Linux powers the backbone of the internet, mobile devices, and now cloud computing systems.
Because of this it's often essential for techies to be able to work directly in a Linux environment, especially for operating servers and for developing software that runs on them.
While Linux has a reputation for being primarily for coders and programmers, over the past couple of decades there have been moves to provide versions of Linux that are more friendly to ordinary users, such as by providing more of a graphic user interface (GUI) and be less reliant on command line use.
However, at its core Linux still remains important for development use, and there are specific distros available that care less for newbies from Windows and are configured specifically for various technical uses.
Here we'll look at the main Linux distros used by software developers, and feature the best of them.
It took a little while but I'm now typing on my second Raptor Talos II workstation, effectively upgrading two years in from a 32GB RAM dual quad-core POWER9 DD2.2 to a 64GB RAM dual octo-core DD2.3. It's rather notable to think about how far we've come with the platform. A number of you have asked about how this changed things in practise, so let's do yet another semi-review.
Again, I say "semi-review" because if I were going to do this right, I'd have set up both the dual-4 and the dual-8 identically, had them do the same tasks and gone back if the results were weird. However, when you're buying a $7000+ workstation you economize where you can, which means I didn't buy any new NVMe cards, bought additional rather than spare RAM, and didn't buy another GPU; the plan was always to consolidate those into the new machine and keep the old chassis, board and CPUs/HSFs as spares. Plus, I moved over the case stickers and those totally change the entire performance characteristics of the system, you dig?
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For other kinds of uses, though, I didn't see a lot different in terms of performance between DD2.2 and DD2.3 and to be honest you wouldn't expect to. DD2.3 does have improved Spectre mitigations and this would help the kind of branch-heavy code that would benefit least from additional slices, but the change is relatively minor and the difference in practice indeed seemed to be minimal. On my JIT-accelerated DOSBox build the benchmarks came in nearly exactly the same, as did QEMU running Mac OS 9. Booted into GNOME as I am right now, the extra CPU resources certainly do smooth out doing more things at once, but again, that's of course more a factor of the number of cores and slices than the processor stepping.
This week we’ve be stoving in people’s heads with spades and buying tablets. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS is out! We discuss GNOME Shell UX plans, the GNOME extension for Snapcraft, Ubuntu on LinuxONE mainframes and a new release of Mir. We round up some events and our picks from the tech news.
Windows 7 has reached the end of its life. It will no longer receive security updates and Microsoft's technical support will stop. Running an out-of-date OS can have serious potential risks, and if you're using Windows 7 connected to the Internet, you will have a problem. Fortunately, there are two simple solutions.
Last year a SUSE developer sent out a set of patches adding authentication support to the Btrfs file-system. Btrfs already has checksums on meta-data blocks and data blocks while the original implementation of these authentication patches was performing HMAC on a SHA256 checksum as a keyed hash. A proper key in turn is then needed to mount a verified file-system.
That Btrfs authentication support wasn't picked up at the time and the SUSE engineer, Johannes Thumshirn, since left the company. But following new inquiries over the work, it sounds like it will be revived for this authentication that could be used for the likes of embedded devices and containers.
As I noted earlier this month, AMD has been amassing many graphics driver improvements for Linux 5.8. On Friday marked their first pull request to DRM-Next of the Radeon graphics driver improvements for this next kernel cycle.
Some of the highlights for the AMDGPU kernel driver improvements sent in as part of yesterday's first pull to DRM-Next for Linux 5.8 includes:
One of the areas being worked on upstream recently for the RISC-V architecture's Linux kernel support is EFI handling. The preliminary work for supporting EFI on RISC-V is set to land for the Linux 5.8 kernel.
In recent months the Linux EFI code has been going through a spring cleaning of sorts with the preparations towards RISC-V enablement. The initial preparations for RISC-V EFI support have been sent in as part of EFI-next code ultimately destined for Linux 5.8.
Adding to the growing list of changes building up for Linux 5.8 this summer is now having Tiger Lake Thunderbolt/USB4 support.
Queued now as part of the Thunderbolt-Next changes for Linux 5.8 is the Tiger Lake support. The commit notes that Tiger Lake's Thunderbolt/USB4 controller is "quite close" to that of current Ice Lake hardware.
Facebook engineer Roman Gushchin presented a new slab memory controller for Linux last September. The new memory controller has been very promising with the potential of using 30~40% less memory and less memory fragmentation, among other benefits. The third revision to that kernel work has now been sent out for evaluation.
The new controller allows for sharing of slab pages between memory cgroups and other improvements. Using this new code can lead up to 45% better slab utilization, similar benefits to a drop in total kernel memory usage, and less unmovable slab pages. The code is also cleaner and with this third revision the code is further simplified.
Loongson, the Chinese MIPS64 CPUs that are becoming more common within China but not so much internationally, continues seeing better Linux kernel support. There has been a fair amount of Loongson Linux work in recent months including in the current 5.7 cycle while more should be on tap for Linux 5.8.
With JEDEC's Universal Flash Storage (UFS) v3.1 specification from January one of the new features is the Host Performance Booster mode for faster and cheaper UFS capabilities. Micron and others have been working on this UFS Host Performance Booster support for Linux.
Keeping all the files and data, is really important task these days because our computers are always connected to internet which increases the threat of virus or phishing attacks on our computer. This could compromise crucial data stored on the computer or sometimes loss of data. In some cases hardware failure also can cause loss of whole data on system. Professional users like web developers, system administrators, and database managers suffer most in this kind of loss. To prevent this loss and safeguard the data we need something like antivirus or backup software.
There has been always a way to backup files in Linux and its distributions, i.e. the command line method. But it is quite tricky approach and is not that easy to handle for novice and normal computer users. Also it is not only limited to safeguarding files but it should also protect important data, database and server.
So today in this article we’re going to have a look at 5 best Linux backup software’s which you can use on Linux and its various distributions to backup important data.
  Once there was a time when finding a proper printer and its driver for Linux based operating systems was quite tough and in some cases almost impossible too but things have changed. There are plenty of Linux compatible printers available in the market at competitive prices.
In this post, we are showing you the link from where you can download the printer’s driver and utilities for your Linux based operating system.
  This short article covers resources and helps to people who want to quit MS GitHub and move away to a better one --ethical, Free Software-based and user-controlled--. This includes examples of popular projects already moved, alternatives you could choose, self-host solutions, repository transfer guides, our community services, and further information, all presented in short format. In this article of course I mentioned several names like GitLab and Kallithea as alternatives and GNOME and Trisquel projects as examples. I hope this simple article could lighten your burdens in migrating away your source code repository. Happy hacking!
Built off yesterday's exciting Wine 5.7 release that brought more WineD3D Vulkan bits and the start of a USB driver, Wine-Staging 5.7 is out with a number of its patches upstreamed into yesterday's release plus a bit of new functionality.
Wine-Staging 5.7 is down to less than 850 patches atop the upstream Wine code-base. Wine 5.7 upstreamed a number of the staging patches around Windows Codecs, NTDLL, and other bits to lighten the delta carried in the staging area.
But in addition to Wine-Staging 5.7 updating their NTDLL syscall emulation and raw input mouse handling code, there is a fix in this release for running Windows applications built using .NET CoreRT.
Following a four-month development cycle, the KDE community has released its first KDE Application bundle update for 2020. KDE Applications 20.04 contains a number of KDE-based apps and libraries that have come with dozens of changes, more features, and improvements.
2020.4 update for KDE Applications includes Okular, Dolphin, Lokalize, KMail, Konsole, Elisa, Gwenview, Yakuake, Kdenlive, KDE Connect, Spectacle, and Krita. So, let’s discuss new changes in each application in detail.
  Dear digiKam fans and users,
Just few words to inform the community that 7.0.0-beta3 is out and ready to test two month later the second beta release published in February.
After a long test stage while this Covid-19 containment, this new version come with more than 670 bug-fixes since last stable release 6.4.0 and look very promising. Nothing is completed yet, as we plan one release candidate version before next spring, when we will publish officially the stable version. It still few bugs to fix while this pre-release campain and all help will be welcome from the community to stabilize codes.
