's Vietnamese Service that things are getting worse for Vietnam when it comes to tolerating dissent and likely to get even tougher in the run up to the January ruling party congress.
“Police are not only making arrests, but also beating the arrested people and threatening and provoking their relatives,” she said.
“Freedom has always been restricted, but nowadays it seems to be narrower and there’s more and more violence. From now until the party congress, the scope of freedom can be tightened more and more, and the suppression will increase,” added Trang.
Julian Assange is due to appear in court by video link from Belmarsh prison next Monday, 1st June, just days after the Ministry of Justice admitted that Covid 19 is far more widespread in prisons than was previously announced.
On doctor’s advice, Assange did not participate in the last two procedural hearings, as moving through the prison to use the communal video room would put him at even greater risk of contracting the virus.
Assange has an underlying lung condition that makes him especially vulnerable to Covid 19.
On Tuesday, the Ministry of Justice provided a ‘more robust way’ of reporting coronavirus cases which saw the number of staff who have tested positive jump from 563 to 873 in a week.
The window of opportunity for containment is shutting fast. We must work together quickly to stop the spread of Covid-19 among the continent's most vulnerable populations.
The report, titled Captured Courts: The GOP's Big-Money Assault on the Constitution, Our Independent Judiciary, and the Rule of Law, examines a decades long effort by conservative interests to “fix” the federal court system to serve their political agenda. This effort has accelerated under the Trump administration and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch€ McConnell.
“I can’t breathe” — that’s what George Floyd, an unarmed African American man, repeatedly told a white Minneapolis police officer who pinned him to the ground Monday with a knee to his neck. Video of the police attack went viral. Now four officers have been fired. This comes as another video went viral of a white woman calling the cops on a Black man in New York City’s Central Park and falsely accusing him of “threatening her life” after he asked her to leash her dog. We discuss these developments and more with Ibram X. Kendi, founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University and National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and How to Be an Antiracist.
In examining two productions of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui. A Parable Play.(1) € Bertolt Brecht wrote about the rise of Ui, which illustrated Hitler’s rise to power that was resistible –but was not, we see some elements related to today’s events.
Next June the United Nations Assembly will hold elections at its 74th session for five non-permanent seats on the UN Security Council (UNSC) starting on January 1, 2021 for the period 2021–22.
"There has been a determined movement, occurring largely outside the public eye, to delegitimize public protest and paint demonstrators as dangerous or even criminal."
"What is happening tonight in our city is shameful," Rep. Ilhan Omar said of police behavior.
Minneapolis police officers dressed in riot gear fired rubber bullets, tear gas, and stun grenades into crowds of protesters that gathered late Tuesday to demand justice for the killing of George Floyd after video footage showed a cop kneeling on the back of the man’s neck as he cried out, “I cannot breathe!”
In “Freedom Is a Constant Struggle,” political activist Angela Y. Davis invokes€ a€ song€ from the Freedom Movement, which says freedom is a constant dying, we’ve died so long we must be free.€ Davis appreciates this irony: “We’ve struggled so long, we’ve cried so long, we’ve sorrowed so long, we’ve moaned so long, we’ve died so long, we must be free, we must be free. And of course there’s simultaneously resignation and promise in that line, there is critique and inspiration: we must be free, we must be free but are we really free?”
"It would be unconscionable for the Democratic House to pass any PATRIOT Act reauthorization without critical privacy reforms."
Iran's Islamic penal code reduces punitive measures for fathers and other family members who are convicted of murder or physically harming children in domestic violence or "honour killings".
The thirteen-year-old girl was killed with a sickle in the city of Hovigh, Talesh county, northern Iran. Her father was detained after widespread reaction to the tragedy across the country and on social media.
Saga Dawa, which falls on the fourth month of the Tibetan lunar calendar and began this year on May 23, commemorates the Buddha’s birth, death, and enlightenment, and is traditionally celebrated in Buddhist countries around the world.
