In the past, Linux-based operating systems had difficulty in not being well configured with the hardware system. Users had to suffer a lot for heavy work, rendering, and gaming. Most Windows users didn’t want to switch from Windows to Linux because there was not much smart software for multimedia and editing tools. Photoshop specialists, graphic designers, multimedia editors, and motion designers had to face many problems to sync with Linux. Rendering audio, video, and multimedia files were havoc. But as time goes by, software developers have built alternative open source renderers for Linux distributions to cope with the battle in the multimedia and graphics designing sector. Even, often the open-source renderers work fine and better than the traditional software on Linux.
While hosting is better in the long run, if you want to try out Matrix and a Discord bridge it's much easier to just use existing public services and then decide later down the line whether this service is going to be worth your time and effort to host privately.
Picos and the self-sovereign internet.
Phil Windley co-invented Picos (persistent compute objects) and discusses how they could make everything on Earth, including people, "smart" even without onboard electronics. He joins hosts Doc Searls and Shawn Powers to talk about a new self-sovereign layer for the Internet. This is built on SSI (self-sovereign internet) - a whole new way to make personal identity work both online and off, potentially without logins and passwords. Windley explains Distributed Identifiers and also shares how Hyperledger Aries relates.
goodbye 2020, family accounts, playstation 5
Services and subscriptions get a bad wrap, so we flip the script and talk about the ones we're grateful to pay for.
FreeBSD Remote Process Plugin Final Milestone achieved, Tailscale for OpenBSD, macOS to FreeBSD migration, monitoring of our OpenBSD machines, OPNsense 20.7.6 released, and more
This article shows how to boot a T430 laptop in BIOS (Legacy) and UEFI mode with Ubuntu operating systems. Thus, you will be able to boot either a hard disk, a solid state drive, or a USB flash to install such OS. Setups mentioned in this article are useful to help you install Ubuntu in modern standard UEFI-boot, GPT-partitioned, even in a 16GB USB mass storage. Now, let's learn!
I'm announcing the release of the 5.10.4 kernel.
All users of the 5.10 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.10.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.10.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
The DualSense controller is the latest in Sony’s controller technology which boasts features that are used exclusively for the PlayStation 5, until now. Gamers who use the Linux operating system will now be able to use their DualSense controllers on their computer, with the help of a new compatibility ‘HID-PlayStation” driver.
Reddit user u/vladthetransilvanian posted an email from Roderick Colenbrander, the Director of Hardware & Systems Engineering at PlayStation. This email detailed a new compatibility driver that lets Linux users play games using the DualSense controller.
With it recently being noticed that the Linux AES-NI XTS performance regressed big time from the return trampolines "Retpolines" enacted nearly three years ago as a defense against Spectre, here are some benchmarks looking at the performance cost involved to this day using Retpolines and the impact on the XTS encryption/decryption performance measured by cryptsetup that is used for setting up encrypted disks under Linux.
There are many new features with the Linux 5.11 kernel that is presently under development but one of the ones I've been more curious about for how well it works is the Intel "workload hints" that can be passed via its thermal framework. This is about providing the system with hints of workloads being run to optimize the thermal/power properties.
Announcing a new -ck release, 5.10-ck1 with the latest version of the Multiple Queue Skiplist Scheduler, version 0.205 These are patches designed to improve system responsiveness and interactivity with specific emphasis on the desktop, but configurable for any workload.
Probably the most interesting thing to happen as pointed out to me by Damentz was that the Intel i915 scheduler is based on the scheduling algorithm from MuQSS: [Intel-gfx] [PATCH 36/56] drm/i915: Fair low-latency scheduling
It seems they understand the incredible simplicity of the underlying scheduling algorithm that guarantees both latency and fairness intrinsically.
Con Kolivas took some time out of his New Year's Eve to release Linux 5.10-ck1 as his independent patch-set applied to the recently minted Linux 5.10 kernel and with that the latest MuQSS scheduler.
Kolivas announced Linux 5.10-ck1 today paired with MuQSS 0.205 as the latest of his kernel scheduler optimized for system responsiveness and interactivity.
There’s a number of strange hacks in zink that provide compatibility for some of the layers in mesa. One of these hacks is the NIR pass used for managing non-constant UBO/SSBO array indexing, made necessary because SPIRV operates by directly accessing variables, and so it’s impossible to have a non-constant index because then when generating the SPIRV there’s no way to know which variable is being accessed.
The open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver in Linux 5.11 didn't see any exciting features but there is now a patch pending for this DRM driver so it will at least handle mini DisplayPort connections properly.
While Mini DisplayPort is just a miniaturized version of DisplayPort, a missing explicit check for the mDP connector was leading to problems.
Before I start writing about the list of best open source mail notification tools for Linux, I must mention the difference between mail and email. Though the mail and email sound alike, there is a technical difference between them. Electronic mail (Email) is defined as a messaging system that can deliver and receive messages over the internet. On the other hand, the term mail is referred to as a system where you can send documents, files, and other bundles through an active mailing server in a network.
However, if you are a regular client of the mailing services, you can use open-source mail notification tools on your Linux system to get notified about your mails and other mailing services.
A text editor is an essential tool for both developers and sysadmin, especially when dealing with text based sessions. We use a text editor to create, edit, and update text. A text editor is used for many things. Some use them to write documents. Some people write code and others use it to edit Linux and Unix configuration files locally or remote servers running in the cloud. Let us see the top 6 text editors for Linux, macOS, and Unix command-line users/developers.
My favorite pastime is to see an eclectic range of bands, solo artists, and orchestras live. It’s such a life-changing and exhilarating experience to be present. It’s one thing to be sitting at home listening to a CD or watching music videos on TV or on YouTube, but being with an audience, packed out in a stadium or music hall, takes it to another level. But it’s an expensive pastime, and still on hold given the current coronavirus pandemic. I’m therefore listening to music from my CD collection which I’ve encoded to FLAC, a lossless audio format, and stored locally.
Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem.
My attention to Silverjuke was reignited by one of our visitors. I had tried this software a few years ago. It’s a music and video player written in C++ and C. Let’s see how it fares.
Parole, Xfce’s default media player, released version 4.15.0 a few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 20.04, Linux Mint 20, and Ubuntu 20.10.
Parole 4.15.0 features a in-window popover Playlist instead of a slide-out panel. The shuffle functionality now utilizes a sort filter instead of randomly selecting the next track, making it possible making the playback history more accurate.
Command-line email clients are not rich in features, but they are powerful in mail management and handle its components easily. Command-line email clients are easy to set up but offer amazing compatibility for mail handling. Many Linux users prefer these text-based email clients for their system.There are various command-line email clients available for Linux, so it is important to choose the best one from it. That’s why we have covered all of the details regarding the 7 best command-line email clients for Linux so that you can choose the best one according to your requirements.
This article will list some useful Linux applications that will allow you to create bootable live USB drives by extracting or transferring ISO image files of various Linux distributions. Live mode allows users to run and experience a full Linux desktop along with all of its applications without actually installing the OS. You can also create persistent live bootable USB drives that will allow you to permanently store changes made in a live session. Creating persistent storage for live mode won’t be covered in this article as it is a complex and lengthy topic that needs to be covered in a separate article.
Using strong passwords is a good way to help protect your accounts. On the Librem 5, we recommend you use Password Safe to keep track of and generate better passwords.
Have you ever imagined looking up some topic on Wikipedia while you're working on the Linux command line? What about displaying the results in a different language? Yes, it's possible. In fact, it's quite easy. The tool that provides this service is called wikit (Wikipedia IT).
[...]
To use this script, you will need to have recognizable topics in your "list" file, one topic per line. Then run the script while redirecting its output to a file like this:
./getinfo > REPORT
If you’re someone who wants to try out Linux, but you’re afraid that you might screw up something while dual-booting, this tutorial is for you. We’ll be looking at the two most popular methods to install Linux in Windows. In this tutorial, we’ll be using a Virtual Machine like Oracle’s VirtualBox, a popular tool used by professionals worldwide.
Do you find yourself continually checking the time difference when scheduling meetings with people living in other countries? Wouldn’t it be easier to have the time in multiple timezones on your desktop? That’s where Gnome Clocks can help.
Gnome Clocks is not a task or a time manager. However, it can help us ease our collaboration with people living in different time zones. With it, you can have multiple clocks for various regions in the same window. As a bonus, you can also set up alarms and have instant access to a stopwatch and timer. Let’s see how you can install and use it in Ubuntu.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Tor Browser on CentOS 8. Tor is free software and an open network that helps you defend against traffic analysis, a form of network surveillance that threatens personal freedom and privacy, confidential business activities and relationships, and state security. Tor protects you by bouncing your communications around a distributed network of relays run by volunteers all around the world. it prevents somebody watching your Internet connection from learning what sites you visit, and it prevents the sites you visit from learning your physical location.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Tor Browser on a CentOS 8.
In this video, I am going to show how to install Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix 20.10.
A server running multiple containers with continuous/maximum uptime is of course very productive, but it is no good unless all those containers are well maintained and updated regularly.
However, the bigger question here is how do you know if there is an updated image available so that you can think of updating Docker containers?
VseeFace is an application that can be used for 3D character tracking in the .vrm format. Applications like this are really needed by YouTuber or what is often called Vtuber. Vtuber will usually use a 3D or maybe 2D character for streaming, or to discuss something.
Regular system maintenance is necessary to make the system healthy and function properly and It’s common for all the operating systems not only for Linux systems.
There is no specific schedule for Linux package update but windows has a scheduled one. Hence we need to perform the package update at least once in a month.
In the worst cases at least once in a quarter.It would be fix for some of the outstanding issues if you install the available updates on your system.
While browsing the web with Google Chrome, it’s easy to get carried away and open dozens of windows filled with hundreds of tabs. Luckily, it’s easy to close multiple Chrome windows at once on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Here’s how.
To close all of your Chrome windows quickly on Windows or Linux, click the vertical ellipses button (three dots) and select “Exit.”
Downgrading any package including the kernel is done for a reason.
Most of the time we downgrade the package because the new update is malfunctioning with other software or with our hardware.
We have an application already pre-installed called : downgrade.
You can use this application to get an older version back of the needed software. You need to know the package name to do so.
sudo downgrade linux
Downgrading any package including the kernel is done for a reason.
Most of the time we downgrade the package because the new update is malfunctioning with other software or with our hardware.
We have an application already pre-installed called : downgrade.
Snap Store is the GUI interface to install various SNAP packages available in the repository of it. The Snap is from the Ubuntu team that provides cross-platform packages to install on most of the available Linux editions regardless of their codebase.
The focus of the snap store is on the installation and administration of snaps, less, on programs from the package sources. For software installed as a snap package, the rights of the snap can be adjusted via the snap store.
Elementary OS Linux distro is popular for its attractive Pantheon interface and beginner-friendliness. However, out of the box, you will not find many applications that actually you would need in your day-to-day computing need. Nevertheless, it is also good because there would not be unnecessary application clutter on your OS; only those will be there, you really want to install. Thus, in case you want to browse internet websites but with a high level of privacy and anonymity, install Tor Browser on Elementary.
This is a follow-up to my previous post Configuring a Brother MFC-7460DN Laser Printer/Scanner on Fedora 23 (64-bit), as things have fortunately changed to the better in the meanwhile.
As described in this post, setting up this printer in CUPS on Fedora has become quite an ordeal, as Brother no longer updates the printer drivers for these old models and they don’t provide 64 bit binaries.
LXQT is a lightweight, modular, fast, and user-friendly desktop environment. The free, open-source LXQT is the successor of the LXDE desktop environment. Lubuntu and a few other Linux distribution have default LXQT desktop environments. LXQT is based on QT rather than GTK+.
The main reason to use LXQT desktop over other environments is low resource utilization, elegant and clean user interfaces. Secondly, the high level of customization to meet desktop usability need.
Blizzard Entertainment is a game development company that creates some top-rated games that work well on Linux. Blizzard develops Battle.net, an online platform with multiple social networking services, digital rights management and digital distribution, etc.
The only issue with Blizzard Battle.net is that it is not available in Linux. However, most of the games still work appropriately on Linux by using Wine in it. In case you want to install the Blizzard Battle.net app on Ubuntu easily, then read this complete article. In this article, we will cover the full details on “how to install Blizzard Battle.net app on Ubuntu.”
In this video, we are looking at how to install GeForce Now on Linux Mint 20.
RAID is a virtualization platform for data storage that integrates several physical disc drives into one or more logical units. Based on the required level of reliability and efficiency, data is scattered across the drives in one of many ways, referred to as RAID levels. Different systems are known as ‘RAID’ followed by an integer, such as RAID 0 or RAID 1. Each system, or level of RAID, provides a different balance between the key goals, i.e. stability, usability, performance, and strength.
RAID uses disc mirroring or disc striping methods, mirroring on more than one drive would copy similar data. Partition striping allows distributing data across many disc drives. The storage capacity of each drive is split into units that range from a sector (512 bytes) up to multiple megabytes. RAID levels higher than RAID 0 offer protection against unrepairable read errors in the field, as well as against entire physical drive failures.