We are pleased to announce the launch of Nitrux 1.2.8. This new version brings together the latest software updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and ready-to-use hardware support.
Nitrux 1.2.8 is available for immediate download.
Today, we bring you a new report on the Maui Project progress.
Are you a developer and want to start developing cross-platform and convergent apps, targeting, among other things, the upcoming Linux Mobile devices? Then join us on Telegram: https://t.me/mauiproject.
If you are interested in testing this project and helping out with translations or documentation, you are also more than welcome.
In the last post I described how we handle public transport line metadata in KPublicTransport, and what we use that for. Here’s now how you can help to review and improve these information in Wikidata and OpenStreetMap, where it not only benefits KPublicTransport, but everyone.
It’s cool storing stuff in a database, but what if you shared the database schema so other tools can work with the data? That’s the basic idea of Linked Data which Tracker tries to follow when indexing your content.
In a closed music database, you might see a “Music” table with a “name” column. What does that mean? Is it the name of a song, an artist, an album, … ? You will have to do some digging to find out.
When Tracker indexes your music, it will create a table called nmm:MusicAlbum. What does that mean? You can click the link to find out, because the database schema is self-documenting. The abbreviation nmm:MusicAlbum expands to a URL, which clearly identifies the type of data being stored.
By formalising the database schema, we create a shared vocabulary for talking about the data. This is very powerful – have you seen GMail Highlights, where a button appears in your email inbox to checkin for a flight and such things? These are powered by the https://schema.org/ shared vocabulary. Google don’t manually add support to GMail for each airline in the world. Instead, the airlines embed a https://schema.org/FlightReservation resource in the confirmation email which GMail uses to show the information. The vocabulary is an open standard, so other email providers can use the same data and even propose improvements. Everyone wins!
With the somewhat surprising announcement this week that Intel's Clear Linux platform would be divesting from the desktop and focusing on server and cloud workloads, the first visible changes on the desktop side are expected next week.
Clear Linux is preparing to transition to the recently released GNOME 3.36. As part of that transition is when they will be dropping their default desktop customizations. Clear Linux will still be providing a vanilla GNOME default desktop for those that want Clear's desktop experience, but it will follow a "vanilla" GNOME configuration.
With FreeBSD Foundation grant, Kristof Provost harnesses new parallel techniques to uncork performance bottleneck Independent embedded systems developer Kristof Provost certainly knows his way around the networking stack. For the past several years, (since George Neville-Neil approached him at AsiaBSDCon with an offer he couldn’t refuse) he has maintained FreeBSD’s port of the OpenBSD Packet Filter (pf) firewall.
Even before this, if you’ve used IPv6, you’ve benefited from Kristof’s work to clean up fragment handling in the firewall. But it’s his 2018 engagement with Orange (France Telecom) that marks the beginning of this particular story.
With 2019 turnover of €42 bn, Orange is on a mission “to ensure that digital services are well thought-out, made available and used in a more caring, inclusive and sustainable way in all areas of our business.”
FreeBSD plays a role in this mission, serving as the OS for some of Orange’s business gateway devices. Olivier Cochard-Labbé, who at the time worked as a Network Engineer at Orange, discovered a pfsync performance issue and recruited Kristof to come up with a fix. Olivier is a recognized networking expert who founded FreeNAS and BSD Router Project and is a FreeBSD port committer.
“Olivier set this project up for success very well,” said Kristof in an interview for this blog. “He had extensively researched the issue and provided me with benchmarks and flame graphs that really sped up my work.” After a few weeks of coding and testing, and another few for the commit (work that was spread out across about 6 months), Kristof had a patch that doubled pfsync performance.
Thanks to a FreeBSD Foundation Community Grant, FreeBSD 13 will be bringing up to a 5x performance improvement for if_bridge, the kernel code for network bridge device support.
FreeBSD is already known to perform well within enterprise network infrastructure but it turns out for if_bridge there has been a performance bottleneck hitting some large operators like France's Orange telecom company. Due to heavy contention on a single mutex for this network switch code, there was a limit of processing around 3.7 million packets per second. But in making use of epoch on FreeBSD 13-CURRENT for allowing greater concurrency without needing a lock/mutex, the performance opened up to being able to handle around 18.6 million packets per second.
Lenovo is to start selling Fedora versions of ThinkPads. Announced via the Fedora magazine, Lenovo has agreed to begin selling Fedora editions of the ThinkPad P1 Gen 2, P53 and X1 Gen 8. Part of Lenovo's Linux Community Series, the three machines will come pre-loaded with Fedora 32 Workstation.
According to Matthew Miller, the machines running Fedora 32 will only come pre-loaded with official Fedora repositories. Practically speaking, this means the P1 Gen 2 and P53 will not have NVIDIA drivers installed by default. Naturally, these can be enabled by downloading software from proprietary sources.
Miller notes that the ThinkPad Fedora editions will be available globally. Seen as a pilot program, Lenovo may expand its Fedora offering if uptake is strong. There is no word on availability or pricing yet, though.
IBM joined the legion of companies withdrawing its full year financial guidance as it reported its first quarter financials late on Monday, citing the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on its ability to forecast upcoming business performance.
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IBM splits its business into five units to report its financials, with Cloud & Cognitive Software the most interesting for a couple of key reasons.
First, it was the only unit to record any notable sales growth during the first three months of 2020, climbing by 7% year-on-year to $5.24 billion.
Here’s your report of what has happened in Fedora this week. Fedora 32 is GO and will ship on Tuesday 28 April!
I have weekly office hours in #fedora-meeting-1. Drop by if you have any questions or comments about the schedule, Changes, elections, or anything else.
Nonetheless, what does it look like when Microsoft's money comes along?
There can be no greater contamination. The letterhead of Software in the Public Interest, Inc used to request money from Microsoft???? While Sam Hartman was unleashing feral dogs to attack a long-standing volunteer, he was spreading his bum cheeks for Bill Gates to come in.
What are the principles that govern Debian Developers in 2020? They are clearly not the same as they were in 2006. Anybody who dares to ask about these paymasters is accused of violating the Code of Conduct. Long live the Code of Conduct.
A short while ago Daniel, Lars and I met to discuss Russ Cox’s excellent essay Our Software Dependency Problem. This essay looks at software reuse in general, especially in the context of modern distribution methods like PyPI and NPM which make the whole process much more frictionless than traditional distribution methods used with languages like C. Possibly our biggest conclusion was that the essay is so eminently sensible that we mostly just talked about how much we agreed with it and how comprehensive it was, we particularly admired the clarity with which it explores how to evaluate the quality of free software projects.
Building packages in Debian seems to be a solved problem. But is it? At the bottom, installing the dpkg-dev package provides all the basic tools needed. Assuming that you already succeeded with creating the necessary packaging metadata (i.e., debian/changelog, debian/control, debian/copyright, etc., and there are great helper tools for this such ash dh-make, dh-make-golang, etc.,) it should be as simple as invoking the dpkg-buildpackage tool. So what's the big deal here?
The issue is that dpkg-buildpackage expects to be called with an appropriately setup build context, that is, it needs to be called in an environment that satisfies all build dependencies on the system. Let's say you are building a package for Debian unstable on your Debian stable system (this is the common scenario for the official Debian build machines), you would need your build to link against libraries in unstable, not stable. So how to tell the package build process where to find its dependencies?
The answer (in Debian and many other Linux distributions) is you do not at all. This is actually a somewhat surprising answer for software developers without a Linux distribution development background1. Instead, chroots "simulate" an environment that has all dependencies that we want to build against at the system locations, that is. /usr/lib, etc.
There is a new tool available for Sparkers: jgmenu.
[...]
Due to changes in the Debian testing repositories, the Obmenu and Obmenu-generator is not available and can not be installed on Debian/Sparky testing any more, so… The ‘jgmenu’ provides a pipemenu to the Sparky 6 Openbox edition instead of the two menu apps mentioned before.
