In 2021, there are more reasons why people love Linux than ever before. In this series, I'll share 21 different reasons to use Linux. Let's explore why anyone can try Linux.
Linux can seem mysterious to the uninitiated. People talk about Linux like it's something only meant for computer programmers or sysadmins, yet people also talk about running Linux on laptops or mobile devices. Tech sites list the top 10 Linux commands you need to know, and yet there's just as much talk about how exciting the Linux desktops (plural!) are.
Traffic simulation software PTV Vissim, from PTV Group, is now also available for the Linux operating system, for analysis of complex multimodal transportation systems, with particular benefits for the automotive industry.
PTV Vissim Kernel provides detailed and realistic simulations of the entire traffic environment, including the movements and interaction of different road users and modes of transport. Innovative concepts and services such as shared mobility, mobility-as-a-service and autonomous driving can be evaluated and verified in a virtual environment.
Since 2016 when it first appeared, Google’s Fuchsia effort has been shrouded in mystery.
If you’re not familiar with Fuchsia, Google describes it as a “new open-source operating system” that can be scaled to run on small microcontrollers all the way up to traditional computing devices. Unlike Chrome OS, which runs on a Linux kernel, Fuchsia will have its own microkernel called Zircon.
Up until now, I didn’t see Fuchsia having much future impact to Chromebooks.
Hello and welcome to Episode 393 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts interview Doug, AD8DP, the author and primary coder of the DUDE-Star project. This project allows someone to use most of the VHF and UHF digital radio modes that have become all the rage: YSF, D-Star, DMR, P.25, NXDN and more. In the process, we learn much more about the M17 Project than we thought we would so stay tuned for an upcoming deep dive on that subject. If you want to dive into digital and not spend a lot of money, then DUDE-Star is for you!
Microsoft and Ubuntu's relationship is under a new spotlight this week.
Plus our rundown of the feature-packed 5.11 release, a Fuchsia surprise, exciting hardware news, and more.
Josh and Kurt talk about the Google Project Zero report titled “A Year in Review of 0-days Exploited In-The-Wild in 2020”. It’s a cool report but we don’t agree on the conclusion. The answer isn’t to security harder, it’s to stop using C.
As usual, after two months of development and seven release candidate, Linux creator Linus Torvalds has officially released a new stable Linux Kernel 5.11.
The latest version, 5.11, contains several changes ranging from new hardware enablement (from both AMD and Intel), ARM hardware support, networking enhancements, to driver updates.
The development of Linux Kernel 5.11 has been going on in full swing for a while now. Finally, Linus Torvalds announced the release after endless testing and adding support for new software and hardware.
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Wi-Fi 6E is the biggest update to the Wi-Fi standard in the last 20 years. The new standard aims to provide a new wireless band to the public, the 6 GHz band. This will help reduce signal drops on connected devices over a distance and can transfer more data faster across longer distances.
With Linux Kernel 5.11, support has been added for 6GHz band / Ultra High Band (UHB). Support for Wi-Fi 6E chips from manufacturers such as Intel, MediaTek and Qualcomm has also been added.
Other notable additions include, Fast Initial Link Setup (FILS) for the Qualcomm ath11k driver, Dual-Band Concurrent (DBDC) support for the MediaTek Mt7915 driver and various other performance improvements.
The version arrived on Sunday's Valentine's Day with only a small amount of changes from the previous seventh release candidate (RC). It's been in development since before December and brings support for Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), a hardware-isolated trusted execution environment for applications to store and process secrets in enclaves.
The latest release of the Linux kernel features some impressive performance enhancements for AMD hardware.
Released over the valentine’s day weekend, Linux kernel 5.11 fixed a major performance regression that impacted the AMD Zen architecture. Thanks to the fix, Zen-based processors such as Ryzen and EPYC have been benchmarked as being faster out of the box than on previous kernels. Also debuting in the release is support for AMD “Van Gogh” and “Dimgrey Cavefish” GPUs.
The semiconductor company has recently put out a number of Linux-related job postings, and the improvements to AMD hardware in the latest release is further evidence that the chip giant is actively working to improve support for its hardware on Linux.
Linus Torvalds released version 5.11 of the Linux kernel on February 14. This latest release, otherwise known as the Valentine’s Day edition, is the first major stable release for 2021.
Linux Torvalds announced the release of the latest Linux Kernel 5.11 ("Valentine's Day Edition") with some interesting new features. We take a look at what's new and how you can get the latest Kernel in your favorite Linux Distribution.
A brand new Linux kernel is now available and in this post we do our very best to recap the core changes and new features you’ll find tucked up inside.
Linux Kernel 5.11 was released a day ago on Valentine’s Day. Here’ how you can install it in Ubuntu and Linux Mint based systems.
Linus Torvalds announced the Kernel 5.11: “Nothing unexpected or particularly scary happened this week, so here we are – with 5.11 tagged and pushed out. In fact, it’s a smaller-than-average set of commits from rc7 to final, which makes me happy. And I already have several pull requests lined up for tomorrow, so we’re all set for the merge window to start..”
Last time around, Linux 5.10 was an LTS release that added EXT-4 performance enhancements, improved post-Spectre performance, as well as the enablement of BCM2711 (Raspberry Pi 4) display pipeline, among other many changes.
Linus Torvalds has delivered version 5.11 of the Linux kernel to the faithful.
"Nothing unexpected or particularly scary happened this week, so here we are - with 5.11 tagged and pushed out, Torvalds said in his weekly state of the kernel post.
Big inclusions in this release include support for Intel’s Software Guard Extensions (SGX) technology that allows developers to use walled-off enclaves of memory in which it’s theoretically possible to get some work done without the rest of a system having any idea what’s going on inside. It’s a nice idea but SGX has been compromised on several occasions .
AMD admirers get support for more silicon plus finer controls for power management and handling workloads as CPUs throttle up and down. The new kernel also improves Linux performance of some AMD CPUs.
Linus Torvalds announced the Linux Kernel 5.11 after seven weeks in development and available for general usage with new features, improvements, and better hardware support.
As per Linus Torvalds for Kernel 5.11
In fact, it’s a smaller-than-average set of commits from rc7 to final, which makes me happy. And I already have several pull requests lined up for tomorrow, so we’re all set for the merge window to start.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install kernel 5.11 in Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, and LinuxMint 20.1
It's approaching one year since the proposal of FUTEX2 for addressing shortcomings of the existing FUTEX system call and allowing the semantics to better match that of the Windows behavior, which is of use when running Windows games on Linux via Steam Play's Wine/Proton. In the end the FUTEX2 system call can lead to lower CPU utilization and in turn allowing for greater Linux gaming performance.
André Almeida of Collabora today posted the latest patches introducing the FUTEX2 system call though with these patches are still marked as "request for comments" (RFC) so don't expect them to be merged to mainline in short order -- plus the fact that it would already be too late for trying to get it into the now-open 5.12 merge window.
Due to an unfortunate misalignment of the Ryzen 5000 series launch and the Linux kernel cycles, CPU temperature monitoring for Ryzen 5000 (Zen 3) desktop CPUs isn't landing until now with the Linux 5.12 kernel cycle.
The hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem updates were sent in this morning for the just-opened Linux 5.12 merge window. There is now Zen 3 desktop CPU temperature monitoring support within the existing k10temp driver. The patch just needed to add the IDs for the Zen 3 parts to the k10temp driver while the rest is unchanged. The two line patch didn't come from AMD but a community developer and has been verified to work on the Ryzen 5800X / 5900X / 5950X processors to provide correct CPU temperature monitoring.
Going back to last year there has been work by AMD engineers on an experimental FreeSync video mode optimization to avoid screen blanking around full-screen video playback. Basically avoiding an entire mode-set when changing the timing mode during video playback to bypass any screen flickering/blanking. That work has now been updated to its sixth spin while it's being viewed as a temporary measure until a better solution can be devised.
That FreeSync video mode optimization has continued seeing new revisions following the public code review process. The sixth version of the patches were posted this week but obviously given the timing is too late for possibly seeing it in the imminent Linux 5.12 merge window -- it will now wait until at least Linux 5.13.
Linux 5.11 should be released today as stable but we'll see if 5.11-rc8 is decided instead given there has been an uptick in last minute changes for this kernel. This will mean either the Linux 5.12 merge window is kicking off at the end of today or could be pushed back by one week, but in whatever case there are many changes that have been queuing up for this next kernel version window.
The open-source Linux graphics driver support for the Ryzen 5000 series mobile hardware has been developed under the "Green Sardine" codename. With the soon-to-be-stable Linux 5.11 kernel offering the initial enablement for the new hardware and Ryzen 5000 series laptops expected this quarter, the Green Sardine firmware blobs have landed in linux-firmware.git.
