Encrypted Crash Dumps in FreeBSD, Time on Unix, Improve ZVOL sync write performance with a taskq, central log host with syslog-ng, NetBSD Entropy overhaul, Setting Up NetBSD Kernel Dev Environment, and more.
  At the end of April AMD announced the Ryzen 3 3100 + Ryzen 3 3300X and these Zen 2 budget processors are now shipping. Here are our initial benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 3 3100 and Ryzen 3 3300X processors running on Ubuntu Linux compared to an assortment of old and new Intel/AMD CPUs with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
The AMD Ryzen 3 3100 is a four core / eight thread part with a 3.6GHz base clock and 3.9GHz boost clock. This CPU has a 16MB L3 cache and 65 Watt TDP rating. This CPU will retail for around $99 USD.
  Foobar2000 is the go-to music player for many users (including myself). Though it isn't available on Linux, you can opt for an alternative like DeadBeef.
The program's interface is minimal and the playback controls are at the top (its almost like Foobar), but DeadBeeF has a colorized progress bar and volume slider. The large pane below the controls is the playlist pane. It supports tabs, so you can open/manage multiple playlists at the same time.
The pane has many columns inlcuding the current playing status, artist name, album, track number, title, and the duration of the track. Right-click on a column to edit/remove it. You can group columns too. Select the add column option to add any of the following: Album art, Year, Band/Album Artist, Codec, Bitrate or a Custom column.
Castle Game Engine might not be as well known as other free and open source game engines, however it does look rather useful and the developers continue to pull in improvements.
A big improvement coming soon is a complete re-work of how they handle gamepads. This includes a "serious improvement of joysticks API, access to a huge joysticks database by SDL2 with hundreds of joysticks definitions, autodetection of joysticks, detection of connection/disconnection of joysticks". It's nice to see more developers look to use parts of SDL2 since it has excellent cross-platform support.
The Castle Game Engine crew announced they're needing some help, as they have a very limited set of hardware to test on. To speed things up, they built a Linux and Windows test application for detecting gamepads using this new code.
Open source, free and cross-platform is what we like to see here. Sometimes we cover some real classic gaming too and today we're talking a bit about entering a MUD with Mudlet.
What is Mudlet? Not something we've covered often that's for sure. It's an application that aims to enhance the MUD (Multi-User Dungeon) experience for both players and developers. MUDs are usually text-based adventures that take elements from RPGs while mixing in multiplayer and larger worlds. They're quite a unique experience.
Mudlet has been around for some time now, keeping the MUD scene alive and it's regularly being upgraded with big new features to push what's possible.
This isn't a comedy game, far from it, the team said it's a "hate letter to the growing indifference in the world" created as a response to growing inequality and some of their own experience of nearly becoming homeless. They're trying to help too, as 20% of the profits will also be going to "charities focused on the issue of homelessness".
It's not even a wild idea for a game. We see games constantly come out focused on over the top violence, sex, drugs and more but rarely do we see games focused solely around issues like homelessness.
Adventure In Aellion is an upcoming drop-in / drop-out co-op adventure game, which the developers claim 'evokes the spirit of Legend of Zelda'.
With a big open-world to explore full of secrets to find, dungeons to explore and more it can be played entirely in solo. However, it will also have cross-platform online play so that others can join you to solve puzzles and help with battles.
Time travelling slavic fantasy adventure, The End of the Sun, is now crowdfunding on Kickstarter and they plan to have full Linux support. One we've talked about here a few times now, as the setting has certainly piqued our curiosity.
Set in the world of slavic rites, beliefs, legends, and their everyday life. The End of the Sun is set in a small village where the line between myth and reality began to fade perilously. As someone with the ability to travel through time, you're following the trail of the secretive fugitive when you come across the village but it's empty. What happened here? That's for you to find out apparently.
BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION the latest game from THE BROTHERHOOD (CAYNE / STASIS), has been updated for Linux and it now appears to work great across AMD and Intel GPUs with the open source Mesa drivers.
BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION is a 2D isometric adventure game set in the distant future. Explore a post-apocalyptic landscape, solve puzzles, meet new friends and make powerful enemies, mediate conflicts and fight for your life as you unravel the secrets of the world around you. Originally releasing in February this year, BEAUTIFUL DESOLATION then came to Linux in Beta shortly after in March. From there, the developer has continued to polish it showing some real care and attention on the Linux version.
It seemed they were facing issues with Mesa drivers (AMD / Intel) and video rendering with the Unity game engine, thankfully they've now solved it. Explaining in a little more detail on Steam, they mentioned using a shader to enhance video playback output but it wasn't failing nicely and created a black box so they've managed to sort it—great! Now even more people can enjoy it easily on Linux.
Not many popular MMO games have Linux support but Albion Online does and it appears that in terms of player population overall they're doing well.
Right now a lot of games are seeing a surge in player numbers, thanks in part due to millions more staying at home due to the worldwide situation with the Coronavirus. It seems Albion Online has also grown thanks to this, as they've shown off in a recent update.
  After the KDE Apps update 20.04, now the recently released Plasma 5.18.5 is ready for Debian.
Furthermore, since the most recent version of the KDE frameworks have been uploaded to Debian/experimental, I have adapted the packages to make upgrades to the versions in experimental – and hopefully soon in unstable – smooth. I am also working with the Debian KDE Qt Team to update KDE Apps and Plasma in Debian proper. Stay tuned.
  So you won’t be surprised to hear that this particular developer has once again played a major role in delivering major performance improvements to the desktop, as on show in the recent Ubuntu 20.04 LTS release.
Not all knights ride on horseback or wear shiny armour.
Now, in a forum post Daniel explains some of his canny-code changes in more detail and I won’t lie: some of the engineering effort taking place beneath the hood, in the engine is …incredibly complicated sounding.
DragonFlyBSD 5.8 debuted in March while now shipping is v5.8.1 as the latest update for this BSD operating system.
While just over two months have passed since the v5.8 milestone, DragonFlyBSD 5.8.1 has less than two dozen changes. Making up this point release are some compilation fixes, minor optimizations and random fixes to the kernel code, fixing two "serious deduplication bugs", a "serious memory leak" in the nmalloc code of their libc, and other fixes.
Following the recent release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2, Oracle has now released Oracle Linux 8 Update 2 as their RHEL8-based distribution with various extra features on top and even an alternative kernel option.
Oracle Linux 8 Update 2 has the RHEL 8.2 changes plus more. One interesting change is that beginning with this release, the Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel is included as part of the install image and is in fact the default kernel on first boot for new installations. The Red Hat Compatible Kernel will remain available, but UEK R6 is their now default kernel.
The Community Platform Engineering team (formerly Community Infrastructure) indicated in July of 2019 that they have a higher workload than the team can bear. To ease this, they evaluated the applications that fit their mission statement. The applications that didn’t fit the mission were proposed for hand off to the community.
