cloud services, arcade games, workload identity
OpenZFS snapshots, OpenSUSE on Bastille, printing with netcat, new opnsense 21.1.8 released, new pfsense plus software available, and more.
A minor optimization was posted by an AMD engineer on Wednesday for the Linux kernel.
The optimization posted is around the ACPI C3 power state handling on Linux for AMD processors. Right now when a CPU core enters the C3 power sleep state, its cache is flushed even though the cache may be shared with CPU cores that are not in the sleep state. As the AMD patch notes, "this will cause performance drop for the cores which share some caches."
Independent developer Luke Jones continues making good progress on improving the "ASUS-WMI" driver for better ASUS laptop support on Linux.
Luke recently worked on eGPU/dGPU toggling and panel overdrive support for higher-end ASUS laptops on Linux while now he's been working on custom fan curve support.
Kali Linux installation comes with a pre-configuration of system tools that meet the above-stated three objectives. This Linux distribution does not limit itself to these pre-installed system tools, as you are free to install and use as many as you like from its repository.
This article is for users that have installed Kali Linux and are trying to familiarize themselves with the operating system. It is also a good starting point for users that have thought of using Kali Linux but need more information before making this transition.
Since Kali Linux tools fall into several categories, this article guide gives the best Kali Linux tools. These tools relate to the use of the Kali Linux operating system as a penetration testing environment.
Computer users tend to amass a lot of data over the years, whether it's important personal projects, digital photos, videos, music, or code repositories. While hard drives tend to be pretty big these days, sometimes you have to step back and take stock of what you're actually storing on your drives. The classic Linux commands df and du are quick ways to gain insight about what's on your drive, and they provide a reliable report that's easy to parse and process. That's great for scripting and processing, but the human brain doesn't always respond well to hundreds of lines of raw data. In recognition of this, the ncdu command aims to provide an interactive report about the space you're using on your hard drive.
Good collaboration is often a key contributing factor in high-performing teams. Collaboration is the process of working together towards a common goal, with teams working as one towards a common purpose, adapting as needed by using the available resources.
Providing the right tools to facilitate collaboration can mean the difference between an efficient and an inefficient workplace. In the open source and closed source spheres, you'll find an abundance of collaboration tools. Some offer up a no-frills platform with the basics of instant messaging and voice calling. Others take it a step further and throw in video conferencing, custom plugins, continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) integrations, bot accounts, and more.
Choosing a collaboration suite that is both open source and hosted on premises provides a number of advantages for sysadmins. Open source software often comes with the convenience of faster innovation, improved security, and more flexibility. Having the option to host a solution in-house instead of being forced onto a cloud-based solution can also be a huge plus for some companies, especially those with strict security policies.
in theory yes, nano can replace vi and less, but in reality, it faults on large amount of data-files-streams
Vagrant is an open source software that provides a clean, easy to configure, reproducible, and portable development environment. Using Vagrant, we can easily and quickly build and maintain different virtual software development environments. In this guide, we will see how to install mongoDB using Vagrant in Linux operating system.
For those who cannot afford the hustles of developing websites from scratch, there are now several content management systems (CMSs) such as WordPress that you can take advantage of to set up blogs as well as complete websites with a few clicks.
WordPress is a powerful, free, and open-source, highly pluggable, and customizable CMS that is being used by millions around the world to run blogs and fully functional websites.
While not making it for last week's SDL 2.0.16 release, merged on Wednesday to the SDL2 development code is an "SDL_GeometryRender" interface that stems from feature requests going back nearly a decade for this graphics API independent triangle rendering API.
Going back to 2012 was a bug report about desiring the ability with SDL to be able to render polygons with an SDL-defined API. And then in 2013 was a patch about adding a SDL_RenderGeometry interface that at the time allowed geometry rendering with OpenGL / OpenGL ES (ES2).
The upcoming Godot 3.4 release will provide a number of new features which have been backported from the 4.0 development branch (see our release policy for details on the various Godot versions). This beta 4 build provides additional features and fixes to bugs reported against previous builds.
If you already reviewed the changelog for the previous beta, you can skip right to the differences between beta 3 and beta 4.
1047 Games have announced that due to the explosion in popularity that Splitgate, the FPS with portals will see the current Open Beta extended with no end date.
