Big businesses are willing to pay top dollars to find access to your sensitive data to design targeted ads. What’s scary is that there are criminals also prowling in the shadows for this information. You must protect yourself. Installing browsers like Tor that ensure online anonymity greatly boost your privacy and security. Downloading a VPN offers greater privacy hiding your identity on the internet. Keep the nosy snoopers away with Tor.
Documentation is incredibly important but somehow we've got to a point where some people think that having good documentation is a bad thing or that it somehow makes the software for advanced users, I completely disagree and think if it's for advanced users the documentation is even more important.
Welcome to the 430th episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this action-packed episode, the hosts discuss topics including the JARL Hamfest, AMSAT events going virtual, JOTA and JOTI, vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, updates to the Linux kernel, Pat, Winlink, HAMRS and much more. Thank you for listening and have a great week.
What we’d do if we were in charge of the Linux desktop, first impressions of an unusual but frustrating distro, and your feedback about Mastodon and Bodhi Linux.
OpenVPN has been implementing a kernel module for data channel offload (DCO) capabilities to enhance the performance of this virtual private network system.
OpenVPN DCO aims to provide a much faster VPN implementation by leveraging data encryption backed by AES-NI in kernel space to avoid the context switching overhead from OpenVPN currently in user-space. The OpenVPN DCO kernel module handles the OpenVPN data channel in kernel-space and provides higher throughput and lower latency. Further helping the performance is this new implementation having multi-threaded encryption.
While Intel is normally quite good with their new hardware support being in good shape well ahead of launch, their new code for supporting the ENQCMD functionality for the Data Streaming Accelerator (DSA) with Xeon "Sapphire Rapids" has been an exception. This summer the mainline Linux kernel disabled ENQCMD support since the code was "broken beyond repair" while now Intel engineers have sent out a new series looking to get it re-enabled.
The latest version of P2Pool, a decentralized Monero mining pool has released. This is the first official release, signaling an invitation for more users to try out the new software.
Sometimes I mess up. Then I have to clean up and redo.
These help me do that.
Much has been written about the problem of link rot, so I’m going to focus on how I decided to “solve” (or at least, ameliorate) the problem for myself. When a link in my Obsidian notes becomes unavailable, it’s not the end of the world – so instead of doing something more resource intensive like actually saving all the pages I have links to, I decided that making sure that the links exist in the Internet Archive was sufficient.1
Before Microsoft could bring native Android app support in Windows 11, Linux has spoiled the party. WayDroid is a kind of compatibility layer that enables you to run Android apps in any Linux distribution. The best part about WayDroid is that you get far better performance, even better than an optimized Android emulator or a virtual machine running Android x86 on Linux. It almost feels like you are running Android apps natively on your Linux machine. With that said, let’s not waste more time and learn how to run Android apps in Linux without an emulator.
For years, ‘computing’ and ‘graphical user interface’ have been two concepts that seem to go hand in hand : clicks, buttons, menus and windows are the most common means of interacting with our computers. But sometimes when we need to dig deep, we find ourselves head-on with command consoles . And the complexity of it can be very difficult for many first timers .
So it is common for those who are still learning to navigate in this environment (even experts who want to save time) turn to ‘chops’ or ‘cheatsheets’ to have at hand the meaning of each command and its corresponding range of options and modifiers .
In this video, we are looking at how to install Toontown Rewritten on Linux Lite 5.4.
CPanel provided by WHM earlier can only be installed on CentOS, however, now we can use it on AlamLinux, Rocky Linux, and also on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Officially, WHM cPanel on Ubuntu 20.o4 LTS is still in the experimental phase while writing this article and was recommended by the WHM developers not to use it for commercial. However, still you can start experiencing this Control Panel on this Debian-based Linux because in our usage it worked absolutely fine.
Here we are installing WHM cPanel on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS server running on Amazon AWS Lightsail Instance, hence the server is clean without pre-installation of any kind of software or firewall.
Today we are looking at how to install the SeaMonkey Browser on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
ZIP is a highly useful archive file format that helps in storage and file management. With an efficient zipping utility in tow, you can share multiple files and folders efficiently by combining them into one single file.
In Linux, zipping a folder saves a lot of space and network bandwidth. Since its development in 1989, ZIP has become one of the preferred ways to compress data and reduce the file size.
Using some native commands like zip, you too can zip a folder on Linux-based systems with ease.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install AngularJS on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, AngularJS is a JavaScript framework that is used to develop web apps. It has MVC (Model-View-Controller) architecture. It lets you extend HTML syntax to express your application’s components efficiently. In addition to that, it eliminates much of the code you write through data binding and dependency injection.
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 AngularJS on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
UUID stands for Universally Unique IDentifier of a partition. This ID used in few different places to identify the partition. Most commonly this would be /etc/fstab.
Last week has seen the release of the first beta of Plasma 5.23 Anniversary Edition. Work behind the scenes to get this release as soon as possible into Debian has progressed well.
Starting with today, we provide binaries of Plasma 5.23 for Debian stable (bullseye), testing, and unstable, in each case for three architectures: amd64, i386, and aarch64.
To test the current beta, please add...
I’m using for my own personal projects a generator for c++ preferences for quite a while, I’ll not say that it’s heavily tested as KConfigXT is, but it is also much more simple than it.
While talking about it to a fellow developer he asked me how hard it would be to port the thing to KConfig (as the main backend I used was QSettings) - and the result is quite nice, the port toook less than a day, and now my generator generates configurations for both KConfig and QSettings.
It's been a while since my last blog post. And in the meantime GNOME 41 was released. So I thought it would be time for a new post, although there's not been that much news to show in Maps itself since the last update (where I showcased the refreshed icons for search results.
But a few small visual improvements have been done https://hackaday.com/2021/09/20/open-source-hot-rod-mod-gives-more-power-to-ev-owners/.
Already in 40.0, we made the display of population numbers for places (such as towns, cities, and similar) locale-aware. So that it now uses localized digits and decimal separators.
[...]
This utilises the localization API from ES (JavaScript) and as can be seen here gives a localized unit suffix and also in the case of Japanese as shown in the last example, the multiple in this case is 10,000, as this is based on traditional Chinese numerals, with denominations 10â´, 10⸠and so on. So in this case it would translate to “800 ten-thousands (man)”.
And over in libshumate (the new GTK4-based map rendering library we're working to eventually replace libchamplain, and enable migrating to GTK4), James and Corentin has been busy.
