The ability to be flexible is a must-have characteristic for working in any field.
Whether you’re in a technical or creative field, being able to adapt and evolve is a key component to increasing your productivity and your overall success.
Which is why it makes sense that you’d want your computer’s operating system to have the same characteristic. This is where Linux fits in.
System76 today introduced the Thelio Mira as their nwest desktop computer offering that is sized between the Thelio and Thelio Major while still packing quite a bit of compute potential.
Today, we introduce you to the newest addition to our Thelio desktop line: Thelio Mira. Our in-house engineers have been hard at work creating this pro solution for you, so without further ado, let’s get into the things we love about our new desktop:
A Chimera of Size and Performance
One day, we wondered, “What if expanded Thelio to support more memory and more powerful GPUs?” Our in-house science team quickly got to work, splicing the compact genes of Thelio and the performant genes of Thelio Major. Then they removed the extra limbs, and presto! Thelio Mira was born. This happy little test tube baby is configurable with 4th Gen AMD Ryzen CPUs, PCIe 4.0 NVMe storage, and up to 128GB of RAM.
Tuxedo Computers, a Schenker / XMG subsidiary from Germany, is now offering its latest Linux-powered laptops with Intel CPUs and Nvidia RTX 3000 GPUs. The new Book XP15 and XP17 models could have benefitted from some AMD Ryzen 5000H APUs, but the available Intel Comet Lake-H CPU options are still a solid choice, although a bit pricier than we would like.
Both 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch models come with largely similar specs, except for some screen options. Even the chassis weigh ~1.99 Kg (including battery) on both models. Here is a list with the shared specs...
In this video, we are looking at how to install OBS Studio on Linux Mint 20.1.
Yakuake is a great little terminal emulator for KDE Plasma. It is inspired by the drop-down terminal used in the Quake game. Yakuake has some nice features including tabs, keyboard shortcuts, scripting capabilities and configuration options.
AwesomeWM has a lot of really neat addons that people have made over time and today we're looking at one of those Awesome collision which adds in visual indicators to show where key movements will take you.
The 5.12 merge window closed with the release of 5.12-rc1 on February 28; this released followed the normal schedule despite the fact that Linus Torvalds had been without power for the first six days after 5.11 came out. At that point, 10,886 non-merge changesets had found their way into the mainline repository; about 2,000 of those showed up after the first-half merge-window summary was written. The pace of merging obviously slowed down, but there were still a number of interesting features to be found in those patches.
The first article in this series provided an introduction to lockless algorithms and the happens before relationship that allows us to reason about them. The next step is to look at the concept of a "data race" and the primitives that exist to prevent data races. We continue in that direction with a look at relaxed accesses, memory barriers, and how they can be used to implement the kernel's seqcount mechanism. Memory barriers are an old acquaintance for some Linux kernel programmers. The first document vaguely resembling a specification of what one could expect from concurrent accesses to data in the kernel is, in fact, called memory-barriers.txt. That document describes many kinds of memory barriers, along with the expectations that Linux has concerning the properties of data and control dependencies. It also describes "memory-barrier pairing"; this could be seen as a cousin of release-acquire pairing, in that it also helps creating cross-thread happens before edges.
This article will not go into the same excruciating detail as memory-barriers.txt. Instead, we'll look at how barriers compare with the acquire and release model and how they simplify or enable the implementation of the seqcount primitive. Nevertheless, one article will not be enough to cover even the most common memory-barrier patterns, so full memory barriers will have to wait for the next installment.
Using RAID is a very good idea. Not because it is the same as having a backup, it isn't. RAID is a good idea because it saves downtime. If one drive fails in a RAID6 array created with mdadm then you're good until a second drive dies and you can simply order a replacement. And there won't be any downtime when the replacement arrives, you can use a RAID6 array normally while it is rebuilding. If a single drive fails and you happen to have a recent backup then you're without a drive while you wait for a replacement and you'll have to restore the contents of it from backup when the replacement arrives. This is why it is a good idea to have everything in a RAID setup.
RAID1, a RAID mode that mirrors two drives, is a good solution for root file systems where binaries and libraries are stored. RAID6 is a good solution for storage drives if you happen to have 5 or more. RAID5 shouldn't really be used by anyone, ever, unless you have 3 identical disks and you can't afford two more (or your motherboard or case limits the number of drives you can have).
Last week Intel wired up Gallium3D threaded context support to their "Iris" OpenGL driver for yielding some sizable performance improvements. Now the Freedreno driver for Qualcomm Adreno hardware has hooked into the threaded context support as well.
The Freedreno Gallium3D driver now supports threaded contexts (u_threaded_contexts) as well for helping with performance with this open-source Qualcomm Adreno GL/GLES driver.
Intel sent out their latest open-source Linux driver patches today for their new "XE_LPD" display architecture that will be found with upcoming hardware platforms. XE_LPD features "version 13" display capabilities but not to be confused with "Gen13" graphics as they are beginning to more segregate their different Intel GPU IP blocks.
The Intel "XE_LPD" patches are for their next-gen display architecture, also referred to as version 13 of their display IP. XE_LPD is an evolutionary advancement over Tiger Lake / Rocket Lake / DG1 / Alder Lake. The kernel code sent out today isn't tied to a particular platform at this time but is preparing the Linux driver from the display side for handling this new architecture.
These XE_LPD patches are what in their initial form back in January were first referred to as Intel's "Display13" bring-up while now is carrying the XE_LPD references.
Coming more than a year after the Mesa 20.0 series, the Mesa 21.0 release introduces many cool features to the Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV), including support for the VK_VALVE_mutable_descriptor_type and VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate (RDNA2 only) Vulkan extensions, sparse memory support, and rapid packed math (16bit-vectorization).
Collabora’s Panfrost graphics driver (including Bifrost) for Mali GPUs also received OpenGL 3.1 support for Mali T760+ GPUs, as well as OpenGL ES 3.0 support on Mali G31, G52, and G72 GPUs.
Hi List,
It's finally here, Mesa 21.0.0! And there was much rejoicing. There is a lot in here since 21.0.0-rc5, and I'm a bit short on time ATM so I'm not going to go over all of it, but it's in the release notes.
Expect releases on a regular cadance from here on out.
Cheers, Dylan
git tag: mesa-21.0.0
Mesa 21.0 has many additions especially on the Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver front where sparse memory support is in place, AMD Smart Access Memory / Resizable BAR optimizations, various RDNA 2 improvements, rapid packed math for ACO, and more.
After much waiting, the latest release of the Mesa graphics stack is out now with tons of improvements to lots of drivers for Linux users and for Linux gaming. The release announcement was very brief and to the point, mentioning to expect regular releases back on schedule from here on out.
Like each new release the developers mention that if you want stability you should stick with the previous release, or wait for the first point release to clear up anything that slipped through. Mesa 21.0.1 should be out in a couple of weeks.
Mesa 21.0 has released as a major update with improvements to the open-source implementation of OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems.
Even though this is a development release and not intended for general use, there are significant improvements to talk about. If you’re hoping for stability, you might want to wait for Mesa 21.0.1 release.
The announcement does not mention any key highlights, but I’ve compiled some important changes from their release notes.
I've mentioned fzf a few times in the articles on Linux Uprising, but I've never actually written about it. fzf has been part of my workflow for a long time, and is an amazing tool which you should know about.
I realize many of you are already using fzf, but for those who don't, this article is for you. This is just a simple introduction to fzf, without going too much into details. The fzf project page and wiki provide extensive information about fzf, its usage, as well as many examples, so check those out for more information.
fzf is a fast, interactive command-line fuzzy finder written in Go. The tool is available for Linux, macOS, *BSD and Windows.
It can be used manually or in scripts by parsing the output of a command, using Shell extensions (which include fuzzy auto-completion for Bash and Zsh, as well as key bindings like CTRL-T, CTRL-R and ALT-C for Bash, Zsh and Fish), and as a Vim / Neovim plugin. There's also a Tmux script for launching fzf in a Tmux pane.
Don’t unpack your excitement just yet: this is an alpha release, and we’re only taking about a command line client not a full-blown user-interface extravaganza.
Now, at first I was a bit: “is this news?”. I’ve memories of playing around with p7zip in the past. But that client, reader’s tell me, isn’t quite same thing. While it supports the .7z format it isn’t an official upstream thing. This build is that: the first official native version of 7-Zip for Linux.
Linux is not exactly short of tools that do (mostly) the same job as 7-Zip. But more choice is rarely a bad thing. 7-Zip is a fairly well-known app on the Windows scene, so having it available (in some form) on Linux could persuade some reticent Windows users to switch.
An official version of the popular 7-zip archiving program has been released for Linux for the first time.
Linux already had support for the 7-zip archive file format through a POSIX port called p7zip but it was maintained by a different developer.
As the p7zip developer has not maintained their project for 4-5 years, 7-Zip developer Igor Pavlov decided to create a new official Linux version based on the latest 7-Zip source code.
7-Zip is a popular, powerful, and versatile file archive utility that you can use to compress or decompress files and folders. The free and open source software is something of a Swiss Army Knife utility, able to open ZIP, gzip, tar, and RAR files, along with a many others. You can also use its 7z file compression format.
The first version of 7-zip was released in 1999, and in recent years the developer has taken to releasing a new version with additional features and performance improvements about once a year.
While there has been 7-Zip file support on Linux via the p7zip project, the upstream 7-Zip 21.01 Alpha release has finally introduced native Linux support.
Igor Pavlov announced the availability this week of 7-Zip for Linux -- the first "official" 7-Zip port to Linux and similar to the p7zip implementation.
This command-line-only Linux version was announced as part of 7-Zip 21.01 Alpha. That alpha release also improves 7-Zip's 64-bit ARM support, provides a number of bug fixes, and more.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Guacamole on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Guacamole is a free, open-source HTML5 web-based remote desktop gateway developed by the Apache software foundation. It supports standard protocols like VNC, RDP, and SSH.
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 install of the Apache Guacamole on CentOS 8.
Android games are becoming more and more complex, to the point where today’s mobile games rival PC games from 5 years ago.
However, there are still plenty of users out there that don’t like mobile gaming, either because they hate looking at a small screen, or because mobile gaming kills your battery’s life expectancy.
Whichever the cause, those of you that still love the titles but not the console can always use an Android emulator as a compromise, such as Bluestacks.
7zip is a wildly popular Windows program that is used to create archives. By default it uses 7z format which it claims is 30-70% better than the normal zip format. It also claims to compress to the regular zip format 2-10% more effectively than other zip compatible programs. It supports a wide variety of archive formats including (but not limited to) zip, gzip, bzip2, tar, and rar. Linux has had p7zip for a long time. However, this is the first time 7Zip developers have provided native Linux support.
In a Linux environment, there are scenarios when multiple users are working on the server simultaneously through SSH. However, sometimes system admin needs to restart or shut down the system due to e.g. system maintenance, kernel upgrade, adding or removing hardware from the server. If this is the case, the system admin should inform all logged-in users to save their work. Email does not fit in this situation, as you first have to find out who is logged in and then sending emails to them. Also, you do not know when the user will read the email. Luckily, there is a Linux command “wall” that allows you to do this easily.