They also recently announced that Splitgate has officially seen more than 10 million downloads, with server capacity being increased once again to cope with the rush of players flowing in to see what the fuss is about. 1047 also teased that there will be a "significant announcement" for players at this month's Gamescom 2021 which begins on August 24.
A few days ago, we released version 2.0.0 of MauiKit and the Maui Applications. These updates will be present in the next distribution release (end of August); however, continue reading if you’d like to try them before then.
The MATE desktop environment version 1.26 has released after 18 months of development and excitingly adds some more Wayland support to various parts of the stack. MATE is the continuation of the classic GNOME 2, before the GNOME team completely changed the way the desktop works.
"The theme for this release has been adding new functionality to the MATE Desktop while maintaining the look and feel that we all know and love. While all the added features are surely quite exciting we also did not forget to do tons of bugfixing, modernising the code base and optimizing the performance." - the MATE team.
One of the big additions is the bring up of Wayland support for Atril, System Monitor, Pluma, Terminal and other components of the Desktop. There's also updates to Calculator and Terminal so they can now be built with the Meson build system.
Being one of the best KDE focused Linux distros, KaOS has launched the new version KaOS 2021.08 with an updated package base and appearance changes.
KaOS is a KDE Plasma focused, rolling release distribution primarily built upon Arch Linux tools for packaging and package management. KaOS doesn’t identify itself as an Arch-based distro. It is built from scratch, builds its own kernel and packages, and hosts its own repositories. KaOS comes with the XFS filesystem as default.
The distro provides only KDE’s Plasma Desktop Environment, as the developers believe this is the best desktop environment, along with the toolkit it is built upon, Qt.
The built-from-scratch Linux distribution KaOS — which uses KDE, Qt, and pacman as a package manager, has finally received its fifth update this year. This article will highlight the significant changes that have been brought to the distribution.
Let us get to know about what this new release brings!
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The default Midna theme has been given a slightly different look, which can be easily noticed from the boot-up to the logout screen. This includes a darker look for the logout screen, combined with a transparent sidebar for the lockscreen and SDDM, and a minimal look for the splash screen. The icon themes have also been customized accordingly for both the light and dark versions of the theme.
The desktop environment is now based on Plasma 5.22.4 and the latest Frameworks 5.85.0; both are built on Qt 5.15.2+.
The BlackArch Linux team has released a new version of its Arch-based distribution for security experts and savvy hobbyists. BlackArch 09/01/2021 comes with an updated Linux kernel (5.13.10), revised installer, updated tools, packages and menus as well as some new plugins for the text editor Vim. Above all, however, the already extensive collection of tools supplied has been increased again: With more than 130 new additions, it now includes over 2700 tools for vulnerability searches, IT forensics and the like.
IBM is playing a game of catch-up when it comes to its focus on hybrid cloud, said Lisa Ellis, senior equity analyst at MoffettNathanson, in an interview with CNBC’s ‘TechCheck’ reporters this week.
“It’s a little bit like trying to turn the Titanic,” Ellis described. “It’s a very small piece in a much broader portfolio of IBM, much of which is in structural decline and being negatively impacted by the cloud.”
Enterprises are still headed in the direction of private cloud, Ellis noted.
Culture matters in open organizations. But "culture" seems like such a large, complicated concept to address. How can we help open organization teams better understand it?
One solution might come from Michele J. Gelfand, author of Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: Tight and Loose Cultures and the Secret Signals That Direct Our Lives. Gelfand organizes all countries and cultures into two very simple groups: those with "tight" cultures and those with "loose" ones. Then she explains the characteristics and social norms of both, offering their relative strengths and weaknesses. By studying both, one might overcome the divisions and conflicts that separate people in and across teams, organizations, and countries.
The latest version of the Debian distro, 11.0 aka Bullseye, was released last week and after a long absence, includes Kiwix! Previously in Debian 10/Buster, we only had the underlying C/C++ libraries available.
If you're not familiar with it, Kiwix is an offline content reader, providing Wikipedia, Gutenberg, TED talks, and more in ZIM (.zim) files that can be downloaded and viewed entirely offline. You can get the entire text of the English Wikipedia in less than 100GB.
apt install kiwix will get you a graphical desktop application that allows you to download and read ZIMs. apt install kiwix-tools installs kiwix-serve (among others), which serves ZIM files over an HTTP server.