If you don’t want to upgrade to Windows 11, here are some Best Linux distros to choose, after end support of most popular Windows 7, and although there are some extraordinary measures you can take to continue using the system that give you a minimum of security, it is not recommended at all. Keep in mind that it is still possible to upgrade to Windows 10 or Windows 11 for free, but if you refuse, you also have the option of trying your luck with Linux.
Distributions abound and although the experience will never be the same as Windows 7 or Windows 10, neither better nor worse but different, and you will have to go through an adaptation process, there are some Linux distros that make this process a little easier than others.
Despite the fact that the Linux desktop has improved a lot over the course of the past decade, it still has some important shortcomings compared to Windows, such as the lack of support HDR . Fortunately, this could change in the not too distant future, as Red Hat has announced that it wants to hire an engineer to introduce HDR support in Fedora and RHEL.
In the job we read that “the engineering team at Red Hat Workstation is looking for a senior software engineer with experience working in desktop support, composer and GPU formats and screens high dynamic range ( HDR) for Linux . In this role, he will work in the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) New Platform Technologies Enablement team, maintaining and enhancing the GPU stack within RHEL and Fedora and contributing to upstream graphics development ” .
The Apache Flink project provides the ability to perform stateful computations over data streams. The SQL Stream Builder interface is used to create stateful stream processing jobs using SQL. The executed SQL queries run as jobs on Flink. Together, these components make up the Cloudera Streaming Analytics (CSA) package.
This article recommends Debian 11 users after-installation tips and tricks including simple guide to get additional useful applications. For new Debian users, this article is for you. Let's check it out.
Issue 701 for the week of September 12 – 18, 2021. The full version of this issue is available here.
On Kickstarter for only three more days: a $145, open source “PiKVM” HAT kit for the Raspberry Pi 4 that offers KVM over IP capabilities for remote management and repair of computers.
A KVM over IP HAT for the Raspberry Pi has surpassed $560,000 in Kickstarter pledges. Developed over the last six years by a Delaware based startup led by developer Max Devaev, the PiKVM kit is available for $145 through Sep. 24 and ships in October.
KVM over IP devices are non-intrusive, hardware-based products for in- and out-of-band network access to connected servers and workstations. Based on the Linux Kernel Virtual Machine (KVM) virtualization solution, these remote access and repair devices claim to enable remote access into systems running any OS.
Advantech’s Linux-ready, $935-and-up “EI-52” edge PC runs on an 11th Gen Core CPU along with a 64GB SSD, 2x GbE, 6x USB, 2x COM, HDMI, DP, mini-PCIe, 5G-ready M.2, and the EdgeX Foundry IoT framework.
We missed Advantech Europe’s June announcement of the Tiger Lake ULP based EI-52 embedded computer. The system began shipping last week, according to this Embedded Computing story. A PR-style EEJournal announcement reports that it is available in the UK with pricing undisclosed at Impulse Embedded. It is also available direct from Advantech, starting at $935.
The organisation behind Britain's bestselling personal computer - the Raspberry Pi - has sealed a $45m (€£33m) investment after demand surged during the pandemic.
The trading arm of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has offloaded stakes to Lansdowne Partners and the Ezrah Charitable Trust in a move that values the operation at around $500m. The foundation is a charitable organisation whose profits are used to promote computing. Raspberry Pi was founded in 2009 by Eben Upton, who created a singleboard computer that has been widely used to champion programming in schools.
In March, The Telegraph reported that it was exploring ways to raise capital - including a potential London stock market flotation - as the move to working from home during lock down prompted strong sales of its $70 keyboard-based PC, the Raspberry Pi 400.
Jackson Pollock was famous for his unique style of splattering large blobs of paint across a canvas, and it was this technique that JBV Creative was trying to imitate. But rather than working by hand to painstakingly dip a brush into paint and then flinging it many times over, he wanted to build a robot that could do this task for him while still creating art.
The main part of the Flingbot, the name JBV gave to his system, is comprised of a catapult arm that is capable of both rotating and adjusting how far it can throw paint. A servo motor at the back pulls an elastic band a certain amount based on the desired distance, and a second one releases a pin to perform the launching action. As another parameter for generating abstract art, the silicone scoop itself can bend to change its shape. Every servo motor is connected to a single SSC-
[Jeff Geerling] routinely tinkers around with Raspberry Pi compute module, which unlike the regular RPi 4, includes a PCI-e lane. With some luck, he was able to obtain an AMD Radeon RX 6700 XT GPU card and decided to try and plug it into the Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module.
While you likely wouldn’t be running games with such as setup, there are many kinds of unique and interesting compute-based workloads that can be offloaded onto a GPU. In a situation similar to putting a V8 on a lawnmower, the Raspberry Pi 4 pulls around 5-10 watts and the GPU can pull 230 watts. Unfortunately, the PCI-e slot on the IO board wasn’t designed with a power-hungry chip in mind, so [Jeff] brought in a full-blown ATX power supply to power the GPU. To avoid problems with differing ground planes, an adapter was fashioned for the Raspberry Pi to be powered from the PSU as well. Plugging in the card yielded promising results initially. In particular, Linux detected the card and correctly mapped the BARs (Base Address Register), which had been a problem in the past for him with other devices. A BAR allows a PCI device to map its memory into the CPU’s memory space and keep track of the base address of that mapped memory range.
But [Nick Bild] thinks his latest project might be able to improve on the classic technique with a dash of artificial intelligence provided by a Jetson Xavier NX. Basically, the Jetson watches the live feed from the camera, and using a hand pose detection model, waits until there’s no human hand in the frame. Once the coast is clear, it takes a shot and then goes back to waiting for the next hands-free opportunity. With the photographs being taken automatically, you’re free to focus on getting your characters moving around in a convincing way.
Meet [Daniel Ãâster]. [Daniel] is a self-professed petrolhead. In other words, he’s a hot rodder who can’t leave well enough alone. Just because he’s driving a 2012 Nissan Leaf doesn’t mean he isn’t looking for a bit more kick. Having already upgraded the battery, [Daniel] turned his attention to upgrading the 80KW inverter.
We're wrapping up another great week with the following activities from the Apache community...
An Open Printing micro-conference took place today during the Linux Plumbers Conference 2021 week. While it's hard to get excited about printers in 2021, it is exciting the renewed effort around CUPS with it now being back to effectively led by the community and CUPS founder Michael Sweet who left Apple. CUPS 2.4 is coming as the first feature release in quite a while and then CUPS 2.5 followed by CUPS 3.0 are already being talked about with features being discussed.
