Need a new PC? Slimbook have a pretty fancy and sleek looking compact mini-PC called the Slimbook One powered by an AMD RYZEN 7 4800H and AMD Radeon Graphics Vega 7. Since it's coming from Slimbook, you can expect full Linux support and you can buy it with Linux pre-installed.
Oracle and SUSE have been working together closely to expand the supported compute instances on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). SUSE Rancher will become the only multi-cluster management solution to provision Kubernetes clusters on OCI Arm-based instances by delivering support for Oracle Container Engine for Kubernetes (OKE) on OCI Ampere A1 instances.
This the third development update during our development fund campaign. The development fund is necessary to make sure core Krita development can continue no matter what, so if you use Krita and can manage, please join the development fund!
Here is a fun article on how Carl Schwan adapted the fund.blender.org codebase for Krita: https://carlschwan.eu/2021/05/25/tech-report-of-fund.krita.org/.
Ramon discusses the new resource system this time. It’s not a terribly glittering subject, but it’s really important and pretty much the reason we’re calling Krita 5, Krita 5. We’ve been working on it for years, with the main developers involved being Halla and Agata. It makes working with resources a lot less glitchy and it also means Krita starts a lot faster, since we’re not loading all brushes, brush presets, patterns and so on on start-up. And the from-the-ground up redesign gives us a solid basis for further extensions and improvements.
In our Innards section, we pick some of our favorite (free and?) open source software
Just one week after AMDVLK 2021.Q2.3 is now another update to this open-source AMD Vulkan driver for Linux systems.
AMDVLK 2021.Q2.4 re-bases against the Vulkan 1.2.178 header files plus enables two new extensions in this open-source driver. The two Vulkan extensions now supported are VK_EXT_custom_border_color and VK_EXT_color_write_enable.
Weylus is a tool similar to the macOS & iPad Sidecar feature, which turns your tablet or mobile phone into a graphic tablet / touch screen, and allows mirroring or extending the desktop screen to a phone or tablet. It's available for Linux, Microsoft Windows and macOS.
To use a phone or tablet as a graphic tablet / touch screen, all you need is to install Weylus on your desktop, have a modern web browser (e.g. Firefox 80+) running on your phone or tablet, and have both the desktop and tablet / phone on the same network.
Weylus lets you control your mouse with a tablet or phone, mirror the desktop screen to a tablet, and send keyboard input, all with optional hardware-accelerated video encoding (on Linux, VAAPI and NVENC are available; for macOS there's only Videotoolbox, while on Windows it can use NVENC or Microsoft's MediaFoundation).
Inkscape, free open-source vector graphics editor, release new major version 1.1 a few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Linux Mint 20.x.
Inkscape 1.1 features a new welcome screen with ability to choose canvas colors, keyboard shortcut style, and toggle dark mode.
By different tabs, it also shows you how to contribute, and options to open recent files, set size of documents.
Ardour 6.7 DAW application brings another point release with important new features, bug fixes. We summarise the release in this post.
Digital Audio Workstation software is used as a central application for producing, creating, and mixing audio. They are very complex applications and capable of connecting and controlling several audio sources to create final audio output. Among the top free DAW apps that are available in Linux, Ardour is very active in terms of development and bug fixes. Ardour keeps improving itself to comply with the latest hardware and platforms while bringing new features to its users.
Well, we already have RHEL based operating system to install on a virtual machine such as CetnOS, Rocky Linux, and AlmaLinux. However, if you are Amazon cloud User, then you would like to use Amazon Machine Linux Image (AMI) on your local virtual machine created on VirtualBox, Vmware, and Hyper-V. As Amazon Linux is based on RedHat codes, we can use the same YUM package manager and other commands of RHEL to install and handle various tools and software. Here we will learn the steps to set up and run Amazon Linux 2 on Virtualbox.
These days, most users don’t need to build open source software from its source code, given the availability of package managers such as apt-get, rpm, etc. But there are many good reasons to want to build software from source. Perhaps the package manager offers an older version and you want the latest, greatest features. Maybe you want to ensure the software is built with specific optimizations or debugging flags. Or, perhaps you need to cross-compile for a different architecture. In any case, building software from source code is usually straightforward.
In this article, I’ll explain what goes on behind this process to help you get the build that best suits your needs. I’ll focus mostly on software written in C/C++ or other compiled languages. Such software is usually distributed with a means to build it flexibly and portably, and there are two predominant build systems common today: those based on the GNU Autotools and those based on CMake. Autotools is by far the most commonly encountered method, and it is the official GNU build system.
EHCP (Easy Hosting Control Panel) is an open source and very effective Hosting Control Panel that offers you to host any websites, create ftp accounts, email accounts, sub domains and so on. Ehcp is the only first hosting control panel was written using PHP programming language and available for free.
It offers all major hosting control panel features such FTP Accounts, MySQL Databases, Panel Users, Resellers, MailBox with Squirrelmail and Round Cube etc. It is the only first control panel that provides built in support for Nginx and PHP-FPM with completely throw out Apache and gives better performance for low end servers or VPS.
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and client software. Dropbox was founded in 2007 by MIT students Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi as a startup company, with initial funding from seed accelerator Y Combinator.
Dropbox has been ranked as one of the most valuable startups in the US and the world, with a valuation of over US$10 billion, and it has been described as one of Y Combinator’s most successful investments to date. However, Dropbox has also experienced criticism and generated controversy for issues including security breaches and privacy concerns.
Many a time, we need to schedule a task for a future time, say in the evening at 8 p.m. on a specific day. We can use the at command in such a situation.
Sometimes, we need to repeat the same task at a specific time, periodically, every day, or every month. In such situations, we can use the crontab command.
If you are using Amazon Linux 2 (AMI) based on RedHat and want to connect remote database using mysql-client on it, then here is the way to not install the client but also how to use AMI CLI to manage cloud databases services of Amazon such as RDS and Lightsail database service.
1Password is a leading password manager that offers reliable secret vaults for keeping user credentials secure. It's available for all major platforms, including Windows, Mac, Android, iOS, and Linux.
The recent release of 1Password for Linux provides a solid desktop client built with Rust and Electron. Here's how you can install it on your Linux system.
Alpine Linux is a minimalist distribution with a focus on security and simplicity.
MariaDB is one of the most popular database servers in the world, created by the original MySQL developers and initially conceived as a direct and improved MYSQL replacement. MariaDB is fast, scalable, and robust, with a rich ecosystem of storage engines, plugins, and other tools that make it versatile and flexible in different scenarios. MariaDB is developed as free software under the GPL license. The latest versions of MariaDB also include GIS and JSON functions.
Since we have learned basic commands in the Linux OS, we will now write our first shell script called hello.sh. You can use any editor of your choice, such as vi, gedit, nano, emacs, geany, and other similar editors.
A file system controls where, how, and when data is stored and retrieved from a storage device. An efficient file system is necessary for everyday system processes. The Linux kernel supports a variety of file systems. The most commonly used are Ext4, Btrfs, XFS, and ZFS which is the most recent file system released back in 2018. Each of these file systems has its own way of organizing data, merits, and demerits.
In this tutorial, we will check Btrfs against Ext4 filesystem, and seek to understand their functionalities, strengths, and weaknesses.
Two ways screen sharing is where teacher can share his screen to student and student can also share screen his screen to teacher. To do that in Jitsi is very easy but in Big Blue Button it is different as the workaround is like explained in this article. The ability to share screen for the students exist in Big Blue Button and it's not just for the teacher. Please note that the screen sharing is not simultaneous (unlike Jitsi) so it must be done by turns for example teacher shares, then student shares, then teacher again, then student again, and so on. Please also note that up the time of this writing, screen sharing is not supported in Android and iOS.
System log servers are used to collect syslog messages in a single location. A syslog server might be a physical server, a standalone virtual machine, or a software-based service.
Maybe you have had this problem: you are using Debian or Ubuntu Linux and a software package you would like to install is only available in RPM format. The solution is the handy tool called alien, which converts .rpm files to .deb files.
If you’re an active Discord user and recently switched to Linux, we’re glad to let you know that Discord is available on Linux too. In this article, let’s look at how to install Discord on Linux or any Linux distribution.
Discord is an amazing application for starters where you find and connect with like-minded people in different communities. By joining a community, you get to communicate in “Discord servers,” hop into the voice server, thereby talk and chat with different people. In addition, there are tons of other things that you can do and keep talking about, making this article more informative and never-ending.
Concrete5 is an open-source content management system used to publish content on the internet. It is written in PHP and uses MariaDB as a database backend. It provides an easy-to-use builder that helps you to create pages and content through the web browser. It is flexible, secure, mobile-ready, and based on Model-View-Controller architecture. It offers a rich set of features including, WYSIWYG content editor, Media Manager, Drag and Drop Content, In-context editing, and many more.
In this post, we will show you how to install Concrete5 CMS with Apache and Let's Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 20.04 server.
A new report on the rumored Valve SteamPal suggests that the portable gaming PC will be larger than the Nintendo Switch and run on Linux.
Ars Technica has reported that Valve is developing a Nintendo Switch-inspired portable PC that will apparently be on the market by the end of 2021.
The information in the report comes after it was discovered that Valve was possibly working on a handheld Steam console, codename Neptune, via files located in the Steam beta client.
Now that the dust has settled on the new Steam Library design, along with various other UI overhauls like the Properties page for games (and the recent SteamPal console leaks) - Valve will be fixing up the Steam Downloads page now too.
“You will get a better idea of that by the end of this year… and it won’t be the answer you expect,” Newell responded. “You’ll say, ‘Ah-ha! Now I get what he was talking about.'”