The RAID devices are deployed via the application driver md. The Linux software RAID array currently supports RAID 0 (strip), RAID 1 (mirror), RAID 4, RAID 5, RAID 6, and RAID 10. Mdadm is a Linux utility used to control and manage RAID devices for applications. Several core operating modes of mdadm are assembled, build, create, follow, monitor, grow, incremental and auto-detect. The name derives from the nodes of the multiple devices (md) that it controls or manages. Let’s look at creating different kinds of Raid arrays using mdadm.
Deduplication is a software feature that is used to remove duplicate data blocks (redundant data blocks) from a filesystem to save disk spaces. The Btrfs filesystem is a modern Copy-on-Write (CoW) filesystem that supports deduplication. If you need to keep a lot of redundant data (i.e., file backups, database) on your computer, then the Copy-on-Write (CoW) and deduplication feature of the Btrfs filesystem can save a huge amount of disk spaces.
In this article, I will show you how to save disk spaces using the Btrfs deduplication feature. So, let’s get started.
Today we are looking at how to install Milkman Karlson by Dani 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.
NGINX is an open-source web server with features for load balancing, caching, and functioning as a reverse proxy. Igor Sysoev created it to overcome the limits of scaling and concurrency existing within regular web servers, offering an event-based, asynchronous architecture that enhances NGINX’s performance and stability as a web server.
As is the case with managing all servers, you’ll find yourself needing to start, stop, and restart the NGINX web server for various reasons.
This guide discusses how to use various methods to manage the NGINX service running on a Linux system.
Btrfs (B-Tree Filesystem) is a modern copy-on-write (CoW) filesystem for Linux. It aims to implement many advanced filesystem features while focusing on fault tolerance, repair, and easy administration. The Btrfs filesystem is designed to support the requirement of high performance and high-capacity storage servers.
If you want to learn more about the Btrfs filesystem, check my article Introduction to Btrfs Filesystem.
In this article, I am going to show you how to install Btrfs on Fedora 33 and use it. So, let’s get started.
The Btrfs filesystem supports filesystem-level data compression. It means that the filesystem data will be compressed automatically as new data is written to the filesystem. When you access the files stored in your Btrfs filesystem, those files’ data will be automatically decompressed.
This feature of the filesystem will save you a lot of disk space and will save you a lot of time that you would have spent compressing your files manually.
In this article, I am going to show you how to enable the Btrfs filesystem-level compression on a Btrfs filesystem. So, let’s get started.
You might have heard or even come across a Linux distribution using Wayland—for example, Fedora 25—as its default display server. Whether you are looking to test Wayland, understand what it is before using it, or learn how to enable and disable it on Ubuntu, this guide will prove valuable in one way or the other.
This guide will discuss what Wayland is, how it works, and how to enable and disable it on your Ubuntu system.
Let’s get started.
Memory is a critical part of any system. The Linux kernel knows this and tries to ensure there’s enough memory at the system’s disposal. One way the Kernel manages memory is by using a swap system to create additional memory space.
In this tutorial, we will talk about what a swap is, how it works, and finally, how to customize the swappiness of your Linux system.
Load-balancing is the most common practice of distributing incoming web traffic among multiple back-end servers. This makes the application highly available even if some of the servers go down for some reason. Load Balancing increases the efficiency and reliability of a web application. HAProxy load-balancer is used for the same purpose. It is the most widely used load-balancer in industries. As per the official website, HAProxy is used by leading companies like AWS, Fedora, Github, and many more.
HAProxy or High Availability Proxy provides high availability and proxying solution. It is written in C and works at network and application layers of the TCP/IP model. The best thing is that it has a free community edition, and it is an open-source application. It works on Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris operating systems. The enterprise edition is also there, but it has a price tag.
For years, the Bash shell [1] has been an integral part of many Linux distributions. In the beginning, Bash was chosen as the official GNU shell because it was well-known, quite stable, and offered a decent set of features.
Today the situation is somewhat different — Bash is still present everywhere as a software package but has been replaced by alternatives in the standard installation. These include, for example, Debian Almquist shell (Dash) [2] (for Debian GNU/Linux) or Zsh [3] (for GRML [5]). In the well-known distributions Ubuntu, Fedora, Arch Linux, and Linux Mint, Bash has so far remained the standard shell.
It is quite helpful to understand Bash startup and to know how to configure this properly. This includes the customization of your shell environment, for example, setting the $PATH variable, adjusting the look of the shell prompt, and creating aliases. Also, we will have a look at the two files .bashrc and .bash_profile that are read on startup. The corresponding knowledge is tested in Exam 1 of the Linux Professional Institute Certification [4].
A couple of months ago, I posted about a fix for extremely annoying default behaviour of gtk3 scrollbars:
https://bkhome.org/news/202010/oe-gcc-target-default-commandline-options.html
That fix is in Easy, however, today I received an email from Alfons, asking about the missing arrows at the ends of the scrollbars. SeaMonkey, Inkscape and LibreOffice use gtk3 and exhibit this lack-of-arrows.
In my previous articles in the series on asynchronous communication with the modern NNCP tool, I talked about its use for asynchronous, potentially airgapped, backups. The first article, How & Why To Use Airgapped Backups laid out the foundations for this. Now let’s dig into the details.
Today’s post will cover ZFS, because it has a lot of features that make it very easy to support in this setup. Non-ZFS backups will be covered later.
The setup is actually about as simple as it is for SSH, but since people are less familiar with this kind of communication, I’m going to try to go into more detail here.
The advantage of plain text is that there’s no extra computer-specific information cluttering up your otherwise human-readable writing. The good thing about computers is that they’re programmable, and so as long as we humans agree to follow very specific conventions when writing, we can program computers to interpret human-readable text as secret instructions. For instance, by surrounding a word with two asterisks, we not only give a visual cue to humans that a word is significant, but we can also program computers to display the word in bold.
This is exactly the theory and practice behind Markdown, the popular plain text format that promises writers that as long as they use specific plain text conventions, then their text will be rendered with a specific style.
Traditionally, that has meant that an author writes in plain text and doesn’t see the pretty styling until the text is fed to a converter application (originally markdown.pl), but the Markdown Editor app in Nextcloud changes that.
Website Caching system is undoubtedly one of the most promising technologies available, which can help your website grow remarkably. According to experts, there are several benefits of a caching system for any website. It can help enhance your website loading speed, better SEO (search engine optimization) score, and much more. Here in this post, we will give you complete knowledge about the caching system and how it can help improve your website growth and speed.
So read the post till the end to grab complete knowledge! Let’s get started.
Before going further, it’s necessary to understand what is a caching system.
Every so often I find myself with an idle hour and decide to use that time to package some new software for Linux. A common activity among nerds, I’m sure ;). This blog post is a write up of what I did, and why, which may be useful to others with time on their hands.
I keep meaning to live stream when I do, but on this occasion I had a bad hair day was also listening to and engaging with a podcast, so it wasn’t practical. In leiu of that, while the information is fresh in my head - the morning after - I thought I’d write down some notes here.
Why do this
My Linux distro of choice is Ubuntu. A significant number of Ubuntu users are on “old” Long Term Support (LTS) releases. Some estimates put it at around 10x or 20x more users are on Ubuntu LTS releases than the interim non-LTS releases. It’s hard to get new software into the repositories of old Ubuntu releases. While it’s possible for developers to create PPAs or repositories for their software, that’s hard for new users to discover. If I make and help publish a snap for something new, that can get in users hands within hours (or even minutes), with updates coming as they’re published. I wrote a (work) blog post titled “Snaps: How we got here” if you want to know more about “why?”.
Pop!_OS is an awesome distribution of Linux for your laptop or desktop, and in this video I walk you through everything you'll need to start using it right away. Topics include installation, adding applications, and more!
To modify the root folder in Apache, you would need to make changes to two files basically. We will first start by modifying the file /etc/apache2/apache2.conf.
Macs may have popularized launcher docks, but it’s Linux where they were perfected. Apps like Plank allow you to have such a dock on your desktop. From there, you can launch your favorite apps, juggle the active ones, and check out useful information.
Let’s see how you can install, use, and configure Plank in Ubuntu for quick and snazzy-looking access to your favorite apps.
The best way to describe Cron is to label it as a time-based job scheduler. It means that this service can be used in Linux to schedule all those tasks that are supposed to occur at a specific time, however, you do not want to perform these tasks manually. In today’s article, we will teach you the method to schedule a shutdown using Crontab in Linux Mint 20.
In GNU/Linux A sed command stands for Stream Editor, and It was developed in 1974 by the Lee E McMahon.
A sed command had a different version for macOS sed command is managed by Berkley Software Distribution BSD, and for GNU/Linux SED is managed by General Public License GNU.
It is highly used command to manipulate TextFile to achieve task like searching, find and replace, insertion or deletion.
I think we can all agree that 2020 has been a weird and very challenging year. Many of us have been presented with an interesting paradox: we’re more digitally connected than ever, and yet this year has been isolating without the ability to see each other in person. For those of us working in IT, this past year has truly underscored the importance of networked communication in our personal and professional lives.
Containers continue their quest to take over the world, and these 10 articles help you manage this technology.
ReactJS is a free and open-source JavaScript library used for building reusable UI components. It was developed by Facebook in 2011 for creating rich and engaging web apps fast and efficiently with minimal coding. It allows you to create interactive elements on websites. It uses Virtual DOM that makes the app fast. It offers a rich set of features including, Virtual DOM, One-way Data Binding, Components, JSX, Conditional Statements and many more.
I totally agree that Elementary OS’ Pantheon is quite beautiful, however, it is not rich and easy to use for users who are shifting from Windows operating systems. For them, Cinnamon on Linux will like a back to the home thing.
Cinnamon Desktop is not only user-friendly but also comparatively easy to understand & use for beginners. Unlike Elementary, we can customize it with help of the various officially available themes and widgets by the Mint community.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install LibreOffice on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, LibreOffice is the best alternative for Microsoft Office. It is a powerful free office suite for creating spreadsheets, slide shows, and databases. It is an open-sourced version of the earlier StarOffice. LibreOffice available in 115 languages and used by millions of people around the world. The latest LibreOffice 7 is available to download and install on the Linux system.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step by step installation of LibreOffice free office suite on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian based distribution like Linux Mint.
As per the design, Keycloak imports all users into its local database if the users are authenticated via any third-party identity provider (e.g., Google, Facebook, or Okta). But what if users authenticated through the third-party identity provider have to be restricted—or be allowed only limited access—to applications that are federated with Keycloak? Here’s how you do it.
Following on from my recent posts about how to install Docker CE, and looking at Docker storage drivers, I thought it was time to dive into doing what Docker is for – and go into how you can use the docker run command to start up some docker containers! This post will be a general overview of how to run Docker containers, with plenty of practical examples, so hopefully this should be a good one!
Xfce 4.16 is released a while back with many new features and improvements. In this guide, we lay out the steps to install Xfce 4.16 desktop environment in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Along with a huge upgrade to the game that adds in a whole new Adventure Mode, the grid-battler EndCycle VS now offers up Linux support.
"EndCycle VS the customization-heavy strategic grid-fighter is here! Fight intense, fast-paced situations by combining reflexes and crafting your own strategy!! Packing both Singleplayer and Multiplayer action, the game has something for everyone!"
One for fans of Mega Man Battle Network, One Step From Eden and other grid-fighters it's another interesting choice for fast-paced strategic action. This latest update brings with it almost an entirely new game with the Adventure Mode, one that's different each time you play through with some random generation.
Block-breaking puzzle games come in many different forms and Mixolumia from davemakes is one that has absolutely sucked away my attention recently. Originally released much earlier in 2020, the developer has recently put up a Linux build on itch.io and I've been playing through it.
"Mixolumia introduces a fresh twist on block-clearing puzzlers. Scintillating visuals and entrancing music respond to your input and evolve as you progress. Diamond blocks slide together on the gem-shaped board and explode in glittering chain reactions."
Do you love puzzle games? Want to play a puzzle game on your Linux PC but don’t know what puzzle games are free? We can help! Follow along as we go over 6 puzzle games you can play for free!
In this list, we went over 6 puzzle games you can play on Linux for free. However, there are more than just 6 puzzle games available to play on Linux. What is your favorite Linux puzzle game to play? Tell us in the comments below!
For the majority of 2020, unless we had to work or do grocery shopping, we had to stay indoors, in our own homes. The fact that Steam recorded an all-time high of over 24 million users logged in in a single weekend proves that gaming has never been as great of a pastime as it is now.
Here’s our top picks of games either released in 2020, or that got so significant of an enhancement this year that it was worth including in this list, whether they’re native Linux releases or work well on Proton. And what better time to be talking about these games now, while most of them are on sale during the Steam Winter Sale until January 5th, as well as on GOG, Humble, and many other stores right now!
Valve this year continued contributing significantly to not only improving the Linux gaming experience but also the Linux desktop at large with their continued open-source graphics driver enhancements and other infrastructure work.
Open-source driver developers working under contract for Valve continued pushing along the open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver, pushed the "ACO" compiler back-end for RADV into excellent shape that it's now enabled by default and delivers excellent performance, continued work on the Linux VR support as well as their engagements with Collabora and the like, and other infrastructure work such as backing the SUD functionality and other ongoing kernel work.
