Cars of the future will be more like connected devices on wheels and software-based, allowing customers to add new functions and features to their vehicles just as easily as downloading apps to a smartphone. Software based vehicles can also be kept up to date by receiving regular over-the-air updates to add new features and functionality. Building vehicles that are more like smartphones is a model pioneered in the auto industry by electric automaker Tesla, but now legacy automakers are making plans to transition to software based vehicles, the latest is U.S. automaker General Motors. The company on Tuesday announced a new end-to-end vehicle software platform called "Ultifi" that will underpin its future vehicles. The platform was designed entirely in-house and will allow GM and its customers the ability to add new vehicle features and functions and personalization options so cusomters can make their vehicles an extension of their digital lives.
Ultifi will be based on the Linux software platform to make it easier for third-party developers to have access.
The new software program will be enabled through hardware that's built into some next-generation products, including both internal combustion vehicles and electric vehicles. Customers will opt in to Ultifi. Some capabilities will be provided for free and others will come with additional costs.
Version 3.33 of syslog-ng arrived with basic MQTT support. Version 3.34 has added many important features to it: user authentication, TLS support and WebSocket support. These features give you both security and flexibility while sending log messages to an MQTT broker.
This blog helps you to make your first steps securing your MQTT connection.
One of the most often asked questions that I get is "Why do you run Linux?" There are many reasons that I personally run Linux, but maybe the most important reason is this: Linux can help save the environment!
Recently Brave opened up public access to their new chat service Brave Talk except it's not actually a new chat service it's literally just Jitsi with a couple on minor CSS tweaks
Today we are looking at Ubuntu Kylin 21.10 Beta. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.13 and uses about 800MB to 1GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at Ubuntu Kylin 21.10 Beta.
Mike's falling in love with FastAPI and gives us a hint at the next project he's building.
Plus, our thoughts on employee machine monitoring and building a transition plan when you are ready to quit your job.
Daniel Maslowski joins Doc Searls and Dan Lynch to talk about open firmware. Open firmware is an almost ironic term, especially for IP cameras, given the proprietary purposes of most manufacturers. There is a large and active community of code and developments around open firmware, led largely in part by Maslowski.
A few weeks ago, Matthew Wilcox might have guessed that his session at the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference would be focused rather differently. But, as we reported earlier in September, his folio patch set ran into some, perhaps unexpected, opposition and, ultimately, did not land in the mainline for 5.15. Instead of discussing how to use folios as part of the File Systems microconference, he led a discussion that was, at least in part, on the path forward for them.
Wilcox began by noting that the folio patches had not been merged and that he did not have clear direction from Linus Torvalds about what "needs to be changed in order to make it acceptable to him". That is a rather different outcome than Wilcox had been hoping for, so the session was not going to be about "what you need to do in order to enable your filesystems to go faster" using folios. "That's not where we are."
The first ever Rust for Linux conference, known as Kangrejos, got underway on September 13. Organizer Miguel Ojeda used the opening session to give an overview of why there is interest in using Rust in the kernel, where the challenges are, and what the current status is. The talk and following discussion provided a good overview of what is driving this initiative and where some of the sticking points might be.
The first day of the online Kangrejos conference was focused on introducing the effort to bring the Rust programming language into the Linux kernel. On the second day, conference organizer Miguel Ojeda shifted to presenting the Rust language itself with an emphasis on what Rust can provide for kernel development. The result was a useful resource for anybody who is curious about this project, but who has not yet had the time to become familiar with Rust.
Ojeda began by stressing that the talk was not meant to be a tutorial; to actually learn the language, one should get a good book and work from that. There is no way to cover everything needed in an hour of talk (a fact that became abundantly clear as time went on), but he hoped to be able to show some of the key ideas behind Rust. In the end, though, the only way to really understand the language is to sit down and write some code.
The first day of the Kangrejos (Rust for Linux) conference introduced the project and what it was trying to accomplish; day 2 covered a number of core Rust concepts and their relevance to the kernel. On the third and final day of the conference, Wedson Almeida Filho delved deeper into how Rust can be made to work in the Linux kernel, covered some of the lessons that have been learned so far, and discussed next steps with a number of kernel developers.
Almeida started by noting that he is not a Rust developer and does not feel that the language is perfect; he does believe, though, that it can solve some problems in the kernel. He works as an Android platform security-team engineer and has been looking for ways to improve that platform — specifically, to reduce its attack surface. Rust can do that, he said; it also helps with correctness and provides an expressive type system with features that C cannot match.
Libcamera as an open-source camera stack that has been coming together over the past few years has been maturing quite well, broadening its supported hardware and feature set, and more in filling a void in the Linux camera ecosystem.
Longtime Linux kernel developer Laurent Pinchart presented yesterday at the Embedded Linux Conference around libcamera and how it has developed over the past three years, the current state, and some of the future work for improving Linux camera support.
A new kernel option was proposed today called "pkill_on_warn" that would kill all threads in a process if that process provoked a kernel warning.
Currently when a process triggers a kernel warning there is no impact on that process by default. The Linux kernel does have a "panic_on_warn" option to cause a kernel panic when a warning happens, but pkill_on_warn would be less of an overkill and at least keep the system up and running.
Hi list,
The next, regularly scheduled release of mesa is here. Due to the broken cadence of the last release this one is slightly smaller than normal (once you discount all of the release metadata commits).
There is a bit of everything here, but not too much of any one thing, which is what one would normally expect by this point in the cycle. Overall I think this is trending nicely for the 21.2 series.
Cheers, Dylan
Succeeding Mesa 21.2.2 from earlier this month that was a much delayed and in turn very large release, Mesa 21.2.3 is out today and it's on the quieter side.
Mesa 21.2.3 is out on time and thus a more manageable release compared to the big v21.2.2. There still though are a number of bug fixes, as usual mostly around the Intel and Radeon drivers for both OpenGL and Vulkan.
For the last years, the GStreamer community has been analysing and discussing the idea of merging all the modules into one single repository. Since all the official modules are released in sync and the code evolves simultaneously between those repositories, having the code split was a burden and several core GStreamer developers believed that it was worth making the effort to consolidate them into a single repository. As announced a while back this is now effective and this post is about explaining the technical choices and implications of that change.
You can also check out our Monorepo FAQ for a list of questions and answers.
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Since we can not create new merge requests in your name on gitlab, we wrote a move_mrs_to_monorepo script that you can run yourself. The script is located in the gstreamer repository and you can start moving all your pending MRs by simply calling it (scripts/move_mrs_to_monorepo.py and follow the instructions).
Fans of the open-source DJ software will be happy to learn that the Mixxx 2.3.1 release introduces support for 125% and 175% HiDPI scale factors to make the application look better on HiDPI/4K displays. However, it should be noted the fact that this feature is only supported on systems where Qt 5.14 or later is installed.
This update to one of the greatest and free DJ software out there also brings support for new hardware. For example, it adds mappings for the Numark DJ2GO2 Touch and Numark Mixtrack Pro FX controllers, and updates the mappings for the Behringer DDM4000 mixer and the Denon MC7000 controller.
A console application is computer software which can be used with a text-only computer interface, the command line interface, or a text-based interface included within a graphical user interface operating system, such as a terminal emulator (such as GNOME Terminal or the aforementioned Terminator). Whereas a graphical user interface application generally involves using the mouse and keyboard (or touch control), with a console application the primary (and often only) input method is the keyboard. Many console applications are command line tools, but there is a wealth of software that has a text-based user interface making use of ncurses, a library which allow programmers to write text-based user interfaces.
Console based applications are light on system resources (very useful on low specified machines), can be faster and more efficient than their graphical counterparts, they do not stop working when X is restarted, and are perfect for scripting purposes. When designed well, console applications offer a surprisingly improvement in productivity. The applications are leaner, faster, easier to maintain, and remove the need to have installed a whole raft of libraries.
Load balancing refers to distributing tasks to a set of resources to reduce the heavy workload on a single resource. Think of a load balancer as a traffic cop that manages the traffic from the clients and distributes it across multiple servers.
Load balancing enhances performance and ensures the servers do not go down due to heavy workload. It can also help manage the traffic if one of the resources is down.
This tutorial will show you how to set up a load balancer on Apache Tomcat using the Apache HTTP server.
NOTE: Before we proceed, ensure you have Apache Tomcat and Apache HTTPD installed and working correctly. Check out our tutorial on the topics to learn more.
In the previous article and others in this series, I discussed how I signed up for and created an "Always Free" AMD virtual machine (VM) using Oracle Cloud, and then used that VM to create an Apache Web server which I accessed from the internet. I was pleasantly surprised by how easy Oracle made it to consume its cloud-based resources.
