Popcorn Computers Pocket PC Linux handheld open source design files now available

Even though the Pocket P.C. is still available to preorder priced at $199 the development team at Popcorn Computers have released the open source design files for the handheld Linux computer. The small handheld PC is capable of running Debian 10, Mainline Linux and is compatible with Gadget OS and Buildroot and comes complete with an open source keyboard and LED controller firmware.

“Finally, a handheld Linux device with a high-definition 1080p display and large battery life. Pocket P.C. is your hacker terminal on-the-go. People should be able to use their devices as they want. This is the premise that we based Pocket P.C. on when we began development of this device. This is the device we always dreamed of owning that’s why we made it. In today’s technology lanscape, there are plenty of Android and iOS devices however Linux-based are largely ignored.”

THE ZERO TERMINAL 3: A POP-OUT KEYBOARD LINUX COMPUTER IN YOUR POCKET

The mobile phone revolution has delivered us attractively packaged and convenient computing in our pockets, but without the easy hackability we like in our community. Meanwhile the advent of single board computers has given us affordable super-powerful hardware that can run a very capable GNU/Linux operating system and fulfill all our hackable computing needs. Combine the two though? Plenty have tried, few have succeeded in making something as slick as the former with the open power of the latter. Fine if you like your portable devices to have a cyberdeck vibe, but maybe not something you’d take into the boardrooom. Never fear though, for [N-O-D-E] have the solution, in version 3 of the Zero Terminal. It’s the ultimate in Raspberry Pi based handheld computing, and it resembles a slightly chunky mobile phone.

Elecrow’s new Raspberry Pi laptop is perfect for STEM students

Since launching back in 2012, the Raspberry Pi has proven to be an extremely successful method of miniaturising the PC experience, with sales topping 30 million at the end of 2019.

At just US$35, it’s an extremely affordable way to make your first steps into the world of computer science, allowing you to build a fully functioning computer with relatively little expertise.

However, one of the common complaints about the Raspberry Pi is the maze of wires that you’ll need to connect in order for it to work properly.

Hong Kong-based company Elecrow is hoping to change that with the CrowPi2, a tiny laptop which is making waves on crowdfunding platform Kickstarter. With an initial goal to raise around £15,000, it’s at over £420,000 at the time of writing and growing all the time.

Desktop/Laptop

• Lenovo’s New ThinkPad P53 Is Everything I Want In A Linux Laptop

  This is not a review of the new Fedora-powered ThinkPad P53 which releases later this month. Rather, it’s a story about being spoiled by hardware. It’s a tale about giving a Linux distribution another chance. It’s a subtle admission that maybe, just maybe, we shouldn’t rule out corporate behemoths like Lenovo in our search for the perfect Linux laptop. This somewhat melodramatic introduction is meant to boil down to one bold statement: holy crap, the Fedora-powered ThinkPad P53 is amazing.

Server

• OpenDev 2020: Containers in Production – Day 1

• Linux vs. Windows hosting: What is the core difference?

  If you are having a budget constraint, Linux hosting is always a better option. But if you want to run certain complex applications on your website or web hosting that is specific to Windows, Windows hosting is the solution for you.

  If you are looking for a bulk of free and open-source applications and content management systems such as WordPress to run, it is better that you select Linux hosting.

Audiocasts/Shows

• “Hey, DT. Why Arco Linux Instead Of Arch?” (Plus Other Questions Answered)

  In this lengthy rant video, I address a few questions that I’ve been receiving from viewers. I discuss fake DistroTube accounts on social media, my thoughts on PeerTube, my experience with LBRY, my thoughts on Arco vs Arch vs Artix, and what YouTubers have influenced my life.

• 2020-08-10 | Linux Headlines 186

  elementary OS teases big changes coming in version 6, RetroArch rolls out major search improvements with version 1.9, Microsoft releases Minecraft: Education Edition for Chromebooks, and the new Krita Scripting School website aims to help developers expand the painting application.

Kernel Space

• A “Large Hardware Vendor” Wants A EULA Displayed For Firmware Updates On Linux

  The open-source Fwupd firmware updating utility paired with LVFS as the Linux Vendor Firmware Service has seen explosive growth for vastly improving the BIOS/firmware updating experience on Linux. Many major hardware vendors distribute their firmware updates on LVFS for consumption by Fwupd and more than 17 million firmware files have been served. Now though there is a new “large hardware vendor” willing to distribute their firmware updates this way but they want a end-user license agreement (EULA) added.

  Fwupd/LVFS lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat noted today that “A large hardware vendor wants to join the LVFS, but only on the agreement that every user has to agree to a English-only EULA text when deploying their firmware updates. This is the first vendor that’s required this condition, and breaks all kinds of automated deployment.”

• Linux 5.8 released: Bootlin contributions

  Linux 5.8 was released recently. See our usual resources for a good coverage of the highlights of this new release: KernelNewbies page, LWN.net article on the first part of the merge window, LWN.net article on the second part of the merge window.

  On our side, we contributed a total of 155 commits to Linux 5.8, which makes Bootlin the 19th contributing company by number of commits according to Linux Kernel Patch Statistic.

• SD Times news digest: New Relic and Grafana Lab on open instrumentation, Atlassian TEAM Anywhere, and Linux 5.8 rc-1 released [Ed: No, Linux 5.8 rc-1 released ages ago]

  The Linux working group stated that 5.8 looks to be one of the project’s biggest releases of all time, including a lot of fundamental core work and cleanups, as well as filesystem work and driver updates.

  Within the 5.8 merge window, about 20% of all the files in the kernel source repository have been modified.

  In total, the release includes over 14k non-merge commits (over 15k counting merges), 800k new lines, and over 14 thousand files changed.

• Linux 5.9 HID Has Improvement For Faster Probe/Boot Time

  The HID changes for Linux 5.9 aren’t too many but there are a few worth mentioning for improving input device support on Linux.

• XFS Is Packing Many Improvements With Linux 5.9

  The XFS file-system has many improvements ready for the Linux 5.9 kernel.

  The main XFS feature pull was sent in on Friday for Linux 5.9 and includes a wealth of improvements for this mature file-system…

• Graphics Stack

  • R600 Gallium3D Now Has Compute Shaders Working With NIR

    If you are still rocking a pre-GCN AMD Radeon graphics card on the R600g driver for the HD 2000 through HD 6000 series, you really ought to consider upgrading in 2020, but otherwise at least from the open-source community there continues to be improvements.

  • NVIDIA GeForce are teasing something for August 31, likely RTX 3000

    Ready for your next upgrade? NVIDIA think you might be and they’re teasing what is most likely the GeForce RTX 3000 launch at the end of this month.

    We don’t know what they’re actually going to call them, although they will be based on the already revealed Ampere architecture announced back in May. It’s probably safe to say RTX 3000 for now, going by the last two generations being 1000 and 2000 but NVIDIA may go for something more fancy this time.

BIOS/UEFI

• Boothole GRUB2 bug breaks Secure Boot on Linux and Windows

• Linux GRUB2 bootloader flaw breaks Secure Boot on most computers and servers

  Operating system maintainers, computer manufacturers, security and virtualization software vendors have worked together over the past few months to coordinate a unified response to a vulnerability that allows attackers to bypass boot process integrity verification, one of the key security features of modern computers. The flaw is located in the GRUB2 Linux bootloader, but because of how Secure Boot is implemented, it can be used to compromise the booting process of Windows and other systems as well.

• BIOS Update Dell Latitude E6440 on Linux

  My BIOS was 4 years out of date. I thought it was time to update it. I went to the Dell Support page and noticed that they only had *.exe files available. I sighed and was initially frustrated because my initial supposition was that I was going to have to have a working copy of Windows to do the update. My last Dell Latitude, a D630, the BIOS updates required a lot of fiddling on my part. At the time, I would burn a special FreeDOS CD with the BIOS update EXE on it. I figured I would have to do the same with this computer. The good news is, that is not the case and it could be I am the last person to know this bit of information.

  [...]

  Due to my laziness and inhibition to use Windows caused me to avoid pursuing updating my BIOS. Dell, on newer systems (~2015 and later), have built in a service to perform these updates outside of the operating system and has removed or eliminated your excuses for keeping your system up to date and more secure.

  I am glad I took the time today to figure this out and do the proper thing in keeping my system updated.

Applications

• Byte – music player designed for elementary OS

  I spend an inordinate amount of time listening to music. My favorite pastime is to see an eclectic range of bands, solo artists, and orchestras live. It’s such a life-changing and exhilarating experience. It’s one thing to be sitting at home listening to a CD or watching music videos on TV or on YouTube, but being in the audience, packed out in a stadium or music hall, takes it to another level. But it’s an expensive pastime, and on hold given the current coronavirus pandemic. These days, I’m listening to music from my CD collection which I’ve encoded to FLAC, a lossless audio format.

  Linux is endowed with a plethora of open source music players. And I’ve reviewed the vast majority. But I seem to keep finding interesting music players. Byte is the latest I’ve stumbled across.

  Byte is a GTK-based music player. It was created with the desire to make a good music player for elementary OS. It focuses on two aspects: features and design. Byte isn’t tied to elementary OS; it runs on other Linux distributions. It’s in a fairly early stage of development, with its initial release only back in August 2019.

• Beaker Browser – A P2P Browser for Web Hackers.

  Beaker is a free and open-source web browser built to enable users to publish websites and web apps themselves directly from the browser without having to set up a separate web server or hosting their content with a 3rd party.

  To quote one of the project devs, it has been built to “to give users more control over the Web”. We’ve covered several projects based on similar technology (e.g. PeerTube) but this one has a little more icing on the cake.

  [...]

  The Dat protocol is favoured over HTTP for Beaker for 5 main reasons. It can sync archives from multiple sources; the URLs remain the same even when the archives can change hosts. All updates have checksums; changes are written to an append-only version log, and any archive can be hosted on any device. Although it uses Dat by default, Beaker supports connecting to traditional servers with HTTP so you can equally visit typical websites.

• Darktable 3.2 Open-Source RAW Image Editor Released with Major New Features

  Darktable 3.2.1 is now available and it’s the first major update to the application since the introduction of the 3.0 series. If you’re asking, there wasn’t a 3.2.0 release, nor a 3.1 release. The development team jumped straight to the 3.2.1 version number from version 3.0.2, which you’re probably using right now on your GNU/Linux distribution, because of a last minute bug in the 3.2.0 release.

  But don’t let the version number fool you, because Darktable 3.2.1 is a massive update with lots of goodies for amateur and professional photographers alike. Highlights include support for up to 8K screen resolutions thanks to the complete rewrite of the Lighttable View and the revamped Filmstrip.

• The 10 Best Linux Performance Monitoring Tools

  Do you want to monitor the performance of your Linux system? Are you looking for some powerful performance monitoring tools to help you out? If you agree, it’s your day as we have put together a detailed list of the ten best Linux performance monitoring tools. Performance monitoring tools can help users check on how much system resources are being used and which apps are consuming what percentage of it. This helps the user to properly manage the applications and make sure that the system is in good health.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to set up the NewsFlash RSS feed reader on Linux

• How to Boot your Windows or Linux PC from a USB Drive

• How to install MongoDB Compass on Linux (Ubuntu, Fedora)

• How to Install Apache Cassandra on Ubuntu 20.04

• How to install Bleachbit, a CCleaner Alternative, on Ubuntu 20.04

• Install darktable 3.2.1 On Ubuntu / Fedora / OpenSUSE

• How To Install Slack on CentOS 8

• Easy Motion: How Did I Use Vim Until Now Without This Plugin??

• How to Run Any Linux Distribution Directly from Hard Disk in Ubuntu Using Grub Menu

• How to Boot Raspberry Pi 4 From USB

• How to grant LibreOffice file open permission on Chrome OS

• How to read Lynis reports to improve Linux security

• Monitor System Resources With Bashtop And Bpytop In Linux

• Moving from docker-compose to Podman pods

• How to Access Google Drive on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa)

• Upgrade the Oracle Linux Virtualization Manager KVM Host

• Merging and sorting files on Linux

• How to install KVM on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Headless Server

• How to Install and Configure MongoDB on CentOS 8

• How To Install Tor Browser on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

• Attempt to switch MSI X570 A PRO to Legacy BIOS ( just for fun )

• Getting started with Ansible 09 – Targeting Specific Nodes

• LibreOffice 7.0 Ready to Install via PPA in Ubuntu 20.04/18.04

Games

• Challenging co-op dungeon crawler ‘Barony’ gets Linux Steam and Epic Store crossplay

  Recently, the first-person dungeon crawling roguelike Barony had a bit of an upgrade along with a release on the Epic Store and that came with crossplay.

  “Barony is the premier first-person roguelike RPG with cooperative play. Cryptic items, brutal traps and devious monsters, like those found in classic roguelikes and CRPGs, await you. Conquer the dungeon alone, or gather a perfect party in co-op with iconic and exotic RPG classes.”

• Get ready to beat ‘em up as 9 Monkeys of Shaolin releases in October

  9 Monkeys of Shaolin is an upcoming beat ‘em up from Sobaka Studio, what they claim will mark the “true rebirth of the iconic beat ‘em up genre in vein of old-school video games”.

  We’ve been waiting on this for quite some time now after being announced back in 2018. They’ve now confirmed it will see a release on October 16.

• The ‘Tiny Teams Festival’ on Steam shines a light on micro studios

  Tiny Teams Festival, a little sale and event page went live on Steam recently to showcase a bunch of micro-teams and their games and there’s a few fun picks there.

  Run by Yogscast Games, a YouTube / Twitch group that have turned to publishing indie games. So you could compare this little Steam event to other publisher-focused sales although this includes plenty not published by Yogscast. It’s interesting for us, because smaller teams are what make up a large majority of games supported on Linux. They’re the ones who most need our support too and so it’s nice to highlight some good stuff they make.

• Darkest Dungeon – The Butcher’s Circus due for Linux ‘in the next week or so’

  Red Hook Studios are currently working on the free DLC The Butcher’s Circus and with Season 2 about to release, the Linux (and macOS) versions are just about ready.

  To be clear, Darkest Dungeon is already on Linux but the updates to support this brand new competitive game mode are not. Red Hook Studios have been pretty clear on it for some time that it would come later, and they mentioned in early July about it being close but they wanted to ensure they’re ready for release.

• PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3 gains online play with PSN Emulation

  It seems a very exciting development will be coming to the next release of the PlayStation 3 emulator RPCS3.

  While they haven’t done a blog post to go over their progress since 2019, work is as always ongoing. The main reason they don’t often talk about progress, is simply a lack of people to go over it all and blog about it for them.

  Thankfully though, they do release videos to show off and talk about some of the major progress. One such brand new feature coming is online play via PSN Emulation. That is absolutely huge especially since online features were such a major part of some games.