On Thursday the necessary "Green Sardine" firmware binaries were merged into linux-firmware.git, the central repository for Linux harware firmware/microcode files. All 11 binaries, which are required for working hardware acceleration with the open-source driver, were merged. Hopefully the major Linux distributions will all quickly pick up the new firmware files and thus when paired with a new kernel will allow for working out-of-the-box 3D acceleration with the new AMD graphics hardware.
Made public last year was the Arm Straight Light Speculation (SLS) vulnerability. SLS with ARM hardware can result in speculative executing instructions following an unconditional change in control flow. The Linux kernel may soon have an option for enabling the mitigation of the Arm SLS vulnerability.
Mitigating the Arm Straight Line Speculation vulnerability involves using speculation barrier sequences following vulnerable instructions -- either the Speculation Barrier (SB) instruction or the DSB+ISB instruction sequence. The GCC compiler added its support along with the LLVM Clang compiler handling of this vulnerability in the same manner.
Cloud-Hypervisor 0.13 released this week as the newest version of the Intel-led open-source hypervisor that has also the involvement of other key organizations. With this v0.13 update there is broader VFIO device support, which most significantly now means that NVIDIA graphics cards are supported in conjunction with their proprietary graphics driver. The VFIO device support improvement is for devices not supporting MSI/MSI-X but relying on INTx interrupts as is the case with NVIDIA.
Heading out of Valentine's weekend, there is a new Vulkan specification update with a notable new extension.
Vulkan 1.2.170 is available this morning and includes the VK_KHR_synchronization2 extension. VK_KHR_synchronization2 is an update over the original Vulkan synchronization APIs.
Earlier this month Hector Martin and the Asahi Linux developers posted their initial Linux kernel patches for bringing up the Apple M1 ARM SoC platform for the mainline kernel with devices like the 2020 Mac Mini / MacBook Pro / MacBook Air devices. The second iteration of those Apple M1 Linux patches have now been posted.
Hector Martin continues working on the Apple M1 Linux support via crowdfunding with the ambitious goal of getting Linux running well on these modern ARM-powered Apple devices. Linux is already booting on Apple M1 hardware but will be quite a while before it's a polished, performant experience especially when it comes to accelerated graphics support on the M1.
Plots is a graph plotting application that makes it easy to visualize mathematical formulae. You can use it for trigonometric, hyperbolic, exponential and logarithmic functions along with arbitrary sums and products.
Plots is a simple application inspired by graph plotting web apps like Desmos. It allows you to plot graphs of different math functions, which you can enter interactively, as well as customizing the color of your plots.
Written in Python, Plots takes advantage of modern hardware using OpenGL. It uses GTK 3 and thus integrates well with the GNOME desktop.
VLC 4.0 is probably one of the most anticipated software release with a major UI overhaul.
I am pleased to announce that a new release of the libvirt-glib package, version 4.0.0, is now available from
https://libvirt.org/sources/glib/ The packages are GPG signed with
Key fingerprint: DAF3 A6FD B26B 6291 2D0E 8E3F BE86 EBB4 1510 4FDF (4096R)
RabbitMQ is a free, open-source and multi-protocol messaging broker software written in the Erlang programming language. A message broker is used to store messages for an application. When an application sends data to another application, the app publishes the message onto the message broker. RabbitMQ supports multiple messaging protocols and can be easily deployed in a distributed configurations. The message broker act as a middleman for various web application and used to reduce loads and delivery time of web application.
Although we already have Libre Office out of the box on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, yet if you have a Microsoft office 2007 copy then you can install it on Ubuntu Linux using Wine; to use just like any other software…
XFCE is a lightweight, highly customizable desktop environment for the Linux platform. Many Linux users choose to use it over other flashy options as it stays out of the way and uses very little memory. In this guide, we’ll show you how to install it on your system.
Nano is my text editor of choice on both the Linux and macOS platforms. How many times have you read my words saying, "open so-and-so configuration file in the nano editor, locate entry X and change it?" If that configuration file is a few short lines, you'd have no problem locating the entry in question. What if it's 100+ or 1,000+ lines of options to comb through?
At that point, you'd spend way too much of your precious time searching for the entry in question. Fortunately, the nano editor includes a handy feature to make this task exponentially easier. Said feature is, you guessed it, a search tool. With this search tool you can quickly locate those entries, no matter how big the configuration file is.
How do you use the search feature? Let me show you.
PHP 8.0 is a major update released by the PHP team on Nov 26, 2020. It contains a large number of new features and optimizations over previous versions. To read more about read the PHP 8 change log.
REMI and EPEL are the most popular repositories contains latest RPM packages for installation. It also contains the PHP 8 RPM packages to be install on CentOS/RHEL 8 systems.
This article will describe you to how to install PHP 8 on CentOS 8 or RHEL 8 Linux system.
Apache Kafka is an open-source, distributed event streaming platform developed by the Apache Software Foundation. This is written in Scala and Java programming languages. You can install Kafka on any platform supported Java.
This tutorial described you step by step tutorial to install Apache Kafka on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Linux system. You will also learn to create topics in Kafka and run producer and consumer nodes.
HTOP command is used to monitor our Linux system’s resources. It provides information related to system processes, system memory, Load average, etc. It is a cross-platform, interactive process viewer. It is quite similar to the ‘top’ command, which comes pre-installed with almost all Linux distributions. But the HTOP command is quite an improvement over the TOP command.
Linux is a very secure operating system, but it's not perfect. No operating system is. In fact, any platform that's connected to a network is, in many ways, vulnerable. Like all other operating systems, there are a number of steps you can take to help mitigate those insecurities.
One thing you can do with Linux is remove the legacy communications services that can be installed by default, even though they are never used. Services like xinet, nis, tftp, tftpd-hpa, telnet, and rsh are not only unnecessary, they can pose security risks to your system. What do you do? You delete them.
When you have decided to switch from Windows 10 to Linux Distributions like Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or any other Distribution’s.
It is a piece of cake to create a bootable drive using the Rufus tool. In Windows, one of the best tools to create a bootable Disk is Rufus.
But the problem with designing pages this way is that you end up with a bunch of disparate objects that just float around without any coherent design system bringing them all together.
In writing, this would be akin placing several paragraphs of text on a page without linking one to the next. The reader would lose the thread. In visual design, the user senses something is missing: a unifying theme that helps it all make sense.
For me, this lack of cohesion in the page design negates any time or money saved. It doesn’t matter how elegant the delivery process is if the end result is lacking. This is standardization run amok.
Upon realizing this, I iterated my processes once again.
This is more or less a followup to this blog posting of mine about AutoSSH and GNU Screen from nearly ten years ago — which by the way is still valid and still the way, I use SSH and GNU Screen.
JetBrains Qodana is a new product, still in early access, that brings the “Smarts” of JetBrains IDEs into your CI pipeline, and it can be easily integrated in GitLab.
The ps command makes it fairly easy to sort its output by any column of data. Learn more about the --sort option and how to use it, plus how to pass ps output to the sort command.
Developed by Microsoft, PowerShell is a powerful tool that is used for automating tasks and simplifying configuration management. You can use it to automate virtually any tasks on a Windows environment including installing roles and features and making changes to the Active Directory on a Windows server system.
A Cron job is a job that runs automatically after a fixed interval of time. A Cron job can either be a command or a shell script that you want to run periodically at a specified time.
Backups can be defended against ransomware attacks by moving them offsite from primary systems, removing file-system access to the backups, and avoiding using Windows as a backup platform.
If you want to do any number of things that require access to Google's Android Debug Bridge (ADB) or fastboot tools for Android — sideload apps, install custom ROMs, take screenshots on certain Android platform versions, or access certain hidden features — you'll need to get it up and running on your platform of choice first. Fortunately, doing so virtually anywhere is possible at this point — even from another Android phone, or a web browser. We'll help you get set up no matter what platform you're on in this guide.
Nowadays, many open source projects offer container images for easy deployment. This is very handy when running a home server or lab environment. A previous Fedora Magazine article covered installing Nextcloud from the source package. This article explains how you can run Nextcloud on Fedora 33 as a container deployment with Podman.
I like Solarized, but every now and then, I switch to a different theme just to check it out. Eventually, I’ll go back to Solarized, and run into the same problem over and over...
Dart is easy to use BSD licensed programming language to build mobile, desktop, server, and web apps. Google creates and maintains the Dart ecosystem. It follows C-style syntax. We can compile code either to the native platform or JavaScript. Flutter allows building iOS/Android mobile and desktop/web apps from a single code base. Let us see how to install Dart programming language on a Debian or Ubuntu Linux and set vim as IDE.
This page explains how to install the Dart SDK on the Ubuntu Linux desktop to build Dart command-line, server, and non-Flutter web apps.
