There's a new Linux laptop in town. The Spanish PC vendor Slimbook and the Linux desktop non-profit KDE have united their efforts to release a new high-end Linux laptop: The third-generation KDE Slimbook.
This slender laptop comes in two versions. The KDE Slimbook 14 and, the slightly larger, KDE Slimbook 15. Other than the screen size, 14 and 15.6-inch full HD IPS LED displays, the two are essentially identical.
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The laptop uses the KDE Neon Linux desktop operating system. This is built on top of Ubuntu 18.04. KDE's developers are working hard on moving Neon to the recently released Ubuntu 20.04.
Unlike Ubuntu, which uses GNOME as its default desktop, Neon, as you'd expect, uses the KDE Plasma desktop and KDE applications as its defaults. It is not, however, compatible with Ubuntu's own KDE branch, Kubuntu. Neon, somewhat like Fedora, is a cutting edge Linux distribution with KDE's latest and greatest programs.
The company behind this laptop, Slimbook, is dedicated to Linux. Its team is made up of Linux sysadmins and open-source developers. It's partnered with KDE since it started in 2015, but it also supports other Linux desktops.
Pricing for the Slimbook 14 starts at 899 Euros with the 15 going for 929 €. In American dollars, that would be, as of July 23, 2020, respectively $1,042 and $1,077. To ship a Slimbook to the United States, or any country outside of Europe, it will cost you an additional 120 € or $139. All purchases include a donation to the KDE community.
Calls for political activism in software projects continue to ramp up, digiKam 7 arrives with enhanced facial recognition, Zulip unleashes its biggest release ever amid tensions between its competitors, and a new ‘zine focusing on Fedora seeks contributors.
Brent sits down with Carl Richell, Founder and CEO of System76. We explore the people, passion, and culture behind the scenes, learn of young Carl, the early years of building a Linux-focused hardware business, how today System76 fuels a tiny piece of SpaceX, and more.
Would you like to clearly understand what's happening when you use the Python import keyword? Do you want to use modules more effectively to structure your code? Or maybe you're ready to move to the next level with your Django project by adding user management. This week on the show, David Amos is back with another batch of PyCoder's Weekly articles and projects.
It's time once again for The Weekender. This is our bi-weekly departure into the world of amateur radio contests, open source conventions, special events, listener challenges, hedonism and just plain fun. Thanks for listening and, if you happen to get a chance, feel free to call us or e-mail and send us some feedback. Tell us how we're doing. We'd love to hear from you.
That (Linux) Containers are a userspace fiction is a well-known dictum nowadays. It simply expresses the fact that there is no container kernel object in the Linux kernel. Instead, userspace is relatively free to define what a container is. But for the most part userspace agrees that a container is somehow concerned with isolating a task or a task tree from the host system. This is achieved by combining a multitude of Linux kernel features. One of the better known kernel features that is used to build containers are namespaces. The number of namespaces the kernel supports has grown over time and we are currently at eight.
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So from the section above it should be clear that seccomp provides a few desirable properties that make it a natural candiate to look at to help solve our mknod(2) and mount(2) problem. Since seccomp intercepts syscalls early in the syscall path it already gives us a hook into the syscall path of a given task. What is missing though is a way to bring another task such as the LXD container manager into the picture. Somehow we need to modify seccomp in a way that makes it possible for a container manager to not just be informed when a task inside the container performs a syscall it wants to be informed about but also how to make it possible to block the task until the container manager instructs the kernel to allow it to proceed.
Intel open-source developer Kristen Carlson Accardi continues work on Function Granular Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (FGKASLR) as a big improvement over traditional KASLR address space layout randomization.
FGKASLR was originally published earlier this year, 15 years after the debut of KASLR for randomizing the base address of the running kernel. With FGKASLR, individual kernel functions are reordered so that even if the kernel's randomized based address is revealed, an attacker still wouldn't know the location in memory of particular kernel functions as the relative addresses will be different.
The Linux 5.9 kernel is set to introduce support for the new IBM POWER System Call Vectored (SCV) ABI with the new SCV and RFSCV instructions. These new instructions can help with performance.
POWER9 / POWER ISA 3.0 supports System Call Vectored (SCV) but to date has not been supported by the mainline Linux kernel. That finally is set to happen with Linux 5.9 with the SCV support being queued in the PowerPC-next tree.
The Xen Project, an open source hypervisor hosted at the Linux Foundation, today announced the release of Xen Project Hypervisor 4.14, which introduces Linux stubdomains, better nested performance, more robust live patching and reflects contributions from across the community and ecosystem. This release also continues the fundamental shift for Xen, which was outlined in version 4.13, to make it increasingly resistant to side-channel attacks and hardware issues.
“Xen Project Hypervisor 4.14 is a clear example of important investments from companies and community members to move the project forward,” said George Dunlap, Xen Project Advisory Board Chair. “We continue to see broad participation from many companies, which is validation of the important role Xen plays in the open-source virtualization space: a project focused solely on virtualization, with a mature code base and community.”
The initial batch of WiFi/wireless driver improvements slated for Linux 5.9 landed in net-next this week with a few noteworthy additions.
Among the WiFi driver changes queued so far for introduction in the Linux 5.9 kernel include:
- The wilc1000 driver is being promoted out of staging and into the proper Linux networking subsystem area. This is the driver for supporting the Microchip ATWILC1000 series hardware. The ATWILC1000 is designed as an 802.11b/g/n IoT link controller module for various devices. After getting into good enough shape in staging, it's time for graduation.
While it was just two days ago that AMDVLK 2020.Q3.1 debuted and normally there is a two to three week release cadence for these open-source AMD Radeon Vulkan driver code drops, this morning was already met by the debut of AMDVLK 2020.Q3.2.
This expedited AMDVLK 2020.Q3.2 release is coming principally due to a few bugs. AMDVLK 2020.Q3.2 has changed its preference around Y-coordinate swizzle modes for 3D color attachments with GFX10/Navi, restricts its pipeline cache flush optimization to only cases where it's certainly legal behavior, updating against the Vulkan API 1.2.146 headers, and extends its "defer reusing command stream chunk concept" to all scenarios. There is also fixes for a shared metadata bug on GFX6 (Southern Islands) and fixing of some 999e5 format failures.
It’s a very slow day, and I awoke at 4:30 with the burning need to finish tessellation shaders. Or maybe I was just burning because it’s so hot out.
In either case, I had a couple remaining tests that were failing, and, upon closer inspection and a lot of squinting, I determined that the problem was the use of partial writes to patch output variables in tessellation control shaders.
With this knowledge in hand, I set about resolving the issue in the most bulldozer way possible, with no regard for how much of the code would survive once I discovered which nir pass I probably wanted to be running instead.
Computer Networks facilitate the sharing of information and resources between multiple nodes linked together. It is regarded as the backbone of telecommunication in the field of technology.
The other crucial term under networks is Computer Network security. It refers to the set of rules and configurations adopted to prevent and monitor network misuse, data modification (integrity), and denial of network access and resources.
Having understood these two terms, now we can look at Network Scanning. Network scanning mainly deals with security in computer networks. It is a procedure used to identify nodes on a network, services offered by different devices, identify network security systems in place, the operating systems, protect networks from attacks, and check the overall network health.
CONSCRIPT, a blending of themes and elements similar to Resident Evil and Silent Hill come together in the harsh trenches of the first world war. It recently completed a Kickstarter campaign, pulling close to $40,000 (AU) from almost 800 backers to bring it to life across the confirmed platforms of Linux, macOS and Windows.
Exploring a setting that horror games don't usually go to, a pixel-art survival horror like this definitely has a way of capturing our interest.
"During the First World War, a lone French soldier must navigate twisted trenches, scavenge for limited supplies and solve complex puzzles - all whilst fighting for survival in the midst of mankind’s most brutal and horrifying conflict."
With some fully psychedelic styling to it, the latest Psychonauts 2 trailer is out now with vocals from Jack Black.
What is Psychonauts 2? Crowdfunded on the Fig platform with over three million dollars back in 2016, it's a sequel to the much loved first full game from Double Fine Productions, which ended on something of a cliffhanger. Fans have been waiting so very long to find out more and they will…in 2021.
In the brand new trailer, Raz is jumping inside a brain and it all gets thoroughly weird. As if things weren't trippy enough! It also showcases a brand new power with the 'Time Bubble, which lets you slow down platforms and you can use it against enemies too.
Seems Intel are not having the best of times with their CPU tech lately. Not only have they been through waves of security issues, they're continuing to struggle to move to smaller processing nodes.
In the latest earnings call showing off their second-quarter 2020 financial results, we got an interesting little peek behind the curtain at their plans for future CPUs. What we know is that Intel are continuing to lag behind and it's not getting any better for quite some time.
Unity Technologies have released the latest version of the Unity game engine with Unity 2020.1 with lots of new features and bug fixes included.
This is the first planned 'TECH' release of this year, which is the interim release build where all the fancy new tech goes in for developers who need the latest and greatest. Unity do two TECH releases a year to introduce and polish all the new stuff but they suggest sticking to the LTS (long term support) releases for production, which release following the two TECH builds.
Looking over the release notes, there's quite a lot of fixes for Linux included in there, and plenty of Vulkan improvements too which is good news. It also mentions added IL2CPP support for the Linux Standalone player, although that's been available in previous releases.
Currently available as a tech demo with the developer needing feedback, Ova Magica looks like a promising start of a new casual sim blending lots of different gameplay features.
Ova Magica looks like it mixes in a farming-life type of sim, with a creature hatching and battle system with blobbly little creatures that look like something slightly resembling what's in Slime Rancher. Inspired by the likes of Azure Dreams, Harvest Moon, Stardew Valley, Pokemon, Grandia and many more it's in early development but they're planning full Linux support. The developer, ClaudiaTheDev, is being backed up by Top Hat Studios who are also helping to publish Steamdolls and Synergia for Linux too.
Linux or Ubuntu has been for quite a while, an extremely popular OS for a lot of PC users. A lot of PC users prefer using the Linux OS over other platforms, but one that is not necessarily built for playing games.
While not a lot of substantial Triple-A games come out with a version of the game for Linux platforms, there is no shortage of quality games for Linux on Steam.
Here we look at some of the best games available for Linux OS on Steam.
Carrion running natively through Linux.
CARRION from Phobia Game Studio and Devolver Digital sees you turn into an almost unstoppable force and you're so very hungry for tasty Human flesh. Note: key provided by GOG.com.
A creature of unknown origin, whose body doesn't have any real form. You're just a mess of angry, red tentacles that you use to reach out and destroy with. It's a reverse-horror and a damn good one at that. The kind of setting we don't often get to play in video games and a welcome change. Plenty of gore, screaming and exploration are on the cards here and none of it is boring. I often found myself just destroying everything possible because CARRION makes it feel so good.
Firaxis Games and 2K, along with Aspyr Media for the Linux and macOS versions today released the next DLC for the New Frontier Pass available for Civilization VI.
Coming as either part of the pass or as an individual purchase, the Ethiopia Pack is the second in a planned year of free updates and paid DLC for Civilization VI. If you buy the full New Frontier Pass instead of individual DLC, you also get access to 'Persona Packs' which add new flair and abilities to some rulers.
Need some games for this coming weekend? Humble Bundle has returned with a new Paradox Interactive bundle.
The Humble Best of Paradox Interactive Bundle runs from now until Thursday, August 6th, 2020 and has some quality gaming experiences.
A window manager is software that manages the windows that applications bring up. For example, when you start an application, there will be a window manager running in the background, responsible for the placement and appearance of windows.
It is important not to confuse a window manager with a desktop environment. A desktop environment typically consists of icons, windows, toolbars, folders, wallpapers, and desktop widgets. They provide a collection of libraries and applications made to operate cohesively together. A desktop environment contains its own window manager.
There are a few different types of window managers. This article focuses on dynamic window managers. A dynamic window manager is a tiling window manager where windows are tiled based on preset layouts between which the user can switch. Layouts typically have a main area and a secondary area. The main area usually shows one window, but one can also change the number of windows in this area. Its purpose is to reserve more space for the more important window(s). The secondary area shows the other windows.
Here’s our recommended free dynamic window managers. All of them are free and open source software.
If you are a long time Plasma user, you probably remember the times when most GTK applications in KDE Plasma prior to 5.18 were practically unusable due to the lacking support for _GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS. In this blog post, I would like to get a bit technical and walk you through some changes that happened during the 5.18 time frame that made it possible to support _GTK_FRAME_EXTENTS in KWin. I also would like to explain why after so many years of resistance, we had finally added support for client-side decorations. So, buckle up your seat belt!
he team behind the open-source app say the new neural network model used in release “can detect blurred faces, covered faces, profiles of faces, printed faces, faces turned away, partial faces, etc”
Which is pretty impressive if a little creepy — hey, I watched a lot of cyberpunk movies as a kid.
DigiKam 7.0’s redux facial recognition even works on animals too...
DigiKam 7.0 is out for this KDE/Qt-aligned open-source photography manager solution.
