The thirteenth installment of the 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup is here, for the week ending on December 27th, keeping you guys up to date with the most important things that have happened in the Linux world.
This past week was slow in news and that’s mostly because everyone celebrated the Christmas holidays with their loved ones. But, since it was Christmas, we had some nice presents from Santa under the tree, such as the release of the highly anticipated Xfce 4.16 desktop environment.
Hello and welcome to this week's Linux Roundup.
Linspire 10 Public Beta 1 has been released this week.
This is it for this week, a peaceful week which makes sense.
We hope you had a wonderful Christmas and will have a fantastic 2021!
Our annual predictions episode kicks off with a review of what we got right and wrong for 2020, and then we speculate wildly about what could happen in 2021.
All about **squashfs-tools** and **sudo**.
Josh and Kurt talk about communication. It’s really hard to talk about a lot of what we do. How do we know if a device is secure? How do we know our knowledge is correct?
Dylanaraps will make some really amazing software like pywal, neofetch and pfetch and then other times he just likes to mess and see what's possible and that's how we got shfm a terminal file manager that takes the idea of minimalism and takes it almost as far as it can go even further than fff.
Linus has released 5.11-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle.
Two weeks have passed, Christmas is over, and so is the merge window.
I want to thank all the maintainers who sent in their pull requests early: we all wanted to get things done before the holidays really hit, and mostly it seemed to work quite well.
In fact, it was rather nice to handle the big bulk of all the merge window pull requests in the first three or four days of the merge window. I wouldn't want to do it that way every time - it would stress me out - but as an occasional "let's get it over with so that the second week is calm" it really wasn't bad at all.
It probably helped that 5.11 isn't going to be an LTS release and isn't as big as 5.10 was, but it's not small either. Solidly average.
Well, it's average, unless you look at the actual diffs, and notice another huge dump of AMD GPU descriptor header files, which completely dwarfs all the "real" changes here. The AMD "Van Gogh" include file additions are in fact about two thirds of the whole patch, even if it comes from basically one single commit that just adds the register definitions. We've had it before, I'm sure we'll see it in the future too: header files probably generated from the hardware description for all the possible bit masks etc get very very big.
Oh well. If you ignore that area, everything else looks normal. Driver updates dominate, but all the usual other suspects are there: arch updates, filesystems, networking, docs and tooling.
And while it doesn't look like a huge release, it's certainly still big enough that what's appended below is just my "merge log". As always, my merge logs credit only the people I pull from, which is a much smaller set than all the people involved in actually writing the patches. As usual we had more than 1500 actual developers, and roughly 12,500 changes merged. That's pretty much our average these days.
Please go kick the tires,
Linus
That’s right, two weeks have passed since Linux kernel 5.10 LTS was released and the merge window of the Linux kernel 5.11 opened, so now it’s time to get busy again and test the next major Linux kernel branch, which looks to be an average release, not too big, but not too small either.
The biggest changes in Linux kernel 5.11 appear to be made around the AMD GPU open-source graphics driver for AMD Radeon GPUs, which received a “huge dump” of descriptor header files, along with support for the AMD “Van Gogh” GPU family, which looks to be about two-thirds of the entire RC1 release.
Sony's Roderick Colenbrander published open source drivers for the DualSense (PS5) controller in the new hid-playstation kernel module!
Roderick Colenbrander of Sony Interactive Entertainment has sent in a brand new and official Linux driver for the PS5 DualSense for even better out of the box support.
With the newly proposed driver, it enabled the DualSense to function in both Bluetooth and USD modes along with most other features working including LEDs, Touchpad, Motion Sensors and Rumble. However, they make it clear that the Adaptive Triggers and VCM-based Haptics are not yet supported but they hope to "have a dialog on how to expose these over time in a generic way".
Sony has published a new and official kernel driver for Linux that brings support for the company’s new PlayStation 5 DualSense controller to the platform. The new game controller that came with the launch of the PlayStation 5 recently received improved support on PC via Steam with a recent update that added support for rumble over Bluetooth and the use of external haptic feedback even when rumble is in use.
Sony has also released a recent update for the PlayStation 5 that included a firmware update for the DualSense controller, requiring users to connect their controllers to their consoles via USB cable. The company did not specify what the updated firmware will be changing or introducing so it could just be stability improvements or minor background updates. Unfortunately, the update won’t be able to fix a problem users have been experiencing with the DualSense controller. PS5 players have recently been reporting that their DualSense controller adaptive triggers are breaking.
Fast forward to today, some developers don't recall that original discussion or in some cases weren't even involved in kernel development at that point and wondering about the breakage. Thus the discussion over this default has been brought back up with some seemingly hoping for it to be reverted or at least enabling it by default for newer systems.
PCI subsystem maintainer Bjorn Helgaas ushered in a discussion over removing this default restriction. The user who proposed removing it argued that with run-time power management disabled by default, the PHY on network devices can remain powered up even when no cable is attached, among other situations where this default hurts.
Linux has been ported to the Nintendo 64 game console – a game console that was launched more than two decades ago.
Open-source developer Lauri Kasanen who has contributed to Mesa and the Linux graphics stack took to developing a new Nintendo 64 port and announced it on Christmas day. This isn't the first time Linux has been ported to the N64 but prior attempts weren't aimed at potentially upstreaming it into the mainline Linux kernel.
Ideas come in various forms. At some point in our lives, we’ve all perceived incredible ideas when we were least expecting them, and we end up losing them thinking they’re too stupid. “A good idea becomes a great idea when you let it out,” but, clearly, not all the ideas are fuelled by just great minds. Some emerge from the feeling of revenge, while others due to our inability to get what we desire the most. The latter was the case with Linus Torvalds.
