Bonum Certa Men Certa

Links 15/11/2020: The LibreOffice Calc Guide 7.0 and PinePhone KDE Community Edition



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Linux vs. macOS: 15 Key Differences You Need to Know

        The tug of war between Linux and macOS continues to go through the test of time. The internet meme world concludes their major differences in the usual humorous manner. In their opinion, macOS is for the rich, and Linux is for the skilled. If we add the Windows operating system to this debate, then patience as an attribute would also be a highlight of discussion. However, no operating system is perfect, but there is a perfect being for each operating system.

        The individual superiority in both Linux and macOS comes at a cost. This article is here to shed some light on the matter and, at the same time, remove the skeletons hiding in the two OS’s closets.

        Linux vs. macOS

        Since we are here to neither shame Linux nor macOS, we will look at the preference each operating system brings to the table when comparatively analyzed. However, the preferences might favor one operating system over the other. The final verdict will be in regards to performance flexibility and stability. It’s time to roll the dice on the first comparative topic.

    • Audiocasts/Shows

      • New KDE Plasma Theme In 5.21, GNOME Extensions Rebooted, GIMP 2.99.2 | This Week in Linux 125 - TuxDigital

        On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got a bunch of new releases from a variety of projects. We’re also going to be looking into the future with my magic crystal ball to discuss what is coming in the next versions of GIMP, GNOME and KDE Plasma . . . and by Crystal Ball I mean the projects issued roadmaps on their blogs. We’ve got a couple distro releases to discuss with Feren OS, Clonezilla, and a new offering from the Proxmox team. Then we’ll discuss a Call For Help issued by the FSF to update their high priority list. All that and much more coming up right now on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

      • The Top Five Linux Distros Of 2020 - YouTube

        In 2020, I took a look at many Linux distributions. Some of them really impressed me. So as the year nears the end, what are my "Top Five" distros for 2020? The answers may surprise you.

    • Kernel Space

      • A Specification Is Being Discussed For Passing Firmware/Bootloader Logs To The OS - Phoronix

        Stemming from a GRUB bootloader inquiry and discussion that started over one year ago, a new specification is being proposed for possible adoption by the Linux kernel in being able to pass bootloader or system firmware logs to the operating system kernel for in turn exposing them to user-space.

        An Akamai engineer inquired over a year ago to the GRUB development community about being able to debug remote hardware without a KVM. The desire arose for being able to read GRUB bootloader messages from within the running Linux environment. After discussing among GRUB developers and an early specification they began debating earlier this year, Oracle's Daniel Kiper has taken to the Linux kernel mailing list to gauge upstream kernel interest in such a specification and ultimately supporting it.

        The goal would be to allow the OS kernel to either process such firmware/boot logs and where relevant to expose them to user-space. The specification is designed to be platform agnostic and self-contained.

    • Applications

      • 4 Best Free and Open Source Linux FTP Servers

        File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a time-honored method of transferring files to and from a remote network site. FTP is built on a client-server architecture and uses separate control and data connections between the client and server applications. The FTP client connects to the FTP server, and enables the user to send and retrieves files from that server.

        FTP is one of many different file transfer protocols that are used. Other examples include the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), BitTorrent, the SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP), and Secure Copy (SCP).

        In recent years, FTP’s popularity for general downloading files has declined. Linux distributions and software are now often downloaded by using direct downloads using a web browser, by BitTorrent, metalink, or by using a download utility. FTP is often tucked away as a download option even if it is available. While FTP can cause bandwidth problems it nevertheless remains a great way of moving large files.

        The downside to using FTP is that it doesn’t necessarily take internet security risks into account. SFTP, the more advanced version of the same technology, enables you to manage files on your server just like FTP does. However, it uses a previously-established Secure Shell (SSH) connection to maintain the safety of your files and the site as a whole.

        An FTP server is a software application which enables the transfer of files from one computer to another. Here’s our recommendations.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Decrypting OpenSSH sessions for fun and profit

        A while ago we had a forensics case in which a Linux server was compromised and a modified OpenSSH binary was loaded into the memory of a webserver. The modified OpenSSH binary was used as a backdoor to the system for the attackers. The customer had pcaps and a hypervisor snapshot of the system on the moment it was compromised. We started wondering if it was possible to decrypt the SSH session and gain knowledge of it by recovering key material from the memory snapshot. In this blogpost I will cover the research I have done into OpenSSH and release some tools to dump OpenSSH session keys from memory and decrypt and parse sessions in combinarion with pcaps. I have also submitted my research to the 2020 Volatility framework plugin contest.