I am happy to say there is a lot being done to preserve the applications that our community values. I have been working with the Fedora Project Leader (FPL), Fedora Program Manager (FPgM), Community Platform Engineering team (CPE), and the Open Source Program Office (OSPO) at Red Hat to transition app hosting and maintenance from CPE to OSPO.
In short, the IRC101 session will be a guide for newcomers to How to get started with IRC with the Fedora community & hang out with other contributors in IRC. After finishing the session you will have the knowledge to setup your IRC client and start communicating with other Fedora People.
Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform cluster administrators can deploy cluster logging using a few CLI commands and the OpenShift Container Platform web console to install the Elasticsearch Operator and Cluster Logging Operator. The cluster logging components are based upon Elasticsearch, Fluentd, and Kibana (EFK). The collector, Fluentd, is deployed to each node in the OpenShift Container Platform cluster. It collects node and container logs and writes them to Elasticsearch (ES).
In what could be a trial run for more of the same, Red Hat last week held a first-ever virtual technical summit to spread the word about its latest cloud tech offerings.
CEO Paul Cormier welcomed online viewers to the conference, which attracted more than 80,000 virtual attendees.
The company made several key announcements during the online gathering and highlighted customer innovations around Kubernetes, hybrid cloud and next-generation computing.
As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous tech events around the world have been canceled, postponed or turned into online-only events. This year’s Red Hat Summit was the biggest yet, according to Cormier.
Cormier’s keynote focused on the history of open source, virtualization, and hybrid and cloud technologies. While all of those concepts began as ideas, they now are integrated deeply into our daily lives, he said, especially hybrid cloud.
One of his prevailing themes was the role innovation plays in the operations of tech companies. Cormier emphasized Red Hat’s pursuit of innovation in the use of hybrid technology, which he said is essential in order to scale. To that end, he detailed the growing partnerships with industry leaders including Ford Motor Company, Verizon, Intel, Microsoft and Credit Suisse.
“Hybrid requires a common development, operations, security and automation environment. This is essential in order to scale. Hybrid isn’t a trend. It’s a strategic imperative,” he said.
One day, I was on vacation, having a barbecue and some beer, when I got a call from my colleague telling me that the terminal server with the ERP application was broken due to a failed update and the guy who ran the update forgot to take a snapshot first.
The only thing I needed to tell my colleague was to shut down the broken machine, find the UI of our backup/restore system, and then identify the restore job. Finally, I told him how to choose the timestamp from the last four hours when the restore should finish. The restore finished 30 minutes later, and the system was ready to be used again. We were back in action after a total of 30 minutes, and only the work from the last two hours or so was lost! Awesome! Now, back to vacation.
  Ubuntu is the industry-leading operating system for cloud hosts and guests. Every day millions of Ubuntu instances are launched in private and public clouds around the world. Many launched right on top of Ubuntu itself. Canonical takes pride in offering the latest virtualization stack with each Ubuntu release.
In Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), users can find the recently released QEMU version 4.2 and libvirt version 6.0 available on day one. These new versions have brought a number of key updates to the virtualization stack. Here are the most notable ones...
If you have been using computers for some time now, you probably have fond memories of this or that piece of software from the past, an application or a game that was fun, useful and just plain great, but which isn’t available any longer. For those who have had a chance to experience the digital boom of the 90s and early 2000s, software has gone from spartan DOS applications shared on floppy disks to large, network-connected tools that can solve complex problems, often using detailed, realistic graphics. The revolution also led to significant changes in underlying technology and formats, and almost overnight “old” tools became obsolete. And of course, there’s the steady onward march of progress, and we often have to leave software behind.
However, sometimes, there is still time and place for old applications in the modern world. This could be legacy software that your business relies on, and which may not have suitable (modern) replacements. There could also be the question of cost and complexity in replacing these legacy tools, as they are often deeply woven into workflows, with delicate setups and intricate workarounds. As the old adage goes: if it ain’t broken, don’t touch it.
Old applications may not necessarily solve or address every contemporary use case, but they can be of real, practical value. Or you may want to use them out of pure nostalgia, like perhaps the old games. Indeed, there are ways to preserve ancient content, even if it’s no longer available in standard online archives. Leave no (software) behind – with snaps!
  TQ Group, headquartered in Germany, has launched two NXP i.MX 8X Cortex-A35 modules with TQMa8Xx and TQMa8XxS SoMs, with the latter being SMARC 2.1 compliant, and both targeting various applications ranging from medical devices, HMIs, industrial controllers and industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) to gateways, building automation, transport, and robotics.
The press release explains NXP will officially launch i.MX 8X CPUs on May 14, 2020. We first heard about i.MX 8X in 2016, before an official announcement in 2017, and we wrote about Toradex i.MX 8X SoM in 2018, plus 96Boards AI-ML SBC in 2019, so I naively believed the processor had been around for a couple of years, but the Toradex SoM product is still shown as an “early product announcement“, and AI-ML board has just launched with 26 units available on Arrow website. Some samples have been around for companies part of “NXP Early Access Partner “, but as I understand mass production will just be getting started
Fairphone is known for its ethical (or fair) approach of making a smartphone.
Normally, the ethical approach involves that the workers get paid well, the smartphone build materials are safer for the planet, and the phone is durable/sustainable. And, they’ve already done a good job with their Fairphone 1 , Fairphone 2, and Fairphone 3 smartphones.
Now, to take things up a notch, Fairphone has teamed up with /e/OS which is a de-googled Android fork, to launch a separate edition of Fairphone 3 (its latest smartphone) that comes with /e/OS out of the box.
  In its first three years of life, postmarketOS has gotten considerable popularity over time, partly thanks to the rising interest in the field after the huge press coverage of projects like the Librem 5 and the PinePhone, partly thanks to its wide range of supported devices and extremely easy porting process, which made running Linux on most phones a breeze.
The news is that postmarketOS just reached the milestone of 200 booting devices, which is a somewhat incredible achievement considering the aura of mystery Linux on phones and other ARM devices had until years (if not months) ago.
Google this week announced accepted projects for Summer of Code 2020 as their virtual engagement for getting students involved in open-source development. As usual, there are a lot of interesting GSoC projects.
Google Summer of Code is the annual project funded by Google where they pay student developers to get involved in open-source development by working on different defined tasks.
We are very happy to announce The NetBSD Foundation Google Summer of Code 2020 projects:
Apurva Nandan - Benchmark NetBSD Jain Naman - Curses library automated testing Nikita Gillmann - Make system(3) and popen(3) use posix_spawn(3) internally Ayushi Sharma - Enhance the syzkaller support for NetBSD Aditya Vardhan Padala - Rumpkernel Syscall Fuzzing Nisarg Joshi - Fuzzing the network stack of NetBSD in a rumpkernel environment Jason High - Extending the functionality of the netpgp suite
The community bonding period - where students get in touch with mentors and community - started on May 4 and will go on until June 1. The coding period will be June 1 to August 24.
The GNU project and the GCC developers are pleased to announce the release of GCC 10.1.
This release is a major release, containing new features (as well as many other improvements) relative to GCC 9.x.
