Many developers wonder why they should care about service mesh. It's a question I'm asked often in my presentations at developer meetups, conferences, and hands-on workshops about microservices development with cloud-native architecture. My answer is always the same: "As long as you want to simplify your microservices architecture, it should be running on Kubernetes."
Concerning simplification, you probably also wonder why distributed microservices must be designed so complexly for running on Kubernetes clusters. As this article explains, many developers solve the microservices architecture's complexity with service mesh and gain additional benefits by adopting service mesh in production.
For those running Linux MD RAID10 arrays you may have found the performance around discard requests such as when running MKFS and FSTRIM operations to be rather slow... Well, with Linux 5.13 it will be lightning fast.
For years there have been reports of slow DISCARD handling for RAID10 MD block devices under Linux...
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This dramatic speed-up from 280 seconds to less than 1 second has now been queued into Linux-block's for-next branch ahead of the Linux 5.13 kernel from md-next. Thus barring any issues from coming up, this optimization will be found in Linux 5.13.
Two fixes were queued this week into the Linux kernel's power management "linux-next" branch that could help improve the power management behavior for some devices as up to now the Linux kernel was not properly following the ACPI specification.
An Intel discovered and fixed issue was Linux not turning off unused power resources during initialization. For select platforms there may appear to be power resources not associated with any devices physically present on the platform. The ACPI specification outlines that the OS should turn off such unused power resources, but the Linux kernel currently doesn't do this -- with Linux 5.13 that will happen.
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Following that is this patch to turn off unused power resources unconditionally. This should help for ensuring unused power resources get turned off regardless of what is being reported by the BIOS should its state get confused.
Open source consulting firm Collabora are certainly busy. While they work with Steam owner Valve on various things, they also work in other areas of Linux like driver development - their latest being PanVk.
Extending the Panfrost driver which currently supports OpenGL and ES across Arm Mali Midgard and Bifrost GPUs, they're now looking at Vulkan support now that Panfrost is getting quite mature. PanVk itself is already being worked on, with enough of the Vulkan API implemented so that vkcube can run but it's still overall in the early stages of development so real-world applications need more functions added and optimization is not yet a focus.
A small but measurable and seemingly widespread performance optimization is currently being buttoned up for Intel's open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver within Mesa to benefit latest-generation Gen12/Xe Graphics.
A pending merge request is providing 1~3% better performance on Intel Gen12 graphics hardware with the ANV Vulkan driver. Games like Dota 2, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Shadow of the Tomb Raider, Fallout 4, and others have been tested and confirmed to benefit.
Google's open-source SwiftShader has been supporting a software-based Vulkan implementation for some time, building off its prior OpenGL / GLES and D3D9 support. While SwiftShader's Vulkan implementation has received heavy investment and attention from Google, it turns out Mesa's Lavapipe software implementation is beginning to pull ahead.
The CPU-based Mesa Lavapipe Vulkan implementation started by Red Hat's David Airlie and continued to work on part time by him and other Mesa developers is actually looking better now than Google's SwiftShader, at least according to Airlie's recent benchmarks. David meanwhile continues working on many different areas of Mesa, maintaining the DRM subsystem for the kernel, and his other areas of attention at Red Hat. Granted, Lavapipe is able to leverage existing Mesa infrastructure, but the results are looking real well against Google's SwiftShader receiving full-time attention.
Intel's latest addition to Mesa 21.1 with their "ANV" Vulkan driver is... A null hardware layer.
This "nullhw" Vulkan layer is to disable all rendering and compute commands in the command parsing hardware. This null hardware Vulkan layer was written a year ago but only merged now.
One of the issues cropping up in the migration from Xorg to Wayland is the desire to capture part or all of your screen for recording and/or streaming to others - in many cases, applications designed for Xorg simply capture a black screen, with few workarounds.
However, for games and applications that can run with the Vulkan API, there's a new plugin from David Rosca (nowrep) for OBS Studio called obs-vkcapture (OBS Plugin Forum | GitHub) that aims to work around the issue and get your gameplay ingested directly, bypassing the built-in Xorg 'Window Capture'.
The South Korean Internet giant NAVER has released a new version of their feature-rich proprietary Whale web browser. It features a online video conferencing solution called "Whale On", which has been greatly improved in the latest release, and a music player, a calculator and many other interesting features other web browsers do not have. Whale is available for Linux, Windows, macOS, iOS and Android.
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The toolbar above the web page area has a button that lets you control the built-in music player, a button that lets you take a screenshot of a part of a web page, entire web pages or the entire screen, a button that lets you split the web browser window in two and a button that expands or closes the feature-rich sidebar.
The sidebar is full of features that are unique to NAVER Whale. There's a toolbox with a clock, an alarm, a calculator, a calendar, a conversion tool and other useful tools, a scrapbook, a bookmark manager, a language translator, a music player, a comic strip reader, something called "NOW" and a few online services you can only use if you have a NAVER account.
Apache Tomcat is an open source web server with servlet container for publishing Java based web applications. Tomcat is developed and maintained by an open community of developers under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation. As of today, Tomcat 10 is the latest stable version available for the installation on development and production environments. To know more about the Apache Tomcat visit apache official site http://tomcat.apache.org/.
This tutorial will help you to how to install Apache Tomcat 10 on Debian 10 Buster Linux system.
BTRFS – an abbreviation for the B-tree file system, is a modern Linux file system and logical volume manager optimized for fault tolerance, error detection, and repair. BTRFS uses the Copy on Write (CoW) principle and it provides features such as snapshots, RAID, and self-healing.
Canon is one of the largest printing giants in the world. It is used widely for both industrial, office, and home usage. Normally, using a mobile printer is easy and doesn’t require a lot of computing knowledge. On Windows, you can find the official software driver for each printer device. But, in Ubuntu Linux, it automatically detects the printer, and the CPU transfers the print command to the printer. However, if you have any issues setting up your Canon printer on your Ubuntu system, you can install a few packages on your system and make your printer ready. There are a few methods available on the web that you can use to install the Canon printer driver in Ubuntu and other Debian distribution-based systems.
Nextcloud needs no introduction. It is the most popular open-source software for self-hosting a collaboration suite that gives you access to document collaboration, file hosting, project management boards and chat service.
We have been using Nextcloud for managing our team activities on Linux Handbook and It's FOSS. We self-host our Nextcloud instance, obviously. This self-hosting experience has taught us several important lessons and I am going to share them with you. This will help you if you happen to be a day-to-day Nextcloud administrator.