This series of articles came about due to Oracle's latest offering: Arm-based compute instances. In this article, I will use Oracle Cloud to create an Ubuntu instance to use as a virtual desktop. This will be interesting to attempt as the VM does not have a built-in remote console like VMware does to display a graphic desktop; instead, it will have to be entirely set up using the command line.
Using a free Arm instance on Oracle Cloud is not something that is practical. Although an Arm "Always Free" instance -- with its 4 cores and 24GB of RAM -- should be powerful enough for a desktop, Oracle limits the use of an Arm instance to a maximum of 30 days, after which point it will be destroyed and need to be recreated.
You deployed a perfect firewall and other network security policies preventing unauthorized access to the user's desktop computer over a network. However, you still need to block USB device access. We can configure a Linux desktop security policy to protect your computer against rogue USB devices (a.k.a. BadUSB) by implementing essential allow and blocklisting capabilities based on device attributes. For instance, I can define what kind of USB devices are authorized and how a USB device interacts with the Linux system. For example, I can define policy allowing Yubikey with serial number "XYZ" and USB LTE modem with serial # "ABC." Every other USB device access is denied by default. This guide will cover the following topics:
Today we are looking at how to install Downhill Jam 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.
I was having some strange issues on my ejabberd XMPP server the other day: some users complained that they couldn’t connect anymore to the MUC rooms on my server and in the logfiles I discovered some weird warnings about LetsEncrypt certificates being expired – although they were just new and valid until end of December.
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After some days of fiddling around with the issue, trying to find a solution, it appears that there is a problem in Ejabberd when there are some old SSL certifcates being found by Ejabberd that are using the old CA chain. Ejabberd has a really nice feature where you can just configure a SSL cert directory (or a path containing wildcars. Ejabberd then reads all of the SSL certs and compare them to the list of configured domains to see which it will need and which not.
With the initial Steam Deck release quickly approaching, Valve continues to be quite busy on a variety of improvements to enhance their Steam Linux builds.
Hitting the Steam beta state tonight is an improved Vulkan pre-caching system. Steam's Vulkan pre-caching data-sets are now separated by Proton versions and graphics driver capabilities. In turn this should lead to smaller Vulkan cache sizes for users by avoiding the downloading of unnecessary/irrelevant caches while not impacting the performance goals of pre-caching. Though in transitioning to this new scheme, moving to this new beta will start from scratch with its downloads.
SuperTuxKart 1.3 has recently appeared , the latest version of the classic Super Mario Kart clone starring the most prominent mascots of free software and whose code is published mainly under the GPLv3 license, with components of the artistic part under Creative Commons licenses and public domain .
SuperTuxKart is a very veteran project that as a video game falls within a genre that is very trite, so saving things like the online video game, which was included in version 1.0 , the foreseeable thing is to expect improvements and more content. SuperTuxKart 1.3 has included two new battle arenas called Ancient Colosseum Labyrinth and Alien Signal , the first being inspired by the Roman Colosseum and the second by the actual location of the SETI program .
The Las Dunas Soccer Stadium circuit, which is not very popular with users, has been revised based on the feedback generated by the community, so it is now presented as a simplified and symmetrical soccer field.
In order to facilitate the completion of the races, extensions have been introduced to the finish line on the following tracks to ensure the counting of the laps even in case the player is slightly off the track: Hacienda, Old Mine, Ravenbridge Mansion and Shifting Sands. At the broker level, Pepper has been included , extracted from the Pepper & Carrot comic that is published as free and Open Source software, while Adiumy, Emule, GNU and Sara have been improved.
With so many web browsers out there to pick from, many of them really aren’t very different from each other, and few take the time to work like the other applications on your desktop.
In Windows, nobody notices this because none of the applications (even from Microsoft) or system settings menus are consistent. They duplicate functionality, have different GUI conventions, and the entire thing is a usability hell. GNOME tries to be a bit “cleaner” than this.
In Windows 11, in fact, Microsoft tried to steal from Chrome OS, GNOME, and the Mac’s “clean” interface design, but reverted to form and immediately crapped it up with the usual junk and ads and trialware, and a store that nobody wanted to use to begin with because there’s still time to repeat that disaster again.
But the point, here, is that GNOME (and to a lesser extent) KDE for various *nix operating systems (they’re portable), try not to confound the user and present them with a giant headache of pointlessness and redundancy and bugs. Which is nice.
That’s where GNOME Web comes in. The development name is Epiphany, because that was the application’s original name, when it started as a project to build a web browser around the Mozilla rendering engine, Gecko. In the late 2000s, Mozilla decided to make it difficult to use their engine in anything but Firefox, forcing the GNOME Web developers to go a different way.
When you think of Fedora, Red Hat's community Linux distribution, you think of Linux's cutting edge. Everything is the newest version. If some of that isn't ready for prime time yet, well, you could always get a more mature Linux distro. But with the latest Fedora Linux 35, you also get a more polished Linux that extends, in the words of Fedora Project Leader Matthew Miller, "existing features and [adds] new features or support to level up the experience of using Fedora Linux."
In Deepin 20.2.4 many of the DDE applications have been patched and optimized to improve the overall user experience.
Deepin is a rising star among Linux distros thanks to its combination of an elegant desktop environment with the stability and reliability of Debian. Deepin’s primary goal is to offer a dependable but also beautiful and easy to use work environment.
Deepin features its own desktop environment called DDE (Deepin Desktop Environment) which is built on Qt and available for various distributions like Arch Linux, Fedora, Manjaro, openSUSE and Ubuntu. DDE brings a clean, elegant, modern, and professional-looking user interface.
Linux does not belong to any specific country -- the open source kernel can be enjoyed by people all over the world. This includes China, a great ally of the United States. We depend on China to manufacture many of our goods, but also, developers in that country contribute to open source projects.
Case in point, deepin is a Linux-based operating system from China that is both beautiful and elegant. For some, it could be a nice alternative to Windows 11. deepin is a miraculous Chinese gift to the open source community. Today, the wonderful deepin developers release version 20.2.4 of the Linux distribution. Based on Debian, it uses Linux kernel 5.13.13 and has a new global search feature.
We’ve been eagerly following the development of the WiFiWart for some time now, as a quad-core Cortex-A7 USB phone charger with dual WiFi interfaces that runs OpenWrt sounds exactly like the sort of thing we need in our lives. Unfortunately, we’ve just heard from [Walker] that progress on the project has been slowed down indefinitely by crippling chip shortages.
At this point, we’ve all heard how the chip shortage is impacting the big players out there. It makes sense that automakers are feeling the pressure, since they are buying literally millions of components at a clip. But stories like this are a reminder that even an individual’s hobby project can be sidelined by parts that are suddenly 40 times as expensive as they were when you first put them in your bill of materials.
With its copious number of GPIO pins and native USB, the Raspberry Pi Pico is arguably the ideal microcontroller for developing your own platform agnostic USB Human Input Devices. But you don’t have to take our word for it. Check out how quickly the $4 USD board allowed [Alberto Nunez] to put together a pair of foot pedals for his computer.
Vecow’s rugged, Linux-ready “ECX-2400 AI” computer combines a 10th Gen CPU with a Blaize Xplorer AI PCIe card along with 6x GbE (4x with PoE), 4x SATA, 6x USB 3.2, 3x M.2, 2x mini-PCIe, and PCIe x4.
Vecow and Blaize have teamed up on a powerful AI edge computer that features a choice of single- or quad-core, PCIe form-factor Blaize Xplorer X1600P AI accelerator cards. The 260 x 240 x 104mm ECX-2400 AI is even bigger than Vecow’s pleasantly plump ECX-2200/2100 Series computers, which similarly runs Linux or Win 10 on Intel’s 10th Gen Comet-Lake-S CPUs.
Panfrost open-source driver for Arm Mali Bifrost and Midgard GPUs has come a long way, and Hardkernel’s ODROID-N2+ board now supports Ubuntu 21.10 and Chromium OS with 3D graphics acceleration through the Panfrost driver.
As a reminder, ODROID-N2+ is a single board computer powered by an Amlogic S922X Rev.C processor clocked at 2.4GHz with an Arm Mali-G52 GPU, with up to 4GB RAM, and which comes with HDMI 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, four USB 3.0 ports, plus a GPIO header.
If you’re of a certain vintage and have ever done any technical drawing, chances are good that you used a r0tring of some kind, be it pencil or pen. Well, r0tring makes more than writing implements. They also made electronic scribers — a small plotter that pens ISO lettering on technical drawings based on typed input. This was a huge time saver over doing it freehand or stenciling each letter. The CS-50 is designed to hold the top-of-the-line r0tring drawing pen, which turned out to be the most expensive part of this restoration aside from the time spent sniffing out issues.
