Flameshot, powerful yet simple to use screenshot tool, released version 0.8.0 with new editing tools, improvements, and many fixes.
Flameshot 0.8.0 added the popular requested circle counter tool. It added a button in left-side of screen to open the sidebar, which was previously only accessible by hitting Space on keyboard.
The blur tool has been replaced by pixelate tool. If the “thickness” is 0 or 1, the old blur behavior is preserved. If the thickness is increased past 1 the image will pixelate by the thickness.
Battlefield 4 running through Steam Play on Linux.
Last year I wrote about some enhancements made to Okular’s annotation tool and in one of those, Simone Gaiarin commented that he was working on redesigning the Annotation toolbar altogether. I was quite interested and was also thinking of ‘modernizing’ the tool — only, I had no idea how much work it would be.
The existing annotation tool works, but it had some quirks and had many advanced options which were documented pretty well in the Handbook but not obvious to an unscrupulous user. For instance, if the user would like to highlight some part of the text, she selects (single-clicks) the highlighter tool, applies it to a block of text. When another part of text is to be highlighted, you’d expect the highlighter tool to apply directly; but it didn’t ‘stick’ — tool was unselected after highlighting the first block of text. There is an easy way to make the annotation tool ‘stick’ — instead of single-click to select the tool, simply double-click, and it persists. Another instance is the ‘Strikeout’ annotation which is not displayed by default, but can be added to the tools list.
Simone, with lots of inputs, testing and reviews from David Hurka, Nate Graham and Albert Astals Cid et al., has pulled off a magnificent rewrite of Okular’s annotation toolbar. To get an idea of the amount of work went into this, see this phabricator task and this invent code review. The result of many months of hardwork is a truly modern, easy to explore-and-use annotation support. I am not aware of any other libre PDF reader with such good annotation features.
Congratulations to GNOME developers! We can already try version 3.38 "Orbis" right here right now. Simply grab Fedora or openSUSE at the latest development version as you can find Orbis in them. I share with you my experience in trying out Orbis below. Along with this short review I also include the links, video, and a lot of screenshots like usual. Enjoy!
Andy C is the creator and lead dev of Arc Menu, a highly customisable application launcher for GNOME Shell and one of the most popular third-party extensions available for the platform. He announced his decision to quit on Gitlab in an issue titled “ArcMenu Development is Stopping!!!“.
Contributors are the life blood in any open source project. It’s always a worry when someone decides to step back. But those concern go double when it’s the originator and driving force behind the project who is bowing out.
In this tutorial, we shall focus on the 10 + 1 best Linux distributions for the year 2020 for new and experienced users. As per distrowatch below are the top 10 Linux distributions based on website page hit ranking...
In this article, we have covered the best 11 Linux distribution for the year 2020. Please do not forget to tell us which ones you like or find any other better distro.
After understanding what is Linux, what is a Linux distribution, when you start using Linux, you might come across the term ‘rolling release’ in Linux forum discussions.
In this Linux jargon buster, you’ll learn about rolling release model of Linux distributions.
In software development, rolling release is a model where updates to a software are continuously rolled out rather than in batches of versions. This way the software always remains up-to-date. A rolling release distribution follows the same model and it provides the latest Linux kernel and the software version as they are released.
The super lightweight Linux distribution 4MLinux released the latest stable version 34.0 with new features and latest app updates.
Continuing my business shipping computer installation media in Indonesia, recently I shipped Arch 2020 to South Sumatra the southern province in Sumatra Island along with other GNU/Linux operating systems. Apparently, nowadays Arch is a little bit different to earlier versions back in 2019 in which the ISO file contents changed by merely a character. Default GLIM configuration won't work anymore. Thus we need a change in the configurations so new Arch will work with GLIM once again. This tutorial brings you my custom change so Arch boots in multiboot way straight from the flash drive.
There are some simply cool things going on in the OpenPOWER space, like Microwatt, an implementation of the POWER instruction set that runs on an FPGA and boots Linux. If you don't trust the chips from IBM, Microwatt is a really interesting alternative.
Do you need a workstation class computer?
If you don't actually need a workstation class computer then any of the systems mentioned here are going to look quite expensive. If you do need a workstation then there are ways to build the Talos II or Blackbird and ensure you get value for money.
As an example, for a small IT support team of 2 to 4 people, it is possible to build a multi-seat configuration (example for Fedora), connecting all four users directly to the same Talos II computer. The cost of the computer is split up to 4 ways but any one user can exploit the power of the system when needed. The upcoming AMD Radeon Big Navi GPUs, which were leaked this week, are rumoured to have 16GB of video RAM, easily enough to attach four 4k displays.
In addition to XDC2020 this past week, the Linux Foundation hosted the virtual OpenPOWER Summit North America 2020 event as well with a mix of interesting hardware and software presentations.
Recordings from the virtual event aren't yet available but will be soon via the OpenPOWER Foundation YouTube channel but there are slide decks for many of the presentations.
Dealing with either of those incredibly frustrating situations without appearing petty is difficult. But getting credit for your ideas and work is critical in today's organizational environments, especially those that aspire to be well-functioning meritocracies. Promotions, bonuses, and other forms of recognition (such as the opportunity to lead the project you proposed) are all generally based on performance. If people don't know you contributed, you'll likely be continually overlooked.
Last year, Embest – an Avnet company – introduced MaaXBoard NXP i.MX 8M SBC mostly compatible with Raspberry Pi form factor and running Android 9.0 or Yocto Linux.
We've established a bit of a tradition here at Ars. Every year at Google I/O, we have a sit-down talk to learn more about Android directly from the people that make it. Of course, this year, just about every major event was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, nothing is really normal, and Google I/O never happened.
