Eyüpsultan is a district located on the European side of Istanbul. The area of Eyüpsultan district is 242 km€². According to 2018 census data, the Eyüpsultan district, with its twenty-one neighborhoods and seven villages, has a population of 383,909. In this article, Pardus project leader, Hüseyin GÃÅÃâ¡, explains why Eyüpsultan chose free software.
What is Pardus?
Pardus is a distribution of the GNU/Linux operating system whose development began in 2003. It is developed by Ulakbim, which is a government research institute subsidiary of the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, called Tübitak. Pardus GNU/Linux is based on Debian GNU/Linux, but it is redesigned to be used in accordance with the practices and habits of users in Turkey.
LibreOffice, GIMP, VLC, and other free software programs are the default applications for use in the Pardus GNU/Linux operating system.
Additionally, with customizations implemented by us at the Eyüpsultan IT department, Pardus has a theme resembling Microsoft Windows and other common proprietary software that people are commonly familiar with. This choice of theme was made because it was expected that users would be able to more easily adopt the change.
Linux Plumbers Conference 2022 is pleased to host the CPU Isolation Microconference
CPU Isolation is an ability to shield workloads with extreme latency or performance requirements from interruptions (also known as Operating System noise) provided by a close combination of several kernel and userspace components. An example of such workloads are DPDK use cases in Telco/5G where even the shortest interruption can cause packet losses, eventually leading to exceeding QoS requirements.
Because we ran out of places so fast, we are setting up a waitlist for in-person registration (virtual attendee places are still available). Please fill in this form and try to be clear about your reasons for wanting to attend. This year we’re giving waitlist priority to new attendees and people expected to contribute content. We expect to be able to accept our first group of attendees from the waitlist in mid July.
Mixxx 2.3.3 comes almost five months after Mixxx 2.3.2 and it’s here to further improve support for several DJ controllers and mixers. For example, it improves the stability of the Behringer DDM4000 mixer, which also received soft-takeover for encoder knobs in this release.
The Pioneer DDJ-SB3 DJ controller received a fix for the broken controller issue that occurred when releasing the shift button, the Traktor S3 DJ controller gets better deck cloning, and the Denon MC7000 DJ controller gets a fix for the ‘inverted shift’ bug in the controller mapping.
Congratulations to Chris Hildenbrand, the winner of the Inkscape 1.2 About Screen Contest, held this year, 2022.
We recently caught up with Chris to ask a few questions about himself and his use of Inkscape.
Inkscape: Please introduce yourself to the Inkscape Community. Who is Chris and where in the world do you live?
Chris Hildenbrand (Chris): I grew up in Germany but was lucky enough to end up in tropical far North Queensland in Australia. I am calling Cairns home now - where the reef meets the rain-forest.
Kali Linux is arguably one of the best Linux distros used by hackers of the whole color spectrum, thanks to its hundreds of built-in hacking, security, and pen-testing tools. That’s a lot but not all of them will be used given that many of those tools are already multi-purpose, encapsulating the other tools in Kali’s arsenal.
They’re all included for a purpose to be used by seasoned users but for beginners, it would be nice to narrow things down a bit and list down the 10 Best Kali Linux Tools for Hackers.
And since hackers are a very diverse lot, preferences can be quite relative. This listing of 10 Best Kali Linux Tools for Hackers therefore won’t be in any particular order nor would reflect the actual preferences of absolutely everyone.
Hello, friends. In this post, you will learn how to install Icecast on Ubuntu 20.04. The procedure is simple and thanks to our tutorial you will have no problems.
In part one I covered a little bit of general information and preparation work before detailing the first part of the installation of FreeBSD 1.0 on real hardware. We stopped with having transferred a rump root filesystem and the kernel from two diskettes onto the hard drive.
Part two covers the rest of the installation. We’re going to continue right where we left off.
In case you want to play with FreeBSD 1.0 yourself – I’ve made an image of the drive and zstd-compressed it to make it as small as possible. It contains a bootable 1.0 system with bindist installed and both srcdist and xfree86 sources available, too. Download it here (60 MB compressed, 20 GB uncompressed) and play with it if you like.
That, right there, is a file manager for the terminal. Written in Python (using an NCurses wrapper). That runs on Linux, Windows, & Mac.