Insight: Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla Release Schedule
Right after the official release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa on April 23, 2020, the Canonical company behind Ubuntu is gearing up Ubuntu 20.10 Groovy Gorilla. Ubuntu 20.10 will be available on 22 October 2020.
I am soping in thousands of errors at a crack. I refreshed the entire focal repository. I felt I was not doing justice to what Ubuntu has done, I waited for them to create a “LTS” I have re-bounced it to the server in the basement. Data is flowing at rapid succession.
Ubuntu “Focal Fossa” 20.04 was released two days ago, so I took the opportunity yesterday and this morning to upgrade my VPS from Ubuntu 18.04 to 20.04.
[...]
Anyway, to get back to the distribution upgrade - it was fairly boring. I started yesterday by taking a copy of the server and launching it locally in a lxd container, and then tested the upgrade in there; to make sure I’m prepared for the real thing :)
In this Ubuntu 20.04 Download guide you will learn where to download and how to download Ubuntu 20.04 LTS ISO image for Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu Studio, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, Kylin desktops and Ubuntu 20.04 Server.
Additionally, you can download Ubuntu 20.04 server preinstalled images for Raspberry Pi and various other architectures. Lastly, hypervisor cloud images such as Azure, Vagrant, KVM or VirtualBox are also available for download.
This month: * Command & Conquer * How-To : Python, Valentina, and Rawtherapee[1] * Graphics : Inkscape * Graphics : Krita for Old Photos
My name is Ovidiu, also known as Ovi, Ovid or `solazio`.
I joined the web team at Canonical about a year ago as a Front End Developer. Since I joined, I was involved with multiple projects (and that’s pretty cool), but in the last few months, I worked mostly on snapcraft.io – which is one of our coolest projects
Believe it or not, but I am a Chartered Structural Engineer and worked in the construction industry for approximately 10 years. Until I decided to challenge myself and delve into the developer’s world.
I love playing football and challenging my cool colleagues in the gym during lunch breaks. I also like to take photos – mostly landscape and events.
With last-minute tweaking, Canonical has finally released the final Ubuntu 20.04 LTS which is now the latest long-term version that you can use. Undoubtedly, Ubuntu 20.04 packs exciting new features to give better user experience, performance, and speed than ever before.
Along with 20.04, seven other officially recognized Ubuntu flavors have also been released, with downstream changes from Ubuntu 20.04. These seven derivatives include Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Ubuntu Budgie, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Ubuntu Kylin.
Canonical, the parent company of Ubuntu, on Thursday announced the general availability of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, codenamed "Focal Fossa." This major upgrade places particular emphasis on security and performance.
Released once every two years, the new long-term support version provides a platform for enterprise IT infrastructures and workloads across all sectors for five years. Enterprise users can extend that support for up to 10 years with a commercial support plan.
Ubuntu has reached the top of independent rankings of enterprise Linux security, according to Canonical. Ubuntu 20.04 LTS applies Kernel Self Protection measures, ensures control flow integrity, and adds stack-clash protection for systemic forward-looking enterprise security.
Ubuntu 20.04 LTS includes Secure Boot to protect against low-level attacks and rootkits, often employed by Advanced Persistent Threat groups. This feature limits attack proliferation or blast radius with strict snap confinement of key exposed applications on the desktop and server, such as the local Kubernetes package MicroK8s.
Last week we asked “is MIPS dead?” question following the news that Wave Computing had filed for bankruptcy, two MIPS Linux maintainers had left, and China-based CIP United now obtained the exclusive MIPS license rights for mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macau.
Ingenic is one of those Chinese companies that have offered MIPS-based processors for several years, but one commenter noted that Ingenic joined the RISC-V foundation, and as a result, we could speculate the company might soon launch RISC-V processors, potentially replacing their MIPS offerings.
I need an open-source POS solution for a client. They have a small cafeteria-type restaurant + gift shop. Currently they are using a craptastic closed-source commercial solution that offers no support despite requiring a huge service contract.
Lots of bonus points for something web-based, since the POS terminals they have are rather low-end.
The following article presents a high-level overview of ProtonMail’s Android security model and explains how the app protects users’ sensitive data. You can view our Android app’s open source code on GitHub. We also explain the importance of open source to Proton in our Android open source announcement. For more information on what threats ProtonMail is designed to counter, read our threat model. Although the document covers technical subject matter, we wrote it to be as accessible as possible to the general audience.
Google's third developer preview (DP3) of the Android 11 operating system is an enticing look at the future of the platform, where new features and UI tweaks abound.
But before we get into the meat of things, a bit of a throat-clearing. In the past, features have appeared in Android developer previews that didn't ultimately make it into the finished product. As a result, it's always worth looking at these with a healthy awareness of the fact that they're experimental in nature.
Google has planned six releases before Android 11 starts slithering onto devices in Q3 2020. So, again, anything mentioned here is subject to change.
Arguably the most exciting feature – at least for road-warrior IT pros – is the ability to tether devices to your phone's internet connection via Ethernet. This makes sense, especially given that both Huawei and Samsung offer desktop "experiences" with their phones. Attach a monitor and peripherals to your pricey blower with a USB-C hub, and you've effectively got a pocketable desktop computer.
And now you can easily share your internet connection via that hub. Plug in an Ethernet cable, and another machine can share your phone's data. All you have to do is enter your tethering settings and toggle a switch.
This could also be handy for those living in areas seldom frequented by Openreach vans. If you can't get decent broadband, but there's solid 4G connectivity, you can easily turn your phone into a router, breathing life into devices that might perhaps lack integral Wi-Fi, like some older smart TVs, or an Xbox 360.
Another cool enhancement is found in multitasking – or, in Android parlance, "Recents". Those with Android phones know that there's a lot of dead UI space when you flick between apps, and Google has chosen to fill that with new functionality, allowing you to easily take screenshots and share them via the usual places.
Open source will survive and likely grow during the current economic downturn caused by the global coronavirus pandemic. That's the position of people in the open source community, including Dr. Dries Buytaert, co-founder and CTO of Acquia and creator of Drupal, the open source web content management framework. In a March post on his personal blog, Dr. Buytaert wrote that during periods of economic decline, "organizations will look to lower costs, take control of their own destiny, and strive to do more with less." Adopting open source can help "organizations survive and thrive," he continued. I had a chance to interview Dr. Buytaert about his article, his advice for building successful open source projects and what's happening with the Drupal Association and DrupalCon for TechRepublic's Dynamic Developer video and podcast series . The following is an edited transcript of the the interview.
NordVPN, one of the biggest VPN service provider companies in the world, has, today, rolled out a new technology based on the promising WireGuard VPN protocol. The new tech dubbed NordLynx is built around the WireGuard VPN protocol which is touted to offer better speed than other contemporary protocols like OpenVPN, IPSec, and more.
Another benefit of WireGuard VPN protocol over other protocols is its easy deployment as there are extremely fewer lines of code involved. To give you a perspective, OpenVPN runs on 400,000 lines of code whereas WireGuard VPN has only 4,000 lines of code, marking a stark difference between the two.
The database that’s making waves in enterprise settings is PostgreSQL (often called Postgres), which would be romping up the database popularity index, if such a thing existed. Why is that the case?
An open-source system that runs on Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Azure and ARM alike, you can download it, run it on your virtual or real tech, from 60-core x86s to a Raspberry Pi, and it’ll happily mince your data, just how you want it!
But what happens when your business relies on Postgres, or you need a helping hand? Or an extra feature you can’t/won’t develop yourself? That’s where EnterpriseDB comes in. We speak to Marc Linster, Senior Vice President of Product Development at the company, about paying for “open-source-PLUS”, upstreaming, development communities and the unique capabilities of PostgreSQL.
Network operators, integrators and software vendors have joined forces to create Leitstand, an open-source community that aims to increase the efficiency of developing, buying and running network management systems for next generation carrier networks.