• Upcoming ‘post-cyberpunk’ RTS NeuroSlicers looks great, Steam page up

  NeuroSlicers is an upcoming in-development real-time strategy game that aims to ‘modernize’ the genre with a ‘post-cyberpunk’ setting and it’s looking slick.

  “Instead of seeing how fast you can click, NeuroSlicers tasks you with how fast you can think. Using intelligent AI-powered units, you are free to make more significant, more strategic decisions that focus on territory control, resource management, upgrading and careful placement of customizable buildings, units and powerful function abilities called Scripts.”

  It’s been quite a long time since we last covered it, while also keeping an eye on their progress. They’ve now announced that their Steam page has finally gone live as they continue their very early testing period. While this ‘pre-alpha’ is currently limited to supporting Windows, they confirmed to GOL on Twitter that a Linux release continues to be planned.

• Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition gets more graphical upgrades

  Beamdog are really starting to put the Enhanced into Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition and showing just how much they care about the classic RPG experiences as a studio.

  A fresh development build for Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition went up recently with a brand new Lighting Engine and the difference it makes is quite ridiculous. They said their aim with this is to “allow much higher quality future content, but also in large to enhance the visual quality of existing content” and since pictures say more than a thousand words they showed quite a few examples.

• RetroArch 1.9.0 is out with video player improvements, UI upgrades and more

  RetroArch is practically the go-to for all your emulation needs under one roof and the project just release the latest major upgrade with RetroArch 1.9.0.

  It seems they’ve continued going over the user interface, with an aim to make everything clearer and more useful. Part of this work went into adding a new “Explore View” for playlists, which lets you search and find content based on criteria like the amount of players, developer or publisher, the system it was released for and much more. This only looks through what you’ve directly added though and the metadata it uses will be improved as time goes on.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KDE neon Rebased on 20.04

    KDE neon is our installable Linux with continuous integration and deployment. It’s based on Ubuntu who had a new Long Term Support Release recently so we’ve rebased it on Ubuntu 20.04 now.

    You should see a popup on your install in the next day or so. It’ll ask you to make sure your system is up to date then it’ll upgrade the base to 20.04 which takes a while to download and then another while to install.

    Afterwards it should look just the same because it’s the same wonderful Plasma desktop.

  • KDE Neon 20.04 is Out, Available to Download Now

    The very appeal of KDE Neon — which doesn’t like to be called a ‘Linux distro’, apparently — is that it doesn’t require you to sacrifice stability in favour of newness, or vice versa as you get both: new versions of KDE Plasma on top of a rock solid, long-term support foundation.

    “KDE neon is our installable Linux with continuous integration and deployment. It’s based on Ubuntu who had a new Long Term Support Release recently so we’ve rebased it on Ubuntu 20.04 now,” Jonathan Riddell says.

  • KDE neon Is Now Based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa)

Distributions

• New Releases

  • EasyOS version 2.3.8 released

    Many changes since 2.3.3!

  • Easy Buster version 2.3.8

    EasyOS versions 1.x are the “Pyro” series, the latest is 1.3. Easy Pyro is built with packages compiled from source using ‘oe-qky-src’, a fork of OpenEmbedded. Consequently, the builds are small and streamlined and integrated. The Pyro series may have future releases, but it is considered to be in maintenance status.
    The “Buster” series start from version 2.0, and are intended to be where most of the action is, ongoing. Version 2.0 was really a beta-quality build, to allow the testers to report back. The first official release was 2.1.
    The main feature of Easy Buster is that it is built from Debian 10 Buster DEBs, using WoofQ (a fork of Woof2: Woof-CE is another fork, used to build Puppy Linux).
    The advantage of Buster over Pyro is access to the large Debian package repositories. That is a big plus.

• BSD

  • GhostBSD 20.08.04 Now Available

    I am happy to announce the availability of GhostBSD 20.08.04. This release comes with kernel, OS and software application updates. We updated the MATE desktop to 1.24.0.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Fedora Nest 2020

    This year Flock did not happen due to COVID-19, and in its place, Fedora Nest happened. After many events I’ve seen going virtual in the last few months, I was skeptical. I was yet to see an acceptable online platform to run events. I was wrong on the platform. Fedora Nest used Hopin , which is by far the best platform for events I’ve seen so far. Don’t get your expectations too high, though, because when I say the best one I’ve seen so far, only means that it is usable, and it does not mean in any way that is on par of real conferences.

    I might be a weird being, but I find traveling relaxing, so I usually add to the joy of the conference the pleasure of traveling. In addition to this, at conferences, I find myself to connect with people – sometimes briefly, sometimes more deeply – and this does not occur in online events. For those reasons, I really hope we will be able to soon go back to in-person conferences.

  • Miroslav Suchý: Nest 2020 – my notes

    This year, we had Nest conference instead of traditional Flock, which has been canceled due to COVID. The conference happened purely remotely over the Hopin video conference. This was good and bad. The good is that we saved a lot on traveling and that it happened at all. It would be bad if it was canceled. The bad part was that I found it hard to focus on the conference. There are too many distractions at home. It was much harder to socialize. And a lot of people had issues either with microphone or internet upload. It was sometimes hard to follow. The conference was organized mostly for US folks, and therefore some sessions were very late in my timezone.

  • Btrfs by default status updates, 2020-08-09

  • Fedora Btrfs Activity Continues – New Options To Control Discard, Compression

    Fedora developers continue embracing the work on making the Btrfs file-system the default for F33 desktop variants. Their latest progress report indicates new installation options being wired up for the Btrfs support.

    A new Anaconda Kickstart install configuration knob is being added for setting the async discard behavior for solid-state drives. This configuration option will simply set the Btrfs DISCARD option to be enabled by default per the /etc/fstab options. They are still weighing whether to make it the default or more than likely that default transition would be next year for Fedora 34.

  • “To be, or not to be,” vulnerable… How customers and partners can understand and track Red Hat security vulnerabilities

    That is the question. Yes, I believe William Shakespeare was thinking about container security when he began Act 3 of Hamlet. He probably scanned his Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) 8 container with multiple vulnerability scanners, and with “the heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks”, noticed each report told him something different. One report said his container had a vulnerability, another indicated the vulnerability was patched, and another didn’t even show the vulnerability. As Hamlet contemplates his fate, it’s no wonder he says: “With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action.” In other words, he rips up the reports and does nothing!

    In many ways our customers are experiencing the same vulnerability inconsistencies as Hamlet. But unlike our hero’s tragic fate, there is some good news: Red Hat is working with independent software vendors (ISVs) to help drive vulnerability consistency for both Red Hat and our partners.

  • Kubernetes and the hybrid cloud with Skupper

    DevNation Tech Talks are hosted by the Red Hat technologists who create our products. These sessions include real solutions plus code and sample projects to help you get started. In this talk, you’ll learn about Kubernetes and the hybrid cloud with Skupper from Ted Ross and Burr Sutter.

• Debian Family

  • Debian-Based Finnix 121 Live Linux Distro Arrives with Goodies for Sysadmins

    In early May, the Finnix developers celebrated the project’s 20th anniversary with the release of Finnix 120, making Finnix one of the oldest LiveCDs for system administrators that’s still maintained and kept up to date with the latest GNU/Linux and Open Source technologies.

    It’s actually good to see people still maintaining older distributions, and the new release, Finnix 121, brings a bag of goodies that include a new base from the Debian Testing repositories, where the Debian Project currently develops the upcoming Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Ubuntu Linux 20.04′s first point release arrives

    As always, this point release includes many updates and security patches. Indeed, it’s mostly a roll-up of existing bug fixes, app updates, performance tweaks, and security patches. Simultaneously, it maintains stability and compatibility with its parent distribution, Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It doesn’t have any major Linux kernel or hardware upgrades. For that, you must wait for Ubuntu 20.04.2, which I expect will be released in early 2021.

    With this release, users who are still running the last long-term version, Ubuntu 18.04, now have an easy, one-step upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04. Most 18.04 users will probably have already seen an announcement letting them know they can smoothly update from one to the other.

  • AMD Ryzen Embedded SBC Review with Ubuntu 20.04

    DFI GHF51 Ryzen Embedded SBC runs about as well in Ubuntu 20.04 as it does in Windows 10. Everything basically works and performs well. Our testing shows AMD Ryzen Embedded R1606G processor to offer slightly better performance than the top of the line Intel Gemini Lake Pentium J5005 processor.

    I also had one of the same issues as in Windows: one Seagate USB hard drive would not work reliability at all with transfer stalled. That’s probably just a hardware incompatibility, as the drive works with other platforms, and other USB storage devices achieve normal performance when connected to DFI SBC. I also noticed some artifacts with one 3D graphics benchmark, but those did not show up in other 3D accelerated programs.

    DFI GHF51 is an impressive piece of hardware as it packs lots of CPU and GPU power in a form factor similar to Raspberry Pi 4 SBC. I’d like to thank DFI for sending a review sample. If you plan to buy in large quantities to integrate the board into your product, you could contact the company via the product page. It’s used to be available as a sample on the company’s DFI-ITOX online store for $378, but it has been taken down since last time.

  • Everything You Need to Know About Linux Ubuntu Server

    As you should probably know, Linux powers the majority of the web we see today. This is mainly because Linux systems are inherently more secure and stable than other systems. There are several types of Linux distributions for powering servers. Some notable ones include Ubuntu, Red Hat, Debian, and CentOS. Ubuntu, in particular, has been enjoying a surge in popularity as a server distro in recent times. In this guide, our editors have outlined why the Linux Ubuntu server is outgrowing many of its competitions. Stay with us throughout this guide to learn why Ubuntu shines as a server distro.

  • Ubuntu 18.04.5 and 16.04.7 LTS Release Candidate ISOs Now Ready for Public Testing

    After last week’s release of Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS as the first point release in the Focal Fossa series, Canonical is now working on new point releases for its long-term supported Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system series.

    Your reaction right now would be like… wait, Ubuntu 16.04.7? Why? Aren’t there only five point releases during the life cycle of an Ubuntu LTS series? Yes, you’re right, Canonical usually bakes only five ISO point releases for each LTS series, but sometime they have to release emergency ISOs because of some nasty bugs.

    It happened last year with Ubuntu 16.04.6 LTS and Ubuntu 14.04.6 LTS (now ESM) to patch a critical security vulnerability in the APT package manager, which allowed attackers to execute code as root or possibly install malicious apps and crash the system.

Devices/Embedded

• Supermicro Launches SuperServer SYS-E100-9W-H Fanless Whiskey Lake Embedded Mini PC

  US-based Supermicro is known for its server products, but the company’s latest SuperServer SYS-E100-9W-H fanless embedded mini PC targets other applications, specifically industrial automation, retail kiosks, smart medical devices, and digital signage.

  The mini PC is equipped with an Intel Core i7-8665UE Whiskey Lake Embedded processor coupled with up to 64GB DDR4 memory, and offers plenty of connectivity options with dual Gigabit Ethernet, eight USB ports, four serial ports, and dual video output with HDMI and DisplayPort.

  [...]

  Supermicro only certified the mini PC with Windows 10, but looking at the OS compatibility matrix for X11SWN-H SBC used inside the mini PC, 64-bit Linux OS like Ubuntu 18.04/20.04, RedHat Enterprise Linux, and SuSE Linux should also be supported. The company also provides SuperDoctor 5 command-line or web-based interface for Windows and Linux operating systems to monitor the system and gets alerts via email or SNMP.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • HSE says fix for Covid Tracker app rolled out to all Android users

  • 8 iPhone and Android photo-editing apps you need to download ASAP

  • Google Adds Smart Compose to Docs, Sheets, And Slides on Android And iOS

  • Poll: Do you use an Android controller for gaming?

  • Get the latest Android update to patch major security flaws

  • Project xCloud Early Access Goes Live On Android Tomorrow

  • Google is readying this long-awaited feature for millions of Android users

  • Google Stadia adds 4K HDR support on Android TV

  • Android TV continues its growth w/ 7,000 apps, 80% more users, more

  • Fix for Covid Tracker app rolled out to all Android users, Google says

  • Android warning: 400 vulnerabilities discovered that could let hackers spy on you

  • Paytm launches portable Android POS device

  • Asus ROG Phone 3 review: Solid contender for best Android phone of 2020

  • Samsung Galaxy Tab S7+ hands-on: Android’s never had a tablet this good

  • Best apps to send and receive money on Android & iPhone

  • Grab yourself WST Snooker for iOS or Android in our latest giveaway

  • New Firefox for Android won’t show full URLs in address bar (just like Chrome)

  • How to safely sideload apps on your Android device

  • Xiaomi Mi MIX 3 5G Android 10 (MIUI 12) update hopefuls receiving new MIUI 10-based security patch (Download link inside)

  • Android 11 will make password autofill much better thanks to keyboard integration

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Photoflare: An Open Source Image Editor for Simple Editing Needs

  When it comes to image editing on Linux, GIMP is the first and obvious choice. But GIMP could be overwhelming if you don’t need advanced editing feature. This is where applications like Photoflare step in.

  Photoflare is an editor that provides basic image editing features with a simple-to-use interface.

  It is inspired by the popular Windows application PhotoFiltre. The application is not a clone though and it has been written in C++ from scratch and uses Qt framework for the interface.

  The features include cropping, flipping/rotating, resizing image. You can also tools like paint brush, paint bucket, spray can, blur tool and eraser. The magic wand tool lets you select a specific area of the image.

• The many meanings of ‘Open’: Open Data, Open Source, and Open Standards

  It is important to note that open source software is not always “free” software. The difference is in the licensing and the level of effort required to customize the code for your use case. According to GNU progenitor and software freedom advocate Richard Stallman, free does not mean non-proprietary but rather suggests that “users have the freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software” for any purpose. (“This is a matter of freedom, not price, so think of ‘free speech,’ not ‘free beer,’” Stallman says.). One also has the freedom to sell the software after modifying it. Implementing open source software inside a business enterprise frequently requires customization for your organization’s workflow. Whether this customization is done using internal resources or with the help of external consultants, it typically is not free, nor is the subsequent maintenance of the software.

  Successful open source software is designed and built using a collaborative community software development process that releases frequent updates to improve functionality and reliability. The key is in the “community” adoption and development.

• How an open community rebrands

  As an open community evolves, so does the way it expresses its identity to others. And having open conversations about how you’d like your community to be recognized is an important component of community engagement.

  Simply put, your community’s brand is what people (especially potential contributors) see first when they encounter you. So you want to make sure your brand reflects your community—its values, its principles, and its spirit.

  [...]

  Together, then, we were able to augment Jim’s experience at Red Hat (though we always welcomed his perspectives along the way). Over the past half-decade, the Open Organization community has grown from a small group of passionate people debating nascent ideas about the “cultural side” of open source to a bustling bunch of thought leaders who have literally written the definition of what it means to be an open organization. To put it in open source terms: Our entire upstream project continues to evolve from that founding gesture.

