ArchBang is one of the original easy-to-install Arch-based distributions. For a decade, the default window manager has been Openbox. The latest release of ArchBang marks a change though. Now, i3 is the default window manager.
Mint finally sorts out the Chromium mess, what distro we should be recommending to new users, a new Raspberry Pi, the problem with Let’s Encrypt’s success, and a packed KDE Korner.
Valve’s Pressure Vessel Source Code Available https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2020/10/valve-put-their-pressure-vessel-container-source-for-linux-games-up-on-gitlab Looking to Abandon the X Server https://ajaxnwnk.blogspot.com/2020/10/on-abandoning-x-server.html Linux Mint Now Maintains Their Own Chromium https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3978 Freespire 7.0 Out https://www.freespire.net/2020/10/freespire-70-released.html Linux Lite 5.2 Out https://www.linuxliteos.com/forums/release-announcements/linux-lite-5-2-final-released/
Ubuntu 21.04 Release Date Set https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/hirsute-hippo-release-schedule/18539 https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-devel/2020-October/041248.html
KDE Plasma 5.20.2 Out https://kde.org/announcements/plasma-5.20.2/
Nvidia Short Lived Driver 455.38 Out https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/166177/en-us
I already showed impressive live benchmarks for AMD 5600X... Well, things just got better on Linux!
RSS Guard feed reader 3.8.0 was released today. The new release adds supporting for labels and basic CLI interface.
RSS Guard is simple, light and easy-to-use RSS/ATOM feed aggregator based on Qt. It support online feed synchronization with:
Tiny Tiny RSS, Inoreader, Nextcloud News, Gmail API.
RSS Guard is a simple (yet powerful) feed reader. It is able to fetch the most known feed formats, including RSS/RDF and ATOM. It's free, it's open-source. RSS Guard currently supports Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian. RSS Guard will never depend on other services - this includes online news aggregators like Feedly, The Old Reader and others.
Since ancient times, books have been man’s best friend, playing the role of guiders and philosophers. Books have always been there to inspire humans and help them broaden their horizons and open new avenues. As Neil Gaiman says, “a book is a dream that you hold in your hands.” However, in recent times, with the advancement shown in technology, printed books have seen a decline in its popularity as with the emergence of eBooks, electronic versions of printed books, this has totally brought about a huge change in the publishing industry and has made the electronic copies a much more sought-after and in-demand format. From among the dozens of eBook readers available, Adobe Reader has mostly been the get-go for Windows users due to its excellent features and support for several PDF manipulation functions.
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Another great alternative that can be found on Linux is Evince, a free and open-source document reader developed by FOSS and is available for all major platforms such as Windows, Linux, and so on. Evince is actually the default document viewer for GNOME-based desktop environments, the most notable ones being Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian. One of the most noteworthy features that come along with Evince is its ability to display dual pages simultaneously along with having support for displaying files in full screens and slide shows. It even allows users to switch the page view as in right to left or vice versa.
The virt-manager application or package uses the libvirt library to provide virtual machine management services. It comes with a desktop interface that helps to create, delete, and manage multiple virtual machines.
Upgrading your skills in 2020 has never been important. If you are someone who loves Linux and wants to certify, then you have come to the right place as we go through the five best Linux certifications that you should not miss in 2020. The IT industry revolves heavily around the Linux operating system. And that’s why you will find that there is a constant demand for Linux experts.
In this guide we're going to take a look at how we can use cheap and "low end" hardware to build an amazing OpenBSD router with firewalling capabilities, segmented local area networks, DNS with domain blocking, DHCP and more.
We will use a setup in which the router segments the local area network (LAN) into three separate networks, one for the grown-ups in the house, one for the children, and one for public facing servers, such as a private web server or mail server. We will also look at how we can use DNS to block out ads, porn, and other websites on the Internet. The OpenBSD router can also be used on small to mid-size offices.
I’ve found this software when I searched for an open-source SSH proxy solution that can be easily deployed in a containerized environment. If you know me, you know that I like to run almost everything containerized. Teleport is such an open-source software made by Gravitational that exists in a completely free community edition. It is rich-featured and supports two-factor authentication, access control, monitoring, auditing, and a web client for all your SSH connections. It can suit your home lab but it’s also targeted for enterprise environments. Companies that usually need to integrate existing external authentication methods and single-sign-on can also purchase an enterprise license.
It uses common industry standards for protocols and CA-pinning which is a good idea to secure access to all your SSH servers. But one of the best features for me is the ability to create a reverse tunnel for SSH servers that are behind a NAT firewall or behind a shared IPv4 tunnel. Because my ISP doesn’t provide me a real IPv4 address, this is very useful to me. It’s also a good way to connect to IoT devices that are often behind a NAT device.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install GlassFish on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, GlassFish is a popular app server that can run java based web applications for you. GlassFish 5 release supports the latest Java Platform: Enterprise Edition 8. It supports Enterprise JavaBeans, JPA, JavaServer Faces, JMS, RMI, JavaServer Pages, servlets, etc.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of GlassFish on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Plex Media Server on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Plex Media Server is a great multimedia tool that will turn your Linux Mint into a features multimedia server. With Plex, you can stream your music or movies from any device at home.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of Plex Media Server on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
This tutorial shows you how to set up SMTP relay between 2 Postfix SMTP servers on CentOS/RHEL, so your website can send email via your mail server.
CI/CD (Continuous Integration/ Continuous Deployment) is a core concept of the DevOps world. It helps us to automate the software development processes: building, testing and deploying the source codes.
Among many CI/CD tools, Jenkins is one of the most well-known open-source tool that help setting up the pipelines for continuous integration and continuous deployment.
This tutorial will show you the way to install Jenkins on a Kubernetes cluster.
Joplin is an open-source Note-taking and To-Do application, which comes in two flavors: Desktop application and Terminal application. In this article, we will only take a look at the Desktop version. Joplin is available on Windows, Linux, and macOS. It is also available on mobile platforms like android and IOS. Since it is free to use, Joplin is a good alternative for applications like Evernote.
It is also possible to export notes from Evernote (.enex) and import it in Joplin. Joplin notes are in Markdown format and follow Github style with few variations and additions. Joplin supports cloud synchronization with various cloud services like DropBox, NextCloud, WebDav, OneDrive, or network file system.
The apt-add-repository command is a symlink of the add-apt-repository command. Which is used to add third party PPA to our Ubuntu or Debian systems.
This command comes under software-properties-common debian package. Which is not available under the minimal Ubuntu installation, but this package can be installed from default system repositories.
If you found apt-add-repository command not found error on your system, Follow this article to add this command to your system.
In this guide, you will learn how to install and setup Python 3.9 in Ubuntu, Debian or any of their derivatives.
Python is one of the most popular general purpose programming language out there. It supports multiple programming paradigms including structured, object-oriented, and functional.
Recently, Python 3.9 is released, introducing many updates. So let’s see how to install it on Ubuntu, Debian or any of their derivatives.
A public IP address is assigned to each server when it is connected to the Internet. This address can be assigned directly to a router that is used to send signals or traffic to the server.
This article shows how the IP address and geographical location of the remote Linux system can be determined using open APIs and how a bash script can be executed through the terminal.
Something for game developers, and anyone wanting to plan things using a slick app: enter MasterPlan.
Created by SolarLune Games, an indie developer who previously released the non-linear action-platforming exploration game Gearend back in 2017. Quite a nice game actually, do check it out if you missed it.
MasterPlan is not a game though, instead SolarLune are creating an application that is both an idea board and project manager. Giving you a completely freeform grid, you can create all sorts with it including todo lists, timers, put up gifs, lists and whatever you can think of. The developer mentions you can "use MasterPlan your way, whether as a moodboard for art, or as a productivity planner for your next big video game".
Miss the classic arcade first-person shooters? I know I certainly do (although without bleeding money into machines) and Affliction Rescue has a really great feel that you should check out.
In this retro-arcade FPS you get a tip off regarding illegal experiments leads to investigation of the Emeraldo Corporation's research sites. You are 'Agent Red' and your task is to gather intelligence, rescue survivors and survive the various monstrosities spreading through the island complex.
What Affliction Rescue gives is a very old-school feel not unlike that of a classic arcade machine experience, and other early blocky-looking first-person shooters. It's pretty damn good too, bringing things back to the basics of managing your ammo and hunting for secrets.
As someone who grew up with early Sega consoles, the Sonic games were part of my first gaming experiences and you can relive some of it with Sonic 3 A.I.R. It's a fan-made remaster, built to bring Sonic 3 & Knuckles into the widescreen era on modern platforms.
With the latest preview release, the developer announced that they're now providing Linux builds.
While art of rally showed off how strikingly beautiful a top-down racer could be, the earlier Bloody Rally Show showed the opposite with how brutal it can be. Both great racing games suited for different audiences and Bloody Rally Show continues seeing major updates.
For racers who love competing against others online, the Daily Challenge mode has seen a massive improvement. Each day will now see a newly generated randomised track along with its own leaderboard, and the cars used are faster - making each day have something fun and tough to try out. You will also see the timer for it in the main menu.
Supfly Delivery Simulator is a name that doesn't leave much to the imagination, set in a world where humanity is ruled by delivery service it's your time to shine.
Released back in October from Koro.Games, Blacer Studio and Source Byte. While the idea and presentation is simple, the gameplay is anything but. It's quite a challenging game actually, surprisingly so, as it needs you to really be careful with your flying. The packages are fragile and will spill out everywhere if you screw up, and you have to constantly keep an eye on your battery level to ensure you've got enough charge.
Two pieces of Valve news to cover this Tuesday morning including new updates to Steam Play Proton and an upcoming Vulkan extension to help deal with other APIs and porting.