After a year in development on the latest update, the brilliant puzzle game b.i.t.Lock is now not only free but Petorio also added a Linux build too.
B.i.t.Lock is a game about fitting shapes into slots by moving around blocks on the screen. Sounds simple right? Wrong. All the blocks you have move at the same time, together and you need to push them around into walls to get them into the right place. It's challenging, makes you really carefully think and it's just such a well-made puzzle game that's definitely worth looking at.
You navigate these blocks through six different worlds with their own themes and mechanics and free the world bit by bit with each level solved. Each world has its own style of gameplay and requires different ways of thinking to solve the puzzles.
Need more casual arcade racers? Neon Wings: Air Race is a colourful sci-fi air racer currently available in Early Access and they recently hooked up a Linux build. Originally released in November 2020, the Linux build came in mid-December.
"Neon Wings: Air Race is an adrenaline-filled fast-paced air racing game packed with a cart-game like skill system, spectacular effects and graphics, innovative gameplay mechanics, and good old fun!"
Scrabdackle is one game you really need to keep an eye on, an adventure following a novice wizard getting to know their own strange world for the first time.
Made in the awesome free and open source game engine Godot Engine, it's a 2D top-down hand-drawn action-adventure that focuses on exploration and combat. With some quirky humour, fun scribbly-line artwork that's super charming it's already got a lot to love about it.
After some classic first-person shooter fun? Developer 'Scumhead' who works with the GZDoom game engine recently announced that Shrine, Lycanthorn and Lycanthorn II all now have Linux builds.
This makes grabbing them and playing them easier than ever, no need to mess about with setting up GZDoom manually or moving anything around. Currently it's only on itch.io but hopefully the Linux builds will hop over to Steam too sometime soon. Shrine is quite highly rated too, one we've talked about briefly here before when running it as a standalone.
Currently, Calindori works with calendar data provided by files that follow the iCalendar specification, without offering an out-of-the-box way to synchronize your calendars with external sources, e.g. with Nextcloud. However, this will change in the future. In specific, a plan for this feature has been devised. The first step, a plugin interface that will enable Calindori to use calendar data from various data sources is already in progress.
Although Calindori works on Linux mobile, desktop and even Android, it has been created as the calendar of Plasma Mobile. From this point of view, as soon as a personal information management (PIM) system is available on Plasma Mobile, Calindori will make use of it. However, such a system has not been implemented yet. Various ideas have been discussed on the Plasma Mobile sprints and community meetings. Personally, I am in favor of a sustainable, KDE community driven solution that will work well with Plasma desktop as well as taking into account the particularities of the mobile world, e.g. low energy consumption, “deep sleep” support, etc.
[...]
Finally, let me clarify that this approach is not the way that Calindori and Plasma Mobile are going to offer online synchronization of calendars in the future. Nevertheless, Vdirsyncer is a nice, simple utility that enable users to use Nextcloud calendars in Calindori at the moment. It has worked pretty well for me, and I think that the Linux-on-mobile community will find it as an interesting solution for calendar synchronization.
Over the last few years and especially since the Wayland goal vote, the Plasma team, we have been focusing on having our Plasma Wayland experience work at least as good as our traditional Plasma X11 experience does. Today I’d like to wrap up my experience on this front for 2020.
Despite having been working on KDE and even Plasma projects for a long while, I’d never gotten much deep into working on KWin internally. I dipped my toes in it in 2019 when working on the key states feature (that plasmoid that says if caps lock is pressed or not, which we needed because the KDE Slimbook didn’t have an LED for the Caps Lock). Here I’ll discuss a bit how it evolved over time.
2020 was for sure no good year for most people around the world. A lot of us are affected directly or indirectly by the currently still raging COVID-19 pandemic. Let’s hope that 2021 will bring better fortune at least in this aspect.
Still, good stuff happened in 2020, too, not all was bleak. I read already some wrap ups of 2020 from others like Nate and Aleix. A lot stuff happened inside the KDE community this year. Kate and it’s closely related parts KTextEditor & KSyntaxHighlighting evolved a lot in 2020, too. Let’s take a look at the highlights out of my perspective ;=)
I make typos — okay: I make a lot of typos* — but modern technology cleans up after me. Features like autocorrect, “did you mean?”, and (relevant here) fuzzy search step in when my typing precision fails.
Fuzzy search (or “approximate string matching” as some call it) is a type of search that returns results that are likely to be relevant to a search term, even though they don’t match it exactly.
GNOME Shell has a powerful search feature built in. You hit the super key, start typing, and all kind of results, including applications, files, folder, system shortcuts, and more, appear before you.
One of my favourite discoveries of 2020 is Joplin, an open, comprehensive notebook app. I’m slowly consolidating various developer journals, Zettelkasten inspired notes, blog drafts, Pinboard bookmarks and abstract doodles into Joplin notebooks.
Now it’s there I want to search it from the GNOME Shell overview, and that’s pretty fun to implement.
Debian-based Deepin Linux is one of the most beautiful Linux distributions out there. The new Deepin 20 release makes it even more beautiful. The new looks resemble the macOS Big Sur.
You don’t have to take my words for it. See it in action in this review.
The first point release of Deepin version 20 is here. Deepin 20.1 adds Linux kernel 5.8 along with the existing kernel 5.4 LTS. It uses Debian 10.6 repositories to give you updated packages and security patches.
Based on Debian GNU/Linux 10.6 “Buster” repositories, Deepin 20.1 is now shipping with Linux kernel 5.8 as an alternative kernel that’s supposed to offer support for newer hardware components, as well as the long-term supported Linux 5.4 LTS kernel series, which remains the default for new installations.
Also improved in this release is the Deepin Desktop graphical environment, which is received new power settings in the Control Center, namely Balanced, Power Saver, and High Performance, support for Bluetooth file transfers, and new Deepin apps, including Browser, Mail, Disk Manager, and Camera.
Well, folks, 2020 is almost in the books, and once again, it was not the fabled year of Linux on the desktop. Yes, Microsoft's Windows 10 still reigns supreme as far as market share, but that doesn't mean it is the best desktop operating system -- just the most popular. In fact, many consumers are switching to Linux-based Chromebooks for their simplicity and security, while macOS continues to attract new users. Those M1 Macs in particular are quite intriguing, especially when a brand-new Mac Mini can be had for less than $700.
The thing is, neither Windows 10 or macOS are the prettiest desktop operating system -- that designation belongs to a Linux distribution from China called "deepin". Today, Debian-based deepin Linux 20.1 (1010) becomes available for download and you should absolutely check it out. Hell, depending on your needs, you should consider switching from Windows 10! Seriously, y'all, deepin is that good.
This new version is based on Debian 10.6 and uses Linux kernel 5.8. Surprisingly, deepin 20.1 ditches popular default apps like Firefox, GParted, and Thunderbird for all-new deepin-made programs. Yes, the operating system now comes with a deepin-made web browser, email client, and disk manager to name a few. Don't like that? No need to worry. You can, of course, still install the apps you prefer, such as Firefox or Google Chrome.
As the year 2020 will end today, the Deepin OS team has announced a new stable point version 20.1 (1010) of its Deepin Linux 20 series.
The latest Deepin 20.1 (1010) comes with numerous updates ranging from kernel, apps, repositories, enhanced system stability, compatibility and performance.
Similar to how audio recording is handled, recording has been disabled by default in video(4). It may be reenabled like this: [...]
Due to issues with our anti spam measures, we had to migrate those mailing lists, that were sent from @archlinux.org before to the @lists.archlinux.org domain.
Submission to the mailing list is not affected and still works with @archlinux.org. Mails get redirected automagically.
Fedora 33 introduced a new default filesystem in desktop variants, Btrfs. After years of Fedora using ext4 on top of Logical Volume Manager (LVM) volumes, this is a big shift. Changing the default file system requires compelling reasons. While Btrfs is an exciting next-generation file system, ext4 on LVM is well established and stable. This guide aims to explore the high-level features of each and make it easier to choose between Btrfs and LVM-ext4.
In summary
The simplest advice is to stick with the defaults. A fresh Fedora 33 install defaults to Btrfs and upgrading a previous Fedora release continues to use whatever was initially installed, typically LVM-ext4. For an existing Fedora user, the cleanest way to get Btrfs is with a fresh install. However, a fresh install is much more disruptive than a simple upgrade. Unless there is a specific need, this disruption could be unnecessary. The Fedora development team carefully considered both defaults, so be confident with either choice.
Rocky Linux was invented as soon as Red Hat’s self CentOS program newly changed the direction of emphasis, much to the embarrassment of its consumers.
Gregory Kurtzer, amongst the actual CentOS co-founders, proclaimed that Rocky Linux would furnish the aground consumers with an achievable alternative to leave their servers ahead of the recent edition of CentOS verges early in the ultimate month of 2021.
Fedora Workstation 33 successfully switched over from EXT4 to using Btrfs as its default file-system. Now with Fedora 34 due out in the spring we are seeing Fedora beginning to make use of more features offered by Btrfs.
We previously reported on Fedora 34 looking to make use of DNF/RPM copy-on-write functionality in conjunction with Btrfs. Now another Btrfs feature being eyed for use by default in this next release is transparent file-system compression.
In a recent thread on Fedora’s development list, Miroslav Suchý asked about what Fedora packagers found most time-consuming, that could be simplified or better automated.
For me, personally, it’s rebuilding a stack of packages that Facebook develop - due to a lack of stable ABI (so it’s partly our own doing, yes), the entire stack has to be rebuilt each time.
There are some Fedora tooling that make this easier – rpmdev-bumpspec can automate the process of updating the version and changelog on simple spec files, and fedpkg request-side-tag lets any packager get a ‘side tag’ based off of an existing release, so packages can be built individually then merged back as a set, so there is no window in which the set of packages in, say, Rawhide, are inconsistent with each other, and there is no need to use buildroot overrides (which exposes the unreleased packages to other developers when they might still be buggy).
It’s still a tedious process though, and will get worse the more packages get added to this set. And I want the process to be reproducible so I can hand it off to someone else.
Many thanks also for your donations and for your support. With the money collected during the past few months we were able to send big bonuses to our developers and to our moderators. This always feels really good, especially around Christmas.
At the moment there are 34 issues open. Most of them aren’t release blockers but there still are bugs we want to fix prior to giving Linux Mint 20.1 a stable release.
I know it’s been asked a few times but I can’t give you an exact release date. It’s not that we don’t want to tell you, it’s simply that we don’t know exactly when the release will happen. Until it’s ready it won’t happen, and once it’s ready there’s no reason to wait for an announced date.
As a project, if we wanted to announce a release date and stick to it we would have to deliberately plan it further than anticipated, be ready to make people work late at night even where there are no real emergencies or worse, release the product with important bugs we could have fixed but didn’t have time to. I know some companies and some projects work like that and that’s OK. I know the visibility they give their user base is important and appreciated as well, but that’s not how we chose to operate. The release comes out when we’re happy with it. Looking at the list of bugs we have, there still are issues we want to fix. In 2 months time it won’t matter at all whether we released this a week earlier or a week later, but the bugs we let through, especially those which affect the live session, will mark the release forever and be on the forefront of the version people download for the next 6 months.
So we do not have set release dates. We do however have a 6 months release cycle which gives us rhythm and a sense of urgency and getting this release out right now is all we’re focused on.
The year 2020 was quite extraordinary, because a lot of things developed quite differently from how they were supposed to because of the Covid-19 crisis. Even though a lot of things happen virtually at Ubuntu, it also had an impact on my Ubuntu life.
Every year I attend a few trade fairs to present Ubuntu and/or give talks. In 2020, this only took place virtually and in a very limited way for me. In March, the Chemnitzer Linuxtage were cancelled and one fair after the other was cancelled.
In my home town I go to a Fablab where we also work on Ubuntu. After the meetings in January and February, this was also cancelled. Now and then this still took place virtually, but somehow it didn’t create the same atmosphere as when we met in real life.
With the team members of the German-speaking Ubuntu forum (ubuntuusers.de) we organise a team meeting every year, which is always very funny and partly productive. In 2020 it had to be cancelled. Since I have also reduced my other contacts to help contain the virus, I have only met two people from the Ubuntu environment in real life since March.
Alongside performance, theming is one of the primary concerns for desktop snap users. People expect applications bundled inside snaps to look and behave just like their counterparts shipped and packaged in the traditional way in their Linux distributions, and any discrepancy in this space can lead to a degraded user experience.
Over the years, we have invested a lot of focus in improving the theming integration, but recently, we picked up pace in this area, and we’d like to share a story of our ongoing and future efforts, and set the tone for 2021.
[...]
Seamless theming should make snaps even more fun to use. If you’re a theme developer, you may want to consider the improvements we are introducing in our tooling, and help bring even more art and variety to Linux users in an easy and consistent way. We also welcome feedback, so please join our forum for a discussion, on themes or any other topic.
A week before the announcement that Raspberry Pi supported industrial customers through several new services, including a dedicated website for the industry and the Raspberry Pi Approved Design Partners program, OAS announced support for deploying the Open Automation Software Platform on Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB or 8GB of memory. The solution enables the low-cost scaling of operations and “reliable on-site data logging in remote locations with limited power and connectivity”.