We can still do interviews over the Internet though! So while it happened later in the year than normal, we were still able to hold our annual chat with some of the most important Googlers at Android HQ: Dave Burke, Android's VP of Engineering, and Iliyan Malchev, Principal Engineer at Android and the lead of Project Treble.
We came prepped with questions about the more mysterious corners of Android 11, which actually led to a lot of interesting talk about the future. You'll learn about a coming re-write of the Bluetooth stack, and there's lots of talk about modularity and easy updating (like plans will hopefully, someday, allow you to update the Linux kernel and developer APIs as easily as you download an app update).
This is illustrated by the image to the left which depicts the web browser share for visits to LinuxLinks.com for the period covering June – September 2020.
But Chrome and Firefox are not for everyone. Chrome is proprietary software so it’s not very appealing to open source enthusiasts. There’s the open source Chromium, of course, but that’s not very popular. And Firefox has been steadily losing market share.
TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 27 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). Unfortunately, I have thus far been unable to solve issue 621 regarding the crashes on LinkedIn, so to avoid drive-by crashes, scripts are now globally disabled on LinkedIn until I can (no loss since it doesn't work anyway). If you need them on for some reason, create a pref tenfourfox.troublesome-js.allow and set it to true. I will keep working on this for FPR28 to see if I can at least come up with a better wallpaper, though keep in mind that even if I repair the crash it may still not actually work anyway. There are otherwise no new changes since the beta except for outstanding security updates, and it will go live Monday evening Pacific assuming no new issues.
Interest in SETI can be used to bring the public into science as well. A recent collaboration between the SETI Institute and the open-source software project GNU Radio aims to give people the opportunity to learn about radio engineering, digital signal processing, and radio astronomy. By purchasing a dongle for around $25, members of the public can digitize analog radio signals and process signals on their computers.
When developers release their software as open source, they are also giving a by-definition right to every company in the world to commercially use their software without having to obtain a license or share some profits with them. And this caused some problems in the open source world few years ago. For example, Amazon took the MongoDB source code (An open source database system), changed its name and then provided it as a SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) on its AWS platform, and then charged people money to use it. MongoDB developers were angered since they literally got nothing back from Amazon although they are the original creators of 100% of the code.
This adds some sustainability problems to open source projects, as anybody and any company can just take the code and then reuse it commercially without giving anything back to the original developers. The original developers may starve and the project may stop, and there would be no obligation by anyone to commercially pay them.
Fair code initiative arose from this context; To prevent anyone from using the software commercially without contacting the original software authors first, making it under the umbrella of what’s known as source-available models.
This blog post provides a step-by-step example about how the conversion of a project to REUSE compatible license statements is done in practice. For my setup, I have a readily configured kdesrc-build environment.
First, I get out the most recent source code if the project I want to convert. For this tutorial, I use KTurtle, which is a nice and small application from KDE Education with just about 200 files.
RenderDoc 1.10 was released on Friday for this leading open-source program supporting frame-capture-based debugging on Vulkan, OpenGL / GLES, and Direct3D across Windows, Linux, and Android along with platforms like Stadia and the Nintendo Switch.
RenderDoc 1.10 brings various optimizations and speed improvements, which is always nice to see. RenderDoc should now have lower idle overhead, greater performance when capturing a frame on Vulkan in certain instances, faster cold startup time, improved replay time when switching events for Vulkan captures, and other optimizations.
In this guide, you will learn how to install Sublime Text editor on Linux distributions like Ubuntu, Mint, Fedora, Manjaro, etc.
Sublime Text is a cross-platform, light-weight code editor. It natively supports many programming and markup languages. Its functions can be extended with plugins. It has many other features, some of them listed below.
For a number of years the GNU Compiler Collection has shipped experimental support for the DWARF 5 debugging data format while finally for next year's GCC 11 release it might be deemed stable and used by default.
The DWARF 5 debug data format was published back in 2017 to succeed the now decade old DWARF Version 4. With DWARF 5 there is support for better data compression, various performance improvements, better debug handling around optimized code, and other enhancements over DWARF4. DWARF 5 itself was in development for a half-decade and is detailed at DWARFstd.org.
In this tutorial, we will learn how to post a tweet from Django application using Tweepy.
This article is going to be a very informative read no matter what kind of programmer you are. In fact, even if you aren’t a programmer you will find this article useful. After all, dependencies is not just a programming concept. It’s a general term that has meaning even outside of Computer Science.
[...]
Dependency is a broad software engineering term used to refer when a piece of software relies on another one. Simply put, if Program A requires Program B to be able to run, Program A is dependent on Program B. This makes Program B a dependency of Program A.
You may ask, why would Program A even need Program B, or any other program for that matter? This will be further elaborated in the “Why we use dependencies” section in this article, but a short version is that Program A requires a special service or feature which Program B has.
It doesn’t really matter what it is, if your program needs to run correctly, it’s a dependency. Common examples of dependencies are programming libraries, Online services, programming scripts etc.
In this tutorial, we will cover various methods to rename columns in pandas dataframe in Python. Renaming or changing the names of columns is one of the most common data wrangling task. If you are not from programming background and worked only in Excel Spreadsheets in the past you might feel it not so easy doing this in Python as you can easily rename columns in MS Excel by just typing in the cell what you want to have. If you are from database background it is similar to ALIAS in SQL. In Python there is a popular data manipulation package called pandas which simplifies doing these kind of data operations.
[...]
First step is to install pandas package if it is not already installed. You can check if the package is installed on your machine by running !pip show pandas statement in Ipython console. If it is not installed, you can install it by using the command !pip install pandas.
When you sign up for an account somewhere, some websites do not actually store your password in their databases. Instead, they will transform your password into something else using a cryptographic hashing algorithm.
After the password is transformed, it is then called a password hash. Whenever you try to login, the website will transform the password you tried using the same hashing algorithm and simply see if the password hashes are the same.
