The TUXEDO Book XP14 is powered by 10th Gen Intel Quad-Core “Tiger Lake” processors, either Intel Core i5-1135G7 with 4 cores, 8 threads, and 8 MB cache, or the Intel Core i7-1165G7 with 4 cores, 8 threads, and 12 MB cache.
Both processors come with integrated Iris Xe G7 graphics, but customers interested in playing some of the latest games will be able to choose a more powerful, dedicated graphics card, namely the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650 with 4GB GDDR6 VRAM.
Just a little heart to heart with you all about one man's journey through running the Linux desktop for the last 10 years.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.9.14 kernel.
All users of the 5.9 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.9.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.9.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
Linux file navigation tools are great for navigating directories through commands. Undoubtedly, Linux is nowadays much improved with a modern graphical user interface. Even a kid can easily navigate through the Linux system by using the GUI. But still, some Linux enthusiasts and developers prefer command lines for navigation.
This is because the CLI or command-line interface is more fluid and fast. Besides, they aren’t resource-hungry like graphical tools. The stock Linux commands have some limitations. But some awesome tools have extended the functionalities of the terminal. Well, in most cases, they are not full-fledged programs. Rather they act as extensions for the terminal or shell.
You guys asked for it, now I finally deliver - in this video I show you how to use Ansible to configure your laptops and desktops! This works for servers too.
AWS S3 Storage Lens gives visibility into object storage usage, activity trends. It gives recommendations to improve cost-efficiency, also it applies data protection best practices. It is the first analytics service that provides a single view of object storage usage and activity across hundreds and thousands of accounts in an organization. It provides a summary of insights of S3 Buckets, detects outliers, enhances data protection, and optimizes storage costs.
S3 Storage comes up with a dashboard containing pre-configured views to visualize storage usage and activity trends. We can also export metrics in CSV or Parquet format to an S3 bucket.
In this article, we will see the existing default dashboard and metrics it has. We will also create a new dashboard with free metrics in it.
Netdata is a free, open-source and real-time performance and health monitoring tool. It supports Linux, MacOS and FreeBSD. You can troubleshoot and monitor cloud-based servers, containers and your entire IT infrastructure with Netdata. It provides real-time system metrics including, Memory usage, CPU, Bandwidth, Disk utilization and more. You can also integrate it with other monitoring tools like Prometheus, Graphite, OpenTSDB, Kafka, Grafana, and more.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install the Netdata monitoring tool on Ubuntu 20.04 server.
DHCP (Dynamic host configuration protocol) used to assign an IP address automatically to Mobile, Laptop, PC, and other network devices so they can communicate. It employs a connectionless service model, using the UDP (User Datagram Protocol). DHCP uses a well-known UDP port 67 for the DHCP Server and the UDP Port 68 for the client. DHCP operations fall into four phases: server discovery, IP lease offer, IP lease request, and IP lease acknowledgment. These stages are often abbreviated as DORA for discovery, offer, request, and acknowledgment. In this tutorial, we will learn how to install and configure DHCP Server on Centos8. So, let’s get started.
Oracle Linux is a RHEL-based Linux distribution developed by Oracle. It is one of the best alternative to CentOS Linux. This guide explains how to migrate CentOS Linux to Oracle Linux using centos2ol script.
After CentOS Community Manager Rich Bowen announced that they are shifting focus from CentOS Linux to CentOS Stream, there is a great resentment among developers and users. Many users strongly condemns this decision. However, the decision is already made and it seems that there is no going back. When CentOS Linux 8 ends at December 31, 2021, your best and only option will be to migrate to CentOS Stream 8. Since CentOS Stream is a rolling preview (i.e. development), a lot of users raised their concern about its stability. At present, the only stable and viable RHEL-based alternative to CentOS is Oracle Linux. If you'd like to migrate CentOS Linux to Oracle Linux, this tutorial will teach you how.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install PHP 8.0 with Apache on Ubuntu 20.04. PHP is a free, open-source, and most popular server-side programming language used by many CMS including, Drupal, WordPress, Magento, and many more. PHP 8.0 is a major update of the PHP language that contains new features and optimizations including named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expression, null safe operator, JIT, and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency. Let’s get started with the installation of PHP 8 on Ubuntu 20.04.
AnyDesk is a handy, lightweight, and secure desktop tool to control computers remotely. AnyDesk is a cross-platform application; you can install and run AnyDesk on Windows, Mac, and Linux distributions. Despite being lightweight and quick, it can handle many heavy and long time duties. Many IPS and VoIP service providers use the AnyDesk to solve client’s issues remotely from the server office. If you’re a NOC engineer, probably you already know that finding an appropriate and easy to install remote desktop tool is very crucial in an emergency. In such emergencies, you can always rely on AnyDesk.
As I’m mentioning about NOC engineering, that doesn’t mean that you have to be skilled and need to know a lot of SSH commands to use the AnyDesk tool on your system. No matter what type of service you provide, the simple user interfaces and robust connectivity of AnyDesk will attract you.
Cinnamon is a popular Windows 7 like interface that comes by default in Linux Mint operating systems. It makes the Mint very easy to understand and use, that is also one of the reasons why Mint is one of the many Popular Linux distros that are part of home-use PC and laptops.
Although MX Linux is already available with lightweight XFCE and Fluxbox desktops including eye-catching KDE Plasman, however, in case you still not comfortable, use Linux Cinnamon, which can be installed with just one command…
Use both Cirrus CLI and Podman to better manage and secure container environments for rootless builds.
Signal, the secure messaging service, already has a dedicated desktop application for Windows, MacOS and Linux, and in this tutorial, you will see how to install the Signal messenger on Linux via Flatpak.Signal app is an encrypted chat application for iOS and Android. An alternative to WhatsApp, Signal allows you to send messages to other people who use the service. It also enables you to create and participate in group conversations and make voice and video calls to other users. All chats are protected using end-to-end encryption. In addition, the codes in the app allow you to check the connection.
Learn how to set up a Pi-Hole instance with a single command and a cluster of Raspberry Pis on MicroK8s. High availability, load balancing and Kubernetes configuration included. The Raspberry Pi 4 brings the graphics, RAM and connectivity needed for a Linux workstation, so why not...
This is guide, howto install NVIDIA Container Toolkit with Docker >= 20.10 on Fedora 33. Check video to see also howto install latest Docker Engine 20.10 (docker-ce) on Fedora 33. Same method works with Podman, but it will cause strange SELinux problems even with custom generated policy installed. So package still requires Docker 20.10 or newer. If you want run Podman version without docker dependencies, let me know and I can build different version of nvidia-docker2 package.
XAMPP consist of (X) cross-platform software, (A) Apache,(M) MariaDB,(P) PHP and P (Perl).