Naturally, the Internet seemed to explode with YouTubers and the like theorizing what Gabe’s vague reply might mean. Gardiner Bryant suggested that Valve could be working on a game console. Other websites had a similar thought.
Well, that theory could very well be true — albeit in a portable form factor. Ars Technica reported about this earlier. Pavel Djundik, SteamDB operator, tweeted of Valve’s “Neptune” controller showing up in the latest beta Steam client. “SteamPal” became the new name for this controller/handheld.
Apparently, SteamPal (name may not be final) will come in a Nintendo Switch-style format — a touchscreen, USB-C connectivity, and buttons on both sides, with triggers, analog sticks, and perhaps a touchpad that looks similar to the touchpad found on the Steam controller. There’s talks about it being dockable to also connect to a larger screen.
Eleventh Hour Games have published the latest huge upgrade for Last Epoch, their time-travelling action-RPG. Last Epoch combines time travel, dungeon crawling, lots of character customization and endless replayability to create an Action RPG for veterans and newcomers alike. Travel through the world of Eterra's past and face dark empires, wrathful gods and untouched wilds – to find a way to save time itself from The Void.
This latest update 0.8.2 is once again massive. It especially enhances the end-game, giving players much more to do within the Monolith of Fate and completely overhauls the way you progress through this special interconnected area. You can read about their work on it in their recent dev blog post. The Arena area where you can face off against various enemies to test your skill was also expanded with new layouts. Thanks to this update there's a lot more content overall.
We now know what you can expect from Stadia Pro, the optional Google Stadia subscription, if you stay subscribed in June with the next set of claimable games announced.
StarCrawlers Chimera has been announced by Juggernaut Games as their newest modern first-person dungeon crawler.
The same team that created the rather good StarCrawlers from 2017 are back, bringing with them StarCrawlers Chimera which will be a highly customizable cyberpunk dungeon crawler. "Customize your skills to suit your playstyle. Are you a stealthy cyberninja? A crazed pyromaniac soldier? Mind-bending void psyker? Or… a bit of each? Design your character by selecting from 25+ skill trees with unique abilities in each tree. Skill trees are a mix of fan favorite classes from StarCrawlers, weapon specialist trees, utility sets, and more - with extra skill trees in the works!"
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So no Early Access or Beta versions but we will be seeing the proper finished experience supported on Linux.
AssaultCube, a name I bet plenty of Linux users know but haven't heard anything of in a long time. It hasn't seen a release since *checks notes* 2013. However, it's going to make a return.
Yes, really. The developers are currently working on AssaultCube 1.3 Lockdown-Edition. As the name suggests, it's a homage to the worldwide lockdowns. Seems like it's under new management too, with one of the new people mentioning how "the first generation of developers handed over the project in an orderly fashion to the next generation".
Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit is an upcoming 3D point and click adventure from developer Tag of Joy, who have now announced a team up with publisher Headup for a 2022 release. A beautiful hand-painted adventure, the Lithuanian team at Tag of Joy are led by the art director of Broken Sword 2.5 and it will take you through a vivid modern Europe.
The story follows a girl from Chicago, Milda, who unexpectedly receives an inheritance from her grandfather – a house in Lithuania. She sets off to Europe, but an unknown stranger threatens her upon arrival, demanding that she give up her inheritance. Determined and intrigued, she explores the run-down house, discovering old documents and clues dating back to the 15th century. In no time, Milda gets dragged into a dangerous search for a long-lost mysterious relic.
Epic Games has today released Unreal Engine 5 into Early Access with some huge new features, a new look for the editor and continued support for Linux builds of games. They make it clear that it's noway near production ready but it's still quite exciting as this will end up powering some of the biggest games in the next few years and beyond.
"Today, we’re excited to announce that Early Access to Unreal Engine 5 is now available. While our ultimate goal is for UE5 to empower creators across all industries to deliver stunning real-time content and experiences, this Early Access build is intended for game developers who like to live on the bleeding edge to start testing features and prototyping their next games." - Epic Games
An electronic book (commonly abbreviated e-book) is a text and image-based publication which can be read on a computer or other digital devices such as an e-book reader.
Digital books are well established. Project Gutenberg, an online library of books that can be downloaded free of charge, has been expanding its collection since 1971. Almost its entire library consists of books that are available in the public domain, although there are a few copyright texts which are also included.
Foliate is an open source eBook viewer built with GJS (GNOME JavaScript bindings) and Epub.js, a JavaScript library for rendering ePub documents in the browser, across many devices.
In this article, we will review the 10 most used Linux distributions based on the huge availability of software, ease of installation and use, and community support on web forums.
That said, here’s the list of the top 10 distributions of all time, in descending order.
Debugging CI/CD pipelines isn't always easy. This is especially true when a pipeline takes a long time to run, and the failing part you want to debug runs at the end of the pipeline. A feature introduced in a recent Tekton enhancement proposal (TEP) would let users stop the pipeline at any Step and debug in real time.
This article looks at debugging TaskRuns in Tekton, the open source framework that integrates with Kubernetes to create cloud-native CI/CD pipelines. You can learn more about the basics of Tekton in this article by Joel Lord.
The proposal, TEP-0042, outlines this feature with a proof of concept that describes how Tekton's composability and container support enable this functionality. For a thorough overview of these concepts, watch the talk, Russian Doll: Extending Containers with Nested Processes by Christie Wilson (Google) and Jason Hall (Red Hat).
The other day during an editorial meeting, the Enable Sysadmin staff discussed the topic of hardware procurement by sysadmins in today's IT landscape. There is so much talk these days around computer hardware, and while much of it is centered around crypto mining or gaming, there are still large conversations around enterprise-level hardware. I wanted to poll our audience to see who had racked a server in the past, much less been involved with hardware procurement.
My starting assumption was that many sysadmins don't actually have much of a say in the hardware that they operate every day. I tend to see the system administration field so divided up by specialization that most people come in and maintain their designated systems and go home. We have storage admins, network admins, security admins, and so on. What's more, most of the purchasing of hardware is done by "they, them, or the powers that be." Somewhere in the chain, there is an elusive authority with procurement power. I could be wrong. In fact, I hope that I am and that most sysadmins do have a say in their hardware selection and purchasing.
One of the most critical aspects of any business throughout the world is the customer experience. The customer experience can mean the difference between brand loyalty, engagement, and repeat purchases, or the sentiment of “I would never use their services again,” coupled with scathing reviews on multiple media outlets. A positive customer experience speaks volumes about the quality that a business provides, as it shows effort and a level of care that has been curated toward maintaining a relationship with the end customer.
CIOs leading successful digital transformation efforts have a certain set of skills. What are the most important capabilities now?
ShellHub is a cloud server that allows universal access to your networked devices from any external network. Using it prevents being blocked by firewalls or overly complex networks because ShellHub uses the HTTP protocol to encapsulate the SSH protocol. This transport layer allows seamless use on most networks, as it is commonly available and accepted by most companies' firewall rules and policies.
Best of all, ShellHub is open source (released under the Apache 2.0 license) and facilitates developers' and programmers' remote tasks and making access to Linux devices possible for any hardware architecture.
Fedora Workstation has been defaulting to the Btrfs file-system since F33 while other editions of Fedora Linux have continued using their defaults. With Fedora Cloud 35, this cloud spin of Fedora is now also looking to migrate to Btrfs.
The plan is for the Fedora Cloud 35 release later this year to use Btrfs by default in order to allow using advanced file-system features more readily. This Fedora Cloud change proposal is backed by Fedora developers as well as stakeholders from the likes of Facebook and Amazon.
IBM on Monday told workers in the Netherlands to expect a layoff. This is the first time that IBM has ever done a layoff in that country, it said in an email to employees.
Previous changes in the workforce were done via voluntary separation packages.
That internal email that explained the layoff was leaked to the Watching IBM employee watchdog Facebook page and shared with IB Times UK.
IBM’s Cloud is experiencing another severity-one issue, the rank it uses for incidents that see business-critical systems become unavailable.
“Users may experience connectivity issues when trying to access the listed cloud services” was the explanation offered when the incident kicked off at 1454 UTC on May 25. Resources in Washington DC, Osaka, London, Dallas, Sydney, Tokyo, and Frankfurt were all impacted.
Those cloud services were: App ID; Cloudant NoSQL DB; Code Engine; Continuous Delivery; Toolchain; DNS Services; Event Streams; Hyper Protect Crypto Services; Hyper Protect Virtual Server; Hyper Protect DBaaS; IBM Cloud Shell; IBM Watson Machine Learning; Mobile Foundation; and MQ in IBM Cloud. IBM’s most recent status update available at the time of writing, time-stamped 0241 UTC on May 26, said all but five services were back online.
This is a simple guide to check your Ubuntu system resource use & running programs with the built-in program System Monitor. To formerly Windows users, this is your Task Manager on Ubuntu. You will learn to read information in it and do end a process with it.
Every day, people who download and share pirated content receive DMCA notices via their ISPs, warning them to cease and desist their infringing behavior. While the majority of these notices are accurate, one Ubuntu user says he has just been targeted by an anti-piracy company alleging that by torrenting an OS ISO released by Ubuntu itself, he breached copyright law.
Yet I am fairly certain that you can’t get a DMCA takedown from your ISP for downloading an Ubuntu .iso.
But that’s exactly what someone in the US got from their ISP Xfinity, a Comcast subsidiary recently.
And I’m …speechless.
Torrenting Ubuntu is not only an a-okay thing to do, but it’s something that the people who make Ubuntu (and own the Ubuntu copyright) actively encourage.
Heck, the Ubuntu website even provides torrent download links for people to use.
“We have received a notification by a copyright owner, or its authorized agent, reporting an alleged infringement of one or more copyrighted works made on or over your Xfinity Internet service,” the letter received reads.