Though Lhasa’s famous Jokhang Temple and other religious sites are now open to the public, “students, government workers, and persons drawing a state pension are not allowed to take part in religious events,” one resident of the city told RFA’s Tibetan Service.
The Primate of Poland has informed the Vatican about new cases of pedophilia uncovered in a recent documentary. The Church and government are both under pressure following the revelation of what happened to the victims.
The Diocese of Saint Cloud, Minn., has agreed to pay victims of past clerical sexual abuse $22.5 million and file for bankruptcy, making it the fifth of the state’s six Catholic dioceses to take such a step if the settlement is approved.
The agreement will settle claims made against more than 40 priests by about 70 plaintiffs, with the allegations dating back to the 1950s, according to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. While many of the accused priests have since died, at least one was still in active ministry in Elk River as recently as 2015, according to the newspaper.
The agreement would also require the diocese to turn over its files on the accused priests.
That changed when bird-watcher Christian Cooper pulled out his phone and captured Amy Cooper calling police to report she was being threatened by “an African American man.” The widely watched video – posted on Facebook by Christian Cooper and on Twitter by his sister – sparked accusations of racism and led to Amy Cooper getting fired.
“Unfortunately, we live in an era with things like Ahmaud Arbery, where black men are seen as targets,” Christian Cooper told CNN. “This woman thought she could exploit that to her advantage, and I wasn’t having it.
"George Floyd deserved better and his family deserves justice. His life mattered, I'm grateful for the swift action in Minneapolis to fire the officers involved—they must be held responsible for their egregious actions," said Biden.
The horrifying video spread quickly on social media earlier in the day, showing the officer driving his knee into the Floyd's neck as the man repeatedly says he can't breathe.
Four officers involved in the Monday incident have been fired, and Floyd's family and their attorney, Ben Crump, have called for their arrests. Police have not identified the officers, but attorney Tom Kelly said he was representing Derek Chauvin, the officer seen with his knee on Floyd's neck.
Four officers were fired after a video showed one of them kneeling on a handcuffed black man's neck and ignoring pleas that he couldn't breathe.
George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police in broad daylight this Memorial Day weekend. We know he was murdered because video shows Floyd handcuffed and pinned under the knee of an officer who was crushing his throat into the pavement. Floyd could be heard telling the officer that he couldn’t breathe. He could be heard telling the officer, “Don’t kill me.” Onlookers were heard begging the officer to stop killing the man.
The police didn’t stop. The police are never going to voluntarily stop killing black and brown people. The killings will continue until the majority of white people in this country make the killings stop.
"Initially ... it was just being looted, but at some point, a fire started," he said, adding he wasn't sure how it began.
The police department said in a statement on its Facebook page that it was made aware of Aucoin's comments. Chief Joshua Hardy "looked into it," and the officer was terminated.
At the human rights organization WITNESS, where I work as the senior U.S. program coordinator, we’ve learned that video has a greater chance of making an impact when it’s filmed ethically and strategically, and released in coordination with advocacy and legal efforts. Using the camera in your pocket can be a valuable way to ensure the world bears witness to abusive policing and systemic racism, help hold authorities accountable, and advocate for the real safety of our communities. To help you film safely, ethically, and effectively, see the guidance below: [...]
Unlike in Hitler’s Nazi Party, America’s regime is bipartisan and entails the billionaires in both of the fascist regime’s two political Parties. By means of dividing the billionaires into these two contending political teams, one Democratic and the other Republican, the post-WW-II myth of a ‘democratic’ United States continues to be spread both nationally and internationally, in order for the regime to continue to be called ‘democratic’, long after democracy’s having actually expired in the U.S.
Through this video essay, Tom Secker examines the Los Angeles Police Department’s Entertainment Trademark Unit, which deals with Hollywood.
Secker, host of “Spy Culture,” focuses on ABC’s “The Rookie,” a television show that he says “dilutes and trivializes sexism and racism in the LAPD, police brutality, and excessive force, violation of civil rights, predictive policing and rogue cops and LAPD corruption, including the Rampart scandal.”
