Summary: Keith Bostic explains that Richard Stallman (RMS) played a role in BSD becoming free
I will often put the conclusion and point I’m making right in the title. This time, I consider the conclusion far less important than the facts behind it.
The title is tongue-in-cheek; I know rms HATES being called “The Father of Open Source” but the facts still point to this being sort of true. I wrote this to share the facts, but an article still needs a title.
“My move years ago to Free Software from Open Source was based on the former being more real and more honest than the latter.”RMS of course, is the father of Free Software. When I started out with Open Source, I found too many inconsistencies that I often summarise as “Open Source rewriting history”, which is to say it lies to people. My move years ago to Free Software from Open Source was based on the former being more real and more honest than the latter.
Credit where credit is due, for the things OSI co-founder Perens has been candid about. Eric S. Raymond (ESR) has stated his opinion on various occasions, that the position of rms in all this history was overstated — and he has frequently damned rms with faint praise.
This is part of the rhetoric of Open Source, and I find it terribly petty. They, in turn, react to people trying to set the record straight (the record they lie about) as US being petty. But the bulk of how I feel about it can nonetheless be summed up in the letter Perens wrote to the Debian community in 1999, where he says that Open Source “overshadowed” Free Software, and that this was “never fair”.
Having gradually become disgusted with Open Source, even calling it a scam on several occasions, I think we got many glimpses of the present several years ago. Today, even some people who use the term “Open Source” (thus giving OSI more power to speak, while Free Software loses notoriety for its work that OSI co-opted) are disillusioned with the Linux Foundation (LF) while I consider LF to be a perfect example of what “Open Source” has always been.
“Techrights is hosting old Debian emails that are already referring to source being “Open” in 1996, most of the “Open Source Definition” had already been written as the Debian Free Software Guidelines (by the same author), and OpenBSD forked from NetBSD in 1995 — years before “Open Source” was “coined”.”However, when I complain about “Open Source” I am complaining about the same thing Perens did in 1999 — the “Open Source” that began when Christine Peterson “coined” the term in 1998. Techrights is hosting old Debian emails that are already referring to source being “Open” in 1996, most of the “Open Source Definition” had already been written as the Debian Free Software Guidelines (by the same author), and OpenBSD forked from NetBSD in 1995 — years before “Open Source” was “coined”.
It’s no revelation to OpenBSD developers (or to pre-SCO Caldera, who used the term “Open” for two products in reference to the source being available) that Open isn’t new, but it’s news to some of the people who think Open Source (largely) started in early 1998.
Since going back to review the history of Open Source (as OSI-led) is what made me leave it behind for something more honest, I have also become increasingly curious about the pre-history of OSI-led Open Source, namely the BSD world.
I don’t as of yet put pre-OSI “Open” in the same category as the BRAND “Open Source” (or OSI), because I’m not at all certain that’s fair to do. I mean everything I’ve complained about with regards to Open Source is from 1998 onwards. So what about the rest?
Of course Perens and ESR can have the credit for OSI, and sometimes OSI has taken the credit for things Free Software did (and to be fair, Perens and Eric Raymond were certainly contributors to Free Software, even before OSI was founded. Maybe Raymond felt he never got enough credit for his contributions).
But this doesn’t answer obvious (for some) questions about who we can thank or credit for the freedom that BSD offers.
“I admire rms a great deal, but you don’t have to like him to admit when he has a point.”This is a new chapter of history in my experience, even if it’s an old one to those who were there. So the conclusions really DON’T matter as much as the facts that lead to them. Still, as I work on getting an overall picture, the exploration is fascinating. Marshall McKusick (Often referred to as Kirk McKusick) gives interesting lectures on the history of BSD, and those aren’t the only history I’ve paid attention to but they certainly help.
I was at one point directed to a quote from Keith Packard, of X11 fame:
Unfortunately, Richard Stallman, the author of the GPL and quite an interesting individual lived at 5405 DEC square, he lived up on the sixth floor I think? Had an office up there; he did not have an apartment. And we knew him extremely well. He was a challenging individual to get along with. He would regularly come down to our offices and ask us, or kind of rail at us, for not using the GPL.
This did not make a positive impression on me, this was my first interactions with Richard directly and I remember thinking at the time, “this guy is a little, you know, I’m not interested in talking to him because he’s so challenging to work with.”
And so, we should have listened to him then but we did not because, we know him too well, I guess, and met him as well.
He really was right, we need to remember that!
These are familiar sentiments for people who have paid attention to Bruce Perens over the years (both for and against rms) both publicly and in Debian-private. I admire rms a great deal, but you don’t have to like him to admit when he has a point.
