On this episode of This Week in Linux, PineNote: E-Ink Tablet by Pine64, MATE 1.26, Manjaro 21.1, Zorin OS 16, Sparky Linux 6.0, KaOS Linux 21.08, Slackware 15.0 RC1, Kdenlive 21.08, Element Chat Adds Voice Messages, HP Envy x360 Collab with DasGeek, Krita 5.0 Beta. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
While it was busy on the hardware side of the house with Intel talking up all of their forthcoming hardware, Intel's open-source software engineers remain very busy working not only to enable their next-generation hardware but other open-source efforts they've invested in like the iNet wireless daemon.
IWD has matured well on Linux the past few years as a possible replacement to WPA Supplicant and can integrate with the likes of NetworkManager, systemd-networkd, and Intel's own ConnMan project too.
A few days ago Debian 11 (codenamed "bullseye") stable version was released by the Debian Project. The new Linux distro packs a lot of changes under the hood in terms of feature additions, and more. You can find the details here.
And it seems the new OS also has optimizations geared towards extracting much more performance out of the hardware resources available to it, according to testing conducted by Phoronix.
Using its OpenBenchmarking Linux test suite, the site has assessed the performance of an 80 core-Intel Xeon 8380 Ice Lake 2P system and a 128 core-AMD EPYC 7763 Milan 2P system in the newly unveiled Debian 11 stable compared to the previous Debian 10.10 release.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Jellyfin Media Server on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Jellyfin is an open-source media streaming system that allows you to manage and stream your media. With Jellyfin, you can organize and share your Media files, TV Shows, Music, and Photos from the web-based interface. Jellyfin can be installed on Linux, macOS, and Windows.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Jellyfin on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
Git is a mature, actively maintained open source project originally developed in 2005 by Linus Torvalds, the famous Linux operating system kernel creator. Git is designed for developers that need a pretty straightforward version control system. Most software is collaborative efforts and sometimes can have hundreds of people with commits working on software development projects. It’s essential to track these commits customarily done in branches in most projects before being merged into the master for release. It is easy to review and track down any incorrect commits and revert, leading to a much easier development if anything goes wrong.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Git on Debian 11 Bullseye in three different ways.
In the first post of this series, we covered the general idea and benefits of model-driven observability with Juju, but did not dive deep into the idea of contextualization and how it makes observability more actionable. In this post we start addressing what contextualization means in model-driven observability, starting from adding Juju topology metadata added to telemetry, and how that improves the processing and querying the telemetry for charmed applications.
RabbitMQ is an open-source enterprise messaging scheme initially based on the Advanced Messaging Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard but now supports numerous other protocols. Lightweight and easy to deploy on-premises or on the cloud, RabbitMQ is the most popular open-source messaging. To ensure optimal performance of RabbitMQ, it is critical to RabbitMQ monitoring.However, it is challenging for organizations to find Clustered RabbitMQ monitoring tools that provide complete visibility into their infrastructure. Also, check RabbitMQ on Centos8 and documentation rabbitmq site
MariaDB is one of the most popular open-source databases next to its originator MySQL. The original creators of MySQL developed MariaDB in response to fears that MySQL will suddenly become a paid service due to Oracle acquiring it in 2010. With its history of doing similar tactics, the developers behind MariaDB have promised to keep it open source and free from such fears as what has happened to MySQL.
MariaDB has become just as popular as MySQL with developers, with features such as advanced clustering with Galera Cluster 4, faster cache/indexes, storage engines, and features/extensions that you won’t find in MySQL.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MariaDB 10.6 on Debian 11.
This tutorial explains how you can monitor Linux log files (desktop, server or applications) in real time for diagnosis and troubleshooting purpose.
The first installment in the Quake game series arrived in 1996, a full 25 years ago, when id Software partnered with GT Interactive to publish one of the most game-changing game series of all time. The game implemented new technologies (at that time) like 3D acceleration through OpenGL, and later on, brought support for multiplayer.
Presented at today's virtual QuakeCon conference, id Software and Machine Games partnered to develop a Quake remaster with various visual improvements for nostalgic players.
For those looking for a lightweight Linux Desktop Environment, MATE is a good choice besides XFCE and LXDE.
MATE is a free open-source fork of the classic Gnome 2 desktop. It also forked a list of core applications, e.g., Caja file manager from Nautilus, Pluma text editor from Gedit, MATE Terminal from Gnome Terminal.
Though it’s Gnome 2 continuation, MATE fully supports the GTK 3 application framework. And by releasing version 1.26, it introduced initial Wayland support.
TÃÅBðTAK ULAKBðM tarafñndan gelià Ÿtirilmeye devam edilen Pardus’un 21.0 sürümü yayñnlandñ. Pardus 21.0, Pardus 21 ailesinin ilk sürümüdür.