If you do not use torrent files to download a copyrighted material, you may have never received a DMCA notice.
However, what if you receive a copyright infringement notice from your Internet Service Provider for downloading free software?
Xfinity, an internet service company by Comast has managed to do just that. A subscriber received a DMCA notice for downloading Ubuntu 20.04.2 LTS ISO file.
Wait, what? Yes, you heard it right. Let us look at what it is all about.
The web team at Canonical run two-week iterations building and maintaining all of Canonical websites and product web interfaces. This iteration we took a week to go through the roadmap items and plan them across the next six months. Here are some of the highlights from the remaining week from this iteration.
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Before Canonical I worked both as a designer and researcher at agencies, and in-house in healthcare, government and fintec. My favourite design tool is the sharpie, and my favourite research question is “Tell me more about that.“
Canis Labs’ CANPico board adds a CAN bus to the Raspberry Pi Pico. The open-source hardware board can then be used as a CAN adapter connected to a host computer
The company also provides an open-source MicroPython SDK, as well as a pre-built firmware image to quickly make it started, making it possible to easily control or monitor the CAN bus using Python.
Low-level debugging can be performed with a JTAG debugger and OpenOCD open-source software, but since not everybody may have a JTAG debugger at home, some have reverted to using the Raspberry Pi as a JTAG debugger, and you’ll find instructions for cabling and installing the software on the Internet.
Matt Mets of BlinkinLabs have been using the Raspberry Pi SBC and OpenOCD to debug Arm-based microcontroller boards for a while, but found it to be a pain to find jumper wires and look up the pin-outs manually each time. So he designed a JTAG Hat with properly labeled 20-pin .1ââ¬Â³ and 1.27mm Cortex debug connectors to speed up the process.
Armv9 architecture was announced in Q1 2021, building upon Armv8 but adding blocks and instructions for artificial intelligence, security, and “specialized compute”, i.e. hardware accelerators or instructions optimized for specific tasks.
The company has now introduced the first three Armv9 cores with Cortex-X2, Cortex-A710, and Cortex-A510 cores, providing updates to respectively Cortex-X1, Cortex-A78, and Cortex-A55 cores. The company calls those new cores “Arm Total Compute solutions”.
Huawei is a large and ruthless company, and on June 2nd, its new OS, which has been in a developer preview for quite some time, will be released on mobile.
It won't take long until we see a fully created HarmonyOS being thrown at many of its devices, and even some in different country's later after that.
Huwawi posted a video to their YouTube channel to confirm the June 2 launch, here...
Welcome to the 200th curl release. We call it 200 OK. It coincides with us counting more than 900 commit authors and surpassing 2,400 credited contributors in the project. This is also the first release ever in which we thank more than 80 persons in the RELEASE-NOTES for having helped out making it and we’ve set two new record in the bug-bounty program: the largest single payout ever for a single bug (2,000 USD) and the largest total payout during a single release cycle: 3,800 USD.
The BLAKE3 high performance crypto hashing function that is much speedier than MD5, SHA-1/SHA-2/SHA-3, and the former BLAKE2, is nearing its v1.0 release for its official Rust and C implementations.
Google’s Chrome browser and operating system has been updated to version 91, bringing with it a wide variety of features, mainly announcing that Linux support is now official for ChromeOS, alongside being able to copy and paste a file onto a web page and much more.
In April there were 187 alerts generated, resulting in 34 regression bugs being filed on average 6 days after the regressing change landed.
Welcome to the April 2021 edition of the performance sheriffing newsletter. Here you’ll find the usual summary of our sheriffing efficiency metrics, followed by some analysis on our invalid regression alerts and bugs. If you’re interested (and if you have access) you can view the full dashboard.
We have just released version 1.0.0 of the Foreign Data Wrapper for InfluxDB.
This release can work with PostgreSQL 9.6, 10, 11, 12 and 13.
We have just released version 2.0.0 of the Foreign Data Wrapper for SQLite.
This release can work with PostgreSQL 9.6, 10, 11, 12 and 13.
pgSCV is a Prometheus-compatible monitoring agent and metrics exporter for PostgreSQL environment. The goal of the project is to provide a single tool (exporter) for collecting metrics from PostgreSQL and related services.
We have just released version 2.0.0 of the Foreign Data Wrapper for GridDB.
This release can work with PostgreSQL 9.6, 10, 11, 12 and 13.
The Document Foundation (TDF) is the charitable entity behind the world’s leading free/libre/open source (FLOSS) office suite LibreOffice.
In March, we announced that LibreOffice will be participating in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC), a programme that connects students with free and open source software projects. GSoC helps students to implement new features, and provides them with financial support along the way.
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We are looking for an individual or company to implement the new TDF Membership Committee’s web-based tooling.
Beginning with WordPress 5.8, you can colorize your image and cover blocks with duotone filters! Duotone can add a pop of color to your designs and style your images to integrate well with your themes.
It is no secret that the FSFE's activities are only possible with the priceless help of our contributors and supporters around Europe. In return we support local engagement financially, with our expertise, information material and networks. To help formalize this process, we run our next call for FSFE community projects.
One part of my job as a software engineer is writing tools.
Something I always want to see in a tool which does anything non-trivial is a --dry-run mode. To be able to know what you’re about to do, before you do it, is a great and wondrous thing, helpful to the novice and the experienced user alike.
But it’s sadly often the case that a tool’s --dry-run is an unloved second-class citizen, prone to drifting out of date or failing to provide all the information you need.
There’s a simple method that keeps you honest, ensures that your --dry-run has all the information the user wants to see, and (an unexpected bonus!) helps make the entire tool more maintainable: use the --dry-run code path as an input to the “execute” code path.
I've just got a new full time job, programming in Perl... finally, after several years of looking for that perfect work environment. Some of it will be on Windows (which I haven't used except for developing berrybrew), so I'm actually looking forward to using my own software, especially how useful its become thanks to the new UI I've developed.
Using editable dependencies is becoming more popular, especially if you want to install from a version control system. But --editable is not without dangers. This article discusses why using editable dependencies should be considered a bad practice, and why it's a particularly bad practice for data scientists using Project Thoth.
The use case for editable dependencies
With Python’s pip and with pipenv, you can install dependencies in an editable form. As an example, imagine you wanted to fix a bug. You could install the package from a version control system in an editable way:
pipenv install -e git+https://github.com/requests/requests.git#egg=requests Now, you can create the changes to fix the bug and test them on your local machine.
Over time, however, we have seen practices that are generally acceptable, but not good for data scientists to follow. One of these practices is to include an application's dependencies in an editable way. If your goal is to change the package itself, like a developer or open source contributor would, --editable is indeed a good practice. But let's focus on why editable dependencies are bad in the context of data science.
CircuitPython provides a revolutionary way to interact with microcontroller boards. This article explains how to use CircuitPython to measure a greenhouse's temperature, humidity, and ambient light and publish the results to an MQTT broker using a CircuitPython MQTT client. You can subscribe any number of programs to the MQTT queues to process the information further.
This project uses a simple Python program that runs a web server that publishes a Prometheus-formatted scrape endpoint and pulls these metrics into Prometheus for ongoing monitoring.
WGS84 (also written WGS 84) is short for World Geodetic System 1984. It's the spatial standard used by most GPS receivers to calculate their position on the Earth's surface.
WGS84 is maintained by the US Department of Defense and gets periodic updates. The updates are also "WGS84". They're not called WGS85, or WGS86, or WGS87. Nevertheless, when auditing data tables with a geodetic datum field I sometimes find entries like WGS85, WGS86 and WGS87. One table had all the numbers up to WGS123. I call these Incrementing Fill-Down Errors, or IFDEs for short, and they probably originated in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet user wanted to copy "WGS84" down a column of cells, but somehow the copying turned into incrementing. The order of the cells was later lost when the records were sorted on another field.
Princess Diana’s brother, Charles Spencer, eternally committed to excoriating press coverage of his sister, brought pressure to bear on the BBC last year in allegations that Bashir had used forged bank documents to induce the interview.€ The documents suggested that people were receiving cash to monitor the princess.€ Bashir, Spencer accuses, sowed the seeds of concern that a conspiracy within Buckingham Palace was afoot against his sister.€ Bashir, for his part, claimed that the documents in question had “no bearing whatsoever on the personal choice of Princess Diana to take part in the interview.” For Diana fans, such a detail is irrelevant.
In November, the BBC appointed retired Supreme Court judge Lord Dyson to revisit old ground, notably the 1996 investigation by Tony Hall, who found Bashir to have been “honest” and an “honourable man”.€ € Lord Dyson begged to differ.€ “What Mr Bashir did,” the report states, “was not an impulsive act done in the spur of the moment.€ It was carefully planned… What he did was devious and dishonest.€ To dismiss his actions as no more than a mistake, unwise and foolish did not do justice to the seriousness of what he had done.”€ Hall’s investigation was “flawed” and “woefully ineffective”.€ The BBC had fallen “short of the high standards of integrity and transparency which are its hallmark” effectively instigating a cover up.
It’s been a tumultuous few years for the art world. In the United States, the election of Donald Trump served as a moment of political awakening for many: Well-intentioned artists began to make explicitly political art—some of it quite moving, more of it not—and initiated or joined various organizing efforts. Institutions exhibited artists from communities further marginalized by Trump’s policies—the Museum of Modern Art’s 2017 rehang featuring works by artists from the Muslim-majority countries affected by Trump’s travel ban being a particularly visible example—and issued tepid statements celebrating diversity. More recently, last summer’s Black-led uprisings in response to the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others by police set off a wave of public call-outs of (and clumsy, face-saving apologies by) art institutions for their discriminatory policies and the racist behavior of some among their leadership. And the Covid-19 pandemic has intensified many of the art world’s most frustrating contradictions: Ostensibly committed to progressivism, museums nonetheless laid off or furloughed tens of thousands of staffers across the country, squeezing even more labor from the few employees they have retained.