In this guide, we will share with you how to install XAMPP on ubuntu 20.04. Follow the step.
Basic Requirement
Ubuntu 20.04 Focal Fossa A user with sudo privileges Access to a terminal/command line The apt the tool, pre-loaded in Ubuntu and other Debian-based distros
A fresh Beta update for the Steam Client has rolled out and it seems Valve have begun modernising more parts of the UI, along with Linux fixes.
For the Steam Library, they've now ripped out the old Properties dialog with one that more closely matches their newer design style found elsewhere like with chat settings and they also fixed displaying the coming soon date for a pre-loaded game.
The story of the Atari VCS is definitely an eventful one but it appears it might finally be coming to an end, with units actually about to ship and a couple of game announcements.
Powered by their own Linux-based Atari World operating system, along with the PC Mode ability to load up any other Linux distribution of your choice, it looks like a nice bit of tech for fans of compact systems. Quite underpowered compared with all the latest traditional consoles and normal PCs of course though.
After many delays and a lawsuit involving Rob Wyatt (the architect behind the original Xbox), who the Atari team pulled in to help do some design work, the Atari VCS has limped along. On December 5, they noted that "starting next week" they would begin the sorting, packing and shipping and that they would update their pages to note it was shipping - which has not yet actually happened it seems. Also, units will only come with a US plug, so you will need an adapter outside the US and they said it will need an internet connection to activate.
1C Entertainment announced today that they've teamed up with Acid Man Games and Fire Plant Games as publisher for Viscerafest, their colourful retro themed sci-fi fantasy FPS.
Shown off originally during the Realms Deep event earlier this year, in Viscerafest "you take the role of Caroline, a bloodthirsty, psychopathic mercenary who wants nothing more than to marry her wonderful boyfriend Athens Fetter. Problem is money's tight, and rings aren't exactly cheap. But thankfully there may be hope for her yet, as a warlock named Cromune has acquired a rather hefty bounty on his head."
Uncharted Depths is the name of the latest upgrade to Barotrauma, a sci-fi exploration sim that puts you and friends (or random people / AI) inside a submarine in the depths of Jupiter's moon Europa.
What I love to call an underwater suffering sim, as it's a pretty good description of what to expect from it. Inspired by FTL, RimWorld, Space Station 13 and others it's a sci-fi game full of silly ragdoll characters and plenty of horrifying sea creatures that want to eat you and your submarine. It's like a much darker and more in-depth version of We Need To Go Deeper.
The Uncharted Depths is out now adding in a huge overhaul to the environment with remade textures, branching level paths, more varied levels, new small explorable caves, destructible floating ice chunks, new environmental hazards like falling Ice Spires and more. That alone sounds awesome but there's a whole lot more including new missions, a big upgrade to the AI bot system to help you when you're alone, expanded modding support, tons of bug fixes and more.
SouthPAW Games and NEOWIZ have confirmed that Skul: The Hero Slayer, their head-swapping 2D rogue-lite action game will leaving Early Access on January 21, 2021. One of the most promising Early Access titles that became available through 2020, they've enjoyed a very good reception to the game overall with over seven thousand user reviews giving it a Very Positive rating on Steam.
A fun mix on the traditional hero types you find in other games, with you taking on the role of the unusual skeleton Skul. After humans and heroes teamed up with an army to try and destroy the Demons once and for all, you're the only one seemingly left so you begin your quest to save your friends after the destruction left at the Demon King's castle.
One particular indie game I am very excited to eventually get my hands on is Death Trash, a blending of real-time action and RPG mechanics in a very strange post-apocalyptic world.
"A world where cosmic horrors long for humanity but meet punks with shotguns. Influenced by post-apocalyptic, horror, and cyberpunk classics, but with a fresh personality of its own. Death Trash combines the crunch and depth of old-school, role-playing classics with the controls and game feel of modern games."
In a recent update post on the Steam page, the developer confirmed that 2021 will be the year for Early Access and they're still figuring out an exact date while a few people have been helping to playtest. They're working on more content and will pull in more testers in the coming weeks and eventually a new trailer too.
Ubuntu MATE 20.10 Groovy Gorilla is not a bad distro. But it's also not really fun. It's virtually identical to its predecessor, for better or worse. The annoying thing is - lots of existing bugs persist. There are some improvements, and the fixes to layouts and the overall Boutique speed are more than welcome. However, various inconsistencies remain, the fonts can be better, and the performance can be better.
I'd say, average score. If you're after Ubuntu MATE, then the LTS makes far more sense. The changes in this release do not warrant the hassle of an upgrade, especially since you will have to do it again soon, as the support timeframe for the interim releases is very short. Groovy is mostly for tinkerers and those who want the latest version of whatever, no matter what. Decent, but it can be vastly more fun. And we're done.
The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.12.2 of its Alpine Linux operating system.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Kubuntu 20.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Zoom, the cloud meeting company, unifies cloud video conferencing, simple online meetings, and group messaging into one easy-to-use platform.
Vivaldi is a new web browser based on Chromium that is built by an Opera founder. It’s aimed mostly at power users, but it can be used by anyone.
Opera is a Chromium-based browser using the Blink layout engine. It differentiates itself because of a distinct user interface and other features.
GeckoLinux is pleased to announce updates to its full range of ROLLING, STATIC, and NEXT editions. GeckoLinux spins are generated directly from unmodified openSUSE and Packman repositories, and the installed system can be updated directly from those official sources. GeckoLinux continues to be focused on eliminating pain points and polishing its unique out-of-the-box configuration on top of the stable and flexible openSUSE base.
All three editions of GeckoLinux (ROLLING, STATIC and NEXT) have been updated, but while each one comes with its own updates, all of them include some quality improvements for Bluetooth audio users.
These include the ability for the PulseAudio sound server to prevent the automatic switching of audio to the low-quality HSP/HFP profiles, as well as support for automatically switching audio streams to newly connected Bluetooth devices using the A2DP profile.
Four openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots updated hundreds of packages in the rolling release this week.
There were two major versions to arrive this week and one of them, pulseaudio, has an important message for GNOME who plan on using the new major version.
An update of Mesa 20.2.4 and firewalld 0.9.1 arrived in the latest snapshot - 20201209. While no new features were added in Mesa 20.2.4, there was a rendering bugfix for Blender viewport with AMD NAVI 5700 XT GPUs. Firewalld 0.9.1 removed a patch and added a workaround for the Docker bridge. ModemManager 1.14.8 made minor improvements and fixed a daemon crash when a device is being removed during the initialization sequence. NetworkManager 1.28.0 unified some behavior affecting IPv4 and IPv6 connections with the boot configuration generator. A couple new features were added for the DNS server package bind 9.16.8 and a feature change affecting the EDNS buffer size has been changed from 4096 to 1232 bytes; the change log states that measurements were done by multiple parties and that the change should not cause any operational problems as most of the Internet “core” is able to cope with IP message sizes between 1400-1500 bytes. More color printer support was added in the hplip 3.20.9 update. Other packages to update in the snapshot were vim 8.2.2105, mutt 2.0.3, poppler and sudo 1.9.4, which allows the parser to detect when an upper-case reserved word is used when declaring an alias.