How to Add New User with Key Pair in AWS EC2. Learn how to create new user with new key pair and provide separate access to developers. Instead of using the default private key for all operations you can create additional users and share the corresponding private key to access the instance.
In this guide you are going to learn how to create new SSH key pair with public key and private key and add it to your EC2 instance.
You must have heard about the Windows app “Remote Desktop Connection“. This application comes with default windows installation and allows you to access another PC or server remotely. It uses remote desktop protocol to establish remote desktop connection sessions.
Some of the Linux distributions may provide you RDP clients to connect to the Windows system. However, for some linux distributions you may need to install RDP clients to establish remote desktop connection.
As a Linux user there are some rdp tools available which you can install and use for windows remote connection. In this article we are going to explain how to install RDP clients on Ubuntu linux and use them to access (or connect) remote windows desktop.
Previous article described how to use emacsclient inside of an SSH session. While the solution mentioned there relied on TRAMP, I’ve confessed that it isn’t what I’m actually using. From my experience, TRAMP doesn’t cache as much information as it could and as a result some operations are needlessly slow. For example, delay of find-file prompt completion is noticeable when working over connections with latency in the range of tens of milliseconds or more. Because for a long while I’d been working on a workstation ‘in the cloud’ in a data centre in another country, I’ve built my setup based on SSHFS instead.
It is important to note that TRAMP has myriad of features which won’t be available with this alternative approach. Most notably, it transparently routes shell commands executed from Emacs through SSH which often results in much faster execution than trying to do the same thing over SSHFS. grep command in particular will avoid copying entire files over network when done through TRAMP.
xz compression has been rising in popularity because it offers smaller file sizes than gzip and bzip2. You're still likely to see all three on a Linux system, but you may want to start opting for xz if you want smaller file archives.
In this guide, we're going to introduce you to xz compression, starting from basic examples to more specific and advanced usage. If you've worked with compressed tar files or gzip compression (files with the .tar.gz extension, for example) in the past, you'll find that xz feels very familiar.
Moonwards is the experience of building a world together. That world is an advanced town on the moon designed on hard science and engineering. It starts with a vast set of habitats and infrastructure, and a detailed development timeline based on solid known technology. The community that takes up residence there – by making actual homes and offices – then brings it alive, fills it in, and advances it. Because this world depicts a future that is entirely feasible, it provides a unique reward – a sense that your participation influences the world towards a better future. For the same reason, it can call for support from a resource few games can – the industry devoted to building the future it depicts, that being the space industry.
We need to draw in the many space engineers out there starving for the kind of space development they imagined when they chose their careers. Moonwards gives them a place to express those visions, but they will need help from game developers interested in providing the tools they need to do so in a game environment. The Godot community is clearly the best one for this. From the beginning, we’ve financially supported Godot as much as we can. As Moonwards grows, it will be providing a series of add-ons back to the community for any project to use, adapted from our code. Our architecture is also being designed to be a platform for game devs looking for a great place to test, experiment, showcase, or browse other developers' ideas.
Our three lovely devs can explain - Karim, Yael, and Zach. Read on…
Do we call this a Zach-like now? ComPressure is a puzzle game that has you design increasingly complex computation units powered by high pressure steam.
You're tasked with investigating the mathematical properties of steam, which appears to power an entire city from steam umbrellas to steam xylophones. Yes, really. I'm not sure why you would want a steam umbrella but that is apparently a thing in ComPressure.
Mod which is a standalone free and open source first-person stealth game. Calling it a game isn't entirely correct though. Well, it is, sort-of. The Dark Mod is really a platform for others to create with, it's a big beautiful toolkit for developers to make stealth games and missions with and it's quite fantastic actually.
The Dark Mod 2.09 was announced today bringing in a big overhaul to the graphics rendering, thanks to it using more modern OpenGL. The team mentioned that all their changes "gives TDM some of the performance advantages of rendering using a low level API like Vulkan".
The Dark Mod that began as a total conversion mod for Doom 3 but evolved into a standalone game making use of the open-source id Tech 4 game engine is out with a big update. This is one of the few open-source games making use of the public id Tech 4 code-base and with today's v2.09 update is a large rewrite to its graphics back-end.
This open-source id Tech 4 game has a new OpenGL 3.3 renderer that replaces the existing graphics back-end, which will be removed moving forward. ARB shaders have been gutted from the new back-end, an effort made to minimize driver overhead, and supporting other "newer" OpenGL features like bindless textures, multi-draw indirect, UBO streaming, and more. The graphics support is still dated compared to the latest commercial games, but a step forward for open-spurce games and again The Dark Mod being one of the few active open-source projects atop id Tech 4.
In need of a game to just click around in and idle for a while? SPACE / MECH / PILOT from October 2020 has been updated and is now supported on Linux too. Don't see the point in idle games? It's probably not going to be for you. However, if you do usually like them then it looks like another good choice to sink some time into. Positively rated by users too!
"Hello (Hello), welcome to the SPACE/MECH/PILOT program, a idle-RPG clicker video game entertainment simulation unlike any other. With this exciting (and brand-new) SPACE/MECH/PILOT program, you get to fully live out the dream of being a totally violent space pilot, soaring through the universe, the stars, and through the broken chassis of your foes!"
With an aim to release in late 2021, Dungeon Alchemist is an AI-powered mapmaking tool for both players and dungeon masters to use with your favourite Virtual Tabletop Application.
Planned to support Linux, macOS and Windows through Steam the idea is that Dungeon Alchemist takes a map size, a theme and then lets you draw a few rooms which it then populates using AI. Pretty much everything is done for you, and you can then take the AI-made maps with you through PDFs or import it directly into something like Foundry VTT or Fantasy Grounds.
Three months since their last devlog, 314 Arts have shown off some more footage on Projekt Z, their upcoming first-person co-op game set during the second world war on a mysterious island full of zombies.
Inspired by the Left 4 Dead series, it's going to offer a rather different and far more brutal take on it. There's going to be multiple different game modes, along with a special hub area you build up as you progress through the game. Youalso have different characters with various abilities, along with plenty of realism sprinkles in like weapon malfunctions and a minimal HUD.
With the latest devlog they show off one of the modes: wave-based survival. They mentioned it's a good way to get plenty of gun-play testing to make sure it feels good. This mode sounds very much like the early Zombies mode in Call of Duty. Overall though Projekt Z is really shaping up to look good.
The first GOL Podcast episode of 2021 is here, come get it while it's hot and ranty as we cover a range of weird and wonderful topics in Linux, open source, gaming and more.
Apologies on the delay with this episode but we're back! As usual, it's a very casual and frank chat between two friends (myself) and GOL contributor / Linux livestreamer Samsai about many different Linux-related topics.
Hello everyone,
let's improve our layout and view templates in order to make distros and users life easier when they share their Latte layouts and views. View in Latte stands for a Dock or Panel.
This post is part of an ongoing series about the overview design changes which are being worked on for GNOME 40. (For previous posts, see here.)
Ongoing user research has been a major feature of this design initiative, and I would say that it is by far the best researched project that I have worked on. Our research has informed the design as it has proceeded, resulting in particular design choices and changes, which have improved the overall design and will make it a better experience for users. As a result of this, we have a much greater degree of confidence in the designs.
This post is intended as a general overview of the research that we’ve been doing. I’m excited to share this, as a way of explaining how the design came about, as well as sharing some of the insights that we’ve found along the way.
I normally deal with Linux machines. Linux is what I know and it's what I've been using since I was in college. A friend of mine has been coaxing me into trying out FreeBSD, and I decided to try it out and see what it's like. Here's some details about my experience and what I've learned.
Please do not misinterpret me. I do not mean that I under appreciate the hard work of the OpenMandriva developers and community in making sure that everything under the hood of this distro functions smoothly; it's quite the opposite. I, for one, truly value their commitment and effort. However, I cannot pretend to grasp the technicalities. I am one of those users who do not understand what "Qt Framework 5.15.2, LLVM/clang 11.0.1, systemd 247, Java 15, Calamares 3.2.35, binutils 2.36.1, gcc 10.2." imply on the system.
My perspective is, then, one of a non-technical user and this is what I have seen so far...
The latest stable version of OpenMandriva has been released and offers the newest KDE desktop and ARM support.
OpenMandriva is a direct descendant of the not forgotten (and much-loved) Mandriva Linux, and was the first to ever make use of the LLVM toolchain by default. With the release of Lx 4.2, OpenMandriva brings to the table a few improvements, as well as the latest release of the KDE desktop environment, and some exciting ARM news.
As for software, OpenMandriva improves the OM Welcome, which is an on-boarding tool that makes it incredibly easy for new users to do things like install software with a single click. Beyond the welcome app, OpenMandriva includes LibreOffice 7.1, Krita 4.4.2, Digikam 7.2, SMPlayer 21.1.0, VLC 3.0.12.1, Falkon browser 3.1, SimpleScreenRecorder 0.4.3, and much more. Also included with OpenMandriva is Desktop Presets, which allows users to easily customize the appearance of the Plasma Desktop to look and feel similar to other desktop environments.