I assume that you use Docker to deploy Nextcloud. Most tips are centered around that while some are generic advices that are valid for all kind of Nextcloud deployments.
Nautilus file manager is the software of choice for many Linux users who enjoying using GUI apps for directory management. Personally, I like to work with Git via the terminal because I learned to be more efficient in working that way.
The last time we talked about this, I had to use an extension to make it work. This is the reason why I am now happy to tell you that you can also be efficient using the GUI thanks to Nautilus integration capability for Git on the GNOME desktop environment.
This is particularly good news because some users have had to employ third-party apps to achieve the same goals and that no longer has to be the case. What is required to integrate Git with your file manager? Nautilus, a Git account, and sudo privileges.
This is the third post in a series about network address translation (NAT). The first article introduced how to use the iptables/nftables packet tracing feature to find the source of NAT-related connectivity problems. Part 2 introduced the “conntrack” command. This part gives an introduction to the “conntrack” event framework.
Like many people working with Linux machines, I prefer using the command line interface when possible and when it makes sense. In some cases, it is easier to find, inspect, and modify some configurations using your fingers because they just "know" the commands you need to type, and it's quicker than opening a GUI and searching for the sequence of menus that you need to click.
Sure, there are some cases when using the GUI is faster, and you're only doing that task once or twice, so who cares, right? But if it's something that you'll need to do multiple times, maybe with some variations, your sysadmin brain ponders, "Can I automate this?" In many cases, the answer will be, yes, but the effort to automate the task isn't worth it in other situations.
Back in 2018, after a year of truly hammering down on independent game studios producing what many would consider "adult" or "porn" games, Valve finally relented and said its Steam platform would be more open. As part of the announcement, Valve indicated it would take a hands off approach to game curation and allow more adult-style games generally, later clarifying that it intended to prevent only "troll" games. If all of that sounds incredibly vague and ripe for creating a massive and confusing mess, well, that's precisely what happened. Developers saw the chance that Steam would accept their games as a crapshoot, with some making it through and others not. The reasons for denials were equally vague and arbitrary.
Chromebooks may get a new "game mode" that will make Google-powered laptops a lot more useful for gaming — which would in turn play into long-rumored plans to bring Steam to Chrome OS.
According to Chrome Unboxed, a new entry in the Chromium Gerrit hints at the possibility of a game mode toggle for Borealis — an upcoming Ubuntu-based Linux container. Specifically it looks designed to automatically activate game mode when you open or close a game.
The sixth and final DLC pack is out as part of the New Frontier Pass with a Portugal DLC for Sid Meier’s Civilization VI. Available to all who purchased the pack, or as an individual DLC. It includes the Portugal civilization with João III, the Nau unique unit, and two unique structures, the Navigation School building and the Feitoria.
You also get access to a new Zombies Defense game mode. In this optional game mode, the dead don’t stay dead for long and present an ever-growing threat to the world’s civilizations. On top of that you also get a new Wetlands Map Script and two new World Wonders.
Ready, FIGHT! Them's Fightin' Herds from Mane6, Inc. and Humble Games has now been officially ported to Linux with the 2.0 patch release and the Shanty character DLC is out now too. Them’s Fightin’ Herds is an indie fighting game featuring a cast of adorable animals designed by acclaimed cartoon producer Lauren Faust. Beneath the cute and cuddly surface, a serious fighter awaits!
This 2.0 update is the biggest yet, so big in fact that their patch notes are ridiculously long. The highlight for us here is of course their new fancy Linux build! It works to perfection too, I've been playing it today and it's very smooth and looking fantastic.
After being around in some form for quite a few years now, Cryptic Sea and Devolver Digital have now released Sub Rosa into proper Early Access on the Steam store.
"Sub Rosa is an experimental online multiplayer FPS with a focus on orchestrating deals and coordinating a team of players to increase their wealth and perceived status in the game. This requires a great deal of iteration and testing with how a growing numbers of players understand and react to the possibilities laid out before them in Sub Rosa. Early Access gives an opportunity to tinker with many facets of the game in an attempt to better the experience for everyone."
Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun was one of the best games from 2016 easily, it helped to revive a classic style of tactical stealth games and it's coming back with Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun - Aiko's Choice.
This is a standalone expansion from the same developer, Mimimi Games. Now they're finished with Desperados III they've come back to their first proper hit. Set in Japan around the Edo period, you take control of kunoichi adept Aiko and her deadly assassin friends to hunt down the ghosts of her past.
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So that's good news for us that they still plan to continue their Linux support.
Ready to bring some friends together this weekend but still social distancing because of COVID-19? Valve have your back here with a big sale now on for games that work with Remote Play Together. This follows on from the big Steam Client update with the 'Invite Anyone' feature, along with the Steam Link app finally coming to Linux.
Metro Exodus is popular as a post-apocalyptic setting first-person shooter game as a modern sequel to Metro 2033 and Metro: Last Light. And, Total War: Rome remastered is just a reboot of the classic RTS game which was quite popular as well.
Recently, they’ve both announced that the game titles are also releasing for Linux with native support in April.
Considering the promising work being done by Steam with Proton, Linux is probably going to become a first-class platform for games soon. And, the arrival of popular game titles like Metro Exodus and Total War: Rome remastered is just something that re-affirms that hope.
At first glance, Matthew Macy seemed like a perfectly reasonable choice to port WireGuard into the FreeBSD kernel. WireGuard is an encrypted point-to-point tunneling protocol, part of what most people think of as a "VPN." FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system that powers everything from Cisco and Juniper routers to Netflix's network stack, and Macy had plenty of experience on its dev team, including work on multiple network drivers. So when Jim Thompson, the CEO of Netgate, which makes FreeBSD-powered routers, decided it was time for FreeBSD to enjoy the same level of in-kernel WireGuard support that Linux does, he reached out to offer Macy a contract. Macy would port WireGuard into the FreeBSD kernel, where Netgate could then use it in the company's popular pfSense router distribution. The contract was offered without deadlines or milestones; Macy was simply to get the job done on his own schedule.
With Macy's level of experience—with kernel coding and network stacks in particular—the project looked like a slam dunk. But things went awry almost immediately. WireGuard founding developer Jason Donenfeld didn't hear about the project until it surfaced on a FreeBSD mailing list, and Macy didn't seem interested in Donenfeld's assistance when offered. After roughly nine months of part-time development, Macy committed his port—largely unreviewed and inadequately tested—directly into the HEAD section of FreeBSD's code repository, where it was scheduled for incorporation into FreeBSD 13.0-RELEASE.