Firstly, the Proton update. 5.13-2 RC has been announced which needs more testing, since the Proton 5.13 release was quite a big one and it's not quite ready yet as they deal with some known issues.
Valve's open-source developers responsible for DXVK and VKD3D-Proton are working on a new Vulkan extension to help in their porting/layering effort of Direct3D on top of the Vulkan API.
Not yet merged into the Vulkan repository but a short-lived public pull request on Monday as a seemingly accidental PR then quickly closed is the VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor extension. VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor aims to reduce the descriptor memory footprint and with its new mechanisms aims to make for "more efficient emulation of the binding model present in other graphics APIs for layering or porting purposes."
VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type is through its third iteration so far and led by Valve's Joshua Ashton and Hans-Kristian Arntzen.
Golf With Your Friends brings me back big time to the late 80s. You see, the idea of having a miniature golf game is not new, far from it. Back in my early days I spent a lot of time on the infamous Zany Golf. And Golf With Your Friends is basically a modern version of Zany Golf in 3D with the bells and whistles that come with modern technologies.
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When you do an 18 holes course, there’s a single soundtrack based on the theme playing in the background. Thankfully they are relatively pleasant and unobtrusive, yet not very remarkable.
Golf With Your Friends comes with a very complete level editor that you can use to create your own 18 hole courses. It allows for a lot of flexibility and very precise positionning of different elements. On Steam, this also means the game benefits from the community workshop: you can find dozens of user-created maps to download in order to expand on the base content. This is exactly the right approach to make the game last forever, as long as people keep playing and making stuff for it.
On Linux, GWYF has a native client so there’s no need to mess up with anything to get it running. However, using Proton does make sense if you actually care about… performance. On my GTX1060 machine with the native client I get 30 FPS in High settings while there’s nothing remotely impressive going on. This begged the question… can Proton do better? and the answer is a resounding YES. On the very same machine, with the Windows version running on Proton, I can go up to Ultra settings and stay at 60 FPS like it’s nothing. I’m sorry to say, but with this kind of performance it’s going to be hard to give native clients a good reputation.
Developed by Arjen Hiemstra during the past two years using Kirigami UI Framework and Plasma's KSystemStats system statistics service, the new Plasma System Monitor app is here as a drop-in replacement for the KSysGuard utility that currently ships by default with the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
The Plasma System Monitor app promises not only a fancier and modern user interface, but also a simpler way for monitoring system resources on your KDE Plasma-based GNU/Linux distribution, along with more powerful customization options and cool new features.
We have released Qt 5.12.10 today.
Qt 5.12.10 provides fixes to over 30 bugs compared to Qt 5.12.9 release. Please check details about the release from Qt 5.12. Change Files.
Qt 5.12.10 can be updated to existing online installation by using the maintenance tool. Note that we have recently released new version of the installer, so unless you already have updated to it, you need to run the installer update first.
Who do you think should be a Qt Champion? Nominate the champions you know right now!
It is that time of year again as we are in November and therefore time to look back at 2020, at least the Qt related part about it, and think about who helped you out most during the past year.
In case you have forgotten, Qt Champions are the people in the community who go above and beyond the normal activity in the community, and contribute in some form every time. They are the stars that make you feel at home.
KDAB has been working closely together with unu to create the dashboard application for their next-generation of electric scooters. You can find out about these affordable, innovative, urban transport solutions and book a test ride here.
unu is now launching the scooters. So in this blog post, we will have a look at some of the internals of the dashboard application to see what is going on behind the scenes while driving. We will see how the data travels from the physical scooter hardware up to the UI layer of the dashboard application, by using Qt’s meta-object functionality on parts of the journey.
While Qt solves many of the typical tasks of writing an application, there are always corner cases that Qt can not cover, or where it makes more sense to build a feature on top of the platform specific APIs, or another toolkit. One of the tasks we wanted to address for Qt 6 was to clean up and coordinate the various mechanisms we had for accessing platform-specific functionality.
We'll now go through the result of this work in Qt 6. The full documentation is available in the documentation snapshots, as part of the new Platform Integration section.
For those on the Qt 5.12 LTS series the Qt 5.12.10 point release is out today with 30 new bug fixes. But for those looking ahead to Qt 6 also out today is Qt 6.0 Beta 4.
Qt 5.12.10 details can be found on Qt.io. Among the changes for this latest point release are various error fixes, a possible heap corruption scenario, an issue with GIFs not playing in some Qt applications, inconsistent XPM handling, and other problems.
Fedora 33 just came out, and I installed it right away. Among the many features in this new version of the Linux distribution is the latest GNOME desktop. GNOME 3.38 was released in September 2020, and I'm loving it.
The GNOME 3.38 release notes list some great new features in this update. Among other things, the Welcome Tour for new users received a major facelift and is now much easier to use and provides more useful information if you're new to GNOME.
The November 2020’s ISO snapshot of Feren OS is here and it’s the first to be based on Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series. This means that it includes all the latest software and security updates that you’ll also find in the upstream release, and it’s using the long-term supported Linux 5.4 kernel.
First, the good news as Feren OS’s November 2020 release completely redesigns the default theme/style to make Feren OS look more professional. These include a new dark look, two new pre-defined accent colors, namely Purple and Banana, new wallpapers, new maximize icon, Adwaita-based GTK2 and GTK3 themes, custom Qt5 application style based on Adwaita-Qt, as well as a new default font called Inter
The Endless team has released a new stable version 3.9.0 of its Linux-based Endless OS with tons of new features, improvements, and core component updates.
Starting with the core elements, version 3.9.0 features Linux kernel 5.8, which brings support for the latest hardware, file system, GPU drivers, and security.
Based on the Debian Sid repository as of November 2nd, 2020, Clonezilla Live 2.7.0-10 is the first release of this live system for disk cloning/imaging and partitioning tasks to ship with the latest Linux 5.9 kernel series by default. Linux kernel 5.9.1 is included in this release, which usually translates in Clonezilla Live being able to run on more, newer hardware.
Major enhancements include new tools like blktool, gpart, safecopy, scsitools, and uuid-runtime, new options like --no-restore-mbr, --restore-raw-mbr, and --no-restore-ebr, support for loop devices, the implementation of a --rsyncable parameter for Zstd (ZStandard) saving, Zstd support for network cloning to compress the data, support for ocs-live-dev to create recovery zip files larger than 2 GB in size, and support for the Korean language.
On Saturday November 7th I remote participated in OpenFest 2020 with an updated version of the OpenBSD and you talk.
Recordings will be released after the conference, but I was happy enough with my dry run or backup recording that I'm making that available too, along with the slides to follow along. I hope this will be useful in your advocacy or education on OpenBSD and why the project matters.
we are pleased to announce that Gabor Kum, founder of HelloTux, has just added a clothing line with the OpenMandriva logo. Each item sold brings 3€50 to our Association, so it is an alternative way to support us :)
Hellotux, is a Hungarian family business designing embroidered garments with the image of free software, which exists since 2003 and has always been faithful to the spirit of free software. Here you can find more information about the company.
The openSUSE release team has established a survey to gain greater insights into the use cases of people using or developing for ARMv6, ARMv7 and ARMv8.
The introduction to the survey explains that ARMv7 architecture is currently being challenged by the new Jump development model of openSUSE Leap.
The Jump process looks to use pre-built binaries from the corresponding SUSE Linux Enterprise release.
“Previously openSUSE Leap was sharing the distribution package sources with SUSE Linux Enterprise, but built them separately,” according to the introduction of the survey. “As SLE stopped supporting 32-bit distributions many years ago, we have the option of continuing to rebuild the packages for openSUSE Leap on those architectures from sources, or to stop supporting those.
Ansible documentation is changing fast to keep up with changes in the project. In this post, we’ll describe some of the biggest changes to the Ansible community docs, cover some ways you can help maintain and improve the docs, and look ahead at what we hope to accomplish over the next six to twelve months.
Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, like other Red Hat products, adopts upstream innovations once they are ready for long-term support. The changes discussed in this post affect the latest upstream release, Ansible 2.10. The work we’re doing upstream, while not immediately included in Ansible Automation Platform, ultimately helps us improve the products to customers. We also have new downstream documentation for Automation Hub and Automation Services Catalog coming out with the upcoming release of the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform 1.2.
Red Hat Renewals Intelligence is a digital platform that places renewals data and insights directly in the hands of distributors and resellers. As part of Red Hat’s Partner Renewals Engagement Program (PREP), the Renewals Intelligence platform provides partners with daily-updated data on renewal performance and exclusive Red Hat sales insights.
Featuring a suite of interactive dashboards, the Renewals Intelligence platform allows channel partners to gain a more complete picture of their Red Hat renewals business. This is especially useful for account managers, sales and marketing teams at distributor, reseller and solution provider companies. With Renewals Intelligence, we are equipping partners with actionable insights that can help contribute to revenue growth, improved customer experience and new business opportunities.
In Summer 2019 Red Hat were invited to the Turing Institute to provide a workshop on issues around building and sustaining an Open Source community. I was part of a group of about 6 people to visit the Turing and deliver the workshop. It seemed to have been well received by the audience.
The Turing Institute is based within the British Library. For many years I have enjoyed visiting the British Library if I was visiting or passing through London for some reason or other: it's such a lovely serene space in a busy, hectic part of London. On one occasion they had Jack Kerouac's manuscript for "On The Road" on display in one of the public gallery spaces: it's a continuous 120-foot long piece of paper that Kerouac assembled to prevent the interruption of changing sheets of paper in his typewriter from disturbing his flow whilst writing.
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I'm hoping to stay involve in further collaborations between the Turing and Red Hat. I'm pleased to say that we participated in a recent Tools, practices and systems seminar (although I was not involved).