Dubbed “Po Tolo,” SparkyLinux 6.0 is fully compatible with the software repositories of the recently released Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system and includes up-to-date packages that were pushed as of August 16th, 2021, along with the long-term supported Linux 5.10 LTS kernel series.
Of course, that’s not the only thing new in the SparkyLinux 6.0 release, which also features an updated and improved Calamares graphical installer, native support for exFAT filesystems with the use of the exfatprogs utility for managing exFAT formatted partitions, and extended driverless printing to USB devices support with the new ipp-usb package, which is also included in Debian Bullseye.
Sparky 6.0 “Po Tolo” has been released. It is based on and fully compatible with Debian 11 “Bullseye”.
While Ubuntu normally ships with the very latest GNOME desktop version issued just before release time, with Ubuntu 21.04 they stuck to GNOME 3.38 rather than punting early to GNOME 40. In the Ubuntu 21.10 development packages they since migrated to GNOME 40 but now it looks like they will be sticking to that and not pulling ahead to the near-final GNOME 41.
GNOME 41 will be out in September (as usual) as the latest half-year update to this open-source desktop. Especially being one cycle ahead of an LTS release, normally Ubuntu's desktop would very much be on the latest and greatest GNOME version at the time, but that doesn't look like it will be the case for Ubuntu 21.10.
Many will recall DFI motherboards from close to two decades ago for their wildly colored "LANParty" motherboards but in recent years the company has been focusing on IoT and industrial hardware where, of course, Linux has much relevance. DFI and Canonical today announced an AMD-powered Ubuntu-loaded "industrial Pi" single board computer.
Canonical and DFI announce that the GHF51 and EC90A-GH, have been certified, based on the latest AMD-based platform. Both offer improved performance, a smaller footprint, and full access to open-source software with Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core. These are part of the first wave of products that passed the Ubuntu IoT hardware certification.
Small footprint, better performance
The GHF51 is positioned as the “Industrial Pi”, making it the first ultra-mini industrial motherboard powered by high-performance AMD Ryzen™ R1000 Processors. The EC90A-GH is a mini fanless embedded system holding an unprecedented processing throughput despite its size. This “industrial Pi” defines a new level of balance between performance and cost-effectiveness. Its expandability brings a versatility adapted for industrial application development, edge computing, AI vision, and more. The Ubuntu certification gives access to a rich open-source software ecosystem and equips developers with a platform for AIoT innovation.
Simply NUC “Tiger Canyon Porcoolpine” is a fanless Intel NUC offered with a choice of Tiger Lake UP3 processors, notably Core i3-1115G4, Core i5-1135G7, and Core i7-1165G7, and equivalent vPro parts when available.
The mini PC comes with up to 64GB DDR4, NVMe & SATA storage, a Thunderbolt 4 port, two HDMI 2.0b ports, 2.5 GbE networking, and optional Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.1, as well as a DB9 serial port for industrial applications, for example, to connect a barcode scanner.
Lantronix Inc. (NASDAQ: LTRX), a global provider of secure turnkey solutions for the Internet of Things (IoT) and Remote Environment Management (REM) offering Software as a Service (SaaS), connectivity services, engineering services and intelligent hardware, today announced its new ultra-compact Open-Q™ 5165RB System on Module (SOM). Lantronix’s Open-Q™ 5165RB SOM features multiple specialized processing cores for powerful AI processing, image and graphics processing and audio processing.
Summer is here. Despite the current situation of the world, I hope you can still enjoy a bit of sunshine and the breezing air wherever you are. And while vacations are planned, SUMO is still busy with lots of projects and releases. So let’s get the recap started!
Our modern browsers are much better than their ancestors at protecting us from vulnerabilities and online dangers, but the big ones aren’t always so great when it comes to caring for your privacy. Firefox is one of the better browsers in this regard, with some decent anti-tracking features, but you may still need to get some add-ons to shore up those privacy defenses.
The following add-ons for the Firefox browser can help with that. Here are some of our favorites that will block all the online nonsense you don’t want any part of.
LibreOffice 7.2 Community, the new major release of the volunteer-supported free office suite for desktop productivity, is available from https://www.libreoffice.org/download. Based on the LibreOffice Technology platform for personal productivity on desktop, mobile and cloud, it provides a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats. In addition, LibreOffice 7.2 Community offers numerous performance improvements in handling large files, opening certain DOCX and XLSX files, managing font caching, and opening presentations and drawings that contain large images. There are also drawing speed improvements when using the Skia back-end that was introduced with LibreOffice 7.1.