Here are some facts that you need to know about Linus Torvalds and his journey of developing Linux.
While Linux 5.11-rc1 was just released yesterday, we have already been closely monitoring the new features of Linux 5.11 as well as carrying out early benchmarks. One area looking quite good so far are the Intel graphics performance and features with Linux 5.11, or more specifically Gen9 and newer while the latest Xe Graphics are obviously the most interesting from a benchmarking perspective.
The Intel kernel graphics driver has some fun features this time like integer scaling support, big joiner enablement, and more. There is also continued work on Intel discrete graphics enablement that continued with Linux 5.11. Perhaps the most interesting Intel graphics performance work for Linux 5.11 is the async page-flipping support being flipped on and enabled by default for Skylake/Gen9 graphics and newer. See our Linux 5.11 feature overview for more details on the kernel changes this cycle.
Adobe Photoshop is a widely used photo editing software as it offers various features to the users. If you learn to use photoshop, then you can create incredible creations with multiple tools.
Many people use this tool for photo editing, daily designing, digital drawings, etc. However, if you are a Linux enthusiast and don’t want to go for Windows or Mac, you may face disappointment because Adobe Photoshop doesn’t have so many Linux options. This article will give you the complete details on the best photoshop alternatives you can run on Linux for photo editing and designing job.
Following the incredible Xfce 4.16 release, Parole Media Player has been updated with refreshed dialogs, a more powerful playlist, and improved DVD support.
After successfully releasing the latest stable Xfce 4.16 desktop, Xfce core developer and Xubuntu Tech Lead Sean Davis has announced a new version 4.15.0 of Xfce’s default media player named Parole.
The latest Parole 4.15.0 has arrived after a year of development with refreshed dialogs, more robust playlist support, and improved DVD support.
For those who don’t know, Parole is a free, open source, and GStreamer-based media player specially designed for the Xfce desktop.
Though it’s a default video player of Xubuntu Linux distribution, you can install and run it on other Linux and Unix-like operating systems as well.
I’m a fan of text editors that make it easy for you to learn how to use them. GNU nano is my favorite example of this: you launch nano, and you see a list of the most common commands along the bottom of the window throughout your entire session. Joe’s Own Editor (that’s joe for short) is another great example.
The joe editor uses a terminal-based interface, providing simple text editing capabilities and an easily accessible help screen. It’s written in C, it’s small with a hard dependency only on libc (ncurses is optional), and it’s licensed under the GPL.
The terminal is a program that you use to type in commands. It’s a text input/output environment.
The terminal window allows the user to access a console and all its applications such as command line interfaces (CLI) and text user interface software. Even with the sophistication of modern desktop environments packed with administrative tools, other utilities, and productivity software all sporting attractive graphical user interfaces, it remains the case that some tasks are still best undertaken with the command line.
butterfly is an xterm compatible terminal that runs in your web browser.
In this guide, we learn how to boot arch linux into single user mode or rescue mode step by step.
If you use the file sync & share platform and want to expand its functionality by adding online editing features, you should definitely give a try to ONLYOFFICE Docs.
ONLYOFFICE Docs allows you to create a collaborative environment by adding its online editors to the platform of your choice, whether it be Alfresco, Confluence, Liferay, Nextcloud, Nuxeo, ownCloud, SharePoint, or ONLYOFFICE Groups.
Following up to yesterday’s article about how NNCP rehabilitates asynchronous communication with modern encryption and onion routing, here is the first of my posts showing how to put it into action.
Email is a natural fit for async; in fact, much of early email was carried by UUCP. It is useful for an airgapped machine to be able to send back messages; errors from cron, results of handling incoming data, disk space alerts, etc. (Of course, this would apply to a non-airgapped machine also).
The NNCP documentation already describes how to do this for Postfix. Here I will show how to do it for Exim.
I use the reboot command to reboot our PostgreSQL server running on RHEL 7. We have a development server running on CentOS 7 too. However, sometimes I noticed database corruption or file issues. Is there is a safe reboot command that will do a graceful reboot for our CentOS or RHEL 7 server without causing any issues? What is the best way to appropriately restart CentOS/RHEL over ssh?
There is no graceful shutdown or restart. However, modern Linux distro does an outstanding job when you need to reboot the server powered by CentOS or RHEL. Let us different options to restart the CentOS/RHEL 7/8 server.
Installing an additional desktop environment allows more user experience without installing another Linux distro. Gnome is the default desktop environment for many Linux distributions. Gnome is based on GTK+ and has a new release every 6 months.
Linux Mint by default supports Cinnamon, MATE, or Xfce desktop environment. Cinnamon and Mate are a fork of GNOME with a codebase of GNOME 3 and GNOME 2 respectively. Switching desktop
In this article, I will guide how to install the GNOME 3 (gnome-shell) desktop in your Linux Mint 20.
This brief guide walks you through the steps to upgrade to Fedora Silverblue 33 from Fedora Silverblue 32. Upgrading Fedora Silverblue is very easy and fast! It is way faster than other traditional Linux desktop operating systems. If something goes wrong after upgrading to latest version, we can easily rollback to previous working version. Now let us begin to upgrade Silverblue 33 from Silverblue 32.
Before upgrading the current Fedora Silveblue version, make sure you take a backup of all important data that you can't afford to lose.
I do not know whether it is really true but I have heard there is a traditional Chinese curse that goes, "May you live in interesting times." 2020 has certainly been a very interesting year for many reasons. My idea of interesting is probably different from most people's because I find Linux command line interface (CLI) tools to be some of the most interesting things on the planet. So I had a very interesting year because Enable Sysadmin published many articles this year that explored numerous command line utilities.