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • LibreOffice 7.0 arrives, improves performance and compatibility

    AMD sponsored the developers’ implementing the Skia graphics engine in LibreOffice. In Windows this open source 2D graphics library provides upgraded performance. Additionally the engine is accelerated by the Vulkan graphics and compute API.

• FSF

  • FSFE

    • 100 days of ‘Public Money? Public Code!’ in Munich

      100 days ago, the new Green-Red coalition in Munich adopted the principle of ‘Public Money? Public Code!’ to guide their procurement of software. Now, we take a look at the first activities undertaken for the use of Free Software.

      100 days ago, the coalition agreement “Mit Mut, Visionen und Zuversicht: Ganz München im Blick (With courage, vision and confidence: All of Munich in view”) was signed in Munich by the new government groups Grüne/Rosa Liste and SPD/Volt, as well as by the Lord Mayor Dieter Reiter. This agreement contains a strong commitment to the use of Free Software; that in the future, the principle of ‘Public Money? Public Code!’ shall apply. Munich has thus agreed to the FSFE’s demand; in turn, we are happy about this decision and have promised to follow and evaluate its implementation.

      Together with LibreOffice Foundation “The Document Foundation”, we asked the two groups what activities they have undertaken in the last 100 days to implement ‘Public Money? Public Code!’ in Munich.

      Of course, significant changes cannot always be accomplished after a mere 100 days, especially considering the difficulties in current events. However, it is still easy to see if the new government is serious about its commitment, or if is just empty words, by their actions so far.

  • GNU Projects

    • Richard Stallman Discusses Privateness Dangers of Bitcoin, Suggests ‘One thing A lot Higher’

• Programming/Development

  • Python

    • How to Learn Python in 21 Days?

      Before moving further, let’s have a brief introduction to Python Language. Python, designed by Guido Van Rossum in 1991, is a general-purpose programming language. The language is widely used in Web Development, Data Science, Machine Learning, and various other trending domains in the tech world. Moreover, Python supports multiple programming paradigms and has a huge set of libraries and tools. Also, the language offers various other key features such as better code readability, vast community support, fewer lines of code, and many more. Here in this article, we’ll discuss a thorough curriculum or roadmap that you need to follow to learn Python in just 21 days!

  • Rust

    • This Week In Servo 135

      Last week we released Firefox Reality v1.2, which includes a smoother developer tools experience, along with support for Unity WebXR content and self-signed SSL certificates. See the full release notes for more information about the new release.

Science

• The Facts Just Aren’t Getting Through

  If they even heard it: If that doesn’t sound familiar, it should. Because the same thing could happen in the United States this fall—or during the next election in France, or Italy, or Ukraine. American politics, Polish politics, French politics, Italian politics, Ukrainian politics, all derived from their own history, economics, and culture, now have this in common: In each of these countries, deep informational divides separate one part of the electorate from the rest. Some voters live in a so-called populist bubble, where they hear nationalist and xenophobic messages, learn to distrust fact-based media and evidence-based science, and become receptive to conspiracy theories and suspicious of democratic institutions. Others read and hear completely different media, respect different authorities, and search for a different sort of news. Whatever the advantages of these other bubbles, their rules render the people in them incapable of understanding or speaking with those outside of them.

Hardware

• TinyFloat, Troll Arithmetic, GIMP Palettes

  I’ve been working on a 64 bit extension to the 6502 processor architecture. This is for the purpose of implementing a secure computer which also has a hope of working after post industrial collapse.

  Along the way, I have found a use for a practical use for 8 bit floating point numbers. Floating point representations were historically used for scientific calculations. The two components of a floating point number – the exponent and mantissa – work in a manner similar to logarithms, slide rules and the scientific representation of numbers. For example, 1.32×104 = 13,200. Why not just write the latter? Scientific notation works over a *very* large scale and is therefore useful for cosmology, biology and nanofabrication. For computing, floating point may use binary in preference to decimal. Also, it is not typical to store both the exponent and mantissa within 8 bits.

• Goodbye Toshiba Laptops. It’s Been Good Knowing Ya

  Toshiba will officially no longer be making PCs. To be fair, in recent years it had taken a step back from making laptops, but this goes beyond that. It’s a complete exit.

  In a little-reported press release published this week, Toshiba issued a short and to-the-point statement announcing that it had transferred its remaining minority stake in its personal computer business to Sharp. Toshiba sold 80.1% of this business unit, which its new owners renamed Dynabook, to Sharp in 2018, retaining 19.9% of shares. Sharp currently sells laptops under the Dynabook name.

Health/Nutrition

• Trump COVID-19 Executive Actions Woefully Inadequate, Legally Dangerous

  Under our constitutional system, the President and Congress together—not the President acting alone—have the power to appropriate funds and decide how to use them.

• Sen. Sanders proposes one-time tax that would cost Bezos $42.8 billion, Musk $27.5 billion

  The “Make Billionaires Pay Act” would impose a one-time 60% tax on wealth gains made by billionaires between March 18, 2020, and Jan. 1, 2021.

  The funds would be used to pay for out-of-pocket health-care expenses for all Americans for a year.

• Sioux Nation will block bikers headed to Sturgis rally, citing coronavirus concerns

  A convoy consisting of thousands of bikers headed for a South Dakota rally will not be allowed to cross Cheyenne River Sioux checkpoints on their way to the event, according to a Native American spokesman.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Privatisation/Privateering

      • Linux Foundation

        • Open Source Contributions on the Rise in FinTech, Healthcare and Government [Ed: "The Linux Foundation sponsored this post." So the Foundation is now busy distorting the media instead of actually supporting developers who develop Free software on shoestring budget.]

          Enterprise use of open source remains stable, and a new generation of companies are increasing their engagement with open source communities. Led by financial services, healthcare and government, more organizations across most industry verticals are regularly (frequently or sometimes) contributing to upstream projects, going from 42% to 46% over the last three years.

        • TODO Group Survey Shows Stable Enterprise Open Source Use

          The “Open Source Programs in the Enterprise” survey, from The Linux Foundation’s TODO Group and The New Stack says “enterprise use of open source remains stable.”

          An article by Lawrence Hecht reports that more organizations across industry verticals are regularly contributing to upstream projects, increasing from 42% to 46% over the past three years. “The multi-year effort provides a solid baseline for measuring change, growth and effectiveness of efforts to guide corporate open source policies and community participation,” Hecht said.

  • Security

    • 1Password is coming to Linux

      Maybe you can remember dozens of complex passwords, I can’t. That’s why password managers, such as 1Password, Keeper, and LastPass, are so important. Now, AgilBits, 1Password’s parent company, has finally listened to their customers who have been asking for a Linux version for a decade. At long last, the company announced, “1Password is coming to Linux.”

      Don’t get your credit cards out yet though. True, the first development preview version of 1Password is out now. But it’s not ready for prime-time yet. It’s not a finished product. “For example, the app is currently read-only: there is no item editing, creation of vaults, or item organization.”

    • Security updates for Monday

      Security updates have been issued by Debian (pillow, ruby-kramdown, wpa, and xrdp), Fedora (ark and rpki-client), Gentoo (apache, ark, global, gthumb, and iproute2), openSUSE (chromium, grub2, java-11-openjdk, libX11, and opera), Red Hat (bind, chromium-browser, java-1.7.1-ibm, java-1.8.0-ibm, and libvncserver), SUSE (LibVNCServer, perl-XML-Twig, thunderbird, and xen), and Ubuntu (samba).

    • Have I Been Pwned to release code base to the open source community

      Members of the general public can submit their email addresses into the Have I Been Pwned search engine to find out if they have been “pwned,” and if their emails have been linked to a data breach, each one and a summary of what happened is displayed — as well as what information has been exposed.

      Since its launch in 2013, Hunt has poured more resources, including time and energy, into managing the search engine over time, expanding the service to include domain monitoring and breach alerts.

      At the heart, one main operator isn’t enough to ensure future scalability or sustainability, and with this in mind, Hunt previously attempted to find a buyer to help expand his life’s work.

      Unfortunately, the merger and/or acquisition process failed, and so Hunt has decided to pursue another alternative — opening up the Have I Been Pwned code base to the open source community.

    • Researcher Demonstrates Several Zoom Vulnerabilities at DEF CON 28

      Popular video conferencing app Zoom has addressed several security vulnerabilities, two of which affect its Linux client that could have allowed an attacker with access to a compromised system to read and exfiltrate Zoom user data—and even run stealthy malware as a sub-process of a trusted application.
      According to cybersecurity researcher Mazin Ahmed, who presented his findings at DEF CON 2020 yesterday, the company also left a misconfigured development instance exposed that wasn’t updated since September 2019, indicating the server could be susceptible to flaws that were left unpatched.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • Tencent Shares Fall Further as Worries About U.S. Action Persist

        Tencent Shares Fall Further as Worries About U.S. Action PersistTencent Holdings Ltd. added to Friday’s sharp decline to start the week, helping lead weakness in technology shares after the U.S.’ move to ban residents from doing business with the company’s WeChat app.

      • Twitter [attackers] were caught after sending bitcoin to verified Coinbase accounts

        The path to capturing the trio turned out to be fairly easy for the FBI. The three may have been crafty in gaining access to Twitter, but ultimately they were extraordinarily lax in hiding their trail. Using blockchain analysis tools, the FBI traced the bitcoin sent to the trio in the scam to Coinbase Inc. accounts that had been registered and verified with real driver’s licenses of Fazeli and Sheppard.

      • How Malicious Tor Relays are Exploiting Users in 2020 (Part I)

        Tor exit relays are the last hop in the chain of 3 relays and the only type of relay that gets to see the connection to the actual destination chosen by the Tor Browser user. The used protocol (i.e. http vs. https) by the user decides whether a malicious exit relay can actually see and manipulate the transferred content or not.

        In this post I want to give you an update on the malicious Tor relay situation for the first seven months of 2020 by looking at a single large scale malicious actor that is of ongoing concern. It demonstrates once more that current checks are insufficient to prevent such large scale attacks.

      • Twitter shows interest in acquisition as TikTok plans to sue over ban

        Twitter, which owned a predecessor to TikTok called Vine that it acquired in 2012 for $30 million before closing the service in 2016, is said to have held preliminary talks with ByteDance over a possible acquisition. TechCrunch reported that there are serious questions as to whether a deal might be possible given that Twitter may not have the capacity or investor support to raise the money required.

        Twitter itself has a market valuation of $29 billion, whereas the parts of TikTok currently on the table — operations in the U.S., Australia, Canada and New Zealand at the least — could have a valuation of between $15 billion and $50 billion. Microsoft, by comparison, has a market cap of $1.6 trillion, with $136.6 billion in cash [sic] on hand as of November, and would easily win any bidding war against Twitter should it come to that.

      • Coronavirus and the Surveillance State

        The coronavirus pandemic is challenging our ideas about the fundamental responsibilities of government and the proper limits of government demands on the governed.
        These issues are particularly pressing when it comes to government surveillance. How far should government agencies and representatives go to monitor the well-being of individual Americans and, more importantly, to reach out with corrective action, when things go wrong? To answer these questions we have to go far beyond policies for health and illness, and grapple anew with tensions between government efforts to protect people (and administer justice) and the perils of oppressive overreach.
        Classic conservative doctrines stress limitation of government powers as the best safeguard for liberty. Americans who have resisted restrictions on public socializing in restaurants and other gathering places and orders to close business show that this doctrine still resonates today.
        Yet changing technologies upend established compromises on these matters and force us to confront possibilities that once seemed fantastical. In the last few years, for example, political campaigns have turned to techniques like geofencing, which enable strategists to scan crowds and identify their members—without the latter’s knowledge—by the signals emitted by their cell phones. This information makes it possible to trace the presence of those targets in future public venues. Law enforcement agencies at many levels have wide recourse to related technologies, such as Stingray, that track the movements of persons of interest using the signals between the targets’ phones and the nearest towers. The legal status of these activities is unclear, and court orders are rarely sought for them. Many of these technologies have been developed not by government agencies but by advertising and marketing entrepreneurs.
        Thus far use of these capabilities in the United States has largely been scattered across different private-sector and government organizations, rather than concentrated in any single institution. By contrast, mainland China has openly deployed its considerable resources to track the movements of virtually every member of its population. During the pandemic, citizens were classified by three color codes—green, yellow, and red—based on the history of their movements. These codes were available via each person’s cell phone, which must be used for crucial transactions. When seeking access to high-speed rail service or bus connections, or entering other public spaces likely to be crowded, everyone expected to have their code checked. Those coded red or yellow were assumed to have had close contact with a confirmed coronavirus carrier; the authorities would block holders of these phones from further travel and possibly assign them enforced quarantine. Those lucky enough to show a green classification faced few restrictions. An additional feature of the system enables the authorities to drill down into the detail of the person’s traveling history should suspicions remain. Citizens revealed to have traveled recently to Hubei province, whose capital is Wuhan, risked further investigation as possible virus carriers.

Defence/Aggression

• Our Moral Awakening in the Long Shadow of the Bomb

  The continued existence of nuclear weapons are effectively killing us every day even without their use.

• The Atomic Bomb Poets and the Military Realists 75 Years After Nagasaki

  May the hibakusha and this generation guide us to global abolition of nuclear weapons.

• What wasn’t the US telling about Hiroshima? A reporter found out.

  In “Fallout: The Hiroshima Cover-up and the Reporter Who Revealed It to the World,” Lesley M.M. Blume goes behind the scenes of journalist John Hersey’s reporting on Hiroshima, which was published in 1946 in The New Yorker. “Fallout” is not a rehashing of Hersey’s reporting, but rather a deconstruction of the dynamics among Hersey, his editor William Shawn, and New Yorker founder Harold Ross, that made the article’s publication possible.

  In 1946, it was daring for any publication to report on what happened to the victims in Japan. As Hersey and The New Yorker reported, there was a need to cast a light on what was happening on the ground versus what Americans were hearing from the U.S. government spin machine. We often forget that the bombings took the lives of 42,000 Hiroshima residents instantly, and left in its wake a litany of deaths and health effects from the radiation. Hersey’s calculations pushed the number of deaths into the hundreds of thousands.

• Japan marks 75th anniversary of Nagasaki atomic bombing

  The attack on Nagasaki occurred just three days after the US carried out the world’s first ever atomic bombing in Hiroshima. The bomb that hit Nagasaki, known as Fat Man, destroyed most of the city and killed tens of thousands of people instantly. Approximately 74,000 people died from the bombing and its after-effects by the end of 1945.

• Gone in a flash: Hong Kong’s dreams of a democratic majority, candidates, even election

  Rarely has victory been transformed into defeat quite so quickly, but things move at high speed once Beijing takes charge.

  The watershed event was Hong Kong’s new national security law, announced in late May, and promulgated by the central government close to midnight on June 30. The law went into effect on June 30, and from that day forward, as the unfamiliar routines of a security regime went into effect, all things political began to change.