Big wireless carriers haven't been exactly honest when it comes to the looming fifth-generation wireless standard (5G). Eager to use the improvements to charge higher rates and sell new gear, carriers and network vendors are dramatically over-hyping where the service is actually available, and what it can actually do. Some, like AT&T, have gone so far as to actively mislead customers by pretending that its existing 4G networks are actually 5G. AT&T took this to the next level last year by issuing phone updates that changed the 4G icon to "5GE" on customer phones, despite the fact that actual 5G isn't really available.
"Jeff Bezos can run as many scripted news segments he wants. It still doesn't change the fact that he made $34.5 billion over the course of this pandemic while putting his workers in harm's way and shirking on their hazard pay."
While most TV news professionals have scoffed at the idea of running Amazon-provided content as news, at least 9 stations across the country ran some form of the package on their news broadcasts. The package—you can view the script Amazon provided to news stations here—was produced by Amazon spokesperson Todd Walker. Only one station, Toledo ABC affiliate WTVG, acknowledged that Walker was an Amazon employee, not a news reporter, and noted that Amazon had supplied the video. Other stations that ran the Amazon-provided content as a news package include: [...]
Access to standard-essential patent (SEP) injunctions in Germany remains in flux. This is the third post in a row to share news regarding the situation in Mannheim, the "diversity venue" du jour.
One week ago, I reported on the position taken by the Mannheim Regional Court's Second Civil Chamber (Presiding Judge: Dr. Holger Kircher) in a Nokia v. Daimler trial earlier that week. Effectively, Judge Dr. Kircher's panel told the parties (behind closed doors, but without insisting on confidential treatment of that part of the conversation) that the judges were going to reverse their Huawei v. ZTE-related approach of several years: they were going to start their analysis with the implementer's counteroffer.
Toward the end of yesterday's post on Conversant's quartet of patent infringement complaints against Daimler in Munich, I mentioned that in a Nokia v. Lenovo trial on Friday, the Mannheim court's other patent-specialized division--Presiding Judge Dr. Peter Tochtermann's Seventh Civil Chamber--had distanced itself from the other panel's stance.
Meanwhile I've obtained a copy of a clarifying order by Judge Dr. Kircher and his side judges Sender and Dr. Seibel, dated Monday, May 26, 2020, in that Nokia v. Daimler case.
In a notice posted on its website earlier today, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced that it was further extending the time to file certain patent-related documents and to pay certain required fees, but only for certain types of entities. As with the initial extensions announced by the Office on March 31, 2020 (see "USPTO Announces Extension of Certain Patent Deadlines") and the extension of those deadlines announced by the Office on April 28, 2020 (see "USPTO Announces Further Extension of Certain Patent Deadlines"), the additional extensions are the result of the temporary authority provided to the USPTO by the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), which was signed by President Trump on March 27, 2020.
Some of the most widely discussed COVID-19 interventions include vaccines, drugs, and medical devices—typical interventions for many diseases, whether the cause of a pandemic or not. These interventions share a further similarity—they’re all generally excludable. That is, the owner of a particular invention can generally exclude others from practicing it without permission. In a classic account of IP, it is this excludability that encourages their development in the first instance. But as Professors Amy Kapczynski and Talha Syed have explained, some knowledge goods are more excludable than others. In this post, we describe why many successful COVID-19 interventions—washing hands, wearing face masks, even the proning of patients in a hospital setting—are generally nonexcludable and thus likely to be underincentivized by IP-based market rewards. Policymakers tasked with encouraging COVID-19 innovation should attempt to correct for this asymmetry in excludability.
[...]