I wouldn’t have written an article just to quote Keith Packard. It’s not that Packard isn’t notable, he definitely is — it’s that this quote by itself “isn’t news” enough to inspire an article about it. What I was looking for was a better understanding of the differences between BSD and rms, or BSD and the FSF. And I know there are plenty; I greatly admire the work of Theo de Raadt (which I use as I type this) but he has often railed against rms and Free Software — and I am still very sincerely interested in getting “BSD’s side of the story” on all this. I avoided OpenBSD for a long time because of the song “Home to Hypocrisy”, which lampoons rms as both a hypocrite and as being unreasonable.
“The head of FreeBSD (of their foundation?) wants to work more closely with Linux developers. I don’t think that’s going to yield any fruit, I think Linux is going to become more corporate and useless and co-opted.”At a time when Open Source has worked so hard to discredit rms, I certainly don’t feel like that’s fair. On the other hand, I really do appreciate the work de Raadt has done (I don’t think he even wrote that song) and I don’t automatically hold it against him that he and rms have had their differences about philosophy — OSI came about later. The more I read about BSD’s justifications for their way of doing things, the more tolerable I find it. Note I said tolerable — I did not say I entirely agree with it.
What I have said about this is that BSD is not (ever) going to do things the FSF way or the rms way. The head of FreeBSD (of their foundation?) wants to work more closely with Linux developers. I don’t think that’s going to yield any fruit, I think Linux is going to become more corporate and useless and co-opted. But who knows what is really meant when the head of the FreeBSD Foundation (not de Raadt, who started OpenBSD) talks about working more closely with Linux developers?
I know some of de Raadt’s feelings — because he speaks very candidly about them — regarding copylefting BSD software. He’s NOT a fan. He questions both the legality and the morality of doing so; but rather than paint this as de Raadt vs. rms, as de Raadt may (unintentionally or deliberately) do, I think of this quandary as BSD vs. Free Software. And not in the sense that it’s antagonistic, (which it sometimes is) but I’m extremely interested in both the legality and ethics (“morality”) of doing so, because I think it’s a good direction for Free Software and regardless of what my opinion is, it’s EXACTLY what is already being done.
“Yes, he is the person who coined POSIX, but BSD predates POSIX. It predates the FSF and even GNU.”I happen to support it. And although de Raadt has his objections, I’m not yet convinced that BOTH rms and say, Eben Moglen (or for that matter, emulatorman) have this wrong. I want to understand the BSD position a lot better, but that doesn’t mean I’m necessarily going to agree with de Raadt on this.
I don’t expect cooperation from BSD — I’m NOT out to convert BSD into doing anything they’ve been invited to do a thousand times. They have their way, Free Software has its way. What I support is Free Software doing (within reason and ethical limitations) what it needs to do to survive. That’s why I continue to support adding to BSD and copylefting the additions.
But my interest in understanding BSD’s position is no less sincere. They have a complaint, I do not doubt their honesty (I find BSD far more sincere than I find Open Source in general, even if very many people consider BSD to be PART of Open Source) and even if it takes years I would like to understand their position well enough that I COULD advocate it myself, IF I wanted to. That doesn’t mean I will, but it’s never been a boon for me to misunderstand the positions on either side. I want intimate knowledge of BSD’s real position — despite the obvious fact that “BSD” is far from a single entity; as much as (or even more than) with “Linux”. This “position” will certainly have facets.
But getting back to the central theme of this article, as well as back to what McKusick has said about BSD history, he credits Keith Bostic, (Not to be confused with Keith Packard) the “third” person hired to work on BSD in the early days. What does he credit Bostic with? Among other things, making the whole of BSD freely redistributable. Several people worked on that of course, once the push and then the decision was made. It’s Bostic who is credited with the pushing.
To me that’s extraordinary; I mean here you have this really wonderful OS that I feel is important to the future of Free Software (more than Linux at this point) and it’s an important part of the past and present as well. And this Bostic sounds like the rms of BSD! So what could I learn if I started there and tried to find out more?
I may find more and until then, I have a quote directly from Bostic himself. I asked him about it, after reading this FSF page: “People sometimes ask whether BSD too is a version of GNU, like GNU/Linux. The BSD developers were inspired to make their code free software by the example of the GNU Project, and explicit appeals from GNU activists helped persuade them…”
I was a bit sceptical. I really consider rms to be one of the more honest people you can find in the tech world, but I wouldn’t trust him (even based on my own personal experience) to NEVER a. overstate or understate something or b. ignore / dismiss a detail that I consider very important. I think people who disagree with him tend to overstate these, at least a bit unfairly, but though I consider rms MORE honest than most people, these are the boundaries where being sceptical is a real possibility.