This switch supports monitor resolutions up to 2048 x 1536, and I’m using 1920 x 1080 in both OSs. Any monitor that supports a VGA connection should work. My monitor happens to be a 23-inch ViewSonic VX2363SMHL which has both VGA and HDMI sockets and cables. Any USB keyboard and mouse should work; I’m using an HP K45 keyboard and a Logitech M90 mouse. My laptop runs Gentoo Linux and the desktop runs Windows 10, and the switch works fine with both machines.
Although the custom cables between the KVM switch and the computers are quite bulky and stiff, I managed to connect everything to the KVM switch with it in a convenient position on my desk. Selecting the computer from the keyboard instead of the push-button on the KVM switch is easier, though. There is somewhat of a ‘cable spaghetti’ on my desk due to all the cables, but I have arranged them as tidily as possible. The audio sockets on my laptop are on the opposite side of the laptop to the VGA socket, which does not help. Fortunately the audio jack plug cables that branch out of the custom cable are just long enough to reach the Headphone and Mic sockets on the laptop.
The protesting federal irrigators are represented by the Klamath Water Users Association (KWUA). Here is how KWUA’s President Ben DuVal reacted to Reclamation’s announcement: “Family farms, rural communities, and wildlife are going to suffer beyond imagination.”
Beyond imagination?
"There's nothing 'moderate' or 'bipartisan' about blocking plans to lower drug prices," said one organizer.
"Now that the EPA's highly politicized, anti-science approach to fast-tracking use of this harmful pesticide has been fully exposed, the agency should cancel dicamba's recent approval," said one critic.
The “Cattlemen” (what century is this?) say more thanââ¬Â¯95% of people are consuming beef. For 70% of people, that consumption goes on every week. Valerie McGowan, past director of the Vegan Society of Humboldt asks: “If that’s the case, why do they need a burger day? Isn’t that like having National Straight People’s Day?”
And Another Thing…
"If oxygen capacity is there for mining companies to extract, the capacity must be there for the health system to save lives."
We have certainly seen some shitty trademark disputes in the past, but this one that centers around lawn fertilizer may take the proverbial cake. Apparently, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, supposedly focused on keeping the city's public water clean and local flooding from occurring, has something of a side hustle going where it also sells fertilizer to citizens, marketed as "Milorganite". Menards, the well-known home improvement retailer based in Wisconsin, sells its own fertilizer, marketed as e-Corganite. For this reason, in part due to an advertisement Menards put out (more on that in a moment), the Sewerage District has sent letters to Menards threatening to sue for trademark infringement. Worth noting is that Milorganite is actually sold in Menards stores.
In April last year, the University of Oxford was reportedly considering offering a Covid vaccine developed by its scientists on a nonexclusive basis, which would have made it possible for manufacturers across the world to produce it more cheaply and widely. But then, as reported in Kaiser Health News, “Oxford — urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation — reversed course. It signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices.”
This deal-making left many people aghast. It seemed to conflict with the Gates Foundation’s stated mission to improve global access to medicines, but it’s not surprising to those who’ve long followed the foundation’s proclivity to lend big pharma a helping hand. Recently, Melinda told The Times that vaccine makers like Pfizer and AstraZeneca “should make a small profit, because we want them to stay in business.”
Define small. AstraZeneca paid nothing toward Oxford’s basic research on the vaccine, yet the company now has exclusive distribution rights, standing to make billions from the deal brokered by the Gates Foundation.
"The majority of the ambulance service staff are not paid so if you don't have your volunteers, they can't run calls," Franklin said. "Another problem is that there's simply just not enough volume to keep ambulance service afloat and in the state of Wyoming, EMS is not essential, which means there's nobody responsible to fund these entities."
Sypherd said the funding model for EMS is fundamentally flawed, with most service providers reimbursed only if they take patients to a hospital or clinic. In rural areas like Washakie County, smaller populations mean fewer calls, and consequently, less money.
"You're reimbursed based on the number of patients that you transport to a hospital so you could get called 1,000 times a year and only transport 750 patients -- those other 250 calls you made no money on," Sypherd said.
The recent ransomware attack on the Colonial Pipeline has brought renewed public attention to cybersecurity issues. The field is always evolving, and the attack serves as a great starting point for understanding the current state of cybersecurity, so this week we're joined by three experts — Ross Nordurft and Alex Botting from Venable LLP, and Amy Mahn from the National Institute of Standards and Technology — to discuss the lessons from the pipeline attack, and how to take a risk management approach to cybersecurity.
A ransomware intrusion of the computer networks of Bose in March forced some of the electronic giant’s IT systems offline and exposed the personal information of a handful of former employees, the company said in a breach notification letter.
Seven weeks into an investigation of the incident, in late April, Bose discovered that hackers had accessed and “potentially exfiltrated” files containing the Social Security numbers and salary information of six former Bose employees based in New Hampshire, according to the statement.
Alongside founding members, Accenture, GitHub, Microsoft and ThoughtWorks, Goldman Sachs and nonprofits including Leaders for Climate Action, Watt Time and The Green Web Foundation have also joined The Green Software Foundation.
Is nothing sacred any more? Gosh, there's vulnerabilities everywhere. Just when you thought you were safe after updating to protect your CPU, now there's this. Thought RAM vendors had fixed Rowhammer from 2014? Think again, it's back with Half-Double.
As a reminder: Rowhammer is a DRAM vulnerability whereby repeated accesses to one address can tamper with the data stored at other addresses. It's kinda similar to the speculative execution vulnerabilities in CPUs. This newer Half-Double attack vector "capitalizes on the worsening physics of some of the newer DRAM chips" which sounds quite terrible.
Apple's shiny new in-house M1 Arm chip is the latest processor challenged by a security vulnerability. The "M1RACLES" vulnerability was made public today as a covert channel vulnerability by where a mysterious register could leak EL0 state.
The M1RACLES vulnerability is assigned as CVE-2021-30747. This vulnerability is summed up as, "A flaw in the design of the Apple Silicon “M1” chip allows any two applications running under an OS to covertly exchange data between them, without using memory, sockets, files, or any other normal operating system features. This works between processes running as different users and under different privilege levels, creating a covert channel for surreptitious data exchange...The ARM system register encoded as s3_5_c15_c10_1 is accessible from EL0, and contains two implemented bits that can be read or written (bits 0 and 1). This is a per-cluster register that can be simultaneously accessed by all cores in a cluster. This makes it a two-bit covert channel that any arbitrary process can use to exchange data with another cooperating process."
Asahi Linux developer Hector Martin has revealed a covert channel vulnerability in the Apple M1 chip that he dubbed M1RACLES, and in the process, he’s gently criticized the way security flaws have started to be shared with the public.
Martin’s executive summary for M1RACLES sounds dire: “A flaw in the design of the Apple Silicon ‘M1’ chip allows any two applications running under an OS to covertly exchange data between them, without using memory, sockets, files, or any other normal operating system features. This works between processes running as different users and under different privilege levels, creating a covert channel for surreptitious data exchange. […] The vulnerability is baked into Apple Silicon chips, and cannot be fixed without a new silicon revision.“ (Emphasis his.)
A week ago, I blogged about a vulnerability in a platform that would allow anyone to download users’ amortisation schedules. This was a critical issue, but it wasn’t really exploitable in the wild as it included a part where you had to guess the name of the document to download.
I no longer trust that platform so I went to their website to remove my loan data from it, but apparently this isn’t possibile via the UI.
I also opened a ticket on their support platform to request removal and they replied that it isn’t possible.
Statistics quoted by the paper show that people around the world are worried by the quantity of data that businesses and governments collect about them. A study of more than 25,000 people in 40 countries showed that 70% of them were concerned about sharing personal information, and two-thirds were unhappy with the current privacy practices of data collectors. Access Now points out that specific groups are especially at risk from excessive data collection, which can reduce the opportunities for Black, Hispanic, Indigenous, and other communities of color, or actively target them for discriminatory campaigns and deception.
The two letters, and their leaks, are signs of a slow cultural shift at Apple. Employees, once tight-lipped about internal problems, are now joining a wave of public dissent that’s roiling Silicon Valley. Employees say this is partly because Apple’s typical avenues for reporting don’t work for big cultural issues. They also note the company rolled out Slack in 2019, allowing workers to find and organize with one another.
Three years ago, on 25 May 2018, the General Data Protection Regulation became applicable. The GDPR was meant to give rights to everyday people that are subject to data processing (“data subjects”). At noyb, we apply the GDPR from that user perspective every day.
After three years, our first interim conclusion is mixed: The GDPR has clearly brought the issue to everyone’s attention, ensured that companies reviewed practices (often for the first time) and users became more aware that they have rights in the digital sphere.
If you browse the web without an ad blocker, you will have noticed that the ads you see tend to follow you around. Have you been looking around for a new pair of shoes? Be prepared to see more ads for shoes on completely unrelated websites. This advertising technique is called “behavioural retargeting” and is built on recording your web history in a central place, then using that information to select ads that advertisers expect you are more likely to react to.
A drug dealer whose fingerprints were analyzed by police when he shared a photo of his hand holding a block of cheese has been sentenced to 13 years and six months in prison.
Carl Stewart, 39, from Liverpool, northwestern England, sent a picture on an encrypted device of a block of Stilton he had found in upmarket British grocery store Marks & Spencer, Merseyside Police said in a press release.
But the photograph was discovered by police, who used it to analyze his fingerprints and identify Stewart.
