When you live in the USA, you get used to buying things that are made in other countries. It is just very common to see things stamped with "Made in China" or "Made in Mexico." Some Americans take issue with this, actively trying to buy products made in the USA, but this can be quite hard. Even American car companies, like Ford, outsource labor to foreign counties, such as Mexico.
System76 is a company that sells computers preloaded with Linux-based operating systems, including laptops and desktops. While its laptops are not yet manufactured in the USA, its beautiful Thelio desktops are handcrafted here. And now, in an interesting twist, System76 has begun shipping its computers to customers in Mexico.
Why do I say this is interesting? Well, like I previously stated, Americans are used to seeing products made in Mexico on store shelves. And most computers are not made in the USA, nor are they running Linux. So to think that a company in the USA is making Linux desktops and selling them to people in Mexico is pretty damn neat.
I’ve led the OpenShift Hive engineering team since it’s inception 3 years ago. Hive is a CRD based Kubernetes operator for provisioning OpenShift clusters at scale. You define your desired OpenShift clusters, and our controllers make that happen. It’s also a backing component of OpenShift Dedicated and Red Hat OpenShift Service on AWS. This obviously requires far more scale and resiliency than one instance of an operator in one Kubernetes cluster can provide, and requires a number of Hive shards across various failure domains.
My team has often felt some discomfort with parts of what we ended up with, and have been discussing with Clayton and others in the OpenShift organization how we can improve some of the pain points. The crux of all of those concerns generally involves the fact that CRDs reside in the Kubernetes cluster’s etcd where your operator is running, both in terms of scale, and continuity.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got a ton of news to cover with some big news from Audacity in that the project has been acquired by the Muse Group, Ubuntu 16.04 Reaches End of LIfe . . . well sort of. Then we’ll check out some great hardware news from IBM & also from Star Labs. In App News this week, we’ve got new releases from MusE Digital Audio Workstation, Kdenlive 21.04, QEMU 6.0 and more. We’re also going to do a follow up to some news last week related to Humble Bundle and so much more including new version of WINE and Proton and even a milestone for the Linux kernel to celebrate. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
The popular VTE-based terminal emulator known as Termite is now officially dead. The main dev has decided to stop working on Termite. He is telling everyone to switch to Alacritty and help contribute to that project. He also has some not-so-nice things to say about the GNOME project, which maintain VTE.
In various privacy oriented tech circles you'll here the term botnet be thrown around to refer to anything that makes network connections and does something in response so today I thought I should take the time to explain what a botnet actually is.
Outside of the i915 kernel graphics driver one of the areas Linux 5.13 is seeing more discrete graphics card bring-up work is within their PMT driver for enabling platform monitoring / telemetry support with this inaugural Intel PCIe graphics card.
The Linux Multi-Function Device (MFD) subsystem pull request for the 5.13 merge window included the addition of Intel DG1 graphics support to the company's Platform Monitoring Technology (PMT) driver.
The PowerPC architecture pull request for the Linux 5.13 cycle brings some improvements to its 32-bit support and other enhancements.
Some of the 32-bit work on the PowerPC front with this next kernel version includes KFENCE and eBPF support most notably. 32-bit eBPF support is important given how widespread eBPF usage is becoming. KFENCE is the Kernel Electric Fence that debuted in Linux 5.12. KFENCE is a low-overhead memory safety detector designed to be suitable for production systems.
Support for the Loongson 2K1000 is finally mainline with the forthcoming Linux 5.13 kernel.
While the MIPS-based Loongson processors are known for being open-source friendly and for a time were trumpeted by Stallman, the older 2K1000 series support has been out-of-tree the past few years and only now being mainlined.
2K1000 Linux patches were sent out again in March for review and this time deemed ready for mainline. That 2K1000 support then was sent in and merged last week as part of the MIPS architecture updates.
Most of the time while running SSH connections to remote servers we need to edit configuration files, read log files, take notes for other people and we do all that in the command line with a text editor. Now Linux comes with a huge variety of text editors. Some of them are built in with the distribution you have installed, others can be downloaded and installed via tar or apt and so on. But whatever the case is the editor we use must be lite, fast and comfortable for us to use. One example of a great but hard to use for new users is the VI text editor. Vi is great and powerful and you can do great stuff with vi, but for new users is very uncomfortable.
So in this article we are going to check for text editors that are lite, have great options and also are easy to use for new Linux users.
It’s a well-known fact that Microsoft 365 is the default productivity solution for many companies and its range of features is truly impressive. It includes such functionalities as document editing, real-time collaboration, file sharing, project management, email, calendaring, and video conferencing. In other words, Microsoft 365 provides both personal and corporate users with all the essential applications that allow them to get their work done effortlessly and quickly.
However, the subscription model and cost of this software as well as its security standards and policies are not appropriate for everyone, and some companies start looking for more affordable solutions.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Virtualmin on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Virtualmin is a free server control panel (Pro version also available). It helps managing websites (hosts) using Apache, Nginx, PHP, DNS, MySQL, FTP, SSH, and many more. It is based on the well-known open-source web-based system management Webmin.
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 Virtualmin web hosting control panel on a CentOS 8.
Have you done too many customizations and turned your Gnome Linux desktop ugly or broke something? No worries! You can always reset Gnome desktop settings to default in Linux as described here. I have a habit of changing the look and appearance of stock GNOME desktop environment. I often install many themes, change the icon theme, cursor theme, colors, and move the topbar to different position etc. After completing the customization, I mostly end up with either an ugly desktop or broken desktop. If you're anything like me, don't panic! Resetting GNOME Linux desktop to its factory settings is easy!
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, MongoDB is a general-purpose, cross-platform, document-based database solution that falls under the NoSQL classification. MongoDB features include full index support, replication, high availability, and auto-sharding. It is cross-platform and it makes the process of data integration faster and much easier. Since it is free and open-source, MongoDB is used by a number of websites and organizations.
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 the step-by-step installation of MongoDB on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
Docker has an extensive set of commands (subcommands to be more precise). You cannot possibly use all of them and there is no need to go for that achievement as well.