This unexpected commit raised the stakes for Donenfeld, whose project would ultimately be judged on the quality of any production release under the WireGuard name. Donenfeld identified numerous problems with Macy's code, but rather than object to the port's release, Donenfeld decided to fix the issues. He collaborated with FreeBSD developer Kyle Evans and with Matt Dunwoodie, an OpenBSD developer who had worked on WireGuard for that operating system. The three replaced almost all of Macy's code in a mad week-long sprint.
The latest version of the Arch-based community-made GNU/Linux distribution Manjaro comes with a better and more intelligent installer and Linux Kernel 5.10. It is available in three desktop flavors: Xfce 4.16, which is the most popular one among Manjaro users, KDE Plasma 5.21 and GNOME 3.38 (not 40).
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The updated installer is the main highlight in this release. The "Calamares" installer used by Manjaro will now lookup your location using a GeoIP database and use that information to propose language settings, keyboard settings and time-zone. It will only propose defaults based on where it thinks you are, you can override its suggestions if you want to.
Manjaros improved installer will, for some reason, propose "No swap" as a default in the disk Partitions section. It is possible to change that. It is also possible to enable Encrypt system with a single check-box. The rest of the options you have to configure are strait forward with the Users section being a notable exception. It won't let you proceed without entering some string in the What is your name? field - like that's somehow any of Manjaros business.
Finding a new open source project might seem daunting, but it may not be as hard as you think. If you are passionate about any hobby or cause in your life, you can probably find an existing open source project that is closely related to your interests.
Do you sew clothing? Projects exist that build open source patterns or feed inputs into sewing hardware. Passionate about flight? Investigate some of the many open source drone projects. Within any of those projects, whenever you catch yourself thinking that something could be better or different, seize on that impulse. This could be your first contribution waiting to happen.
It doesn't have to be an earth-shattering change either. You might find a broken link or a typo in some of the project's text. Or you’re a user of the project and you notice something is not working as expected. This is your chance to not only start contributing and improving a project, but also making your cause or hobby that much better!
Research from the Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) indicates that 78% of organizations run different Linux distributions in the public cloud than they do on-premises. This can mean different management tools, different administrator certifications, different support contracts, and even different levels of patching and security compliance. The same ESG study shows that two-thirds of surveyed organizations regularly move workloads between public clouds, but find these migrations painful because of the differences in technology stacks, and the resultant issues with performance, security, availability, and in-house skills. (ESG Research Insights Paper Survey: Today's Top 3 IT Challenges with Modern Application Environments, March 2021)
To help reduce this complexity, Oracle's Linux distribution is consistent across deployments on premises, in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Microsoft Azure, and Amazon Web Services.
When running Oracle Linux on premises or in clouds, customers have access to the exact same code and packages. Oracle Linux improves performance of all workloads and is optimized–out of the box–for Oracle software. Oracle Linux is 100% application binary compatible with Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Since 2006, Oracle Linux has been completely free to download and use. Free source code, binaries, and updates. Freely redistributable. Free for production use.
The GNOME project has released version 40 of its Linux desktop, with a new design for finding and launching applications and updated core apps.
GNOME is the default desktop for numerous Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Red Hat and variants such as Fedora and CentOS Stream, SUSE, and many more.
Version 40 is the first to use a new numbering scheme. The previous version was 3.38, but the project did not want to get to 4.0 out of concern that it would be perceived as too big a shift. "If we ever did release 4, then people would see it as a huge change in [that] everything's going to be broken again, and that's not really what we've got," executive director Neil McGovern told The Reg last year.
There is history here: GNOME 3.0 caused considerable grief and was described by Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, as "crazy crap" and "really annoying".
Fedora 34 will be releasing next month. Fedora 34 beta is already released and it features the awesome new GNOME 40.
If you are running Fedora 33 right now and want to enjoy GNOME 40 and all the other features that come with Fedora 34, you can easily do that.
In this tutorial, I’ll show the steps for upgrading to Fedora 34 beta using terminal as well as the GUI method.
Here’s your weekly Fedora report. Read what happened this week and what’s coming up. Your contributions are welcome (see the end of the post)! The Final freeze begins 6 April.
I have weekly office hours on Wednesdays in the morning and afternoon (US/Eastern time) in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else. See the upcoming meetings for more information.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation released today a new version of their Raspberry Pi OS (formerly Raspbian) distribution for the tiny Raspberry Pi computers, finally upgrading the kernel to Linux 5.10 LTS, which brings numerous new features and improvements and is supported until December 2022.
Linux kernel 5.10.17 is included in the new Raspberry Pi OS release, which also improves support for the Raspberry Pi 400 computer by ensuring the keyboard country is correctly read in the startup wizard, adds support for NVMe devices to SD Card Copier utility, and ports the Recommended Software app to GTK3 for a more modern UI.
Snaps are several things, all at once. They are confined, standalone Linux applications that bundle all their necessary dependencies, which means they do not need to rely on the underlying system, and can run independently of it. Snaps are also packaged as compressed Squashfs filesystems, using the .snap extension. For most users, they are an abstraction to get software on their Linux distro, in a simple, straightforward manner. But you may wonder, what lurks inside?
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Your snap (or a snap) could have only a handful of folders, or a whole range of them, including custom paths and structure. The contents will differ from one application to another, but at the end of the day, there is no great mystery about what snaps are. Anyone can download, unpack and inspect any snap, and see exactly what they do. In many cases, you will have an exact trail of environment variables and commands that run. If you want to learn a bit more about what else to expect inside a snap, you may want to check the snap format documentation for other useful details.
Finally, if you want to experiment, you can try the handy snap try command – to make quick, live changes to snaps, and test modified behavior. This can be quite useful if you want to speed up your development. That’s all we had today. If you have any comments or suggestions, please join our forum for a discussion.
ESP32-C3 may be one of the most expected RISC-V processors in the IoT world, as it’s eventually expected to sell for the same price as ESP8266 and offers both WiFi and Bluetooth LE connectivity.
Some engineering samples of the chip. modules and boards were distributed to developers shortly after the announcement at the end of the last year, but now it appears ESP32-C3-DevKitM-1 board will become available for $8 next month from distributors such as Mouser or DigiKey.
Arduino Day 2021 explores the idea of “undistancing”, with a packed roster of talks, demos, presentations, interviews and more that show us how Arduino can bring us together, even when we’re apart.
Special guest Jeff Geerling tells us how he got 16 drives connected to one Pi.
Plus his thoughts on automation, self-hosting, and more.