Last month’s detentions marked the first time the surveillance network, which was rolled out last January, had been used at scale to target dozens of peaceful protesters and journalists in the wake of a demonstration. It comes amid an accelerating crackdown on independent media, civil society, and social media in Russia, in a bid to choke off opportunities for dissent ahead of parliamentary elections in September and as Russian President Vladimir Putin’s approval ratings continue to fall.
As advanced surveillance technology increasingly becomes part of the toolkit for authoritarian governments, they are often quietly reliant on components made by Western technology companies. Although Moscow’s facial recognition cameras are not subject to export controls or sanctions, their use underscores the ethical and logistical challenges for companies and governments seeking to prevent Western technology from enabling human rights abuses as policy struggles to keep pace with technological development.
In the US, the Second Amendment provides that American citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents have the right to bear arms, as do most state constitutions, including the one of the state of Illinois.
None of them hint that it would be lawful to restrict this right in any manner, but the federal courts have upheld that the federal and state governments have the right to bar people who are convicted felons or are subject to a restraining order.
Unfortunately, getting a restraining order is comically simple in the United States. In fact, a woman in New Mexico was able to get one against David Letterman in 2005 (CNN deleted the original story, but it’s at the Internet Archive) because she believed that he was sending her coded messages through her television set.
Instead of ordering the woman to undergo a mental health evaluation, the judge decided that, under the federal “Violence Against Women Act” (which some studies have shown to have increased violence against women, which would not be unprecedented given the results of the Wars on Drugs and Terrorists, and which gives people perverse incentives to make false accusations of domestic violence that ruin other people’s lives in exchange for government benefits), David Letterman couldn’t own a firearm until the restraining order ended.
America cannot lead the world in embracing multiracial democracy and rejecting authoritarianism, while also condoning the actions of Netanyahu and the Saudis and launching military strikes wherever it wants.
The Department of Defense deliberately exaggerated the Soviet threat throughout the Cold War in order to gain congressional authorization and appropriation for desired military weaponry.€ Their assessments were consistently inflated, regarding Soviet military manpower in Eastern Europe; the size of Soviet chemical weapons stocks; the range of Soviet military aircraft; and overall deployments in Eastern Europe.€ These distortions contributed to delays in negotiating both strategic and tactical disarmament agreements. The Committee on the Present Danger used bloated estimates and assessments to contend that a window of vulnerability existed in U.S. capabilities vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.€ Harvard Professor Richard Pipes was central to this effort while serving in Reagan’s National Security Council.
President Harry S. Truman created the Central Intelligence Agency in order to gain more objective assessments of our adversaries, but CIA estimates often contributed to the problem. Their estimates were far more accurate than those of the Defense Department’s Defense Intelligence Agency, but Soviet military manning and procurement was never as robust as the CIA estimated.€ The CIA depiction of a Soviet military Goliath with global reach and even control of international terrorism bolstered Reagan’s portrayal of an “evil empire.”€ CIA publications regularly discussed a “relentless Soviet buildup” and a “disquieting index of Soviet intentions,” which reflected institutional bias and not reality.€ CIA distortions of military issues also contributed to delays in disarmament negotiation with the Soviet Union, which is documented in Secretary of State George P. Shultz’s excellent memoir (“Triumph and Turmoil: My Years as Secretary of State”).
The compromises made by the center-left parties in Chile not only squandered their chance to reform the economy, but left the government largely unaccountable to an electorate that had long rejected the country's neo-liberal model of development.
The Papers provoked questions about how the war could have been waged through six presidencies in a row: Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford. How could such dissimilar presidents have gone wrong — over and over again? Why couldn’t they stop? Did they get bad intelligence? Did they pick unworthy advisers? Did other bureaucratic dynamics guarantee bad decisions every time? Were they afraid of losing re-election?
This speculation avoided a more straightforward conclusion: Six presidents in a row did not change the long-term goals and strategy, and could not have if they wanted to, because presidents don’t decide those things.
In its new report, Action on Armed Violence urges states and others to "commit politically to stop using explosive weapons with wide area effects in populated areas."
America dominates arms sales again and again.
A Frenchwoman jailed for her part in a foiled 2016 plot to blow up a car packed with gas canisters near Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris was back in court on Wednesday to appeal her 30-year jail sentence. FRANCE 24's Yena Lee reports from the courthouse.
Nowhere in Mezied’s account, however, is there any mention that Hamas kicked off the latest carnage by firing 100 missiles at Jerusalem or that Hamas/Islamic Jihad ended up firing 4,000 missiles in the direction of Israel. Or that some of those dead 63 Gazan children, if that is a genuine figure, were as likely killed by misfiring rockets from her side of the border. Or that Gazan civilians were put in harm’s way not so much by the IDF but Hamas deliberately positioning their mobile launch sites in the vicinity of hospitals/clinics, schools and civilian apartments. The Islamo-terrorists, in other words, wanted – let us make that clear: hoped and prayed – their captive Gazans are killed in order to increase the martyrdom or propaganda factor. Mezied, prudently, does not mention Hamas or Islamic Jihad at all in her Zionophobic piece for the SMH. If we leave Hamas and Islamic Jihad out of the equation, if we dispense with the inconvenient truth that this terrorist duo started the war by firing 100 rockets at Jerusalem, then – yes – then Jews are, as Adolf Hitler, Hassan al-Bannah, Sayyid Qutb and Osama bin-Laden warned us, our cosmological enemy. Bring on the old blood libel, Asma Abu Mezied.
Screaming "Sieg Heil" and "Hitler, Hitler," a mostly Muslim mob threw bottles and stones at a small group of Jews peacefully demonstrating for Israel at this town's central square last year. Worshipers on their way to synagogue and Jewish kids in schools are routinely accosted as "Dirty Jews." Last year's Davis Cup tennis match against Israel, which pro-Palestinian activists had sought to cancel, was held behind closed doors. The official reason was to avoid disruption by anti-Israeli protesters. But roughly 6,000 of them clashed with the police during the event anyway. Notwithstanding the official explanation, the closed-door match left the impression that Israel is a pariah state that needs to be quarantined. Not surprisingly, Malmö's small Jewish community of roughly 700 is getting smaller as families leave town.
The UN Agency lamented on Wednesday that the growing number of displaced persons were now in dire need of humanitarian assistance, adding that the homeless women are also in potential danger of predators.
In an electronic mail update sent to SaharaReporters, the UNOCHA stated that after the second attack in less than a week by the non-state armed groups occurred in Yobe State, 30,000 people fled their homes in Kanama town, Yunusari while 15,000 fled theirs in Geidam.
Boko Haram had on May 2 attacked the Yobe towns, the third attack in two weeks.
"Groklaw was a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003 by paralegal Pamela Jones ('PJ'), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU anti-trust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML. Jones described Groklaw as ...'a place where lawyers and geeks could explain things to each other and work together, so they'd understand each other's work better.' Its name derives from 'grok', roughly meaning 'to understand completely', which had previously entered geek slang. Other topics covered included software patents, DMCA, the actions of the RIAA against alleged illegal file sharers, and actions against free and open software such as Android and Linux. Almost every article also attracted an 'Off Topic' thread, where a diverse range of topics was discussed." -- Summary retrieved on October 7, 2019 http://dbpedia.org/resource/Groklaw
Andreas Malm, a historian and scholar of human ecology at Lund University in Sweden, may be the hardest-working intellectual on the climate left. The author of 2016’s Fossil Capital, a major contribution to our historical understanding of the climate crisis, and 2018’s The Progress of This Storm, he has published three more books since last September: Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency; How to Blow Up a Pipeline; and now the massive White Skin, Black Fuel: On the Danger of Fossil Fascism.
Storms devastate. Climate change makes them more devastating. Now we know how much the human cost of climate change really is.
Nearly a third of the directors of Africa’s biggest bank have close connections to the coal industry, casting doubt on their ability to ensure the organisation’s business is aligned with global climate goals.
A DeSmog investigation has found that 29 percent of board members of South Africa’s Standard Bank have current or former roles in companies involved in the coal supply chain that are included on the Global Coal Exit List (GCEL). Nearly a quarter (24 percent) of board members have current ties to the industry, making it the most coal-affiliated of any of the 39 banks analysed by DeSmog. Over 80 percent of directors had a past or current tie to polluting industries, either as a current or former adviser or employee.€
The company, which plans two new battery plants in Ohio and Tennessee in a joint venture with a unit of LG Chem Ltd., said Tuesday it would be open to discussions with the United Auto Workers over its demand for collective bargaining rights.
I especially appreciate the linkage of recent large fires to drought and warming temperatures. That is what is driving these fires across the West, and it is good to see the Revelator making this a central theme. Westwide, we are experiencing some of the most severe drought of the past 1000 years. This, more than any other factor, is driving large blazes across the West.
I also am grateful that the author recognized that many species for their survival often need wildfire. I’ve seen some references that suggest as much as 2/3 of all species depend on dead trees for some part of their life requirements (trees can be killed by fire, drought, beetles, etc.).€ We need large fires to maintain healthy forest ecosystems. Fires do not “destroy,” “degrade,” or “devastate” forest ecosystems. Rather they rejuvenate them.
The cycle of animal abuse is not only bad for animals, it's bad for us.
The Third Reconstruction should aim to end—once and for all—the oligarchy of rich Whites by creating an America in which all are equal at the voting booth, the school, the clinic and the workplace.
"For too long, the wealthiest Americans and big corporations have been able to use lawyers, accountants, and lobbyists to avoid paying their fair share."
"No one should face financial ruin for living in states run by Republicans."
As vaccinations and relaxed health guidelines make returning to the office a reality for more companies, there seems to be a disconnect between managers and their workers over remote work.