As you may know… or not, OAS has provided IIoT solutions for the last 20 years and is widely used since the company offers secure moving of data from one location to another.
With the change of form factor, the keyboard chassis Raspberry Pi 400 introduced an interesting challenge for third party accessory makers. The GPIO, now moved to the rear of the case and rotated 90 degrees means that standard HATs and add on boards no longer fit. Companies and makers are rising to the challenge, with Pimoroni's Flat HAT Hacker being the first commercial board. Announced via Twitter, Adafruit's latest board, a Cyberpunk / Neuromancer inspired Cyberdeck Bonnet which aims to improve on Pimoroni's design.
This article will walk you through the step by step process of setting up your Raspberry Pi into a remote Linux development environment. You can access this setup on your local network.
This environment can be used for web and software development. It will give you complete access to the Raspberry Pi hardware remotely.
I recently obtained a brand new Raspberry Pi4 device and took the free days around x-mas to play a little bit around with it. And I must say, I am very pleased with this device!
My goal was to get a Yocto-built multi-display plasma-mobile environment on the device. Except two magic lines for the /boot/config.txt configuration that enabled multi-display output for me, it nearly worked out of the box.
There you go. Gboard comes with a range of settings and options, and you should actually go through every one of them, and make sure only the relevant and useful features are toggled on. Some have efficiency implications, others privacy implications. It's not something most people would think about actively, I'm sure. But since that's your primary input method, you should invest a little bit of time tweaking and polishing things.
Like almost everything else in Android, you have a great deal - too much almost - of freedom in changing the defaults. You can also minimize noise and improve your privacy baseline. Some of the stuff can be confusing, as options are available in more than one place, and there seems to be too much emphasis on emojis. But hopefully, this article sheds some light on the intricacies of the Android virtual keyboard. And we're done.
Big Data is an all-inclusive term that refers to data sets so large and complex that they need to be processed by specially designed hardware and software tools. The data sets are typically of the order of tera or exabytes in size. These data sets are created from a diverse range of sources: sensors that gather climate information, publicly available information such as magazines, newspapers, articles. Other examples where big data is generated include purchase transaction records, web logs, medical records, military surveillance, video and image archives, and large-scale e-commerce.
There is a heightened interest in Big Data and Big Data analytics and the implications they have for businesses. Big data is more than simply a matter of size though. Big Data varies in terms of volume, velocity, variety, and veracity. The analysis of Big Data provides a unique opportunity to find insights in new and emerging types of data and content, to make a business more responsive to change, and to have answers to questions that could not previously be addressed.
At the start of Q4, Intel released Media SDK 20.3 with AV1 accelerated decode, Rocket Lake, DG1/SG1 discrete GPU support, and other improvements. Now to end out the quarter is a new release coming in at version 20.5.1.
I’ve just made my blog available on the Fediverse, at least partially.
Yesterday while browsing Hacker News, I saw Carl Schwan’s post Adding comments to your static blog with Mastodon(m) about him replacing Disqus with replies posted at Mastodon. Just on Monday I was thinking, why can’t blogs participate in Fediverse? I tried to use WriteFreely as a replacement for Pelican, only to find it very limited, so I thought I might write a gateway to expose the Atom feed using ActivityPub. Turns out, someone already did that: Bridgy, a service connecting websites to Twitter, Mastodon and other social media, also has a Fediverse counterpart, Fed.brid.gy — just what I was looking for!
Since about 2019-09-11, the FSF (the largely autonomous staff body that was supposed to be supervised by, and to follow directions given by the board of directors) has asked me to leave FSF public communications to them, even while I was acting president, and preferred to distance themselves from myself and from Richard Stallman's leadership.
When they make as urgent an exception as they have yesterday, I might as well take it.
The FSF has been running its end-of-year fundraiser for several weeks, and at the time of this writing it's 175 new members short of its goal of 500 new members by the year's end, with less than 24 hours to go.
If I were to explain this shortcoming, as I often have, I'd point out that, over the past 15 months, to a significant number of Free Software and former FSF supporters, the FSF has come across as betraying its founder, lifetime leader, and founding-father of the social movement it belongs in.
The core mission of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) is, and always will be, to support the four freedoms of free software as embodied by the GNU Project. In 1985, when I saw Richard Stallman attempt to undertake the task of creating for you, users and creators of software, a wholly free GNU operating system by himself, I thought it was a noble idea unlikely to succeed. How wrong I was! Luckily, I made the correct decision to pitch in and help, as have many thousands of people since. In the thirty-five years since the FSF was established, countless free software users and supporters around the globe have experienced the joys that come from creating software and knowing that you have the right to learn, to tinker, to make modifications to suit your needs, to make your own contribution, to be heard and recognized, to share your work, and to be appreciated by your peers.
While the pandemic has been very hard on people everywhere, there was one bright spot for me in 2020: by attending virtual conferences all over the world, I was able to see and hear about the work of hundreds of people inspired by the free software movement, and I have been astounded at the brilliance, creativity, and dedication of contributors everywhere on the planet. I think back to the Moon missions of a half century ago, when the astronauts peered back at the world and saw that it really was one world, that limitations in the way of boundaries seem very artificial from space. From the vantage of space, you see a beautiful blue ball with land masses, oceans and clouds, a fragile atmosphere, and as you visualize there are people down there, they should be roaming free and enjoying all that beauty.
For the first case, the OpenMP standard and its implementation in GCC, libgomp, provide all you need. It uses multiple threads under the hood. Use the Autoconf macro AC_OPENMP for portability.
[...]
POSIX multithreading and ISO C multithreading are similar. ISO C multithreading contains only the essential APIs, whereas POSIX multithreading has more features. For example, while both have locks/mutexes, only POSIX has spin-locks. And when creating a thread, only POSIX allows to specify thread attributes, such as its stack size or its scheduling priority. Also, lock initialization is straightforward in POSIX, but clumsy in ISO C.
Open source software is by nature a type of computer program, which is still a type of work regulated and protected by the Copyright Law and whose distribution is also restricted by the terms of its license agreement. Open source software is different from general commercial software primarily in the terms of its license agreement. The terms of the license agreement for general commercial software are mainly based on the receipt of royalties, while the terms of the license agreement for open source software are mainly premised that the licensor shall maintain the freedom and openness of the open source software program. An open source license agreement has the following main characteristics: The software source code should be made public at the time of distribution, and open source code software should be made freely available for download, use, duplication and modification by other users, and may be freely distributed to third parties for any purpose.[2][3]
Due to the prosperous development and application of the Internet, more and more people can participate in the development and editing of open source software through online collaboration tools, and because the development of open source software is participated by a multitude of people, the speed of open source software optimization and innovation is sometimes even faster than that of commercial software developed by ordinary enterprises. In recent years, more and more software companies, such as Apple and Microsoft, have opened up the source code of their underlying technologies in order to save their own development costs and widen the application of their products. According to Sonatype’s Software Supply Chain Status Report 2020, over 1.5 trillion open source software components and software units have been requested for download by developers worldwide in 2020, demonstrating the current high usage of open source software.
Jennings noted, importantly, that as of 2018 non-corporate editors were still responsible for the majority of activity on OSM (about 70% of all edits) and were significantly more active on edits to buildings, places of interest, and amenities.â´
In a more recent talk from State of the Map in July 2020, Jennings presented updated figures showing that the torrent of corporate contributions only increased from 2018 to 2019 and beyond with Amazon and Apple trending along the steepest slopes: [...]
“Should I build my own IoT platform? Is it worth it to do it myself? The answer is, of course, it depends.
You’ve got an idea for an awesome IoT project, and you’re ready to get started making it into a reality. But there’s a lot of options to choose from. Should you build your project from the ground up? Should you hire an IoT company to build it for you? Or should you take a middle path, using others’ work as a foundation on which to build?
This release of Is Parallel Programming Hard, And, If So, What Can You Do About It? features numerous improvements...
If you're a fan of scripting languages like Bash, Python, or Ruby, you might find Lua interesting. Lua is a dynamically typed, lightweight, efficient, and embeddable scripting language with an API to interface with C. It runs by interpreting bytecode with a register-based virtual machine, and it can be used for everything from procedural programming to functional programming to data-driven programming. It can even be used for object-oriented programming through the clever use of arrays, or tables, used to mimic classes.
A great way to get a feel for a language is by writing a simple application you're already familiar with. Recently, some Opensource.com correspondents have demonstrated how to use their favorite languages to create a number-guessing game. Lua is one of my favorites, so here's my Lua version of the guessing game.
This leads us to ponder — and not for either the first or the last time in the history of computer science — the distinction between code and data. We stumble across this question even in the simplest cases. How would you describe the refactoring transformations above? Many would describe them in terms of separating the data from the code. Does that mean, then, that numerals.py contains data but not code? It’s a valid Python module that initialises a variable to a list of string–integer pairs. Sounds like code. Nothing says an essential qualification for something to be considered code is the presence of control flow. We use the word code freely, referring both to anything written in a programming language and, more specifically, to code (sic) whose primary concern is algorithm and operation rather than data structure and definition. Natural language is messy like that, filled with ambiguity, synecdoche and context dependency. If we want to be more rigorous, we could say that we have separated the code into code that abstracts operation and code that abstracts data. In other words, we are saying that Programs = Code and, given that Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, therefore Algorithms + Data Structures = Code. This can be convenient and clear way to frame our thinking and describe what we have done. We also need to recognise, however, that it is just that: it is a thinking tool, a way of looking at things and reasoning about them rather than necessarily a comment on the intrinsic nature of those things; it is a tool for description, a way of rendering abstract concepts more concretely into conversation. If we confuse a point of view for the nature of things we will end up with a dichotomy that feels like Cartesian dualism. Just as Descartes claimed there were two distinct kinds of substance, physical and mental, we could end up claiming there are two distinct kinds of code — code that is data and code that is operation. When we look to hardware, compilers or the foundations of computer science, such as Turing machines, we will not find clear support or a strict boundary for such separation. The indistinction runs deep. Although we have code and data segments in a process address, these enforce negotiable matters of convention and protection (e.g., the code or text segment is often read-only). Both code and data segments contain data, but the data in the code segment is intended to be understood through a filter of predefined expectations and an instruction set. On the other hand, it is also possible to treat data in the data segment as something to execute.
Using a similar approach than James Curtis-Smith , the solution looks at points with equal slope to see if they are in a straight line. Being less literate in Raku, using classes help me to organize coding ideas.
This exercise gives me the opportunity to work with the type BagHash. The highest value of the slopes stored in a BagHash gives the number of points in a straight line. Happily, the first example in Raku documentation is for a Class Point, an example reused in this solution.
Last January there was a post on reddit which claimed that my module JSON::Parse was not only failing some of the JSON Test Suite tests, but also crashing on one of them. Anyway I should have got around to doing something about it sooner, but here are my conclusions.
First of all there was a crash on one of the files, which went something like this: [{"":[{"":[{"", repeated about 100,000 times. Investigating it using a LInode, I found that after 80,000 open brackets the stack was overflowing, causing the crash to occur. If I added a printf in the midst of my code the printf would cause the stack overflow, so it wasn't actually due to my code but just because the stack size seems to be quite small on Linux.
There are various things one could do to tackle this, but it does seem a bit unlikely that anyone would want to have that many open brackets, so what I did as a strategy was to add a "max_depth" of parsing after which it would stop. I thought 10,000 open { and [ would be enough for anyone, and it would satisfy the people who want to run the JSON Test Suite tests, but I also added an option for the user to alter the max depth and get the max depth as well.
Hi, fellow pythonistas! Before I start publishing future Python-related posts to this aggregator, I would like to shortly introduce myself and the reason for this blog’s presence on the planet.
[...]
Here I blog mainly about new releases and improvements in my Python software apps (which means GTG lately, but I also have a couple of pythonic utility apps I’ve been meaning to publish sometime soon), and sometimes write about performance optimization in software applications in general, or how a particular bug was solved. As such, my blog posts tend to be “applied Python” type of content rather than theoretical tutorial-style blog posts.
Each year, Opensource.com publishes various articles about Python to pique new users' interest and help long-time Pythonistas expand their skills. The following are Opensource.com's top 10 articles about Python in 2020.
glob() function is a built-in PHP function that is used to search the specific files or folders based on the pattern. It returns the file and folder names in an array that matches the pattern. How this function can be used to search the particular files or folders is shown in this tutorial.
Data security is very important for any application. The unauthorized access of the data can damage the valuable data of the application. If the data can be secured by applying proper encryption, then unauthorized access of the data can be prevented. For example, the password of the new user requires to encrypt before storing in the database to prevent unauthorized access of the user easily. One way of encryption is to use the hash function. Many built-in hash functions exist in PHP to encrypt the data. It encrypts the data without changing its original meaning. Some commonly used hash functions of PHP are md5(), sha1(), and hash(). The uses of these functions are explained in this tutorial.
Environment variables are used in PHP to set up the application and retrieve the different types of data dynamically from the server. The database credentials, API keys, etc., are visible to the code through the environment variable instead of using any configuration file. When any PHP script runs, then it will inherit all required environment variables from the server. There are two ways to read environment variables in PHP. One is getenv() function and another is $_ENV array. The uses of the getenv() function are shown in this tutorial.