After compiling the open source cyusb linux suite, I was successfully able to connect to the EZ-USB FX2 and upload one of the included demonstration firmware images into RAM. After the Sling Adapter renumerated, a program running on the computer was able to establish a loop-back connection with the firmware. While I haven’t personally tested it yet, you should be able to use the official (and relatively modern) EZ-USB FX3 Software Development Kit from Cypress to start writing your own firmware as its backwards compatible with FX2.
The Manjaro ARM project is proud to announce our sixteenth BETA release for the PinePhone running Phosh!
The Volla Phone and Volla Phone X have each received an update with bug fixes this month. After the security update for the new model is up to date, we will also update the Volla Phone.
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The latest update, OTA-19, fixes a bug that caused it to repeatedly confirm the WLAN connection. We are already working on the next update. With it, we want to introduce a more convenient setup of a VPN for anonymizing traffic on the Internet, as well as handling a second call during a conversation.
Linux PC maker System76 is now selling an updated version of its Oryx Pro high-performance notebooks. The Fedora Linux team has released a beta of Fedora 35. Manjaro Linux developers have released a new build of their mobile Linux distro for the PinePhone. And there’s a workaround for folks who had installed Windows 11 in a virtual machine without TPM and found themselves unable to apply updates after Microsoft started enforcing restrictions.
Two days ago, Google released a new version of its web browser, Chrome 94, which has come with many changes, such as improved HTTPS connections, better integration with Google Drive or performance improvements thanks to the new WebGPU API. However, not all is good news for users of the Google browser, and this new version also includes a new controversial function that, if you are the least concerned about your privacy, you should take into account.
The term “extern” has been used to define the global variables within the C language. The word “extern” indicates that it is abbreviated from the word “external” which means outside. Hence, these variables are globally accessible throughout the C code. These variables are always initialized and defined outside of the main method. This guide is for the users who want to explore the working of the “extern” variable using the C language. So, let’s go ahead.
The bind() system call binds an address or name with any socket in the C language. This system call has mostly been used in socket programming. This address will be bonded to the socket descriptor. The bind() system call contains three parameters in actual. The first one is the descriptor of a socket. The second parameter is the pointer used for the address of a socket. The address must be some local path. The third argument can be the size of a socket address. Today’s guide will see how the “bind()” system call works in Ubuntu 20.04 using the C language. So, log in from the system first.
Ptrace() system call is generally used for debugging breakpoints and tracing system calls. The ptrace() “process trace” system call is frequently used for debugging purposes. It is the main way that native debuggers keep track. Tracees can be paused, registers and memory can be inspected and set, system calls can be monitored, and even system calls can be intercepted using Ptrace system call. The Tracee must first be connected to the tracer. In a multithreaded process, each thread can be separately attached to a possibly distinct tracer or left unattached and therefore un-debugged. As a result, “Tracee” always refers to “a potentially multithreaded process, never or maybe multithreaded process.
All signals provided to the traced process, except for one, cause it to stop, regardless of its registered signal processing, and deliver an event towards the tracing process, which may be identified using the wait () system function. The SIGKILL signal is an exception, as it is delivered instantly and accomplishes the expected behavior. There has never been a standard for Ptrace system call. Its interface is comparable across operating systems, notably in terms of essential functionality, but it differs slightly from one system to the next.
System calls can be traced using the Linux edition of ptrace. The PTRACE SYSCALL request restarts the child process in the same way that PTRACE CONT does, but it arranges for it to stop at the next system call entry or exit. This brings up a lot of new opportunities. For PTRACE PEEK requests, ptrace() will return the desired data; it will return zero for all the other requests. All requests that fail return -1, with errno set to the optimum value. In the case of PTRACE PEEK requests, -1 may be a legitimate return value; the program is responsible for determining whether this is an error situation or a valid return value. This guide will explain to you the functionality of the ptrace() system call in C language with one example.
In general, thread synchronization primitives necessitate the use of system calls by userspace programs. The system call is inherently inevitable for placing a thread to sleep and waiting for another thread or waking up a thread from sleep. Obtaining an uncontended lock, for example, does not necessitate a system call, at least not naturally. The futex is the remedy to this challenge. A futex is simply an instantaneous integer address. The address is used to identify a queue of threads that are waiting to be processed. The value of the integer at that location is utilized to execute the fast path with atomic operations if available, as well as to handle corner case race situations in the event of a conflict. The futex() system call allows a program to wait for a value at a particular address to change, as well as wake up anyone waiting on that address. It is most commonly used to implement the debatable case of a shared memory lock, as mentioned in futex (7). When a futex(7) action in userspace fails to complete without error, a call to the kernel is required to resolve the issue. Arbitration can be used to either put the calling process to sleep or to wake up a waiting process. The semantics defined in the futex is expected to be followed by callers of this function (7).
Because these semantics require authoring non-portable assembly instructions, most users will most likely be library authors rather than ordinary application developers. Futex is a single system call that performs many operations. That may appear strange, even perplexing, if not downright. That is, nevertheless, standard procedure for a one-of-a-kind system call: the “ioctl” system call contains considerably more operations than futex. For another instance, programmers are unlikely to discover because Glibc hides it, although the single socket call system implements all socket-related functions. As a result, if threads access it in a single process, it can be specified as a global variable or stored in a shared memory segment if threads from various processes utilize it. A state updated in userspace using atomic operations is stored in the shared variable. There is no need for a system call when the state says that there is no conflict. If the condition indicates a contention, on the other side, a futex system call is made to put the calling task to sleep.
Getline is the newest and most popular function for reading a string of text (). The getline() function is part of the C library. This function accepts a string from the input stream as an input, so getline() is a better option. The concept of pointers is used by getline(). For reading text, the getline method is the ideal way. The getline method reads a full line from a stream, such as a newline character. To finish the input, use the getline function to generate a stop character. The command will be completed, and this character will be removed from the input. We all have the cin object to take user input; however, the cin object doesn’t allow us to receive user input in many lines; therefore, we can use the getline() function to take input from the input stream in several lines or a string till a delimiter character is discovered.
The getline function uses the realloc function to automatically increase the memory block as required, ensuring that there is never a space shortage. This is one of the explanations why getline is safe. The value returned inside the second parameter will also inform us of the new block size. It returns -1 if an error appears, such as reaching the end of a file without receiving any bytes. Getline functions cease reading input from the stream when they meet a newline character or the end of a file.Syntax
The program discontinuity, which marks the termination of the process’s data segment, i.e., the program breakdown is the first position following the completion of the uninitialized data segment, can be changed using brk(). Increasing the program break allows memory to the process; reducing the break allows memory to the process. When that amount is sensible, the system would have enough memory, and the process does not surpass its maximum data size, brk() sets the ending of the data segment to the value supplied by the addr. Brk() returns zero if it succeeds. If there comes an error, -1 is returned. The system functions brk(), and sbrk() is utilized to regulate the amount of memory allotted towards the process’s data segment. Usually, these functions are invoked from a larger memory management library function like malloc. The program break, which identifies the end of the process’s heap section, is moved about with brk() and sbrk(). brk() assigns the value of addr to the ending of the heap segment. sbrk() increases the heap space of the program by increment bytes. It takes you back to the earlier program break. The present location of the program break can be found by calling sbrk() with just a raise of 0.
The malloc is a C language function used to allocate memory to some variable. It also returns a pointer. We can also use the Malloc function to check for errors about memory allocation. When a malloc method finds itself unable to allocate memory, it usually returns NULL. You can also through an error message if the allocation got failed upon managing the pointers. In this guide, we will see the implementation of the malloc function to allocate memory and check the error for memory allocation. So, start the implementation by simply log in from the Linux system.
Postgresql group by clause is a feature that is used to unite/combine those rows in the table that have the same data. This clause is mainly used to remove duplicate data and to maintain concurrency. Whenever we want to calculate sum, or any other aggregate like AVG, etc., this group by clause is always used as there are many clauses used in PostgreSQL. But there exists a hierarchy between each clause.
Postgresql database is more reliable than others because it can create and store the data in the form of relations, procedures, etc. Postgresql is a customizable database, as we can modify the storage containers according to our requirements. The data in Postgresql is managed by the schemas and catalogs. Postgresql supports many languages, which means that we can execute queries in any programming language either in the psql (shell) or on the pgAdmin side.
Just like the temporary tables, we also use some other features to involve the storage capacity. These are called the “STORED PROCEDURES”. These are not shown like the tables. But silently works with the tables.