Create the python function that converts a given string into an md5 hash. The return value should be encoded in hexadecimal.
In this tutorial, we will cover various methods to rename columns in pandas dataframe in Python. Renaming or changing the names of columns is one of the most common data wrangling task. If you are not from programming background and worked only in Excel Spreadsheets in the past you might feel it not so easy doing this in Python as you can easily rename columns in MS Excel by just typing in the cell what you want to have. If you are from database background it is similar to ALIAS in SQL. In Python there is a popular data manipulation package called pandas which simplifies doing these kind of data operations.
In this entire blog series on Python's syntactic sugar, this might end up being the most boring post. We will cover the unary arithmetic operators: -, +, and ~ (inversion if you don't happen to be familiar with that last operator). Due to the fact that there is only a single object being involved, it's probably the most straightforward syntax to explain in Python.
[...]
That is literally all of the documentation for unary arithmetic operators in Python's data model. Now is that an over-simplification, or is it actually as simple as it sounds?
I was looking recently at the Python module toolz, a collection of convenience functions. A lot of these functions don’t do that much. They don’t save you much code, but they do make your code more readable by making it more declarative. You may not realize need them until you see them.
For example, there is a function partitionby that breaks up a sequence at the points where a given function’s value changes. I’m pretty sure that function would have improved some code I’ve written recently, making it more declarative than procedural, but I can’t remember what that was.
Although I can’t think of my previous example, I can think of a new one, and that is Descartes’ rule of signs.
Lagos witnessed another building collapse on Saturday when a three-storey building at Ansarudeen Street, Ile-Epo, Ejigbo caved in.
[...]
“Fortunately, nobody was trapped, no injury and no fatality has been recorded. Responders to the incident scene are LASEMA, Lagos State Building Control Agency and the police (Ejigbo division).”
Pick any industry of life and you’ll find that very few people actually do the work.
Rather than read the original study, most people cite the headline from a secondary source. Rather than spend 100 hours observing every detail of a fish, most biology students would look up the description of the fish online. When most people say, “I read an article on climate change,” what they really mean is, “I read the title of an article on climate change.”
This is exactly why doing the boring work more consistently is actually a competitive advantage. Ignore the expert advice and pay attention to what gets results for you.
Look, and see for yourself.
One critic warned that "this decision imperils the health of our children and the safety of drinking water supplies across much of the nation."
Victor Coronado felt lightheaded one morning last month when he stood up to grab an iced tea. The right side of his body suddenly felt heavy. He heard himself slur his words. “That’s when I knew I was going to have a stroke,” he said.
According to local officials who work with the Great Basin Unified Air Pollution Control District, the Creek Fire smoke will likely be with Mammoth and the Eastern Sierra at least through this week and into next week - and perhaps longer than that.
Although the smoke might get a bit less dense due to an incoming cold front and stronger winds this week, if the fire continues to grow and the winds continue to come from a south or southwest direction as is forecast for quite some time, the Mammoth area (at least) will likely be in for quite a bit more smoke, possibly into the end of the month. The most likely way the smoke will end completely is via a good, winter-like storm, which is not in the forecast at this time, said Tom Schaniel Air Pollution Control Officer with Great Basin. Until then, he said, the smoke could get lighter, it could gather at a higher elevation at times, but it will still be in the area until a large storm scours the smoke out of the region.
The Cloud-Hypervisor project that is led by Intel open-source folks for providing a cloud-focused hypervisor written in the Rust programming language is out with a new feature release.
Cloud-Hypervisor 0.10 was issued on Friday and this Rust-VMM based project now supports multiple descriptors with VirtIO-Block, memory zone support for finer grained control of memory allocations for the guest, sandboxing improvements with SECCOMP filters, preliminary KVM HyperV emulation control support, and a number of bug fixes.
Since China adopted the National Intelligence Law in June 2017, all Chinese citizens and companies have been under a legal obligation to help the government gather intelligence (and keep any cooperation secret). The law allows China’s intelligence services to embed their people and devices or to requisition facilities in any premise, anywhere, for that purpose.i
The Constitution of the Chinese Communist Party also essentially requires any company with at least three party members to form a cell tasked with carrying out the party’s wishes.
About a decade ago, after a temporary falling out with Vladimir Putin, Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko tried to pivot his country to the West. In this endeavor, he had help from a British PR firm€ called “Bell Pottinger” that once employed some of the most influential spin-doctors in the world.€ The campaign was a complete failure: the consultants left empty-handed and Lukashenko became an international pariah once again.€ In August 2020, after workers at state television and radio broadcasters in Belarus started walking off the job in protest as the police brutally dispersed opposition demonstrations, a handful of independent journalists and activists reported that whole brigades of “strikebreakers” from Russia arrived to replace these employees.
Cabo Delgado is home to a $60 billion natural gas development that is heavily guarded by Mozambican military and private security.
Loosely aligned with ISIS, the insurgents have undertaken increasingly sophisticated attacks in recent months, overrunning large parts of Mocimba de Praia, a strategic port north of the regional capital Pemba in August. Unlike in previous attacks, government forces have struggled to fully retake the territory.
An injury to one being an injury to all, CAJ News Africa urgently calls upon the Southern African Development Community (SADC) regional bloc member states to immediately deploy a combined force to drive out Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL)-affiliated Ansar al-Sunna insurgents from Mozambique.
If ever there was time to ruthlessly deal with the rubble rousing terrorists in the SADC region, it is now.
The Cabo Delgado province in northern Mozambique is the epicenter of the insurgency that threatens to spill into the entire regional bloc.
The six French nationals and their driver worked for international aid group ACTED and were touring the reserve, which is a popular destination for expatriates and was considered safe by the Nigerien government.