A number of interventions that have emerged in the context of COVID-19 have limited excludability. Consider mask wearing. At present, the best evidence suggests that wearing masks in public helps reduce the spread of COVID-19—whether it is an exhaustive review of the existing literature, empirical studies done in the context of seasonal coronaviruses, mathematical models of COVID-19, or other scientific articles. After initially recommending against the use of masks in public by most Americans, the CDC has now recommended the use of cloth masks “in public settings where other social distancing measures are difficult to maintain,” such as grocery stores.
But this knowledge about the benefits of wearing of masks in public—particularly DIY cloth masks—is highly nonexcludable. The holder of a patent on a method of wearing masks in public to prevent the spread of COVID-19 (should it even issue) would not reasonably be able to enforce that patent. Systematically enforcing patent violations would not be practical, given the vast numbers of Americans wearing masks in public (73%, in a recent AP poll). It might be easier to sue entities (like grocery stores) who require shoppers to wear masks, on grounds of inducement of infringement, but this is difficult to imagine, given the social pressure on such a patentholder not to enforce their rights. And the same argument applies to knowledge about the benefits of other public health measures—it is hard to imagine enforcement of a patent related to hand washing or social distancing.
As another example, consider proning, in which COVID-19 patients are simply placed on their stomachs (in the prone position) rather than on their backs. According to a series of studies (including multiple on COVID-19 specifically—see here, here, and here for a selection, but also here in the pre-COVID-19 context), proning may increase patients’ oxygen saturation and may help patients avoid being placed on a ventilator. It may even lower their risk of death.
The Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office has decided that the exclusion from patentability of essentially biological processes for the production of plants or animals now also extends to plant or animal products that are exclusively obtained by means of an essentially biological process for European patents or pending European patent applications that were granted or filed from July 1, 2017, on.
Plants and animals exclusively obtained by essentially biological processes are excluded from patentability, according to the Enlarged Board of Appeal ("EBA") of the European Patent Office ("EPO"). This reversal of the EBA's previous rulings was issued late last week in the eagerly anticipated opinion in referral G 3/19 ("Pepper").
To recap, after the Broccoli-II and Tomato-II decisions (G 2/12 and G 2/13) affirmed the patentability of products derived from essentially biological processes, the European Commission issued a Notice indicating that the Biotech Directive should have been interpreted to exclude such products from patentability (see our June 2015 Commentary, "Clarifying or Confirming the Extent of Process Exclusion under Art. 53(b) EPC?" and our December 2016 Alert, "Clarifying or Confusing? The European Commission Chews on Tomatoes and Broccoli"). In order to comply with the Notice, the EPO Administrative Council introduced Rule 28(2) EPC in July 2017 (see our July 2017 Commentary, "Clarifying or Conforming? The EPO Bows to the European Commission").
[...]
The interpretation of Article 53(b) EPC given in G 3/19 is said to have no retroactive effect on relevant European patents or pending European patent applications that were granted or filed before July 1, 2017.
For years, the Eastern District of Texas was the favored stomping ground for patent trolls. Short times from filing to trial, shorter trials, judges with local rules friendly to patent plaintiffs, and a jury pool that tended to be friendly to plaintiffs all contributed to this. It probably didn’t hurt that Eastern District judges were significantly less likely than average to grant defendants summary judgment and, more recently, significantly less likely to stay a case pending IPR.
And NPEs were likely particularly interested in the fact that the Eastern District gave NPEs a win at trial almost twice as often as the average court would.
But with the Supreme Court’s 2017 TC Heartland decision, NPEs had a much harder time suing defendants in the Eastern District. Since most defendants had no presence in the district, NPEs could no longer rely on it being an option in their lawsuits, especially after some of the more far-reaching attempts to keep cases in Eastern Texas were slapped down by the Federal Circuit.
Enter Judge Alan Albright and the Western District of Texas.
[...]
Many litigators predicted a rise in litigation in the Western District of Texas. They were right. Since Judge Albright was seated, patent filings in his court have risen significantly. In the first four months of 2020, 258 new patent cases were filed in the Western District. That’s an eightfold increase over the same period in 2018, before Judge Albright was seated.