One of the most common questions I get as a consultant is, “What is the difference between a liveness and a readiness probe?” The next most frequent question is, “Which one does my application need?”
Anyone who has tried Duck Duck Go-ing these questions knows that they are difficult to answer using an internet search. In this article, I hope to help you answer these questions for yourself. I will share my opinion about the best way to use liveness and readiness probes in applications deployed to Red Hat OpenShift. I’m not offering a hard prescription but rather a general framework that you can use to make your own architectural decisions. Each application is different, and these differences might require adapting the “rules” you learn here.
To help make the abstract more concrete, I offer four generic example applications. For each one, we’ll explore whether and how to configure liveness and readiness probes. Before we dive into the examples, let’s look more closely at the two different probe types.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 656 for the week of November 1 – 7, 2020.
Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, today announced that its Charmed OpenStack, an open source private cloud solution that allows businesses to control large pools of computer, storage and networking in a datacentre, has been selected by Telekom Networks Malawi Plc (TNM), to modernise and virtualise its entire telecommunications infrastructure. TNM is Malawi’s leading telecoms provider and aims to create faster time to market across its product range through the move.
TNM has been a pioneer of mobile and data solutions in Malawi, having been the first mobile operator to launch 4G broadband services, while its network is the fastest in the country, covering all cities and major towns. Charmed Openstack will enable TNM to separate network hardware and software, turning legacy components into software based network services. This means they can be updated quicker with continuous integration and development, while ensuring the network is robust and scalable.
The move towards Charmed OpenStack has been driven by TNM’s existing use and advocacy of open source software. The deployment, including two private clouds, will happen immediately and give TNM access to virtual network functions (VNFs), which will open up access to a wide range of network services to build on top of the initial deployment.
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TNM’s cloud will be built on Canonical’s Charmed OpenStack, and utilise Canonical’s open source tools to automate the deployment and operations of their infrastructure. TNM has adopted Juju – Operator Lifecycle Manager to manage and operate a set of software applications for a model-driven architecture to onboard virtual network functions (VNFs) applications, while MAAS is used as the cloud-provisioning tool. The company will also benefit from Canonical’s Managed OpenStack offering for the ongoing maintenance and support of operations.
7SIGNAL€®, the leader in enterprise wireless experience monitoring, today announced the general availability of Mobile Eye€® for Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu and their respective derivatives. The new release provides complete visibility into the end user experience on a variety of Linux clients including internet of things (IoT) devices throughout a number of industries including medical, retail and manufacturing.
Librem 14 will begin shipping in December with all backorders shipped in January and reaching shipping parity in February.
While our plan was to be able to start shipping devices early Q4, which would be about now, a couple of recent industry-wide developments caused a few delays. We are at least as disappointed as you are, but on the other hand we also do not want to rush some half-baked solution forward but instead want to stay focused on what we planned—making the ideal laptop—because we are convinced that this is what we all want.
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Another issue which showcases the challenges of producing complex custom hardware during a pandemic we learned one of our suppliers of specific metal parts went out of business. We were able to secure all parts needed, so luckily this is not a problem, it just added some time delay, and negotiating a new supply chain for those parts.
Now that we are back on track, with a month or so delay, we expect to produce a second round of EVT samples within about two to three weeks which may double as PVT (production validation testing) and if this is the case, which we expect, we will very quickly kick off mass production. The current conservative estimate is that we will produce product by mid of December.
Raspberry PI GPIO ports are a really useful resource and allow PI to interface real world with a wide number of external sensors. However, some projects requires so many connections with many sensors/devices that the rich 40-PIN GPIO can become limited. In these cases you can get help from a simple and cheap electronic piece: the Shift Register or Serial to Parallel Converter.
In this tutorial I’m going to show you how to use the 74hc595 chip with a Raspberry PI and python, in an easy configuration which drives 8 LEDs.
I’m going to use a Raspberry PI Zero W, but this procedure works also with other Raspberry PI boards.
Ground penetrating radar systems, which can be used to sense the density of objects under the Earth, are normally seen as a fairly exotic piece of equipment. Naturally, such devices cost thousands of dollars. Mirel Paun’s “GPRino” prototype, though, aims to accomplish this viewing task for the comparatively paltry sum of $300.
The GPRino uses antipodal Vivaldi antennas to see into the ground, under control of an Arduino Mega. Onboard visualization is handled by an LCD shield, and collected data can also be transmitted to a PC for further analysis.
When creator mattb_138’s parents were cleaning out their house, he came across an old cassette player and decided to upgrade it with MP3 capabilities and an RFID interface.
The newly-enhanced device uses an Arduino Nano for control, along with a DFPlayer Mini module to play songs stored on a microSD card. An RC522 reader enables him to select tracks based on RFID cards, printed with their appropriate album art.
$99 3D printers are announced nearly every year with varying quality, and Selpic, which made the Selpic S1+ handheld 2D printer, joined the fray with Selpic Star-A multi-function 3D printer that was offered as for as little as $99 as an early bird reward on Kickstarter.
The 3D printer is still up on Kickstarter with pledges starting at $129 and support for laser engraving for $39 extra, meaning it offers many of the same features as SC-10 SHARK multi-function 3D printer but at a lower price point, a much smaller form factor also meaning a smaller build volume, and slower printing speeds.
Find the always connected smartphones too distracting and privacy invasive? Let’s go back to the pre-2010 era and enjoy the simplicity of feature phones but with a modern design with MuditaOS.
There are a few open source mobile operating systems existing already. Let me add one more to this list.
Unlike most other mobile operating systems, MuditaOS is not interested in serving smartphones. Let’s have a look at it.
Our Android devices are amazing tools that can help us do many things. From communicating with video calls to writing documents and searching the Internet, these devices are powerful. One feature we may not have considered, however, is the ability to protect us. Android has a few personal safety features built in that can help us in the case of an emergency. Here is how you can set up your Android phone for an emergency.
"Software Freedom in Europe" is the yearly report of the Free Software Foundation Europe e.V. (FSFE). In one document, it gives you a breakdown of important things the FSFE has done and achieved during the last 12 months.
No report about the status of software freedom and the FSFE in 2020 can possibly be written without mentioning the impact the global spread of COVID-19 had on our organisation and the global process of digitisation. Software Freedom in Europe gives you a quick overview of the challenges our community had to overcome and the successes we have achieved. The report will further concentrate on the FSFE's different areas of activities, our long-term goals, and our achievements in the last twelve months.
To help you navigating through the report, we have grouped its content along the three pillars of our activities: Policy Advocacy, Legal Support, and Public Awareness. We finish the report with insights into our activities, numbers from our merchandise and information materials, an introduction to our team members and our community, and an outlook into the next 12 months.
My maybe most impactful piece of code is tttool and the surrounding project, which allows you to create your own content for the Ravensburger Tiptoiâ⢠platform. The program itself is a command line tool, and in this blog post I want to show how I go about building that program for Linux (both normal and static builds), Windows (cross-compiled from Linux), OSX (only on CI), all combined into and released as a single zip file.
Maybe some of it is useful or inspiring to my readers, or can even serve as a template. This being a blob post, though, note that it may become obsolete or outdated.
Announced by Arm back in September was the Neoverse V1 "Zeus" platform with 50%+ performance uplift over the Neoverse N1. Neoverse V1 also supports Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) and other features in catering the platform for machine learning, cloud, HPC, and similar use-cases.
Quite quickly after that GNU toolchain support began appearing while now the LLVM Clang compiler support has their Neoverse V1 target merged thanks to the punctual work of Arm engineers.
Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax created by John Gruber in 2004. It’s designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write.
Readability is at the very heart of Markdown. It offers the advantages of plain text, provides a convenient format for writing for the web, but it’s not intended to be a replacement for HTML. Markdown is a writing format, not a publishing format. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters included, such as # or *.
Markdown has a much more basic syntax than HTML, leaving aside things like opening and closing tags, and instead uses punctuation and characters that all users will already use in daily writing. The punctuation characters have been carefully chosen to resemble what they mean. The intention is to ensure that the syntax does not stop the flow of writing, allowing the author to focus on content, rather than how it looks. In this way, Markdown shares a common bond with LaTeX, a document preparation system for high quality typesetting, which also encourages authors not to focus too much on the appearance, but to concentrate on the right content.
Like any well-entrenched programming language, Perl has a rich history and a number of personalities who shape and lead its community. In addition to wanting to learn its syntax and how to write simple scripts with it, I'm also trying to learn more about that history and the people who influence it today. I do this by following some blogs (which perhaps I'll write about later) and reading online books and articles but the best way for me is to listen to relevant podcasts. I'm an avid podcast listener and love learning about new concepts or technologies while walking the dog, doing the dishes, or pre-pandemic, sitting in traffic.
In almost a weekly event, Jonathan Worthington has just announced the 0.8.4 release of Cro, the Raku Programming Language’s set of libraries for building reactive distributed systems. What yours truly actually finds amazing, is that apart from the people of Edument, this release has contributions by 9 Raku community members, indicating a growing user base.
One of the most basic analysis functions is grouping and aggregating data. In some cases, this level of analysis may be sufficient to answer business questions. In other instances, this activity might be the first step in a more complex data science analysis. In pandas, the groupby function can be combined with one or more aggregation functions to quickly and easily summarize data. This concept is deceptively simple and most new pandas users will understand this concept. However, they might be surprised at how useful complex aggregation functions can be for supporting sophisticated analysis.
This article will quickly summarize the basic pandas aggregation functions and show examples of more complex custom aggregations. Whether you are a new or more experienced pandas user, I think you will learn a few things from this article.