It will provide the tools needed to operate the underlying infrastructure in a disaggregated telecoms network, including zero-touch provisioning of infrastructure, inventory management, operational visibility of network elements, alarm monitoring, fault diagnosis and software version management. The Leitstand toolset will be provided in an open-source model, freely available to any operator, equipment vendor and systems integrator. Initial contributors to the Leitstand initiative include Deutsche Telekom, EWE TEL, Reply and RtBrick.
Remote team members obviously can’t rely on the nonverbal cues that happen in face-to-face communication, but they can use methods such as emojis to help gauge each other’s mood and status.
Get your own server or the apps, which offer more or less the same level of features as Zoom, with what it’s perhaps it’s “killer feature”: End-to-end encryption. Furthermore, it does not require any form of user ID. While its cloud service collects general performance data (“Crashlytics”), the server-based comes without any form of analytics features or libraries.
Network is an essential part of infrastructure health and requires constant monitoring. To meet specific OS and hardware requirements, open source tools can be the best fit.
ProtonMail has open sourced its Android app, meaning all ProtonMail and ProtonVPN apps are now open source.Open sourcing allows anyone to review the code and verify Proton’s data protection claims are accurate.The company also announced that all ProtonMail and ProtonVPN apps have also passed an independent third-party security audit.
ProtonMail has published the code for all its apps following the open sourcing of the ProtonMail Android app. The company said, “Transparency is one of Proton’s guiding principles, which is why it’s always clear who runs the organization, what its data policy is and the capabilities and limitations of the technology”.
By open sourcing all the apps, Proton is allowing users the same level of transparency into its code. Any security researcher can now verify if Proton is handling user data in the way that it claims. This extra layer of transparency means that everyone, including activists, dissidents and journalists who rely on Proton’s service can check if their communications are as private as promised.
In contrast, Jami is peer-to-peer text and video chat software for computers and phones, available as a free download. While it won’t replace the communication and collaboration you would do in Zoom or Jitsi, it could be an alternative for the kind of communication and collaboration associated with Skype or Microsoft Teams — chat with the option to transition to a call when necessary. Jami was created by Savoir-faire Linux of Montreal, which plans to make money selling Jami Account Management Server, an administrative tool.
Signal, the high-security messaging app, supports video calling, but so far only from mobile devices. Wire and Wickr are a couple of other open source options in this category.
A group of scientists and researchers have designed a open source, low-cost ventilator to be used in areas that have limited means within their healthcare systems.
Researchers from the Biophysics and Bioengineering Unit of the University of Barcelona, Spain, have created an open source, non-invasive, low-cost ventilator, to support patients with respiratory diseases in areas with limited means.
The study was led by Ramono Farré, professor of Physiology and member of the August Pi i Sunyer Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBAPS) and the Respiratory Diseases Networking Biomedical Research Centre (CIBERES), and the results were published in the European Respiratory Journal.
Ventilator could support coronavirus treatment in low-income regions or where supplies are limited.
A low-cost, easy-to-build non-invasive ventilator aimed at supporting the breathing of patients with respiratory failure performs similarly to conventional high-quality commercial devices, according to new research published in the European Respiratory Journal.
Non-invasive ventilators are used to treat patients with breathing difficulty and respiratory failure, a common symptom of more severe coronavirus disease. Non-invasive ventilation is delivered using facemasks or nasal masks, which push a set amount of pressurized air into the lungs. This supports the natural breathing process when disease has caused the lungs to fail, enabling the body to fight infection and get better.
As hospitals in developing countries struggle with ventilator shortages, engineers and doctors are coming together to launch open-source projects to help meet demand. WSJ takes a look at whether any of these plans could become real machines that help save lives.
The Kahanu open-source ventilator project has received a $250,000 grant from the Hawai‘i Community Foundation to build bridge ventilators for state hospitals.
A team of Hawai‘i engineers and an emergency room doctor are working to produce simple and effective bridge ventilators with funding from the Hawai‘i Resilience Fund, part of the Hawai‘i Community Foundation (HCF).
Named Kahanu, which means “the breath” in the Hawaiian language, the ventilator is made of durable, sterilizable materials and can be produced in Hawai‘i for about $1,200 each, according to a project press release. Medical grade ventilators can cost more than $25,000 each.
A Kahanu ventilator can serve as a “bridge ventilator” that can be enlisted in an emergency to save a patient’s life, the release said.
Since the lockdown began, there are plenty of people in the local community who are putting their time to good use to help others.
One of those people is Finian McCarthy, who is an electronic engineer and the Managing Director of county Longford-based company, Envitec Ltd.
Finian has been making the most of the time at home by designing and building an open source ventilator, which he says can be made cheaply and shared around the world so that others can replicate the design should there be an urgent need for ventilators during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a team at the University of Cambridge has designed an open-source ventilator in partnership with local clinicians, engineers and manufacturers across Africa that is focused to address the specific needs for treating COVID-19 patients and is a fully functioning system for use after the pandemic.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, a team at the University of Cambridge has designed an open-source ventilator in partnership with local clinicians, engineers and manufacturers across Africa that is focused to address the specific needs for treating COVID-19 patients and is a fully functioning system for use after the pandemic.
Built primarily for use in low- and middle-income countries, the OVSI ventilator can be cheaply and quickly manufactured from readily available components. Current ventilators are expensive and difficult to fix, but an open-source design will allow users to adapt and fix the ventilators according to their needs and, by using readily available components, the machines can be built quickly across Africa in large numbers. The cost per device is estimated to be around one-tenth of currently available commercial systems.
An open-source ventilator has been designed by a team at the University of Cambridge primarily for use in low and middle-income countries.
In partnership with clinicians, engineers and manufacturers across Africa, the focus was on the specific needs for treating Covid-19 patients and a fully-functioning system for use after the pandemic.
Ventilators have been difficult to find at any price, sometimes forcing doctors in jammed intensive care units to decide who gets the last one available. General Motors Co. was ordered last month by U.S. President Donald Trump to make the breathing machines to help fill the gap, and announced preparations for deliveries last week.
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On April 1, Alkaher’s team published the design for the AmboVent-1690-108 on the online forum GitHub, allowing anyone to take the idea and run with it. AmboVent is busy producing 20 prototypes on a shoestring budget of $200,000, planning to send them to various countries where other developers will navigate the process of getting regulatory approval.
Data sharing, open-source designs for medical equipment, and hobbyists are all being harnessed to combat COVID-19.
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Perhaps nowhere is that open ethos clearer than in the way do-it-yourself (DIY) and ‘maker’ communities have stepped up. As soon as it became clear that health systems around the world were at risk of running out of crucial equipment to treat people with COVID-19 and protect medical workers, DIY-ers set about trying to close the gap.
Facebook groups such as Open Source COVID19 Medical Supplies, which has more than 70,000 members, have become dispatch centres, through which hospital workers seek volunteers to print or make supplies, and volunteers trade tips on what materials to use and where to source them, and on sterilization procedures.
The coronavirus crisis plays to 3D printing’s strong points — rapid prototyping and the ability to produce parts on demand anywhere in the world. Prusa Research, a manufacturer of 3D printers in Prague, has designed a frame for a face shield that is meant to be worn outside a mask or respirator to protect against infectious droplets. The company says it has the capacity to produce 800 shields per day, and tens of thousands of the devices are already protecting health-care workers in the Czech Republic. But because the company made its designs open-source, they are also being made around the world in maker spaces and homes.
Formlabs, a 3D-printer manufacturer based in Somerville, Massachusetts, leads another project that has reached production: printing nasal swabs for COVID-19 test kits. Unlike common cotton swabs, nasal swabs must have a rod that is long and flexible enough to reach deep into the nose, to the upper throat. The swabs were designed by doctors at the University of South Florida in Tampa and the Northwell Health hospital system in New York, using printers purchased from the company to produce test versions. “They are prototyping it themselves, which is crazy and really awesome,” says Formlabs’s chief product officer, Dávid Lakatos. And whereas conventional swabs feature a bushy tip coating of nylon flock, the doctors devised a tip with an intricately textured pattern that is 3D-printed.