So I asked Bostic himself. Originally, his reply was:
“It’s true. John Gillmore & Richard Stallman convinced me that opening up the sources was worthwhile, we wouldn’t have done that without their urging.”
He continued to spell the name that way later but I’m fairly confident he was referring to John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
This is a huge deal to me, because I’ve long noted the penchant Open Source has of painting rms has a has-been, as someone whose contributions to freedom are incidental or overstated — he is the Chief GNUsiance after all, and some people would prefer you think of him as Merely a nuisance — a busybody, an insufferable know-it-all sticking his nose into YOUR work.
“As for why it matters that RMS was part of this, as I’ve said before — the reason some people (even at the FSF, and in at least the more modern variety / chapter / establishment of Open Source) people try to downlplay Stallman’s role is so they can downplay the importance of his movement — You know, Us.”His awards and recognitions are many, though I’m more impressed by his work than his recognition. And yet in getting into this history, I honestly expected to find a very vital part of Free Software (some say “Open Source”) history that we CAN’T give rms much hand in. Yes, he is the person who coined POSIX, but BSD predates POSIX. It predates the FSF and even GNU. So surely, (I thought before asking Bostic) someone is exaggerating Stallman’s role, right? I mean, what does rms really have to do with BSD?
When I asked if I could quote him, Bostic clarified what he had already said. He said of course the collaboration between BSD and the FSF was limited (I would assume it was more limited than the collaboration with Debian, which we are learning more about these days) but there was cross-talk, and that “I’d credit John Gillmore more than Richard in our push towards Open Source, but both were there, and John was certainly working with Richard, IIRC.”
This is very cool as well. I didn’t know Gilmore or the EFF (unless there is another person and I have this wrong) had any connection to this stuff either.
I already know (from the talks McKusick gave, circa 2010/2011 at various conferences, which he probably still does) that the goal of liberating BSD came later, probably in the 80s or even the 90s after the FSF was founded. The famous lawsuit that followed also came later, which was still going on when Linus Torvalds announced Linux (Torvalds has said that if BSD hadn’t been tied up in litigation, Linux probably would have never been written. But that’s already a common quote).
As for why it matters that RMS was part of this, as I’ve said before — the reason some people (even at the FSF, and in at least the more modern variety/chapter/establishment of Open Source) people try to downlplay Stallman’s role is so they can downplay the importance of his movement — You know, Us. Attacking rms, as Techrights published well before he was ousted, is a goal as part of attacking Free Software in general. Downplaying rms downplays the importance of freedom itself. “Don’t listen to these guys, they’re spouting the same garbage Stallman says”.
Of course BSD (broadly speaking) has their own take(s) on freedom, not entirely in line with the FSF’s, or Stallman’s, and which sometimes will overlap more with the thing that “Open Source” now refers to.
“I consider history more important to the present than it is to the past. Without it, the present is missing context.”I am still interested in learning more about that. But in trying to do exactly that, I learned that rms has had influences even in ways which I would not have guessed.
The conclusion of this article is not the most substantial aspect of it, by far. I think the details and the facts are pretty interesting, in light of the things some people say. I still think Keith Bostic is a very big deal as well, and it was an honour to be able to talk to him. I would still thank him and credit him for his effort in liberating BSD — I kind of doubt Gilmore and rms would have gotten quite as far in the BSD world without Bostic as part of the interface!
But that’s a common theme in the BSD world (and the tech world, broadly speaking) as when it was up to someone at DARPA to evaluate BSD’s TCP/IP stack vs. BB&N’s, and the “neutral third party” chosen by DARPA was someone who the BSD devs had already worked with. It’s good to have advocates and people who understand your work, even when your offering is already great.
“As far as Linux, I’m a supporter of all Open Source systems… If you create a tool that people find useful and that moves us all forward, well, I’m going to support you in that!” — Keith Bostic
I consider history more important to the present than it is to the past. Without it, the present is missing context. This benefits some, but truth (and therefore justice) benefits more from context and a fair treatment of facts. I want to do both BSD, and rms (thus our movement) justice — and that means a superficial take on facts will get us less than a reasonable study of history will. I find these things interesting, but not as trivia. The “big picture” matters now as much as ever, and the details (with care) may yet get us there.
Long live rms, Long live BSD, and happy hacking. █
It’s that time of year again, where the new version of GNOME is upon us. Like every 6 months, this release includes a bunch of improvements to the desktop experience, and will be included in Ubuntu 20.10, Fedora 33, and will hit Arch and other rolling releases pretty quickly.
