The Linux kernel is the main component of the Linux operating system. In general terms, the kernel is a software code that serves as a layer between the hardware and main programs that run on a computer. It was created by Linus Torvalds back in the early 1990s in Finland and licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). In other words, Torvalds was made the Linux kernel available to the world for free. There is an official website for the Linux kernel.
The rest of the system consists of other programs, many of which were written by or for the GNU Project. These utilities were then added to the Linux kernel to create a complete system. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself, because the Linux kernel alone does not form a working operating system. It can only function in the context of a complete operating system.
The Linux kernel is used by Linux distributions alongside GNU tools and libraries that interact with it. This combination is sometimes referred to as GNU/Linux.
So Linux is just a kernel, but the term Linux is far more commonly used by the public and media and that it serves as a generic term for systems that combine that kernel with software from multiple other sources. Therefore when most people say Linux, they’re really talking about a combination of the Linux kernel plus a lot of tools and libraries from the GNU Project.
To put it more clearly, Linux and GNU/Linux refer to the same operating system and software. There is still a controversy over which term is more appropriate.
Raspberry Pi is an awesome platform, the only limit is your imagination. If you want to turn your Pi into a desktop, the DeskPi aims to help you do exactly that. In this video, I'll review the DeskPi Pro v2 and give you my thoughts.
In this video, we are looking at how to install MEGAsync on Linux Lite 5.4.
The brand new L4E Show is here! Jason, Jerry and Schykle talk about their recent passion projects, then get into a somewhat disturbing conversation about the creeping invasion of our online privacy. Plus, a Software Spotlight and a proper introduction of our new co-hosts!
Recently Twitch had a massive data leak of source code, creator payouts, and information about a steam competitor but I thought I'd be good to talk about the follow up that Twitch did which I honestly don't think was that bad.
Silicon Valley technology veteran, Mary Hodder, joins Doc Searls and Aaron Newcomb on FLOSS Weekly to talk open source in construction. Home construction is the original open-source field, and nobody knows more about making it work than Hodder. Where does open source fit in the world of construction and building codes? Hodder details it all on FLOSS Weekly.
Mike just launched the secret project he's been working on for months and shares all the details.
And Chris has a surprise for the end of the show.
support falters, standardNotes, tomato powder, smokers
I'm announcing the release of the 5.14.12 kernel.
All users of the 5.14 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.14.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
Two Google engineers came to Open Source Summit North America 2021 to talk about a project to change the way the company creates and maintains the kernel it runs in its data centers on its production systems. Andrew Delgadillo and Dylan Hatch described the current production kernel (Prodkernel) and the problems that occur because it is so far from the mainline. Project Icebreaker is an effort to change that and to provide a near-mainline kernel for development and testing within Google; the talk looked at the project, its risks, its current status, and its plans.
The term "interrupt" brings to mind a signal that originates in the hardware and which is handled in the kernel; even software interrupts are a kernel concept. But there is, it seems, a use case for enabling user-space processes to send interrupts directly to each other. An upcoming Intel processor generation includes support for this capability; at the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference, Sohil Mehta ran a Kernel-Summit session on how Linux might support that feature.
Much of the free-software development world has adopted Git forges (such as GitHub, GitLab, or sourcehut) with enthusiasm. The kernel community has not. Reasons for that reticence vary, but one that is often heard is that these forges simply don't work well at the scale needed for the kernel project. At a Kernel-Summit session during the 2021 Linux Plumbers conference, Donald Zickus and Prarit Bhargava sought to show how Red Hat has put GitLab to good use to support its kernel team. Not only can these forges work for kernel development, they said, but moving to a forge can bring a number of advantages.
Love it or hate it, Linux users in a Windows world must deal with Microsoft's New Technology File System (NTFS). This has always been a pain in the rump. Even after Microsoft finally gave up on its anti-Linux rhetoric and released its patents to the open-source community and expressively opened up its exFAT patents, we still couldn't get into NTFS.
Things have changed. Starting with the Linux 5.15 kernel, NTFS is finally being fully supported in Linux. This journey hasn't been easy.
Microsoft introduced NTFS, a proprietary – naturally – journaling file system in Windows NT 3.1 in 1993. From there, it replaced 1977's File Allocation Table (FAT) file system across Windows.
[Microsoft's] Sasha Levin, one of the maintainers of the stable kernels, gave a presentation at Open Source Summit North America 2021 on a proposal for a different way to handle the stable tree. He noted that throughout most of the kernel's history, version numbers did not really mean anything, but that the versioning scheme suggests that they do, which leads to a disconnect between how the kernels are seen versus how they are actually maintained. He proposed making a "rolling stable" release that provides users what they need—timely fixes to their kernel—without forcing them to choose to switch to a new version number.
Mesa 21.3 feature development is now over with the code having been branched and the first release candidate issued.
Mesa 21.3 will be the last major feature release to this collection of open-source GPU drivers for 2021. Mesa 21.3 should debut in November if all goes well but until then will be weekly release candidates to help test out the new code that has accumulated over the past three months.
You can use markdown for anything—formatting websites, authoring books, and writing technical documentation are just some of its uses. I love how easy it is to create rich documents. Everyone has their favorite markdown editor. I have used several on my markdown journey. Here are five markdown editors I have considered.
One reaction to learning that 4BSD is where Unix started to have a stack size limit is to ask why you would bother with a stack size limit at all in an environment without threads (where a process will thus only ever have one stack). There are a number of reasons that operating systems have generally done this, and probably why it starts in Unix in the 4BSD line, which ran on 32-bit VAX systems instead of the 16-bit PDP-11s that V7 did.
Imagine what happens when you forget the WHERE. It's the last thing on the line as shown, so you could send off the command early and it would totally work. It would look like this: [...]
The process of git repository cloning is initiated on a daily basis in the DevOps world. But, if you simply issue a git clone command, the cloning process will create a new directory for the repository. In this tutorial, we will help you learn how to clone a git repository into a specific folder.
sFTP or Secure File Transfer Protocol is a convenient upgrade from the traditional FTP (File Transfer Protocol). The sFTP program boasts of improved security layers since it mirrors encrypted SSH transport protocols in its file transfer operations.
Redis is an open-source (BSD licensed), in-memory key-value data structure store used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperlog logs, geospatial indexes, and streams. Redis also provides high availability with Redis Sentinel software logic, creating automatic partitioning across Redis nodes with Redis Cluster.
At the end of the guide, you will know how to install and configure Redis on your AlmaLinux operating system.