The 20201207 snapshot updated three packages. GNU Compiler Collection 10 received a minor update to enable fortran for offload compilers. The 6.2.1 version of gmp fixed a longtime AArch64 bug and gstreamer-devtools 1.18.1 fixed a memory leak and made various stability and reliability improvements.
In an unexpected announcement earlier this week, Red Hat killed off the free-as-in-beer CentOS variant of their flagship distribution, Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
The announcement—which clearly stated "CentOS Stream is not a replacement for CentOS Linux"—left thousands of CentOS users stunned and bewildered. In many cases, CentOS users had migrated to CentOS 8—which they expected to receive support until 2029—only to find out that their "until-2029" distro had become an "until-2021" distro just a few months after they'd installed it in the first place.
I can't pretend this is good news for CentOS users, but I can offer some good news: CentOS might be dead, but it's far from your only option for a "rebuild" distro that's binary-compatible with RHEL. Let's take a look at a few of the most likely options below.
The creator of CentOS started planning for a new Linux Distribution called Rocky Linux. It is going to be a true replacement for CentOS and will be enterprise-ready.
Who are these companies? They're names you know. Major companies that don't just use CentOS but depend on it include Disney, GoDaddy, RackSpace, Toyota, and Verizon. Other important technology companies build products around CentOS. These include GE, Riverbed, F5, Juniper, and Fortinet.
This isn't just a few disgruntled users venting on Hacker News, Twitter, and Reddit. These are multi-billion-dollar companies. I'm told by executives at several of these enterprises they are not happy at all and are looking for alternatives. While some of them are considering switching to RHEL, many more are looking at other Linux distributions. Canonical's Ubuntu was the one most often mentioned.
Some of them may now look to Rocky Linux.
Red Hat/IBM's announcement of the end of CentOS as we knew it, turning it into a rolling development beta program of the commercial GNU/Linux distro for enterprises, is a reminder that Free Software is not to be mistaken for gratis software.
A resilient Free Software community requires more than a single maintainer, individual or incorporated: individuals have the imponderable bus-hit factor, but corporations can be reliably predicted to do that which maximizes the return on the investment.
If you're reliant on a project maintained by any one of them, it's good to have a backup plan. The nice thing about Free Software is that this doesn't have to be another program: you can plan to keep on using the same software, maintaining it by yourself or along with other users in the community.
There are many Linux distributions (operating systems) for the Raspberry Pi single-board computers. In this article, I am going to talk about the 5 best Linux distributions for the Raspberry Pi. So, let’s get started!
Single-board computers seemingly get more powerful by the day. The Raspberry Pi 4 gets all the attention and a lot of software support, but there are plenty of other alternatives out there that also deserve your attention. One new SBC will run x86 Windows 10 or most Linux distros without any need for platform-specific support, and promises to hit a low enough price point to give the Raspberry Pi serious competition. Not only that, but a Windows version for not a whole lot more money looks like a real winner.
The Hackboard 2 is a newly-announced tiny x86 PC powered by an Intel Celeron N4020 processor. This is a dual-core CPU based on Intel's Gemini Lake Atom architecture with a base clock of 1.1 GHz, maximum turbo speed of 2.8 GHz, and 4 MB of cache. Intel's integrated UHD 600 graphics handle video output duties. While that's not the beefiest CPU around, it's soldered to a completely integrated motherboard that measures just 120 x 80 millimeters (4.72 x 3.15 inches). There's 64 GB of eMMC storage, 4 GB of system RAM, and a pair of NVMe slots that accommodate SSDs for up to 4 TB of extra space.
We’ve seen several x86 SBCs made for the makers’ community including AAEON Up Board family, AMD powered UDOO BOLT boards, and Seeed Studio Odyssey-X864105 SBC and mini PC.
Hackboard 2 is another one of those single board computers. Powered by a dual-core Intel Celeron N4020 Gemini Lake Refresh processor coupled with 4GB DDR4 RAM and 64GB eMMC flash, the board offers the usual HDMI, Ethernet, USB ports, plus a 40-pin Raspberry Pi header, and an optional 4G or 5G modem.
We recently wrote about Devterm, a modular, retro-looking portable computer that looks like a typewriter with an extra-wide display, and takes Raspberry Pi CM3-series modules, or other compatible modules made by Clockwork based on Rockchip RK3399 or Allwinner H6.
If you’re into this kind of device, but would like to use your own Raspberry Pi, another SBC, an Intel NUC motherboard, a Nano/Pico-ITX board, or even your smartphone, Ready! Model 100 single board computer expansion system may be worth looking into.
In this article, you will learn how to use Debezium with Apache Avro and Apicurio Registry to efficiently monitor change events in a MySQL database. We will set up and run a demonstration using Apache Avro rather than the default JSON converter for Debezium serialization. We will use Apache Avro with the Apicurio service registry to externalize Debezium’s event data schema and reduce the payload of captured events.
The Libs team is looking at how we can improve the std::sync module, by potentially splitting it up into new modules and making some changes to APIs along the way. One of those API changes we're looking at is non-poisoning implementations of Mutex and RwLock. To find the best path forward we're conducting a survey to get a clearer picture of how the standard locks are used out in the wild.
Having just completed my own humble book on Habermas as learning theorist (To Emancipate Humanity: reading Habermas as learning theorist) and suffering a few anxiety attacks regarding its adequacy, this tumultuous book of nineteen chapters appeared on first sight to cover just about every critical philosopher alive. Who was this guy? What was he up to? What did he want to accomplish with such a sweep over rocky terrain? Perhaps I can get some tips I could weave into my own book when the editors look at me gravely and pronounce, “Well, it’s sorta ok, but needs major revisions.”
I discovered soon enough that Bernard is wavy-haired, debonaire, gracious and brilliant. He’s the Ronaldo of Critical Theory. Officially, he is the Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law and profession of political science at Columbia University and chaired professor of the Ecole de Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. I discovered that for five years he has chaired the seminar series on critical theoretical issues at the Columbia School for Contemporary Critical Theory. Before Critique and Praxis, Harcourt wrote several books, including The Counterrevolution: How Our Government Went to War Against Its Own Citizens (2018) and The illusion of free markets: punishment and the myth of natural order (2011).