Most of the time you'll be using a certain subset of commands for managing containers and images.
I am going to list such common but essential Docker commands that are extremely useful for day to day use by Docker users and admins.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to upgrade Ubuntu 20.10 to Ubuntu 21.04. For those of you who didn’t know, Ubuntu 21.04 “Hirsute Hippo” features the latest Ubuntu technology for desktops, servers, and all of its flavors. This release, however, features moderate changes being a short-term one. This stable release will be supported until Jan 2022.
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 upgrading from Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) to Ubuntu 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo).
If you are using Kitematic to manage Docker machines and while accessing Containers’ CLI – you get an error “The null does not exist please set the correct path”; then here is the solution for that.
Kitematic is an open-source project that makes it easier to get started with Docker by offering a graphical interface with which containers from the Docker Hub registry can be selected and used comparatively easily.
It is available for Windows, macOS, and Ubuntu Linux operating systems. But if you want then can install the Kitematic on RHEL based Linux such as CemtOS, Rocky, AlmaLinux, and others. See our tutorial- How to install Kitematic docker manager on RedHat-based OS such as CentOS and others…
Coming to the error that is “The null does not exist please set the correct path“. It appears when after installing Kitematic you either click on Docker CLI or EXEC option given for each container.
Your system's hard disk can get full really quick if you don't monitor it on a regular basis. We have got more digital data than we can even store on our devices. Therefore, checking disk space and usage is an important task that you should incorporate in your digital life.
On Linux, several utilities are available to check disk usage and storage including df, ncdu, and gdu. Read on to learn how you can use gdu to analyze disk usage on your Linux system, along with a brief guide on how to install it.
Whether you want to know free memory available, disk space usage, network device detail, or hardware information, a command utility is available for each purpose.
But remembering all those commands might be a tedious task, especially for beginners. So, what if you can view every detail of your system and hardware using a single command utility?
Yes, inxi is one such lightweight tool rightly developed to ease the task of collecting all Linux system information by using different options and displaying it in a terminal in a very simple way.
Let’s Encrypt revolutionized the SSL certificate management for websites in a short span of time — it directly improved the security of users of the world wide web by: (1) making it very simple to deploy SSL certificates to websites by administrators and (2) make the certificates available free of cost. To appreciate their efforts, compare to what hoops one had to jump through to obtain a certificate from a certificate authority (CA) and how much money and energy one would have to spend on it.
I make use of letsencrypt in all the servers I manitain(ed) and in the past used the certbot tool to obtain & renew certificates. Recent versions of certbot are only available as a snap package, which is not something I’d want to or able to setup in many cases.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to disable SELinux on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, SELinux (Security-Enhanced Linux) is a Linux kernel module that provides a mechanism to enforce access control security policies including MAC (Mandatory Access Control). SELinux policy rules specify how processes and users interact with each other as well as how processes and users interact with files. When there is no rule explicitly allowing access to an object, such as for a process opening a file, access is denied.
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 disabling SELinux on an AlmaLinux 8.
Have you done too many customizations and turned your Gnome Linux desktop ugly or broke something? No worries! You can always reset Gnome desktop settings to default in Linux as described here.
I have a habit of changing the look and appearance of stock GNOME desktop environment. I often install many themes, change the icon theme, cursor theme, colors, and move the topbar to different position etc. After completing the customization, I mostly end up with either an ugly desktop or broken desktop. If you're anything like me, don't panic! Resetting GNOME Linux desktop to its factory settings is easy!
This simple tutorial shows how to install the latest PipeWire server via an Ubuntu PPA in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, and Ubuntu 20.10.
PipeWire is a new low-level multimedia framework, aims to offer capture and playback for both audio and video with minimal latency and support for PulseAudio, JACK, ALSA and GStreamer based applications. And it also work with sandboxed Flatpak applications.
PipeWire is available in Ubuntu universe repositories, and it’s officially supported in Ubuntu 21.04. While the default version is always old, a fan of Arch user maintains an Ubuntu PPA with the latest packages so far for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 21.04, and next Ubuntu 21.10.
Have you ever come across text files with repeated lines and duplicate words? Maybe you regularly work with command output and want to filter those for distinct strings. When it comes to text files and the removal of redundant data in Linux, the uniq command is your best bet.
In this article, we will discuss the uniq command in-depth, along with a detailed guide on how to use the command to remove duplicate lines from a text file.
Now one of the things that every modern person wants to know about his internet connection is the network speed. Most people don’t even know if 60 Megabits is a good or bad speed but they know more is better. So in order to understand network speed we have to understand what is good and bad speed? But how to do this in a really short and not boring way? The easy way is to trust us and take our word that speeds grater than 75 Megabits per second are great for home and watching 4k online TV and so on.
For the more curious readers there is an article on Wikipedia explaining network speeds which you can read from here.
Now your network speed is divided in two parts, the first part is the external network speed ( the speed after your home router ) and internal speed ( the speed that your home network runs at ). In this article we are interested in our speed after the router ( The speed that the network provider is selling us ) so that we can check if we are getting what they are selling to us. For this to be accurate we have to accept that the internal network speed ( our home LAN ) is capable of reaching the provided by the provider speeds ( for example if we have a 200 Megabit provided to our router, the router has to be capable to operate at gigabit speeds ).
Wine, that glorious bit of tasty open source software has a new 6.8 development release now available.
For newer readers and Linux users here's a refresher - Wine is a compatibility layer built for operating systems like Linux, macOS and BSD. The idea is to allow other platforms to run games and applications only built and supported for Windows. It's also part of what makes up Steam Play Proton. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.
The Invisible Hand is a first-person stockbroker experience where you try and get rich quick, while you work for the trading firm FERIOS. Your only job is to make money and as much as possible.
Just like the real thing you will buy when they're going up, sell before you make a big loss and make as much commission as possible. Of course, it's not that simple. This is, after all, a game. You can find ways to make things easier, like lobbying an influential group to affect the market or even drive down an entire currency to boost your margins. It's a cut-throat world out there.