One of the big new features of digiKam 7.0 is deep learning powered faces management. The digiKam 7.0 software makes use of deep learning for detecting and recognizing faces within photos. DigiKam is making use of the Deep Neural Network features within OpenCV.
Just in time to get you into the holiday spirit, we are now proud to release digiKam 7.0.0 final release today. This version is a result of a long development that started one year ago and in which we have introduced new features and plenty of fixes. Check out some of the highlights listed below and discover all the changes in detail.
Version 7.0.0 of the digiKam photo editing and management application is out. This release adds support for a number of new raw formats, support for Apple's HEIF format, and a new mosaic plugin. The headline feature, though, appears to be completely reworked face detection: "The new code, based on recent Deep Neural Network features from the OpenCV library, uses neuronal networks with pre-learned data models dedicated for the Face Management. No learning stage is required to perform face detection and recognition. We have saved coding time, run-time speed, and a improved the success rate which reaches 97% of true positives. Another advantage is that it is able to detect non-human faces, such as those of dogs."
digiKam 7.0 comes eight months after latest version 6.4, which probably many of you are currently using on your favorite GNU/Linux distributions, and about a year and a half after the digiKam 6.0 series. So, as you can imagine, it’s a massive update that adds numerous changes.
A lot of the work in digiKam 7.0 was done around the face recognition capabilities of the program, which now use modern neuronal networks and deep-learning technologies based on the latest Deep Neural Network features of the OpenCV library.
They did suggest adding a featured app, which is a task we also want to do for Discover which has featured apps but they don’t currently change. That feels like an interesting wee task for anyone who wants to help out KDE.
But more easy would be the task of going over all the apps and checking the info on them is up to date, including going over the various app stores we publish on like the Microsoft Store and making sure those links are in the Appstream meta-data files.
Finally, the main task of All About the Apps is getting the apps onto the stores so we need people who can get the apps running on Windows etc and put them on the relevant Stores. I did an interview asking for this for Flathub in the most recent monthly apps update.
meshgradient get rendered in Krita just like you'd expect them to render in other apps
Well, because I couldn't get Bicubic interpolation fully working by the time of writing and publishing this blog. This part is still in pending state :(
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I started with reading the algorithm mentioned in the specs sheet i.e Divide And Conquer. I had some confusions about it, but thanks to my mentors. I got the idea. Then, to implement this algorithm, the idea was to subdivide the patches, until the difference between the corners is small enough.
Now the question was, how am I going to divide the surface. Luckily, there was a paper, one search away, which I picked up. I read it quickly and started writing the algorithm on paper. Somethings didn't quite make sense, but as I later found out that they were probably misprints.
So, as I implemented the algorithm, the first thing that I tried to open was this, to check if the subdivision algorithm was right. Comparing this to Inkscape, it was pretty accurate (not the color, but the surface itself).
This month, I took forward my ongoing project with Gcompris and added Multiple Datasets for Categorisation, Gnumch equality, and Gnumch inequality activities.
Ergonomics is about the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize overall interaction. In short, ergonomics is about making things comfortable and efficient to work with. This also applies to software design and development, or at least it should.
Companies and projects have been thinking and researching ergonomics in software development pretty much since the beginning, even if that was just a developer thinking about where best to place this or that button in his program. The GNOME project had the Usability Project from 2001 to 2011 and now apparently has design teams to cover usability. GNOME also came up with the HIG - the Human Interface Guidelines. So you would think the GNOME world is well prepared in terms of software ergonomics as far as human to interface interactions go.
Unfortunately the GTK+/GNOME using world in reality seems to have paid little heed to usabiliy studies as of late, just as much as the hodgepodge of applications written for the different desktop environments using the toolkit, with all their various takes on window borders, size, button placement and size etc. and custom applications for the various distributions and projects does not help.
KDE on the other hand has never had this problem and presents a well integrated desktop experience, even when using Qt applications not explicitly written for being part of the KDE suite. It even has a settings module to integrate GTK applications into the overall look as much as possible. This works quite well but perhaps apart from Firefox and LibreOffice most KDE users seem to prefer a as pure as possible desktop experience.
While GNOME software may be free as in beer, at today's GUADEC 2020 annual GNOME developers conference there was a call that GNOME software should label their "embodied carbon cost" as part of collecting more data on the environmental impact of creating said software and working to reduce said impact.
Philip Withnall of Endless presented at the virtual GNOME developer conference today on the environment impact of GNOME and that more responsibility should be taken as to the environmental impact and in turn reducing that impact.
SUSE€® officially released SUSE€® Linux Enterprise 15 SP2 on July 21, 2020. With this new version of SUSE Linux Enterprise, we also announce the availability of the latest SUSE YES System Certification Kit (SCK), version 8.5. The 8.5 SCK provides certification support for SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP2 including Xen and KVM virtualization certification.
The 8.5 SCK continues support for SUSE Linux Enterprise for Arm, SUSE Linux Enterprise for Power, and SUSE Linux Enterprise for z Systems. Certifications for servers, workstations, desktops, laptops, point of service systems, virtualization hosts, and third-party hypervisors are also supported.
This week SUSE announced the release of SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 Service Pack 2, which comes with many new features and support for new hardware. We sat down with Dr Thomas Di Giacomo for an exclusive interview to learn more about the new release.
Since its introduction in 2006, Ceph has been used predominantly for volume-intensive use cases where performance is not the most critical aspect. Because the technology has many attractive capabilities, there has been a desire to extend the use of Ceph into areas such as High-Performance Computing. Ceph deployments in HPC environments are usually as an active archival (tier-2 storage) behind another parallel file system that is acting as the primary storage tier. We have seen many significant enhancements in Ceph technology. Contributions to the open source project by SUSE and others has led to new features, considerably improved efficiency, and made it possible for Ceph-based software defined storage solutions to provide a complete end-to-end storage platform for an increasing number of workloads.
Some might be skeptical of Hana-Linux clusters. If their implementation will be a success largely depends on know-how. With an increasing number of customers either deploying or planning to deploy SAP Hana and Hana-based applications like S/4, BW/4 and C/4, cluster solutions (especially Hana-Linux clusters) are gaining importance mostly due to high availability as well as disaster and recovery concerns.
Here is a new program for inclusion into my DAW package collection. It is Sonic-Pi, a ‘code-based music creation and performance tool’ as its web site states. My DAW collection already features Supercollider, which at its core is a powerful audio synthesis engine, but it also features a graphical user interface which you can use for live-coding music. Sonic-Pi has similar capabilities but it is more intuitively accessible (compare it to vi and notepad for instance).
Therefore Sonic-Pi would be better suited for introducing people to the concept of creating music through writing code, and letting that music evolve during a live performance by updating on-the-fly the code which represents the audio synthesis.
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The software is usually distributed as an ‘appimage’ which simply bundles everything you need into an archive. This is not really Slackware-like, so I wrote a SlackBuild script which brings some order into the directory structure, removing a lot of redundant megabytes and creating a proper package with a nice menu item.
Fedora 33 development is in progress. Check out the major feature changes in the upcoming Fedora 33 release.
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) and its AI research institute Borealis AI have partnered with Red Hat and NVIDIA to develop a new AI computing platform designed to transform the customer banking experience and help keep pace with rapid technology changes and evolving customer expectations.
As AI models become more efficient and accurate, so do the computational complexities associated with them. RBC and Borealis AI set out to build an in-house AI infrastructure that would allow transformative intelligent applications to be brought to market faster and deliver an enhanced experience for clients. Red Hat OpenShift and NVIDIA’s DGX AI computing systems power this private cloud system that delivers intelligent software applications and boosts operational efficiency for RBC and its customers.
"Learn to pivot" has been the mantra for 2020. Like most businesses, March 2020 was a challenging time for us on the Red Hat marketing team. With COVID-19 spreading across the world, and businesses sending their employees to work from home, it became clear that Red Hat Summit, scheduled to be hosted in April in San Francisco, could not go on as planned.
By mid-March we were in full pivot mode to change Red Hat Summit, the premier open source technology conference, from an in-person event to a full digital experience. The challenge -- that the event would still immerse our attendees in everything that makes a Red Hat event special. It was certainly an exciting ride, and on April 27, we opened the Summit virtual experience to the world. In the end, we had more than 50,000 attendees from more than 100 countries visit the live environment. We learned a lot of lessons along the way - below are a few successes we had while pulling off this event, and a one tip for improving a virtual experience.
Red Hat continues to drive support of an open 5G infrastructure to help drive accelerated adoption of cloud-native technologies for our communications service provider (CSP) customers and partners. As operators look to offer new revenue generating services, the importance of scalability, flexibility and security become critical for the smooth evolution of their networks. With this in mind, customers are looking for ways to deploy cloud-native technology with confidence and an open hybrid cloud foundation offers an essential tool for those deployments.
Red Hat OpenShift delivers the container based platform that provides consistency from the core to the edge. This platform is part of the recently announced HPE Telco blueprint that we collaborated on with Hewlett Packard Enterprise and utilizes Intel€® Xeon€® processors. CSPs can use the blueprint to implement an open 5G cloud-native core that provides transformation for telco networks and enables CSPs to engage with leading industry ecosystem partners more easily.
During mid-July, US Tech major IBM had close to 200 positions open in India. Of course cloud architects and machine learning experts were part of the list, but they were fewer in number.
In the past times the Fedora Ambassadors Program had some issues, which made the Ambassadors Team feel disheartened and discouraged. This caused the Mindshare Committee to step up and to gather community input to improve the Ambassadors Program, which gave birth to the Fedora Ambassadors revamp proposal and to create a temporary taskforce which would work on the plan of action in the proposal.
I hope you are all having a good week! I have to say, writing these blog posts and reflecting on the week and what I’ve done has become a really therapeutic process. Also maybe I’m enjoying myself this week even more, because I’m testing out a Bluetooth keyboard that I got for school and for writing on the go without a laptop.
Let’s see what have I been up to. Over the weekend I decided to take the plunge and order some stickers with my own design. I had this great drawing in my sketchbook of a plant with a little face on it’s pot, so I redrew it with the right dimensions and higher quality on my iPad and ordered a small batch of die cut stickers, to see the quality and if I want to get more for the future. It was really cool and I’m looking forward to getting them in the mail in the next week or so.
The process for the Fedora 33 and Fedora 34 wallpapers has started, you can look at the tickets Mo’s created for them here and here. But over the weekend people voted on which scientist/mathematician/inventor/amazing human being for inspiring the wallpaper, and Walter Lincoln Hawkins was chosen for Fedora 33, and Ub Iwerks was chosen for Fedora 34. I compiled a document full of info for all of the options, which I hope was helpful to others, but at least it was helpful to me.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. Cockpit 224 with bug fixes was released as well as Cockpit Podman 20. Here are release notes for Cockpit Podman 20.
Release Candidate versions are available in testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for a parallel installation, perfect solution for such tests, and also as base packages.
RPM of PHP version 7.4.9RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 32 or remi-php74-test repository for Fedora 30-31 and Enterprise Linux 7-8.
RPM of PHP version 7.3.21RC1 are available as SCL in remi-test repository and as base packages in the remi-test repository for Fedora 30-31 or remi-php73-test repository for Enterprise Linux.
A months weeks ago I alluded that you could run the LVFS in an offline mode, where updates could be synced to a remote location and installed on desktops and servers in a corporate setting without internet access. A few big companies asked for more details, and so we created some official documentation which should help. It works, but you need to script things manually and set up your system in a custom way.
The legacies of earlier designs, such as Babbage's difference engine and the mainframe punch card systems of the 1970s, have a significant impact on today's computer systems. In my first article in this historical series, Computer history and modern computers for sysadmins, I discussed several precursors to the modern computer and listed characteristics that define what we call a computer today.
In this article, I discuss the central processing unit (CPU), including its components and functionality. Many of the topics refer back to the first article, so be sure to read it if you haven't already.
The central processing unit (CPU)
The CPU in modern computers is the embodiment of the "mill" in Babbage's difference engine. The term central processing unit originated way back in the mists of computer time when a single massive cabinet contained the circuitry required to interpret machine level program instructions and perform operations on the data supplied. The central processing unit also completed all processing for any attached peripheral devices. Peripherals included printers, card readers, and early storage devices such as drum and disk drives. Modern peripheral devices have a significant amount of processing power themselves and off-load some processing tasks from the CPU. This frees the CPU up from input/output tasks so that its power is applied to the primary task at hand.
Early computers only had one CPU and could only perform one task at a time.
We retain the term CPU today, but now it refers to the processor package on a typical motherboard. Figure 1 displays a standard Intel processor package.
Most experts say it’s a mistake to think of cloud native computing in technology terms. Rather, it’s a mindset shift based on the assumption that better technology is available in the cloud than inside a company’s data center. Think of cloud native principles as more of a business enables than an infrastructure improvement.