The teenage Chapman wore his hair like Lennon’s, learned to play guitar, and joined a rock group. He sang Lennon’s songs over and over. Like Lennon, Chapman married an older Japanese woman. As a security guard at a Honolulu condominium, he even taped Lennon’s name over his own on his ID tag. On the day he quit, Chapman signed out as “John Lennon,” crossing the name out with the final stroke of his pen. The murder he was about to commit was a partial suicide.
John Lennon was killed by the sinister side of the same force that makes millions of people still mourn him and other dead media icons: a sense of personal connection to selected strangers fostered by media that simulate the sights and sounds of face-to-face interactions.
In the late 1970s, Moscow broke ground on a massive indoor sporting arena to host competitions during the 1980 Summer Olympics. Appropriately named the “Olimpiyskiy” (Olympic Stadium), it was a venue for athletic contests and music concerts for nearly 40 years. In 2019, however, the facility closed for remodeling. The public was told that the stadium’s historical façade would remain (the mayor’s website still indicates this), but some of it is already rubble. Meduza looks at the reconstruction efforts, so far, and explores if it was ever possible to preserve the iconic building’s historical appearance.
Russia’s vaccination campaign against the coronavirus has already begun in Moscow and the Moscow region. On Thursday, December 10, the Gamelaya Research Institute’s director Alexander Gintsburg reported that 150,000 people had already received their “Sputnik V” vaccine. But recently, news reports have emerged explaining that the vaccine (which requires two injections over the course of several weeks) doesn’t pair well with alcohol. Here’s what Russian officials had to say on the subject and what science tells us.€
Under the new system, private agricultural businesses, grocers and supermarkets can buy directly from farmers and government price supports have been eliminated.€ Farmers believe it puts them at the mercy of agro-business.
As the World Food Programme accepts the Nobel Peace Prize, we look at the growing global hunger crisis amid the pandemic, the climate crisis and war. In the United States, as many as 50 million people could experience food insecurity before the end of the year — including one in four children. “It’s important to remember that hunger does not always happen because of natural disasters,” says Ricardo Salvador, director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “It is often the result of things that we do to each other deliberately.”
"His transition team has made a completely avoidable, self-inflicted injury by appointing Tom Vilsack to USDA."
Progressives and environmental and labor activists are objecting to President-elect Joe Biden’s selection of Tom Vilsack to be his agriculture secretary, reprising the role he held in the Obama administration. Those opposed to Vilsack’s nomination say he has a record of supporting corporate interests over those of farmers, loosening regulations and backing genetically modified, herbicide-resistant crops. The NAACP has pointed to Vilsack’s role in firing former USDA official Shirley Sherrod in 2010 as disqualifying. Biden’s pick of Vilsack is a missed opportunity to reshape the U.S. Department of Agriculture, says Ricardo Salvador, director of the Food and Environment Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Going back to a secretary of the past is not the way to strike in a new direction. That is status quo.”
"We are losing the battle against hunger as never before," warned WFP's David Beasley. "And we are losing it most in Yemen."
First, the good news. Only a year ago, SARS-CoV-2 emerged on the world stage, slowly growing into the pandemic we know today. A year later, multiple vaccines against this new virus are on the verge of being distributed to millions of people around the world. The timeline is astounding. It’s a testament to science first and foremost. Earlier this year I was skeptical of the prognostications of having a vaccine within a few months—mainly because of the gaps in our knowledge about SARS-CoV-2 and the immune response to it, and the reliance on novel mRNA technologies for some of the candidates. I was wrong, and I couldn’t have been happier.
More than 150,000 Russian citizens have been immunized against the coronavirus with the “Sputnik V” vaccine, reported the head of the Gamaleya Research Institute Alexander Gintsburg on Thursday, December 10.
In total, Russia saw 138,325 excess deaths between the start of the pandemic in March and the month of October, reports the Federal Statistics Service (Rosstat).
"Federal employees have affirmative obligations to preserve documents, and destruction of federal records is potentially illegal," warned Rep. James Clyburn.€
Evicted families’ limited housing options increase their contact with others and limit their ability to social distance, quarantine, access appropriate health services, or practice recommended hand hygiene.
The World Food Programme, the world’s largest humanitarian organization dealing with hunger and food security, accepted the Nobel Peace Prize today, with its executive director David Beasley warning that the combination of conflict, climate crisis and COVID-19 could push 270 million people to the brink of starvation. In his acceptance speech, Beasley said, “Because of so many wars, climate change, the widespread use of hunger as a political and military weapon, and a global health pandemic that makes all of that exponentially worse, 270 million people are marching toward starvation. Failure to address their needs will cause a hunger pandemic which will dwarf the impact of COVID.”
Russia’s federal healthcare watchdog (Roszdravnadzor) has accused three private clinics in Moscow of providing assisted reproductive technology (ART) services to single men from other countries. Though this isn’t prohibited by law in Russia, it isn’t explicitly allowed either. Nevertheless, one clinic is now facing charges for administrative violations. In addition, these cases have both the Russian Health Ministry and the State Duma’s lawmakers considering an overhaul of the country’s surrogacy regulations.
Still being a craft veteran King is able to keep the young upstart at bay through the early rounds. In the tenth round, King sees his opening, landing a vicious right that drops his opponent. Though Sandel rises, King sensing victory pins Sandel on the ropes continuing his attack. Suddenly however, King’s strength abandons him and Sandel’s superior condition allows him to counterattack and score a knockout over the exhausted older fighter. King, who had been advanced the loser’s share some weeks and therefore made no money for the fight, ends the story weeping on a park bench contemplating his deep hunger and dim economic prospects. London writes: ‘Ah, that piece of steak would have done it! He lacked just that for the decisive blow, and he had lost. It was all because of the piece of steak.’
London actually placed the story in Australia, and his clear theme was the perilous road of ageing prizefighters, however being published in a widely circulated American magazine, the meaning of the steak would not have been missed. Steak has long been the symbolic pinnacle of American meat, simultaneously representing both democratic eating and high class status. In the early 20th century, immigrants wrote home and visitors marveled about the abundance of available meat in American cities.
There's a battle playing out in the enterprise open source arena right now, but it's one you probably haven't heard about.
It's a clash between pure open source and commercialized open source (or 'open core') versions. While this may be below the radar for anyone not directly involved it has important long-term implications for the industry.
In an exclusive interview we spoke to Ben Bromhead, the chief technology officer at open source specialist Instaclustr to get his view of the battlefield.
[...]
BB: The muddying of what open source means through the use of restricted open source licenses is a significant challenge for open source at the moment. At Instaclustr, we favor software governed by open source foundations such as the Apache Foundation, where you can be sure that the governance of the open source project is focused on acting in the best interest of users. And as mentioned, enterprise open source adoption is increasing and on quite a healthy path right now. The challenges of the next ten years may be in better distinguishing true open source offerings, and ensuring that the market gives new adopters the clarity to understand the potential pitfalls ahead when dealing with open core solutions. In scenarios where enterprises don’t control their own code, vendor and technical lock-in are very real threats. Hopefully the next decade will see a stark reduction in the number of enterprises that find themselves in such situations.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (minidlna and x11vnc), Fedora (pam), openSUSE (chromium, minidlna, nsd, openssl-1_1, and pngcheck), SUSE (gcc7 and kernel), and Ubuntu (lxml and squirrelmail).
