Summary: ‘Demolition crew’ IAM still helps European Patent Office (EPO) President António Campinos — as it did Benoît Battistelli before him — distort reality and lie to the world about what goes on inside the Office; but the Office goes even further by completely blocking sites that refute the lies
What will it take for people to realise this? (What’s the moralistic threshold?)
Summary: Fascistic and autocratic tendencies, which seem to be on the rise internationally, will teach people that unless they reject/eschew rather than absorb whatever gets thrown at them in the name of ‘novelty’ (including the Web and especially Social Control Media) they can become victims of injustice
THE Internet never really evolved along the lines of users’ needs; corporations quickly took over the Web back in the 1990s and used it — or brutally leveraged it — to expand their monopoly power. Proprietary extensions were added for no reason other than domination (recently DRM was added in “EME” clothing, after W3C had been captured). This rogue trajectory is all very well documented (including in antitrust material). What started as a project of a CERN scientist, inspired in part by Richard Stallman and looking to share his physics papers, turned into Social Control Media with spying on everything from mouse movements to clicking. He is dissatisfied to see this trend, but it’s too late… as he lost control of his own creation. He and Stallman nowadays have another thing in common.
“Corporations strive for greater wealth for themselves and governments wish to control their population, if not in seemingly harmonious ways (‘soft power’) then by force.”Technology isn’t a new thing. It started well before computers. Machinery for calculating things and for spying on people doesn’t need a central processing unit when similar things can be done by people equipped with pens, papers, and many piles of documents, ranging from travel records to family trees (birth, marriage, death certificates and so on).
Corporations strive for greater wealth for themselves and governments wish to control their population, if not in seemingly harmonious ways (‘soft power’) then by force. So it’s hardly surprising they’d leverage anything within their means to get richer and stronger, respectively. In a lot of countries there’s no real separation between corporations and government, only perceptual separation.
“At the moment the revolt comes from the top (looting of trillions disguised as “stimulus”) and the riots are perpetrators by goons who work for the state, shooting rubber bullets at reporters (eyewitnesses) and gassing people with legitimate grievances.”Apathy among citizens and ‘customers’ (or ‘consumers’) is our biggest threat. If people unquestionably accept anything thrown at them by corporations and governments, e.g. contract-tracing ‘apps’ and so-called ‘phones’ that mostly spy on people 24/7, then resistance against misuse of power would seem hopeless (until it’s too late). Right now, for example, even in the United States, the DHS is ‘kidnapping’ people based on predictive models (the assumption they may simply gather peacefully to protest injustice). This relies on surveillance, of course…
No need to ask where the data comes from. The DHS made it no secret that it’s harvesting and analysing Social Control Media.
Recently we wrote a bunch of articles about IBM’s history of oppression and assistance to ethnic cleaners, including blatant eugenics in Jamaica. With the Internet the data gathering process (data-mining people’s thoughts and intents) became a lot more extensive. That’s nothing to be celebrated but feared. Look what companies control this data and examine their track record (Facebook, Palantir, Cambridge Analytica, Microsoft etc. — all in the same data pool); they’re not your friend and they’re not “social”. They sure “follow” you, but not in a good way (think of police officers who follow protesters around). At the moment the revolt comes from the top (looting of trillions disguised as “stimulus”) and the riots are perpetrators by goons who work for the state, shooting rubber bullets at reporters (eyewitnesses) and gassing people with legitimate grievances. Just because you do nothing wrong doesn’t mean you have “nothing to hide…” (especially when the state does many wrong things) █
“In this country we have no place for hyphenated Americans.” –Theodore Roosevelt
Posted in Europe, Patents at 5:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
They don’t want to even comment on the apparent self-censorship (as if it’s a “national security” or perceived national interest matter)
SZ coverage of EPO affairs these days (almost nothing unflattering, except ‘monkey patents’)
SZ coverage of EPO affairs back in the days there was proper scrutiny
Summary: Based on journalists whom I met in person, there are consequences (from above) for exposing EPO scandals; Katja Riedel still writes for this publication (e.g. about AfD this year [1, 2]) but never about European Patent Office (EPO) scandals; we heard some stories related to this and reached out to inquire (they never responded)
Modern technologies develop in the blink of an eye, and every fresh computer science student eventually learns to solve issues with new operating systems (OS). Even if it is said that famous operating systems like Windows or iOS are similar, their editions in 2020 are not the same as what they used to be ten years ago. There has been enough time to figure out all the pros and cons of each OS. Therefore, it is time to speak about the reasons computer science students prefer GNU/Linux to any other OS.
[...]
The central part of it is the GNU/Linux kernel that runs on more different kinds of hardware than any other firmware or OS. If you want to use a command-line on different non-Linux based systems, use bash integration with its terminal to work in a similar environment. The Linux kernel provides a common platform for software and supports various hardware architectures. Linux can run on any hardware type: from tiny laptops with micro-controllers to powerful supercomputers.
[...]
Computer science students have a great opportunity to quench their curiosity with the GNU/Linux system. If the source is open and free, it is a crime to avoid learning it. Even if you compare the Linux OS with other famous tools, you definitely will not regret to know how it works. Who knows, maybe it is a first step to creating your own operating system
When Google introduced Chrome OS back in 2011, it was mostly just a window to the web. The operating system eventually expanded to include Android integration, and last year Google announced that every new Chromebook would be launching with Linux support. However, the implementation of Linux on Chrome OS had been a little limited out of the gate. Now with the launch of Chrome OS 84, Google is adding the ability to set a username and configure the Linux disk size during initial setup.
Previously, it was possible to adjust the size of the Linux container, but it required setting up a fresh installation. The Chrome OS team has been working on this change for several months now, and it’s finally landing in the Stable channel. With this update, users will be able to resize the Linux container without having to remove it and re-do the installation.
System76 have begun providing more AMD based hardware for Linux enthusiasts, and the next step in their plan to be as open as possible appears to have begun.
They’re certainly busy! After announcing the AMD powered Serval WS back in early June, they also then revealed the Oryx Pro later in June which was their first laptop with Coreboot, Open Controller Firmware and NVIDIA all together. This is all on top of working on their own Linux distribution too with Pop!_OS which launched the 20.04 LTS at the end of April.
Every time the Kubernetes release train stops at the station, we like to ask the release lead to take a moment to reflect on their experience. That takes the form of an interview on the weekly Kubernetes Podcast from Google that I co-host with Craig Box. If you’re not familiar with the show, every week we summarise the new in the Cloud Native ecosystem, and have an insightful discussion with an interesting guest from the broader Kubernetes community.
At the time of the 1.17 release in December, we talked to release team lead Guinevere Saenger. We have shared the transcripts of previous interviews on the Kubernetes blog, and we’re very happy to share another today.
Next week we will bring you up to date with the story of Kubernetes 1.18, as we gear up for the release of 1.19 next month. Subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts to make sure you don’t miss that chat!
The Manjaro community is in turmoil over the controversial resignation of the project’s treasurer, Firefox 79 brings improved user-facing security features, and WordPress 5.5 bundles a long-awaited sitemap generator.
One of the best methods for learning programming is to just build a project and see how things work first-hand. With that in mind, Ken Youens-Clark wrote a whole book of Tiny Python Projects that you can use to get started on your journey. In this episode he shares his inspiration for the book, his thoughts on the benefits of teaching testing principles and the use of linting and formatting tools, as well as the benefits of trying variations on a working program to see how it behaves. This was a great conversation about useful strategies for supporting new programmers in their efforts to learn a valuable skill.
Intel has been preparing “Power Limit4″ support for their Linux PowerCap driver that is being rolled out for the forthcoming Tiger Lake SoCs.
The Power Limit4 (PL4) support allows limiting the SoC’s maximum power limit at a package level. The user can mandate the maximum Wattage the SoC is allowed in order to prevent power spikes from tripping any power adapter, battery over-current protection, or other limitations.
The user can control the PL4 power limit in Watts via the RAPL (Runtime Average Power Limiting) sysfs interface. RAPL has already allowed power limiting while this PL4 support is about providing the limit at a package-level.
The AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 “Southern Islands” graphics processors continue seeing open-source driver improvements on Linux in 2020.
There continues to be the trend by AMD and other open-source developers on improving the GCN 1.0 / Southern Islands support within the AMDGPU kernel driver. By default GCN 1.0 (and GCN 1.1) use the “Radeon” DRM kernel driver by default where as GCN 1.2+ through Navi 2 are all using the AMDGPU driver. For years there has been experimental support for GCN 1.0/1.1 in this AMDGPU driver while in recent months there seems to be some effort on getting the original “Graphics Core Next” GPUs into better shape on this driver.
With the Intel Core i9 10900K “Comet Lake” processor here are some fresh GCC compiler benchmarks when looking at the performance of GCC 8.4 versus 9.3 versus a 10.2 snapshot while testing with optimization flags of -O2, -O3 -march=native, and -O3 -march=native -flto.
On Ubuntu 20.04 with the Linux 5.8 kernel the compilers GCC 8.4.0, GCC 9.3.0, and a GCC 10.2 snapshot from 10.2 were built from source while using the same build arguments across all tested builds and using the same compiler (Ubuntu 20.04 default compiler) for building these different GCC compiler releases. Various C/C++ benchmarks were carried out with each GCC release while setting the CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS to “-O2″, “-O3 -march=native”, and “-O3 -march=native -flto” for a mix of common optimization levels.
Via the Phoronix Test Suite dozens of different benchmarks were carried out for looking at the compiler performance on the current Core i9 10900K that still makes use of the Skylake era target.
Telegram Desktop 2.2 is not a hefty update, but it comes with some very nice features that I bet you’ll like. One of these is a new limit for sharing and storing files as the application now supports files up to 2GB each, and it works with an unlimited number of files of any type. Until now, the file limit was set to 1.5GB.
Another cool new feature is Auto-Night Mode. When enabled, Telegram will match the current theme of your operating system, whether it’s Dark Mode or Light Mode. This is nice to have because you don’t have to keep night mode enabled all the time or manually enable it at night.
In this tutorial to will learn to censor photos using computer program GIMP. This is part of a mini series GIMP for Author – so then you can conceal digital information for your articles like faces, passwords, emails, bank accounts, and anything. You will reuse techniques you learned from the basics part. to select and save the pictures. You will get examples and exercises again here. Happy editing!
After moving over to Godot Engine as the base for Thrive, the team behind this free and open source game of evolution have a new and important update available.
Thrive is a survival sim based on evolution, starting off a tiny microbe the plan is to eventually allow you to progress through many different stages of evolution including: Microbe, Multicellular, Aware, Awakening, Society, Industrial and Space. It’s still early and in development but it’s showing a huge amount of promise. Since it’s free and open source, anyone can help too.
With the latest release, it’s become far more playable as well thanks to proper saving and loading support, including quick load / save. You can finally progress through it a bit more and actually come back to it, this makes exploring the world a lot nicer. There’s also new Chromatic Aberration and Distortion effects, improved performance in places, some improved visuals, code clean ups and more.
If you enjoy a good traditional real-time strategy game and you haven’t already tried The Fertile Crescent, you’re really missing out on a wonderful title that keeps getting better.
The Fertile Crescent is a little like a streamlined pixel-art Age of Empires, although they do have a different focus and it does play in a unique way, that comparison gives you a reasonably close idea of it mechanically. You build, you gather resources, explore and fight others. With support for AI battles and cross-platform online play, there’s a lot there to love.
M2H and Blackmill Games recently released Tannenberg, their WWI FPS on consoles but they haven’t left the PC version behind with a fresh update out with a new map.
Since Tannenberg, like their previous game Verdun, is one based on historical accuracy the inclusion of Przemyśl as a map is quite interesting. During the First World War, it was the location of what’s known as the ‘Siege of Przemyśl’ which was the longest siege of the whole war. For Tannenberg it’s a fun map to blast through, giving you lots of open spaces along with multiple forts to battle to capture.
Showing that the point and click adventure genre is very much alive, Red Martyr Entertainment didn’t just finish their crowdfunding campaign, they actually ended up getting €50,178 in funding which was quite a bit over the initial goal they had set. Thanks to that, they’re going to ensure the game has full voice acting and there will be a DLC (free for backers) to explain some backstory.
art of rally, an upcoming stylized rally experience from the creator of Absolute Drift still has a demo available and it was recently updated.
Unlike other sims like Dirt Rally, art of rally is aimed to be more fun and accessible. This includes the different viewpoint, with it giving you an overhead camera so you can completely focus on the stages by seeing upcoming road features without needing pace-notes. While work goes on to produce the full game, they still want to show off how it’s going and gather feedback and wishlists with the demo.
That poor ball, stuck between Pong paddles that just bounce it around and they’ve done it since 1972. The ball has had enough of this and it’s going to escape.
qomp is the name and it’s currently in development by a team of indie developers including Stuffed Wombat, Britt Brady, Miroko and Clovelt. The idea sounds quite hilarious, a seemingly self-aware sprite that’s had enough of this arcade game life and wants to escape. Imagine if you were smacked by paddles for multiple decades, you would be pretty annoyed too. Using one button you will defeat bosses, solve puzzles and overcome platforming challenges.
Need a project to easily capture the last 30 seconds of action? ReplaySorcery might just be the open source project that you’re looking for.
Unfortunately, on Linux the GPU vendors like AMD and NVIDIA do not provide their special tools like ShadowPlay or ReLive. On Windows, those can give you simple to use and high quality instant-replay recording. On Linux, you could use OBS Studio but it’s a bit overkill, needs it to always be open and always recording. This is where ReplaySorcery comes in, giving you a new way to capture the action.
DRM-free store GOG have today launched a Grand RPG Sale and they’ve filled their store full of sales on some top RPGs, from smaller indie titles to big hitters.
Admittedly, the Visual Novel genre is not one I go to often but I couldn’t resist with Synergia because of the incredible atmosphere and wonderful design work that went into it. Note: key provided by the publisher.
“Synergia is a yuri thriller visual novel that takes place in a cyberpunk future, wrapped up in a beautifully unique, vibrant neon aesthetic. At the end of the world, sometimes love is the ultimate crime.”
Radi Art and Top Hat Studios have crafted something that gives off a definite Ghost in the Shell vibe, the Anime versions I mean, not the questionable 2017 movie. Synergia is genuinely quite a surprise! You’re greeted first by a pumping intro with music that sounds like it’s something out of Blade Runner and it certainly commands your attention. That demanding atmosphere carries through the game too, it’s quite something.
From the developers of NeuroVoider which also supports Linux, ScourgeBringer is a fast-paced free-moving roguelite platformer that’s seriously fun and it’s had a huge upgrade.
Currently in Early Access, this is part of a series of planned big upgrades that they’ve successfully delivered from their roadmap. The focus of the ‘Old World’ update appears to be boosting the overall content with it adding in a whole new realm to battle through with its own unique enemies, a mini-boss and a main boss. There’s also now challenge rooms and an alternate mini-boss for the first world too. They’ve also gone and tweaked the difficulty, as some rooms will alternate between easier or harder enemy waves to make the difficulity of the game a little more progressive.
Hot on the heels of the digiKam 7.0.0 release comes a new revision of the digiKam Recipes book. The new version includes
Grouping RAW and JPEG files manually can be a real chore. Fortunately, a simple Python script can do this automatically, and the Group RAW and JPEG files with a script chapter provides instructions on using the script.