When I need to flash a Raspberry Pi OS image, I usually download the image from the Raspberry Pi website before flashing it to a MicroSD card with either balenaEtch or USBimager.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation released the Raspberry Pi Imager last year, but I never used it, except to try it out, because at the time, it would just flash the image to the MicroSD card like other tools, and since I’m working with SBCs from different vendors it did really not bring any benefits to me.
There are a lot of well-known open source applications used in web design, but there are also many great tools that are not as popular. I thought I'd challenge myself to find some obscure options on the chance I might find something useful.
Open source offers a wealth of options, so it's no surprise that I found 10 new applications that I now consider indispensable to my work.
Shazam is an app that identifies multimedia. The program stores a catalogue of audio fingerprints in a database. Shazam works by analyzing the captured sound and seeking a match based on an acoustic fingerprint in a database of millions of songs. It generates a spectrogram (a time/frequency 2D graph of the sound, with amplitude at intersections) of the sound, and maps out the frequency peaks from it (which should match key points of the harmonics of voice or of certain instruments).
Shazam can identify music, movies, advertising, and television shows, based on a short sample played either through the microphone of the device and also when you’re listening through your headphones.
Farewell, March --we're wrapping up the month with another great week.
Catalyst Cloud is now offering PostgreSQL as an alternative to proprietary databases in its new managed database service.
The company launched the managed database as a service offering into tech preview five months ago, saying the fully automated database infrastructure allowed customers to focus on delivering what really mattered for their businesses
So, 2021 isn't bad enough yet, but don't despair, people are working to fix that:
Welcome to the Stallman wars
Team Cancel: https://rms-open-letter.github.io/ (repo)
Team Support: https://rms-support-letter.github.io/ (repo)
Current stats are...
Stallman’s reinstatement came with a staggering lack of transparency from FSF’s board of directors and has triggered a cascade of condemnation from individuals and organizations across the tech industry. Among the many critical responsibilities it maintains, the FSF currently holds the copyrights to enforce the GPL.
The voting members unanimously agreed to elect a union staff member, selected by the FSF union staff, to be a full voting member and director. The first such representative will be elected as soon as the staff chooses one. The FSF will adopt by-law changes to implement this as a requirement going forward.
Since Conda is a language-agnostic package and virtual environment manager, we can easily create virtual environments for different programming languages. We already knew how to create Nodejs virtual environments and Rust virtual environments. Today, we will see how to create Golang virtual environments using Conda in Linux.
This is what defines an Action.
Ngrx implements a message passing architecture, where Actions are dispatched.
In C++, reading and writing to files can be done by using I/O streams in conjunction with the stream operators >> and >>. When reading or writing to files, those operators are applied to an instance of a class representing a file on the hard drive. This stream-based approach has a huge advantage: From a C ++ perspective, it doesn't matter what you are reading or writing to, whether it's a file, a database, the console, or another PC you are connected to over the network. Therefore, knowing how to write files using stream operators can be transferred to other areas.
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Reading and writing to files in C++ is not that complicated. Moreover, if you know how to deal with I/O streams, you also know (in principle) how to deal with any kind of I/O device. Libraries for various kinds of I/O devices let you use stream operators for easy access. This is why it is beneficial to know how I/O steams work.
The national media paid scant attention to the release, on March 1, of the final report of the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI). In high government circles, however, it is receiving close and admiring attention. That’s because the report bolsters a widely held perception among senior policy-makers—Democrats and Republicans alike—that the United States is engaged in a protracted struggle with China for global supremacy and risks losing out to its more tech-savvy adversary. “For the first time since World War II, America’s technological predominance—the backbone of its economic and military power—is under threat,” the report asserts. “China possesses the might, talent, and ambition to surpass the United States as the world’s leader in AI in the next decade if current trends do not change.” If this country is to avert such a calamity, “the US government must embrace the AI competition and organize to win it.”
A panel, hosted by the San Francisco Federal Reserve Bank and discussing the “new future of work” on Monday, said those who are in an “elite” category are getting ahead on education because they benefit from good quality internet. Poorer households, who don’t have good quality internet – either due to where they live or how much it costs – are getting left behind, they said.
Boris Johnson claimed the UK's vaccine breakthrough was brought about by 'giant corporations that wanted to give good returns to shareholders.' Nothing could be further from the truth.
Here are highlights from the last 12 months of billionaire wealth growth:
The 10 biggest “Pandemic Profiteers” saw the greatest percentage increase in their wealth—at least 300 percent. [See Table 2]
A new report reveals that as a record number of people in the United States lost their jobs and struggled to put food on the table during the past year of the pandemic, the combined wealth of the 657 billionaires in the country grew more than $1.3 trillion, nearly 45%, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who saw his personal wealth increase by $65 billion — more than $7 million every hour. “They are often leading companies who have benefited from the pandemic conditions by having, essentially, their competition shut down,” says Chuck Collins, author of the report on pandemic profiteers by the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Tax Fairness. “These folks have reaped enormous windfalls in this pandemic.” The massive gains come as pressure grows on lawmakers to impose new taxes on the top 1%, with both Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders proposing new measures to address growing economic inequality.
The deal would put a 13% sales tax in place for cannabis and would allow people 21 and older to use the drug recreationally. The changes reportedly won’t impact existing medical marijuana dispensaries.
According to Bloomberg, 9% of the total tax would go to the state and the remaining 4% would go to local governments. The move to legalize marijuana would create a new revenue stream for the state — around $350 million in annual tax revenue once fully implemented, according to an estimate from Governor Andrew Cuomo’s office.
A new study found that fine particulate pollution generated by the burning of fossil fuels was responsible for one in five early deaths worldwide in 2018—far more than previously thought. Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health’s Aaron Bernstein said that the people most at risk are those “who can least afford it.”
Bernstein, interim director of Harvard Chan School’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment (C-CHANGE), discussed the study in a March 19, 2021, interview on the PRX radio show “Living on Earth.”
This detailed guide talks about why security teams are overwhelmed with vulnerabilities, the danger that hides behind the double reporting of vulnerabilities, and how to mitigate such vulnerabilities using live patching tools like KernelCare.
We know that the cybersecurity threat is growing, with matching growth in the efforts to try and mitigate the threat and the associated costs. But evidence suggests that mitigation is not progressing quickly enough.
According to a joint analysis performed by McAfee and the Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2020 will see the global cost of cybercrime rise past the $1tn mark for the first time - a massive increase of 50% over the 2018 total. That is a rate of change clearly outpacing any comparable metric such as GDP growth, or growth in IT expenditure.
The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 171. This version includes the following changes:
[ Mattia Rizzolo ]
* Do not list as a "skipping reason" tools that do exist.