But unlike face shields, these parts are beyond the capabilities of most printers used by hobbyists. “If someone tried to print the swabs on a hobbyist printer, they can really do harm” in a clinical setting, says Lakatos.
All submissions must be open-source designs.
One bottleneck to the mass production of critical goods, from antibody (or serology) tests to face masks, necessary to keep the public safe is copyright law. These chokeholds held over the world of atoms and the world of bits are preventing the appropriate response to a global pandemic, said Mark Radcliffe, a partner at DLA Piper, a global law firm.
Health minister Greg Hunt has put a question mark over whether a promise to release all source code for the federal government’s forthcoming COVID-19 contact tracing app is actually possible due to security concerns.
Talking on Triple M Hobart’s ‘The Spoonman’ show with Brian Carlton on Tuesday, Hunt would not commit or back up Government Services minister Stuart Robert’s assurance last week that the full code of the app would be available for inspection.
According to Hunt, the app will drop sometime next week.
For post-secondary schools, the coronavirus pandemic has spurred a paradigm shift in teaching and learning, as courses have migrated online. Because of this, universities now have the chance to save students huge sums of money by ramping up the creation and use of open educational resources (OER), particularly open textbooks.
A sober look at the trajectory of the pandemic reveals that the prospects of in-person classes resuming as normal this fall are slim to none. Earlier this month, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared that living with COVID-19 is “the new normal” until a vaccine is found, which experts widely predict will take at least another year, if not more. The high probability of second and third waves of COVID-19 will likely prompt more intermittent lockdowns in the future, as is currently happening in Singapore, one of the countries that initially seemed to be very successful in its coronavirus response. Through this lens, widespread online learning must be seen as part of a new era of post-secondary education, not a short-term fix.
No legal development over the past decades has had a greater impact on the free flow of information and technology than the rise of the open access and open source movements. We recently looked at how AI, machine learning, blockchain, 3D printing, and other disruptive technologies are being employed in response to the coronavirus pandemic; we now turn to how two disruptive legal innovations, open access and open source, are being used to fight COVID-19. Although the pandemic is far from over, there are already promising signs that open access and open source solutions are allowing large groups of scientists, healthcare professionals, software developers, and innovators across many countries to mobilize quickly and effectively to combat and, hopefully, mitigate the impact of the coronavirus.
An ad hoc team of engineers and doctors has developed a low-cost, open-source alternative, now ready for rapid production.
It was clear early on in the unfolding Covid-19 pandemic that a critical need in the coming weeks and months would be for ventilators, the potentially life-saving devices that keep air flowing into a patient whose ability to breathe is failing.
Seeing a potential shortfall of hundreds of thousands of such units, professor of mechanical engineering Alex Slocum Sr. and other engineers at MIT swung into action, rapidly pulling together a team of volunteers with expertise in mechanical design, electronics, and controls, and a team of doctors with clinical experience in treating respiratory conditions. They started working together nonstop to develop an inexpensive alternative and share what they learned along the way. The goal was a design that could be produced quickly enough, potentially worldwide, to make a real difference in the immediate crisis.
as the COVID-19 pandemic spreads internationally, the first prototype of an open-source project to create plug-in intensive care units (ICU) from shipping containers has been built and installed at a hospital in italy. CURA (acronym for ‘connected units for respiratory ailments’ and also ‘cure’ in latin) proposes a quick-to-deploy solution to expand emergency facilities and ease the pressure on healthcare systems treating patients infected by coronavirus — (see designboom’s previous coverage of the project here).
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CURA has been developed as an open-source project, with its technical specifcations, drawings and design materials made universally accessible online. since the project’s launch, more than 2,000 people have shown an interest and contacted the CURA team to join the project, reproduce it, or provide technical advice. more units are currently under construction in other parts of the world, from the UAE to canada.
Two camps have emerged within the open-source COVID-19 tracking space in Europe. One solution, DP-3T, offers privacy-preserving benefits for citizens and is backed by over 300 scientists around the world. The other, PEPP-PT, is centralized and risks being repurposed for commercial uses or worse.
Developers have built a new smartphone app for tracing potential novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infections.
A team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, announced the tool this week, describing it as potentially “instrumental” in the effort to trace and track infections, which is something governors have described as a vital step in reopening the economy. The tool is called TrackCOVID, and it is a free, open sourced app that its creators say also ensures the privacy of those who are potentially affected.
The United Nations (UN) is organizing a global contest called “COVID-19 Detect and Protect” as part of the efforts to search for a solution to the coronavirus.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)— the UN’s agency for development, and Hackster.io, the largest community of hardware and software developers, will be organizing the event which will be open until August 2020.
The UN identifies COVID-19 as an “unprecedented global health and humanitarian emergency.” The organization also said the pandemic presents a massive threat and potentially devastating social, economic, and political crises that will be felt by many countries for many years to come
The coronavirus pandemic can also reverse the progress made in tackling global poverty over the past 20 years, “putting at risk the lives and livelihoods of billions of people,” the organization said.
Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the US have developed a low-cost, open-source ventilator to address the shortage caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Named Spiro Wave, a version of the ventilator is currently being produced by a consortium of partners, including 10XBeta, Boyce Technologies and Newlab.
The aim is to rapidly fulfil the Covid-19-related ventilator requirements at hospitals in New York, followed by other hospitals across the US.
Furthermore, the MIT team is working to refine the ventilator’s design to make it more compact and add a respiratory function.
10XBeta, Vecna Technologies and NN Life Sciences are part of the project.
Apart from Aarogya Setu, the Centre and state governments are using at least 28 mobile applications to tackle the covid-19 pandemic.
These apps have varied purposes — some disseminate information on cases, deaths and so on to users while others are used by officials to track people under quarantine.
There is one common aspect to all of them: None of them is open-sourced.
One of the most famous apps is the Centre’s Aarogya Setu, which collects users’ Bluetooth and location data to track their whereabouts and alert them if they come in contact with a covid-19 positive patient. The app, which has been controversial given privacy concerns, has been downloaded by over 7.5 crore people.
Boston Dynamics has open-sourced some of its robotics technology to help protect healthcare workers battling the coronavirus.
The robotics firm has developed a healthcare toolkit that it hopes will allow mobile robots to carry out essential functions that reduce the exposure of frontline healthcare staff to COVID-19.
Since the onset of the coronavirus epidemic earlier this year, numerous countries have found themselves running short of ventilators. Ventilators, used in hospitals' intensive care units, are crucial to helping those worst affected by the virus to stay alive. They take on some of the work of breathing for COVID-19 patients who find themselves in respiratory failure. However, a number of innovative grassroots initiatives, built in weeks by altruistic engineers with distributed design methodologies and open-source licences, have sprung up to try and solve the shortage.
There are several browsers available out there that are based on the open-source Chromium project, the most popular being Google Chrome of course. But if you prefer to not use the Chrome browser, there are other great options out there. One of the more promising ones that launched two years ago was the Kiwi Browser which was actually the first to support Chrome extensions. Now the developer is open-sourcing the app and all the features that come with it, inviting other developers to contribute the code into their various projects.
XDA Developers says that Kiwi Browser is one of the better Chromium-based browsers out there in its two years of experience. It had a lot of pretty useful features when it first launched including a built-in content blocker, dark mode, background video playback, etc. A lot of these features that launched two years ago actually are better compared to some of the current browsers. Best of all, it was the first of its kind that supported Chrome Extensions.
The Beaker browser lets us take a glimpse at the better internet, in which the control is back in the hands of the people. This is a great project, with amazing features and surprises everywhere. Even though a little unstable right now, it is very promising, and we request that you support this project if you can. Cheers!
All in all, this is a checkbox exercise release really. Firefox 75 isn't drastically different from the previous few versions, and if you ignore the address bar thing, it's virtually identical. Then again, there's a limit to how much innovation can be crammed into a four-week release schedule. It does feel unnecessarily forced. And specifically, the address bar change is totally unnecessary. Because it brings no actual value.