      • Zero-Touch Provisioning for Juniper ⁕ Vincent Bernat

        Juniper’s official documentation on ZTP explains how to configure the ISC DHCP Server to automatically upgrade and configure on first boot a Juniper device. However, the proposed configuration could be a bit more elegant. This note explains how.

      • Using Buypass card readers in Linux

        If you want to know the result of your corona test in Norway (or really, any other health information), you'll need to either get an electronic ID with a confidential spec where your bank holds the secret key, can use it towards other banks with no oversight, and allows whoever has that key to take up huge loans and other binding agreements in your name in a matter of minutes (also known as “BankID”)… or you can get a smart card from Buypass, where you hold the private key yourself.

      • The LibreOffice Calc Guide 7.0 Just Arrived! - The Document Foundation Blog

        The LibreOffice Documentation Team is happy to announce the availability of the LibreOffice Calc Guide 7.0, the most comprehensive guide for the Calc module, updated to the latest version of LibreOffice.

        The Guide is available in PDF format and contains 545 pages, covering all basic and advanced features of the spreadsheet module of LibreOffice, and is a must-read book for exploiting the maximum of LibreOffice Calc.

      • 15 Ways to Use the Linux Watch Command for Everyday Activities

        The Linux watch command provides a useful means of executing commands periodically. Many system admins use this simple tool to get live feedback from frequently used Linux terminal commands. Moreover, it also allows us to locate changes in command outputs in real-time. In this guide, we have discussed the various use cases of the watch utility and illustrate several useful usages of this tool for our readers. So, if you were looking for a way to run commands repeatedly, continue reading with us. You will learn to use one of the most useful yet often overlooked Linux commands.

      • Setting up graphical login into KDE Plasma via SDDM on CentOS 8.2
      • How To Install Cinnamon on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cinnamon on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Cinnamon is a desktop environment like GNOME and It is a simple and clean desktop environment, looks similar to the Windows desktop. It’s usually deployed on the Linux Mint distribution.

        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 Cinnamon 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.

      • Show contents of all git objects in a git repo
    • Games

      • Go sight seeing in the American Truck Simulator - Colorado expansion out now | GamingOnLinux

        SCS Software continue to expand where we can go trucking with the American Truck Simulator - Colorado expansion out now and it looks like it has some good sights to see.

        This is probably one of the bigger DLCs that has been released, which includes tons of areas to drive through like the Million Dollar Highway. A rather special bit of road the stretches around 25 miles, often said to be one of the most beautiful drives in the states where you get views of mountains, valleys and gorges and more. For many of us stuck at home during the COVID19 pandemic, it sounds like something worth exploring.

      • Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Craftworld Aeldari expansion is out now | GamingOnLinux

        Warhammer 40,000: Gladius - Craftworld Aeldari is the latest expansion to the first turn-based 4x strategy game in the Warhammer universe. As the name suggests, the Craftworld Aeldari expansion brings in another new race that you can control or fight again.

        "In the base game, the player could face the conquest and the exploration of Gladius with the heroic Space Marines, the brutal Orks, the brave Imperium and the relentless Necrons. With the additional DLCs, the player can lead the new factions such as the ravenous Tyranids, the corrupted Chaos Space Marines and the ambitious T’au. Now another faction join the fight with the swift and deadly Craftworld Aeldari, one of the most ancient races in the Warhammer 40,000 universe, having turned war into a fine art."

      • Valve dev clarifies what some of their upcoming and recent Linux work is actually for | GamingOnLinux

        Valve are committed to Linux and Linux gaming with Steam, that much is currently clear. They're working with so many contractors on various things, and it seems not everything is as people think.