The GNU Compiler Collection 10 has seen its first stable release this morning in the form of GCC 10.1.
Not long ago I discovered that someone had written this book about curl and that someone wasn’t me! (I believe this is a first) Thrilled of course that I could check off this achievement from my list of things I never thought would happen in my life, I was also intrigued and so extremely curious that I simply couldn’t resist ordering myself a copy. The book is dated October 2019, edition 1.0.
I don’t know the author of this book. I didn’t help out. I wasn’t aware of it and I bought my own copy through an online bookstore.
At the Conference in the Cloud, expect to see Perl and Raku presentations. Core presentation topics in the past have included Perl 5 and Perl 6 (now Raku) and organizers plan to continue the same way moving forward. Just like the Perl and Raku Conference, The Conference in the Cloud is organized and run by volunteers. There will be two or more presentation tracks, each with 20-50 minute talks on a variety of technical topics throughout each day.
Two types of variables can be defined in most of the programming languages. These are global variables and local variables. The variables which are defined outside the function is called a global variable. This variable is accessible and changeable from anywhere in the script. The variable which is declared inside the function is called the local variable. But if the same variable name exists as global and local variables then the variable inside the function will get the priority and the value of the global variable will be ignored. The scope of the global variable in the python script is shown in this tutorial using various examples.
The unordered collection of items is called set in Python. Any item can be added or removed from the set but the value of any item in set is not changeable like a tuple. Every item in the set must be unique. Set does not contain any index like list or tuple, so each item of the set can’t be accessed by index like list or tuple. Sets are mainly used for different types of mathematical operations in Python like union, intersection, difference, etc. Different symbols are used to perform different types of operations. Pipe ( | ) is used for union operation on sets. How to declare sets and perform union operation on them are explained in this tutorial.
In this episode, we’re remodeling! I changed the model relationship between GradeLevel and Course from a ForeignKey (1 to many) to a ManyToManyField. We talked through the change and started fixing all the tests that broke.
After explaining the change that I wanted to make and why I want to make it, I explained how a foreign key and many to many relationship at the database level.
Once we had the conceptual foundation in place, I started with the documentation. We looked at the ManyToManyField and what changes were needed to convert a ForeignKey to a ManyToManyField.
As the saying goes "It takes a Village to Raise A Child" has never been ringing true to me till this day. Looking back in the amount of work getting back to upgrade my skill to be relevant for the local startup scene as a developer in Singapore. Devouring endless amount of youtube video, books, podcast, and Udacity React Nanodegree one bite at a time has helped to shape me into who I am now.
I think it might make sense to put it here as if there wasn't anyone like them creating technical content has helped to be my mentors to guide me on what I know now. People like Justin Michel from Coding for Entrepreneurs, Chris Hawkes in Chris Hawkes, Brad from TraverisMedia with lastly Daniel Roy Greenfield & his wife Auredy Roy Greenfield for Two Scoops of Django helped a lot while I am stumbling to stand up.
PyCharm 2020.1.1 is out and we’ve fixed small issues, including usability problems introduced by version 2020.1. Update from within PyCharm (Help | Check for Updates), using the JetBrains Toolbox, or by downloading the new version from our website.
Back in early March, before “social distancing” and travel restrictions became the norm, before in many ways literally and figuratively (except online, at home, and in our hearts), the music died – killed by the coronavirus – one of my wildest dreams as a reggae fan came true.
The biblical prophet Jeremiah was bemoaning the spiritual sickness of the people of the Kingdom of Judah in the sixth century BCE.
Kraftwerk pioneered the idea of a synthesizer group that didn’t pretend to be anything else, challenging the boundaries between organic and artificial sounds. As Schneider said in Rolling Stone, “We don’t make a distinction between an acoustic instrument as a source of sound and any sound in the air outside or on a manufactured tape. It’s all electric energy, anyway.” They had the air of artists born into a history they rejected, building a musical world where they could be permanent aliens. They mocked the Seventies rock ideal of youth as a utopia — they were still in their twenties when they posed as Old Hollywood mad scientists on Trans-Europe Express, one of the decade’s most brilliant album covers.
Etsy began pushing homemade masks in early April, and the results panned out in a big way: total sales on the platform doubled last month, by and large thanks to a surge in face mask sales. For comparison, Etsy’s marketplace sales figures between January and March were up only 16 percent.
More than 12 million face masks were sold during April, totaling around $133 million in sales. Etsy says they represented the second largest category of product sales across the entire site during the month of April.
One main reason behind students’ reluctance to return to campus in the fall is their disappointment in how remote learning has gone this semester. Many students feel that the quality of education has nosedived. Students can no longer go to office hours to get face time with their professors or go to the library to study, and taking classes online can be tricky if a professor or student does not have their own computer or a reliable internet connection. What’s more, many students have expressed that trying to focus on school in the middle of a global health crisis has taken a huge emotional toll.
Some businesses make us feel all warm and cuddly. Like bakeries. Who can resist smiling just thinking about the smell of newly baked bread? But other businesses — like meatpacking — we do our best to ignore. Who wants to think about blood and guts and squealing pigs?
Anna Popova, the head of Russia’s public health authority, Rospotrebnadzor, has presented a three-step plan for the gradual easing of quarantine restrictions.
Russia’s Culture Minister Olga Lyubimova has been diagnosed with the coronavirus. She is now the third Russian Cabinet member to test positive for the disease.
On the morning of May 6, Russian officials announced that the country recorded 10,559 new coronavirus infections in the past day (there were 10,102 new cases than the day before), bringing the nation’s total number of confirmed COVID-19 cases to 165,929 patients.
The head doctor at the Kabanov City Hospital No.1 in Omsk willingly resigned on May 5, after media reports drew attention to the clinic's staff forming a long lineup outside of the hospital building the day before. The employees were reportedly waiting to undergo coronavirus testing. The Omsk region’s Health Minister, Irina Soldatova, said that Sobolev, “was unable to save his team and could not take the necessary measures [to ensure] epidemiological safety.”
The Transportation Security Administration ignored guidance from the Department of Homeland Security and internal pushback from two agency officials when it stockpiled more than 1.3 million N95 respirator masks instead of donating them to hospitals, internal records and interviews show.
Internal concerns were raised in early April, when COVID-19 cases were growing by the thousands and hospitals in some parts of the country were overrun and desperate for supplies. The agency held on to the cache of life-saving masks even as the number of people coming through U.S. airports dropped by 95% and the TSA instructed many employees to stay home to avoid being infected. Meanwhile, other federal agencies, including the Department of Veterans Affairs’ vast network of hospitals, scrounged for the personal protective equipment that doctors and nurses are dying without.
As President Trump starts to reopen the country, Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Laurie Garrett predicts the pandemic will last at least 36 months. Meanwhile, a top government vaccine specialist says he was forced from his job after he resisted the administration’s promotion of untested treatments for COVID-19. Garrett predicted the pandemic. In an extended interview, she discusses what’s next.