Here, we are going to describe the usage of wall command in Linux. Remember, the wall command works the same for all Linux distributions.
Note: Wall command only displays the message on the Terminal window of logged-in users. Users working only on GUI, with no Terminal window open will not be able to see the messages.
Perl is abbreviated for Practical Extraction and Reporting Language that is a well-known and powerful language for String Processing and handling. It is a web scripting language that can be used along with different web frameworks and the latest technologies. Mostly the Perl used for server-side scripting but, it can also be used to front-end interface programming languages like HTML with the backend in the Database application. It is fast and robust so, it can interact with many other programming languages on different platforms.In this article, we will talk about the best steps to install Perl language and how we can create and run the Perl script through the command line on Ubuntu 20.04.
When you delete a file in Linux, it is not immediately deleted from the system. Instead, it is moved to the Trash in case you need to restore it. Trash is the first place where you look for the accidentally deleted files. Because the file is not removed from the system, it continues to take space on the system and in the end, can fill up large storage space. Although we can empty the trash manually to avoid wasting system space, however, we often forgot to do such a simple task. Luckily, Linux OS offers a utility known as “Autotrash” that can automatically delete the data in the Trash based on the options you specify.
In this post, we will explain how to install the Autotrash utility to automatically empty the trash in Ubuntu. This way you can get rid of old and useless files and make room for important files.
While working with computer systems, sometimes you might require multiple IP addresses on your physical machine. One of the solutions is to have multiple NICs installed on your system. However, it is not practical to buy a new NIC and plug it in your system when you have the option to assign multiple IP addresses to a single NIC which is referred to as IP Aliasing. The common use case of IP aliasing is the implementation of IP based virtual hosting.
In this post, we will be demonstrating you how to assign multiple IP addresses to a single NIC in Ubuntu OS. We will be demonstrating the procedure on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa).
Google Hangouts is a famous communication app to send messages, share content like files, pictures, and videos. The screen sharing and video call options in this application make it popular among its users. The application can be installed on all operating systems and is also available on mobile phones. To make phone calls, users might need to buy monthly packages. In this tutorial, we will set up and install the YakYak Google Hangouts client on an Ubuntu 20.04 system.
If you do not want others to have access to your data, then encryption is essential. When you encrypt your sensitive data, unauthorized persons cannot easily get to it. This how-to guide focuses on the installation and basic usage of Veracrypt disk encryption software on Ubuntu Linux. Veracrypt is an open-source software and it is free.
Users are the most important component in a Linux system. Linux provides built-in commands to the administrators that allow them to manage users efficiently. There's one for creating users, deleting users, and changing user permissions. But what about listing all the users that are currently present on a system?
In this article, we will discuss how you can get a list of all the users in Linux, along with a brief guide to check whether a user exists on a system or not.
The Linux head command reads and prints the first N lines to standard output. By default, it prints out the first 10 lines. However, this can be modified by passing additional arguments on the command-line. The ‘head’ command is the opposite of the ‘tail’ command that prints out the last N lines of a given file. In this guide, we focus on the Linux head command and feature a few use cases of the command.
The Central Processing Unit, shortly CPU, is the most important component of a Computer. CPU is also called as microprocessor or simply processor. Just like how the brain controls a human body, the CPU controls all the parts of a Computer. Hence, CPU is considered as the brain of a Computer. You may know the basic details of your processor like Intel Core i3, i5, AMD etc. But what about the other details such as processor speed, number of cores, architecture, cache size and so on? In this guide, we will discuss all the possible ways to find CPU information in Linux using various command line tools as well as graphical tools.
Private IP addresses are used to communicate inside a local network. Private IP addresses cannot be routed and hence no traffic can be sent to them from the external network. There may come a time when you need to know the private IP address of your system like to setup a network-related application, to enable remote administration, or for troubleshooting, etc. In our previous posts, we have shared with you some ways to find the private IP address in Ubuntu and Debian OS.
In this post, we will describe some methods to find the private IP address in CentOS8. These methods involve both the command line and GUI based methods.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MariaDB on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, MariaDB is a free and open-source relational database management system (DBMS) that is considered as a successor and replacement of MySQL DBMS. This DBMS is available for all three major operating systems i.e. Linux, macOS, and Windows.
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 the MariaDB database on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
The Monica personal CRM is an organized and personalized customer relationship management system for those who maintain a busy life and can’t remember the small life events. The Monica personal relationship management tool can remember the events on your behalf and remind you when the date arrives. You can install the Monica personal relationship management tool on your Ubuntu Linux system to organize your thoughts, notes, to-do list, and other activities.
I must mention, if you’re a fan of the TV show, you probably already guessed that the name Monica might be taken from the tv show F.R.I.E.N.D.S., where we all liked Monica, and we all know how clean and organized she was.
Odoo (formerly known as OpenERP) is a self-hosted suite of over 10,000 open source applications suited for a variety of business needs including CRM, eCommerce, accounting, inventory, project management and point of sale. These applications are fully integrated and accessed through a common web interface.
In this tutorial, we will learn to install Odoo 14 Stack on a Ubuntu 20.04 based server.
Terraform is a well-known Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) platform. Terraform makes it easy to create and provision full-fledged data center infrastructures by using the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). This article shows you how to install Terraform on Ubuntu 20.04.
Ping is a network administration utility that is used to test the availability of a system on an IP network. Ping is also used to test the quality of the network connection by monitoring the round trip time and packet losses. On the other hand, network intruders and hackers also use ping to identify network subnets to find potential hosts or to perform ICMP flood attacks. Therefore, it is a good practice to block ping requests to your servers to prevent any kind of attack.
This article is about how to block ping requests to Linux Server. We will also describe how to unblock the ping requests in case you need to use ping for system administration and troubleshooting.
If you want to install AlmaLinux on Desktop PC, Laptop, or Server hardware, then using a bootable USB drive will be a great idea.
There are dozens of ways to create a bootable Linux USB drive using various free software such as Rufus, Unetbootin, BalenaEtcher, and more. One of the best bootable Linux USB creators is Ethcer because of easy to use interface and availability for Windows, Linux, and macOS platforms. And here we will show how to use the same for making an AlmaLinux 8 bootable Flash drive.
Perl scripts are yet another powerful method of executing complex programs with a very minimal effort. The people who have a good know-how of programming in C and C++ get along with Perl very nicely because of its close resemblance to these languages. In this article, we will teach you the method of creating your first Perl script and running it in Debian 10.
In this tutorial, I demonstrate how and where to install Ansible collections in an Ansible control node that has no internet access. The process is simple and straightforward, but some users are confused with the installation location and configuration.
HAproxy is an open-source and lightweight package that offers high availability and load balancing for TCP and HTTP based programs. It distributes the load among the web and application servers. HAproxy is available for nearly all Linux distributions. It is a widely used load balancer that is popular for its efficiency, reliability, and low memory and CPU footprint. In this post, we will explain how to install and configure HAproxy on a Ubuntu system.
We have setup three machines. We will install HAproxy on one server and the Apache web servers on two servers. Our HAproxy server will then act as a load balancer and will distribute the load among Apache web servers.
Note: The procedure and commands mentioned in this post has been tested on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa). The same procedure is also valid for Debian and Mint distributions.
Docker is not a new term, this virtualization platform is popular for its ability to run applications in Containers. We can build and communicate containers with one on another. Here we learn how to install the Docker CE platform on AlmaLinux 8 to create containerized virtual machines.
The key difference between normal virtual machines we run such as on VirtualBox is that in Docker not every container has to bring a complete operating system. For instance, you want to install and run Ubuntu 20.04 Server virtually but with a very minimalistic approach, I mean only core files that you need to run this server OS because, on Docker, the Containers are going to share the same kernel. This makes us start multiple containers with different applications such as Apache web server, MySQL, etc. without asserting extra stress on the system hardware resources. Whereas in a normal Virtual Machine or hypervisor we install a complete Guest with the full-blown kernel that means, if we want to separate the webserver from the database server, we would have to start two complete virtual machines including the operating system. In Docker, these are simply two independent containers that start the respective servers.
Zimbra Collaboration Suite is open-source software that includes the Zimbra LDAP server, MTA (Mail Transfer Agent), and Zimbra mailbox server. It also provides you with a web-based administration panel that can be used to manage the domain and accounts. Zimbra collaboration software can run on various OS platforms including Red Hat, Ubuntu, CentOS, etc. In an earlier post, we have explained the installation of Zimbra Collaboration in Ubuntu. In today’s post, we will be going to explain how to install Zimbra Collaboration Suite on CentOS 8 system.
I use a few Windows applications I installed via WINE in my user account on my family’s desktop machine running Lubuntu 20.10 (LXQt Desktop Environment). A few days ago I logged in and found that the icons for the Windows applications had disappeared from my Desktop, and the ‘Wine’ entry in the LXQt applications menu had also disappeared. This was rather bizarre and I still have no idea why it happened. However, the directories for each WINEPREFIX were still present so I set about recreating the missing menu entries and Desktop Configuration Files. I reinstalled one of the Windows applications, and its icon reappeared on my Desktop but the ‘Wine’ entry in the LXQt applications menu did not reappear. I had to delve into WINE menu structures to fix everything.
Let’s face it! It’s far too easy to send an email to an unintended person. Not only can this cause a compliance breach, but it will also impact your reputation. This post will give you tips on how to avoid sending emails to the wrong person.
You cannot solely rely on “recall” in Outlook. Recall only works if the original message was unread and the organization allows recalls. If the message has been viewed, then the recipient will receive a request that you want to recall the message. It will then be up to the recipient to delete the original themselves.
You probably know by now that Kubernetes is a powerful platform – but it needs other tools to make it even better. Ingress Controllers fall into that category, and if you’ve been using Kubernetes, you’re probably quite familiar with them. But here’s a quick refresher on Ingress and Ingress controllers.
By design, Kubernetes pods can be accessed only by other pods within the cluster – not from the external network. Ingress is Kubernetes’ builtââ¬âin configuration for HTTP load balancing that defines rules for external connectivity. When you need to provide external access to your Kubernetes services, you create an Ingress resource that defines rules, including the URI path, backing service name, and other information. Then you use an Ingress controller to automatically program a frontââ¬âend load balancer to enable Ingress configuration.
NGINX Ingress Controller from NGINX (now part of F5) provides enterprise-grade delivery services for Kubernetes applications. In this blog, we’ll explore the integration of NGINX Ingress Controller with the Rancher Apps and Marketplace. But before we jump into the blog, let’s talk about which NGINX Ingress Controller you may be using.
So in this follow-up article, we review four (as listed below) Hyperledger libraries that work very well with other Hyperledger DLTs. As of this writing, all of these libraries are at the incubation stage except for Hyperledger Aries, which has graduated to active.