How do we fix the broken Internet? We try to find solutions that don’t mean resorting to regulation. Plus Arm is sold again, Ubuntu community rumblings, a packed KDE Korner, and more.
I’ve been trying out a lot of these 3rd party discord clients lately like 6cord and Gtkcord and they’re all missing something fundamental, but finally I’ve discord Ripcord which is an almost perfect client, basically the only thing that it’s missing is video calls but I can always use the web client for that anyway.
News media is an important source of information for understanding the context of the world. To make it easier to access and process the contents of news sites Lucas Ou-Yang built the Newspaper library that aids in automatic retrieval of articles and prepare it for analysis. In this episode he shares how the project got started, how it is implemented, and how you can get started with it today. He also discusses how recent improvements in the utility and ease of use of deep learning libraries open new possibilities for future iterations of the project.
Linus Torvalds has decided to do away with the “soft scrollback” functionality found in the FBCON and VGACON kernel code as a sign of the times.
VGACON/FBCON for the basic Linux console has supported a software scrollback buffer with the Shift + PageUp keyboard sequence for scrolling up in the output for contents out of view. But with most people not making heavy use of the frame-buffer console these days and the code being unmaintained, it’s being stripped out from Linux 5.9.
I’ve got the T710 (mentioned in my previous post [1]) online. When testing the T710 at home I noticed that sometimes the VGA monitor I was using would start flickering when in some parts of the BIOS setup, it seemed that the horizonal sync wasn’t working properly. It didn’t seem to be a big deal at the time. When I deployed it the KVM display that I had planned to use with it mostly didn’t display anything. When the display was working the KVM keyboard wouldn’t work (and would prevent a regular USB keyboard from working if they were both connected at the same time). The VGA output of the T710 also wouldn’t work with my VGA->HDMI device so I couldn’t get it working with my portable monitor.
Fortunately the Dell front panel has a display and tiny buttons that allow configuring the IDRAC IP address, so I was able to get IDRAC going. One thing Dell really should do is allow the down button to change 0 to 9 when entering numbers, that would make it easier to enter 8.8.8.8 for the DNS server. Another thing Dell should do is make the default gateway have a default value according to the IP address and netmask of the server.
One of the interesting Intel Linux graphics driver patches to be sent out last year were for per-client engine reporting to allow on a per-application/process basis to see how the GPU’s render/blitter/video engines were being utilized.
That work for per-client “engine busyness” reporting went through a few rounds of review but as of Linux 5.9 there still isn’t the support within Intel’s i915 kernel driver.
The Vulkan System Integration working group has decided to publish their work-in-progress extension on VK_EXT_present_timing as their effort to expose the presentation engine’s display details and better allow scheduling a present to happen at a specific time.
VK_EXT_present_timing is a big effort about helping to reduce stuttering and use-cases like better handling of variable refresh rate setups and other scenarios in wanting to ensure the presentation of a frame/image happens on schedule to avoid anomalies.
The Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) that is used by their Linux OpenCL/Level-Zero compute stack as well as now being used by their Windows graphics driver and potentially their Linux OpenGL/Vulkan drivers in the future is out with a new release.
IGC releases tend to come frequent with a large team working on this open-source graphics compiler code while the 1.0.4944 milestone is a bit of a larger release.
After DebConf, Linux Plumbers and Akademy, the lineup of great virtual conferences continues this week with the 2020 edition of X.Org Developer’s Conference (XDC), the leading event for developers working on all things Open graphics, including the Linux kernel, Mesa, DRM, Wayland and X11.
Taking place entirely online for the first time, XDC 2020 brings a packed schedule of talks, workshops and lightning talks spread out over three days. Collaborans will giving two presentations & a lightning talk during the week, for which you can find full details below. The entire conference will be live-streamed on YouTube (Day 1, Day 2 & Day 3), however if you would like to take part in any of the discussions, there’s still time to register (free of charge)!
It turns out the Radeon RX 6000 series will have AV1 hardware video decode capabilities.
In addition to Intel Xe / Tigerlake and the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 30 series supporting AV1 hardware decoding, it’s now firmed up that the next-gen Navi 2 GPUs will also have AV1 decode.
As previously reported, the AMD next-gen GPUs feature VCN 3.0 for Video Core Next. The previous VCN 3.0 Linux/open-source patches didn’t reveal AV1 capabilities but new patches out today confirm AV1 support with VCN3.
Ahead of the RDNA 2 / Navi 2 reveal on October 28, AMD has shown off the first official render of a Radeon RX 6000 series graphics card.
On Twitter AMD commented, “Take a first look at the design of the new Radeon RX 6000 series. Our upcoming @AMD #RDNA2 graphics cards will feature a brand new cooler design.” They also noted there is a render of the Radeon RX 6000 series card within Fortnite for those wanting to explore there.