En yeni Pardus’ u hemen à Ÿimdi indirebilir, bu sürüm hakkñnda detaylñ bilgi edinmek için sürüm notlarñnñ inceleyebilirsiniz.
We were looking forward to it in September. The latest version of the Debian operating system has just been released. A few days before the Debconf21 conference, here is a summary of the new ones on the Debian 11 Bullseye.
There are a lot of Linux-based operating systems these days, and if you have some free time, I suggest trying as many as you can. Think of it like fruit -- apples are great, but you shouldn't stop after just tasting that. The world is full of different choices, such as mangoes, bananas, and oranges. The same can be said of Linux -- even if you really like, say, Ubuntu, you should also test Fedora, Mageia, and more.
Today, yet another distro hits a major milestone; SparkyLinux achieves version 6.0. Code-named "Po Tolo," it is a rolling release operating system that is based on the brand-new Debian 11 "Bullseye." Sparky aims to be easy on system resources, with choices of three main desktop environments -- LXQt, KDE, and Xfce. This lightweight operating system can breathe new life into aging computers. SparkyLinux even still supports older 32-bit processors.
SparkyLinux 6 is here and brings the packages from Debian 11 “Bullseye”, which released a while back. Let’s take a look at what’s new.
Sparky is a fast, lightweight, and fully customizable OS built on Debian that offers a few versions for different users and tasks. It is one of the few distributions which offers two versions, based on the Debian stable and testing branches.
The SparkyLinux 6 ‘Stable’ version features ISOs with different desktop environments such as LXQt, Xfce and KDE. It also offer a ‘Semi-Rolling’ version which is based on Debian’s testing branch and features more up to date packages. The ‘Semi-Rolling’ version comes with the same desktop environments as their ‘Stable’ version plus MATE desktop environment added.
CSEM and USJC together have developed an ultra-low-power RISC-V chip for electronic gadgets such as wearables. Both pioneering semiconductor companies from East Asia have been in the market for a while, developing and innovating new technologies to design low-power chips. With proven technologies of Adaptive Body Biasing (ABB) and Deeply Depleted Channel (DDC) to build a chip with all the required and necessary components, the collaboration to come up with an incredible ultra-low-power RISC-V chip.
It’s a hacker’s dream to have a 3D printer on their desk. I had seen 3D printers on television when I was in school. I wanted to own a 3D printer since I saw one in real life at the reserved-bit hackerspace. My brother keeps building different mechatronics projects. So, having a 3D printer was going to help him build more complex, precise parts in less time for his projects.
In the last couple of years, Creality (and probably other companies too) brought affordable 3D printers to the market. These are available from ââ¹12-15k on Amazon in India (prices keep fluctuating).
While the prices are comparatively less than other printers like Prusa i3, it is still a significant amount of money for us. On top of it, we had questions like, what if it does not work as expected, or keeps failing? Because my brother’s friend has a printer, and he said that only 1 out 3 prints are usually successful for him.
A while back, I stumbled across the AirGradient project – a DIY air quality sensor built on the ESP8266 platform – and thought it would be interesting to build one to track the air quality where I live. AirGradient supports sensors for temperature/humidity, CO2, and – most importantly for air quality – PM2.5.
Of course, these are all low-end consumer-grade sensors. I wouldn’t trust them with my lung health, but I figured it’d provide another data point to add to the available local air quality measurements.
In episode 2 I mentioned three aspects of pl/python that are reasons to use it instead of pl/pgsql: access to Python modules, metaprogramming, and introspection. In episode 5 I discussed metaprogramming, by which I mean using pl/python to compose and run SQL code. This episode features introspection, by which I mean taking advantage of Python’s inspect module to enable a pl/python function to discover its own name.
The Document Foundation has announced the release of LibreOffice 7.2, the latest version of its free and open-source office productivity suite. Among the changes is a significant number of improvements related to interoperability proprietary Microsoft DOC, and DOCX, XLSX, and PPTX documents.
“LibreOffice 7.2 Community provides a large number of interoperability improvements with Microsoft’s proprietary file formats,” the announcement post reads. “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.”
As Google Summer of Code 21 comes to an end, the 3-month long journey has been nothing short of amazing. From developing the UI, reading documentations to adding new features and fixing issues. I am ecstatic to share that mostly all of the milestones for the development of the Faces of GNOME are complete and the entire source code can be found at GitLab. This is a summary of all the work done during and before the GSoC period and plans post-GSoC.
As GSoC comes to a close, here are some thoughts of reflection that I would like to share regarding the past months working on the KDE Connect iOS 2021 project with the KDE Community. I’m usually not a fan of talking about how “things could have gone that’ll lead to a better present” as I prefer to focus on the present and the focus rather than the past, but there might be some of that vibe here.