President Donald Trump announced on Twitter Wednesday that the coronavirus task force would not be disbanding, as had been previously reported, but will transition to focus on the task of “opening up” the United States’ economy, shifting away from its present task of mitigating and preventing the spread of COVID-19 across the country.
The UK government's failure to respond swiftly and effectively to the pandemic can and should be considered evil.
"This suffering cannot be forgotten," says project's creator.
Moscow authorities purchased hundreds of thousands of test kits for coronavirus antibodies from the Netherlands at the end of April. However, these rapid tests are actually made in China, and are not very accurate, reveals a new report from the investigative outlet IStories.€
We must act now to protect animals, workers, and public health from the meat industry.€
"Are we going to keep getting body bags or are we going to get what we actually need?"
A Seattle-area Native American health center in April received body bags instead of requested equipment to handle the coronavirus in what tribal officials described as a “metaphor” for how the Indigenous population is being treated by local, state, and federal governments around the country as the pandemic continues to rage.
Nursing home residents have been among those hardest hit by the new coronavirus. In some states, more than half of the recorded deaths have been long-term care residents. Some of the homes have been cited for putting residents at “immediate jeopardy” of harm or death, our analysis showed.
And many of the affected homes have been previously written up for violating federal standards. That’s true in California, New Jersey and New York.
There will likely be a US Commission on the Pandemic of 2020, the verbiage of which will mirror the 911 Commission Report. Fault will be placed on a lack of federal, state and local coordination and sharing of medical intelligence among the three levels of American government. The US federal administration will be admonished with a few tough words and that, as they say, will be that.
“I am selling some vegetables, but there’s not much profit in it. We all are sitting at home, idle, mostly. The local cement factory is running, but we aren’t going to work,” Karim Jat tells me on the phone from Mori, his village in Lakhpat taluka of Kachchh district. Karim Jat is a maldhari of the Fakirani Jat community. In the Kachchhi language ‘mal’ refers to animals, and ‘dhari’ means guardian or possessor. Across Kachchh, the€ maldharis€ rear cows, buffaloes, camels, horses, sheep and goats.
In his complaint, Bright claims he was excluded from an HHS meeting on the coronavirus in late January after he "pressed for urgent access to funding, personnel, and clinical specimens, including viruses" to develop treatments for the coronavirus should it spread outside of Asia.
"When we left, there was a pandemic plan," Lurie said. "There was a checklist about where you're supposed to do when. All of that stuff was in place, and it was quite comprehensive. That plan should have been activated that first week in January, and if you look at Rick Bright's whistleblower complaint, you see multiple attempts to do that."
She said that the Obama administration had left a crucial contract in place to speed the production of masks but that the contract was dropped after Trump took office in 2017. Another plan created under the Obama administration that would have developed reusable masks was deployed too late to boost current efforts, she said.
Fugate said the stockpile was supposed to be the first line of defense — not the only resource in an emergency.
"The Commonwealth sought to recover part of its expenditure on Sanofi’s drug Plavix (clopidogrel) under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS), being the additional amount it said it paid to subsidise the cost of the drug to patients during the period when Apotex was restrained from entering the market with its generic version of clopidogrel. As is usual, in return for an interlocutory restraint by the Court and pending a decision about the validity and infringement of its patent, Sanofi was required to provide an undertaking that it would compensate any person adversely affected by the interlocutory injunction (interlocutory injunction decision here). The relevant patent was upheld in part in the first instance judgment but revoked on appeal. Special leave to appeal to the High Court of Australia was refused.
This paved the way for claims for compensation by any person adversely affected by operation of the interlocutory order. Apotex made a claim, which was ultimately settled. The terms of the settlement have not been made public save that a provision preventing Apotex from assisting any other party in a claim was held to be unenforceable because it had a tendency to interfere with the administration of justice.
The Commonwealth also made a claim for compensation. A threshold question of whether certain statutory provisions in the Therapeutic Goods Act 1989 (Cth) established an exhaustive statutory code limiting the Commonwealth’s right to recover under the undertaking given by Sanofi was referred as a stated case directly to Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia, which held that it did not.
The purpose of the tender offer is to manage Nokia's overall indebtedness, it said a statement. Nokia also announced it planned to issue new euro-denominated fixed-rate notes.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, keystone, mailman, and tomcat9), Fedora (ceph, firefox, java-1.8.0-openjdk, libldb, nss, samba, seamonkey, and suricata), Oracle (kernel), Scientific Linux (firefox and squid), SUSE (libvirt, php7, slirp4netns, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (linux-firmware and openldap).
Until recently, I was content using the Uncomplicated Firewall that comes built-into Ubuntu. And it's called uncomplicated for a reason: its complicated counterpart – the iptables. It's not to say that iptables are difficult to comprehend or even impossible to use, but is rather massive. In other words, it has immense capacity and functionality, and as such is perhaps a lot more complicated.
Iptables are used for ipv4 packet filtering as well as NAT. For ipv6, there's ip6tables. Iptables allows its users to configure incoming/outgoing traffic to be modified, allowed, denied or re-routed. An incoming packet is passed through the table rules one by one. If it matches an existing rules, the action is carried out. If it does not, by default, it is allowed in.
It is not often that you see a botnet’s tooling written from scratch. The Internet of things (IoT) botnet ecosystem is relatively well-documented by security specialists. New threat actors are generally discovered quickly due to the inherent noise caused by DDoS operations, both in terms of infecting new machines and conducting operations. Simply, it is difficult to hide such overt activities. Most DDoS actors do not invest resources in creating custom tooling, unless they require specific capabilities, and resort to using well-known botnet implants (e.g. Mirai, BillGates).
Given all we know about facial recognition tech, it is literally jaw-dropping that anyone could make this claim… especially without being vetted independently.
Government officials always remind us that the price of order and lawfulness requires us, as a society, to give up some of our privacy and liberty. It shouldn't be that way, but it almost always is.
Grassroots activism, in its many forms, allows a community to mobilize around a shared set of ideals and creates an environment whereby participants can share information and resources to help facilitate the advancement of their common aims.
The Electronic Frontier Alliance (EFA) is a grassroots network of community and campus organizations, unified by a commitment to upholding the principles of the EFA: privacy, free expression, access to knowledge, creativity, and security.€ An active member of the EFA, Cryptoparty Ann Arbor, connects with their community by hosting digital security workshops with an emphasis on educating people about privacy issues in the digital age.
Keeping track of ISPs’ commitments to their users, today Paraguay’s leading digital rights organization TEDIC is launching its second edition of €¿Quién Defiende Tus Datos? (Who Defends Your Data?), a report in collaboration with EFF. Transparent practices and firm privacy commitments are particularly crucial right now. During times of crisis and emergency, companies must, more than ever, show that users can trust them with sensitive information about their habits and communications. While Paraguayan ISPs have made progress with their privacy policies and taking part in forums pledging promotion of human rights, they still have a long way to go to give users what is needed for fully building this trust.