And this isn’t an instance in which productive companies are flocking to the district to file their cases. This increase has been driven mostly by NPEs. Unified Patents attributes more than 70% of the new cases to an NPE, and the vast majority of those are from the sort of large patent aggregators that the AIA and TC Heartland decisions had the largest impact on.
That shouldn’t be surprising. The presence of many tech companies in Austin—inside the Western District—combined with Judge Albright taking a very harsh view of motions to transfer cases means that those cases won’t go elsewhere. And once you’re in Judge Albright’s court, a plaintiff can rest easy in the knowledge that patent trolls who file cases in his court can almost definitely never face an IPR.
Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winners, Ekta Aswal and Rajesh Singh, who split the winning cash prize of $1,000 for prior art submissions for U.S. Patent 7,137,127. The '127 patent is generally related to user-generated embedded information transfer and was granted to Benjamin Slotznick, an NPE-individual.
[...]
The ongoing contests are open to anyone, and include tens of thousands of dollars in rewards available for helping the industry to challenge NPE patents of questionable validity by finding and submitting prior art in the contests.
One of this Kat's favourite journalistic pieces of the last year was a foray, by Tad Friend for The New Yorker, into the world of vegetarian burgers [here]. In particular, it chronicles Pat Brown's mission to "save the planet from environmental catastrophe". His strategy? The Impossible Burger, a 100% plant-based burger.
As suggested by Elon Musk, the way to change the world is to start a business. And so, Pat Brown took on the beef industry, which he considers the greatest contributor to climate change. The piece describes the ascent of vegetarian burgers [and the painstaking opposition they face from various quarters] and raises thought-provoking questions about what, exactly, makes us love our favourite foods.
It was therefore nice to see that Impossible Burger has become so successful that it faces competition from a major player in the food industry – Nestlé – which recently introduced the "Incredible Burger". Given his mission, Pat Brown was probably happy, too, but less so about the name. Hence, Impossible Foods brought suit against Nestlé for infringement of its European Union Trade Mark IMPOSSIBLE BURGER before the district court of the Hague [Dutch decision here, courtesy of IE-forum]. In it's decision yesterday, the Hague court forbid Nestlé to further infringe Impossible Foods' trade mark in the entire EU.
Popcorn Time made thousands of headlines after being dubbed the 'Netflix for Pirates' and a new piece of software released this week could be making some early steps towards becoming its counterpart for pirated games. Like Kodi, Vapor Store doesn't come with any unlicensed media installed but after a simple tweak can provide access to a huge library of Steam games.
Last week Nintendo sued the operators of nine online stores for enabling widespread piracy. The websites in question offered Switch hacks and mods linked to Team-Xecuter, including an upcoming release of a Switch Lite hack. While the lawsuits are just starting up, they already seem to have had an effect as most stores have now disappeared. Or have they?
Update/Correction, May 27 2020, 2PM Pacific. An earlier version of this article contained the phrase "the the online music industry is currently generating more revenues than the music industry did at the height of the CD bubble"; this has been corrected to read "the online music industry is currently generating more revenues than the music industry at any time since the CD bubble."
As Congress gets ready for yet another hearing on copyright and music, we’d like to suggest that rather than more “fact-finding,” where the facts are inevitably skewed toward the views of the finder, our legislators start focusing on a concrete solution that builds on and learns from decades of copyright policy: blanket licensing. It will need an update to make it work for the Internet age, but as complicated as that will be, it has the profound benefit of adhering to copyright’s real purpose: spurring creativity and innovation. And it's far better than the status quo, where audiences and musicians alike are collateral damage in an endless war between giant tech companies and giant entertainment companies.
With the explosion of the video game industry and the technology that has come along with it, it's starting to get really fun to see what creative minds can do inside of the gaming realm. It's turning games into something much more than they would have been 20 years ago. Back then, games were singular in purpose: play the video game. Today they can be so much more when done right. They can be a social ecosystem. They can be economies onto themselves.