While Apple led CUPS development while employing Michael Sweet for about a decade, Sweet left Apple at the end of 2019 and Apple's public CUPS development effectively ended. As has been since confirmed, Apple now is basically interested in just maintaining CUPS 2.3 and not really developing it further.
Web scraping is the process of extracting data from a website in an automated way and Node.js can be used for web scraping. Even though other languages and frameworks are more popular for web scraping, Node.js can be utilized well to do the job too. In this post, we will learn how to do web scraping with Node.js for websites that don’t need and need Javascript to load. Let’s get started!
When using Nix/NixOS and requiring some development libraries available in pip (for python) or cpan (for perl) but not available as package, it can be extremely complicated to get those on your system because the usual way won't work.
So, I decided to measure the build time of the Gemini browser Lagrange in three cases: without ccache, with ccache but first build so it doesn't have any cached objects and with ccache with objects in it. I did these three tests multiple time because I also wanted to measure the impact of using memory base filesystem or the old spinning disk drive in my computer, this made a lot of tests because I tried with ccache on mfs and package build objects (later referenced as pobj) on mfs, then one on hdd and the other on mfs and so on.
Do you regularly run Rake on projects with thousands of FileTasks? In that case, chances are your Rake execution time is I/O bound. I’ve created two patches that can cut ââ¦âº off your Rakefile task evaluation/compilation time.
Rake is the task and build automation tool for the Ruby programming language. It’s distributed as a part of the Ruby Standard Library default set of tools and modules. It’s a make-like tool that incrementally rebuilds only the parts of your project that have changed. It tracks changes by querying the file system for the last modified timestamp of every source and object file in your project. Each of these queries requires an individual system call (syscall) to the operating system kernel per file.
Ages ago I wrote a simple GUI app called Glyphtracer to simplify the task of creating fonts from scanned images. It seems people are still using it. The app is written in Python 2 and Qt 4, so getting it running becomes harder and harder as time goes by.
A major difference between what I called program managers (such as Debian's apt) and module managers (such as Python's Pip) is their handling or non-handling of multiple versions of dependencies. Program managers are built with the general assumption of a single (global) version of each dependency that will be used by everything that uses it, while module managers allow each top level entity you use them on (program, software module, etc) to have different versions of its dependencies.
At a recent local Python meetup, a friend was presenting some of the new features in Python 3.8 and 3.9, and afterwards we got to talking about the pattern matching feature coming in Python 3.10. I went on a mild rant about how I thought Python had lost the plot: first assignment expressions using :=, and now this rather sprawling feature.
My friend interpreted my rant rather generously, and soon said, “it sounds like you want to give a talk about it at our next meetup”. Okay … well, why not!
In the meantime, I thought I’d get to know the feature better by writing up my thoughts and some code examples in article form. As you can gather, I’m rather biased, but I’ll try to present the positives as well as just criticism.
I titled my first book of essays Reasonable Creatures, after Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous remark “I wish to see women neither heroines nor brutes but reasonable creatures.” I’d never use that title now. Women are as rational as men, sure, but that’s not saying much. If Wollstonecraft came back to life, she’d have a heart attack. By comparison with her 18th-century day, we live in paradise, yet people seem as willfully ignorant and blinkered as ever.
Having a useful about page, like mine, is very important as it lets your readers both learn about you, and connect with you.
You might find it impossible to imagine a world without your smartphone, or have trouble remembering a time when Wi-Fi wasn’t everywhere, but many of today’s most relied-upon technologies would not have been possible—or even dreamed of—if it weren’t for the game-changing inventions that came before them. And while it’s easy to take many of the marvels of design and engineering we interact with on a daily basis for granted—think toilets, seat belts, and suspension bridges—it’s just as easy to overlook how a handful of more surprising inventions, like the Super Soaker or the pizza saver, have affected the world around us. From blood banks to barcodes and beyond, here are the stories behind 20 inventions that changed the world.
The world stands at a critical juncture of the COVID-19 pandemic. Countries that lack the first round of vaccine coverage are extraordinarily vulnerable to the highly infectious Delta variant, and are also seedbeds for new variants that could quickly spread worldwide. The Lancet COVID-19 Commission, which I chair, is working urgently with the United Nations system to strengthen the multilateral response. Governments of countries where vaccines are being produced – the United States, European Union members, the United Kingdom, India, Russia, and China – need to cooperate under UN leadership to ensure that a sufficient supply of vaccine doses reaches the poorest countries.
Abortion rights advocates geared up for a major fight as the U.S. Supreme Court announced Monday it will soon hear arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, a case in Mississippi which poses a direct challenge to Roe vs. Wade.
The high court confirmed it will consider the case December 1 after months of speculation regarding when it would take up the dispute over Mississippi's ban on most abortion care after 15 weeks of pregnancy.
A new analysis projecting that 100 million Covid-19 vaccines stockpiled by rich nations and set to expire by the end of the year could be left to waste is prompting an outcry from social justice campaigners who warn of a potential "atrocity" as poor nations are refused access to doses.
The estimate released Sunday by science analytics company Airfinity came as tracking by Our World in Data showed that just 1.9% of people in low-income countries have received at least one dose. By contrast, 63% of people in the U.S. and 71% of those in the U.K. have received at least one jab.
Public health campaigners on Monday pressed President Joe Biden to do far more to help poor countries vaccinate their populations against Covid-19, including by investing heavily in global manufacturing, pushing harder for a suspension of patents, and facilitating the transfer of key technology.
"Short of such action, the pandemic will continue its devastation, driven by a lack of political will."
I’ve been writing about how antivaxxers misuse the Vaccine Adverse Events Recording System (VAERS) database dating back to very early in my history as a blogger.€ VAERS, for those unfamiliar with it, is a database to which anyone can report any adverse event (AE) noted after vaccination. It serves as an early warning system that can generate hypotheses regarding correlations between specific AEs and vaccines, but by its very design cannot test these hypotheses. (I’ll explain in detail later in this post when I discuss the shortcomings of€ VAERS.) Indeed, out of curiosity, I did some searching of all of my blogs and discovered that the first time that I mentioned€ VAERS€ and its shortcomings here was on the old Blogspot version of the blood back€ in 2005€ in the context of a discussion of chelation therapy for autism. Because of its very nature,€ VAERS€ is prone to misunderstanding and misuse, and, unsurprisingly,€ VAERS€ has become a favorite tool of antivaxxers to claim that vaccines cause whatever AE on which they want to blame vaccines. That’s why, over the years, we’ve mentioned€ VAERS€ on many times, and I’ve€ mentioned€ it€ elsewhere€ many times going back to 2005.