        Recently, Collabora, one of the companies they're contracting with went over a bunch of details like their upcoming Linix Kernel work coming to Linux 5.11 and then a quick overview of everything. Many people thought that a lot of the ongoing work, like the Kernel work was to help things like anti-cheat with Steam Play Proton and it was mentioned by Collabora however it seems that's not exactly the case. Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais commented on Reddit to clear up on some speculation, mentioning that Collabora did some speculating of their own.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • PinePhone KDE Community Edition Launches with Plasma Mobile UI, Convergence

          After PinePhone UBports Community Edition, PinePhone postmarketOS Community Edition, and PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition, here comes the PinePhone KDE Community Edition using the Plasma Mobile UI developed by the KDE Project.

          If you love the KDE Plasma desktop environment, you'll adore the Plasma Mobile-powered PinePhone Linux phone, which promises to offer you the same underlying technologies `and apps that you're already using on your personal computer.

        • PinePhone KDE Community Edition up for preorder in December

          The PinePhone is an inexpensive smartphone capable of running a variety of different Linux-based operating systems. But the folks at Pine64 have been partnering with developers to ship a series of Community Edition phones with a specific OS pre-installed, and a custom logo on the back of the phone.

          Pine64 had previously offered PinePhone UBports (Ubuntu Touch) and postmarketOS Community Edition phones, and the company is currently shipping PinePhone Manjaro Community Edition phones to customers.

          Up next? The PinePhone KDE Community Edition.

          [...]

          The convergence dock is a USB-C hub that allows you to connect a display, ethernet cable, and usb accessories to the PinePhone and use it like a desktop computer.

        • KDE Announces PinePhone KDE Community Edition with Plasma Mobile

          The KDE project and Pine64 announce the availability of PinePhone KDE Community Edition with the Plasma Mobile operating system.

    • Distributions

      • PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family

        • Calibre updated to 5.5.0 €» PCLinuxOS

          Calibre is primarily a ebook cataloging program. It manages your ebook collection for you. It is designed around the concept of the logical book, i.e. a single entry in the database that may correspond to ebooks in several formats. It also supports conversion to and from a dozen different ebook formats.

        • Freetube updated to 0.9.2 €» PCLinuxOS

          Freetube is a native youtube client for using youtube with privacy in mind.

      • IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

        • Fedora's Qt-Based Media Writer Seeing Improvements

          Fedora Media Writer is the project's cross-platform utility for deploying Fedora install images to USB drives in an easy-to-user manner and for selecting from the various Fedora spins. One of Red Hat's engineers has recently been working on some modernization improvements to this Fedora image writer.

          While Fedora Workstation continues to be GNOME/GTK-focused, with macOS and Windows being supported alongside Linux for the Fedora Media Writer, it's understandably written using a Qt5 interface for greater cross-platform compatibility. Jan Grulich of Red Hat has been working to modernize this C++ program since it has been relying on the deprecated Qt Quick Controls 1.

          Grulich has been working to move off the Qt Quick Controls 1 code to using Qt Quick Controls 2.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • PANTS: a progressive web-based open-source nutrition ingredients and calories manager

        PriceAndNutritionTrackingSystem (PANTS for short) is an open-source web-based application and self-hosted built to help users track their nutrition with its composed tool for nutritional data analysis of ingredients and recipes.

        [...]

        PANTS is released under Apache License 2.0, which guarantees the permissions to use it for commercial use, modification, distribution and more, with condition of license and copyright notice and state changes notification.

      • Web Browsers

        • Mozilla

          • Clippings for Thunderbird replacement: Quicktext – Chris Ilias

            I was a long time user of Clippings in Thunderbird. I used it for canned responses in the support newsgroups and more. Now that the Clippings is not being updated for Thunderbird 78, it’s time to look for a replacement.

            I found a great replacement, called Quicktext.

            With Quicktext, I create a TXT file for each response and put them in a designated directory. Quicktext has the option to paste from a TXT file or an HTML file. When composing a message, there are two buttons to the far-right above the text area.

          • TenFourFox Development: TenFourFox FPR29 available

            TenFourFox Feature Parity Release 29 final is now available for testing (downloads, hashes, release notes). There are no additional changes from the beta except for outstanding security patches. Locale langpacks will accompany this release and should be available simultaneously on or about Monday or Tuesday (November 17 or 18) parallel to mainline Firefox.