… and, perhaps most interestingly, it displays icons for files and folders… built entirely out of ASCII characters.
LLVM was imported in the OpenBSD ports tree back in 2008, and happily lived there for a long while before being imported in the source tree at the g2k16 hackathon in 2016. I previously wrote about this in “The state of toolchains in OpenBSD” last year.
As mentioned in my previous article, we do not use upstream build system to build LLVM in the base system, but hand-writen BSD Makefiles. Importing CMake into the base system was not an option, because of the size of the project and the large dependency chain it requires for building. As a drawback, the build is slower than it could be, were we able to take advantage of a more modern build system.
Nowadays, Clang is the default compiler on the amd64, arm64, armv7, i386, macppc, octeon, powerpc64, and riscv64 platforms. It is also available in the sparc64 base system.
For many years, I was only a casual user of rsync and used it mostly for one-off file transfers.
Over time, I found rsync useful in more and more cases, and would recommend every computer user put this great tool into their toolbox!
This tutorial shows how to install a Debian 11 (Bullseye) minimal server in detail with many screenshots. The purpose of this guide is to provide a minimal setup that can be used as the basis for our other Debian 11 tutorials here at howtoforge.com.
Jack Wallen demonstrates how to install software from the command line on Ubuntu, AlmaLinux, Arch Linux, and openSUSE.
The Ubuntu Linux distribution from Canonical is an always evolving operating systems. Ubuntu gets updated once per year with a new release. On every second year that release is a Long Term Support, or better known as LTS, release. It is constantly being developed with new features and hardened with security patches.
As such, it’s important for us to know what version of Ubuntu we are running on. Like that we know when to do upgrades to our system. Below we will show you some examples on how to check your Ubuntu version using the desktop or the command line terminal.
Today, we are going to learn how to view directory structure using Tree command. As the name says, the tree command will display the contents of a directory in a tree-like format in Linux and Unix-like operating systems.
You might wonder why would someone use this command while we already have ls command to list the contents of a directory.
SuiteCRM is an open-source customer relationship management solution written in PHP. It's a fork of the popular SugarCRM software after SugarCRM stopped releasing its community edition. In this post, you will learn how to install SuiteCRM using the Nginx web server and Let's Encrypt SSL on Ubuntu 22.04.
When working on the retro handheld console mentioned in a previous post, I had an issue where the LCD driver was not probed when booting a custom Linux kernel image built.
To understand the problem, first some knowledge is needed about how devices and drivers are registered in the Linux kernel, how these two sets are matched (bound) and what is a probe deferral.
If you are not familiar with these concepts, please read this post where are explained in detail.
In this guide we will set up grafana loki for log aggregation on kubernetes using helm chart.
Loki is a Prometheus-inspired logging service for cloud native infrastructure. It is a logging backend optimized for users running Prometheus and Kubernetes with great logs search and visualization. It is designed to be very cost effective and easy to operate. It does not index the contents of the logs, but rather a set of labels for each log stream.
Unlike other logging systems, Loki is built around the idea of only indexing metadata about your logs: labels (just like Prometheus labels). Log data itself is then compressed and stored in chunks in object stores such as S3 or GCS, or even locally on the filesystem. A small index and highly compressed chunks simplifies the operation and significantly lowers the cost of Loki.
iPXE is a modern PXE firmware that works for the BIOS and UEFI motherboards. It can download the required boot files using many protocols, such as TFTP, FTP, HTTP, HTTPS, and NFS. Also, iPXE can boot from iSCSI SAN (Storage Area Network), Fibre Channel SAN via FCoE, and AoE SAN. iPXE can boot operating system installer images and full operating systems without requiring any HDD/SSD installed on the host (iSCSI SAN boot). Diskless booting with iPXE is very easy to configure.In addition, iPXE supports scripting. You can control the boot process with iPXE scripts stored on a remote server. Thus, iPXE script is a very powerful tool for dynamic boot management with iPXE.
Now a days we are more and more depending on mobile smartphones for work and our computing needs. Yet a desktop computer is still indispensable for our professional needs.
There are times that we can’t have access to our desktop, for example when traveling on vacation. For this situations there are a myriad of remote desktop software, but one of the best is the AnyDesk suite of remote desktop utilities.
Remote desktop software are applications that are used to access a desktop or desktop interface of a remote computer locally through a software client.