American Express Services Europe has been fined €£90,000 ($127,377) by a U.K. regulator, which found the company illegally blasted out 4 million marketing emails to customers who had opted out of receiving them.
Critics said the fine, which is nominal for the multi-national financial brand, isn’t likely to do much to deter Amex, or any other company, from engaging in the practice.
The Open Bank Project (OBP), which I first met in 2010, helps banks to practice REAL openness in banking. Unlike certain similarly named EU proposals, this is a really good idea for a lot of reasons, including that more really open banking would bring less need for wikileaks.
The insurance industry already was a potential source of discrimination and control nightmares before the Internet. Today, coupled with continuous digital tracking, it may become much worst. We cannot mitigate that risk without, among other things, real openness in how insurance data and services are created, exchanged and used.
This is why I am happy, and I think you too should be, about the new partnership between OBP and G2 Startups, a Milan-based “Open Innovation Enabler and a Startup Accelerator”. G2 Startups leads the Italian chapter of the Open Insurance Initiative (OPIN), which, by a first look at their White Paper, seems to me a promising answer to the concerns I just expressed.
The newly-touted "rules-based order" by the U.S. is its latest smokescreen for a foreign policy based on illegal threats and uses of force and a doctrine of "might makes right."
Filibustering against civil rights legislation in congress is an unfortunate tradition. It was repeatedly used by Southern Democratic senators to successfully block efforts to pass anti-lynching legislation in the 1920s and ’30s. Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina became the iconic example of filibustering when he talked twenty-four hours straight to stop the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 to protect the right of Blacks to vote. His effort failed, and the Act passed within two hours after he sat down. The filibuster was used again in another failed effort to stop the Senate from passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Less publicized is how the filibuster has been used to block workers’ rights legislation, such as the 1978 Labor Law Reform Act and, more recently, the Employee Free Choice Act, supported by the Obama administration. Republicans are threatening to filibuster to stop the Senate from passing HR1. This is a critical bill that would negate past state-mandated laws suppressing voter turnout and curtail the impact in the 47 state legislatures that have bills before them to restrict ballot access further. Many Democrats use these examples to demand an end to the filibuster.
No one has been held responsible for the Tulsa massacre that left hundreds of Black people dead and their prosperous community in ruins.
Elections are an exercise in the power of the people to choose a government that is representative of their communities and responsive to their needs and interests. We used that power in 2020 to drive state and national change, and this year, our local elections give us another opportunity to exercise our right to determine who our leaders are and what they stand for.
Would you put big money on Democrats winning big in 2022? Recently, a wealthy progressive donor stated on a Listserv for political junkies that he expected Democrats to sweep the House and Senate by large margins. Conventional wisdom, of course, holds that Democrats are likely to lose control of the House and quite possibly the Senate, putting an abrupt end to the progressive reforms that President Biden is advancing. But can Democrats beat the odds next year?
On the ground, regime police entered the plane and abducted opposition journalist Roman Protasevich and his girlfriend, Sofia Sapega. Belarus’s state media reports that the hijacking/abduction was carried out on the personal orders of President Alexander Lukashenko.
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (rightly) called the operation a “shocking act.”
US sanctions Venezuela for being sovereign
Stansfield Smith of Chicago ALBA Solidarity commented that the Saab case is part of a larger US effort to use “lawfare” to impose its illegal sanctions, which the United Nations condemns as “unilateral coercive measures.” The US employs sanctions to discipline countries that attempt to develop independent of its dominion.
"The Justice Department is in superb hands as it continues to restore its role as chief enforcer of our civil rights," said one human rights advocate.
"The prosecutors are convinced they have a case. That's at least how I read it," said one legal expert.
Notes: Abby Martin is the founder of www.mediaroots.org and www.theempirefiles.tv. She produced a 2019 documentary Gaza Fights For Freedom. Michelle Rodino-Colocino and Brian Dolber are two members of a four-person team that edited a forthcoming book The Gig Economy: Workers and Media in the Age of Convergence. Both teach communications, Rodino-Colocino at Penn State University, and Dolber at California State University, San Marcos.
Support independent cartooning: join€ Sparky’s List—and don’t forget to visit TT’s€ Emporium of Fun, featuring the new book and plush Sparky!
Because in the waning days of the Trump presidency, as unfounded allegations of election theft gripped the Republican Party, a bombshell dropped: Twitter had banned the president for tweets the company said could be read as an incitement of the riots at the capitol just days prior on January 6.
The president, who by then had lost the election, and his allies were already clamoring for reforms to a decades-old law known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which shields social media and other platforms from legal liability for posts by their users. For example, if a user posts something libelous about a person or business, the platform on which it is posted enjoys full immunity.
But critics of the law have argued that immunity vanishes when the platform gets involved in moderating those posts. The reasoning is that the platform moves from mere facilitator to editorial or publisher of what can and cannot be seen by its users.
What this comes down to, though, is that Bill Gates has been so rich for so long that he’s spent the bulk of his adult life without anyone telling him he’s wrong. That has the same corrosive effect on character and sanity that you see in the case of kings and dictators. People want some of Bill Gates’ money, so they constantly suck up to him and tell him his ideas are great even when they’re atrocious, and the guardrails normal people live between don’t exist in his case.
So he throws money around at insane things. That he isn’t outwardly off his rocker like Howard Hughes was is small comfort; Hughes mostly kept to himself in that hotel suite in Las Vegas as he descended into madness. Gates is everywhere.
What’s different this time is the acquiescence of Republican elites. The Big Lie about the election didn’t well up from the grass roots — it was promoted from above, initially by Trump himself, but what’s crucial is that almost no prominent Republican politicians have been willing to contradict his claims and many have rushed to back them up.
Or to put it another way, the fundamental problem lies less with the crazies than with the careerists; not with the madness of Marjorie Taylor Greene, but with the spinelessness of Kevin McCarthy.
And this spinelessness has deep institutional roots.
A former Trump spokesman has reached the end of his always-doomed attempt to sue an online publication for reporting on the content of court documents. And it's going to cost him about $42,000 in legal fees.
Remember the absolute shit fit that Donald Trump threw after Twitter placed warning labels on some of his tweets about mail-in ballots? That resulted in the ridiculous executive order to undermine Section 230, even though all Twitter had done at the time was add more speech to Trump's tweets and pointed out that they were presenting misleading information.
Russia's communications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, has given Google 24 hours to delete what it said was prohibited content as it faces the possibility of a punitive slowdown measure on it.
Google faces a fine of up to 4 million rubles ($54,300) if the company does not respond to Roskomnadzor's May 24 notifications about the removal of prohibited information within 24 hours, the watchdog was quoted as saying by TASS.
Roskomnadzor said that YouTube, which is owned by Google, did not remove about 5,000 "prohibited" videos, out of which some 3,500 incite "extremism."
Emmanuel and his wife, Shagufta Kausar, were accused and convicted of sending blasphemous text messages to a prayer leader at a mosque in 2013. The Christian couple denies the charges, pointing to the bogus SIM card presented as evidence at trial and the fact that both are illiterate unable to have written the text messages that were sent.
Despite this evidence, the couple was sentenced to death under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Since then, they have been jailed separately and have appealed their sentences of the Lahore High Court.
A team of the BJP leaders, led by its state treasurer and party’s chief whip in the Bihar legislative council Dilip Kumar Jaiswal, on Sunday visited Purnia district’s Majhuwa village where more than a dozen houses of Mahadalit community were attacked and burned down by an around 300- strong mob of peoples belonging to minority community in the night of May 19.
One member of Mahadalit community Mewalal Rai (70), a retired village chowkidar, was beaten to death during the attack by the mob which also misbehaved with women and children following a dispute over a big chunk of government land, police said.
Officials in Bengkulu have reversed the expulsion of a high school student, whose viral TikTok video mocking Palestinians became the subject of nationwide outrage last week.
Her readmission to school was confirmed by the Commission for the Protection of Indonesian Children (KPAI) this morning, who has been among the most vocal in arguing that she should not have been robbed of her right to an education over the video.
The operation to detain Raman Pratasevich is a call to action to protect journalists, dissidents and people seeking protection in Europe—at all costs.
It certainly appears the new Attorney General is doing some house cleaning. A pretty steady drip of disclosures have made their way into the public sphere about the DOJ's activities while headed by Bill Barr and overseen by the Trump White House.
Wilder's firing has left AP employees "wondering how we treat our own, what culture we embrace and what values we truly espouse as a company."
In her first TV interview, we speak with Emily Wilder, the young reporter fired by the Associated Press after she was targeted in a Republican smear campaign for her pro-Palestinian activism in college. Wilder is Jewish and was a member of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace at Stanford University before she graduated in 2020. She was two weeks into her new job with the AP when the Stanford College Republicans singled out some of her past social media posts, triggering a conservative frenzy. The AP announced Wilder’s firing shortly thereafter, citing unspecified violations of its social media policy. “Less than 48 hours after Stanford College Republicans began to post about me, I was fired,” says Wilder. “I was not given an explanation for what social media policy I had violated.” Over 100 AP journalists have signed an open letter to management protesting the decision to fire Wilder, which came just days after Israel demolished the building housing AP offices and other media organizations in Gaza. Journalism professor Janine Zacharia, a former Jerusalem bureau chief for The Washington Post who taught Wilder at Stanford, says the episode is an example of how much pressure news organizations face on Middle East coverage. “I am very aware, perhaps more than most, to the sensitivities around the questions of bias and reporting on the conflict,” says Zacharia. “In this case it wasn’t about bias.”
Lufthansa, KLM, SAS, Air France, LOT and Singapore Airlines were among carriers that stopped flying over Belarus along a major Europe-to-Asia corridor that generates hard currency payments to the Minsk government, $300 to $940 per flight.