      • Programming/Development

  • Leftovers

    • The Tide is Turning: Change and the Coming of Maitreya

      For the issues of the day to be met and overcome a major shift in attitudes is needed, a change in consciousness allowing for the creative re-invention of civilization to take place. The current ‘way of life’ is largely unhealthy, for the individual and society, and has proved deadly for the natural environment. It is an unkind brutal construct based on ideologies that separate, setting one against the other, creating an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Pleasure and desire are promoted as surrogates for natural happiness and love, competition and conformity insisted upon; it is an outdated construct that has no place within the positive movement of the times, which is well underway.

      The transition into the new is happening apace and as those forces obstructing change begin to be swept aside there is a sense that humanity is poised to turn a corner. Sharing, cooperation, tolerance, understanding, these are some of the keynotes of the time. Perennial principles held within the hearts of people throughout the world, and which, given the correct conditions will explode into life, sweeping aside all obstacles to freedom, justice and unity. But resistance is fierce, conditioning and attachment to the old ways, strong. And the issues are daunting, overwhelming.

    • Maupassant and America Today

      Any writer aspiring to be a literary artist must read and learn from de Maupassant. He was a master of economy of style, brisk pacing, even-tempered wit, deep insights into human psychology that remain entirely relevant to this day, and of devising imaginative plots with deliciously apt denouements (endings).

      He was superb at describing food, dining and cuisine, and also of sensory impressions like smells, with vividness. Also, he was a lyrical artist with his many passages describing natural settings: the sky at various times of the day and during various seasons, river environments, the woods, open hilly grasslands and plains, and weather day or night. The best equivalent I can recall in American literature is Mark Twain’s lyrical passage in “Huckleberry Finn,” on the early morning mists on the Mississippi River.

    • Health/Nutrition

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Security

          • Melbourne firm's listing back on Windows REvil ransomware site

            Malicious attackers who used the Windows REvil ransomware to attack Nexia Australia and New Zealand, a network of solutions-focused accountancy and consultancy firms, have re-lsited the company on their dark web site, along with screenshots of data that has been allegedly filched during the attack.

          • Privacy/Surveillance

            • Commerce Department Remembers It Was Supposed To Ban TikTok; Says It Won't Enforce For Now

              Yesterday we noted that TikTok had made a filing with the government asking what the fuck was going on with the supposed ban on their application that was supposed to go into effect this week. While a court had issued an injunction saying the Commerce Department couldn't put the ban into effect, the Trump administration basically hadn't said anything since then, and the ban was set to go into effect yesterday.

    • Defence/Aggression

    • Environment

    • Finance

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • Censorship/Free Speech

      • Ep116: Project Censored with Andy Lee Roth - Along The Line Podcast
      • Content Moderation Case Study: GoFundMe Addresses Controversial Fundraising Efforts (2020)

        Summary: Shortly after protests began in Kenosha, Wisconsin over the killing of Jacob Blake by police officers, armed citizens began showing up ostensibly to protect businesses and homes from violent protesters. One of these citizens was Kyle Rittenhouse, an Illinois native who traveled to Kenosha as a self-appointed peacekeeping force.

      • ICE Briefly Becomes A Stranded Minor: Loses Its Twitter Account For Being Too Young

        Yesterday afternoon the Twitter account of the US's Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) briefly disappeared from the internet. Was it... anti-conservative bias? Nope. Was it ICE doing more stupid shit in locking up children and separating them from their parents? Nope. Was it ICE's willingness to seize domain names with no evidence, claiming "counterfeit"? Nope. It was that ICE had changed the "birthday" on its account to make it so that its "age" was less than 13. Thanks to the ridiculousness of the Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which has basically served only to have parents teach their kids it's okay to lie online in order to use any internet service, most websites say you can't use the service if you're under 13 years old. ICE changed its "birthdate" to be less than 13, thereby making it... shall we say, something of a "stranded minor" and Twitter automatically, well, "separated it" from its account.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Jurists Shocked by Justice Alito's 'Wildly Inappropriate' Attack on LGBTQ Equality, Reproductive Rights, and More

        "How can litigants with claims on these issues now believe they can get a fair hearing from Alito?" wondered one legal reporter.€ 

      • Hologram Daddies and Posthumous Molestation

        Human beings can find it hard to part with their dead.€  The departed and gathered are revisited, reconstituted and even repurposed.€  In some particularly disturbing instances, their bodies are dug up again, subjected to trial, and punished.€  Oliver Cromwell, responsible for the execution of the Stuart king Charles I in 1649, was exhumed and posthumously executed, along with several regicides, in 1661.€  By then, the Sceptred Isle had been re-sceptred with the return of Charles I’s son.€  In monarchical restoration, revenge was sought by disgruntled royalists.