In Postgresql or any other database management system, we use functions to perform operations on the data. These functions are user-created or user-defined. One major drawback of these functions is that we are unable to execute transactions inside the functions. We cannot commit or rollback. That’s why we use the stored procedures. By using these procedures, application performance is increased. Moreover, we can use more than one SQL statement inside a single procedure. There are three types of parameters.
PostgreSQL like other database management systems supports the standard streams. These streams are responsible for manipulating data for storage in PostgreSQL. These are the input and output channels of communication between the application and the environment that is created at the time of execution.
Whenever we execute a command in PostgreSQL, the streams make the connection with the text terminal where the psql (shell) is running. However, in the case of inheritance, each child’s process inherits the streams from the parent process. Not every program needs these streams to be introduced in the code, some functions such as getchar() and putchar() use the input and output streams automatically. Streams lie in the category of 3.
Postgresql database, like other databases, can store data that remain intact for a long time. This can be done by removing redundancy from the data in the schema by maintaining concurrency and accuracy of data present. While adding data in relations, you might encounter such a situation in which you don’t notice the replication of the inserted data at the time of inserting. To remove the garbage values or similar data, we need some special functions to keep the rest of the values unique and distinct. Count () is a built-in function of PostgreSQL. By using this function, we can get information regarding the data present in the table. Postgresql deals with the count () very effectively by displaying data to the provided conditions. To get the distinct data or the values in terms of discrimination with other data, we need some different commands and the count (). This article will highlight the examples applied on different relations to elaborate the concept of counting unique values in PostgreSQL.
Firstly, you need to create a database in the installed PostgreSQL. Otherwise, Postgres is the database that is created by default when you start the database. We will use psql to start implementation. You may use pgAdmin.
To describe the tables of a database, we don’t need any permissions or privileges of the user. Anyone can describe the information regarding the table. “postgresql describe table” refers to checking the table structure. We can use various examples with variety in their usage leads to gain the description of the data. This will be understood by you while reading the article.
The calculating median is obliging to get the middle value from the data. Like many other functions, Postgresql provides a wide range of versatility in dealing with the median function. It is concerned with finding the median value from the column of the table on which median is used. In contrast with Postgresql aggregate functions COUNT, SUM, there is not a specific function used to calculate the aggregate of the median. Median is a user-defined function.
In simple arithmetic functions, there are different means and formulas to find the median in any provided data either in plain text or in the tabular form. Whereas in the case of database systems, we use some other built-in functions combined to get the value of the median. This article will elaborate on some of the most efficient techniques and also a manual function created by us to fetch the median from the data in Postgresql.
Whenever we talk about PostgreSQL, we always think about databases because it is a database management system. You can create as many databases of your choice on your PostgreSQL server as you want. After creating a database of your choice, you can create multiple tables within it to store your data, and then you can perform different calculations on that data. However, at times, we want to run a query on an existing database, but for that, the existence of such a database is mandatory.
What we mean to say is that we need a mechanism to check if a database exists on our PostgreSQL server or not. Moreover, there are some situations in which we want a database to be created once we run a query if it does not already exist on our database server. In that case, the “Create Database if not Exists” notation comes into play. This guide aims to introduce you to the usage of this notation with a brief discussion on whether PostgreSQL supports this notation or not. After that, we will share with you a PostgreSQL-supported alternative for this notation.
Joe Biden promised me at the Democratic National Convention that he would work towards a national health insurance public option. My Senator, Michael Bennet, put forward a national public option plan, called Medicare-X earlier this year. A limited version of the public option is re-emerging in the Build Back Better bill to fix the so-called Medicaid gap, which traps low income people in conservative states (Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Wisconsin, and Wyoming) without health care. Reforms in progressive states like Washington, Nevada and Colorado are leading the way.
A new congressional report released Wednesday revealing the baby food industry has failed to keep products with heavy metals off the shelves spurred calls for federal authorities to enact swift action and tough limits on toxin levels.
"This is what happens when you let the food and chemical companies, not the FDA, decide whether our food is safe to eat," said Scott Faber, senior vice president for government affairs at Environmental Working Group (EWG), in a statement.
Public health advocates on Wednesday brought towering piles of prop bones to the homes of a top White House aide and Moderna's CEO in a bid to spur the Biden administration and Big Pharma to save countless lives around the world by ramping up Covid-19 vaccine production and technology-sharing.
"The world's current shortage of Covid-19 vaccines is really the result of deliberate policy choices."—Dr. Rebecca Zash,Harvard Medical School
We know from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data that just over 100 people, on average, are killed by firearms in the U.S. every day. That includes crimes, suicides, gun accidents and shootings involving law enforcement.
But how often is someone injured by a firearm in America? Why, how and what kinds of weapons are used? What are the underlying causes? What's the relationship between shooter and victim? What evidence-based, scalable programs work best to help prevent criminal shootings, accidents and suicides? On these and other questions, people in public health, criminal justice, policing and academia admit they lack full and adequate answers.
Global cyber security firm Kaspersky claims to have discovered a new backdoor it has named Tomiris which shows signs of being connected to the same actor behind the attacks on SolarWinds which were revealed last year.
The House on Wednesday passed bipartisan legislation aimed at strengthening the federal cybersecurity workforce, an issue that has garnered support following a year of massive information security incidents.
The Federal Rotational Cyber Workforce Program Act, sponsored by Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), would establish a program to allow cybersecurity professionals to rotate through multiple federal agencies and enhance their expertise.
The bill would also encourage federal agency leaders to identify cybersecurity positions that can be rotated through government, and give the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) jurisdiction over the Federal Rotational Cyber Workforce Program.
Middleboxes are, unfortunately in many ways, a big part of today's internet. While middleboxes inhabit the same physical niche as routers, they are not aimed at packet forwarding; instead they are meant to monitor and manipulate the packets that they see. The effects of those devices on users of the networks they reign over may be unfortunate as well, but the rest of the internet is only affected when trying to communicate with those users—or so it was thought. Based on some recently reported research, it turns out that middleboxes can be abused to inflict denial-of-service (DoS) attacks elsewhere on the net.
Though it lacks the catchy nickname and logo that have come to dominate security research reporting over the last few years, the "Weaponizing Middleboxes for TCP Reflected Amplification" web site describes a potent threat. The researchers, Kevin Bock, Abdulrahman Alaraj, Yair Fax, Kyle Hurley, Eric Wustrow, and Dave Levin, found flaws in the TCP/IP implementation of various middleboxes that allow DoS attacks via amplification. The middleboxes they studied are those deployed by government organizations for the purposes of censorship, but "even benign deployments of firewalls and intrusion prevention systems in non-censoring nation-states can be weaponized using the techniques we discovered".
In February, KrebsOnSecurity wrote about a novel cybercrime service that helped attackers intercept the one-time passwords (OTPs) that many websites require as a second authentication factor in addition to passwords. That service quickly went offline, but new research reveals a number of competitors have since launched bot-based services that make it relatively easy for crooks to phish OTPs from targets.
Just a few days ago, Clearview -- the company that scrapes the web to build a facial recognition database it sells to law enforcement, government agencies around the world, and a number of private parties -- decided to make itself even less likable.
A new school year has started, the second one since the pandemic began. With our education system becoming increasingly reliant on the use of technology (“edtech”), especially for remote learning during the pandemic, protecting student privacy is more important than ever. Unfortunately, the Future of Privacy Forum’s 2020 Student Privacy Pledge, like the legacy version, continues to provide schools, parents, and students with false assurance due to numerous loopholes for the edtech company signatories that collect and use student data.
The Future of Privacy Forum (FPF) originally launched the Student Privacy Pledge in 2014 to encourage edtech companies to take voluntary steps to protect the privacy of K-12 students. In 2016, we criticized the Legacy Pledge after it reached 300 signatories—to FPF’s dismay.
The 2020 Pledge once again falls short in how it defines material terms, such as “Student PII” and “School Service Providers”; many of the 2020 Pledge’s commitments are conditioned on school or parent/student consent, which may inadequately protect student privacy; and new commitments are insufficiently precise.
And now that iOS 15 brings with it the capability to locate your phone even if the battery has run out or it’s been turned off — if you’ve got the right phone — the utility of Find My has become even greater.
GM is thinking of some advanced features. A car could include settings to slow down teen drivers in school zones. The system may also be able to host V2X, a vehicle-to-everything app that enables cars to communicate with other, similarly equipped vehicles to alert drivers to hazards or changing road conditions.
The NBI decided to try Clearview AI after it was recommended at a meeting hosted by European law enforcement group Europol in 2019.