Excited to play Resident Evil Village? It may not support Linux but that isn't stopping Valve with a new Proton Experimental update out now.
The latest update to Proton Experimental 07/05/2021 has a single line added in the changelog which notes "Beginnings of Resident Evil Village support.". With that in mind then, Valve's partner CodeWeavers and their Wine hackers are already hooking up whatever they can to get it working.
From initial few reports, it looks like you can actually get in-game now thanks to Proton Experimental but there are plenty of issues like settings not being able to change and videos not yet showing up. So keep that in mind if you were planning to pick it up to play it on Linux.
Music is now a part of our life, and some of us even love to play music a lot. We have instruments, both real and virtual, to play music. But what can be more interesting to create music while playing video games? Well, that’s possible. There is a genre of Android video games that lets you play different types of instruments in terms of playing a game. And we call it rhythm games for Android. Mostly, kids love to play this kind of game, but adults in their free time also love to enjoy playing these games too. However, if you plan to enjoy a rhythm game anyway, you are on the right track.
Vector Pinball is a pinball game.
The graphics are deliberately simple; currently everything is drawn with lines and circles. The focus is on gameplay and accurate physics. The game uses the Box2D engine (via the Java wrapper in libgdx) to simulate its physics.
The game begins with ball savers in the left and right outlanes, which disappear when used. You can restore the ball savers by hitting all the drop targets on the left or right side.
KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.82.0.
KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.
This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
KDE Frameworks 5.82 comes with more than 200 changes to improve generation of thumbnails during screenshots or when copying files, make it easier to add events to Kontact from Digital Clock’s pop-up, and improve the Plasma Wayland session by fixing sub-menus of context menus for Plasma applets.
It also improves grid items in System Settings pages by making them fully accessible, adding keyboard navigation, and improve usability on touch screens and discoverability by implementing the ability to display their inline actions for the currently-selected item and the hovered one. Moreover, a System Settings crash that occurred when navigating from one QtQuick-based page to another was also fixed.
The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation (RESF) is pleased to announce the general availability of the Rocky Linux 8.3 Release Candidate 1 for x86_64 and aarch64 architectures.
The AlmaLinux OS Foundation announced the general availability of AlmaLinux 8.3 AWS Machine Image on the AWS Marketplace.
AlmaLinux is an open-source, community-driven project that intends to fill the gap left by the demise of the CentOS stable release. It is a 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8 and it is built by the creators of the established CloudLinux OS. If you missed the news, the first stable version of AlmaLinux OS was released on March 30th, 2021.
AlmaLinux has worked with the AWS Marketplace team to produce images of AlmaLinux OS and make this easier for AWS users to find, and to trust, these images. There is no additional charge, beyond the charges for the underlying AWS resources, to use these images.
Here’s my (nineteenth) monthly update about the activities I’ve done in the F/L/OSS world.
FTP master
This month I accepted 103 and rejected 10 packages, which is again an increase compared to last month. The overall number of packages that got accepted was only 107.
Debian LTS
This was my eighty-second month that I did some work for the Debian LTS initiative, started by Raphael Hertzog at Freexian.
Following the tradition to offer commercial support for those who still want to use Ubuntu 16.04 LTS on their machines, Canonical is now offering extended security maintenance (ESM) support, which usually provides users with security updates for high and critical common vulnerabilities and exposures for an additional 3 to 5 years.
As such, Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) is still supported until April 2024 with Extended Security Maintenance (ESM) through Canonical’s Ubuntu Advantage for Infrastructure, as well as on the public cloud with Ubuntu Pro for AWS (Amazon Web Services), Azure, and Google Cloud.
If you are looking for an Arm Linux tablet option are limited with, for instance, the Allwinner A64 powered 10.1-inch PineTab tablet or the CutiePi tablet with a Raspberry Pi CM4 module.
If you’d like more performance, the upcoming JingPad A1 2-in-1 tablet might be an option worth looking into. The 11-inch 2K tablet features an octa-core Cortex-A75/A55 processor, coupled with 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, and can be transformed into a laptop with an optional detachable keyboard. JingPad A1 runs the company’s JingOS optimized for tablets, and which also happens to be able to run Android apps.
Chia farming is a less intensive task when trying to get in on the latest crypto craze. While Chia plotting requires an SSD for optimal performance, farming on the other hand thrives on hard drives and can run on just about anything. Of course, the Raspberry Pi is the homelabber’s delight, a little unit that is as flexible as it is affordable. So, on the surface, it seems a great candidate to connect to a few USB hard drives for low-impact Chia farming duty. Let’s take a look at how to set up Chia farming on Raspberry Pi 4.
[...]
And that is it. The Raspberry Pi may not have enough oompf to plot Chia, as it is not more than a board with a tiny bit of compute and memory. However, it can be set up to farm or harvest Chia once a user gets going. Following the above should have you ready to go within a few minutes, minus the network sync that can take a while. If you want to step up the budget a little bit, the Lenovo Nano will let you plot and farm for under $400. If you happen to have a Pi on hand though, it should handle the Chia farming task just fine.
Although mechanical keyboards are more popular than ever in gaming communities, getting that perfect “click” when you press down on the key is still being chased. That’s why maker Jason Ron wanted to convert an old typewriter into the perfect gaming controller. It works by using some tape wrapped around several of the typebars that either reflects more light when held up or none when it’s lowered. A pair of IR emitters and receivers were used to detect these changes in light levels, where their values were then read by an Arduino Leonardo.
The code Ron wrote takes advantage of the Leonardo’s native USB peripheral, letting it act as a keyboard for a host device. When the light level falls between certain predetermined values a key is pressed virtually and then sent to the computer, although this functionality can be toggled on or off to prevent unwanted keypresses.
This week happened to see new releases of two prominent open-source AV1 video encoders.
[...]