Running two or more commands in one line can save you a good deal of time and help you become more efficient and productive in Linux. Learn how to run multiple commands in one line in Linux.
Lately there is a severely annoying trouble with my laptop using all GNU/Linux operating systems I have. Whether I use Ubuntu or others, this trouble stopped me from working for days. When booting I can use my keyboard just fine but when I come into login screen I failed to press any button. The only clue I have is that after doing suspend in login screen I can use keyboard for just a few seconds. My diagnosis comes down into my touchpad cable and finally the solution is to unplug that cable and the trouble is gone. I share my experience below hoping this helps somebody else out there.
They announced the game would launch October 15th for Windows PC, Linux, Mac (all via Steam), and other “major platforms”- assumedly Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One.
For those unfamiliar with prior Jackbox games, only one player needs to own the game to host, while other players can play via their smartphone or any device that can connect to the internet. This means people sitting in the same room with friends, or across the internet can join in wacky word, doodle, and speech based games.
Along with the returning Quiplash (challenging players to give hilarious answers which are then voted on), new games include The Devils and the Details, Champ’d Up, Talking Points, and Blather Round.
Until September 18, you can try out a demo for the upcoming modern point and click adventure Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit. The demo going live for a limited time is part of the event season, specifically for the Europe focused Digital Dragons.
“Crowns and Pawns, inspired by point-and-click classics such as Broken Sword, Still Life, Syberia and others, brings the less explored history of Europe to the world of adventurers. Experience the legendary stories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, beware of the villainous branch of the KGB, solve puzzles and follow hints to reveal the secrets of the king who was never crowned.”
[...]
Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit will be supporting Linux at release, and it seems like it’s in pretty good shape already going by some time spent in the demo.
A game where the unexpected hero is an NPC inside a game world that’s glitching out so badly the NPC becomes aware of you? GLITCHED sounds pretty wild.
“When a glitch appears in the video game world of Soren, an NPC named Gus becomes aware of you- the player. Travel together to solve the mystery of the glitch and save Gus’s friends, hometown, and digital world. As the story unfolds, Gus might start to question what role you play in his world.”
[...]
As it turns out, it actually had a Kickstarter campaign way back in 2016 which clearly mentioned Linux support. Since it had been a long time, and it has now appeared on Steam as an upcoming title we reached out to the developer about this. They confirmed Linux support continues, although they will be officially only supporting Ubuntu.
Face off against large groups of zombies while taking a scenic road trip with Death Road to Canada, which just had a big upgrade and there’s more confirmed on the way.
The ‘KIDNEY Update’ adds in a few big improvements for multiplayer co-op play, with a complete revamp of the character selection screen. They said it originally confused everyone so they remade it. Now any other player connected locally (or Steam Remote Play) can hit start and bring up a character select menu. Sounds great.
Additionally, if you’re out or normal recruits the new player can pick the ‘?’ icon to be a ‘Vermin Recruit’ which has low stats but they regenerate every mission so anyone can still take part. They said they plan to expand this feature if it proves to be popular.
If the fullscreen mode for you only gives you a small window, simply toggle it in the options and for me that seems to sort it out properly into fullscreen. It’s obviously an early work in progress, and it’s a demo so issues are to be expected. Other than that, it worked great. Scrabdackle is another game made with the free and open source Godot Engine, awesome to see more developers go for it.
The latest horror experience from Frictional Games with Amnesia: Rebirth now has an official release date of October 20 with Linux support.
Just when you were planning for a quiet and casual 2020 Halloween right? Well, think again. Time to get your spare pants at the ready. Amnesia: Rebirth is a sequel to Amnesia: The Dark Descent released back in 2010 so it’s releasing not too far off the 10th anniversary.
In the new trailer to go along with the announcement, we get a short look into the twisted story behind Amnesia: Rebirth. The protagonist, Tasi Trianon, finds herself in the desolate landscape of the Algerian desert, battling against her fears and pain as she seeks out answers. She must do everything and anything to survive. She is Tasi.
We need to talk about Breakpoint because it’s now confirmed to be releasing with Linux support on September 24 and I think you need to put this on your wishlists. Mentioned before here on GOL early in August because it looked interesting but I didn’t realise just how brilliant the idea actually was.
You’ve played twin-stick shooters but what if they took away ranged weapons? There’s no pew-pew lasers or firing tons of rockets here. Instead, you get an axe or a sword, it’s a melee twin-stick slasher soaked in neon and your weapons explode destroying things around you after building up power. What more do you need?