The Disaster-proof digiKam setup chapter describes how to keep digiKam databases and configuration safe.
The Use G’MIC-Qt filters chapter provides an introduction to the powerful G’MIC-Qt tool, featuring a vast collection of ready-made filters.
The Tagging in digiKam chapter has been revised and extended.
The Batch process photos and RAW files chapter provides better examples of using the Batch Queue Manager tool.
Finally, the Use digiKam with an external storage device chapter has been completely revised, and it now describes a better way to use digiKam with an external device.
All digiKam Recipes readers will receive the updated version of the book automatically and free of charge. The digiKam Recipes book is available from Google Play Store and Gumroad.
The KDE team working on the Plasma desktop environment are busy pushing ahead for the 5.20 release due later this year and it’s sounding great.
Developer Nate Graham blogs about work done quite often, with a recent post catching my attention. While Wayland support has come along nicely now, there’s still areas that are lacking compared to the ancient X11 and they keep on plugging those holes.
With Plasma 5.20, screen recording and screencasting are one area that should be a lot better, as they’ve now wired up what’s needed for it to be properly supported with Plasma on Wayland. Their code is based upon using Pipewire, a project that itself aims to greatly improve handling of audio and video under Linux. Graham mentioned that this will work with OBS Studio and that there’s “more to come”.
Hi! Today, I am bringing the results of my work in developing text annotation support for marK.
In these three weeks I have been working in bug fixes and the logic to handle text annotation. It is worth mentioning one change in the original plan, I said in the previous posts that I was going to use KTextEdit, but for now, the code is using QTextEdit that is already available by using Qt and I could focus on the logic.
Hello KDE people. Phase 2 evaluation is due from today onward until the 31st of July. In this blog post, I will update you on the progress made during the second month of the coding period. So here are the things done:-
This is the last week before the phase 2 in Google Summer Code ends. This phase my area of focus was the preset editor, which would enable the user for modifying existing and creating new MyPaint brushes. I went on to extend the same then the one mentioned in my proposal to include more diverse variety of options and settings so that the editor gives us the provision to make much larger scale of changes and exercise complete customization control over the brush engine. It later on became a bit more complicated than I had expected it to be initially which led to a lot of bugs and crashes. It works fine now, mostly:) There is still one last bug that I need to eliminate, though.
I’m glad to announce that my GSoC 2020 project has been merged!
You should be able to use Disney’s SeExpr for fun and profit as soon as the next nightly.
The next objective is getting the docs in shape – see this merge request for more information; and, of course, we still need your help for a good batch of scripts to bundle with!
KDE Plasma 5.19.4 comes three weeks after the Plasma 5.19.3 update with more bug fixes and improvements across various core components to make the Plasma 5.19 desktop environment series more stable and reliable.
In this update, support for GTK apps is further improved when applying a Global Theme, as their color schemes will also change accordingly, the hotspot configuration dialog of the Plasma Networkmanager applet is now bigger, and the “Text Only” display style of new system monitor widgets is now properly shown.
The GNOME desktop environment has been through many changes since its initial release in March 1999. For most of this time, the open source project has issued updates twice a year, which gives users predictability in when they can expect new features to land on their Linux and other Unix-like desktops. Its latest release, GNOME 3.36, came out in March, and the project is preparing to issue its next iteration in September. To learn about what’s new in GNOME, I spoke with Emmanuele Bassi.
Emmanuele has been contributing to GNOME for more than 15 years. He started as the maintainer of language bindings that allow developers to use GNOME libraries in other programming languages, then moved on to contribute to GTK (a cross-platform widget for developing GNOME apps) and other parts of GNOME. In 2018, GNOME hired Emmanuele as a full-time GTK Core Developer, where he works on GTK and the GNOME application development platform.
GNOME OS as the Linux build with bleeding edge GNOME software for testing continues taking shape and a call for testing has been issued.
For GNOME module maintainers and other interested individuals, a call for testing of GNOME OS was issued today for the latest operating system images.
While GNOME OS is improving with its hardware support, this call for testing is focused on using GNOME Boxes or other virtualization software for firing up this bleeding-edge version of GNOME.
Hi all,
As most of you have probably heard by now, our nightly VM images are
ready for wider testing. I'd like to ask at least maintainers of GNOME
core modules to test it.
Core modules are defined in
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/tree/master/elements/core
I'd also like to request maintainers of core modules to review the way
their modules (and their dependencies) are built, and file bugs if the
apps doesn't work correctly or would prefer it to be built with a
different set of options.
The image can be downloaded from
https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-build-meta/-/jobs/artifacts/master/raw/image/disk.img.xz?job=vm-image-x86_64
To run it with you distro version of gnome-boxes (or anything that
uses libvirt), first decompress it, then run:
virt-install --name GNOMEOS --boot uefi --video virtio --memory 2048
--import --disk disk.img
To run it in nightly flatpak of gnome-boxes, decompress and convert to
qcow2 using:
qemu-img convert disk.img disk.qcow2
then from gnome boxes, add a new virtual machine, select "GNOME
Nightly x86_64" and select the qcow2 image.
The image uses the "user" variant by default, and can be updated using
GNOME Software, or using the command line:
sudo ostree admin upgrade
If you'd like to try the developer image, use
sudo ostree admin switch GnomeOS:gnome-os/master/x86_64-devel
you can switch back to the user image using
sudo ostree admin switch GnomeOS:gnome-os/master/x86_64-user
Lastly, I'd like to announce that we're going to do an informal
workshop on using BuildStream to develop GNOME components starting at
16:00 UTC on the GUADEC platform. That's about 3 and half hours from
now.
Regards,
Abderrahim
The latest GNOME performance work being explored is effectively how to make the Intel graphics clock speed ramp up quicker when necessary. Canonical developer Daniel van Vugt is working on a set of patches for enabling triple buffering with Mutter when the GPU starts falling behind and that additional rendering work in turn should ramp up Intel GPUs to their optimal frequency in order to smooth out the performance.
Daniel has been working on various GNOME desktop optimizations focused primarily on Intel graphics and at 4K. He had been seeing the modern Intel “Iris” Gallium3D driver at times delivering lower performance than the classic “i965″ driver. On investigation, he found that it wasn’t due to the OpenGL driver per se but the iGPU was running in a lower clock/performance state.
Each of the three distribution independent package formats discussed above has its advantage and disadvantages. I think there are still some improvements by each of them to make any of them the main package format for Linux distributions. Luckily, all these package formats can co-exist. You don’t have to stick to a particular package format when you can enjoy software from different package formats.
This is a minor (point) release in the 4MLinux STABLE channel, which comes with the Linux kernel 5.4.46. The 4MLinux Server now includes Apache 2.4.43, MariaDB 10.4.13, and PHP 7.4.7 (see this post for more details).
You can update your 4MLinux by executing the “zk update” command in your terminal (fully automatic process).
Here we have the Alpha milestone of OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 release cycle.
Warning: This is an alpha product, and it is not aimed to be used in a production environment.
Alpha release is primarily for testing and bug squashing. Testing is a critical step during development as all bug fixing will take place during this lapse of time.
Therefore we exhort all OpenMandriva users to test our system and report any issue you may find at our forum or at Github Issues.
You can get in touch real time with our developers at IRC channel #openmandriva-cooker on freenode.
The OpenMandriva community announced today the availability for public testing of the first alpha build of the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 distribution release.
Dubbed “Argon,” OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 is the second major update to the latest OpenMandriva Lx 4 series. It comes with up to date packages and GNU/Linux technologies, including the latest Linux 5.7 kernel series and KDE Plasma 5.19 desktop environment.
In this first alpha version, OpenMandriva Lx 4.2 ships with Linux kernel 5.7.8, which should further improve hardware support, as well as the newest KDE/Qt software, such as the KDE Plasma 5.19.3 desktop environment, KDE Applications 20.04.3, KDE Frameworks 5.72.0, and Qt 5.15, for a better desktop experience.
few weeks ago, we saw the development version release of the most popular Mandriva Linux-based distro, Mageia OS. Now another community, OpenMandriva, which also carries on the legacy of the legendary Mandriva Linux, has released an alpha version of the upcoming OpenMandriva Lx 4.2.
The alpha release is primarily for testing purposes to find and fix all bugs before its stable release. Hence, you should not use it in your production system. It also comes with major changes in core components and software updates.
Hi everyone, I’m pleased to announce another update to the GeckoLinux NEXT Plasma edition. The purpose of this edition is not to replace the regular GeckoLinux STATIC Plasma release, but rather as an alternative for those who want the latest Plasma and KDE packages on top of a stable openSUSE Leap base. This is achieved thanks to some additional openSUSE OBS repositories, together with the polished GeckoLinux configuration for the Plasma desktop.
To better understand the GeckoLinux editions, I’d like to inform the reader that there are three main editions of this distribution. GeckoLinux Stable, based on the latest openSUSE Leap release, GeckoLinux Rolling, based on openSUSE Tumbleweed, and GeckoLinux NEXT, based on the latest openSUSE Leap release but featuring newer, bleeding-edge components.
While the Stable and Rolling editions of GeckoLinux come with KDE Plasma, GNOME, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE, LXQt and IceWM flavors, the GeckoLinux NEXT edition only feature the KDE Plasma desktop environment.
The new GeckoLinux NEXT Plasma edition is derived from the same base as the latest GeckoLinux Stable editions released last week, namely the openSUSE Leap 15.2 repositories. But it features the latest KDE Plasma 5.19.3 desktop environment, along with KDE Applications 20.04.3, KDE Framework 5.72.0 and Qt 5.15.0.
We made an important change for our Container Host OS openSUSE MicroOS, which our Kubernetes platform openSUSE Kubic will inherit since it is based on openSUSE MiceroOS: we use now tmpfs for /tmp.
tmpfs is a temporary filesystem that resides in memory. Mounting directories as tmpfs can be an effective way of speeding up accesses to their files and to ensure that their contents are automatically cleared upon reboot.
A fresh installation will use tmpfs for /tmp by default. Old installations needs to be converted to this manually, but it is still possible to switch back to use disk space for /tmp. This is especially useful and important, if big files are stored in /tmp.
A progress report was shared today on the work towards making the Btrfs file-system the default choice for the desktop spins of the upcoming Fedora 33.
While the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee has already approved using Btrfs for desktop spins by default with Fedora 33, a lot of work still is being done to make that a reality for the debut of F33 this autumn.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 promises to be yet another hefty update to the latest Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 operating system series, improving IT security and compliance with new security profiles, updating the developer tools, and adding new Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles to enforce remote work strategies.
Security is always important, and Linux-based operating systems are known to be the most secure and virus-free. Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.3 introduces new SCAP profiles for the Center for Internet Security (CIS) benchmark and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
These promise to bring a new layer of security configurations that IT administrators need to meet strict compliance requirements in both commercial and healthcare environments.
Everyone dreads the moment when they hear: “Someone broke the build!” Developers scramble to review errors and assemble patches to bring the problem under control. Recent movements, such as continuous integration (CI), aim to eliminate this stress by testing early and testing often.
Developers of small projects usually make the transition to CI without much difficulty. On the other hand, large projects require more planning and investment. These projects have plenty of dependencies, they require more time to prepare them for testing, and they must be tested on a wide array of systems.
Continuous integration for the Linux kernel feels like climbing Mount Everest. Testing can mean working through 14,000 changesets from 1,700 developers just for the 5.0 release. Fast machines compile kernels in about ten minutes, but that only includes one kernel configuration out of an enormous number of possible configurations. From there, the kernel must boot and test properly on various types of hardware.
At Red Hat, the Continuous Kernel Integration (CKI) project team realized that elastic compute resources would allow us to balance the speed in which we test kernels with the cost of testing them. When the queue grows, the infrastructure grows. When the queue shrinks, the infrastructure shrinks along with it.
This year has been an adventurous one to say the least… but that should get in the way of the community getting together, exchanging ideas, and keeping up with what’s new in the sphere of Kubernetes. In fact, it’s all the more reason to do so!
That’s why KubeCon and CloudNativeCon is going virtual this year, with expected attendance to be higher than ever before.
Canonical will be there too, of course, as we have been every other year. This time round, we’re excited to contribute to the conversation with what’s exceptional and what’s new about our multi-cloud Kubernetes portfolio.
“Won’t people think it’s 20 years old?” management asked when they saw our Linux Mint cover. That made us pause. Just how old is Linux Mint? It’s not older than Ubuntu and that’s 15-years old. So we stuck to the facts: Linux Mint 20 is out and it’s about to turn 14-years old on 27 August 2020. That’s longer than we would have guessed!
Largely that’s due to Linux Mint really making a splash back with Mint 13 that adopted the Cinnamon desktop and helped really put Linux Mint on the distro map. The aim was to create a classic desktop, designed how users wanted a desktop to work – an entirely reasonable request.
NAKIVO customers can now perform application-aware, incremental backups of Linux workstations running Ubuntu 18.04 Desktop and Ubuntu 20.04 Desktop. In addition to full recoveries of entire Linux workstations, NAKIVO Backup & Replication also offers granular recoveries to restore individual files and application objects from compressed and deduplicated backups.
Hilscher unveiled a “cifX M.2” card that brings Real-Time Ethernet and FieldBus to PC based systems. The company also released its previously tipped, Raspberry Pi based netPI Real-Time Ethernet gateway for $445.
Hilscher has launched a cifX M.2 expansion card equipped with its netX 90 Real-Time Ethernet controller. It has also begun shipping a netPI gateway for $445 (see farther below). Demonstrated at Embedded World earlier this year, the NetPI Real-Time Ethernet gateway combines a Raspberry Pi 3 with Hilscher’s “netHAT 52-RTE.” The Germany-based Real-Time Ethernet technology firm also recently announced a netX 90 Starterkit (see farther below).
Radxa’s “Rock Pi 4 Model C” SBC starts at $59 with a Debian-driven RK3399, 4GB RAM, and NVMe and dual-display support. Radxa is also offering some free beta samples of its Intel-based Rock Pi X.
Last October, Radxa unveiled its Rock Pi 4 Model C variant of its similarly Rockchip RK3399 based Rock Pi 4 Model A and B that adds dual display capability. The SBC was expected to ship later that month for $75 but has been delayed until now. Radxa also announced it has begun sampling its Intel Cherry Trail Atom based Rock Pi X SBC (see farther below).
ATMegaZero is an Arduino Leonardo compatible board based on Microchip ATmega32U4 8-bit AVR microcontroller that mostly follows Raspberry Pi Zero form factor with the 40-pin GPIO header, MicroSD card slot, and one micro USB port in the same location.
The MIPI CSI camera connector makes place for an OLED display connector, and the HDMI port is obviously gone, but you also get an 8-pin header to easily install an ESP8266 based ESP-01 module to add WiFi connectivity.
Codasip, a supplier of customisable RISC-V embedded processor IP, has released the Bk7, the most advanced core in the Codasip family of RISC-V processor IP, and built specifically for customisation and domain-specific optimisation.
The Bk7 is intended for any sophisticated modern application, from security to real-time AI processing, especially where embedded Linux is required.