“The primary benefit is to reduce the time between forming a business idea and delivering it into production,” said John Clingnan, senior principal project manager, middleware, at Red Hat Inc., an IBM Corp. subsidiary. “It can also be critical when businesses are in a pitched battle to implement a concept and out-executing the competition through rapid, incremental change” will determine who wins.
“Cloud gives you the flexibility to pick and choose which parts of your application to abstract and which to spend your engineering resources on, giving companies the ability to focus on building on their core differentiators,” said Steven Mih, chief executive of Ahana Inc., a startup that provides services around the Presto distributed database platform
A Red Hat marketing executive shares insights on how to smoothly shift a big in-person event to a virtual one in a short amount of time as her company just did.
Like each month, here comes a report about the work of paid contributors to Debian LTS.
For those of you using the Ubuntu Studio Backports Repository, we recently had a major update of some tools. If you’ve been using the Backports PPA, you may have noticed some breakage when updating via normal means.
To update if you have the Backports PPA enabled, make sure to do the following...
As the world is moving toward cloud-based services, we can perform almost every task using a single Web browser. This is one of the reasons why Chrome OS integrated with the Google Chrome web browser has become the most popular web-centric operating system.
Even though Chrome OS uses Linux kernel under the hood, it is exclusively available to run only on Google’s hardware like Chromebook. Hence, if you’re looking for an alternative, soon you’ll be able to experience the potential of cloud computing right on your laptop using Ubuntu Web.
Chromebooks have become popular alternatives to Windows and Mac laptops in recent years due to their simplicity, security, and ease-of-use, among other things. The fact that many entry-level models are super cheap probably doesn’t hurt.
But Google doesn’t necessarily hold a monopoly on the idea of building an operating system that puts the web browser front and center. Mozilla’s Firefox OS may have been a short-lived experiment, but developer Rudra Saraswat plans to create a new web-based operating system that puts Firefox front and center.
Right now just about all we know about the project is the name: Ubuntu Web.
Adlink’s rugged “ROScube-X” robotics controller runs Ubuntu, ROS 2, Adlink’s Neuron SDK, and AWS RoboMaker on a Jetson AGX Xavier with 2x GbE, 5x USB 3.1, 2x M.2, and optional PCIe, CAN, LTE, and time-sync’d GMSL2 camera I/O.
In May, Adlink announced support for Nvidia’s “Nvidia EGX” AI edge solution on four new edge servers using Nvidia’s Jetson Nano, TX2, AGX Xavier, and Tesla. The Xavier-based model, called the M300-Xavier-ROS2, has now apparently been replaced with a similar ROScube-X controller. The system has fewer USB and serial ports, but additional expansion, including support for optional FAKRA connectors for time-synchronized GMSL2 cameras.
A common developer’s dream is of a single programming framework and language that can be used to publish production-ready applications on just about every platform under the sun. Ideally, developers should be able to write one set of code, and then deploy it — with as few tweaks as possible — onto mobile (iOS and Android), the desktop (Windows 10, Mac, Linux) and the web.
The magic word here is, of course, convergence, which several companies and organizations have tried (remember Windows Mobile?), and many still continue to strive for. The most recent example of work-in-progress is Apple’s decision to roll out “Apple silicon” (aka ARM processors) in its desktop and laptop Macs over the next few years.
This week we’ve been making operating systems for the Raspberry Pi 4. We discuss our favourite gadgets, bring you a verrrry long command line love and round up all your wonderful feedback.
It’s Season 13 Episode 18 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Alan Pope, Mark Johnson and Martin Wimpress are connected and speaking to your brain.
If you’re a fan of virtualization, then you are most likely aware the one thing virtual machines do less well than systems installed on physical hardware is the graphics stack. You can get guest operating systems up and running relatively easily. But sometimes, there is no guarantee you will have advanced graphics features, like 3D acceleration, available in the virtual machines, which can limit their usefulness.
In recent years, there have been attempts to rectify this, and different virtualization tools now offer some 3D support. Qemu-virgil is a snap that bundles the latest version of QEMU, along with GTK, SDL2 and Virgil 3D enabled, designed to give you decent graphics performance out of the box.
Once you install the snap, you will need to connect the kvm interface (snap connect qemu-virgil:kvm), but after that, you can launch virtual machines, and start enjoying solid graphics performance. Now, be aware that you will probably not have native-level results, but you can still get a decent level of usability, without having to resort to any significant manual changes or complex command line arguments.
Kontron’s rugged, 10.1- to 23.8-inch “FlatClient Panel PCs” have been upgraded with 8th Gen UE-series processors, an isolated power supply, and an optional, Linux-based QIWI toolkit for HMI displays.
Kontron announced an update to its FlatClient Panel PCs that adds the option of an Intel 8th Gen Whiskey Lake CPU. The announcement links to a datasheet that continues to list dual-core 4th, 6th, and 7th, Gen U-series processors along with the new quad-core, 1.6GHz/4.1GHz Core i5-8365UE or optional i7-8665UE Whiskey Lake processors. In addition to detailing these FlatClient Pro models, the datasheet includes the slightly reduced feature set “FlatClient Eco” line based on Apollo Lake.
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The Linux and Win 10 IoT supported FlatClient systems now offer an optional, “QIWI” toolkit based on Linux and an optimized Chromium web browser. Designed for building industrial HMI displays, Kontron’s QIWI enables “sophisticated” 2D and 3D visualizations, videos, and large documents that can be “easily” configured via a local touch-based UI or web interface, says the company.
For his school science fair, Mars Kapadia decided to take things up a notch and create his own pair of smart glasses.
The wearable device, which went on to place in the state competition, uses a transparent OLED display to show info from Retro Watch software running on an Android phone. They’re controlled by an Arduino Nano Every with an HC-05 Bluetooth module to communicate with the mobile app. Power is provided via a LiPo battery.
One unusual feature is that the darkened lenses can be flipped down for sun protection in outdoor environments, then up to allow easy viewing in darker areas. Kapadia demonstrates how his glasses work, plus discusses the technology used in the video below.
It can take a while to understand the concept of open source software—at least for me, it was difficult to understand why anyone would develop a product and then open it up to the entire world. It is a general assumption that products are developed to be sold, not to be given for free, and I saw software as such a product. After a while, however, the value of open source, especially in terms of product development, became clearer to me. Two heads are better than one, as the saying goes, and any developer, regardless of their location, can work on an open source project and contribute with incredible results—a dynamic not as easy or possible to achieve in proprietary software projects. But what I want to discuss here is how the benefits of open source are as relevant from a marketing strategy point of view as they are for product development.
Artificial general intelligence (AGI), which is the next phase of artificial intelligence, where computers meet and exceed human intelligence, will almost certainly be open source.
AGI seeks to solve the broad spectrum of problems that intelligent human beings can solve. This is in direct contrast with narrow AI (encompassing most of today's AI), which seeks to exceed human abilities at a specific problem. Put simply, AGI is all the expectations of AI come true.
At a fundamental level, we don't really know what intelligence is and whether there might be types of intelligence that are different from human intelligence. While AI includes many techniques that have been used successfully on specific problems, AGI is more nebulous. It is not easy to develop software to solve a problem when the techniques are not known and there is no concrete problem statement. The consensus from the recent AGI-20 Conference (the world's preeminent AGI event) is that AGI solutions exist. This makes the emergence of AGI in the future likely, if not inevitable.
Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, Chrome OS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 85 is beta as of July 23, 2020.
Following the recent Chrome 84 stable release, Google has now promoted Chrome 85 to beta as their latest feature update to this cross-platform web browser.
Chrome 85 Beta brings initial fetch upload streaming capabilities, the WebHID API is taking shape to improve gamepad support within web browsers, a declarative shadow DOM API is now available as an origin trial, and auto-upgrading of images served over HTTP from HTTPS sites.
Facebook is still a place where it’s too easy to find hate, bigotry, racism, antisemitism and calls to violence.
Today, we are standing alongside our partners in the #StopHateForProfit coalition and joining the global day of action to tell Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg: Enough is Enough.
With the release of Firefox 79, we are pleased to welcome the 21 developers who contributed their first code change to Firefox in this release, 18 of whom were brand new volunteers!
On July 23, MDN Web Docs turned 15 years old. From humble beginnings, rising out of the ashes of Netscape DevEdge, MDN has grown to be one of the best-respected web platform documentation sites out there. Our popularity is growing, and new content and features arrive just about every day.
When we turned 10, we had a similar celebration, talking about MDN Web Docs’ origins, history, and what we’d achieved up until then. Refer to MDN at ten if you want to go further back!
In the last five years, we’ve broken much more ground. These days, we can boast roughly 15 million views per month, a comprehensive browser compatibility database, an active beginner’s learning community, editable interactive examples, and many other exciting features that didn’t exist in 2015. An anniversary to be proud of!
Starburst's mission is to help organizations with data stored in Hadoop-based deployments to access and query that data quickly, using the open source Presto SQL query technology.
The data access and analytics vendor said on Wednesday that it updated the Starburst Enterprise Presto platform, which is based on the open source Presto distributed SQL project originally developed by Facebook.
If you own a Chromebook, most probably you’re missing a rich office productivity software that respects your privacy and lets you have full control over your files. But, as of today, Collabora Office brings all the office tools you love to your Chromebook, so you won’t have to depend on Google or Microsoft.
Collabora Office for Chromebooks not only gives you full control over your files and respects your privacy with GDPR compliant on-site storage capabilities, but it also promises top-notch collaboration and interoperability tools for students and home office workers.
Pleroma is another social media/microblogging platform similar to Mastodon. It also interoperates with the rest of the Fediverse using ActivityPub so it still allows me to follow people who use Mastodon, just like Mastodon allowed me to follow people who use Pleroma. However, there are a number of advantages that Pleroma brings to the table over Mastodon.
Pleroma provides so many customization options, it took me a while to go through all of them and customize my instance to my liking. That is by no means a bad thing; it was a really enjoyable process and it feels like it’s social media but for hackers (not the Hollywood kind).
In April, we joined Mastodon, a Twitter-like open source, federated and self-hosted microblogging service. Fosstodon – a Mastodon server set up specifically for free software projects – kindly accepted our request for an account, so we set up this account and started posting content, often more focused on technical users, compared to our tweets and Facebook posts. By the end of the year, we had over 3,100 followers, and have been engaging with other users who have questions and suggestions.
Our Facebook page growth was smaller, from 54,045 page likes to 55,985, and on April 2, Google officially discontinued its Google+ service. We had over 16,000 followers at the time, but that number had gradually been reducing, as most users had been aware for many months that Google was closing the service for personal accounts.
The above is a statement from Michael Stenta, lead developer of FarmOS, and a LibrePlanet 2020 speaker. He submitted his thoughts for us to add to the "Working Together for Free Software" pages, which we have been updating as part of a summer push highlighting "free software in action." On these pages, we explore the different reasons why people dedicate their time to free software, and highlight all the different ways that user freedom is important to them.
With each submission that comes in, we realize again just how far the fight for software freedom stretches. Thankfully, like Michael and many other community members that we have spoken to recently, there are people all over the globe and in many industries, who are fighting for justice.
Right here in the Boston area, Micky Metts (also known as FreeScholar, and a member of Agaric, a worker-owned cooperative of Web developers), is working with the Boston Public School system to host an online Learning Management System (LMS), as schools will not be open for the summer, and possibly not even in the fall. Agaric is using some packages the FSF put together with Canvas as the LMS and BigBlueButton as the video chat/whiteboard. On Micky's "Working Together" page, you can find more information about the timely and relevant work that Agaric does with free software in education, immigration, and community engagement.
The GNU Compiler Collection version 10.2 has been released.
GCC 10.2 is a bug-fix release from the GCC 10 branch containing important fixes for regressions and serious bugs in GCC 10.1 with more than 94 bugs fixed since the previous release.
This release is available from the FTP servers listed at:
http://www.gnu.org/order/ftp.html
Please do not contact me directly regarding questions or comments about this release. Instead, use the resources available from http://gcc.gnu.org.
As always, a vast number of people contributed to this GCC release -- far too many to thank them individually!
GCC 10.2 serves as the first stable point release to the GCC 10 compiler as this year's stable feature series.
GCC 10.2 back-ported 94 bug fixes to the release compared to GCC 10.1 as the inaugural stable release of the series. But that's about it is just under 100 bug fixes -- all feature work continues to be focused on GCC 11 for its stable debut around Q2'2021.
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a robust and highly capable image editor that offers a wide array of functionality that covers the needs of the majority of photographers. Features include layers, brushes, channels, filters, automated correction tools, plug-in support, gradients, cropping, noise reduction, and more, all packaged in a fairly standard interface that does not take long to get used to, especially if you are coming from Photoshop. Better yet, because the program is open source and highly popular, there is a huge support community, and development is continually being pushed forward.
I am very happy to announce the release of Bison 3.7, whose main novelty, contributed by Vincent Imbimbo, is the generation of counterexamples for conflicts.