France and other countries have warned people against travelling to parts of Niger where militants including Boko Haram and ISWAP operate.
The amendment to the Penal Code establishes that rapists who abuse minors under 14 years old will face castration of their genitals and the removal of the Fallopian tubes in the case of men and women respectively.
The idea that Spanish-language news cannot be trusted is being pushed by YouTube channels, like GR8 America, Sin Filtros, that urge viewers to subscribe so they can view Trump campaign events in Spanish and follow interviews that viewers “won’t see in traditional news outlets.”
GR8 compared itself to Telemundo — which is owned by NBCUniversal, NBC News' parent company — and Univision, saying it was the “second most followed outlet during the Republican convention on YouTube.”
“People see the videos and the disinformation so many times that it gets to them. They feel they can’t trust the media, and that’s the most worrisome part,” Pérez-Verdía said. “Now they call Spanish-language media fake news.”
The two largest and most established Spanish-language networks are seeing more protesters confront their reporters and question their coverage.
The findings are based on information captured by the Global Fishing Watch mapping tool developed by Oceana, in partnership with Google and Skytruth, a nonprofit environmental watchdog.
“This massive and ongoing fishing effort of China’s fleet threatens the Galapagos Islands, the rare species that only call it home and everyone that depends on it for food and livelihoods,” said Oceana’s illegal fishing and transparency analyst, Dr. Marla Valentine.
Valentine added that the findings were merely the “tip of the iceberg” when it comes to the impact of mass fishing operations conducted by Chinese vessels: “The situation playing out in the Galápagos should raise serious questions and concerns about the impact China’s massive fishing fleet is having on the oceans it sails.”
"The clock is a way to speak science to power," says a project co-founder.
An important new investigation examined the issue of the shocking state of over three million abandoned oil and gas wells in the United States.
The founder of SunEdison discusses what the future holds for BP and other major oil and gas companies that are looking to transition.
As climate change becomes a focus of the US election, energy companies stand accused of trying to downplay their contribution to global warming. In June, Minnesota's Attorney General sued ExxonMobil, among others, for launching a "campaign of deception" which deliberately tried to undermine the science supporting global warming. So what's behind these claims? And what links them to how the tobacco industry tried to dismiss the harms of smoking decades earlier?
In California's most catastrophic wildfire season yet, an organization is challenging the state to hire firefighters who were previously incarcerated to help meet public safety needs.
Taiwan is pioneering coral rehabilitation through identifying heat-resilient varieties and building "coral hospitals."
The oceanic nation has been blighted by coral bleaching over the past two decades due to global warming and warm water discharges from its nuclear power plants. Thus, how to best restore the nation's vulnerable coral reef systems is being investigated, wrote CNA.
In these final weeks of the 2020 presidential campaign, U.S. voters’ attention is being consumed by a maelstrom of crises — a merciless pandemic, a battered economy, a society ruptured by racist police violence and deadly structural inequalities, climate chaos and a fragile democracy.
They ought to come in prepared to introduce serious reform so that our laws reflect the will of our 330 million people rather than that of a few corrupt billionaires allied with hypocritical religious fundamentalists.
"The fate of our rights, our freedoms, our healthcare, our bodies, our lives, and our country depend on what happens over the coming months."
If the president gets to appoint another SCOTUS judge, we'll be paying the price for decades to come.
This slow talker, ruthless editor, and die-hard romantic wanted to make sure that every woman could find her best place.
As mourners left flowers and signs outside the U.S. Supreme Court building overnight following Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death Friday evening, President Donald Trump and Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell vowed to force through her replacement with just weeks until the November election while progressive lawmakers and organizers promised to fight the GOP’s hypocritical effort to shift the court right.
Right. Ol’ Lindsey nearly broke both legs walking that one back upon the passing of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If Senate Republicans can seat a new Justice before the election, they will do it. If they can seat a new Justice before the end of January (in the event of a Trump loss), they will do it.
"She gave all she could, with literally all she had. Now it's our turn."
GOP senators invented a new standard in order to deny President Obama a Supreme Court appointment in 2016. Now they should abide by it.
But when it comes to voting in an election like 2020, where the candidates have such violently competing ideologies, I think many voters will use the mental shortcut of imagining each potential presidency after 4-8 years and ask themselves which would cause the Worst Damage based on their personal values.
This, combined with the Primacy Concern model, is what allows people to vote for people they don’t really like.
The Republican Party and its allies have relied on voter suppression tactics for decades, but this year they are pulling out all the stops.
(New York, NY) Howie Hawkins, the Green Party candidate for President, said that achieving racial justice was essential to the effort for effective climate action.
Hawkins, who participated in the march for Climate Justice Through Racial Justice in Manhattan on Sunday, outlined 7 key initiatives: Green New Deal, Economic Bill of Rights, Medicare for All, Homes for all, Democratic Community Control of the Police, Reparations for African-American rights, and Honor Indigenous Treaty Rights.
“People of color and low-income communities are the principal victims of climate change. We face this existential threat to our future since the leaders of both major parties, in exchange for campaign contributions, allow fossil fuel companies and others to pollute and exploit such communities. We can not solve climate change without system change, including ending racial injustice,” said Hawkins, the first US candidate to campaign for a Green New Deal in his 2010 race for Governor of New York.
[...]
Hawkins said today’s youth-led anti-racist and divestment demands in the climate justice movement were similar to the youth-led anti-apartheid movement’s divestment demands a generation ago. It was at Hawkins’ initiative that Dartmouth College students built a shantytown on the college green in the fall of 1985 demanding divestment of college funds from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. That action sparked shantytown protests on campuses across the nation and a swelling of anti-apartheid actions across society over the next year until the US government imposed sanctions on South Africa in the fall of 1986. The apartheid regime responded by freeing Nelson Mandela and negotiating a transition to democracy. 1243 institutions have divested $14.38 trillion from fossil fuel companies to date.