Linux admins have a love affair with information. The more information they can gather the better. And that’s a good thing, as the more informed you are, the more apt you’ll be to make smart decisions. This applies to administration tasks, security, development, and just about anything else you can imagine.
Did you connect an SSD to your Raspberry PI 4, with a SATA to USB 3.0 adapter, and getting poor read and write speeds? In theory this setup should yield significant speed improvements, making your Raspberry PI 4 system a worthy PC for your daily work. Unfortunately, some SATA to USB 3.0 adapters do not work that well in combination with your Raspberry PI 4. This article offers a fix for getting your SSD working via USB 3.0 on your Raspberry PI.
There are so many intricacies involved in using Linux as a daily-driver desktop operating system. You have to consider whether the drivers for the hardware you want to use are available, whether the software you want to use is available, and whether Linux is compatible with all of the different security controls you may have to manage, with things like Active Directory reigning supreme in the enterprise world.
However, there’s something else that we often forget about: firmware. Firmware is the software for the hardware, the configurations and options that software can interact with in the form of drivers to allow you to use it. Are firmware updates that important? How do you get firmware updates in Linux? Why should vendors make their firmware available for Linux? These are all questions that are answered in this article on what LVFS is and how to use it.
I've decided to post regular summaries of all the articles written here about QSoas; this is the first post of this kind. All the articles related to QSoas can be found here also.
The articles written here can be separated into several categories.
We usually copy files from one location to another existing location using commands such cp, rsync, and scp etc. If the target location doesn't exist, we first create it and then the copy file to that newly created location. Up until now, this is how I usually copy files from one location to another from commandline. Did you know that we can copy a file and create the destination directory automatically if it not exists? No? No problem! In this guide, we will see how to copy files and create target directories at the same time, with a single command, in Linux.
Shell scripting, specifically Bash scripting, is a great way to automate repetitive or tedious tasks on your systems. Why type when you can schedule and run scripts in a hands-free manner? One of the many scripting constructs is the loop. A loop is a section of code that picks up data or generates data and then performs some operation on the data and then begins the process over again until some condition is met, the script is disrupted, or when input data is exhausted. When you use Bash scripting, sometimes it is useful to perform actions using some form of loops.
[...]
Another useful application of a while loop is to combine it with the read command to have access to columns (or fields) quickly from a text file and perform some actions on them.
In the following example, you are simply picking the columns from a text file with a predictable format and printing the values that you want to use to populate an /etc/hosts file.
Here the assumption is that the file has columns delimited by spaces or tabs and that there are no spaces in the content of the columns. That could shift the content of the fields and not give you what you needed.
Notice that you're just doing a simple operation to extract and manipulate information and not concerned about the command's reusability. I would classify this as one of those "quick and dirty tricks."
Whether you are setting up a Ubuntu virtual machine in VirtualBox for the first time or you experiment with VMs frequently, setting up the virtual machine for general use is often frustrating.
When you install the Ubuntu machine in VirtualBox, it takes a long time to make it user-ready. There are various things missing when you get started: display settings might be off, packages out of date, and crucial utilities missing from the system.
So, what should you do to correctly configure your Ubuntu virtual machine?
By default, openSUSE Leap 15.x is using the firewalld firewall implementation (and the firewalld backend is using iptables under the hood).
But since a while, openSUSE also has nftables support available - but neither YaST nor other special tooling is currently configured to directly support it. But we have some machines in our infrastructure, that are neither straight forward desktop machines nor do they idle most of the time. So let's try out how good we are at trying out and testing new things and use one of our central administrative machines: the VPN gateway, which gives all openSUSE heroes access to the internal world of the openSUSE infrastructure.
As a developer, you'll eventually need to look up hex or ASCII values and see what they translate to. You might also need to know what the decimal, binary, or HTML values are, too.
If you search for these codes online, you'll often find tables that are really just images. These are inaccessible to people with disabilities, and inconvenient to use – you can't search for something and copy-paste code you want.
To make your life easier, I created a table from the best sources I could find. Just scroll or use Ctrl/Cmd + f to find the value you're looking for.
Remember the Commodore home computers C-64 and Amiga? Commodore hardware was highly popular back in the 80s and early 90s, but several bad business decisions brought an end to the company. Still, there are plenty of people out there that look back with fond memories, and others who may be curious about gaming or programming on these old machines.
While you can purchase C-64 and Amiga hardware and software on places such as eBay, emulation is an option as well. WinUAE is probably the best Amiga emulator out there, but it does require Kickstart ROMs to function.
One way of obtaining these ROMs legally, is to purchase the official Amiga Forever emulation package.
Amiga Forever 9 and C64 Forever 9 ship with everything that users need to get started. Both products are available in different versions.
[...]
The packages do include GNU/Linux binaries of UAE, the amiga emulator, so that emulation works on Linux as well out of the box, albeit not with the company's own Amiga Forever application.
Love your FMV adventures? The Dark Side of the Moon is a brand new interactive movie featuring live-action video and point & click elements out now on Steam along with full Linux support.
"When his two children randomly vanish throughout the night, it's up to you to help Dean Hamilton bring them back home. As the mystery deepens decisions will need to be made and it's down to you to make the right ones. Who can you trust? Who's doing this? What's the significance of the impending solar eclipse? And what are those strange glowing lights in the sky?"
Love your 2D action-adventure games? How about collecting everything you possibly can? Shield Cat from CyanSorcery has a brand new demo available with support for Linux desktops and the Raspberry Pi.
"Shield Cat is a game starring Lance the otter! He is a mail courier for the Cat Kingdom, delivering official letters and packages. One day, Lance wakes up and finds that the Cat Kingdom is in chaos. What's worse, his friends seem to be responsible! What dark magic could be at work here? Lance will need all the help he can get on his adventure, both to save his friends and to save the Kingdom!"
Now, what if you could apply that same immersive, personalized experience to all of your users’ media needs — cable programming, streaming content, gaming, smart home solutions — using a relatively straightforward integration with an open source software platform? With RDK-V, you can.
Welcome to another developer interview following the introduction of the Godot Showcase page! This week, we are interviewing Leonardo "Leocesar3D" Veloso about their game Human Diaspora.
Valve continues to be making exciting progress in the realm of Steam Play for improving the experience of running Windows games on Linux.
First up is a new Proton Experimental build now available. This latest Proton Experimental build has more work on reducing CPU overhead and helping performance, memory allocator performance work, support for Futex2 patches in FSYNC when using the latest kernel patches, better non-US keyboard support, improved video support, and a variety of other enhancements. For those with a VR headset, the virtual reality start-up time should be better and with increased compatibility for titles like Microsoft Flight Simulator.
For those of you with a graphics card capable of Ray Tracing who use the Steam Play Proton compatibility layer we have some good news coming for you. While it's still clearly an early work in progress, work towards getting Ray Tracing working in VKD3D-Proton is well underway (VKD3D-Proton is the Direct3D 12 API on top of Vulkan that's used with Proton).
Developer Hans-Kristian posted on Twitter about "Ray-tracing support in vkd3d-proton is finally starting to come together. Starting with some meme reflections." and shared two pictures showing the reflections working in Control but the performance drop is huge but it will hopefully be improved over time.
Only a single week after the release, Loop Hero from developer Four Quarters and publisher Devolver Digital has managed to surpass 500,000 sales. Plus they revealed we can expect a lot more to come from it.
Like the recent success of Valheim, it's pleasing to see some developer managing to really cut through the noise on Steam with thousands releasing every year. Even more exciting because it's another game that directly supports Linux, and it's easily one of the best games I've personally played in some time. From over 8,000 user reviews, Loop Hero has also hit an Overwhelmingly Positive score now too. To celebrate they hooked up Steam Trading Cards in collaboration with artist Bard-the-zombie.
War Thunder continues expanding its roster of countries available with the 'Ixwa Strike' update out now that brings with it South African armoured vehicles.
For ground vehicles there's 24 new with this update including a special South African subtree within the British ground forces and includes the likes of the SARC Mk.VI, Ratel 90, Ratel ZT3-A2, Olifant Mk1A and more. There's multiple new aircraft too like the F-5A, Mirage IIIE and the F8U-2 plus a few new additions to the naval forces. There's also a whole new map the Seversk-13, which is a mixed battle map so it's reasonably big allowing for armoured vehicles and aircraft to compete for supremacy.
Looking for some different icons for your Ubuntu Desktop? Flatery is a flat style icon theme for Linux.
Flatery is a full desktop icons set licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 3.0. It includes icons for app shortcuts, file folders, menu buttons, and in application icons.
KDE Plasma is one of the most beautiful Linux desktop environments out there. With its highly customizable settings and good performance, the Plasma desktop provides a great Linux experience.
The KDE Plasma 5.21 was released last month and the release came with a lot of exciting improvements. The development team is also actively working on the next release i.e. KDE Plasma 5.22. Recently, some exciting details surfaced through a blog post by one of the developers.
Let’s have a detailed look at the upcoming features along with other improvements in KDE Plasma 5.22.
As you are probably aware by now, GNOME 40 will bring some big changes.
This is exciting, but big changes also means that many extensions will have to adjust to continue working in GNOME 40.
To help with that, this post provides a brief overview(!) of the most important changes.
You can join the #gnome-shell and #shell-extensions channels on IRC/Matrix for further questions, and the friendly folks of the extensions rebooted project provide helpful resources like a testing VM image as well as advise.
Another feature tacked onto the big GNOME 40 desktop update is a headless native back-end for Mutter and the ability to easily create virtual monitors.
This headless native back-end that was merged today into GNOME 40's Mutter allows for running the native back-end atop a render node in a headless configuration without a physical display attached. As part of this headless native back-end is also the ability to create virtual monitors via command-line options for debugging and other purposes. This also allows creating virtual monitor PipeWire streams. Virtual monitors can be used outside of the headless native back-end but the headless back-end is dependent upon virtual monitors.
Multiple virtual monitors can be created for a single session. An example of Mutter's new support for a headless virtual monitor output is via mutter --wayland --headless --virtual-monitor 1920x1080. The virtual monitor output can be viewed via streaming with PipeWire.
One of the last features from Builder I really wanted to get upstream for the 5.0 release (and the beginning of a new ABI stream) is our auto-indenter interface. It, however, was a product of the times in GTK 3 and was rather clunky by necessity.
Now that we are on GTK 4, I could significantly clean up the implementation by putting it in GtkSourceView directly.
Toggling GtkSourceView:auto-indent still does the same thing as before. However, you can now set the GtkSourceView:indenter property to your own indenter and GtkSourceView will happily use that instead.
Linux is fun, but sometimes you just hit a wall with current distros and want something different. Plus, it seems that ISO file sizes and memory requirements keep going up with time. There has to be a smaller distro out there somewhere.
If you're looking for a lightweight Linux distribution, Alpine Linux might be a breath of fresh mountain air for you!
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Installing Alpine Linux is similar to installing any other Linux distribution. You grab the installation image and transfer it to your preferred media, and then reboot your machine.
Alpine's minimalism applies to its installation process as well. You find yourself at the standard Linux text console. There's no graphical installation here.