Google Summer of Code is almost finished, and it’s time for me to wrap up and present my work done so far during this period. It has been an awesome, and fruitful journey, I really learned a lot and I enjoyed every bit of it. In this blog post, I’d like to present all of the work done, the challenging parts, as well as the future work that I’m planning to do. Before I continue to representing the work, I’d like to thank Albert for helping me through this period and for his great efforts and continuous support, it’s much appreciated.
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Most of the work done on Okular Side was on the PDF Generator. Okular has multiple generators that are used to talk to the corresponding library. One of those generator is the PDF Generator, which talks directly to the Qt5 Frontend of Poppler. Mainly, we modified the current behavior to support calling the new APIs. There were some challenges in this particular part that I’m going to talk about in detail below. However, all of the modifications were only related to stamp anontations. We needed first to disable Okular’s rendering for stamps and only rely on Poppler’s rendering, and whenever a new Stamp gets added we load its QImage and pass it to the Qt5 API. This way we’re sure that any new stamps get added by Okular will have AP streams and other PDF viewers will be able to understand and render them.
Free Software history is full of examples of server software that users could install and run autonomously on their own computers, developed to promote server-side user autonomy and decentralization, but that third parties install and run for multiple users, defeating these motivations.
It has happened to such widely-used communication and publishing services as instant messaging, email hosting, blogging, social media, and source code hosting, and to domain-specific software as for managing cities, schools, libraries, shops, restaurants, etc.
An important observation is that it has often happened even when software developers and server maintainers embraced decentralized (federated) architectures, and actively promoted decentralization by encouraging users to install their own servers.
When users' own computing is performed as a service for the users on a server controlled by a third party, the users relinquish control over their computing and their data. That's SaaSS, and that's why it's freedom-denying. If users ran Free Software on a server under their own control instead, they'd retain freedom and privacy. Alas, when they compare the costs of maintaining their own servers and IT staff with outsourcing the server to a service provider that runs the same software for multiple clients, the economies of scale are irresistible for all but the most freedom-concerned users.
These economies of scale tend to lead all server software to outsourcing and (re)centralization, and thus all server-side computing software to SaaSS. Even server software that is Free Software! It doesn't follow that it's unethical to develop Free Software for server-side computing, but even if it's developed with the intent of promoting users' freedoms, the economies of scale it enables play against this goal, driving most users to SaaSS instead. It's a poor strategy to liberate users.
Now armed with a complete PL/0 compiler, we have a few last bits to clean up. The one I want to cover today is basic input and output. For us, that will mean the ability to print number and input numbers. Shorter than yesterday for sure, but very useful.
We won't be printing strings today. That will come later. You can fake it for now with repeated character printing.
The guilt is killing me every time I delay the monthly report. I finally found time to get this out on 22nd day of the month where I would do that on the very first day of the month in the past.
Life can be challenging at times, balancing personal and professional aspect can be difficult, I must confess.
In all of these up and down, I have to keep myself motivated and find ways to stay happy.
I try to avoid negative thoughts coming on my way and stay positive.
Some people in computing are famous, some are not. Sometimes the fame is proportional to their contributions to computing, sometimes it's not. That's how life and the world works: the winners write the history. Financial success and personal charisma is deemed more interesting than quietly doing your work, however impactful it might be. The computer that's made the biggest impact on me is the Amiga. Several people are famous for their involvement in creating this computer, and rightly so. But some of those who laid the foundations for making it into an amazing overall experience of computing have gone largely unnoticed - even among Amiga users.
I think that's a bit sad and I'd like to help set the record straight by presenting a few persons whose work has had a deep impact on both how I personally and many others use and view computers in general and the Amiga in particular.
The most obvious problem with a big load is the scalability. As your data inputs get larger and larger, you consume more and more memory. Though it is true that over time we get more memory, we also tend to get more processing cores, and RAM is a shared ressource. Currently, in 2021, some of the most popular instance types on the popular cloud system AWS have 4 GB per virtual CPU. If you have the means, AWS will provide you with memory-optimized virtual nodes that have 24 TB of RAM. However, these nodes have 448 logical processors sharing that memory.
Finland’s first green hydrogen production plant, with a capacity of 20MW, is set to be constructed in Harjavalta.
According to GizmoChina, it could serve as a precision mouse for swift navigation of the display. Aptly termed the Deployable Key Mouse, the patent filing details a description of what the key will look like and its possible performance in a MacBook.
The city-owned utility typically goes through 10 trucks of liquid oxygen a week but its supplier recently said that it would be cut back to five to seven trucks a week to accommodate hospitals, said Linda Ferrone, OUC's chief customer and marketing officer.