• Six French tourists killed by gunmen in Niger

  The French foreign ministry said it was looking into the reports. There was no immediate comment from the government in Niger. The French government warns people against traveling to large parts of Niger where militant groups including Boko Haram and an affiliate of Islamic State operate.

• In the news: Seven aid workers killed in Niger

  Unidentified gunmen on motorbikes killed seven aid workers and a tourist guide who were visiting a wildlife reserve on Sunday in Niger’s Tillabéri region, where jihadist groups have become increasingly active in recent years.

  In a joint statement, the humanitarian organisations, ACTED and IMPACT Initiatives, confirmed the “senseless” and “cowardly” killing of six French nationals and one Nigerien.

  “Our colleagues have been working to support the people of Niger facing hardship, driven by values of humanity and solidarity,” the statement said.

  Jihadists were not previously known to operate near the tourist attraction, which is 40 miles east of the capital, Niamey, and home to an endangered population of West African giraffes.

  But Mathieu Pellerin, a Sahel analyst at the International Crisis Group, said “all eyes” are on the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, a regional offshoot of the so-called Islamic State group that has been under increasing pressure from military forces in the region over recent months.

  Ten humanitarian workers from the local NGO APIS were also abducted in June while distributing food in a different part of Tillabéri, where tens of thousands of people have been displaced by violence.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• Trump walks out of news conference after reporter asks him about Veterans Choice lie he’s told more than 150 times

  In fact, former President Barack Obama signed the Choice program into law in 2014. The law, which allowed eligible veterans to be covered by the government for care provided by doctors outside the VA system, was a bipartisan initiative spearheaded by two senators Trump has repeatedly criticized, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and the late John McCain of Arizona.

• Facebook Fired An Employee Who Collected Evidence Of Right-Wing Pages Getting Preferential Treatment

  But some of Facebook’s own employees gathered evidence they say shows Breitbart — along with other right-wing outlets and figures including Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Trump supporters Diamond and Silk, and conservative video production nonprofit Prager University — has received special treatment that helped it avoid running afoul of company policy. They see it as part of a pattern of preferential treatment for right-wing publishers and pages, many of which have alleged that the social network is biased against conservatives.

  “We defer to third-party fact-checkers on the rating that a piece of content receives,” Facebook spokesperson Liz Bourgeois said in a statement. “When a fact checker applies a rating, we apply a label and demotion. But we are responsible for how we manage our internal systems for repeat offenders. We apply additional system wide penalties for multiple false ratings, including demonetization and the inability to advertise, unless we determine that one or more of those ratings does not warrant additional consequences.”

  On July 22, a Facebook employee posted a message to the company’s internal misinformation policy group noting that some misinformation strikes against Breitbart had been cleared by someone at Facebook seemingly acting on the publication’s behalf.

Environment

• EPA Destroys Water Quality Records, Deceives Archivist

  The Environmental Protection Agency illegally destroyed records, deceived the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) about that destruction, and falsely blamed the coronavirus pandemic to escape accountability, according to internal documents uncovered by CREW.

• Ocean Warming Due to Climate Change Could Soon Imperil Coral Reef Restoration

  Anyone who’s tending a garden right now knows what extreme heat can do to plants. Heat is also a concern for an important form of underwater gardening: growing corals and “outplanting,” or transplanting them to restore damaged reefs.

• Energy

  • Saudi Aramco Says Profit Fell 73 Percent as Demand for Oil Shrank

    The company said Sunday that on April 2 it achieved a record daily production of 12.1 million barrels. The Saudi production surge sent a gusher of oil into the market as demand was plummeting, rattling markets. Futures for the U.S. benchmark, West Texas Intermediate, briefly reached a negative price.

    In May, Saudi Arabia reined in production through an agreement reached under pressure from the Trump administration. Prices for Brent crude, the international benchmark, have risen from their April lows of under $20 a barrel to about $44 a barrel but still remain down about a third on the year. Under that agreement the Saudis are able to increase production by 500,000 barrels a day in August, but without a discernible impact on prices so far.

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Sharks: Imperiled, Maligned, Fascinating

Finance

• The Shift to Working From Home Has Increased the Number of Hours Americans Work

  A new study finds that employees are working longer hours since the shift to remote work amid the coronavirus pandemic began, even as companies across the country have cut wages.

• Trump Executive Orders Likely Won’t Help the Millions Struggling to Pay Rent

  The United States facing serious rental housing problems that an executive order won’t solve.

• Vowing to Defend Retirees, Biden Denounces ‘New, Reckless War on Social Security’ by Trump

  “This is no art of the deal. This is not presidential leadership. These orders are not real solutions. They are just another cynical ploy designed to deflect responsibility.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The Interests of the Nation

• Critics Warn Against Smear Campaign, ‘Creepy Victorian Moralizing’ Aimed at Progressive Challenger Alex Morse

  “Would be quite something if the groups backing Alex Morse took a stand here on behalf of free, consenting adults not in a subordinate role to do what they want with their lives,” said one political observer. “Not counting on it but we’ll see.”

• Progressives Call Trump Executive Orders What They Are: Illegal. Inadequate. Misleading. ‘A Disgrace.’ ‘A Sham.’ ‘A Cruel Joke.’

  If president actually “cared about helping Americans,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren, “he would have demanded Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell start negotiating as soon as the House passed the HEROES act almost two months ago.”

• Warren Denounces Trump’s Executive Orders as “Cruel Joke” on American People

  Progressive critics and Democratic lawmakers did not need the help of even the Republican U.S. Senator who used the phrase “unconstitutional slop” to describe President Donald Trump’s slate of executive orders—signed Saturday at his private golf club in New Jersey—to rack up ferocious condemnation of the presidential actions as “legally dubious,” shortsighted, wholly inadequate, and final proof that Trump does not understand the scale of the economic devastation his Republican Party is unleashing on the nation with its refusal to join Democrats to pass a far-reaching Covid-19 rescue package.

• Belarusian authorities begin violent crackdown on opposition protesters, after presidential vote ends and suspicious exit polls are released

  Following a hotly contested presidential election in Belarus, riot police have resorted to rubber bullets, flashbang grenades, and water hoses against opposition demonstrators trying to build road barricades using dumpsters and trash cans. A correspondent for the news website MBK Media reported that the authorities fired at least seven shots using non-lethal ammunition.

• What Is the US-Mexico Border to Indigenous Peoples Who Have Lived There?

  For Indigenous peoples of the Americas, the U.S.-Mexico border is increasingly a symbol and tool of genocide. When this border was created, Indigenous peoples of the region were divided, including the Yaqui, O’odham, Cocopah, Kumeyaay, Pai, Apache, and Kickapoo. These peoples are represented by 26 sovereign tribal nations in the United States with tribal relatives residing in Mexico. Indigenous peoples tend to understand and talk about the U.S.-Mexico border in different terms from those who understand the border to be an agreement between governments, often describing the border as artificial or “imaginary.”

• Positive Nationalism

  We should decide what our identity is, and make sure it’s a positive one.

  And then go about making it real.

• Reddit [attacked] and defaced with pro-Trump messages in English and Chinese

  The [attack] occurred on Friday and involved those behind the attack accessing accounts belonging to moderators of popular subreddits with millions of subscribers, including r/space, r/food, r/Japan, r/nfl, r/cfb and r/podcasts.

• Facebook Sued in Washington State Twice in Two Years Over Political Ads

  According to The Seattle Stranger, Washington state law requires political ad-sellers “to make significant disclosures about who’s paying for political ads that target state and local elections, as well as details about the reach of those ads.”

  In June 2018, Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson sued Facebook and Google after the web giants refused to publicly furnish information on political ads as required by state law. Because state statutes allowed for both companies to be fined as much as $10,000 per violation, Facebook and Google potentially owed millions of dollars to the state for the hundreds of ads they had run for local and state elections.

• Trump’s TikTok ban is bad policy

  The risks from these mobile apps arise from the data they collect and how they transmit and store it, as well as potential Chinese government influence over the internet and technology companies within China that control the apps. There are real questions to be asked on the issue of TikTok, mobile apps, and national security risks alone, separating out and unpacking policymakers’ purported, yet sometimes ill-elaborated or conflated, concerns. There are also real and broader questions that can and should be asked by the United States and its allies about risks like Chinese government censorship, espionage, and data access through technology companies.

  Yet policy process matters—not just policy outcomes. The reality is that these digital supply chain risks are incredibly complicated, and substantive analyses of these issues don’t often lend themselves to soundbites. The global technology supply chain is deeply interdependent and interconnected; if you cracked open your smartphone, you’d see components sourced from numerous countries on the inside. Devices designed and sold by a company incorporated in one country, in other words, may have numerous subcomponents manufactured in others. Software, too, comes from all over the place—and research into technologies like artificial intelligence depends on heavy cross-border collaboration, such as between China and the United States. If you fly out of the country, you can, from many places, still access your email or your online banking. All the while, the United States benefits from internet freedom and openness, and has long been a staunch global defender of those principles, even in light of cyber and information threats posed through that interconnection.

  Prohibiting federal employees from using TikTok would be a narrowly targeted way to deal with espionage concerns. Providing evidence that the Chinese government actively orders, encourages, or causes worldwide political censorship on TikTok or actively manipulates its political messages, to give another example, would be a way to demonstrate to the US public reason for concern. Communicating that many of these issues of data collection and security—including data collection on minors—apply to many more apps than TikTok would be a smart approach as well.

  But that is not what’s happening here. Even in the presence of real data policy questions, the Trump administration is pursuing a dangerously broad and unproductive whack-a-mole policy that’s not about security.

• How Pro-Trump Forces Work the Refs in Silicon Valley

  But while it was a quintessentially 2020 exchange, the gripe voiced by Representative Greg Steube was also a classic example of a politician “working the refs” — that is, complaining vocally about a referee’s decision in the hopes of getting a better call next time. It’s a tactic the Trump movement has revived and deftly employed against the powerful, befuddled new referees of public debate, Google, Facebook and Twitter.

  I’ve been thinking about conservatives’ long and persistent campaign to influence the referees since the historian Rick Perlstein emailed me recently to offer me a scoop, if a somewhat dusty one.

  In combing the archives of The New York Times at the New York Public Library for his new book Reaganland, he’d come across correspondence from the 1970s and 1980s between The Times’s publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, known as Punch, and Reed Irvine, the founder of Accuracy in Media and the prototype of the professional partisan media critic. Mr. Irvine had the ingenious idea of buying Times stock and then showing up at shareholders’ meetings to vocally accuse the paper of being soft on communism. Mr. Sulzberger, in an effort to mollify him, offered him instead private meetings every year in the publisher’s office. A warm, first-name basis correspondence ensued.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Trump’s Threat to Press Freedom Is Global

  Conservative filmmaker Michael Pack is a true believer in Trump’s version of a global war of ideas, as was made evident by a recent editorial penned by the Trump loyalist. That is likely why the Senate confirmed his appointment in June as head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), one of the largest news networks in the world. USAGM runs a number of state media and technology organizations, including Voice of America (VOA), Middle East Broadcasting, Radio Free Asia, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Office of Cuba Broadcasting (which oversees Radio Televisión Martí) and the Open Technology Fund (OTF), which promotes internet access around the world.

• Jimmy Lai: Hong Kong media tycoon arrested under security law

  Chinese state media Global Times on Monday described Mr Lai as “riot supporter” and his publications as having been “instigating hatred, spreading rumors and smearing Hong Kong authorities and the mainland for years”.

  The Global Times also reported that two of his sons as well as two senior executives of Next Digital had also been arrested.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Lynching Is Not a Relic of a Jim Crow Past. It’s a Modern Form of Racial Terror.

  The moment haunts me. It resides in my consciousness as a harbinger of stalled progress. It grasps my existence with the tension of every maddening expression of racial othering and inhumanity I have witnessed, studied, experienced.

• How the 1971 Stanford prison experiment prophesied America’s authoritarian backslide

  Although intended to last for two weeks, the plug was pulled after less than one week. Still, the experiment became a go-to reference point for scholars and pundits attempting to explain how ordinary people can become tyrants when given power. Though ethical concerns and controversy still swirl around the Stanford prison experiment, its relevance today is undeniable. And as many Americans perceive the nation lurching towards authoritarianism, its conclusions are more vital to understand than ever. Indeed, only in understanding authoritarianism can one stop it.

• Three years after the Caliphate, Iraq’s Christians find little incentive to return

  It’s been three years since the guns fell silent in Mosul, the onetime capital of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). With the Caliphate finally pushed out, it seemed the nightmare of extremist rule was finally coming to an end, giving Iraq’s Christian minority a chance to reclaim their homes after years spent sheltering under brutal conditions, fleeing to refugee camps, or taking flight abroad.

  Instead, their hopes of rebuilding have diminished even as the threat of the Caliphate has faded. The region’s few remaining Christians find themselves caught between Iran-backed Shia militias and an Iraqi government that, nearly twenty years after the American invasion, is politically paralyzed and still unable to provide basic security and services—let alone protect the country’s embattled minority populations. As a result, most Iraqi Christians are searching for brighter pastures, even if it means forever parting with the land of their ancestors.

• Life in prison for smashing windows? Utah charges BLM protestors.

  Some Black Lives Matter protesters in Salt Lake City could face up to life in prison if they’re convicted of splashing red paint and smashing windows during a protest, a potential punishment that stands out among demonstrators arrested around the country and one that critics say doesn’t fit the alleged crime.

  The felony criminal mischief charges are more serious because they carry a gang enhancement. Prosecutors said Wednesday that’s justified because the protesters worked together to cause thousands of dollars in damage, but watchdogs called the use of the 1990s-era law troubling, especially in the context of criminal justice reform and minority communities.

• The legal battle to hold the EU to account for Libya migrant abuses

  More than 6,500 asylum seekers and migrants have been intercepted at sea and returned to Libya by the Libyan Coast Guard so far this year. Since the EU and Italy began training, funding, equipping, and providing operational assistance to the Libyan Coast Guard in 2017, that number stands at around 40,000 people.

  Critics say European support for these interceptions and returns is one of the most glaring examples of the trade-off being made between upholding human rights – a fundamental EU value – and the EU’s determination to reduce migration to the continent.

Monopolies

• [Guest post] Why IP lawyers are among the best placed to help lead the sustainable revolution

  Here we are halfway through 2020. What an eventful year it’s been in unprecedented ways that will be unforgettable for all sorts of reasons — both bad and good. Positive changes are undeniable: agile working is becoming normal for some professions, including ours. As we are going back to some sort of “new normality” around the world, we are now avoiding long travels like unnecessary commutes and we can attend conferences and webinars from the comfort of our own homes, meaning less jetlag and more time for family or catching up on this blog!

• Patents

  • Guest Post: We Must Protect Access to Vital Telemedicine Services

    Seniors have been taking advantage of telemedicine services, often accessed via their smartphones, tablets or laptops, for some time now. But the coronavirus has put that trend into overdrive, as more older Americans look for ways to stay safe while still getting the medical care they need.