The Asahi Linux project, which is working to build a distribution for M1-based Apple systems, has published a progress report for January and February.
Apple Silicon Macs boot in a completely different way from PCs. The way they work is more akin to embedded platforms (like Android phones, or, of course, iOS devices), but with quite a few bespoke mechanisms thrown in. However, Apple has taken a few steps to make this boot process feel closer to that of an Intel Mac, so there has been a lot of confusion around how things actually work. For example, did you know that Apple Silicon Macs cannot boot from external storage at all, in the traditional sense? Or that the bootloader on Apple Silicon Macs cannot show a graphical user interface at all, and that the “Boot Picker” is in fact a full-screen macOS app, not part of the bootloader?
Open-source enterprise software company SUSE is targeting a pre-summer initial public offering in a deal that may value the private equity-backed company with German roots at 7-8 billion euros ($8.3-9.5 billion), people close to the matter said.
The Linux specialist’s owner, buyout group EQT, has stepped up preparations for the deal and chosen a syndicate of banks to organise the deal, which is expected to kick off in May, they said.
The rumors were true. EQT, the Swedish-based private equity firm with €52 billion in assets, is getting ready to spin SUSE, the leading European Union (EU) Linux distributor, out in an IPO. The SUSE IPO, according to Reuters and ZDNet sources, will be worth €7 billion to €8 billion ($8.3 billion to $9.5 billion).
The SUSE IPO spinout has been in the works since late 2020. Prior to that SUSE has changed owners several times. First, it was acquired by Novell in 2004. Next, Attachmate, with some Microsoft funding, bought Novell and SUSE in 2010. This was followed in 2014 -- when Micro Focus purchased Attachmate and SUSE was spun off as an independent division. In its late move prior to the one coming up, EQT purchased SUSE from Micro Focus for $2.5 billion in March 2019.
Insync is an application I have been using since about 2013 to make my Google Drive files available to me on my Linux Desktop. I have previously written about my Insync experience and continue to use Insync but recently, I received a question about installing Insync on openSUSE Leap and I realized that the documentation on the InsyncHQ site has some missing bits of information. I was unable to point the requestor a proper solution. So, here is my latest list of instructions on how to get going with Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive sync on openSUSE.
Let’s gehts los! The openSUSE Project is one of about 200 mentoring organizations selected for this year’s Google Summer of Code.
The openSUSE Project has participated in several GSoC events since 2006 and the project’s mentors have helped more than 60 students become familiar with open-source software development.
openSUSE website dedicated to GSoC offers several projects for GSoC students. Projects are available for software testing with openQA, Artificial Intelligence development with Phoeòe and configuration and infrastructure management through the Uyuni Project. Some of the projects listed with the openSUSE organization within the GSoC program work with Kubernetes like the carrier project and Rancher.
For more than a decade, PulseAudio has been serving the Linux desktop as its predominant audio mixing and routing daemon — and its audio API. Unfortunately, PulseAudio's internal architecture does not fit the growing sandboxed-applications use case, even though there have been attempts to amend that. PipeWire, a new daemon created (in part) out of these attempts, will replace PulseAudio in the upcoming Fedora 34 release. It is a coming transition that deserves a look.
Speaking of transitions, Fedora 8's own switch to PulseAudio in late 2007 was not a smooth one. Longtime Linux users still remember having the daemon branded as the software that will break your audio. After a bumpy start, PulseAudio emerged as the winner of the Linux sound-server struggles. It provided a native client audio API, but also supported applications that used the common audio APIs of the time — including the raw Linux ALSA sound API, which typically allows only one application to access the sound card. PulseAudio mixed the different applications' audio streams and provided a central point for audio management, fine-grained configuration, and seamless routing to Bluetooth, USB, or HDMI. It positioned itself as the Linux desktop equivalent of the user-mode audio engine for Windows Vista and the macOS CoreAudio daemon.
One of the under-the-hood changes in the Fedora 33 release was a switch to systemd-resolved for the handling of DNS queries. This change should be invisible to most users unless they start using one of the new features provided by systemd-resolved. Recently, though, the Fedora project changed its default configuration for that service to eliminate fallback DNS servers — a change which is indeed visible to some users who have found themselves without domain-name resolution as a result.
Systemd-resolved continues the systemd tradition of replacing venerable, low-level system components. It brings a number of new features, including a D-Bus interface that provides more information than the traditional gethostbyname() family (which is still supported, of course), DNS-over-TLS, LLMNR support, split-DNS support, local caching, and more. It is not exactly new; Ubuntu switched over in the 16.10 release. Fedora thus may not have lived up to its "first" objective with regard to systemd-resolved, but it did eventually make the switch.
It is probably fair to say that most Fedora users never noticed that things had changed. Toward the end of 2020, though, Zbigniew JÃâ¢drzejewski-Szmek made a change that drew some new attention toward systemd-resolved: he disabled the use of fallback DNS servers. The fallback mechanism is intended to ensure that a system has a working domain-name resolver, even if it is misconfigured or the configured servers do not work properly. As a last resort, systemd-resolved will use the public servers run by Google and Cloudflare for lookup operations. On Fedora 33 systems, though, that fallback has been disabled as of the systemd-246.7-2 update, released at the end of 2020.
The Fedora Mobility SIG is working to get Fedora Linux working on mobile device. This includes the PinePhone, a smartphone built with open hardware. Many distros are working to add support for the features that smartphone users expect, including video calls. I was able to use Firefox as a fully-featured Matrix client to make video calls.
On my test runs, to get a fully featured Matrix client for the PinePhone, I had the idea to simply use Firefox or Chromium to access a self-hosted instance of the element-web client. It’s basically the same idea that Schildichat and others are using in form of an electron application, which you can install on your PC. Electron apps ship a special version of the Chromium browser with some HTML and JavaScript files as a package, i.e. inside a Flatpak.
As you may know, Matrix is a chat protocol which can be used with various clients, even as a web application. As a web application you can use web features like WebRTC to open audio & video chats with end-to-end encryption (“E2EC” in Matrix terms ).
Drift, a feature within Red Hat Insights, can help with managing and troubleshooting issues across a number of systems. Red Hat Insights is a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) configuration analysis service that is available as part of your RHEL subscription.
System administrators can use Drift to compare configurations, define baselines, and ultimately perform root-cause analysis of issues during troubleshooting. Since system configurations tend to vary and drift away from initial defined standard operating environments, it is important for users to be able to immediately check if a problem can be related to any differences from the recommended configuration.
In this post, we will explore some new features recently added to the Drift UI in response to customer feedback, including requests to help troubleshoot faster.
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that Schwarz Group has adopted Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to centrally control and manage 12,500 retail outlets. Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform supports an automation framework that allows Schwarz Group to roll-out new stores quickly and deliver digital services globally, while simultaneously supporting local markets through decentralised management.
This article is a collection of electronics software available on Ubuntu computer operating system. This is for you students who want to know what tools you can obtain to learn electronics, draw circuits, create schematics, do simulations, and produce printed circuit boards. The golden saying is that every software available for Ubuntu users are also available for GNU/Linux users in general who use other than Ubuntu.
Escape rooms can be a lot of fun, though with today’s conditions, you may instead be staying at home. As seen in the video below, the Spacecase gives you the best of both worlds as an entirely portable escape “room” in a box.
The Spacecase consists of only a hard suitcase, along with a NASA tote bag. Each of these contain different elements that allow you to “repair your spaceship and escape before you and your crew run out of oxygen.”
The Raspberry Pi Pico is becoming the Swiss Army Knife of microcontrollers, and this is largely down to the flexibility provided by the programmable IO (PIO) and the $4 price tag. In the latest project to grab our attention, we see Luigi Cruz, a computer student and amateur radio enthusiast, use the Pico as a software defined radio (SDR) interface for the popular GNR Radio application.
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Cruz continues the demo by showing how you can use the GNU Radio to view and analyze the audio input; for example, Cruz plays a video file, and we can see the audio frequency and sample rate in GNU Radio.
Crowbits STEM education kits comprised of magnetic modules launched on Kickstarter a couple of weeks ago. There are five kits increasing in difficulty with the Hello Kit just requiring the student to connect modules to get started, i.e. no programming required, to the Crowbits Master Kit based on a battery-powered ESP32 module suitable to create your own phone, portable game console, radar tower, etc…
Elecrow sent me the latter for evaluation, and in the first part of the review, I’ll unbox the kit, see how modules mechanically fit together, and have a quick look at the user manual, before trying one or two projects from the manual in the second part.
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The procedure was the same for the module, except the 2G module, keyboard module, and ESP32 + TFT module had to be used instead. I also accidentally turned on the ESP32 module during installation. As you may see, we’ll need to insert the MicroSD card and reflash the firmware to have a working phone. But that’s for another day. Note the module only supports 2G, so it may not work in all countries if 2G has been sunset already in your location.
Most applications using Raspberry Pi camera are perfectly happy to rely on the FPC flat cable connecting the Pi camera to a Raspberry Pi SBC. But for some use cases, the board and camera may have to be separated by some distance, for example, if you’d like to keep the single board computer indoor, while the camera is housed in a waterproof enclosure outside.
THine Solutions has designed a cable extension kit for the Raspberry Pi camera exactly for this purpose. The kit comes with Rx and Tx boards to be connected to the board and camera respectively., as well as a 2-meter CAT5e LAN cable, but the company says the solution supports up to 20-meter Ethernet cables.
OSI has managed to have a steady and successful year, despite the challenges of 2020–2021. In particular, OSI has answered a couple of my questions through action—not just talking the talk but also walking the walk.
My first question for last year's candidates was: If OSI could only do one thing, what would it be? Very recently, the organization answered that question by publishing an updated mission statement. A new mission statement might seem like a small thing, but it is big in a couple of ways. First, as I said last year, there are a lot of different answers to the question "what is OSI for?"—and those different answers have been a source of tension both within and outside the organization. The new mission statement doesn't narrow things down to "just one thing," but it does center stewardship of the Open Source Definition as "the foundation of our ecosystem." That's a welcome focus.
In late 2020, the organization also announced it intended to hire an executive director for the first time, with long-term plans to have two to three other employees. This answers my second question last year (Should OSI move towards a board that…does less on a day-to-day basis?) with a resounding "yes." While I did (and still do) see the potential case for a small, board-driven organization, overall, I think this is very much the right move for OSI. It will help the board stay high-level while making key initiatives more effective.
LibreOffice 7.0.5, the fifth minor release of the LibreOffice 7.0 family, is available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download/. All users are invited to update to this version, as this is now the suggested version for all users.
End user support is provided by volunteers via email and online resources: https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/community-support/. On the website and the wiki there are guides, manuals, tutorials and HowTos. Donations help us to make all of these resources available.
For enterprise class deployments, TDF strongly recommends sourcing LibreOffice from one of the ecosystem partners, to get long-term supported releases, dedicated assistance, custom new features and other benefits, including SLAs (Service Level Agreements): https://www.libreoffice.org/download/libreoffice-in-business/.