Paraguayan ISPs should make greater efforts in being transparent about their practices and procedures as well as having stronger public commitments to their users, such as taking steps to notify users about government data requests.
As this blog noted a couple of weeks ago, many governments around the world are looking to introduce coronavirus tracing apps to help take their countries out of lockdown. The hope is that such apps can be used by millions of people to pinpoint potential new cases of Covid-19 so that medical interventions can be made quickly and efficiently. Most countries are opting for a decentralized approach, which is better able to protect the highly personal data that is collected. In the EU, France and Germany had both chosen a centralized approach. But Germany has now reversed its position, and said that it will be building a decentralized app using the Apple-Google framework. The French government is under pressure to change its mind too. But the most fervent supporter of the centralized approach is the UK.
Independent security researcher Baptiste Robert published a blog post today sounding that warning about India’s Health Bridge app, or Aarogya Setu, created by the government’s National Informatics Centre. Robert found that one feature of the app, designed to let users check if there are infected people nearby, instead allows users to spoof their GPS location and learn how many people reported themselves as infected within any 500-meter radius. In areas that have relatively sparse reports of infections, Robert says hackers could even use a so-called triangulation attack to confirm the diagnosis of someone they suspect to be positive.
A seamless vision of this country’s ever-flowering dystopia unspooled itself in Arizona yesterday. Donald Trump, in furtherance of his quest to reopen the U.S. economy in the middle of the beginning of a lethal pandemic, visited a Honeywell International face mask factory in Phoenix… and refused to wear a mask, despite the big sign at the door telling visitors to WEAR A MASK.
A new collection of€ maps found here€ displays what militarism looks like in the world. Here’s a brief guide to using and understanding them.
You may have seen the news reports this week that German prosecutors have issued an arrest warrant for Dmitry Badin for a massive hack of the German Parliament that made headlines in 2016. The reports about the German arrest warrant all mention that German authorities "believe" that Badin is connected to the Russian GRU and its APT28 hacking group.
We look at an incredible story unfolding in Venezuela of a failed coup attempt. Did a former Green Beret mastermind it? Two Americans have been arrested in Venezuela. President Nicolás Maduro claims the U.S. was behind the plot. “It looks like a bad Rambo movie, or a really bad telenovela,” says Miguel Tinker Salas, author of The Enduring Legacy: Oil, Culture, and Society in Venezuela. He notes that “the U.S. is seeking regime change … and the consequences for Venezuela could be very dire going forward.”
The€ Washington Post€ has a reputation as liberal and even left-of-center, although its editorial pages are dominated by neoconservatives who support the idea of American exceptionalism and the extreme operational tempo of America’s military.€ In the past week, we have been treated to a series of oped essays that are supportive of expanded American military power and a political, if not military, confrontation with China.
At this moment of unprecedented crisis, you might think that those not overcome by the economic and mortal consequences of the coronavirus would be asking, “What can we do to help?” A few companies have indeed pivoted to making masks and ventilators for an overwhelmed medical establishment. Unfortunately, when it comes to the top officials of the Pentagon and the CEOs running a large part of the arms industry, examples abound of them asking what they can do to help themselves.
According to Westrop, Western counter-Islamism analysts have long focused the bulk of their attention on the Muslim Brotherhood and its various offshoots in the U.S. and Europe. While the Brotherhood is indeed dangerous, other Islamist groups "have flourished under the lack of spotlight, and no group has flourished quite so well and so successfully as Jamaat-e-Islami." Founded in India in the 1940s and today "very active here in the US," it has proven very adept at advancing its ideology, yet "until about a year or two ago, very few in America had heard of the group."
The anti-lockdown protests aren’t the first time the media has been swindled into cheerleading an extremist faux libertarianism.
Hogan’s deputy communications director also noted that Monday’s Reopen Maryland–organized rally in Annapolis saw “more media inquiries” than actual protesters. Indeed, the gatherings have typically featured attendees in the dozens or low triple figures, making Michigan’s Thursday crowd of roughly 3,000 an outlier. Though the likes of Fox have framed the protests as an organic grassroots push, a good number have been organized through a network of Facebook pages that appear to have been launched by a right-wing activist family known for using pro-gun and anti-abortion social media posts to harvest data, per reports from the Washington Post and NBC News. Aaron, Ben, Chris, and Matthew Dorr are reportedly behind pages that have accumulated more than 200,000 members in total, such as New Yorkers Against Excessive Quarantine and Minnesotans Against Excessive Quarantine. However, given Facebook’s newly announced ban on groups advocating for social distancing violations, it’s unclear how much longer these groups will be allowed to exist on the platform. The family declined requests for comment from NBC News and the Post, but Ben Dorr called accusations of them running a scam operation “fake news” in a response to the Philadelphia Inquirer. In one of the Dorrs’ most successful pushes, over 100,000 Facebook users have joined a Wisconsinites Against Excessive Quarantines group, and at least 300 of those members RSVP’d for an “Operation Gridlock” protest next week. (The group’s creator, Ben Dorr, lives in Iowa, NBC News found.) The scheduled rally is a rip-off of Michigan’s “Operation Gridlock,” which was staged by a group backed by the billionaire family of Trump’s education secretary, Betsy DeVos.
By 2100, US farmers can expect more lethal heat, the equivalent of two months when it’s unsafe to pick crops.
Some 3.5 billion people are going to end up living in places where it is unbearably hot by 2070. And likely a lot of them will have to leave for somewhere else.
U.S. fossil fuel companies have taken at least $50 million in taxpayer money they probably won’t have to pay back, according to a review of coronavirus aid meant for struggling small businesses by the investigative research group Documented and the€ Guardian.
The state’s Energy Office recently released the Colorado Electric Vehicle Plan 2020, an update to the 2018 EV plan that established a target of 940,000 EVs by 2030. The new plan retains that target and lays out a vision for a “large-scale transition of Colorado’s transportation system to zero emission vehicles.” That vision includes electrifying all light-duty vehicles and making all medium and heavy-duty vehicles zero-emission (including electric, hydrogen, and other zero emissions€ technologies).
The€ discussion, titled “Behind the Curtain: The Trump Administration's Fossil Fuel Agenda During the Pandemic,” was part of an ongoing series of live-streamed forums hosted by the Committee on coronavirus impacts on at-risk populations. The conversation, which included several guest speakers,€ highlighted how vulnerable communities are hit with the simultaneous impacts€ of€ the virus, industrial pollution, and the climate crisis. In addition, the discussion voiced concerns over the way€ federal agencies have been€ bestowing favors upon fossil fuel corporations while restricting public input.€ €
It’s clear from a recent litany of disasters—from the coronavirus pandemic to America’s deadliest wildfire in a century—there are forces that cannot be domesticated.
According to Hisham, sea cucumbers are crucial to the marine ecosystem, performing similar functions to earthworms in the land ecosystem. Their extinction will have a devastating impact on the marine ecosystem, he said.