Redis is a popular in-memory key-value store that can be used as a NoSQL key-value database, message broker as well as a caching solution. It is renowned for its flexibility, scalability, seamless replication, simplicity, and ease of use. Redis is widely used in various fields such as machine learning, real-time analytics, chat, messaging, and gaming leaderboards.
On its own, Redis has no robust features, however, you can still tweak Redis to provide added security and ward off unauthorized users.
Telegram is a popular free cross-platform, cloud-based instant messaging system. Telegram is famous for providing end-to-end encrypted video calling, VoIP, file sharing, amongst many other features. One of the main attractions of Telegram, it is unique in having no ties or shared interests with the big social media giants such as Facebook or Twitter. The application is also cross-platform, with versions of the app available for most operating systems for desktops and mobile/tablet devices.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the Telegram client on Linux Mint.
Using Flatpak apps in Linux? You may found that Flatpak app appearance does not change when toggling light & dark mode or switching to another app theme.
As more and more apps publish Linux packages via Flatpak, I have a few of them installed in my Ubuntu laptop. However, the apps stick to the light theme whenever I switches to dark mode in Appearance settings.
Since Flatpak runs in sandbox and does not have permission to access the “/usr” directory, it does not use system theme according to the document. So, some popular GTK themes are packaged as Flatpaks. And, it detects the current system app theme and tries to install the Flatpak version of the theme if available during app installation or update.
I’m working with default Yaru theme in the most time, so it automatically installs Yaru theme flatpak package but leaves Yaru Dark not installed. When I switching to Yaru Dark, it can’t find the match theme so falls back to the default Adwaita.
f you have Rocky Linux 8 desktop and Windows 7/10/11 in a local environment and want to access using the RDP- Remote desktop protocol, then here is the way.
To connect Linux operating systems such as Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux 8, or CentOS, we can use the open-source implementation of Remote desktop protocol called XRDP. RDP is developed by Microsoft and has been an integral part of Windows operating systems. It allows the users to remotely control and use the GUI desktop systems just like a local one. Although, Windows can be operated over this protocol out of the box, for Linux we need to install some additional packages. Here we learn how to set up a remote desktop connect to Rocky Linux 8.
I run Linux,…or does it run me? Some computing paradigms are so ubiquitous, so ingrained, we rarely stop to think that things could work another way. When such a realization comes, we can exercise our freedom – one of Fedora’s four foundations – to improve the user experience. For that sentiment to be more than cliché, I needed to re-imagine the idea of the default printer and how it gets set. This article presents that implementation.
LearnLinuxTV's Proxmox full course aims to get you up to speed with all the finer points of Proxmox Virtual Environment. In video #12, we take a look at the Command-Line interface.
When you type a command into a Linux terminal, what’s really happening is that a program is being executed. Normally, to execute a custom program or script, we need to use its full path, such as /path/to/script.sh or just ./script.sh if we’re already in its residing directory. Alternatively, we can execute a lot of commands without specifying paths, like uptime or date, etc.
The find command is used for searching for files and directories in the Linux command line.
Find is one of the most powerful and frequently used commands. It is also one of the most extensive commands with over 50 options and this makes it a bit confusing, specially when it is paired with the exec or xargs command.
It is impossible for a sysadmin or software developer to avoid the find command while working in the command line. Instead of being afraid of it, you should embrace its power.
I am going to discuss some of the most common examples of the find command that you are likely to use. But before that, let me show you its syntax and how to use it.
Panther is an open-source log management system, which is also available as a service for a time-limited trial. It is still in beta phase, but it looks promising. You can see the “beta” sign on its opening page: https://app.panther.support/ I tested the time-limited cloud service version, but you can also install it locally, either from Dockerhub, or you can build the containers locally from the source.
Even if it is still in beta phase, Panther comes with detailed documentation. There is a notable exception: while syslog-ng is shown on some of the figures, documenting it is still to be done. This blog helps you to get started with sending logs to Panther, using syslog-ng. You can use either legacy syslog with TLS encryption (still a bit problematic) or the http() destination to send logs to the Panther HTTP API.
Linux might sound scary for first-time Linux users, but actually, it isn’t. Linux is a bunch of open-source Unix operating systems based on Linux Kernel. These operating systems are called Linux distributions, such as Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint.
Since its inception in 1991, Linux has garnered popularity for being open-source. People can modify and redistribute Linux under their own brand. When using a Linux OS, you need a shell to access the services provided. Also, it’s recommended to run your Linux OS through a CLI or command-line interface. CLI makes time-consuming processes quicker.
This article presents a guide to 7 important Linux commands for every Linux user to know. So, let’s begin.
For those not familiar with Ubuntu MATE, it is a free, open-source community-driven lightweight desktop environment and an official derivative of Ubuntu. One of the main differentiation from Ubuntu is that it uses the MATE desktop environment as its default user interface instead of the GNOME desktop environment that is the default user interface for Ubuntu.
Ubuntu MATE is famous for being lightweight, fast, and stable, a community-driven project, and a great alternative to Ubuntu’s stock Gnome. At the end of the tutorial, you will have learned how to install Ubuntu MATE on your Ubuntu 20.04 system.
Vanilla is a Canadian software company founded in 2009 in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. It is both a cloud-based (SaaS) community forum software and an open source community supported software. The company’s main product is Vanilla Cloud.
Its open source product, Vanilla OSS, is a lightweight Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language using the Garden framework. The software is released under the GNU GPL. Vanilla Forums is free software, standards-compliant, customizable discussion forums. Since 2009 there is also a cloud-hosted version (offered by Vanilla).
Docker is an open-source application that provides lightweight operating-system-level virtualization through the use of containers. It is a kind of virtualization technology that is specially designed to easily develop and deploy applications inside of neatly packaged virtual containerized environments. Docker containers are in essence a set of software packages that run as one application that’s isolated from others. We can deploy it to any machine without any compatibility issues. By using this, the software stays system agnostic, simpler to use, less work to develop, and easy to maintain.
If you have Rocky Linux 8 desktop and Windows 7/10/11 in a local environment and want to access using the RDP- Remote desktop protocol, then here is the way.
To connect Linux operating systems such as Rocky Linux, AlmaLinux 8, or CentOS, we can use the open-source implementation of Remote desktop protocol called XRDP. RDP is developed by Microsoft and has been an integral part of Windows operating systems. It allows the users to remotely control and use the GUI desktop systems just like a local one. Although, Windows can be operated over this protocol out of the box, for Linux we need to install some additional packages. Here we learn how to set up a remote desktop connect to Rocky Linux 8.