Belgium's Charles Michel, who chairs European Union summits, called the flight bans, "Europe in action," tweeting a picture of a flight tracker map showing no planes flying over Belarus.
Belarusian planes also faced a possible ban from flying to European Union cities, which could leave landlocked Belarus only able to reach its territory via its eastern border with its close ally Russia.
The brazen arrest of journalist Roman Protasevich by the Belarusian government, in which it forced the international flight he was aboard to land in Minsk, has sent a chill down the spine of the international community.
Protasevich, the former editor and founder of Nexta, an anti-regime blog and social media channel, has been instrumental in leading protests against authoritarian President Alexander Lukashenko.
The unprecedented steps taken by Belarus to capture a fugitive dissident have broad implications. Political leaders, human rights advocates and international law experts are calling Protasevich's detainment tantamount to an act of state terrorism.
Air France, Finnair and Singapore Airlines became the latest carriers to suspend flights over Belarus on Tuesday after Minsk forced a jet to land to arrest a dissident.
United States citizen and managing editor of Frontier Myanmar Danny Fenster was detained at Yangon International Airport, the outlet said in a statement on its verified Twitter account.
The US State Department said it was "aware of reports" of the arrest.
Christopher Grant, a veteran detective with the city of Baltimore’s police department, had to take a refresher course in 2007 on investigating sex crimes. At the last minute, the instructor backed out. They would watch a video instead.
The video was an old “48 Hours” episode involving a rape victim named Laura Neuman. Neuman was a teenager when she was raped by a stranger in Baltimore in 1983. Her rapist had never been caught, but she had never let go. She called Baltimore police over the years until she found two determined city detectives to investigate her case in 2002. They solved it in less than a week using a fingerprint that police had never bothered to load into a state database. She saw her rapist, Alphonso Hill, sent away for 15 years.
On April 7, former Vice President Mike Pence launched his new organization, deceptively named “Advancing American Freedom.” The organization claims to “expand freedom for all Americans” and “defends the successful policies” of the Trump administration. Still, a quick look at its advisory board reveals an alliance with known hate groups, anti-choice extremists, and organizations who have pumped millions of dollars into suppressing the vote.
May 26, 2020. People come from all directions: holding signs, wearing masks. It’s quiet, considering the size of the crowd. The day after George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, the space that will become George Floyd Square is blocked off by some kind of red ribbon, twisted through the doors and windows of a barricade of cars. Flowers mark the spot on the sidewalk where he died. In the days to come, the flowers multiply and other forms of memorial emerge: vigils, murals, billboards, portraits.
A new study from Louisiana shows that immigrants who challenge their detention in court are much less likely to prevail before judges than to quietly get released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement while their cases are pending.
The study, conducted by Tulane University Law School’s Immigration Rights Clinic and shared with ProPublica, makes the case that what it calls “shadow wins” may allow ICE to uphold a status quo that frequently goes beyond the Supreme Court’s 2001 ruling that indefinite detention is unconstitutional.
George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, sparked a global uprising against systemic racism and police brutality and put the spotlight on decades-long movements dedicated to abolition and criminal justice reform. Memorial events and marches are celebrating George Floyd’s life and commemorate the first anniversary of his murder, and President Joe Biden is hosting some of his family at the White House as negotiations continue in Congress over legislation that bears his name, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Monifa Bandele, who sits on the steering committee for Communities United for Police Reform and is an organizer with the Movement for Black Lives, says the racial justice uprising that followed Floyd’s death served as a “clarion call” to defund police and reinvest those resources. “What you see emerging from the communities is a much more powerful demand to actually shift the realities so that our children are not marching again in another 50 years,” Bandele says.
Income inequality is blamed for being the main driver of violent crime by the majority of the literature. However, earlier work on the topic largely neglects the role of poverty and income levels as opposed to income inequality. The current paper uses all court verdicts for homicide cases in China between 2014 and 2016, as well as various inequality measures calculated from 2005 mini census data together with a host of control variables to shed light on the relationship at the detailed Chinese prefecture-level. The results suggest that it is the poverty and low income level, rather than income inequality, that is positively related to homicide rates. We show that the internal rural-urban migration from more violent localities contributes to the destination cities’ homicide rates. The poverty-homicide association implies that instead of “relative deprivation”, “absolute deprivation” is mainly responsible for violent crime. Poverty is the mother of crime. —Marcus Aurelius (121-180AD), Emperor of the Roman Empire.
It goes without saying that judges, probation officers, prosecutors,and others who work in the courts perform a vital public service underdifficult circumstances. Questions of how to deal with people who commitcrimes and how to fund court operations are challenging and intractable.Judges and law enforcement officials are confronted daily with a world ofsocial ills and with people who, for a variety of reasons, do not complywith court orders or probation conditions.
But we can, and must, do so much better. We cannot tolerate thenormalization of a justice culture in which one’s income so explicitly de-termines one’s experience. We cannot tolerate the existence of courts thatprioritize the collection of money over fairness and public safety. All sortsof improprieties flow from this perversion of priorities.
We in the legal profession have a special responsibility for the way ourcourts operate. It is our responsibility to object when we see people jailedand otherwise mistreated just because they do not have money.
Changing an entrenched, mercenary court culture is enormously dif-ficult. The most effective approach we’ve found is collaborative, and in-volves litigation, community organizing, policy reform, legislativeadvocacy, and especially investigative journalism.
While not all, or even most, Muslims are involved, persecution of Christians by extremists is growing. The report posits that such persecution is not random but rather systematic, and takes place irrespective of language, ethnicity, or location. It includes incidents that take place during, or are reported on, any given month.
Sweden had been, in the XX century, one of the most welcoming places for Jews in Europe (the hero of the Holocaust Raoul Wallenberg also came from there) and Malmö was the city-refuge for the many who managed to escape Nazi deportation. Swedish writer Paulina Neuding spoke at a conference of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees: “I live in Mälmo. It was once a safe haven for Jews, but today only 200 remain and they are harassed ”.
Yanñk's statement prompted outrage nationwide, with the hashtag "Derya Yanñk resign" trending on Twitter shortly after her statement was made public.
Main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) Ankara deputy Yñldñrñm Kaya said that the minister was encouraging the public to tolerate violence against women, a phenomenon that he said was on the rise both at homes and in the streets.
Citing a survey of the Services General Directorate on the Status of Women, Yanñk said that 26 percent of women have been exposed to emotional violence, 15 percent to economic violence, 8 percent to physical violence and 5 percent to sexual violence in one year.
The minister said it is only 11 percent of the suffered women that file a complaint with the police.
Yanñk also made a reference to a UN report which puts Turkey globally at 13th place in terms of the percentage of women who have been exposed to physical violence in the country.
According to the results of the UN report, Turkey ranks 4th in the world in terms of the percentage of women who have been exposed to sexual violence, following Kenya, Ethiopia and India.
A quarter-century ago, Pres. Bill Clinton signed the 1996 Telecommunications Act arguing that it would “promotes competition as the key to opening new markets and new opportunities.”€ He insisted, “it will protect consumers by regulating the remaining monopolies for a time and by providing a roadmap for deregulation in the future.”
Unfortunately, Clinton’s “for a time” was short lived.€ Immediately after the Act’s passage, the telecom industries began a period of mega mergers and acquisitions (M&As) that continues today.
The fallout from Bill C-10 for freedom of expression and the regulation of user generated content has rightly garnered considerable attention given the unprecedented regulatory scope of the bill. From a consumer perspective, the bill will lead to services either passing along hundreds of millions in fees through regulatory surcharges or blocked foreign services that licence their content to domestic Internet streaming services, who will increasingly become indistinguishable from cable television.
As we've been noting, there's a long runway between the Biden Administration's vague but promising broadband plan and actual implementation. And there's millions of dollars and literally thousands of lobbyists hard at work trying to make sure that the plan, whatever it winds up looking like, doesn't disrupt the comfortable, status quo that is the regionally-monopolized and dysfunctional US broadband market.
Way back in 2005, former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre whined incessantly about how Google was getting a "free ride" on his company's "pipes," and that they should be charged an additional toll (you know, just because). As we've discussed countless times in the years since, Whitacre's argument made absolutely no sense, given that Google not only pays plenty for bandwidth, but the company owns billions in international and oceanic fiber runs, data centers, and network infrastructure. Despite making no sense, this idea that Google was some kind of free ride parasite and should be throwing millions in additional money at telecom giants has been a talking point for global telecoms for years.
I have just disconnected from irc.freenode.net for the last time. You should do the same. The awful new de facto operators are using user numbers as a public justification for their behaviour.
As of around 3:00 UTC today, freenode’s new management believed that our channel topics and messaging pointing users in the right direction were outside of their policy, and rather than consulting with the IRC Council, they performed yet another hostile takeover, this time of the Ubuntu namespaces, including flavors, as well as other spaces from projects who were also using freenode for communication.
“In order to provide you with the best experience on IRC, Ubuntu is now officially moving to Libera Chat. You will be able to find the same channels, the same people, and the same tools that you are used to. In the event that you see something is not quite right, please, don’t hesitate to reach out to our Ubuntu IRC Team, on #ubuntu-irc,” Ubuntu Community Council’s Jose Antonio Rey writes in a message to the Ubuntu IRC mailing list.
IRC is a well-known protocol designed to serve communication and messaging purposes between users. It is built using a client-server architecture, where many “networks” exist to provide the hosting servers, so that users can join “channels” about specific topics and textually message each other.
Dozens of organizations and projects are abandoning the historical IRC network run by Freenode following the resignations of a dozen staffers last week who accused the Crown Prince of Korea of a "hostile takeover."