More than a dozen civil society groups in India have written an open letter to Johnson & Johnson and the U.S. government, urging the pharmaceutical giant to cancel export of Indian-made COVID-19 vaccine doses to rich countries and instead focus on distributing them in the Global South. “The 600 million doses that Johnson & Johnson is manufacturing currently … in India should go where the vaccines are most needed, which is the Indian subcontinent, the African continent and the COVAX Facility,” says public health activist Achal Prabhala, who co-authored the letter and is coordinator of the AccessIBSA project, which campaigns for access to medicines in India, Brazil and South Africa.
By Sophie Kevany, in a joint investigation by DeSmog and Sentient Media
An animal pharmaceutical representative body appears to have made a failed attempt to influence the United Nations by using what experts are calling distorted climate information to protect the livestock industry against calls to reduce food animal numbers and eat less animal protein.€
A recent report from the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund found that 71 officers died of “COVID-related causes” contracted while performing official duties — more than gun and traffic incidents combined — between January 1 and June 30. And since the release of that report, the number has risen: As of September 16, the death toll included 133 officers.
In 2020, COVID-19 was the highest cause of death for police officers on the job, also according to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund. In South Florida alone, at least five officers died of COVID over the course of one week; it's not clear if all contracted the disease in the line of duty.
Another malware purveyor is shocked, SHOCKED to discover its products have been used to do Very Bad Things. Thomas Brewster has more details for Forbes. Here's the setup:
It happens all the time: Organizations get hacked because there isn’t an obvious way for security researchers to let them know about security vulnerabilities or data leaks. Or maybe it isn’t entirely clear who should get the report when remote access to an organization’s internal network is being sold in the cybercrime underground.
Agriculture group New Cooperative group was hit by a ransomware attack over the weekend, potentially endangering operations of a company key to the agricultural supply chain.
A spokesperson for New Cooperative confirmed the attack to The Hill on Monday, noting in a statement that the company "recently identified a cybersecurity incident that is impacting some of our company’s devices and systems."
I'm a parent with two children in public schools in Christchurch, NZ. I'm also a software developer with an interest in education. I'm writing this post to make members of NZ school boards of trustees aware of a significant risks they face, but which I believe few if any school boards in NZ recognise, much less attempt to mitigate.
These risks are created by the software adopted by nearly every school in NZ. This software is provided via national-level agreements made by the Ministry of Education with their vendors, who are mostly US-based multinational technology corporations. Increasingly, school curriculums completely depend on this software.
Today, nearly every school in NZ is either a 'Microsoft Office 365' or a 'Google Classroom' school. Many schools also embed products like SeeSaw and StoryPark into their student assessment process and depend on them for parental engagement.
My goal here is to explain the liabilities lurking within this status quo, and how the Ministry of Education has divested responsibility for these liabilities onto individual school board members.
The ninth annual Open Source Jobs Report examines trends in open-source hiring, retention, and training.
This is the announcement for IPFire 2.27 - Core Update 160 which is available for testing. It comes with a large number of bug fixes and package updates and prepare for removing Python 2 which has reached its end of life.
In recent days and months, the development team has spent a lot of time on finding bottlenecks and removing those. Our goal is to increase throughput on hardware and bringing latency down, for a faster network.
This update brings a first change which will enable network interfaces that support it, to send packets that belong to the same stream to the same processor core. This allows taking advantage of better cache locality and the firewall engine as well as the Intrusion Prevention System benefit from this, especially with a large number of connections and especially on hardware with smaller CPU caches.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (gnutls28, nettle, nextcloud-desktop, and openssl1.0), Fedora (dovecot-fts-xapian, drupal7, ghostscript, haproxy, libtpms, lynx, wordpress, and xen), openSUSE (xen), Red Hat (rh-ruby27-ruby), and SUSE (openssl, openssl1, and xen).
There’s no shortage of security people who will tell you that passwords are broken. It’s also not a coincidence how many of them sell products to supplement or replace passwords. Microsoft just announced that the passwordless future is here. In their announcement they make it clear that passwords are broken, and they should know–they broke them!
This passwordless future requires that Microsoft follow in Apple’s and Google’s footsteps in deciding which software you are allowed to run on your computer. These vendors don’t trust you to manage your own security, instead they want you to hand all trust over to them. Without them in control, they don’t believe your hardware can be trusted and untrusted hardware isn’t allowed to login to the passwordless future. As more vendors follow in Microsoft’s footsteps to implement passwordless logins, they too will anchor their trust in the hardware and ultimately in Microsoft (or Apple or Google). In the name of security and convenience your computer will be less and less your own.
In this guide, you’ll find answers to the following questions:
Do I have a tenant score?
While I am concerned about the power wielded by giant tech companies and am interested in creating more competition, I'm always a little perplexed by the arguments that people make that, somehow, the "big four" companies of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple are so dominant that no new competitor can ever catch up to them. It's one thing to point to similar articles about Myspace that totally dismissed Facebook as a possible competitor to that platform, but it's another thing altogether to see new social media apps... actually doing pretty well.
Body-worn cameras were supposed to usher in a new era of police accountability. That hasn't happened. At best, they've generated a ton of additional footage of interactions and arrests that may prove valuable to criminal defendants and people filing civil rights lawsuits. "May" is the operative word. Cops still control the footage, which limits public access and increases the odds that unflattering/unhelpful (to police) footage rarely ends up in the hands of the public. The end result is that prosecutors have been the biggest beneficiary of this so-called accountability tech.
You should have control over your own computers. Your phone should be your castle. True control means controlling your hardware and software. It means picking hardware that doesn’t depend on absolute trust in a vendor for its security, but gives you control over your own security so you don’t have to ask the vendor’s permission to use the computer how you wish. It means using a free operating system that lets you install whatever software you want and remove any software you don’t. Finally, it means running free software that you or anyone in the community can modify (or change back) if a developer ever makes it work against your interests.
Computers will only become more important and integral in our society, and collectively we get to choose the rules that govern them. It’s not too late to reject technology that’s not on your side. Invest in technology that gives you back the control and ownership you should have always had.