Surrounded by a cloud of nutmeg and cinnamon fragrances, the sorceress puts the final touch to her creation: a potent potion of Pythonism, which promises immunity against perverted classes hierarchies and neverending compilations. Join us on November 30 at 6pm for Montréal-Python 81 – Ochre Libation – so that you too can benefit from the antidote.
A Command-line interface (CLI) is a way to interact with computers using textual commands.
A lot of tools that don't require GUIs are written as CLI tools/utilities. Although Python has the built-in argparse module, other libraries with similar functionality do exist.
These libraries can help us in writing CLI scripts, providing services like parsing options and flags to much more advanced CLI functionality.
This article discusses the Python Fire library, written by Google Inc., a useful tool to create CLI with minimal code.
This week we welcome Mary Chester-Kadwell (@marycktech) as our PyDev of the Week! Mary is a software engineer at Cambridge University Library.
An interview with Mark Shannon about his work to help create a formal specification of CPython and how it will help other implementations of Python.
Sentiment analysis is a powerful tool that allows computers to understand the underlying subjective tone of a piece of writing. This is something that humans have difficulty with, and as you might imagine, it isn’t always so easy for computers, either. But with the right tools and Python, you can use sentiment analysis to better understand the sentiment of a piece of writing.
Why would you want to do that? There are a lot of uses for sentiment analysis, such as understanding how stock traders feel about a particular company by using social media data or aggregating reviews, which you’ll get to do by the end of this tutorial.
Talk Python to Me is a weekly podcast hosted by developer and entrepreneur Michael Kennedy. We dive deep into the popular packages and software developers, data scientists, and incredible hobbyists doing amazing things with Python. If you're new to Python, you'll quickly learn the ins and outs of the community by hearing from the leaders. And if you've been Pythoning for years, you'll learn about your favorite packages and the hot new ones coming out of open source.
Later on, while I was in residency at Cook County Hospital in Chicago and as I met Black patients who were angry about the state of their lives, Waitzkin’s formulations about the micropolitics of the medical encounter helped me understand that my role as a physician made it difficult for me to recommend political engagement as therapy. As I try to integrate my own clinical and political work through the praxis of social medicine, I am guided by Waitzkin’s narrative of the founding of social medicine (by Engels, Virchow, Allende) in The Second Sickness.
Broadening our purview from human health to planetary health, it is becoming increasingly clear that the survival of our species and life on earth is threatened by the climate catastrophe, nuclear war, and grotesque economic inequalities. During 2020, we have watched the U.S. health care system (in particular) and U.S. political economy (in general) collapse in the face of COVID-19. The capitalist way of doing things has become a rather embarrassing debacle. Clearly, we need to do things differently, and fast. That is to say, we need a revolution. I am heartened that a lot of young people think so.
Celia Paul cried throughout her first sessions modeling for Lucian Freud. “The experience of being naked disarmed me,” Paul writes in her new memoir, Self-Portrait. She describes sitting for him as a tortuous experience and the sense of his scrutiny as overpowering. “I felt like I was at the doctor’s or in hospital, or in the morgue.” At one point, he tells her that her breasts reminded him of eggs; then he boils one, slices it in half, and places it in a dish in front of her. She has to lie still while he paints it. 1
This is what Jane Mayer, one of the most prestigious American journalists, wrote in the latest issue of the New Yorker magazine (Gaming the Endgame). Her article serves to illuminate one of the most tragic and decisive moments of the presidency of Donald J. Trump. What happens between now, after the victory of Joe Biden, and the new president’s takeover on January 20, 2021, can have enormous consequences for the future of the United States and the world. No possibility can be ruled out.
Biden’s victory was much tighter than what Democrats expected, showing that, against many predictions, Trump ran an extremely effective election campaign. This was thanks not only to his charisma, but also to his enormous energy that allowed him to attend numerous campaign events in critical points of the country still convalescing from its infection with the coronavirus. Also important were not only to his personal ambition but also to his desperation knowing the consequences of his defeat. Those consequences could lead him, if not to jail, at least to years of persecution by justice.
Do you ever feel you can’t share the reality of what you know about the climate crisis? A new scientists’ oath could help.
Given how much I’ve been writing about COVID-19 science, pseudoscience, public health policy, and crankery, I feel as though I’ve been neglecting other issues relevant to science-based medicine. So this week, I’ll take a little break from the pandemic (don’t worry—I’m sure it’ll probably be back next week to look at another bit of COVID-19 grift), and revisit another form of grift, a particularly disturbing one. I’m referring to stem cell quackery. It’s a topic that I addressed initially on my not-so-secret other blog a couple of weeks ago, but that now has a major update, along with a paper, meaning that I can summarize what happened initially and, hopefully, update in a way to make a more complete story for this blog. It all started when I saw this Tweet about Duke University, stem cells, and autism:
Though President-elect Joe Biden ran as a centrist, many in the scientific community view Biden's victory as a potentially radical shift. That's not because of the politics of said scientists, but because Biden himself has promised to value science and the scientific community when it comes to shaping policy and doling out funding — unlike his predecessor.
The 2019 edition of the conference--which regularly attracts Hollywood's animation, visual effects and interactive media community--was held in Los Angeles and counted nearly 19,000 attendees. The 2020 conference was an entirely virtual event.
During the last 10 years I have written multiple articles documenting how Cuba has better medical practice and education than the US. To be honest, I have known for a long time that there is an area of medical training where medical students in the US get considerably more training than do those who study in Cuba.
This realization came to me when my daughter Rebecca was in her first year of medical school in Havana. When I phoned after she had been there for a few months, she said, “Dad, I am really glad that when I was a girl you gave me a needle and thread to sew up rips in my clothes. In clinic today, we saw someone with his head whacked open by a machete and a medical student was sewing it back together. It was clear that the guy trying to sew the wound did not have experience with a needle and thread and that the guy getting his head patched up could tell. With the sewing I’ve done, I know that I could handle a wound.”
"The public needs to know that the best way to prepare for this vaccine is to wear a mask."
"This is a race against time and we cannot allow the pursuit of profit to triumph over human need," said Heidi Chow of Global Justice Now.
Alani’s ad hoc registry was the beginning of a yearslong, unfinished quest to document and investigate the most controversial medical mystery of the Iraq War: an alleged increase in birth defects that, local doctors say, began after the United States invaded the country in 2003 and plagues the city to this day. At stake is the question of whether US military activities in Fallujah contributed to these congenital disorders—an explosive possibility that has transformed this local public health concern into an international political and scientific controversy. For years, the fierce debate over Fallujah has centered on questions about the use and impact of potentially toxic material in US weapons, particularly depleted uranium. The discussion has largely overlooked, however, broader and perhaps even more troubling questions about the long-term public health effects of urban warfare on civilian populations and the dangers of politicizing science and medicine in times of conflict.
Apple has been on somewhat of a rampage with their App Store late this year, between the Fortnite debacle and new obtuse rules. In a seemingly reversed stance, Apple went up against Linux and Unix shell-app developers, claiming that they violated App Store Review Guidelines.
Linux and Unix shells are essentially command-line interfaces, and in this case, are installed on devices that typically do not have command line functionality. Apps such as iSH and Blink Shell offer these tools to provide more features to the power users or IT wizards. They can eliminate the need for different devices on the go, especially if you can pair up a keyboard and get work done. The command-line functionality, while useful, could also pose problems for the uninitiated and seemingly went against Apple’s App Store regulations. On Sunday, the Twitter account for iSH announced that the app would be removed from the App Store within 24hrs. Another shell app, a-Shell, replied, stating that Apple sent it a termination notice too. According to their Apple contact, a-Shell would have had to remove curl, pip, and wasm.
Arm, however, is a whole new ball game. There’s just a handful of Arm laptops that can give even an idea of how Apple’s own chips might fare. And even the best Arm chips for laptops out right now, like Qualcomm’s 8cx or the Microsoft-branded SQ2, are designed for ultralight laptops. No one has made an Arm-based laptop that can offer performance on par with computers like Apple’s MacBook Pros or Dell’s XPS lineup, much less a desktop.
Nexia Australia and New Zealand, a network of solutions-focused accountancy and consultancy firms, has been hit by cyber criminals using the Windows REvil ransomware.
Taiwanese original design manufacturer Compal Electronics has suffered a cyber intrusion, with the attackers using the Windows DoppelPaymer ransomware to infiltrate the company's systems in an attack that was reported over the weekend.
What the EU is calling for is a “balance” between regular encryption use and lawful access to encrypted data. The EU seeks to work with tech companies and academics to find out a way to lawfully access encrypted data aka have an encryption backdoor:
Sweden's 5G spectrum auctions have been put on hold after a court suspended sections of a decision that had excluded Chinese telecommunications equipment vendor Huawei Technologies from participating in the bids.
With the US administration changing next year, it is very likely that Google will be able to get a waiver on selling the proprietary version of its Android operating system to Chinese telecommunications vendor Huawei Technologies, something it has been unable to do ever since the Trump administration put in place sanctions on the Chinese firm.
In its inception, Firefox for Desktop has been using one single process for all browsing tabs. Since Firefox Quantum, released in 2017, Firefox has been able to spin off multiple “content processes”. This revised architecture allowed for advances in security and performance due to sandboxing and parallelism. Unfortunately, Firefox for Android (code-named “Fennec”) could not instantly be built upon this new technology. Legacy architecture with a completely different user interface required Fennec to remain single-process. But in the fall of 2020, a Fenix rose: The latest version of Firefox for Android is supported by Android Components, a collection of independent libraries to make browsers and browser-like apps that bring latest rendering technologies to the Android ecosystem.
For this rewrite to succeed, most work on legacy Android product (“Fennec”) was paused and put into maintenance mode except for high-severity security vulnerabilities.