Meanwhile ending out the week is SVT-AV1 0.8.7. SVT-AV1 is the high performance AV1 encoder originally developed by Intel but since then the development has shifted to the Alliance for Open Media members. While it's another point release in the v0.8 series, it is coming with many improvements. SVT-AV1 0.8.7 has more AVX2 and AVX-512 optimizations, various feature optimizations, tuning of the presets, HDR support, memory optimizations, and a variety of other enhancements.
A year ago, video calling tools became part of everyday life for many people. Few were spared having meetings with family, friends and co-workers, several in a single day. The advance of the pandemic and the containment measures have relaxed that situation, but they are still very much needed.
If we ask, everyone has their favorite tool, either because they already have the application installed, it is the one they use at work, because it allows them to record meetings, or because it offers more games and funds to have a good time. Google Meet, Microsoft Team, Skype or Zoom … they are many and very similar, but Jitsi Meet has gone more unnoticed, despite having been available for years and offer a lot for free.
MariaDB has added proprietary bells and whistles, in the form of distributed SQL, for its DBaaS and supposedly developer-friendly front end.
The biz supporting the open-source MySQL-derived database introduced its DBaaS SkySQL last year and has now announced the general availability of its distributed SQL as one of the engines in MariaDB's SkySQL system, said CMO Franz Aman.
"What's cool about distributed SQL is that you get all the scale of NoSQL, but you get it with all the benefits of relational," he said. "So, you have strong consistency, you have full SQL vocabulary, but at a scale that is ready for the internet for internet-scale."
Dubbed Xpand, the DBaaS engine is designed to tolerate infrastructure failures and maintain availability by storing multiple copies of data on different database nodes. MariaDB is adding zone awareness to ensure that redundant data is kept in all the right places and survives if a zone goes down entirely.
Hello M4 users,
GNU M4 1.4.18b has been released. This release is a minor update, and is marked beta in order to give translators the time to upload translations before the stable 1.4.19 is released later this month. The bulk of the changes have been to portability fixes inherited from gnulib, since it has been more than four years since the last release.
GNU 'm4' is an implementation of the traditional Unix macro processor. It is mostly SVR4 compatible, although it has some extensions (for example, handling more than 9 positional parameters to macros). 'm4' also has built-in functions for including files, running shell commands, doing arithmetic, etc. Autoconf needs GNU 'm4' for generating 'configure' scripts, but not for running them.
GitLab says a surge in demand and a technical shortcoming resulted in the DevOps outfit yanking a free certification offer barely two days after turning on the tap.
In a postmortem write-up this week, GitLab manager Christine Yoshida said the infrastructure of its glossy "learning experience ... eventually hit a system limit" as excited users piled on, and the promotion period was ended early.
A discount code was made available in April to people who wanted to get GitLab-certified. The 100 per cent discount was planned to last for ten days, and the GitLab gang figured 4,000 users would sign up.
David Sakamoto, veep of customer success, told The Register that, as it turned out, "in just two days, there were over 59,000 enrollments with over 7,000 people using the hands-on training lab infrastructure."
We want to express our disappointment with the recent transparency reports and associated actions from the Community Affairs Team (CAT).
On Monday 19th March, a first Transparency Report was issued, which said that an individual had been investigated for (1) behaviour on IRC and Twitter, and (2) behaviour at a Perl event in 2019. The report also reported that they had "found many instances of communication which alone may not have constituted unacceptable behavior, but when taken together did constitute unacceptable behavior", but no further details were given on those. The report issued a ban from all TPF events "in perpetuity", and furthermore issued a ban on the individual’s participation on irc.perl.org and any perl.org mailing lists. A second individual was issued a warning.
Prior to the 19th, one of the Perl Steering Council (PSC) members explicitly asked you not to issue a ban, saying that the PSC were already starting work on improving discourse in and around p5p. That person felt that a ban would be counterproductive when the PSC were trying to improve things in a more inclusive way. The second event was the Perl Toolchain Summit (PTS). The incident was investigated at the time, resulting in two of the organisers (Philippe Bruhat and Neil Bowers) asking the individual to leave. He left peacefully, expressing regret that he had upset and offended the other party. The PTS is not a TPF event.
Riffing on the topic of what unusual jobs people had before tech, a few of our responses from the community were more focused on jobs that led to a job in tech.
Accessibility was also something I had never considered in depth. I knew that images should have alt descriptions, and that was about it. One of the course’s key points is that using the appropriate semantic elements is important to making a site more accessible.
For example, people who use screen readers can jump around using heading elements (<h1> through <h6>), so it’s important to use them and make sure they’re in the correct order. It’s wrong to use them only to make text bigger because their real purpose is to define the structure of the content. They’re like a table of contents.
Instead of headings, we could use <p> elements and alter their font sizes with CSS to create a website that looks identical, but it’d be less semantic and less accessible. There is more to web development than making websites look the way we want. It’s important to make the content mean what we want as well.
Accessibility isn’t just about improving how websites work with screen readers. We should think about font size, font style, and color contrast for people who have visual impairments or color blindness. We should consider that people who have hearing loss may have a harder time recognizing that audio or video is playing. We should make tab navigation work well for people who rely primarily on the keyboard, perhaps because they have a difficult time using a mouse. When we add animations, we should take care to avoid ones that make it more difficult for someone to actually use the website, such as animations that change the page layout in the middle of interactions. And we should consider when a page is overloaded with too much information or too many elements, making it hard for people to understand things or how to actually use the website.
It’s easy to forget about accessibility, but we should strive to make websites work well for as many people as possible. Accessibility also goes hand in hand with usability and search engine optimization. The course points out that improving one frequently means improving all the others.
In the spring of 2019, Cory Dowd suddenly found himself without health insurance for the first time. A self-employed event planner, he had just finished a Peace Corps stint that provided health benefits, but he was still more than a year away from starting a graduate program that would provide coverage through his university.
So, like countless others in an online world, he went insurance shopping on the internet.
One of the largest pipelines in the U.S. was forced to halt some of its operations Friday after a crippling cyberattack on its energy infrastructure.