OpenRA, the highly versatile open source game engine you can use to play Command & Conquer, Red Alert, Dune 2000 and more is bringing a game back from the dead with Hard Vacuum.
By and large the technical infrastructure, both of the event and my own, held up. Over the course of the event a number of ideas for improving remote event experience came up though, such as those for Plasma collected in task T13570.
Some of the important social interactions during a physical events are missing at a virtual event, the creation of the hallway BBB rooms helped a lot with this though. It’s still not the same as having dinner with a small group for example, but it nevertheless enabled discussions on random topics, fun and hacking for hours after the official schedule had ended for the day.
Another very positive aspect is that the virtual setup not only enabled many people to participate that otherwise might not have been able to attend at all, but also let people say hello again that weren’t that active in recent years.
As said before we should find a way to retain remote participation in post-pandemic physical events for this reason.
Kontrast is a contrast checker available for desktop and mobile devices. You can use Kontrast to choose background and text color combinations for your website or app that your users will find easy to read. Kontrast can help you improve the accessibility for your site or app for people with vision problems.
Kontrast won’t catch all the problems, but it should still be very helpful to catch many issues early on, when designing your interface.
I released the first version of Kontrast earlier this month.
Prior to tagging Mutter 3.38 for this week’s GNOME 3.38 desktop release there was a last-minute change around the DMA-BUF screencasting feature.
Earlier this year GNOME developers wired up DMA-BUF screencasting support for GNOME on Wayland. With making use of DMA-BUF for buffer sharing to avoid excess image copies between CPU and GPU memory, the screencasting functionality is much more efficient. GNOME screencasting is just one of many projects making use of this zero-copy buffer sharing support.
One major pain points of writing a desktop application that interacts with the user’s desktop is that a “simple” task can easily become complex. If you want to write a colour palette generator and you wanted to pick a colour, how would you do that?
GNOME Shell for example provides a DBus interface org.gnome.Shell.Screenshot that you can communicate with by calling the PickColor method. The method returns a HashMap containing a single key {“color” : [f64;3] }. Thankfully with zbus calling a DBus method is pretty straightforward.
File Roller is an archive manager for the Linux desktop. This means that you can:
create and modify archives
view the content of an archive
view a file contained in the archive
extract files from the archive.
gEdit is a small but powerful text editor. It includes such features as split-screen mode, a plugin API, which allows gEdit to be extended to support many features while remaining small at its core, multiple document editing through the use of a ‘tabbed’ notebook and many more functions.
Evince is a Document viewer application. It supports PDF, PostScript and other formats. To view .dvi files as produced by TeX in evince, install the evince-dvi package.
Connections is a new app that aims to be a modern remote desktop client for the desktop. The app takes advantage of the VNC (Virtual Network Client) and RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) standards and lets users connect to remote machines.
The plans to shrink the Fedora install media by ramping up the compression settings were rejected at last week’s Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee meeting.
The plan had called for ramping up the XZ compression settings for Fedora’s SquashFS image in order to deliver a smaller image. Some numbers being talked about in the proposal were saving around 142MiB for a roughly 6.5% longer install time.
While the smaller image size is a win for those on limited/metered bandwidth as well as reducing the hosting requirements for Fedora mirrors, depending upon your system the increase in install time could be much longer.
In this post, I explore the history, the details, and the large ecosystem of open source software that’s now available for the IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms.
IBM has deep roots in the open source community. We have been backing emerging communities from a very early stage — including the Linux Foundation, the Apache Software Foundation, and the Eclipse Foundation. This includes years of contributions to the development of open source code, licenses, advocating for open governance, and open standards in addition to being an active contributor to many projects.
As open source continues to gain momentum in the software world, we see growth reflected across different hardware and processor architectures. The processor architecture for IBM Z and LinuxONE is known as s390x.
Red Hat Enterprise Linux has further solidified itself as a platform of choice for users requiring more secure computing, with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.6 achieving Common Criteria Certification as well as Commercial Solutions for Classified (CSfC) Status.
These validations show Red Hat’s commitment to supporting customers that use the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform for critical workloads in classified and sensitive deployment scenarios.
Today, IBM celebrates not one but three important milestones in their 20-year-long relationship with Linux and the Open Source community, 20th anniversary of Linux on Z, 5th anniversary of LinuxONE and first anniversary of Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Z and LinuxOne, as the company informs 9to5Linux.
Believe it or not, this month marks 20 years since IBM made the smart choice of opening its proprietary computer technology and announcing it would support Linux on IBM Z, a family of z/Architecture mainframe computers from the Z900 series, which is now used by more than two-thirds of the Fortune 100 companies to protect their highly sensitive data.