The Codasip Bk7 is a 64-bit processor core with a single in-order 7-stage pipeline, fully compliant with the RV64IMAFDC instruction set architecture (ISA). As with all Codasip Bk cores, the open RISC-V standard makes it possible to configure and extend the core to precisely fit the customer’s domain-specific needs.
Flipping the CPU to the other side of the PCB means that under heavy load, Dogwood’s screen heats up a bit more, while Chestnut heats the back cover. The way Dogwood manages heat is much more efficient, resulting in the hottest spot being 4 degrees Celsius cooler than in Chestnut.
Purism has revealed more details about their improved “Dogwood” batch that will be soon shipping for their Librem 5 GNU/Linux smartphone. The battery life is longer but still short of what is provided by modern day flagship smartphones.
Dogwood is the batch of the Librem 5 smartphone with significant hardware improvements as well as continued software improvements. Librem 5 Dogwood flips the SoC to the other side of the PCB to improve heat dissipation, upgraded to a 3600 mAh battery that is 75~80% larger than what shipped on prior revisions, and more robust build quality of the chassis/device itself.
[...]
- The idle battery life is just under five hours with the screen on. On another graph looking at the battery life with the screen off it appears to be just over 35k seconds, or just over nine and a half hours. Still not to get through the day and that’s assuming not interacting with the phone at all, but at least better than before where the Chestnut revision got less than six hours of battery life with the screen off.
- For battery life if just making phone calls, it’s just under four hours.
For one, it has an integrated 5G modem. For another, it’s significantly cheaper than the 5G-enabled Snapdragon 865, so 765-based phones won’t cost anywhere near four figures. In fact, the first Sanpdragon 765G phone to launch in the U.S. is the LG Velvet and it costs $599, considerably less than the crop of 5G phones from Samsung and Oneplus that launched earlier in the year.
As part of my role as a principal communication strategist at an enterprise software company with an open source development model, I publish a regular update about open source community, market, and industry trends for product marketers, managers, and other influencers. Here are three of my and their favorite articles from that update.
Before you get too excited by this news I’ll tell you up front that this is not a big update (at least as far as Firefox updates go). That said there are a couple of changes you may want to know about.
Such as?
Well, if you’re a Firefox user in Germany you now get to “enjoy” more Pocket recommendations being shown to you on the new tab page. I know: you’re ecstatic. If you don’t want to see these — surely not? — you don’t have to; you can turn off Pocket stories (as well as other elements) on the new tab page without any hacks.
A number of bug fixes related to using screen readers (including developer tools) make it in to this update as do a swathe of security patches. For privacy reassurance there’s also more improvement to the browser’s built in tracker blocker.
Firefox 79.0 isn’t scheduled to be formally announced until Tuesday but the release binaries have now hit Mozilla’s FTP servers.
Firefox 79 isn’t a particularly exciting release with few end-user alterations but some developer additions. The developer docs note a number of WebAssembly items now shipping including support for bulk memory operations, reference types, and threads with shared memory and atomics. Plus there are the usual assortment of additions to JavaScript APIs and CSS. Older versions of macOS have also been dropped from Firefox 79.
One of the most notable changes worth mentioning for Firefox 79 is on the security front and that is “_blank” links will now implicitly provide the same behavior as also adding rel=”noopener”. The rel=”noopener” is a security improvement and with being implicitly set for all “_blank” links will ensure the DOM on the original page cannot be manipulated by the linked website should it be malicious. Without this attribute, it’s possible for the linked website to use JavaScript to take control of the referring window.
When we select the console.log lines in Firefox devtools, and cut and paste in an editor, there are newline characters added to the output.
[...]
Silly idea of the day. This is not available right now in devtools, but I wish it was.
Put two breakpoints in devtools.
Run the code as record stacktrace in between these two targets
export the stack trace as a json in a standard format in between these two breakpoints (do the same thing in another browser)
Have a diff tool giving the possibility to explore the differences in between the two stack traces.
For helping to debug more issues within the Rust-written Redox operating system, the GNU Debugger (GDB) is beginning to work well on the platform.
Thanks to work being achieved during the Redox Summer of Code, the GDB debugger is beginning to work well enough on the platform that bugs are being evaluated with the popular GNU Debugger. In recent weeks it’s been serving well for debugging the operating system’s dynamic linker and issues with shared libraries.
Australia’s Independent National Security Legislation Monitor (INSLM) earlier this month released a 316-page report calling for significant, and much needed, reforms to the nation’s 2018 Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (TOLA) law. The Parliamentary Joint Committee on Intelligence and Security (PJCIS) will meet later this month to consider the INSLM’s recommendations. While we still believe this dangerous law should be repealed, if enacted, these recommendations would go a long way in reducing the risk of this flawed piece of legislation.
This legislation – which Mozilla has continually opposed – allows Australian authorities to force nearly all actors in the digital ecosystem (Designated Communications Providers or DCPs) to do “acts or things” with an explicit goal of weakening security safeguards. For example, under this law, using a Technical Assistance Notice (TAN), Australian authorities could force a company to turn over sensitive security information, or using a Technical Capability Notice (TCN), they could force a company to redesign its software.
[...]
Mozilla has been involved throughout the legislative process and the development of the INSLM’s report. We filed comments to the PJCIS in late 2018 and early 2019 warning of TOLA’s dangerous effects. Martin Thomson, Mozilla Distinguished Engineer, testified at a hearing held by the INSLM – which ultimately proceeded to quote a portion of Martin’s testimony in his final report. Moreover, our team has provided comments to the Australian Ministry of Communications, Cyber Safety & the Arts relating specifically to the significant security risks posed by TCNs. Our December 2019 cover letter to the INSLM contributing input to his report can be found here. A detailed list of Mozilla’s recommendations alongside related INSLM recommendations can be found here.
The PJCIS will hold a hearing later this month to discuss the recommendations and likely begin the process of discussing amendments to TOLA. This presents the PJCIS with a unique opportunity to demonstrate leadership in defending individuals’ online privacy and security while enabling effective access to justice. The implementation of TOLA continues to pose serious privacy, security, and due process issues for both users and developers, and Mozilla will continue to oppose this law. In the event that the bill is not repealed, we strongly urge the involved MPs and Senators to adopt the INSLM’s recommendations which may help soften the blow of some of the law’s most damaging provisions.
The Open Technology Fund plays a vital role for democracy worldwide. That’s why Mozilla on Friday joined a friend of the court brief in support of the Open Technology Fund’s independence from government control as OTF’s case moves forward to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The Open Technology Fund is a U.S. government funded, independent nonprofit corporation with a mission to support development of open-source technologies that “increase free expression, circumvent censorship, and obstruct repressive surveillance as a way to promote human rights and open societies.” One such OTF-supported project is Tor Browser, which is built on the Firefox codebase and enables encrypted access to the web for anonymous browsing. Another is Let’s Encrypt, a free certificate authority enabling more secure web connections that began as a project of Mozilla, EFF, and the University of Michigan. These are invaluable tools not only to citizens of authoritarian regimes, but more broadly to internet users everywhere who rely on them to protect the privacy of their personal associations, communications, and interests.
There’s a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for 0.4.4.3-alpha from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release by mid-August.
Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you’d like to find and report more bugs than usual.
Happy 10 years of OpenStack! Millions of cores, 100,000 community members, 10 years of you.
Storytelling is one of the most powerful means to influence, teach, and inspire the people around us. To celebrate OpenStack’s 10th anniversary, we are spotlighting stories from the individuals in various roles from the community who have helped to make OpenStack and the global Open Infrastructure community successful.
We are looking for an individual or company to implement support for a dedicated, built-in UNO object inspection tool in LibreOffice, to start work as soon as possible.
In order to make working with UNO objects easier and to avoid the need to always install extensions before debugging, it is necessary to be able to inspect UNO objects in a running LibreOffice instance effectively.
This task involves reading the existing Basic IDE Watch code, evaluating how it can be improved based on ideas implemented in external tools like xray and MRI and extending the Watch code to be a first-class inspector that allows focusing the relevant part of the UNO API for opened documents and also based on your current selection (similar to what is possible in web browsers).
A good part of the features are implemented already. Work carried out under this tender will therefore mostly consist in making the features more accessible and more stable, adjusting the UI and refactoring things.
First, there’s the free and open-source office suite LibreOffice. This suite offers six programs that will feel instantly familiar if you’ve ever used Office. Writer, Calc, and Impress are equivalent to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Even better, it can open and edit the documents you made in Office and can save new files in Office formats.
The last week was the 8th week of coding weeks in GSoC program. So this report is final report before phase 2 evaluation . I am still in the final exams period but I continued adding support for the non supported items.
I have been using TiddlyWiki for years, mainly as personal memo, to-do organizer and encrypted data reserve (to keep track about some of my patients, or while learning). I always recommend this amazing project to my friends, colleagues doctors and developers alike, because I believe the value it gives is far so great than its minimal size and humble look.
As a self-learner, TiddlyWiki was my main choice and companion to record what I learn, links I collect, code snippets, medical cases and algorithms. It’s the only tool I am still using for more than decade.
I consider a TiddlyWiki is a masterpiece, not in coding but its simplicity and flexibility, needless to say its rich features list.
This software is still in development, so it’s not recommended to run this version on a production site. Consider setting up a test site to play with the new version.
[...]
WordPress 5.5 is slated for release on August 11th, 2020, and we need your help to get there!
Thank you to all of the contributors who tested the beta 3 development release and gave feedback. Testing for bugs is a critical part of polishing every release and a great way to contribute to WordPress.
Guix is an advanced distribution of the GNU operating system developed by the GNU Project. It is available as a GNU/Linux-libre distro or you can use Guix with GNU’s HURD kernel. Guix supports transactional upgrades, roll-backs, and unprivileged package management. Guix is a 100% free distro and is approved by the Free Software Foundation.
Google is well-known for forbidding the use of software using the GNU Affero General Public License, commonly known as “AGPL”. Google is also well-known for being the subject of cargo-culting by fad startups. Unfortunately, this means that they are susceptible to what is ultimately anti-AGPL propaganda from Google, with little to no basis in fact.
[...]
The Google page about the AGPL details inaccurate (but common1) misconceptions about the obligations of the AGPL that don’t follow from the text. Google states that if, for example, Google Maps used PostGIS as its data store, and PostGIS used the AGPL, Google would be required to release the Google Maps code. This is not true. They would be required to release their PostGIS patches in this situation. AGPL does not extend the GPL in that it makes the Internet count as a form of linking which creates a derivative work, as Google implies, but rather that it makes anyone who uses the software via the Internet entitled to its source code. It does not update the “what counts as a ‘derivative work’” algorithm, so to speak — it updates the “what counts as ‘distributing’ the software” algorithm.
The reason they spread these misconceptions is straightforward: they want to discourage people from using the AGPL, because they cannot productize such software effectively. Google wants to be able to incorporate FOSS software into their products and sell it to users without the obligation to release their derivative works. Google is an Internet company, and they offer Internet services. The original GPL doesn’t threaten their scheme because their software is accessed over the Internet, not distributed to end-users directly.
Publishing the kernel source of an Android-powered smartphone is needed for the OEM to comply with the GNU General Public License v2, and it also helps third-party developers to build custom recoveries and ROMs for that device. An ideal kernel source release should be accompanied by appropriate commit history, and all the dependencies are expected to be properly documented. While we don’t expect every OEM to maintain such high-quality control, even a partial release should be enough for experienced developers to get the ball rolling. Manufacturers like Motorola and Nubia have a good track record of releasing kernel sources and they have now posted kernel sources for the Moto G8 Plus and the Nubia Mini 5G, respectively. Realme, on the other hand, has released a revised kernel source package targeting the Realme 1 and the Realme U1.
The latest feature release Git v2.28.0 is now available at the
usual places. It is comprised of 317 non-merge commits since
v2.27.0, contributed by 58 people, 13 of which are new faces.
It is smaller than the releases in our recent past, mostly due to
the development cycle was near the shorter end of the spectrum (our
cycles last 8-12 weeks and this was a rare 8-week cycle).
Version 2.28.0 of the git version control system has been released. “It is smaller than the releases in our recent past, mostly due to the development cycle was near the shorter end of the spectrum (our cycles last 8-12 weeks and this was a rare 8-week cycle).”
Git 2.28 is now officially out this Monday and features continued work on moving off the “master” default branch naming as well as the ongoing work around ultimately transitioning from SHA1 to SHA256 for hashing to prevent possible collisions.
With Git 2.28 the support is now in place for git config init.defaultBranch to set the default branch name for newly-created Git repositories. This is to replace Git’s existing hard-coded default of “master” so instead users can opt for alternative default branch names like “default” or “main” and others. This new option does not change existing Git repositories.
Vala is an object-oriented programming language with a self-hosting compiler that generates C code and uses the GObject system.
Vala combines the high-level build-time performance of scripting languages with the run-time performance of low-level programming languages.
Vala is syntactically similar to C# and includes notable features such as anonymous functions, signals, properties, generics, assisted memory management, exception handling, type inference, and foreach statements.
Its developers, Jürg Billeter and Raffaele Sandrini, wanted to bring these features to the plain C runtime with little overhead and no special runtime support by targeting the GObject object system. Rather than compiling directly to machine code or assembly language, it compiles to a lower-level intermediate language. It source-to-source compiles to C, which is then compiled with a C compiler for a given platform, such as GCC.
Did you always want to write GTK+ or GNOME programs, but hate C with a passion? Try Vala.
Vala is published under the GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1+.
This post is a public service announcement about backups inspired by the one that got lost. I’ve had my own backups for over 5 years, and never have I lost any data from those backups. So I have a little bit of experience making backups. The following advice is meant for individuals, not a corporate or business setting.
Recently Canonical have been working alongside Google to make it possible to write native Linux apps with Flutter. In this short tutorial, I’ll show you how you can render colour fonts, such as emoji, within your Flutter apps.
July 17 was “World Emoji Day,” and so the online learning site Codecademy found a fun way to celebrate. It unveiled a five-hour mini-course teaching Emojicode, a unique programming language that consists entirely of emojis.
“We believe that Emojis have expressive force,” explained the language’s official web page. “Let’s use that to make programming more fun and accessible.”
Originally, Codecademy planned to reveal the mini-course on April Fool’s Day, but was delayed in the height of the world dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic.
Alexander Kiryuhin announced the Rakudo 2020.07 Compiler Release just a few days after the targeted date! The delay was caused by some build breakage introduced just days before the release, which needed to be fixed first. The associated binary packages are available at the expected locations.
I’ve been posting some Perl related polls in Perl Programmers over the last few weeks. Despite the obvious weaknesses in the sampling method, they’ve provided some good insights and great talking points.
…we extract language rankings from GitHub and Stack Overflow, and combine them for a ranking that attempts to reflect both code (GitHub) and discussion (Stack Overflow) traction. The idea is not to offer a statistically valid representation of current usage, but rather to correlate language discussion and usage in an effort to extract insights into potential future adoption trends.
[...]
The data source used for the GitHub portion of the analysis is the GitHub Archive.
IEEE Spectrum has released its annual list of top programming languages, which indicates that “Python has held onto its comfortable lead, with Java and C once again coming in second and third place, respectively.” JavaScript and C++ round out the top five.
I’ve had a chance to return to talking about High Performance Python at EuroPython 2020 after my first tutorial on this topic back in 2011 in Florence.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) are neural networks that generate material, such as images, music, speech, or text, that is similar to what humans produce.