Concerns are mounting regarding Unsplash’s terms and image licensing after the site launched its official WordPress plugin this week. Several people commented on the restrictions and lack of clarity in the license. “The irony here is that this goes against Unsplash’s own licensing for images,” Aris Stathopoulos commented. “It’s vague and restrictive to the point where one doesn’t even know if they can actually use the images they import.”
The German state of Schleswig-Holstein says national and international cooperation among public services and others is key to success in making a switch to open source. The state government published its open source strategy in June, presenting it as a combination of a response to the changing business models of software vendors, and a strategic focus on data, sustainability, and technological sovereignty.
The PHP team is pleased to announce the second testing release of PHP 8.0.0, Alpha 3. This continues the PHP 8.0 release cycle, the rough outline of which is specified in the PHP Wiki.
For source downloads of PHP 8.0.0 Alpha 3 please visit the download page.
Please carefully test this version and report any issues found in the bug reporting system.
The PHP project has released PHP 8 Alpha 3, the final alpha release according to the 8.0 release schedule. Feature freeze for the 8.0 release is scheduled for August 4, making this release the last one before features for the latest version of PHP are finalized. PHP 8.0 is scheduled to be released for general availability on November 26.
In the last few years, Data Science has been fuelling powerful business decisions taken by Industry leaders. Data scientists are story tellers. They often need to dig into Data, clean, transform, build and validate models, understand pattern, generate insights and, most importantly, communicate results effectively.
In the field of Statistics, Analytics and Visualization, in addition to SAS (Statistical Analysis System), most talked about languages are R and Python. This article highlights the current status, the observed challenges of R, proposed approaches for the risk assessment of R packages, mitigation, and implementation for Clinical Trial Data Analysis.
So, what is the Need of the Hour? It is of paramount importance that we understand the bigger picture for the Life Sciences Industry.
In the first article in this series focusing on the top 5 languages for systems admins, I wrote about not being too fond of programming. To recap, it's not because I don't see the value behind it, because I whole-heartedly do. I mean, creating your own apps to manage client devices and make them do exactly what you want them to do is incredible as far as I'm concerned. My hesitation stems partly from frustration as it's not a natural talent for me and can—at times—take me some time to develop the solution I need.
As a technical search-engine optimizer, I'm often called in to coordinate website migrations, new site launches, analytics implementations, and other areas that affect sites' online visibility and measurement to limit risk. Many companies generate a substantial portion of monthly recurring revenue from users finding their products and services through search engines. Although search engines have gotten good at handling poorly formatted code, things can still go wrong in development that adversely affects how search engines index and display pages for users.
I've been part of manual processes attempting to mitigate this risk by reviewing staged changes for search engine optimization (SEO)-breaking problems. My team's findings determine whether the project gets the green light (or not) to launch. But this process is often inefficient, can be applied to only a limited number of pages, and has a high likelihood of human error.
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One website with a complex and novel implementation of React had a mysterious issue with regression of origin.domain.com URLs displaying for its origin content-delivery network server. It would intermittently output the origin host instead of the edge host in the site metadata (such as the canonical link element, URLs, and Open Graph links). The problem was found in the raw HTML and the rendered HTML. This impacted search visibility and the quality of shares on social media.
In this episode, I updated a model to handle the default duration of new tasks. This default needed to come from the Course model instead of the CourseTask model so we had to determine how best to set that data in various forms. I also fixed some drop down selection bugs that populated a form with the wrong data. We made sure that all the code was well tested.
I created a new default_task_duration field to the Course model. The field records the number of minutes that will be set when create a new task. We added the field and wrote some model tests to confirm the behavior.
Then we updated the Course creation and edit forms. To do this, I needed to add the new field to the CourseForm model form and update the template to include the new field. After that, I fixed the POST tests that broke because the required field was missing.
Good news! PyCharm 2020.2 Release Candidate build is out today!
After 8 weeks of EAP builds, feedback gathering, and polishing, we are proud to share our release candidate for PyCharm 2020.2. This week’s build brings a couple of bug fixes as we hope to take the release in for a smooth landing. Let us know how we’re doing by getting this version and if you run into any issues please leave us a ticket on YouTrack.
In this tutorial, you will learn about regular expressions (RegEx), and use Python's re module to work with RegEx (with the help of examples).
Delving deeper into Python functions and learning more about them, using Reuven Lerner’s Advanced Python Functions Course
STX Next, one of Europe's largest Python development companies, has shared with us how Spyder has been a powerful tool for them when performing data analysis. It is a pleasure for us on the Spyder team to work every day to improve the workflow of developers, scientists, engineers and data analysts. We are very glad to receive and share a STX Next testimonial about Spyder, along with an interview with one of their developers, Michael Wià âºniewski, who has found Spyder very useful in his job.
In early March the final steps of planning, scheduling, ordering, counts, rooming lists, shipping, and signage had just begun for PyCon 2020. Our team was working diligently to pull all the final pieces together when we began to fully realize the impact that could be expected of COVID-19. The new words in planning quickly became stop, wait, change…..what? We went from finalizing the event to evaluating contracts to determining cancellation options and potential losses.
CSS debuted way back in 1994, when web browsers were a very new, relatively undeveloped technology. People were excited just to see documents that lived on other computers across the world—and not just in plain text, but with headings and lists, too! Adding finer control over presentation was mostly seen as a secondary goal.
In 1971, the artist Rosemary Mayer was 28 and living alone in New York City. At the time, much of her work took the form of large abstract sculptures made from fabric that was pinned, knotted, draped, and painted, meant to be hung on the wall or from the ceiling. The bolts of material—voile, burlap, nylon, not necessarily precious stuff—were picked up at Macy’s or from her friend Hannah Weiner, who at the time had a day job as a lingerie designer. Mayer cobbled together her own living by art modeling and (illegally) collecting unemployment, all the while daydreaming about other forms of self-support as an artist. Among the year’s events: She participated in a feminist consciousness-raising group with her art-school friend Adrian Piper; she had a fruitless studio visit with the art critic Lucy Lippard; she attended a John Cage concert and read Anaïs Nin’s diary; she tried to curb her smoking; she had a handful of lovers, many disappointing but one promising; at least once, she ate a half-pound ball of mozzarella in one sitting.
Parents of 51 million school-age children in the U.S. are facing an agonizing choice — whether to risk exposing their children to the coronavirus in public school classrooms this fall, or to sacrifice their children’s intellectual, social and emotional development by keeping them home for “online learning” via the web, which even before the pandemic was judged not very effective.
Dave Grohl has spoken out in defense of teachers as the Trump administration continues its “daunting and evermore politicized question of reopening our schools in the coronavirus pandemic.”
The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. by the NAACP along with a coalition of public schools and parents. Law & Crime reporter Jerry Lambe notes that the lawsuit "claims that DeVos illegally issued a rule reallocating $13.2 billion in congressionally approved Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security (CARES) Act funds to benefit private schools rather than public schools under a disputed aid formula."
While companies certainly want choice when it comes to the chips in their switches – and are increasingly demanding more open and less costly routing chips – when it comes to network operating systems, they are sick of making choices. Or more precisely, they are sick and tired of having choices thrust upon them. Switching is like the RISC/Unix operating system era, where vendors had their own silicon and a flavor of Unix that was just enough alike the others it could be called Unix and offer a certain degree of portability between platforms. But these RISC/Unix systems had enough differences when it came to their APIs and the way they were operated that it was nonetheless still hard to move from platform to platform. With routers, the situation is more like the proprietary minicomputers that predate the RISC/Unix revolution in servers in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The chip is closed and the operating system is closed and there really is not interoperability or porting.
As I observed in a 17 April article, “View from Vietnam: COVID-19 reminds the world that Trump has no clothes”: “The coronavirus lays bare on an almost daily basis the litany of faults and weaknesses of Donald Trump and the country he was elected to lead.”
Denis Logunov, a deputy research director at the Gamaleya Center, leads the group developing Russia’s first coronavirus vaccine. In an experiment he now refuses to discuss publicly (saying he “doesn’t like the hype”), Logunov actually tested the treatment on himself. He has since administered the vaccine to 76 volunteers, each of whom has maintained a “journal,” noting any side effects, like fever, rash, and irritation where they received their shots. So far, fortunately, there have been no serious aftereffects. The authorities hope the immunization will be ready as soon as September. In an interview with Meduza science editor Alexander Ershov and special correspondent Svetlana Reiter, Logunov explained that the vaccine’s mass production won’t begin any sooner than the end of the year, though he expects provisional approval for broader testing by the fall. Logunov has yet to publish the results of his research in scientific journals, but he agreed to share some of the details of his work here.
Russia’s Sverdlovsk Region registered its first case of the coronavirus in mid-March. By June 1, the region was recording 250–290 new cases per day. By June 24, this figure had dropped to 181 cases, but the start of voting in the constitutional plebiscite was accompanied by another spike in infections. In the past week (since July 15), the regional statistics have risen to 263–349 new cases per day.€
Access to essential medications should not be subject to the whims of our employers.
An overwhelming number of Americans believe that there should be a national mandate requiring masks or facial coverings to be worn when people are out in public to stop the spread of coronavirus in the U.S.
In May 2020, St. Petersburg recorded 9,560 cases of community-acquired pneumonia — 9.9 times more than in May 2019, states a report from the St. Petersburg and Leningrad Region’s branch of the Federal State Statistics Service (Rosstat). This statistic was first reported by the St. Petersburg-based news outlet Fontanka.€
"The more that we can provide information to people to keep themselves and their families safe, the better off we'll be."
"There is no humanity in destroying grassroots attempts to support an already deprived health system suffocated by occupation."
The Victorian Premier turned up for his weekend delivery of coronavirus infections, gruffly delivering the news. It has become grim if compelling viewing: the announcement about the next spike in coronavirus infections, the next gruesome statistical spread on transmission. On Sunday, Daniel Andrews had a pose that has become legend, a cross between plasticine figure and instructive despair. Stern, humourless, with little to be humour filled about, his role of late is telling people what to do. With stern command he had a message: All those in the state of Victoria, had to wear face masks. “Most of us wouldn’t leave home without our keys, we wouldn’t leave your home without our mobile phone – you won’t be able to leave home without your mask.”
Even if he’s wearing a mask now, he’s still trying to conceal data, silence experts, and block funding.
Frustrated by the lack of response to their complaint of the “imminent danger” posed by COVID-19, three meatpacking workers at the Maid-Rite Specialty Foods plant outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania, took the unusual step Wednesday of filing a lawsuit against the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia.
The lawsuit, filed in a Pennsylvania federal court, accuses the government of failing to protect essential workers from dangerous conditions that could expose them to the coronavirus. It relies on a rarely used provision of the Occupational Safety and Health Act that allows workers to sue the secretary of labor for “arbitrarily or capriciously” failing to counteract imminent dangers.
From the department of "if you can't beat 'em..." comes the inevitable sueball slung by Slack over Microsoft's bundling of Teams into its Office behemoth.
A competition complaint has been filed against Microsoft before the European Commission.
Microsoft's collaboration platform, Teams, has been enjoying impressive growth, hitting 75 million users in the last set of published figures, and the company used this week's Inspire event to tease partners with more features to tempt customers.
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David Schellhase, general counsel at Slack, asked for the EU to take on the role of referee and conjured the spectre of decades past. "Microsoft is reverting to past behavior," he alleged. "They created a weak, copycat product and tied it to their dominant Office product, force installing it and blocking its removal, a carbon copy of their illegal behavior during the 'browser wars.'"
Schellhase optimistically called for the European Commission "to take swift action."
The complaint will now be reviewed before the commission decides if action needs to be taken.
The Nefilim ransomware was previously said to share similarities to the Nemty 2.5 ransomware, though without the ransomware-as-a-service component. The ransomware was previously noted to spread likely through RDP and uses AES-128 encryption on a victim’s files.
While U.S. law enforcement typically advises against paying ransomware demands, victimized organizations sometimes meet attackers’ demands when decryption without hackers’ help seems unlikely, or cost-prohibitive.
Attackers from the so-called Netwalker ransomware gang were behind this incident, BBC News reported, the latest in a series of ransomware hacks against universities and public health agencies. The scam also coincides with an evolution in ransomware techniques, as hackers increase the size of their demands and, in some cases, threaten to publicize stolen data when victims refuse to pay.
Gounares also pointed out one finding that Amazon is sucking the life out of open source by creating an uneven playing field.
Finland will invest 1.3 billion euros on rail infrastructure over the next ten years, Minister of Transport and Communications Timo Harakka announced at a press conference on Thursday morning.
The most significant projects include plans to reduce travel time between Helsinki and the cities of Turku and Tampere to one hour, as well as the Espoo city line.
Almost 45,000 people have registered for the courses so far, and the Linux Foundation recently announced the availability of a bootcamp program designed so that those with very little to no experience can become certified cloud engineers in six months. This bootcamp includes a Kubernetes fundamentals course.
Ireland’s Health Service Executive (HSE) announced that is donating the code for COVID Tracker app as open source to the not-for-profit Linux Foundation.
This will enable jurisdictions worldwide to quickly build and deploy their own contact tracing apps.