    The Trump administration has helped accelerate telemedicine for seniors. The U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced new initiatives at the end of April to increase access to telehealth services. At a White House coronavirus task force meeting recently, the President said that the number of Medicare recipients using telehealth had increased from about 11,000 patients a week to more than 650,000.

    The COVID-19 pandemic also accelerated this trend. Many seniors are enthusiastic mobile technology owners. They use their mobile devices to supplement or take the place of traditional office visits or other communications with health care providers. In a January 2020 survey of older Americans – taken prior to the pandemic – 38% had already used their smartphones or tablets to manage or receive medical care in the last three months. More than half of respondents said they preferred to handle their medical needs with a combination of health care professionals and technology, and 32% had used their smartphones or tablets to track their health and fitness routines.

    [...]

    Neodron is a type of business known as a patent assertion entity or, more commonly, a patent troll. The company was established for the sole purpose of obtaining whatever patents it could find to use as the basis for filing patent infringement suits. Neodron’s actions are especially dangerous because they focus on the ITC. Unlike a court, the ITC cannot offer money damages for possible infringements and therefore cannot calibrate remedies to the facts. The ITC’s only power is to issue an exclusion order – a ban on importing a product into the U.S. market, which can occur on the basis of even just one minor patent claim. And even though claims of infringement from trolls may not ultimately stick, trolls have become skilled at essentially extorting tech company targets whose products can encompass thousands of patents. For these companies, the threat of excluding an entire product from the US market on the basis of a single patent claim creates an intolerable choice between extortion and exclusion.

  • Shining the light on insufficiency (T 1285/15)

    One of the arguments heard again and again during opposition is that an Opponent’s insufficiency objection is merely a dressed-up clarity objection. The distinction is crucial, given that insufficiency is ground for opposing a patent whilst clarity is not (unless the clarity issues results from a post-grant amendment). In a recent case from the Boards of Appeal (T 1285/15), the Opponent attempted to circumvent the issue by arguing that a collection of clarity issues amounted to insufficiency when taken in combination. The Board of Appeal was not convinced by these arguments, reasoning that the only way to deal with a series of separate issues with the claim language was in a step-by-step fashion.

    [...]

    The Board of Appeal agreed with the Patentee. In particular, the Board of Appeal “could not endorse” the Opponent’s objection that the insufficiency attack should be treated holistically as opposed to atomistically. The Board of Appeal’s reasoning was quite simply that anything other than an atomisitc approach would be impractical: “there is no other way for the board to tackle the multiple objections than by breaking the sum of objections into distinct aspects” (r. 12.2.10). Furthermore, the Board of Appeal reasoned, the step-by-step approach is also the way in which the skilled person would tackle the problem: “A more holistic approach would have to be based on some overall impression and would therefore lack objectivity”.

  • Software Patents

    • American Axle & Mfg. v. Neapco Holdings LLC (Fed. Cir. 2019)

      The District Court granted summary judgment that these claims, and all other asserted claims, were invalid under Section 101 for being directed to a natural law (at least Hooke’s law and “friction damping”) and did nothing more than instruct the skilled worker to “apply” that law, in contravention of the patent eligibility requirements for satisfying Section 101 set forth in Mayo Collaborative Servs. v. Prometheus Labs., Inc. The District Court’s basis for arriving at this conclusion was that the ’911 specification did not provide a “particular means of how to craft the liner and propshaft in order to do so.” American Axle appealed.

      As it had in the earlier-issued decision, the Federal Circuit affirmed, in an opinion by Judge Dyk joined by Judge Taranto; Judge Moore filed a vociferous dissent. In its earlier opinion, the majority set out its understanding of the invention and the basis for the District Court’s decision to invalidate.

      [...]

      Turning to specifics, the majority identified two relevant types of attenuation of these vibrations: resistive attenuation (“a vibration attenuation means that deforms as vibration energy is transmitted through it . . . so that the vibration attenuation means absorbs . . . the vibration energy “) and reactive attenuation (“a mechanism that can oscillate in opposition to the vibration energy [of the propshaft] to thereby ‘cancel out’ a portion of the vibration energy”). The ’911 specification (according to the majority) discloses that the prior art contained means and methods for attenuating each of the three propshaft vibration modes, but were limited insofar as they could not attenuate two vibration modes simultaneously; the specification identified a “need in the art” to dampen shell mode and bending mode vibrations simultaneously (which American Axle contended below and at the Federal Circuit comprised the “inventive concept” required by Supreme Court precedent to make their claim patent eligible). While recognizing these assertions, in the majority’s view the ’911 specification does not disclose how to achieve these goals (this being the basis for finding the claims were not patent eligible).

      While putting their decision in the context of the two-step test for patent eligibility announced in Mayo and further clarified in Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v. CLS Bank International, the majority appeared to anticipate the furor their decision would engender, saying that “[t]here is no legal principle that a claim to a method of manufacturing cannot be directed to a natural law, nor are there any cases saying so.” The majority based its opinion on its belief that according to the ’911 “most aspects of the ’911 patent were well known in the art” and thus failed the inventive concept requirement of the Supreme Court’s Alice test.

    • Covered Business Method Review: Last Day to File is September 16, 2020.

      Under the 2011 America Invents Act, certain Covered Business Method Patents (CBM) can be broadly challenged as part of a Post-Grant Review (PGR). CBM filing was opened on September 16, 2012 – 1 year after AIA enactment. So far, about 600 CBM petitions have been filed.

      The CBM program is “transitional” — and is set to sunset (i.e., become inactive) soon. Under the law, the program sunsets “upon the expiration of the 8-year period beginning on the date that the regulations … take effect.” That takes us to September 16, 2020 — CBM Sunset Date. The particular language of the law indicates that Section 18 of the AIA is “repealed” as of the sunset date. However, the provision will still apply to “any petition … filed before the date.”

    • Another Sound View patent challenged

      On August 6, 2020, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 6,725,456, owned and asserted by Sound View Innovations, LLC. The request was filed in an effort to protect Open Source technologies from invalid NPE assertions. The ’456 patent generally relates to ensuring quality of service in an operating system. Sound View recently asserted this patent against Cigna, Walmart, Vudu, Delta Air Lines, DISH Network, and Sling TV.

    • Sound View patent challenged

      On August 3, 2020, Unified Patents filed an ex parte reexamination proceeding against U.S. Patent 7,426,715, owned and asserted by Sound View Innovations, LLC. The request was filed in an effort to protect Open Source technologies from invalid NPE assertions. The ’715 patent generally relates to shutting down a plurality of software components in an ordered sequence. Sound View recently asserted this patent against Walmart, Vudu, and Delta Air Lines.

• Copyrights

  • Anime Publisher Asks Google to Wipe Dictionary Page

    Japanese manga publisher Shogakukan has asked Google to remove a Dictionary.com page for the word ‘magi’ from its search engine. While Magi is the name of a popular manga comic, it also refers to the Bible’s three wise men. Something Shogakukan should know, as the company also publishes dictionaries.

  • Looks Like Sky Was Funding CrimeStoppers’ “Report a Pirate” Campaign

    Late 2017, UK charity Crimestoppers launched a campaign to discourage the use of pirate set-top boxes and encourage people to report pirates to the police. While the financial backers of the initiative were never revealed at the time, Crimestoppers accounts reveal that it had £100,000 at its disposal, with the amount now attributed to broadcasting giant Sky.

Beelink GT-R Review – An AMD Ryzen 5 Mini PC Tested with Windows 10 and Ubuntu 20.04

One issue I did encounter both in Windows and in Ubuntu was that my 4-port KVM was not properly recognized. I did get a rather poor HDMI signal to the monitor however the USB port was not working and by extension neither were my wireless keyboard and mouse. However, using a USB-C hub (2 x USB 3.0 and 1 x HDMI) worked fine as did using the various HDMI and USB ports directly including wirelessly connected peripherals.

Another point to note is that the power cord from the device to the power adapter is slightly shorter than most and the power adapter itself is quite large meaning care needs to be taken when using a US/EU to AU adapter for example.

Overall this is a powerful mini PC (relative to similar form factor devices but excluding the higher-end Intel NUCs and comparable models) and the addition of capable graphics makes gaming possible together with light video editing. Equipped with a very good selection of ports and features including multiple configurable storage options, the GT-R makes a great impression as one of the first AMD based mini PCs. The only negative is that the fans are quite noisy when the processor is under load.

Audiocasts/Shows

• This Week in Linux 112: LibreOffice 7.0, Ubuntu 20.04.1, elementary OS 6, Kdenlive, Mageia 8 & More

  On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got some big news from LibreOffice with the release of LibreOffice 7.0! Ubuntu has announced the first point release of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. I’m going to show you a cool app that lets you view and interact with your Android device from your Linux desktop. We’ve got some news about some upcoming releases for Mageia 8, KDE’s video editor Kdenlive, and elementary OS 6. Later in the show, we’ll check out some new app releases from auto-cpufreq (an automatic CPU speed & power optimizer), Pinta image editor and Mastodon. We’ll also check out some Humble Bundles including a game you can get for free for a limited time! All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

• Open Source Security Podcast/Josh Bressers: Episode 209 – Secure Boot isn’t Secure

  Josh and Kurt talk about Secure Boot. The conversation uses the recent “Boot Hole” vulnerability to frame a conversation about what Secure Boot is and isn’t. Why the Boot Hole flaw doesn’t really matter, and why Secure Boot was very scary for Linux users back when it came out.

• Linux is NOT for Everyone

  Linux is NOT for Everyone, so let’s go over what kind of user you are and some of the shortcomings you might encounter.

• GNU World Order 366

  **libx86** and **linuxdoc-tools**, including Asciidoc and Docbook. shasum -a256=1c7ce8e031f7dc5c72d35fca6d5c049f9822791d3ad18474a65d6d4b2b5984fc

Kernel Space

• Linus Torvalds: Linux 5.8 “One of our Biggest Releases of All Time”

• Intel Emmitsburg Support Begins Appearing In Linux 5.9

  Not much is publicly known about Intel’s Emmitsburg chipset. Prior to noticing some Linux patches recently referencing Intel Emmitsburg, the only other public mentions of it has been in the context of the Windows HWiNFO program mentioning it in their change-log. With Linux 5.9, Intel has begun adding Emmitsburg support.

  Speculation on Windows sites earlier this year following the HWiNFO mention of “Emmitsburg” pegged it as for Xeon Ice Lake or Cooper Lake. However, that is quite unlikely and is more than likely some other 10nm target. In particular, the Linux kernel already has Cooper Lake and Ice Lake Xeon support in good shape as would be expected given the usage of Linux on servers these days… Intel meanwhile is only adding Emmitsburg to Linux 5.9, thus if their historical punctual open-source support is any indication, the Emmitsburg chipset won’t be launched until at least 2021. Linux 5.9 stable will be out in October but won’t see widespread support among non-rolling Linux distributions until later on or even in 2021.

• Linux 5.9 Enables P2PDMA For All AMD CPUs Zen + Newer

  The PCI subsystem updates have been sent in for the Linux 5.9 kernel. Peer-to-peer DMA support is now solid for all AMD CPUs of the Zen family or newer.

  Support for peer-to-peer DMA (P2PDMA) on AMD Zen and newer CPUs is now set. This is for the whitelist being maintained around this feature. There previously was Zen bits in Linux 5.2 while now for Linux 5.9 appears ironed out.

Applications

• Intel Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 Brings io_uring Block Device Support For Faster Performance

  Intel’s Cloud Hypervisor focused on being a Rustlang-based hypervisor focused for cloud workloads is closing in on the 1.0 milestone. With this week’s release of Cloud-Hypervisor 0.9 there is one very exciting feature in particular but also a lot of other interesting changes.

• Joplin

  Joplin is a free, open source note taking and to-do application, which can handle a large number of notes organised into notebooks. The notes are searchable, can be copied, tagged and modified either from the applications directly or from your own text editor. The notes are in Markdown format.
  Notes exported from Evernote via .enex files can be imported into Joplin, including the formatted content (which is converted to Markdown), resources (images, attachments, etc.) and complete metadata (geolocation, updated time, created time, etc.). Plain Markdown files can also be imported.
  The notes can be synchronized with various cloud services including Nextcloud, Dropbox, OneDrive, WebDAV or the file system (for example with a network directory). When synchronizing the notes, notebooks, tags and other metadata are saved to plain text files which can be easily inspected, backed up and moved around.

• Kodi 19 Alpha 1 Released With AV1 Decoding, Many Other HTPC Improvements

  Kodi 19 “Matrix” Alpha 1 has been released for this very popular, cross-platform open-source HTPC software.

  Kodi 19 is bringing many exciting improvements as a major update to this open-source home theater software.

• Scorewriter MuseScore 3.5 Released with Chord Symbol Playback

  MuseScore, free music composition and notation software, released version 3.5 with long list of new features, bug fixes, and other improvements.

  MuseScore 3.5 contains one of the most requested features: Chord Symbol Playback. The feature is disabled by default so far. You can enable it by going to Edit > Preferences > Note Input.

• Bashtop: An Htop Like System Monitor But Much More Useful

  As cool as Htop there is one thing that it’s seriously lacking in and that is system monitoring tools, this may not be a problem for you but if you want a system monitor than bashtop is a much better option to choose, it let’s you do most of the process management stuff that you want from htop but it comes with things like hard drive usage, network usage and cpu usage statistics.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to install LibreOffice 7 in Linux Mint 20

• How to use the git clean command with untracked files

• How to Install Tor Browser on Ubuntu 20.04

• How to Install Java (OpenJDK) on Ubuntu 20.04

• How to Get Bedtime Mode on Your Android Device

• How To Install Sublime Text on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

• How To Boot Kali Linux From USB (With Installation Procedure)

• Ubuntu 20.04 add network bridge (br0) with nmcli command

• [Fixed] lsb_release command not found In Ubuntu or Derivatives

• Linux CSV Command Line Tool XSV

Games

• An Early Look at Grounded

  You’re in control of a child, who looks like he/she hasn’t entered the teenager years just yet. Among four different children — two boys and two girls — they’ve got a big problem: they’ve been shrunk to the size of an insect. Join them in their adventure — either by yourself or with a group of online friends — as they fight to survive in someone’s backyard, trying to build shelters whilst defending against bugs, and figure out why they’ve shrunk in the first place. Enter Grounded, developed by Obsidian Entertainment — the studio that brought us such titles as Pillars of Eternity, The Outer Worlds, and Star Wars: KOTOR2.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • KPhotoAlbum 5.7.0 out now

    We’re pleased to announce a new release of KPhotoAlbum, the KDE photo management software! This time, it’s mostly a maintenance release with a lot of code cleanup and bug fixes. Nevertheless, there are also some changes and new features. In detail…

Distributions

• Reviews

  • Review: Zentyal Server 6.2

    Zentyal is an Ubuntu-based server distribution which is designed to be easy to set up and then manage using a friendly, web-based interface. The distribution targets small and medium office and business environments. The Zentyal distribution is intended to take on such tasks a as a storage server, Internet gateway, or to provide other office IT infrastructure – all through a convenient, point-n-click web portal.