In my mind, the only reason for this change that would make sense is to drive revenue. Again, this is Mozilla's fault. They removed the search box as part of the modern copypasta changes, so perhaps this also reduced the search-generated interest and revenue. Now, the new address bar kind of fixes that, but it doesn't really, because it feels forced, out of place - and the search box is there anyway. The whole thing feels like a rushed experiment. The proper solution would be to enable this on mobile - the zoom feature feels touch anyway, because there's no separate search there to begin with. On the desktop, restoring the search box by default would be the sensible thing to do. Thus, you kill two dodos with one claymore.
I like Firefox, and I really hope it can survive this nonsense called the modern Internet. But then, this situation is no reason to condone silly changes, especially when they dilute the value of Firefox over its competitors. There's no reason to play the low-IQ game. Firefox should be about privacy, freedom, choice. And extensions. Oh woe me. That's where the focus should be. More extensions. More access. More. The reason why it was such an amazing success in the early days. It can't win the game of financial attrition. So there you go. Firefox 75. Toggle the config changes, and enjoy the Webz. Me not happy. Me worried about the future. Me done.
The flipping part is pretty easy, but since I'm a huge fan of Higher Order Perl I thought I should at least try to make it sort of like the tree walking code I remembered reading, where you give the tree-walker the function you want to operate on each node. (That word, "remembered" should be a hint that I haven't read the book in years and you should really go read the master.) I wrote both a depth-first and a breadth-first binary tree walker. For the purposes of flipping the whole tree, either one would have sufficed, but it is handy to have the option when you are experimenting.
The second (and optional) part of the problem was pretty-printing the binary tree. I think the restriction of the input binary tree to be a full one was for the benefit of the fools attempting the bonus, but me being a fool, I ignored the helpful restriction and tried writing a generic binary tree pretty-printer. I wound up with a binary tree pretty-ish-printer.
You can sign up for an account by providing your email and a password or by logging in with Facebook. This will get you a free “Start” account. Paid options exist which do away with the ads and iBuildApp branding that come with the free version. The paid options are monthly/yearly based plans for one native application so if you have several you will need a plan for each app. The prices of the plans are related to the number of downloads per month (screenshot).
connect-python-3-electron-nodejs-build-desktop-apps
In this post, you’ll learn about the possible ways that you can use to connect or integrate Python with Node.js and Electron with simple examples.
We’ll introduce Electron for Python developers, a great tool if you want to build GUIs for your Python apps with modern web technologies based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. We’ll also see different ways to connect Python and Electron such as child_process, python-shell and an HTTP (Flask) server.
Traditionally, when we have depended upon software to make a decision with real-world implications, that software was deterministic. It had some inputs, a few if statements, and we could point to the exact line of code where the decision was made. And the same inputs lead to the same decisions.
Nowadays, with the rise of machine learning and neural networks, this is much more blurry. How did the model decide? Has the model and inputs drifted apart, so the decisions are outside what it was designed for?
These are just some of the questions discussed with our guest, Andrew Clark, on this episode of Talk Python To Me.
When people come to Python one of the things they struggle with is OOP (Object Oriented Programming). Not so much the syntax of classes, but more when and when not to use them. If that's you, read on.
In this article I will give you some insights that will get you clarity on this.
Classes are incredibly useful and robust, but you need to know when to use them. Here are some considerations.
I've been writing code for about 15 years (on and off) and Python for about 4 or 5 years. With Python it's mostly small scripts and such. I’ve never considered myself a ‘real programmer’ (Python or otherwise).
About a year ago, I decided to change that (for Python at the very least) when I set out to do 100 Days Of Web in Python from Talk Python To Me. Part of that course were two sections taught by Bob regarding Django. I had tried learn Flask before and found it ... overwhelming to say the least.
Sure, you could get a ‘hello world’ app in 5 lines of code, but then what? If you wanted to do just about anything it required ‘something’ else.
I had tried Django before, but wasn't able to get over the 'hump' of deploying. Watching the Django section in the course made it just click for me. Finally, a tool to help me make AND deploy something! But what?
Django supports testing out of the box with some cool extensions to unittest. However, many people are using pytest for their Django testing, mostly using the pytest-django plugin.
Adam Parkin, who is known online as CodependentCodr, joins us to talk about migrating an existing Django project from unittest to pytest. Adam tells us just how easy this is.
In this article I will review the main concepts a beginner Python programmer should learn about OOP in Python. The content is explored in detail in other posts on the blog that are linked at the end of each section.
I've been wanting to try out Rust with something very simple as a first pass through the language.
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I decided to write a simple unoptimized version of the fibonacci sequence. My goal was to take enough time to be noticable...
There is one major difference, though, about the consequences of Trump’s and Nixon’s disregard of science. Nixon’s concerns were over what scientists had to say about the feasibility of expensive technology — supersonic planes for commercial flights and antiballistic missile defense systems — that large companies wanted to build for profit at taxpayers’ expense, rather than sober analysis of risks to the health of American citizens. The scientific advice rejected by Nixon was likely expensive for Americans; rejecting scientific advice about the scope of the pandemic and how to treat COVID-19 are quite literally matters of life and death.
Even by historical standards, the U.S. president is an abysmal failure.
The voice on the message started out calm but soon faltered. Natasha Roland wanted to report what happened to her father at the Queens Adult Care Center, a home for some 350 low-income elderly and mentally ill adults that I’d described as an epidemiologist’s nightmare in a story the previous week.
“They had been telling me since March that they didn’t have any virus cases,” Roland said, her words quickening. “They were telling me that my father was OK. When I went there to get my dad, he hadn’t eaten in a week. My dad was dying. He couldn’t move.”
"Hey, â¦Joe Biden, â© as a Democrat running for president in a pandemic, this looks like a popular idea."
"As of Saturday, it's all rumors and unverified reports. NOBODY KNOWS. But that hasn't stopped American Twitter from exulting in its favorite Kim death cult."
This story originally appeared in InsideClimate News, and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
In a moment like this, where some steadying force is coveted, we have this circus instead.
Last year, the Trump administration finalized the rollback of a 2016 rule requiring employers to electronically file detailed logs of injuries and illness in the workplace with federal safety regulators. Employers were already supposed to keep the logs on hand, and the rule was designed to help safety inspectors, unions and employers identify workplace hazards across industries and individual companies — including hazards that contribute to the spread of diseases like COVID-19.
The pandemic teaches that we are a single interdependent species, and that militarism and xenophobic policies threaten our security and survival.
"There was a lot of pressure in pretty much all of these American cities to reopen," said Navarro, whose research was done in conjunction with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "When they removed those restrictions too soon, then many cities saw a resurgence in cases."
The center's research found that cities that used "early, sustained and layered" practices such as social distancing, closing public events and stay-at-home orders "fared better than those that did not."
Friday’s FDA warning follows a study, reported by the AP on Tuesday, from the National Institutes of Health and the University of Virginia, that showed “more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care.” In the study, which included 368 males afflicted with the virus, 28 percent who were given hydroxychloroquine died, compared to 11 percent who received only routine care.
The report went even further, suggesting immunity passports could backfire and unwittingly accelerate the spread of the virus. “People who assume that they are immune to a second infection because they have received a positive test result may ignore public health advice. The use of such certificates may therefore increase the risks of continued transmission,” the report says.
Part of the reason the WHO is counseling caution is because scientists don’t yet understand what ensures immunity to the virus.
Software issues and concerns over public access to justice prevent French IP courts from going online
Non-profit technology consortium, Linux Foundation, enabling mass innovation through open collaboration has announced that the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a 501c6 non-profit, independent organization with the mission to accelerate the adoption of open-source software, standards and practices in financial services, will become a Linux Foundation organization. According to the announcement, Linux Foundation has agreed to acquire the FINOS operating assets. Gabriele Columbro, who is the executive director of the FINOS team, will join the Linux Foundation and continue his role.