Till 2001, there were no legal hurdles in catching sea cucumbers. The blanket ban came into effect after the implementation of the Wildlife Protection Act of 2001. In the past, sea cucumbers were directly caught and shipped overseas. Now the hunters clean and freeze and add preservatives before shipping to the market hubs.
Hurray for Central Oregon Land Watch and Oregon Wild for suing the Ochoco National Forest over its proposed Black Mountain Vegetation Management Project near Big Prairie.
Without rent and mortgage relief, millions of families and smaller landlords could lose their homes and businesses.
Today’s headlines scream at us about the trauma, pain and loss from an historic explosion of capitalist unemployment. Unemployment always stood as a mocking indictment of capitalism. Unemployment also threatens capitalism. This system rewards employers with profits from the waged labor of employees. Yet it fails to keep them working and thereby undermines its profits. Worse, that failure recurs quite regularly — a phenomenon known as the business cycle.
"Child and household food insecurity are off the charts."
"Abbott does not care about the lives of Texans... Our governor is morally bankrupt."
"Senator Bernie Sanders suspended his campaign but you can't suspend a revolution. We have a lot of work to do."
Sen. Richard Burr was not the only member of his family to sell off a significant portion of his stock holdings in February, ahead of the market crash spurred by coronavirus fears. On the same day Burr sold, his brother-in-law also dumped tens of thousands of dollars worth of shares. The market fell by more than 30% in the subsequent month.
Burr’s brother-in-law, Gerald Fauth, who has a post on the National Mediation Board, sold between $97,000 and $280,000 worth of shares in six companies — including several that have been hit particularly hard in the market swoon and economic downturn.
For long-term fighters for justice, up against cruel or reckless corporations and their political toadies, there are few accolades, almost no recognition, and no citizen Hall of Fame.
"Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on dividends to enrich wealthy shareholders," said Sen. Bernie Sanders, these "corporations should be using this money to compensate the thousands of workers they laid off."
College students last week gained tenacious footing and found ways to fight back against pandemics of disease and insecurity, but their struggle is still overlooked in the grand scheme of trillion-dollar rescues that focus on fruits, not roots of human flourishing.
For starters, pigs are remarkably intelligent animals with a sense of social responsibility to the common good of the group.
The allure of capitalism has never been a clean or ethical one—the very roots are predicated on a system of continued growth and extraction, only becoming less feudal and more “modern” with the advent of beliefs that technological advances could usher in continued input to help the system survive. This has been true in some ways, such as the advent of fracking, which was able to massively disrupt Hubbert’s peak (the bell curve expected to show the gradual diminished reserves of oil). That peak was extended like a covid graph 10 days after an evangelical beach party. The rub with all things extractive and unsustainable is that there is always inherent blow-back. Just because there is more petro-product to burn doesn’t mean those greenhouse gases won’t build up from actually burning them—there will be hell to pay. This is because the natural world has a way of slapping down hubris with an intangible, almost sentient response to the greed.
In the course of the evolving patchwork of rent strikes happening right now across the US, there is suddenly a lot of talk in the press about how much the landlords are hurting. The landlords, of course, own the press, control the federal government, run all fifty states, and have a stranglehold on most of the city councils, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise.
"If you're looking for a bold new idea for€ New York public schools," wrote congressional candidate Jamaal Bowman, "how about you just try fully funding them for once?"
There has been some discussion of whether we should anticipate deflation or inflation as a result of the impact of the pandemic. I have been in the camp arguing the latter, based on the idea that precautionary measures will raise costs in major areas of the economy while reducing supply. (This is not an argument against stimulatory policies that are needed to restore employment. The inflation is a one-time price rise that will be reversed when we get effective treatments and/or a vaccine. It is not an inflationary spiral story.)
"He absolutely does not want you to view these deaths for what they are... a result of his abject failure to handle the pandemic in any logical way."
The pandemic is turning into a grand opportunity for the foxes to raid the henhouse under cover of darkness.
"If there isn't a minimum income floor to fall back on when this kind of massive shock hits, people literally have no options."
Through programs like the Small Business Administration’s Paycheck Protection Program and the Federal Reserve’s Main Street Lending Program, the federal government is deploying hundreds of billions of dollars in grants, loans and bond purchases to help businesses amid the coronavirus-sparked economic crisis. Each program comes with different strings, but their basic purpose is to keep workers on the payroll.
We want to know what this means for your workplace. How has your company treated its workers during the crisis? Have you or your colleagues been laid off, furloughed or otherwise affected? Have you seen money used in surprising ways? What do you think we should be reporting on?
On May 12, after a six-week delay caused by the pandemic, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in the epic battle by congressional committees and New York prosecutors to pry loose eight years of President Donald Trump’s tax returns.
Much about the case is without precedent. Oral arguments will be publicly broadcast on live audio. The nine justices and opposing lawyers will debate the issues remotely, from their offices and homes. And the central question is extraordinary: Is the president of the United States immune from congressional — and even criminal — investigation?
"Failing to act now would put our democracy and the 2020 election at risk."
"This is what happens when Wall Street captures Congress and writes themselves bailout check after bailout check as working people die."
But much of the American economy remains closed because of the pandemic. The number of infections and deaths continue to climb. Almost 3,000 Americans died last Friday alone, the deadliest day since the pandemic began.
The number of registered unemployed Russians reached 1,243,000 people at the end of April. What's more, 735,000 of these people registered as unemployed between March and April of this year. These figures were reported by Russia’s Labor and Social Protection Minister, Anton Kotyakov, during a May 6 conference with President Vladimir Putin, focused on issues related to supporting the economy.
In two previous pieces in CounterPunch I compiled Donald Trump’s statements on the COVID-19 pandemic up to April 19th (early evening). Here is a continuation of that list.
As President Trump has complained, the U.S. does not win wars anymore. In fact, since 1945, the only 4 wars it has won were over the small neocolonial outposts of Grenada, Panama, Kuwait and Kosovo. Americans across the political spectrum refer to the wars the U.S. has launched since 2001 as “endless” or “unwinnable” wars. We know by now that there is no elusive victory around the corner that will redeem the criminal futility of the U.S.’s opportunistic decision to use military force more aggressively and illegally after the end of the Cold War and the horrific crimes of September 11th. But all wars have to end one day, so how will these wars end?
Donald Trump has done it again. Will wonders ever cease? Trump, who is not a doctor but is, in his own words, “like a person that has a good you know what” as he plays at being one on TV, attempted to shed new light on the coronavirus by “jokingly” suggesting Americans inject themselves with bleach and, in the process, exposed himself to ridicule and renewed doubts about both his credibility and his sanity.
"I hope that the New York Board of Elections takes from this ruling a newfound appreciation of their role in safeguarding our democracy," Andrew Yang said in a statement.
U.S. capitalism’s would-be savior, the “moron” President Donald Trump, sees his re-election prospects tied to a “re-invigorated” economy based on sending U.S. workers back to work close to the height of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic. 63,000 Americans have died of this pandemic as of this writing. Another 2,000 more perish daily. Yet “back to work” is ever on the agenda of Trump and the ruling rich, whose statisticians hunt for a “safe” mathematical formula that factors in ever-changing rates of infections and deaths with corporate profits lost. Few deny that whatever the calculations regarding the safety of a generalized return to work, they will soon after become obsolete when an inevitable second wave of this terrible disease, estimated to be far worse than the present horror, takes its tolls.