About 40% of the utility commission's potable water is used for irrigation so any strains on the water supply will be greatly reduced if residents stop watering their lawns, washing their cars or using pressure washers, she said.
Sweden decided not to implement a full-scale lockdown during the pandemic.
It now has up to 10 times as many COVID-19 deaths per capita as its Nordic neighbors.
Sweden also didn't fare much better economically, suggesting its gamble didn't pay off.
A newly disclosed flaw in software from BlackBerry Ltd. has resulted in warnings from U.S. government authorities due to its serious nature.
The flaw, described as a BadAlloc vulnerability, has been founded in BlackBerry’s QNX Real Time Operating System. QNX is a commercial Unix-like real-time operating system primarily used in embedded systems. The software can be found in medical devices, cars, factories and even the International Space Station.
According to an alert today from BlackBerry, the vulnerability affects QNX Software Development Platform version 6.5.0SP1 and earlier, QNX OS for Medical 1.1 and earlier, and QNX OS for Safety 1.0.1 and earlier. Exploiting the vulnerability, an attacker could perform a denial-of-service attack or execute arbitrary code. BlackBerry noted that it’s not aware of any exploitation of the vulnerability.
Researchers have discovered a Nigerian threat actor trying to turn an organization’s employees into insider threats by soliciting them to deploy ransomware for a cut of the ransom profits.
Researchers at Abnormal Security identified and blocked a number of emails sent earlier this month to some its customers that offered people $1 million in bitcoin to install DemonWare ransomware. The would-be attackers said they have ties to the DemonWare ransomware group, also known as Black Kingdom or DEMON, they said.
Fuchsia, Google’s mysterious new OS, is making its way to more and more Nest devices, and if you happen to own the original Nest Hub, your display might already be running on Fuchsia, even if you don’t know it.
Recently, the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF), the preeminent organization for open source software development in the motion picture and media industries, announced the addition of two new general members: Maxon and Tangent Animation. The news comes as the Academy Software Foundation heads into its annual conference, Open Source Days, a free virtual event which will be held on 4 and 5 August where top Hollywood studios and technology developers come together to share the latest progress on open source tools and standards.
[...]
The addition of Maxon and Tangent Animation marks continued growth for the ASWF, following the addition of Adobe and the Entertainment Technology Center@USC as members earlier this year. The ASWF has grown significantly in just three years, from 13 founding members to 33 members today, a testament to the importance and scope of open source development across the industry.
Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Thune (R-SD) voiced their “serious concerns” with the app’s current privacy policy in a two-page letter addressed to TikTok CEO (and ByteDance CFO) Shou Zi Chew. “The updated policy appears to enable TikTok to automatically collect biometric data, including certain physical and behavioral characteristics from video content posted by its users,” the document relays.
There is one thing I need to mention for anyone going the separate iCloud account route on corp devices: you *probably* should make sure you have it logged in from a personal Mac or something like that, or some other place where you can have passcodes sent. The reason is that if you should quit, you lose access to the authorized devices (phone, laptop) which will receive auth codes.
Apple says that hash collisions in its CSAM detection system were expected, and not a concern. I’m not convinced that this secondary system was originally part of the design, since it wasn’t discussed in the original specification.
The recent unpleasantness in Afghanistan has occasioned one of the usual cyclical national bouts of self-righteousness from the media, the chattering classes, and Very Serious People in general. Who could have let this outrage occur, they wail, and for God’s sake, what are we going to do about it in five minutes flat?
The maudlin coverage of the U.S.’s botched exit from Afghanistan will go on for months, maybe years.€ It will do as much good as rubbernecking a wreck on the side of the road to prevent it from having happened.€ The U.S.’ inartful exit from the country should not be confused with the loss of the War, and it’s the loss that needs to be weighed.
Should the Taliban be allowed on social platforms if they don’t break any rules, such as a ban on inciting violence, but instead use it to spread a narrative that they’re newly reformed and are handing out soap and medication in the streets? If the Taliban runs Afghanistan, should they also run the country’s official government accounts?
And should tech companies in Silicon Valley decide what is – and isn’t – a legitimate government? They certainly don’t want to. But as the situation unfolds, uncomfortable decisions lie ahead.
The Taliban, who banned the [Internet] the first time they controlled Afghanistan, have turned social media into a powerful tool to tame opposition and broadcast their messages. Now firmly in control of the country, they are using thousands of Twitter accounts — some official and others anonymous — to placate Afghanistan’s terrified but increasingly tech-savvy urban base.
The images of peace and stability projected by the Taliban contrast sharply with the scenes broadcast around the world of the chaotic American evacuation from the Kabul airport or footage of protesters being beaten and shot at. They demonstrate the digital powers the militants have honed over years of insurgency, offering a glimpse of how the Taliban could use those tools to rule Afghanistan, even as they cling to their fundamentalist religious tenets and violent proclivities.