On 30th September 2021, the root certificate that Let's Encrypt are currently using, the IdentTrust DST Root CA X3 certificate, will expire. You may or may not need to do anything about this Root CA expiring, but I'm betting a few things will probably break on that day so here's what you need to know!
[...]
The answer to the question "what will happen when the IdenTrust root expires?" depends on how widespread the types of clients listed above are. I don't know what's floating around out there on the Web, and I don't know what depends on those things either. One thing that I do know, though, is that at least something, somewhere is going to break.
Jake Tappers’ career is inextricably linked to America’s so-called longest running war. His travels there and book–turned–Hollywood film detailing his exploits are how, more than any other beat, he polished his reputation as a Serious Journalist, and not just another pretty suit behind a desk. He’s reported dozens of stories on the conflict, done book events, tweeted nonstop for years about the war in Afghanistan, and done scores of segments on the conflict, including a two-hour primetime special earlier this month lamenting “what went wrong” in the war for the United States.
Sen. Bernie Sanders said Monday that a new congressional watchdog report showing the Pentagon failing in efforts to combat department-wide fraud and waste revealed an "absolutely unacceptable" situation that merits true accountability.
Budget Committee chair Sanders (I-Vt.), along with House Oversight Committee chair Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), had requested the Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, which was made public Monday.
Australia has no nuclear power infrastructure; they will be dependent on the US or UK to provide same for any nuclear powered Australian attack subs.€ For Australia to develop same on their homeland just to support these subs would be cost-insane.
The cost of the 12 French subs has been variously described as $40, $60 and $90 billion with the $90 being the most likely but it is not at all clear what beyond just the hulls is accounted for (weapons, services, R&D, and more).€ The 3-4 nuclear subs cost a multiple, per unit, the the French subs.€ The Australians will be getting one-third to one fourth the number of subs for some unknown increase in cost.
Germany’s antisemitic and semi-fascistic Reichsbürger, also known as sovereign citizens – were at the forefront when a mob of right-wing extremists attacked Germany’s parliament, the Bundestag in August 2020. Like many other right-wing extremists, Reichsbürger too, use anti-lockdown rallies as cover to conjure up supports for its reactionary ideology.
At Germany’s parliament, three policemen were fighting the crowd of Reichsbürger, Neo-Nazis, anti-vaxxers, and tin-foil-hat wearing conspiracy fantasies believers until reinforcements arrived preventing a German version of what has happened in Washington in January 2021.
Yoda, the Jedi Master in the Star Wars films, once pointed out that the future is all too difficult to see and it’s hard to deny his insight. Yet I’d argue that, when it comes to the U.S. military and its wars, Yoda was just plain wrong. That part of the future is all too easy to imagine. It involves, you won’t be shocked to know, more budget-busting weaponry for the Pentagon and more military meddling across the globe, perhaps this time against “near-peer” rivals China and Russia, and a global war on terror that will never end. What’s even easier to see is that peace will be given no chance at all. Why? Because it’s just not in the interests of America’s deeply influential military-congressional-industrial complex.
The current imbroglio involving the need for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, to make two calls to his Chinese counterpart, General Li Zoucheng, marks a break in the civil-military chain of command. In actual fact, the U.S. chairman of the JCS is not part of the chain of command for nuclear decisions, but Milley and other senior members of Donald Trump’s national security team were so concerned about the obvious mental deterioration of the president that the calls were essential.€ Sensitive intelligence informed us even before the 2020 election that the Chinese leadership had become particularly concerned with Trump’s anti-China rhetoric and the increasingly aggressive U.S. military exercises in the South China Sea.
In 1974, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger had become so alarmed with the mental deterioration of President Richard Nixon brought on by a combination of alcohol and anti-depressants that Kissinger informed Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger to block any decision to use force that was communicated from the White House.€ Fortunately, Nixon was so overwhelmed with the threat of impeachment that he lacked the inclination or the time to concern himself with using military force to distract the U.S. public, the so-called “wag the dog” syndrome.
On the 20th anniversary of the official launch of the so-called "Global War on Terror," a coalition of progressive advocacy groups on Monday demanded that U.S. President Joe Biden finally shut down the military prison at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, where more than three dozen people are still being detained indefinitely in violation of their human rights.
"It's long past time for the Biden administration to close Guantánamo prison and end indefinite detention once and for all."—Carolyn Fiddler, Daily Kos
Notes: The original webinar is over three hours long, and can be viewed in its entirety below
Protest speaks a language of forceful insistence. “Defund the police,” “Build the wall”—the unyielding demands go back to Moses’ “Let my people go.” So it was curious when the July 2011 issue of the Vancouver-based magazine Adbusters ran a cryptic call to arms: a ballerina posing atop the famous Charging Bull statue on Wall Street, with the question “What is our one demand?” printed above her in red. The question wasn’t answered; readers were only told, “#OccupyWallStreet. September 17th. Bring tent.”
When the R&AW got inputs on him, it shared the information with the special cell of Delhi Police who nabbed the suicide bomber in 2016. He was then interrogated by multiple agencies where he revealed information about many terror training camps active in Afghanistan.
After interrogation, the suicide bomber was deported to Afghanistan. Upon his return, he was again probed by the Afghan security officials about the ISIS-K training camps.
Last winter, UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund, conducted its own negotiations with the Taliban. The UN agency, like many other non-profits, wanted to operate in Taliban territory and the representatives of the Islamist killers were willing to listen. What the Jihadist organization wanted from the UN was the same deal that Hamas got from UNRWA.
UNICEF would enable an ad-hoc school system that would operate under Taliban control.
Four Northern California militia members affiliated with the far-right “boogaloo” movement admitted to destroying evidence in the alleged murder of a federal security officer in Oakland last year, authorities said Monday.
The report echoes some of the data and warnings from experts in the last year: the average global temperature for the past five years was among the highest on record, and there is an increasing likelihood that temperatures will temporarily breach the threshold of 1.5€° Celsius above the pre-industrial era, in the next five years.
The picture painted by United in Science is bleak: even with ambitious action to slow greenhouse gas emissions, sea levels will continue to rise and threaten low-lying islands and coastal populations throughout the world.
“We really are out of time. We must act now to prevent further irreversible damage. COP26 this November must mark that turning point. By then we need all countries to commit to achieve net zero emissions by the middle of this century and to present clear, credible long-term strategies to get there”, urged the UN chief.