Today we are looking at how to install UTAU 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.
Are you looking to develop video games on your Ubuntu PC using the Unreal Engine? If so, you will need to install the latest Unreal Engine toolkit to your system. This guide will show how to set up the newest release of Unreal Engine 4 on your Ubuntu computer.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Gitlab CE on Debian 11. GitLab is an open source end-to-end software development platform with built-in version control, issue tracking, code review, CI/CD, etc. It is is a complete DevOps platform, delivered as a single application.
We have 3 users, Jhon, Doe, Mike. Suppose you are at the IT department for a Software Company. You have to manage the identity of those 3 users. Easy right? You can easily manage their Identity Access. But how about 3 users become 300 or 3000? How can you manage them?
Well things get pretty hard I guess, How about if we can have a system that has a central identity info, maybe that would be easier to solve our stated problem.No worries, FreeIPA is here to help you by solving the problem.
Hi Everyone ! In the previous article, we have seen how to set up freeIPA Server on centOS 8.
In this write up, we will show how to add a client host to the freeIPA Domain. We will be configuring a CentOS 8 machine to authenticate against an existing FreeIPA server.
The name KDE comes from “K Desktop Environment”. For those not familiar with KDE Desktop, it is a free, open-source desktop environment. It provides Linux users on various distributions an alternative graphical interface to customize their desktop environment and applications for everyday use enhancement.
Besides the graphical enhancements and changes, it is also a lightweight, fast, smooth environment with superior performance compared to native shipped desktops with some Linux Distributions. In Ubuntu’s case, this is Gnome.
At the end of the tutorial, you will have learned how to install KDE Desktop Environment on your Ubuntu 20.04 system.
Quickest way to fix How to fix “Got permission denied while trying to connect to the Docker daemon socket at unix:///var/run/docker.sock: Post “http://%2Fvar%2Frun%2Fdocker.sock/v1.24/auth”: dial unix /var/run/docker.sock: connect: permission denied” error.
Fedora, the operating system of RHEL(Red Hat Enterprise Linux) does not have pre-installed exclusive Nvidia drivers in it for the users. Although it does have default Nouveau drivers which work in most conditions, you may face some problems while using them. If you encounter issues while using the Nouveau drivers you will have to install the official proprietary Nvidia drivers.
The official Nvidia drivers can help you get the most out of your GPU by enhancing its performance. In this article, we will learn to install the official Nvidia drivers on Fedora
However, before we start with the installation process, we need to do system configuration. The first configuration we need to do is stop the GUI from running and the second step is to disable the default nouveau drivers. From the GRUB boot menu, it is really easy and doable.
Kubernetes is fast becoming the operating system of the cloud. Every major cloud provider has a supported Kubernetes platform, Kubernetes can be run on-premises, and Kubernetes even has a package manager with Helm. And thanks to the operator pattern, Kubernetes has built-in support to describe and manage almost any kind of workload.
Getting DOOM to run on hardware it was never intended to run on is a tradition as old as time. Old cell phones, embedded systems, and ancient televisions have all been converted to play this classic first-person shooter. This style of playing games on old hardware might be passé now as the new trend seems to be the ability to play this game on more ethereal platforms instead. This project brings DOOM to Twitter.
Strategy Forge S.A. and Jujubee S.A. have announced that their 4x strategy game Punk Wars will be releasing with Linux support on November 11.
"Punk Wars tells the story of four new powers emerging from the ashes of a global cataclysm and fighting for domination of the ruins of a once magnificent megacity. Become the powerful leader of the messianic steampunk, tenebrous dieselpunk, militaristic steelpunk, or technocratic atompunk, with each faction holding the key to a different branch of industrial science, with a different set of unique skills. Explore the ruins of a bygone civilization, where resources are scarce and the dangers way too common. Develop your infrastructure and technology that will secure your triumph. Create a winning strategy and a playstyle for each faction, utilising their distinctive skills and units. Become the messiah of the new age and lead humanity towards the era of prosperity and happiness… as you see it."
Fallout 3 from Bethesda Game Studios received a surprise update recently where the developer finally removed Games for Windows Live which is great news.
Released back in 2008, Fallout 3 is something of a classic and a game I thoroughly enjoyed before making the switch fully to Linux. Thanks to Steam Play Proton, you can play Fallout 3 easily on Linux and with this update no workarounds are needed - at all.
You'll find on the website âËâ https://25years.kde.org/ âËâ the full celebration of the event: videos, meeting, activities, old KDE distro ready to run on virtual machine, merch (Tee-Shirt/Stickers).
But if you still wonder what is KDE; I'll try to give you an overview: KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. KDE helps these projects to get common tools: bug trackers, software development forge, distributing the software, organizing in real life events like sprints,conferences, etc... Y
It’s come to my attention several times now that if you want information about a program for GNU/Linux, don’t bother reading the reviews that people put in GNOME Software.
Some of it isn’t in English, which is the language that I speak, and GNOME Software doesn’t sort them out based on your preferred language.
The GNOME Software application doesn’t collect basic information about what distribution of GNU/Linux. (Or if it even is GNU/Linux, as GNOME actually still does run on other *nix systems, but I can’t imagine there’s too many non-GNU/Linux users left).
It doesn’t consider what package manager you installed the program from.
It could be from Fedora, it could be from Debian, or Ubuntu, or Arch. It could be a Snap. It could be a Flatpak.
DragonFly version 6.0 has been released. DragonFly version 6.0 brings a revamped VFS caching system, significant dsynth updates, various filesystem updates including HAMMER2, and a long list of userland updates. 6.0.1 brings a Let's Encrypt certificate fix for dport installation, plus other minor fixes
Released back in May was the shiny DragonFlyBSD 6.0 release while today a point release for it has been issued.
The DragonFlyBSD 6.0.1 release appears to be primarily driven by the need to address a certificate issue for downloading dpkg binaries. Due to an expired Let's Encrypt certificate, downloading dpkg binaries began failing. With DragonFlyBSD 6.0.1 that certificate has been renewed.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Ubuntu 21.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Filezilla updated to 3.56.0. FileZilla is a fast and reliable FTP, FTPS and SFTP client with lots of useful features and an intuitive graphical user interface.
The Chromium Browser has been updated to 94.0.4606.81 and shipped to the PCLinuxOS Software Repository.
Dino 0.2.2 is a modern XMPP (“Jabber”) chat client using GTK+/Vala.
Blender 2.93.5 is the essential software solution you need for 3D, from modeling, animation, rendering and post-production to interactive creation and playback. Professionals and novices can easily and inexpensively publish stand-alone, secure, multi-platform content to the web, CD-ROMs, and other media.