CNCF, a Linux Foundation project, recently appointed Priyanka Sharma as its new GM. As a long time expert of cloud native technologies Sharma brings unique vision and insights to the organization. On behalf of the Linux Foundation, Swapnil Bhartiya, founder and producer at TFiR talked to Sharma to better understand the vision she has for CNCF and what goals she has set for herself and the foundation.
The 3MF Consortium, an organisation dedicated to advancing a universal specification for Additive Manufacturing, has announced that it is becoming a Linux Foundation member and that HP Inc.’s Luis Baldez is its new Executive Director.
Baldez succeeds Microsoft’s Adrian Lannin, who has served as 3MF’s ED since the consortium was founded in 2015. Lannin will remain a strategic advisor to the group.
REMnux is a popular Linux-based toolkit for reverse-engineering malicious software which malware analysts have been relying on for more than 10 years to help them quickly investigate suspicious programs, websites, and document files.
Today, Mozilla is pleased to announce that we’re joining the Ford Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and the Open Society Foundations to launch a request for proposals (RFP) for research on open source digital infrastructure. To kick off this RFP, we’re joining with our philanthropic partners to host a webinar today at 9:30 AM Pacific. The Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) is contributing $25,000 to this effort.
Nearly everything in our modern society, from hospitals and banks to universities and social media platforms, runs on “digital infrastructure” – a foundation of open source code that is designed to solve common challenges. The benefits of digital infrastructure are numerous: it can reduce the cost of setting up new businesses, support data-driven discovery across research disciplines, enable complex technologies such as smartphones to talk to each other, and allow everyone to have access to important innovations like encryption that would otherwise be too expensive.
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We’re pleased to invite interested researchers to apply to the RFP, using the application found here. The application opened on July 20, 2020, and will close on September 4, 2020. Finalists will be notified in October, at which point full proposals will be requested. Final proposals will be selected in November.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (poppler and tomcat8), Fedora (cacti, cacti-spine, java-1.8.0-openjdk, mbedtls, mingw-python3, singularity, and xen), openSUSE (firefox, redis, and singularity), Red Hat (samba), SUSE (java-11-openjdk, qemu, and vino), and Ubuntu (ffmpeg and pillow).
The first of the MATA attacks were April 2018. Since then, the actor behind this advanced malware framework has taken an aggressive approach to infiltrate corporate entities around the world, cyber security solutions firm Kaspersky has said.
Besides amounting to a serious privacy breach, the database was at odds with the Hong Kong-based UFO’s promise to keep no logs. The VPN provider responded by moving the database to a different location but once again failed to secure it properly. Shortly after, the Meow attack wiped it out.
Representatives of UFO didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Since then, Meow and a similar attack have destroyed more than 1,000 other databases. At the time this post went live, the Shodan computer search site showed that 987 ElasticSearch and 70 MongoDB instances had been nuked by Meow. A separate, less-malicious attack tagged an additional 616 ElasticSearch, MongoDB, and Cassandra files with the string “university_cybersec_experiment.” The attackers in this case seem to be demonstrating to the database maintainers that the files are vulnerable to being viewed or deleted.
In 1991, two unrelated events occurred, each the promise of two very different kinds of freedom: the death of the Cold War and the birth of Linux.
Kernel live patching arrived in 2008 during Linux’s teenage years. Today, with the Linux kernel approaching 30 years old, live patching has matured, ready to ditch its reputation as an optional extra—a “nice to have.”
There are two reasons for this. The first is the predominance of Linux as the platform of choice for cost-effective, versatile web hosting—more than half of all known websites now run on Linux. The second is the recognition that live patching is not just a convenience; it’s also an effective, low-impact way to augment Linux system security.
Another update is available for IPFire: IPFire 2.25 - Core Update 147. It contains a vast amount of package updates and brings some security updates.
IPFire 2.25 Core Update 147 has been announced today by project maintainer Michael Tremer. This release comes about a month after the previous version, which deprecated support for 32-bit system with PAE, to update several core components and add-ons, as well as to patch some security vulnerabilities and fix other bugs.
First, security, because it’s important for every operating system. IPFire 2.25 Core Update 147 includes a recent version of the Squid web proxy software that was patched against HTTP Request Smuggling and Poisoning attacks (CVE-2020-15049).
The two flaws allow man-in-the-middle attacks that would give an attacker access to all data flowing through the router.
A pair of flaws in ASUS routers for the home could allow an attacker to compromise the devices – and eavesdrop on all of the traffic and data that flows through them.
The bugs are specifically found in the RT-AC1900P whole-home Wi-Fi model, within the router’s firmware update functionality. Originally uncovered by Trustwave, ASUS has issued patches for the bugs, and owners are urged to apply the updates as soon as they can.
A Denial of Service attack is any attempt/attack that is aimed at making the web resource unavailable to its users (denying service, hence the name), mainly by flooding the website’s URL with so many requests that the server can handle. During a successful DoS attempt, regular traffic on the website will be slowed down or completely unavailable.
A DDoS attack, on the other hand, is a DoS attack that comes from more than one source which is distributed. A DDoS attack can involve thousands or even hundreds of thousands of computers. These computers/devices might not know that their resources are used to attempt a DDoS attack, but they have been previously infected with malware and are collectively known as “botnets”.
It is suspected that there are tens of millions of machines that have been compromised and used in DDoS attacks, which can include traditional computers to smartphones and even IoT devices.
The Privacy Shield framework for transferring personal data across the Atlantic was brought in to deal with a problem created by the EU’s GDPR. According to the latter, the personal data of European citizens can only be transferred to countries that offer “adequate” data protection, equivalent to the GDPR. The Privacy Shield system was devised to allow the European Commission to confirm that the US did offer adequate privacy protection. The EU’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has just ruled that the Commission was wrong to do so, and that Privacy Shield is invalid, and may not be used to transfer personal data to the US. The main reason is that Edward Snowden revealed that data sent to the US from abroad is routinely spied on by the NSA, which means EU personal data is not adequately protected. This is another major victory for the privacy expert and campaigner Max Schrems, who commented:
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit has ruled that. The ruling came down in the case of U.S. v. Gratowski and sets the precedent that law enforcement doesn’t need a warrant to access the stored financial data at cryptocurrency exchanges such as Coinbase. Essentially, the court ruled that Gratowski had no constitutional expectation of privacy from the cryptocurrency exchange because of the third party doctrine. The EFF writes:
Last fall we wrote about the unfortunate situation happening with privacy laws in California. As you may know, California has a new privacy law that recently went into effect. And even though we're big supporters of privacy here at Techdirt, we've noted that the CCPA law is and remains an unmitigated disaster. Much of that has to do with the way it came together. A wealthy real estate developer, Alastair Mactaggart, with little to no understanding of how the internet actually works, spent millions of dollars to get a "consumer privacy" ballot measure on the ballot in 2018. But it was incredibly dangerous and confused. Mactaggart, though, cut a deal: if the California legislation agreed to a privacy law, he would drop the ballot measure. So, the California legislature rushed through a very under-cooked privacy bill, that was written in just a couple of weeks, in order to get Mactaggart to drop his much, much worse ballot measure.
A couple of years ago, investigators in California used a DNA matching service to track down the so-called "Golden State Killer." Uploading a sample of the suspected serial murder's DNA, they were able to identify distant relatives of the suspect. Using these sentient clues, investigators eventually worked their way back to the suspected killer, who had eluded authorities for years.
The case, which has been in the country’s high court since 2017, hinged on the argument that officials had caused significant financial loss in the country due to their $4 million purchase of NSO Group’s signature Pegasus spyware. The National Communications Authority (NCA) allegedly bought the surveillance product through a reseller in order to track suspected terrorism, according to Graphic Online, which attended the court session Tuesday. It was not clear if the officials used NSO Group’s products.
The plaintiffs, which include Wozniak and 17 other individuals, allege that YouTube is aware of these scams but has nonetheless not taken the videos down.
The legislation comes after the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) filed a lawsuit forcing the state education department to block Lockport school district from adopting facial recognition systems to screen people entering campuses.
“We weren’t asking ‘does this thing follow our policy?’ We were asking ‘why do our policies allow for this thing?’” Wang said. “Why don’t our policies require that we do take some kind of action?” Zuckerberg framed his response around following policies rather than fixing policies, Wang added. The response prompted a June 1st virtual walkout by dozens of Facebook employees.
The case is In re Facebook Biometric Information Privacy Litigation, 3:15-cv-03747, U.S. District Court, Northern District of California (San Francisco).
Well, consider this: Last month, a San Francisco federal judge wasn't particularly impressed by the eye-popping $550 million proposed to settle a class action against Facebook. He rejected it. Now weeks later, the parties are headed back to the judge with a new number — $650 million. That's right. Facebook just added $100 million in an attempt to make one of its problems on the privacy front go away.
Analysts had forecast 178.8 million users for the latest quarter. Twitter is no longer reporting monthly active users as a metric.
"I don't€ want to hear anyone tell me that we can't afford to expand€ enhanced unemployment benefits when we spend more on endless€ wars than the next ten countries combined," said Rep. Ro Khanna.
Ottawa has not criticized the devastating US sanctions. Quite the opposite. It has egged the bully on.
Okinawans opposed to the expansion of U.S. military bases on their island have been upset by the environmental damage, the accidents, and the crimes associated with the presence of 25,000 American troops. Now the anti-base movement has one more powerful argument to use in its case to shrink the U.S. footprint in this southernmost Japanese prefecture: the coronavirus.
"It's incredibly irresponsible for the Army and the Navy to be recruiting impressionable young people and children via live streaming platforms."
The Sandinista Front’s fight against poverty, coronavirus, and imperialism
Late June Abdul Fattah Al Sisi said that Egypt was prepared to launch a military intervention in the neighbouring Libya because of a direct threat to his country’s security. He also called the GNA’s attempts to capture Sirte town and Jofra airbase a “red line” for Cairo. Such statements demonstrate Egypt’s deep concern about the Turkish quest for dominance in Libya that manifested itself in breaking a deadlock in a struggle between the GNA and LNA. However, Turkey had to pay a hefty price for the recent victories as it deployed its national Armed Forces to Libya despite the rapid deterioration of the economy, in addition to sending thousands of the Syrian mercenaries and modern weapons to its Islamist-weighted ally GNA.
Turkey and Egypt are almost equal in their military capabilities, but Cairo has a number of strong advantages. First, Egypt has a 1,115 km long land border with Libya. It significantly simplifies the logistics and deployment of the Egyptian armed forces. Besides, Cairo will definitely benefit from unique opportunities offered by Mohamed Nagib, the biggest Middle East military base located not so far from the Libyan border. As for Turkey, it has to overcome a lot of obstacles due to its geographical position. Put simply, the only locations able to receive the Turkish troops and the Syrian mercenaries are two cities of Tripoli and Misrata that both have an airport and a seaport. The Turks are literally trapped in this “bottleneck”. Direct confrontation with Cairo will most likely result in Ankara’s military defeat – due to the above-mentioned considerations the Egyptians are potentially capable of eliminating the Turkish troops faster than Turkey deploys reinforcements to Libya.
Over the last few months, the debate has however risen to a different level via the growing assertiveness of Islamic State in the brutal insurgency in Mozambique’s northernmost Cabo Delgado province. Though the precise nature of that insurgency remains hazy, Islamic State has for some months been laying claim to the attacks. The extremists themselves, generally known as Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jama, have proclaimed allegiance to Islamic State.
The involvement of Islamic State in northern Mozambique seems to be what has eventually jolted the South African government into really taking notice of the insurgency, which started in October 2017 and has killed over 1 400 people.
Already, the insurgency is greatly tainting the Southern African Development Community’s (SADC’s) reputation as the most peaceful regional bloc in the continent.
Recently, ISIS, warned it would “open a fighting front inside South African borders” if it deployed its military to boost the response by the Mozambican government to eradicate the ISIS-affiliated Ahlu Sunnah Wal Jamaah, whose terror has led to the deaths of an estimated 2 000 civilians in the Cabo Delgado. Members of the Mozambican military have also been killed.
Considering the threat has been issued in coincidence with leaders of the SADC committing to support fellow member Mozambique against the armed groups and terrorists perpetrating bloodshed in the north, the threat could be directed to South Africa but ultimately a menace to the entire bloc.
The terrorists confirmed that their victims were humanitarian staff of non-governmental organisations.
Islamic extremists released a video showing the slayings of five aid workers who were abducted last month in northeastern Nigeria.
Their abductions came around the same time that a Boko Haram splinter group said it would begin targeting Nigerians who work for international aid groups as well as those who help the military.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari issued a statement identifying the victims as staff members of the country’s State Emergency Management Agency and the international charities Action Against Hunger, Rich International and International Rescue Committee.
The lawsuit describes how the money was funneled through banks based in New York City, then re-routed to Qatar Charity’s accounts at the Bank of Palestine and the Islamic Bank, which are located in the Palestinian Authority-controlled capital of Ramallah. From there, the funds were distributed to cells of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
If that’s not bad enough, the German weekly news outlet Die Zeit last week reported evidence that Qatar is also providing financial support to the Hezbollah terrorist group.