Recent activity seems to indicate that this actor is active once again. In November of 2019 the group Malware Hunter Team discovered new samples of the Bandook malware which is associated with Dark Caracal. This time with legitimate signing certificates for Windows (issued by the “Certum” certificate authority,) which would allow them to be run without a warning to the user on any Windows computer. Tipped off by the emergence of new variants of the Bandook Trojan, researchers at Checkpoint found three new variants of Bandook: some expanded (120 commands), some slimmed down (11 commands), and all signed with Certum certificates. The Checkpoint researchers also discovered several new command and control domains in use by Dark Caracal.
In previous campaigns, this actor has displayed impressively lax operational security, enabling researchers to download terabytes of data from their command and control servers. The latest campaign exhibits a somewhat higher level of opsec. Checkpoint reports that targets included “Government, financial, energy, food industry, healthcare, education, IT and legal institutions” in the following countries: Singapore, Cyprus, Chile, Italy, USA, Turkey, Switzerland, Indonesia and Germany.
The Dark Caracal threat actors still seem to primarily use phishing and Office-based macros as their primary method of infection. Because of this, the best step one can take to protect against Dark Caracal is to disable Office macros on your personal devices or that of your entire organization. This is additionally a good basic security hygiene practice. Standard methods to avoid phishing attacks are also good practice. Readers may also take some comfort in the fact that Bandook is currently detected by many, if not most, antivirus products.
Cyber security is the next booming domain and offers immense growth opportunities to everyone. The increasing dependency on technologies and digital services has also increased the vulnerability towards new cyber threats.
The cyber security space has seen exponential growth as workforce management and business models have undergone a drastic shift during the Covid-19 pandemic. This has caused protection providers to become financial investors’ main point of focus. A report by the Data Security Council of India (DSCI) predicts that the Indian cyber security market will grow to $7.6 billion by 2022.
Cyber attacks have increased during the pandemic. GoDaddy, the world’s largest web domain registrar, experienced a breach that saw a hacker gain login data information for the hosting accounts of 28,000 consumers. On April 23, 2020, the organisation recognised suspicious action on a subset of servers and immediately began an investigation. The investigation found that unauthorised access to customers’ login credentials was used to connect to the secure shell (SSH) on its hosting account. The company reset the usernames and passwords of the targeted customers and removed the SSH file from its platform to resolve the attack.
We're still hearing quite a bit about law enforcement's supposedly endless string of losses to criminals and their device encryption. Citing facts not in evidence, consecutive FBI directors -- along with outgoing Attorney General Bill Barr -- have claimed the implementation of encryption has pretty much made it impossible to successfully prosecute criminals.
It comes from the company Ghostery, founded in 2009, and best known for its Ghostery browser extension, which allows users to choose which – if any – trackers to allow. The company claims to have over seven million active users, and by drawing on their online experiences Ghostery has put together a report called “Tracking the Trackers“. This is the company’s second report on tracking. The first was in 2017, and during the last three years some important trends have emerged. One is that Google has extended its dominance in the world of trackers:
The crux of WhatsApp’s “privacy nutrition labels are anticompetitive” argument is that Apple preinstalls iMessage, which means pretty much all users won’t ever see iMessage’s privacy nutrition label – even though Apple does provide it. A WhatsApp spokesperson told Axios:
The TSA's "Quiet Skies" program continues to suffer under scrutiny. When details first leaked out about the TSA's suspicionless surveillance program, even the air marshals tasked with tailing non-terrorists all over the nation seemed concerned. Marshals questioned the "legality and validity" of the program that sent them after people no government agency had conclusively tied to terrorist organizations or activities. Simply changing flights in the wrong country was enough to initiate the process.
“YouTube dominates the online video market, and Content ID dominates video makers’ experiences there,” said EFF’s Katharine Trendacosta, associate director of policy and activism. “Instead of making the best video they can, they have to make the best video that will pass through Content ID—a system that does a clumsy job of finding actual copyright infringement, but does a great job of ensnaring videos that don’t infringe at all.”
“Unfiltered” describes the byzantine process that professional video creators and others must go through to ensure that their video is posted and recommended by YouTube’s algorithm, including dealing with mistaken matches to copyrighted content, arbitrary judgements on how long content clips can be, loss of revenue, and multiple copyright claims of the same piece of music or video. Creators can appeal a Content ID match, but missteps during that appeal process can lead to a formal legal claim through the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). That creates more headaches, including the potential loss of an entire YouTube channel.
In addition to a step-by-step description of how Content ID works, “Unfiltered” also includes case studies from popular YouTubers “hbomberguy,” Todd in the Shadows, and Lindsay Ellis—all who express their frustration with Content ID.
For the second time in a few months, Spotify has had to reset the passwords for user accounts. This time, Spotify passwords were reset by the company after user account info was exposed to some of the company’s business partners.
The Pentagon predictably described the maneuver as defensive, even though it was the U.S. that pushed the two nations to the brink of war repeatedly over the past several years.
After four years of sanctions, sabotaged industries, attempted coups, an assassination by drone attempt, a mercenary incursion and paramilitary attacks, among others, Venezuela managed to survive the Trump administration’s maximum pressure.
Recently, in a podcast chat about our very different but somehow twin journeys through those wars, he and I got to thinking about what might have happened if our paths had crossed so much earlier. Both of us, after all, have been writing for TomDispatch for years. As Bill once said to me, thinking about his post-military writing career, “You know, Danny, in my small way I was trying — and failing — to stop the wars you were heading into.”
Now that’s an interesting, if disturbing, thought. But Bill, what would you have said to Lieutenant Danny (that was me once upon a time!) and how might he have responded then?
Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019 for ending the two-decade “state of war” between Ethiopia and Eritrea, with many hailing a new era of peace in the region. Just one year later, Ahmed’s military has displaced tens of thousands of civilians in an ongoing military campaign in the northern Tigray region. Thousands have died since Ethiopia declared war on the Tigray People’s Liberation Front in early November, and at least one massacre has been reported. Ethiopia has admitted federal troops fired at and detained U.N. workers in the northern Tigray region for attempting to enter areas they say are forbidden. Awol Allo, associate professor at the Keele University School of Law in the United Kingdom, was among those who nominated Ahmed for the Nobel Peace Prize, but he now says the prime minister has dashed hopes for peace in the region. “Ethiopia over the course of the last two years moved from a moment of a very high degree of hope and optimism, a vision of transformation, into a total civil war that threatened to destabilize not only the country but also the broader Horn of Africa region,” he says.