In the reprimand issued to the NBI on Tuesday, the Deputy Data Protection Ombudsman noted that the police had used a facial recognition programme without adequately ensuring in advance that the app complied with data security or data protection legislation.
“It wouldn't be hard for the enemy to set up a fake mobile phone tower, for example, acting as a 'Man in the Middle' to steal all the data in transit,” he says. “If Bond is 'in country' then mass data collection and analysis at an infrastructure level is also a possibility. In short, like anything in cybersecurity, he would be expected to weigh up the risk and return with any technology and make a call, or not make a call.”
Imagine that you are strolling along a tranquil beach in your swimsuit. Suddenly, a stranger walking toward you takes out their phone and starts recording you. You might work up the courage to ask how they dared to invade your privacy, and demand they delete the footage.
Fortunately, overt recording of people in public spaces is not as common as it could be, because it involves pointing a camera at someone. But it just became a lot easier with Facebook and Ray-Ban’s new mainstream tool to secretly surveil people: Stories smart glasses (as pictured above).
Below, we’ll unpack why you shouldn’t buy these wearable surveillance cameras, why they can’t be used safely in public spaces, and why Facebook and other companies need to prioritise human rights when developing “smart” glasses.
As a parting shot, on its way out of Afghanistan, the United States military launched a drone attack that the Pentagon called a “righteous strike.” The final missile fired during 20 years of occupation, that August 29 air strike averted an Islamic State car-bomb attack on the last American troops at Kabul’s airport. At least, that’s what the Pentagon told the world.
“I do believe we are in a struggle for the future of our country,” she said, adding that "the January 6 insurrection at our capitol was a terrorist attack.”
A ââ¬Å¾hotspot“ for asylum seekers is opening on Samos, which inmates describe as ââ¬Å¾Guantanamo“. The EU Commission finds such facilities dignified, and therefore finances them completely. The pilot project will be monitored with motion detectors, behavioural recognition and drones.
Emergency responders said that the blast did not look like an accident, in a country that has suffered dozens of actual or attempted bombings linked to violent criminal gangs in recent years.
In 2020, police recorded 107 detonations in the country of 10.3 million inhabitants, with another 102 recorded incidents involving attempted blasts or preparations.
The arrest was reported on Tuesday, a day after Dutch media said Mr Rutte had been given extra security over fears that he may be the target of an attack or kidnapping by a criminal gang.
Criminal gangs known locally as bandits have terrorised northwest and central Nigeria for years, but they have become more brazen in recent months and the military has renewed operations in the region.
Pope Francis on Wednesday praised young environmental activists for challenging global leaders on emission policies ahead of a United Nations climate summit next month.
The 'August Rebellion', or Syyskapina, is calling on Finland's government to declare a climate and environmental emergency, and to create binding legislation that will achieve carbon neutrality by 2025, a decade ahead of the government's current goal of 2035.
Indigenous and environmental activists on Wednesday vowed to keep up the fight against Enbridge's Line 3 pipeline expansion after the Canadian company announced the completion of the multi-billion-dollar tar sands project.
"From the belly of the beast north of the medicine line to rice beds that sustain the life-ways of the Anishinaabe... we will continue to fight for the natural and spiritual knowledge of the Earth."—IEN
Household gas boilers in the UK release over double the carbon dioxide of all gas-fired power stations in the country, a new study has revealed.
Analysis of data from energy regulator Ofgem shows that domestic gas boilers also emit over eight and a half times as much harmful nitrogen oxide than the UK’s entire gas power fleet, increasing the risk of respiratory illnesses.
Known around the world as the "alternative Nobel Prize" to honor and support "courageous people solving global problems," the Right Livelihood Award was granted Wednesday to three activists from Cameroon, Canada, and Russia as well as a legal group in India.
Right Livelihood has recognized nearly 200 laureates from more than 70 countries since its founding over four decades ago. This year, the Stockholm-based organization considered a record 206 nominees from 89 nations, executive director Ole von Uexkull said during a press conference.
A conversation between National Academy of Sciences fellow Dr. Sarah Myhre and National Poetry Series winner Teresa K. Miller on bearing witness to the climate crisis through science and storytelling.
It’s important to look at longitudinal trends in protest to understand how mass political action has changed in recent years. Data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) makes clear that the frequency of demonstration events grew significantly in North America from the late 2000s and early 2010s – during the early Obama years – compared to in the mid-2010s, late in his presidency. Protest events were the most frequent during Trump’s first year in office, and relatively more common in 2018 and 2019 than during the Obama years. The CSIS estimates are not completely ideal, since they refer to all protests in North America, rather than to those in the U.S. However, our alternative measure of news coverage of both “protest” and “demonstrations,” drawn from the Nexis Uni academic database and covering The New York Times as the nation’s “paper of record,” reveals a similar trend. As the figure below demonstrates, total coverage of protests over the last 20 years – measured in number of articles per month – increased significantly over time, spiking in 2003 during the Iraq war, and later in 2011 coinciding with the Madison, Wisconsin protests of Republican Governor Scott Walker’s assault on state worker’s and collective bargaining and with the rise of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and finally during the mid-to-late 2010s with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Protest coverage reached its highest point in 2020, coinciding with the rise of the George Floyd protests, only to fall dramatically in 2021.
If we were to offer a simplistic explanation for the dramatic decline in protest and protest coverage in 2021, we might adopt the much-repeated leftist platitude that the Democratic Party is the “graveyard of social movements,” and that the rise of Joe Biden’s presidency represents yet another example of how social movements are co-opted and assaulted by smooth-talking Democratic officials who promise to respond to rising protests during Republican administrations but deliver on little to none of their promises. There is some real substantive appeal to this explanation, in that there has been a dramatic decline in protest this year, and it does coincide with the rise of an administration that has promised action on the climate and to address concerns with racial inequality but has not thus far implemented solutions on these pressing crises.
Labour’s transport spokesperson has rejected calls to “pause” expansions at UK airports during a party conference event on how to “build back greener” after the Covid-19 pandemic.
Jim McMahon, Labour’s shadow transport secretary, claimed that some flights were “too cheap”, however, while speaking on a panel event on Tuesday alongside Andy Brown, group corporate affairs director at Manchester Airports Group and Karen Dee, CEO of the Airports Operations Association.
Wildlife conservationists on Wednesday welcomed the U.S. Department of the Interior's imminent reversal of a Trump administration attempt to roll back a key law credited with saving the lives of millions of migratory birds each year.
"Oil and gas companies must be held accountable when their actions lead to wildlife deaths."—Jennifer Rokala,Center for Western Priorities
Let’s call it the Point Reyes National Scandal.
With its decision, the National Park Service perpetuates the following 12 environmental problems, indeed enshrines them in future park management. The Park Service ignores the overwhelming proportion of public comments urging the agency to solve each one by the simple act of ending the leasing of Park Service lands for commercial agriculture. Each one of the following major problems, by itself, presents sufficient cause to compel the Park Service to end commercial ranching on Point Reyes National Seashore for good.
Mitch McConnell just had Republicans in the Senate declare a filibuster against a simple piece of legislation that would raise the debt ceiling to keep the federal government running, telling Democrats if they want to avoid a massive and destructive government shutdown they're going to have to raise the debt ceiling using reconciliation.
I’ve been writing about quacks for over 20 years now if you count my time on Usenet before I launched the first iteration of this blog in 2004. Indeed, my very first (substantive) post asked the question: How can intelligent people use alternative medicine? Soon after, I started deconstructing alternative cancer cure “testimonials” (with many variations over the years) and thus this blog was born. Over the years, I’ve occasionally contemplate another question: Do those pushing alternative medicine “miracle cures,” be they for cancer or other serious diseases, really believe in their quackery or are they just in it for the grift? In other words, are they true believers or scamming grifters? The answer is more complicated than I had initially thought, but when you come right down to it often they’re both. They believed, which led them to start selling their “cures,” and now they’re in it for the grift too.
According to a White House analysis (9/23/21), the country’s 400 wealthiest families have an effective tax rate of just over 8%. At the New York Times (9/23/21), reporter Jim Tankersley was quick to cast doubt on the figure.
Nearly a decade and a half after I’d learned it, the Goldman Rule had only grown in importance. In January 2020, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon declared that Goldman would refuse to take companies public unless they had at least one “diverse” member on their board. Goldman didn’t specify who counted as “diverse,” other than to say that it had a “focus on women.” The bank said that, “this decision is rooted first and foremost in our conviction that companies with diverse leadership perform better,” and that board diversity “reduces the risk of groupthink.”