    The latest version of Zentyal is based on Ubuntu 18.04.4 and mostly features minor updates. There are new anti-virus packages, improved DNS management, easier management of hard drives, and the AppArmor security software is enabled by default.

    The download for Zentyal is 1GB in size and is available for 64-bit (x86_64) machines only. Booting from the install media brings up a menu asking us to select our preferred language from a list. Then we are given the choice of wiping the hard drive and installing Zentyal or launching an expert installer. Both menu options launch a text-based installer which should be familiar to people who have set up Ubuntu Server or used Debian’s text installer.

    [...]

    After my second failed attempt at using Zentyal, and some troubleshooting, I came to the realization the distribution was not going to work as expected and put it aside. According to the documentation, I should be able to simply install the distribution and connect to it using a web browser, but this did not work, either locally or over the LAN. This was disappointing as I have used Zentyal in the past and generally had positive experiences with it. I’ve even recommended the distribution to a few people who wanted to run a light office server with an easy, point-n-click interface.

    I have three theories as to why Zentyal did not work for me this time around. One is that the documentation is out of date (or updated in places I’m not looking) and additional steps are now required to set up the web portal service. The second is that there is a bug in the web portal software that is preventing it from running.

    Personally, I suspect neither of these are true and, instead, something (or multiple somethings) are going wrong during the setup phase. While the installer appears to finish copying its files to my hard drive and reports it is done, the fact the system does not shut down cleanly afterwards suggests something is not finished in the background. The shutdown services never conclude and, while disk and CPU activity was virtually non-existent all twenty minutes I waited, I suspect additional configuration steps were supposed to be happening during that time. It is hard to say for certain though since no status messages are displayed and the installer claims to be finished. I would also consider it odd for services to be enabled during the shutdown phase of the live media, but stranger things have happened.

    Whatever the case, Zentyal did not work for me and, unfortunately, did not display any errors or status messages which would help explain why. The documentation, while normally helpful, did not offer any tips to help me get going. In the past Zentyal has proven to be easy for me to use, but this version has left me with a server-sized void to fill.

• MX Linux

  • MX Linux 19.2 KDE Edition Reaches Release Candidate, Final Release Imminent

    Three weeks after the release of the second beta version, the upcoming and highly anticipated MX Linux 19.2 KDE Edition distribution reaches Release Candidate stage and it’s now inches closers to the final release.

    The MX Linux development team announced today the availability of the Release Candidate (RC) milestone for public testing. That’s great news because when a project reaches Release Candidate stage it means the final release is very close.

    This also means that the team managed to address a lot of the issues from previous beta versions, in an attempt to offer the community a bug-free release of MX Linux 19.2 KDE Edition. One important fix included in this release is to the updater icon right-click menu appearing after an action is completed.

  • MX-19.2 KDE RC 1 available for testing

  • Porteus 5.0-rc2 Released: Slackware-Based Fast And Portable Linux Distro

    More than a year later, the Dev team of Porteus Linux has finally announced the second release candidate (RC-2) for its upcoming version 5.0. This means you can now try the new testing version Porteus 5.0-rc2.

    For those who don’t know, Porteus is based on one of the oldest Linux distros, Slackware. It was also formerly known as Slax remix when it started as a community remix of Slax OS.

    Porteus aims to provide a portable, fast, and light operating system that you can boot directly in less than 15 seconds (in the case of LXDE desktop) from CD, USB flash drive, hard drive, or other bootable storage media.

• Arch Family

  • RetroArch 1.9 Released with Many Goodies for Retro Linux Gamers

    If you are a hardcore retro gamer, RetroArch is what you want to install on your GNU/Linux distribution to enjoy those awesome cool retro games that you probably played all day long when you were young.

    The latest release, RetroArch 1.9 is a massive one, bringing lots of goodies for retro gamers. Highlights include a new Explore View for all playlists, which lets you search for content based on various criteria, such as genre, origin, publisher, system, release year, developer, and amount of players.

    The developers note the fact that the new Explore View will only display search results based on the content that’s already included in your playlists. Also, the metadata is not yet complete.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Fedora 33 Moving Closer To LTO-Optimizing Packages

    Going back to last year Fedora has been working to enable link-time optimizations by default for their packages. That goal wasn’t achieved for Fedora 32 but for Fedora 33 this autumn they still have chances of marking that feature off their TODO list.

    LTO’ing the Fedora package set can offer not only performance advantages but in some cases smaller binaries as well. This is all about applying the compiler optimizations at link-time on the binary as a whole for yielding often sizable performance benefits and other optimizations not otherwise possible. LTO is great as we often show in benchmarks, especially in the latest GCC and LLVM Clang compilers.

  • Zamir SUN: Report for session 1 of FZUG @ Nest with Fedora

    Last month, Alick suggested the Fedora Zhongwen User Group (FZUG) can do a online meetup during Nest with Fedora. And based on the survey, people registered for two time slots, the first one is 9:00 PM Saturday evening UTC+8 which is not a good time for Alick, so I take up the coordinating role for this session.

    As for the tool, we decided to use Jitsi, as it should work fine for most of us and do not have any limitations. What’s more, it’s totally open source.

    During the meeting, I firstly introduced Nest with Fedora and it’s previous offline version, Flock to Fedora, to the attendees. It’s interesting to see that during the past years, we not only have new users in China, but also new contributors. One attendee shares that his motivation of being a packager is that deploying packages for their research in the lab is cumbersome before. So he decided to package all into Fedora and then he can just simply install them on every machine. It is good to know that people contribute back because they want to solve their own problems. Maybe this can be a talking point to attract more contributors in the future.

    After the self introduction, we continue by sharing our interesting stores with Linux. That is a lot of fun.

  • Jon Chiappetta: Last piece of relay software needed for my home bridged network

    If you are running a bridged/relayd network with macs on it you may need to also forward the multicast broadcasts (mDNS related) that allow the devices to automatically discover each other. On the WRT wifi client side, there is a pkg called avahi-daemon and you can configure to operate in “reflector” mode to forward these broadcasts across the specified interfaces. Running this service along with the dhcprb C program which takes care of layer 2 arp requests & dhcp gateway forwarding has been pretty smooth so far!

Devices/Embedded

• RaspAnd Project Now Lets You Run Android 10 on Your Raspberry Pi

  Arne Exton released today a new version of his RaspAnd project that lets you run the latest Android 10 mobile operating system on your tiny Raspberry Pi computer.

  For $9 USD, RaspAnd 10 promises to make it easier to install Google’s latest Android 10 mobile operating system on your Raspberry Pi computer, but let’s take a look at the new features and improvements it brings over previous versions.

  First and foremost, RaspAnd 10 is compatible with several recent Raspberry Pi models, including the recent Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB RAM, but also older models, such as the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B and Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+.

• Create a stop motion film with Digital Making at Home

• The people problem

  Systems used to be designed by groups of engineers. Integration and test engineers waited on the developers and toes tended to get trodden on, with hidden code picked apart and untouchable historic designs questioned – all for product development. There was certainly no room for ego!

  Today, favourite tools may be replaced by those common to the technologies inside a device. Xilinx Zynq devices have two debug ports to allow individual debugging of the Processor Section or Programmable Logic. On Zynq you can chain these ports into one, so tools that are aware of both worlds deliver greater insight. Other devices may only offer specific insight. Vendors will offer a toolset to work with this, but it may be different to what people are used to. Suddenly, this new wonder-device to solve everyone’s design problems is upsetting the engineering apple cart across all engineering disciplines.

  [...]

  Silicon vendors offer a step-up in trying to build Linux for their device, and may offer a pre-built image to boot from. This will need modifying for your needs. It’s amazing how many common command-line tools don’t show up by default. Don’t be fooled into thinking moving from a Raspberry Pi to another platform will be straightforward.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Samsung Galaxy Tab S7 Plus: one of the finest Android tablets yet

  • Razer Reveals First Controller Designed for xCloud on Android

  • The Pixel 4a will have the longest life of any budget Android phone

  • HSE working with Google to fix problem with Covid Tracker app that drains Android phone batteries

  • Google Pixel 4a review: All the phone you need, none of what you don’t

  • Google: Android is launching new Nearby Share feature

  • Android 10’s Live Caption is coming to phone calls. Here’s how to use it

  • Stable Android 10 update begins hitting the LG G7 ThinQ in Canada and Europe

  • Android and Chromebook owners can finally try the iPhone and Mac’s best trick

  • PowerCore Play 6K from Anker works with iOS and Android

  • Android: 3 signs your smartphone has hidden malware you need to delete now

  • How to disable Gmail’s annoying Meet tab on Android, iOS

  • Android Gaming Headlines and Updates: PUBG Mobile, Project xCloud, Levelhead, and More

  • The best affordable Android smartphones under Rs 15,000 in August 2020

  • OnePlus teases Android 11 upgrades, including dark mode improvements

  • HSE responds to reports of Android battery complaints with COVID Tracker App

  • 15 new Android games from the week of August 3, 2020

  • Samsung Galaxy S7 Plus hands-on: can the best Android tablet replace a laptop?

  • New Android Auto Headaches as Waze GPS Appears to Be Broken

  • Google delivers the final public beta version of Android 11

  • Google wants your Android 11 Beta 3 feedback in final survey

  • Best new mobile games on iOS and Android – August 2020 round-up

  • Peugeot and Citroen models to employ Android Automotive infotainment from 2023

  • https://www.bmmagazine.co.uk/business/guide-to-phone-repair-common-android-problems/

  • Disney+ Hotstar Is Now Finally Streaming In 4K On Your Android TV, If You Have A 4K TV That Is

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Chromium

    • After a decade of Chromebooks, it’s time for Chrome OS to sort apps in the Launcher

      I can’t believe it’s 2020 and I’m saying this, but you still cannot sort applications of any kind on a Chromebook.

      When a new app is installed, the app shortcut simply gets added to the next available space in the Chrome OS Launcher and when that space is full, a new Launcher page is created with the next app shortcut appearing.

      [...]

      What has made this situation markedly worse over the past few years is the addition of both Android and Linux apps. At least for the latter, any Linux app installs made through Chrome OS get grouped in a folder called Linux Apps. That doesn’t happen with Progressive Web Apps or Android software.

      You can create your own app folders and manage apps yourself if you want, so that’s something. But one of the things I like about Chrome OS is that the operating system doesn’t get in your way. Meaning: it lets you focus on doing things, not managing things.

      So even a basic sort feature by type of app (Android, Chrome OS, Linux, and PWA) would a start. Alphabetical app sorting would be a nice option too.

    • 5 must-have terminal commands for Linux on your Chromebook

      We’ve spent a lot of time over the past week exploring what is possible on Chrome OS. Thanks to some updates to the Linux container, we’ve installed Windows 10 and a variety of Linux flavors. I love tinkering with Chrome OS to see how far I can push the maturing ecosystem but today, we’re going to focus on what the Linux container is currently designed to do. That, of course, it to run the Debian framework and allow users to install compatible Linux applications on Chrome OS. Doing so doesn’t require you to be a Linux guru and thank goodness for that. I’m still learning as I go but mastering the Chrome OS Linux terminal doesn’t have to be a terrifying or even daunting.

    • 11 Best Web Development Extensions for Chrome

      When developing a website, you have to make a checklist of many complex requirements. Whether dealing with color or font schemes, CSS layout problems, or website responsiveness on various devices, it is important to stay on top of any emerging issues. The following are some of the best web development extensions for Google Chrome (and other Chromium-based browsers).

• Programming/Development

  • rra-c-util 8.3

    n this release of my utility library for my other packages, I finally decided to drop support for platforms without a working snprintf.

    This dates back to the early 2000s and a very early iteration of this package. At the time, there were still some older versions of UNIX without snprintf at all. More commonly, it was buggy. The most common problem was that it would return -1 if the buffer wasn’t large enough rather than returning the necessary size of the buffer. Or, in some cases, it wouldn’t support a buffer size of 0 and a NULL buffer to get the necessary size.

  • Embedded Programming and Beyond: An Interview with Warren Gay

    Interested in embedded programming? Warren Gay, an Ontario, Canada-based senior programmer, is an excellent resource for professional programmers, students, and makers alike. Here he talks about his new book, FreeRTOS for ESP32-Arduino (Elektor, 2020), and shares insights about FreeRTOS, ESP32, Arduino, embedded technologies, and more. You are sure to find his input informative and inspiring, especially if you plan to work with ESP32 or Arduino in the near future.

  • PHP 7.1 – 8 new features

    In the PHP 7.0 version function declaration accepts a return type, with the release of 7.1 version functions and parameters can return/accept null by prefixing the data type with a question mark(?).

    if the data type passed as parameter or returned by a function is different from the type specified a TypeError exception will be thrown.

  • Senior Developers don’t know Everything

    For about 20 years, I’ve been doing C++ and Qt and KDE development. I suppose that makes me a “senior software engineer”, also in the sense that I’ve hacked, programmed, futzed, designed, architected, tested, proved-correct, and cursed at a lot of software. But don’t let the label fool you: I look up just as much in the documentation as I ever did; senior developers don’t know everything.

  • Perl/Raku

    • The [Perl] Weekly Challenge #072

      I am glad, this week focus was more Array/List related. Technical speaking Array and List aren’t the same in Perl. I must admit until I read the article by brian d foy, I thought they were the same. As the famous saying, you learn something new every day.

    • Perl Weekly Challenge 72: One-Liners for Trailing Zeros and Line Ranges

      These are some answers to the Week 72 of the Perl Weekly Challenge organized by Mohammad S. Anwar.

      Spoiler Alert: This weekly challenge deadline is due in a few hours. This blog post offers some solutions to this challenge, please don’t read on if you intend to complete the challenge on your own.

    • Russ Allbery: DocKnot 3.05

      I keep telling myself that the next release of DocKnot will be the one where I convert everything to YAML and then feel confident about uploading it to Debian, and then I keep finding one more thing to fix to release another package I’m working on.

      Anyway, this is the package I use to generate software documentation and, in the long run, will subsume my static web site generator and software release workflow. This release tweaks a heuristic for wrapping paragraphs in text documents, fixes the status badge for software with Debian packages to do what I had intended, and updates dependencies based on the advice of Perl::Critic::Freenode.