"The United States should be working to deescalate conflict in the Middle East, not fueling it by selling more and more weapons to regimes using them to kill civilians," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Trump’s repeated false claims about the presidential election add fuel to the already simmering fire of right-wing extremism in the US.
Punishing the target country regardless of its behavior does not create leverage; it destroys it.
"Globally, tropical cyclones are about 25 percent more likely to be at major-hurricane intensity now than four decades ago. The chances of rapid intensification in the 1980s was about one in 100 in the Atlantic. Nowadays, the chances are 1 in 20."
The global crisis, says the youth leader, "cannot be solved without system change. That's no longer an opinion. That's a fact."
"It's time that Indigenous people have authority over stolen land."
Human handiwork, all we’ve produced, now outweighs the plants and animals evolved over 3 billion years: a global takeover.
Irrigation practices have severely altered the river’s natural flows. Historically, due to an abundance of springs, the Deschutes ran crystal clear as the Metolius or Fall rivers still do and had almost no variation in flow year-round.
Irrigation withdrawals have changed the river dramatically.€ The Upper Deschutes River is essentially an irrigation canal that may drop as low as 100 CFS in winter and flood to 2000 CFS in summer. These radical changes in flow have contributed to the endangerment of Oregon spotted frog, as well as harmed other species like Bull trout.
Human exploitation of Planet Earth has reached a point where what we do and how we live reverberates across the circle of life—and could destroy it, for every species, for all life.
And here's the real question: Is a planetary Green New Deal possible?
The Department of Interior approved Hilcorp’s Liberty project in October 2018. However, months before the agency completed the project’s environmental review and issued its decision, a high-ranking Trump Interior official said he expected it would be approved and went on to praise and defend the company, despite Hilcorp’s checkered environmental and safety record in€ Alaska.
"The only reasonable decision for investors in this situation is to green their portfolio and to quit companies planning new fossil investments now."
"The nation's health and economy are going backwards, not forwards, because Republicans and the leader of their party have spent months doing the very opposite of what is needed."
The job openings and labor turnover survey continues to show weaker levels of hires than before the recession hit.
As we recreated his legendary aerial shot of Sao Paulo, I connected with Brazilian photographer Tuca Vieira around our shared passion for creating provocative images of spatial inequality.
"Corporate welfare? Endless amounts of money," said Sen. Bernie Sanders. "Now when children are going hungry in America and so many families are struggling, suddenly we don't have enough money?"
From Ford to Visa to Verizon, journalist Judd Legum reports corporations are spending big "to keep McConnell in charge."
"This state of austerity is an artificial cruelty designed to redistribute wealth, enrich the obscenely wealthy, and keep us under the thumb of employers and politicians."
According to the results of a new survey from the independent Levada Center, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ratings remain at pre-quarantine levels — if presidential elections were to be held next weekend, 39 percent of Russian citizens would cast their vote for him. In December 2019, the share of Russians ready to support Putin was 38 percent.
"Millions€ face€ joblessness, foreclosure, or eviction. And€ 100 House€ Republicans are focused today on insisting the election was rigged."
"Were the Supreme Court to agree to hear this meritless suit brought by Texas, we might as well toss the Constitution."
When President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris take office, their administration must make racial justice a top priority.
Sen. David Perdue, R-Ga., sold his Washington, D.C., home last year to a brokerage industry official whose organization is under the purview of a committee Perdue sits on.
The deal was made off market, without the home being listed for sale publicly.
During a meeting with members of Russia’s Human Rights Council on Thursday, December 10, President Vladimir Putin spoke about the case of former journalist and advisor to the head of Roscosmos Ivan Safronov, who was jailed on treason charges in July. As Putin’s comments revealed, he doesn’t quite have the facts straight when it comes to the details of the criminal case against Safronov. Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov later maintained that the president simply misspoke.
London—Earlier this fall, the British Labour party announced it had suspended its former leader, Jeremy Corbyn, over his response to a finding by the United Kingdom’s equality watchdog that the party’s handling of complaints of anti-Semitism had broken the law. Corbyn, a veteran left-wing member of Parliament, was elected as the Labour head in 2015—a surprise victory that spurred a record surge in party membership. He successfully defended his premiership when his own MPs challenged him a year later, took the party to a historic vote increase in the election of 2017, and then led it to a catastrophic defeat in December 2019, giving Boris Johnson’s Conservatives five more years in power.
The United States has imposed Magnitsky Act sanctions on a number of individuals and legal entities linked to Chechnya’s leader Ramzan Kadyrov, the U.S. Treasury Department announced on Thursday, December 10.
As I wrote previously, Donald Trump, our amoral Midas and unrepentant super-spreader of both COVID-19 and corruption, befouls everything he touches, including our far from perfect democracy, grabbing at ballots as if they were random vaginas, with the leadership of the GOP letting him get away with it because he is their star performer.
And get away with it he does. To be sure, the dozens of legal challenges he has initiated have been thrown out, but that hasn’t prevented him from launching new ones and pursuing other avenues to reverse his election defeat.
What should the new Presidential administration do about the Department of Homeland Security and the associated laws, regulations, and homeland-security industrial complex?
Neither freedom of movement, other human rights, nor the DHS are among the self-described priorities of the incoming Biden Administration.
But for better or worse, it isn’t hard to come up with our short list of recommendations to the Biden€ transition team and to members of Congress who will be questioning nominees for Secretary of Homeland Security and other DHS leadership positions including the Administrator of the Transportation Security Administration.
Back in October, Reps. Tulsi Gabbard (who is leaving Congress in a few weeks) and Paul Gosar (whose had six of his own siblings tell voters that their brother should not be in Congress), teamed up to introduce an incredibly stupid anti-Section 230 bill, which would take 230's liability protections away from any site that does basic data tracking or has an algorithmically generated feed.
YouTube is the largest streaming video service and one that hosts the most user-generated content. As a result, Content ID has an outsized effect on the online video creator ecosystem. There is a terrible, circular logic that traps creators on YouTube. They cannot afford to dispute Content ID matches because that could lead to Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) notices. They cannot afford DMCA notices because those lead to YouTube. They cannot afford copyright strikes because that could lead to a loss of their account. They cannot afford to lose their account because they cannot afford to lose access to YouTube’s giant audience. And they cannot afford to lose access to that audience because they cannot count on making money from YouTube’s ads alone—they need as many eyes as possible to watch them in order to make money from sponsorships and direct fan contributions, partially because Content ID often diverts advertising money to rightsholders when there is Content ID match. Which they cannot afford to dispute.€
Within the paper is a diagram of the full maze of Content ID, capturing just how difficult it can be to navigate. Here it is, reproduced in full:
"For decades now, government surveillance and anti-Muslim policies have been an unavoidable fact of life for American Muslims. Because of this ruling, American Muslims now know that they can speak out and fight back in court against injustice."