The Btrfs filesystem can be resized online (when the filesystem is mounted), but if you want to resize a partition that is added to a Btrfs filesystem, you will have to do it offline (when the filesystem is not mounted). You can grow/expand or shrink a Btrfs filesystem online and grow/expand or shrink a Btrfs partition offline.
The Btrfs filesystem is a multi-device filesystem. If you have multiple devices added to your Btrfs filesystem, then you need to resize specific storage devices attached to the filesystem to resize the filesystem itself. Otherwise, you can directly resize the filesystem (as by default, the only attached storage device will be selected when you perform the resize operation).
In this article, I am going to show you how to grow/expand and shrink a Btrfs filesystem online and a Btrfs partition offline. I will also show how to resize a Btrfs filesystem that has multiple devices attached to it. So, let’s get started.
I have an Intel Corporation Wireless/WiFi 8265 / 8275 (rev 78) card. How do I configure this card? I always get an error, “iwlwifi 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load iwlwifi-8265-36.ucode“. How do I load iwlwifi-8265-36 firmware and enable this driver card on Debian Linux version 10/11 and assign an IP address using DHCP?
Intel WiFi device needs firmware, and it has to be loaded into the device driver during the device initialization. Some firmware is opensource and free to load. However, Intel WiFi driver requires a non-free binary blob. Let us see how to configure Intel WiFi on Debian to load firmware and configure networking using the command-line.
Today we are looking at how to install Gedit, a text and code editor, on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Git submodule is a Git subdirectory or component of another host, Git repository, that simply refers to a specific commit in another external Git repository. Submodules are static and keep track only of the particular commits. They don’t track the Git branches or refs and are not updated automatically with the host repository. Git submodules allow you to enable the Git repository to incorporate and to track the version history of all external code. When a user includes a submodule to a Git repository, a new file with the name .gitmodules will create.
In this article, we will give you an idea about how to use Git submodules in an external Git repo in the Linux system.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Raft, an itch.io game, on Linux Mint 20.
We all prefer to find the most suited, wireless channel from our Wi-Fi network. The most recommended way is to configure your routers to automatically determine the optimal channel number that depends on periodic frequency analysis. However, there are ways to scan your Wi-Fi network and determine the optimal channel that lies within the range of your network adapter.
With the help of modern utilities, it’s easy to determine the Wi-Fi signal from the access point to the room. One among many of these utilities is LinSSID. It is an open-source Wifi-Analyzer tool that is written in C++ using Linux wireless tools and Qt4, Qt5, Qwt 6.1, etc. It has a graphical interface that shows nearby wireless routers and ad-hoc connections. LinSSID interface is similar in appearance and functionality to the Windows Wi-Fi network analyzer (Insider).
By default, the Ubuntu network-manager identifies all wireless networks and allows you to connect with one manually. However, with the help of this utility, you can check the nearest networks along with the number of radio channels used by them. Moreover, this app does not only inform you about the strength of your Wi-Fi network but also the strength and frequency of other Wi-Fi signals. This information allows you to choose the less congested radio channel and the strength of radio signals in different places of your home.
Especially those dedicated to critical services, Linux systems require expert-level knowledge to work with and core security measures.
Unfortunately, even after taking crucial security measures, security vulnerabilities still find their way into secure systems. One way to manage and protect your system is by limiting the damage possible once an attack occurs.
In this tutorial, we’ll discuss the process of using chroot jail to manage system damages in the event of an attack. We’ll look at how to isolate processes and subprocesses to a particular environment with false root privileges. Doing this will limit the process to a specific directory and deny access to other system areas.
First of all, what is docker inspect? Docker inspect is a tool that enables you do get detailed information about your docker resources, such as containers, images, volumes, networks, tasks and services. In this article, I will go through examples of how you can use docker inspect to get detailed information about your docker resources, which will aid you in the management and troubleshooting of your docker objects.
When working with Linux systems, you’ll often need to inspect and understand the actions performed by processes and the system calls carried out by their execution. When it comes to performing such tasks, the Linux kernel provides features such as ptrace to debug and diagnose processes.
This article discusses how to use the strace tool to trace, monitor, and debug processes interacting with the Kernel.
Today, we use personal computers as workstations and personal devices. On these devices, we keep personal information and private files not intended for public access.
Given this, even if you do not share your computer with others, it’s essential to treat your security as a high priority and secure your files with cryptography and encryption methods.
This tutorial discusses how to protect and secure your files by hiding them inside other files. For this tutorial, we will look at how to hide files in images; as a bonus, we’ll also discuss how to hide files in audio files.
Currently in a feature-freeze while as many lingering issues are solved as possible for the next big stable release, Wine has a fourth Release Candidate up now.
What is Wine? It's a compatibility layer for running various Windows-only applications and games on Linux and other operating systems. Tons of people work on it, with some sponsored or employed directly by CodeWeavers who have their special version with the CrossOver application. Wine is also the backbone of Steam Play Proton.
Is this actually seriously real? I still have some doubts but I am beginning to get hungry. KFC and Cooler Master have properly announced the KFConsole.
Going over the details of it, what they've actually created is a fully powered custom-built PC case with a built-in "Chicken Chamber". Yeah, really. It mentions how it uses "the systems natural heat and airflow system you can now focus on your gameplay and enjoy hot, crispy chicken between rounds". Completely ridiculous of course but I've no doubt if it really becomes available, people will absolutely buy it.