Are you missing catching up with OSI at events? We miss it too! We have been staying busy with online events and hope you’ll be able to stay current with us from the comfort of your home. This weekend is the 13th FOSSASIA event. FOSSASIA is an OSI Affiliate organization and this year’s event takes place from March 13th to March 21st. OSI’s Vice President, Hong Phuc Dang will deliver the opening keynote on Saturday.
Videos are also now available for many staff and board appearances from the last two months, including many from FOSDEM.
At The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) Annual Members' Meeting held this week, the following individuals were elected to the ASF Board of Directors:
Bertrand Delacretaz (current Director) Roy Fielding (current Director) Sharan Foga (new Director) Justin Mclean (current Director) Craig Russell (current Director) Sam Ruby (current Director) Roman Shaposhnik (former Director) Sander Striker (current Director) Sheng Wu (new Director)
This is the 89th issue of syslog-ng Insider, a monthly newsletter that brings you syslog-ng-related news.
Mozilla today started rolling out Firefox 86.0.1 to address a known bug causing the web browser to crash frequently when launched on Linux systems.
While this issue came with a low crash rate on previous Firefox versions, Linux users have started seeing more and more crashes after updating to Firefox 86 last month.
According to Mozilla's software engineers, the startup crashes happen on Linux systems where users have an invalid color profile due to a bug in Mozilla's color management implementation.

LibreOffice 7.0.5 comes about three months after version 7.0.4 and includes more than 100 bug fixes across all core components, which address important crashes or issues and improves document compatibility with other popular formats.
Released in August 2020, the LibreOffice 7.0 series is still supported with maintenance updates until June 6th, 2021. Numerous GNU/Linux distributions are shipping and maintaining the LibreOffice 7.0 office suite on their repositories, so updating to today’s 7.0.5 point release is mandatory for all users.
Templates can seem daunting and overly complex as any new concept. Hopefully this series of articles will help to understand and clarify some of your worries. If you have never heard of templates or if, for any reason, you tend to avoid them- this is for you. Already working with them in your workflow? Cool, so read up and revisit some of the reasons why you rock. Templates for the win!
With GCC 11 stable likely to be released next month, here is the latest in our compiler testing against the current GCC 10 stable release. This round of tests was carried out on a System76 Thelio Major with Ryzen Threadripper 3990X HEDT processor.
We have provided various GCC 11 compiler benchmarks already while more is on the way with GCC 11 work winding down. Given though GCC 11 is already well into stage four development, the performance at this stage should be quite close to how GCC 11.1 will be shipping in April. This round of benchmarking was with GCC 10.2 against GCC 11.0.1 -- both being built from source in the same release configuration. During testing the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS were set to "-O3 -march=native -flto" especially with this being a high-end Threadripper system where users are more likely to be tweaking their system and looking to achieve maximum performance.
LLVM 12.0 was aiming for release at the start of March but it missed that goal post and a third release candidate was tagged on Wednesday. But, fortunately, it looks like the official release will be out soon.
Tom Stellard as the LLVM release manager announced LLVM 12.0-RC3 on Wednesday and indicated that it should be the last release candidate barring any new major issues from becoming known. This will be the first major LLVM release of 2021 and keeping up with their roughly half-year release cadence should be succeeded by LLVM 13 come September/October.
An editor's draft for post-Spectre web development guidance was made available by the W3C.
The W3C is preparing guidelines for web developers in better ensuring their code is safe from potential exploit by Spectre security vulnerabilities. Spectre has been public since January 2018 and concerns have been known around JIT'ed JavaScript. Made public recently though was the first "fully weaponized" exploit for Spectre beyond the early proof-of-concept code.
There was no prompt answer and no improvement at all. I couldn’t find a nice way to do this quickly either. In fact it took me the better part of an hour to crack this nut. The main issue here is that a failed match will produce Nil that .Str will complain about. So lets separate boolean check of if and the conversion to Str.
Flask is a popular web development framework for Python.
We just published a course on the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel that will help you learn Flask by building your own e-commerce platform with its own robust authentication system.
The course was developed by Jim from JimShapedCoding. Jim has made many popular coding tutorials.
The Python lambda keyword, which can be used to create small, anonymous functions, comes from the world of functional programming, but is perhaps not the most beloved of Python features. In part, that may be because it is somewhat clunky to use, especially in comparison to the shorthand notation offered by other languages, such as JavaScript. That has led to some discussions on possible changes to lambda in Python mailing lists since mid-February.
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Former Python benevolent dictator Guido van Rossum agreed: "I'd prefer the JavaScript solution, since -> already has a different meaning in Python return *type*. We could use -> to simplify typing.Callable, and => to simplify lambda." He also answered the question by suggesting that the "endless search for for multi-line lambdas" may have derailed any kind of lambda-simplification effort. Van Rossum declared multi-line lambda expressions "un-Pythonic" in a blog post back in 2006, but in the thread he said that it is not too late to add some kind of simplified lambda.
"In 2021, we should be able to bring high-speed internet to every family in America—regardless of their zip code," said Sen. Amy Klobuchar.€
The Prince Harry-Meghan Markle revelations were boring, uninspiring, tedious, self-promoting celluloid slush.€ For a moment, royalty gorgers and gloaters could forget the pandemic, the deaths of over 500,000 Americans, millions of job losses and incompetent governance.€ They could feast their eyes on a privileged couple being interviewed in the environs of Californian luxury talking about their terrible hardships.
Press outlets such as Associated Press were merely stating the obvious in claiming that the interview revealed a “picture of racism, insensitivity and deep-rooted dysfunction” in the royal family.€ On the racist charge, Meghan revealed that there had been “concerns and conversations” between Prince Harry and the family “about how dark” the skin of their offspring would be.€ Meghan was adamant that her treatment in the British media was different to that offered to other royals, particularly Prince William’s wife Catharine.€ It was one thing to be “rude”, another to be “racist”.
If not for the drawing of the Covid top, Cornell would now have been marking the tenth anniversary of the dedication of its creative reconstruction of one of the vanished musical monuments of the baroque: the magnificent organ in the chapel of the Charlottenburg Castle in Berlin. That instrument was destroyed in an Allied bombing raid in 1944, but after a ten-year research project involving Cornell and Gothenburg University in Sweden, this vanished work of art found an unlikely earthly afterlife in Ithaca, New York. Ten years ago this week builders, scholars, and performers from around the world, many of whom had contributed to the project, came together at Cornell for four days of celebratory concerts, lectures, and banquets.
Kircher could think of God as an organist because the instrument He played was the most complex technology ever seen or heard. Delving into the mysteries of life and artifice, Kircher held a particular fascination for automata, including organs played as if miraculously by themselves, the keys depressed not by human fingers but pinned barrels, the wind raised not by human feet but water power. Kircher was several centuries ahead of his time on the sustainability front.
The four documentaries s under review below constitute just a tiny minority of the festival offerings. As is universally the case, I found all of them compelling. Except for the last, they deal with issues close to my heart and I suspect that they will be close to yours as well.
The Boys Who Said NO! (Monday, March 15, 4:00 PM)
"These obscene gains of wealth during a pandemic prove that our economy is clearly designed for billionaires to profit, while millions suffer."
I'm writing this in the middle of another cold and seemingly endless New England winter. It's the time of year many people begin feeling the effects of burnout.
At the same time, we're observing the first anniversary of many lockdowns since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. So feelings of burnout are even more widespread.
For those of us lucky enough to work from home, work is actually something of a release from all this. But it's still work. However, this release gets complicated when we have other responsibilities around the home, notably for those of us helping our kids school from home or providing additional medical care for family members.
I am using Intel NUC as a backend for local development for like 5 months already and to summarize it all I can say that I am happy with the setup and I think that I achieved what I was willing to.
Women and girls have bore the brunt of the crisis.
The Frist family of Tennessee are the founders and biggest shareholders of Hospital Corporation of America (HCA), the largest for-profit hospital conglomerate in the U.S. Thomas F. Frist Jr. and his family have seen their personal wealth increase from $7.5 billion on March 18, 2020 to $15.6 billion on March 8, 2021, an increase of $8.1 billion or 108 percent, according to an analysis by the Institute for Policy Studies.
Almost half of these gains — $4 billion — have come since September 2020, when Forbes reported the Thomas F. Frist Jr. family wealth at $11.5 billion. The Frists have an estimated 20 percent ownership stake in HCA.
Yes, there have been local women imbued with lore and legend. Many of them, including my friends, Anne Teller and Pat Eliot, have passed, though not before they lived full, rich lives and told riveting tales.
Bob Cannard is famous. At least he was when Chez Panisse was up and running. Cannard supplied vegetables, fruits and herbs to Alice Waters legendary Berkeley restaurant. She and her chefs turned curly cress, baby Brussels sprouts, celery root and bok choy into sumptuous dishes that appealed to foodies from near and far.
Dr. Breen is but one of the more then half-million — 514,000 as of March 1st! — people was have died from Covid-19; little data is available about those who have taken their own life.€ As with Dr. Breen, the stresses associated being an ER doctor likely contributed to her fateful decision.€ Such stresses are shared by many “essential” workers.€ As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports, millions of other Americans are enduring all manner of stresses, including the loss of a jobs; eviction for failing to pay back rent or foreclosure for failing to pay their mortgage; burdened by debt; feeling locked in by stay-at-home requirements, leading to increased domestic violence, including child abuse; and still others.
Understandably, the media and public attention has been focused on the deaths caused by the pandemic and the vaccines that might bring an end to it.€ It has extended and deepened the recession, exposing the profound racial and class disparities in society.€ The former U.S. Surgeon General, Jerome Adams, admitted, “I and many black Americans are at higher risk for COVID. That’s why we need everyone to do their part to slow the spread.”€ He identified a host of factors contributing to this situation including preexisting conditions such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart€ disease as well as the lack of access to health care.
Put enough cameras up and pretty soon they become tasty targets for malicious hackers.
According to Apple’s suit, Lancaster and his correspondent began communicating in 2018 about the possibility of obtaining information; the two then spent the next year in communication. Lancaster then reportedly contacted his correspondent in spring 2019, asking him to investigate rumors of a potential Apple product that could “mean trouble for my startup.” The lawsuit also claims that Lancaster boasted to a third party shortly after that conversation that his media contact would be writing a story on his startup if it hit $1 million in funding.
The tech giant is taking on Simon Lancaster, who worked at Apple for 11 years before departing in 2019, in a suit filed in federal court in San Jose, Calif., alleging he committed trade secret misappropriation and breached his contract. The lawsuit was first reported by Apple Insider.
In the lawsuit, Apple asserts that Lancaster, who worked as an advanced materials lead and product design architect, “abused his position and trust within the company to systematically disseminate Apple’s sensitive trade secret information in an effort to obtain personal benefits.”
It’s the latest example of increasing adoption of Apple’s hardware within employee-choice schemes, which has helped the company seize a 23% share of the US enterprise PC market.