The basis for this list is multiple years of experience supporting automation for the upstream container-runtimes team (podman, buildah, skopeo, etc.). I will not take full credit, as many of these tips are based on an amalgam of evolved experience and individual contributions from a large community of users and developers.
Most items below can be boiled down to a single principle: Eliminate or reduce complexity. This concept is based on a compound application of Murphy's Law: The more "breakable things" you have, the more likely Murphy will show up. Here are eight ways to avoid those chance encounters.
Most of the new cloud-native applications and microservices designs are based on event-driven architecture (EDA), responding to real-time information by sending and receiving information about individual events. This kind of architecture relies on asynchronous, non-blocking communication between event producers and consumers through an event streaming backbone such as Red Hat AMQ Streams running on top of Red Hat OpenShift. In scenarios where many different events are being managed, defining a governance model where each event is defined as an API is critical. That way, producers and consumers can produce and consume checked and validated events. We can use a service registry as a datastore for events defined as APIs.
Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 15 February at 1300UTC in #fedora-neuro on IRC (Freenode). The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend. You can join us over:
Among Facebook employees while they are mostly using Windows and macOS on their laptops/desktops, for those using Linux the primary choice has shifted from Ubuntu to Fedora but they have begun ramping up CentOS Stream too.
Michel Salim of Facebook presented at last weekend's FOSDEM 2021 virtual conference on the company's internal desktop fleet. While Facebook is known for their usage of CentOS on servers, when it comes to Linux on their employee desktops Fedora is the primary target but with growing support for CentOS Stream.
Devuan GNU/Linux 3.1 comes nine months after the release of the Devuan GNU/Linux 3.0 series to provide the freedom loving community with up-to-date ISO images in case they need to reinstall the system or deploy the systemd-free distribution on new computers.
While Devuan GNU/Linux 4.0 "Chimaera" is still in the works, Devuan GNU/Linux 3.1 brings updated desktop-live, server, and minimal-live ISO images powered by the Linux 4.19 LTS kernel from Debian GNU/Linux 10 "Buster" operating system series.
Once again the Veteran Unix Admins salute you on this day commemorating six years since the first Devuan pre-alpha Valentine's Day release in 2015!
Devuan Beowulf 3.1.0 point release installer ISOs, desktop-live, and minimal-live isos are now available. Note that ARM and virtual images are not updated in this release.
[...]
We wish to thank all of you for the incredible support given to this development effort, which continues to make Devuan a useful and reliable base distribution.
Devuan 3.1 is the latest release of this Debian fork/downstream while new to it is offering Runit as an init system alternative. Devuan 3.1 now supports the options of Runit, SysVinit, and OpenRC that can be selected from during the Devuan installation process. The Runit init daemon is also what is used by Void Linux, Dragora, antiX, and other platforms.
As far as I remember, Siduction offered monthly releases with up-to-date components and latest security patches for those who wanted to deploy the Debian-based distro on new computers. The last official ISO release of Siduction Linux was version 2018.3.0, announced back in March 2018.
But the developers never quit working on the distro during this time, even with all the economic and social disruption caused by the Coronavirus pandemic, and they still generated updated ISO images for those who wanted to install the distribution on their computers without having to download hundreds of updates from the repositories.
The Mint project has been a long-time favorite among Linux users who are mainly home users. Its friendly and common sense approach to a distribution appeals to many people who want to run something with the Linux kernel on their desktop. There's ample testimony of this, from the inception and creation of the Cinnamon desktop as common sense, traditional but still sleek and modern alternative to the evolving desaster and dumbing-down assault from other desktops at the time to coming up with great little tools like the Warpinator for file sharing on a LAN, the Hypnotix IPTV app and other little improvements to make things just a little easier, for the average Joe and the Techie who just wants to get things done alike.
For various reasons I am one of the very small percentile who happen to prefer the Debian Edition over the regular Ubuntu derived offering, which is almost identical in features though. For example, shortly after the release of Linux Mint 20.1 we saw all the small improvements and additions trickle down to LMDE4. Within days we received Cinnamon 4.8.6, including the new ability to add files and folders to Favorites in Nemo file manager which would be reflected in the menu and on the panel, Hypnotix, the Warpinator and new themes and backgrounds through the update channel. I think the newly refereshed icon theme was even trialled first in LMDE. It is definitely not a step child.
There's only one thing wrong with LMDE and that is that it's based on Debian rather than on Devuan with its more traditional and predictable init. So I set out on a little experiment to build a LMDE-like system on top of Devuan and what can I say, it works very well. Steps are outlined here on the LM forum.
It was just another day for Luca Bongiorni, a security advisor for Bentley Systems. He'd just spun up an Ubuntu Linux 18.04 instance on the Microsoft Azure cloud using a corporate sandbox for testing purposes. Three hours later, on Bongiorni's LinkedIn account he received a message from a Canonical sales representative saying, "I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure," and telling him he'd be his "point of contact for anything Ubuntu-related in the enterprise." Say what??
Actually, Bongiorni was a little more "frank" about his annoyance and surprise that a Canonical salesperson had tracked him down on an entirely different service and knew that he had just used Ubuntu on Microsoft Azure. "What the f*** is happening here? WHY [did] MICROSOFT FORWARDED TO UBUNTU THAT I SPUN A NEW VM!?!" Customer privacy, what's that?
Micro Nova has put together an open-source, whole house audio amplifier called AmpliPi based on Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3+. It is capable of streaming four independent sources to 6 stereo output zones, expandable to up to 36 stereo output zones through daisy-chained extender units.
AmpliPi specifically supports inputs from four networking streaming sources including AirPlay, Pandora, Spotify, and DLNA, as well as four analog RCA inputs for your media appliances.
PINE64 has announced Manjaro ARM running Plasma Mobile will be the default software preloaded on the PinePhone. This news isn’t too much of a surprise given the popularity and polish of Plasma Mobile, and Manjaro’s rapidly-improving ARM foundations.
“We are very pleased to announce that the PinePhone will ship with Plasma Mobile on a Manjaro ARM base from this point on. We have a long-standing relationship with Manjaro and KDE Community, and both projects have supported us and our efforts since the dawn of PINE64,” writes Pine64’s Lukasz Erecinski in a February update.
Big news from the Arduino Tooling team: The new Arduino CLI version 0.16.0 has been released!
You can now use arduino-cli core list –all to return all installed and installable platforms, including those installed manually in the Sketchbook hardware folder.
Our engineers identified a couple of components which we could upgrade to support lower voltages. The final result was that the ARM-USB-OCD-HL new modification of the JTAG can now work with targets from 0.65V up to 5.5V.
This pretty much covers all existing SOCs on the market.
You know what’s hard? Supporting all the operand encodings ‘SIB’ allows is hard. Writing a good register allocator is hard. Supporting a thousand different object formats used by different OSes is hard. Making a good macro system is hard. Creating a high-quality, correct mapping from assembly to a higher-level representation is hard. These are tasks which are hard for assemblers and compilers and decompilers and other tools which interact with assembly. Intel? AT&T? Completely irrelevant.
There’s a strict eligibility criteria for inclusion in this series. See the Eligibility Criteria section below.
We recently recommended Musicolet, a small yet powerful music player which organizes and plays local audio-files stored on your device. While the app receives our strong recommendation, it has a startling omission, the absence of support for media servers.
foobar2000 is an alternative to Musicolet and is better suited for anyone needing media server support. It offers support for UPnP/DNLA media servers.
OpenUK is an organisation promoting open tech, come join us and belong. OpenUK Belonging video.
LibreOffice has extensive documentation in many languages, thanks to the great work of our worldwide docs community. Today we’re talking to Steve Fanning, who has been working on the updated LibreOffice Calc Guide…
Hi Steve! Tell us a bit about yourself…
I live near Bolton in the North West of England with my wife and, sometimes, our adult son (he has recently been working in Australia for a year). I studied applied mathematics and theoretical physics at university and subsequently enjoyed a career mostly spent implementing and designing complex real-time software systems.
Passionate about improving the documentation for the company’s systems, I moved into specialist technical writer roles during the last few years of my employment. I retired around two years ago and now enjoy indulging in my main hobbies, which are bridge, computing, reading and coarse fishing. I guess that some readers might wonder about coarse fishing – it is angling for freshwater fish for pleasure and relaxation rather than food (all fish caught are returned to the water alive).
WordPress has no multi-million dollar marketing campaign or celebrity sponsors, but we do have something even better—you. If you enjoy WordPress please consider telling a friend, setting it up for someone less knowledgable than yourself, or writing the author of a media article that overlooks us.