Army Special Forces are deployed to over 70 countries daily and engaging hostile actors while still being able to effectively message portions of a population, meaning they have been at the tip of the spear when it comes to developing and maturing information warfare capabilities.
The conventional forces are learning the importance of harnessing these capabilities as adversaries are using a variety of techniques to posture forces and undermine the U.S. and its forces. The Army, as a result, is pursuing an emerging idea called information advantage, which seeks harness information-related capabilities to enable commanders to maintain decision advantage over enemies.
Raetz told C4ISRNET following his remarks that Special Forces are looking to partner more frequently with conventional forces, noting that experimenting with regionally aligned Army forces was one success of the exercise.
Facebook said Tuesday it was blocking WhatsApp accounts linked to the Taliban after the radical Islamic group seized control of Afghanistan and sought to use the messaging service to help it govern.
The job vacancy described a "Skilled Electronics Engineer required for CNO Exploit solutions in support of a specialist military user organisation". GCHQ is named as a key partner. It is possible that MAB5 is linked to the ultra secretive Special Reconnaisance Regiment (SRR). The successful candidate was required to obtain the highest level Developed Vetting (DV) security clearance.
As for that curious MAB acronym, well it is simply a coy reference to "MoD A Block" which in turn is a codename for use by those "in the know" when wishing to refer to UK Special Forces (UKSF) operations. The actual physical MoD A Block is at the SAS Regents Park Barracks in Albany Street, Central London and is UKSF HQ.
There is a direct line from the loss of trust in government caused by the Bush administration’s lies about weapons of mass destruction to Donald Trump’s claim as a presidential candidate that “I alone can fix it.” The hatred and fear mobilized to justify the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan seamlessly flowed from the Bush era into the tea party and then the white nationalist movement that Trump surfed to the White House. Most importantly, the trillions spent on weapons used to bring foreign populations to heel was money that was not allocated instead to pay for desperately needed health care, education or infrastructure here at home.
Nowhere in that segment did either person explicitly acknowledge they’d worked in the very administration that started the war, though a chyron did identify Thiessen as a “FMR GW BUSH SPEECHWRITER.”
Close to one billion children were classified as "extremely high-risk" with the climate crisis threatening their health, education, and protection, exposing them to potentially fatal diseases, a new climate report from the UN's children's agency.
"For the first time, we have a complete picture of where and how children are vulnerable to climate change, and that picture is almost unimaginably dire," said Henrietta Fore, UNICEF executive director.
"Climate and environmental shocks are undermining the complete spectrum of children's rights, from access to clean air, food and safe water; to education, housing, freedom from exploitation, and even their right to survive. Virtually no child's life will be unaffected," she added.
AuroraSat-1, which will be operated by Finnish company Aurora Propulsion Technologies, will lift off from Rocket Lab's New Zealand site, on the North Island's Mahia Peninsula. After deploying in low Earth orbit, the cubesat will demonstrate systems designed to help operators maintain control of small satellites and bring them down to Earth before they become space junk.
Erratic infernos like the Creek Fire last year, the fifth-biggest ever, could be blamed in part on a 2012-16 drought. It is estimated to have killed more than 100 million trees in the Sierra Nevada, the state's largest mountain range and the setting for many of the fires, North said.
North was co-author of a 2018 scientific paper that predicted Sierra wildfires could burn at the intensity of blazes lit by fire bombings in Dresden, Germany and Tokyo during World War II.
“I do think that's what we're seeing,” said North. “The current models we have for how fires are going to behave don’t cover this because it’s just off the charts. It’s hazardous to firefighters and hard as hell to predict what it’s going to do."
Fires have intensified across the entire West, creating a nearly year-round season that has taxed firefighters. Fire patterns used to migrate in seasons from the Southwest to the Rockies, to the Pacific Northwest and then California, allowing fire crews to move from one place to the next, Scardina said.
California is one of a dozen mostly Western states where 99 large, active fires were burning as of Friday, according to the National Interagency Fire Center.
“Let’s be clear: This was avoidable,” a furious Varshini Prakash, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, said in response to the latest United Nations climate report. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Sixth Assessment Report, released on August 9, “is apocalyptic, catastrophic, and nothing we haven’t been screaming about from the rooftops for years,” Prakash continued. “If Biden really wants to be a world leader on climate, he’ll heed this call and pass the boldest reconciliation bill possible.”1
In one of his first acts in the White House, President Joe Biden signed an executive order to have the United States rejoin the Paris climate agreement. It signaled an important step in the country recommitting to action to tackle climate change after the Trump administration withdrew the United States from the accord and worked to roll back environmental regulations nationwide.