"We refuse to go back to the days when rape and harassment in schools were ignored and swept under the rug."
One of the key points we've been making concerning Attorney General William Barr and his DOJ's eager support for the terrible EARN-IT Act, is that much of it really seems to be to cover up the DOJ's own failings in fighting child porn and child exploitation. The premise behind the EARN IT Act is that there's a lot of child exploitation/child abuse material found on social media... and that social media companies should do more to block that content. Of course, if you step back and think about it, you'd quickly realize that this is a form of sweeping the problem under the rug. Rather than actually tracking down and arresting those exploiting and abusing children, it's demanding private companies just hide the evidence of those horrific acts.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and President Donald Trump have exhibited a unique determination to appoint young, far right judges to the federal bench over the past three and a half years.
A dark-money group aligned with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is dropping more than half a million dollars on an advertisement shielding Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, an embattled Republican incumbent, from criticism of her response to the coronavirus outbreak.
A major party’s presumptive nominee enmeshed in multiple sexual harassment and assault scandals dropping out months before the general election is the sort of thing that seems like it could never actually happen — until it does. My bet is still that Joe Biden will power through the uproar over Tara Reade and accept the Democratic nomination in a few months down the road, but I’m not a fortune teller, and neither is anyone else.
The Hungarian government has announced plans to suspend its obligation to certain protections laid out in EU data protection law until the current ‘state of emergency’ period has been declared over.
The new measures, announced on Monday (4 May), include the suspension of the rights to access and erasure of personal information, and those who lodge a complaint or exercise their right to a judicial remedy will also have to wait for the proceedings to start until after the government proclaims an end to the state of danger.
The decree also relaxes the obligation of authorities to notify individuals when collecting personal data, when certain authorities act with the purpose of “coronavirus case prevention, recognition, exploration, as well as prevention of further spreading.”
In this vein, strict notification requirements are to be replaced with general information published electronically and made available about the “purposes, legal grounds, and scope” of processing.
In response, opposition politician Bernadett Szél said she will turn to the Hungarian Constitutional Court.
It is suitably repugnant that this theatre continues even as British politicians sing the praises of press freedom. Last week, Britain’s foreign secretary Dominic Raab added his name to those of the Dutch, French and German foreign ministers to “celebrate the crucial role journalists play around the world,” thereby doing their little, and inconsequential bit, to commemorate World Press Freedom Day. What was particularly repellent in the statement was the cap doffing to this year’s theme, being very WikiLeaks, as it were, and equally shunned in practice. “This year’s theme ‘Journalism without fear or favour’ emphasises the importance of taking action to secure independent journalism as a prerequisite for a functioning society.”
The statement also rings hollow when considering the entire scope of Assange’s hearings, which have been poorly conducted, appallingly managed and meagrely rationed in terms of resources. Those covering the case have also been treated with mild contempt. The very fact that it has dragged on in purgatorial fashion for so long suggests a form of torment by prolongation, a macabre display of institutional corruption. The US imperium wants its man and Britain will deliver, but must be seen to be observing some due process, however shoddy.
Journalism in Egypt has effectively become a crime over the past four years as authorities clamp down on media outlets and muzzle dissent, Amnesty International has said in a report.
Have you heard of Heath Freeman? He's a thirty-something hedge fund boss, who runs "Alden Global Capital," which owns a company misleadingly called "Digital First Media." His business has been to buy up local newspapers around the country and basically cut everything down to the bone, and just milk the assets for whatever cash they still produce, minus all the important journalism stuff. He's been called "the hedge fund asshole", "the hedge fund vampire that bleeds newspapers dry", "a small worthless footnote", the "Gordon Gecko" of newspapers and a variety of other fun things.
Buried by the news cycles are stories of how Chinese-American doctors, researchers, and community members are standing on the frontline in America’s fight against Covid-19.€
For years, the Orleans Parish District Attorney's Office in Louisiana issued fake subpoenas to witnesses and crime victims. Unlike subpoenas used in ongoing prosecutions, these were used during the investigation process to compel targets to talk to law enforcement. They weren't signed by judges or issued by court clerks but they did state in bold letters across the top that "A FINE AND IMPRISONMENT MAY BE OPPOSED FOR FAILURE TO OBEY THIS NOTICE."
A federal scientist filed a formal whistleblower complaint Tuesday, weeks after being reassigned from his position at the Health and Human Services Department following a clash with Trump administration officials over untested Covid-19 treatments that the president was promoting.
The state's conservative justices raise issue of Japanese internment camps while discussing Governor Tony Evers's order.
"The reason that there has not been an indictment, in my opinion, is because these men were white, these men have strong law enforcement ties," said a lawyer for the victim's family.€
Following the release of cell phone footage of the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery, 25, who was shot and killed while jogging near Brunswick, Georgia, in February, state officials say they intend to convene a grand jury investigation to determine whether charges should be filed against his shooters.
The Russian Interior Ministry’s internal security department questioned two journalists from the news outlet Baza due a viral video of the arrest of Moscow resident Jesus Vorobyov.€
The sinister potential of coronavirus lockdown to suppress dissent was on display on Monday as police broke up a small group of protestors outside Westminster Crown Court during a case management hearing for Julian Assange. The dozen protestors, who included Julian’s father John Shipton, were all social distancing at least 2 metres apart (except where living in the same household). The police did not observe social distancing as they broke up this small and peaceful protest.
In early April, as reports of deaths from COVID-19 began to emerge from U.S. prisons and jails, Aaron Campell posted a desperate 20-minute Facebook Live video shot using a contraband cell phone. The video showed sick people gasping and coughing on his unit in the low-security federal FCI Elkton in Ohio, and one of the small bottles of soap that was supposed to last each person two weeks.
Campbell said that three people he knew had died in the facility, and that a prison nurse told them to prepare for more deaths on the unit. He claimed that people who met the criteria for home confinement, including himself, were being refused release. Staring into the camera, he said, “We’re people. People shouldn’t have to die like this.”
Influential Nigerian drummer Tony Allen died on April 30, 2020, at the age of 79. He was considered a pioneer of the Afrobeat genre for his work with Fela Kuti as the drummer and music director of Fela’s backing band Afrika ’70.
Ravi Hooda made the comment in reply to Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown, who announced a by-law would allow mosques to play daily calls to prayer over loudspeakers during Ramadan.
People complained about the tweet to the Peel District School Board as Hooda was the school council chair for the Macville Public School in Bolton City. The principal of the school uploaded a statement on the Peel school website on Tuesday, notifying that Hooda had been removed from the school council.