        The famed diarist Samuel Pepys notes the wish to revisit these bodies of perpetration in an entry from December 4, 1660.€  “This day the Parliament voted that the bodies of Oliver, [Henry] Ireton, [John] Bradshaw, &c., should be taken up out of their graves in [Westminster] Abbey, and drawn to the gallows, and there hanged and buried under it: which (methinks) do trouble me that a man of so great courage as he was, should have that dishonour, though otherwise he might deserve it enough.”

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • The plausibility battleground at the EPO

          Plausibility in the context of the inventive step and sufficiency requirements can be a contentious issue before the European Patent Office. Markus Grammel of Grünecker reports.

          The European Patent Office (EPO), as the central organ of the European patent system, rewards inventors or their legal successors for their technical contribution to art with patent monopolies, fostering and stimulating innovation.

          It is therefore a central pillar of the EPO’s practice to weed out purely speculative patents that do not make a technical contribution at the filing date.

          To assess whether an invention is purely speculative, the Boards of Appeal of the EPO have developed the doctrine of “plausibility” in the context of sufficiency of disclosure/enablement as well as inventive step/non-obviousness. Plausibility is also sometimes applied when considering industrial applicability.

        • How to protect a user interface with a patent

          Any features of a user interface that specify a mechanism to enable user input are usually considered to provide a technical effect. However, features that rely more on the subjective preferences of a user tend to be treated as non-technical.

          In a world where everything from your car to your fridge has a user interface, features can often be considered mundane and technically uninteresting. It’s the dismissal of these features by patent offices that can provide interesting guidance as to where the lines are between non-technical and technical user interface features.

          In the case T277/16 (Google), the question of patentability for an access method was considered and accepted as being technical. The concept, in short, was to control access by requiring less complex and less burdensome security rules in areas which are defined as ‘familiar’. Put simply, if a user was accessing a device at home, they could gain access using a shorter passcode than they would if they were accessing the device in a non-familiar area, such as a shopping centre.

        • Patent Rules amended again, major changes in fee structure for small enterprises; WIPO launches new patent information tool – WIPO INSPIRE and more

          On 4th November 2020, The EPO signed a ‘Reinforced Partnership agreement’ with the Superintendent of Industry and Commerce of Colombia with the objective of strengthening co-operation. According to the official notification on the EPO website, the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by the President of EPO, António Campinos and Colombia’s Superintendent of Industry and Commerce, Andrés Barreto, during a virtual meeting. The MoU allows the Superintendence to use EPO’s products, tools and practices, for the next five years, when granting national patents. The EPO President said “This agreement will not only improve the quality and efficiency of handling patent applications, which is key as Colombia moves to strengthen its knowledge economy, but will also help align our patent systems to better support the global technology market.”

        • The cnipa-EPO pilot: a direct access to efficient and cost-effective patent prosecution in Europe for nationals and residents of p.R. China

          The CNIPA-EPO pilot will start on December 1st 2020 and will allow nationals and residents of P.R. China new strategic options as well as substantive cost reductions.

          Starting on December 1st 2020, and for a period of two years at least, nationals and residents of P.R. China will be able to participate in the CNIPA-EPO pilot.

          When filing an international application in English, nationals and residents of P.R. China will thus be able to select the European Patent Office (EPO) as International Search Authority. They will thus benefit from the opinion of the EPO long before entry into national phase, enabling them to save costs, and to have in advance of the entry into Europe a very good knowledge of chances to obtain a European patent.

        • Achilles Therapeutics Announces Grant of European Patent Covering Use of Selectively Expanded T cells Targeting Clonal Neoantigens for the Treatment of Cancer

          Achilles Therapeutics Limited (“Achilles”), a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing personalised cell therapies targeting clonal neoantigens, a novel class of tumour target, today announced the decision by the European Patent Office (“EPO”) to grant European patent EP3288581B, which covers the treatment of cancer using T cells that have been selectively expanded to target clonal neoantigens.