Many types of loops are supported by PHP. foreach loop is one of them. This loop is mainly used to parse array and object variables. When the total number of array elements is undefined, then it is better to use a foreach loop than another loop. The number of iterations of this loop depends on the number of array elements or the number of properties of the object used in the loop for reading. How this loop can be used for reading array and object variables is shown in this tutorial.
The variable is used to store any value temporarily in the script. Two types of variables are used in any programming language. These are local and global variables. The variables which are accessible anywhere in the script called global variables. That’s mean the value of the global variables can be accessed or modified inside and outside of the function. But if the name of any global variable is the same as any variable declared inside a function there are some ways to recognize the global variable inside the function. Two types of global variables are used in PHP. One is a user-defined global variable and another is a superglobal variable. Some useful superglobal variables are $_GLOBALS, $_SERVER, $_REQUEST, $_GET, $_POST, $_FILES, $_COOKIE and $_SESSION. How the user-defined global variable can be declared, assigned, and changed inside and outside the function have shown in this tutorial.
Heredoc is one of the ways to store or print a block of text in PHP. The data stored in the heredoc variable is more readable and error-free than other variables for using indentation and newline. How the heredoc content can be stored in a variable or printed has shown in this tutorial.
Two types of global variables can be used in PHP: the superglobal variable and the user-defined variable. $_SERVER is a superglobal array variable that is used to retrieve the full path of the current page. The protocol (HTTP or HTTPS) of the URL is also required to get the full URL of the page. If $_SERVER[‘HTTPS’] returns ‘on’, then HTTPS will be used with the URL address, otherwise, HTTP will be used. How the full URL address of the current page can be retrieved using the $_SERVER array has been explained in this tutorial.
The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.49.0. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
Rust 1.49 has promoted their 64-bit ARM Linux support to being a Tier-1 target, which is the highest support guarantee and on par with the likes of Rust's x86_64 support. Rust has long worked well on 64-bit ARM Linux but is now considered to be in great shape and put at the highest tier. This also makes 64-bit ARM Linux the first non-x86 target to reach a tier one level.
That said, I’ve talked to a number of people in the Rust community who feel nervous about this change. After all, we’ve worked hard to build an open source organization that values curiosity, broad collaboration, and uplifting others. As more companies form Rust teams, there’s a chance that some of that could be lost, even if everyone has the best of intentions. While we all want to see more people paid to work on Rust, that can also result in “part time” contributors feeling edged out.
[...]
I want to zoom out a bit to the broader picture. As I said in the intro, we are entering a new phase for Rust, one where there are multiple active Rust teams at different companies, all working as part of the greater Rust community to build and support Rust. This is something to celebrate. I think it will go a long way towards making Rust development more sustainable for everyone.
Even as we celebrate, it’s worth recognizing that in many ways this exciting future is already here. Supporting Rust doesn’t require forming a full-time Rust team. The Google Fuchsia team, for example, has always made a point of not only using Rust but actively contributing to the community. Ferrous Microsystems has a number of folks who work within the Rust compiler and embedded teams. In truth, there are a lot of employers who give their employees time to work on Rust – way too many to list, even if I knew all their names. Then we have companies like Embark and others that actively fund work on their dependencies (shout-out to cargo-fund, an awesome tool developed by the equally awesome azfoltzer, who – as it happens – works at Fastly, another company that has been an active supporter of Rust).
MySQL is an RDBMS (Relational Database Management System) which is owned by the Oracle Corporation and inherited from the standard SQL. It allows access and manipulation of Databases. Whoever knows the word ‘Database’ must have knowledge of Primary and Foreign keys. There is no concept of a relational database without the existence and idea of the concepts of Primary Keys and Foreign Keys. So in this article, we are going to learn about the importance and correct use of Primary and Foreign keys in MySQL.
The primary key can be any field or column of a table, which should be a unique and non-null value for each record or a row.
The Foreign key is a field that contains the primary key of some other table to establish a connection between each other.
Let’s have a look at the syntax and different examples to create primary and foreign keys in MySQL.
MySQL provides a lot of commands, which are needed while managing a database. For example, we often need to get some data from different tables based on some condition. MySQL then provides different types of joins to get the desired results. Let’s learn LEFT JOIN AND RIGHT JOIN of MySQL. There is no such statement as FULL OUTER JOIN in SQL, but we can use a simple JOIN to get the same results or by simply using a SELECT statement over two different tables.
Otherwise, MySQL provides LEFT JOIN and RIGHT JOIN to get the records or rows from the right or left table, respectively. Let’s try a couple of different examples to get the desired results using appropriate joins.
Dutch historian Rutger Bregman documents that Golding had no knowledge of behavioral science and was hardly an impartial judge of children's propensities.
Fetch the Bolt Cutters Fiona Apple (Epic)
Pursuance: the Coltranes Lakecia Benjamin (Bandcamp)
What’s that floating along the televisual stream to comfort and amuse us, as this brutal year flows toward its end? A much-touted exposé of old-time Hollywood, shot with an old-Hollywood look by David Fincher; a Steven Soderbergh fable about the literary life, with a Queen Mary 2 setting as posh as the cast and writer; an adaptation of an August Wilson play, ushered onto the screen with all due ceremony by George C. Wolfe. If prestigious credentials were the same thing as entertainment, we should all be chortling like 5-year-olds tearing at wrapping paper.
After his slow, decade-long ascent from laid-off schoolteacher to buzzing indie star, Los Angeles rapper Open Mike Eagle suffered a series of setbacks. In 2019 he and his wife divorced, a reunion with his old rap crew Hellfyre Club fell apart, and his Comedy Central variety show, The New Negroes, was canceled after one season. Those upsets form the backdrop to Anime, Trauma and Divorce, the rapper’s whimsical and introspective take on an old trope: the breakup album. By turns goofy and pensive, the record uses pop culture as a vehicle for self-examination and restoration.
Signals are all around us, but we are unaware of their presence because they are invisible and intangible. The most common type we hear about are the electrical signals, but there are also other types such as optical and audio signals. In the field of electronics, measuring these signals is necessary but also challenging because of their nonphysical nature. Due to this, test equipment like Spectrum Analyzers was invented.
There are spectrum analyzers for different types of signals, but this article will focus mainly on Radio Frequency (RF) Spectrum Analyzers.
Or you could do what everyone else does, and visit World of Spectrum and download your favourites from there. Put them on the SD card, and ZXDS will be able to find them. ZXDS has a simple file manager, so you can browse around, find a game and instantly load it. Or you could load it in real tape-time for the authentic experience.
Dade City, Fla.—The last time I kissed a man was almost a year ago, just before the virus closed the country. The gentleman caller standing outside my trailer had been giving me that look over the previous few days in the pool that serves as a gathering spot at our winter gay campground. On the day before I was to leave for the trip back north, this handsome chap mustered the courage to knock at my door. Since I would be gone before the gossip at the pool would undoubtedly identify me as a slut, I gave in to his advances.
By comparison, we manage to get over 170 million flu shots in people’s arms every year, without any heroic efforts by the government and the military. Most of those doses are given over roughly a four-month period, which means a bit less than 1.5 million a day. That puts our flu shot delivery system ahead of Donald Trump’s warp speed. What the f**k?
Last week I wrote a piece asking why we didn’t have 400 million doses of vaccines on hand by the start of December. Of course production takes time, and we didn’t know back in the summer which vaccines would prove effective, but so what?
Nurse Kristen Cline was working a 12-hour shift in October at the Royal C. Johnson Veterans Memorial Hospital in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, when a code blue rang through the halls. A patient in an isolation room was dying of a coronavirus that had raged for eight months across the country before it made the state the brightest red dot in a nation of hot spots.
Cline knew she needed to protect herself before entering the room, where a second COVID-19 patient was trembling under the covers, sobbing. She reached for the crinkled and dirty N95 mask she had reused for days.
"We should have been prepared to start inoculating millions of people the day a vaccine was approved. This is a massive policy failure."
These new strains should make you very worried indeed: they’re much more infectious.
As the United States reports record deaths and hospitalizations from COVID-19 in the final days of 2020, we look at how the pandemic that ravaged the country this year has shone a stark new light on racism in medical care. In a viral video recorded by Black physician Dr. Susan Moore, she describes racist treatment by medical staff at a hospital in Indianapolis and says they did not respond to her pleas for care, despite being in intense pain and being a doctor herself. In the video, Dr. Moore says she had to beg to receive pain medication and the antiviral drug remdesivir, and accuses a doctor at Indiana University Health North Hospital of ignoring her pleas because she was Black. “I put forth, and I maintain: If I was white, I wouldn’t have to go through that,” she says. Dr. Moore died December 20, just over two weeks after she posted the video. She was 54 years old.
"For countries reeling from the consequences of conflicts, disasters, and climate change, Covid-19 has turned a nutrition crisis into an imminent catastrophe."
His comments came one year into the public health crisis and as the U.K. became the first country to approve a vaccine from AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford that is cheaper and easier to distribute.
Because the group – Plowshares 7 – believes that nuclear weapons aren’t created in isolation from a system that also creates climate change, murders people like George Floyd, and brutally detains immigrants, the group read out a statement, repenting of the sin of white supremacy. They condemned “racism, militarism, and extreme materialism,” the triple evils of the U.S. profit imperative once called out by Martin Luther King.
Unsurprisingly, Clare and her comrades were arrested, charged with federal crimes, and convicted on all counts. By now, all but one have been sentenced to terms similar in length to Clare’s, which, compared to those served by most people convicted of felonies, seem almost tiny.
The issue now seems to be under control, but 19 January 2038 was set to be the next troublesome date for Linux computers, which count the date in seconds from 1 January 1970. The date is stored as a 32-bit integer, and its storage capacity would be exceeded at this point.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libdatetime-timezone-perl and tzdata), openSUSE (kdeconnect-kde and opera), and SUSE (gimp, squid3, and xen).
[...] That is cybercriminals adapt to the shifting situation by redeploying known attack techniques to suit the new social and economic contexts. Publications are started to be produced showing the extent of the problem (Lallie et al. 2020, Buil-Gil et al. 2020) and police forces and private actors, especially across western countries are trying to raise the attention to the problem. [...]
The strike appears to have taken place sometime during the fall and was discovered earlier this month, according to the Finnish Central Criminal Police. Currently, law enforcement officials believe this intrusion is an act of espionage.
The Norwegian parliament's investigation into the hacking of email accounts of some elected officials and government employees in August has concluded that a Russia-linked advanced persistent threat group is likely responsible, according to a report issued this week.
In a December 8 press release announcing the findings of its investigation into the August attack, the PST said there was not enough evidence to press charges relating to damage to Norway's national interests.
Norwegian officials had previously announced that a "vast" cyberattack on August 24 had gained access to the e-mails of some parliamentarians and parliamentary employees, although the identity of the attackers was not revealed. Norwegian Foreign Minister Ine Eriksen Soreide subsequently accused Russia of being behind the attack against the NATO-member Scandinavian country.
The worm spreads to other computers by scanning for and brute-forcing MySql, Tomcat, and Jenkins services using password spraying and a list of hardcoded credentials.
Law enforcement -- especially at the federal level -- has spent a great deal of time complaining about an oddity known only to the FBI and DOJ as "warrant-proof" encryption. Device users and customers just call this "encryption" and realize this protects them against criminals and malicious hackers. The federal government, however, sees device encryption as a Big Tech slap in the face. And so they complain. Endlessly. And disingenuously.
You'd think a massive and controversial deal to sever the UK from the European Union, impacting the lives of millions of people over the better part of the next generation, would contain a certain amount of... precision.
As the researchers point out, the well-established educational norms that protect the privacy of students and teachers in the traditional educational context are absent in the new virtual classrooms. There, they are determined largely by the privacy policies of the companies that make the software. As is usually the case, few people bother understanding or even reading the details. As a result, practices that would be completely unacceptable in the physical classroom – things like surreptiously recording students and teachers, or recording data about their studies – may be happening as a matter of course, but without anyone being aware of that fact. Collecting and storing large quantities of personal data about every student is so easy that it often happens by default. Analyzing the privacy policies, the researchers found that 41% permitted a platform to share data with advertisers, which conflicts with at least 21 US state laws, while 23% allowed a platform to share location data. Clearly, neither would be acceptable in most educational contexts, and this underlines how privacy in the virtual classroom is not well protected for those platforms.
After 2018 and 2019, which saw cities including San Francisco and Oakland passing municipal bans on government use of face recognition, many state lawmakers took notice of the growing momentum around this dangerous technology.
Unfortunately, not all of their ideas were good.
In California, EFF joined a broad coalition of civil liberties, civil rights, and labor advocates to oppose A.B. 2261, which proposed weak regulation of face surveillance. Modeled after a similar bill enacted in Washington state—a measure EFF and other civil liberties groups opposed—this bill threatened to normalize the increased use of face surveillance of Californians where they live and work.€ Our allies included the ACLU of California, Oakland Privacy, the California Employment Lawyers Association, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) of California, and California Teamsters. This wide-ranging group illustrated how many people recognize the threat of face surveillance to their communities.