Another week another game bundle, a chance for you to build up that collection of games with the Humble Holiday in Space Bundle out now. Running for another 10 days, it does have a few nice picks. As usual, we shall highlight in bold text those that offer Linux builds.
Need more grand strategy in your gaming time? Get ready to go medieval and expand with Feudal Kingdoms from developer Blood and Pixels.
Sounds like it's going to have a pretty interesting amount of depth to it too. Lots of little details big and small will affect the gameplay, from weather affecting food production to training your troops directly from your existing population and more. Pretty ambitious sounding too with the army customization, a special agent system, research trees, per-settlement resources and attributes and so on.
1 year and 4 months of work later, the sleek and simple Linux desktop Xfce 4.16 is out now along with plenty of visual upgrades and some big tech upgrades too. A desktop for those of you who like less bling, more "classic" styling and one that just stays out of you way.
On top of various visual upgrades including a whole new set of icons for the default applications with a consistent colour palette, Xfce 4.16 has seen some other impressive improvements with one major tech change being the introduction of display scaling with a new fractional scaling option in the Display Settings.
However, which one is the best desktop environment to install on Linux Desktop PC in 2021?
Although there are dozens of GUI desktops, the answer to this question is very narrowed because choices are limited when it comes to the best one. However, opting for any desktop environment is mainly depends on the taste and comfortability of a user on the Linux distribution, where he or she uses it. Furthermore, it also depends on the technical reasons, for example, if you have an old pc or laptop then you definitely want lightweight LDE such as XFCE.
Xfce 4.16 was released a few days ago. Since it uses GTK 3 and has some new functions, third-party applications like Whisker Menu has to refactor their code for the Xfce 4.16 code.
Whisker Menu is an application launcher for Xfce desktop environment. It is not part of the Xfce package itself. It’s one of the additional tools that you can use to customize Xfce desktop.
Whisker Menu has released version 2.5.0 with Xfce 4.16 support among several other changes. Let’s see what has changed here.
The Universe is full of the hydrogen and one of its emission lines that is very important in astronomy is caused by the hyper-fine interaction. This electromagnetic radiation has the frequency of ca. 1420.4MH which corresponds to the vacuum wavelength of ca. 21cm.
Observations performed at this wavelength reveal many structures in the Universe. The following plot shows the results of such observations in the Milky Way...
4MLinux is very lightweight and has the ability to revive your old PC/Laptop. It comes with Multimedia applications, maintenance apps, a LAMP stack powered mini-server, and a couple of mystery games. Hence the name “4M”.
It features the lightweight pcmanFM file manager which is also a file manager for LXDE based systems. 4MLinux comes with 32-bit and 64-bit installer for your all hardware need.
4MLinux follows a quarterly release cadence, hence this release comes after 4 months of the prior 4MLinux 34.0 release, 4MLinux in its latest version 35.0 brings some changes with its applications stack with the latest version of the software.
The HAMMER2 file-system that has been used by default on DragonFlyBSD for some time has lacked multi-volumes support compared to its former HAMMER1 file-system. But as of this weekend in the latest Git development code, HAMMER2 now has initial support for multiple volumes.
Looking for a little gaming on the go or perhaps something in bed? The upcoming ODROID-Go Super announced recently sounds like quite a useful little Switch-styled device.
Going on sale in late January for $80, this is the next-generation of the ODROID-Go Advance which Hardkernel announced back in 2019. This time the ODROID-Go Super will feature a bigger 5 inch screen with tough tempered glass for protection, a higher resolution at 854x480 and also a bigger 4000mAh battery. On top of that a bunch of hardware design changes also went in including being pre-assembled instead of a kit, dedicated volume buttons, a second joystick and more smaller changes.
Bash 5.1, described as the fifth major release of the Unix and Linux shell in a release bulletin, was published earlier this month, featuring a return to Bash 4.4 behavior regarding pathname expansion.
Called the most significant change in the new release, the return to Bash 4.4 behavior involves not performing pathname expansion on a word that contains backslashes but does not contain unquoted globbing special characters. The Bash 5.1 release also introduces changes in trap handling while reading from the terminal, and it fixes a number of bugs including several that caused the shell to crash.
GnuCash is a personal and small business finance application, freely licensed under the GNU GPL and available for GNU/Linux, BSD, Solaris, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. It’s designed to be easy to use, yet powerful and flexible. GnuCash allows you to track your income and expenses, reconcile bank accounts, monitor stock portfolios and manage your small business finances. It is based on professional accounting principles to ensure balanced books and accurate reports.
There are a couple of ways to learn a programming language. If you're new to coding, you usually learn some basic computer coding concepts and try to apply them. If you already know how to code in another language, you relearn how coding concepts are expressed in the new language.
In either case, a convenient way to learn these new principles is to create a simple guessing game. This forces you to understand how a language receives input and sends output, how it compares data, how to control a program's flow, and how to leverage conditionals to affect an outcome. It also ensures that you know how a language structures its code; for instance, Lua or Bash can easily run as a script, while Java requires you to create a class.
The friendly battle continues with the next post from Wenzel where he considers different cases where strict typechecking doesn’t work. The primary point he makes is that many decisions Raku makes are run-time decisions and this is where static typechecking doesn’t work well. This is true. But this doesn’t change the meaning of my previous post.
[...]
Just to sum up the above written, Wenzel is right when he says that coercion is about static type checking. It indeed is. For this reason it ought to be strict because this is what we expect it to be.
It is also true that there’re cases where only run-time checks make it possible to ensure that the object we work with conforms to our requirements. And this is certainly not where coercion comes into mind. This is a field of dynamic transformations where specialized routines is what we need.