* Drop the "compose" tool from the list of required tools for these tests,
since it doesn't seem to be required.
Location data is the new growth market. Data harvested from apps is sold to data brokers who, in turn, sell this to whoever's buying. Lately, the buyers have been a number of government agencies, including the CBP, ICE, DEA, Secret Service, IRS, and -- a bit more worryingly -- the Defense Department.
"Tech CEOs want to talk about their content policies and moderation efforts—because they know their core business models are indefensible."
Roskomnadzor (Russia’s Federal Service for Supervision of Communications, Information Technology, and Mass Media) has written up a draft order that will require new users joining social networks and messengers to provide their passport data, address, telephone number, and email address, reports the Russian business newspaper Kommersant.€
What makes this latest initiative different is that it has an associated Web site that draws together a wide range of information about surveillance advertising and its problems. For example, it points to recent market research carried out by GQR in January this year among 1000 people registered to vote in the US. It shows 49% were strongly opposed to companies that track behavior online and collect personal data in order to target people with ads; 25% were somewhat opposed, while 19% were somewhat supportive, and only 7% strongly supported the practice. Even allowing for the fact that the sample was quite small, and may not be completely representative, it’s clear that ordinary people are well aware of the dangers of micro-targeted advertising based on constant surveillance, and unhappy about it.
Each production implemented COVID safety procedures and used different combinations of technologies, allowing the participants to experiment with numerous workflows that enable remote, cloud-based production tasks including live review of camera footage, dailies, and participation in editorial, color grading and mixing sessions. The experiment involved the Amazon, Google and Microsoft clouds, as well as a range of technologies from participating manufacturers including 5th Kind, Adobe, ARRI, Avid, Bebop, Blackmagic, Colorfront, Evercast, Frame.io, Moxion, Sohonet, Teredek and Teradici. The shorts were also made with the collaboration of many companies from VFX house Framestore and Skywalker Sound (which mixed four of the shorts).
Chrissy Teigen, a prolific tweeter the company once called the mayor of Twitter, quit the social media platform Wednesday night. In a series of now-deleted tweets, Teigen said Twitter “no longer serves me as positively as it serves me negatively, and I think that’s the right time to call something.”
After more than a decade on Twitter, Chrissy Teigen has had enough of the social network.
The model, TV personality, author and entrepreneur on Wednesday posted a thread on Twitter, telling her more than 13.7 million followers that she was leaving the platform — before she deleted the account.
At a hearing focused on disinformation and extremism, lawmakers pressed Facebook Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet Inc. and Google, which owns YouTube, to answer questions about whether their products are designed to keep kids addicted and pose a threat to their well-being.
Drugs, surveillance & the war on terror.
According to the results of a medical examination, opposition politician Alexey Navalny’s health has been deemed satisfactory, Interfax reported on Thursday, March 25, citing spokespeople for the Federal Penitentiary Service (FSIN) in the Vladimir region.
When the killing is done in the context of war, it’s not murder.
Whatever you think of Biden’s€ assertion€ during an ABC News interview that Russia’s President Putin is “a killer” — and whether or not you think the label might apply to Biden, given his pro-war record — the existential imperative of U.S.-Russian relations is to avert a nuclear war. Biden’s claim during the same interview that Putin does not have “a soul” indicates that much of the new president’s foreign-policy thinking is stuck in a cold-war rut.
No doubt many Americans have welcomed Biden’s holier-than-thou stance toward Putin. But an overarching reality is routinely hidden in plain sight: Everyone’s survival on this planet hinges on Washington-Moscow conflicts not spinning out of control.
We’ve seen where dehumanization leads: to violence, war, and regret.
"This is much-needed good news following recent high-profile gun massacres in Atlanta and Boulder," said Kris Brown, president of the gun control group Brady: United Against Gun Violence.
It is a sign of hope that Biden and Blinken are turning to legitimate, multilateral diplomacy in the case of Afghanistan, even if only because, after 20 years of war, they finally see diplomacy as a last resort.
"Congress needs to throw cold water on the Pentagon's mad dash to burn toxic firefighting foam," which "threatens the health of millions of Americans."
In America, returning to “normal” means returning to the constant drumbeat of gun violence and mass shootings. We are the only wealthy country in the world that refuses to protect ourselves or our children from gun violence, and the year of pandemic-induced isolation did not make us any less barbaric.
That approach found a receptive audience in meetings with Japanese officials, who recognize it as offering a path to remilitarization. Results in South Korea were more ambiguous. By a substantial margin, China is South Korea’s primary trading partner, and relations between the two nations are generally solid. South Korea has no rational reason to join Washington’s fanatical anti-China campaign, no matter how much pressure the United States applies. A difference of opinion between Washington’s envoys and South Korean officials can be inferred by comparing the joint U.S.-Japan statement with South Korea’s, as only the latter lacked China-bashing verbiage.
Blinken and Austin appear to have been more successful in reminding South Korean officials that no independent action should be taken to improve inter-Korean relations and in making it understood that Washington calls the shots. The two sides agreed to establish a “working-level diplomatic dialogue” process to align policy regarding North Korea and other matters. [2]In their joint statement, Korean and American officials affirmed that their two nations “are closely coordinating on all issues related to the Korean Peninsula” and that “these issues should be addressed through a fully-coordinated strategy toward North Korea.” [3]
This commentary offers several game strategies that promise political stability and might even prevent military coups. Unfortunately, the game theory does not fully comport with the conventional principles of democracy. By no means is the democracy game theory superior to representative democracy. The game theory builds on the realism norm that the stealth player will continue to influence democracy in the foreseeable future. The game theory is irrelevant if the stealth player no longer interferes in the democratic process.
Six Chambers
In his last months in office, former President Donald Trump gave American defense contractors like Lockheed Martin and Reaper drone manufacturer General Atomics Aeronautical Systems billions in projected earnings through a controversial $23 billion arms deal with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), a deal now “under review” by the Biden administration.
Yesterday, in a (deliberately, I assume) well-timed release, the Tech Transparency Project released a report entitled Facebook's Militia Mess, detailing how there are tons of "militia groups" organizing on the platform (first found via a report on Buzzfeed). You may recall that, just days after the insurrection at the Capitol, that Facebook's COO Sheryl Sandberg made the extremely disingenuous claim that only Facebook had the smarts to stop these groups, and that most of the organizing of the Capitol insurrection must have happened elsewhere. Multiple reports debunked that claim, and this new one takes it even further, showing that these groups are (1) still organizing on Facebook, and (2) Facebook's recommendation algorithm is still pushing people to them:
The German armed forces want to arm their drones. Germany, France, Italy and Spain are also to decide on combat drone swarms.