It was during this time, coinciding with the general availability of the new Firefox for Android, that Chris Moberly from GitLab’s Security Red Team reported the following security bug in the almost legacy browser.
[....]
I’m lucky enough to be paid to hack things at GitLab, but after a long hard day of hacking for work I like to kick back and unwind by… hacking other things! I’d recently come to the devastating conclusion that a bug I had been chasing for the past two years either didn’t exist or was simply beyond my reach, at least for now. I’d learned a lot along the way, but it was time to focus on something new.
A friend of mine had been doing some cool things with Android, and it sparked my interest. I ordered a paperback copy of “The Android Hacker’s Handbook” and started reading. When learning new things, I often order the big fat physical book and read it in chunks away from my computer screen. Everyone learns differently of course, but there is something about this method that helps break the routine for me.
Anyway, I’m reading through this book and taking notes on areas that I might want to explore. I spend a lot of time hacking in Linux, and Android is basically Linux with an abstraction layer. I’m hoping I can find something familiar and then tweak some of my old techniques to work in the mobile world.
You can create the fanciest Linux malware in the world but if you have no means of getting it onto a Linux system — and with admin rights too — you might as well spend your time baking a cake. Or maybe walking the dog.
I asked Kaspersky if the researchers who made this post — Fedor Sinitsyn and Vladimir Kuskov — could provide this information. The response I got was: "Our malware analyst does not have additional information about the infection vector of this malware." That's like writing a murder mystery and not mentioning the name of the man/woman who was the killer.
Now if this had been clearly stated in the blog post which was put up — the company regularly posts about its findings, and while the primary purpose is marketing, some of the posts are of very high quality — then I would have no beef with the post.
Starting today through December 31, every dollar donated to the Tor Project, up to $100,000, will be matched by Friends of Tor. That means that your donation will make double the impact. We’re able to offer this match because of generous folks in our community who believe in Tor, privacy online, and the work to resist the surveillance pandemic.
Make a donation today and your gift will be matched, 1:1.
Someone wants to out-evil Clearview. Now, there are a lot of questionable facial recognition tech vendors but most have decided to cede "most hated" to Clearview. But another startup thinks it should generate as much ill will as possible before securing prominent marketplace status.
As companies and governments increasingly hoover up our personal data, a common refrain to keep people from worrying is the claim that nothing can go wrong because the data itself is "anonymized" -- or stripped of personal identifiers like social security numbers. But time and time again, studies have shown how this really is cold comfort, given it takes only a little effort to pretty quickly identify a person based on access to other data sets. Yet most companies, many privacy policy folk, and even government officials still like to act as if "anonymizing" your data means something.
“I had a swollen face, I spat blood. My whole body was hurting. I was scared that I might die,” Giscard wrote last May from an immigrant detention center in Louisiana, describing the torture and persecution he had fled in the Republic of Cameroon. (Our correspondence was published as part of The Nation’s Migrant Voices series.)
We must vigorously advocate for a team that would put an end to the normalization of war and make diplomatic engagement€ in the pursuit of international peace and cooperation our number one foreign policy priority.
Twelve months after being driven into exile by right-wing forces, socialist former president Evo Morales was "received by the very social movements who defeated the coup and restored democracy."
An ACLU leader urged the incoming administration to "take bold actions on day one to reverse President Trump's harmful policies."
Democrats will need to win both of Georgia's seats to secure control of the chamber with the tie-breaking vote of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris.
The stakes are enormous. If Republicans hold one or both seats, Biden would be the first president since 1989 to enter office without full control of Congress, and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., would have power over his legislative agenda, cabinet picks and judicial nominees.
According to official data by Europol, France has witnessed more jihadist attacks than any other European Union member since 2014, when the Islamic State (IS) established its so-called caliphate in Iraq and Syria. Nearly 300 French citizens have died in those attacks.
The General Services Administration (GSA) normally recognizes a presidential candidate when it becomes clear who has won an election so that a transition of power can begin.
That has not yet happened despite U.S. television and news networks declaring Biden the winner on Saturday after he secured enough electoral votes to secure the presidency.
[...]
The transition team needs to be recognized to access funds for salaries, consultants and travel, as well as access to classified information, the official said.
In addition, the team has no access to the State Department, which usually facilitates calls between foreign leaders and the president-elect, the official said.
Up to 2,000 people have been killed and about 430,000 have been left homeless in the conflict in the mainly-Muslim province.
The militants are linked to the Islamic State (IS) group, giving it a foothold in southern Africa.
The group has exploited poverty and unemployment to recruit youth in their fight to establish Islamic rule in the area.
The NBN Co has indulged in various kinds of spin over the years to project itself as an organisation that is doing a brilliant job at rolling out a broadband network in Australia and thus its latest stunt, to keep some of its accounts hidden and reveal them only at the half-year and full-year results stages, should not come as a surprise to anyone.
By that time, Mr. Mackowiak had seen people suggesting that the numbers he highlighted were the result of an error that had been fixed. He deleted his original tweet and wrote a new post clarifying that the suspicious numbers were not the result of fraud.
The New York Times found that Mr. Biden did not receive any of the votes in question and that the mix-up was the result of a typo in a small Michigan county that was caught and corrected in about 30 minutes.
Still, Mr. Mackowiak’s images continued to rocket around the internet. They were ultimately shared hundreds of thousands of times on Twitter. His correction? It had been shared 3,600 times as of Friday.
"Don't let anyone€ tell you that Biden's hands are tied on climate action without the Senate."
With Democrats anxious about the probability that President-elect Joe Biden will be forced to grapple with€ a Republican-led Senate after taking office in January, a coalition of more than a dozen climate action groups are calling on Biden to take every possible step he can to help solve the planetary emergency without the approval of€ Congress.
New York–based artist David Opdyke had already been addressing climate change, among other political issues, by way of semi-monumental sculptures and bas-reliefs for a good decade and a half when, in the mid-2010s, he began to shift the polarities of his practice. He took vintage postcards of the American pastoral from the early 20th century (hand-tinted black-and-white photographic vantages celebrating local courthouses, highways, parks, dams, recreation areas, forests, or agricultural vistas) and injected them with trenchant contemporary political commentary by means of subtly compressed painterly interventions. Then for a year, starting in 2017, he reverted to the monumental, gradually unfurling This Land, an epic gridlike mural, more than 16 feet long by eight feet high, consisting of over 500 such individually treated postcards.
What from a distance at first presents itself as a single bird’s-eye view of a vast alpine vista (mountains, lakes, sunrise), upon close examination, sure enough, proves to be fashioned out of hundreds of those postcards celebrating the American dream as conjured up at the turn of the last century. But when you advance closer still, Opdyke’s myriad sly interventions within and between cards begin to reveal a harrowing nightmare vision of the potentially rampaging effects of global warming: fires, floods, droughts, tornadoes, plagues of locusts, murders of crows, butterflies adrift in the snow, a cacophony of political responses, panicked traffic jams, pipelines run amok slathered with livid graffiti, immiserated homeless encampments, Alcatraz Island given over to high-rise luxury apartment buildings (secure prisons for the rich), even an actual ark under construction. “During the months I was working on the piece,” Opdyke recalls, “I figured I was portraying the way things could well get in two or three decades if climate change continued to go unaddressed. But two years on and it’s pretty obvious the timeline has proved much, much tighter: The fires out west, the pandemic, hurricanes barreling in one hot on the next—they’re all already here now.”
"Saying progressive policies held Democrats back from expanding their House majority/taking the Senate just doesn't hold water with data available so far."
"It no longer makes business sense for banks to back polluting projects, and those that plan for a low-carbon future will prosper in the economies of tomorrow."
On November 6th€ a coalition of Western wolf advocates filed a€ notice of intent to sue€ the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, launching a challenge of the Trump administration’s decision to prematurely strip gray wolves of federal protections in the contiguous 48 states, in violation of the Endangered Species Act. This notice starts a 60-day clock, after which the groups will file a lawsuit in federal court.
The most recent data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) and its state partners show an estimated 4,400 wolves inhabit the western Great Lakes states, but only 108 wolves in Washington state, 158 in Oregon, and a scant 15 in California. Nevada, Utah, and Colorado have had a few wolf sightings over the past three years, but wolves remain functionally extinct in these states. These numbers lay the groundwork for a legal challenge planned by a coalition of Western conservation groups.
A noticeable tremor of fear passed through the public health community. It was already known that mink are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2. On April 23 and 25, outbreaks linked with mink farms were reported at farms in the Netherlands holding 12,000 and 7,500 animals respectively. The mink had been infected by a farm worker with COVID-19 and, like humans, proved to be either asymptomatic, or evidently ill with symptoms such as intestinal pneumonia. In time 12 of the 130 Dutch mink farms were struck. What interested researchers was the level of virulence in the transmission of the virus through the population. “Although SARS-CoV-2 is undergoing plenty of mutations as it spreads through mink,” writes Martin Enserik for Science, “its virulence shows no signs of increasing.”
The Danish discoveries, however, fuelled another concern: the possibility that the virus from cluster 5, as identified by the Institute, was more resistant to antibodies from humans infected with SARS-CoV-2 when compared to other non-mutated SARS-CoV-2 viruses. Potential vaccines, in other words, could be threatened with obsolescence. “This hits all the scary buttons,” claimed evolutionary biologist Carl Bergstrom.
The labor market continued to rebound from the spring shutdown, adding 638,000 jobs. The unemployment rate fell another percentage point to 6.9 percent. This still leaves the number of jobs 6.6 percent below the February level.