Just like everyone else, 2020 was the year of having more and more video-conference calls. How many times did we struggle to find the meeting window during a call, and say “Sorry, I was on mute”? I tried to address the pain and ended up with the following setup.
A London judge granted a 12-year old girl anonymity so she can take TikTok to court over allegations the social-media company violated the European Union’s strict data protection rules.
The London child “intends to go to a court asserting -- rightly or wrongly -- that her privacy rights and those of others like her have been infringed in ways that call for a remedy,” Judge Mark Warby said in a decision Wednesday. Not granting her anonymity could “have a chilling effect on the bringing of claims by children to vindicate their data-protection rights.”.
Promising money to [crackers] able to point out weaknesses in the system might endanger its safety as some of them might prefer to keep the information they find to themselves, Li said. Inviting [crackers] to attack Taiwan’s information systems was putting all of its networks at risk, with the government underestimating the China element.
The Samsung Galaxy phone ran on Google’s Android operating system, which requires users to link to their Google accounts and comes loaded with the company’s apps, including Google Maps, that collect detailed location data through Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth signals.
Draeger decided to ask Google to use this data to identify the suspects in M.D.’s case. He'd never done it before and didn't know anyone who had, although the technique had been tried at least twice: Google says it received its first geofence warrant in 2016 from a law enforcement agency it did not name, and in March 2017 police in Raleigh, North Carolina, sought a geofence warrant in a murder case, according to documents obtained by Raleigh TV station WRAL, an NBC affiliate.
Network-connected home video surveillance devices are now widespread and documenting an increasing amount of residential life, challenging many of our assumptions about private spaces. Amazon, in particular, has made waves in the home video surveillance market with its “Neighbors by Ring” application,[3] which is tied to operations of the Ring Video Doorbell device. Through the Neighbors app, Amazon became the first private company in the home surveillance space to establish a public partnership with law enforcement agencies.[4] Amazon advertises this partnership as a way to promote safer communities. In exchange for access to information from the app, Amazon encourages—and sometimes even contractually requires[5]—law enforcement agencies to promote installation of Ring doorbells and use of the Neighbors app in their community.[6]
This relationship raises many challenging constitutional questions and civil liberty concerns, which I will explore in five parts. In Part I, I provide an overview of the relationship between Amazon Ring and law enforcement. Part II explains the overarching constitutional concerns arising from the relationship in the context of criminal investigations. Given these constitutional concerns, Part III questions whether Amazon should be considered an agent of the government for purposes of the Fourth Amendment. Part IV discusses what are permissible government actions for obtaining video footage under current law. And finally, Part V highlights the vast privacy concerns that seemingly innocuous partnerships may bring.
As one divorce lawyer explains, subpoenaing this information is cheaper and more high-tech than hiring a private investigator to follow around your ex. On the other hand, privacy advocates say there are not enough safeguards in the law. For example, there is no obligation to inform someone when their I-Pass data has been subpoenaed.
With the order of protection in place, Ellen said she also changed her cell phone number and email address. She even bought a new car with a new license plate — all to make it harder for her troublesome ex to contact her.
But a few months later, Ellen’s ex obtained all that information — and much more — without her knowing.
That’s because he opened a court case to which Ellen wasn’t even a party, then subpoenaed the Illinois Tollway for I-Pass transponder records that would show her movements on the state’s tollways.
The tollway complied with that legal request, and also turned over information about Ellen’s new cell phone number, email address, credit card and license plate. Ellen’s ex-boyfriend also requested similar private information about her parents, and the tollway turned all of it over — without ever notifying Ellen or her family.
Over six million I-Pass transponders have been issued in Illinois. The devices track the movement of tollway customers and, according to new reporting by WBEZ, that data is often shared with law enforcement and divorce attorneys, causing unease among privacy advocates.
The Illinois Tollway’s privacy policy states that it will provide I-Pass data to anyone who has a warrant, subpoena, or court order.
Following the creation of Space Force, $15.4 billion was transferred from the U.S. Air Force budget to Space Force. That money€ includes€ funds for space research, satellites and launch services, space operations, and maintenance and war-related satellite services and space operations.
As with all entities, it was important to find a name for those who will be participating in work of the new creation.€ Hundreds of suggestions from taxpayers were considered during the year following its creation before a final decision was made.€ The presenter at the occasion of the € announcement was a slight disappointment since it would have seemed that at such an important occasion in the history of the United States, he who was responsible for the creation of € the new entity would be in attendance at the event.€ The trump was, however, absorbed in petulance as a result of the election that had taken place a few weeks earlier and was not in the mood for any kind of celebration even if the event being celebrated was his idea.€ Accordingly he delegated the important task of making the announcement to Vice President Mike Pence.
On the heels of the Russian prison authorities accusing Alexey Navalny of violating his probation, the country’s Investigative Committee launched a criminal case against the opposition figure for large-scale fraud. Meanwhile, Navalny remains in Germany, where has been since he was evacuated to Berlin for treatment after he was poisoned back in August. During a press conference on Wednesday, December 30, journalists asked Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to comment on the latest charges against Navalny. Here’s what he said.
Additional arms deals this week include $4 billion in helicopters to Kuwait, $169 million in military equipment to Egypt, and $65 million in drones and fighter jets to UAE.
"The Rice family has been cheated of a fair process yet again," said family attorney Subodh Chandra.
Trump's benevolence has yet to reach two Black men who’ve been on death row since the 1990s and are slated to be killed in mid-January at the federal government’s maximum security prison in Terre Haute, Indiana.
"Public lands are stolen lands," asserted Red Nation. "Indigenous people have the right to practice their culture and spiritual ways on Indigenous land without fear of repression, discrimination, or violence."
"These pardons violate U.S. obligations under international law and more broadly undermine humanitarian law and human rights at a global level."
When Data for Progress surveyed Americans on Pentagon spending earlier this year, the polling group asked a simple question: “Over the past four years during a time of relative peace, America has increased its defense spending by 20 percent. Would you support or oppose cutting 10 percent of the $738 federal defense budget—with the guarantee that none of the cuts would affect American military personnel’s pay or health care—to pay for other needs like fighting the coronavirus, education, health care and housing?”
It was the end of October 2001. Two friends, Max Elbaum and Bob Wing, had just dropped by. (Yes, children, believe it or not, people used to drop in on each other, maskless, once upon a time.) They had come to hang out with my partner Jan Adams and me. Among other things, Max wanted to get some instructions from fellow-runner Jan about taping his foot to ease the pain of plantar fasciitis. But it soon became clear that he and Bob had a bigger agenda for the evening. They were eager to recruit us for a new project.
It is the festive season in Colombia, but not everyone is celebrating. Sunday brought news of the ninetieth massacre€ of the year. Five people were found dead in Bolívar Department in the north of the country, among them former leftist guerilla Rosa Amalia Mendoza and her infant child. Meanwhile, just hours earlier in the southwestern department of Cauca, the brutally tortured body of 55-year-old Manuel Alonso Villegas was found on a roadside close to his hometown of Miranda.
President-elect Joe Biden has introduced his foreign policy and national security team, and it is certainly a far cry from the haphazardly organized group assembled under Donald Trump. These people—seven nominated so far: Antony Blinken for Secretary of State; Alejandro Mayorkas for Homeland Security; Avril Haines for Director of National Intelligence; Linda Thomas-Greenfield for UN ambassador; Jake Sullivan for National Security Assistant; John Kerry for climate envoy; and retired Gen. Lloyd Austin for defense secretary—are highly experienced policy wonks, brought together to send two messages: the seriousness of purpose with which the United States will reenter world affairs, and the new president’s aim to put foreign affairs in capable, reliable hands so that he can focus on domestic problems.
Although only time will tell how effectively, and for whom, this group functions, the intent behind their appointments seems clear. Biden wants people he knows well and are well-known abroad, who are independent thinkers rather than loyalists, and who will value teamwork. These are all people who have come up through the ranks and served during the Obama-Biden years. So their learning period should be short, and the president’s confidence in them will be high.
The son of a Sephardic Jew and Dutch Protestant might well count as excellent material for British intelligence but George Behar ended up condemned in Britain and the toast of the now defunct Soviet Union.€ George Blake, as he came to be known, along with that other great British export of betrayal, Kim Philby, was always convinced that to authentically betray, you had to belong.€ That belonging came in loyalty to the Soviet Union.€ As Russian President Vladimir Putin declared solemnly on Blake’s passing this month, “The memory of this legendary person will be preserved forever in our hearts.”
The clandestine world of the Rotterdam-born Blake began early.€ He joined the Dutch resistance during World War II, serving as a courier after obtaining a set of forged papers.€ Under British instruction, he travelled through Brussels and Paris to unoccupied France, and made his way through neutral Spain, enduring a three-month period of imprisonment before making it to Britain via Gibraltar in January 1943.€ A spell with the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve led to his enlistment into the ranks of British intelligence in 1944.€ There, he was charged with deciphering coded messages from the Dutch resistance.
Although this return to the status quo ante is deeply reassuring to the Washington policy elite as well as key U.S. allies, the leadership in Pyongyang will not be so enthusiastic. North Korea has generally preferred bilateral negotiations with the United States, not multilateral talks. It has perceived closer U.S. relations with its allies (like South Korea and Japan) as an intensified encirclement. And it will view a restored emphasis on human rights and democracy as a challenge to its own sovereign right to control what goes on within its own borders.
On top of that, the Biden administration won’t be sending any “love letters” to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un of the sort that Trump boasted of exchanging. Even before Biden takes office, relations with North Korea will have taken a step backwards.
Landmines planted by Boko Haram jihadists have killed 11 security personnel, including four soldiers in northeast Nigeria, security sources said Tuesday.
Seven hunters recruited to help the military fight the Islamist insurgents were killed on Tuesday when their vehicle hit a landmine in the village of Kayamla, outside Borno State's capital Maiduguri.
Police in northwestern Pakistan say an angry mob Wednesday led by local Islamist clerics vandalized and set on fire a Hindu temple.
The attack took place in district Karak of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. Witnesses said area police dispersed the crowd of about 1,000 people, but not before they demolished the minority community’s worship place.
In a year in which virtually every trendline was in the wrong direction, this change in direction was a welcomed gift.
The United States has been moving in the opposite direction under President Donald Trump. His administration has loosened more than 100 environmental regulations, including efficiency rules for vehicles and appliances, emissions from power plants and leakage from oil and gas operations of methane, which is a more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
That toll is apparent in Louisiana where I continued to document the struggle for environmental justice for DeSmog throughout 2020. These photos are part of an ongoing DeSmog series on the industrial corridor between Baton Rouge and New Orleans known as ‘Cancer Alley’ which hosts more than 100 petrochemical plants and refineries.€ Environmental racism and pollution€ have left€ fenceline communities€ especially vulnerable to€ COVID-19. At the start of the pandemic, Concerned Citizens of St. John the Baptist Parish, a Cancer Alley community group, worried that the industrial sites around their homes might end up releasing even higher levels of air pollution since the€ U.S.€ Environmental€ Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it was relaxing some of its pollution reporting and monitoring rules for industrial plants due to the€ pandemic.€
“It is crazy,” declares Robert Alvarez, a former senior policy advisor at the U.S. Department of Energy and a U.S. Senate senior investigator and now senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies and is an author of the book Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation.
“No reactor in history has lasted that long,” commented Alvarez. The oldest nuclear power plant in the U.S. was Oyster Creek, five miles south of Toms River, New Jersey, which opened in 1969 and was shut down 49 years later in 2018.
The radiation levels reported around shield plugs at two reactors are high enough to kill a worker exposed for even an hour.€
The new rules won’t actually force the aviation sector to make any changes. These standards won’t even apply to all planes, just some new types of commercial ones. But the industry isn’t even working on any new models right now.
“No new designs are currently in development, and none are expected for at least 10 years,” Liz Jones, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity’s Climate Law Institute, wrote in an email.
Further, all in-service aircrafts are completely exempt. New airplanes of existing models won’t have to comply until 2028, by which time the EPA admits they would have been updated to meet the new regulations in any case.
They poured millions into deals with giant corporations. They propped up small businesses. They changed the tax code. They expanded mass transit.
In cities as distinctly different as Washington; Newark, New Jersey; Chicago and Pittsburgh, government officials have found ways to restore essential goods and services to neighborhoods devastated by population loss and the flight of business.
Russian Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin has signed a decree allocating 487 million rubles ($6.5 million) “for the creation and development of infrastructure” for the Moscow State University (MGU) Innovative Scientific and Technological Center “Sparrow Hills” (otherwise known as MGU’s “technological valley”).
On December 21, the United States Congress€ passed€ the COVID-19 Relief Package, as part of a larger $2.3 trillion bill meant to cover spending for the rest of the fiscal year. As usual, US representatives allocated a massive sum of money for Israel.
BoJo’s “oven ready” Brexit deal was always premised on a con— the UK would be able to cast aside the EU politically but continue to enjoy all the economic benefits.
The newly completed deal leaves many loose-ends that will only be resolved through micro-negotiations. Meanwhile, jobs will be lost as the UK economy loses capacity due to the deal’s terms.
Former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Chief Economist of the World Bank, Director of the National Economic Council, and President of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers has warned against any implementation of a $2,000 COVID relief check.