Why would it matter if the sshd config got reverted? Simple: it's because the stock Mac sshd install includes password-based auth, and that means someone can brute-force their way onto your machine if they can connect to it on port 22 for long enough.
The code was published on Wednesday by a Vietnamese researcher Nguyen Jang, according to a report in The Record, a website owned by the CIA-backed threat intelligence firm Recorded Future.
But hours later, GitHub took down the code. iTWire has asked the company why it did this.
British security researcher Marcus Hutchins, the first to make mention of the PoC, said in a tweet that it did not work in its original state, but needed some tweaks.
The latest Windows update has been causing problems for some printer owners, according to a report from Windows Latest (via Gizmodo). Users are reporting that they’re getting a blue screen when they try to open the print dialogue from Notepad, Office, or other programs. (You know that annoyingly ambiguous error message that’s like “Your PC ran into a problem and needs to restart”? It’s that one.)
The chatbots are fast automating customer service. As of July 2020 (based on an Invespcro study), 67% of the customers used a chatbot. About 40% of the customers do not care if they are being served by a bot or a human being as long as they get their information. Millennials are more comfortable with texting than phone calls to traditional call centers.
More importantly, the automated interactive systems deployed by the businesses are becoming conversational, shedding the menu-driven, rule-based genesis of the IVR time. For example, popular chat apps (conversational) are doubling up as payment apps (rules-driven).
Sigstore promises to be a gamechanging service for Free and Open Source software security.
sigstore will empower software developers to securely sign software artifacts such as release files, container images and binaries. Signing materials are then stored in a tamper-proof public log. The service will be free to use for all developers and software providers, with the sigstore code and operation tooling developed by the sigstore community. Founding members include Red Hat, Google and Purdue University.
“sigstore enables all open source communities to sign their software and combines provenance, integrity and discoverability to create a transparent and auditable software supply chain,” said Luke Hinds, Security Engineering Lead, Red Hat office of the CTO. “By hosting this collaboration at the Linux Foundation, we can accelerate our work in sigstore and support the ongoing adoption and impact of open source software and development.”
At the end of 2019, we announced an upcoming requirement for extension developers to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) for their Firefox Accounts, which are used to log into addons.mozilla.org (AMO). This requirement is intended to protect add-on developers and users from malicious actors if they somehow get a hold of your login credentials, and it will go into effect starting March 15, 2021.
If you are an extension developer and have not enabled 2FA by this date, you will be directed to your Firefox Account settings to turn it on the next time you log into AMO.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (zeromq3), Oracle (dotnet, dotnet3.1, python3, and wpa_supplicant), and Red Hat (wpa_supplicant).
Killing people using metadata is boring. These days, we're killing people using data brokers.
More recently, this problem has become worse with the application of advanced artificial intelligence techniques to fraud detection. The obscure nature of the machine-learning algorithms deployed make it hard for anyone to challenge the decisions. Even worse is a growing tendency for such automated decision-making systems to draw on highly personal data as a matter of routine. A good example of this is SyRI, which stands for “Systeem Risico Indicatie“, or System Risk Indicator. It was created by the Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs in 2014 to identify people who were considered to be at high risk of committing benefit fraud.
The thing€ is,€ the€ FLoC€ model has attracted a lot of criticism from privacy experts. As an example, the€ Electronic Frontier Foundation€ calls it a “terrible idea.”€ Others such as€ Pieter€ Artnz€ of€ MalwareBytes€ wonder if tracking is just being better concealed.
As companies like Google shift away from individual behavior tracking in their ad efforts, telecoms like T-Mobile are headed in the opposite direction. The wireless giant this week announced it would be automatically enrolling all of its customers (including recently acquired Sprint customers) in a new behavioral tracking and ad system the company is launching on April 26. Whereas Google is shifting to its FLOC system that tends to clump consumers into groups of like minded consumers (an approach that still comes with its own issues), T-Mobile is doubling down on individualized targeting, and will start sharing its customers’ web and mobile-app data with advertisers.
WhatsApp head Will Cathcart may not have anything to do with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey but when it comes to India, he is worried -- not only about the Union government's aim to break encryption but also the move to promote the homegrown micro-blogging platform Koo.
Speaking to 'Big Technology Podcast' host Alex Kantrowitz, Cathcart said that "splinternet" -- where instead of having a global [Internet], you have countries each with their own regulations -- is a profound risk and it will be worse if governments decide to have their own mini-internet with their own mini-apps.
Right now. That’s always the best answer to the question, “When is it a good time to start using an encrypted messaging app like Signal?” Ever since Edward Snowden became the world’s most famous whistle blower, concerns about digital privacy have been front and center, and apps like Signal can help protect the wary. But what is Signal and other encrypted messaging apps, and how do they work?
Still trusting Gmail with your emails? Perhaps it's time to reconsider it? Here's why you should opt other email services.
Tim and I met one Sunday at the Friends Meeting of Richmond. He would convince me to move forward with the prosecution of four youths who had thrown a brick through the front window of our house in the Fan District. His reasoning was that if I didn’t press charges, he might well end up defending one of them years later when the boy ended up on death row facing execution because there had been no consequences for earlier errant behavior. I did prosecute and Tim and I became friends. Neither of us knew what the future would hold.
Within weeks of us relocating to VA, I was sad to see that Linwood Briley was the second man to be executed in the modern era of the death penalty in Virginia. A friend at the Richmond Peace Education Center where I was volunteering invited me to attend the vigil to be held outside the gates.
The official multilateral system is stagnant. If it hopes to remain relevant, it needs such blunt talk, a complete new mindset and a renewed pushed for transparency and accountability
Admittedly, China’s rise, Russia nihilistic posture and the U.S’s loss of moral standing have brought a new level of complexity and uncertainty to the geopolitical landscape. Yet the fact remains that the UN has done little to ensure peace and security in Yemen, Syria and elsewhere, and was on the sidelines in stopping a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia over Nagorno Kharabak.
So, MBS is implicated both before and after the murder of Khashoggi: There is the threat; the means; the motive; and, the discovery of the ‘get away’ vehicles. On top of this is a CIA “assessment” that MBS was responsible for the murder; that is is “inconceivable” that he didn’t know and, indeed, order the hit. But this is still largely circumstantial. What’s missing is the habeas corpus — Khoshoggi’s body. People accused of murder, without a body, have been convicted before, and that’s what happened in Saudi Arabia, when the regime there owned that a murder had taken place and convicted several patsies for Khoshoggi’s death. But MBS still walks on water.
Al-Jazeera has produced a brief animated re-enactment of the murder demonstrates how the event probably went down. It’s the kind of scenario you’d see displayed to a court during a trial. It’s worth a watch. Here it is.
Cops in the southern city of Bari said he was behind the faking of documents which enabled ISIS to carry out its November 2015 bloodbath in Paris which left 130 dead and 350 injured.
Most of those killed died at the Bataclan concert venue while others were shot in bars and restaurants throughout the French capital in a series of coordinated attacks that lasted four hours.
Procedural Irregularities
We wish to express our deep concern over the protracted controversy and political fall-out surrounding the OPCW and its investigation of the alleged chemical weapon attacks in Douma, Syria, on 7 April 2018.
I don’t have the vast journalistic resources or investigative reporters that Patrick Kingsley and The New York Times have at their disposal. But I do have access to Google.
At long last, some more NYPD police misconduct records have been released. Last month, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused to block the release of these records, now publicly available thanks to the repeal of a state law that shielded these records from the public eye for more than 40 years.
“There is growing evidence linking residence near unconventional oil and gas operations with negative health impacts for nearby residents, including impacts on fetal growth and preterm birth,” said one of the study’s authors, Lara Cushing, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles Fielding School of Public€ Health.
The planet had already warmed by around 1.2 degrees Celsius (2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times when the World Health Organization officially declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020. This began a sudden and unprecedented drop in human activity, as much of the world went into lockdown and factories stopped operating, cars kept their engines off and planes were€ grounded.
"No religious tradition sanctions the destruction of nature," said one Catholic leader. "Yet this is exactly what governments, financial institutions, and major corporations are doing."
"Having the U.S. taking such strong action would reverberate across the world, and result in other countries also stepping up to adopt the kind of targets they need to make global net-zero a reality."
In air pollution terms alone, the price of coal is huge. The true price of energy in almost any fossil form is colossal.
A nuclear accident anywhere is an accident everywhere.
And yet, the line between containment and utter disaster was razor-thin. In the end, an even worse disaster was averted only through the virtual drowning of the reactors through water sprayed on top of the buildings by firetrucks to stop the nuclear cores from turning into unstoppable chain reactions. Ten years later, the injection of water continues. With the containment vessels leaking and unable to be fixed due to the high radiation, the utility has had a continued battle against water. Some 1,000 tanks holding 320,000 gallons of partially decontaminated water that had been used to cool the nuclear fuel now dot the landscape of the facility while TEPCO tries to figure out where to put it.
Despite the many excuses the Trump administration used to promote more logging, aspens€ and conifers have existed together for millennia before cattle were introduced in the West and€ logging is not the answer. If the Forest Service really wants to regenerate aspen stands it is€ imperative to follow the science and actively minimize cattle grazing in aspen groves.€ Unfortunately, the Middle Fork Henry’s project would increase grazing, not reduce it. Yet,€ instead of considering viable alternatives that would lighten the grazing pressure, the agency€ chose to destroy existing habitat for lynx and grizzly bear as well as other old growth-€ dependent species such as the Flammulated owl.
The Caribou National Forest’s Revised Forest Plan’s Final Environmental Impact Statement€ (FEIS) € identifies aspen as a “habitat-at-risk” and specifically notes that aspen was€ “historically overgrazed” — which likely contributed to aspen decline due to the loss of€ regeneration. It is also notes that aspen need a “diversity of seral stages,” putting the loss of€ tender aspen shoots to cattle grazing in direct contradiction to the Forest Plan’s management€ recommendations. The document goes on to say aspen is at high departure from historic€ conditions in part due to heavy grazing which eliminates regeneration.€ Cattle grazing is what’s killing aspen.
These days, all I want to do is weave. The loom that’s gripped me, and the pandemic that’s gripped us all, have led me to rethink the role of work (and its subset, paid labor) in human lives. During an enforced enclosure, this 68-year-old has spent a lot of time at home musing on what the pandemic has revealed about how this country values work. € Why, for example, do the most “essential” workers so often earn so little — or, in the case of those who cook, clean, and care for the people they live with, nothing at all? What does it mean when conservatives preach the immeasurable value of labor, while insisting that its most basic price in the marketplace shouldn’t rise above $7.25 per hour?
That, after all, is where the federal minimum wage has been stuck since 2009. And that’s where it would probably stay forever, if Republicans like Kansas Senator Roger Marshall had their way. He brags that he put himself through college making $6 an hour and doesn’t understand why people can’t do the same today for $7.25. One likely explanation: the cost of a year at Kansas State University has risen from $898 when he was at school to $10,000 today. Another? At six bucks an hour, he was already making almost twice the minimum wage of his college years, a princely $3.35 an hour.