It’s no secret that Ubuntu is a great operating system for software development. While programmers have ample choices as to what code editor or IDE to use, one of the most beloved ones is Sublime Text.
In this tutorial we will learn how to install Sublime Text on our Ubuntu Desktop computer.
Today we are looking at how to install Funkin' Chromatic Scale Generator 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.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
In a science fiction game I play, we often find ourselves asking “which side of the Sun is Mars from the Earth right now?” Since this is for a game, the exact distance is not important, just “same side” or “90 degrees ahead” is a sufficient answer. But “right now” actually means a couple hundred years in the future.
This is certainly not a common setup, but I have a laptop plugged on my TV through an external GPU, and it always has a gamepad connected to it. I was curious to see if I could use the gamepad to control mpv when watching videos; it turns out it's possible.
In this text, you will learn how to control mpv using a gamepad / game controller by configuring mpv.
I wrote a simple Bash script to more easily change the screen brightness on systems where that's possible. Normally you have to guess at how much to change it by, since as far as I can tell, every backlight has a different scale (for example, my main laptop goes up to 120000 but another goes up to only a couple thousand); with this script you can work with a consistent percentage scale on all systems.
I keep a todo list on my computer, which contains tasks for work and home. It also contains items where I'm waiting for someone to do something, and I use it as a scratchpad for bits of pertinent information that might be useful in the near future. The file is written in Markdown[1]. Items in the list are written as bullet points (-), and sometimes I group items together under headers (#). Sometimes I have headers for each day of the week, and sometimes for a particular project I'm working on. The bullet point list of tasks is sometimes nested to include extra information about each task, or to add subtasks below a main task.
Seven years ago, back when I was a university student living with my parents and with lots of free time in my hands, I created GNOME To Do to help me organize my Google Summer of Code tasks. It was a fantastic time of my life, and I had the privilege of having time to procrastinate on writing productivity tools without earning a single coin on it.
Over the years, however, things changes. I married, moved to a new home with my partner, adopted a lovely dogga. Had to deal with the sucky parts of life like paying bills, planning meals, doing groceries, therapy, relearning how to live and operate under ADHD, taking care of myself and people around me.
Automation is the name of the game in IT today, particularly with the talent shortage gripping the industry and remote work becoming the norm. To that end, a new release of a message management solution from DRV Technologies that will enable IBM i shops to automate their responses to IBM i messages will likely be well received.
DRV Technologies develops a series of handy utilities for the IBM i server, including spool management and distribution (SpoolFlex), a forms management tool (FormFlex), secure MICR check printing (SecureChex), a database query and report writing tool (DBXFlex), and MessageFlex, a message monitoring solution.
For most IBM i shops in the world, a unit of compute, storage, or networking on a cloud or a unit of time for a skilled IT specialist is always going to cost more than what it costs to have such talent in house. And so, you would think, putting an IBM i system in the cloud and managing all aspects of that system will always cost companies more money, right?
Although Ubuntu has been an enormous success, controversial decisions will prevent it from being named the best Linux desktop distribution in the future.
I’m aware that this article’s headlines are not among the most popular of the day. On the other side, the Internet is overflowing with articles like “Why Ubuntu is the best distribution for…,” which are not valid for one reason. In Linux, there is no such thing as “best.”
But before we go any further, it is essential to note that this post only covers the desktop editions of Ubuntu. The server side of things is an entirely different story that is outside the scope of this article.
So we will start with the following maxim – Ubuntu is a phenomenon. The distribution has risen from 0 to 100 at a rate that no other Linux distribution has ever matched.
Only a few years after its initial version 4.10, “Warty Warthog,” in 2004, Ubuntu rose to the top of the desktop Linux rankings.
In the years that followed, Ubuntu evolved to the point where, to the uninitiated, the terms Linux and Ubuntu meant the same thing. In other words, the distro became synonymous with Linux for a good reason.
A new version of Linux Lite, a lightweight Linux distro based on Ubuntu, is available to download.
Linux Lite 6.0 uses the latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS as its foundation, paired with Linux kernel 5.15, and the nimble Xfce 4.16 desktop environment. Although it runs fine on modern machines Linux Lite is tailored towards use on older and/or resource-limited hardware.