        • Patenting cleantech in Europe: A global market for Canada's clean technology

          Because of the manner in which a single European application often leads to multiple national patents, attacking a competitor's European patent family can be a daunting and expensive prospect. An exception to this general rule is the European opposition procedure. For a 9-month window following grant, a European patent can be challenged at the EPO by filing a so-called opposition. If successful, the European patent is deemed never to have existed, and all national rights stemming from the patent are revoked. European oppositions therefore provide a very cost-effective means of centrally attacking a recently granted European patent.

        • Software Patents

          • Soar in US AI patenting activity sees applications more than double from 2002-2018 [Ed: People rebrand software patents and frame them as "Hey Hi" (AI)]

            Artificial intelligence (“AI”) and intellectual property (“IP”), have been under the proverbial microscope in recent times. One debate has focused on how AI should be accommodated in IP law in the UK (see The Lens post here), the EU (here) and on the international stage (here). Another debate previously discussed on The Lens has considered whether an AI machine can be an inventor for patent purposes in the UK (here), the EU (here) and the US (here). These are important, real-time, practical questions, as a recent USPTO report titled “Inventing AI: Tracing the diffusion of artificial intelligence with U.S. patents” highlights.

            This report states that AI-related patent applications increased by 100% over this period, from 30,000 annually in 2002 to more than 60,000 annually in 2018. During that period there was also an unprecedented growth and broad diffusion of AI across technologies, inventor-patentees, organisations, and geography, which the USPTO thinks attests to the growing importance of AI for all of those seeking IP protection. This of course makes sense, given that patents are the primary form of legal protection for inventions - patent activity can indicate how the technology is growing and diffusing.

            The authors of the report developed a machine learning AI algorithm to examine all U.S. patent applications published from 1976 through 2018. Therefore, as the report puts it, they have used AI to discover AI, building on recent AI landscaping efforts by the European Patent Office (“EPO”), the World Intellectual Property Organization, and others. This examination found that patents containing AI appeared in 9% of technologies in 1976, spreading to more than 42% of technologies by 2018. While the growth of AI patent applications came in all AI-related technologies, “planning and control” and “knowledge processing” were the two categories that recorded the greatest increase in AI use.

      • Trademarks

        • The top filers and agility in action: inside EUIPO operations | World Trademark Review

          World Trademark Review’s annual EUIPO focus assesses current office processes, reveals the most proactive filers and explores how the agency has responded to the impact of covid-19 on its employees, users and offerings

          Every year World Trademark Review (WTR) runs an used on the EUIPO, analysing the evolution of office operations and updates on key projects. This year, however, things are inevitably different. The impact of covid-19 means that it has not been business as usual – in Alicante or anywhere else. How the office responded to the unprecedented crisis is therefore a natural starting point for a review of EUIPO processes and performance.

          In early June, the office announced that the exceptional extensions granted to users by two decisions of EUIPO executive director Christian Archambeau (Decisions EX-20-3 and EX-20-4) had come to an end. The extensions were designed to support users and covered all procedural deadlines, irrespective of whether they had been set by the office or were stipulated in the regulations.

          However, on their expiration, the office provided users with further guidance on coping with time limits stipulated in the applicable regulations, recognising that many will still face operational difficulties arising from measures taken by public authorities to tackle the pandemic, as well as sickness among parties or their representatives. The end of the extensions represented a partial return to normality, albeit one with increased flexibility and relying on a remote workforce. It has been an unprecedented few months to say the least.

      • Copyrights

        • uTorrent Inventor Wins Prestigious Technology Innovation Award

          Ludvig Strigeus, the Swedish programmer who made uTorrent and also helped to create Spotify, has been awarded the prestigious Polhem Prize. Strigeus received the technology innovation award for his exemplary coding skills, which helped to create two of the most used applications in the world.

        • Unmask 25 Pirate Site Owners: ACE/MPA Piles Pressure On Tonic Registry

          This week the MPA and RIAA reported the Tonic domain registry to the USTR as a notorious pirate market. As pressure mounts, two DMCA subpoenas obtained by the Alliance For Creativity and Entertainment on behalf of the MPA and dozens of other companies now order the company to hand over all information it holds on more than two dozen 'pirate' sites.



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