GANs have been an active topic of research in recent years. Facebook’s AI research director Yann LeCun called adversarial training “the most interesting idea in the last 10 years” in the field of machine learning. Below, you’ll learn how GANs work before implementing two generative models of your own.
Abigail was introduced to programming at the University of Mines and Technology, Ghana. taking classes in Java, C++ and Visual Basic under the department of Computer Science and Engineering.
In 2017, Abigail attended a Django Girls workshop as a mentee. The goal of the workshop was to teach women how to build web apps using Django and Python.
It was that Django Girls workshop that introduced Abigail to the Python programming language. She was hooked to the simplicity of using Python to build web apps, compared to the other languages she had learnt in school.
If you, dear reader, have problems in Python that you’d like me, a budding Python programmer to solve, please mail them to me at jason at this domain.
It’ll add to my pool of problems and give me plenty to practice.
One of the misconceptions that developers say that python is too slow and python multithreading sucks. Well, it’s not true. let’s broaden this topic. A lot of pythonists used to say GIL (Global Interpreter Lock) is the cause of the performance of python. They say it prevents you from running more than one thread at a time. You can’t get the real concurrency feature in python. Yes, it’s true but the truth is multithreading is still perfect. Yeah, there are some exceptions which you have to lookout. And depending on the cases, it might need GIL otherwise why to make ur development life harder and being burn out. What Gil restricts that two bytecode can’t run parallelly. Threading can allow concurrency and reduces time consumption, increase performance.
As I mention here about GIL a lot but what actually it is? Well, Gil is a feature of CPython which default python manages memory. but Jython and IronPython lack the GIL coz it’s an implementation detail of the underlying VM. I tired about it and here is the result.
jython.png
lol, they don’t have. They handle dynamic memory differently and can safely run the python code in multiple threads at the same time. And I think Cpython can’t remove the GIL feature too. And what’s the solution in order to achieve Multithreading. Well, Many python libraries bypass multithreading issue by using C/C++ extensions.I recommend multiprocessing to get the benefits of all the cores. One more thing GIL is only a problem in a multiprocessor environment.
The Java programming language celebrated 25 years on May 23 this year. It was first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. Two and a half decades on, it remains one of the most popular programming languages.
In 1991, James Gosling, an engineer at Sun Microsystems, began developing a new language that he initially called Oak. Later on, the language came to be known as Java. The purpose of developing this new language was to build a system that would enable a large network of interactive consumer electronic devices that could be managed from a handheld remote controller. The concept didn’t excite the digital cable television industry at that time. Perhaps, it was too advanced for them way back in 1995.
Developers began using Java, however, to develop applications for desktop computers. The Internet was beginning to catch on around the same time. In 1993, the World Wide Web became a public domain, thereby enabling the public to join in the fun. In 1995, the Pew Research Center reported that 14 percent of adults in the US were already “online.” Programmers started using Java for web applications and it soon became the preferred programming language for apps.
Java was better suited for the Internet and enterprise application development than older languages, such as COBOL, C, and C++. It provided support for Internet protocols, such as HTTP. Java enabled easier and faster application programming than COBOL or C because of its object-oriented design, integrated libraries, and run-time error detection capability.
Apparently the issue is with a file called robots.txt that tells search engine crawlers which pages or files the crawler can or can’t request from your site. When a page uses robots.txt to prohibit certain content from appearing in its search results — like, I don’t know, “Flirtatious something something for something something blonde something” — Google may still list the page and form a title for it from other sources that link to it. Normally, the company’s systems work to prevent forming any titles that might be obscene. That system failed in this case, and Google is working to figure out why.
Google recommends sites that really want to block certain content from making uninvited cameos in their search results use the noindex tag rather than robots.txt. Noindex prevents a page from appearing in Google’s listings at all.
OpenXR 1.0 was officially released nearly one year ago to the day while now the first conformant implementations are shipping. These implementations have been vetted using Khronos’ open-source OpenXR CTS (Conformance Test Suite).
Last summer, Moscow saw dozens of mass protests in response to independent candidates being banned from running in the City Duma elections — drawing an unprecedented amount of attention to the 2019 municipal election campaign. Law enforcement aggressively dispersed the rallies, arresting 1,373 people on July 27, 2019, alone. The protests ended with the launch of “The Moscow Case” for alleged criminal rioting. The case included 32 suspects; 22 were convicted and 10 are still serving time in prison colonies. Some of the most active participants in the protests became rising stars on the political scene, such as Alexei Minyaylo from candidate Lyubov Sobol’s campaign team, and municipal deputy Ilya Azar. Members of the systemic opposition ended up winning nearly half the seats in the Moscow City Duma. Journalist Katerina Gordeyeva’s interviews with the most important figures of last summer’s events turned into a documentary filmed titled “Cold Summer of 2019.” Work on the documentary was completed in September of last year, but it has yet to be released to viewers. To mark the anniversary of the July 27 protests, Meduza premieres Gordeyeva’s new film.
As China invests to recover from the pandemic, though, the Americas are still grappling with it, explains Jeff Currie of Goldman Sachs, a bank. Because copper production is concentrated in South America, that has constrained supply. Some mines in Peru, shut because of the virus, are only slowly resuming production, points out Susan Bates of Morgan Stanley, another bank. In Chile, where mines have been operating with reduced staff, the deferral of needed maintenance may restrict supply in the months to come. And miners may strike, further threatening output.
My recommendation to any practising software engineer is to go back and read the stuff discovered by the early software engineers. There’s a lot we can learn from ourselves, if we only take the time to.
Start with the nato Software Engineering Conference reports. Then read the papers by David Parnas on software modularity and designing for contraction and extension. Read things by Ward Cunningham, Alan Perlis, Edsger Dijkstra, Douglas McIlrouy, Brian Randell, Peter Naur, and so on.
But the apparent success of this episode should not blind institutions to some of its shortcomings. Universities did move their teaching online, but in general, staff have not been doing what most educational experts consider ”online teaching”. Understanding this difference is critical if universities want to learn from this lockdown experience.
Effective online teaching uses technology to create learning situations that are more student-centred, encouraging more collaboration, active learning and formative assessment. It requires the development of new instructional skills; the teacher-student interaction and communication is entirely different to conventional teaching, while the format of teaching and learning materials differs from to that found in tutorials.
In the throes of the Covid-19 emergency, almost all of New Jersey’s state universities, like many university research centers across the country, have halted in-person functions—except for work on the pandemic. And rightly so. This is a dangerous public health emergency that requires large-scale shifts in how we live and work until we get it under control. But it also requires an institutional response that matches the scale of the problem.
About a month or so ago on the radio program Fresh Air, host Terry Gross spoke to epidemiologist Michael Osterholm from the University of Minnesota about a variety of topics related to the pandemic. It’s an interesting discussion, and one part stood out: he complained about the term “social distancing” arguing that the phrase “social distancing” was misleading since it suggested not being social with others.
“Democrats who understand the profound need for Medicare for All don’t want a pat on the head. We want a genuine political commitment to healthcare as a human right.”
Several individuals who are close to President Donald Trump are suggesting that his recent statements on coronavirus, indicating a change in tone on how he views the crisis in the United States, came about more due to politics than a genuine concern for the American people as a whole.
As I write this, armed protesters have occupied the Michigan statehouse to protest the state’s stay-at-home orders. Men in fatigues and MAGA hats, some wielding assault-style long guns, filled the lobby outside the house floor, where lawmakers debated a twenty-eight-day extension to Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s state of emergency. Whitmer, a Democrat, has become a target of particular bile, thanks in part to President Trump’s tendency to single her out (“that woman from Michigan,” he called her, and later, “Gretchen ‘Half’ Whitmer”). Protesters have taken to calling her “Governor Hitler.”
The images were chilling but familiar. Open-carrying firearms has become a mainstay of conservative protests in recent years. Some Michigan lawmakers donned bulletproof vests on the floor, from which gun-toting protesters could be seen in the rafters above. But the protest concluded peacefully. And the Republican-controlled legislature denied Whitmer’s request to extend her emergency powers.
When this essay appears in print, this moment will either represent a passing exhibition of the inchoate ire of a small segment of conservatives, egged on by the president and funded by partisan libertarian groups, or else the first glimmers of a genuine cohering of dangerous social forces. I hope for the former, but I have learned to entertain ever darker premonitions of the future’s shape.
Thus far, the conservative response to COVID-19 has been defined by its heterogeneity: a blur of contradictory recriminations, confirmation biases, and conspiracy peddling.
There are those, like Missouri Senator Josh Hawley and Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton, who have treated the crisis as an opportunity to hammer away at their ideological hobbyhorses, summoning the menace of China and blaming globalized supply chains for shortages of medical supplies. Some fringier but no less popular figures, like Candace Owens, have continued to take their cues from Trump and Fox News circa late February, when the party line on coronavirus was that it was no more dangerous than the flu, that those panicking about it were doing so with the intent of harming the economy and thereby the president’s reelection prospects. Tucker Carlson, who personally beseeched Trump to take the virus more seriously in early March, has reversed course, joining the chorus of doubters. Ever the chameleon, Carlson now says the pandemic “just isn’t nearly as deadly as we thought it was” and dismisses the role of state lockdowns in preventing healthcare systems from becoming overwhelmed.
The other day, we went to a designer’s fashion shop whose owner was rather adamant that he was never ever going to wear a face mask, and that he didn’t believe the COVID-19 thing was real. When I argued for the opposing position, he pretty much dismissed what I said out of hand, claiming that “the hospitals are empty dude” and “it’s all a lie”. When I told him that this really isn’t true, he went like “well, that’s just your opinion”. Well, no — certain things are facts, not opinions. Even if you don’t believe that this disease kills people, the idea that this is a matter of opinion is missing the ball by so much that I was pretty much stunned by the level of ignorance.
His whole demeanor pissed me off rather quickly. While I disagree with the position that it should be your decision whether or not to wear a mask, it’s certainly possible to have that opinion. However, whether or not people need to go to hospitals is not an opinion — it’s something else entirely.
After calming down, the encounter got me thinking, and made me focus on something I’d been thinking about before but hadn’t fully forumlated: the fact that some people in this world seem to misunderstand the nature of what it is to do science, and end up, under the claim of being “sceptical”, with various nonsense things — see scientology, flat earth societies, conspiracy theories, and whathaveyou.
So, here’s something that might (but probably won’t) help some people figuring out stuff. Even if it doesn’t, it’s been bothering me and I want to write it down so it won’t bother me again. If you know all this stuff, it might be boring and you might want to skip this post. Otherwise, take a deep breath and read on…
This May, Antmicro announced support for the POWER ISA in Renode, its open source, multi-architecture, heterogeneous multi-core capable simulator for software development and software-hardware co-development.
It’s an exciting development, as developers can now test applications based on the POWER ISA before running them on actual hardware. It’s an important step in achieving the vision of the OpenPOWER Foundation – to make POWER the easiest architecture on which to go from an idea to a silicon chip.
First off – nothing I’m going to talk about in this post is novel or overly surprising, I just haven’t found a clear writeup of it before. I’m not criticising any design decisions or claiming this is an important issue, just raising something that people might otherwise be unaware of.
With that out of the way: Automatic deduplication of data is a feature of modern filesystems like zfs and btrfs. It takes two forms – inline, where the filesystem detects that data being written to disk is identical to data that already exists on disk and simply references the existing copy rather than, and offline, where tooling retroactively identifies duplicated data and removes the duplicate copies (zfs supports inline deduplication, btrfs only currently supports offline). In a world where disks end up with multiple copies of cloud or container images, deduplication can free up significant amounts of disk space.
What’s the security implication? The problem is that deduplication doesn’t recognise ownership – if two users have copies of the same file, only one copy of the file will be stored[1]. So, if user a stores a file, the amount of free space will decrease. If user b stores another copy of the same file, the amount of free space will remain the same. If user b is able to check how much free space is available, user b can determine whether the file already exists.
This is a joint alert from the United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
CISA and NCSC are investigating a strain of malware known as QSnatch, which attackers used in late 2019 to target Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices manufactured by the firm QNAP.
All QNAP NAS devices are potentially vulnerable to QSnatch malware if not updated with the latest security fixes. The malware, documented in open-source reports, has infected thousands of devices worldwide with a particularly high number of infections in North America and Europe. Further, once a device has been infected, attackers can prevent administrators from successfully running firmware updates.
This alert summarizes the findings of CISA and NCSC analysis and provides mitigation advice.
Many communication service providers (CSPs) are looking at shifting to containers and a cloud native architecture, but have concerns about security. In this post, we’ll explain why you don’t need virtual machines to offer the security features the telecommunications market needs.
[...]
The solution to the security problem for telecom and other markets is SELinux. This set of changes for the Linux kernel originally came right from the National Security Agency (NSA) itself and it is standard with Red Hat CoreOS and RHEL. CoreOS is specifically a hardened version of Linux perfect for support of containerized applications.
With many organizations relying on G Suite™ as their core productivity suite, IT administrators wonder whether their users can log into their systems using their G Suite passwords Specifically, for those interested in automating their Linux® management, the possibility of logging into a Linux system with a G Suite password could help save time and money.
A new version of popular Linux toolkit REMnux is now available to download, equipping security analysts with an improved arsenal of tools with which to scrutinize Linux malware.
Built on Ubuntu, REMnux has been in circulation for more than 10 years, now in its seventh incarnation. The latest version, REMnux 7, does away with some tools present in previous iterations and also adds a handful of new ones to the roster.
As with previous versions, the new toolkit is configured specifically to minimize friction experienced by malware analysts and reverse engineers working to better understand Linux threats.
Docker is a popular platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution for Linux and Windows designed to make it easier for developers to create, test, and run their applications in a loosely isolated environment called a container.
Threat researchers have found a new feature-rich malware that can encrypt files on any system running PHP, making it a high risk for Windows, macOS, and Linux web servers.
The malware received the name Ensiko and is a web shell written in PHP. Attackers can use it to remotely control a compromised system and run a host of malicious activities.
A very interesting decision [PDF] has been handed down by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals. It not only addresses what constitutes exigent circumstances, but also attacks predictive policing as nothing more than a tool law enforcement uses to enforce a racist status quo.
The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) conducted mass surveillance of protesters at the end of May and in early June using a downtown business district’s camera network, according to new records obtained by EFF. The records show that SFPD received real-time live access to hundreds of cameras as well as a “data dump” of camera footage amid the ongoing demonstrations against police violence.
The camera network is operated by the Union Square Business Improvement District (BID), a special taxation district created by the City and County of San Francisco, but operated by a private non-profit organization. These networked cameras, manufactured by Motorola Solutions’ brand Avigilon, are high definition, can zoom in on a person’s face to capture face-recognition ready images, and are linked to a software system that can automatically analyze content, including distinguishing between when a car or a person passes within the frame. Motorola Solutions recently unveiled plans to expand its portfolio of tools for aiding public-private partnerships with law enforcement by making it easier for police to gain access to private cameras and video analytic tools like license plate readers.
The Commerce Department on Monday asked the Federal Communications Commission to write a regulation weakening protections laid out in Section 230, language in a 1996 law that protects online companies from legal liability for users’ posts, and for decisions to remove material.