In this series, we're writing the same application in different programming languages to compare how various languages work and to show how using a standard test program is a great way to learn new ways to program.
When you learn a new programming language, it's good to focus on the things they have in common. Variables, expressions, and statements are the basis of most programming languages. Once you understand these concepts, you can start figuring the rest out.
Today in the penultimate post from the chronicle of teaching myself the Rust programming language by doing programming puzzles from Advent of Code 2020: a hexagonal grid, and another homage to Conway, this time unexpected.
New technologies such as 5G, IoT, blockchain and many others are implemented as ecosystems with many interoperable products and services designed to communicate seamlessly through a developing web of technical standards. Today’s standards are far more software-driven than in the past. As a result, standards development organizations (SDOs) are increasing their use of open source software (OSS) to promote both the rapid development of new standards and the deployment of standards-conformant products and services in the marketplace.
Although SDOs have traditionally avoided requiring the use of any specific software code for conformance to its standards, SDOs have relied on OSS communities to develop tools, test suites, and independent implementations to assist implementers in developing products and services utilizing the standard. Today, however, there is a growing movement for SDOs to initiate their own OSS projects so that the standards and open source development efforts can be better integrated.
SDOs understandably seek to replicate the benefits of collaborative development associated with OSS projects. In doing so, SDOs are also selecting the most common OSS licenses for the software they develop through these projects, such as the BSD or Apache licenses. These common licenses are ones that have been certified by the Open Source Initiative (OSI) as being compliant with its open source definition (OSD). While OSI does not hold a trademark on the term “open source” nor is it the arbiter of which software is considered OSS, OSI discourages others from referring to software as open source if the applicable software is licensed under a license that does not meet the requirements of the OSD.
As spotted by Patently Apple, a patent granted today relates to new inputs which would be pretty cool. “Detecting Through-Body Inputs At A Wearable Audio Device,” it’s called.
If you’ve used true-wireless earbuds – of many brands, actually – you may have found them hard to control easily. Some use touch-sensitive areas, few have buttons. One of the triumphs of Apple’s latest headphones, AirPods Max, is that the controls are simple, down to a button and a Digital Crown-like dial. Sometimes, swiping up, tapping or squeezing to make things happen can be a bit hit-and-miss. So, how would it be if you could just touch your face to make things happen? Or just wave your hand near the AirPods Pro?
More than two years after the federal government was preparing to indict Walmart on charges of illegally dispensing opioids, the U.S. Department of Justice is finally taking action. But it’s seeking a financial penalty, not the criminal sanction prosecutors had pushed for.
Restrictions on the press, however, have not lifted, and Chinese state media has begun aggressively pushing an alternative origin story for the pandemic, with claims the coronavirus may have been circulating outside of the country prior to the initial outbreak in Wuhan.
Other stories I know not to tell at fancy dinners, just as I've learned over the years how not to out myself as white trash. I wouldn't explain how my family didn't have clean drinking water and instead consumed a whole lot of pop (or soda, depending on where you're from) that rotted my baby teeth. I wouldn't tell them how I grew up learning the names of prescription pills. The most popular ones in my father's vocabulary were Percocet and Oxycontin. Lortabs were "the poor man's cocaine." I wouldn't tell them about the time my father spelled a word by saying, "V – V as in Valium." My adult son still laughs at that, and I savor the rare instances of humor that briefly lighten what has otherwise been a source of constant loss and heartache.
So ask yourself: how close are we to seeing these three things happening?
Yeah. Pretty far.
The fact is that this Microsoft Azure blob from the cloud was completely unsecured and accessible via the Internet. Anyone who knew the required URLs could access the stored information. There were no security controls for the Azure blob, meaning the data could be accessed without authentication. If it had just been test data, it could have been shrugged off. But the developer was using real data from specific operations.
The unsecured Microsoft Azure blob contained more than half a million confidential and sensitive documents from customers, which were thus freely accessible on the Internet. According to The Register, the information contained in the Azure Blob included occupational health reports, U.S. company insurance claims documents underwritten by Lloyds of London, and private opinions from senior lawyers about younger colleagues applying for promotion.
SSD covers myriad topics, and is broken up into four main sections:
In 2017, we also launched the Security Education Companion, also known as SEC, as a sister site to SSD. It’s geared toward people who would like to help their communities learn about digital security, but are new to the art of security training.
SEC also features four main areas of educational resources:
The Irish companies were used to hold its intellectual [sic] property [sic] for international sales, and Facebook companies around the world would pay the units for the use of the IP, shifting much of the sales outside the U.S., the newspaper said. Facebook’s main Irish holding company paid $101 million in taxes on profit of more than $15 billion in 2018, the last year records were available, the paper said.
The event, usually an unremarkable routine formality, could be exploited to further spread misinformation about the election results if one representative and one senator jointly object to the results given by slates of electors as they're read aloud.
Under the Electoral Count Act of 1877, if this happens the process is paused while both the House and Senate debate the objection before voting whether to sustain it.
Killing civilians in wartime is a grave human rights violation and un-American. Did the four Blackwater contractors get arrested immediately? No. Did Blackwater get fired from its $1 billion U.S. government contract? No.
"People are losing their extended unemployment benefits," said the senator from Vermont. "They're going to be evicted from their apartments because the eviction moratorium is ending."