As Canadians head to the polls Monday on the final day of federal elections, a journalist, documentary filmmaker, and climate activist in British Columbia is hoping his plan to take aggressive action to combat the climate emergency will resonate with enough voters to score an upset victory.
"The entire political system is failing to confront the level of emergency that we have."—Avi Lewis,NDP candidate
After Gov. Tim Walz took to Twitter on Monday morning to inform his constituents that "Minnesota Climate Week" had begun, U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar urged the governor of her state to immediately block further construction of Line 3, Enbridge's multi-billion-dollar oil pipeline that endangers local ecosystems and the global climate.
"This Climate Week, we are reminded that the cost of climate change is clearer than ever," said Walz, marking the start of a themed week he recently established by proclamation. "Together, let's recommit to combating climate change to protect the health and beauty of our state for generations to come," the Democrat added.
There are approximately 1,600 active and idle oil wells within unincorporated communities of LA County. Over half of those wells are within the 1,000 acre Inglewood Oil Field, the largest urban oil field in the nation, located in Los Angeles County’s Second Supervisorial District.€ Sentinel Peak Resources, a€ Denver based Quantum Energy Partners portfolio company,€ owns and operates the oil field.
The motions were authored€ by Supervisor Holly J. Mitchell with co-authorship from Supervisors Sheila Kuehl and Janice Hahn, according to a press statement from Mitchell’s Office.
As a result, at current bitcoin prices, the annual volume of e-waste from bitcoin mining globally is about 30,700 metric tons—about as much as the Netherlands produces in a year from laptops, phones, and other personal computing devices. Divided by the average number of bitcoin transactions, that means just two transactions create as much waste as a disposed iPad, said Alex de Vries, a cryptocurrency economist and the study’s lead author.
In 1999, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bear population was “in danger of extinction.”€ € Today, over 20 years after the finding that these bears should be protected as “endangered,” the Cabinet-Yaak grizzly is still struggling to survive.
A 2015 peer-reviewed study (Kendall et al (2015)) estimated that in 2012 there were 48–50 Cabinet-Yaak grizzly bears, which is approximately half the number necessary for a viable grizzly population in this area. The study also found the Yaak population to be reproductively isolated from the Cabinet population, which is now highly inbred. Thus, “the small size, isolation, and inbreeding documented by this study demonstrate the need for comprehensive management designed to support population growth and increased connectivity and gene flow with other populations.”
Australian Koala Foundation (AKF) chief executive Deborah Tabart said numbers had plummeted to as low as 50,000, leaving the iconic animal perilously close to extinction.
"It's not just the bushfires, there's also drought and habitat clearing," Ellis told the ABC.
"One hundred years ago, the fur trade nearly wiped out the species. If the fur trade did continue, koalas would have vanished, because we know that in some areas where they were wiped out, they never came back."
Koalas are in rapid decline around Australia, with 30 per cent of the iconic species lost in just three years, the Australian Koala Foundation says.
As the United Nations General Assembly kicked off in New York City on Monday, activists unveiled a new version of their digital "Climate Clock" to spotlight the extent to which rich countries are reneging on their vow to invest $100 billion a year in a global green energy fund designed to assist developing nations.
"We are in a climate emergency, and without drastic corrective action on track for climate catastrophe."
The House Ways and Means Committee missed key opportunities in their initial revenue proposals to fairly pay for President Biden’s Build Back Better plans, especially in addressing wealth inequality.
In a recent report in July 2021, Jason Furman and William Powell documented that the recent job transition rate from unemployment to employment was somewhat lower than expected given the job opening rate. The job opening rate averaged 5.6 percent in the first six months of 2021. It had previously never been higher than 4.8 percent — a peak hit in 2018 — and usually is well under 4.0 percent. Given this backdrop, this article investigates how demographic groups are transitioning from unemployment into employment and how that compares to their historical relationship between job openings and transitions.
Effects by Race and Ethnicity
Trump’s advisors aren’t the villains, either, although Trump was just the latest Republican president advised by Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, whose partner in the years after they advised Nixon, Lee Atwater, had passed away from brain cancer after making a public apology for all the damage he did to our nation in the service of Nixon’s party and, later, George HW Bush (Willie Horton, et al).
And Nixon, too, presented such a threat to world peace and democracy in America that his own Defense Secretary, James Schlesinger, took actions remarkably similar to Milley’s, as was revealed by the Washington Post on August 22, 1974. Schlesinger and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs George S. Brown (who’d just taken that post on July 1, 1974), the Post wrote, “kept a close watch to make certain that no orders were given to military units outside the normal chain of command.”
Pedro Castillo taught and served as principal in an elementary school in rural Chotaprovince. He was a leader of the regional teachers’ union. Perú Libre invited him to run for president. That socialist party, founded in 2012 by Cuba- trained neurosurgeon Vladimir Cerrón, claims José Mariátegui, founder of Peruvian Communist Party, as its ideological forebearer.
Political novice Castillo was unknown except in his rural province. His rise owes directly to a rural and/or mostly mestizo population, marginalized and very poor, taking a stand against urban power centers regarded as corrupt, exploitative, and culturally removed. € Lima’s middle class makes up around 35% of the city’s population. One third of all Peruvians live in Lima.
Juan Guaidó, Leopoldo López, and other prominent opposition figures participate in the Unitary Platform, which groups together the majority of opposition parties. The talks with the Maduro government have the approval of the European Union, the United States, and Canada. These countries agree on their willingness to “review the sanctions” imposed on Venezuela if “significant progress is made in a global negotiation” that repairs “the country’s institutions” and allows free elections.
This political will was demonstrated by Antony Blinken, Josep Borrell, and Marc Garneau, the highest representatives of the diplomacy of those countries, in a document that they jointly signed in late June that calls for “a peaceful solution”, based on€ “the Venezuelan people themselves” and channeled through Venezuelan political structures.
Democratic lawmakers and the White House are facing pressure to disregard the Senate parliamentarian after the unelected official on Sunday deemed a crucial immigration measure out of bounds for reconciliation, endangering an effort to provide a pathway to citizenship for millions of people.
In a three-page opinion (pdf), Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough advised against the inclusion of Democrats' immigration proposal in the emerging reconciliation package, arguing the measure amounts to "a policy change that substantially outweighs the budgetary impact of that change."