One of the most fundamental parts of an AI application is model serving, which is responding to a user request with an inference from an AI model. With machine learning approaches becoming more widely adopted in organizations, there is a trend to deploy a large number of models. For internet-scale AI applications like IBM Watson Assistant and IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding, there isn’t just one AI model, there are literally hundreds or thousands that are running concurrently. Because AI models are computationally expensive, it’s cost prohibitive to load them all at once or to create a dedicated container to serve every trained model. Also, many are rarely used or are effectively abandoned.
When dealing with a large number of models, the ‘one model, one server’ paradigm presents challenges on a Kubernetes cluster to deploy hundreds of thousands of models.
The Hierarchy of Needs was defined by the psychologist Abraham Maslow in his paper “A Theory of Human Motivation.” The base of the pyramid contains the most fundamental and most critical needs, with each subsequent layer representing needs that become important once those of the preceding layer have been satisfied. Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” was used to represent the needs and behavioral motivation drivers for humans. This pyramid represented a series of basic psychological and self-fulfillment needs.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs has been adapted and adopted to represent the needs and motivations in other domains, including the needs of applications and services being managed by SREs and IT Operations teams.
We've improved on the technology of our AI/ML Industrial Edge solution, designed to boost manufacturing efficiency and product quality with AI/ML, edge computing and Kubernetes. Let's see what's new!
Single node OpenShift is here, putting both control and worker capabilities into a single server to help fit into space-constrained environments.
Where does it make sense to utilize single node OpenShift? Learn how it can help at the manufacturing edge!
Today, we are sharing news that Tim Yeaton, Red Hat’s executive vice president and chief marketing officer (CMO) will retire in 2022. We’ve had the benefit of planning for Tim’s retirement for some time and using Red Hat’s succession planning process to identify and develop our next CMO. Long time Red Hat marketing communications and brand leader Leigh Day has been promoted to senior vice president (SVP) of Marketing and in January, she will assume the role of CMO. Until his retirement in mid-2022, Tim will become a senior advisor at Red Hat, helping with a smooth transition.
The pressure is on for companies to deliver a top-notch customer experience (CX). But to deliver a high-quality and holistic CX, you need to invest in the right data and technology. For IT leaders facing an abundance of options, investing in technology to enhance CX can feel like a gamble.
For a while now, Mac Pro towers have had the nickname “cheese grater” because of their superficial resemblance to this kitchen appliance. Apple has only been a company since the 70s, though, and is much newer than one of its historic rivals, IBM. In fact, IBM is old enough to have made actual cheese-related computers as far back as the 1910s, and [Hand Tool Rescue] recently obtained one of these antique machines for a complete restoration.
Many people with a long career in engineering, including me, have had misconceptions about sales and marketing. As an engineering community, we've viewed it as things like ordering swag, naming things, running ad campaigns, and creating white papers. There's a joke in the marketing community about how engineers are always willing to provide their "opinions" on marketing decisions without fully comprehending the discipline, but marketers rarely—like never—make suggestions on code improvements. To work together, engineers and marketers must share a common definition.
While product marketers do help drive those commonly recognized tasks, the role is so much richer. Product marketers, technical marketers, and evangelists have outbound responsibilities like creating content (e.g., blogs, press releases, white papers, demos), delivering roadmap sessions to customers (as well as analysts and journalists), building content for sales teams, and much more. Combined, these outbound functions are often referred to as getting a product to market, but just as importantly, product marketing also has inbound functions. They serve as another set of eyes and ears to listen for customer needs and provide input to the product strategy. There's a saying in product management: nothing interesting happens within these four walls. Businesses must go out into the world, talk to customers, and more importantly, listen to them.
Sipeed and Alibaba T-Head have opened $399 pre-orders on an “RVB-ICE” dev kit featuring a RISC-V compatible, dual-core, 1.2GHz XuanTie C910 ICE SoC with a Vivante 3D GPU, an NPU, 4GB RAM, and support for Android 10 and Debian 11.
Sipeed and Alibaba’s T-Head Semiconductors unit (AKA Pintouge) are launching a development kit for a XuanTie C910 ICE SoC, featuring the first 3D GPU we have seen on a commercially available RISC-V SoC. The RVB-ICE dev kit is available for pre-order in limited quantities at $399, including a 7-inch touchscreen, with shipments expected in November.
Separately, he called on senators to reject a bill on the legalization of vapers and electronic cigarettes, and claimed that tobacco companies were deliberately obfuscating the issue. “If we go with this fallacy that the tobacco industry has put to us, that vapers are the alternative solution to the tobacco problem, we will once again be making a mistake because vapers and heated tobacco products are not an alternative to harm reduction,” he said.
It is a little-known fact that humans have not one but two immune systems. The first, the biophysical immune system – the one we’ve all heard much about – responds to infections as they enter the body, detecting and eliminating intruders such as the coronavirus.
The second is the behavioural immune system, which adapts our behaviour to preemptively avoid potentially infectious people, places and things. The behavioural immune system is the first line of defence against infectious disease. It prompts people to socially conform with known traditions and to avoid foreign, dissimilar and potentially infectious groups.
In a recently published study, my colleagues and I at the University of Cambridge examined the impact of the behavioural immune system on our attitudes towards obedience and authority. We found that high rates of infectious diseases – and the disease-avoidance they promote – may fundamentally shape political opinions and social institutions.
The Biden administration has sought to rally its allies to help fight cyberthreats and ransomware attacks, pushing NATO to adopt a new cyber defense policy and launching talks on cyberthreats among G-7 nations. It also launched a series of initiatives in recent months to target cybercriminals and boost protection against ransomware attacks following several high-profile ransomware attacks against a major oil pipeline company and a meat-processing company earlier this year. The attacks laid bare how vulnerable elements of U.S. critical infrastructure, including its food and energy sectors, were to cyber incursions.
About 2% were Android-based, while one set, known as EvilQuest, targeted OSX, the study, titled Ransomware Activity Report, said. It took into account samples submitted all the way back to January 2020.
Vicente Diaz of VirusTotal said in a short blog post accompanying the 14-page study that of the 140 countries which submitted ransomware samples, Israel was far and away an outlier with the highest number of submissions and nearly 600% rise in submissions compared to its baseline.
The student is allowed to keep a small purse with her at all times, as it contains a smartphone that runs an app that talks to, and controls her insulin pump. The teachers at the school were briefed about the smartphone. However, there’s one part of the setup that caused problems: the pump would occasionally issue a beeping noise.