Unemployment and poverty figures, already very high in 2019, have shot up in 2020 in ways that were almost unimaginable just a few months ago. A year ago, more than 21% of the EU population was considered to be at risk of poverty with data that vary greatly between the countries, many of which give figures of over 25%, among them Spain, Lithuania, Italy, Latvia, Greece, Romania, and Bulgaria (the latter with more than 32%). The contrast with other states is considerable. For example, in the Czech Republic, Slovenia, Finland, Denmark, Slovakia, the Netherlands, and Austria, they range from 12% and 17%. However much the numbers vary, one constant is that things are getting worse every week. Soon we’ll have more end-of-year data. All the signs are that the news will be anything but good.
It’s hardly surprising, then, that the proposal of a basic income, a universal and unconditional payment of public money to all registered residents, was one of the measures that got most attention from a good part of the mainstream press in the early weeks of the pandemic. On April 3, a Financial Times editorial titled “Virus Lays Bare the Frailty of the Social Contract” was fairly upfront: “Redistribution will again be on the agenda; the privileges of the elderly and wealthy in question. Policies until recently considered eccentric, such as basic income and wealth taxes, will have to be in the mix.” Quite a few people were surprised, not to mention absolutely gobsmacked. It’s anybody’s guess what political intentions lurked behind the Financial Times piece, but what it said about economic policy is clear enough. A few months later, on 22 September, in his address to the opening debate of the 75th session of the UN General Assembly, Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said, “Inclusivity means investing in social cohesion and ending all forms of exclusion, discrimination and racism. It means establishing a new generation of social protection – including Universal Health Coverage and the possibility of a Universal Basic Income.” Another surprise. This year we have the Financial Times and the UN secretary-general speaking out for such an “eccentric” policy as a universal basic income, and the two related focuses of redistribution and social cohesion are especially interesting.
Republicans have touted the idea popularized by Ronald Reagan that tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations would inevitably "trickle down" to workers, despite ample evidence showing that wealth has accumulated at the top while worker wages have barely budged for decades. A new working paper from researchers at the London School of Economics and Kings College's London, which looked at the effect of five decades of tax cuts for the wealthy in 18 developed countries, shows that the concept has always been flawed.
Nothing will correct this unless or until an overwhelming majority of Americans recognize and condemn what has occurred.
Unlike Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, Canada's laws governing animal welfare have barely evolved over the last century.
Their acceptance of Trump’s behavior will be his vilest legacy. €
Many people are shocked to learn that the United States maintains the world’s largest immigration detention system with over 200 detention centers across the country, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In our work at Detention Watch Network (DWN), we’ve seen how ICE locks up survivors of torture, people seeking asylum, people who have lived in the U.S. for years, and families with children — even babies. Chances are there’s a detention center unjustly detaining immigrants near you.
A new bill, to be unveiled next month, will only permit police searches of a victim’s mobile phones where it is strictly necessary, and to extract only the minimum of data required for their investigation.
In 2016, BBC had included Baloch in their ‘BBC 100 Women 2016’ list for her work involving “campaigns for independence for Balochistan from Pakistan.” She had used her social media profile to highlight abductions, torture, forced disappearances and other human rights violations that people in Balochistan were being subjected to by the Pakistan government and the army.
In her activism, she had placed emphasis on fighting for the rights of Balochi women, and had highlighted how the legal system and religious groups in Pakistan would use state and social machinery to intentionally target women, particularly from vulnerable groups.
In her last tweet on December 14, she had shared a news report by The Guardian titled ‘Kidnap, torture, murder: the plight of Pakistan’s thousands of disappeared’.
Here’s a snapshot, in the form of our top articles from the year. It’s a look at the coverage you found most compelling, from the unfolding of coronavirus to how the Black Lives Matter movement reverberated through the humanitarian sector.
Proclaiming which articles are “most compelling” is more of an art than a science, to be honest. Yes, we have statistics in the form of unique pageviews; the list below is in order of the most-viewed articles first. Why you gravitated to these particular reports, and just what impact those stories had on you, is often little more than conjecture, though.
Sex, conspiracy theories, and allegations of corruption always attract clicks, and our coverage is no exception. It’s no surprise that coronavirus-themed coverage was a big draw, as the world scrambled for information. The need to find bright spots in a particularly trying year perhaps accounts for the interest in coverage that upended usually dire pandemic news, such as our piece on potentially positive changes in the works in South Africa. And there’s comfort perhaps in counting on the appearance of a perpetual favourite: our 10 crises and trends to watch list.
If you missed any of these stories the first time around, there’s still time to catch up before the countdown to 2021 (and our 10 Crises and Trends to Watch list, to be published in mid-January) begins.
“Skinny labels” have a funny name. But that is all that is funny about them.
When a drug can be used to treat multiple conditions, a generic can “carve out” the patented indications from its label. The resulting “skinny label” allows the generic to launch its product for uses not covered by a patent. In this case, the Federal Circuit panel majority held, contrary to the regulatory regime and Federal Circuit precedent, that this long-recognized practice of skinny labeling could form the basis for induced infringement.
The panel’s decision is far-reaching and exceptionally important. As Chief Judge Prost explained in dissent, a finding of inducement based on Teva’s skinny label “invites a claim of inducement for almost any generic that legally enters the market with a skinny label.” This brief argues that such a “nullification” of a 35-year-old law that has been an indispensable path for generics to enter the market contradicts the Federal Circuit's decisions giving effect to skinny labels and threatens to sow uncertainty for generics, undermine the balance at the heart of the Hatch-Waxman pharmaceutical regime, and increase the costs of drugs for millions of Americans.