Worried that certain Democratic senators will refuse to back him because of his administration’s€ infamous cover-up€ of a horrendous€ police murderof a black teenager – and€ other injustices€ against people of color in Chicago – Emanuel is now busy lining up GOP senators who will confirm him as the next U.S. ambassador to Japan. On Saturday, the Washington Post€ described Emanuel’s campaign€ for Republican help as “an aggressive behind-the-scenes effort”; the article’s headline: “Rahm Emanuel, a target of the left, may be rescued by Republicans.”
Three GOP senators told the Post that they will proudly vote to confirm Emanuel, including that pillar€ of€ integrity: Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
With civil rights groups and progressive members of Congress staunchly opposed to disgraced former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel becoming a prestigious ambassador, Emanuel is appealing for support from a set of politicians he has repeatedly relied on in his career: Republicans. € €
“In any other country, Joe Biden and I would not be in the same party,” Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said during the 2020 presidential campaign. “But in America, we are.”1
Before leaving Israel for his meeting with President Joe Biden in Washington in late August, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett of Israel repeated his firm opposition to Palestinian statehood, thus confirming the permanence of the de facto apartheid that he and his government—like the preceding ones headed by Benjamin Netanyahu—intend to maintain in the Jewish State. Like Netanyahu and most Israelis, he considers the apartheid charge anti-Semitic slander—not because the alleged facts are untrue, but because if Israel does it, you cannot call it apartheid. Why? Because anything done in Israel in the name of its self-interest and for its Jewish citizens is permissible, no matter how clearly deemed illegal by international law.
And if Biden fails, it won’t just be his agenda that fails. America could continue its vicious cycle of ever-growing wealth and power at the top — power that’s able to rig the rules of the political-economic game against almost everyone else.
It started in 2016. U.S. officials in Havana, Cuba, began complaining en masse about hearing strange noises, suffering recurring headaches, nausea, hearing and memory loss. From there it spread around the world, with hundreds of U.S. spies and diplomats in the United Kingdom, Colombia, China, Uzbekistan, Germany, Austria, and in Washington itself reporting similar symptoms. Very little about the cases — even the identities of those involved — can be verified. Nevertheless, the story has become a media sensation, appearing on front pages the world over, with journalists speculating that futuristic microwave weapons are the culprit, likely wielded by devious Russian spies. While the scientific and medical community have cautioned not to jump to conclusions, underlining a number of key flaws in the narrative, the existence of directed energy weapons (DEWs), as they are known, is beyond doubt.
It will include thought pieces from me, along with audio recordings, office hour opportunities, and even a few of my drawings.
The induction of electronic voting machines (EVM) in the next general elections is a costly proposition. The EVM-based elections in 2023, according to relevant circles, will double the cost of the extensive exercise.
The details about SC4Y sounded like B.S. to me, but it was Owens’s response to my question that really caught me off guard. The congressman claimed he does not receive money from the organization but still consults with it. Then he chose to take aim at something else: youth voices.
When Wikipedia was first launched 20 years ago, it was widely derided as an impossible project, bound to fail or, at best, to produce worthless rubbish. And yet today, along with open source software, it is undoubtedly the best demonstration that a distributed team of volunteers can produce work that is not just free but arguably better than anything created for profit using traditional, top-down management approaches. But beyond that, Wikipedia has become something else: a unique repository of validated information and thus, implicitly, a store of "truth" about the past and the present. That has turned many pages of Wikipedia into a battleground, as people with different views fight in sometimes fierce "edit wars" over what counts as "verified". The choice of information and even how things are phrased often have considerable social, economic or political importance. No surprise, then, that there is a struggle taking place over what Wikipedia should say is happening in the contested space of Hong Kong. Back in July, an article in the Hong Kong Free Press explained:
The Russian government sent KGB 2.0 (the FSB) to kill opposition leader Alexey Navalny late last summer. That effort failed. Navalny survived the poisoning attempt to continue to be a thorn in Putin's side. So, the Russian government did the next best thing. It tossed Navalny in jail, revoking his suspended sentence to imprison him in a "corrective labor colony."
Banned Books Week begins on Sunday. This year, spotlighting the fight against censorship may be more important than ever.
We look at the attack on reproductive rights in the United States, as the Department of Justice sues Texas over a new law that bans abortions after six weeks into a pregnancy. The law makes no exception for rape or incest and allows anyone in Texas to sue patients, medical workers or even a patient’s family or friends who “aid and abet” an abortion. “What we see time and time again is when we ban abortion, it doesn’t stop the need for people to access abortion,” says Dr. Bhavik Kumar, a staff physician at Planned Parenthood Center for Choice in Houston, Texas.
"The speed and scale at which this country has deported Haitians seeking refuge from utter turmoil is reprehensible and anti-black... This is cruel."—New York state Sen. Zellnor Myrie
As the U.S. State Department announced Monday that it would seek to double the number of refugees resettled in the United States over the next year, migrant rights advocates implored the Biden administration to allow many more people into the country, while ensuring that actual admissions reach the target.
In a move that would fulfill one of President Joe Biden's campaign promises, the State Department said in a statement that the administration "recommends an increase in the refugee admissions target from 62,500 in Fiscal Year 2021 to 125,000 in Fiscal Year 2022 to address needs generated by humanitarian crises around the globe."
Progressive leaders and activists on Monday reacted with shock, disgust, and condemnation of an immigration system "designed for cruelty" toward migrants following the publication of photos showing mounted U.S. Border Patrol agents using their horse reins like whips to round up Haitian asylum-seekers along the Texas-Mexico border.
The El Paso Times reports whip-swinging agents on horseback charged at migrants carrying food and water as they waded across the Rio Grande near Del Rio, in Val Verde County, on Sunday.
Miami Herald Haiti and Caribbean correspondent Jacqueline Charles discusses new revelations about the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. In her piece, “Grenade-dropping drones, a paranoid president, guards who ran: Latest on Haiti assassination,” she reports the night President Jovenel Moïse was shot “was actually the second time in a span of weeks that his life was in danger, according to testimony from one of the Colombians in custody, and one of the Haitian Americans.”
Thousands of asylum seekers, primarily from Haiti, have sheltered in a makeshift camp at the U.S.-Mexico border under the Del Rio International Bridge, as the Biden administration has vowed to carry out mass deportations. On Sunday alone, the Biden administration said it sent three deportation flights to Haiti, with several more flights expected in the coming days. “For them to be deporting young children into Haiti right now, … it is unacceptable,” says Guerline Jozef, co-founder and executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance. We also speak with Jacqueline Charles, Haiti and Caribbean correspondent for the Miami Herald, who says reporters have had almost no access to the camp. “You cannot access this bridge, so we don’t know what is happening,” Charles says. “This is a huge issue, the lack of transparency around this.”