This March marks the 10-year anniversary of the Arab Spring and the protests that rocked Syria, which were a starting point for the ongoing civil war. That conflict has led to over half a million deaths and nearly 13 million people displaced, according to some estimates.
As the world’s worst humanitarian crisis enters its seventh year in Yemen, we look at the toll of the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led air war. A new report by the Yemen Data Project summarizing the impact of air raids over the past six years finds the bombing campaign has killed almost 1,500 civilians every year on average, a quarter of them children. Journalist Iona Craig, who heads up the Yemen Data Project, says there have been almost 23,000 air raids since the war began in 2015. “We’re still seeing mass civilian casualty events,” says Craig. “We’re still seeing a large number of airstrikes on residential areas and, of course, on civilian infrastructure, which has been absolutely decimated over the last six years of the conflict.”
Nearly one in five people facing charges related to the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol had some connection to the military, including at least two active-duty troops, prompting Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin to order a 60-day stand-down across the services to address extremism. Ahead of the first deadline on April 6, the House Armed Services Committee held a hearing Wednesday on extremism in the U.S. military. We speak with one of the experts who testified. “People who are connected with the military are prime targets for extremists,” says Lecia Brooks, chief of staff at the Southern Poverty Law Center. Despite the decades of inaction, she says, “the conversation is moving forward” in Washington, as lawmakers are finally speaking openly about white supremacy and white nationalism.
QAnon, the anti-Semitic and white supremacist conspiracy-theory cult and live action roleplaying game, may actually be a new type of American religion, as Caroline Mimbs Nyce argued in a recent article at the Atlantic. In an interview with CBC radio, sociologist Edwin Hodge offered this complementary insight: [...]
Russia has invested heavily in the development of the Northern Sea Route that allows ships to cut the journey to Asian ports by 15 days compared with the conventional route through the Suez Canal.
As the route becomes increasingly free of ice due to climate change, Moscow is planning to use it to export oil and gas to overseas markets.
There is a clear way to get more value from the seas: protect fish. New research confirms an old argument.
"We will keep fighting for justice and for the protection of fundamental rights that are threatened by the unequal and diverse impacts of climate change."
This works out at $400m an hour in trade along the waterway which is a vital passageway between east and west.
Data from shipping expert Lloyd's List values the canal's westbound traffic at roughly $5.1bn a day, and eastbound daily traffic at around $4.5bn.
Despite efforts to free the ship, it could take weeks to remove experts say.
I have a confession to make. I love stories about utility companies. Always have. Always will.
There are several reasons. First, and perhaps foremost, they check the most important box for being the focus of investigative reporting: The services they deliver – electricity and water – touch the lives of nearly everyone. And, they are almost always monopolies. When the grid fails in Texas, or the water system becomes toxic in Flint, Michigan, it’s not like customers can take their business elsewhere.
A letter published today and signed by over 170 grassroots groups urged the government to “kick out” polluters from sponsoring or even visiting the summit, claiming their presence is “poisoning” the climate€ debate.
For forty years, the Coastal Commission has been arguing with the California State Parks and Recreation that thrillcraft jeopardized the area’s natural values, including the destruction of nests of endangered least terns and snowy plovers. There are ten species within the Park listed under state or federal laws that the Park agency is obligated to protect.
But with thousands of dune buggies, dirt bikes, 4WD pickups, and other motorized thrillcraft tearing up the beach and dunes, protection of plants and animals is not among the Park’s priorities.
Ranger Davy wrote: “Research indicates use of helicopters has significant negative impacts to denning grizzly bears, a threatened species. Wildlife biologists have documented occupied grizzly bear dens in the vicinity of the proposed use. Based on a preliminary review of this project, U.S. Fish and Wildlife agreed with Caribou-Targhee determination of an adverse effect to denning grizzly bears as well as an adverse effect to grizzlies emerging from their dens. Helicopter use would likely cause injury to denning females and possible mortality of cubs of the year. Some of the areas proposed for skiing and landing a helicopter are located within known avalanche prone areas creating a risk to public health and safety. This use as demonstrated by the applicant can be accommodated on lands other than National Forest System lands.”
After the Forest Service first indicated that they were going to grant the permit for helicopter skiing, Yellowstone to Uintas Connection, the Alliance for the Wild Rockies, and Native Ecosystem Council jumped into action and submitted comments to the Caribou-Targhee National Forest pointing out that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s own maps showed the area is occupied grizzly bear habitat.
So, in the spirit of reciprocity, here’s the picture.
As can be seen, after four years in the White House, Donald Trump had a net loss of 2,943,000 jobs. After one month, Joe Biden has a net gain of 379,000. Looks pretty damn MAGA to me.
The Vermont senator and former presidential candidate takes shot across the bow of the wealth defense industry.
"President Biden can't stand for this any longer. He must protect Social Security beneficiaries by firing Saul and Black immediately."
"The climate crisis poses an existential threat to our planet, but it also brings massive opportunity to redress historic injustices and build a better future for all."
"At the end of the day, we need massive tax reform in this country, so that we end the tax loopholes and the giveaways to the wealthy and large corporations."
The president, said one advocate, sent "an unmistakable signal that he is willing to do what it takes to end gridlock and deliver results."
The Racial Equity Anchor Collaborative called the order "a first step in the pursuit of a vision of democracy that honors and protects every American's right to vote."
"The most radical fringes of the Republican Party sitting in the state legislature will be able to wipe out boards of elections... This is Jim Crow 2.0."
We've pointed out a few times how silly all these Congressional panels on content moderation are, but the one happening today is particularly silly. One of the problems, of course, is that while everyone seems to be mad about Section 230, they seem to be mad about it for opposite reasons, with Republicans wanting the companies to moderate less, and Democrats wanting the companies to moderate more. That's only one of many reasons why today's hearing, like those in the past, are so pointless. They tend to bog down in silly "but what about this particular moderation decision" which will then be presented in a misleading or out of context fashion, allowing the elected official to grandstand about how they "held big tech's feet to the fire" or some such nonsense.
Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of imprisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny, has reportedly left Russia once again. An informed source told Interfax that Navalnaya flew to Germany on Wednesday, March 24.€
Joe Biden’s reluctance to meet Russia’s president in an “open discussion” is deeply “regrettable,” Moscow declared earlier this week. Putin had challenged his American counterpart to something akin to an online debate after Biden called him a “killer” in a television interview. Though the Kremlin insists it had in mind ðn informal exchange rather than a public contest, Meduza looks at which president fares better in debates, who might emerge victorious if the two battled each other, and which leader lost more by not debating, in the end.