This beeping makes for a disastrous experience for a sixth grade girl. She’s at the age where social pressures really start to manifest. The pump gives something other students can latch onto to make fun of.
The White House plans for at least 30 countries to attend a series of meetings to be held over Zoom. The summit will be the most concrete step it has taken so far to build an international coalition to address ransomware, an epidemic of cybercrime where hackers remotely lock victims’ computers and demand an extortion payment to fix them.
Of all companies, Lenovo gave me an idea.
They mentioned GalliumOS as a potential Chrome OS replacement on some of their own Chrome devices.
These are considered low end by PC standards, but they run Chrome OS fine because it’s a stripped down GNU/Linux system. Not some bloated 100 GB+ Windows horror that has to trap every file system call in case it’s a virus.
The Intel-based ones, mostly, should run a normal GNU/Linux distro, but they occasionally have odd hardware in them that’s not well supported by the vanilla Linux kernel, and GalliumOS steps in to add those.
Many years ago, there was a guy running a charity in Texas that took old computers that were not able to run Windows anymore, and re-imaged them with a minimum GNU/Linux distribution, which they were able to run okay.
Somewhere, out of the blue, Texas sent the police in to enforce “environmental standards”.
Jamie Zawinski commented that his perfect Mac experience continues with light grey text on light grey backgrounds.
These have been a problem for years, and it’s only getting worse.
It’s why I use the Adwaita-Dark theme and Solarized Dark for Gedit and GNOME Terminal.
I think they’re all making the default theme so unusable unless you jack up the display backlight to “IT BURNS US! IT BURNS US PRECIOUS!” so they can market “Dark Mode” as if it was a special feature, when I’ve always used them in one form or another.
When I started using Solaris, I got hooked on one that Sun wrote for GTK2 called Nimbus. The icon pack was pretty sharp too. And even the light version was quite lovely.
The beleaguered .NET Foundation has apologised, again, and reversed one of the policies that saw its members revolt.
The Foundation's had a tricky few weeks, after a board member resigned and complained the reasons for doing so were misrepresented. Members have also complained the organisation had made unauthorised changes to projects, and about the decision to move projects to a GitHub account the Foundation controlled without advance notice. Foundation executive director Claire Novotny stepped down as the controversies swirled.
The White House on Wednesday will convene a virtual meeting on countering ransomware with senior officials representing 30 countries and the European Union, Biden administration officials said, as part of President Biden’s effort to work with global partners to address cyber threats.
Ministers and senior officials from a range of countries will take part in the virtual meeting, though the attendees do not include representatives from Russia, which has been a key focus of the Biden administration in trying to root out criminal ransomware groups.
It’s true that looking for the lock icon and HTTPS will help you prevent attackers from seeing any information you submit to a website. HTTPS also prevents your internet service provider (ISP) from seeing what pages you visit beyond the top level of a website. That means they can see that you regularly visit https://www.reddit.com, for example, but they won’t see that you spend most of your time at https://www.reddit.com/r/CatGifs/. But while HTTPS does guarantee that your communication is private and encrypted, it doesn’t guarantee that the site won’t try to scam you.
Because here’s the thing: Any website can use HTTPS and encryption. This includes the good, trusted websites as well as the ones that are up to no good — the scammers, the phishers, the malware makers.
You might be scratching your head right now, wondering how a nefarious website can use HTTPS. You’ll be forgiven if you wonder in all caps HOW CAN THIS BE?
The answer is that the security of your connection to a website — which HTTPS provides — knows nothing about the information being relayed or the motivations of the entities relaying it. It’s a lot like having a phone. The phone company isn’t responsible for scammers calling you and trying to get your credit card. You have to be savvy about who you’re talking to. The job of HTTPS is to provide a secure line, not guarantee that you won’t be talking to crooks on it.
That’s your job. Tough love, I know. But think about it. Scammers go to great lengths to trick you, and their motives largely boil down to one: to separate you from your money. This applies everywhere in life, online and offline. Your job is to not get scammed.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (flatpak and ruby2.3), Fedora (flatpak, httpd, mediawiki, redis, and xstream), openSUSE (kernel, libaom, libqt5-qtsvg, systemd, and webkit2gtk3), Red Hat (.NET 5.0, 389-ds-base, httpd:2.4, kernel, kernel-rt, libxml2, openssl, and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (389-ds-base, kernel, libxml2, and openssl), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, curl, glibc, kernel, libaom, libqt5-qtsvg, systemd, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (squashfs-tools).
The funding came from members of the foundation. The long lineup: Dell Technologies Inc., Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson, Facebook Inc., Fidelity Investments Inc., GitHub Inc., Google LLC, International Business Machines Corp., Intel Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Microsoft Corp., Morgan Stanley, Oracle Corp., Red Hat Inc., Snyk Inc., VMware Inc., Anchore Inc., Apiiro LLC, AuriStar Technologies Inc., Deepfence Inc., Devgistics, GitLab Inc., Nutanix Inc., Tidelift Inc. and Wind River Systems Inc.
Imagine you have created an open source project that has become incredibly popular. Thousands, if not millions, of developers worldwide, rely on the lines of code that you wrote. You have become an accidental hero of that community — people love your code, contribute to improving it, requesting new features, and encouraging others to use it. Life is amazing, but with great power and influence comes great responsibility.
When code is buggy, people complain. When performance issues crop up in large scale implementations, it needs to be addressed. When security vulnerabilities are discovered — because no code or its dependencies are always perfect — they need to be remediated quickly to keep your community safe.
I know what it means to be watched all too carefully, a phenomenon that’s only grown worse in the war-on-terror years. I’m a strange combination, I suspect, being both a military spouse and an anti-war-on-terror activist. As I’ve discovered, the two sit uncomfortably in what still passes for one life. In this country in these years, having eyes on you has, sadly enough, become a common and widespread phenomenon. When it’s the government doing it, it’s called “surveillance.” When it’s your peers or those above you in the world of the military spouse, there’s no word for it at all.
For an example of how private firms have become the digital police, consider the rules on [Internet] pornography being introduced by Mastercard on October 15th. In a bid to weed out illegal material, the card firm is demanding that porn sites take steps that go beyond what the law requires, including reviewing footage before publication and checking the identity of those who upload or feature in it. Sites that think these sorts of rules too onerous are under no obligation to work with Mastercard. But Visa is also cracking down, and the two firms handle 90% of card payments outside China, meaning that they are becoming the industry’s de facto regulators.