I am developing a new filesystem suitable for persistent memory – nvfs. The goal is to have a small and fast filesystem that can be used on DAX-based devices. Nvfs maps the whole device into linear address space and it completely bypasses the overhead of the block layer and buffer cache.
Yet another new file-system being worked on for the Linux/open-source world is NVFS and has been spearheaded by a Red Hat engineer.
NVFS aims to be a speedy file-system for persistent memory like Intel Optane DCPMM. NVFS is geared for use on DAX-based (direct access) devices and maps the entire device into a linear address space that bypasses the Linux kernel’s block layer and buffer cache.
Modifying Red Hat Enterprise Linux installation media is not a supported process, but this handy workaround may be useful to you. Please see this solution on the Red Hat Customer Portal for more information and other options that you may wish to consider for your environment.
Not everyone has high-speed network connections to locations where they need to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). Customers often ask how they can reduce the installation media to make delivery over slower networks faster. I walk you through the steps to build a custom, small RHEL installation ISO. The default RHEL 7.8 ISO is over 4GB in size; these steps show you how to create a RHEL 7.8 ISO that is 1GB in size and supports a smaller RHEL installation.
IBM announced today at the OpenPOWER Summit 2020 that they are contributing the A2O POWER processor core and Open Cognitive Environment to the OpenPOWER community.
The A2O processor core is now open-source as a POWER ISA core for embedded use in SoC designs. The A2O offers better single threaded performance over its predecessor and supports 2-way SMT, PowerISA 2.07, and a modular design.
In the decades since its inception, Linux has become synonymous with collaboration, both at a technical and organizational standpoint. This community work, from independent contributors, end users and IT vendors, has helped Linux adapt and embrace change, rather than fight it. A powerful example of this collaboration was the launch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 2.1 in 2002, heralding the march of Linux across the enterprise world. Today, Red Hat Enterprise is a bellwether for Linux in production systems, serving as the world’s leading enterprise Linux platform to power organizations across the world and across the open hybrid cloud.
All of this innovation and industry leadership wouldn’t have been possible without a strong partner ecosystem, including the close ties we’ve long had with IBM. IBM was one of the first major technology players to recognize the value in Linux, especially RHEL. As IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE celebrate 20 years of powering enterprise IT today, this benchmark provides further validation of the need for enterprise-grade Linux across architectures, especially as the requirements of modern businesses change dynamically.
The final destination of a journey is what usually has the most focus, but it’s also important to understand the steps it took to arrive there. This certainly holds true for learning, especially as you work to achieve something as big as a Red Hat certification. You ultimately want that tangible object that says “I have the knowledge and I can prove it,” but what about the milestones that marked your progress to get to that result? The achievements earned along the way that consistently reminded you that you are on the right path? Understanding the small goals in pursuit of larger ones helps you keep motivated to continue progressing.
There’s no doubt that Debian is one of the most popular distributions, especially among desktop enthusiasts and professionals alike. This guide features some of the most popular and widely used Debian-based Linux distributions.
This is by no means the entire list, however, we would like to acknowledge other flavors such as Dog Linux which is a good alternative to Puppy OS, SolydXK, and BunsenLabs Linux which is a lightweight distribution.
There are a lot of interesting and valid things to say about the philosophy and actual arguments of the “Actions, Inactions, and Consequences: Doctrine of Doing and Allowing” by Warren Quinn. Unfortunately for me, none of them are things I feel particularly inspired by. I’m much more attracted to the many things implied in this paper. Among them are the role of social responsibility in making moral decisions.
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One of the things I maintain is that we cannot be the best versions of ourselves because we are not living in societies that value our best selves. We survive capitalism. We negotiate climate change. We make decisions to trade the ideal for the functional. For me, this frequently means I click through terms of service, agree to surveillance, and partake in the use and proliferation of oppressive technology. I also buy an iced coffee that comes in a single use plastic cup; I shop at the store with questionable labor practices; I use Facebook. But also, I don’t give money to panhandlers. I see suffering and I let it pass. I do not get involved or take action in many situations because I have a pass to not. These things make society work as it is, and it makes me work within society.
The developer behind the add-on recently shared a ‘one year update’ with Linux customisation fans on Reddit, announcing that the add-on is now considered stable and is available to install direct from the GNOME Extensions website.
Fans of the well-crafted cross between a tiling window manager and modern GNOEM goodness can also learn more about it through a new website. This not only offers an “intro” the extension to potential new users but also provides a concise introduction to Material Shell, why it exists, and what makes it different from other tiling window managers.
Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth said yesterday that he will revive the defunct Community Council amid complaints that the volunteer Ubuntu community has been neglected.