Customers in the bottom five states — Maine, West Virginia, California, Michigan and Mississippi — had the longest total time interrupted by power outages that year, often caused by major weather events like storms and wildfires. An abundance of trees, estimated to be 14 billion in Michigan, also is blamed for mass outages like the one last week that left more than 900,000 in the dark.
Year after year, thousands of fawns are accidentally killed when meadows are mowed.
Thanks to the drones and thermal imaging, fawns can be discovered and brought to safety.
The theory we are talking about states that a so-called “youth bulge”, which describes an excess in the young population of a country, is the real (and main) hidden force behind political instability. The term was first used by Gary Fuller in 1995, then adopted by the renowned political scientist Samuel Huntington, and later extended and popularized by German sociologist and economist Gunnar Heinsohn in his book “Söhne und Weltmacht” (2003, new ed. 2019).
The basic idea is that resources are limited and are owned and managed by (older) adults. This is also true for (political) power. Young people want a piece of the action. The bigger the imbalance, i.e. the more young people there are, the bigger the conflicts because more young people fight for their place in the economy and society. If there is a balance the transition of power and resources can be organized more smoothly and if a society is even dominated by older people (like e.g. in Germany) the young just don’t have a say in those matters
Around the world, stories like al Sadr's are becoming far too common. As much as a quarter of the world's population now faces severe water scarcity at least one month out of the year and – as in al-Sadr's case – it is leading many to seek a more secure life in other countries. "If there is no water, people will start to move," says Kitty van der Heijden, chief of international cooperation at the Netherlands' foreign ministry and an expert in hydropolitics. Water scarcity affects roughly 40% of the world's population and, according to predictions by the United Nations and the World Bank, drought could put up to 700 million people at risk of displacement by 2030. People like van der Heijden are concerned about what that could lead to.
China will now allow couples to legally have a third child as it seeks to hold off a demographic crisis that could threaten its hopes of increased prosperity and global influence.
A California judge ruled Friday that Proposition 22—a measure that let so-called gig economy companies like Uber and Lyft limit worker protections—is unconstitutional.
"This is a MAJOR and deserved win for drivers and gig workers," the California Labor Federation tweeted Friday in response to the ruling.
Which was surprising, because Robinhood is the beloved trading platform of choice for WallStreetBets users. It’s the app they’ve used since last year to buy meme stocks they collectively adored: GameStop, or AMC, or BlackBerry. And after Robinhood listed on the Nasdaq on July 29, a surge of Redditors decided to lean into the meta—to turn Robinhood, the meme stock trading app, into a meme stock itself.
OnlyFans has brought in billions of dollars distributing pornography. The website, which allowed sex workers to enter the so-called creator economy with its popular direct-to-consumer subscription platform, did $2 billion in sales in 2020 and took a 20% cut of the action, according to Bloomberg, which first reported the news of the pivot away from porn.
The ban, announced in June, has hurt Nigerian businesses and drawn widespread condemnation for its deleterious effect on freedom of expression and the ease of doing business in Africa’s most populous nation.
Nigeria will soon lift its ban on Twitter (TWTR.N) after resolving some of its differences with the social media platform, Information Minister Lai Mohammed said on Wednesday, signalling the end of a policy widely condemned as an affront to freedom of expression.
The Nigerian government suspended Twitter on June 4 after it removed a post from President Muhammadu Buhari that threatened to punish regional secessionists. Some telecoms companies subsequently blocked access to users in Nigeria.
The Australian Strategic Policy Institute says it’s independent, free of influence and stands by the integrity of its research, so who is scrubbing negative comments from the Wikipedia page of the China hawk think tank? Is it the Chinese spies, is it Winnie the Pooh? Marcus Reubenstein reports.
Douglas London, who retired from the CIA in 2019 after 34 years, said that the intelligence community had presented various scenarios if US troops withdraw early from Afghanistan. But former president Trump still took the decision of fast-track the withdrawal and it was endorsed by Joe Biden.
This is like IHOP saying it will only serve its lunch and dinner menus.
“I’ve been getting requests from activists and computer engineers and people in civil society organizations about security and deletion of their data. Most of them are also trying to find ways to leave the country, but their online lives are also kind of a lifeline for them,” which is why few people want to delete their profiles entirely, she said.
Dad also said that the Internet Archive, a nonprofit group that works to periodically capture snapshots of the internet that can be easily searched in case content is deleted, needs to take action.
“It’s not just social media platforms; it’s also on the web,” Dad said. “The Internet Archive really needs to step up and work with the international civil society groups who are already in touch with Afghan people on the ground.”
The two-page timeline depicting news events from 2020 and 2021, including the U.S. Capitol riot and the several police killings, were ripped out by hand.
Some internet clown has satirised current UK controversy over mapping app What3words by making a version that uses four swearwords to name each 3x3 metre block of Great Britain.