Colonial Pipeline, which funnels refined gasoline and jet fuel from Texas to New York, said in a statement late Friday that it was shuttering 5,500 miles of pipeline in an attempt to contain the breach.
The company has already reached out to law enforcement and tapped a third-party company to conduct an investigation into the attack, though it did not reveal who it believes is behind the breach.
The intruders, who are part of a cybercrime gang called DarkSide, took nearly 100 gigabytes of data out of the Alpharetta, Georgia-based company’s network in just two hours on Thursday, two people involved in Colonial’s investigation said.
The move was part of a double-extortion scheme that is one of the group’s hallmarks. Colonial was threatened that the stolen data would be leaked to the [Internet] while the information that was encrypted by the hackers on computers inside the network would remain locked unless it paid a ransom, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the information isn’t public.
A series of major cyber-attacks in recent weeks has underscored the brazenness of the attackers and the challenges of tackling the problem of ransomware, just as the Biden administration announced plans to take on the issue.
In a matter of days, attacks were revealed against the police department in Washington, D.C. , where the [crackers] threatened to release information about police informants to criminal gangs; the Illinois Attorney General’s office, which had been warned about weak cybersecurity practices in a recent state audit; and San Diego-based Scripps Health, where medical procedures were canceled and emergency patients diverted to other hospitals.
Then on Saturday, Colonial Pipeline confirmed that it had joined the list of recent ransomware victims in an attack that threatened to upend gasoline and diesel supplies on the East Coast. While few details about the attack are yet known, Colonial shut down the biggest gasoline pipeline in the U.S. as part of an effort to contain the threat.
Much of the lingering disagreement has centred on the role of institutional review boards (IRBs), which adjudicate on study proposals that involve human subjects.
Computer science experiments generally are not regarded as subject to IRB reviews, and Minnesota’s IRB – approached by Dr Lu after the controversy became public – affirmed that position for his type of project.
That judgement has not gone over well with Linux leadership. “As someone who was ‘researched on’ as part of this ‘experiment’, I was not happy to have this pointed out to me after the fact,” said Greg Kroah-Hartman, a Linux Foundation fellow in Amsterdam who plays a chief role in Linux maintenance.
Linux kernel will issue best practices for scientists operating with the kernel community. The review board says rogue researchers did not successfully insert buggy patches into the kernel.
The Linux Foundation‘s Technical Advisory Board (TAB) has developed a statement to review the “Hypocrite Commits” line. After that, a thorough review of all Minnesota University (UNM) submissions found that none of the buggy code made it to the mainline Linux kernel.
I’m a long time fan of USB security keys for SSH access and signig GitHub commits, currently using YubiKey ones on both my laptop and desktop.
I did a semi-regular bulk upgrade of all the software packages managed on my desktop with Homebrew and then noticed a few days later that my YubiKey stopped working. It took me a few days to notice because I mostly worked on laptop (where things kept working) and also because my desktop has recently been upgraded - so I expected some instability.
After a few reboots, restarts of GnuPG daemon and even resintall of all the relevant packages using Brew, YubiKey was still not working.
Turns out it’s because GnuPG 2.3 and later releases (I’m using 2.3.1) stopped identifying YubiKey keys properly, and so CCID (it means Chip Card Interface Device protocol) way of accessing keys on the YubiKey device is not working.
Apparently, the way to fix this for now is to disable CCID, forcing GnuPG to use other means of accessing the same keys on the same YubiKey device - PC/SC (Personal Computer/Smart Card) interface.
The entity attacking tor users, originally disclosed in August 2020, is actively exploiting tor users since over a year and expanded the scale of their attacks to a new record level (>27% of the tor network’s exit capacity has been under their control on 2021–02–02).
The average exit fraction this entity controlled was above 14% throughout the past 12 months (measured between 2020–04–24 and 2021–04–26).
The malicious actor actively reported non-malicious but poorly configured relays to the Tor Project’s bad-relays mailing list to find viable victims to use for operator impersonation attacks.
Most of the malicious tor exit capacity did not have any relay ContactInfo. Throughout the last 6 months the majority of tor exit capacity without ContactInfo was malicious.
The attacker primarily uses servers at the hoster OVH. [...]
Want to help with tor network safety? Consider implementing the non-spoofable ContactInfo on your tor relays.
Painting immigrants' faces and laughing on chat shows will not excuse the former U.S. president's blood-stained past.
Gen. Cavoli is visiting personnel taking part in Exercise Swift Response, which started earlier in the week and has already seen a U.S./British Multiple Launch Rocket System (MLRS) live-firing exercise, and a large-scale jump by U.S. airborne forces, and its preparations, centered on Nurmsi airfield in Järva County.
The commander met President Kersti Kaljulaid during the course of the exercise.
Chia Kurd said that disrupting the river’s water flow into a neighboring country violates international law.
But a diplomatic source at Turkey’s Foreign Ministry denied that Turkey has deliberately decreased the volume of water on the Euphrates.
Afghan Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian said mostly young students were among the victims. He feared the death toll could increase. Arian said that at least 52 injured people had been transported to local hospitals.
Nothing that has transpired in the subsequent months makes it necessary to change this analysis. Trump continues to falsely claim he won the 2020 election and continues to mobilize violent right-wing extremists. He would, if he had the means, carry out another violent coup d’état tomorrow.
Subsequent reporting has only demonstrated the degree of planning and organization of the insurrectionists—who had offsite weapons caches ready to deploy if their plot succeeded. Internal documents from the military and capitol police testify to the scope of the military/police stand-down that allowed the insurrectionists to breach the capitol.
Trump’s suspension from Facebook is not a free speech issue. His social media accounts were suspended in the midst of an effort to overthrow a presidential election and install himself as dictator.
The attack hit Colonial Pipeline, which carries gasoline, diesel and jet fuel from Texas to New York and moves about 45% of all fuel consumed on the East Coast.
In a statement late Friday, Colonial Pipeline said it was "the victim of a cybersecurity attack" though the company didn't say who launched the attack or what the motives were.