A takeover of Sogou also raises the prospect of a lucrative listing in Hong Kong or Shanghai in the future, on the heels of well-received debuts by Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and JD.com Inc. It’s become an increasingly attractive route for tech giants such as Jack Ma’s Ant Group, which is speeding toward what could be the city’s biggest float in years. Sogou Chief Executive Officer Wang Xiaochuan in 2018 declared his ambition to list on mainland bourses when regulations permit.
Teen Vogue spoke to four teenagers from around the country about how they engage with college TikTokers and YouTubers. Danielle Park, a rising senior at an independent school in San Francisco, has spent much of her time in self-isolation playing Animal Crossing; Kaelyn Walker, 15, is a student at the School at Marygrove in Detroit, and a Hamilton megafan; Pahal Ahuja is a rising senior at New Canaan High School in Connecticut, who is currently into making friendship bracelets and watching Dynasty; and Dru Donald, 16, is an anime fan who attends Fort Lauderdale High School.
“TikTok clandestinely has vacuumed up and transferred to servers in China vast quantities of private and personally-identifiable user data that can be employed to identify, profile, and track the location and activities of users in the United States now and in the future,” the lawsuit states.
“TikTok also has surreptitiously taken user content, such as draft videos never intended for publication, without user knowledge or consent. In short, TikTok’s lighthearted fun comes at a heavy cost.”
Match Group, parent company of the Tinder dating app, announced that Lanzone has been appointed Tinder’s new CEO. Lanzone takes over the role from Elie Seidman, who is stepping down as chief exec. Lanzone starts at Tinder on Aug. 3, reporting to Match Group CEO Shar Dubey.
Lanzone had spent nine years at CBS, most recently president and CEO of CBS Interactive. He exited CBS last fall to join venture-capital firm Benchmark Capital as executive-in-residence.
Zuckerberg plans to portray his company as an American success story in a competitive and unpredictable market, now threatened by the rise of Chinese social media apps around the world — and increasingly, at home, with the popularity of TikTok, according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the CEO’s remarks aren’t yet public.
There are legitimate concerns about a Chinese-owned company capturing the attention and data of millions of Americans — especially one like ByteDance, which has a history of bending the knee to the country’s ruling regime. Like all Chinese tech companies, ByteDance is required to abide by Chinese censorship laws, and it could be forced to give user data to the Chinese government under the country’s national security law. Lawmakers have also raised concerns that TikTok could be used to promote pro-China propaganda to young Americans, or censor politically sensitive content.
The Trump/Pence regime has sent a federal occupying army into Portland to “quell” ongoing protests. Overseen by the Department of Homeland Security and cobbled from a number of federal agencies, including Customs & Border Patrol and the Coast Guard, these anonymous thugs in camouflage, virtually indistinguishable from right-wing militias, have seized the authority to kidnap protesters.
Soon it will be 60 straight nights of demonstrations and ear shattering protests in Portland, Oregon. There is a continuous drum corps that is beating hypnotic rhythms that gives thousands of Portlanders a reason to be alive.
Russia’s Investigative Committee is carrying out a preliminary inquiry into the potential involvement of former Khabarovsk Territory governor Sergey Furgal in two more instances of murder and attempted murder in 2003–2004, a source in law enforcement told TASS.
President Trump remains committed to escalating against Iran even as the U.S. battles a worsening pandemic, an economic depression, and internal discord not seen in decades.
Courts must end Trump’s paramilitary urban war against Democratic mayors and cities ahead of the November election, voting rights and legal experts tell Truthout, otherwise they leave open the possibility of an unprecedented constitutional crisis buttressed by the president’s personal secret police.
As of this writing, the United States is rocked with civil unrest due to racism and police violence, and the country continues to break records for the most cases of coronavirus. The unstable and unhinged president Donald Trump makes things far worse domestically and internationally with his inflammatory language and his disdain for science. As this occurs, a new, radical right-wing ‘movement’, one fueled at least in part by Trump’s racist rhetoric, has entered the U.S. This is known as the ‘Boogaloo’ movement, and while loosely organized, has as its goal civil war. Members tend to be gun enthusiasts, neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
While coronavirus ravages life, dominates policy and clouds debate, that other pressing issue of addressing climate change has moved into a more modest gear. That has not prevented some bubbling activity from taking place on the matter of litigation. While climate change law suits remain in their swaddling clothes, some shape is discernible. In countries where fossil fuels remain sovereign, legal actions have focused on restricting or preventing the approval of projects and holding companies accountable on environmental risks associated with their activities.
Eric Schaeffer, who formerly served as the director of EPA’s Office of Civil Enforcement, said he fears the new policy will shield bad actors from facing greater penalties.
In a new memo, Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Bossert Clark said federal actions seeking penalties under the anti-pollution law will be “strongly disfavored” when a state has already initiated its own enforcement action for alleged violations.
The Nord Stream gas pipeline, which runs on the bed of the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, has returned to operations on Sunday after a routine maintenance, the pipeline operator said.
The pipeline, being built by a company owned by Gazprom, the Russian gas giant, has become the particular focus of concerns in Washington that Russia’s dominance of energy supplies to Europe could translate into political leverage for Moscow. Such worries are not new, as natural gas from the Soviet Union and, after its demise, Russia has been crucial to powering the European economy for decades.
Recently, though, President Vladimir V. Putin’s aggressive approach to Russia’s foreign policy has heightened worries about his ambitions. And now that the United States has ample supplies of gas from shale drilling and fracking, there is widespread suspicion that Washington may be using geopolitical concerns to bolster American exports of liquefied natural gas.
Transferring ownership to workers, communities, and/or the state allows for a shift in the entire focus of the economy from generating profit for the top one percent to serving all the people.
The Federal Reserve Board – our unaccountable Central Bank – needs more citizen and Congressional supervision. Fees from financial institutions fund its operations, not Congressional appropriations. It is as secret as it wants to be and that’s plenty. (See Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country by William Greider). Plus, the Fed can print money at will. In the past several years it has “produced” trillions of dollars that juiced the stock market’s speculation.
The goal should be climate resilience and mitigation that helps empower local communities, indigenous peoples and workers while diminishing market power of oligopolies in agribusiness that drives social and environmental standards towards a race to the bottom.
A Republican proposal to pare back enhanced unemployment benefits to about 70% of what a worker earned prior to losing their job — as opposed to the previous weekly payment of $600 across the board — would take most states between two to five months to implement, likely causing delays in relief for tens of millions of people.
The climate crisis is perhaps the greatest challenge humanity is facing. Yes, it threatens everyone’s existence. But in particular, it exacerbates the centuries-long systemic oppression plaguing so many communities.
After spending a May day preparing her classroom to reopen for preschoolers, Ana Aguilar was informed that the tots would not have to wear face masks when they came back. What’s more, she had to sign a form agreeing not to sue the school if she caught COVID-19 or suffered any injury from it while working there.
“You know Republicans are in pretty bad shape when they have to go with a plan based on rough ideas that Donald Trump’s own Secretary of Labor says are unworkable.”
We must take these public health choices out of the hands of corporate executives and put corporations in their proper place: subservient to public welfare.
As millions of small businesses suffer to the point of going under, some in one industry have found a way to benefit: temp agencies.
Companies typically seek contracted temp workers because they don’t have to pay them benefits and can pick them up and let them go easily. For sudden needs brought on by COVID-19, such as conducting temperature checks and sanitizing workplaces, staffing companies can recruit, vet, hire and supply workers on a few days’ notice.
President Donald Trump’s law and order gambit against Democrat-led cities and states that is intended to swing votes his way Nov. 3 could use more law and less disorder.
Over the past few years, a loose coalition of activist groups, think tanks, and policy-makers dedicated to ending the post-9/11 forever war has asserted itself in foreign policy debates. As recently as February, when Bernie Sanders appeared to be the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, it seemed possible that US foreign policy was on the verge of turning toward a less militarized and interventionist approach. Sanders and the other major progressive candidate in the race, Elizabeth Warren, had foreign policy advisers who advocated slashing defense budgets and reinvesting in diplomacy to confront nonmilitary threats.
Here’s the script: Criminalize the boycotts, deport the human rights advocates, rebrand anti-Zionism as anti-Semitism, smear the leftist Jews, infiltrate the leftist organizations, defund the aid programs, torpedo the political campaigns, fire the high school teachers and speech pathologists and network commentators, and pinkwash the occupation. The tactics vary today, but the intent remains the same. For as long as I have been alive, the barriers in the West to advocating for Palestinian rights have deterred all but the most committed people.
Some Democrats and progressives, including Nation columnist Elie Mystal, are upset that former representative and Ohio governor John Kasich, a Republican, will be speaking at the Democratic convention in August. For most of his political career, Kasich was anathema to Democrats and liberals. It isn’t clear if he’ll officially endorse Joe Biden, but his presence at the convention is a very public repudiation of Trump.
Can Joe Biden be moved to the left on the issues that matter most and are critical to the sort of mass mobilization of voters that might transform our politics and our governance? Yes. That’s the best takeaway from the presumptive Democratic nominee’s July 14 announcement of a climate and jobs plan that would have him move immediately as president to invest $2 trillion in developing clean energy infrastructure and a host of other responses to the climate crisis. “We’re not just going to tinker around the edges,” Biden declared. “We’re going to make historic investments that will seize the opportunity and meet this moment in history.”
Netfa Freeman is an organizer for Pan-African Community Action and the Coordinating Committee of the Black Alliance for Peace. He is also a radio talk-show host of the popular D.C.-based Voices with Vision and an active supporter of the Cuban and Bolivarian revolutions. In an exclusive online interview for teleSur from Washington D.C., Freeman asserted that the principal message he has for readers is: “The Black left perspective is that our struggle is for power.” In response to a question regarding illusions about the Democratic Party as an alternative to the Trump/Republicans, he stated:
A poll published over the weekend has some bad news for President Donald Trump: Most Americans, by a wide margin, believe we’re headed in the “wrong direction.”
Sky News are today carrying the story that Nicola Sturgeon attended a meeting with Salmond’s former Chief of Staff, Geoff Aberdein, about a historic sexual allegation made against Alex Salmond on 29 March 2018, several days before she claimed to parliament that she first heard of it. It will prove in the long term still more significant that this meeting also contradicts Sturgeon’s claim that it was Alex Salmond who first told her of the existence of the allegations.
West African presidents called for the formation of a unity government in Mali on Monday amid renewed efforts to resolve a political crisis that has seen tens of thousands of protesters take to the streets against President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita.
The heads of states – who visited Mali last week as part of a delegation from the regional ECOWAS bloc – said members of the opposition should join the new government, and threatened sanctions against anybody undermining the process.
Mali’s cabinet said it had begun negotiations with “concerned parties”, but the opposition coalition leading the protests, M5-RFP, appeared unhappy with the ECOWAS plan, having rejected a similar one put forward by the bloc earlier this month.
“We take note, but we really believe that this is not the will of the people, it is not what we expect,” a coalition spokesman, Nouhoum Togo, told Reuters.
Political tensions have been rising across Mali since a disputed legislative election in March. Some results were later overturned by the country’s constitutional court in a decision perceived to benefit Keita’s party, sparking protests in different cities.
Protesters are also unhappy with the state of the economy, perceived government corruption, and Keita’s failure to stem rising jihadist and inter-communal violence in the country after seven years in power.
The latest ECOWAS plan calls for a partial re-run of the March polls and an inquiry into the deaths of at least 11 protesters during recent clashes with security forces in the capital, Bamako.
Police in Khabarovsk have launched a criminal case for battery in response to the July 23 attack on opposition YouTuber Dmitry Nizovtsev, following his coverage of local protests.
In February, we wrote about how a patent troll, Voice Tech, had sued a small open source voice assistant company, Mycroft AI, claiming infringement. Mycroft AI and its founder/CEO Joshua Montgomery had put up a blog post about the situation, which attracted our attention, in part due to his willingness to call out trolling for trolling, and promising not to back down. It included some strong language, including:
In contrast to the relatively calm atmosphere outside of the U.S. consulate in Chengdu on Sunday (July 26), netizens on Chinese social media platform Weibo have been actively launching attacks against U.S. government officials and their family members. Chuang, who has raised two children with Mullinax and has nearly 600,000 followers on the network, was especially targeted for comparing her departure from the Chinese city of Chengdu in February to Jews fleeing the Nazis during World War II.
As nationwide protests against systemic racism and police violence stretch into their second month, President Trump has sent a team of federal agents to Seattle, following a controversial deployment of federal forces in Portland, Oregon. “We don’t know exactly what the federal officers are doing. What we do know is we are in a situation where local police are welcoming those federal agents into our cities,” says Seattle community organizer Nikkita Oliver, co-executive director of Creative Justice. We also speak with Pastor E.D. Mondainé, president of the Portland, Oregon, branch of the NAACP.
On July 25, Day 58 of the continuous Portland, Oregon, Black Lives Matter protests, thousands of protesters swarmed the Justice Center located in the city’s downtown area. This was a crushing number of people, and they were joined by solidarity marches in other cities. Protesters pushed up against a fence that was raised around the federal buildings and anchored in cement blocks in an attempt to stop demonstrators from getting into the building as they had during previous nights. The vast majority of the crowd were wearing helmets, goggles and gas masks or respirators in anticipation of the violence these federal officers have become famous for using. Some were holding up umbrellas or shields to block the MK-9 pepper spray that the officers had been using against the demonstrators.
What say the millions of jailed black and brown Americans to the fret over cancel culture? If they could say anything, we would know. But the real cancellation of black lives cannot be ignored as we attempt to assert a white opinion cosmopolitanism. How many Americans are canceled because of their neighborhood or their lack of one? How many Americans have had their literal lives canceled during coronavirus because they can’t afford health care or can’t afford to not work? How many immigrants are canceled because they can’t even report this virus without being deported or caged? How many are canceled because of their record sheet or even specifically their race? Trans folks are canceled with near universality. Women don’t have to worry about their abusers being canceled, they have to worry about the opposite. When was the last time a cop was canceled for murder? When was the last time a billionaire was canceled for slavery or ecocide?
Donald Trump has fallen far enough behind in the polls as to raise the hopes of the world that it will soon see the back of him as US president come the election in 100 days’ time. Given his calamitous handling of the coronavirus pandemic, the decline in his popularity is scarcely surprising.
On Monday, July 27, St. Petersburg’s Dzerzhinsky District Court found Mediazona correspondent David Frenkel guilty on three administrative counts: disobeying law enforcement officers, impeding the work of election officials, and violating self-isolation orders.
As I see white mothers and mayors being teargassed on the streets of Portland, Ore., one word keeps bubbling up from my bleeding heart: “Welcome.” Welcome to the world of secret police and nighttime raids. The world where you can be snatched by an unidentified officer in an unmarked van. The world where you get to see an attorney, maybe, after the government is done beating you. Welcome to the world as experienced by brown people with foreign-sounding names in this country since 9/11.
The Confederate flag (one of three flag designs used by the Confederate States of America… The flag pictured in the video is commonly referred to as the Confederate battle flag) is cut in two, part of this heinous symbol of racism and racist violence remains on its flag pole attached to the side of a garage in a yard strewn with many objects. The other half of the flag has been nailed to the same side of the garage. Perhaps the nailed half of the flag is a symbol of the effort of its owner to preserve this representation of hate?