While everybody today knows how China has intruded and captured quite a part of Ladakh, this wasn’t the case when they started in April. That time Ajai Shukla had shared this with the top defence personnel but nothing came of it. Then on May 30th he broke/shared the news with the rest of the world and was immediately branded anti-national, person on Chinese payroll and what not. This is when he and Pravin Sawnhey of Force Magazine had both been warning of the same from last year itself. Pravin, has a youtube channel and had been warning India against Chinese intentions from 2015 and even before that. He had warned repeatedly that our obsession with the Pakistan border meant that we were taking eyes of the border with China which spans almost 2300 odd kms. going all the way to Arunachal Pradesh. A good map which shows the conflict can be found at dw.com which I am sharing/reproducing below –
[...]
Nepal had been a friend of India for 70 odd years, what changed in the last few years that it changed from friend to enemy ? There had been two incidents in recent memory that changed the status quo. The first is the 2015 Nepal blockade . Now one could argue it either way but the truth is that Nepal understood that it is heavily dependent on India hence as any sovereign country would do in its interest it also started courting China for imports so there is some balance.
The second one though is one of our own making. On December 16, 2014 RBI allowed Nepali citizens to have cash upto INR 25,000/- . Then in 2016 when demonetization was announced, they said that people could exchange only upto INR 4,500/- which was far below the limit shared above. And btw, before people start blaming just RBI for the decision, FEMA decisions are taken jointly by the finance ministry (FE) as well as ministry of external affairs (MEA) . So without them knowing the decision could not have been taken when announcing it. The result of lowering of demonetization is what made Nepal move more into Chinese hands and this has been shared by number of people in numerous articles in different websites. The wire interview with the vice-chairman of Niti Ayog is pretty interesting. The argument that Nepal show give an estimate of how much old money is there falls flat when in demonetization itself, it was thought of that around 30-40% was black money and would not be returned but by RBI’s own admissions all 99.3% of the money was returned. Perhaps they should have consulted Prof. Arun Kumar of JNU who has extensively written and studied the topic before doing that fool-hardy step. It is the reason that since then, an economy which was searing at 9% has been contracting ever since, I could give a dozen articles stating that, but for the moment, just one will suffice. The slowing economy and the sharp divisions between people based on either outlook, religion or whatever also encouraged China to attack us. This year is not good for India. The only thing I hope Indians and people all over do is just maintain physical distances, masks and somehow survive till middle of next year without getting infected when probably most of the vaccine candidates have been trialed, results are in and we have a ready vaccine. I do hope that at least for once, ICMR shares data even after the vaccine is approved, whichever vaccine. Till later.
The former head of DNS regulator ICANN has been named as co-CEO of a company that launched a controversial attempt to purchase the .org internet registry earlier this year. The news has again raised concerns over the revolving doors between regulators and those who need regulation.
In the past week, the website of Ethos Capital, the private equity firm that offered $1.13bn to take control of the popular .org registry, was updated to list ex-ICANN CEO Fadi Chehade as its joint head.
The change is significant because it was Chehade’s involvement in the attempted .org purchase that first alerted internet users that the deal deserved closer scrutiny.
"Zurich's decision to walk away from the pipeline just underlines how risky this project has become."
Critics charge Democrats' current proposal "will not go nearly far enough to secure a just and equitable transition."
The coldest place in the Arctic has experienced record heat. Climate change has made this 600 times more probable.
ProPublica, with The New York Times Magazine and funded by the Pulitzer Center, hired geographer Bryan Jones at Baruch College to build an extended version of a climate migration model that Jones had done with the World Bank for its 2018 report, “Groundswell.” The model aims to understand how climate change might lead to population shifts in Central America and Mexico, including how people may move across borders between these countries and to the United States.
Jones’ work considers five specific plausible socioeconomic and climate scenarios for the future, which makes it possible to examine the relative importance of different climate and societal futures in terms of their influence in driving migration. The scenarios take into account standard versions of global socioeconomic development — including border management, GDP growth and trade — used by the United Nations scientists, combined with levels of future atmospheric global carbon concentrations also standardized by global climate scientists.
Despite governments around the world claiming they want to support low-carbon industries in the wake of COVID-19, many have prioritised airlines and plane manufacturers for bailouts with no green strings attached — giving or lending money to some of the world’s biggest€ polluters.
ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center, have for the first time modeled how climate refugees might move across international borders. This is what we found.
A wave of persistent, intense heat and humidity has enveloped the Midwest, South, and Northeast in this second half of July. By the time it subsides, more than half of the U.S. population will have been hit with heat indexes above 100; for many, the heat wave will last for several days.
While conventional bike sales declined slightly in 2018 and 2019, e-bikes soared more than 50%, according to data from market research firm NPD. And they’ve gone into overdrive during the coronavirus pandemic. E-bike sales have more than doubled since January, outpacing even huge sales growth in conventional bicycles.
SEATTLE. Conservation groups€ appealed to Governor Jay Inslee today€ to order the Washington Fish and Wildlife Commission to draft enforceable rules that limit when the state can kill endangered wolves for conflicts with livestock.
This year, President Donald Trump’s reelection campaign filed defamation lawsuits against three of the country’s most prominent news outlets: The New York Times, The Washington Post and CNN. Then it filed another suit against a somewhat lower-profile news organization: northern Wisconsin’s WJFW-TV, which serves the 134th-largest market in the country.
The Trump campaign sued the station over what it claims is a false and defamatory ad WJFW aired that showed Trump downplaying the threat of the coronavirus as a line tracking new COVID-19 infections ticks up and up on the screen.
And cost so much?
"A disaster of Congress' making is looming for those who have lost their livelihoods during the global pandemic."
Ellen Brown: My guest today is Dr. Michael Hudson, who we’re delighted to have on our Public Banking Institute Advisory Board, and who really should be advising the Federal Reserve and the Treasury, but BlackRock seems to have gotten the job. Paul Craig Roberts, who is former Assistant Treasury Secretary under Reagan, called Michael Hudson the greatest economist on the planet. He’s a Wall Street financial analyst, Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, and author of over two dozen books, including Killing the Host and one called … and Forgive Them Their Debts, which are both particularly relevant today. So it’s great to be speaking with you, Michael.
The Trump administration’s reliance on big banks to distribute small business aid under the Paycheck Protection Program and a lack of transparency requirements have resulted in many Black-owned businesses being shut out of the program. One bank, Wells Fargo, reported distributing only one PPP loan larger than $150,000 to a Black-owned business out of the more than 12,000 it gave out.
Women demanding equality in work opportunities and conditions march along Beacon Street in Boston in March 1970. (Don Preston / The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
At the opening of the Connecticut Feminist Federal Credit Union in August 1974, 24-year-old Dawn Ladd used a bolt cutter to snap a five-foot-long steel chain. Ladd, the credit union’s president, explained that she was symbolically “breaking the economic chains” that tie women down. Susan Osborne, 26 and a cofounder of the credit union, spoke to reporters about the group’s mission: “Our answer to this continuing discrimination is to create our own credit institution, a credit union where we can save money together and where we lend our money, to each other.”
"Corporate liability waivers are just the next phase of a Trump polluter bailout."
On July 19, 2020, The Providence Journal published an opinion piece authored by Marcela Betancur of Roger Williams University (RWU) that advocated for a policy agenda that synchronizes with the anti-union orientation of Gov. Gina Raimondo and Education Commissioner Angélica Infante-Green. The Governor’s entire political career has been financed by the hedge fund sector of Wall Street that backs the demolition of public sector pensions and union-busting charter schools, exemplified by individual donors such as Paul Tudor Jones and Enron alum John Arnold. The Journal is a longtime bastion of anti-labor sentiment. It also is now even more limited as a forum for respondent Letters to the Editor, saying they “welcome letters, and greatly favor those 150 words or less.”As such, I submit my response to Counterpunch in hope of gaining a full venue for an important rebuttal.
With the final boosted unemployment check set to go out in just three days barring an unlikely last-minute extension by Congress, Senate Republicans are reportedly considering a proposal to slash the $600-per-week benefit boost to $100 — a cut that would drastically reduce the incomes of 30 million Americans and potentially cause massive job loss.
Trump and his GOP allies know that they cannot succeed by attacking Social Security directly. It is too popular. Instead, they profess their support for Social Security, all while undermining the program's funding so they can demand cuts down the road.
According to a new investigation from Alexey Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK), Deputy Prime Minister Yuri Trutnev is the owner of a large house located in Moscow’s Serebryany Bor Park. Trutnev, who is also the presidential envoy to the Far Eastern Federal District, is known for his difficult relationship with the Khabarovsk Territory’s recently dismissed governor, Sergey Furgal. Putin’s envoy arrived in Khabarovsk unannounced on July 13, in an apparent effort to calm the sustained mass protests that ensued following Furgal’s arrest on July 9.
"Senate Republicans are wildly out of touch with reality. Seriously, just $400 a month? Cutting monthly income for 30 million families by $2,000 would cost the country millions of jobs."
Congress must extend the extra $600 in UI benefits.
Last Wednesday there was a collective sigh of relief from the Irish government. The EU’s General Court had ruled against the EU Commission in their case against Ireland/Apple. The Court found that the 0.005% corporate tax rate that Apple had availed of here in Ireland did not constitute illegal state aid.
At least Vladimir Putin is gaining his€ dictatorial powers democratically. He got elected by a solid majority of Russians, and then he went to the Russian Duma and asked for a constitutional change to allow him to continue to be elected through 2030.
Reporter Dmitry Nizovtsev, the host of the YouTube channel “Navalny’s headquarters in Khabarovsk,” was beaten after covering a march in support of jailed former governor Sergey Furgal on July 23. Nizovtsev wrote about the attack on Twitter, after which it was reported by Mediazona.€
Donald Trump does not have the qualifications to be President of the United States. He has limited understanding of modern history and the political-economy of the world-system. He is self-centered, and he has an erratic administrative style. He is not the first to occupy the office without the necessary qualifications; but he brings the phenomenon to new heights.
U.S. policy towards Venezuela has been a fiasco. Try as it might, the Trump regime-change team has been unable to depose President Maduro and finds itself stuck with a self-proclaimed president, Juan Guaidó, who President Trump was reported to have called “a kid” who “doesn’t have what it takes.” The Venezuelan people have paid a heavy price for Trump’s debacle, which has included crippling economic sanctions and coup attempts. So has U.S. prestige internationally, as both the UN and the EU have urged lifting sanctions during the pandemic but the U.S. has refused.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) appeared on the House floor Thursday to address comments directed toward her from Rep. Ted Yoho (R-Florida), who reportedly used derogatory language earlier this week following a heated exchange between the two members of Congress.
I wasn't expecting this, but this morning Judge Alvin Hellerstein ordered Michael Cohen released from prison, saying that the Bureau of Prisons violated his 1st Amendment rights. If you haven't been following this story beyond the fact that Cohen was sent to prison last year for tax evasion and campaign finance violations, what you need to know is that (following his request for such), Cohen was furloughed from prison to home confinement in May, as the prison system tried to lessen the number of people in prison during the pandemic. A little over a month later, he was returned to prison. While there were reports it had to do with the fact that he was seen eating out, it turned out to be because he refused to sign an agreement saying he would not speak to the media in any form, including saying he could not publish the "tell-all" book he is supposedly writing.
"It is outrageous that this proposal contains not one penny to help states conduct safe elections during a global pandemic."
Even if we don’t characterize this as a bribe, at a minimum, the public evidence demonstrates that Trump’s purpose in commuting Stone’s sentence is to reward him for covering up for Trump.
It’s been 75 years since the end of WWII and interest in all things Nazi has seen no end of interest; indeed, you could argue cogently that the monster Herr Docktor Deutschenstein brought to life from the parts of dead people and
"This issue is not about one incident. It is cultural. It is a culture of... impunity, of accepting violence and violent language against women."
Russia sows discord and undermines institutions in many Western countries, but Britain is a particular target. The presence of émigrés such as Alexander Litvinenko, who was murdered by the Kremlin, and Sergei Skripal, who nearly suffered the same fate, infuriates Russia’s leadership. It regards Britain as hypocritical and duplicitous for making money from Russians through the “London laundromat” for cleaning money and reputations while offering sanctuary to its opponents. Britain’s special relationship with America also makes it a convenient proxy for Russian attacks on its bigger rival.
The intelligence and security committee of the House of Commons says the effort to encourage Scotland to break away from the United Kingdom is part of a much broader Kremlin bid to destabilize Western democracies.
UPDATE Since posting the link to Bill Binney’s talk, a number of people have been in touch to allege that the hosting organisation, the Schiller Institute, has an objectionable right wing or even racist agenda. I am not aware and have no time now to research. I am however 100% certain that Bill Binney, whom I know, is neither right wing nor in any sense racist, and that he has very important things to say. This does not constitute either an endorsement or a condemnation of the Schiller Institute or anybody else who may be present or speaking.