FINOS will act as an umbrella project, through which the Linux Foundation will perform the development of open source and standards in the financial services industry. Joining the Linux Foundation is expected to provide a more significant forum for industry-wide collaboration, accelerating the delivery of open source software and standards that address pressing industry needs.
As COVID-19 safety concerns continue, the Linux Foundation announced yesterday that rather than holding a physical event in Austin, Texas, they will transition the Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference North America 2020 (OSSNA 2020) to a virtual event. The digital conference will take place from June 29th to July 2nd, 2020.
“While it doesn’t quite take the place of meeting face to face, it comes darn close,” said the organizer.
“Without the barriers of cost and travel, we expect the attendance to the online OSSNA 2020 to be significantly higher than an in-person event.”
Some news that went seemingly unreported at large this month until stumbling across it... AMD has joined the Academy Software Foundation as a premier member. This joint initiative between the Linux Foundation and Academy of Motion Picture Arts is focused on pushing open-source software through the motion picture and content creation industries. Additionally, the Open Shading Language has become a new hosted project under the Academy Software Foundation.
AMD has joined the Academy Software Foundation as a premier member for pushing open-source in this industry. AMD joins the likes of The Walt Disney Studios, Sony Pictures, Red Hat, Pixar, NVIDIA, Netflix, Microsoft, Intel, Epic Games, Google Cloud, and others backing this foundation.
While its technology is used by open source projects like OpenStreetMap and by firms like Foursquare, open source mapping company Mapzen couldn't sustain itself as a business. Mapzen initially closed its doors in 2018, but it has a new lease on life with the support of the Linux Foundation.
As part of its ongoing commitment to support open source projects and service providers' efforts to deliver advanced services like 5G, Blue Planet, a division of Ciena (NYSE: CIEN), is contributing new functionality and code to the Linux Foundation's open source Open Networking Automation Platform (ONAP) Policy Framework. These additions give service providers, who have deployed ONAP, more flexibility for creating and administering intent-based policies supporting automation use cases.
As a sample, here's Dan Walsh updating us on the State of Container Security. Enjoy!
Two things I’ve realized. One, Yahoo was managed by Verizon media and two, they can at any time delete your account without notifying you and they shall not be liable to it. Well, I did read the terms and conditions on signup but considered it to be in case if you did something illegal using your account.
As far as I've been able to see, the state of this '(permanently) enable deprecated TLS versions' setting is not exposed in the Preferences GUI, making its state invisible unless you know the trick (and even know to look). Perhaps when Mozilla raises the normal minimum TLS version in a Firefox release, they will expose something in Preferences (or perhaps they'll change to do something with per-site overrides, as they do for TLS certificates). In the mean time, if you want to find out about websites using older TLS versions through your normal browsing, you'll need to remember to reset this preference every time you need to use that big blue button to get a site to work.
Already powering over 30% of the internet, WordPress is the fastest-growing content management system (CMS) in the world—and it's not hard to see why. With tons of customization available through coding and plugins, top-notch SEO, and a supreme reputation for blogging, WordPress has certainly earned its popularity.
However, with popularity comes other, less appealing attention. WordPress is a common target for intruders, malware, and cyberattacks—in fact, WordPress accounted for around 90% of hacked CMS platforms in 2019.
Whether you're a first-time WordPress user or an experienced developer, there are important steps you can take to protect your WordPress website. The following six key tips will get you started.
“Contact research does not really require an app,” De Backer said in the VRT programme Villa Politica. “It is done manually, and has existed for years. People write down who they have been in contact with and call them. These people, in turn, get tested. That’s the system we need to map out the virus and stop its further spread,” he added.
Earlier this week, it was announced that Belgium would hire 2,000 “corona detectives,” who will work to trace the people who have been in contact with confirmed or suspected coronavirus patients.
Germany changed course on Sunday over which type of smartphone technology it wanted to use to trace coronavirus infections, backing an approach supported by Apple and Google along with a growing number of other European countries.
As the coronavirus pandemic continues to ravage millions of lives and paralyze much of the economy, these right-wing activists in the United States are seizing every opportunity to reach out to thousands of potential followers and expand their ranks.
Take, for example, the recent [crack] of nearly 25,000 email addresses and passwords belonging to the World Health Organization, the U.S. National Institutes of Health and other organizations combating the pandemic.
While the reports amounted to the government’s first confirmation of the new unit, few further details were made available, such as the size of the new force. Military commentators described the unit as comparable to the Marines in other countries, with their main task being fighting on islands.
China’s claims over islands and reefs in the South China Sea were mentioned as a key element in the rationale behind the new unit, while other countries have also formed amphibious fighting groups. The protection of diplomatic missions overseas and the fight against terrorism were also issues which could be addressed by the Marines, the China Times reported.
For the second time in a year, China also launched a new amphibious attack vessel based on a domestic design this week. The ship reportedly only took six months to build.
On the 50th anniversary of Earth Day this week, United Nations Secretary General António Guterres urged world leaders to ensure economic responses to the COVID-19 pandemic include measures that tackle what he called the “even deeper emergency” of climate change. According to a recent report from the International Renewable Energy Agency, directing stimulus funds toward green infrastructure will enable countries around the world to become less unequal and more resilient, cumulatively employ 100 million energy jobs and save trillions of dollars in comparison with a recovery that returns economies to “business as usual.”
Make no mistake: the simultaneous crisis of inequality and climate is no fluke. Both are the result of decades of deliberate choices made, and policies enacted, by ultra-wealthy and powerful corporations.
This story is a part of Covering Climate Now’s week of coverage focused on Climate Solutions, to mark the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. Covering Climate Now is a global journalism collaboration committed to strengthening coverage of the climate story.
In December DeSmog reported on the work of Robert Howarth, a biogeochemist at Cornell University, who has been studying the methane emissions of the oil and gas industry. Howarth’s latest research estimated that 3.4 percent of all natural gas produced from shale in the U.S. is leaked throughout the production cycle, which appears to be confirmed by this new€ research.
President Donald Trump on Friday threatened to withhold all future COVID-19 relief funding from the U.S. Postal Service unless the federal agency dramatically raises its shipping prices — a demand that critics say is ludicrous given the economic calamity the American people and the post office are now facing.
“Insane.” That’s what Marc Gunther thought as he looked out of the window of his downtown Bethesda, Maryland, apartment. Below him, cramped construction crews were building a headquarters and adjoining hotel for Marriott, the world’s biggest hotel chain. The $600 million project, which has received $60 million in public funding, is scheduled to be completed in 2022, pandemic or not.
Every weekend at 6 am, Elvira Sucasaca, along with her family, sets up their renowned Peruvian tamales street cart along the bustling Roosevelt Avenue in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York, as they prepare for the breakfast rush. Usually, like clockwork, a hungry drove of loyal regulars, craving savory tamales and sweet picarones — deep-fried donuts made of sweet potatoes and squash — forms around the cart with the thunderous roar of the elevated train passing overhead. The cart is so popular, people often order on the phone and pick up their food from the comfort of their car. Yet, since the emergence of the COVID-19 crisis, the once-lively streets of Jackson Heights have become akin to a ghost town. In fact, the community, once famed for its diversity, has become more well-known as the epicenter of the epicenter. This has particularly hurt Sucasaca, who like many street vendors, is finding earning a living to be precarious at best.
In the rural South, the COVID-19 pandemic is becoming a silent disaster.
Last week, a group of angry and desperate Citi Tax Financial customers gathered outside the company’s storefront in Augusta, Georgia. Millions of Americans had received a big deposit from the IRS in their bank accounts, but they had not. The IRS website told them their coronavirus stimulus checks were deposited in an account they didn’t recognize.
Why exactly should we trust for-profit media outlets to be impartial and have their news coverage untainted by their own business interests?
Everything Summers touches turns to ruin.
Earlier this month, Trump spoke with Putin for two consecutive days about oil production as the fossil fuel industry in both countries faces historic lows.