FourKingMaps, which appears to have been put together using the same basic principles as What3Words, copies the same basic approach as W3W but uses four words – and very sweary words at that.
Since August 15, members of the Taliban have barred at least two female journalists from their jobs at the public broadcaster Radio Television Afghanistan, and have attacked at least two members of the press while they covered a protest in the eastern Nangarhar province, according to news reports and journalists who spoke with CPJ.
Ahead of next week’s G7 summit on the situation in Afghanistan, announced by US President Joe Biden, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls for a special plan for evacuating endangered Afghan journalists and human rights defenders that would mean postponing the completion of the US military withdrawal.
The attack on Groeneveld came slightly more than one month after crime reporter Peter R. de Vries was shot in the head on a street in Amsterdam. De Vries ultimately succumbed to his injuries after fighting for his life for more than a week.
The Taliban have started to use any means at their disposal to track down the people they see as a threat to their rule, even going to local mosques or using corrupt police officers to find information, despite showing a conciliatory face to the world. The FRANCE 24 Observers spoke with five activists and journalists from all over Afghanistan, who all report that the Taliban are beginning searches in their regions.
At least two female journalists working for a state-owned broadcaster in Afghanistan have said the Taliban are not allowing them to work.
Since entering Kabul last Sunday, the Taliban have taken control of government agencies, including state-run media.
When journalists at the national Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) arrived at work, some women were told they could not enter the building.
Iranian officials have reported an increase in the overall number of child marriages last year compared to 2019.
According to the Statistics Center of Iran, the marriage rate of girls aged 10-14 last year increased by 10.5 percent compared to 2019.
It says 31,379 girls in that age bracket were married in 2020 compared to 28,373 cases the previous year.
Kasimu Kawona of Bupalama village, Buseta Sub-County in Kibuku District was not charged with murder but a lesser charge of manslaughter because he killed his son in anger for leaving Islam, sources said.
And even Nationalmuseet, the national museum, has entered the debate, claiming that ancient Danes were wearing them 3,500 years ago in the Bronze Age.
The cable project dubbed Apricot would be some 12,000 kilometers (nearly 7,500 miles) and be operational in 2024 subject to regulatory approvals, the companies said in separate statements.
The project announced by the US firms and regional and global partners "will deliver much-needed internet capacity, redundancy, and reliability to expand connections in the Asia-Pacific region," said Facebook engineering manager Nico Roehrich.
That event was the establishment of the WorldWideWeb (yes, its name was one word originally) in August 1991, in two somewhat obscure offices in Geneva at CERN, the European centre for nuclear research, perhaps better known as the home of the Large Hadron Collider. Those two offices became the underpinning of the graphically based internet, which today we might refer to as the beginnings of the web.
Deere will spend $275 million to acquire the factories and intellectual [sic] property [sic].
Ezama will begin at Netflix in mid-September after serving as PepsiCo’s global chief talent officer and chief human resources officer. At the streaming company, Ezama will begin remotely from New York but will ultimately work out of Netflix’s multiple global offices.
TAKE TWO: The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on Thursday filed an amended complaint in its antitrust case against Facebook after an initial courtroom setback earlier this summer.
The new complaint makes the same central argument that Facebook has maintained a monopoly on “personal social networking” by gobbling up potential competitors and enforcing unfair agreements, while offering new evidence and analysis.
In Secretary of State for Health and another v Servier Laboratories Ltd and others,[1] the Supreme Court recently considered the scope of the economic tort of ‘causing loss by unlawful means’ (the “unlawful means tort”), ultimately finding in the defendants’ favour.
In an exclusive Managing IP podcast, Pfizer chief patent counsel Bryan Zielinski talks about his company’s patent operations and delves into the proposed COVID intellectual property waiver being discussed at the World Health Organization.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Aug. 18 refused to revive claims in a NuVasive spine surgery patent case, siding with a previous decision made by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.
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Prior art is any evidence that an invention was already publicly known or available before the filing date of a patent application. An existing product is the most obvious form of prior art, according to the European Patent Office.
3. The appeals board initially found that the patent lacked sufficient evidence to the merits of the invention, according to court documents.
4. After revisiting the case, a three-judge Federal Circuit panel saw "no error in the board's obviousness conclusion" and found that its findings were supported by substantial evidence.
3 of the 10 corporations with the most applications for industrial property rights at the European Patent Office are from Germany (2020). While German industry shines for its innovative strength, its citizens benefit only from this prosperity, as shown in a new infographic by Block-Builders.net.