Personally, I believe the best way to achieve diversity of thought on a corporate board is to simply screen board candidates for the diversity of their thoughts, not the diversity of their genetically inherited attributes. But that wasn’t what bothered me most about Goldman’s announcement. The bigger problem was that its edict wasn’t about diversity at all. It was about corporate opportunism: seizing an already popular social value and prominently emblazoning it with the Goldman Sachs logo. This was just its latest version of pretending to plant trees in Harlem.
The timing of Goldman’s announcement was telling. In the prior year, approximately half the open board seats at S&P 500 companies went to women. In July 2019, the last remaining all-male board in the S&P 500 appointed a woman. In other words, every single company in the S&P 500 was already abiding by Goldman’s diversity standard long before Goldman issued its proclamation.
Goldman’s announcement was hardly a profile in courage; it was just an ideal way to attract praise without taking any real risk: another great risk-adjusted return for Goldman Sachs.
Unfortunately, of course, there is a hint of truth to this. Last spring, as a child molestation scandal might have sunk her along with former Providence Superintendent Harrison Peters, she accused an unnamed Providence Teachers Union member for calling her the undeniably racist name “AnHELLica.” August Bebel famously quipped that antisemitism was “the socialism of fools” and there certainly were a few clowns taking center ring that day. These clowns have taken center stage quite a few times in the past few years. Owing to a dearth of political education, for example, one group of teachers that were displaced from Cooley High School ended up ranting to the School Board about “political correctness” as if they had just walked out of a Limbaugh broadcast studio.
Yet despite these issues, which should not be ignored or brushed aside, the scandals remain.
The Republican Party with Donald Trump as its leader is trying to destroy America as we know it.
Here in Montana there’s not much debate over who is calling the shots. The Republicans took every state-level office in the last election and, other than the judiciary, are in total control of state government. We now have a Republican governor, solid Republican majorities in both chambers of the Legislature, a Republican superintendent of public instruction, state auditor, secretary of state, and all-Republican Public Service Commission.
Basically, what that means is anything that goes wrong or right in our state government, elections, lawmaking, education system, insurance or utility regulation fall for better or worse in the Republicans’ laps. And yes, that means holding them accountable for those outcomes€ — which doesn’t mean criticism is necessarily motivated by political partisanship, there’s just no one else to criticize for the decisions when one party holds all the power.
Corporations threatened by the prospect of paying a slightly higher tax rate and exercising a little less power over working people are spending millions to sabotage a far-reaching Democratic reconciliation bill that would expand the social safety net and bolster climate action.
"We pulled the curtain back on corporate America to find they were trying to put Congress in a headlock."—Sondra Youdelman, People's Action
Defenders of the U.S. Postal Service are urgently renewing their calls for the ouster of Postmaster General Louis DeJoy as his 10-year plan to overhaul the cherished government institution is set to take effect Friday, ushering in permanently slower mail delivery while hiking prices for consumers.
"DeJoy calls his plan 'Delivering for America,' but it will do the exact opposite—slowing€ many First Class Mail deliveries down, taking their standard from three to five days," Porter McConnell of Take on Wall Street, a co-founder of the Save the Post Office Coalition, warns in a video posted online late Tuesday.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Tuesday joined fellow Sen. Bernie Sanders in backing House progressives as they fight to ensure that Democrats' reconciliation package—a potentially historic investment in climate action and the social safety net—passes before Congress gives final approval to a bipartisan infrastructure bill.
"We had a deal. And that deal was in place long before we voted here in the Senate."
A new report released Wednesday reveals the extent to which a handful of corporate Democrats "are choosing a minority of wealthy households over the millions of children in their states who would benefit from the expansion of the child tax credit" proposed in the Build Back Better Act.
"It makes no sense economically to hold hostage real help for families just to protect tax breaks for a tiny, wealthy minority."—Kyle Herrig, Accountable.US
At the start of the pandemic, international jetsetters were rushing home to quarantine in five-star hotels at Australian taxpayers’ expense. And complaining about it. At the same time, governments around the country were ‘ring-fencing the vulnerable’ by blocking access to aged care centres, and closing remote Aboriginal communities. Meanwhile in Wilcannia, a chronically overcrowded Aboriginal community in a remote corner of the Far West of NSW, residents there couldn’t even convince the Berejiklian government to give them tents so they could isolate from the virus in their own backyards. Now, 18 months after the COVID-19 crisis began, more than one third of the community has contracted the disease in a shocking outbreak that has captured the world’s attention. Chris Graham, Cherie von Horchner and Jack Marx report*.
With reproductive freedom under attack nationwide, six advocacy groups on Wednesday delivered 300,000 petition signatures pressuring the U.S. Senate to urgently pass House-approved legislation that would ensure the right to abortion under federal law.
The petition delivery and press conference outside the U.S. Capitol came ahead of hundreds of marches planned for Saturday across the country. Organizers of the #RallyforAbortionJustice events are calling on members of Congress to pass both the Equal Access to Abortion Coverage in Health Insurance (EACH) Act and the Women's Health Protection Act (WHPA).
[...] Now in its third release, it effectively supports the drafting of legal documents using Akoma Ntoso compatible schemes. However, the tool, originally developed for cooperative legislative drafting, can be repurposed to draft parliamentary control documents. This is achieved through the use of actor-oriented software components, referred to as software agents, which enable system interoperability by interlinking the text editing system with parliamentary control datasets. [...]
The accessibility and reuse of legal data is paramount for promoting transparency, accountability and, ultimately, trust towards governance institutions. The aggregation of structured and semi-structured legal data inevitably leads to the big data realm and a series of challenges for the generation, handling, and analysis of large datasets. When it comes to data generation, LEOS represents a legal informatics tool that is maturing quickly. Now in its third release, it effectively supports the drafting of legal documents using Akoma Ntoso compatible schemes. However, the tool, originally developed for cooperative legislative drafting, can be repurposed to draft parliamentary control documents. This is achieved through the use of actor-oriented software components, referred to as software agents, which enable system interoperability by interlinking the text editing system with parliamentary control datasets. A validated corpus of written questions from the Hellenic Parliament is used to evaluate the feasibility of the endeavour, and the feasibility of using it as an authoring tool for written parliamentary questions and generation of standardised, open, legislative data. Systemic integration not only proves the tool’s versatility, but also opens up new grounds in interoperability between formerly unrelated legal systems and data sources.
The report found that [astroturfer] farms were reaching the same demographic groups singled out by the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency (IRA) during the 2016 election, which had targeted Christians, Black Americans, and Native Americans. A 2018 BuzzFeed News investigation found that at least one member of the Russian IRA, indicted for alleged interference in the 2016 US election, had also visited Macedonia around the emergence of its first [astroturfer] farms, though it didn’t find concrete evidence of a connection. (Facebook said its investigations hadn’t turned up a connection between the IRA and Macedonian [astroturfer] farms either.)
House Bill 20, which passed on Sept. 9, prohibits email service providers from "impeding the transmission of email messages based on content." Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University of Law whose research and teaching focuses on internet, IP [sic] and advertising law topics, says this restricts efforts to control email spam.
The law has four main provisions:
[...]
a ban on email service providers blocking spam, coupled with a private right of action and statutory damages…for any spammer whose spam gets blocked. THIS IS THE STUPIDEST POSSIBLE POLICY THE LEGISLATURE COULD ADOPT, AND TEXAS RESIDENTS BOMBARDED BY SPAM WILL BE SHOCKED THAT THEIR LEGISLATURE SCREWED THEM OVER.
The short story is that the initial version of SESTA didn’t link 1595 to 1591, which caused many objectors–myself included–to raise concerns that 1595’s lower scienter requirements would reach too many unintended defendants. In response to this concern, after a pivotal Senate Commerce Committee meeting (one of the most stressful moments of my professional career), the SESTA Manager’s Amendment (which got rolled verbatim into FOSTA) added the heightened scienter requirement–which is what caused the Internet Association (as ordered by Facebook) to flip on SESTA and endorse it. So efforts to write the 1591 precondition out of the statute are an attempt by plaintiffs to reclaim the original SESTA proposal, even though that’s exactly what Congress chose NOT to do as part of the bargain to advance the legislation. It’s frustrating, but hardly unexpected, to see historical revisionism by plaintiffs–but ultimately, I blame FOSTA and everyone who has supported it, because Congress was warned about these impending jurisprudential trainwrecks and went ahead anyways.
(If your head is hurting trying to sort through all of this, you are not alone).
In a series of sweeping measures, Beijing has moved to check what it considers the excesses of modern entertainment, and urged social media platforms to promote patriotic content.