In this post I whizz through what’s new in Linux Lite 6.0, and point you in the direction of the official download so you can grab a copy, boot it up, and try it out for yourself.
Let’s dive in!
The latest version of Canonical OS for IoT and embedded systems, Ubuntu Core 22, introduces real-time support for applications in robotics and industry. With a 10y LTS and a special focus on security, Ubuntu Core is a containerized version of Canonical Linux-based OS specifically crafted for IoT devices and embedded systems. Ubuntu Core leverage containerization to enforce a clean separation the kernel, OS image and applications. Additionally, it supports "on the air updates" to make it easier for customers to update their app in a transactional way and reducing network traffic by only transmitting diffs. Devices running Ubuntu Core can also have their dedicated IoT App Store which allows to control which apps can be installed.
SolidRun RZ/G2LC SOM is a system-on-module based on Renesas RZ/G2LC single or dual-core Cortex-A55/M33 processor and designed for AI-enhanced human-machine-interface (HMI) applications, industrial and building automation, video surveillance, IoT, etc…
The module is also equipped with 1GB DDR4 RAM, 8GB eMMC flash, and a wireless module with dual-band WiFi 4 and with Bluetooth 4.2 all packed into a tiny footprint measuring just 47 x 30mm that makes it suitable for space-constrained devices such as video doorbells and compact IP cameras.
The DevTerm modular computer from Clockwork has a hint of a significant upgrade, after its creator posted on Twitter to show an adapter to fit a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 board into the slot previously occupied by a Compute Module 3.
With a simple adapter board, we can make the #DevTerm immediately compatible with the #CM4. CM4 is so GREAT, for me it's not much different from a desktop PC already.
Before you complain about there being nothing to watch on Netflix, check out Rodrigo Feliciano’s potent reminder of just how awful watching broadcast TV once was. Using a Raspberry Pi, this hacked black-and-white set simulates the classic TV experience using modern content.
Finding a Raspberry Pi right now is harder than ever with many vendors selling out almost as soon as they’re restocked. But if you’re like maker and developer Pi800, you can always splice together a mod using an old Pi to create a faster, more efficient model that would be otherwise impossible to find on the market. In this project, Pi800 has updated a Raspberry Pi 3A+ to use a 1GB RAM chip harvested from a broken Pi.
This mod makes the 3A+ a more viable contender for projects by doubling the RAM from it’s usual 512MB to 1GB. According to Pi800, this mod uses a chip from an old Raspberry Pi 3B+. so recreating it will require either sacrificing a Pi or using components from an out-of-commission module.
The Chrome team is delighted to announce the promotion of Chrome 103 to the stable channel for Windows,Mac and Linux.This will roll out over the coming days/weeks.
Chrome 103.0.5060.53 contains a number of fixes and improvements -- a list of changes is available in the log. Watch out for upcoming Chrome and Chromium blog posts about new features and big efforts delivered in 103.
Once you’ve determined that you want to use Kubernetes as your base for developing applications locally, it’s time to figure out which development solution is the best. There are many different options out there, but a few select reign over the others as the most common, including minikube, kind, K3s, kubeadm, Docker Desktop, and MicroK8s.
In this article, you’ll take a more in-depth look at these six tools, and by the end, you should have an easier time picking out the one that works best for you. These options will be compared based on what platforms they support, what the complexity of the setup is, how flexible they are, and what kind of support they provide.
Engineers build systems. Good engineers always stress and focus efficiency of these systems.
Two recent examples of engineering thinking follow. One was in a video / podcast interview with Martin Thompson (who is a noted high-performance code expert) I came across recently. The overall focus of the hour-long interview is on ‘managing software complexity’. Around minute twenty-two, the conversation turns to feedback loops and systems, and a strong preference for simple and fast systems for more immediate feedback. An important topic indeed.
Part steadfast approach - part welcoming spirirt; Collabora continues to successfully expand with new talent amply on deck. Well ahead of the remote work curve, our new joiners have settled into their roles from their respective corners of the planet.
I am trying to contact Francis van Dun (FVANDUN on cpan) for permission to relicense Net::DHCP to the MIT license.
sortcanon.py is a tool to sort text files according to some canonicalization function. For example, sorting domains or ipv4 addresses.
This is actually an old tool, that I still had to publish. I just updated it to Python 3.