Many comments on the GoFundMe page referenced the Choctaw donation. Some read “Ní neart go cur le chéile” and others simply “Ireland remembers”. “173 years ago, the people of the Choctaw nation showed Ireland unimaginable generosity,” wrote donor Michael Foy. “I am donating today in memory of our shared past, and to help overcome this crisis together – just as we did nearly two centuries ago.”
Many donors cited the generosity of the Choctaws, noting that the gift came not long after the United States government forcibly relocated the tribe and several other American Indian groups from the Southeastern United States, a march across thousands of miles known as the Trail of Tears that left thousands of people dead along the way.
Human rights at Intel are not a priority. This is already clear if you have read my website.
Now we see that the problem concerns not only respect for the person but also freedom of speech.
I found on Internet this interesting article of the New York Times, it is about Intel fighting against speech freedom of its employees.
Not much has changed since then. Back then, the question was whether Intel could limit an employee’s freedom of expression.
Today in 2020 we are still at the same point if not worst. It still does not seem that basic principles such as freedom of speech and respect for the person are priorities within Intel. In reverse! Yesterday as today Intel asserts the law of the fittest, the prince before the principle.
Back when T-Mobile and Sprint were trying to gain regulatory approval for their $26 billion merger, executives repeatedly promised the deal would create jobs. Not just a few jobs, but oodles of jobs. Despite the fact that US telecom history indicates such deals almost always trigger mass layoffs, the media dutifully repeated T-Mobile and Sprint executive claims that the deal would create "more than 3,500 additional full-time U.S. employees in the first year and 11,000 more people by 2024."
The regime in Beijing was quick to recognize the opportunity the pandemic presented. The deeper the U.S. sunk into its crisis, the more China could prove its superiority. In March and April, Beijing dispatched teams of doctors to 16 countries. At the same time, it provided more than 125 countries and four international organizations with relief supplies. While Italy was begging Europe for help at the beginning of the crisis, the Chinese billionaire Jack Ma was supplying the EU with 2 million protective masks.
The suspended accounts were active on both Facebook and Instagram, which Facebook owns, and were linked to eight networks, the California-based social-media giant said.
The networks based in Russia and Iran focused their content internationally, while two networks in the South Caucasus nation of Georgia, along with two in the United States and one each in Mauritania and Burma (also known as Myanmar), operated with domestic audiences in mind.
All the networks were created before the coronavirus pandemic, but the company said it found people behind the campaigns had "opportunistically" used coronavirus-related posts to build an audience and drive people to their content.
This month, the PTO announced that it would be opening up an online licensing market, “Patents 4 Partnerships.” The market, which will initially focus on COVID-related patents, is intended to provide a centralized and easily accessible database of U.S. patents and published patent applications that have been voluntarily made available for licensing.
There’s a number of reasons to think that this would be good for the patent system—if patent owners actually use it and if license information is public. Unfortunately, that seems less than likely. And there’s some concerns with what’s already there.
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The real question is whether patent owners will actually put their patents up for license. It’s possible that some will, but many patent owners treat licensing activity as highly confidential and wouldn’t want to provide a list of the patents they’re licensing, much less making the terms or licensees public information. And they often have little interest in having a fixed set of license terms, preferring to negotiate extremely specific licenses that use differential pricing (i.e., different parties pay different prices) in order to maximize their profits.
Given all that, it’s questionable whether many patent owners will participate. And if major licensors aren’t participating, it’s not clear what the value of this marketplace would be.
Even if licensors were interested in openly announcing their patents and terms, it’s unclear whether potential licensees will use the marketplace. Engineers don’t tend to say “I want to make a robot arm, let me go look for robot arm patents to license,” they just figure out how to make a robot arm. (That’s reflected in the high rate of independent invention—most cases of infringement aren’t cases of copying, they’re cases of someone inventing the same thing a little later.) And if there’s no customers for licenses, it’s one more reason that patent owners won’t list their patents for licensing.
The Patents 4 Partnerships program isn’t a bad idea if it sees use, but it’s not at all clear that it will.
The case concerns the transfer of a priority right from an employee to his/her employer and the relevant time zone for determining the priority:
1. The validity of the transfer of rights to an invention by the employer by claiming it as a service invention is governed by the law applicable to the employment contract.
2. The rights and obligations of the contracting parties that result from a legal agreement on the transfer of a priority right are not to be judged according to the law applicable to the priority application, but according to the law applicable to contracts between the parties. If the agreement is made between the employee inventor and his/her employer, the agreement is governed by the law applicable to the employment contract.
Uniloc, owner of U.S. Patent No. 6,993,049, brought an action for infringement of that patent against LG in the Northern District of California. The District Court granted LG's motion to dismiss on the pleadings, agreeing with LG that the claims were directed to patent-ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101. Uniloc appealed.
The patented technology relates to Bluetooth-enabled and similar networks. These networks involve a primary station and at least one secondary station that form ad hoc networks (piconets) with one another. Joining such a network involves an inquiry procedure, in which primary stations identify secondary stations and the secondary stations can request to join the piconet, and a page procedure, in which a primary station can invite the secondary stations to join the piconet. According to the patent, "it can take several tens of seconds to complete the inquiry and page procedures so that a device joins a piconet and is able to transfer user input to the primary station."
Further, secondary stations can be battery operated, and may enter a low-power "park" mode by stopping active communication with the primary station. A parked station must be polled in order to restore its ability to communicate with the primary station. This polling process may also take several tens of seconds.
Popular mixtape platform Spinrilla wants the RIAA to be held liable for sending inaccurate takedown notices. Responding to a motion to dismiss from the music industry group, the mixtape service stresses that the RIAA was well aware of its wrongdoing and that it doesn't matter whether any files were actually removed or not.
During a 2017 raid on homes owned by Kristopher Dallmann, the alleged founder of the Jetflicks streaming service, FBI agents removed him from the premises at gunpoint, declined his request for a lawyer, and insisted he waived his Miranda rights. On this basis, certain evidence should be surpressed, Dallmann now argues. This version of events is hotly contested by the US Government, which insists everything was done by the book.
Oscars DVD screeners, the DVDs that get sent out to judges that are up for an award, have been an on again, off again topic for years at Techdirt. These screeners were at one time a very prevalent source for pirated films that showed up on the internet. There was once some irony in the MPAA and film industry insisting that piracy could be solved by tech companies if only they would nerd hard enough, yet here are these screeners going out the doors that supposedly were secure and turned out not to be. It was all bad enough that the MPAA wanted to ban screeners entirely, which pissed off filmmakers enough that the lobbying group ended up having to back down.
I'm lucky enough to own a decades old Nintendo 64 and a handful of games, including the classic Mario 64. My kids love that game. Still, the first thing they asked when I showed it to them the first time is why the screen was letterboxed, why the characters looked like they were made of lego blocks, and why I needed weird cords to plug it all into the flat screen television. The answer to these spoiled monsters' questions, of course, is that the game is super old and wasn't meant to be played on modern televisions. It's the story of a lot of older games, though many PC games at least have a healthy modding community that will take classics and get them working on present day hardware. Consoles don't have that luxury.