WordPress is the official continuation of b2/cafélog, which came from Michel V.
The work has been continued by the WordPress developers.
Dear community: I am very proud to announce the release of the series 3.8 from the GNU Health Hospital Management Information System (HMIS) component! Twelve years old, the GNU Health project has now become a Libre digital Health ecosystem, with different solutions to meet different realities, integrating them in the Federation. The year 2020, the year of the COVID-19 pandemic, has put our societies against the ropes, and challenging the public health system of every country around the globe. The GNU Health community responded swiftly to this formidable challenge. Within hours of the official World Health Organization announcement, we were able to deliver the new ICD-10 codes of the COVID-19 disease; Include the pathology in the person record when it was confirmed by laboratory and setting the disease as a notifiable disease so the Min. of Health could have uptodate epidemiological information. GNU Health has played a crucial role in many public health systems, not only by providing real-time observatory of COVID-19, but also, very importantly, study the impact of the socioeconomic conditions in both the incidence and severity of the disease on the underprivileged. Our community keeps growing! A notable example is that GNU Health is now also part of the KDE community! KDE has adopted MyGNUHealth, the GH Personal Health record. We are very grateful to KDE for trusting us! Most GNU/Linux users will have in their favorite GNU/Linux distribution a Personal Health Record focused on privacy and integrated with Libre devices and trackers. MyGNUHealth also runs on the PinePhone!
Based on the recently released Linux 5.11 kernel series, the GNU Linux-libre 5.11 kernel is now available for the GNU/Linux community seeking 100% freedom for their PCs with deblobbed drivers, but featuring the same new features and improvements as the upstream kernel release.
These include support for AMD “Van Gogh” and “Dimgrey Cavefish” GPUs in the AMDGPU driver, support for Intel SGX (Software Guard Extensions), support for task-local storage in the BPF subsystem, suspend-to-idle support in user-mode, as well as a new “big block” mode in the virtio-mem mechanism.
GNU Linux-libre 5.11-gnu cleaning-up scripts, cleaned-up sources, and
cleaning-up logs (including tarball signatures) are now available from
our git-based release archive git://linux-libre.fsfla.org/releases.git/
tags {scripts,sources,logs}/v5.11-gnu.
Tarballs and incremental patches will also be published at
<https://www.fsfla.org/selibre/linux-libre/download/releases/5.11-gnu/>.
The scripts are unchanged since first published for this cycle, last
weekend.
This was a quite busy cycle. New drivers needed cleaning up in a
broader than usual range of types of peripherals: qat_4xxx crypto,
lt9611uxc dsi/hdmi bridge, ccs/smia++ sensor, ath11k_pci, nxp audio
transceiver, and the mhi bus pci controller. The wimax drivers were
moved in the tree, so the code to clean them up was adjusted. Other
drivers that needed adjusting to deblobbing were wakeup m3 rproc,
idt82p33 ptp clock, and qualcomm arm64. New blob versions had to be
handled in amdgpu, btqca, btrtl, btusb, i915 csr.
For up-to-the-minute news, join us on #linux-libre of irc.gnu.org
(Freenode), or follow me on P2P or federated social media. Check the
link in the signature for directions.
Be Free! with GNU Linux-libre.
What is GNU Linux-libre?
------------------------
GNU Linux-libre is a Free version of the kernel Linux (see below),
suitable for use with the GNU Operating System in 100% Free
GNU/Linux-libre System Distributions.
http://www.gnu.org/distros/
It removes non-Free components from Linux, that are disguised as
source code or distributed in separate files. It also disables
run-time requests for non-Free components, shipped separately or as
part of Linux, and documentation pointing to them, so as to avoid
(Free-)baiting users into the trap of non-Free Software.
http://www.fsfla.org/anuncio/2010-11-Linux-2.6.36-libre-debait
Linux-libre started within the gNewSense GNU/Linux distribution.
It was later adopted by Jeff Moe, who coined its name, and in 2008
it became a project maintained by FSF Latin America. In 2012, it
became part of the GNU Project.
The GNU Linux-libre project takes a minimal-changes approach to
cleaning up Linux, making no effort to substitute components that
need to be removed with functionally equivalent Free ones.
Nevertheless, we encourage and support efforts towards doing so.
http://libreplanet.org/wiki/LinuxLibre:Devices_that_require_non-free_firmware
Our mascot is Freedo, a light-blue penguin that has just come out
of the shower. Although we like penguins, GNU is a much greater
contribution to the entire system, so its mascot deserves more
promotion. See our web page for their images.
http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/
What is Linux?
--------------
Linux is a clone of the Unix kernel [...]
(snipped from Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst)
--
Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/
Free Software Activist GNU Toolchain Engineer
Vim, Vi, Voltei pro Emacs -- GNUlius Caesar
Building off yesterday's release of the Linux 5.11 kernel, the GNU folks have put out their "GNU Linux-libre 5.11-gnu" kernel that removes support for loading closed-source kernel modules, stripping out drivers/functionality that are dependent upon closed-source microcode/firmware, and other sanitization work in the name of maintaining a fully free software system.
Hindawi's publishing partnerships services, built upon its open source journal management platform, Phenom, are designed to run open access publishing workflows from submission and peer review, through to production and publication. The program offers publishers the option to retain editorial control and ownership of their journals while benefiting from Hindawi's proven track record in delivering excellence in open access scholarly publishing. Current partners include leading publishers such as Cambridge University Press, SAGE and GeoScienceWorld.
Although such advances make it possible for everyone to have access to advanced computer systems, Thompson believes programming skills are being eroded. “We are not teaching people how to do things any more,” he said.
One example is the trend for using low-code/no-code tooling to lower the skillset needed to create useful business applications. But, says Thompson: “Tasks get automated that shouldn’t be.” In other words, automation does not necessarily help to grow programming skills.
Glen Beck (background) and Betty Snyder (foreground) program ENIAC Unlike a modern computing architecture, the ENIAC did not use memory; instead, it comprised a series of modules for performing calculations. Recalling his experiences of programming, Thompson says: “I remember working on mainframes with 6MB of memory. We needed to code in obscure ways to get the most from the machine.
“Today’s programmers do less coding than before. Memory is limitless, I/O [input/output bandwidth] is not a problem. In a traditional sense, we are not doing data processing any more. Programmers today are building applications.”
In 4 reasons why JavaScript is so popular, I touched on a few advanced JavaScript concepts. In this article, I will dive into one of them: closures.
According to Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), "A closure is the combination of a function bundled together (enclosed) with references to its surrounding state (the lexical environment)." Simplified, this means that a function inside another function can access the variables from the outer (parent) function.
JavaScript source code minification is a beneficial tool for reducing download file sizes. However, the resulting obfuscation makes the code difficult to read, and reduces trust and transparency. Public source maps will help restore code readability and transparency. As a bonus, it enables others to learn from your code.
The Web Almanac 2020 found that 99,5 % of JavaScript is minified. It’s a more popular data-reduction strategy than using transport layer compression, which is at only 85 %. However, the 2019 Web Almanac found that only 18 % deployed source maps. This last number should be much higher.
As a Ruby user and programmer, I thought that Linux distributions and BSD projects offered packaged versions of Ruby gems to add sanity and stability to a computer.
The problem is that every distribution and project packages a different subset of all the Ruby gems available.
I’ve always tried to use as many “packaged” gems as possible in the systems I run — chiefly Debian and Fedora Linux, along with OpenBSD.
If you only need a couple of gems, distribution packages might be the way to go. But once you start to pile up the gems and get one or more with a LOT of dependencies on other gems, the whole thing can get a bit tangled.
The documentation to my blogPoster project has included a lot on how to install gems with package managers like apt. I’m about to pull all of that out in favor of recommending that all Ruby gems be installed with Ruby’s own gem install program.
There is plenty of similar articles on the web, but I just thought that I can add my perspective on the topic, and make the “tricks” list more complete. The code fragments used here are somehow crucial to my workflow and I am reusing them over and over again.
As many of the readers already know, for the past (almost) 2 years, I've been developing a Rust-crate for D-Bus, called zbus. With this being my first big Rust project to start from scratch done almost entirely in my spare time, the progress was rather slow for many months. My perfectionism didn't help much with the progress either but also the fact that implementing a SerdeAPI for the D-Bus format was quite challenging. Then along came my old friend and ex-colleague, Marc-André Lureau who sped up the progress 10 times and soon after we had the 1.0 release of zbus.
While my original plan (perfectionism again) was for the API to be primarily async, with the synchronous API mostly just a wrapper around it, it was Marc-Andre who ended up doing most of the work and coming up with nice high-level API and his use case was primarily synchronous so we decided to go with synchronous API first. I still believe that was the right thing to do, since neither of us were familiar with async programming in Rust and going with the original plan would have meant the first release getting delayed by at least another half an year.