The Rust programming language is becoming increasingly popular these days, used and loved by hobbyists and corporations alike. One of the reasons for its popularity is the amazing tooling that Rust provides making it a joy to use for developers. Rustup is the official tool used to manage Rust tooling. Not only can it be used to install Rust and keep it updated, it also allows you to seamlessly switch between the stable, beta, and nightly Rust compilers and tooling. This article will introduce you to rustup and some common commands to use.
Last night I started on a journey: re-reading some of the early writings by k-punk, the blogging alias of music writer and cultural theorist Mark Fisher. Mark was possibly most famous for his short essay 'Capitalist Realism', and for those who haven't yet come across the writings or experienced the influence of his work, I think you're missing out, and I'd encourage you to dive in to *some* - the vast majority - of what you're missing out on. Mark's writing can have a raw energy that rebels against the sober tendencies of academic theory, whilst itself drawing heavily on theoretical substance/concept in an approachable and creative way, and also heightens 'everyday text' like music journalism.
The writers in the foreword and introduction to The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher[1], Simon Reynolds and Darren Ambrose, capture and frame this sense of Mark's work better than I can, but for me I've always thought that what was great about Mark's approach is how it acknowledges our 'media landscapes' as something in common; something that we can point to, identify, find, critique and navigate through (or escape), together - by acknowledging and drawing in all of the shared experience of theory, concept, television, film, music, art, etc. And in this approach, Mark would avoid the stale or rigid somnambulist culture of academic text, whilst also steering clear the emptiness of anti-intellectual trends in discourse that could be found in much of the popular UK broadcast and mainstream media that had surrounded his experience in his formitive years and the time of his writing (1980s-90s).
A fast circuit with long straights and heavy braking is usually a recipe for some overtaking. This one has walls that break cars that go off and bring out saftey cars to mix things up. Despite all that, most of this race wasn't that interesting. But then at the end, Sainz was right behind, and Verstappen had to work for it. It seemed as though Sainz had a chance of a win, but it's Verstappen's year.
Clara and I have been diving headfirst into Paul’s discography of late, and now I learn the chap just hit the big 80 yesterday.
A team of researchers at Spain's Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV), the Spanish National Research Council, and Columbia University has created customizable, three-dimensionally-printed acoustic holograms that could be used to treat diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
The holograms focus ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier in a controlled manner, so drugs that target central nervous system-affecting pathologies can pass through.
They also correct for skull-induced aberrations, and can produce an ultrasonic multi-focal beam in critical brain structures.
The International Dark-Sky Association (IDA) has named Keweenaw Dark Sky Park the newest addition to the International Dark Sky Places Program. The headquarters for the Dark Sky Park is located at the Keweenaw Mountain Lodge (KML). Here, visitors and supportive community members can meet, learn, and look “U.P.” to the stars for inspiration and embrace nature while traveling around the top of the Keweenaw Peninsula. The park becomes the 3rd IDA-certified Dark Sky Park in the State of Michigan, joining the Headlands International Dark Sky Park and the Dr. T.K. Lawless International Dark Sky Park, and is the first International Dark Sky Park in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
“Well-calibrated” means that if you predict something occurs with X% probability, then that event actually occurs X% of the time. Since predictions are often made on one-off events, another way of expressing calibration is that X% of predictions that you made with X% confidence should resolve in your favor. For example, if you make 100 predictions of 100 independent events, each with probability 75%, then you’d expect that (roughly) 75 of your predictions would be “correct”.
The corollary to this is that, in the same example, you’d expect that 25 of your predictions would be “wrong”. And this is a good thing. If you instead observed that only 5 of your predictions were “wrong”, then you would not be well-calibrated. Rather, you’d be significantly underconfident in your predictions.
Australia’s universities have been corporatised and compromised, and business schools are at the vanguard of academic capture. Jeanne Ryckmans investigates the rise and fall of the five-star travelling former professor who led the high-life on public grants.
The University of Sydney Business School website trumpets “Business not as usual!”. Its mission? To “develop students into future business leaders” using an “innovative approach to our teaching and learning”. True to its word, in 2021, the school promoted on LinkedIn a free online “Masterclass in leadership” that promised to give “a taste of what it’s like to study at Sydney: Discover how so-called ‘dark side’ personality characteristics, such as narcissism and psychopathy, play a part in effective leadership.”