Despite a complete lack of evidence, the Government and the intelligence bureaucracy stood by and watched as “Australian intelligence” was referred to reverentially around the world as a basis to damage an honest company.
As surprising as it may sound, digital surveillance and speech control in the United States already show many similarities to what one finds in authoritarian states such as China. Constitutional and cultural differences mean that the private sector, rather than the federal and state governments, currently takes the lead in these practices, which further values and address threats different from those in China. But the trend toward greater surveillance and speech control here, and toward the growing involvement of government, is undeniable and likely inexorable.
In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong. Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a society’s norms and values.
The kingdom’s most famous flogging case was that of Raif Badawi, who ran a website that published material criticizing Saudi religious figures, lauding Western legal systems and arguing that atheists should be free to state their views without being punished.
That angered Saudi conservatives, who denounced him.
The Saudi authorities arrested Mr. Badawi in 2012 and put him on trial on charges that included cybercrime and disobeying his father. In 2014, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison, fined more than a quarter-million dollars, and ordered to endure 1,000 blows with a cane in weekly installments over several months.
In reaction to Thryv v Click-To-Call Technologies, lawyers weigh in on justice Neil Gorsuch’s scathing dissent and what the case means for Federal Circuit decisions
On April 7, the PTAB designated five decisions as either precedential or informative on establishing a printed publication. Importantly, the PTAB held that Examination and IPR proceedings use different standards. These decisions also provide guidance on how various types of references qualify as printed publications, including conference materials, drug product labels, and theses.
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The POP held that the framework for establishing a printed publication outlined in Hulu v. Sound View Innovations, LLC, IPR2018-01039, Paper 29 at 13 (P.T.A.B. Dec. 20, 2019) (precedential) does not apply to Examination. We previously discussed that decision here. The POP based its reasoning on the different “legal frameworks and burdens” between IPRs and Examination. In IPRs, the burden rests with the Petitioner to establish a reasonable likelihood that the challenged claims are unpatentable, whereas Examination involves a burden-shifting framework where the burden shifts to the applicant to rebut a prima facie case.
The POP concluded that the Examiner had sufficiently established that the transcript was publicly accessible because the “publication of the notice of the advisory committee meeting [was] intended to ‘insure that all interested persons are notified of such meeting prior thereto.'” Because persons of ordinary skill in the art would be such “interested persons,” and FDA transcripts of advisory committee meetings would be publicly available at “a designated place at the agency,” the transcript satisfied the requirements to be a printed publication.
The latest data from the European Patent Office, released in March, reveals that the UK’s transport sector continued to innovate in 2019 – filing 9% more patent applications than over the previous 12 months. Patent applicants from across the world use the EPO, so these figures give a good snapshot of global technology innovation.
The announcement marks the second month that the court has switched to remote oral arguments, citing "the continued public health restrictions and limits on public access to the courthouse.” Overall, 26 arguments will be heard over the phone, and another 43 decided on the briefs, according to the court’s calendar.
The clerk’s office will be contacting attorneys set to argue with more information, which last month included an orientation session on how the arguments would proceed and what to do if things went wrong.
Attorneys who argued remotely in April, a first for the circuit, largely said the process went smoothly from a technology standpoint, but were still frustrated at not being able to see the judges and read their body language.
As in April, the Federal Circuit will allow the public to listen in on the oral arguments.
The news came a day after the European Patent Office made a push to go digital, although not explicitly tied to the pandemic.
With the Federal Circuit now deciding most patent cases on briefs, lawyers say it’s become more complicated to use visual aids or split arguments with junior attorneys
The EPO is known to increase its fees every two years and the last revision was made in 2018. Thisdecision is taken by the European Patent Office's Administrative Council on 12 December 2019 (CA/D 12/19) by amending Articles 2 and 7 of the Rules relating to Fees. Here's a quick take on this revision of fees.
Broadly, we can categorize the fee structure in to two broad groups – (i) basic patent application fee, and (ii) additional patent related fee. The basic patent application fee would include all such activities which are required for filing and maintaining a patent or patent application – this fee include fees for activities such as filing a European Patent Application, fee for additional pages or claims, examination fee, renewal fee and also includes filing an international application. While the additional patent related fee would include all such activities which are not ordinarily part of a filing and prosecuting a patent application and are availed by some depending on the specific requirements of a case by the application.
Those familiar with the European Patent Office’s approach to patent applications will be familiar with the procedure under Rule 71(3) in which the examining division sends the applicant a copy of the text proposed for grant. Only once the applicant has approved this text is the European patent then granted. In T 2277/19 the Board of Appeal held that approval of an erroneous text is not correctable on appeal.
Among the EPO requirements for an appeal are that “Any party to proceedings adversely affected by a decision may appeal”. This appeal focussed on whether the applicant was or was not adversely affected by the decision to grant that followed the accidental approval of an erroneous text.
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The Board of Appeal also commented on earlier case T1003/19, noting that in its view “there is no legal basis in the European Patent Convention for a distinction between the text referred to in a communication under Rule 71(3) EPC and that reflecting what the examining division actually intended” and then went on to comment “in the board’s judgement, Article 71(3) EPC thus imposes on the applicant a duty to check and verify this text. The fact that an applicant does not exercise its right to request amendments under Rule 71(6) EPC can therefore only be interpreted as approval of the communicated text, i.e. the text intended for grant. Whether the applicant notices a possible error has no effect on the fact that this approval is binding.”
“The operating results reported today favorably reflect our persistent efforts to reduce costs and streamline our operations. We are well positioned financially to the start of the new year with significant cash reserves and working capital in excess of $77 million. Our primary focus remains on our intellectual property and we are working diligently to prepare for the oral hearing before the Technical Board of Appeal on the European EP2801355 patent to be held on June 18, 2020,” said Dr. Claus Bo Svendsen, Chief Executive Officer of Forward.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has granted Compugen (NASDAQ:CGEN) a new patent for the composition of COM701 or backup antibodies for the treatment of cancer.
The company TELEMATIC has developed a patented technology of touchless payment for transport which allows ticket payment with any smartphone at point of payment at the entrance to a bus or underground while the phone is situated in a passenger€´s pocket or his bag.
This case from the UK High Court (Conversant Wireless Licensing SARL v (1) Apple Retail UK Ltd & (2) Apple Distribution International & (3) Apple Inc. [2019] EWHC 3266 (Pat)) demonstrates the similarity (at least from a patent perspective) between UIs of seemingly very different products from different eras. It also helps highlight the potential opportunities and threats to holders of UI patents.
The patent concerned was GB 2365712 and was owned by Conversant. Conversant alleged the patent was infringed by the UI of various models of Apple’s iPhone. On the other hand, Apple alleged the patent was not valid based on various grounds including obviousness.
Responding to questions from US Senators, the Motion Picture Association is stressing that DMCA takedown notices alone don't cut it anymore. The Hollywood group argues that the current legal framework should be complemented with other tools, such as pirate site blocking. The MPA believes that these blockades are highly effective and no danger to free speech, but that idea isn't shared by everyone.
EU law enforcement agency Europol is warning citizens to stay away from pirate IPTV services during the coronavirus pandemic. While part of the message includes the usual cautions over potential malware and security issues, the agency says that the services are maintaining high-quality video streams and offering a wider range of content due to a lack of sports broadcasts.
Here’s a fun (and copyright observant) musical toy for anyone who’s ever wanted to get their inner De La Soul on, but who didn’t want to spend a lot of time digging through old stacks of vinyl—or getting sued out of existence for an unauthorized sample. Titled Citizen DJ, the project is a creation of Library Of Congress innovator-in-residence Brian Foo, allowing users to trawl the Library’s vast resources of copyright-free audio material in order to make their own sounds and beats. Although the program is only in a preview form at the moment, the basics are all there: Curated selections from the Library’s collections, a set of drum beats to apply them to, and tools to remix and use the half-second or so clips as artists see fit.
In-house counsel are clearer on getting copyright protection for designs but are worried by inconsistencies in the law and a perception that copyright is a “weaker” IP right