Ancient ethnic divisions and long held grievances die hard. Ethiopia is made up of dozens of tribal/ethnic groups, divided into nine regional states. Oromia is the largest region (it includes the capital, Addis Ababa) and, with 34% of the population (c.40 million), the Oromo people make up the biggest single group.
A surge of federal agents swept into Portland, Oregon in response to ongoing protests in the city. The city hadn’t asked for federal help, but help arrived anyway. And it wasn’t much help. The blend of federal agents — drawn from the CBP, US Marshals Service, and ICE — rolled onto the streets in unmarked vehicles. Out of these vehicles sprang agents dressed like soldiers, wearing no markings clearly identifying the officers or the agency they represented. Residents were taken off the street to unknown locations for questioning. They were later released and given no paperwork that informed them who had detained them or for what reason.
The federal government’s “Fusion Centers” — overseen by the DHS — continue to provide us with the least bang for our federal buck. DHS officials have told Congress that the real purpose of the centers — supposedly designed to gather intelligence about threats to the country — is to generate conversations about terrorism. And those conversations are meant to portray the DHS as useful and worthy of continued funding.
As Belarus approaches its presidential elections on August 9, the 2020 race has already been deemed the dirtiest in the country’s history: the authorities arrested alternative candidate Viktor Babariko and opposition leader Sergey Tikhanovsky, while another would-be candidate, veteran politician Valery Tsepkalo, recently fled to Russia with his children. In response, the Belarusian opposition united around Svetlana Tikhanovskaya, who decided to run in the presidential elections in place of her husband (Sergey Tikhanovsky). Now, Tikhanovskaya has found herself heading up a vibrant and inspiring campaign. Meduza summarizes Svetlana Tikhanovskaya’s conversation with our special correspondent Svetlana Reyter.
With the 30th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) happening this weekend as Black Lives Matter protests continue, it’s a good time to look at the intersection between race and disability in the United States. The figure below compares disability rates by age, sex, and race for non-Latinx adults. The data in the figure comes from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS). A person is counted as disabled if they answer “yes” to any one of five questions in the survey.
In the wake of the police killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Rayshard Brooks, protesters have taken to the streets against the violence of policing and to make demands, including defunding policing.
That demand is gaining traction as organizers have ignited a new wave of interest in the abolition of prisons and policing—a concept theorized mostly by Black women and femmes.
Amid a nationwide reckoning with systemic racism, we speak with Princeton African American studies professor Eddie Glaude, whose new book on James Baldwin offers lessons from the iconic writer for the present. Baldwin, says Glaude, insisted that “we put aside the myths and illusions and understand what white supremacy has done in terms of disfiguring and distorting the character of this nation.” The book is titled “Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own.”
Memorials for John Lewis, the civil rights icon and 17-term congressmember, are highlighting the bravery he and others showed in the face of police violence as they fought for the right to vote. We highlight the radical early years of Lewis, when he was chairperson of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. His political upbringing as a youth and student organizer and “the movement that he came out of” can’t be ignored, says Princeton professor Eddie Glaude. It’s important that people “don’t simply yoke him to Dr. King, [and] understand him as a product of this student activism.” Glaude is chair of Princeton University’s Department of African American Studies.
America I’ve given you my blood and my skin and
now I’m too old to riot in the streets of Portland,
[...]
America, it’s those Chinese and Russian spies, and those terrorists
who want our Coca Cola and our Internet.
America I’m scattering my ashes above the fruited plain and praying for a rebirth of wonder.
With all that’s going on at home and abroad, you’d hope something as picayune as baseball could offer a moment of wholesome distraction and relief. That’s the point of it, right? The national pastime? Turn on a game and unplug your brain for three hours. Hell, that’s why Major League Baseball was in such a hot rush to get the season going even in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic (well, that and the money, of course). Baseball is “normal,” and normal has been in desperately short supply.
As the sports world limps toward a reopening, complete with bubbles, fake crowds, and Covid nursing stations with the kind of round-the-clock testing the rest of us couldn’t hope to access, we are also seeing more athlete protest than ever before. Part of the spectacle now is seeing who takes a knee before or during the anthem, wears a Nike/NBA-approved racial justice slogan on their uniforms, or raises a fist as the anthem plays. These gestures, which would have been absolutely electric a year ago, are now commonplace and acceptable. It’s a testament to the kind of “woke capitalism” that the sports world seems desperate to embrace.
Persuasion describes itself as an outlet for “advocates of free speech and free institutions,” and is described by Slate (7/10/20) as “a newly launched ‘intellectual community,’ whose announced list of members overlaps heavily” with the signers of the Harper’s open letter “on Justice and Open Debate”—”particularly, the core group that the New York Times credited with having written the Harper’s letter.”
Even when it comes to crimes of violence, it turns out that law enforcement often fails to protect people. Less than 4 percent of an officer’s time is spent investigating so-called violent crimes, and police don’t even do a particularly good job at that. In Chicago, for example, police typically solve only 4 out of 10 murders, and only 2 out of 10 when the victim is Black. Yet police are expensive, eating large amounts of municipal budgets. The City of Chicago spends approximately $4 million dollars per day on the Chicago Police Department, an amount equivalent to 5 months of mental health services, 18 months of substance abuse treatment, or 32 months of violence prevention programs.
As former Dallas Police Chief David Brown said, “We are asking cops to do too much in this country. We are. Every societal failure, we put it off on cops to solve. Not enough mental health funding, let the cops handle it… Here in Dallas we got a loose dog problem; let’s have the cops chase loose dogs. Schools fail, let’s give it to the cops… that’s too much to ask. Policing was never meant to solve all these problems.”
Police should no longer occupy all of our vital support systems in our communities. Here are ten ways to make our communities safer for everyone. The following concrete steps present a way forward, one that would begin to reduce reliance on policing.
Rizvia Society SHO Muzaffar Ali said they had married around four to five months back. It was the second marriage of the man. The woman’s family had opposed the marriage. He claimed that Hina’s brothers were involved in the double murder and they had been arrested. The suspects killed the couple with a knife and an axe.
In a nine-count complaint, the plaintiffs accused the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agents of violating constitutionally protected rights including freedom of speech and protest, and exceeding their law enforcement authority.
As nationwide protests against systemic racism and police violence stretch into their second month, President Trump has sent a team of federal agents to Seattle, following a controversial deployment of federal forces in Portland, Oregon. “We don’t know exactly what the federal officers are doing. What we do know is we are in a situation where local police are welcoming those federal agents into our city,” says Seattle community organizer Nikkita Oliver, co-executive director of Creative Justice. We also speak with Pastor E.D. Mondainé, president of the Portland, Oregon, branch of the NAACP.
For decades, incumbent broadband and television giants like Comcast and AT&T enjoyed life from a comfortable position of monopoly dominance. If you want to subscribe to broadband, such companies are often your only option. If you wanted to subscribe to television service, you were required to rent a locked down, highly proprietary cable box courtesy of the industry’s cable hardware monopoly. Are you a broadcaster and want to have your cable channel in a conspicuous position in the lineup? Expect headaches. Want to use their utility poles to build a decent competitor? Expect a lot of bullshit.
In this case, Judge Moore begins with a lamentation that a Federal Circuit panel is “bound by the determinations of a prior panel, unless relieved of that obligation by an en banc order of the court or a decision of the Supreme Court.” Quoting Deckers Corp. v. United States, 752 F.3d 949 (Fed. Cir. 2014).*
Here, Fall Line appealed against the PTAB’s real party-in-interest determinations. That argument was recently foreclosed in ESIP Series 2, LLC v. Puzhen Life USA, LLC, 958 F.3d 1378 (Fed. Cir. 2020). Fall Line attempted to skirt the decision by asking the court to use its “mandamus jurisdiction” to hear the case. On appeal, the Federal Circuit concluded that would be improper in this case. Although mandamus may be proper to review “institution decisions that implicate constitutional or jurisdictional violations” — mandamus is not proper for an “ordinary dispute” over the construction of an “institution-related statute.” Fall Line’s argument would have carried more weight – but for Thryv.
The Court of Appeal of the Hague held that entering into a second exclusive licence contract is possible, but the failure to end the first contract in the present case constituted unlawful behaviour and tort. Further, the Court discussed the extent to which a tort between two parties can affect the liability of third parties.
James filed this change-of-inventorship lawsuit against the patent owner (Advanced Messaging Tech.). James alleged that he was the sole inventor of U.S. Patent No. 6,208,638 and that his name should replace that of Jaye Muller and Jack Rieley.
The listed inventors – Rieley and Muller are famous in the music world. Rieley was the Beach Boy’s manager in the 1970s and co-wrote many songs with them as part of their “revival.” Muller (“J”) is a German musician. In the 1990s, the pair started a company known as JFAX. The company – now known as J2 – has a $2.6B market cap. The company’s original idea was to receive VM and faxes via email.
[...]
The district court sided with J2 — and the Federal Circuit has affirmed. In particular, the court ruled that James’s claim of invention was not supported by sufficient documentary evidence.
In a conundrum worthy of a law school civil procedure examination, plaintiff Gensetix found itself apparently with no remedy for infringement by Baylor College of Medicine, Diakonos Research Ltd., and William Decker of patents licensed from the University of Texas (UT), when UT refused to join as a necessary party on sovereign immunity grounds. The Federal Circuit, in a fractured decision reminiscent of the alignment of the judges in Amgen v Sandoz, remedied this situation in its decision last Friday in Gensetix, Inc. v. Board of Regents of the University of Texas System.
The case arose related to Gensetix’ exclusive license of UT-owned patents, U.S. Patent Nos. 8,728,806 and 9,333,248 relating to methods of modifying a patient’s immune system to kill cancer cells. Defendant Dr. Decker had invented the claimed methods when we was a UT faculty member and then left (as professors are wont to do) to join the faculty at Baylor.
The license between Gensetix and UT provided that Gensetix was obliged to pursue infringement at its own expense and was entitled to any recovery from such enforcement efforts. However, should Gensetix fail to pursue its legal remedies within six months of obtaining knowledge that there was infringement, UT had a secondary right to pursue enforcement of these patents (with a corresponding entitlement to any recovery). There were provisions in the contract of mutual cooperation between the parties of any such lawsuits. Importantly, however, the contract also contained an express provision that UT did not waive its sovereign immunity as a State by entering into the contract.
The license covered “parents” and “continuations”, but did not expressly combine those in a way that would include the ‘836 patent — which is “a continuation of a continuation of the parent of a continuation-in-part.” In its decision, the Federal Circuit extended the license terms to cover the ‘836. And, since AT&T buys its products from the licensee, AT&T’s activity was covered by the license.
In its petition here, the patentee argues that the Federal Circuit should not – as it did here – create and extend a Federal common law of patent license contract interpretation.
Following on Unified’s previous study, the PTAB continues their steady uptick in procedural denials under § 314 through the first half of 2020, and on procedural, non-merits-based denials in general. These § 314 denials have surpassed 2019’’s annual total—and total denials are just 7 denials shy of 2018’s total, with just half the year reported. Projections show procedural denials will most likely greatly exceed those in 2019 by the end of Q3. Most significantly, though, the General Plastic/NHK framework is being used to procedurally deny petitions more than ever—projecting more than double the number of denials in 2019, they are set to make up 30% of all denials this calendar year.
[...]
Indeed, § 314(a) now accounts for the majority of procedural denials (including denials under § 325 and those related to joinder). The ratio of § 314(a) procedural denials has grown this year, as you can see below. 2019 saw 49% of all procedural denials be § 314(a) (75 out of 154); in 2020, more than 73% of procedural denials have been under § 314(a) (81 out of 111). This means that the PTAB is expected to issue 162 § 314(a) denials by the end of the year, a 116% increase from last year.
[...]
When looking at the petitioners that are denied on 314(a) with related parallel district court litigation, the California Northern District Court comprises 45% of the cases related to denials, with 208 cases being cited. (It should be noted that often with denials multiple cases are cited for the denial, and these numbers don’t yet distinguish between “multiple petition” denials under General Plastic, “parallel petition” denials under the July 2019 Trial Practice Guide Update, or “trial date” denials under NHK Spring and Aptiv. A large number of these suits are related to sprawling ongoing litigations, like the yearslong Finjan or Rovi v. Comcast disputes.) These numbers encompass the Board’s entire history, and are a lagging indicator of where cases were being filed years ago.
The Texas Eastern District has 80 cases cited, comprising 17% of all 314(a) denials. The Delaware District Court had 67 cases cited, comprising 15% of all 314(a) denials. The Texas Western District Court has seen 1 case cited in 2019, and this year that number has risen to 4, accounting for 1% of all 314(a) denials to date; as that docket balloons to more than 20% of the US patent docket, that number is set to rise dramatically.
On July 27, 2020, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,500 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 6,854,067. The patent is owned by Heritage IP, LLC, an NPE subsidiary owned by IP Edge. The ’067 patent generally relates to a method and system for interaction between a processor and a power on reset circuit to dynamically control power states in a microcontroller. This patent has been asserted in district court against NXP, Resideo Technologies, Maytronics, Insulet Corp., and August Home.
Unified is pleased to announce the PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Preeti Dua, who received a cash prize of $2,000 for her prior art submission for U.S. Patent 9,626,342. The ’342 patent was formally owned by Yahoo and is now owned by Digi Portal, an NPE and subsidiary of Excalibur IP, owned by IP Edge. The ’342 patent generally relates to a dynamic page generator.
To help the industry fight bad patents, we have published the winning prior art below.
Open Invention Network (OIN) and UNISOC announced today that UNISOC has become one of OIN’s community members. As a leading fabless semiconductor company in mobile communications and IoT chipsets, and a strong proponent of open source software (OSS), UNISOC is committed to OSS as an enabler of advanced communications and industrial / IoT systems.
“OSS is ushering in a transformation of the IT and Communications sector and enabling realization of the vision of the billion-device universe first discussed in the mid-90′s. Growth in networking through Linux Foundation Networking projects such as OPNFV and ONAP is driving innovation in silicon,” said Keith Bergelt, CEO of Open Invention Network. “As a global leader in mobile and communications chipsets we are excited to have UNISOC join OIN and for its recognition of the need for patent non-aggression in the core of Linux and adjacent OSS.”
In a recent decision, the EUIPO Fourth Board of appeal did not consider it relevant that the public might understand the contested figurative mark as meaning “land of wood” (“legno” in Italian means “wood”) and that the message conveyed to consumers would be that the goods sold under the contested mark are made of wood. Instead, it confirmed that, when a sign is composed of word and figurative elements, the former are – as a rule – more distinctive than the latter, since the average consumer will more easily refer to the goods in question by citing the name rather than by describing the figurative element (T-460/11, Bürger). As a result, registration of “LEGNOLAND” as an EU trade mark (EUTM) could not proceed due to likelihood of confusion with the opponent’s earlier EUTMS “LEGO” and “LEGOLAND”.
[...]
Visually, the earlier sign consists of the word “LEGO”, while the contested sign is figurative and consists of an irregular rectangle resembling a handmade wooden sign and the word “LEGNOLAND” appearing inside, represented in a highly stylised font in upper-case letters together with a tree depicted over the second “L” letter.
Also, the Italian word “legno” means wood, and the contested trade mark intends to convey to consumers the message that the toys sold under the “LEGNOLAND” brand are all made of wood. This message is emphasized by the graphic element depicting a tree.
Aurally, the earlier mark consists of a four-letter and disyllabic word, LE-GO, while the verbal element in the trade mark applied for is a nine-letter and trisyllabic word, LE-GNO-LAND. They only share three out of nine letters in the same sequence.
Lego submitted that the signs are similar irrespective of how ‘legno’ is understood, which merely concerns Italian-speaking consumers: the tree symbol in the contested mark will simply be perceived as a decoration and consumers who do not speak Italian will not understand the word “legno” as meaning wood, solely because of the depiction of a stylised tree in the contested mark.
[...]
While overall the Board’s decision may not be surprising, it is not entirely convincing to consider that Danish- and English-speaking consumers would not recognize the word “legno” at all in connection with wood. In fact, the word “legno” appears routinely used – at least in certain contexts – to signify products made of or with the appearance of wood. If nothing else, decisions like the present one demonstrate once again the importance of defining the characteristics of the relevant public appropriately.
On 20 July 2020, the European Council announced its decision on the agreement between the EU and China on Geographical Indications (GIs).
[...]
This dialogue of the EU-China cooperation on GIs was opened back in September 2010. The latest concrete result was the completion of the ‘10 plus 10’ project in 2012, which provided mutual protection on 20 agriculture GIs in total, ten within each other’s territories. This time, the ‘100 plus 100 in 2020’ is a major step forward.
The EU-China agri-food trade has been remarkable. A Commission report showed that China was the second destination of exports of EU agri-food products from September 2018 to August 2019, reaching €12.8 billion; it was also the second destination of EU exports of products protected as GIs (accounting for 9% of its value), including wines, agri-food products and spirit drinks. In June 2020, the agri-food monitor observed that ‘the COVID-19 outbreak did not appear to impact the EU’s agri-food exports to China, as monthly values rose by €291 million compared to February 2019.’
The Chinese market is known as a high-growth market, surely no exception for exotic food and drinks. To quote Agriculture and Rural Development Commissioner Phil Hogan: ‘Consumers are willing to pay a higher price, trusting the origin and authenticity of these products, while further rewarding farmers.’ It is noted that this is particularly the case for those who ‘have a taste for iconic, high-quality and genuine European products’.
This high-level cooperation is good news for foodies. For instance, when craving some Salamini Italiani alla Cacciatora or Pu’er Cha (普洱茶), people can now save themselves the trouble of guessing which product is actually from the specific geographic area they want by spotting the official GI symbol.
The legal battles between Internet providers and record labels are developing a familiar pattern. After the music companies accuse ISPs of failing to terminate accounts of pirates, the ISPs strike back by accusing the rightsholders of sending inaccurate and deceptive DMCA notices. A few days ago, Bright House Communications submitted its counterclaims.
Young faces long legal odds if he decides to go through with a legal challenge over Trump’s use of “Rockin’ in the Free World,” but that may not stop him from trying. “Imagine what it feels like to hear ‘Rockin’ in the Free World’ after this president speaks, like it is his theme song,” Young writes. “I did not write it for that.”
A frustrated YouTube user has filed a lawsuit against the company in California, alleging multiple failures to comply with the requirements of the DMCA. While the case is likely to fail, it may provide useful pointers for those in a similar position and considering the same kind of action.
When Mexico’s Congress rushed through a new copyright law as part of its adoption of Donald Trump’s United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA), it largely copy-pasted the US copyright statute, with some modifications that made the law even worse for human rights.
The result is a legal regime that has all the deficits of the US system, and some new defects that are strictly hecho en Mexico, to the great detriment of the free expression rights of the Mexican people.
We’ve argued for a long, long time that these automated copyright takedown bots that far too many media companies utilize are both broken and illuminate just how broken copyright takedown policies for streaming sites have become. The output of this broken system is shown when these bots take down totally legitimate content or when grifters abuse the system to try to take some measure of income away from small third-party streamers. But attempts at machine-based copyright enforcement are truly at their most satisfying when content companies employing these bots commit unintentional copyright seppuku.
Summary: “GAFAM” are notorious for mass surveillance (more so than telecoms, equally bad if not worse), but many forget that IBM is facilitating rather oppressive surveillance all around the world (it builds proprietary spying systems, whereas GAFAM typically does the spying directly) and nowadays they pitch the amazing security of their ‘clown computing’ because they try to persuade whole states to hand over citizens’ medical records (in the name of public safety or health)
Posted in Deception at 7:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
It used to be possible to surf almost anonymously; now they have ‘free’ Wi-Fi that tracks your MAC address and much more (to hold you accountable)
Summary: It has been getting a lot harder to publish the truth on the World Wide Web because of growing levels of censorship, general demise of journalism as a profession (with special legal protections), and surveillance that’s used to discourage essential speech/communications
THE older days — be it any arbitrary time after the invention of prints or mere language — had information disseminated on papyrus/paper (like newspapers) and in books. It was hard to have stuff retracted or all copies of papers/books recalled. Censorship in the age of the Internet — and Social Control Media in particular — is another matter. See, the Internet was originally made to be robust to nuclear strikes, less so to DDOS attacks (which came much later). Then there’s SLAPP and other methodologies geared towards censorship. The net effect is misinformation or lack of access to accurate information. We’re not talking about fake (as in fabricated) news here but suppressed reports, typically about people with a lot of money and power (and of course legions of lawyers). Over the years we’ve had a number of encounters with them, including two law firms that EPO under Benoît Battistelli hired to bully me and spy on me. António Campinos is the same; he’s still blocking this site and has done so for over 2 years. Campinos is probably what his late father would have fought. If he didn’t die in Africa, he would likely have suffered a heart attack seeing what a dictator his son became, fighting for corporate imperialists.
“The net effect is misinformation or lack of access to accurate information.”We’ve just reproduced 4 blog posts which in a typical fashion a patent troll (through lawyers) tried to water down or altogether remove. The EPO demanded that we remove several blog posts as well. They’re all in tact though. One was unpublished only temporarily (until the dust settled). This was unprecedented for us. We’ll soon publish our 28,000th blog post; the only other post we unpublished (and remains unpublished) is one that conflated one company with another because they have identical names. We weren’t forced to remove it but chose to remove it because of this confusion. That’s one in almost 28,000.
The Internet added the “Web” (WWW) less than 30 years ago and it became a large-scale spying operation
There’s this antiquated notion or false assumption that on the Internet everybody gets a voice; in practice, however, it’s a little more complicated than that because there are multiple levels at which sites can be gagged, blocked, or forced to cease operations. Then there’s stuff like platform liability and corporate profits/shareholders, which motivate Social Control Media giants to censor posts if not terminate entire accounts (along with everything they ever posted).
Web browsers are typically monopolies (Netscape, MSIE, now Chrom*). Even without the WWW there are still cellular networks and the Internet, which are turning into 'Stalin's Dream' in 'Corona Times'.
Free speech in today’s World Wide Web is a complicated subject. It’s worldwide, but it’s mostly controlled by the US; it’s a Web of imperial and corporate censorship. There are multiple levers, ranging from DNS lookups to blacklists (denylists, whatever) and from Web hosts to litigation (or even threats of it). At present, blowback (backlash) associated with censorship is one of the few things that can still make various parties hesitant to muzzle critics. And it’s far from ideal a situation. Free speech Utopia does not mean death threats everywhere; it’s a crime to threaten to kill someone, just as Free software that directly assists crime or encourages criminal behaviour would likely be banned by sites like GitHub. Never mind if GitHub itself is assisting violence actively committed by the state (for profit even!) whilst it distracts us with some “Arctic” fantasy (PR ploy).
“A lot of stuff we publish here is based on material and information submitted anonymously.”Anonymous speech remains very valuable; it’s not just for Internet trolls. Whistleblowers need it too and in that sense anonymous speech can help stop or prevent crime. So the state and its media come up with demonising terms, which insist on accountability no matter the risk of reprisal/retribution from corrupt officials.
The media uses terms like “Dark Web” (or even worse words) for anything that’s not under surveillance; we’re being persuaded to associate privacy with crime
A lot of stuff we publish here is based on material and information submitted anonymously. Are the submitters criminals? No. They typically expose crimes they’re aware of. Corruption thrives when mass surveillance becomes a form of a ‘solidarity’ (as if all states are inherently benign and their exposers are malicious actors, saboteurs). █
Summary: Patent troll “Voice Tech” does not want people to read these articles (and its lawyer is trying to silence criticism of the troll/client)
Article #1: Patent Troll Gets Court To Order Startup It Sued To ‘Edit’ Blog Post; Troll Now Asks Startup To Get Us To Change Our Techdirt Post
Mon, Jul 27th 2020 10:44am – Mike Masnick
In February, we wrote about how a patent troll, Voice Tech, had sued a small open source voice assistant company, Mycroft AI, claiming infringement. Mycroft AI and its founder/CEO Joshua Montgomery had put up a blog post about the situation, which attracted our attention, in part due to his willingness to call out trolling for trolling, and promising not to back down. It included some strong language, including:
I don’t like letting these matters go quietly. In my experience, it’s better to be aggressive and “stab, shoot and hang” them, then dissolve them in acid. Or simply nuke them from orbit, it is the only way to be sure.
There was certainly precedent for Montgomery to take this kind of stance. In the past, we’ve highlighted how Newegg’s “we never settle with patent trolls” approach had been quite successful. And, more recently Cloudflare’s similar approach had been successful as well. Standing up to patent bullies is important in not letting them get away with such shenanigans.
In April, we wrote about the case again, after seeing one of the troll’s lawyers, Tod Tumey (who had also sent the original threat letters to Mycroft AI), submitted one of the oddest filings we’ve seen in court. It was “Suggestions in Support of Motion for Relief to Require Decorous and Civil Conduct by the Parties.” In it, Tumey made the wholly unsubstantiated case that Mycroft and Montgomery had engaged in threatening behavior towards Tumey, had tried to hack his website, and more. As we noted at the time, there was no evidence whatsoever to support this. The story had gone viral on Reddit, and the likely result of that being that some immature Reddit users did some immature things, sending Tumey some angry emails and signing him up for some mailing lists. There was no reason to believe they were coming from Montgomery himself.
In fact, Montgomery directly denied having anything to do with any of that. He later filed a declaration with the court to that effect as well. However, after oral arguments a week after my blog post, the judge in the case made a somewhat surprising order from the bench (after mentioning my blog post!?!?), telling Mycroft that it needed to edit its original blog post to take out some of the more incendiary language.
THE COURT: All right. Here is where the Court is
landing. In your Exhibit 5 to your opposition in your document
20, in that exhibit, it is a posting by Techdirt. And one of
the sentences in that writing — the paragraph begins with, As
Tumey recounts, the various angry, immature, internet trolls
then did a bunch of other mean stuff to Tumey, such as signing
him up for mailing lists. This is, again, childish behavior,
but it’s kind of what often happens when you do something
stupid and the internet finds out about it.
And I find that there is sufficient evidence that
the harassment that plaintiff’s counsel has received is induced
or inspired by the postings of Mr. Montgomery. In particular,
the initial blog posting on February 5th where his — the
posting is, basically, I want you to do something for me. And
he says, I’d like — I don’t often ask this, but I’d like for
everyone in our community to share the post in any which way
they can. And so that is what — he is calling folks into
action to get the word out.
And then as he describes and educates the readers as
to what a troll is, then he explains what their internal
policy — how they’re going to combat this. And he describes
it in equating plaintiff as a bully and the language of
punching a bully in the face; stab, shoot, hang them; and
dissolve them in acid; and nuke them from orbit; and that he is
turning into a hunter, a troll hunter. I think that even
though he may not be directly the source of the harassment, his
actions are foreseeable and that that is what would happen
based on his conduct.
So I am going to order, at least for the pendency of
this case, or until ordered otherwise, for defense to
assertively take down the sentence that begins with “I don’t
often ask this,” to delete that portion until the section where
“a brief history of patents in the United States.” I’d also
order defense to assertively search and take down in those
similar — whether it’s Facebook or blogs or whatever, the
remainder of the writing beginning with “the thing is, once you
pay the bully, he just comes back again and again and again.”
And so from that sentence — that can stay in, but where it
begins with “Eventually, the lunch money adds up to a lot more
than a doctor’s visit.” From “eventually” until the end of
that posting, for that to be deleted. And I do — I’m not
asking that all that blog be taken down, just those sections
Mycroft’s lawyer asks for some clarification and the judge again explains what needs to be taken down:
THE COURT: Yes. So they need to take down “I don’t
often ask this, but I’d like for everyone in our community who
believes that patent trolls are bad for open source to repost,
link, tweet, and share this post. Please help us to get the
word out by sharing this post on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter,
or email.” All of that is to be deleted.
In addition, towards the end, beginning with,
“Eventually, that lunch money adds up to a lot more than a
doctor’s visit.” And that continues on. And to take down the
remainder, which includes Tod Tumey’s confidential
correspondence information and the email 1, 2, 3, email 4,
final notice letter link. And then there shouldn’t be any need
for the image attribution. Does that clarify your concern?
So, first off, I don’t see how this is possibly allowed under the 1st Amendment. Directly ordering a company to edit a blog post to remove a request to share the blog post on social media seems like a fairly blatant infringement of the 1st Amendment. A company should certainly have the right to notify its community that it is in the middle of a costly legal battle (one that it believes is frivolous), and part of getting people to understand how serious it is is asking for that information to be shared.
Mycroft’s lawyer then points out that since the company is part of the open source community, he’s worried that this order might prevent them from collaborating on certain projects, or even asking for assistance, and the judge gives an unfortunate answer to that scenario:
MR. DeBACKER: So often — they are part of an open
source network that collaborates with other open source
innovators. And I just want to be clear that they’re going to
be able to continue to ask for support outside of this matter
with sharing links and such with their open source network, if
they post on other forums, if they’re going to be allowed to
request aid and other things like that, as long as they’re not
directing it towards codes like this.
THE COURT: Well, I’ll just have to see it as it
comes. I don’t want to have to rule on that now. I know just
in my own little messing around on my phone, I see that they
may be seeking financial assistance with attorneys’ fees. You
know, that I’m not — that doesn’t have anything to do with
this issue. So I don’t know what else you’re referring to, but
just — I mean, I think it’s common sense what the Court’s
focus is.
That “know it when I see it” kind of thing is dangerous to free speech as well. It does not provide any clear guidelines, and likely creates a chilling effect in which the company has to be careful not to run afoul of these amorphous speech suppressing rules. Again, I can’t see how that doesn’t fly in the face of the 1st Amendment. Yes, there’s the infamous Potter Stewart “I know it when I see it” test for obscenity, but obscenity is a clearly defined exception to the 1st Amendment. And, yes, incitement to imminent violence is also an established exception, it’s a very narrow one. And the Mycroft blog post comes nowhere near that standard. The violent imagery was clearly figurative, not literal. It even linked to an article where the “stabbed, shot, and hanged” message came from — and it was about killing off an attempt to ban municipal broadband. In other words, it was clearly figurative and not an actual threat or incitement to violence.