Established in 1920, the University of Sydney Business School claims to be the oldest business faculty in Australia. Its $250 million state-of-the-art Abercrombie Building, a high-tech 376,740 square feet facility in Sydney’s Inner West is the “physical manifestation of the school’s ‘Business Not as Usual’ vision for the future” where “academics will solve poverty through profitability”. It boasts of all things, a “Sandpit”.
I’ve felt that for a few pieces of kit lately. I keep it around in the hopes that one day I’ll skill up enough to work on them.
This has worked out in a few cases. I was ready to throw away a tape drive years ago, then I learned about belts and how to replace them. A set of DIMMs in my Pentium 1 tower suddenly worked when I learned about timings and voltages. Heck, I even learned recently that a beloved childhood toy has a glorified Z80 in it, which gets me a step closer to figuring out how to bring it back to life one day.
In other news, my parents flew in last night only to find out when they arrived that they have COVID. We wore masks in the car and they are isolating in their room, so hopefully I will avoid catching it.
Microsoft said a day-long service outage affecting the Exchange Online service has ended following hours of complaints from users about connection issues.
On Monday evening, Microsoft explained that it was investigating problems with the service after users said they were “experiencing delays or connection issues when accessing the Exchange Online service.”
Two hours later, the company said its traffic management infrastructure was not working and attempted to reroute traffic in an effort to end the outage.
It took another nine hours before service was fully back to normal.
Forescout’s Vedere Labs disclosed OT:ICEFALL, 56 vulnerabilities affecting devices from 10 operational technology (OT) vendors. This is one of the single largest vulnerability disclosures that impact OT devices and directly addresses insecure-by-design vulnerabilities.
In this video for Help Net Security, Daniel dos Santos, Head of Security Research, Forescout, talks about the 56 vulnerabilities, which impact ten vendors, including Bently Nevada, Emerson, Honeywell, JTEKT, Motorola, Omron, Phoenix Contact, Siemens, and Yokogawa.
Attackers are targeting a number of key vertical markets in the U.S. with the active campaign, which impersonates the organization and Microsoft to lift Office365 and Outlook log-in details.
While the number of new security bulletins for IBM i is nowhere near what we see with Windows Server and Linux platforms, it has become a constant game of Whack-a-mole.
In recent weeks, IBM has disclosed a handful of vulnerabilities in its IBM i operating system and related IBM i products, including Db2 Mirror, WebSphere, Navigator for i, the Java development and runtime tools, and OmniFind Text Search Server. IBM has shipped PTFs for the security problems, which range in severity from medium to high.
A reported a “potentially dangerous piece of functionality” allows an attacker to launch an attack on cloud infrastructure and ransom files stored in SharePoint and OneDrive.
Researchers are warning attackers can abuse Microsoft Office 365 functionality to target files stored on SharePoint and OneDrive in ransomware attacks.
Those files, stored via “auto-save” and backed-up in the cloud, typically leave end users with the impression data is shielded from a ransomware attack. However, researchers say that is not always the case and files stored on SharePoint and OneDrive can be vulnerable to a ransomware attack.
Around 16% of all global companies work remotely, with no indication the trend will slow anytime soon. While remote working can save companies money in the long run, the lack of digital security used to secure remote networks creates an issue that’s incredibly costly.
A rise in remote working means many companies face increased cyber threats and attacks. Unsecured public networks, weak security measures, and use of personal devices for remote access create vulnerabilities. Cybercriminals use replay attacks to exploit these security holes, intercepting traffic to steal important company data.
Skeptical Science is a good collection of arguments against many common myths among climate change deniers. Those same old climate change denial myths are still going strong and unfortunately still need to be debunked again and again.
These days, there’s a new category of debunking that we need to do even as people are realizing the gravity of the situation. This isn’t meant to be doomy but it’s so we can recognize common arguments when they show up again and again and figure out a way to address them (or ignore them). I feel like some of these arguments do have a kernel of merit.
Alyssa Blackburn, a data scientist at Rice University and Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, has spent several years performing digital detective work with her trusty lab assistant, Hail Mary, a shiny black computer with orange trim. She has been collecting and analyzing leaks from the Bitcoin blockchain, the immutable public ledger that has recorded all transactions since the cryptocurrency’s launch in January 2009.