“The anti-apartheid divestment movement aroused a new generation of activists. Zephyr Teachout has said that visiting the Dartmouth shantytown when she was in high school near the college was an inspiration for her activism. We see the same happening today with youth in the climate justice movement today. It is time for New York State to listen to these young people who are fighting for their future and divest,” Hawkins said.
Facebook employees have recently been wondering if perhaps Facebook—which lets politicians lie in ads, festers with extremist movements like QAnon, and by design amplifies authoritarian propaganda, misinformation, and hate speech—is actually the bad guy.
Hey, pal, why don’t you shut the fuck up, CEO Mark Zuckerberg responds.
According to reports in CNBC and the Wall Street Journal, Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday that the company plans to crack down on discussion of polarizing political and social issues on internal message boards. The Journal wrote that Zuckerberg said staff shouldn’t have to discuss social issues at work and outlined potential steps like establishing rules on where these discussions can pop up on the company’s messenger, making sure those conversations are monitored and moderated: [...]
The ongoing journalists’ visa war between the United States and China shows no sign of abating. Rather than easing, it seems headed towards its end game.
It began back in February when the US State Department ordered five Chinese news outlets to register as foreign entities and forced them to reduce their staff by roughly 40 percent. Beijing promptly expelled three journalists from the Wall Street Journal, using an op-ed published by the Journal as an excuse even though the journalists had nothing to do with the piece.
New Zealand investigative journalist Nicky Hager took to stand to testify about using WikiLeaks documents in his work. Hager published€ Other People’s Wars, New Zealand in Afghanistan, Iraq and the war on terror,€ and said that WikiLeaks-released military and diplomatic files “greatly increased my understanding of the conduct of the war. It would have been impossible to write the book without these confidential and leaked sources.”
I have to confess that after the last court session of another tough week (and yesterday was a particularly emotional and startling court day) I went to the pub with a friend after court yesterday rather than start writing. So Friday’s report this afternoon.
4. For years the United Kingdom maintained a pretense that it sought Assange for criminal accusations from Sweden. The idea that the United States sought to prosecute the act of reporting on its wars was mocked as paranoid fantasy. For global society to now accept this outrage would be a significant blow to press freedom globally and to the independence of any vassal state from U.S. demands. Those demands tend to be, first and foremost, to buy more weapons, and, secondarily, to participate in the use of those weapons.
The corporate "Borg" is sucking the ready availability of the good life, decent, secure livelihoods assured by our collective self-reliance, and the freedom to shape our future out of our political economy.
PHR’s analysis finds that crowd-control projectiles are being used in cities across the country in ways that violate local, federal, and international guidelines. Shooting civilians in the head with KIPs violates widely accepted use of force principles, which forbid targeting of the head and neck and emphasize proportional response to actual threats faced by law enforcement. Furthermore, past research by PHR has shown that severe injury, disability, and death are often consequences of being shot in the head with these weapons. Such excessive and indiscriminate police responses to protests have a chilling effect on the exercise of the fundamental First Amendment rights to freedom of assembly and expression.
In light of “Shot in the Head” and related evidence, PHR calls for a ban on the use of KIPs in crowd-control situations, due both to the life-threatening injuries they can cause and their potential to violate freedom of expression and assembly.
There are no signs of a détente between Fortnite maker Epic Games and Apple. While Apple apparently keeps the door open to whatever version of Fortnite that would bring the battle royale game back into compliance with the App Store terms, Epic is not only being very vocal in public and running an anti-Apple tournament but also pursuing a litigation strategy that appears to be all about escalation, trying to take the merits of a huge antitrust case to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the coming months.
Notwithstanding the extremely acrimonious nature of this litigation, there's one remark that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers made in last month's hearing on Epic's motion for a temporary restraining order (TRO) that neither party is comfortable with. When counsel for Epic insisted on their likelihood to prevail on the merits (while the court placed the emphasis at the TRO stage on irreparable harm), Judge Gonzalez Rogers said this case was not going to be a "slam dunk" for either Epic or Apple, and reminded everyone that the Supreme Court's Pepper v. Apple vote--which ultimately allowed a consumer class action (seeking damages for allegedly having overpaid for app downloads and in-app purhcases) to go forward before her court--was very close: 5-4.
Representing Epic, Cravath's Gary Bornstein distinguished Pepper from Epic a few minutes later. He noted that Epic is an app developer bringing antitrust claims against Apple over its App Store terms, while the Pepper class action complaint is about harm to consumers from what Apple withholds from app developers, and the Supreme Court ruled on whether or not that consumer class could sue for damages (with Epic not even seeking damages for now).
If you're more interested in what Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney said in a sworn declaration about the popularity of Fortnite, please click here to skip the part that addresses the legally more relevant questions surrounding Epic's push for a preliminary injunction against Apple.
TROs are in effect for only a fortnight (whichever way one may spell it) unless the enjoined party consents to an extension. After that period, a preliminary injunction (PI) can and often does replace it, which is commonly referred to as "converting a TRO into a PI." What makes a PI preliminary is that it's in effect until a final judgment grants or denies a permament injunction; a TRO is even more preliminary than a PI. In this case, the court discussed a PI briefing schedule with the parties, which will culminate in a PI hearing on Monday, September 28--ten days after a deadline for Epic's second filing in that context, its reply brief in support of its motion. Until the court's decision on the PI motion, Apple must comply with the TRO.