We study how innovation reacts to climate change and shapes its economic impacts, focusing on US agriculture. We show in a model that directed innovation can either mitigate or exacerbate climate damages depending on competing equilibrium effects. To test the model's predictions, we combine data on the geography of agricultural production, shifting temperature distributions, and crop-specific temperature tolerance to estimate crop-specific exposure to damaging extreme temperatures; we then use a database of crop-specific biotechnology releases and patent grants to measure technology development. We find that new technology has systematically re-directed toward crops with increasing exposure to extreme temperatures and that a given county’s exposure to new innovation, measured by the extent of climate-induced innovation for locally grown crops, significantly dampens the economic damage from extreme temperatures. Our estimates imply that directed innovation has negated 20% of the damage from climate change on US agriculture since 1960, and will negate 15% of the damage from projected climate change over the 21st century. The results, taken together, highlight the vital importance—but incomplete effectiveness—of endogenous technological change as a systemic adaptive response to climate change.
Illicit digital transmission: Big new copyright protections against streamers with felony penalties.
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Trademark Modernization Act of 2020: Presumption of injunctive relief — overcoming eBay:
‘‘A plaintiff seeking any such injunction shall be entitled to a rebuttable presumption of irreparable harm upon a finding of a violation identified in this subsection in the case of a motion for a permanent injunction or upon a finding of likelihood of success on the merits for a violation identified in this subsection in the case of a motion for a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order.’’
Biologic Patent Transparency: requires the holder of a license to market a biologic drug to disclose all patents believed to be covering that drug.
What do you know of Industry 4.0, or the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR)? Characterised by the growing utilisation of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI), cloud computing, robotics, 3D printing, the Internet of Things and advanced wireless technologies (many of which have been discussed here on The Lens), 4IR is global technological innovation concerning automation. The development of 4IR technology blurs the boundaries between the physical, digital and business spheres, and seeks to remove the need for human intervention within them.
English courts may set the terms for global FRAND licences to portfolios of declared standard essential patents.
On 26 August, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom (UKSC) gave judgment in Unwired Planet v Huawei and Conversant Wireless Licensing v Huawei & ZTE [2020] UKSC 37. The judgment confirms that English courts may set the terms for global FRAND licences to portfolios of declared standard essential patents.
The Unwired case involved the first full judicial determination of the terms of a FRAND portfolio licence with global scope. In Conversant, the defendants challenged the jurisdiction of the English courts to undertake such an exercise. Both cases were appealed, to the Court of Appeal, and then to the UKSC.1
After more than two decades of being the red-headed stepchild of patent infringement before the Federal Circuit, infringement under the doctrine of equivalents has made a dramatic comeback in the past few years, the Court affirming plaintiffs asserting their patents under the doctrine six times (versus denying DOE infringement on the basis of prosecution history estoppel twice, on the basis of the dedication-disclaimer estoppel twice, and finding no equivalents twice). One of those affirmances was in Eli Lilly & Co. v. Hospira, Inc., directed to the same patent and with assertion of infringement under the doctrine of equivalents as in the most recent case decided by the Federal Circuit, Eli Lilly & Co. v. Apotex, Inc.
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And finally, the panel also did not credit Apotex's argument that in a corresponding European Patent Convention application the Applicant had substituted pemetrexed disodium for pemetrexed per se, saying "[i]n light of the European prosecution history as a whole, we do not read Lilly's statement that it was "refocus[ing]" the claims in its application to suggest that Lilly equated "ALIMTA" with "pemetrexed."
However, stakeholders were quick to point out that IPR are not yet properly tailored to reflect the complexities of the agricultural sector.
“The IP system is not focused enough on issues in certain sectors, including agriculture,” Heli Pihlajamaa, director of patent law at the European Patent Office (EPO), pointed out during the event.
He added that this is despite the fact that patent law is becoming “more and more important” with the advancements in biotech developments.
However, while panellists in the plant breeding sector were united in stressing the need to innovate, they were split as to the role of patenting in achieving this.
“All innovators need a stable and predictable framework of IP protection that ensures legal clarity for both the innovator and the user of that innovation, and this particularly holds true in the field of agriculture and plant breeding, which has become very technical over time,” said Jürgen Eckhardt, senior vice president and head of innovation programme ‘Leaps by Bayer’.
After the Bundestag (German Parliament) passed the Act approving the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPCA) on 26 November 2020, the Bundesrat (German Federal Council) also approved this Act today.
Thus, eight years after the adoption of the EU patent package by the European Parliament in December 2012, there is now (almost) nothing standing in the way of the launch of the Unified Patent Court - and thus also the EU Unitary Patent.
On 18th December 2020, the German Federal Assembly (Bundesrat) approved the law on the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court of 20th June 2013 (UPC-Agreement) with the required two-thirds majority. It was the last puzzle piece for paving the way for a Unitary Patent System in Europe, which is now expected to be operational from 2022.
The entry into force of the UPC-Agreement was dependent on the ratification by the three Member States with the highest number of European patents, at that time Germany, France and the United Kingdom. France had already deposited its ratification in 2014 and the United Kingdom in 2018, but withdrew it in July 2020 due to Brexit. With its withdrawal from the European Union, the United Kingdom has refrained from participating in the establishment of a Unified Patent System.
A patent filing from Sony Corporation showing the use of acoustic measurements of users as a biometric modality has been published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The patent application for a ‘head related transfer function (HRTF) as biometric authentication’ describes how user’s head geometry is used to tailor audio playback, and how this HRTF, if well-modeled “is very personalized and can be considered as biometric data.” The system would use HRTF templates stored locally or in the cloud in encrypted form, and used to grant access to a computer or certain functions. The HRTF can take the form of a password or simply as a biometric measurement, and be combined with other biometric modalities or factors to implement multi-factor authentication. The drawings depict an individual performing biometric authentication through a wearable headset. The application was filed in June, 2019, and as with all patent filings, may or may not depict a system actually in development.