As of Thursday, March 25, more than 250,000 people across Russia have signed up to take part in a countrywide protest action demanding the release of imprisoned opposition politician Alexey Navalny.€
When the House Oversight and Reform Committee considered HR 51, the proposal to grant statehood to the District of Columbia, Georgia Republican Jody Hice delivered an antidemocratic diatribe that caused jaws to drop.
Back in 2013, I defended Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s refusal to listen to leading liberals who said she should retire so that President Obama could appoint her successor. For one thing, I knew, as she argued, that Obama would never appoint anyone as liberal as Ginsburg, a former ACLU attorney. But I also shared her political analysis. As she told The Washington Post at the time: “I think it’s going to be another Democratic president [in 2016]. The Democrats do fine in presidential elections; their problem is they can’t get out the vote in the midterm elections.”
The White House press corps recently elevated President Joe Biden’s “delay” in holding a press conference to the level of a scandal. The narrative was that he couldn’t handle the unscripted format—because of dementia, gaffes, other “Uncle Joe” problems, or all of the above.
"Trump's biggest regulatory attack on SNAP is officially dead and buried."
In late February, I drove to see the Trump wall in Sasabe, Ariz. As soon as I parked, a green-striped Border Patrol vehicle stationed a quarter of a mile away began to creep down the dirt road toward us. Just ahead, a dystopian “No Trespassing” sign was flapping in the wind. It was cold as I stepped out of the car with my 5-year-old son, William. The wall ahead of us, 30-feet high with steel bollards, was indeed imposing as it quavered slightly in the wind. Through its bars we could see Mexico, a broken panorama of hills filled with mesquites backed by a blue sky.
Increasing numbers of migrants are attempting to cross the US/Mexico border, and unaccompanied children and teenagers are exceeding the capacities of government-run detention facilities. The right has declared a crisis, and national corporate media have largely followed suit.
In the middle of Congress’ first hearing of the year with the chief executives of Facebook, Google, and Twitter on Thursday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey tweeted out a poll. It was just a question mark with two answers: yes and no.
It was an obvious troll directed at the lawmakers questioning Dorsey, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai over the roles their platforms have played in spreading misinformation and inciting a violent insurrection at the US Capitol earlier this year. With limited time for questioning, the members would interrupt the CEOs’ responses, asking for “yes” or “no” answers or nothing at all.
Later today, my colleague Makena Kelly will publish a breakdown of “Disinformation Nation,” a marathon House of Representatives hearing about social media, extremism, and misinformation. But to massively oversimplify, just imagine several hours of that three-step process — and that Jack Dorsey is clearly, obviously sick of it all.
The leaders of Google, Facebook and Twitter faced sharp questions about misinformation’s role in the attack and the mental health of children who use their products, but lawmakers got few direct answers.
The CEOs of Facebook, Google and Twitter on Thursday faced a congressional grilling over their platforms' roles in the organization of January's Capitol insurrection, but managed to give very few direct answers.
Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Jack Dorsey dodged and deflected a broad range of questions over the course of the five-and-a-half hour long hearing before two House Energy and Commerce subcommittees ostensibly focused on misinformation that ended up veering away from that topic for long segments.
The hearing was the first featuring the executives after the deadly insurrection at the Capitol, which was largely organized on social media.
"Of course Facebook wants to see changes to Section 230. Because they know it will simply serve to solidify their monopoly power and crush competition from smaller and more decentralized platforms."
For decades now Utah legislators have repeatedly engaged in theater in their doomed bid to filter pornography from the internet. And repeatedly those lawmakers run face first into the technical impossibility of such a feat (it's trivial for anybody who wants porn to bypass filters), the problematic collateral damage that inevitably occurs when you try to censor such content (filters almost always wind up with legit content being banned), and a pesky little thing known as the First Amendment. But annoying things like technical specifics or the Constitution aren't going to thwart people who just know better.
Earlier this month, we noted that, to close out its session, the Utah legislature decided to pass two separate blatantly unconstitutional bills. One requiring porn filters on internet-connected devices, and the other that tried to overrule Section 230 (something states can't do) and require all "social media corporations" to employ an "independent review board" to review content moderation decisions. It also says that social media companies must moderate in an "equitable" manner (whatever that means).
A message spread on social media last night urged people to attend and demand the resignation of the Batley Grammar School teacher allegedly involved.
For the first time in the 29 years since the signing of the peace accords, a president and several members of his cabinet have been called out for their repressive actions and for inciting violence against critics, in ways that echo the military governments of the 1980s.
Last week, the Association of Journalists of El Salvador (APES) presented its report on attacks on journalists, freedom of expression and freedom of the press. According to the APES report “Freedom of Expression in El Salvador 2020”, aggressions against journalists doubled between March and September of that year. The organization registered 125 cases in 2020 and 77 in 2019, while in 2018 there were 65. The main culprits of threats and aggressions against journalists and media included President Nayib Bukele and several officials of his cabinet.
It is not just opposition activists, but also journalists and other critics of the government who increasingly wind up behind bars. In 2018 the government introduced the Digital Security Act, supposedly to curb religious radicalism and pornography online. But its vague provisions, which include stiff jail sentences for those who post “aggressive or frightening” content, have been used to silence critics of all sorts. Mushtaq Ahmed, a writer, was arrested last year after criticising the government’s response to covid-19 on Facebook. He died in prison last month, having been denied bail six times.
More information has come out about the disastrous attempt by Arizona prosecutors to turn anti-police-violence protesters into a street gang. Phoenix police officers waded into the protest comprised of (checks official documents) 17 protesters, showering them with pepper balls and arresting them all. Charges were brought, including one very damaging one: assisting a criminal street gang. Gang charges are automatic felonies with hefty sentence enhancements.
"This is why federal voting rights legislation is necessary."
"Congress has the opportunity to bring us one step closer to a world where access to abortion care doesn't depend on where you live, how you are insured, or how much money you have."
Three ways to begin to end the war on terror.
A barely tolerated opposition magazine had published an excruciating interview with him, and I forced myself — having recently returned to my native land after 12 years of exile — to devour it with a mix of perverse curiosity and obvious dread. It was a tale of multiple horrors, detailing how Valenzuela and his fellow state agents had abducted dissidents, applied electricity to their genitals, dumped the corpses in rivers and ravines. I knew some of those victims personally and was aware that the viciousness inflicted on them and so many others could very well erupt into my own life.