Can anti-discrimination litigation be a tool for social change? For many years, a contingent on the academic left contended that the answer is no. The Critical Legal Studies movement (CLS) of the 1970s and ’80s argued that using litigation to enforce rights privileged lawyers, fed an alienating and individualized discourse, and ultimately had a depoliticizing effect. CLS adherents believed that anti-discrimination laws often legitimated, rather than challenged, the fundamental inequalities of society. Although CLS is no longer a presence in law schools, its ideas live on. Its critique of rights litigation has been bolstered by the opposition to identity politics from some on the left. In the words of Nancy Fraser, today’s neoliberals “[talk] the talk of diversity, multiculturalism, and women’s rights, even while preparing to walk the walk of Goldman Sachs.” A commitment to anti-discrimination “charge[s] neoliberal economic activity with a frisson of excitement,” she writes, and allows it to take on the mantle of “the forward-thinking and the liberatory, the cosmopolitan and the morally advanced.” A remarkable new book by Michael McCann and George Lovell offers a different view. In Union by Law: Filipino American Labor Activists, Rights Radicalism, and Racial Capitalism, McCann and Lovell, professors of political science at the University of Washington, trace the history of Filipino workers in the United States through the last decade of the twentieth century, starting from the U.S. occupation of the Philippines following the Spanish-American War. This review will not spend much time on McCann and Lovell’s engaging treatment of U.S. imperialism before and after the Second World War. Rather, it will focus on the implications of their argument for how anti-discrimination law can be a useful political tool and not simply written off as elitist, alienating, and supportive of the status quo.
When CLS adherents formulated the rights critique, they had history on their side. During the early part of the twentieth century, courts deployed rights to property and contract as weapons to stymie minimum wage, child labor, workers’ compensation, and other laws that sought to reform the labor market. Even the liberal Warren Court, which dramatically expanded the scope of the First Amendment to cover mainstream civil rights groups such as the NAACP, provided little meaningful protection to the speech of radicals such as members of the Communist Party. When the Burger Court began to deploy the First Amendment to protect commercial speech and, especially, political spending by the rich, the critique appeared to have increasing bite. Even anti-discrimination law, which had seemed the shining example of successful rights litigation, turned out to be double-edged. As the legal scholar Derrick Bell saw it, anti-discrimination law had “lowered racial barriers for some talented and skilled blacks” and thus encouraged the belief that “racism is dead.” Law professor Alan Freeman contended that legal rules took a narrow “perpetrator perspective” in seeking to identify discrimination. By focusing on discrete, identifiable acts of wrongdoing undertaken by specific, blameworthy individuals, the law failed to provide a meaningful response to structural or institutional discrimination that cannot be attributed to the fault of a particular racist or sexist.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie showed “a lack of genuine commitment” to addressing a high-profile sexual assault allegation in a VA hospital and focused instead on denigrating the veteran who made the complaint, according to an investigation by the department’s internal watchdog.
Wilkie was convinced the allegation was staged to damage him politically because the veteran was a Democratic congressional staffer, investigators found. The secretary sought to attack the woman’s credibility by saying she had a history of making baseless complaints — a false smear according to the woman and investigators.
Plus: A WhatsApp cofounder’s regrets, the rules of chip hoarding, and a failed attempt at influencer marketing.
[...]
At the end of day one of Facebook’s 2019 F8 developer conference, I found myself alone with Mark Zuckerberg in a room big enough to host a 250-person breakout meeting. It was one of the last interviews I’d do for my book on his company. Among the issues on my agenda was a development that surprised me: According to my sources, Zuckerberg seemed more threatened than thrilled by the breakout success of Instagram, which he bought in 2012. After five years of giving the founders freedom, he now was demanding that Instagram divert its resources to help Facebook Blue, the company’s flagship app—so much so that he had alienated Instagram’s founders, who walked out of the company in September 2018. I asked him about a perception I had heard directly from the Instagram team: Are you jealous of Instagram’s success?
Zuckerberg seemed taken aback by the question, repeating the word, “jealous,” perhaps as a stalling tactic. Finally, he denied the charge. Then he launched into a complicated explanation about how, after several years of allowing relative autonomy to the founders, he now felt the company should have a more cohesive strategy involving its franchises. While WhatsApp and Instagram could evolve, he was essentially saying, he drew the line at Facebook’s properties competing with each other. As for the founders, they should be proud of what they helped build—and be happy to move on.
I thought back to that exchange when reading the complaints filed against Facebook in the long-anticipated lawsuits by the Federal Trade Commission and 48 state and territorial attorneys general this week. The nub of the case is that Facebook built and maintained a monopoly, largely through anticompetitive acquisitions. Both filings took pains to make an unexpected point—in trying to make sure that no one knocked off Facebook Blue, Zuckerberg paid close attention to small new players who’d mastered the powerful tricks that his platform hadn’t figured out yet. The fear was that the young companies would add new features and “morph” into something that drew users from Blue.
In other words, the most fearsome threat to Facebook, in Zuckerberg’s mind, would not be something that worked just like Facebook. That would rule out Google+, the search company’s massive social networking initiative in 2011. Google made the mistake of trying to make a “better” version of a Mark Zuckerberg production. Though it had innovative features, Google+ failed to draw users from its rival. As quoted in the state AGs’ filing, a Facebook postmortem concluded that Google+ fell short because “there isn’t [sic] yet a meaningful differentiator from Facebook.” Without that, there was no incentive to switch.
While the Melatonex advertisement for 3 mg of melatonin as a sleeping aid was dismissed as mere advertising puff, akin to the infamous Carbolic Smoke Ball, the judge made some surprising comments on Zisapel 1999 and found it to be an unpromising piece of prior art apparently based on the fact it was a review article. The judge’s view was that “one would expect the relevant prior art to appear elsewhere than what is purely a review article”. He also referred to evidence given by Neurim’s expert that the data in the references did not always support the comments made in the article itself. The judge, once again, preferred Neurim’s expert’s views that Zisapel 1999 did not address the therapeutic use of melatonin for treating primary insomnia (whether characterised by non-restorative sleep or otherwise) and concluded that the use claimed in EP 702 was neither adverted to in the references nor mentioned in the article itself.
[...]