This may sound very disappointing to readers who come from glib programming background but a purely synchronous blocking API in a Rust app is not at all as bad it would be in a glib+C (or even Vala) app. There is a reason why Rust is famous for its fearless concurrency.
I’m actually thinking about making a slim machine-focused vector graphics format (the name “SlimSVG” has been suggested :D) and writing my own human-focused Haskell graphics creation library with similar goals for my own purposes in the future, maybe as a student research project for the university.
In summary: Decide whether a language is for humans or for machines and do one of those things. And do the one thing well instead of both, but badly.
Two new outbreaks of Ebola in two weeks – first in the Democratic Republic of Congo and now in Guinea – have sent health teams scrambling to try to contain the spread of the deadly disease, ramping up contact tracing and medical support to local authorities.
Guinea declared an Ebola epidemic on 14 February after three people died and four others became ill in the rural southeast of the country – the first reported outbreak in West Africa since a region-wide pandemic ended five years ago after claiming more than 11,000 lives.
The initial case in Guinea’s new outbreak involved a nurse in rural Gouéké who died on 28 January, and the six other reported cases were people who had attended her 1 February funeral – with unsafe burials a known danger in Ebola transmission.
The Idaho Statesman (IS) is a USA local newspaper, that is owned by a company called McClatchy. A few years ago, McClatchy decided to cut costs by, among other things, “doing away with subscriptions to Microsoft Office for new employees”. Consequentely, in late January 2021 McClatchy denied a request by a new IS reporter to have “access to Microsoft Excel”. Faced with resistance to get a software program as basic as a spreadsheet for a member of her staff, the IS top editor, Mrs Christina Lords, complained about this on Twitter.
Eventually, it seems, the reporter was “granted access to Excel on her company laptop”. But Lords was fired, for violating McClatchy’s social media policy.
[...]
As far as I am concerned, I find nothing wrong in McClatchy’s decision to not pay anymore for Microsoft Office. What I find hard to accept is just their refusal to buy the most expensive variety of a software essential for daily tasks… without concretely encouraging all of their staff to use license-free alternatives, or at least allowing them. It is almost like saying “we won’t buy gold-plated Mont Blanc pens for new employees anymore, but even those employees must write only with gold-plated Mont Blanc pens”. Please tell me that there is more to this story.
Microsoft Corp. at one point considered acquiring the social network Pinterest Inc., according to a report today in the Financial Times.
Pinterest had a market capitalization of about $51 billion prior to the publication of the report. The company’s stock price jumped more than 5% following the Financial Times’ scoop, after previously rising more than 600% since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
The paper, citing people familiar with the matter, said that Microsoft had approached Pinterest about an acquisition “in recent months.” One of the tipsters was citing as saying that the negotiations are currently not active. It’s unclear whether the talks were shelved completely or simply paused.
Law enforcement authorities in France and Ukraine have joined forces to arrest a number of people in Ukraine who were using the Windows Egregor ransomware to make money.
Singapore's multinational telecommunications conglomerate Singtel has been breached by an attack on a file-sharing system from Accellion that is nearing its end-of-life, with the breach ocurring on 20 January, the telco says.
Lockdown is a relatively new security feature designed specifically for the Linux kernel. Part of the Linux kernel 5.4 branch, it is a feature that must be activated. Its default mode is off, simply because it can negatively affect existing systems. However, the primary function of lockdown is to prevent root account interactions with kernel code. By strengthening this divide, Lockdown counters potentially dangerous interactions that have been possible since the launch of the Linux OS. Once lockdown has been activated, there will be limitations on kernel functionality, but these will make it significantly more difficult for root accounts that have been compromised to affect the rest of the OS.
In the world of Android modding, people tend to regard root access as the cornerstone of all things. It allows users to take complete control of their devices and add features that aren’t always available in the stock configuration. But as they say — “with great power comes great responsibility” — it’s not wise to bypass Android’s security model unless you know what you’re getting into. For veteran Android enthusiasts on our forums, you are probably aware of the potential for backdoors to exist on your device, and you are more likely to be running a trusted root-enabled mod on top of the latest Android version with the latest security patches. Having said that, you might know a few people who don’t really care about what root tweaks they install so long as they seemingly work for them. This is why you can still find a truckload of mods that only work when SELinux is set to permissive, which, in turn, leave their users extremely susceptible to security threats.
[...]
For a user to get full root access on their own device running Android 10 (or higher) with SELinux set to permissive is shockingly easy to do: All you have to do is press install, and “Magica” will automatically gain root access in a service and install Magisk to the boot image. This is something far wider in scope than just tweaking your device. According to XDA Senior Recognized Developer and Magisk maintainer topjohnwu, any arbitrary app, including malware, can permanently root your device without your consent and permission by utilizing the PoC.
This entire post is a big pile of opinions. Please feel free to skip this one if you don't want to hear it. It says so in the footer of each page, but I want to emphasize that these opinions are my own and not that of my employers (past, current or future). This is my subjective opinion. I cannot be unbiased about this topic (though I also doubt that anyone who has experienced it can be), so instead of trying to pretend to be unbiased in this article I'm just going to let the words out.
I also don't really have any solution to propose in this article. This is a problem that is way bigger than a single shitposter like me can really handle on their own. I am one person among an unfathomably large crowd. If this makes you think, then I have done my job.
Buckle up, I'm doing a philosophy.
Apple’s privacy labels are a great start in letting consumers know what is happening with their data, but in my opinion, it is not clear enough in terms of how this data collection happens.
On 25 February, Mozilla will host the next installment of Mozilla Mornings – our regular event series that brings together policy experts, policymakers and practitioners for insight and discussion on the latest EU digital policy developments.
This installment of Mozilla Mornings will focus on the DSA’s risk-based approach, specifically the draft law’s provisions on risk assessment, risk mitigation, and auditing for very large online platforms. We’ll be looking at what these provisions seek to solve for; how they’re likely to work in practice; and what we can learn from related proposals in other jurisdictions.
For years, U.S. investigators found tampering in products made by Super Micro Computer Inc. The company says it was never told. Neither was the public.
The new version of the hardware hack story floated by Bloomberg illustrates one thing: the English language is a glorious tool for obfuscating things and making the meretricious appear like the magnificent.
Central African Republic security forces and their allies claim to have pushed back a rebel offensive seeking to topple President Faustin-Archange Touadéra. But a humanitarian crisis is far from over in the country, with hundreds of thousands of people still displaced and many more in need of assistance.
In the town of Liton, 22 kilometres from the centre of the capital, Bangui, around 2,500 people have been living in a makeshift displacement camp since clashes between the government and the Coalition of Patriots for Change (CPC) rebel group erupted in their villages in mid-January.
On a visit to the camp, set up in the grounds of a local school, The New Humanitarian spoke to one person who described a relative disappearing, women who said family members had been raped by armed men in recent weeks – some by multiple men at once – and many others who said their villages had been damaged and looted.
Those were the days. In the 1980s, backcountry skiing out of Cooke City, Montana, provided access to endless untracked snow on moderate terrain. The snow falls soft and deep all winter in Cooke. I would go with friends every winter for fresh tracks and quiet mountain adventures.
Equipped with leather telemark boots and 215 cm skinny skis we explored the ski potential of Miller Mountain, Mount Henderson, Crown Butte, Fisher Mountain, Mount Abundance and Scotch Bonnet Peak. We earned out turns with sweat and muscle power, and nearly every run was untracked and deep. The possibilities for more runs were endless.
The Senate Committee on Banking also plans to hold a hearing into the “current state of the stock market.” The House hearing, which has the catchy title “Game Stopped? Who Wins and Loses When Short Sellers, Social Media, and Retail Investors Collide,” will stream live on its website beginning at 12PM ET on February 18th.
Roaring Kitty — who is Keith Gill, 34, a former financial educator for an insurance firm in Massachusetts — has now become a central figure in this week’s stock market frenzy. Inspired by him and a small crew of individual investors who gathered around him, hordes of young online traders took GameStop’s stock on a wild ride, pitting themselves against sophisticated hedge funds and upending Wall Street’s norms in the process.
Their actions — pushing up GameStop’s price by buying so-called options contracts that offer a cheap way to bet on a stock’s direction — have shocked established investors because Mr. Gill and his online comrades are the antithesis of the Wall Street titans who have long ruled the stock market.
Any approach to moving forward must reckon with the fact that one of this country's two major parties is no longer committed to multiracial democracy.
"Biden should fire the governors of the USPS who appointed DeJoy, install new ones, and have them fire DeJoy. He should not be allowed to continue destroying the Postal Service."
At some point you have to wonder whether the bigger danger was the Capitol insurrection or the pusillanimous GOP reaction to it.