Is there actually a way to know, and to then prove, that the “Russiagate” story of the 2016 elections—a story which resulted in massive federal prosecutions, escalating international tensions, national paralysis, and a presidential impeachment trial—was completely false?
William Binney, a thirty-year veteran of the National Security Agency and its former technical director, will expose the continuing suppression by British intelligence agencies and their American counterparts of his evidence disproving the entire “Russiagate” story. “We can prove, that all the data that Wikileaks published from the DNC, that was downloaded on the 23rd and 25th of May, and also the 26th of August of 2016; all of that carried the signatures of being downloaded to a thumb drive or a CD-ROM, and physically transported,” Binney says. “So, we can prove that in a court of law. In fact, I put that in sworn affidavits that I submitted in the Roger Stone case and also in the General Flynn case. And the judges would not let my testimony in. I’ve been hard pressed to find anything (Russia) did in the 2016 election, let alone anything they’re trying to do in the 2020 election,” Binney said.
The nine-article draft legislation would force social media companies with more than 1 million daily users in Turkey — such as Twitter, Facebook and YouTube — to establish a formal presence or assign a representative in Turkey who would be accountable to Turkish authorities legally and for tax purposes.
A social media company or its representative would also be required to respond within 48 hours to complaints about posts that violate personal and privacy rights.
EDM 719 acknowledges€ statements by the National Union of Journalists, the International Federation of Journalists, Reporters Without Borders and others in relation to the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and affirms commitment to press freedom and public-interest journalism.
In a tweet on Sunday evening, Abdullah al-Odeh - son of imprisoned Saudi cleric Salman al-Odeh - described Shehi's death as just the latest tragedy in a line of deaths of prominent dissident Saudi journalists, including Khashoggi and Abdullah Hamid.
American fascism is always a force waiting to be born.
It’s about 100 years too late, but the well-heeled Sierra Club is finally grappling with its founder’s racist past. John Muir, lauded by many as the grandfather of the modern conservation movement, saw the West as a bastion of untrammeled freedom. Not for Indigenous peoples or Black slaves, of course, but for white colonialists.
We bear witness to an extraordinary historical moment, one convulsing with both immense pain and opportunity. We’re finally looking in the mirror, facing the truth that we are a nation born not in liberty but in terror — of white supremacy, slavery, genocide, land theft and racial capitalism. At last we are disrupting centuries of denial.
As more Americans wake up to the notion of police abolition, one organization in California is already making it a reality. Mental Health First—from the Anti Police-Terror Project—is a community-centered initiative to eliminate the need for law enforcement as the first response to mental health crises.
On May 22, Maurice Gordon’s friend called the cops concerned about the 28-year-old’s whereabouts. He informed the dispatcher of Gordon’s mental health history, and said Gordon appeared “panicked” and told him he was having a “paranormal experience.” More than 24 hours later, Gordon was fatally shot by a state trooper during a routine traffic stop in New Jersey.
The cops are violating the Constitution by attacking people exercising their basic rights — — that much is obvious.
“What He Wishes He Had: Total Power”
The Democratic Party often has meaningful debates when putting together its platform on a range of issues—including one often seen as the third rail of American politics: US policy on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The newly appointed acting governor of Russia’s Far Eastern Khabarovsk Territory, Mikhail Degtyarev, does not intend to meet with protesters, who have been carrying out sustained demonstrations in Khabarovsk for nearly two weeks.
Earlier this month, the DOJ announced the launch of "Operation Legend." The operation -- named after four-year-old homicide victim LeGend Taliferro -- targeted cities experiencing spikes in violent crimes, including Kansas City, Missouri, where Taliferro was killed.
My mother was born in 1950 in segregated Mississippi. The first time she met the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., she was at home after church in the late ’50s when he visited my grandmother and her young family. My grandmother was a respected schoolteacher, and a lot of those civil rights leaders understood that getting in good with the teachers was a good way to connect with the young people.
On June 2, for the first time in 25 years, the Bureau of Prisons directed all federal jails and prisons to implement a full lockdown, confining nearly 160,000 people to their cells and severely limiting contact with the outside world. The following day, on the orders of Attorney General William Barr, the Bureau pulled some of its most militarized units out of BOP facilities and deployed them to confront protesters on the streets of Washington, D.C.
The word jubilee comes from the Hebrew “yovel,” meaning a “trumpet blast of liberty.” It was said that, on the day of liberation, the sound of a ram’s horn would ring through the land. These days, I hear the sound of that horn while walking with my kids through the streets of New York City, while protests continue here, even amid a pandemic, as they have since soon after May 25th when a police officer put his knee to George Floyd’s neck and robbed him of his life. I hear it when I speak with homeless leaders defending their encampments amid the nightmare of Covid-19. I hear it when I meet people who are tired, angry, and yet, miraculously enough, finding their political voices for the first time. I hear it when I read escaped slave and abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass’s speech on the eve of the Emancipation Proclamation.
The people of the United States are being brutalized by thugs. Our leaders, as if we had some leaders, are for the most part, not to be found. Occasionally, one or another will poke their heads out from some enclave they share or they might step into the safety of a secured television or recording studio to offer-up some trite response to the dismantling of the country, but they do not take a firm and committed stand against this present catastrophe which is taking place in the heart of America. They do not call this terror by its name.
The harrowing scenes of paramilitary-style units in the streets of American cities like Portland has shocked mainstream America, but award-winning independent journalist Todd Miller, who has reported on border security and immigration for over a decade, says it’s a reflection of how the U.S. has operated around the world. We also speak with Cecilia Menjívar, UCLA sociology professor, who says the image of unmarked vans snatching people from the streets “brings back memories to Latin Americans who lived through disappearances of families and friends and co-workers.”
Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner has made addressing police corruption a cornerstone of his time in office, and he says it affects many criminal cases, including that of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal, who has always maintained his innocence for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer for which he has spent four decades behind bars. Within weeks of the end of the trial, a third of the police involved in his case were jailed for systematically tampering with evidence to obtain convictions in cases across the city, and at least one police officer in the case, James Forbes, lied on the stand, saying he had properly handled guns. “It is a microcosm of the realities of what progressive prosecutors face now when they’re trying to go back in time and do justice,” Krasner says of efforts to rectify police abuses steeped in “a culture that used to shred and used to hide and used to destroy.”
As President Trump announces a “surge” of federal agents into major U.S. cities to confront protesters, we speak with Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, who warns he will arrest and charge Trump’s police forces if they violate the rights of residents in his city. “The law applies to the president of the United States, even though he doesn’t think so. The law applies to law enforcement. The law applies to civilians. It is real simple,” says Krasner. He also discusses the importance of releasing incarcerated people during the pandemic, and tackling police corruption, such as in the case of political prisoner Mumia Abu-Jamal.
Federal agents sent by President Donald Trump to Portland, Oregon, tear gassed Mayor Ted Wheeler after he joined protesters on Wednesday evening, hoping to de-escalate tensions and address the crowd’s demands for police reform.
The harrowing scenes of paramilitary-style units in the streets of American cities like Portland has shocked mainstream America, but award-winning independent journalist Todd Miller, who has reported on border security and immigration for over a decade, says it’s a reflection of how the U.S. has operated around the world. We also speak with Cecilia Menjívar, UCLA sociology professor, who says the image of unmarked vans snatching people from the streets “brings back memories to Latin Americans who lived through disappearances of families and friends and co-workers.”
"This lawlessness must end."
In a conspicuous show of force, armed Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers were recently seen in Portland carrying out surveillance and arrests. Agency director Mark Morgan has defended the deployment as measured and restrained. “I will not send any resource out anywhere to confront American citizens,” he told Time. But CBP’s support to local law enforcement has extended far beyond its controversial Portland deployment, and includes not just thousands of personnel but also drones and dozens of other aircraft, according to a CBP document obtained exclusively by The Nation.
Protesters in Chicago are demanding justice after police officers attacked a teenage activist last week during a demonstration in which people attempted to topple a statue of Christopher Columbus in Grant Park. An officer struck 18-year-old Miracle Boyd, a recent high school graduate and organizer with the group GoodKids MadCity, in the face, knocking out several teeth. Journalists also reported being mistreated by police officers, who used chemical sprays and batons on protesters. “This is consistent with what we’ve seen from the Chicago Police Department in their response to these uprisings,” says Sheila Bedi, the civil rights lawyer representing Boyd.
Years ago, while working on a story for Rolling Stone about why so few white-collar offenders went to jail, I realized I needed to better understand why the criminal-justice system worked with such monstrous efficiency to put poorer people in prison.
For years activists have urged the government to scrap the kafala system, which prevents foreign workers from leaving an abusive employer without also leaving the country. Economic crisis may make the issue less pressing: fewer Lebanese can afford to employ foreign maids. In June a Ghanaian television channel covered the return of 211 citizens from Lebanon, most of them female domestics. They described long hours, beatings and having to steal food to survive. “No one should make that mistake and go back to Lebanon,” one woman said. “They don’t respect us.” ââÂ
“My dad volunteered and served in World War II to fight fascism, like most of my uncles, so we would not have an American president brutalizing and kidnapping Americans for exercising their constitutional rights and trying to make America a better place, which is what patriots do,” Krasner announced Tuesday. “Anyone, including federal law enforcement, who unlawfully assaults and kidnaps people will face criminal charges from my office.”
And some analysts fear the longer they stay there, the harder it will be to ensure any of them answer for potential crimes.
“It becomes harder and harder to gather that evidence,” said Devorah Margolin, a senior research fellow with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.
“People become less cooperative,” she said. “Or memories aren’t as strong as they were when incidents first happened.”
The Buddha, of course, is destroyed. It had been found accidentally, and it is evident from the video that it was in good condition when it was found. It will never be in good condition again. Even after the men have been punished, put in prison for five years or been made to pay Rs2m, the destroyed piece from so long ago will never be whole again. That is the thing with things that are destroyed; they can never be returned to what they were.
He added that it is even more dangerous for Christian converts when allegations of blasphemy are made -Christians have been held for several days and there have been incidents of violence.
The human rights activist said that police have also threatened spouses and children with arrest.
In a social media campaign that has picked up speed in just two days, Yemenis expressed solidarity with Mohammed Abdul Karim, known by his stage name Mohammed Tika, condemning a Friday sermon that called for his killing over his talent.
The campaign was launched after the imam of the Othman bin Affan mosque in the coastal city of Aden incited violence against Tika, including making permissible his killing, after the young magician was hired to do a magic show at the opening of a new mall.
Despite the outpouring of praise for essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic, their own interests continue to come second to the broader public’s need for cheap and reliable labor.
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These essential workers have long faced harsh conditions on the job, regardless of the economic and political context. This was the case even in the 1960s when a tight labor market increased wages for unskilled workers and when organized labor was at its strongest. “So often we overlook the work and the significance of those who are not in professional jobs, of those who are not in the so-called big jobs,” Martin Luther King Jr. stated to sanitation workers on strike in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1968. “But let me say to you tonight, that whenever you are engaged in work that serves humanity and is for the building of humanity, it has dignity, and it has worth.”
The problems facing the sanitation workers in Memphis stemmed from their exclusion from federal labor laws that had protected the rights of mostly white, male industrial workers to form unions and bargain collectively for better wages and working conditions since the 1930s. This exclusion was rooted in policies aimed at ensuring the availability and affordability of essential goods and services, which stretched back to the Progressive Era. Reformers insisted that rapid urbanization and industrialization required city and state governments to provide services that had previously been performed within private households, such as child care, healthcare, food preparation, cleaning, and waste disposal. They coined the terms “Public Housekeeping” and “Municipal Housekeeping” to explain the transition. The comparison between domestic and public service helped to legitimize women’s participation in public life and leadership in city government, but it also encouraged officials to adopt racist and sexist assumptions that had informed structures of domestic servitude for centuries. In 1930 the trade journal The American City published an article by a Philadelphia sanitation engineer, which boasted of various methods used to reduce costs and raise funds. It was illustrated with a photograph of African-American women sorting rubbish for material that could be sold or burned for heat. “Colored women are used for this work,” the engineer informed readers, adding: “many typical mammies are found there.”
That a prominent professional journal would employ such derogatory language to describe city employees demonstrates how uncritically assumptions about the value of domestic labor were adapted to essential public services. And through the 1930s, conservatives fretted that increasing public employment would deprive them of low-wage household labor. “Five Negroes on my place in South Carolina refused work this Spring, after I had taken care of them and given them house rent free and work for three years during bad times saying they had easy jobs with the government,” wrote a prominent critic of New Deal employment programs in 1934.
Returning asylum seekers to the United States under a “safe third-country” agreement violates human rights protections contained in Canada’s constitution, according to a 22 July ruling by Canada’s Federal Court.
The ruling found that the United States is no longer a safe third-country because US authorities “immediately and automatically” imprison returned asylum seekers. People returned under the agreement face “cruel and unusual detention conditions, solitary confinement, and the risk of refoulement… [which are] ‘entirely outside the norms accepted in our free and democratic society’,” according to the decision by Justice Ann Marie McDonald.