Occupy Wall Street was criticized at the time for railing against systemic problems without offering a concrete list of solutions. Yet protesters did speak out about policies they saw as unjust and about others that would address the ills they stood against. The movement has left an indelible mark not just on the national conversation about inequality but on the laws and structures that enable it. The rampant inequality Occupy decried has been perpetuated through decades of policy choices—and can be undone by the same. Below, we identify eight policy areas in which activists and lawmakers have, since 2011, tried to work toward a fairer America.
The thousands of people who flocked to New York City’s Zuccotti Park 10 years ago this fall to protest capitalism run amok were far more diverse than the media let on. “It’s true there were a lot of white people, but in the NYC encampment there were many BIPOC people and women of color, like myself, who had very visible leadership roles,” says Sandy Nurse, a carpenter and local organizer who recently won the Democratic primary (and effectively the election) for the 37th District of the New York City Council.1
A Hindu family of poor farmers were held hostage and tortured for fetching drinking water from a mosque in the Punjab province of Pakistan, reports said on Monday.
Global News, Canada Election: How are the Parties Planning to Tackle Cellphone Affordability
A few months back we noted how FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr had taken to Newsweek to dust off a fifteen year old AT&T talking point. Namely that "big tech" companies get a "free ride" on telecom networks, and, as a result, should throw billions of dollars at "big telecom" for no real reason. You'll recall it was this exact argument that launched the net neutrality debate, when former AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre proclaimed that Google wouldn't be allowed to "ride his pipes for free." Basically, telecom giants have long wanted somebody else to fund network builds they routinely leave half finished despite billions in subsidies.
The letter, which was addressed to leaders of the Senate and House of Representatives, expressed explicit support for six bills that passed the House Judiciary Committee in June. Four of the bills directly address Big Tech's platform powers while two others empower enforcers.
One measure, if it becomes law, would ensure that antitrust cases brought by state attorneys general remain in the court they select, a move that plaintiffs generally prefer.
The full House has not voted on the measures, some of which do not yet have companion bills in the Senate.
The GII 2021 was published by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), in partnership with the Portulans Institute and with the support of its corporate partners.
When America was still actively part of building the tpp alliance, it was portrayed—and sold to Americans—as a tool to keep China from exercising influence over trading rules. It is still difficult to imagine China’s application being successful in the near term. The cptpp is a detailed agreement requiring deep economic integration, and new members must be admitted by unanimous approval. “China is surprisingly close to meeting cptpp conditions in many areas. But where there are gaps, they’re huge,” according to Jeff Schott of the Peterson Institute for International Economics (piie), a think-tank in Washington, dc. He reckons the country has made huge strides in recent years on intellectual-property [sic] and investment rights [sic]. But the dominance of state-owned enterprises (soes), weak labour rights and concerns about data privacy leave a lot of ground to catch up.
So far, the Supreme Court has not granted certiorari in any patent cases for its 2021-2022 Term. Still, there are a couple dozen cases pending that may offers some interest. On September 27, 2021, the court is meeting privately for what is known as the “long conference” to decide the fate of the petitions for writ of certiorari that have piled-up over the summer. There are also a host of additional petitions scheduled for a later conference or not yet scheduled. Although the total number of petitions is down from last year, there is much more diversity since we have now largely moved past the appointments-clause issues.
Capacity to Sue: My favorite pending case is Tormasi v. Western Digital. Tormasi is a convicted murderer and also a patentee seeking to enforce his disk-drive patent. The Federal Circuit held that Tormasi lacked the “capacity to sue” under Fed. R. Civ. Pro. 17(b). That provision states that an individual’s capacity to sue is determined by “the law of the individual’s domicile.” Tormasi lives in New Jersey (state prison) and the administrative rule in N.J. bars a prisoner from conducting business activities without the Wardon’s approval. The courts held that his enforcement action is an “unauthorized patent monetization business” and thus that he has no capacity to sue. Tormasi argues that this conclusion violates his due process and other constitutionally protected rights. There are other standing-related cases pending in the trademark context: Naked TM, LLC v. Australian Therapeutic Supplies Pty. Ltd. (standing to petition cancel a TM registration); See also Kaszuba v. Hirshfeld (pro se, standing of USPTO to intervene in TM appeal).
In response to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, on 6 August 2021 the Hungarian Government issued Decree No. 474/2021 on the different application of the Patent Act (Act XXXIII of 1995). According to the decree, patent applications filed after the entry into force of this decree will not be subject to a maintenance fee for the first three years of patent protection. The decree was promulgated on 6 August 2021 and will remain in force until the end of the state of emergency related to COVID-19.
Although no reasoning was provided to the decree, the decree is in line with the Government's aim to encourage research and development. Lifting part of the financial burden of obtaining patent protection on innovations may boost Hungary's innovation performance and facilitate economic growth disrupted by the pandemic.
The owner of a patent has exclusive rights to exploit the invention. Without exclusive rights through patent protection, there would be no chance of a return on research and development activities, since other companies could copy the results and enter the market with the same product while spending nothing on their own development process.
Public Citizen recently uncovered "an agreement that the European Commission reached with Pfizer and BioNTech last November to purchase 100 million doses of the companies" mRNA vaccine, which was developed with the support of government funding and U.S. taxpayer-financed technology.
It won't come as a total surprise that we have covered intellectual property stories involving The Wizard of Oz in the past. Both the book and film are iconic to say the least, so it would perhaps be a bit strange if such issues didn't arise from time to time. That being said, the relevant players here tend to be on the extreme end of the enforcement spectrum, which leads to extreme cases such as Warner Media opposing a trademark filing by a self-proclaimed "wicked witch" for some reason.
Virgin Media subscribers receiving letters accusing them of movie piracy may find that settling their cases will be a costly affair. TorrentFreak understands that settlement demands run to several thousand pounds, a massive uplift on the several hundred usually requested in similar cases. Interestingly, however, some subscribers could be immune from being sued.
The IIPA, which represents the MPA, RIAA, and other entertainment industry groups, would like China to take a stand against online piracy. This includes targeting pirate sites and apps. In addition, the Chinese government should encourage technology giant Baidu to take more responsibility by applying rigorous filtering technology and terminating repeat infringers.
More than a thousand educators, lawyers and tech experts from over 65 countries will come together this week for a global summit to promote open access and better sharing of research and resources.