  • Python

    • A game of tokens: write an interpreter in Python with TDD – Part 5

      This is part 5 of A game of tokens, a series of posts where I build an interpreter in Python following a pure TDD methodology and engaging you in a sort of a game: I give you the tests and you have to write the code that passes them. After part 4 I had a long hiatus because I focused on other projects, but now I resurrected this series and I’m moving on.\
      First of all I reviewed the first 4 posts, merging the posts that contained the solutions. While this is definitely better for me, I think it might be better for the reader as well, this way it should be easier to follow along. Remember however that you learn if you do, not if you read!\
      Secondly, I was wondering in which direction to go, and I decided to shamelessly follow the steps of Ruslan Spivak, who first inspired this set of posts and who set off to build an Pascal interpreter; you can find the impressive series of posts Ruslan wrote on his website. Thank you Ruslan for the great posts!
      So, let’s go Pascal!

    • Will McGugan: A prettier Python REPL with Rich

      Rich 5.1.0 adds the ability to integrate highlighted pretty printing with the Python REPL.

    • Montreal Python User Group: Montréal-Python 79 – Quadratic Judo

      Summer nears its end and Montréal-Python is coming back from vacation. Before going back to school or to work, come and tell us what new Pythonic things during the summer. As always, we are looking for passionate people who want to share with the community. Be it about a project that you have built or a library that you learned, send us your talk proposal to mtlpyteam@googlegroups.com . Talks duration can be anywhere between 5 and 20 minutes. We accept all reasonable proposals until the program is complete. We can’t wait to read your proposal!

    • Full Stack Python: How to Transcribe Speech Recordings into Text with Python

      When you have a recording where one or more people are talking, it’s useful to have a highly accurate and automated way to extract the spoken words into text. Once you have the text, you can use it for further analysis or as an accessibility feature.

      In this tutorial, we’ll use a high accuracy speech-to-text web application programming interface called AssemblyAI to extract text from an MP3 recording (many other formats are supported as well).

    • Marc Richter: Create your own Telegram bot with Django on Heroku – Part 11 – Apologies for the long pause!

      If you are reading this on any other page, which is not some “planet” or aggregator, you are reading stolen content. Please read this article at its source, which is linked before to ensure to get the best reading experience; thank you!

    • Python 3.8.5 : Pearson Product Moment Correlation with corrcoef from numpy.

      The python package named numpy come with corrcoef function to return Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients.

    • AI-COLOR-SEPARATOR

      In here I will be writing out some code to detect top colours in an image using ML and display the stats.

    • PSF GSoC students blogs: [Week 10] Check-in

    • PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check-In: Week 11

    • PSF GSoC students blogs: GSoC: Week #11

    • PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check-in #11

    • PSF GSoC students blogs: Weekly Check-in #11

    • Python For Loop: Everything You Need to Know

      Loops are one of the essential elements in any programming language, and Python is not an exception to it. Loops are used to repeat a statement or a block of statements multiple times. If there were no concept of loops in programming languages, we have to write each statement again and again for the number of times we want to execute it.

      Python provides two types of loops to handle looping requirements, i.e., the while loop and the for loop. In this tutorial, we will learn everything about the for loop statement in Python.

      Before getting started with this tutorial, It is necessary to have Python installed and set up in your environment path. If you don’t have it installed already, refer to our step by step guide to install Python on Linux. The code presented in this tutorial can be run on the python shell, but it is recommended to run the code in a Python IDE. If you don’t have a python IDE installed in your system or want to know which IDE is a better choice to install, you can refer to our guide Top 10 best python IDE compared.

  • Rust

    • NihAV Is An Experimental Multimedia Framework Written In Rust

      NihAV is an experimental multimedia framework written in the Rust programming language. At the moment it’s focused on diving into supporting decoders for different formats that lack open-source support right now / not yet reverse engineered, exploring new approaches for conventional multimedia concepts, and other experiments for advancing audio-video frameworks.

Fertilizer Likely Behind the Beirut Explosion Is Unevenly Regulated Across US

A powerful explosion that ripped through Beirut on Tuesday and killed more than 130 people may be the latest example of the danger posed by a common fertilizer stored in communities throughout the U.S.

Hardware

• That UPS you bought for your home server may not be as useful as you think

  Some years ago I decided to install a server at home for use as a NAS (network-attached storage) in my home network, and for an Internet-facing server. I live in a place where blackouts are very infrequent (perhaps a couple per year), but occasionally the mains drops out for only a second or two. I suspect these very short dropouts occur when substation switchgear operates, but have no way of being sure. Anyway, with a server running 24/7 I obviously wanted protection against any loss of the mains supply.

  [...]

  Now, the life of the 12-volt lead-acid battery in the APC UPS is supposed to last approximately three to five years. The life will depend on how many times the battery is discharged and ambient temperature.

  While I was away from home on a long work trip, I could no longer connect to my server and I had not received an e-mail from the server informing me of any problem. Luckily it was near the end of my trip so I was not too inconvenienced. When I arrived home I found that the UPS was sounding an alarm and was not supplying power to the server even though there was mains supply to the UPS. It transpired that the UPS battery had suddenly died without warning and could no longer hold a charge, and this had happened while there was mains supply to the UPS, i.e. there had not been a power cut while I was away. Fortunately there was no loss of data on the server; I was able to run fsck during boot-up.

  This failure was annoying on two counts. Firstly, the battery was only about thirteen months old (the manufacturing date stamped on the UPS box was only two or three months before the date I purchased the UPS). Secondly, I certainly did not expect the UPS to stop supplying power to the server while there was mains supply to the UPS. The APC white paper on UPS topologies, ‘The Different Types of UPS Systems‘, does not make this behaviour clear.

Health/Nutrition

• Health Care Workers of Color Nearly Twice as Likely as Whites to Get COVID-19

  Health care workers of color were more likely to care for patients with suspected or confirmed COVID-19, more likely to report using inadequate or reused protective gear, and nearly twice as likely as white colleagues to test positive for the coronavirus, a new study from Harvard Medical School researchers found.

• Covid-19 ‘Has Laid Bare’ the Crisis of Healthcare in America

  Wendell Potter’s new group, the Center for Health and Democracy, investigates how money in politics stubbornly resists health insurance reform.

• Trump, McConnell huddle with virus talks at risk of collapse

• Germany orders tests for all travelers from ‘risk areas’

Defence/Aggression

• Western media’s favorite Hong Kong ‘freedom struggle writer’ is American ex-Amnesty staffer in yellowface

  Kong Tsung-gan bursts onto Hong Kong Twitter scene, becomes go-to source for anti-China content

• Rehearsals for Apocalypse: From the A-Bomb to Covid-19

  This pandemic is a test of our medical emergency response system. Like the nuclear arms race, it’s a rehearsal for apocalypse. It turns out we’re even worse at it than we could have imagined.

Environment

• Will Climate Break Through in Big Media’s Elections Coverage?

  With fewer than 100 days remaining before Election Day, journalists at some of America’s leading news organizations are working with their own newsrooms and others to make sure voters and the public at large understand what’s at stake.

Finance

• Watchdogs Alarmed by Changes to Postal Service Under Trump’s Postmaster General

  Government watchdogs, Democratic lawmakers, and pro-democracy advocates declared it a “Friday Night Massacre” for the U.S. Postal Service after news broke in a classic end-of-the-week dump that Louis DeJoy — a major GOP donor to President Donald Trump and the recently appointed Postmaster General — had issued a sweeping overhaul of the agency, including the ouster of top executives from key posts and the reshuffling of more than two dozen other officials and operational managers.

• ‘This Is a Five-Alarm Fire’: With 2020 Election at Stake, Call Goes Up for Mass Mobilization to Save Postal Service

  “Can’t stress this enough— if the USPS is sabotaged, this will amount to the greatest voter suppression campaign in history.”

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Trump Just Admitted on Live Television He Will ‘Terminate’ Social Security and Medicare If Reelected in November

  One progressive critic called the president’s promise “a full-on declaration of war against current and future Social Security beneficiaries.”

• Trump’s Dangerous Lies About the Covid Economy

  Lies about the economy are harder to spot than lies about the coronavirus because the virus’s grim death count is painfully apparent while the economy is complicated. But Trump’s economic lies are no less egregious.

• NRA Promises to Pour Money Into Trump’s Campaign Following Major Lawsuit

  The National Rifle Association plans to pour millions of dollars into President Donald Trump’s 2020 re-election effort despite escalating legal turmoil and plummeting cash flow leaving its election spending lagging behind recent cycles.

• The Belarusian Election: Three experts explain what to expect from the presidential vote and the real political battle that follows

  On August 9, Belarus concludes its most contentious, openly dirtiest, and toughest presidential campaign ever. During the race, one leading (albeit unregistered) candidate has been imprisoned (as well as two campaign chiefs of staff) and another fled the country altogether. Long-time incumbent President Alexander Lukashenko (Alyaksandr Lukashenka) now faces a surprisingly formidable challenge from Svetlana Tikhanovskaya (Svyatlana Tsikhanouskaya), a woman thrust into the nation’s political spotlight.

• ‘Executive Order Stunt No Substitute for Real Relief,’ Say Progressives of Legally Dubious Trump Proposal

  Coalition accuses Republican Party of “abandoning their constituents and the country as a whole, and causing chaos and turmoil by refusing to negotiate on COVID-19 relief.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Marvel’s “Punisher” Was a Hate Symbol Long Before Police Co-opted His Character

  On February 1, 1974, Francis “Frank” Castle made his debut as a fictional character in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man #129. Gerry Conway, the writer, had initially pitched the idea of the misguided antihero as a throwaway villain. “The Assassin,” as Conway called Castle, was an ex-soldier bent on revenge, wearing a small totenkopf on his breast as the badge of his “war on crime.” Artist John Romita Sr. reworked the symbol into a stylized version of the Waffen S.S. skull before publication. Stan Lee ‒ the creator of hundreds of famous Marvel heroes ‒ changed the character’s name from “The Assassin” to “the Punisher.”

• Final Weekend for EFF’s 30th Anniversary Challenge Coin

  To celebrate the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 30th anniversary, both new and upgrading recurring supporters can claim a first-of-its-kind EFF challenge coin as a token of thanks. These coins will be individually numbered for each supporter and are only available until Sunday night, August 9, 2020 at 11:59 pm PT. Challenge coins follow a long tradition of offering a symbol of kinship and respect for great achievements—and we owe our strength to folks like you.

  To be eligible for an EFF anniversary challenge coin, start a new recurring donation beginning at the monthly Copper Level ($5) or annual Silicon Level ($20), and you’ll automatically get this special-edition EFF challenge coin at the shipping address you provide during your donation.

• Abolishing Police Is a Step Toward Ending White Supremacy and Capitalism

  Something has come unstuck. The common sense about policing has abruptly changed.

• ‘My Husband And I Have Nowhere in the World We Can Safely Live Together’

  At the beginning of our relationship, in love and away from our countries, we didn’t know about the difficulties that were ahead of us. Since I am Israeli and Vinas is Iranian, we cannot live together in Israel or in Iran. Neither of us can live in the country of the other, even after marriage.

  This has meant that we have had to travel to, and stay in, countries that we could both enter with Israeli and Iranian passports, and only stay for the time allowed with a tourist visa. Our challenges began in Turkey, where I didn’t feel comfortable being open about my Israeli nationality. Vinas and I spent an amazing time together camping on stunning beaches of the Mediterranean, the Aegean and the Black Seas, but we were also harassed for being a Muslim and non-Muslim couple and for being unmarried at the time.

• American ideas about racism are influencing Europe

  One tug-of-war is over the term institutional racism, meant to convey that systems can produce racist outcomes even if no one in them is racist. French and German government bodies accept the term; but deny it describes them. However, they generally do not gather data on ethnicity, an ostensibly anti-racist measure that makes it almost impossible to detect institutional racism. Last month Germany’s interior minister cancelled an inquiry into institutional racism in the police. France’s interior minister resists calls to probe the police. Yet in 2015 a study found that 22 out of 26 recent victims of French police killings were “visible minorities”. Some Dutch cops cheerfully admit racial profiling, notably in the case of Typhoon, one of the country’s top rappers, whose car they stopped in 2016 because it was posh and he is black. In June Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, said the Netherlands suffers from systemic but not institutional racism. No one knew what he meant.

• Judge rules woman who accused Trump of rape can proceed with defamation suit

  The ruling allows the case to go forward without waiting for a decision from an appeals court on a separate, similar suit.

  Carroll, a longtime advice columnist, claimed in her 2019 book “What Do We Need Men For?” that Trump sexually assaulted her in the dressing room of a Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the mid-1990s.

  Carroll filed the defamation lawsuit in November after the president denied the allegations, saying he’s never met her despite there being photos of them together.

• Cyber harassment charges dismissed against tweeters, retweeters of Nutley cop photo

  The Essex County Prosecutor’s Office has dismissed cyber harassment charges filed against five people who tweeted and retweeted a photo of a Nutley police officer at a Black Lives Matter protest last month.

  “After reviewing the cases, we concluded there was insufficient evidence to sustain our burden of proof,” said Katherine Carter, a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office. “Consequently, we moved today (Friday) to dismiss all charges.”

• New Jersey prosecutor dismissing cyber-harassment case over tweeting cop’s photo

  The Nutley Police Department filed a criminal complaint in July against protester Kevin Alfaro, who tweeted a photograph of Detective Peter Sandomenico during a Nutley For Black Lives demonstration in June. Alfaro’s tweet asked “if anyone knows who this bitch is throw his info under this tweet,” something Sandomenico said caused him to fear for the safety of his family. The department also charged four people who retweeted the tweet, including Georgana Sziszak, who publicized the case in a GoFundMe campaign. All faced allegations of cyber-harassment, a fourth-degree felony punishable by up to 18 months in jail.

• The Bakken Boom Goes Bust With No Money to Clean up the Mess

  Now, after all of that, the Bakken oil field appears moving toward terminal decline, with the public poised to cover the bill to clean up the mess caused by its ill-fated boom. 

• Union: Employees should have right to telework whenever possible

  The Union of Private Sector Professionals (Erto) said on Friday that employees should have legal right to work remotely whenever it is possible and does not have any undue negative impact.

  The union argues that due to technological advances especially those working in expert positions rarely have a need to be physically present. It says that current legislation is outdated in this regard and should be revised.

Monopolies

• The Role of Antitrust in Preventing Patent Holdup

  Patent holdup has proven one of the most controversial topics in innovation policy, in part because companies with a vested interest in denying its existence have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to debunk it. Notwithstanding a barrage of political and academic attacks, both the general theory of holdup and its practical application in patent law remain valid and pose significant concerns for patent policy. Patent and antitrust law have made significant strides in the past fifteen years in limiting the problem of patent holdup. But those advances are currently under threat from the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice, which has reversed prior policies and broken with the Federal Trade Commission to downplay the significance of patent holdup while undermining private efforts to prevent it. Ironically, the effect of the Antitrust Division’s actions is to create a greater role for antitrust law in stopping patent holdup. We offer some suggestions for moving in the right direction.