The title, and inspiration, for this post are “stolen” from “Just Because It Isn’t Capitalism Doesn’t Mean It Is Socialism”. Because I have always found funny how many people, especially Americans, confuse everything politically left of Trump with full-blown North-Korea style communism, but above all because it mirrors something else I have been saying for years now.
WeWork was founded in 2010 by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey as a successor company to their similar 2008 GreenDesk business. (Adam's wife Rebekah is now presented as a co-founder. This seems dubious in Wiedeman's account, although Rebekah's role in the company is murky, ever-changing, and hard to pin down.) Its business model in reality was to provide turn-key, pre-furnished and stocked co-working and small office space to individuals and businesses on flexible, short-term leases. Its business model in Neumann's speeches and dreams, and represented by the later renaming of the company to the We Corporation, was nothing less than to transform the way people worked, learned, and lived.
Through aggressive, money-losing expansion, WeWork grew rapidly to over 500 locations in 29 countries and became the largest office tenant in New York City. Based primarily on massive financial support from Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese holding company SoftBank, WeWork's private valuation rose to $47 billion. In 2019, the company attempted to go public, but its IPO collapsed, in part due to deeper analysis of the company's books. Neumann was forced out of the company (with an individual payout valued at $1.7 billion), the IPO was withdrawn, SoftBank wrote down 90% of their investment in the company and took control of it, and WeWork laid off more than 20% of its workforce.
Just today it was published that output from eight formal sectors of the economy who make the bulk of the Indian economy were down on a month to month basis . This means all those apologists for the Government who said that it was ok that the Govt. didn’t give the 20 lakh crore package which was announced. In fact, a businessman from my own city, a certain Prafull Sarda had asked via RTI what happened to the 20 lakh crore package which was announced? The answers were in all media as well as newspapers but on the inside pages. You can see one of the article sharing the details here. No wonder Vivek Kaul also shared his take on the way things will hopefully go for the next quarter which seems to be a tad optimistic from where we are atm.
[...]
Now cut to 2020, and where there used to be 20-30 thelas near my home, there are only 4-5. Of course, multiple reasons, but one of the biggest was of course demonetization. That was a huge shock to which many of thela walas succumbed. Their entire savings and capital were turned to dust. Many of their customers will turn up with either a INR 500 or INR 2000/- Re note where at the most a dish costed INR 100/- most times half or even 1/3rd of that amount. How and from where the thela walas could get that kind of cash. These are people who only if they earn, they and their family will have bread at night. Most of the loose change was tied up at middle to higher tier restaurants where they were giving between INR 20/- 30/- for every INR 100/- change of rupees and coins. Quite a few bankers made money by that as well as other means where the thela walas just could not compete. These guys also didn’t have any black money even though they were and are part of the black/informal economy. Sadly, till date no economist or even sociologist as far as I know has attempted or done any work from what I know on this industry. If you want to formalize such businesses then at the very least understand their problems and devise solutions. And I suspect, what is and has happened near my house has also happened everywhere else, at least within the geographical confines of the Indian state. Whether it was the 2016 demonetization or the pandemic, the results and effects have been similar the same all over. Some states did do well and still do, the suffering still continues.
Now that both halves of the Brexit Deal (Withdrawal Agreement and Trade Deal) have been written the UK is finally in a position to spend some months having a discourse about their merits before having a referendum on whether to go with it or go with the status quo. Alas the broken democratic setup won’t allow that as there was a referendum over 4 years ago without the basics needed for discussion. One lesson that needs to be learnt, but I haven’t seen anyone propose, is to require referendums to have pre-written legislation or international agreement text on what is being implemented.
This on top of the occasionally discussed fixes needed to democracy around transparency of campaigning funds, proper fines when they steal data, banning or limiting online advertising, transparency around advertising and proper fines for campaigns that over-spend.
[...]
Johnson deliberately ran down the clock to wait until the final days before making the trade deal. It’s a disgusting tactic which removes the very small democratic oversight that could be expected (the UK parliament having long since had the power removed to approve or deny any such deal). Again I’ve not read anyone pointing out this deliberate tactic which caused much stress on businesses and individuals by playing up the chances of a cliff edge Brexit but it must have been the plan all along. It means he’ll get applauded in the right wing press for limiting democracy, and nobody will be any the wiser.
There is a new bureaucratic border from Scotland and Wales to Northern Ireland with lorry parks and checks for goods. What I haven’t seen any coverage of is increased checks for people crossing. The police have always had the power to check IDs when people crossed into or out of Northern Ireland but that’s not much used since the violence subsided. Now that free movement remains in Ireland but is removed from Great Britain (making Northern Ireland a bit of a no-mans land I suppose) those checks must surely be upgraded to stop foreigners coming over here doing whatever it is the racists moaned about. This will be a new front of low level human rights abuses that will need to be watched, I wonder if anyone is doing so.
New rules will help Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) turn the caucus into a force to be reckoned with.
It is time for the president-elect to put his cards on the table.
The president, I explained, is a desperate cornered rat. Once he leaves office, he becomes vulnerable to a variety of criminal investigations. By far, the one he has to worry about the most is being conducted by the Manhattan district attorney into corrupt business practices, charges that could not be discharged by a presidential pardon if Joe Biden were to issue one. “[Trump] could spend the rest of his life in prison,” I wrote, “unless he declares martial law and becomes America’s first dictator.”
I acknowledged that Trump “doesn’t have the support of the military—but he doesn’t need it.” Instead of a Latin American-style military coup, I said, “his would be a ‘police coup’ carried out by the numerous local police departments whose unions endorsed him for reelection, alongside federalized state police and deputized paramilitary MAGA goons.”
When I got to America in 1972, it was Nixon’s country, even though he would be forced out soon. After a year or so in Baltimore, I made it back to Los Angeles, where I had spent my youth, growing up in Beverly Hills (not the rich part) and where I eventually enrolled in LACC, which then got me to Cal State Northridge (CSUN) where I studied English Literature. My friends were all in the entertainment industry, TV, films, advertising, and the fact that I was leaning left politically didn’t faze anybody at all. Leftism was OK. Jane Fonda was a leftie and still working in movies, so what was the harm? Of course I took film classes, worked on student films as a boom-man and grip, wrote scripts, like everyone, but was so beguiled by the Beat Generation, which had been introduced to me in Durban while I was at university there, that I wanted to be Gregory Corso’s poetic heir, be Ferlinghetti’s godson, be published by City Lights and careen across the United States in a wild Kerouac/Kesey journey that would bring my work to the eyes of every American.
Things went otherwise.
Russian lawmaker Oksana Pushkina, the deputy chair of the State Duma’s Committee on Family, Women, and Children, has criticized the government’s decision to add the anti-domestic violence advocacy group “Nasiliu.net” (No to violence) to Russia’s list of foreign agents.
I’ve been writing a version of this column in just about every other issue of The Nation for nearly 25 years. This will be my last. Obviously, much has changed since I began. There was no Fox News or MSNBC, and the “news” on the Internet barely justified the trouble it took to dial it up. But a few things have remained relatively constant, and so, too, have my attempts to explain them. The one thought I’d like to leave readers with is this: Remember the fundamentals—the things that inevitably get lost in the never-ending frenzy that defines our current media ecosystem.
First, we need to stop pretending that voters don’t support abortion rights. They do.
"We need $2,000 stimulus checks, not $740,000,000,000 for the Pentagon and private 'defense' contractors," said advocacy group CodePink.
"Biden will be president.€ This, however, will continue to radicalize the GOP, keeping it a dangerous threat to democracy and rule of law."
A transition spokesperson said the freeze will apply to regulations as well as guidance documents that "can have enormous consequences on the lives of the American people."
They should have said: Under pressure from the porn abolitionist movement that operates under the guise of thwarting sex trafficking, we are going to compromise the economic lives of hundreds of thousands of performers—during a pandemic, no less. I respect and commend those writing and speaking for people who have been trafficked and teenagers whose abusers post revenge porn on Pornhub or other sites. However, who is speaking for the hundreds of thousands of pornographers whose economic livelihoods have been served upon an altar for penance?
Certainly, sex trafficking isa scourge. But censorship is not the answer. As a Pornhub user put it, "The [Internet] is becoming more and more sanitized every day because of people taking extreme measures to make us 'safer.' It's censorship masquerading as public safety."
Sources told CNN that Trump has been "confused" about why Pence cannot overturn the results on Jan. 6 even as "Pence and White House aides have tried to explain to him that his role is more of a formality and he cannot unilaterally reject the Electoral College votes." Trump has raged at Pence and top White House officials in recent days as they have pushed back on his doomed scheme and would view Pence carrying out his constitutional duty and validating the election result as "the ultimate betrayal," according to Axios' Jonathan Swan.
This pressure arguably puts Pence in a bind, since legally he cannot do anything to affect the result. The vice president reportedly plans to flee Washington for his first overseas trip since the coronavirus pandemic began right after the session.
Summary: During the somewhat controversial Senate confirmation hearings for the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court, there were a few moments that gained extra attention, including a confrontation between Senator Mazie Hirono and the nominee concerning statements regarding LGBTQ rights that Barrett had made in the past. Hirono, who had separately called the hearings themselves illegitimate, was then criticized by traditionally right-leaning media for what they felt was overly aggressive questioning.
As basically a million people mentioned to me, on Monday, John Paul Mac Isaac, computer repair shop owner, sued Twitter for defamation. You may recall his name as the computer repair shop guy who allegedly had Hunter Biden's abandoned laptop, which later became a NY Post story. That story then became a content moderation story, as both Twitter and Facebook sought to limit the spread of the story. In Twitter's case, the company claimed that it violated the social media site's policy against linking to "hacked materials."
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which was passed in 1996, says an “interactive computer service” can’t be treated as the publisher or speaker of third-party content. This protects websites from lawsuits if a user posts something illegal, although there are exceptions for copyright violations, sex work-related material, and violations of federal criminal law.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Rep. Chris Cox (R-CA) crafted Section 230 so website owners could moderate sites without worrying about legal liability. The law is particularly vital for social media networks, but it covers many sites and services, including news outlets with comment sections — like The Verge. The Electronic Frontier Foundation calls it “the most important law protecting [Internet] speech.”
It’s increasingly controversial and frequently misinterpreted, however. Critics argue that its broad protections let powerful companies ignore real harm to users. On the other hand, some lawmakers incorrectly claim that it only protects “neutral platforms” — a term that’s irrelevant to the law.
Similar legislation exists in the European Union and Australia.
Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is trying to tie the repeal to proposed $2,000 coronavirus relief checks.
"Senate Republicans are going to try every conceivable way to try to kill the $2,000 checks."
We’ve been living with a pandemic for almost a year, yet most of the supports Congress enacted to help us get through it have either withered, expired, or are about to be wiped out. The House of Representatives passed another relief package back in May, but Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to take it up.
By bringing up these old Trump hobbyhorses and tying them to the $2,000 checks, McConnell is reverting to the familiar obstructionist cynicism that characterized his actions in the Obama presidency. The new package is a poison pill, designed not to be passed. Although the Democrats might be advised to call McConnell’s bluff: Section 230 is enshrined in NAFTA, so it wouldn’t be easy to rescind. Further, an investigation into election fraud would yield no results, since it’s clear there was no fraud in the 2020 election. As David Dayen of The American Prospect suggests, it would make sense to agree to McConnell’s absurd terms just to get the $2,000 checks out the door.
The Senate is set to vote this week on whether to override President Donald Trump’s recent veto of the National Defense Authorization Act, an annual spending bill that funds the military. Trump had vetoed the NDAA in late December because he said he didn’t like that it called for renaming military bases that honored Confederate officials and because the bill didn’t include a repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social-media companies and other tech companies from liability for content published by others using their technology. But boundless defense spending is one of the few things that Democrats and Republicans still agree on, and the Senate is widely expected to overturn Trump’s veto of the NDAA.
Trump had vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act because he said it did not repeal Section 230, which shields social media companies from liability for the content their users post, and which has little to do with defense spending. But the House voted Monday 322-87 to override Trump.
When he issued his veto last week, Trump told Congress in a statement that he believes the law “facilitates the spread of foreign disinformation online, which is a serious threat to our national security and election integrity.” But Trump’s opposition to Section 230 is likely a personal vendetta because social media companies have implemented fact-checking on political content — including of his own tweets.
McConnell introduced his own measure on Tuesday that would tie an increase in the stimulus checks to the repeal of a liability shield used by tech companies and the creation of a commission to investigate the 2020 election.
Eduardo, alongside the Commonwealth Times’ executive editor and managing editor, says he was subjected to excessive use of police force on multiple occasions while covering protests. “We wanted to make sure we got the full story of what was happening in Richmond and how the police were brutalizing protesters and members of the press nightly,” he explains. (Teen Vogue has reached out to the Richmond Police Department for comment.)
So much for body cameras giving us better law enforcement. What started as an accountability effort has turned into a boon for prosecutors and little else. Every so often, citizens win lawsuits or have charges dropped because recorded footage differs greatly from the official narrative, but those are relative anomalies. When footage would be useful, it tends to go missing or is never recorded.