Typically, a TRO gets converted into a PI, but there are cases in which judges change mind on the basis of more elaborate briefing and in-depth analysis. With respect to the merit of the underlying case, there's not enough time at the TRO stage to fully consider all outcome-determinative aspects of complex matters, so if a judge believes that irreparable harm is imminent, a TRO might come down just to prevent a tragedy, even though a PI might subsequently be denied. Epic is still trying to persuade the court to #FreeFortnite, but that part is again doomed to fail, given that Epic could simply publish an iOS version of the game that wouldn't offer alternative payment mechanisms. Epic itself accepted and complied with those terms for years, and all that Apple says it wants is compliance with its longstanding standard terms. For Apple it's certainly going to be a challenge to defeat the Unreal Engine part of Epic's motion this time around, but such an outcome is nowhere near as inconceivable as a free pass for Epic to violate Apple's App Store terms while litigation over whether or not those terms violate the antitrust laws is still in progress.
As I explained before, it's hard to imagine that the court would not continue to consider Fortnite's removal from the App Store to be self-inflicted harm. Apple reinforces that point nevertheless, describing Epic as "a saboteur, not a martyr," and noting that "Epic started a fire, and poured gasoline on it, and now asks this Court for emergency assistance in putting it out, even though Epic can do so itself in an instant by simply adhering to the contractual terms that have profitably governed its relationship with Apple for years." But the interesting question in the September 28 hearing is not going to be Fortnite--it's Unreal Engine. Apple wouldn't ban the engine and all apps that incorporate it, but Epic would lose access to the developer tools, which sooner or later would hurt its customers (according to Apple's filing, Epic holds Fortnite gamers as well as Unreal Engine licensees hostage).
What applies to both Fortnite and Unreal Engine is that Epic could just continue to do business with Apple, and on iOS, the way it used to do, by complying with the App Store terms while still being able to challenge them in court. The question for the court to decide is whether the fact that Epic holds the key to the kingdom in its hands applies only to Fortnite--the corpus delicti in a contractual sense--or also to Unreal Engine. The reason Epic obtained a temporary restraining order (TRO) was just that the judge was concerned about what might be overreaching retaliation: the termination of a developer account held and used by a separate legal entity for the purpose of developing Unreal Engine.
This is a follow-up to my post on Apple's opposition to Epic Games' motion for a preliminary injunction. Like the previous one, this is about Apple highlighting facts that don't make Epic look good. And Apple appears to have stepped up its rhetoric after weeks of Epic running an aggressive #FreeFortnite campaign and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney's Twitter presence increasingly looking like an "I hate Apple's App Store terms" type of campaign account. Interestingly, even though Epic is suing Google as well (for an update on that case, San Jose-based Judge Beth Freeman has declined Google's invitation to take over the Google Play Store antitrust cases), Mr. Sweeney almost exclusively lashes out at Apple in his tweets, and actually promotes Android over iOS at times. On Twitter I read that Epic is "giving away Android devices in #FreeFortnite tournament."
There will be opportunities in the build-up to, and after, the September 28 preliminary injunction hearing to talk a bit more about the parties' legal theories. However, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers said in the recent TRO (temporary restraining order) hearing that the case would not be decided at this early stage. For now, it's about Epic seeking relief before the court has had the chance to fully analyze the merits. At this point it's just about what the parties are allowed to do while the litigation is ongoing. Epic wants to be allowed to circumvent Apple's in-app payment system, and Apple argues (as I'll discuss later) that Epic's "cheating" (by not disclosing at the time of app review the existence of an alternative payment system) justifies a termination of all of Epic's developer accounts, including the one used for Epic's work on Unreal Engine.
Epic Games v. Google is still in the very early stages. Three of the Google entities sued by the Fortnite maker are based overseas. As a result, service of process took longer: Google Asia Pacific Pte. Limited was served on September 4, 2020; Google Ireland Limited on September 6, 2020; and what procedurally matters is the latest date, September 7, 2020 (when Google Ireland Limited was served).
By contrast, there's already been a fair amount of activity in Epic Games v. Apple, with a temporary restraining order (TRO) in place, Epic having brought a motion for a preliminary injunction (consistent with its TRO motion), to which Apple will respond later today. Apple meanwhile filed its answer to Epic's complaint. It may take quite a while before Google does so, especially since it appears to intend to firstly bring a motion to dismiss.
Other than service, all that has happened so far in Epic v. Google is about the assignment of the case to one judge or another, and about whether or not Epic's case is related to some other antitrust actions against Google in the same district. That's obviously less exciting than motions for injunctive relief, but those little things can make all the difference to the outcome of a litigation. For example, if Oracle's Android-Java copyright case against Google had not been assigned to Judge William H. Alsup back in 2010, it's highly likely Google would already have lost it a long time ago, and a jury would merely have had to determine damages for past infringement while the merits were crystal clear (except to that one judge).
Lawyers at an automotive company, a car supplier, a telecoms company and three firms contemplate the impact of the dismissed antitrust suit
Court rulings from the UK, the US and Germany point to a seismic shift in favour of SEP holders that could reshape FRAND for years to come
By sheer coincidence, three decisions will become known on Friday (September 25) in cases that this blog has previously discussed but which are otherwise unrelated. In two of those cases, competition authorities have to decie whether to turn things around after losing the first appellate decision. In one case, there would definitely be a way, but might not be the political win to keep fighting; in the other case, there would undoubtedly be a will, but there may not be a promising way. Furthermore, a German court will announce a decision on an automotive patent infringement complaint with major antitrust implications.
Starting this September 2020, the Instituto Nacional da Propriedad Industrial (INPI) adds to its lists of patent priority examination, TWO more. They are technology applications resulting from public funding and technology applications already available on the market.
INPI already has available 14 types of priority applications, that is, procedures in place. With the two new additions, INPI has ‘16 types of priority procedure available, 14 for the general public and two for public entities’. INPI notes that the period for decisions of priority examination, counted from the application date, was done in 13.1 months (July 2020).