• It’s Anti-Suit Injunctions All The Way Down – The Strange New Realities of International Litigation Over Standards-Essential Patents

  Today’s markets for technology products — from smartphones to home appliances to automobiles — are inherently global. This is especially true of products that embody technical standards — protocols like 5G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB that are covered by hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of patents (so-called “standards-essential patents” or “SEPs”). Given the global scope and size of these markets, it is not surprising that patent litigation over standardized products is often conducted on a global scale. This article looks at an increasingly important aspect of these global standards wars: the ability of a court in one jurisdiction to prevent a party from pursuing litigation in another jurisdiction using a procedural mechanism called the anti-suit injunction (ASI). To complicate matters further, a litigant may also petition a court in one jurisdiction to prevent a party from seeking an ASI in another jurisdiction — the so-called anti-anti-suit injunction (AASI). And, curiouser still, litigants have recently re-invigorated the anti-anti-anti-suit injunction (AAASI), a procedural move that seeks to prevent a litigant from obtaining an AASI to block another litigant from requesting an ASI. If there is no theoretical limit to the procedural machinations to which parties can go in such disputes, it may, indeed, be injunctions “all the way down”.

• How can patents affect innovation?

  Recently, a court case initiated by CalTech has seen the two industry giants Apple and CalTech face damages of up to $1 billion for violating four patents that CalTech holds. According to CalTech, the patents filed to describe the use of Wi-Fi technologies including IRA/LDPC codes, which helps to reduce the complexity of encoding and decoding, thus requiring simpler electronics to achieve reliable wireless communication.

  The size of the damages reflects the many millions of devices currently on the market (which Broadcom devices violate), and CalTech released a statement saying how they were happy that the jury found in favour of their case. While Apple and Broadcom did file for an appeal, the appeal was invalidated with Apple and Broadcom now being expected to pay for the damages. Apple’s appeal position related to the fact they utilise Broadcom devices in their products, and as such are downstream parties whom themselves did not violate any laws.

• Huawei’s 5G spinoff bluff shows why export ban will hurt US tech firms

  The export controls were poorly understood by many US companies, even long after their implementation. Some firms managed to ship some products overseas subject to the restrictions, but many took a hit to their revenue as existing sales relationships were disrupted. Some got out of the business altogether. The long-term effects included the offshoring of key manufacturing facilities. Worst of all, the controls jump-started the development of foreign suppliers, creating fierce overseas competition in an industry that had long been US-dominated.

• Patents

  • The first European patent for the technology for rapid determination of antibiotic resistance for Bacteromic

  • Salarius Announces Issuance of New Patent for Seclidemstat by European Patent Office

    Salarius Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (Nasdaq: SLRX), a clinical-stage oncology company targeting cancers caused by dysregulated gene expression, today announced the continued enhancement of the intellectual property (IP) portfolio governing its lead investigational drug candidate, seclidemstat. The European Patent Office (EPO) recently announced that the European Patent EP2744330, exclusively licensed to Salarius from the University of Utah Research Foundation, was issued on July 15, 2020.

    The European patent covers composition of matter and methods of use for seclidemstat, a potent reversible inhibitor of the LSD1 enzyme which is currently the subject of a Phase 1/2 clinical trial for Ewing sarcoma, a rare pediatric bone cancer, and a Phase 1/2 trial in advanced solid tumors (AST). Salarius intends to validate this European patent in several important EU countries, ensuring protection of seclidemstat and other compounds in Europe through at least August 2032.

  • This week in IP: Unwired Planet judge promoted, Levandowski sentenced, Land Rover defeated

    The Western District of Texas took the top spot for patent case filings in the first half of 2020, surpassing the District of Delaware by 64 cases. According to data from Docket Navigator on the top seven US patent courts for the first half of 2020, Western Texas’s H1 docket rose by 287% compared to H1 2019.

    Another noteworthy finding from the data was that filings remained relatively steady in most courts, apart from the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, where cases actually went up for the first time since 2015. This data suggests that COVID-19 did not stop companies from conducting business as usual.

  • COVID-19 Report for Life Sciences and Health Care Companies (UPDATED)

    The Hogan Lovells IP & Media Technology team is tracking the changes being made by intellectual property offices around the world in response to the coronavirus so we can keep you informed on the key developments. Our latest update for the UK and European Patent Office (EPO) is online here. (

  • Black IP Lawyers Who’ve Made It Look to Grow Ranks Beyond 1.7%

    The rarity of being a Black intellectual property lawyer in the United States hits home for the 1.7% of attorneys who fit that description.

    ”People are often surprised when they learn that I practice patent litigation,” said Ellisen Turner, IP practice group partner at Kirkland & Ellis LLP. “When I introduce myself at conferences or events and give my elevator pitch, the surprise is often palpable.”

    In particular, say Black lawyers who have broken through, people are surprised they can speak the language of patent law and that many of them have attained scientific and technical knowledge.

    As a junior associate, before going on to co-chair Venable LLP’s IP division, Justin Pierce recalls hearing the trope about being “really articulate” from a potential client.

    James Smith, the first chief judge of the federal Patent Trial and Appeal Board, and now chief intellectual property counsel at Ecolab Inc., said he’s actually had attorneys hand him their bags to carry.

  • Triller Sues TikTok Over Patent Infringement

  • Apple Watch Series 6: Patent Reveals 1 Game-Changing Hardware Upgrade

    When Apple revealed Apple Watch Series 4 in September 2018, it introduced Fall Detection, a supremely useful feature which may add new aspects to make it far more innovative. That’s according to a new continuation patent, revealed this week.

  • Patent Watch: Yamaha applies for patent on dedicated e-bike frame

    The Japanese industrial giant Yamaha may not yet be a prominent name in U.S. retail shops, but the company’s patent filings suggest strong interest in the e-bike market here. Yamaha ranked fifth for bicycle industry patent grants in the U.S. in 2019 with 15 total, ahead of leading brands like Giant (10 patents) and Trek (5 patents).

    Yamaha Motor Company is best known for its motorcycles, along with boats, ATVs, and more, with 2019 revenue over $15 billion USD. But the company has also been a pioneer in e-bikes, starting in 1992, with 4 million units sold to date worldwide — about half of that in the Japanese market.

  • UK patent exams update: Proctoring system will no-longer be used, but exams still to go ahead with “simpler” invigilation system

    As reported by IPKat last month, candidates were told about the proctoring software that would be used for the exams in a CIPA hosted webinar. Candidates were encouraged to look up a YouTube video of the software to familiarise themselves with how it would work. The software would reportedly require a webcam on your laptop, a phone camera positioned behind you and would record any and all disturbances in your environment. Furthermore, only one monitor would be permitted. However, many of the details of the software were still sketchy.

    In the latest PEB statement, the PEB announces that the software is now not viewed as providing the “optimum solution for PEB candidates”. We are left in the dark as to why the software was not “optimal”. In any case, it seems that the plan is now to use a simpler form of remote invigilation. Importantly, the PEB reassures candidates that “the Pre-Registration Information for Candidates will be largely unchanged: the examinations will be delivered online to be taken in candidates’ own home, at another private address, or at their workplace”.

  • European Patent Application Numbering

    Well, we have. Some of our colleagues from non-EU offices have asked us about the meaning and significance of the dot (decimal point) and the digit after it, in European patent applications. Following various responses from our colleagues such as “You know, I am not sure,” or “I have always been curious, but not curious enough,” we decided to find out. For those seeking an article that dives into the critical scholarship of intellectual property laws, this may not be the one for you.

  • HOOKIPA Announces Issuance of US and European Patents

    HOOKIPA Pharma Inc. (NASDAQ: HOOK, ‘HOOKIPA’), a company developing a new class of immunotherapeutics targeting infectious diseases and cancers, today announced that both the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO) have issued patents covering HOOKIPA’s proprietary replicating arenavirus technology (TheraT®).

    The patents (US Patent No. 10,722,564 and European Patent No. 3218504) are granted to the University of Geneva. HOOKIPA has exclusively licensed these patents from the University. The patent claims cover current product candidates based on HOOKIPA’s replicating arenavirus platform technology (TheraT®), including the Company’s lead oncology product candidates HB-201 and HB-202. These programs are currently in clinical development for the treatment of Human Papillomavirus 16-positive (HPV16+) cancers.

  • How to lose priority in 3 ways

    “Priority”. A word that can strike fear into even the most seasoned of IP attorneys. While on the face of it, the law concerning priority at the EPO can seem fairly straightforward, there are a few things that can trip you up if you’re not prepared (and some that are not fixable, no matter what you do).

    Here is our guide to common priority pitfalls, and a few tips on how you might be able to deal with them.

    [...]

    Priority entitlement is not typically looked at in detail, if at all, during prosecution at the EPO. However, if it subsequently determined (e.g. during opposition or appeal proceedings) the claim to priority is not valid, there is often little that the Applicant/Patentee can do to fix it.

  • What Is Patent Prosecution? Your A To Z Guide

    As noted earlier, prosecution refers explicitly to filing a patent application with all of the appropriate patent offices in the markets where you wish to hold IP protection until the grant of the patent. In some nations, including Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands, patent regulators conduct only a formal examination before granting this right. The formal method largely centers around verifying the patent application’s particulars, including whether the applicant furnished all requested information and made appropriate tax payments. Other countries, such as Germany, France and the U.K., assign greater importance to the process known as substantive examination, which goes to much greater lengths, such as proving the existence of the inventive step, to determine patent eligibility.

    Eventually, once a patent has been granted in one or more specific countries, you will want to continue the prosecution process by filing a patent application internationally with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). This will allow you to be protected under the terms of the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) and its 150+ signatory countries, making your patent rights virtually airtight on a global scale.

  • Why tech patent owners flock to Barcelona’s courts

    Florencio Molina López, a judge in Barcelona, explains why his court is attracting the world’s largest tech companies and why teamwork is key

  • Half-year data reveals Western District of Texas’s rise to top

    Data for H1 2020 from the top seven US patent courts shows litigation has risen in Texas and fallen in Delaware, but stayed steady elsewhere

  • Software Patents

    • Courts Rule AI Cannot Hold Patent.

      The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) along with the European Patent Office (EPO) and the Intellectual Property Office of the United Kingdom (UKIPO) have refused applications designating creativity machine DABUS as the inventor of two pieces of intellectual property. DABUS, created by Dr. Stephen Thaler, is short for “device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified Sentience.”

      The applications to patent an interlocking food container easily grasped by robots and another for “devices and methods for attracting enhanced attention” were filed by the Artificial Inventor Project, naming DABUS as the inventor.

      This is hardly the first time AI and patent law have crossed. AI has figured into cases regarding everything from drug development to pencil sharpeners to airplane laminates. But DABUS is an artificial intelligence system capable of generating ideas without human intervention rather than a tool used to improve and enhance human ingenuity. This difference, and the ramifications of DABUS as an inventor have been discussed in Robotics Tomorrow before.

    • How to throw a spanner in the works for patent applicants – third party observations 101

      The European Patent Office (EPO) provides an online form for anyone to make submissions on a pending patent application. The submission could be anonymous – just make sure to avoid using letterhead or any other tell-tale signs of identity within the documents!

      The trick with TPOs is making the submissions convincing so that a patent examiner will take them seriously. This is where your patent advisor will be invaluable. A highly relevant prior document may be available, but the examiner could overlook its relevance if a coherent argument is not prepared using a format that the examiner is familiar with. The examiner is obliged to review the submission but might quickly discard it if it is not clear on a first reading that a current claim is invalid for some compelling reason.

      Typically, the best evidence for knocking out a patent will be on the basis of a printed document, publicly available before the patent’s filing date. A prior patent document works best, but any published document, like a journal article or research paper, can be just as successful. What does not tend to be successful in the context of TPOs is asserting invalidity on the grounds of “prior use” where extensive evidence is needed to establish that a disclosure took place before the patent’s filing date. If the submission gets too complicated then the examiner will likely ignore it, because such issues are more appropriately tackled during a formal opposition procedure, following grant of the patent.

      The best time to file TPOs at the EPO is at some point between becoming aware of the application and before a first examination report is issued. Submissions can be validly made right up until grant, but the impact will naturally diminish at the later stages of examination when the examiner will be reluctant to raise entirely new objections.

• Trademarks

  • Who is the ‘average consumer’ when a product/service is aimed at both specialized and everyday consumers?

    What is the scope of assessment of ‘the average consumer’ in proceedings concerning the distinctive character of a sign? What could be said in relation to the public’s attention when it comes to advertising slogans/messages? Is it possible for the ‘average consumer’ to exert both a high and low level of attention if the goods and/or services in question are aimed at a specific public, while also being, on occasion, purchased by uninformed consumers who are part of the general public?

    In a decision delivered last month, the General Court (GC) considered all the above. It also held that also a slogan can be capable of indicating the commercial origin of the goods or services in question, when that sign is not merely an ordinary advertising message, but rather possesses a certain degree of originality or resonance.

    [...]

    This case is as useful reminder of how to assess distinctiveness of slogans and determine who the sometimes mysterious ‘average consumer’ is.

    With regard to the latter, the GC confirmed that the ‘average consumer’ cannot be understood as only the consumer who is part of the ‘general public’, but also includes the consumer who is part of the public specifically targeted by the goods and services in question.

    In relation to the former, the GC clarified that a sign can still be capable of indicating the commercial origin of the goods or services in question, when that sign is not merely an ordinary advertising message, but also possesses a certain degree of originality or resonance. In this sense, signs that consist of banal promises in relation to the goods and/or services in question have a promotional character and are therefore not capable of performing the basic function of a trade mark.

• Copyrights

  • TikTok: licensing floodgates to open, say lawyers

    Sources representing musicians say TikTok should sign a licensing agreement to use their members’ IP fairly, but lawyers say other factors may be at play

  • Sharing Indigenous Cultural Heritage Online: An Overview of GLAM Policies

    Tomorrow is International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, a day that seeks to raise awareness of and support Indigenous peoples’ rights and aspirations around the world. We at Creative Commons (CC) wish to highlight this important celebration and acknowledge that, internationally, measures need to be taken to protect Indigenous peoples’ rights and interests in their unique cultures. One measure, which intersects with our policy work at CC on Open GLAM, addresses the open, online sharing of Indigenous cultural heritage cared for within cultural heritage institutions. 

  • Convicted Copyright Troll Lawyer Sues US Attorney General Over His Right to ‘Trap’ Pirates

    Paul Hansmeier, one of the lead attorneys behind the controversial Prenda Law firm, has sued US Attorney General William Barr. The former attorney, who’s sitting out a 14-year prison sentence, wants the court to greenlight his plans to trap pirates with a honeypot. The US sees this as a criminal act but, according to Hansmeier, it is the only effective way to stop torrent piracy.

  • Disney Reminds Court That Pirate Megavideo Indexing Site Still Owes $500K from 2010

    When pirate sites agree to settle lawsuits, these cases tend to disappear into the night. However, when stream-linking site 66Stage agreed to pay Disney $500K in 2010 for linking to pirated movies on Megavideo and other sites, the movie company expected to get paid. A decade on, it appears that Disney has a very long memory.