After endless speculation, the construction of the world’s largest dam on the Great Bend of the Brahmaputra (Yarlung Tsangpo) has been approved. The dam itself will be three times more massive than the Three Gorges dam on the Yangtze, the world’s largest so far. And it will not be alone. It will be one of a series of dams that aim to power China’s vast south-western region and irrigate its arid north, impacting the flow of water in India’s Brahmaputra basin and beyond.
Other large infrastructure projects have also been approved. These include the upgrading and extension of major national highways, including along our border, and the construction of at least 20 new border airports. In addition, the railway is set to be expanded, with Shigatse, Tibet’s second largest town and the Panchen Lama’s spiritual seat, becoming a major hub. The second railway line — this time a high-speed link between Chengdu and Lhasa — will reduce travel time between Tibet and the mainland to just 10 hours. Che Dalha is also advocating the exploitation of northern Tibet’s natural gas reserves.
On this basis, the Commission concluded that the Danish scheme is in line with EU state aid rules, as it will facilitate the development of renewable electricity production from various technologies in Denmark and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, in line with the European Green Deal and without unduly distorting competition.
Greater individual wealth doesn't ensure more happiness, but greater equality could.
Few topics are as important as the future of work in our 21st century digital economy. In the spring of 2018 MIT President Rafael Reif commissioned a task force on the Work of the Future to address whether our rapidly advancing technologies will not only raise economic output and the wealth of nations, but enable people to attain higher living standards and better working conditions. After working across MIT for over two and a half years, the task force released its final report in November, 2020.
“Amidst a technological ecosystem delivering rising productivity, and an economy generating plenty of jobs (at least until the COVID-19 crisis), we found a labor market in which the fruits are so unequally distributed, so skewed towards the top, that the majority of workers have tasted only a tiny morsel of a vast harvest,” was the overriding conclusion of the task fore. But, it further argued that with better policies in place, more people could enjoy good careers even as new technologies transform the very nature of work.
Similar conclusions were reached by Upskilling for Share Prosperity, a report published in January, 2021 by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in collaboration with PwC. “Millions of people are already being left behind because of volatile market conditions, the effects of COVID-19, or because they work in industries that are being replaced by new sectors,” said the report… There is an enormous opportunity to reconfigure the world of work at this critical juncture and embark on an upskilling revolution that will give people across the world the ability to participate fully in the future of work, whatever that might be.”
Great minds can differ on which of the two men is the dumbest man in the Senate.€
The hundreds of thousands of Corbyn supporters who carried him though multiple leadership challenges have not vanished from the face of the earth, even though many have vanished from the Labour Party.
"Israel's violence has a clear purpose: ethnically cleanse Jerusalem of Palestinians to allow Israeli settlers to take over Palestinian homes."
America does have a serious fascism problem, but it goes way beyond the kinds of authoritarianism displayed by people like Donald Trump, Rick Scott, Ted Cruz, or Tom Cotton.
Although Boxer could prevent the terrible events that fall on the animal farm, he worked hard and had nothing to do with others. He was busy with its own work and only found out about the incidents around itself when Napoleon, the dictator pig, sold it to a butcher.
In our lives, we meet so many people who are busy with their honest hard work and have no idea how the system, state, country, or people are moving or where we’re heading.
Scotland before independence has been Nicola Sturgeon’s mantra.
Yet the subject of separation has all but dominated this election. Pandemic or no pandemic, every voter knew it.
While a majority might have eluded them, the SNP swept the board in all but a handful of constituency seats.
We are in an era of endemic misinformation — and outright disinformation. Plenty of bad actors are helping the trend along. But the real drivers, some experts believe, are social and psychological forces that make people prone to sharing and believing misinformation in the first place. And those forces are on the rise.
"When the government spies on journalists and their sources, it jeopardizes freedom of the press," said the ACLU.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri has tweeted an apology about a bug that deleted users’ story posts on Thursday. The timing was unfortunate for activists trying to raise awareness about missing Indigenous women, with organizations Red Dress and National Day of Awareness of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG, abbreviated by some as MMIWG2S to include two-spirit people) questioning whether their posts had somehow been erased deliberately. According to Instagram, however, the bug affected stories, archives, and highlights of Instagram users across the globe.
A New York police officer is under investigation after video emerged showing him intentionally damaging a person's car while executing a search warrant.
The local news outlet North Country Now reports that the police department in Massena, New York, has launched an internal investigation following the release of a 20-second video. The video shows the officer, identified by North Country Now as Brandon Huckle, entering a garage. The door hits a silver car as Huckle enters. Huckle then intentionally grabs the door and swings it twice more into the side of the car.
As I announced last Saturday, I'm not going to comment publicly on App Store antitrust matters during the ongoing Epic Games v. Apple trial (also, see my "final pretrial Twitter thread"). I'm not like those New Year's resolutioners starting to smoke again a week later. This post is not about the trial itself or the antitrust matters involved, but about suspicious social media activity of the astroturfing kind.
It's publicly discoverable that Epic Games founder and CEO Tim Sweeney and I follow each other on Twitter, and sometimes retweet or like each other's tweets. Other than that, I don't know him and I'm 100% independent from Epic. I have my own app store issues.
In recent weeks there's been quite some suspicious activity on Twitter. I was not the only one to notice various recently-created or mostly inactive Twitter accounts (no or few followers, hardly any tweets) that chimed in on App Store antitrust discussions with typical Apple talking points. To be clear, there are legit "fanbois" and there may also be cases in which, for example, an open standards fanatic ignores web app shortcomings (like Richard Stallman's attitude that Free Software may lack functionality or perform suboptimally as long as it's ideologically correct). But when there are accounts coming out of nowhere with talking points that independent software makers would never ever agree with, there's an obvious explanation for that phenomenon. It doesn't necessarily mean coordination, nor is it likely to be organic.