The #libreelec IRC support channel on freenode has been moved to Libera Chat. The last month has seen a series of management issues on freenode that have precipitated a mass exodus of FOSS projects to alernative IRC services; mostly Libera Chat or OFTC. Our original intention was to simply open another #libreelec channel on alternative servers. Our project staff are not big IRC users and channel traffic is low, so presence on several servers wouldn’t be a big deal. However:
The idea of free, open, community-building chat for Open Source projects was, and is, a good one. I’m grateful to Freenode sponsors and Freenode volunteers over a great many years.
"You have to break up Amazon," said one consumer advocate, who argued there's a "fundamental conflict of interest when you own the infrastructure and you also compete on that infrastructure."
Case law on contributory infringement is still very scarce in Spain. A Judgment dated 13 November 2020 offers a rare glimpse into the current stance of the influential Barcelona Court of Appeals (Section 15) on contributory infringement. Two points are worth noting: on the one hand, the Court sides with a specific interpretation of “staple product” (a staple product has other significant non-protected uses); on the other hand, the Court applies a seemingly strict standard on the notion of “inducement”.
Today the Senate Judiciary Committee held its hearing on Cunningham’s nomination. The Senate is quite busy to day and her nomination is not considered truly controversial as such there were only a few questions and statements.
Sen Durbin (Chair) and Sen Grassley (Ranking Member) both indicated that they would support the nomination (as did all other Senators who spoke).
[...]
These days there is often not much to learn from the hearing because the nominees are coached to evade and generally answer along the lines of “Thank you for the question, I will endeavor to faithfully apply the law to the facts of the particular cases before me.” The only real answer of interest telling came in response to a question from Senator Grassley.
The Biden administration earlier this month sent shock waves through the pharmaceutical industry when it expressed support for waiving COVID-19 vaccine patent protections.
"This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures," U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said at the time.
Now some environmentalists want the administration to roll back the intellectual property rights of companies that make renewable energy, battery storage and other green technologies designed to address global warming.
It'll be a tough sell — even with Democrats committed to addressing climate change. With the exception of COVID-19 vaccines, President Biden has promised to broadly fight for patent protections, and congressional Democrats seem to have given little thought to the potential for open-sourcing climate technology.
[...]
Across the Atlantic, supporters of the idea have framed the proposal as a necessary measure to combat rising global temperatures.
"This is a climate emergency," said Max Andersson, a former member of the European Parliament who worked on patent policy for the European Green Party. "In an emergency, you have to use emergency rules."
During his time in office, the Swedish MEP and a couple of other European Greens helped draft a policy paper that considered excluding climate technologies from patent protections. It also envisioned a global technology pool where owners of climate change technologies could share their intellectual property.
The European Greens' examination of climate-related patents was part of a larger attempt to formulate a cohesive trade policy following the European Union's 2017 approval of a trade deal with Canada — which the bloc of national green parties had opposed.
After that experience, the bloc decided it needed to "find a positive trade policy instead of saying, 'We're against this, and we're against that, and we're against this new treaty, too,'" recalled Andersson.
The European Greens didn't include any specifics on patent reform in their 2019 election manifesto, but the bloc's Swedish member party did.
The Swedish Green Party's European Parliament campaign platform said it wanted to "renew the patent system to facilitate, for example, the spread of environmentally and climate-friendly technology to poor countries, similar to the system available for certain medicines."
It was a win for Andersson, albeit a short-lived one. The Swedish Greens lost two of their four seats, including his.
Meanwhile, the European Greens won 67 seats, making the bloc the fourth-largest in the 751-member Parliament.
ISD Immunotech (“ISD”), a private biotechnology company developing a novel peptide therapeutic for the treatment of severe systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), announced today that the US Patent and Trademark Office has granted the company its first US patent covering the lead candidate ISD017. Patent US10,961,279 entitled “Identification and Attenuation of the Immunosuppressive Domains in Fusion Proteins of Enveloped RNA Viruses” describes novel immunosuppressive domains (ISDs) derived from enveloped RNA viruses including the specific sequence of ISD017, a solubility engineered version of a native isd sequence from influenza virus.
Immutep Limited (ASX: IMM; NASDAQ: IMMP) ("Immutep” or “the Company”), a biotechnology company developing novel immunotherapy treatments for cancer and autoimmune disease, is pleased to announce the grant of a new patent (number ZL201480073584.3) entitled “Combined Preparations for the Treatment of Cancer” by the Chinese Patent Office.
This Chinese patent follows the grant of the corresponding European, Australian, Japanese and United States patents, as announced separately throughout 2019 and 2020. The new patent protects Immutep’s intellectual property relating to combination therapy comprising (a) lead active immunotherapy candidate eftilagimod alpha (efti or IMP321), which is a LAG-3 fusion protein (LAG-3Ig), and (b) a chemotherapy agent. The chemotherapy agent is oxaliplatin, carboplatin, or topotecan, and the patent provides protection in the territory of mainland China.
Other solutions were proposed in the following decade. In 1999, journalist Anat Balint described an invention by one Shai Gamlieli. “Among the plethora of Israeli patents for security systems, computers and medical devices, it’s calming to discover an invention devoted to a simple and everyday issue. With due respect to internet users, somebody has to think about people walking on the sidewalks,” she wrote.
With the patent subsidy coming to an end in June, some counsel predict a sharp decline in low-quality patent applications and a possible rise in litigation
Chloe Flower looks at new strategies for a developing sector
Covid-19 vaccine makers have dialed up lobbying and public-relations efforts to rally opposition to a proposal to temporarily waive their patents.
Since the Biden administration threw its support behind the waiver proposal early this month, pharmaceutical industry trade groups have been moving to support Germany, Japan and other countries that expressed opposition, people familiar with the lobbying said. The industry lobbyists have told the governments, in meetings and phone calls, that a waiver wouldn’t address shortages any time soon, while straining raw material supplies, the people said.
Vaccine makers have also rolled out pledges to deliver more doses to developing countries, which have pressed for the waiver.
Industry lobbyists have met with Biden administration officials to argue for alternative actions, the people said. And the industry representatives have been lobbying members of Congress to pressure the Biden administration to reverse its support of the waiver, according to the people and a lobbyist email reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Since the European Patent Convention (EPC) is a non-EU instrument, following Brexit the UK transposed many existing laws governing patent into current national legislation. The European Patent Office can still grant UK patents, with UK patent attorneys able to file patents directly to the EPO or UKIPO. Recently, however, the UK’s lack of ascension to the Lugano Convention is a challenge for the UK’s firms and patent courts to navigate.
EU closes door to Brussels Regulation
Following Brexit, the UK is no longer a part of the Brussels Regulation (recast). Broadly speaking, the regulation sets out a code to determine jurisdiction of disputes, and enable harmonisation of judgments and enforcement across the EU.
Although the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and the EU stipulates that all proceedings initiated before the 1 January 2021 still fall under the Brussels Regulation, any proceedings initiated do not. As such, the UK courts will now determine jurisdiction enforcement of judgments via a mix of common law, bilateral treaties, or international legal agreements.
Last week, Junior Party The University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") filed its reply to Senior Party The Broad Institute, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (collectively, "Broad") motion in opposition (see "Broad Files Motion in Opposition to CVC Priority Motion") to CVC's motion for priority in Interference No. 106,115.
The Reply is (relatively) direct and to the point (motivated no doubt as much by the page limit in Reply briefs as to the rhetorical force of a short, pithy, to-the-point argument). (Although to be fair the brief begins with a reminder that the CVC inventors "revolutionized the field of genome editing, giving the world a new system capable of cleaving and editing genes in eukaryotic cells," mixing the irrebuttable with the precise question the Board is asked with answering.) The critical component of this achievement (no matter who did it) is the development of the combination of the tracr RNA and crRNA into a single guide RNA (sgRNA). Asserting their multiple instances of earlier conception, CVC contends that these conceptions predated any conception by the Broad's inventors, accompanied by CVC's diligence in achieving reduction to practice.
Unified Patents is backing Apple's challenge of U.S. District Judge Alan D. Albright's refusal to move a case out of his Texas courtroom, telling the Federal Circuit that the judge's decision warrants the "strong medicine of mandamus."
Unified Patents on Monday asked for permission to file its amicus brief in support of Apple's mandamus petition, in which the tech giant argues that Judge Albright's decision not to transfer a case brought by Koss Corp. to the Northern District of California flouts precedent, laying out certain factors weighing in favor of transfer, including party witness convenience.
For the latest edition of the IP Trend Monitor's study, we focused on how Intellectual Property (IP) management is evolving in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and other societal factors. In addition to transforming IP professionals' work environments, recent events have brought trends like digitalization, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) to the forefront of industry discussion.
Given that the tech world is in many ways a central focus of IP, it is hardly surprising — perhaps even fitting — that ongoing developments in technology would have a significant impact on IP management. In the IP Trend Monitor study 2021, Dennemeyer and CTC Legal Media record evidence of these external influences from an industry-wide survey conducted in late 2020 and examine how their effects manifest in real business.
Malaysia's Intellectual Property High Court has ruled that the sale and distribution of streaming devices configured for piracy purposes constitutes infringement under the Copyright Act. The decision comes a year after Malaysia informed the United States Patent and Trademark Office that pirate set-top devices were a "serious problem" in the country.
Scammers are using the website of the European Banking Authority to trick people into signing up for dubious pirate streaming subscriptions. The 'hacking' scam, which also affected the Mississippi Department of Public Safety, has gained more popularity after search engines started to downrank regular pirate sites.
Generally, the Platform is a space for copyright and open movement advocates and practitioners to identify, plan and coordinate policy-related activities. The Platform acts as:€