"Dear centrist Democrats, you couldn't even get 10 GOP votes to convict the guy who sent a mob to kill you all. You think you can get them to vote on issues like immigration/climate? Come on," said one progressive activist.
Congress is moving ahead with Biden’s American Rescue Plan, which expands health care and unemployment benefits, and contains one of the most ambitious efforts to reduce child poverty since the New Deal. Right behind it is Biden’s plan for infrastructure and jobs.
Trials without witnesses are not genuine trials.
The real reasons he was a shameful Secretary of State, and how Antony Blinken can do better.
Saturday afternoon, 43 GOP senators betrayed both their oath of office and, more particularly, the oath that they swore to impartially hear and judge the evidence presented in Donald Trump’s impeachment trial. They cavalierly discarded that evidence, laid out so meticulously by Representative Jamie Raskin and his eight fellow House managers, and they voted to acquit Trump even though the vast majority of them surely knew—and likely would have admitted in private—that he was guilty as sin.
Alphabet Inc.-owned Google and Facebook oppose planned Australian legislation forcing them to pay media companies for news, and Google has threatened to shut down its search engine if the law is enacted. Parliament will consider the legislation from this week, giving the internet giants an incentive to agree compensation terms for news companies before the law is passed.
The Federal Government appears to be trying to remove the need for passing the news media code legislation by encouraging, and helping, media companies to join up to Google News Showcase.
The Federal Government is likely to give Google and Facebook a major concession before it puts its news media code legislation up for a vote, with a clause that says the two companies do not have to cut deals with publishers under the law if they can convince them to sign up to their news products.
However, industry sources, who requested anonymity to speak about the confidential discussions, said the government had indicated it was prepared to hold off on the designation process to give the tech giants more time to sign commercial agreements through their respective products: Google News Showcase and Facebook News. Google and Facebook would prefer these products to be allocated instead of search and newsfeed.
A separate new law implements Article 17 DSM Directive and regulates the copyright responsibility of upload platforms. It also contains provisions on user rights and on remuneration claims of creators for uses on platforms (Copyright Service Provider Act [UrhDaG-E], Article 3 of the draft).
The systemic abuses of ICE make communities less safe—especially when they act in tandem with law enforcement through programs like 287(g), ICE detainers, and Secure Communities.
Once I saw the connection between domestic and international injustices of our societies and capitalism, I found myself awoken after years of sleeping in the belly of the beast.
There is still a lot of work to do, of course. There is a lot of pain out there. But it feels so good to be hopeful.
Drivers employed by courier companies to deliver Amazon goods are taking home as little as TWO pounds an hour, whistleblowers claim.
Sub-contractors working for the tech giant are said to be pushing them to deliver up to 250 parcels a shift.
But at the end of the day some self-employed couriers say they effectively take home less than the minimum wage after paying for van hire, fuel and other deductions.
Now unions have accused the internet giant of turning a blind eye to alleged “slave labour” working conditions.
It was being caught smoking at the age of ten that Hannah says led to seven years of terrifying abuse by a grooming gang - including four relatives.
UNICEF Programme Officer, National Orientation Agency (NOA), Imo State chapter, Chigozie Ojiaku has disclosed that about 58.1 percent of girls and women between the ages of 15 and 49 are at great risk of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Imo State.
He stated this while addressing students of the Mother of Mercy Convent, Umunakanu-Owerri in the Ehime Mbano LGA of the state.
It’s certainly good for Epstein that his ad worked, especially given how much it cost. But it’s been estimated that there are millions of Americans who don’t have access to any access to home internet at all, let alone broadband (which itself is arguably not fast enough), and they can’t all afford ads in the WSJ. Besides, that certainly seems like a trick that would only work once, especially given that it may only work for one household at a time — Ars Technica wasn’t able to get a straight answer about whether Epstein’s neighbors would be getting faster service anytime soon.
This new petition asks the Supreme Court to chime-in on the judicially created doctrine of obviousness-type double-patenting. The basic rule is that it is improper for a patent owner to extend the term of a first patent by simply obtaining a second patent that is an obvious extension. You might ask – why do we need a separate double patenting doctrine here? Doesn’t Section 103 obviousness do the trick already?
Evergreening via continuation used to be much more of a potential problem in days of yore when the 17-year patent term only began running at the the patent issue date. This would allow a patentee to receive a first patent in a family, and then receive a second patent extending out the patent term. And, that result was seen as an abuse of the system. The obviousness doctrine did not work for this situation because the first patent filing was not prior art to the second filing. Rather, obviousness-type-double-patenting and resulting requirement of terminal disclaimers were the solution.
Although the change in patent term has reduced the potential dramatic impact of term extension via double patenting, the prior art exclusions under 102(b)(2) and generous patent term adjustments for PTO delays maintain a steady demand for the principle.
In Sandoz, the patentee (Immunex) is attempting to extend its patent term with an arguably obvious innovation, but in a bit of a different way. The second patent is not a continuation or even a creation of the patentee. In addition, the second patent was not even one purchased or owned by the patentee. Rather, Immunex exclusively licensed the second patent from Roche. In its decision, the Federal Circuit held that obviousness type double patenting did not apply against Immunex because the company did not own both patents and did not even hold all-substantial-rights since Roche retained a “secondary right to sue” infringers. To be clear on this, the license appears to have been specifically designed to thwart an obviousness-type-double-patenting challenge.
Just over a year ago, the burgeoning COVID-19 pandemic prompted an unprecedented extension of all deadlines at the EPO (OJ EPO 2020, A29) (IPKat). Subsequent announcements in the official journal (OJ) eventually extended all deadlines to June 2020. A recently published Board of Appeal decision (J 10/20) is the first to consider the legal basis and effect of these extensions.
The case in question involved a series of missed deadlines dating back to 2018, the last of which fell within the period of the COVID-19 extensions. In the decision, the Board of Appeal (BA) is characteristically strict on the deadlines pre-dating the pandemic, but accepted the use of the COVID-19 extension period for the final deadline. An interesting aspect of the decision is the consideration given by the BA to the legal justification for the COVID-19 extension. Reassuringly however, the BA concluded that regardless of how the extensions were legally justified, a user of the EPO should not be penalised without good reason for relying on notices published by the EPO itself.
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The extraordinary measures taken by the EPO during the course of the COVID-19 pandemic have been criticised for not being explicitly allowed or provided for by the EPC (see, for example, the comments on IPKat here regarding ViCo oral proceedings). The reasoning of the Board of Appeal in J 10/20 seems to suggest that the COVID-19 related extensions of 2020 could possibly be accused of not having legal basis in Rule 134(2) EPC (although the BA pointedly leaves the question open). However, this Kat would be surprised if there were many who would argue that justice would have been best served by the EPO not providing the extension, just because the general chaos at the start of the pandemic did not necessarily include "a general disruption of mail". Regardless of the merits or otherwise of these arguments users of the EPO can be reassured that, at the very least, the EPO considers itself legally bound by its own announcements.
For the second time, I will have the pleasure and the Honor of welcoming Professor Anne-Catherine Chriariny. Professor Chiariny teaches Patent Law and International Private Law at the University of Montpellier. She is notably the author of a famous doctoral thesis on international patent litigation awarded by the Prix Pierre Véron and published in 2006 and the Prix Montesquieu in 2007 (you can order it here) and has kindly accepted to offer us two brief lectures on issues relating to FRAND litigation in an global context: which Judge can fix a global rate (Part 1)? Which judge can order a cross-border injunction (Part 2)?
Professor Chiariny, who answered to the first question two weeks ago, will address today the second one. Although the issue is less topical than the one dealt with the week before, the cross-border injunction is nonetheless a fundamental and recurrent question in FRAND litigation. Often the Netherlands, known for this practice, is considered as its preferred field (see recently here for instance). We will see hereafter that however this strategy is not specific to the “other cheese country” and can prosper just as well in the other countries of the European Union.
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On the other hand, the effectiveness of a judgment given under a national rule of international jurisdiction – in particular by the French court which would have jurisdiction because of the existence of infringing acts in France – against a defendant domiciled in a non-EU Member State will be more uncertain, especially if the latter were to be executed in this state requiring compliance with his exequatur procedure . Moreover, the practice of anti-suit injunctions, which is common in Common Law countries, is likely to seriously delay the resolution of the dispute. However, such a practice cannot be formulated within the European Union since the Turner judgment[11], under the principle of mutual trust. Note that since Brexit, British courts have regained their freedom to accommodate these anti-suit injunctions. Hence the development of anti-suit and anti-anti-suit[12]… which will not be able to appease the numerous judicial battles in this area.”
Eventually, in the light of Professor Chiariny’s analysis, one conclusion clearly emerges: contrary to popular belief, cross-border injunctions is not exclusive to the Netherlands and is no less conceivable in other European countries.