NLS Pharmaceutics Ltd. (Nasdaq: NLSP, NLSPW) ("NLS" or the "Company"), a Swiss clinical-stage pharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of innovative therapies for patients with rare and complex central nervous system disorders, announces that the European Patent Office has granted the Company Patent No. EP3426232, entitled A MAZINDOL IR/SR MULTILAYER TABLET AND ITS USE FOR THE TREATMENT OF ATTENTION DEFICIT/HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER (ADHD). The patent provides intellectual property protection for oral formulations containing immediate-release and sustained-release layers of mazindol for use in treating attention deficit disorders (ADD or ADHD), related deficit of alertness or decline of vigilance, or excessive daytime sleepiness (e.g., narcolepsy, idiopathic hypersomnia) in particular in children, adolescents and adults.
In a statement issued earlier today, United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced "the Biden-Harris Administration's support for waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines."
As we reported earlier this year, India and South Africa proposed last fall that the Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) recommend "a waiver from the implementation, application and enforcement of Sections 1, 4, 5, and 7 of Part II of the TRIPS Agreement in relation to prevention, containment or treatment of COVID-19" to the General Council of the WTO. The two countries also recommended that "[t]he waiver should continue until widespread vaccination is in place globally."
The European Union and India have agreed to resume stalled free trade negotiations and seek closer cooperation to combat climate change at a virtual summit, as concerns about China bring Brussels and New Delhi closer.
Partly overshadowed by the COVID-19 crisis in India, the meeting on Saturday brought together Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and all of the bloc’s 27 leaders for the first time in eight years in a sign of the EU’s renewed interest in the Indo-Pacific region.
Once a patent is registered, a patent holder can maintain the patent for 20 years from its filing date.
This article is the first of three that will discuss the USPTO Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”)’s use of Precedential Opinions as guidance when exercising discretion whether to institute petitions for post-grant proceedings, inter partes reviews (IPRs) and post-grant reviews (PGRs). In particular, this article addresses the precedential decision, Apple Inc. v. Fintiv, Inc.,[1] which outlines six factors for the Board to consider when denying a petition under 35 U.S.C. €§ 314(a) based on a parallel proceeding. The second article will discuss how the Board can exercise discretion to deny institution under €§ 325(d) if the petition relies on the same or similar prior art/arguments presented during examination, using the test outlined in Advanced Bionics LLC v. Med-EL Elektromedizinische Geräte GMBH.[2]The final article will address how the Board applies the factors from General Plastic Industries Co. v. Canon Kabushiki Kaisha in discretionary denials involving serial petitions.[3]
While Samsung Electronics was recently involved in a patent infringement lawsuit in the United States related to smartphone wireless charging, it was confirmed that the patent in question was bought from LG by a European Patent Troll company earlier this year.
In the industry, it is pointed out that while LG Electronics officially announced the withdrawal of the smartphone business, concerns that the sale of LG Group's patent portfolio could return to the domestic industrial ecosystem as a boomerang has become a reality.
According to industry sources on Wednesday, Scramoge, headquartered in Dublin, Ireland, filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Samsung Electronics and Samsung Electronics' US subsidiary (SEA) at the Texas Western District Court on Apr.30.
Samsung Electronics has recently been embroiled in a patent infringement lawsuit in the United States for smartphone wireless charging technology. The patents were originally owned by LG Electronics, which recently announced an exit from the smartphone business. The patents were reportedly handed over to a European patent troll early 2021.
Samsung Electronics and Samsung Electronics' American subsidiary were sued by Scramoge based in Dublin, Ireland, on April 30.
Scramoge belongs to Atlantic IP, an Irish patent management company which also controls Neodron, Solas OLED, and Sonrai Memory, which filed several lawsuits against Samsung Electronics.
EIP’s George James and Monika Rai, European Patent Attorney and Partner, offer Lawyer Monthly their insights into the patent landscape of microbes and food.
Microbes present in food and drink, which have a functional effect on the health of the digestive tract, are popular with consumers and common on supermarket shelves. These products include those containing specific beneficial microbes (probiotics) and those containing ingredients that promote the growth and maintenance of healthy gut microbes (prebiotics).
Partly overshadowed by the COVID-19 crisis in India, the summit will gather Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and all of the bloc's 27 leaders for the first time, a sign of the EU's renewed interest in the Indo-Pacific region.
Past EU-India summits have involved only the Indian prime minister and the EU's chief executive and its chairman, both of whom will be listening in for the two-hour summit.
[...]
EU-India trade talks were frozen in 2013 over differences including tariff reductions, patent protection, data security and the right of Indian professionals to work in Europe.
People are starting to wonder if these are really abuses of IP or if there’s something wrong with IP itself.
The Biden administration yesterday announced its backing of a waiver for all intellectual property rights to COVID-19 vaccines, in what is a huge blow to the pharma industry.
The waiver was proposed in October at the World Trade Organization by India and South Africa. It covers not just IP for vaccines but for all COVID-19 technologies.
This morning, Ericsson announced a settlement and new multi-year patent license agreement with Samsung. This was actually the first major 5G patent dispute, and after filings in multiple jurisdictions it could have reached Apple-Samsung proportions. But the parties put this behind them.
The previous cross-license agreement had expired four months ago. As a result, Ericsson's licensing revenues temporarily took a hit, and today's press release notes that they "continue to be affected by several factors, mainly expired patent license agreements pending renewal, geopolitical impact on the handset market, technology shift from 4G to 5G, and possible currency effects going forward." The "geopolitical" part must relate to Huawei.
Ericsson's IP chief Christina Petersson is quoted as saying that "[t]his important deal confirms the value of [Ericsson's] patent portfolio and further illustrates Ericsson's commitment to FRAND principles." This suggests that the net payments Ericsson receives under the agreement are substantial. Publicly traded companies must be cautious about forward-looking statements, but Ericsson does express confidence in "growing its IPR revenues long term, thereby further maximizing the value of the overall patent portfolio."
A pair of researchers with Goodix have been named finalists for the European Inventor Award 2021 for their innovation combining fingerprint and blood flow biometrics for device access control.
The European Patent Office announced that Bo Pi and Yi He have been named as finalists in the ‘Non-EPO countries’ category for their invention, which protects against biometric spoof attacks.