The move came in response to a June filing of a shareholder proposal asking the company to evaluate how well it sticks to its human rights statement and related policies. Microsoft committed to a review of any human rights impacts that its products have on those including communities of Black, Indigenous and People of Color in contracts for police, immigration enforcement and unspecified other government agencies, according to correspondence from the company viewed by Bloomberg.
A new report shows that Samsung is the worst Android vendor for invasions of privacy.
Among the problems unique to Samsung is that they’ve foisted Microsoft spyware and Clown Computing that phones home to Microsoft into the stock ROM as system apps.
Also, LineageOS could fix it, if you could get it to run. But Samsung’s “security system” will break your camera for no reason whatsoever if you do, in their newer phones. This isn’t “Oh, the other firmware has no driver.”. It’s Samsung Knox preventing the camera from ever working again.
The slew of killings has instilled fears in thousands of migrants from minority Hindu and Sikh communities. Many are refusing to leave their homes or go to work this week. Others are fleeing Kashmir for safety in India.
Governor Newsom’s oil and gas regulators have continued granting offshore oil well permits also. As of€ October 1, 2021, there have been a total of 150 reported permits issued for offshore wells since January 1, 2019, according to a new analysis of permits approved through October 1, 2021 and posted at€ www.NewsomWellWatch.org€ by Consumer Watchdog and FracTracker Alliance.
In the wake of another disastrous oil spill, CEJA and VISION provided the following statements:
In 2015, almost all of the world's nations agreed to limit the temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above preindustrial levels, and to aim for a limit of 1.5 C under the Paris Agreement.ââ¬Â¯ So far, the actual commitments made to cut fossil fuel use and other measures to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — if carried through — will only get us down to 2.7 C of warming, the UN has warned.
The Arctic region has reached an "unprecedented crisis point" due to climate change, a problem which is the "most comprehensive threat" facing the region, the EU Commission said in a joint statement on Wednesday.
Cryptocurrencies are decentralised systems with no official oversight, so regulation is difficult. Registered companies that deal in them are finding themselves under increasing scrutiny. In June, the UK’s Financial Conduct Authority ruled that Binance Markets Limited, one of the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchanges, had to cease regulated trading in the UK.
We’ll explain how that works in a minute. But first, consider this: The process of creating Bitcoin to spend or trade consumes around 91 terawatt-hours of electricity annually, more than is used by Finland, a nation of about 5.5 million.
That usage, which is close to half-a-percent of all the electricity consumed in the world, has increased about tenfold in just the past five years.
Cryptocurrency operating licenses in Estonia should be revoked, and the system rebuilt from scratch, chief of the money laundering bureau (RAB) Matis Mäeker told investigative weekly Eesti Ekspress. Failure to do so may result in another Danske-style financial scandal. The news comes amid revelations that despite a cull of license-holders in 2020, over 400 cryptocurreny operators are still active in Estonia.
The European Commission argues that oil, gas, and coal should not be extracted in the Arctic if the climate goals are to be met, in addition to its representing a risk for environmental pollution in vulnerable areas, and calls for an international moratorium on hydrocarbon extraction in the Arctic.
The document has been drawn up by the European Commission and the bloc's diplomatic service. It is due to be finalized and published this week. The strategy says Arctic fossil fuel extraction needs to stop so EU countries can meet targets in the 2015 Paris Agreement to limit temperature rises from global warming. It calls for a widening of the scope of existing curbs on Arctic fossil fuel exploration in the Arctic in areas of the U.S., Canada, and Greenland.
EU member states would have to change their behavior sharply under the new policy, since they import Arctic fossil fuels including an estimated 87% of liquefied natural gas produced in the Russian Arctic. The new strategy would not have legal force, but it would create political pressure for member states to comply.
Last month, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) announced it had developed a new asset class and accompanying listing vehicle meant “to preserve and restore the natural assets that ultimately underpin the ability for there to be life on Earth.” Called a natural asset company, or NAC, the vehicle will allow for the formation of specialized corporations “that hold the rights to the ecosystem services produced on a given chunk of land, services like carbon sequestration or clean water.” These NACs will then maintain, manage and grow the natural assets they commodify, with the end of goal of maximizing the aspects of that natural asset that are deemed by the company to be profitable.
Though described as acting like “any other entity” on the NYSE, it is alleged that NACs “will use the funds to help preserve a rain forest or undertake other conservation efforts, like changing a farm’s conventional agricultural production practices.” Yet, as explained towards the end of this article, even the creators of NACs admit that the ultimate goal is to extract near-infinite profits from the natural processes they seek to quantify and then monetize.
NYSE COO Michael Blaugrund alluded to this when he said the following regarding the launch of NACs: “Our hope is that owning a natural asset company is going to be a way that an increasingly broad range of investors have the ability to invest in something that’s intrinsically valuable, but, up to this point, was really excluded from the financial markets.”
Something about the obnoxious, carefree version of the internet from my youth has always appealed to me. I remember exactly where I was when the Heaven’s Gate mass suicide went down and periodically check the cult’s still-functioning website. Even for a mass suicide cult, there’s something innocuous and joyful in the way the site’s displayed. The rainbow coloring, the dreamy night sky background, the welcoming tone. I love it. My love affair with the cutesy, silly part of the internet started there, but never seemed to end. In my teenage years, I must’ve watched every Homestar Runner episode at least ten times. More than anything though, Hampsterdance left an indelible mark on the way I see the internet. The focus of my own writing each week is branding and it’s impossible not to compare the notoriety of Heaven’s Gate and Homestar Runner against that of the dancing Hampsters. Today’s Tedium ponders the commercial viability of the Hampsterdance. — Jared @ Tedium
Local news organizations are rethinking their relationships with the communities they serve, from deploying new messaging platforms that deliver news to overhauling their reporting practices, editors told ProPublica in a series of recent conversations.
Amid increased polarization and a pandemic in which misinformation has spread as fast as the virus, editors in Atlanta, Phoenix and Detroit told us in live virtual events that the notion of local news as a public good is more relevant than ever.
The platform's policies surrounding how public figures are treated include generally allowing users to call for the death of a public figure so long as they are not tagged in the post. Users are not permitted to call for the death of private users, a policy that will now extend to journalists, Reuters reported.