There was, however, some silver lining for Mylan. Mylan challenged Flynn’s status as exclusive licensee of EP 702, putting forward two arguments: (1) that the licence did not exclude others (including Neurim) from carrying out acts within the scope of the patent; and (2) that the licence constrained Flynn’s right to initiate infringement proceedings. Under the Patents Act 1977, only the patentee and/or exclusive licensee has standing to commence a claim for infringement. Section 130(1) of the Patents Act 1977 requires that to be exclusive, a licence must confer a right in respect of the invention “to the exclusion of all other persons (including the proprietor…)”. Marcus Smith J found that there was no true exclusive licence and so Flynn lacked standing to claim for infringement.
It was the second argument that was successful. Marcus Smith J considered that an additional cause of action is created for an exclusive licensee to commence infringement proceedings by Section 67(1) of the Patents Act 1977. The licence as amended provided only for Flynn to commence infringement proceedings jointly with Neurim and was silent on whether Flynn could commence proceedings independently. The Judge considered that such a licence would prevent Flynn from enforcing its rights under the licence and therefore could not be said to be exclusive. Noting that there was no case law authority on the question, Marcus Smith J found that the restrictions in the litigation clause deprived the purportedly exclusive right of substantially all meaning.
Both of these companies take the approach that a can of pepper-spray should be a fashion-accessory. Skyline’s catch-phrase is “Bling it On!” while Super-Sparkly Safety Stuff doesn’t need more than its company name. The Patent at issue here is Super-Sparkly’s Design Patent No. D731,172 titled “rhinestone covered container for pepper spray canister.” In the images below, you can compare the patented design (left) with Skyline’s accused product (right). I have also included an image of a prior art rhinestone cover that was given-out at the Oscars a few years ago.
[...]
Civil Procedure moment: Here, the non-infringement was only partial summary judgment because other claims remained pending in the case–namely, Skyline filed unfair competition counterclaims. Under R. 54(b), partial summary judgment is not immediately appealable because it is not a “final judgment.” However, the rule allows the district court to sever-off that portion of the case and enter final judgment “if the court expressly determines that there is no just reason to delay.” This is effectively an alternate mechanism for certifying an interlocutory question for appeal. The district court took those steps here, and the Federal Circuit agreed that “the case was properly certified” and so heard the appeal.
Before the district court, the plaintiff had asked the court to delay the summary judgment ruling and instead permit more discovery under R. 56(d). The district court denied that request and the Federal Circuit found no abuse of discretion. In particular, the appellate panel found that none of the additional discovery sought by the patentee “has any bearing on the ordinary observer test for design patent infringement.”
Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Preeti Dua, who received a cash prize of $2,000 for her prior art submissions for U.S. Patent 7,490,086. The patent is owned by GreatGigz Solutions, LLC, an NPE. The '086 patent generally relates to job searching services, including a system for storing, processing, and transmitting job-related information (e.g., job openings, assignments, contracts, etc.) based on a job search request.
Thee ‘086 patent has been asserted in district court against LinkedIn, Grubhub, Angie’s List, Lyft, Uber, Instacart, DoorDash, HEB Grocery, and others for their respective job searching and job assignment platforms. To help the industry fight bad patents, we have published the winning prior art below.
On December 11, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 10,237,577 as part of its ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone. Formerly owned by Intellectual Discovery Co. Ltd., the ‘577 patent is currently owned by Dolby Laboratories. The patent is a part of the HEVC Advance patent pool and HEVC Advance claims that certain claims of the '577 patent are essential to the HEVC standard.
Earlier today, we wrote about reports detailing the latest attempt to push through a bill to make streaming copyright-covered works online a possible felony, this time being pushed by Senator Thom Tillis, who wanted to attach it to the federal spending omnibus bill. As we noted, Tillis was pushing back on some of the criticism, saying that the bill is very narrowly tailored and wouldn't be used to criminalize random people. Of course, the response to that is twofold: (1) if this is the case, why haven't you released the text and (2) why are you shoving it onto a must-pass funding bill without any of the normal debate and discussion?
We've documented that Senator Thom Tillis is working on a massive copyright reform bill for which he's asked stakeholders for input (we provided some). He's expected to unveil that bill next week (which seems like a suspiciously short turnaround from asking for ideas to actually releasing a bill). Yet, apparently, he decided that he couldn't even wait for that process to play out to try to push forward the latest incarnation of the infamous felony streaming bill which Tillis is pushing to add to the must-approve government spending omnibus bill (similar to how others are trying to add the CASE Act to that bill).
Well, it's been a measurable amount of time, so we have yet another example of Nintendo doing the Nintendo, which is best described as depriving its fans of ways to celebrate their fandom via intellectual property enforcement while also offering no alternative route for said fans. Whether it's stripping some of the creative fun out of its Animal Kingdom game, nuking fan-made games of Nintendo properties like some kind of IP-version of Missile Command, or just generally being as IP protectionist as possible, it seems that Nintendo chooses restrictive enforcement over creative methods for granting fans permission to be fans at every turn.
In my forthcoming [lockdown] book, Copyright in the Music Industry, I spend the entire first chapter on why artists and songwriters should even care about copyright, and why it matters to music. The first answer [there is a long list of reasons] is in the point of copyright.
Broadly speaking, the Anglo-American justification for copyright emphasises the economic role of copyright as a system that compensates creators for their work, which would otherwise be a freely accessible commodity with no market value, because it is easy to duplicate. So, copyright steps in to ensure that creators get paid for their work, which enables them to continue to create, and rightsholders can disseminate that creativity, knowledge and culture – thus benefiting society as a whole.
So copyright is how the music industry makes money. But it is not just about the money and motivation, copyright also moonlights with what we call the related rights - performer's rights and moral rights - to give creators control over their work, including the right to be named as the creator.
[...]
In conclusion, copyright is doing one part of its job - encouraging dissemination - very well, but failing in its role to remunerate creators. Luckily, copyright is not a natural phenomenon; it is human made – which means that in places where it is not working, it can be changed! As it should, copyright was not made to be static, it is constantly evolving to adapt to new technologies. As mentioned in yesterday's post, the artists are arguing for equitable remuneration for when their work is performed via a stream. Equitable remuneration already applies to radio, but because of an exception under section 82CA(1) CDPA 1988, this does not apply to online streaming. The government could remove this exception, which would mean that equitable remuneration applies to streaming, this would capture streaming services as well as platforms such as YouTube... as such staffing up copyright with more hours for its co-workers, performer's rights.
If you're looking for what the meltdown of a major political institution looks like in real time, you need look only to how the GOP is behaving in the wake of Donald Trump's decisive electoral loss. This trickle down freak-out was somewhat predictable, with nearly everyone agreeing that a Trump loss would not see a classy exit by the soon-to-be former President. But I'm not sure anyone would have predicted that the Republican Party writ large would refuse to admit what is an obvious electoral defeat, would seek to overturn a legitimate election in which they picked up all kinds of seats in the House of Representatives, nor cuddle up with all kinds of crazy actors wielding bizarre and easily disproven conspiracy theories.