The jobs gains were broadly based across sectors. Construction added 84,000 jobs, which is consistent with other data showing a boom in residential construction. Employment in construction is now down by just 3.8 percent from its pre-pandemic level. Manufacturing also had a strong month, adding 38,000 jobs, leaving employment in the sector 4.8 percent below the pre-pandemic level.
If we want to not only survive the pandemic but emerge as a nation more resilient to future crises, we need to reverse these obscenely unfair pay practices.
San Francisco voters have just taken a significant step in that direction.
As Joe Biden’s transition team begins to assemble a cabinet, the former vice president is facing pressure from both the right and left of the Democratic Party over possible appointments—with the question of whether to put Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren in charge of the Treasury Department as one of the top issues for progressives.
"The Trump administration is trying to get a lot of stuff like this out the door ASAP."
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) announced that the principal of crypto asset escrow company Volantis Market Making has pled guilty to commodities fraud worth more than $3.25 million on October 1.
Volantis executive, 49-year-old Jon Barry Thompson, made false representations to a company from which he solicited $3.25 million to make purportedly “no risk” Bitcoin (BTC) purchases through a third firm during June and July of 2018.
These "really crucial changes," said one advocate, "are setting the Congressional Progressive Caucus up to be the power brokers everyone needs them to be if Congress is going to deliver on literally any issue."
A modest proposal: Rather than further soiling his legacy by persisting in pursuing baseless claims and lawsuits and continuing to demonstate a terrifying degree of mental instability, Trump should give an Oval Office address in which he announces, with the maximum degree of dignity of which he is capable, that, since a majority of American voters have proven themselves to be losers unworthy of having him as their president, he is resigning with immediate effect.
By doing so, he would not only avoid the excruciating agony of being obligatorily present at Biden’s innauguration ceremonies, no doubt before a genuinely huge and wildly enthusiastic crowd worthy of a medieval royal beheading, but would also reward his very loyal vice president, who appeared significantly more responsible and mentally stable on election night than the president himself, with the distinction and life-long perquisites of being first a president and then an ex-president and, not incidentally, give him a leg up on Mike Pompeo and Nikki Haley, his primary competitors in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
Neither Jewish leadership groups nor the corporate media have an interest in highlighting the embarrassing fact that the commission’s findings exposed their campaign against Corbyn as misinformation.
When the cheering stops, the hard work begins.
Joyous celebrations spontaneously broke out all over America, and indeed many parts of the world, on Saturday as news outlets declared Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential contest. The raucous public festivities of the day were testament to the importance of defeating Donald Trump, a singularly dangerous president whose mixture of demagoguery, incompetence, and corruption was a threat to American democracy. Defeating Trump was absolutely the most important political goal of 2020, and Biden achieved it.
The Trump presidency is coming to an end. Former Vice President Joe Biden is projected to have won the election after pulling ahead in Pennsylvania, giving him more than the 270 electoral votes needed to become president. Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris will make history as the first female vice president, as well as the first African American, Indian American and Asian American elected to the office. Although President Trump has so far refused to concede as his campaign files a slew of lawsuits challenging the results in several states, plans are already underway to shape the next administration and prepare for the next four years. We speak with Bree Newsome Bass, an artist, antiracist activist and housing rights advocate in North Carolina, and professor Eddie Glaude, chair of Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies, and get reaction from Indian American Congressmember Ro Khanna of California.
We could use a leader like George McGovern again.
"While there will be legal disputes requiring adjudication, the outcome is sufficiently clear that the transition process must now begin," urged the nonpartisan Center for Presidential Transition.€
No one can be engaged and receptive all the time. But it is important to recognise these small opportunities for growth when they present themselves, even if at any particular moment we may decide to avoid grasping them.
When we shut ourselves into the car on the commute to work, do we use it as a moment to be alone with our thoughts or to silence them with the radio or music? When we sit with friends, do we choose to be fully present with them or scroll through the news feed on our phones? When we return from a difficult day at work, do we talk the issues through with family or reach for a glass of wine, or maybe bingewatch something on TV?
Loaded with nearly twice as much money as the Republican Party, the Democratic Party showed€ that weak candidates with no robust agendas for people where they live, work, and raise their€ families, is a losing formula. And lose they did against the worst, cruelest, ignorant, lawbreaking,€ reality-denying GOP in its 166-year history.
The Democrats failed to win the Senate, despite nearly having twice the number of Senators up€ for re-election than the Republicans. In addition, the Democratic Party lost seats in the House of€ Representatives. The Democrats did not flip a single Republican state legislature, leaving the€ GOP to again gerrymander Congressional and state legislative districts for the next decade!
A great many people did not vote for Joe Biden, they voted against Trump. We have to recognise how narrow this win was.
Some environmental advocates have said that because we are barreling toward catastrophe, Biden should invoke€ emergency authority to address climate change.€
One reason we love the news business is that things seldom turn out as expected. In the 2020 elections, the voting process went surprisingly smoothly, with record numbers of Americans casting their ballots in new ways. The big failure of 2020, it turned out, was the political polling, which was so wrong in so many places that some people are now arguing that it’s time to spend a lot less effort trying to divine how people will vote.
I think that argument misses the point. Polls have their uses, particularly when they are used to assess broad questions about what’s on voters’ minds or which issues resonated the most. They seem much less reliable in predicting the future, and that’s OK. It means that we have to treat politics more like other subjects, in which we draw on data, interviews and our past experiences to shape coverage. The rise of the pollster as seer of all matters political is a relatively recent development, a corrective to an era when the “boys on the bus” covered politics largely by anecdote and gut instincts.
But if Joe Biden is locked in as the next president of the United States, Donald Trump has more than two months remaining in office. During that time, there are several steps he can and should take to burnish his legacy and set himself up to be remembered more kindly than his first four years and ten months in office might otherwise merit. Here are two of them.
First: Trump ran on, and has frequently talked about, “ending the forever wars.” He could deliver on a big chunk of that promise by ordering the US armed forces to withdraw all US troops (other than embassy guard) from Afghanistan and Syria by Christmas.
The realpolitik rationales for the left to make nice with the incoming Democratic president are bogus. All too many progressives gave the benefit of doubts to Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, making it easier for them to service corporate America while leaving working-class Americans in the lurch. Two years later, in 1994 and 2010, Republicans came roaring back and took control of Congress.
From the outset, progressive organizations and individuals (whether they consider themselves to be “activists” or not) should confront Biden and other elected Democrats about profound matters. Officeholders are supposed to work for the public interest. And if they’re serving Wall Street instead of Main Street, we should show that we’re ready, willing and able to “primary” them.
I can remember when the GOP went to crazy town. It was during the George W. Bush presidency, and I watched as seemingly rational people responded to the actual details and propaganda surrounding the War on Terror by shedding their commitments to civil liberties to pursue an agenda of torture, government secrecy, mass government spending on the military, and the silencing of whistleblowers. The drift into a Christian fascist dystopia was swift and frightening.
Notes: This program was recorded on November 4 and 5 — just after the presidential election, but before news services projected the winner.
Janine Jackson interviewed Voting Booth’s Steven Rosenfeld about vote counting for the November 6, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
As President-elect Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris prepare to take power, we continue to look at the growing debate over the direction of the Democratic Party. House Majority Whip James Clyburn went on several Sunday talk shows to criticize calls to “defund the police” and argued the phrase hurt Democratic congressional candidates. “It is actually insane that we would think the way to respond to the scale of problems that we confront as a nation is to harken back to an older form of politics that … seems to try to triangulate and appeal to this Reagan Democrat that they are so obsessed with,” responds Eddie Glaude, author and chair of Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies. “It makes no sense that we would go back to the politics that produced Trump in the first place.” We also speak to artist and antiracist activist Bree Newsome Bass, who argues Black voters “are scapegoated when it’s convenient, and then we are thrown under the bus when it’s convenient … That’s a dynamic that has to end.”
Former Vice President Joe Biden and his running mate Kamala Harris are set to take power, after a projected more than 150 million ballots were cast in the 2020 election. A debate is growing over the future of the Democratic Party as progressive lawmakers push back on Biden’s centrist policy proposals and consideration of Republicans for Cabinet positions. Democratic Congressmember Ro Khanna of California says progressive policies, such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, have popular support. “The policies that we are advocating are not just for deeply blue districts,” Khanna says. “They are policies that will help people in the Midwest, in the South, across this country.”
"Refusing to concede and launching a bunch of lawsuits is one thing. Staging big rallies to gin up his supporters against the president-elect seems like an order of magnitude worse."
Various countries and organisations were weighing in on the US elections in a manner normally reserved for seedier regimes and states in ill repair.€ The International Crisis Group, in a report published just prior to the election, is all warning and woe.€ € “The 2020 US presidential election presents risks not seen in recent history.€ It is conceivable that violence could erupt during voting or protracted ballot counts.€ Officials should take extra precautions; media and foreign leaders should avoid projecting a winner until the outcome is certain.”
The last line has a fabulously understated tone of irony, given the more than enthusiastic pronouncements previously made by US administrations on which spoiler should be recognised over another in the elections of other countries.€ Interfering in the elections of other states has been something of a Washington speciality, notably since the nascent days of the Cold War.
"Our nation spent a stressful four days wondering who our next president would be, despite the clear fact that Joe Biden won the popular vote by millions."
"There is no decisive pool of 'illegal' ballots, and Republican Party messaging on this score is at best a cynical attempt to delegitimize a decisive presidential defeat."
If Biden chooses to 'cooperate' with Mitch McConnell, that choice is likely to set off a political war between the new administration and the Democratic Party's progressive base.