Two brothers from Devon have been named among Europe's best inventors for a simple device that has been endorsed by Sir David Attenborough.
Ben and Pete Kimbel are the only finalists from the UK in the European Inventor Awards 2021 for creating the Hookpod, a simple device that prevents the bycatch of marine species including Albatross in longline fishing.
A keen attention to detail is of vital importance in our profession. A recent EPO decision, T 0353/18, illustrates what can happen when a discrepancy arises between the clean and annotated versions of an amended claim set, and confirms that there is no legal primacy for one version over the other.
Hookpod, a UK invention for preventing seabirds getting caught up in fishing lines, has made the final in the SME category of the European Inventor Awards.
In turboshaft mode, one or multiple engines would mechanically power rotor blades via a central gearbox. Alternatively, in turboshaft mode the convertible engine could turn an electrical generator that would send power to electric motors which would then move the rotor blades, say a Bell patent application published by the European Patent Office last October.
Because a convertible engine would need to be sized to power the more energy-intensive VTOL flight phase it would have extra power available during cruise, which could be used to power accessories, such as directed-energy weapons or batteries, says the patent application.
Sports have long used efficiency ratings to analyze players. Made famous by the movie “Moneyball”, Oakland A’s general manager at the time, Billy Beane, used data-driven tactics to form and operate the baseball team. Unified Patents examined this approach in depth and found that there were no current solutions that could effectively, efficiently, and consistently rate law firms during patent prosecution on both an overall approach and per art unit approach.
Unified started from the premise of “Which law firms do a better job getting the (1) broadest and (2) most valid claims (3) allowed and at a (4) cheaper rate & at a (5) faster rate?" With this premise, three factors stood out to answer this question. The first being our Broadness Index (BRIX), the second being total applications, and finally pendency.
On a basic level, LPIX is the Normalized Value of (BRIX * Pendency * Total Applications^2). The formula squares the Total Applications factor to account for consistency. The comparison with the movie reference here would be at the bottom of the ninth, tied scored, two outs with bases loaded, do you want the player that maybe, one out of hundred times can hit the grand slam, or do you want the player that consistently gets on base giving the team a win? Using that same principle and applying it to patent prosecution, a client would want a firm that they know can consistently prosecute and file a high-quality patent each and every time.
Covestro’s CO2 technology continues to write a success story. The European Patent Office (EPA) has nominated the two German chemists Dr. Christoph Gürtler (Covestro AG) and Professor Walter Leitner (Max Planck Institute for Chemical Energy Conversion and RWTH Aachen University) as finalists in the “Industry” category of the European Inventor Award 2021 for their role in the development of a new technology for using carbon dioxide (CO2 ) announced. The technology makes it possible to use the harmful greenhouse gas CO2 as a valuable raw material for sustainable plastics. Their process uses chemical catalysts to drive reactions between CO2 and a conventional raw material. So-called polymers are created in a more sustainable and economically viable way. The CO2 is firmly integrated.
Several world leaders Thursday praised the U.S. call to remove patent protections on COVID-19 vaccines to help poor countries obtain shots. But the proposal faces a multitude of hurdles, including resistance from the pharmaceutical industry.
Nor is it clear what effect such a step might have on the campaign to vanquish the outbreak.
Activists and humanitarian institutions cheered after the U.S. reversed course Wednesday and called for a waiver of intellectual property protections on the vaccine. The decision ultimately is up to the 164-member World Trade Organization, and if just one country votes against a waiver, the proposal will fail.
MediciNova, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company traded on the NASDAQ Global Market (NASDAQ:MNOV) and the JASDAQ Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange (Code Number: 4875), today announced that it has received a Notice of Intention to Grant from the European Patent Office for a pending patent application which covers the combination of MN-166 (ibudilast) and riluzole for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS).
The USPTO recently issued U.S. patent No 10,999,961. That means the old odometer is about to roll over. On Tuesday, May 11, 2021, at 12:01 a.m., we can expect Patent No. 11,000,000.
On April 22, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 8 of U.S. Patent 7,500,201. It is currently owned by Interface IP Holdings, LLC, an NPE. The '201 patent generally relates to graphical input devices, and in particular, to input devices in which users select from a list of choices. It has been asserted against airline companies, along with banks such as JP Morgan and Bank of New York Mellon Corp.
This is the second in a series of three articles prepared for the Intelligent Health community, directed at all innovators using artificial intelligence to solve problems in healthcare. Our aim is to address some of the misconceptions we frequently hear around the protection of AI-based HealthTech inventions and to provide some practical guidance on the steps that should be taken to secure protection that supports your commercial aims and the wider adoption of your technology.
During the period of the Intelligent Health UK event, the GJE HealthTech team are offering free 1-2-1 IP consultations to innovators wanting to explore how best to protect their AI-driven HealthTech innovations. You can register your interest here and a member of the HealthTech team will contact you to organise a session.
Fast 101 lived up to its name. Soon after the case was filed, Judge Andrews (D.Del.) dismissed the complaint for failure to state a claim. You guessed it, the claimed invention is directed to an abstract idea and therefor invalid under 35 U.S.C. 101. Fast 101.
Fast 101’s five asserted patents are all part of a single family and claim “an invoiceless trading system that creates incentives for customers to pay suppliers within a predetermined period of time, such as a settlement period.” Basically, you get some discount or coupon (10% off at Saks) if you pay immediately or on-time. U.S. Patent Nos. 8,515,867, 8,660,947, 8,762,273, 9,811,817, and 10,115,098.
On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed finding (1) the “claims are directed to the abstract idea of an intermediated settlement system that employs a discount for early payment”; and (2) “the claims do not recite any inventive concept to render them patent eligible.”
A streaming platform has warned people who allegedly shared pirate links of hit K-pop musical Midnight Sun that they are being reported to INTERPOL. MetaTheater took the unusual step of publishing the names of eight Twitter accounts that would also face lawsuits. However, at least two of the targets say they are innocent and MetaTheater appears to be backtracking.