With bitter cold, sweltering sun and winds strong enough to tear through sturdy brick churches, the climate here demands invention.
A lengthy research project from the Western Development Museum (WDM) documents part of the province's history with patents and their inventors' gadgets. At almost 600 pages and comprising more than 3,200 patents, it serves as a kind of tinkerer-toiling snapshot of how people made a go of it on the Prairies.
Called Made in Saskatchewan: A Story of Invention, the patents index covers 1905 to 1979, and lists patent holders' name, location, object name and patent date.
Some of the first items patented here in 1905, when Saskatchewan gained status as a province, include things typical of early settlement: A track laying machine by John Oliver in Battleford; a mower and reaper by Jules Gagne in Jackfish Lake; a twine holder, held jointly by Otto and C. Krienkie in Lemburg.
"In the time before mass-produced goods, Saskatchewan came up with solutions that are really rooted in the place. In that way it's a really interesting document — just to read through to kind of see what people [were] inventing," said Elizabeth Scott, the curator at the WDM and a historian.
It is well known that “methods of treatment of the human or animal body by surgery” are not patentable at the EPO in accordance with Article 53(c) EPC. What may not be so well known is that method claims that do not comprise any explicit surgical steps may still be excluded from patentability under Article 53(c) EPC, if one or more surgical steps are considered to be implicit.
A recent decision by the EPO’s Technical Board of Appeal (BOA), T1631/17, addresses the question of when an unclaimed surgical step is considered to be implicit to a claimed method.
In this article of two halves, we first set out a brief summary of the decision and some practical tips to consider when drafting and prosecuting patent applications containing methods which require a preceding surgical step. For those readers interested in a deeper dive, we then take a look at the background to this decision and examine the findings of the BOA in more detail.
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In conclusion, T1631/17 adds to the varied (and sometimes conflicting) case law surrounding the exclusion of the patenting of surgical methods, and in particular to the question of when unclaimed surgical steps are considered to be essential and therefore implicit to a claimed method. The case does provide a confirmation of the approach taken in T992/03 and T429/12, but also identifies another set of conditions under which an unclaimed surgical step may be considered implicit to a claimed method. Given the BOA’s tendency to argue that decisions on this matter are highly case-specific, it remains to be seen the extent to which this decision will influence the EPO’s approach to such methods going forward.
If a therapeutic benefit is only observed in a sub-group of patients (in particular, a small group), is a claim sufficient if it claims all patients or do the non-responders need to be disclaimed? This was the question posed in T0421/14, an appeal decision concerning the opposition division’s decision to maintain patent EP1732548 in an amended form.
According to established case law of the Boards of Appeal, in order to meet with the requirements of sufficiency under Article 83 EPC ("The European patent application shall disclose the invention in a manner sufficiently clear and complete for it to be carried out by a person skilled in the art”) the therapeutic efficacy of the composition and the dosage regime for the claims therapeutic indication must be at least credible/plausible from the description and/or common general knowledge.
In T0421/14 (Acorda Therapeutics Inc v Synthon BV neuraxpharm Arzneimittel GmbH) a key objection asserted against the patent was that the desired therapeutic benefit was only attained in a small subpopulation of “responders” rather than in all patients and, thus, the claims were not sufficient.
The medical use claims at issue in this case concerned the use of a sustained release composition at a specific dose in a specific dosage regime for increasing the walking speed of a patient with multiple sclerosis.
IBM on Dec. 23 announced the dismissal of its patent lawsuit with Airbnb that was filed in early 2020 in the Federal District Court in Delaware. Shares of Airbnb lost 3.2% at the close on Wednesday.
The terms of the settlement between IBM (IBM) and Airbnb (ABNB) remain confidential.
"IBM invests more than $5 billion annually in research and development. This agreement further demonstrates the value of our intellectual property that results from this innovation. We're pleased this matter has been resolved." said IBM general manager Dr. William Lafontaine.
Some of the newly-released images have [copy-]rights restrictions, but the vast majority were published under a Creative Commons license, which means that those photographs can be downloaded and used free-of-charge on websites, apps, books, educational materials and interior decoration products, the agency said, as long as attribution is included.
Another caveat is that if, for example, a photo to be used in marketing or advertising contains an image of an individual who is still alive, his or her permission is required.
If he had chosen to veto the legislation, it would have set up his second showdown with Republicans in Congress who have been reluctant to cross him.
It is a bulging Santa’s bag of special treats: it creates medication and safety standards for horse racing, makes illegal streaming of music and films a felony, provides for sanctions against any Chinese official who interferes with the selection of the next Dalai Lama, authorises the creation of a National Museum of the American Latino and a Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum, allocates $1.375bn for Trump’s wall on the US-Mexican border, foreign aid for Cambodia, Nepal, Burma, Ukraine, Pakistan, Egypt, and Sudan, some money for Israel and Jordan, and funding for one new submarine (even just one is expensive), eight submarine-hunting aircraft, sexual abstinence programmes, and Space Force. Packing such things into big, must-pass legislation is very normal.
A legal campaign by academic and scientific publishers to prevent Internet users from accessing Sci-Hub and Libgen has expanded to India. In a complaint filed at the High Court in Delhi, Elsevier, Wiley, and American Chemical Society, are demanding that local ISPs should block the sites to prevent copyright infringement.
A recent study published through the European Parliamentary Research Service suggests that a new 'EU Anti-Piracy Act' is the most effective way to tackle online piracy of sports events and other premium content. This new legislation should harmonize anti-piracy policies and tools across EU member states, providing strong enforcement options including site-blocking.