The basic point is one that I, and others, have been making for a long time. CEOs and other top executives rip off the companies they work for. They are not worth the $20 million or more than many of them pocket each year. Again, this is not a moral judgement about their value to society. It is a simple dollars and cents calculation about how much money they produce for shareholders, and this piece suggests that it is nothing close to what they pocket.
The reason why this finding is a big deal is that it is yet another piece of evidence that executives are able to pocket money that they did nothing to earn. In the case of these tax cuts, company profits increased because of a change in government policy, not because their management had developed new products, increased market share, or reduced production costs. (Some of them presumably paid for lobbyists to push for the tax breaks, so their contribution to higher profits may not have been exactly nothing.)
We need a system that is truly universal—everybody in, nobody out. Biden's proposal will add more participants to the current program, but still leave millions out.
"This historic legislation is about rebuilding the backbone of this country and giving people in this nation—working people, middle-class folks, people who built the country—a fighting chance."
The March 5, 2021, episode of CounterSpin included an archival interview with historian Alice O’Connor on the War on Poverty, originally broadcast as part of the September 30, 2016, show. This is a lightly edited transcript.
EFF supported the first introduction of this legislation and we enthusiastically support it today after its updates. Most changes simply reflect past COVID-19 provisions that have already been enacted into law such as the Emergency Benefit Program, a program that ensures people are not disconnected due to a lack of income caused by the pandemic. But its most noteworthy updates are the preferences for open access and a minimum speed metric of low latency 100/100 Mbps, which inherently means fiber infrastructure will play a key role. By adopting these standards—along with a massive investment of federal dollars—Congress can reshape the market to be competitive, universally available, and affordable.
The digital divide isn’t about whether you have access to a certain speed like 25/3 Mbps, which is the current federal standard that is effectively useless today as a metric to measure connectivity, it is about what infrastructure has been invested into your community. Is that infrastructure robust, future-proofed, and competitively priced? If the answer to any of these is no, then you have folks that are not able to fully utilize the Internet and they sit on the wrong side of the divide.€
As EFF noted in 2019, the fact that major industry players were slow-rolling or shutting down their fiber to the home deployments, even in major metropolitan areas where really no excuse exists to not wire everyone, was a danger sign. It meant that future-ready access was no longer on track to being universally deployed except through local governments and small private providers who lack the finances to do it nationally. At the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 as the stay-at-home orders were coming in, we pointed out that the digital divide failures we will see are going to be prominent in areas that lack ubiquitous fiber infrastructure.
The saga of Emanuel's three decades in politics is an epic tale of methodical contempt for progressive values.€
During a city council session on Wednesday, one of Moscow’s top police officials insisted that law enforcement officers didn’t use any excessive force against pro-Navalny protesters in January and February. He also rejected reports that a number of journalists were injured by police while covering the demonstrations. That same day, the State Duma’s information policy committee held a meeting on ensuring journalists’ safety amid mass events, during which a top official from the Russian National Guard suggested that the authorities start vetting journalists in advance to determine who’s allowed to cover protests.
"There is no time to lose with thousands of individuals on state death rows across the country and several executions scheduled at state level in 2021."
And I agree with Teju Cole’s point about the White Savior Industrial Complex theory. That starts with protesting against tortuous US foreign policy that makes it worse for nations on the African Continent.
Cole refers to Haiti and Nigeria, two countries that have borne the brunt of the American government’s harshness. You could list most central American countries in that category too, including Venezuela.
Under the guise of correcting Trump's failures, they will perpetuate their own.
"One resignation will not change the deeply systemic issues we have in our society," said N.Y. State Sen. Michelle Hinchey, a Democrat. "But, it is a start."
The For the People Act would make our democracy more inclusive and block efforts by state legislators to make it harder to vote.
"They're doing anything they can to silence the voices of Black and Brown voters specifically because they largely powered [Democrat] wins."
Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov has spent at least one billion rubles ($13.7 million) in state funds on security for himself and his family since 2017, according to a new investigation from Open Media.€
My family lost everything in the Cuban Revolution (from 1959): family business, property, grandparents’ health (early death); 1961-1967 were hell for us that way. Because of the rabid U.S. assaults on the Cuban Revolution, Fidel followed Raul’s lead and looked to the Communist Party — i.e., Russia — for help (I saw a Russian freighter in Havana harbor in 1960), and in reaction to those assaults, Castro banned rock music and the Beatles (in ~1965-1967; yet Juan Formell, famously, penned the seminal Cuban Rock-and-Roll classic, “Llegué, Llegué / Guararey de Pastorita,” and founded Los Van Van in 1969).
Before writing anything about this dreadful case, and before you read my article, it is right to pause to think first about the terrible and entirely undeserved fate of Sarah Everard, and the agony those who loved her must now be suffering.
The European Broadcasting Union (EBU) has rejected Belarus’s 2021 Eurovision Song Contest entry, it announced on Thursday, March 11. The competition’s organizer concluded that the proposed song, “I’ll Teach You” by the band Galasy ZMesta, “puts the non-political nature of the contest in question.”€
After two weeks of congressional hearings, it remains unclear how a rampaging mob of rioters managed to breach one of the most sacred bastions of American democracy on Jan. 6.
During more than 15 hours of testimony, lawmakers listened to a cacophony of competing explanations as officials stumbled over themselves to explain how America’s national security, defense, intelligence and law enforcement agencies allowed a homegrown enemy to put an entire branch of government in danger during the attack on the U.S. Capitol.
"I didn't know if I would make it out alive on January 6th. GOP members who aided insurrectionists or stoked the flames that day must be held fully accountable."
Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has been cleared to run for office again after a judge annulled all convictions against him. Three years ago, Lula, a former union leader who served as president from 2003 to 2010, had been considered a favorite in the lead-up to the 2018 presidential election until he was jailed and forced out of the race on what many said were trumped-up corruption charges. Lula’s jailing helped pave the way for the election of the far-right former military officer Jair Bolsonaro and constitutes “the biggest judicial scandal on Earth,” says Valeska Martins, one of Lula’s lead attorneys. “Lula was wrongfully charged, wrongfully prosecuted,” Martins says.
Democrats can eliminate the filibuster to pass legislation to stop voter suppression, said journalist Ari Berman, "or they can allow [the] GOP to undermine democracy for the next decade."
Many Palestinian intellectuals and political analysts find themselves in the unenviable position of having to declare a stance on whether they support or reject upcoming Palestinian elections which are scheduled for May 22 and July 30. But there are no easy answers.
The resolution calls for more power to be given to the Election Committee that currently chooses Hong Kong’s chief executive. The 1,200-member body is already stacked with the party’s supporters. It will gain another 300 members—all party loyalists. In 2019 pro-democracy candidates won a landslide victory in district polls after months of anti-government unrest. That would give them control of the 117 seats in the Election Committee that are allocated to district councillors. So these seats will probably be given to other, more reliable, people. Candidates running for chief executive will need at least 15 supporters from each of the committee’s five sectors. That, in effect, will give the most loyal sectors the power of veto.
Over the last month we've written quite a few times about various state legislatures (and Governors) picking up on the nonsensical and unsupported statements that (1) "conservatives" face too much bias in social media content moderation decisions and (2) that Section 230 is somehow to blame for this. They've pushed a whole bunch of blatantly unconstitutional state laws that would seek to limit how social media companies can moderate content -- effectively compelling them to host content they disagree with (which would violate the 1st Amendment). Of course, as we've noted for quite some time now, both Republicans and Democrats seem to be very mad at Section 230, but for totally contradictory reasons. Republican bills seek to make social media companies moderate less content, while Democratic bills seek to make social media companies moderate more content.
Pakistan has banned TikTok yet again, citing objectionable content on the shortform video app. This is the second time the ByteDance platform has been banned in Pakistan, following a brief 10-day shutdown in October of last year.
Last fall, TikTok was banned for hosting “immoral” and “indecent” videos, but the company was able to assure the Pakistani government that videos would be moderated “in accordance with societal norms and the laws of Pakistan,” and the app resumed operations a week and a half later.
Many of the changes that the central government seeks to implement through the IT Rules 2021 may be well-intentioned and desirable. However, constitutional due process cannot be sacrificed at the altar of expediency. The solution is to start afresh with publication of a white paper which clearly outlines the harms that are sought to be addressed through regulation of online video streaming platforms and meaningful public consultation which is not limited to industry representatives. After that, if regulation is still deemed to be necessary, then it must be implemented through legislation which is debated in Parliament instead of relying upon executive rule-making powers under Section 69A of the IT Act which never contemplated the creation of such an elaborate regulatory framework and suffers from flaws of its own.
After the murder of Samuel Paty, a climate of fear and repression has settled in French schools and universities. A partial list of recorded cases is enough to make us understand the intellectual terror that is experienced in France due to Islam and its far left allies.
Alexander Mamut made most of his fortune by mediating complex corporate conflicts, but friends say he always dreamed of being more than a simple billionaire. Mamut apparently wanted to embody Russia’s “rich intelligentsia” and it was in this pursuit that he spearheaded the Strelka Institute “cultural cluster,” supported musicians like Zemfira, and sponsored a flood of art projects. His ambitions extended to the mass media, as well, leading him to buy LiveJournal and Rambler in the hope of creating an Internet holding company with the biggest audience in Russia. For all this zeal, the media business is where Mamut lost his reputation as an “outspoken liberal” and fell into crippling debt. In late 2020, he lost Rambler to Sberbank and the money from the sale went to pay off his holding company’s loans. Today, Mamut teeters on the brink of defaulting on his debts to Trust Bank. Meduza correspondent Anastasia Yakoreva looks at how a media mogul ended up like this and what role urban planning, the mass media, and politics played in his story.
On Thursday, March 11, lawyer Alexey Liptser, who represents the Khachaturyan sisters, told the Russian state news agency TASS that state investigators have “launched a criminal case against Mikhail Khachaturyan for torturing and sexually abusing his daughters.”
Moscow’s Zamoskvoretsky Court has refused to satisfy an administrative claim filed against the Russian Justice Ministry by the anti-domestic violence group “Nasiliu.net” (No to Violence) over the decision to label the organization a “foreign agent.”
"This is an abhorrent use of legislative power that reeks of racial animus and must be stopped," said Janai Nelson of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.
The Biden administration is struggling to address the flow of migrant children crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without their parents, many fleeing extreme violence, poverty and natural disasters in their home countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. News reports show more than 3,500 children were detained at the border in just the first nine days of March, with many being held longer than the legal limit of 72 hours. “We can call it a crisis. We can call it a surge,” says Aura Bogado, senior investigative reporter at Reveal. “What we shouldn’t call it is a surprise.”
According to human rights organisations as many as 1,000 Christian, Hindu and Sikh girls are abducted each year. Many of them are forced to convert to Islam, because it is widely believed in Pakistan that marriages under the age of 16 are acceptable under Sharia law if both of those marrying are Muslim. And this is what happened in Farah's case: she was forced to convert, then married by her abductor.