US company Credit Card Supplies, based in Marlborough, Massachusetts, owns the German patent DE 10 2004 041 434 B4. The patent protects a process for embossing 3D structures in sheet metal, which are used on hot-cold laminating presses to produce identity documents and credit cards. However, the US company claimed VTT and Bundesdruckerei had infringed its patent DE 434 B4.
VTT Verschleißteiltechnik in Langenhagen, near Hanover, manufactures high-tech lamination plates for creating secure documents, such as passports, driving licences, national IDs, bank and health insurance cards. These products all feature integrated security components. Bundesdruckerei is a customer of VTT, using the latter’s plates to produce ID cards and passports.
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Boehmert & Boehmert has advised Bundesdruckerei on patent filing for many years. The company develops its own technologies, such as electronic access systems. For the current infringement proceedings, patent attorney Thomas Bittner called in Munich partner and litigator Michael Rüberg. Bundesdruckerei also mandated the Frankfurt based patent team from Linklaters around Julia Schönbohm
Patent attorney Thorsten Rehmann from Gramm, Lins & Partner specialises in mechanical engineering. Previously, Rehmann has worked for VTT for various patent applications at the EPO. VTT also retained the mixed firm for the infringement case. Gramm, Lins & Partner recently stood out for its work for Bury in the prominent dispute between Nokia and Daimler over connected cars patents.
Cisco and another of the four plaintiffs in Apple v Iancu, and Facebook and others set out why the 'capricious' NHK-Fintiv rule had to be challenged
In T 1621/16 the Board of Appeal reversed an Opposition Division decision to revoke a patent for added subjectââ¬âmatter on the basis the claims comprised multiple selections from lists of converging alternatives.
The patentee successfully argued on appeal that lists of converging alternatives (i.e. lists of alternatives wherein each of the more preferred alternatives is fully encompassed by all the less preferred and broader options in the list) should not be considered to be equivalent to selections from lists of non-converging elements (i.e. mutually exclusive or partially overlapping alternatives). The previous EPO approach typically objected to multiple selections from non-convergent lists but allowed multiple selections from convergent lists only where alternatives having the same degree of preference were combined with each other (e.g. “most preferred”). This decision goes further and indicates that multiple selections can be made based on combinations of both more and less preferred convergent alternatives.
After having to be postponed due to coronavirus concerns, the 2020 PTAB Bar Association Annual Conference has now been rescheduled and is going forward on September 24-25, 2020, with pre-conference sessions being held September 23, 2020. This year’s conference will not be attended in person, but it will be held virtually, making it available to all participants world-wide and may draw a wider audience than in previous years. Regardless of the format, this year’s conference promises to be just as interesting, informative and insightful as previous years.
ByteDance currently owns around 3,300 published patent applications (not including design registrations) in China. Roughly one tenth of those have become granted patents. Nearly half of the patent applications relate to electric digital data processing, including primarily deep learning algorithms and traditional image processing algorithms. According to information ByteDance’s AI lab, the AI algorithms are essential for numerous TikTok features (e.g., video/face detection, keyword matching, aggregated recommendations, the assignment of certain videos for each user) and various real-time special effects developed based on the human face (e.g., cat face stickers, rain control, body slimming, leg stretching, finger bubbles, dancing machine, scene classification, beauty makeup). There are also AI algorithms that operate at a deeper level engaged in video and image reviewing, semantic analysis, machine translation, and further AI creation.
Data are primarily required to support the requirements of sufficiency (Article 83 EPC) and inventive step (Article 56 EPC). In recent years, the EPO has applied the concept of “plausibility” when assessing both sufficiency and inventive step. The concept of plausibility has arisen from case law as a response to overly broad claims and to prevent speculative claiming. This is particularly relevant when the invention relates to a new therapeutic effect: is it plausible from the as-filed application that the therapeutic effect can be achieved?
As established in our earlier article, the absence of any grace period provisions at the EPO means that applications must normally be filed before any clinical trial data is available, since clinical trial protocols are publicly available. Filing with no data at all is highly likely to result in lack of sufficiency and lack of inventive step objections. So, how are applicants to know how much data to include on filing?
A simple rule of thumb is that the amount of data generally required is inversely proportional to the maturity and predictability of the technical field. It is also important to keep in mind the breadth of the desired claims, as broader claims will (usually) require more data to show an inventive step across their scope. In general, however, it is usually acceptable for applications to be filed with “proof of concept” style data to meet the (relatively low) sufficiency threshold and to establish that the technical effect is plausible. Additional data can then be filed during prosecution if there is a concern that the data are not adequate to show an inventive step across the scope of the claim.
In early May, the German Federal Court of Justice (the country’s supreme court) handed down its decsion in Sisvel v Haier, the first FRAND-related case it had heard since the Court of Justice of the European Union’s landmark 2015 Huawei v ZTE judgment. Although it found in favour of Sisvel, so overturning a ruling made by the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court, it did not release its reasons for doing so. Now, though, it has given the two parties its full judgment.
IAM will provide more analysis of the case over the coming weeks, but in the meantime Sisvel has given us permision to reproduce a press release the firm put out yesterday that summarises the ruling. Note that this has been edited into IAM house style.
In a watershed decision with significant implications for the technology and telecommunications industries – and the patent community more broadly – the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom has delivered its long-awaited decision in three cases, Unwired Planet International Ltd v Huawei Technologies (UK) Co Ltd; Huawei Technologies (UK) Co Ltd v Conversant Wireless Licensing SÃâ¬RL and ZTE Corporation v Conversant Wireless Licensing SÃâ¬RL. The Court has unanimously upheld lower court decisions, confirming that English courts are able to grant injunctions to restrain infringement of UK standard essential patents (SEP) and have the jurisdiction to determine fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms for worldwide SEP licences.