The draft EPO Guidelines for Examination for 2021 (coming into force on 1 March 2021) have been released and can be read here. A controversial update to the guidelines this year is the new section on amending the description. The new guidelines also include changes reflecting the new norm of Examining Division oral proceedings by video conference, as well as new sections on antibodies and sequence identity that will be of particular interest to biotech attorneys.
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It is becoming increasingly apparent that the EPO considers oral proceedings by video conferencing (ViCo) to be the new norm, at least during Examination (IPKat: The inexorable rise of EPO oral proceedings by video conference). The default to ViCo oral proceedings in the Examining Division is now made explicit in the guidelines, with the new guidelines specifying that "[a]s a rule, oral proceedings in examination proceedings are held by videoconference" (C-VII-5 and E-III-1). Oral proceedings may be held on the EPO premises only if there are "serious reasons" for doing so. Serious reasons include, for example, a proven visual impairment of a representative. Serious reasons do not include "sweeping objections against the reliability of videoconferencing technology".
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The draft 2021 guidelines also include a heavily amended section on Examiner interviews (C-VII-2.1). Previously, telephone consultations with the Examiner were permitted during Examination. These procedures have now been formalised as "consultations", to preferably be held by video-conferencing. The new guidelines also include example situations that might prompt such a consultation, including enquiries about the processing of a file, errors in an official communication and clarification of minor issues.
Senior Party Toolgen and Junior Parties The Broad Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University (collectively, "Broad") in Interference No. 106,126 and University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") in Interference No. 106,127 each filed Lists of Proposed Motions that the Board considered recently and responsive thereto will issue its rulings shortly (see "The CRISPR Chronicles: Enter Toolgen"). The Broad list will be the subject of this post.
Open Invention Network (OIN), the organization formed to safeguard open source software (OSS) and now the largest patent non-aggression community in history, announced today that TD Bank Group (TD) has joined as a community member. Offering a full range of financial products and services to more than 26 million customers worldwide, TD is focused on constantly improving its operating platforms, and frequently uses OSS to do so. By joining OIN, TD is demonstrating its commitment to patent non-aggression in OSS.
“The financial services and fintech industries are increasingly relying on open source technologies for building and integrating feature-rich platforms,” said Keith Bergelt, CEO of Open Invention Network. “As the first major North American bank to join our community, we are pleased that an established leader like TD is committed to patent non-aggression in core Linux and adjacent open source technologies.”
“We remain focused on leveraging the best technologies for our platforms and are excited to join the Open Invention Network (OIN), that supports protection from patent infringement claims for the greater good of the wider innovation community,” said Josh Death, Intellectual Property and Patentable Innovations Lead at TD.
OIN’s community practices patent non-aggression in core Linux and adjacent OSS technologies by cross-licensing Linux System patents to one another on a royalty-free basis. Patents owned by OIN are similarly licensed royalty-free to any organization that agrees not to assert its patents against the Linux System.
When it comes to defending the intellectual property (IP) rights of Linux and open-source software, global leading banks aren't the first businesses to come to mind. Things have changed. Barclays, the London-based global corporate and investment bank, and the TD Bank Group, with its 26-million global customers, have joined the leading open-source IP defense group, the Open Invention Network (OIN)
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The sheer number of patent infringement suits filed by patent trolls has continued to grow over the past several years. Changes in legal precedent and the economic effects of the global pandemic appear to have further fanned the flames of the patent troll threat. Left unaddressed, the practice of asserting questionable patents diverts companies' resources away from Innovation to costly defenses again trolls.
Besides joining the OIN, Barclay is also joining the LOT Network. This is another fast-growing nonprofit group of companies that aims to stop patent trolls in their tracks. It has over 1,100 member companies and covers over 2 million patent assets.
Lee Braine, Barclays's Managing Director and CTO said in a statement: "By fostering a culture of innovation across the financial services ecosystem, we can help protect our future and better serve our clients. Spurious claims from PAEs to divert resources and investment away from true innovation and collaboration. We also recognize that a modern approach to technology development and innovation requires a level playing field around the use of open-source software. With membership of LOT and OIN, we are pleased to contribute to and extend the growing global community working together to prevent the PAE threat and remove barriers to use of open-source technologies."
For his first ad campaign at the helm of Givenchy, Matthew Williams asked Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Playboi Carti, Anok Yai, and Liam Powers to “style themselves,” with the creative director telling WWD that his “ethos is about the luxury of infusing clothes with your own personality, not being worn by them.” Hence, the subjects’ widely-reported self-styling of Givenchy’s Spring/Summer collection in the Heji Shin-lensed campaign, which aimed to elicit fashion editorials of the 1990s.
Having models-as-stylists appears to have been more a creative choice by Williams than a COVID-19 restriction. However, this comes as brands have had to get creative in recent months as a result of pandemic-imposed challenges. In an April editorial spread for Vogue Italia, for instance, supermodel Bella Hadid posed in front of a white wall and doorway in strappy DSquared2 sandals, a camouflage-meets-animal print jacket, and itty-bitty bikini briefs, with a single prop in hand – err mouth: a blue balloon. The magazine spread had – quite notably – been shot via FaceTime, as models, designers, stylists, photographers, makeup artists, and all of the various essential assistants were shut-in at home due to the pandemic.
TheFashionLaw blog addressed an interesting question of copyright ownership in fashion campaigns, which, due to the pandemic, are increasingly being shot through FaceTime, often by the models themselves, under the direction of a photographer who guides the shooting remotely. The blog looks at this recent trend of “models-as-authors” against the background of existing US caselaw on joint authorship
Consistently with that, in October 2020 the government published post-transition guidance, stating that it "has no current plans to change the UK’s intermediary liability regime or its approach to prohibition on general monitoring requirements". Articles 12 to 14 provide limitations on the liability of conduits, caches and hosts for unlawful user information. Article 15 prohibits EU member states from imposing general monitoring obligations on those intermediaries. Whether and how long the government’s commitment to Articles 12 to 15 would survive was an open question. With nothing said in the UK-EU Trade and Co-Operation Agreement about online intermediary liability, there appeared to be nothing to prevent the government – should it wish to depart from its previous policy – from legislating in future contrary to Articles 12 to 15 - subject always to the possibility of a legal objection on fundamental rights grounds.
There was a detectable drift away from the overt commitment to Article 15 with the publication of the government’s Full Consultation Response to the Online Harms White Paper, published on 15 December 2020. The Response strayed into proposing proactive monitoring obligations that could not readily be reconciled with that policy. That drift was also evident in the simultaneously published Interim Voluntary Codes of Practice on Terrorism, and Online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse, which are in effect a template for obligations likely to be imposed under the future Online Safety Bill. The Full Response was silent on the apparent conflict with Article 15.
In a judgment of 7 October 2020, the French Supreme Court upheld the judgment of the Court of Appeal of Paris of 13 April 2018 that ruled that Knoll’s ‘Tulip’ chair is not protected by copyright in France. Under the reciprocity rule set out in Article 2(7) of the Berne Convention on works of applied art, the Court of Appeal sovereignly found that the famous Tulip chair is not eligible for copyright protection under the national law of the country of origin, i.e. US law, and therefore is not eligible for copyright protection in France. This rule of conflict is rarely used, which makes this case all the more interesting.
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Article 2(7) of the Berne Convention therefore departs from the general system of national treatment set out in Article 5(1) of the Convention (i.e., equal treatment for foreign rightholders from a country of the Union), as it contains a rule of reciprocity under which a country of the Union grants national treatment only if the country of origin of the work also does so. Thus, there is a possible conflict between Article 2(7) of the Berne Convention and Article 18 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, which establishes a principle of non-discrimination on grounds of nationality. In Tod’s, a 2015 case in which the defendant had raised a plea of inadmissibility under Article 2(7) of the Berne Convention, contending that the Italian shoemaker Tod’s is not entitled to claim copyright protection in France for designs of shoes that do not qualify for such protection in Italy, the European Court of Justice ruled that Article 12 EC (which has become Article 18 of the TFEU) must be interpreted as meaning that the right of an author to claim in a Member State the copyright protection afforded by the law of that State may not be subject to a distinguishing criterion based on the country of origin of the work.
DISH Network has secured a patent for a next-generation anti-piracy management system that's built around a blockchain. The company envisions a universal and scalable solution that can be used by copyright holders and websites around the world. It's not only cheaper but also more efficient than current anti-piracy options, DISH promises.
If there's one thing you could change in US copyright law, what would it be? Bill Patry, Senior Copyright Counsel at Google, says he would revise the current system where copyright holders can demand up to $150,000 in statutory damages, as it enables a copyright troll industry. At the same time, the seasoned lawyer warns that copyright trolls will exploit the new CASE Act too.