The evidence presented in the case, brought by a coalition of human rights groups and individual litigants, was “sufficient to ‘shock the conscience’,” the ruling added.
“The Canadian court ruling is a strong condemnation of US asylum and detention policies,” Human Rights First, a US NGO that provided expert testimony in the case, said in a press release. “The ruling confirms that these policies are inconsistent with the Refugee Convention and the norms of free and democratic societies.”
Former Katonomist, Nicola Searle, has devoted significant research attention as Senior Lecturer and Digital Economy Fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, to the issue of trade secrets. She brings her insights to the issue of the closure by the U.S. government of the Chinese consulate in Houston.
With countries around the world furiously trying to develop COVID treatments and vaccines, and with the potential economic and health reward enormous, the race is on. Reports that malicious state actors (particularly Russian and Chinese actors) are targeting COVID research through economic espionage increasingly link national security to trade secrets. All of this has culminated in the announcement on Wednesday that the US has ordered China to close its Houston consulate.
A quick lesson in trade secrets and espionage. Not all jurisdictions recognise trade secret theft as a criminal act. US law treats the ‘theft of trade secrets’ as a federal crime. American international trade agreements increasingly criminalise trade secret misappropriation. Trade secret theft is largely synonymous with ‘industrial’ or ‘corporate’ espionage. ‘Economic espionage,’ on the other hand, is the theft of trade secrets to benefit a foreign entity. ‘Foreign entity’ includes means foreign governments and foreign corporations, whose power can exceed that of nations.
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Defendants with Chinese nationality are identified in at least 30% (59 of 202) of the cases in my database of all American federal trade secrets criminal cases (covering 1996-2018). Indeed, the number of publicly known prosecutions of Chinese nationals may likely be significantly lower than the number of cases the US government has actually identified, as other cases may not be made public due to national security issues or not be pursued for political/strategic reasons.
None of this is new, as nations have for a very long time ‘stolen’ IP from each other. Nations happily engage in economic espionage when they are still developing their economies, but their public stance changes once they develop enough knowledge to become targets themselves. The United States itself is known to have engaged in such activities as recently as 1995, here.
Earlier this month, we noted that Charter (Spectrum) had been lobbying the FCC to eliminate conditions affixed to its 2015 merger with Time Warner Cable. As part of those conditions Charter had to not only adhere to basic net neutrality (regardless of the fact that lobbyists had already killed FCC net neutrality rules), but it was also prohibited from imposing arbitrary, bullshit usage caps and overage fees, or engaging in the kind of "interconnection" shenanigans that caused Netflix streams to slow for Verizon customers earlier this decade. It also had to expand broadband coverage, which it failed utterly at.
The chief executives of four of the largest U.S. tech companies plan to deflect criticism next week in a Congressional hearing into their use of market power to hurt rivals by saying they themselves face competition and by debunking claims they are so dominant.
The CEOs of Facebook, Amazon.com Inc, Alphabet’s Google and Apple, are set to speak before the House Judiciary Committee’s antitrust panel on July 27. They will present their testimonies virtually, according to sources familiar with their plans.
Some of the best inventions are the most simple. When judging the inventiveness of a simple invention, it is difficult not to be prejudiced by hindsight. An invention may seem obvious once an inventor has pointed the way, making it hard to recognise the inventive leap that was required. The case of Emson v Hozelock ([2020] EWCA Civ 871) considered whether a relatively technically simple invention was non-obvious in view of an obscure prior art document. The invention was found obvious using the UK legal test for inventive step, in a result that the judges themselves noted might seem unfair. The difficultly inherent in the case was reflected by the disagreement between the two patent specialist judges who heard the case, Lord Justices Arnold and Floyd.
The EP (UK) patent (EP2657585) related to a collapsible garden hose, the Xhose. The Xhose was invented by a sole inventor, Mr Berardi, in his garden. The Xhose, licensed to Emson, has enjoyed considerable commercial success but has been facing competition in the UK from a rival product, Hozelock's SuperHose. The Court of Appeal considered Emson's appeal from a High Court decision finding the Xhose patent obvious in view of a prior art patent document, McDonald (US 2003/0000530).
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On appeal, Emson argued that the High Court's conclusion that the Xhose was obvious was based on an analysis tainted by hind-sight. Emson further argued that the considerable commercial success of the Xhose was evidence of its non-obviousness. Given that McDonald had been around for a long time, if the invention had been so obvious, surely someone would have designed such a hose before Mr Berardi?
However, both Arnold LJ and Floyd LJ were in agreement that the commercial success of Mr Berardi's invention could not be relied on to demonstrate inventiveness. As Floyd LJ put it, whilst "viewed against the common general knowledge of garden hoses, the invention was one of breathtaking ingenuity", the issue of obviousness had to be assessed with respect to the state of the art, i.e. McDonald, not the common garden hose.
Arnold LJ agreed with the High Court that McDonald related generally to the field of self-elongating hoses that could be used for multiple purposes, including garden hoses. Arnold LJ thus found that a skilled person would combine the disclosure of McDonald with their common general knowledge of garden hoses to arrive at the invention. Arnold LJ importantly noted the lack of anything in McDonald that would teach way from applying the disclosure to garden hoses. Arnold LJ therefore found that hindsight had not tainted the High Court's finding that the Xhose was obvious in view of McDonald.
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All of the judges commented that, to a casual observer, the Xhose would seem obviously inventive or expressed sympathy for the sole inventor when finding his "simple and brilliant invention" obvious in view of a niche patent document of which the inventor had not been aware (see Arnold LJ at para. 76). Does this perhaps suggest that the problem-solution approach may be a better test for assessing obviousness than Windsurfer/Pozzoli? The problem-solution approach incorporates the idea that the best starting point for an inventive step analysis is a disclosure from the same field as the invention in preference to a document from a different field. The Problem-Solution approach thus gives more weight to whether a skilled person would be motivated to seek out other documents in order to solve a problem. Interestingly, the USPTO approach is again different. The USPTO generally gives very little credence to the argument that a skilled person would not be motivated to combine prior art documents from very disparate fields.
Regardless of your view with respect to the merits or otherwise of Windsurfer/Pozzoli, this case undoubtedly provides some interesting commentary on how to apply the test.
During this webinar, we discussed current diversity issues in the PTAB bar, such as those highlighted in the PTAB Bar Association’s 2019 Report on Women at the PTAB and The ABA and NALP’s After the JD III: Third Results from a National Study of Legal Careers. We spoke about efforts being made to diversify the bar, including the PTAB’s LEAP initiative. We concluded the discussion with our panelists offering their personal endeavors to ensure diversity in their own companies and how they started their careers in their respective industries.
First, the exam will still be closed book. The possibility of changing the exam to open book was briefly considered, but was thought to be too big a step on top of the changes that will already be taking place this year. However, importantly, screen breaks will be provided: a 10 minute break for 4 hour exams, and 20 minutes for the 5 hour exam. The format of the breaks has not yet been determined. In view of the time pressure of the exam, it seems unlikely to this Kat that, given an extra 20 minutes, many candidates will not just struggle on without a break if given the chance.
Mr Williams assured candidates that a flaky internet connection will not result in an automatic fail. The issue will be flagged by the proctoring software and followed-up on. Furthermore, an emergency contact number will be provided in case of serious technical issues. Candidates will only be permitted to work from one monitor, but there will be no restrictions (so far as Mr Williams is aware), to the size or type of this monitor. Food and drink will be permitted, but drinks containers will need to be transparent.
Thankfully, the proctoring software will permit candidates to take toilet breaks. Candidates will have to "announce" to the system that they are going to visit the bathroom.
Unfortunately, it seems that there will not be any flexibility with regards to the 31 August 2020 cut-off date for candidates to specify where they will take the exam. This may cause difficulties for candidates who are moving house, moving jobs, or are located in an area that becomes subject to local lock-down. However, Mr Williams assured candidates that a pragmatic approach will be taken in exceptional circumstances, such as a local lock-down.
Candidates with busy houses (children, partners, cats...) may also have difficulties, as any disturbances will be flagged by the software. Candidates were also warned off from taking the exam at work in glass offices.
On July 22, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Pure Data Systems, LLC, holding all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 5,999,947 unpatentable. The ‘947 patent is owned by Pure Data Systems, LLC, a Dominion Harbor subsidiary and well-known NPE, and is directed to distributing database changes to one or more client computers. The ‘947 patent has been asserted in 16 district court cases against such companies as Electronic Arts, Spotify, CNN, CBS, Pinterest, LinkedIn and others.
The district court quickly dismissed that defense finding it “squarely foreclosed by recent Supreme Court precedent. See Microsoft Corp. v. i4i Ltd. P’ship, 131 S. Ct. 2238, 2241 (2011). MORryde then amended its complaint to add a counterclaim to the same effect. Having none of that, the district court granted sanctions against attorney Fountain (but not MORryde) with an accounting of $16,000. Fountain immediately appealed the sanction to the Federal Circuit, but that appeal was dismissed for lack of final judgment in the case. By that time, Fountain had withdrawn from representing MORryde (on request of the client). Meanwhile as the case moved forward Fountain filed additional papers in the court including documents allegedly protected by attorney-client privilege in order to protect himself from potential further sanctions (even though his former client was not seeking sanctions). That filing was stricken from the record by the district court judge.
Fountain filed this appeal once the parties finally settled the case in 2019. On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed in a 2-paragraph per curiam decision — finding no abuse of discretion in the sanction award. In addition, the appellate panel held that Fountain did not have any right to appeal the district court’s striking of his filing from the record — since that striking did not constitute a sanction. [Fed. Cir. Decision]. The appeal was interesting because it was Fountain against both parties in the lawsuit–the plaintiff who sued his former client and his former client.
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The problem with Fountain’s argument here is that these cases go to the issue of when questions of law require clear and convincing evidence. The sanctioned pleadings did not attempt to make any kind of law/fact distinction but instead argued the constitutional question.
I'll forgive you if you haven't spent a lot of time thinking about Chia Pets lately. This is, after all, 2020 and not the 90s and we a couple of things going on that have probably held your attention. If you're so young that you don't remember these things, they're essential potted plants shaped like a variety of animals, objects, and celebrities, laden with grass seeds that grow and look like hair and oh my god why is this a thing? Regardless, the product, first developed in the 70s, became popularized in the 90s and was advertised with a well-known jingle: ch-ch-ch-Chia! While Chia Pets are still sold today, they are no longer the cultural icon that they were in these earlier times.
The IPKat team is grateful to Hanne Kirk and her team at Gorrissen Federspiel (Denmark) for an update on the fascinating copyright dispute involving the designer, Anne Black:
Last year, this GuestKat wrote her first IPKat post about the decision from the Danish Maritime and Commercial Court in the case between Anne Black and Salling Group, which is the company behind the Danish discount supermarket Netto. The case was appealed and, on 11 June 2020, the High Court of Eastern Denmark gave its decision, thereby ending this long and media-intensive copyright dispute.
It’s been over a year since CC Search moved out of beta (we just celebrated its first birthday!), and we now have a better idea of who we serve and their needs thanks to user feedback and insights derived from anonymized data. We’re excited to share with you what we’ve learned!
Copyright holders and anti-piracy groups might want to consider best use of their resources when sending takedown notices to Google targeting the Internet Archive. According to data published by Google, 99.2% of complaints against IA result in 'no action taken', with just 0.1% of complaints resulting in some kind of takedown.
Internet provider Charter wants piracy tracking outfit MarkMonitor to share all evidence requested as part of an ongoing piracy liability lawsuit. The RIAA's anti-piracy partner says that it has handed all data over but Charter is missing hundreds of thousands of 'evidence packages' and other relevant information.
Judge Jesse Furman clearly is not interested in copyright troll Richard Liebowitz's games any more. As you may recall, Furman put together that massive benchslap of Liebowitz last month, detailing the many, many, many times Liebowitz failed to follow court orders, and plenty of examples of where he appeared to lie to the court. Furman also included an appendix with an astounding list of 40 examples in other cases where Liebowitz had been found to similarly fail to follow court orders and/or lie to the court. The ruling concluded with Liebowitz being sanctioned a bit over $100k, but also with requirements that he send the order to all of his clients and every other judge handling a Liebowitz case.
Earlier this year, Techdirt reported on an extremely serious development in the world of Japanese copyright, with a new law that will make copyright infringement a criminal offense. Now the country's Supreme Court has issued a ruling that will make using Twitter in Japan more of a risk, legally speaking. The case concerns a photo of a flower, originally posted on a web site in 2009, with the photographer's name and copyright notice. As often happens, the photo was then tweeted without the photographer's consent, and was further retweeted. The problem is that Twitter uses "smart auto-cropping" of images, with the aim of focusing on "salient" regions, and thus increasing the likelihood of someone looking at and engaging with the tweet. Twitter's auto-cropped version of the photo did not include the photographer's name or copyright notice.