Bitcoin represents a techno-utopian dream. Satoshi Nakamoto, its pseudonymous inventor, proposed that the world run not on centralized financial institutions but on an egalitarian, math-based electronic money system distributed through a computer network. And the system would be “trustless” — that is, it would not rely on a trusted party, such as a bank or government, to arbitrate transactions. Rather, as Satoshi Nakamoto wrote in a 2008 white paper, the system would be anchored in “cryptographic proof instead of trust.” Or, as T-shirts proclaim: “In Code We Trust.”
Cryptocurrencies continue their precipitous free fall, assuming they were even worth something in the first place. The bandits and whales are long out, and the marks have switched from arguing about utility to claiming that w-well everything else is a Ponzi scheme too in a desperate attempt to shore up their positions and retain what little credibility they can.
I see some people revelling in the crumbling of this smoke-belching edifice, citing how nauseating some of the conduct of these crypto bros have been. “Have fun being poor” is the quote most often thrown back at them.
The House of Representatives on Monday, following an earlier vote by the Senate, approved legislation that retailers believe will help reign in ocean carriers who have used the coronavirus pandemic as a rational to jack up rates to transport goods to the U.S.
The bill, known as the Ocean Shipping Reform Act of 2022 (OSRA), passed in a vote of 369 to 42. It seeks to improve oversight of ocean shipping practices by granting more investigative authority to the Federal Maritime Commission (FMC), providing greater clarity on prohibited business practices and giving the FMC the authority to order refunds.
Wikimedia Movement and the Free Knowledge Advocacy Group EU have the pleasure to invite you to a Monsters of Law event featuring First Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the European Union, Maciej Szpunar titled: New Technologies and Fundamental Rights.
Apple employees at a Baltimore-area store have voted to unionize, making it the first of the company’s 270-plus stores in the United States to join a trend in labor organizing sweeping through retailers, restaurants and tech companies.
The result, announced on Saturday by the National Labor Relations Board, provides a foothold for a budding movement among Apple retail employees who want a greater voice over wages and Covid-19 policies. Employees of more than two dozen Apple stores have expressed interest in unionizing in recent months, union leaders say. In the election, 65 employees at Apple’s store in Towson, Md., voted in favor of being represented by the union, known as the Apple Coalition of Organized Retail Employees, while 33 voted against. It will be part of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, an industrial trade union that represents over 300,000 employees.
Ahead of their meeting late June, a petition calling for a conference of ministers of contracting states under Article 4a EPC has been sent to the members of the Administrative Council of the EPO.
The petition is an initiative of the EPO’s trade union SUEPO, which has invited all staff members to sign it.
According to the petition: ‘the development of the European Patent Organization (…) has increasingly departed from the structure and its mission as foreseen under the EPC and it appears that no appropriate countermeasures will be taken.
Therefore, we consider an external review of the EPO’s situation by a Conference of Ministers of the Contracting States under Article 4a EPC to be expedient; such a Conference is anyway long overdue in view of Article 4a EPC.
[...]
Backlogs in examination and search are increasing and it appears that for tackling the problems the current line management is tempted to return to outdated management approaches like “challenging people” measures and management “by fear”, which are unworthy of a modern organization like the EPO with highly qualified personnel. At the same time the EPO plans to reduce the staffing level in core tasks even further. This adds to current plans squaring with a large-scale decentralization of EPO tasks, including transfer of tasks to NPOs. Such significant amendments of the Organization’s structure fall outside the prerogatives of the President or the Administrative Council as defined in Articles 10 and 33 EPC. Furthermore, such a decentralization of EPO tasks would also affect the legal certainties of the validity of the patents granted by the EPO.
[...]
According to the European Patent Convention, meetings under Article 4a are due to be held ‘at least every five years’ but since 2000, when the article was introduced, such conference has never been held.
The AC meeting of 29 and 30 June 2022 is especially interesting as a decision will be made about the re-appointment of president António Campinos, who started in office in 2018, for a second five-year term.
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It remains to be seen what the AC’s reaction will be to the petition, which is a sign of the troubled relations at the EPO as well. Kluwer IP Law contacted several members of the Administrative Council about the performance of Antonio Campinos during his first term, but non of them wanted to comment.