The research slide decks are available on Facebook’s newsroom here, split into two PDFs. We’ve also embedded the PDFs at the bottom of this story. Notably, the two PDFs have been annotated by Facebook in an effort to provide context.
Concerns over social media’s impact on kids’ health and privacy have been a rare unifying issue in Washington, though the collective fury has failed to produce swift legislative action on proposals to regulate platforms.
YouTube announced earlier Wednesday that it would ban several prominent accounts that contained false information about vaccines, part of a larger effort by the video platform to crack down on medical misinformation.
Under the new policy, the site, owned by Google, will take down any videos that claim approved vaccines cause cancer or infertility.
Berlin denied an allegation by the Russian foreign ministry that YouTube's decision had been made with clear and tacit support from the German authorities and local media.
The center-left Social Democratic Party in Germany has narrowly claimed victory in an election that marks an end to the 16-year era of Angela Merkel’s conservative chancellorship. We look at what this means for Europe and the world with Yanis Varoufakis, a member of the Greek Parliament and the former finance minister of Greece. The SDP’s narrow victory should be viewed critically, says Varoufakis, noting that the party “ruthlessly” practiced austerity in 2008 and 2009. “Not much has changed,” Varoufakis says. “It’s not as if an opposition party won.”
Summary:€ Content moderation questions can come from all sorts of unexpected places — including custom soda bottle labels. Over the years, Coca Cola has experimented with a variety of different promotional efforts regarding more customized cans and bottles, and not without controversy. Back in 2013, as part of its “Share a Coke” campaign, the company offered bottles with common first names on the labels, which€ angered some€ who felt left out. In Israel, for example, people noticed that Arabic names€ were left off the list, although Coca Cola’s Swedish operation said that this decision was made after the local Muslim community€ asked not€ to have their names included.
In a statement to VOA, LinkedIn defended its actions, saying that as a global platform it “respects the laws that apply to us, including adhering to Chinese government regulations for our localized version of LinkedIn in China.”
Profiles that have been limited in China are still “visible across the rest of the globe,” LinkedIn said.
On Twitter, Eric Zemmour lamented this aggression, which he said was “the daily fate of so many French people”. The MP for the Alpes-Maritimes department and candidate in the right-wing primaries, Ãâ°ric Ciotti, also reacted on the social network, assuring Eric Zemmour of his “support”. “No personality involved in political life should be threatened because of their opinions,” he added.
Beyond the national security law, the government plans to toughen its censorship policies to allow it to ban or force cuts to films deemed “contrary to the interests of national security.” Such powers would also be retroactive, meaning the authorities could bar films that were previously approved. People that show such films could face up to three years in prison.
“Part of the underlying goal of this law is to intimidate Hong Kong filmmakers, investors, producers, distributors and theaters into internalizing self-censorship,” said Shelly Kraicer, a film researcher specializing in Chinese-language cinema. “There will be a lot of ideas that just aren’t going to become projects and projects that aren’t going to be developed into films.”
RSF and its Pakistani partner, Freedom Network, are supporting the campaign that Pakistani media outlets and journalists have launched against the proposed legislation, which was first unveiled in June and would create a powerful new entity called the Pakistani Media Development Authority (PMDA).
"When the government controls that decision for her, she is being treated as less than a full adult human responsible for her own choices."
But in the version that the ACLU shared on Twitter, it removed any reference to women.
To ensure the DSA is moving in the right direction, we are calling on the European Parliament to reject proposals that cross the line to undermine pillars of the e-Commerce Directive crucial in a free and democratic society. In a letter to members of Parliament today, we are sending a clear message that free speech online,€ protection of marginalized groups, and respect for users’ private communication are key principles that should not be up for negotiation.
Specifically, proposals by the EP Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) to limit liability exemptions for internet companies that perform basic functions of content moderation and content curation would contradict EU Court of Justice case law and result in over-removal of legitimate content at large scale. These dangerous ideas, up for committee vote this week, should be rejected. The DSA should make sure that online intermediaries continue to benefit from comprehensive liability exemptions in the EU and not be held liable for content provided by users. Any modifications that result in short-sighted content removals of legitimate speech or which otherwise do not comply with fundamental rights protections under the EU Charter and the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice should be rejected.
Further, measures that would force companies to analyze and indiscriminately monitor users’ communication or use upload filters have no place in the DSA. Protecting the privacy of users and their personal data is a fundamental right laid down in the EU Charter. They should honor users’ expectation of privacy and protect their right to communicate free of monitoring and censorship.
Wisconsin is apparently America's Karen.
On September 14, the Senate introduced the Freedom to Vote Act, a bill that would do more to protect American democracy than any law since the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The news flew under the radar in California, where citizens were busy voting in our recall election. In a sense, it was perfect timing. The recall, which saw incredibly high turnout driven by millions of ballots cast through our state’s universal vote-by-mail provision, made a strong case for precisely the kind of commonsense voting laws that we need to enact on a national level.
Back in the Trump era, when every day brought new official policies designed to make the lives of would-be-immigrants hell, Dr. Luis Romero Guerra, a dual-national who is currently strategic capacity officer for the Tijuana-based Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc (CLINIC), was finding it nearly impossible to keep up. Guerra, a tall, hefty man with cropped hair and bloodshot eyes, wearing a mauve T-shirt, jeans, and blue sneakers initially got involved in immigrant rights work a decade ago after seeing families with children incarcerated at the Dilley Family Detention Center in Texas. By the middle of the Trump presidency, tens of thousands of migrants had cooped up in Mexico in what were effectively refugee camps, as a result of the Orwellian-sounding Migrant Protection Protocols. Migrants were fleeing a brutal combination of poverty, government corruption, gang violence, and environmental collapse.
Fattah began using his technical skills almost 20 years ago to connect technologists across the Middle East and North Africa with each other and build online platforms so that others could share opinions and speak freely and privately. The role he played in using technology to amplify the messages of his fellow Egyptians—as well as his own participation in the uprising in Tahrir Square—made him a prominent global voice during the Arab Spring, and a target for the country’s repressive regimes, which have used antiterrorism laws to silence critics by throwing them in jail and depriving them of due process and other basic human rights.Fattah’s latest arrest, in 2019, occurred just six months after he was released following a five-year prison term for his role in the peaceful demonstrations of 2011. He was re-arrested in a massive sweep of activists and charged with spreading false news and belonging to a terrorist organization. The crackdown comes amidst a number of other cases in which prosecutors and investigation judges have used pre-trial detention as a method of punishment. Egypt’s counterterrorism law was amended in 2015 under President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi so that pre-trial detention can be extended for two years and, in terrorism cases, indefinitely.Fattah has been held without trial at Tora Prison, without access to books or newspapers, no exercise time or time out of the cell and—since COVID-19 restrictions came in to play—with only one visit, for twenty minutes, once a month.Over the years Fattah has continued to speak out for human rights even while jailed, and has shown great courage while facing conditions meant to silence him. Now his calls for justice and free speech will be available for all to read. “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated” is set for release in spring of 2022, and can be pre-ordered on Amazon and other online sources. Fattah speaks with passion in the book about his love for his country and why he has stood up to the regime and joined protestors in Tahrir Square.
Fattah’s family warns that he is in imminent danger, his mental health is failing after two years of cruel treatment by the Ministry of Interior and National Security. “His life is in danger, in a prison that operates completely outside the space of the law and in complete disregard of all officials,” they said in a recent statement.We urge everyone to order “You Have Not Yet Been Defeated,” and contact your elected representatives to ask that they contact their counterparts in Egypt. We must raise awareness about his situation and put pressure on the Egyptian government to release him. His book is a testament to his resilience, and we urge everyone to do everything they can so Fattah, who stands for the right to freedom of expression, association, and assembly, is not defeated.
"To be clear, the current state of the Alabama prison system is abhorrent, but the use of Covid-19 relief funds to pay for decades of our state’s neglect is simply unacceptable."—Rep. Terri Sewell (D-Ala.)
An Israeli man has been charged on Monday, Sept. 27, for murdering his own mother and hiding her body, in August earlier this year, for converting from Islam to Orthodox Christianity.
“When he mentioned that he was a pastor, we opened only to see several men outside,” the Christian said. “We rushed into one of the rooms and hid ourselves on top of the ceiling. The attackers could not find us and landed on our spiritual grandmother, saying, ‘Let us kill her.’ Another said she was too old.”
According to him, there are many Muslims who have got disillusioned with the “outdated beliefs” of Islam, but do not come out in the open due to fear of retribution. “It is the need of the hour to spread awareness that it is perfectly fine to leave Islam,” he says.