No matter your ultimate lean on politics, you have to admit it’s pretty strange to sit with the knowledge that OAN, a conservative news network, was effectively funded by AT∓T, right? This is a strange headline that kind of shakes through people’s heads in part because of what AT∓T used to represent, as the phone company that we all had to use. (Now, at least with the dust settled, we have something of a choice.) The irony of the company that currently owns CNN bankrolling something that is literally the opposite of CNN in every way that matters is too bizarre to ignore. Now combine this with the effect of Facebook’s many negative headlines this week (including its downtime), creating the real possibility that Facebook is the AT∓T of social media (down to the permissive approach around controversial content) and might need to be broken up, and you have some real knotty fodder to think about. Today’s Tedium considers the messy effects of AT∓T’s breakup with the Baby Bells in a modern context.
Zhang also said on Twitter on Sunday that she had provided a US law-enforcement agency with "detailed documentation regarding potential criminal violations."
When asked by CNN, Zhang did not say which agency she gave documents to. An FBI spokesperson declined to comment when contacted by CNN.
Central to Zhang's allegations about Facebook is that it doesn't do enough to tackle abuse of its platform in countries outside of the United States. Roughly 90% of Facebook's monthly active users are outside the US and Canada, according to its most recent quarterly filing.
“I’ve found multiple blatant attempts by foreign national governments to abuse our platform on vast scales to mislead their own citizenry, and caused international news on multiple occasions. I have personally made decisions that affected national presidents without oversight, and taken action to enforce against so many prominent politicians globally that I’ve lost count.”
As part of this new policy update, Facebook said that it would remove any profiles, pages, groups, or events dedicated to sexualizing public figures, including celebrities, politicians, and content creators. The new policy bans sexualized photoshops and drawings and any degrading content “in the process of bodily functions,” Antigone Davis, global head of safety at Facebook, said in a blog post on Wednesday.
Facebook also said that it would remove “unwanted sexualized commentary” and repetitive attacks harassing an individual sexually.
LinkedIn -- the business-oriented social media platform owned by Microsoft -- has spent the last few years increasing its compliance with the Chinese government's demands for censorship. A couple of years back, the network drew heat for not only blocking accounts of Chinese pro-democracy activists but also critics of the government located elsewhere in the world.
Sheng, the Chinese-born Leonard Bernstein Distinguished University Professor of Composition, is a world-class composer, who has been teaching at the University of Michigan since 1995. He was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and was given a MacArthur “genius” fellowship in 2001. The Foundation described him as “an innovative composer whose skillful orchestrations bridge East and West, lyrical and dissonant styles, and historical and contemporary themes to create compositions that resonate with audiences around the world.”
The “crime” for which Sheng has been forced out of teaching the class has only been made possible by the whipping up of racialist frenzy on the university campuses and in the media. No honest or fair-minded individual could find anything remotely offensive about Olivier’s performance or the film as a whole.
The law “is part of a national effort to crack down on environmental activists across the U.S.,” the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents White Hat, Savage and Mejia, said in Thursday's news release. It said the first was passed in Oklahoma in 2017, and said similar bills have been introduced 23 times in 18 states since 2017, including 14 in 2019.
Access to social media and the [Internet] was blocked, at least five local media outlets had licenses revoked, and authorities detained dozens of journalists covering nationwide protests against the junta.
In the months that followed, media outlets have been forced to restructure their operations by working online or from self-imposed exile.
Win Zaw Naing, a journalist at the Yangon-based Red News Agency, says he has been stuck inside his house for seven months, having to work almost entirely online.
“It is almost impossible to report on the ground now. I did not leave the house and I did not see anyone. I do it online, I make phone calls,” he told VOA.
The extraordinary footage was released last week by the lawyer of a man who was caught up in an exchange of fire with police that night. (That man, Army veteran Jaleel Stallings, was exonerated by a jury in September for acting in self defense.) The footage, which was part of the evidence used in Stallings’ trial, also shows Minneapolis cops making racist comments, cursing protesters and journalists, slashing the tires of parked cars — in short, acting more lawless than the crowds they were supposed to be controlling that night.
Preliminary information indicates that the employees checked out batches of applications for processing, and they are alleged to have shredded some of the forms, the Fulton County statement says. Fellow employees reported the alleged actions to their supervisor Friday morning, and the two employees were fired that day.
Keyword warrants are not new, but they are rare, and they are little known by the broader public. The Forbes documents provide hard proof of the government's judicial exercise of keyword warrant in a 2019 Wisconsin case tracking down men suspected of kidnapping and abusing a minor. Investigators asked Google for data on anyone who had searched for the victim's name, her mother's name, and her address over a period of 16 days.
Other known uses of keyword warrants include demands for information on Google searches for the address of an arson victim who was a witness in the racketeering case against crooner R. Kelly in 2020 and Google searches for a fraud victim in Minnesota in 2017. It's not just Google. Jennifer Lynch of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out that keyword warrants were served to Microsoft and Yahoo for searches on things like "pipe bomb" and "low explosives" in the course of tracking down the 2018 Austin bombings. Additionally, Forbes was able to track down the existence of a fifth keyword warrant request in California in late 2020, but it was only noted in a court docket, so we don't know the extent of the order.
"This case is the first case where the court is confronted with an almost unlimited amount of information through social media," says George Kendall, a capital defense lawyer. "So it was really sort of surprising, to say the least, that when the judge decided, 'OK, we can do this in Boston,' that kind of question was not asked of everyone."
In the days after ProPublica’s investigation of the juvenile justice system in Rutherford County, Tennessee, one state lawmaker wrote that she was “horrified.” Another called it a “nightmare.” A third labeled it “unchecked barbarism.” A former Tennessee congressman posted the story about the unlawful jailing of kids and tweeted, “The most sickening and unAmerican thing I’ve read about in some time.” The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund called for a federal civil rights investigation. A pastor, in his Sunday sermon in Nashville, said: “We can’t allow this madness to continue. These are our babies.”
And on Tuesday evening, four days after the story published, the president of Middle Tennessee State University notified faculty and staff that Donna Scott Davenport, a juvenile court judge at the heart of the investigation, “is no longer affiliated with the University.” Davenport had been an adjunct instructor at the school, which is based in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. For many years, she taught a course on juvenile justice. In 2015, she was one of the university’s commencement speakers.
In August 2021, the Brookings Institute reported that at least eight states had passed legislation banning the teaching of Critical Race Theory, although only Idaho actually uses the phrase.
The modern iteration of Critical Race Theory begins in the 1980s when legal scholars followed by social scientists and educational researchers began to employ CRT as a way of understanding the persistence of race and racism in the United States. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who teaches law at UCLA and Columbia University and was an early proponent of critical race theory, described it as “an approach to grappling with a history of white supremacy that rejects the belief that what’s in the past is in the past, and that the laws and systems that grow from that past are detached from it.” Basically, Critical Race Theory rejects the idea of colorblindness or legal neutrality and argues that race and racism have always played a major role in the formulation of American laws and the practices of American institutions. It is a study of laws and institutions that sifts through the surface cover to look for underlying meaning and motivation. As an academic discipline it does not claim that everything about the United States is racist or that all white people are racist. The CRT lens examines laws and institutions, not people, certainly not individual people.