Overcome with revulsion, I resolved to forget that name, Andrés Valenzuela. As if banishing him from memory could deny his ferocious persistence. Because here he is again, the protagonist of Nona Fernández’s novel “The Twilight Zone,” translated fluidly into English by Natasha Wimmer. Given my initial distressing experience with the magazine interview, I approached this book with trepidation, also wary that a plethora of investigations, memoirs, films, fiction, essays, plays and poems had extensively covered the themes of terror, memory and the obstacles to national reconciliation since Pinochet’s loss of power in 1990. Could anything original still be expressed on the subject?
We are now firmly in a time of fear – not only of the virus, but of each other. Fear destroys solidarity. Fear forces us to turn inwards to protect ourselves and our loved ones. Fear refuses to understand or identify with the concerns of others.
In fear societies, basic rights become a luxury. They are viewed as a threat, as recklessness, as a distraction that cannot be afforded in this moment of crisis.
The Homeland Security vehicle soon pulled up next to us. An agent rolled down his window and asked me, “What are you doing? Joyriding?”
After I laughed in response to a word I hadn’t heard in years, the agent informed us that we were in a dangerous construction zone, even if this part of the wall had been built four months earlier. I glanced around. There were no bulldozers, excavators, or construction equipment of any sort. I wondered whether the lack of machinery reflected the campaign promise of the recently inaugurated Joe Biden that “not another foot” of Trump’s wall would be built.
"I am proud to stand in solidarity with Amazon workers in Alabama who are fighting for better wages and better working conditions."
“Edward Said was our prince,” the Egyptian novelist Ahdaf Soueif recently said in a conversation reflecting on the Palestinian public intellectual’s life and writings. An incomparable thinker, Said is credited with founding postcolonial studies, penning histories of cultural representation and “the Other,” and, in so doing, upending the Anglo-American academy. His Orientalism, published in 1978, is among the most cited books in modern history, by some accounts above Marx’s Capital and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Throughout decades of essays, books, and reviews, Said showed his care for form and the structures of feeling, seeing in their examination a means of understanding music, literature, the world, and Palestine, his home.
We get an update on a massive fire at the world’s largest refugee camp: the Rohingya refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. The fire killed at least 15 people and displaced 45,000 this week, with hundreds possibly still missing. Bangladeshi authorities are investigating the cause of the fire, which destroyed about 17,000 shelters as the blaze ripped through the crowded camp, leaving behind scenes of utter destruction and despair as people were separated from their loved ones. Nearly a million Rohingya refugees live in southern Bangladesh, often in squalid and dangerous conditions, after fleeing a brutal military crackdown in Burma in 2017. Tun Khin, Rohingya activist and president of the Burmese Rohingya Organisation UK, says it is a “very, very tragic moment for the Rohingya people.”
A partner at a major firm had been suspended initially for six months for intentionally over-billing certain clients for 450 hours of work she and other lawyers had not performed. (Apparently, one justice initially decides the penalty in a bar proceeding there.). Bar counsel then argued to the entire court that six months was insufficient, and the Massachusetts Supreme Court agreed.
[...]
And, related to that, many state disciplinary rules, like the USPTO Rules, require certain members of firms to have in place policies to ensure compliance with the ethical rules, and so one lawyer’s misconduct could cause ripple effects.
The EPO has said it will continue to hold hearings by video-conference without parties’ permission, despite the fact that an appeal questioning the legality of that approach is pending.
In a statement on Wednesday, March 24, an EPO spokesperson said that after a “careful weighing up of the impact for legal certainty and access to justice”, president António Campinos had decided oral proceedings would continue under current practice.
At the moment, oral proceedings before examination and opposition divisions, and at appeal level, can be held by VICO without both parties’ consent.
Earlier this month, an EPO Technical Board of Appeal made a referral to the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBoA) seeking to clarify whether that approach was permissible under the European Patent Convention.
The referral to the EBoA concerns appeal proceedings, but also extends to oral proceedings by VICO before examining and opposition divisions.
According to the EPO, hosting oral proceedings by VICO in examination and opposition was introduced to ensure the functioning of the office during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Before this was introduced, the pandemic had a “significant negative impact” on legal certainty for parties because almost none of the scheduled oral proceedings could take place, an EPO spokesperson said.
The EPO said it would immediately implement the EBoA’s findings once it rules on the matter.
Viet Nguyen, a climber and coder, created OpenBeta to bring open source software tools to the climbing community. He used Mountain Project, a website where climbers can post information about climbing routes, as a source of user-posted data about climbs, including their location, ratings, route descriptions, and the names of first ascensionists. Using this data, Nguyen created free, publicly available interfaces (APIs) that others can use to discover new insights about climbing—anything from mapping favorite crags to analyzing the relative difficulty of routes in different regions—using software of their own.
Rock climbers get a lot of practice at falling hard, taking a moment to recover, and continuing to climb. Mountain Project should take a lesson from their community: dust off, change your approach, and keep climbing.
The Mountain Project website is built on users’ contributions of information about climbs. Building on users’ contributions, Mountain Project offers search tools, “classic climbs” lists, climbing news links, and other content. But although the site runs on the contributions of its users, Mountain Project’s owners apparently want to control who can use those contributions, and how. They sent a cease-and-desist letter to Mr. Nguyen, claiming to “own[] all rights and interests in the user-generated work” posted to the site, and demanding that he stop using it in OpenBeta. They also sent a DMCA request to GitHub to take down the OpenBeta code repository.
TekSavvy went up against major media companies including Bell and Rogers in Canada's Federal Court of Appeal this week. The Court, which has to decide whether the country's first pirate site blocking order can stay in place, heard arguments from both sides and intervening parties including the Canadian domain name registry.
Following the dismantling of several private trackers in 2020, a man has been sentenced for sharing thousands of TV shows and movies via now-defunct torrent site DanishBits. In a separate case, another man has been convicted of sharing 9,440 movies with a relatively small circle of family and friends using the popular Plex media server.
Techdirt has been following the saga of the City of London Police's special "Intellectual Property Crime Unit" (PIPCU) since it was formed back in 2013. It has not been an uplifting story. PIPCU seems to regard itself as Hollywood's private police force worldwide, trying to stop copyright infringement online, but without much understanding of how the Internet works, or even regard for the law, as a post back in 2014 detailed. PIPCU rather dropped off the radar, until last week, when its dire warnings about a new, deadly threat to the wondrous world of copyright were picked up by a number of gullible journalists. PIPCU's breathless press release reveals the shocking truth: innocent young minds are being encouraged to access knowledge, funded by the public, as widely as possible. Yes, PIPCU has discovered Sci-Hub:
