Summary: MagicHour listed Microsoft among their clients, as we noted before, and the full (redacted for child porn reasons) name is Brett Paine. We had reached out to the employer (several of us, separately), but we never received any reply.
For NetMarketShare, something pretty big happened over the last few months. Back in March the Linux share they recorded was only 1.36%, and then it quickly rocketed upwards to 3.61% in June after multiple months of rising. The kind of rise you can’t easily just write-off since it continued happening. No one really knows what caused it, possibly a ton more people working from home and not attached to their corporate Windows workstation. Now though, it seems to be levelling out as July’s figure now shows it as 3.57%. Considering more people are being told to go back to work, perhaps it was as a result of COVID19. Across that whole time though, it’s worth noting StatCounter which also tracks it has hardly moved this whole time. So you may want to press X to doubt on it.
System76, the company that provides various Linux hardware along with their own Pop!_OS Linux distribution have started teasing their upcoming Keyboard again.
Originally talked about in a blog post back in March last year, we haven’t really heard much since then. Things sounded pretty experimental back then but in a fresh blog post from July 30, it seems it’s moving forward.
The meteoric rise of containerization and microservices has been necessary to meet the growing demand for applications, but getting it right means overcoming some critical network orchestration challenges. Out of the complexities that developers of cloud-native applications face, strategically utilizing Kubernetes ingress controllers is among the most difficult components to understand—and among the most important.
Before diving into ingress controllers, you need to understand why networking is so important to developer workflows.
It is common for development teams to create backend API services to enable connectivity for external applications and users. In early development phases, teams often use implementations of container environments on local development machines, which more simply rely on direct container invocations through Docker Compose or similar local orchestrators for access.
However, when the time comes to shift to a shared development or staging environment and match the configuration that will be used in production, these direct-access stopgaps are no longer sufficient. The access patterns often assume trusted access, which can’t be assumed in production, or they rely on static values that are likely to change in a cloud infrastructure.
Both systems can be configured with a range of Windows operating systems or Ubuntu Linux, and OnLogic plans to add imaging options for many of their software partners in the future, including Ignition by Inductive Automation, ThinManager, EdgeIQ, IGEL and AWS Greengrass.
The start of the COVID-19 pandemic couldn’t delay the release of Kubernetes 1.18, but unfortunately a small bug could — thankfully only by a day. This was the last cat that needed to be herded by 1.18 release lead Jorge Alarcón before the release on March 25.
One of the best parts about co-hosting the weekly Kubernetes Podcast from Google is the conversations we have with the people who help bring Kubernetes releases together. Jorge was our guest on episode 96 back in March, and just like last week we are delighted to bring you the transcript of this interview.
If you’d rather enjoy the “audiobook version”, including another interview when 1.19 is released later this month, subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.
In the last few weeks, we’ve talked to long-time Kubernetes contributors and SIG leads David Oppenheimer, David Ashpole and Wojciech Tyczynski. All are worth taking the dog for a longer walk to listen to!
Josh and Kurt talk about some of the necessary evils of security. There are challenges we face like passwords and resource management. Sometimes the problem is old ideas, sometimes it’s we don’t have metrics. Can you measure not getting hacked?
I ramble a bit about my Linux journey. Well, not just my Linux journey since my story begins before Linux existed. And even in the parts of the story that involve my Linux years, the story is really more about my journey with “free and open source software”.
So I considered making an rc8 all the way to the last minute, but
decided it's not just worth waiting another week when there aren't any
big looming worries around.
Because despite the merge window having been very large, there really
hasn't been anything scary going on in the release candidates. Yeah,
we had some annoying noise with header file dependencies this week,
but that's not a new annoyance, and it's also not the kind of subtle
bug that keeps me up at night worrying about it.
It did reinforce how nice it would be if we had some kind of tooling
support to break nasty header file dependencies automatically, but if
wishes were horses.. Maybe some day we'll have some kind of SAT-solver
for symbol dependencies that can handle all our different
architectures and configurations, but right now it's just a manual
pain that occasionally bites us.
Anyway..
Aside from silly header file noise, the last week was mostly dominated
by the networking pull, which accounts for about half of the changes
(mellanox drivers and selftests stand out, but there's other smaller
things in there too). Some RCU fixes stand out.
Outside of the networking stuff, it's mostly various small driver
fixes (gpu, rdma, sound and pinctrl being much of it), and some minor
architecture noise (arm, x86, powerpc). But it's all fairly small.
So there it is, a shiny new kernel. Give it a whirl before all you
people start sending me the pull requests for the merge window, which
I'll start handling tomorrow..
Linus
Linus Torvalds has called it “the biggest release of all time”. Check out what are the key changes in the recently released Linux Kernel 5.8.
In his email announcement to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) Linus says: “So [here] it is, a shiny new kernel. Give it a whirl before all you people start sending me the pull requests for the merge window, which I’ll start handling tomorrow.”
Linux 5.8 will be available for testing in Ubuntu 20.10 in the near future. It’s not yet clear which Linux kernel version the final stable release of the Groovy Gorilla will ship with in October (and thus be back-ported to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS via 20.04.2 LTS) but there’s a good chance it may be this release.
The Linux 5.8 kernel series has been officially announced by Linus Torvalds.
[...]
You can download the Linux 5.8 kernel sources right now from the kernel.org website or using the direct link below. However, please keep in mind that this currently marked as a “mainline” kernel, which means it’s not yet ready for mass deployments or use in production environments.
You should probably wait for the first point release, Linux kernel 5.8.1, to hit the streets before considering upgrading your kernel packages to the new series. Many of the rolling GNU/Linux distributions like Arch Linux or openSUSE Tumbleweed will probably upgrade to Linux 5.8 in the coming weeks.
Linus Torvalds was debating up to the last minutes today of whether to opt for Linux 5.8-rc8 or go ahead and release Linux 5.8 as stable… He opted for Linux 5.8 splashing down on this historic day.
Linus wrote in the 5.8 release announcement that despite this cycle being very large, it turned out fairly well and didn’t need a 5.8-rc8 release. Though due to some last minute changes, he does dream of having a sort of SAT-solver for symbol dependencies that would work across architectures and configurations for cleaning up the Linux kernel header file dependency mess. But that for now is just a dream.
Linus has released the 5.8 kernel. “So I considered making an rc8 all the way to the last minute, but decided it’s not just worth waiting another week when there aren’t any big looming worries around.” Headline features in this release include: branch target identification and shadow call stacks for the arm64 architecture, the BPF iterator mechanism, inline encryption support in the block layer, the CAP_PERFMON and CAP_BPF capabilities, a generalized kernel event-notification subsystem, the KCSAN data-race detector, and more. As always, see the KernelNewbies 5.8 page for more information.
Linux 5.7 added support for a better exFAT implementation, thermal pressure in the task scheduler, and removed the 80-column warning for developers, among many other changes.
brand new Linux Kernel 5.8 is announced by Linus Torvalds. This kernel release is mostly a big release in terms of hardware, graphics, and other updates.
Yes, you heard it right as Linux Kernel 5.8 is finally available now.
It’s arguably long overdue but with the just-opened Linux 5.9 kernel cycle the Unicore32 CPU architecture is being removed.
Unicore is a 32-bit RISC architecture developed at China’s Peking University. Unicore is an ARM-like architecture. But with Unicore not being too popular and this code not seeing any maintenance for the mainline kernel paired with no upstream compiler support, it’s time to gut the code out of the kernel.
Facebook’s Jens Axboe who oversees the Linux storage/block code and leads the IO_uring efforts summed up the changes for Linux 5.9 as “hardening the code and/or making it easier to read and fixing [bits].” There is though a big change and that is proper async buffered reads support. That work was previously covered but didn’t end up getting pulled into Linux 5.8 due to a branching difference but is now ready to go with Linux 5.9. The async buffered reads support for IO_uring has some nice performance advantages and lower CPU usage while also working its way off KThreads for the fast code path once the async buffered write support is in place.
Linux kernel developers are working on tightening up the access around GPL-only kernel symbols and kernel shims that interface with proprietary kernel modules. This latest work is being driven by code recently put out for improving the Linux networking code where NVIDIA’s proprietary kernel driver would be the initial consumer.
Sent out last month by Facebook’s Jonathan Lemon was some interesting work on DMA zero-copy support between network adapters and a GPU device for the data path while the protocol processing is still handled on the host CPU. The host CPU also would support zero-copy send/receive.
After being worked on a number of months, the FSCRYPT file-system encryption framework for the Linux kernel is enabling inline encryption support with the 5.9 kernel.
Inline encryption for FSCRYPT has been in the works for a number of months spanning multiple cycles while now all the stars have aligned for Linux 5.9. Leveraging inline encryption with Linux 5.9 means using the BLK-CRYPTO support merged the previous cycle and in turn being able to benefit from inline encryption hardware found on most mobile SoCs with their UFS/eMMC host controllers.
This FSCRPYT inline encryption support has been worked on by Google presumably with a focus on Android smartphones for better encrypted storage performance.
Vulkan 1.2.149 is out today and its lone new extension is yet another addition to the Vulkan API for helping translation layers like DXVK map other graphics APIs on top.
Vulkan has been quite welcoming of additions to help run graphics APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D on top of it. With today’s release of Vulkan 1.2.149 there is another addition to help in that multi-project effort and it’s VK_EXT_4444_formats.
libinput 1.16.0 is now available.
No significant changes since the second RC, so here's slightly polished RC1
announcement text.
This has been a long cycle, mostly because there weren't any huge changes on
the main development branch and a lot of the minor annoyances have found
their way into the 1.15.x releases anyway.
libinput now monitors timestamps of the events vs the current time when
libinput_dispatch() is called by the compositor. Where the difference
*may* result in issues, a (rate-limited) warning is printed to the log.
So you may see messages popping up in the form of
"event processing lagging behind by XYZms, your system is too slow"
This is a warning only and has no immediate effect. Previously we would only
notice (and warn about) this when it affected an internal timer. Note that
these warnings do not show an issue with libinput, it shows that the the
compositor is not calling libinput_dispatch() quick enough.
The wheel tilt axis source was deprecated. No device ever had the required
udev properties set so we should stop pretending we support this.
Touchpads now support the "flat" acceleration profile. The default remains
unchanged and this needs to be selected in the configuration interface. The
"flat" profile applies a constant factor to movement deltas (1.0 for the
default speed setting).
Events from lid or tablet-mode switches that are known to libinput as being
unreliable are now filtered and no longer passed to the caller.
This prevents callers from receiving those known-bogus events and having to
replicate the same heuristics to identify unreliable devices that libinput
employs internally.
A new "libinput analyze" debugging tool is the entry tool for analysing
various aspects of devices. Right now the only tool is
"libinput analyze per-slot-delta" which can be used to detect pointer jumps
in a libiput record output. This tool used to live elsewhere, it was moved
to libinput so that reporters can easier run this tool, reducing the load on
the maintainers.
The tools have seen a few minor improvements, e.g.
- "libinput record touchpad.yml" does the right thing, no explicit --output
argument required
- libinput measure touchpad-pressure has been revamped to be a bit more
obvious
- libinput measure touchpad-size has been added (as replacement for the
touchpad-edge-detector tool)
- libinput measure fuzz has been fixed to work (again and) slightly more
reliable
The libinput test suite has been fixed to avoid interference with the
currently running session. Previously it was virtually impossible to work
while the test suite is running - multiple windows would pop up, the screen
would blank regularly, etc.
And of course a collection of fixes, quirks and new bugs.
As usual, see the git shortlog for details.
Diego Abad A (1):
FIX: typo on building documentation
Peter Hutterer (2):
test: semi-fix the switch_suspend_with_touchpad test
libinput 1.16.0
git tag: 1.16.0
Libinput 1.16 is out this morning as the newest feature update to this input handling library used by the Linux desktop on both X11 and Wayland.
Libinput 1.16 has been baking for a while as there haven’t been many features to expedite the release. Among the new features is a warning if your system is too slow. If there are differences in the timestamps between the input events and the time that the libinput dispatch function is called by the compositor, a warning over “the system is too slow” will appear in the logs to inform the user of the input event processing is lagging.
RedNotebook is a modern desktop journal. It lets you format, tag and search your entries. You can also add pictures, links and customizable templates, spell check your notes, and export to plain text, HTML, Latex or PDF. RedNotebook is Free Software under the GPL.
[...]
RedNotebook 2.20 changelog:
Fix drag and drop (#492, @dgcampea).
Fix external previews (Eric Chazan).
Document how to change the theme on Windows (#487, Ankur A. Sharma).
Allow symlinking to ./run script (#509).
Many people who regularly use computers suffer from eye strain and fatigue. Looking at a monitor for a long time can strain your eyes or can make any other problems you are having with your eyes seem more apparent.
There are lots of simple steps you can take to reduce eye strain and fatigue. These include adjusting the brightness, contrast settings, and text size displayed, as well as minimizing glare, and ensuring your room has proper lighting. Taking regular breaks is also very important. This is where Stretchly is designed to help.
Stretchly is a cross-platform open source app that reminds you to take breaks when working with your computer.
cPanel web hosting is easier to set up and manage. Users who are not familiar with Linux servers can easily maintain servers using cPanel, a GUI control panel for web servers.
Buying shared hosting or managed web hosting can provide users a control panel. But both types of hostings have their own advantages and disadvantages. Read this article to know things to remember before buying web hosting.
In this Linux cPanel series, I am discussing the best open source alternatives of cPanel. Most of the open-source alternatives of cPanel are free.
Today in this article, I am going to talk about Vesta Control Panel, a free and open-source control panel for Linux servers. Vesta CP can be deployed on Red hat/CentOS (version 5,6,7), Debian (version 7, 8, 9), and Ubuntu (version 12.04 – 18.10).
Game porter and software developer Ethan Lee announced the 20.08 releases of both of FNA and FAudio, as work continues on the newer FNA3D.
What are they? FNA is an accuracy-focused XNA4 reimplementation for open platforms with it being used by a ton of games including the likes of: Celeste, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Full Metal Furies, Owlboy and a plenty more. While FAudio is accuracy-focused XAudio reimplementation for open platforms, which is used for a number of games and also by the Wine / Proton compatibility layers.
For FNA, it was quite a quiet release as the majority of their work is going into bringing up FNA3D which will soon be merged in with FNA directly. They simply upgraded to the new FAudio, removed some dllmaps for iOS/tvOS due to macOS ARM and removed some dead code elsewhere in ‘ModelReader’ which ‘should mildly improve load performance’.
Wine Staging, the highly experimental area where all the latest (and often not “greatest”) code comes in for Wine testing now has a Patreon so you can support it directly.
It’s perhaps not as well known as the normal Wine project or Valve’s fork with Proton but it is an important project itself. Containing a set of patches that are applied on top of the main development branch of Wine, the idea is to provide experimental features and fixes faster in a way that users can grab and test that eventually get upstreamed into the main Wine project once they’re ready.
Space Haven is an Early Access game that blends together elements of FTL, RimWorld and other such building and survival sims to create a promising mix of space exploration and people management.
After entering Early Access in May following a successful Alpha period for backers of their Kickstarter campaign, Bugbyte continue to expand the gameplay systems. It wasn’t enough to deal with space pirates, ship to ship combat and aliens that pinch your crew members and put them into cocoons—you now have to deal with Space Hazards like: Solar Flares, Micrometeoroids, Siren Worlds (they mess with crew brains) and Nebulae to add a little more variety to your exploration.
Something of a recent discovery is Aloof, an in-development puzzle-battler somewhat inspired by the likes of Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and Puyo Puyo Tetris with its own unique take on it.
According to the full description of the game, you summon and defend small islands all the while you build combos against your opponent. What makes it different is that the puzzle pieces don’t descend by themselves and you can even move up, you can also flush them all away. They said the game ‘ isn’t about zoning out. It’s about responding to your opponent, taking your time to think and move fast when you can’.
[...]
Sounds like it’s going to be ridiculously feature-filled too. They’re planning a full campaign that can be played solo or in co-op, there’s going to be local and online competitive multiplayer, the ability to play it offline while also searching for an online opponent, multiple win conditions and of course full support of Linux.
Sounds like it’s going to be ridiculously feature-filled too. They’re planning a full campaign that can be played solo or in co-op, there’s going to be local and online competitive multiplayer, the ability to play it offline while also searching for an online opponent, multiple win conditions and of course full support of Linux.
The original Half-Life turned out to look and feel rather different than what originally shown before release. This fan project seeks to give players a different experience more inline with that original design.
[...]
I’ve tried the above instructions and can report that things work rather well. I was able to play for a while and progress without any issues. Now, Absolute Zero isn’t quite finished yet and the game is still unbeatable as of the time of writing. It’s the mod team’s hope that things will be done by the end of October. Still, speaking as someone who has played through Half-Life a few times, it’s really interesting to see this alternate visiion for the game.
Coming from the same team as We Need To Go Deeper, Deli Interactive LLC have announced Camp Canyonwood which looks like it puts a quirky spin on building up a summer camp.
What can we expect from it? Well, you’re going to be responsible for building the camp and looking after your visitors. Their fun, education and safety lies in your hands and things might go bump in the night. I’m getting a bit of a Don’t Starve vibe from this.
[...]
Speaking to the developer on Steam, they confirmed it will be supporting Linux.
This diary explains more about character portraits and how they change over time. It sounds pretty fun and has more depth to it than the previous game, with each character having a DNA stream that determines their appearance based on their parents. Character features change over time due to age too along with their lifestyle and any diseases. It also goes over changes made to the vassal contract system and how user testing has helped along development.
[...]
At release I’m hoping to take a look at it, from the perspective of someone new to it who struggled a lot with the previous entry. Thanks to the effort Paradox has put into the tutorial and help systems, it sounds like it won’t be so overwhelming to get into it.
Egosoft are continuing to improve and expand their detailed space trading, exploration and combat sim X4: Foundations.
Along with a bunch of gameplay improvements, one of the highlights of this release is the overhaul of the crew transfer feature. Instead of needing to make an order and having the ships meet up, it’s been streamlined to be less of an annoyance. Now you can do it anywhere, along with it being possible to move any amount of people as they will use crew capsules to move around independently. Once you start getting far into the game and build up a little empire, this sounds like it will be much nicer.
A new feature of QML Online is already available, allows it to run in any site/blog with minimal js/html code!
Hopefully, our experience with QML examples, tutorials and documentation should change in the near future.
Coming to my project, it is almost complete apart from some finalisation related stuff that still is remaining. Perhaps, some review changes that my mentors shall give me once my current patch has been reviewed are also remaining.
[...]
I don’t know why, but I always seem to have this feeling at the back of my head that something will come up that will be tough to handle and ruin my project. Though this has been happening even before GSoC started. That scares me a bit
Anyways.
By discussing with my mentor how could the best approach be, I found out that the notifications were already grouped on the code level, but these groups were not being represented in the UI.
In the code, there’s a class named Source, which is responsible for the group. They handle the info’s about the app that have sent us any notification and store them.
There’s also a class named Notification, that creates a single notification, with title, banner, and has optional parameters such as playing sounds etc.
Each Source has an array property that contains its notification objects, which gives us the groups.
[...]
Lastly, I’d like to talk about GUADEC which this year was completely remote.
This was my first talk at a conference, in a language that I’m not a native speaker. I want to thank my mentor and the GNOME community for creating a comfortable environment for the interns to talk about their projects.
GNOME could soon be playing nicely with deep color displays that aim to offer more realistic color reproduction thanks to the greater bit depth for each color component.
Canonical’s Daniel van Vugt who has led many of the Ubuntu GNOME performance optimization initiatives and countless bug fixes for GNOME since Ubuntu switched back to using it as the default desktop is now looking at plumbing deep color support. Daniel recently has been working on better graphics clock frequency scaling as part of optimizations to improve the GNOME 4K experience particularly when using Intel graphics. The latest area he started dabbling with is deep color support.
I’ve been selected as a student developer at Pitivi for Google Summer of Code 2020. My project is to create an object tracking and blurring feature.
In this post, I introduce a feature in development which allows the user to track an object inside a video clip.
Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the Be Operating System (BeOS), Haiku aims to be fast, efficient, simple to use, and easy to learn. It is specifically geared toward desktop usage and maintaining a responsive desktop environment.
The Haiku project has been, to date, in perpetual development mode. Which is to say the releases to date have been labelled as being alpha or beta releases. I mention this because while the version label is R1 beta 2, the platform should probably be regarded a relatively mature project with the benefit of nearly 20 years of development behind it.
The R1 beta 2 release includes a number of new features such as improved font scaling and HiDPI support, along with the ability to work with mouse devices that offer more than three buttons. More applications have been ported and are now available through the project’s software manager. The installer has mostly remained the same, however users can now exclude the installation of optional packages while setting up Haiku. New driver support has been added and there are some new options for keeping the Deskbar (a sort of combined desktop panel and system tray) out of the way.
The project’s latest release is available in 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x86_64) builds. There are also builds for ARM, PowerPC, m68k, and SPARC architectures, however these builds are considered to be unsupported. I downloaded the 64-bit build which is available as a 955MB ZIP file. Unpacking the ZIP file presents us with a 1,108MB (1GB) ISO file we can write to optical media or a thumb drive.
DragonFlyBSD has been generally working out well for AMD Zen systems sans a few motherboard specific woes, but now is getting even better thanks to importing some new drivers from FreeBSD.
Most exciting is the amdtemp driver now being imported from FreeBSD to DragonFlyBSD. This driver allows for temperature monitoring on AMD Family 0Fh, 10h, 11h, 12h, 14h, 15h, 16h, and 17h processors. The AMD Family 17h support covers Zen 1 as well as Zen 2, including the likes of Threadripper and EPYC.
Also imported from FreeBSD is the amdsmn driver. This driver is for the AMD System Management Network (SMN) support on AMD Zen systems.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of KDE NEON 20200723 and some of the applications pre-installed.
The openSUSE DVD comes with a large collection of software packages, which include the GNOME, KDE, Xfce, MATE desktops and much more. The installer will allow you to select the desktop environment you want during the installation, beside any other packages you may desire.
[...]
Overall, the openSUSE 15.2 distribution is a good release, as it ever was. We recommend upgrading to the new version or installing it on a fresh hardware if you are willing to transfer to the openSUSE world.
One can also give a word about how awesome the available documentation for openSUSE is; You can search in their wiki, for any information you desire and you’ll probably find it in no time.
The Call for Nominations for the openSUSE Ad-hoc Board Election ended last night. The Election Committee received the nominations of two openSUSE members and both nominees accepted to run as candidate for this election.
The names of the candidates are:
Pierre Böckmann
Stasiek Michalski
After navigating the streets of Manhattan and finding a parking spot, we walked down the block to what turned out to be a large bookstore. You’ve seen bookstores like this on TV and in the movies. It looks small from the outside, but once you walk in, the store is endless. Walls of books, sliding ladders, tables with books piled high—it was pretty incredible, especially for someone like me who also loves reading.
But in this particular store, there was something curious going on. One of the tables was surrounded by adults, awed and whispering among each other. Unsure of what was going on, we approached. After pushing through the crowd, I saw something that drew me in immediately. On the table, surrounded by books, was a small grey box—the Apple Macintosh. It was on, but no one dared approach it—no one, that is, except me. I was drawn like a magnet, immediately grokking that the small puck-like device moved the pointer on the screen. Adults gasped and murmured, but I ignored them all and delved into the unknown. The year was, I believe, 1984.
Somewhere around the same time, though likely a couple of years before, my father brought home a TI-99/4A computer. From what I remember, the TI had just been released, so this had to be somewhere around 1982. This machine served as the catalyst for my love of computer technology and was one of the first machines I ever cut code on.
My father tells a story about when I first started programming. He had been working on an inventory database, written from scratch, that he had built for his job. I would spend hours looking over his shoulder, absorbing everything I saw. One time, he finished coding, saved the code, and started typing the command to run his code (“RUN”). According to him, I stopped him with a comment that his code was going to fail. Ignoring me, as I was only five or six at the time, he ran the code, and, as I had predicted, it failed. He looked at me with awe, and I merely looked back and replied, “GOSUB but no RETURN.”
What if you needed to provide authentication to several microservices that were written in different languages? You could use Red Hat Single Sign-On (SSO) to handle the authentication, but then you would still need to integrate each microservice with Keycloak. Wouldn’t it be great if a service could just handle the authentication flow and pass the user’s details directly to your microservices? In this article, I introduce a service that does just that!
It’s not a new idea that organizations worldwide need and seek qualified IT professionals with the skills and knowledge needed to use Red Hat products successfully. And for the last two decades, Red Hat Training and Certification has provided a way for them to assess, train and validate skills. Last year, we launched preliminary exams as a way to provide experience with our hands-on approach to testing to a broader audience and to explore making this approach more widely available as online exams. This year, the COVID-19 pandemic has meant temporary site closures, lockdowns and social distancing. Going to a test center to take an exam is not an option in many places. Even if it is, candidates for certification might be understandably reluctant to visit a center to take an exam. With that in mind, Red Hat has accelerated our efforts, and I am very pleased to announce that several of our certification exams are now available remotely.
Condis Supermarcats is a family-owned supermarket chain that is a household name in central and northern Spain. The company operates more than 400 physical storefronts, ranging from hypermarkets to local convenience stores, and a growing digital business.
In 2017, Condis began several high-profile projects as part of its digital transformation efforts, including launch of a new customer resource management (CRM) system and a customer-facing mobile application. To support these projects, Condis’s IT team sought to better integrate the company’s IT infrastructure with microservices.
“Our architecture was not cloud-integrated or suited for the agile approach we needed to develop our digital business,” said Sergio Murillo, Technology Development and IT Operations Manager at Condis. “For example, each Condis store has access to a customer database, centralized using a cloud-based tool. However, we needed this data exchange to be integrated seamlessly with our CRM.”
Debian 10 “buster” received a fifth update. In addition to the usual security and bug fixes, this point release addresses Debian Security Advisory: DSA-4735-1 grub2. This security update covers multiple CVE issues regarding the GRUB2 UEFI SecureBoot ‘BootHole’ vulnerability.
After more than two years in development, BunsenLabs Linux Lithium release has finally hit the stable channel today for this OpenBox-based and lightweight Debian GNU/Linux derivative, a continuation of the acclaimed CrunchBang Linux.
The BunsenLabs Team is proud to announce today the official release of BunsenLabs Lithium, a new major release based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system series.
As expected, BunsenLabs Linux Lithium is packed with lots of goodies, including the ability to install the distribution on newer computers that use Secure Boot, a new look and feel featuring a brand-new dark theme with custom-colored Papirus icons by default, and more modularity for user to fully customize the distro to their needs.
For example, users can now replace the default Openbox window manager with another desktop environment and keep many of the settings, such as menu item, key bindings, and autostarted apps. Also, the BunsenLabs session now uses jgmenu by default and can coexist with a default Openbox or Xfce sessions.
[...]
The BunsenLabs Linux Lithium release is available for download right now from the official website as a 64-bit live ISO and a minimal, CD-sized 32-bit non-PAE version, which can be extended to full-size by installing the bunsen-meta-all or bunsen-meta-lite metapackages.
I told you I love new projects, right? Well, today I have a brand-new distro that I’d like to introduce you to, called Super Container OS, and targeted at developers who want to run containerized apps.
The Super Container OS developer Harshad Joshi pinged me earlier on Twitter earlier to check out his new distro, which he says it’s a live and installable Linux OS that comes pre-loaded with a container engine powered by Docker and systemd-nspawn.
Based on the Bufferstack.IO computing platform, Super Container OS wants to be the ideal tool for those who want to create, deploy and distribute apps that can run on IIoT Gateways, servers, or even virtual machines.
Now that Container Linux from CoreOS is no more, I guess we need more alternatives. Super Container OS is based on the latest Debian GNU/Linux 10 “Buster” operating system series and aims to make deploying, running and managing containerized applications easier by using OS level virtualization.
Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), which extend the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor.
In July, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability – I was assigned 25.25h for LTS (out of 30 max; all done) and 13.25h for ELTS (out of 20 max; all done).
We shifted suites: welcome Stretch LTS and Jessie ELTS. The LTS->ELTS switch happened at the start of the month, but the oldstable->LTS switch happened later (after finalizing and flushing proposed-updates to a last point release), causing some confusion but nothing major.
This is another incarnation of the software development progress for the Librem 5. This time for June 2020 (weeks 23-26). Some items are covered in more detail in separate blog posts at https://puri.sm/news. The idea of this summary is to have a closer look at the coding and design side of things. It also shows how much we’re standing on the shoulders of giants reusing existing software and how contributions are flowing back and forth between upstream and downstream projects. This quickly gets interesting since we’re upstream for some projects (e.g. calls, phosh, chatty) and downstream for others (e.g Debian, Linux kernel, GNOME). So these reports are usually rather link heavy pointing to individual merge requests on https://source.puri.sm/ or to the upstream side (like e.g. GNOME’s gitlab).
Open-source is not just a license or a code-based that left free on an online repository, It’s a complete concept which comes with several advantages. Moreover, the most advantage you can get from Open-source is beyond the open-code it’s FREEDOM; freedom to use or re-shape it as you see fit within your project commercial or otherwise, and that depends on the license of course. You are free from the headache of license conflict legal problems but also from the dilemma of dealing with restrections and limitations which come with property licenses.
You are free from the system lock-in schemes, furthermore, you own your data, and freedom to customize the software as your structure requires and workflow demands.
The Community:
The Open-source project gains a powerful community as they gain users, the community users vary between advanced users, end-users, developers and end-users on decision-making level.
Many of the community users are providing quality inputs from their usage and customized use-case and workflow or test-runs, Furthermore, they always have something to add as new features, UI modification, different usability setup, and overall introducing new workflows and tools, and That’s what makes the progress of the open-source different than non-free solutions.
While, Good community means good support, The community is a good resource to hire advanced users, developers, and system experts. It also provides alternative options when hiring developers. Unlike non-free software which are not blessed with such communities and where the options there are limited, The rich open-source community provides rich questions and answers sets that contributed by users from all around the world.
Higher education value for the in-house team
The open-source concept itself provides educational value, I owe most of what I know to open-source communities.The access to the source code and open-channels communication with the core developers is the best educational value any developer can get.
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.
The Rust team is announcing a new version of Rust, 1.45.2. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
This is the first part of a blog post series that will allow you to understand how Firefox implements Web Security fundamentals, like the Same-Origin Policy. This first post of the series covers the architectural design, terminology, and introduces core interfaces that our implementation of the Same-Origin Policy relies on: nsIPrincipal and nsILoadinfo.
July was an action-packed month for the WordPress project. The month saw a lot of updates on one of the most anticipated releases – WordPress 5.5! WordCamp US 2020 was canceled and the WordPress community team started experimenting with different formats for engaging online events, in July. Read on to catch up with all the updates from the WordPress world.
Public education in the U.S. has been under severe attack for many years now, thanks to the dominance of neoliberal thinking and policies across the societal spectrum. However, the coronavirus pandemic has sparked a new crisis in the nation’s public education system as a result of having created huge holes in school budgets, especially in high-poverty areas. Yet, there are ways to prevent the collapse of the public education system in the U.S., if there is a will to do so. And the rescue can come directly through the power of the Federal Reserve, according to leading progressive economist Gerald Epstein, professor of economics and co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. In this exclusive interview for Truthout, Epstein discusses how the COVID-19 crisis has exacerbated funding deficits for public education and how the Federal Reserve can step in to save schools.
GNU Linux-libre 5.8-gnu cleaning-up scripts, cleaned-up sources, and
cleaning-up logs (including tarball signatures) are now available from
our git-based release archive git://linux-libre.fsfla.org/releases.git/
tags {scripts,sources,logs}/v5.8-gnu.
Tarballs and incremental patches are still getting compressed; when
ready, they are all going to be at published along with patches at
<https://www.fsfla.org/selibre/linux-libre/download/releases/5.8-gnu/>.
There haven't been any changes to the deblobbing scripts since 5.8-rc7
last weekend.
This was quite a big release. New drivers that required cleaning up
were for Atom ISP Video, MediaTek 7663 USB and 7915 PCIe and Realtek
8723DE WiFi, Renesas PCI xHCI, HabanaLabs Gaudi coprocessor, Enhanced
Asynchronous Sample Rate Converter, Maxim Integrated MAX98390 Speaker
Aimplifier, Microsemi ZL38060 Connected Home Audio Processor, and I2C
EEPROM Slave. Drivers for Adreno GPU, HabanaLabs Goya coprocessor, x86
Touchscreen, vt6656 and btbcm, and various documentation files needed
adjustments to their cleaning-up details.
I've also made some adjustments to enable the use of deblob-check to
verify full tarballs using Python or Perl rather than GNU awk or GNU
sed. The order of regexp alternatives matters in Python and Perl
regular expression engines, and some constructs lead to exponential
backtracking. Those that affected looking for blobs (e.g. -l, -B) have
been fixed, so now checks for blobs without context make steady progress
even with backtracking engines; GNU awk is still tens of times faster,
but Python and Perl will run to completion with as little as a few tens
of MBs, whereas GNU awk takes a couple of GBs. The details are in
comments in deblob-check, under 'top mem'.
GNU sed, that long ago was fastest and leanest, was retested, and
verified to now explode to a couple of tens of GBs of memory use,
running some 4x slower than GNU awk. Maybe that's something that GNU
sed developers would like to look into and see whether there's something
wrong in their code, or in ours?
As for deblob-check -C, that still won't run to completion on full Linux
tarballs when using the Python or Perl engines. There's presumably
still something involving exponential backtracking in the context
patterns. Alas, I haven't got as far as fixing those in time for this
release. This is something that contributors with some regexp
knowledge, or interest in learning, might be able to help with, without
getting into the innards of our deblobbing monster scripts. Please get
in touch if you'd like to help.
Another thing I could use some help with is some means to avoid
introducing regexps prone to exponential backtracking when using perl or
python. I imagine there might be some code that identifies common
pitfalls, that we might be able to use, but my web searches were
unfruitful.
For up-to-the-minute news, join us on #linux-libre of irc.gnu.org
(Freenode), or follow me (@lxoliva) on Twister <http://twister.net.co/>,
Secure Scuttlebutt, GNU social at social.libreplanet.org, Diaspora* at
pod.libreplanetbr.org or pump.io at identi.ca. Check the link in the
signature for direct links.
Be Free! with GNU Linux-libre.
What is GNU Linux-libre?
------------------------
GNU Linux-libre is a Free version of the kernel Linux (see below),
suitable for use with the GNU Operating System in 100% Free
GNU/Linux-libre System Distributions.
http://www.gnu.org/distros/
It removes non-Free components from Linux, that are disguised as
source code or distributed in separate files. It also disables
run-time requests for non-Free components, shipped separately or as
part of Linux, and documentation pointing to them, so as to avoid
(Free-)baiting users into the trap of non-Free Software.
http://www.fsfla.org/anuncio/2010-11-Linux-2.6.36-libre-debait
Linux-libre started within the gNewSense GNU/Linux distribution.
It was later adopted by Jeff Moe, who coined its name, and in 2008
it became a project maintained by FSF Latin America. In 2012, it
became part of the GNU Project.
The GNU Linux-libre project takes a minimal-changes approach to
cleaning up Linux, making no effort to substitute components that
need to be removed with functionally equivalent Free ones.
Nevertheless, we encourage and support efforts towards doing so.
http://libreplanet.org/wiki/LinuxLibre:Devices_that_require_non-free_firmware
Our mascot is Freedo, a light-blue penguin that has just come out
of the shower. Although we like penguins, GNU is a much greater
contribution to the entire system, so its mascot deserves more
promotion. See our web page for their images.
http://linux-libre.fsfla.org/
What is Linux?
--------------
Linux is a clone of the Unix kernel [...]
(snipped from Documentation/admin-guide/README.rst)
--
Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker
https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/
Free Software Activist
GNU Toolchain Engineer
He also noted that for the scripts they use in purifying the kernel, a transition is underway for using Python and Perl rather than GNU awk or Sed. GNU Awk is much faster for the GNU Linux-libre purposes but consumes several GB of RAM where as Python/Perl can complete in “a few tens of MBs.” GNU Sed meanwhile appears to be performing slower than in the past for their deblob checking.
Alexandre Oliva announced today the general availability of the GNU Linux-libre 5.8 kernel for those seeking 100% freedom for their personal computers.
Based on the recently released Linux 5.8 kernel series, the GNU Linux-libre 5.8 kernel is here to deblob any proprietary code and drivers to allow anyone who doesn’t want to use proprietary software on their personal computer to install a libre, 100% free kernel.
As you know, Linux kernel 5.8 is one of the biggest releases of all time, so the GNU Linux-libre kernel developers had a lot of work deblobbing new drivers that required cleaning.
Deblobbed drivers include Atom ISP Video, MediaTek 7663 USB and 7915 PCIe, Realtek 8723DE Wi-Fi, Renesas PCI xHCI, HabanaLabs Gaudi co-processor, Enhanced Asynchronous Sample Rate Converter, Maxim Integrated MAX98390 Speaker Amplifier, Microsemi ZL38060 Connected Home Audio Processor, and I2C EEPROM Slave.
GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) is usually the default go-to alternative for anyone looking for Photoshop-level capabilities in a freeware desktop program. It’s not quite as feature-rich as Adobe’s powerhouse, but it comes with an impressive stack of tools nevertheless — and while it can be bewildering for first-timers, it shouldn’t take you too long to learn the ropes.
Thank you to everyone who made this year’s JuliaCon great! As a parting gift, the Julia developers are pleased to announce the release of Julia v1.5.0, the fifth minor release in the 1.x series. Jeff and Stefan put together a blog post highlighting some of the most exciting new features in 1.5. Check it out!
As usual, binaries are available for all of your favorite platforms (Linux, macOS, Windows, and FreeBSD) at https://julialang.org/downloads.
As a minor release, v1.5.0 contains no breaking changes, only new features, performance improvements, and marginal, undisruptive changes in behavior. You can also see the NEWS file for the full set of changes.
Note that like 1.5, like its predecessor 1.4, does not have long term support. As of this release 1.4 has been effectively superseded by 1.5, which means that there will not likely be any further 1.4.x releases. Julia 1.0 is still currently the only long term support version.
We encourage everyone to give it a try. Packages can test with 1.5.0 on CI by specifying 1.5 on Travis, AppVeyor, Cirrus, and GitHub Actions. As always, let us know in the issue tracker if you run into any issues.
Version 1.5 of the Julia programming language has been released. On the Julia blog, Jeff Bezanson and Stefan Karpinski describe the highlights of the release, which includes struct layout improvements for decreasing heap allocations, stabilization of the multithreading API, faster random numbers, changes to the scoping rules in the read-eval-print loop (REPL), and more.
There’s a new bundle that actually looks amazing right now — new O’Reilly books on Python, Java, Go, Rust, and more. I have paper copies of some of these books and love them.
Junio Hamano has announced the availability of Git v2.28. Among the highlights of this release is a change relating to ongoing efforts to remove or avoid offensive and exclusionary language, such as the terms “master” and “slave”…
With another Linked List related task, I am now enjoying it a lot. It also gives me the opportunity to work with Class in Raku. Learning Raku has changed my thinking a big way. The developer inside me is more organised than before. Also doing regular weekly challenge made me think from unit test point of view every time I come up with a solution. In fact, it dictates the design of my solution. Now with the regular Live Video Raku Reviews by Andrew Shitov gave me the insights of others Raku solutions. It is amazing how he break the code into pieces to make it easy to understand. No book can teach you that. You only learn from experience or watching video from Andrew Shitov.
Running [The|Perl] Weekly Challenge also taught me how to manage my spare time. I use my spare time very carefully. Before I would jump to anything that excites me. Last few weeks, I have started playing with Swift programming language. I am enjoying the journey. Please checkout my Swift solution to the Task #1 of Peak Elements.
It seems a recurring complaint that we’re too aggressive on cleaning Python 2 up from packages. Why remove it if (package’s) upstream still supports py2? Why remove it when it still works? Why remove it when somebody’s ready to put some work to keep it working?
I’m pretty sure that you’re aware that Python 2 has finally reached its end-of-life. It’s past its last release, and the current version is most likely vulnerable. We know we can’t remove it entirely just yet (but the clock is ticking!), so why remove its support here and there instead of keeping it some more?
This is best explained on the example of dev-python/twisted — but dev-python/pillow is also quite similar. Twisted upstream removed support for Python 2 at version 20. This means that we ended up having to keep two versions of Twisted — 19 that still supports Python 2, and 20 that does not. What does that means for our users?
Firstly, they can’t normally upgrade Twisted if at least one of its reverse dependencies supports Python 2 and is installed. What’s important is that the user does not have to meaningfully need or use Python 2 in that reverse dependency. It is entirely sufficient that it supports Python 2 and the user is using default PYTHON_TARGETS.
Of course, you could argue that changing the default PYTHON_TARGETS would resolve the problem without having to proactively remove Python 2 from Twisted revdeps. Today, I’m not sure which of the two options is better. However, back when cleanup started changing default PT would involve a lot of pain for the users. We’d have to reenable 2.7 via package.use for many packages (but which ones?) or the users would have to reenable it themselves. But that’s really tangential now.
Idea by Guido van Rossum to bring back the print statement.
This release brings multiple improvements for dealing with type hints as well as improvements in the Mypy integration in PyDev:
The MYPYPATH can now be set automatically to the source folders set on PyDev and the –follow-imports flag is set to silent by default (this flag is required because only one file is analyzed at a time in PyDev as failing to do so would end up showing errors for other files).
Natural language processing (NLP) is a specialized field for analysis and generation of human languages. Human languages, rightly called natural language, are highly context-sensitive and often ambiguous in order to produce a distinct meaning. (Remember the joke where the wife asks the husband to “get a carton of milk and if they have eggs, get six,” so he gets six cartons of milk because they had eggs.) NLP provides the ability to comprehend natural language input and produce natural language output appropriately.
Computational linguistics (CL) is the larger field of linguistic comprehension and modeling. NLP is a subset of CL that deals with the engineering aspects of language understanding and generation. NLP is an interdisciplinary domain that touches on multiple fields including artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), mathematics, and statistics.
This week we welcome Or Carmi (@liiight) as our PyDev of the Week! Or is the creator and maintainer of notifiers.
Today we’ve issued 3.0.9 and 2.2.15 bugfix releases.
The release package and checksums are available from our downloads page, as well as from the Python Package Index. The PGP key ID used for this release is Mariusz Felisiak: 2EF56372BA48CD1B.
The Django framework comes with a powerful administrative tool called admin. You can use it out of the box to quickly add, delete, or edit any database model from a web interface. But with a little extra code, you can customize the Django admin to take your admin capabilities to the next level.
The infinite scrollbars and newsfeeds of the web just keep going, going, going, going, going, going, going and going until the user gives up to do something elses. There’s no consideration of how the content is discovered, and why the content is discovered, it’s just an endless feed of noise. One subtle change in your worldview after another, just from the headlines alone. Not to mention the endless torrent of advertising.
However, I think there may be a way out, a kind of detox from the infinite scrolling, newsfeeds, notifications and the like for the internet, and I think a good step towards that is the Gemini [2] protocol.
Both version will have same page count (72 pages), premium quality paper, glossy colorful cover and large size 8.5×11 inch size (~ 21,60×28 cm). Compared to all the time invested in it, I would probably need to sell over than 2500 books to start talking about benefits. So, I’ll try to launch a sort of campaign for it to ask to break this number, with a meter I’ll update and weekly blog-post to keep news. It will not be a crowdfunding nor a pre-sale campaign, just a regular sale with what-you-pay-is-whay-you-get. I hope you’ll like this simple concept that I prefer over a classic crowdfunding. I’ll give more details about it on next update.
“A grim sign America lost its grip.”
Coronavirus cases in the U.S. rose by 1.9 million and deaths from the disease by over 25,000 in the month of July, another sign of President Donald Trump’s failure to slow the pandemic.
When police discovered the woman, she’d been dead at home for at least 12 hours, alone except for her 4-year-old daughter. The early reports said only that she was 42, a mammogram technician at a hospital southwest of Atlanta and almost certainly a victim of COVID-19. Had her identity been withheld to protect her family’s privacy? Her employer’s reputation? Anesthesiologist Claire Rezba, scrolling through the news on her phone, was dismayed. “I felt like her sacrifice was really great and her child’s sacrifice was really great, and she was just this anonymous woman, you know? It seemed very trivializing.” For days, Rezba would click through Google, searching for a name, until in late March, the news stories finally supplied one: Diedre Wilkes. And almost without realizing it, Rezba began to keep count.
The next name on her list was world-famous, at least in medical circles: James Goodrich, a pediatric neurosurgeon in New York City and a pioneer in the separation of twins conjoined at the head. One of his best-known successes happened in 2016, when he led a team of 40 people in a 27-hour procedure to divide the skulls and detach the brains of 13-month-old brothers. Rezba, who’d participated in two conjoined-twins cases during her residency, had been riveted by that saga. Goodrich’s death on March 30 was a gut-punch; “it just felt personal.” Clearly, the coronavirus was coming for health care professionals, from the legends like Goodrich to the ones like Wilkes who toiled out of the spotlight and, Rezba knew, would die there.
A dispatch from Bolivia shows the staggering human toll of the military coup, as an incompetent US-backed regime leaves impoverished citizens to die amid a pandemic. In Cuba, meanwhile, the country’s socialized system has saved its population from the worst of Covid-19.
The number of childhood vaccinations during the COVID-19 pandemic has dropped by nearly a fifth in Colorado, potentially putting the state at risk for another public health crisis, state health officials warned Friday.
There was a 19% average drop in vaccinations from mid-March through mid-July when compared to the year prior, officials said in a videoconference about the importance of keeping up with childhood vaccinations.
The decline “puts us at risk for another public health crisis — one in which serious, preventable diseases like measles and pertussis can resurge,” said Dr. Rachel Herlihy, an epidemiologist with the state health department.
[...]
“We don’t want hospital capacity being challenged by these two illnesses at once,” Herlihy said. “We don’t want to go backward in our immunity.”
Based on data pulled prior to local onset of the pandemic, the state health department exceeded its one-year goal to increase the number of kindergartners vaccinated for measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) by June 30. Nearly 4% more children were vaccinated during the 2019-2020 school year when compared to the prior year, bringing the state’s kindergarten rate for that vaccination to 91%.
Measles is highly infectious, with each infected person transmitting it, on average, to 12-18 people. That’s nearly triple the transmission rate for coronavirus. .
Other vaccines saw their rates of use increase for children by between 2.1% and 3.6%, officials said.
The state aims to increase the percentage of kindergartners who receive the vaccine for measles mumps and rubella to 95% by June 2021, officials said.
Like many economists, I was recently delighted to learn my training also makes me an epidemiologist, of sorts. Using these powers for good, I have turned my eye to the role of trade secrets in medical treatments and the implications for the COVID pandemic. Governments are scrambling to fund vaccines and medical research and access the subsequent innovations, ‘access’ that is governed in part by IP law.
Access to medicines and pricing was already a contentious policy area before COVID; pharma has a trust problem. Anti-vaxx and other conspiracy theories abound. In 2014-2015, Martin Shkreli, an investor and pharmaceutical executive, gained notoriety by raising the American price of certain medicines up to a factor of 56, which left a very bitter taste in the public’s mouth. This is the PR stage on which the negotiations for COVID vaccines and treatments will play out.
Some companies with non-medicinal COVID treatments or other innovations, such as medical devices and software code, have been making such innovations freely available. One such effort is the Open COVID Pledge , a Creative Commons-esque approach to licensing patents and copyrights covering COVID technologies. The pledge is lead by illustrious IP notables, including Diane Peters (Creative Commons) and Mark Lemley (Stanford), but it excludes trade marks and trade secrets.
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (ffmpeg, libjcat, mbedtls, tcpreplay, and wireshark-cli), Debian (ark, evolution-data-server, libjpeg-turbo, libopenmpt, libpam-radius-auth, libphp-phpmailer, libssh, ruby-zip, thunderbird, and transmission), Fedora (chromium, clamav, claws-mail, evolution-data-server, freerdp, glibc, java-latest-openjdk, nspr, and nss), Gentoo (libsndfile, pycrypto, python, snmptt, thunderbird, and webkit-gtk), Mageia (botan2, chocolate-doom, cloud-init, dnsmasq, freerdp/remmina, gssdp/gupnp, java-1.8.0-openjdk, matio, microcode, nasm, openjpeg2, pcre2, php-phpmailer, redis, roundcubemail, ruby-rack, thunderbird, virtualbox, and xerces-c), openSUSE (claws-mail, ldb, and libraw), Oracle (firefox), Red Hat (bind, grub2, kernel-rt, libvncserver, nss and nspr, and qemu-kvm-rhev), Scientific Linux (firefox), Slackware (thunderbird), and SUSE (firefox, kernel, and targetcli-fb).
Bitwarden open-source password manager comes at no cost and rated as the best password manager. It provides a multi device sync option and unlimited passwords. Its free version helps in saving identities, credit cards and notes.
The Linux Foundation said today it’s presiding over a new foundation that brings some of the world’s most important open-source security initiatives under a new umbrella.
The newly launched Open Source Security Foundation will host security projects such as the Core Infrastructure Initiative, which was set up in response to the infamous Heartbleed vulnerability discovered in the Open SSL protocol in 2014, and the Open Source Security Coalition, founded by GitHub Inc.’s Security Lab in 2019.
The Linux Foundation, today announced the formation of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF). The OpenSSF is a cross-industry collaboration that brings together leaders to improve the security of open source software (OSS) by building a broader community with targeted initiatives and best practices. It combines efforts from the Core Infrastructure Initiative, GitHub’s Open Source Security Coalition and other open source security work from founding governing board members GitHub, Google, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, NCC Group, OWASP Foundation and Red Hat, among others. Additional founding members include ElevenPaths, GitLab, HackerOne, Intel, Okta, Purdue, SAFECode, StackHawk, Trail of Bits, Uber and VMware.
The initial OpenSSF Technical Advisory Council is backed by stakeholders from GitHub, Google, JP Morgan Chase, IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, and NCC Group. They will be working on enhancing security tooling, security best practices, identifying threats, securing critical projects, developer identity verification, and similar initiatives.
The commissioner also called for continuous review of effectiveness and that “the Government of Canada decommission the app if its effectiveness cannot be demonstrated.” In other words, an independent review has found that the privacy risks associated with the app have been addressed and that it is likely to help reduce the spread of the virus. That was reason enough for me – and hopefully many others – to install it.
In short, this is the current situation:
Data Controllers cannot use Joint Controllers/Processors/Sub-Processors, located in the US or controlled by a US entity, when the invalidated Privacy Shield Agreement is the legal basis used to transfer data to the US
Data Controllers cannot use Joint Controllers/Processors/Sub-Processors, located in the US or controlled by a US entity, when Standard Contractual Clauses are the basis used to transfer data to the US
There may be some US/EU Joint Controllers/Processors/Sub-Processors that can be used but the local Controller (exporter) will need to verify on a case by case basis if they are subjected to US FISA Section 702 and/or Executive Order 12.333.
Microsoft also promised to “ensure that all private data of TikTok’s American users is transferred to and remains in the United States. To the extent that any such data is currently stored or backed-up outside the United States, Microsoft would ensure that this data is deleted from servers outside the country after it is transferred.”
Microsoft would also buy TikTok in Canada, Australia and New Zealand as part of the deal, Microsoft said, adding that it may also “invite other American investors to participate on a minority basis in this purchase.”
Microsoft, which is aiming to conclude talks by Sept. 15, released a statement following a conversation between CEO Satya Nadella and Trump. It said it would ensure that all of the private data of TikTok’s American users is transferred to and remains in the United States.
Microsoft said that if it consummated a deal for TikTok, it would move all data servers covering U.S.-based users to American shores, in a bid to alleviate U.S. policymakers’ concerns that Chinese government officials might be able to track TikTok users or access private messages.
Microsoft said Sunday it is moving forward with talks to buy TikTok after speaking with President Trump, who has threatened to ban the popular video app in the U.S.
“Microsoft fully appreciates the importance of addressing the President’s concerns. It is committed to acquiring TikTok subject to a complete security review and providing proper economic benefits to the United States, including the United States Treasury,” Microsoft said in a statement.
The Q2 financial report does not cover the full month of July, when the ad boycott took place, but Facebook said the first three weeks of July had been “approximately in-line” with the same growth rate, suggesting the boycott had little financial impact.
The campaign—called Stop Hate for Profit—is led by the Anti Defamation League and rights organizations including Color of Change, NAACP and Sleeping Giants.
They allege Facebook values profits over trying to stop the spread of hate content and misinformation; and aim to target Facebook’s main source of revenue: ads.
In the face of criticism, Mayer, the TikTok CEO, announced last Wednesday that the company would publicly release the platform’s code in an effort to push back against “rumors and misinformation” about its handling of user data. Mayer also claimed that any action against TikTok would ultimately harm competition in the social media space.
Your digital rights differ depending on where you live. The European Union (EU), for example, has strict laws pertaining to the collection and use of personal data, as outlined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
According to a comprehensive overview by Matt Burgess in Wired, the “GDPR can be considered as the world’s strongest set of data protection rules, which enhance how people can access information about them and places limits on what organizations can do with personal data.”
Personal data handling is the key to understanding and complying with the GDPR. As Burgess states, it is defined as “information that allows a living person to be directly, or indirectly, identified from data that’s available. This can be something obvious, such as a person’s name, location data, or a clear online username, or it can be something that may be less instantly apparent: IP addresses and cookie identifiers can be considered as personal data.”
Thailand’s deep south conflict has disrupted lives and divided communities for the last 16 years. But a generation of young people, who have come of age amid the violence, hope peace is on the horizon.
Tired of a war they had no part in creating, young men and women from the south’s Malay Muslim and Thai Buddhist communities now speak of breaking down divisions. Many increasingly have a new sense of a shared Thai identity – despite their religious or ethnic differences.
More than 7,000 people have been killed in Thailand’s southern provinces since 2004, when a long-running separatist insurgency re-emerged. Bomb blasts, clashes with security forces, and targeted killings have upended lives in both communities.
The insurgency is pushing for independence or greater autonomy, and to retain the region’s Malay Muslim culture and language. Malay Muslims are a majority in the deep south – the provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat, Yala, and parts of Songkhla – but a minority within Thailand.
Militant attacks, and security forces’ counter-insurgency operations, have kept the region on edge, and continue to kill and injure people from both communities. High-level peace talks have so far failed to produce a tangible result.
Violence continues to simmer in Thailand’s deep south, despite hopes a rare ceasefire called during the coronavirus pandemic would be a stepping stone to peace.
More than 7,000 people have been killed in the slow-burning conflict in Thailand’s southern provinces, where an insurgency pushing for independence or greater autonomy for the region’s Malay Muslim minority was re-ignited in 2004. Although violence has decreased substantially in recent years, bombings, gunfights, and targeted killings still flare.
The Barisan Revolusi Nasional (BRN), the main separatist movement controlling the majority of the conflict’s insurgents, announced a unilateral ceasefire in April, citing the “grave threat” posed by the coronavirus.
To some, the ceasefire is a tentative but rare opportunity.
“For the first time in 16 years of the armed conflict in Thailand’s deep south, there is a glimpse of hope for peace,” said Sunai Phasuk, Thailand researcher for Human Rights Watch.
The breakdown of Syria’s civil documentation system has had a severe impact on people all over the country, but it doesn’t affect all Syrians equally.
After years of war, millions inside the country and abroad find themselves without the paperwork needed to secure their rights: ID cards, passports, marriage and birth certificates, school degrees, conscription papers, and so-called family booklets.
In just a 2C hotter world, according to an analysis of 70 peer-reviewed studies by Carbon Brief:
Seas could rise an average of 56cm, or nearly 2ft.
30 million people in coastal areas could be flooded each year by 2055.
Thirty-seven percent of the population could face a severe heatwave at least every five years.
388 million people could be exposed to water scarcity and 195 million will be exposed to severe drought.
Maize crop yields could fall 9% by 2100.
The global per-capita GDP could fall 13% by 2100.
Isaias was forecast to be near hurricane strength as it approached the Carolinas Monday, just a day after bands of heavy rain from the tropical storm lashed Florida’s east coast.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center issued a hurricane warning from South Santee River, South Carolina, to Surf City, North Carolina, in its 5 a.m. advisory. Tropical Storm Isaias had maximum sustained winds of 70 mph (110 kph) and was expected to strengthen later Monday, forecasters said. A Category 1 hurricane has winds of 74 to 95 mph (119 to 153 kph).
In early June, as protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police went global, American Petroleum Institute CEO Mike Sommers released a statement vowing that America’s most powerful fossil fuel lobbying organization “has zero tolerance for discrimination of any kind.”
On June 29 the Taichung municipality fined the TPC NT$20 million (US$681,863) and persecuted its president, Yang Wei-fu (楊偉甫), as the company insisted several days earlier it would turn on its No.2 generator at the Taichung Power Plant, which the city has still not granted a permit.
On June 30, however, the Environmental Protection Administration (EPA) not only annulled the city’s previous punishment placed on the TPC but said that it would do the same for the new fine.
“We’re in an unprecedented time.”
If an FBI building remains in its current location, Trump is assured that no competing hotel will be built there.
Several months into the COVID-19 pandemic crisis, lower-income families are struggling to pay their energy bills. That’s a big concern during extreme events like summer heat waves, which can be deadly – especially for elderly people, young children, people of color and the poor.
“The House has acted. The Senate must act NOW.”
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California ruled in favor of Trump, whose lawyers argued that the president’s 2018 tweet amounted to an opinion about another user’s post and not a factual claim.
Daniels, whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford, argued that the tweet damaged her reputation by painting her as a liar.
The blog post also says that “the two companies have provided notice of their intent to explore a preliminary proposal that would involve a purchase of the TikTok service in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand and would result in Microsoft owning and operating TikTok in these markets.”
It’s unclear how Microsoft would sever those countries from other areas where TikTok operates, like Europe and Africa. Microsoft also did not commit to undertaking the purchase entirely on its own, saying that the company “may invite other American investors to participate on a minority basis in this purchase.”
It is the powerful, not the masses, who inordinately have the ability to “cancel” individuals for their actions, and that it is the left and those challenging power who consistently suffer the brunt of the consequences.
Our government’s abandonment of the people is sin of the highest order.
It has been almost two months since a Los Angeles Police Department patrol car accelerated into Brooke Fortson during a protest over police violence. She still doesn’t know the name of the officer who hit her or whether that person is still policing the city’s streets. The officer did not stop after hitting Fortson and instead turned around, nearly hitting other demonstrators in the process, and sped off.
If we want to win, we can’t let Trump provoke us into violence.
There may be an actual, thought-out method to his madness.
I am committed to remaining optimistic (at least somewhat), to looking for the best in people.
Over 100 years ago, W.E.B. Du Bois famously predicted that, “The problem of the 20th century would be the problem of the color line.” His prognosis was audacious when he uttered those words, but the sentiment takes on a more ominous warning today. The problem facing the 21st century is the problem of genocide. The enormity of the problem suggests that even terms such as “racial bias” or “racial injustice” are too limiting.
We launched Shadowproof five years ago. Many of you helped us accomplish quite a bit so let’s take a moment to celebrate the impact we’ve had.
Since our last birthday, Shadowproof published 26 articles from 17 freelance journalists. While we published fewer freelance articles than last year, we paid writers greater amounts than in previous years. Members and donors, as well as journalists who contributed work and believed we could provide a solid platform for their reporting, made that possible.
“As always when humanitarian aid in the borderlands is targeted, those who seek care are the ones that face the brunt of these violent escalations.”
Samuel Chu, one of six activists now living overseas who Hong Kong has reportedly issued arrest warrants for under its new national security law, has told VOA he will not stop fighting for democracy for Hong Kong.
According to China’s state television, Chu, an American citizen originally from Hong Kong who has lived in the United States for 30 years, and five other Hong Kongers who have fled the city for political reasons, are wanted by Hong Kong police for allegedly “inciting secession and collusion with foreign forces to endanger national security.”
“The assumption is that policing will stop or prevent sexual violence,” said Simmons, who is also the editor of this year’s Lambda award-winning anthology, “love WITH accountability.” “There is documented evidence that it does not.”
“So why do we rely on the police as the only solution to sexual assault?”
Amid the national protests about racial injustice and policing, the once-extreme demand to “defund the police” has gained traction, with Minneapolis taking steps to remake its police department and other cities, like New York City, pledging to shift some funding away from the police and instead use that money for social services.
Mr Justice Morgan handed down judgment on 22 July 2020 ([2020] EWHC 1968 (Pat)) in relation to two patent infringement actions brought by Lufthansa which were heard together. The first infringement action was against two defendants, Astronics Advanced Electronic Systems and Safran Seats GB Ltd. The second action was against Panasonic Avionics Corporation.
It is likely that the (former) frequent flyers amongst us will already be familiar with the product that is the subject of the patent in suit, EP (UK) 0 881 145 B1, which is for a voltage supply apparatus for providing a supply voltage for electric devices such as computers, consumer electronic devices and chargers in an aeroplane cabin. The intention of the patented invention is to enable an aeroplane passenger to plug his or her personal electronic device directly into a high voltage AC power supply in his or her seat, whilst maintaining a high level of safety. Before the invention, some aeroplane seats had a low voltage DC supply so it was necessary for passengers to use an adapter to plug personal electronic devices into the socket.
In response to Lufthansa’s claims the Defendants, unsurprisingly, counterclaimed that the relevant claims of the Patent were invalid as they were not new and lacked inventive step.
The parties’ experts, Professor Patrick Wheeler of Nottingham University for Lufthansa and Mr Douglas Hay Barovsky of Engineering Systems Inc. for the Defendants disagreed on many points, in particular the identity of the skilled person. Given that the identity of the skilled person was material to a number of other issues in the case, Morgan J resolved this point first, before going on to deal with the other points in issue (namely construction, validity and infringement).
Last week, the Federal Circuit took the opportunity presented in an appeal from judgment on the pleadings in XY, LLC v. Trans Ova Genetics, LC to distinguish claims directed toward a patent-eligible invention from invalidation under the Supreme Court’s imperfectly applied Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank Int’l (2014) test.
The case arose over XY’s assertion of Reissue Patent No. RE46,559 as well as U.S. Patent Nos. 6,732,422, 7,723,116, and 8,652,769 against Trans Ova. The claims of the ’559 reissue patent were directed to improving flow cytometric analysis. As set forth in the opinion, the claimed invention related to “apparatus and methods for real-time discrimination of particles while being sorted by flow cytometry . . . resulting in enhanced discrimination between populations of particles” which could include cells, specifically sperm cells based on whether the sperm carried an X or a Y chromosome. Useful applications included animal husbandry.
[...]
The opinion expressly rejected Trans Ova’s contention (and a basis for the District Court’s decision) that the asserted claims of the ’559 reissue patent were analogous to the claims in Parker v. Flook that were held ineligible because those claims “‘simply provide[d] a new and presumably better method for calculating alarm limit values,’ requiring nothing more than updating an alarm limit—a number—through application of the recited formula” according to the Flook opinion. And the panel further understood there to be a distinction between this case and Flook because “[t]he patent application [in Flook] contained no ‘disclosure relating to the chemical processes at work, the monitoring of process variables, or the means of setting off an alarm or adjusting an alarm system.’” Bringing to mind Judge Lourie’s emphasis on “specificities” in Vanda Pharmaceuticals Inc. v. Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc., the opinion recites in distinguishing Flook the specifically recited steps in the claimed method. The opinion cites in support of these distinctions the Supreme Court’s holding in Diehr that “a process is not unpatentable simply because it contains a law of nature or a mathematical algorithm.” Finally, the panel distinguished these claims from those in Cleveland Clinic Foundation v. True Health Diagnostics LLC, 859 F.3d 1352 (Fed. Cir. 2017), which were held ineligible on Section 101 grounds, because the Cleveland Clinic claims “used a known laboratory technique to observe a previously unknown natural phenomenon,” whereas here the ’559 reissue patent claims were directed toward improving a known laboratory technique using the application of the mathematical formula.
With regard to the claim preclusion issue, the panel agreed with XY that the District Court erred by not comparing the claims of the ’422, ’116, and ’769 patents asserted in this action with the asserted claims in the prior lawsuits. While the District Court recited the proper test (“whether the scope of the patent claims asserted in the 2012 and 2016 lawsuits was ‘materially’ the same”), the Federal Circuit held that the court did not provide the required comparison. “Instead,” according to the panel opinion, “the district court concluded that claim preclusion applied to XY’s ’422 and ’116 patent-infringement allegations simply because (1) these patents issued before XY filed the 2012 lawsuit; and (2) XY’s allegations of infringement ‘address the same, or substantially the same subject matter as previously filed claims and [are] directed at a previously accused product or process,’” citing to the District Court’s ruling on the motion to dismiss. The panel considered the District Court to have concluded, without explanation on the record, that this action was “‘part of the same transaction that prompted the 2012 [l]awsuit,’ because they were ‘related in time, origin, and motivation’ to, and would have been ‘a convenient trial unit’ with, the patents asserted in the 2012 lawsuit.” As for the ’769 patent, which had not issued when the earlier lawsuits were commenced, the District Court believed litigation over this patent to be “a continuation of a patent already in suit” and thus that XY should have moved the District Court in that earlier litigation to amend its complaint to add the ’769 patent. The Federal Circuit consider its precedent, SimpleAir, Inc. v. Google LLC, 884 F.3d 1160, 1165 (Fed. Cir. 2018), to be “materially indistinguishable” from the circumstance here; in that case, the District Court had held separate lawsuits on two related patents involved the same cause of action solely because the two patents shared the same specification and were both terminally disclaimed over another prior patent. The Federal Circuit held that later-asserted patent claims “could provide a larger claim scope to a patentee than earlier-asserted patent claims. According to the Federal Circuit, here “[t]he district court did not even mention the asserted claims of the ’422, ’116, or ’769 patents, let alone analyze their scope as compared to the scope of the patent claims asserted in XY’s 2012 lawsuit,” which comparison was required under its Simple Air decision. On this basis, the Federal Circuit vacated and remanded the case to the District Court for a proper analysis of the similarities and differences of the claims asserted in this action and the prior lawsuits.
This case illustrates hopeful and less hopeful trends in the Federal Circuit’s jurisprudence on Section 101 subject matter eligibility.
Although we know that individual patent examiners can greatly affect an inventor’s chance to (1) get a patent at all and (2) get it in a timely way, there has been very little work determining how examiners are able to either delay or compact prosecution while still maintaining their quotas via the count system. Understanding how examiners work the quota system with very different outcomes can be critical for practitioners trying to understand what sort of responses or claim narrowing they should make. It also has significance for those looking to understand and improve the very process intended to spur invention.
In a previous study, I have shown that there are extreme variations on allowance rates between examiners. For example, in analyzing 10 years of patents from Technology Center 3700 I found that there were approximately 200 examiners from 3700 who had issued over 120,000 patents (approximately 51% of the patents from this Technology Center). In contrast, there was a group of approximately 300 examiners who issued less than 800 patents (less than 1% of the patents from this Technology Center). [See https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1939508]. In this current dataset, I find that not only is there a difference in allowance rates, but there is a significant difference in prosecution times. Fast examiners allow applications in approximately 1.64 years, average examiners in 3.07 years, and slow examiners on average will allow a case in 5.85 years. This delay of over four years (fast versus slow examiners) increases direct costs to applicants in the form of PTO and attorney fees, as well as indirect costs such as reduced growth, sales, and follow-on innovation.
[...]
Not only do slow examiners use more prior art, the sources of prior art differ for slow examiners versus fast and average examiners. Slow examiners employ a rejection strategy based on prior art, with five times as many 102(a/e) rejections and six times as many 103 rejections compared to fast examiners. For 102(a/e) rejections, slow examiners rely on both US patents as well as printed publications, while fast and average examiners rely on US patent applications. Interestingly, for 102(b) rejections all examiners rely more on printed publications and secondarily on US patents. With 103 rejections, examiners also all mainly rely on US patents and, secondarily, on printed publications. Thus, all examiners search and employ prior art from different databases, however, they use the prior art that they find in different ways.
Unsurprisingly, applicants traverse prior rejections from slow examiners at a much higher rate than fast examiners. Specifically, with 102 and 103 rejections, applicants will push back against slow examiners most commonly with a missing elements argument. In contrast, most applicants respond to fast examiner 102 and 103 prior art rejections by simply filing claim amendments. Interestingly, applicants will also push back against 103 rejections from slow examiners by making a “no motivation to combine” argument. This may be because slow examiners use seven times as many references as fast examiners.
Slow examiners also put the brakes on prosecution by filing multiple 112 rejections. Specifically, slow examiners utilize three times as many 112 second rejections, four times as many enablement rejections and seven times as many written description rejections. With slow examiners, applicants use arguments to traverse enablement and written description rejections. In contrast, applicants with fast examiners usually only make claim amendments to traverse enablement or written description rejections.
Practitioners need to understand what type of examiner they have. Understanding and using this data is paramount to help manage client expectations as well as to help create a rational prosecution strategy. I note that all of these data can be accessed through services such as LexisNexis PatentAdvisor® to help determine which examiner you may encounter. This may also be important for patent prosecution strategy since slow examiners may require a strategy that involves an appeal. While fast examiners may require a strategy that involves fewer amendments and more arguments.
Conventional wisdom is now that the Supreme Court will grant certiorari in Arthrex on the questions of (1) whether a PTAB judge is a principal Officer under the U.S. Constitution and if so (2) what result?
[...]
The Federal Circuit is not the first-mover in this situation. The cases remanded to the PTAB on Arthrex grounds have all been administratively stayed pending resolution of Arthrex. And, the US Gov’t has filed an omnibus petition to the Supreme Court.
The case here focuses on Coca-Cola’s trademark registration applications for its beverage products with the ZERO term appended. We’re talking COKE ZERO; CHERRY COCA-COLA ZERO; PIBB ZERO; POWERAID ZERO; etc. Royal Crown argued that the registrations should only be allowed if Coca-Cola disclaimed the term “zero.”
[...]
On remand the TTAB started the process of going through a new study on whether the term is generic. Coca-Cola cut that process short via motion-to-amend its marks to disclaim the term ZERO. This satisfied the TTAB and the oppositions were dismissed.
Crown Royal though was not satisfied and appealed. The company was concerned that Coca-Cola may file new applications or expand the scope of its current marks in some future litigation. Thus, it asked for a reasoned opinion explaining that the ZERO portion was generic. In addition, Crown Royal argued that it was improper under the APA for the TTAB to dismiss the case post-trial based upon this opposed amendment. Rather, the APA calls for a reasoned opinion.
In this second appeal, the Federal Circuit has effectively affirmed the PTAB determination — finding that the appeal is moot because Royal Crown has received the full remedy that it requested.
Earlier in June, Nigeria’s National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) published Amendments to the 6th Edition of the Nigerian Broadcasting Code (NBC Code amendments), after public presentation of the amendments to stakeholders in the broadcast media industry in Nigeria.
The NBC Code amendments provide inter alia for web/online broadcasting, prohibition of agreements in restraint of trade; requirements for acquisition of sports rights; local content requirements and compulsory sub-licensing. The NBC Code amendments have attracted both strong support and criticisms. One of the most debated provisions in the amendments is Article 9 – relating to “anti-competition”.
A few years ago cCloud had millions of monthly users. The IPTV linking service, which offered free access to many premium TV channels, proved to be a big hit. After a combination of legal pressure and a shortage of development support, cCloud has become practically impossible to maintain. As a result, it’s shutting down.
A man who was ordered to pay $32m to the UFC for pirating its events more than six years ago has broken his silence. Steven Messina, previously known online as ‘Secludedly’, says he didn’t pay a penny in damages and angrily insists that the grovelling public apology attributed to him wasn’t his.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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