Either way, the case is getting even more bizarre, and still dealing with my blog post. One of Voice Tech’s lawyers sent a letter to Mycroft’s lawyers saying that a later blog post by Mycroft which merely links to my blog post is in contempt of the order, because my blog post contains the original language the court ordered deleted.
It has come to Voice Tech’s attention that on July 1, 2020, Joshua Montgomery published an article on Mycroft AI’s website entitled “Mark II Update – June 2020.” Under the “Updates” section, in the second paragraph, there is a link entitled “patent trolls” as shown here:
That link, when clicked, takes the reader to a TECHDIRT article from February 13, 2020, which focuses on the language Mycroft was ordered to take down. To the extent Mycroft is able to have the threatening language removed from the TECHDIRT article, it is obligated to do so. At the very least, Mycroft must remove the link to this TECHDIRT article, which Joshua Montgomery recently included in his Mark II Update article on Mycroft’s website.
Further, the original threatening article is currently posted on the Mycroft Community Forum at this URL: https://community.mycroft.ai/t/troll-hunter-mycrofts-position-on-patent-trolls/8047. This publicly available posting of the original article needs to be redacted to comply with the Court’s Order. Additionally, the links to emails 1, 2, 3, and 4, as well as the final notice letter, are still active and need to be deleted.
Voice Tech demands that Mycroft remove the link to the TECHDIRT article and redact the original article on the Mycroft Community Forum by no later than the close of business on Wednesday, July 22, 2020. If Mycroft fails to comply, Voice Tech will have no option but to file a motion for contempt with the Court.
Seeing as the letter said that “to the extent Mycroft was able to have the threatening language removed from the TECHDIRT article, it is obligated to do so,” the company forwarded the letter on to us. Obviously, Mycroft has no ability to remove language from Techdirt, and we have no intention of removing such language, as we feel that our posting that original language is clearly protected under the 1st Amendment. I do see that Mycroft has removed the link from its blog to us however, meaning that some of the fallout from this unconstitutional order is that it sends us less traffic. That seems unfortunate and again raises 1st Amendment concerns about a judge’s order, and the plaintiff’s demands, directly targeting a news site for our reporting.
Obviously, it’s not good that some immature kids got angry at the lawyers behind Voice Tech, but people are sick of patent trolls and takedowns and sketchy attempts to abuse legal process. It certainly seems like this gag order and further demands to censor speech are just another part of that trend.
I found the whole situation with the court order perplexing, so I asked 1st Amendment lawyer Ken White if that order, or the request from Voice Tech’s lawyers was out of the ordinary, and he told the following:
“There’s no lawful basis to demand that Techdirt take down any part of its story – all the more so now that the story involves this First Amendment controversy, which is the heart of what Techdirt covers. As always, I’m ready to lend a legal hand if needed.”
Hopefully that’s the end of this issue, though I am still troubled by Voice Tech’s desire to censor speech (and, of course, its trolling efforts).
On a separate note, it appears that Unified Patents, the organization that tries to get bad patents invalidated, has now become aware of the Mycroft AI situation and has filed for an inter partes review at the US Patent Office. One hopes that these patents are thrown out and that Mycroft AI is able to get back to focusing on building open source voice assistants, rather than having to fight back against a bunch of lawyers building nothing but trouble.
Article #2: Open Source Voice Assistant Promises To ‘Nuke From Orbit’ Patent Troll
Thu, Feb 13th 2020 10:47am — Mike Masnick
Open source voice assistant company Mycroft AI (which we actually wrote about years back) appears to be the latest startup to recognize that the only way to properly deal with patent trolls is to fight back. This strategy was first pioneered by online retailer Newegg, whose refusal to give in to any patent trolls eventually (after years of litigation) meant that patent trolls stopped trying to shake the company down. More recently, Cloudlfare has taken a similarly successful approach.
Tod Tumey of Tumey LLP based out of Texas ( a venue famous for hosting patent trolls ) contacted us with a “Highly Confidential” letter offering to license his “client’s” “valuable” voice patents to Mycroft AI Inc. When we didn’t respond ( don’t feed the trolls! ) he filed suit in East Texas.
As a result, we’ve taken the time to develop an internal policy about how we’re going to deal with patent trolls. Here is how we’re going to handle them:
Our policy is also to attack bogus patents like U.S. Patent No. 9,794,348 and have them re-examined and invalidated where possible. We’ll be doing this in the context of a strong open source community that includes other troll hunters like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Open Innovation Network – both of whom have a strong interest in protecting open technology from rent-seeking trolls.
Patent trolls get paid because short-sighted companies make the decision to pay. Simply put, it is usually cheaper in the short run to pay a troll than it is to litigate. It is also cheaper to give a schoolyard bully your lunch money than it is to visit a doctor. The thing is, once you pay the bully, he’ll just come back again and again and again. Eventually, that lunch money adds up to a lot more than a doctor’s visit. In the long run the best way to deal with a bully is to punch him square in the face. You might take a beating, but if you do it every time? The bully will find easier prey.
I don’t like letting these matters go quietly. In my experience, it’s better to be aggressive and “stab, shoot and hang” them, then dissolve them in acid. Or simply nuke them from orbit, it is the only way to be sure.
Don’t hold back on letting us know how you really feel, Joshua.
Anyway, he also notes that the lawyer, Tumey, appears to have filed in the wrong venue (which one is not indicated), and so Mycroft is seeking to move the case, and then it’s going to go after Tumey for legal fees. Good for them.
Article #3: Troll Hunter – Mycroft’s Position on Patent Trolls
Published on Wednesday, February 5, 2020
Mycroft has recently been targeted by a patent troll seeking to extract a toll.
A Brief History of Patents in the United States
The Cotton Gin was patented by Eli Whitney on March 14, 1794. This easily infringed invention prolonged the economic viability of slavery in the United States and eventually drove Whitney into the arms trade. Patents haven’t improved much since.
The idea behind patents is that the inventor publicly discloses how to create an invention and in return the inventor gets a period of exclusive use. For some inventions this makes sense – the Spyder hole saw system is a great example that I’ve fallen in love with recently. It is simple, extremely useful and inventive. In the future all hole saws will use a system similar to Syder’s because it is so much better. In a decade or two other tool makers can reference the patent and duplicate the technology. In the meantime Spyder’s patent protects them from competitors and, importantly, Spyder has made the invention available in home improvement stores globally.
For other “inventions” patents are basically useless. Software, for example, is effectively math. Math isn’t patentable and software shouldn’t be either. The same is true of “do the obvious, but do it on a computer” type patents. The Supreme Court agrees.
The ability to issue useless patents has created an entire industry. There is now a whole class of “inventors” who file obvious patents with the sole purpose of suing real entrepreneurs once the technology is inevitably perfected. These “inventors” have no plans to create a product. They are simply trolls hiding under a bridge waiting for real entrepreneurs to cross. All they want is to collect a toll by gaming America’s flawed patent system.
These trolls are defined by two important traits. First off, they seldom reduce their patents to practice. That means that they don’t build a product and ship it. They also file patents that are so broad and unspecific that no one could take the patent and create the “invention”. They want the exclusivity period created by the patent without actually having to create anything that works. Their patents are a spaghetti mess of legal jargon and useless diagrams.
Voice technologies like the one that Mycroft is building can be traced back more than 50 years. In fact, Mycroft is named after a voice assistant that appeared in Robert Heinlein’s 1963 Hugo Award winning novel “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress”. All of the underlying technologies are described in the novel and they have been broken out time and again over the past half-century in popular science fiction. “Hal” from 2001 a Space Odyssey, Star Trek’s “Computer”, Knight Rider’s “Kitt” – all of these are examples of how voice technology might work in the real world. They’ve also been disclosed in real-world tech like Honda’s Asimo and more than 3 decades of automotive technologies from Nuance.
Mycroft’s First Patent Troll
Which brings us back to our patent troll who is seeking a toll from Mycroft. Tod Tumey of Tumey LLP based out of Texas ( a venue famous for hosting patent trolls ) contacted us with a “Highly Confidential” letter offering to license his “client’s” “valuable” voice patents to Mycroft AI Inc. When we didn’t respond ( don’t feed the trolls! ) he filed suit in East Texas.
As a result, we’ve taken the time to develop an internal policy about how we’re going to deal with patent trolls. Here is how we’re going to handle them:
We are going to litigate every single patent suit to the fullest extent possible including appealing any adverse decisions all the way to the Supreme Court.
Our policy is also to attack bogus patents like U.S. Patent No. 9,794,348 and have them re-examined and invalidated where possible. We’ll be doing this in the context of a strong open source community that includes other troll hunters like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Open Innovation Network – both of whom have a strong interest in protecting open technology from rent-seeking trolls.
Patent trolls get paid because short-sighted companies make the decision to pay. Simply put, it is usually cheaper in the short run to pay a troll than it is to litigate. It is also cheaper to give a schoolyard bully your lunch money than it is to visit a doctor. The thing is, once you pay the bully, he’ll just come back again and again and again.
Article #4: Patent Troll Runs To Court To Whine About Mean People Online, Insists They Must All Secretly Be From Company It’s Suing
Tue, Apr 7th 2020 1:32pm — Mike Masnick
Earlier this year (though it feels like decades ago…) we wrote about how Mycroft AI was being sued by a patent troll, and how the company’s CEO Joshua Montgomery had put up quite a blog post about the scourge of patent trolls, and how Mycroft AI had taken the position — like a few smart companies before them — to never settle and never give in to patent trolls. The blog post included this fun paragraph:
I don’t like letting these matters go quietly. In my experience, it’s better to be aggressive and “stab, shoot and hang” them, then dissolve them in acid. Or simply nuke them from orbit, it is the only way to be sure.
The court case has continued, but the troll (or rather, the troll’s lawyer) Tod Tumey, has apparently received some fairly angry phone calls and emails. Let’s be clear here: do not do that. That’s very much not cool and people certainly don’t deserve threats of violence. No matter how terrible a person you are, and no matter what bad decisions you’ve made in life that lead you to become a lawyer issuing silly patent troll shakedown letters, that doesn’t mean you deserve death threats. But there are lots of idiots on the internet, and sometimes when they get angry, they do stupid things.
Tumey, though, seems to blame Montgomery for all of that, and has run to court to submit a “Motion for Relief to Require Decorous and Civil Conduct by the Parties.” In other words, “Judge, please stop the other side from saying mean things about me online.” I’ve now asked four litigators if they’ve seen such filings in the past, and got varying degrees of bafflement in response. In the more thorough filing accompanying the motion, the “Suggestions in Support of Motion for Relief to Require Decorous and Civil Conduct by the Parties”, Tumey vents his frustration at having people online mad at him.
Regrettably, however, Mycroft, through its CEO/First Officer,
Joshua Montgomery, has responded to Voice Tech’s professional and respectful handling of this
business dispute with an aggressive campaign of harassment, identity theft, cyber-attacks, and even
death threats directed personally at Voice Tech’s counsel, Tod Tumey, and Mr. Tumey’s family.
Under these extraordinary circumstances, Voice Tech brings this Motion to ask the Court’s
intervention at the outset of this case to require Mycroft and Montgomery to remove the
threatening content it has published online and cease its assaultive campaign against Mr. Tumey
and his family; to admonish Mycroft and Montgomery that such bad faith conduct is unacceptable
and will not be tolerated; to express the Court’s expectation and requirement that the parties will
refrain from such abusive behavior going forward; and to place Mycroft and Montgomery on
notice that they may be subjected to further sanctions and consequences for their misconduct
should they fail to heed the Court’s direction.
The filing goes on to show a number of angry emails that were sent to Tumey’s firm. These are typical angry people on the internet sounding off type emails, but Tumey seems sure that it’s really Montgomery himself.
The timing and nature of this email strongly suggested that Montgomery (or, at the very
least, someone acting for him/Mycroft) sent it. Indeed, it includes a link to Montgomery’s Reddit
post, and brags about posting Mr. Tumey’s correspondence on the Mycroft website—something,
presumably, only Montgomery or someone else at Mycroft could have done. See id. Moreover, the
subsequent avalanche of orchestrated assaults on Mr. Tumey and his firm further evidence a
purposeful campaign by Montgomery/Mycroft against counsel in apparent retribution for Voice
Tech’s orderly, lawful pursuit of its rights through the justice system:
Or — and hear me out on this — the story had already started to go viral on Reddit (the email in question linked to the Reddit story, as noted in the filing) and some immature Redditors, who (for good reasons!) hate patent trolls, decided to act immaturely. That does not mean that it’s Montgomery himself. The next day Tumey received another mean email and again assumes that it must be Montgomery, despite the much more obvious answer that it was people who read the story on Reddit.
First, the next morning after receiving the email shown above, Tumey L.L.P. received
another email to its general email account seemingly from the same source (i.e.,
Montgomery/Mycroft), which, among other hostile content, recommended—in graphic and highly
disturbing terms—death and acts of violence against counsel (as Montgomery’s online post had
also done)
As Tumey recounts, the various, angry, immature internet trolls then did a bunch of other mean stuff to Tumey — such as signing him up for mailing lists. This is, again, childish behavior. But it’s kinda what often happens when you do something stupid and the internet finds out about it. To blame Montgomery for it seems crazy — and kind of clueless about the internet. But, no, Tumey assumes it’s all because of Montgomery:
The timing and pattern of these activities, as well as the nature of the emails, and
similarities and connections with Montgomery’s published posts led Voice Tech’s counsel to
conclude that Montgomery, alone or in concert with others, was most likely the individual behind
this onslaught of harassment.
Look: again, the actions here were dumb, childish pranks played by dumb, childish individuals. But to lump it all on Montgomery because he published a blog post is crazy. Indeed, later in the filing, Tumey drops even the idea that this juvenile behavior was done “in concert” with Montgomery, and just insists that it was the company Mycroft’s actions directly:
In this case, Mycroft’s threatening suggestions of physical harm and death towards Voice
Tech’s counsel, as well as its litany of other harassing and abusive behavior, are antithetical to an
orderly and fair judicial process, and undermine the sanctity of this proceeding. As the above
authorities demonstrate, it is well within this Court’s inherent authority to make it clear that such
conduct will not be tolerated. Indeed, Voice Tech notes that, even in the absence of the
extraordinary circumstances of this case, courts routinely issue orders and adopt standing
procedures directing civil and professional behavior by those appearing before them.
Notably, nowhere in the filing does Tumey link to the Reddit post in question. So I went and looked, and it sure looks like it went viral in r/linux and did pretty well in a few related open source subreddits as well. In other words, a lot of people who are sick of patent trolls saw the story. The idea that all the messages are coming from Montgomery or Mycroft themselves is simply bonkers.
For its part, when asked, I was told by the company’s lawyer, Lee Cheng (who masterminded NewEgg’s anti-patent troll strategy): “Of course no one, even blatant patent abusers and legal advantage takers, should be harassed or threatened. No one who threatens or harasses people or their families is a friend of either Mycroft AI or Josh Montgomery.” And it does seem like rather than insisting that Montgomery and Mycroft AI are sending the threatening emails and engaging in the other childish behavior, the real reason it happened is because a lot of people really hate patent shakedown efforts, and chose a poor way to express that. For VoiceTech and Tumey to try to work the refs early in the case by pinning bad behavior of third parties on Mycroft seems particularly distasteful. █
Battistelli the emperor
SUEPO is dirty
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