On 4 July 2021 the National Medical Products Administration and the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) jointly released measures to implement an early resolution procedure for pharmaceutical patent disputes. The following day the Supreme People’s Court promulgated provisions on several issues concerning how the law is applied in civil case trials involving patent disputes related to pharmaceutical registration applications. The judicial interpretation, which provide clarity on the Chinese patent linkage litigation regime, entered into force on the date of promulgation.
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The judicial interpretation offers operational guidance in terms of preparing the technical materials, with all the information mentioned in the preceding paragraph available on the China Listed Drug Patent Information Registration Platform.
The latest European patent for the MN-166-riluzole combination for ALS, as well as similar patents issued in the U.S. and Japan, are expected to expire no earlier than November 2035.
On June 10, 2021, the German parliament adopted the version of the government bill for a Second Act concerning the Simplification and Modernization of German Patent Law (parliamentary paper 19/25821) as amended by the Committee of Legal Affairs and Consumer Protection (parliamentary paper 19/30498; "Patent Law Modernization Act" below). The Patent Law Modernization Act expressly supplements claims for injunctive relief under Patent and Utility Model Law with the possibility of taking into account proportionality considerations, in which third parties' interests are to be included as well. Additionally, in order to better synchronize infringement proceedings before German civil courts with invalidity proceedings before the German Federal Patent Court, proceedings before the German Federal Patent Court are to be accelerated. Moreover, individual provisions of the German Act on the Protection of Trade Secrets are applied, mutatis mutandis, to patent, utility model and semiconductor protection litigation.
On July 9, 2021, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court rejected a pair of applications for a preliminary injunction directed against the German Approval Act on the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPC) (decision of June 23, 2021, 2 BvR 2216/20). Thus, German ratification of the Agreement now only requires a presidential signature of the Approval Act and the subsequent deposition of the ratification.
Recent decisions from South Africa and Australia that an artificial intelligence machine can be listed as inventor on a patent is putting greater pressure on the U.S. and Europe to resolve debates over what it means to be an inventor.
In a landmark decision issued on July 30, 2021, an Australian court declared that an AI system called DABUS can be legally recognized as an inventor on a patent application. It came just days after the Intellectual [sic] Property [sic] Commission of South Africa granted a patent recognizing DABUS as an inventor. These decisions, as well as at least one other pending case in the U.S. concerning similar issues, have generated excitement and debate in the life sciences community about AI-conceived inventions.
Lawyers from five firms say expedited examinations and other reforms at Canada’s trademark office should reduce delays but won’t be ideal for all clients
SkyKick has fought a desperate battle against Sky, raising some incredible arguments and bringing to the fore a number of important trade mark issues. It has lost at almost every turn, but last July it did succeed in having some of Sky’s voluminous trade marks trimmed ever so slightly based on the High Court’s finding that Sky’s filings were made in bad faith.
The Court of Appeal has now undone this in a judgment handed down in July. Led by Sir Christopher Floyd, the Court of Appeal has decided that Sky never acted in bad faith. The Court conducted an exhaustive review of UK and EU case law on bad faith. It concluded that, so far as the goods and services which were relevant to the infringement by SkyKick were concerned, the allegation of bad faith against Sky essentially amounted to an allegation that when it applied for goods such as “software”, it intended to use its marks for a type of software, but not all types of software. Sir Christopher held that this was not bad faith. Accordingly, there is nothing wrong with filing for a broad category of goods or services where the intention or commercial justification is available for at least one item within that category. Further, he held that the fact there were many items in a specification was not relevant to whether specific items were applied for in bad faith.
A coalition of Hollywood studios, with the addition of Amazon and Netflix, has obtained an injunction to restrain Jason Tusa, the alleged operator of Altered Carbon, Area 51, and several other pirate IPTV services. Tusa previously agreed not to operate unlicensed platforms but reportedly breached that agreement. A court has now agreed that the platforms should be shut down and their domain names disabled.
According to the suit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court, Darick Clemons used a cell phone to record former U.S. President Barack Obama arriving in his city on May 4, 2016, then posted the clip on YouTube.
The video was used in “Fahrenheit 11/9,” Moore’s documentary that premiered in 2018 and chronicled events surrounding the Donald Trump presidency.
Johansson filed a bombshell lawsuit on July 29, arguing that the decision to simultaneously release “Black Widow” in theaters and on Disney Plus cannibalized the film’s box office revenue and cost her tens of millions of dollars.
Disney is demanding that Scarlett Johansson’s suit over her Black Widow pay be moved to arbitration. The filings came near midnight on Friday evening in Los Angeles Superior Court. The company has also revealed that on Aug. 10, it initiated arbitration against her.
In her complaint, Johansson alleges her contract was breached when the superhero film was released on Disney+. The actress earns bonuses when Black Widow reaches certain box office performance markers and she accuses Disney of not having the film exclusively in theaters because it “saw the opportunity to promote its flagship subscription service.”