In October, Anna Sattler saw the man who raped her for the first time since she jumped from his van 19 years earlier.
He wore a dark tie and a blue face mask, appearing in one of Alaska’s first felony jury trials of the COVID-19 pandemic. Sattler was committed to getting justice for what had been done to her. She had subjected her body to the swabbing and prodding and picture taking of a forensic exam after the 2001 kidnapping, so troopers could collect a sample of the rapist’s DNA. In court, where a jury of socially distanced strangers examined images of her genitalia, she answered the defense lawyer’s questions about why she was barhopping the night of her rape.
Though the 2020 murder of George Floyd inspired a global racial reckoning, the injustices he faced date back to his childhood in the 1980s.
"This is a victory for the women's movement in Argentina, which has been fighting for its rights for decades."
In a historic step, The Kansas City Star, one of the most influential newspapers in the Midwest, has apologized for the paper’s racist history. The paper’s top editor, Mike Fannin, admitted the Star and a sister paper had reinforced segregation, Jim Crow laws and redlining, and “robbed an entire community of opportunity, dignity, justice and recognition” with its biased coverage over many decades. We speak with Fannin and Mará Rose Williams, a longtime education writer at the paper who led the effort to examine the newspaper’s coverage of the Black community following the police killing of George Floyd and the nationwide racial justice uprising this year. “Mainstream newspapers across the country, not just The Kansas City Star, have not done a good job of covering the Black community,” says Williams.
When Black doctor Susan Moore died from COVID-19 after posting a video from her hospital bed describing racist treatment by medical staff, her chilling message was compared to the video of George Floyd begging for his life as he was killed by Minneapolis police. We speak to two leading Black women doctors fighting racial disparities in healthcare who wrote The Washington Post opinion piece, “Say her name: Dr. Susan Moore.” “It is a typical and ongoing devaluation of our lives and distrust of our word,” says Dr. Camara Phyllis Jones, a family physician and former president of the American Public Health Association. Dr. Joia Crear-Perry, president of the National Birth Equity Collaborative, says Dr. Moore’s complaints about being disrespected by medical staff are “really familiar” to her. “We’ve found that Black patients, Black birthing people are not valued; they’re not listened to,” she says.
[Note: this is one in a series of posts on the Presidential Commission on Law Enforcement's lengthy report on all things police-related.]
Two of the Louisville police officers involved in the death of Breonna Taylor, the 26-year-old emergency technician killed in her home in March, will be fired.
Louisville Metro Police Department (LMPD) Detective Joshua Jaynes, who secured the no-knock warrant used to enter Taylor’s home, and Detective Myles Cosgrove, who fired the shot that killed Taylor, both received pre-termination letters from LMPD interim chief Yvette Gentry, The Louisville Courier Journal reported.
In a statement released late Tuesday night, the Louisville Fraternal Order of Police said it is "aware that two of our members received pre-termination opportunity to respond notices today, outlining the chief’s current intent to terminate their employment," acknowledging the hearings to come and adding that the FOP "will continue to coordinate with our members and their attorneys throughout this process."
You'd hardly know there was an historic economic and health crisis going on based on Comcast's behavior.
As an organization that yearns for the days when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four, we are excited to see this kind of enforcement underway, but that excitement is tempered by the fear that hasty, reflexive settlements and regulations might actually make the situation worse. For example, deputizing companies to perform the duties of the state by identifying and blocking unlawful speech makes it harder for new, better companies to enter the marketplace, because they can't afford the vast army of moderators that monopolists can pay for with the change they find down the back of the sofa in their campus mini-kitchens.
Thankfully, 2020 saw some very thoughtful approaches to competition that explicitly sought out ways to promote competition and give users more power over how their tech works, rather than blindly "punishing" companies with regulations that also raise barriers for would-be challengers. Both the U.S. Access Act and the EU Digital Services Act propose interoperability mandates—a requirement that the biggest tech companies provide managed access to their systems for startups, co-ops, and other potential competitors.
When it comes to undoing 40 years of indifferent antitrust enforcement, interoperability mandates are a great start, but they are only part of the solution. What happens if the mandatory system is sidelined by changing market conditions or deliberate subversion by monopolistic companies? And what about new technologies just a-borning: what can we do to prevent them from growing into monopolies, and starting the cycle over again?
The acquisition is a notable one, if only because it sets Amazon up to better compete against Spotify, which has been acquiring networks and exclusive talent for over a year. Amazon says this Wondery deal doesn’t change existing shows — they’ll still be available through “a variety of providers.” But Amazon says it hopes buying Wondery will “accelerate the growth and evolution of podcasts by bringing creators, hosts, and immersive experiences to even more listeners across the globe.”
Wondery's sale follows a period of frenzied M&A activity around the fast-growing podcast sector. Other startups, including Gimlet Media, Stitcher, Parcast and Megaphone, have all been snapped up in the last two years major tech and media players including Spotify, Sirius, iHeartRadio and The New York Times invest heavily in the medium amid an uptick in listenership in the U.S. and around the world. Wondery was largely regarded as the last major independent podcast studio, and its sale has been a hot topic among media observers in recent months.
Amazon.com Inc . is in exclusive talks to purchase podcast startup Wondery, according to people familiar with the matter, as the tech giant pushes further into the growing audio sector.
Amazon is acquiring the podcast network Wondery, expanding on its collection of audio content, the tech giant announced Wednesday.
Wondery is capitalizing on a wave of deals in the podcasting industry. Spotify spent hundreds of millions in the past couple years, snapping up companies like Ringer and Gimlet Media, while Sirius XM Holdings Inc. acquired Stitcher.
The Alibaba investigation is the first of its kind into Chinese e-commerce. Its timing—a month after authorities suddenly halted the $37bn initial public offering (IPO) of Alibaba’s fintech affiliate, Ant Group, and days before regulators told Ant to curtail lending and wealth-management activities—hints it is China’s way of chastening the two firms’ flamboyant co-founder, Jack Ma.
The “French style” (at least in patent law), which is generally characterized by the will to do everything at the same time (validity and infringement of the patent), takes a serious hit with a recent Paris Court of Appeal judgment: the Judges propose a fragmented approach to a pan-European infringement for which they only want to rule on the French part of a European patent [1].
In this case, Hutchinson, a company specializing in motor vehicle wheels, brought an infringement action before the Paris High Court (Tribunal Judiciaire), based on a patent No. EP 1 262 340 (“EP’340”) entitled “vehicle wheel with improved inflation system”. After an infringement seizure on French territory, the patentee had sued four companies before the Paris Court for infringement acts committed in France, Germany and the United Kingdom (Tyron, Global Wheel, L.A. VI, Dal).
The Paris Court of Appeal, confirming the Paris High Court, declined jurisdiction for acts committed in United Kingdom and Germany, thus considering itself competent only for acts committed in France. It was ruled that the legal and factual situations were not identical, as required by Article 8.1 of Regulation 1215/2012, known as “Brussels I bis”, and as interpreted by the Solvay judgment of the CJEU (C-616/10, because the patents and the products in question were not identical in the three countries, so that the judgments relating to the said applications were likely to be divergent, but not irreconcilable.
[...]
I am must finally admit to being rather perplexed by the actual trend of French case law, apparently favorable to patentees lately, but which suggests that they should rather see if they can bring a case before the English Courts.
The Loops patent covers a flexible toothbrush — and the claims require “an elongated body being flexible throughout the elongated body.” US8448285 (Claim 1). Apparently, these brushes are sold primarily to “institutional” settings such as prisons.
[...]
The appellate panel also took issue with the sua-sponte summary judgment without first providing the party with a “full and fair opportunity to present its case.” Here, although Loops had presented its summary-judgment argument of infringement, the appellate panel found that summary-judgment of non-infringement to be an entirely different matter. “Under the circumstances, we conclude, Loops did not have a full and fair opportunity to respond to Maxill prior to the district court’s sua sponte grant of summary judgment.”
Last fall the Patent Trial and Appeal Board, in Interference no. 106,115, granted leave to Junior Party The University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") to file a dispositive motion for improper inventorship against Senior Party The Broad Institute, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (collectively, "Broad"). CVC filed this motion, and Broad has filed its opposition.
University of California-BerkleyCVC set forth the precise relief requested at the outset: invalidation for improper inventorship of all Broad patents and applications in the interference having misjoinder of inventors, under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 102(f) for patents and applications claiming priority before enactment of the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act and under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 115(a) for patents or applications having priority after this change in U.S. patent law. In addition, CVC argued that the unnamed inventors' testimony be given no weight.
[...]
Importantly, Broad challenged CVC's assertion regarding intent, not (just) by the denial of deceptive intent but in arguing (correctly) that the statutory amendments under the AIA removed the requirement for "no deceptive intent" for correcting inventorship (in patents and applications), citing Egenera for this proposition ("'error' in €§ 256 includes 'all varieties of mistakes—honest and dishonest—rather than only unintentional inaccuracy'"). (Although the motion did not affirmatively assert the existence of no inequitable conduct, which CVC's reliance on Therasense strongly suggested is their ultimate argument on the inventorship issue.)
Finally, with regard to Dr. Lin, Broad noted that the papers associated with correcting inventorship in the Appendices lack consent from him. Broad asserted that it had attempted in good faith to obtain consent to no avail, and requested either than the Board suspend the rules under 37 C.F.R. ۤ 1.182 or invoke the Board's own authority to name Dr. Lin as an inventor for any patent or application for which the Board determines he should be properly named.
The numbers are in for 2020 — slight decrease in the number of patents issued in 2020. This capability was enabled by the PTO’s smooth transition to an almost 100% at-home workforce.
There are plenty of issues with the patent system as we know it today, but one big one is with the system we use to award them. It's a problem because the more important we think patents are, the more important it is to ensure that the mechanism we use to grant them is capable of recognizing all the invention patent law is intended to protect. Unfortunately, however, right now the patent-review system is architected in a way that makes it miss all too many patent-worthy inventions – including, especially, those inventions invented by women.
On December 23, 2020, Unified filed an opposition proceeding against two patents owned by GE Video Compression LLC (GEVC), EP 3 471 416 and EP 3 487 179. These filings are a part of Unified’s ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone. Both patents are related to U.S. patents that are designated essential to the Access Advance (previously HEVC Advance) patent pool.
On December 29, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Varatec, LLC holding all challenged original claims of U.S. Patent 7,792,256 unpatentable. The ‘256 patent, directed to a system and method for remotely monitoring, controlling, and managing equipment at one or more premises, had been asserted against Comcast and ADT, among others.
On December 30, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Contemporary Display LLC holding all challenged original claims of U.S. Patent 8,863,219 unpatentable. The PTAB also denied Contemporary Display’s motion to amend, finding proposed substitute claims 15 and 16 unpatentable.
The ‘219 patent is owned by Contemporary Display, LLC, an IP Valuation Partners entity and well-known NPE. The patent is directed to the well-known method of a television and its on-screen display menu, and had previously been asserted against various television manufacturers and service providers including LG and Cox.
While Techdirt generally and myself more specifically tend to fall on the side of a more permissive philosophy when it comes to policing trademarks, there are certainly times when one entity or another crosses the line. As it happens, it seems somewhat common that those lines get crossed by parties that have themselves been quite aggressive in policing their own IP. When the Girl Scouts of America (GSA) sued the Boy Scouts of America in 2018 over the rebranding BSA went through after finally allowing girls to join, it was not difficult to see the GSA's side of things. Essentially, what was The Boy Scouts of America became simply Scouts BSA, which did away with the core gender distinction that drew a shiny line between the two organizations in the public sphere. GSA provided real world examples of confusion in the public, with stories of some families thinking or being told that BSA and GSA had merged, and others having intended on signing their daughters up for GSA and ending up in Scouts BSA.
In a recent decision, the General Court upheld the EUIPO Fifth Board of Appeal’s (the Board) findings regarding the likelihood of confusion between the two signs ‘MARK’ and ‘MARQ’.
The General Court considered that there was a low degree of similarity between the goods in Class 11 covered by the Applicant’s mark and the ‘lighting mixers’ in Class 9 covered by the earlier mark. In relation to the comparison of the two signs, the fact that the sole word element ‘MARQ’ in the Applicant’s mark was almost identical to the dominant visual element of the earlier figurative mark, namely the word element ‘MARK’, was sufficient to establish a visual similarity to an average degree. The signs were also considered phonetically identical without any conceptual similarity.
Anti-piracy campaigns come in all shapes and sizes and completely understandably, none are popular with pirates. However, if we pragmatically accept that they're never going away, then we should probably acknowledge that while some are horribly exploitative, others deserve at least some respect for their structure and proportionality.
'Wonder Woman 1984' premiered both on HBO Max and in movie theaters this weekend, which proved to be a massive success. The same can be said for the film's release on pirate sites which hit record numbers. On Saturday, nearly 10% of all pirate downloads on torrent sites related to Wonder Woman, something we haven't seen before. It's a potential game-changer.
As one of the most valuable companies in the world, Apple is involved in many lawsuits, from both ends. This is one where the Cupertino company did not come out on top. Apple filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Corellium for its iOS clone that runs in the browser. However, a federal judge believes Corellium’s use of the iOS technology is “fair use.”