Of all the Republican grifters who attached themselves to the Democratic bid to upend Donald Trump’s presidency, few came out of the 2020 election with so little to show for it as former Ohio governor John Kasich, the anti-choice, anti-labor charlatan who failed in his 2016 Republican presidential bid, remade himself as a “Never Trumper” and landed a prime-time gig at last summer’s Democratic National Convention. The theory was that Kasich was just the guy to swing Republicans and self-identified conservatives in battleground states—such as Ohio—to Joe Biden. So what happened in Ohio? Nothing. In 2016, Trump won the state by 8.1 percent of the vote. In 2020, he won it by 8.2 percent. Ohio didn’t flip. Yet there was Kasich on CNN, minutes after Biden’s victory had been declared Saturday, arguing that Democrats would have done better “if they’d have been more clear in rejecting the hard left.”
Joe Biden will be our next president.
But Trump still has not conceded and some leading Republicans say he shouldn’t.
While Sacha Baron Cohen is thrilled Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election to Joe Biden, the "Borat" comedian is quickly moving on to his next target: Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Baron Cohen reacted to Trump's defeat by posting a photograph to social media of Trump and Zuckerberg together with a caption that reads: "One down, one to go." In a 2019 keynote speech, Baron Cohen called Facebook "the greatest propaganda machine in history."
Baron Cohen wrote in an essay last month ahead of the "Borat 2" opening that Trump "had a dutiful ally" and "willing accomplice" in Zuckerberg and Facebook, a social media platform which has taken advantage of "Americans [who] are especially vulnerable to lies and conspiracies." The comedian added that Facebook is "a megaphone that history's worst autocrats could only dream of. Its algorithm deliberately amplifies content that generates more engagement…Not surprisingly, most days the top 10 Facebook posts are overwhelmingly from right-wing pundits and outlets."
Fortunately, the law doesn’t care about Trump’s temper tantrums or hostility to an orderly transition of power. It lays out a firm timetable by which Trump will be removed from office. Below we break down the key dates and mechanics for ousting Trump from the office of the presidency and inaugurating Joe Biden to the White House.
Ordinarily, Twitter would remove such tweets, but affords world leaders some further latitude.
“A critical function of our service is providing a place where people can openly and publicly respond to their leaders and hold them accountable,” a Twitter spokesman told the Bloomberg news agency. “With this in mind, there are certain cases where it may be in the public’s interest to have access to certain tweets, even if they would otherwise be in violation of our rules.”
This policy, however, does not apparently extend to former leaders, Twitter told the Reuters news organization.
Back in February, long-shot Democratic presidential aspirant Andrew Yang would sometimes be asked why he didn’t bash Trump—or even mention him prominently—in his campaign speeches. At his New Hampshire campaign events (some of them documented for Quillette at the time), he would explain that no matter what happened to Trump in 2020, the conditions that led to his election in 2016 would still need fixing. And no, he did not mean America’s “unique brand of ugliness” or some other secularized formulation of original sin. Rather, Yang was referring to the complex set of factors that had led to large sections of the middle class watching steady jobs and comfortable lives get upended by automation, outsourcing, and the consequent decline of unionized manufacturing.
It appears that the various election polls that predicted Joe Biden would become the 46th President of the United States eventually proved accurate -- the current President's temper tantrum notwithstanding -- but that doesn't mean the polls did a good job. In fact, most people are recognizing that the pollsters were wrong in many, many ways. They predicted a much bigger win for Biden, including multiple states that easily went to Trump. They completely flubbed many down ballot House and Senate races as well. Pollsters are now trying to figure out what went wrong and what these misses mean, coming on the heels of a set of bad predictions in 2016 as well. It's likely there isn't any simple answer, but a variety of factors involved.
The extraordinary admission by Pichai that Google has been suppressing content from the WSWS is a vindication of the campaign launched by the International Committee of the Fourth International against online censorship going back to the spring 2017.
In April 2017, following the implementation by Google of a new search algorithm, the WSWS reported that access to its content and that of other left-wing, anti-war and progressive websites was being heavily censored. In an article published on August 2, the WSWS published data that showed traffic to 13 websites had been reduced by Google between 19 percent and 67 percent. The data showed that “the World Socialist Web Site has been the most heavily affected. Its traffic from Google searches has fallen by two thirds.”
Mark Zuckerberg signed off on a Facebook algorithm change in 2017 that throttled traffic to left-leaning news sites and cost Mother Jones hundreds of thousands of dollars, The Wall Street Journal reported and Mother Jones senior staffers said on Friday.
Sources told The Journal that Facebook was concerned about harming conservative news outlets by changing the algorithm that governs users' news feeds. Zuckerberg eventually signed off on an alternative that affected "left-leaning sites" like Mother Jones "more than previously planned," The Journal said.
Falk also discusses how the study, coverage and understanding of the Palestinian cause has shifted over the years from one of “exposing the hypocrisy and greed of the powerful” to more political and activist-centered solution based forms, within geo-political coverage. Despite this, Falk praises Fisk for “his commitments to peace, self-determination, and neutrality.”€
Daniel Falcone:€ I can recall being amazed by Robert Fisk’s researching capabilities and stamina. In order to read both€ Pity the Nation€ and€ The Great War for Civilization€ it requires the reader to get through over 1,700 pages.€ Can you comment on Fisk’s reporting over the years in general as a Middle East correspondent?
NUJ letterThe train drivers union (ASLEF) has already adopted national policy to support the Assange campaign and this letter from the NUJ is sure to see other unions join the campaign.€ ASLEF supportThe NUJ is offering to send its executive members to meetings organised by other trade unionists to explain why the union is appealing for support for Julian Assange. The NUJ recently held an online rally to discuss the case with former Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger, NUJ executive member Tim Dawson, the union’s Assistant General Secretary Seamas Dooley, and Julian Assange’s lawyer Jen Robinson.€
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange’s legal team submitted their closing argument to a British magistrates’ court. They argue, “It is politically motivated, it is an abuse of the process of this court, and it is a clear violation of the Anglo-U.S. treaty that governs this extradition.”The closing argument relies on evidence presented by witnesses, who testified during a trial in September, and details how President Barack Obama’s administration declined to prosecute Assange. President Donald Trump’s administration reversed this “principled” position because of the nature of Assange’s “disclosures to the world and the nature of his political opinions, which inevitably attracted the hostility of the Trump administration and the CIA.”Prosecutors will submit their closing argument on November 20, and Judge Vanessa Baraitser is expected to rule on the extradition request on January 4.While Trump’s campaign for re-election failed, the outcome of the U.S. presidential election is not expected to impact the decision. (In fact, the submission contains zero references to President-elect Joe Biden.)Assange was charged by the United States Justice Department with 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act and one count of conspiracy to commit a computer intrusion that contains elements of an Espionage Act offense.The charges criminalize the act of merely receiving classified information, as well as the publication of state secrets from the U.S. government. It targets common practices in newsgathering, which is why the case is widely opposed by press freedom organizations throughout the world.
All of the charges relate to the documents Pfc. Chelsea Manning provided to WikiLeaks in 2010.Assange’s defense refers to the “political agenda” of the Trump administration and their “obvious hostility” to Assange’s “exposure and condemnation of U.S. war crimes and human rights abuses.”“Trump’s ‘America First’ policy supporting immunity for U.S. crimes, denouncing the investigations by the ICC [International Criminal Court] of U.S. war crimes in Afghanistan, occurred in harmony with the CIA’s motivation for targeting Julian Assange,” the submission declares.Beginning in 2017, Trump officials publicly condemned Assange. Charges were “ratcheted up” between December 2017 and June 2020, and “breaches of the rule of law” allegedly occurred, as Assange was targeted by a U.S. intelligence-backed surveillance operation while he lived under political asylum in the Ecuador embassy in London.What unfolded was an “unprecedented prosecution for the receipt and publication of documents, where the international publications were plainly in the public interest,” the legal team contends.“To this end, the U.S. prosecution has sought to distort the facts in order to present what is plainly a prosecution for political offenses into a prosecution for ‘ordinary’ crimes.”
It all came down to Philadelphia. It was only fitting that the most acrimonious presidential race in recent history would meet its end in a city that takes pride in its underdog status and refusal to back down from a fight. Electorally speaking, Pennsylvania is always a big deal, and when the prolonged nightmare that was the 2020 presidential election finally heaved itself across the finish line and the race was called for Joe Biden, it was clear that the Keystone State’s coveted electoral votes had been the tipping point. Its biggest city, heavily Democratic Philadelphia, had long suffered the indignities and insults of Donald Trump and his cronies. As the rest of the nation anxiously waited, by Saturday morning, at least one of Trump’s many campaign smears had proven true. Turns out bad things do happen in Philly… if you’re a racist, fascist jagoff like him.
The children were separated from their families under the Trump administration's widely condemned "zero tolerance" immigration policy.€
And he did it while offering him every chance. He tried to steelman him. He gave him an honest shot, and the ideas simply didn’t hold up under scrutiny.
This is how we clean up our ideasphere. We expose ideas to sunlight, in good faith, and we let people decide what they think.
The protesters in Hong Kong have a point: the Chinese government is supposed to stay the fuck out of managing Hong Kong's day-to-day governance for 50 years after its securing of this profitable market sector from the British in 1997. We all love to see colonialism dismantled, but when the recipient is China, caution should be deployed. The Chinese government agreed to not turn Hong Kong into China 1.5 for fifty years.
Late last year, the Fifth Circuit Appeals Court reached a truly horrendous decision. Judge Don Willett's scathing takedown of the "rigged game" that is qualified immunity -- delivered in a different opinion -- failed to move the dial in the Fifth Circuit, which found this doctrine could still cover a host of abusive behavior by government employees.
An Arkansas police chief who posted calls for violence against Democrats on social media resigned from his job on Saturday.