LibreOffice 7.2 Community is out today as the newest version of this widely-used, open-source, cross-platform office suite.
LibreOffice 7.2 Community (yes, their new branding, rather than the former "Personal Edition" attempt) is the latest feature release with much work on improving interoperability with Microsoft Office file formats. In addition to better handling Microsoft Office files like faster opening of DOCX documents, LibreOffice 7.2 Community brings a command pop-up / heads-up display (HUD), initial GTK4 toolkit support, the ability to compile to WebAssembly, font caching for faster rendering, Calc spreadsheet performance improvements, and dropping its OpenGL-based drawing code in favor of routing all the code through Skia.
LDAP as a protocol is a binary protocol which uses ASN.1 BER encoded structures to communicate between a client and server, to query directory information (ie users, groups, locations, etc).
When this was created there was little consideration to security with regard to person-in-the-middle attacks (aka mitm: meddler in the middle, interception). As LDAP has become used not just as a directory service for accessing information, but now as an authentication and authorisation system it’s important that the content of these communications is secure from tampering or observation.
Writing a C program to process files is easy when you already know what files you'll operate on and what actions to take. If you "hard code" the filename into your program, or if your program is coded to do things only one way, then your program will always know what to do.
But you can make your program much more flexible if it can respond to the user every time the program runs. Let your user tell your program what files to use or how to do things differently. And for that, you need to read the command line.
Issues around gender inequality and social injustices affect us all as a result of our interconnectedness as human beings - and are consequences of the decisions made by previous generations. This is the opinion of Oscar-winning and globally acclaimed, South African-born actress, Charlize Theron.
Intel this week hosted a virtual Architecture Day where they talked up their latest efforts from Alder Lake and Sapphire Rapids to their next-generation discrete graphics capabilities as well as other new offerings around IPUs and more. Here are the highlights from Intel Architecture Day 2021 and with a particular focus from our Linux angle.
Which is why I get angry when I read about governments holding back vaccine doses for research, or refusing to waive licensing fees for poorer countries. The virus has no personality and no intent towards you. The virus merely replicated and destroys human cells. Yours, mine, anybody's. The virus doesn't care about your politics or your business model or how office closures are hitting your rental income.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (exiv2, firefox, and thunderbird), Fedora (libsndfile, python-docx, and xscreensaver), openSUSE (haproxy), and SUSE (haproxy).
Intellectual property (IP) is not an end in itself. Nobody ever needed IP to make, market or sell a product or service and, in fact, many businesses compete in the market on the basis of price, service and quality without ever registering or enforcing any intellectual property right.
In Unified Patents, LLC f/k/a Unified Patents Inc. v. Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (IPR2021-00827), the PTAB denied a patent owner's request to file a motion for additional discovery into any real parties-in-interest. Here, the Patent Owner requested a telephone conference with regard to seeking discovery on the issue of real parties-in-interest. With regard to timing, the Patent Owner's preliminary response, in which the Patent Owner would (and did) make the assertion that Petitioner failed to identify all real parties-in-interest, was due the following day. The Board said that there "could have been no reasonable expectation that a telephone conference call would be arranged, a motion for additional discovery be authorized and filed, an opposition to the motion be filed, a reply to the opposition be filed, and a decision be made on that motion all within a single business day, much less obtaining the information requested and making use of that information within the same business day."
NLS Pharmaceutics Ltd. (NASDAQ: NLSP)(NASDAQ: NLSPW) ("NLS" or the "Company"), a Swiss clinical-stage pharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and development of innovative therapies for patients with rare and complex central nervous system disorders, announces that it has received a Notice of Allowance from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office ("USPTO") for patent application No. 16/083,131. When the patent issues, it will cover oral formulations containing immediate-release and sustained-release layers of mazindol and their use in the treatment of attention deficit disorders (ADD or ADHD), related deficit of alertness or decline in vigilance, or excessive daytime sleepiness (e.g., narcolepsy, idiopathic hypersomnia).
A Notice of Allowance is issued after the USPTO makes a determination that a patent should be granted from an application. The patent, which is expected to be issued in the fourth quarter of 2021, will have a term that expires no earlier than March 2037. Based on its current clinical development plans to obtain regulatory approval, NLS would promptly list the patent in the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's (FDA) Approved Drug Products with Therapeutic Equivalence Evaluations, or Orange Book if it receives market approval.