Citizen Lab founder and director, Dr. Ronald Deibert, recently provided a statement in the context of Chelsea Manning’s inadmissibility proceeding before the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.
The statement proceeds in four parts. In the first section, Deibert provides background context regarding his professional experience and the Citizen Lab’s work. In the second section, he describes the Citizen Lab’s research activities in detail and the academic and public interest impacts of those activities. In the third section, he summarizes certain events that have threatened or aimed to chill the Citizen Lab’s research activities in the past. In the fourth section, he explains the chilling effects that a broad interpretation of section 342.1 of the Criminal Code and/or of subsection 16(2) of the Security of Information Act (“SOIA”) could have on the Citizen Lab’s scholarship and on related initiatives.
Facebook policy dude/failed UK politician Nick Clegg has written an op-ed for USA Today confirming what has been obvious to everyone who understands Section 230, but (for reasons I don't quite understand) seems obscured from basically every politician out there: >Facebook wants to destroy Section 230. And it's practically giddy that politicians are so eager to grant it its wish, while pretending that doing so will somehow hurt Facebook.
Amazon.com Inc has been repeatedly accused of knocking off products it sells on its website and of exploiting its vast trove of internal data to promote its own merchandise at the expense of other sellers. The company has denied the accusations.
But thousands of pages of internal Amazon documents examined by Reuters – including emails, strategy papers and business plans – show the company ran a systematic campaign of creating knockoffs and manipulating search results to boost its own product lines in India, one of the company’s largest growth markets.
David Simon, senior vice president of IP at Salesforce, shares his views on Section 101, Fintiv, the DMCA, and more
Filing a single application, rather than numerous national procedures, and obtaining a single patent that is valid throughout Europe will dramatically simplify the patent application process and greatly reduce corresponding costs. Pricey parallel lawsuits would also be prevented [sic] by the Unified Patent Court, while legal certainty would be increased. [sic]
The federal district court in Waco, Texas abused its discretion in denying Juniper Networks’ motion to transfer six patent infringement actions filed by a Texas-based patent assertion entity to the Northern District of California, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has decided in granting Juniper’s motion for a writ of mandamus. The district court erred in its analysis of the relevant public and private public interest factors used for determining whether the transferor or the transferee district is the more convenient forum. For example, concerning the most important factor, the relative convenience of the transferee forum for the potential witnesses, Juniper identified 11 witness located in the Northern District of California, while the plaintiff—a company’s whose presence in Texas appeared to be both recent and ephemeral—identified only one witness (In re Juniper Networks, Inc., September 24, 2021, per curiam).
The UKIPO has still to decide on a path forward for exhaustion after Brexit – but with IP taking a back seat in government circles, don’t hold your breath
The ruling from Rotterdam District Court is interesting because the Hanwha patent is valid in 16 European countries, but not in the Netherlands. Nevertheless, the court issued a cross-border injunction for 9 countries. The court also ordered a penalty sum capped at €5 million.
The Rotterdam court did have doubts as to whether the Dutch Longi company directly infringed EP 2220689 B1. It nevertheless ruled that the distribution and sale of the solar panels in Belgium, Bulgaria, Germany, France, Liechtenstein, Portugal, Spain, the UK and Switzerland is an unlawful act against Hanwha Q-Cells. Therefore, the judges granted the cross-border injunction for nine countries (case ID: C/10/621252 / KG ZA 21-563).
About a year ago I described a complaint by Apple, Google, Intel, and Cisco over then-USPTO Director Iancu's PTAB rulemaking as "litigation to the rescue of legislation" because the case was brought in defense of the ideas underlying the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA). Essentially, Mr. Iancu had gutted the PTAB IPR (inter partes review) part of the AIA by establishing a discretionary-denial regime.
By now there is also hope for the PTAB IPR process because of developments on other fronts. The next USPTO Director may undo some of Mr. Iancu's rulemaking, and now there's a proposal in the United Senate that amounts to "legislation to the rescue of (earlier) legislation": the Leahy-Cornyn Restore AIA bill ("RAIA"). Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), one of the sponsors of the original AIA, is now the President pro tempore of the Senate. Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) has also taken an interest in patent policy for some time. Both have a reputation for balanced positions on patent enforcement: neither are they in the "Coons camp" (which favors ever stronger enforcement even of weak patents) nor could they be reasonably accused of seeking to weaken patent protection.
Litigation, executive action, legislation--three ways to reverse Mr. Iancu's PTAB rules, any single one of which could do the job. Executive action would potentially be quickest (as it won't take that much longer until the new USPTO Director has been named). Durability is the most important quality of new legislation: the Restore AIA would not only solve the problem at hand but would also prevent it from reoccurring, unless and until Congress would decide otherwise.
Koenig & Bauer has won the second instance of the patent infringement case. However the breach of trade secrets dispute is still ongoing. The founders of Hebenstreit, based in Ludwigsburg, are former employees of the patent holder. Koenig & Bauer accuses them of having used the company’s technical drawings for their own business.
Koenig & Bauer, based in Würzburg, sued Hebenstreit for patent infringement. Its EP 1 266 852 B1 protects a device for feeding and stacking tabular goods. The technology is used in metal pressing, where it stacks the pressed metal plates on top of each other at the end of the line. The speed of the stacking process in particular, as well as its precise coordination with the speed of the press, plays an essential role. The original patent applicant was LTG Mailänder, which was acquired by Bauer + Kunzi (later Koenig & Bauer-MetalPrint) in 2006.
Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on U.S. Patent 6,854,067, owned by Heritage IP, LLC, an NPE and subsidiary of IP Edge. The '067 patent generally relates to a method and system for interaction between a processor and a power on reset circuit to dynamically control power states in a microcontroller. This patent has been asserted in district court against NXP, Resideo Technologies, Maytronics, Insulet Corp., August Home, and others.
A good public outcry and backlash can lead to many, many good things. We see it here at Techdirt all the time, particularly when it comes to aggressive bullying episodes over intellectual property. Some person or company will try to play IP bully against some victim, the public gets wind of it and throws a fit, and suddenly the necessity over the IP action goes away. Retailers, manufacturers, breweries: public outcry is a great way to end ridiculous legal actions.