RPX has released its annual Patent Marketplace and Litigation Report. It indicates that the pendulum is beginning to swing back to favour plaintiffs in the US. The report tracks the significant changes in the US patent system over the past year, and also touches upon developments and trends in China. We have created an infographic to present the key takeaways.
CardieX's (CDX) subsidiary, ATCOR, has been granted a new patent by the European Patent Office (EPO) for its SphygmoCor technology.
The SphygmoCor technology enables non-invasive measurement of artery stiffness through central arterial pressure waveform and blood pressure analysis.
Wednesday, September 16 marked the end of the covered business method patent review programme, which was introduced by the America Invents Act in the US.
The AIA says a CBM patent “claims a method or corresponding apparatus for performing data processing or other operations used in the practice, administration, or management of a financial product or service”. The term does not include patents for technological inventions.
The programme was put in place to review CBM patents and allow petitioners to challenge patents on broader grounds than they could at inter partes review (IPR) trials.
Use of the programme has become less common in recent years. Statistics from the USPTO found that although 1,145 IPRs were filed in FY2020, just 11 CBM review petitions were filed in the same timeframe.
With Brexit looming, UK food and spirit producers say losing geographical indication protection is less of a threat than increased tariffs into the EU
Amongst the many films that have been released on the web so far, some big releases starring stalwarts like Irfan Khan in ‘Angrezi Medium’ (which was his last ever!) and Amitabh Bachchan in Gulabo Sitabo, are a few notable ones. If not for this pandemic, these movies would have been block buster releases, creating a stir in cinema halls. But unfortunately, nothing of this sort happened and the producers were compelled to directly release the films (or re-release as in case of Angrezi Medium after its theatrical release was cut short) on streaming services such as Hotstar and Amazon Prime Video. Clearly, the cinema hall owners lost a big share of their yearly profits, but what is unknown is how much the producers lost by not being able to showcase their multi-starrers in a cinema hall.
In contrast with blockbuster theatrical releases, web series or films that are destined to be released on streaming services often have a small star cast with small set ups which makes the same cost efficient. This is quite unlikely for a regular, blockbuster Indian cinematograph film that has elaborate sets and a distinguished star cast to begin with and which under normal practice, is looking forward to a grand theatrical release. Consequently, the cost of producing such films is typically much higher (often, if not always) than the web series made solely for release on online platforms. Profits that producers earn in such cases is often directly related to how well the movies perform in the hall and for how long. In other words, box office earnings account for a significant portion of a producer’s earnings from a film. Having done well at the cinema halls, the producers get a second chance to recover their investments when the rights for the same cinematograph film are granted for television/digital premieres. Here again, the popularity of the film at the theatre allows them to bid high stakes for it. So, when producers of such blockbuster films are compelled to directly release such films on streaming services, they stand to lose parts of their profit that they would have otherwise earned by releasing it first in a cinema hall. A glimpse of the losses incurred by them can be viewed here. The streaming services are also aware that the producers presently have no better option than to release their films online, so they might not negotiate much with the latter. Keeping in mind the flagrant spread of the pandemic and the predictions with regard to its subsistence, it seems like the producers will have to bear with these losses for long.
“Amazon is not synonymous with high fashion yet, but the company may be poised to lead the way when it comes to replacing designers with artificial intelligence (“AI”) algorithms,” Will Knight wrote for MIT Technology Review in 2017. Fast forward to 2020, and Amazon still is not rivaling the likes Prada and Chanel, but in furtherance of its “characteristically algorithmic approach” to retail and given its well-established ambitions to dominate virtually all aspects of the consumer goods market, including fashion, it is working on machine learning-driven endeavors, such as “an algorithm that learns about a particular style of fashion from existing imagery” and uses that information to generate new items in similar styles.
Knight noted that back in 2017 that Amazon’s fashion design-specific AI initiative – a program that creates garment designs (by way of a tool called generative adversarial network) that can then be physically manufactured by humans – was still in early stages at the company’s Sunnyvale, California-based research and development hub, Amazon Lab126. In other words, the technology was hardly ready to turn out fashion designs that the $1 trillion e-commerce titan could add to its sweeping marketplace site, but assuming that the it does, in fact, get to that point (and even if it does not), the technology – and other initiatives in much the same vein – raises some interesting questions, a couple of which center on creation and ownership, namely: who actually created these designs, and thus, who maintains legal rights in them?
Affectionate readers of this blog will already be familiar with the Italian rules on the reproduction of cultural heritage as well as with two 2017 Court decisions that dealt with unauthorized reproductions of, respectively, the Teatro Massimo of Palermo and the David by Michelangelo (see here) (for an earlier dispute over a controversial picture of the David “bearing arms”, see here).
Among the many Italian public entities having the right to authorise the reproduction of their cultural heritage assets, those having rights on the David by Michelangelo in particular seem to be the most aware of their prerogatives, as in early 2019 the Court of Florence was called to rule on yet another case involving this Renaissance masterpiece (the full decision is available here).
The facts of the case are rather simple: Brioni, a prestigious Italian menswear couture brand, launched an advertising campaign (consisting of a video and some pictures) centred on a full-scale marble replica of the David by Michelangelo wearing a tailor made suit from Brioni’s couturiers.
When officers from Hungary's National Tax and Customs Administration raided a pirate IPTV provider they were unsurprised to discover large amounts of satellite and computer equipment for capturing and distributing live TV . However, what they also found was hundreds of pounds of food that had been stockpiled by the operator, who hadn't been outside for months due to fears of catching the coronavirus.
YouTube-rippers FLVTO.biz and 2conv.com will petition the US Supreme Court to take on its legal battle with several major record labels. While the case is ultimately about alleged copyright infringements, both parties disagree on whether US Courts have jurisdiction over the sites and its owner, a matter which the Supreme Court may provide more clarity on.