As the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court) announced in late June, its new patent litigation division started its work on Monday (August 16, 2021). It's the court's 44. Zivilkammer (44th Civil Chamber).
The new civil chamber's Presiding Judge--Judge Dr. Georg Werner--was already known at the time. Today I learned that his deputy will be Judge Dr. Anne-Kristin Fricke, who joined the 21st Civil Chamber (Presiding Judge: Judge Tobias Pichlmaier) a couple of years ago and was available to help out the 7th Civil Chamber (Presiding Judge: Judge Dr. Matthias Zigann) as well with her background in antitrust law. Presiding Judge Dr. Werner's second side judge will be Judge Dr. Franziska Greiner-Wittner. According to the web page of a book she wrote, she studied in Munich and clerkships also took her to Hamburg and Jakarta. In 2015, Judge Dr. Greiner-Wittner was a visiting researcher at George Washington University.
With a view to intradistrict assignment, one needs to consider that the new division is initially operating at 50% of the regular capacity. From this one can infer that the 44th Civil Chamber will get approximately 20% of the total patent caseload in Munich, while either of the other two divisions will handle 40% of cases.
Supporters of the Unified Patent Court would have watched with pleasure last week as reports emerged that Germany had formally ratified the UPC Agreement, bringing another chapter in this epic thriller to a close.
It came after two rounds of constitutional complaints threatened to put the brakes on the project, which was signed in Brussels eight and a half long years ago. Now, the stage seems set for a smooth transition to making the project a reality, at least according to the UPC preparatory committee.
In its latest update yesterday, August 18, the committee said the UPC is likely to come into force in mid-2022. Yes, that’s right: just one year from now.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has announced that the Boards of Appeal have revised some of their measures for the arrangement and conduct of oral proceedings: self tests are strongly recommended and new rules on access to the buildings for vaccinated and recovered people are in place. More information here.
In this era of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, advances in artificial intelligence (“AI”) has resulted in AI capable of generating inventions that are novel and inventive. The question becomes whether these AI generated inventions can be protected under the current patent law framework.
A recent development in Australian jurisprudence takes a step toward clarifying the applicability of patent law on AI generated inventions. The Federal Court of Australia recently held in Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2012] FC 879 (“the Thaler case”) that an AI system can be named as an inventor in a patent application.
San Francisco: Tech giant Apple must face a patent infringement lawsuit alleging that it cribbed heart rate sensor technology for the Apple Watch, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has ruled.
The original lawsuit, lodged against Apple in 2018, alleged that the Apple Watch's heart rate measurement technology infringed on multiple patents owned by Omni MedSci Inc.
Apple moved to dismiss the lawsuit, only to be denied by a US District Court.
Apple appealed that decision, which brought the case to the Federal Circuit.
The Federal Circuit issued three decisions on Monday relating to Eli Lilly & Co's. challenge in separate inter partes review proceedings on obviousness grounds of nine patents licensed by Teva Pharmaceuticals Int'l, with disparate results.
The patents were related to humanized monoclonal antibodies immunologically specific for calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP), for treatment of "all forms of vascular headache, including migraines"; each party marketed a product for this purpose (Teva's AJOVY€® and Lilly's Emgality€®). The appeals clustered separate but related IPR proceedings that the Board had combined for oral argument. In the first of these (as considered here), Eli Lilly & Co. v. Teva Pharmaceuticals Int'l GmbH, Lilly appealed the Board's decision that it had failed to show that challenged claims 1, 3, 4, 8–17, 19, 20, and 24–31 of U.S. Patent No. 8,586,045, claims 1–18 of U.S. Patent No. 9,884,907, and claims 1–18 of U.S. Patent No. 9,884,908 were obvious. Representative claims from each patent are:
Earlier this year, The IPKat reported on the judgment of the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in VG Bild-Kunst, C-392/19, an important case concerning contractual restrictions to linking under EU copyright law (on that occasion, I also updated my linking table: see here).
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Readers interested in this area of copyright may find a more extensive analysis of the implications of the decision in this recent contribution of mine entitled Linking and Copyright in the Shade of VG Bild-Kunst and available - for the time being - on SSRN. Later this year, it will be published by Common Market Law Review.