What is also worrisome for ex-Muslims is the violence perpetrated against them in the name of apostasy. “I know of a family that converted to another religion in Hyderabad. The family and children were tortured by local religious mobs to such an extent that the gentleman lost his mental balance and is now in an asylum,” he says, unwilling to reveal the identity of the family for their safety. “The killing, torture and marginalization of those who leave Islam needs to end.”
Modernizing the Universal Service Fund has been one of the hot topics for broadband this year. The fund, which extends basic telecom services to all Americans, has been called unsustainable due to its reliance on shrinking voice revenues.
Some have suggested that the fund’s reliance be wholesale replaced with general taxation from Congress, while others have said that the fund’s revenue base should be extended to include the increasing broadband revenues.
Simington prefaced his comments by saying he didn’t want to get ahead of Congress, which would set the parameters of a new regime, but raised previous recommendations – including from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr – that part of the money can come from big technology companies, like Facebook and Google.
Last year we noted how the calls to ban TikTok didn't make a whole lot of sense. For one thing, a flood of researchers have shown that TikTok is doing all the same things as many other foreign and domestic adtech-linked services we seem intent to...do absolutely nothing about.
On 21 September 2021 the Court of Appeal handed down its decision in THALER v COMPTROLLER GENERAL concerning allowability of UK patents having an AI based machine known as DABUS (short for Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) listed as an inventor. A copy of the decision can be found here.
The Court of Appeal rejected Dr Thaler’s appeal and upheld decisions of the UKIPO hearing officer and the High Court that applications were deemed withdrawn where no human inventor is named (only an AI system was named as the inventor). Dr Thaler’s appeal was rejected by a majority 2-to-1 decision.
The Court of Appeal has ruled that an artificial intelligence machine cannot qualify as an “inventor” for the purposes of Sections 7 and 13 of the Patents Act because it is not a person. Further, in determining whether a person had the right to apply for a patent under Section 7(2)(b), there was no rule of law that new intangible property produced by existing tangible property was the property of the owner of the tangible property, and certainly no rule that property in an invention created by a machine was owned by the owner of the machine.
Vivint sued Alarm.com for infringing its US Patent 6,717,513. Alarm.com responded with three different inter partes review (IPR) petitions. Those three petitions were denied at the institution stage. Two of the petitions were denied on the merits, the third petition was denied based upon the “abusive” IPR filing practices of Alarm.com (noting that there were 15 total IPRs filed involving ‘incremental petitioning’).
A year later Alarm.com petitioned for ex parte reexamination of the ‘513 patent. Most of the reexamination petition was word-for-word identical to the IPR petitions, although there was one new reference added for two of the four patentability questions. The PTO ordered the examination and eventually concluded that that the challenged claims were not patentable.
Inter Partes Review and Ex Parte Reexamination both involve an initial threshold stage where the patent office must decide whether the petition presents a sufficient case to move forward with the full review. But, the standard for IPR is much higher than that of reexamination. IPR’s are only initiated upon a finding of a “reasonable likelihood” that at least one claim will be cancelled while reexaminations require only a “substantial new question of patentability.” Thus, it logically makes sense that a challenge might fail the IPR threshold, but still be sufficient to surpass the reexam requirement.
Woven Planet, the subsidiary leading Toyota’s self-driving push, acquires a raft of global patent assets from ride-hailing app Lyft
After a two-year litigation battle, Sisvel and Oppo have agreed a peace deal that leaves the Chinese company with a licence to SEPs covering cellular technology
State IP funding programmes have helped fuel patent application growth by Chinese entities, but as subsidies are wound down the rate of increase for foreign filings is already beginning to decline
Tesla will not initiate a lawsuit against any party for infringing its patents through activity relating to electric vehicles, but it does not say anything about other technologies
While DABUS was named as the inventor on the application, the Deputy Commissioner held that an AI system was incapable of being considered the inventor for the purposes of 3.2(C)(2)(aa) of the Patents Regulations 1991 (Cth), and therefore no inventor had been named.
The question faced by the Court was whether a valid application had been lodged, not whether the application should be approved. To answer this, the Court spent substantial time considering section 15(1) (below) which prescribes who may be granted a patent, and particularly sections 15(1)(b) and (c) with respect to granting a patent to a person where the inventor is not themselves a natural person.
Germany’s deposit of its ratification of the UPC protocol on provisional application on 27 September, 2021, and suggestions that Slovenia and Austria may also ratify shortly, mean that the provisional application period during which the practical arrangements for the UPC will be put in place, which this protocol (once sufficiently ratified) will usher in, now looks likely to commence before the end of 2021 and possibly even as soon as October. If so, the UPC could start to function fully from mid-2022, as has been suggested by the UPC Preparatory Committee in recent comments.
The UPC start date is still dependent on the date of Germany’s deposit of its instrument of ratification of the UPC Agreement (UPCA) with the EU Council, but once deposited, the new court system will commence on the 1st day of the fourth month after the month in which that deposit occurs. Germany will not trigger this timetable until all the practical arrangements are in place. As the UPC Preparatory Committee commented following Germany full ratification of the protocol this week, “When it is clear that the UPC will be operational upon the entry into force of the UPCA the final ratification of the Agreement by Germany can take place serving as a “gatekeeper” for Member States to ensure a proper process”.
The German federal government has approved the rules governing the European Union's Unified Patent Court system and expects the court to begin functioning in mid-2022.
Germany's Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection announced the move Monday, which ratified the protocols for the UPC system, which is designed to allow patent disputes in the EU to be adjudicated in a single case before one court.
ENCO and DaVincia compete in the market for automated captioning of audio signals. ENCO did not invent the general concept, but its patent brings together a number of important features make it workable and with a 2000 application priority filing date.
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Unlike Barbed-wire Glidden who did have a novel way of wrapping wire compared with the prior art, I don’t believe that any of ENCO’s individual elements have a point of novelty. Rather, the novelty of the invention involves putting them all together into a method that works.
In its decision, the Federal Circuit ruled that ENCO’s claims were directed to “simply the abstract idea of automating the AV captioning process.” But, the claims did not provide any specific technological improvement: “The advance is only at the abstract level of computerization because claim 1 fails to set forth specific techniques for processing the data, instead reciting known computer techniques for automation of known processes.”
ENCO’s petition argues that “the Federal Circuit reached the wrong result” since the patent claims a “method of solving a technological problem using physical components executing defined steps to produce a tangible result.”
TikTok has agreed to settle a lawsuit with Bev Standing, the voice actress who said she was behind the app’s original text-to-speech voice. Standing sued TikTok in May, saying that the app was using her voice without permission. A robotic version of what sounded like Standing’s voice had been in the app for months, speaking over what felt like every other video at the time.
Ms Standing, a professional voice actor in Ontario, Canada, is better known as the “voice of TikTok”, the computer generated speech that narrates thousands of videos on the app.
Since launching in late 2020, TikTok’s text-to-speech feature has become one of its most viral features, giving the effect of having a virtual assistant like Siri narrating a user’s videos.
But Ms Standing, whose recordings made for a different company in 2018 were used to build the feature, says she never gave permission for her voice to be used.
On Thursday, the European Parliament’s Committee on Legal Affairs (JURI) will vote on the compromise proposals drafted by French opinion rapporteur Geoffroy Didier (EPP) on the Digital Services Act. MEP Patrick Breyer (Pirate Party), shadow rapporteur of the Greens/EFA group, considers the proposals dangerous in many respects. Together with his Renew and S&D colleagues he puts alternative compromise amendments to the vote: [...]
ââ¬Å¾The Rapporteur’s proposals are radical. They would i.e. threaten the secrecy of private correspondence and end-to-end encryption, mandate and encourage error-prone ex-ante upload filtering, introduce excessively short content take-down delays, enforce excessive national laws (e.g. in Poland or Hungary) throughout the EU and even globally, turn ââ¬Å¡trusted flaggers‘ into ââ¬Å¡trusted censors‘ and much more. I expect the vote to be very tight on several of these issues.
Cybersecurity company Group-IB, which for several years has investigated hundreds of pirate sites and their connections to organized crime, is currently in the midst of a huge scandal in Russia. Company founder Ilya Sachkov was arrested by local security services this week under suspicion of treason and working with foreign intelligence services.
In 2020, British singer-songwriter Eddy Grant filed a lawsuit against then-President Donald Trump over the unlicensed use of his 1982 song 'Electric Avenue'. Trump's lawyers attempted to have the copyright claim thrown out, claiming that any use of the song was protected under the doctrine of fair use. U.S. District Judge John Koeltl has now rejected that motion stating that the fair use factors weigh in favor of Grant.