Lang Holland, who was police chief of the roughly 1,300-person city of Marshall, Arkansas, drew outrage from both local residents and people around the country after making ominous comments online in recent days. In addition to repeatedly saying Democrats should be killed, he shared memes from conspiracy theory QAnon and claimed that the election was being stolen.
Well, what is it? There’s no one style, genre or format to answer that question, which makes this current moment exciting and palpable in terms of what it’s laying down for the next few decades of Indigenous filmmakers to come. In essence, it’s Indigenous artists expressing themselves through their own culture, experience and ultimately, their own lens.
A good indication of what’s going on now and how that future might track can be seen through the following directors and their films: [...]
Nothing that currently exists can compete with fiber. Nothing replicates the future growth fiber networks will deliver, simply because nothing that moves data has the inherent capacity of a fiber wire. It isn’t even close by any technical measurement. However, barely 30 percent of Americans have access to fiber infrastructure, despite the fact that 100 percent of Americans have become dependent on high-speed access during the pandemic.
CPAC, Heritage Minister Discusses Bill to Update Broadcasting Act – November 3, 2020
The Indian competition watchdog, the Competition Commission of India, has asked its director-general to investigate whether Google is indulging in anti-competitive practices through its pay service, Google Pay.
Intellectual property rights (IPRs) over agricultural biotechnology has been a subject of increasing importance in the aftermath of the Agreement on Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs). In modern agriculture, the focus is rapidly shifting to biotechnological means and resultant transgenic or genetically modified varieties. The ultimate rationale for plant IPRs is the enhancement of food security through the provision of new improved varieties and improved availability of seeds through private sector channels. In the arena of WTO Agriculture Negotiations, India advocates flexibility and domestic support, renegotiation and maintenance of appropriate tariff binding, special safeguards and several other ideas on the ground of food security. To adequately address the problem of food security, IPRs regime must adequately address the tripartite issues of food availability, access and appropriate utilization. Food security is directly linked to agro-biodiversity which is essential to promote resilience in farming. Agro-biodiversity is of primary importance for small holder and subsistence farmers as it ensures both income-generation and household food security. Some environmentalists are of the view that the TRIPs Agreement is the aspect of globalization, can be the biggest threat to people’s food security when combined with the opening up of the seed industry. Recognition of plant IPRs as an essential part of the package of agribusiness leads to TNC totalitarianism in agriculture. The Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act, 2001, directly addresses the issues of protection of plant varieties, and rights of farmers and plant breeders in India. Since protection of plant varieties has a direct nexus with the sustainable use of biodiversity and food security the country has introduced legislation pertaining to the CBD in the form of the Biological Diversity Act, 2002 and also makes the necessary amendments in the Patent Act 1970. The development of science and technology especially agricultural biotechnology must be used in order to protect and promote human rights throughout the world. The reality is that developing countries can benefit from biotechnology innovation, particularly GM crops, if they have developed some capacity in tradition breeding and if they have regulatory frameworks such as bio-safety and IPRs in place. In this backdrop the present research aims to discuss the development of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) over agricultural biotechnology and its implications upon country’s food security. An attempt has also been made to give a brief account of the various legislative measures adopted at the national level, considering the development taking place at international level.
The People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) witnesses today an explosion of law and legal practice. In the last six years China has enacted laws and promulgated regulations ranging from administrative law to criminal procedure to joint venture regulation to tax law. Intellectual and industrial property law numbers among the fastest growing fields. Since 1979 China has revitalized its trademark system, built a patent system from scratch, promulgated a Patent Law, and drafted a copyright law. Chinese copyright, trademark, nd patent law has grown equally quickly in importance to the Western practitioner. Today a Western lawyer concerned with Chinese legal and business relations must understand its copyright, trademark, and patent laws. Such understanding may prove crucial to handling technology transfer, joint ventures, tax regulation, and the rapidly expanding Chinese foreign trade. This Article describes for the benefit of the American practitioner, the Chinese system of copyright, trademark, and patent law.
In July 1999, representatives of Amazonian Indigenous groups arrived at the headquarters of the US Patent and Trademark Office in Alexandria, Virginia, to challenge a patent on the ayahuasca vine. Indigenous peoples had cultivated ayahuasca for its medicinal and other properties for generations. How could someone in the United States have ‘invented’ it?
This might seem like cultural miscommunication, or the past meeting the future. But this year’s wake-up call to the ravages of social injustice are a reminder that this was also about racism and power. Many people are trying to address systemic biases in science and technology through training, grants and better job pipelines for researchers from marginalized groups. But the tentacles of racism are institutional, embedded and endemic.
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Vats’s powerful analysis draws mainly from laws and legal cases in the United States, moving roughly chronologically from the eighteenth century to the present. But her argument has international reach. US law shapes global industries and markets, and many countries have adopted the US approach to intellectual property. They see it as a model in stimulating innovation and economic growth.
Most histories of US intellectual property emphasize that the idea was so central to the founding of the country that it appears in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution: “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times for Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”. They also often observe that the US system was intentionally more democratic than its European predecessors, with low barriers to participation.
[...]
There is growing resistance, which Vats discusses. This includes the transnational dispute over the patentability of leukaemia drug Glivec (imatinib). In 2013, the Indian Supreme Court ruled that the drug was neither innovative nor more effective than a previously patented form of its active ingredient, and so did not deserve a patent. This ensured greater access to the drug for India’s population.
Vats says that the United States characterized the decision as “patent insolence”. Rather than understanding it as arising from different values or understandings about the relationship between patents and public health, the US government admonished the country as primitive and childlike, lacking knowledge about the benefits of patents for technological progress and a civilized and democratic society.
The PTAB sided with the IPR patentee — finding the cited prior art had not been proven “analogous” On appeal, the Federal Circuit has vacated and remanded for lack of substantial evidence to support that conclusion.
The Analogous Art Test: Federal Circuit obviousness doctrine begins with prior art as defined by 35 U.S.C. 102, but then limits the scope of potential references with the “analogous art” test. The test appears to have its origin in Judge Giles Sutherland Rich’s 1966 decision of In re Winslow, 365 F.2d 1017, 1020 (Cust. & Pat. App. 1966) (“Section 103 requires us to presume full knowledge by the inventor of the prior art in the field of his endeavor.”). There are two potential ways of showing that a reference is analogous. The first option follows directly from Winslow, asking “whether the art is from the same field of endeavor, regardless of the problem addressed.” In re Bigio, 381 F.3d 1320, 1325 (Fed. Cir. 2004). The alternative asks “whether the reference … is reasonably pertinent to the particular problem with which the inventor is involved.” Id. If either prong is met (a factual question), then the reference is deemed analogous and available for use in an obviousness argument. I believe a fair reading of KSR further expands the doctrine, but the courts have not gone there.
In the same way that a pretextual police stop opens the door to more invasive searches, the analogous arts test also opens the door to more extensive obviousness analysis. In particular, once the reference is admitted as analogous art, any aspect of the reference (including non-analogous aspects) can be used.
This article is Part II of a study on the patent eligibility of graphical user interfaces. Part I was published yesterday. We continue from where we left off, with overviews of a handful of Federal Circuit ۤ 101 decisions addressing claims to graphical user interfaces and a discussion of how the three properties of specificity, technical character, and an advance over the prior art can be used to predict whether a claim meets the requirements of 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101.
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Based on the detailed case law analyses provided above, a few recommendations regarding the eligibility of graphical user interfaces can be made. First, like all inventions, claims to graphical user interfaces are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. There is no categorical inclusion or exclusion of these types of claims. Second, to be eligible, at least some aspect of the claim must be specifically recited to address a technical improvement over the prior art. Each of the claims discussed above that failed the Alice test lacked at least one of these three factors. In order to establish that an invention is such an improvement, it can be helpful to disclose in the specification or perhaps in a later declaration, the problems with the prior art and how the claimed invention overcomes these problems using a technical solution.
Even with this framework, not all marketable inventions are going to be found eligible under ۤ 101. But focusing on the innovative displaying of data -- whether a particular layout, workflow, real-time updating, or involving adaptation to screen size -- with claims drawn to specific embodiments is almost certain to help improve your odds of a favorable outcome.
On Friday in the Eastern District of Texas, a jury concluded in its verdict that Apple must pay VirnetX, an internet security software company, a royalty of $0.84 per device for 598,629,580 devices, totaling $502,848,847.20 that Apple must pay VirnetX for patent infringement regarding its FaceTime and iMessage features.
The litigation began in 2010 through multiple lawsuits and appeals. In 2012, VirnetX sued Apple for patent infringement claiming that Apple infringed via a VPN On Demand feature, which Apple used to allow its users access to a VPN connection. Specifically, VirnetX averred that Apple’s VPN on Demand and FaceTime use its patented technology for secure communications.
Alphabet Inc.‘s Google, Cisco Systems Inc., and Apple Inc.‘s strategy of asking the Federal Circuit to curb the patent office’s use of a rule that makes it harder to invalidate patents fell short, after the court ruled it lacks jurisdiction to hear several appeals.
If you can believe it, despite my storied fascination with the intersection of trademark law and alcohol, one battle between two Australian breweries flew under my radar. Sorry, okay? But it is worth writing about now, if only as it demonstrates the length to which some trademark protectionists will go, even when it ultimately causes that protectionist harm.
Internet provider Charter Communications accused several major record labels of violating copyright law by sending DMCA notices for content they don't own. The ISP argued that these notices also violated the Colorado Consumer Privacy Act. After hearing both parties, a federal court in Colorado has dismissed both claims describing Charter's arguments as insufficient and 'ironic.'
Thailand's Department of Special Investigation has raided and shut down three pirate streaming services after they provided access to content owned by the MPA and local companies. The platforms were previously targeted as part of an earlier series of raids but had relocated to new domain names to continue serving customers.