The National Council of Churches in Pakistan (NCCP) says the number of such abductions is increasing.
Last year, we marked the web’s birthday just one day after the World Health Organization declared the Covid-19 crisis a pandemic. In the 12 months since, the web — like so many of us — has been tested like never before. Today, as the web turns 32, it has proven to be a lifeline that allows us to adapt and carry on.
"Americans desperately need a return to an FCC that is an empowered advocate for the public, not the telecom industry."
As reported by GammaWire, some Netflix users have encountered a screen that warns, “If you don’t live with the owner of this account, you need your own account to keep watching.”
At the bottom of the screen are buttons for requesting a verification code sent via email or text. There’s also a “verify later” option that allows users to keep watching without a verification code, although it’s not clear exactly how much later “later” means.
Pony Ma’s Tencent is being fined 500,000 yuan ($77,000) for its 2018 investment in online education app Yuanfudao, according to a statement by the State Administration for Market Regulation on Friday. Baidu was fined the same amount for its 2014 takeover of Ainemo Inc., a maker of consumer electronics including voice-controlled speakers. The firms are being censured for not seeking prior approvals for the deals -- a violation of country’s anti-monopoly laws -- though the regulator had determined the deals themselves aren’t anti-competitive.
Having received some initial feedback to yesterday's post that outlined seven hypothetical approaches to the current multi-antisuit mayhem, I've identified a couple of aspects of this complex topic that I should address.
First, for the sake of completeness I must point out that the German zero-deference doctrine (sanctity of patents beats everything and warrants self-defense) and the multifactorial analysis performed by U.S. and Chinese courts are not the only two frameworks. There's a spectrum, and the longer it takes to resolve the current antisuit crisis, the more variants we will see.
[...]
As for a way out of the current mess, a loyal reader with a strong professional interest in this subjet wrote me that the industry could "potentially" solve the problem at the level of standard-setting bodies. With a strong emphasis on "potentially" I would agree, given how hard it is to build consensus within standard-setting organizations, and only with respect to future standardization processes. The enforcement of whatever patents have been pledged under older FRAND policies would not be affected. Furthermore, implementers are merely third-party beneficiaries, so except in cross-licensing situations (reciprocity), the SEP licensing policies of SSOs could not prevent implementers from seeking antisuit injunctions. They could just deprive implementers of some of their rights if they did so, or authorize certain kinds of retaliation by SEP holders.
Antisuit and especially multi-antisuit injunctions are presumably an interesting topic for standard-development organizations to discuss, and they could, for example, require SEP holders to litigate country by country if they wanted. If.
There'll be more on that front this year. There's Samsung's pending Federal Circuit appeal of Ericsson's anti-antisuit injunction from Texas. Maybe Xiaomi will appeal, or has appealed, Interdigital's German A4SI to the Munich Higher Regional Court. And I would expect a lot of additional antisuit and anti-antisuit filings throughout this year, presumably too many that I could comment on every single one of them, but I'll try to keep an eye on those that could really make a difference.
The German Federal Constitutional Court published its annual preview of the important cases it intends to decide during the year, on Tuesday, March 9, but neglected to include the new complaints made against the constitutionality of the Unified Patent Court.
Two complaints were filed on December 18 2020 against the draft legislation enabling Germany to ratify the UPC Agreement. One was filed by Ingve Stjerna, the German lawyer who made the first complaint against the UPC in 2017, and the other was made by a private individual, a company and an association.
The fact that these new complaints, which are once again holding up German ratification of the UPCA, were not included will likely come as a disappointment to proponents of the harmonised European patent proposal.
The previous complaint, which was decided in March 2020 after Justice Peter Huber announced to Managing IP in November 2019 that he would decide the case in early 2020, was included in the 2018, 2019 and 2020 lists.
Every year, very few cases listed are actually heard and many are just carried over, which makes the fact that the UPC complaints were not listed this year all the more disconcerting.
Gregory Bacon, partner at Bristows in London, says non-inclusion of the two complaints on this year’s list suggests that they will not be decided this year or next.
[...]
On Wednesday, March 10, the EPO announced that it had conducted 1,000 virtual opposition hearings as part of its VICO pilot programme, which was implemented last summer.
“This week the EPO reached an important milestone: 1,000 oral proceedings in opposition by VICO since the start of the pilot programme last summer,” said EPO spokesperson Luis Berenguer. “The office is grateful to all its users, interpreters and colleagues for their patience, trust and support in this change.”
The programme originally required the consent of both parties to appear virtually. As of January 4, however, the EPO announced that all examination and opposition proceedings would be virtual until September 2021, even if one or both parties withdrew consent.
This announcement came after the Boards of Appeal (BoA), which sits independently from the office, decided that boards could conduct VICO hearings without the agreement of the parties involved.
The BoA amended its procedural rules to include Article 15a, which sets out “that a board may decide to hold oral proceedings by videoconference if it considers it appropriate, either upon request by a party or of the board's own motion”.
Virtual conferences at the EPO have been controversial. Sources have told Managing IP that some patentees have refused to appear in online hearings as a delay tactic to stall the invalidation of their patents.
In an interview with Managing IP, EPO president António Campinos agreed that some patentees were using the virtual hearings in this manner.
“We had to make this move [to introduce VICO] now to address the growing backlog [of cases],” he said. “I understand discussions around the right to be heard and that parties should be able to state their preference, but you have to counterbalance the right to be heard – or what you understand by it – with access to justice.
“As we speak, that right of access to justice could be denied by one of the parties,” he said.
One year ago today, World Health Organization Director-General Tedros Adhanom declared the COVID-19 outbreak to be a pandemic. At the time of the announcement, the WHO noted that there were 118,000 cases reported globally, but in its most recent situation report, the WHO indicated that as of March 7, 2021 there have been 116,166,652 cases globally.
The response to the COVID-19 pandemic by the global biopharmaceutical industry over the past fourteen months has been unprecedented. From December 30, 2019, when SARS coronavirus was first detected in a patient sample, and January 10, 2020, when the complete genome of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) was released, multiple treatments and vaccines have been developed and approved for use in combating COVID-19. And the rapid development of these treatments and vaccines has, as the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) recently put it, been "nothing short of incredible." For example, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted Emergency Use Authorization (EUA) for Gilead Sciences' remdesivir 123 days after the virus was first detected in a patient sample, granted EUA to Eli Lilly's antibody treatment 315 days after the virus was first detected, and granted EUA for the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine 347 days after the virus was first detected. And since the pandemic was declared a year ago, the FDA has also granted EUA for Regeneron's antibody treatment, as well as for Moderna's and Johnson & Johnson's vaccines, with other vaccines expected to be granted EUA by the FDA shortly.
Milestone Scientific (MLSS +8.0%) has received Notice of Allowance from the European Patent Office (EPO) combining minimum intensity of nerve stimulation (MIS) and real-time injection pressure (IP) monitoring utilizing the company's CompuFlo instrument and associated DPS Dynamic Pressure Sensing Technology to optimize needle tip location in ultrasound-guided peripheral nerve block (PNB) procedures.
"The pandemic has made clear that we are connected to people around the world, and our futures are tied to theirs," said Ben Levenson of People's Action Justice is Global campaign.
The United States and other wealthy members of the World Trade Organization have blocked a push by dozens of developing countries to waive patent rights in an effort to boost production of COVID-19 vaccines for poor nations. The proposal by South Africa and India was supported by hundreds of civil society organizations, including Doctors Without Borders, Oxfam and Amnesty International. Without the waiver, vaccine production will remain in the hands of only a few pharmaceutical companies. “Millions of us are basically going to have to wait for a vaccine, putting global immunity, as well as regional immunity, particularly in Africa, at severe risk,” says South African activist Fatima Hassan, founder and director of Health Justice Initiative. We also speak with Achal Prabhala, coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa. He says one of the barriers to spreading vaccine production to other parts of the world has to do with perceptions of scientific expertise. “The entire world — not just the West — is incredulous at the idea that you could have useful science in this pandemic come out of places not in the West,” says Prabhala.
"Ending this pandemic requires collaboration, solidarity, and empathy. It requires a very different mindset—a mindset that puts people over profits at every turn."
Due to a reorganisation at the French first-instance courts, judges are handing down rulings faster than before the pandemic. For instance, the Judicial Court Paris recently ruled on a number of high-profile cases. Further oral hearings in wide-ranging SEP battles, such as the Intellectual Ventures suit, are imminent.
In particular, French proceedings in pan-European disputes are gaining momentum. A team from Bird & Bird is fighting for Edwards Lifescience in the major proceedings over five European patents covering a transcatheter heart valve.
The UK courts have handed down the first judgments, and parallel nullity suits and infringement proceedings are underway in Germany. The main proceedings are also now set to start in France. On Meril’s side is a team from Gide.
It will come as no surprise to most of our readers that the NCAA is a jealous protector of its March Madness trademark. Much like the Super Bowl, the NCAA likes to march (heh) around and try to pretend like its trademarks give it overly restrictive rights when it absolutely doesn't.
The USPTO refused to register the proposed mark PENNSTATE HEALTH in standard character form, for various educational, research, and health care services, finding it to be primarily geographically descriptive under Section 2(e)(2). The Office refused to register the word-and-design mark shown below absent a disclaimer of that same phrase, for the same services. The Examining Attorney pointed out that the applicant had disclaimed "PENN STATE" in some of its registrations, or claimed acquired distinctiveness. Applicant argued that "Penn State" is not a nickname for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, but rather for the University. How do you think this came out? In re The Pennsylvania State University, Serial Nos. 88311154 and 88311234 (March 9, 2021) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Frances S. Wolfson].
Counsel at the American Red Cross, Unilever and Henkel reveal how they combat online actions that threaten their brands, and what private practice lawyers can do to help
Lawyers say two England and Wales High Court rulings will strengthen the argument for new tools to fight online piracy
Several of the largest Internet providers and copyright holders in Germany have joined forces to tackle online piracy. With the new "Clearing Body for Copyright on the Internet," they have agreed to block structurally infringing sites without going to court. The first target is streaming portal S.to and other prominent sites including Kinox and The Pirate Bay are being considered.
Two operators of the now-defunct pirate site Movie-Blog, which enjoyed an estimated 65 million visits per year, have been convicted by a court in Germany. The individuals were handed 22-month suspended prison sentences. The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment supported the criminal proceedings throughout and has now seized several Movie-Blog domains.
Last summer we wrote about an interesting case involving the latest evolution of copyright trolling, involving Jon Nicolini, who some copyright troll watchers may recognize from his participating in an earlier generation of copyright trolling, when he was a sketchy "forensic expert" for copyright trolling firm CEG TEK. These days, Nicolini runs his own firm, Okularity, which appears to have created a new form of copyright trolling. According to the lawsuit, rather than file lawsuits as the pressure point (as was common in the past), Okularity sends a ton of DMCA takedown notices to social media companies, and then once your account gets taken down, Nicolini pounces and demands huge sums to rescind the notices, so you can get back your account.