In theory, the Ubuntu Community Council plays a key role in the governance of the project, setting the code of conduct, resolving disputes, and managing nominations and elections for other Ubuntu boards and councils.
I also have taken time to test the Groovy Gorilla ISOs for Xubuntu. I encourage everybody out there to visit the testing tracker to test disc images for Xubuntu and other flavours as we head towards the release of 20.10 next month. Every release needs as much testing as possible.
Based upon an article from The Register it appears that the Community Council is being brought back to life. Nominations are being sought per a post on the main Discourse instance but readers of this are reminded that you need to be a current member either directly or indirectly of the 609 Ubuntu Members shown on Launchpad. Those 609 persons are the electors for the Community Council and the Community Council is drawn from that group. The size and composition of the Ubuntu Members group on Launchpad can change based upon published procedures and the initiative of individual to be part of such changes.
Here is deepin 20 “Innovation is ongoing” released September this year. deepin 20 is the latest stable version of a beautiful yet modern operating system for desktop and laptop computers. This version is a long awaited continuation to the version 15 released five years ago. It is really luxurious that will make everyone wants to enjoy. Congratulations to deepin developers and users! Happy downloading!
Chinese SinoVoip has teased a Raspberry Pi-style single-board computer, the Banana Pi BPI-M5, with an Amlogic S905X3 four-core Cortex-A55 processor.
The Raspberry Pi rival features a system on chip with 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, 16GB of eMMC storage, four USB 3.0 ports, Gigabit Ethernet, an HDMI port, and just like its fruity rival, a 40-pin GPIO (general-purpose input/output) rack to connect other devices.
Performing over-the-air updates of devices in the field can be a tricky business. Reliability and recovery is of course key, but even getting the right bits to the right storage sectors can be a challenge. Recently I’ve been working on a project which called for the design of a new pathway to update some small microcontrollers which were decidedly inconvenient.
There are many pieces to a project like this; a bootloader to perform the actual updating, a robust communication protocol, recovery pathways, a file transfer mechanism, and more. What made these micros particularly inconvenient was that they weren’t network-connected themselves, but required a hop through another intermediate controller, which itself was also not connected to the network. Predictably, the otherwise simple “file transfer” step quickly ballooned out into a complex onion of tasks to complete before the rest of the project could continue. As they say, it’s micros all the way down.
Amlogic has plenty of variants to its S905 processors, and so far I had never heard about Amlogic S905L2 processor that can be found in some Android 9.0 TV boxes sold for a little over $20 including shipping.
There are only two such TV boxes listed with the quad-core Cortex-A53 processor so far, and they are basically the same X7 model except for different storage and memory configuration.
SiFive will soon demo a Linux-driven, RISC-V based “FU740” SoC powering a PC and will unveil a new superscalar AI core. Interest in RISC-V is likely to increase if Nvidia completes its $40 billion acquisition of Arm.
At the Linley Fall Virtual Processor Conference starting Oct. 20, SiFive CTO Yunsup Lee will unveil a Linux-driven Freedom U740 (FU740) SoC based on its high-end U740 core and demonstrate it running on “the world’s first RISC-V PC.” In addition, SiFive Chief Architect and RISC-V architecture co-developer Krste Asanovic (see image at top) will announce a SiFive Intelligence AI core that appears to be related to the new U8-series.
In recent years, people have discussed the need to have Arm-based PCs or workstations for developers to work directly on the target hardware, and there are now several options including SynQuacer E-Series 24-Core Arm PC, Ampere eMAG 64bit Arm Workstation, and HoneyComb LX2K 16-core Arm Workstation.
SiFive, Inc., the leading provider of commercial RISC-V processor IP and silicon solutions, today announced that Dr. Yunsup Lee, CTO of SiFive, and Dr. Krste Asanovic, Chief Architect of SiFive, will present at the technology industry’s premier processor conference, the Linley Fall Virtual Processor Conference. The conference will be held on October 20th – 22nd and 27th – 29th, 2020 and will feature high-quality technical content from leading semiconductor companies worldwide.
This week we are launching our Arduino Explore IoT Kit, which allows high school and college students to take their first steps in building connected devices. Educators can make a complex subject simple – explore the Internet of Things right now with Arduino Education.
Aimed at the beginner, there is a complete set of easy to follow online projects providing students with a gateway into the digital world of connected objects and how people work together.
Created by developed Ondřej Jirman, the 13 in 1 multi-distro demo image includes 13 different Linux distributions made specifically for the PinePhone Linux phone. Why demo image? Simply because it lets you try all these distros without having to install them on the device.
The PinePhone multi-distro demo image currently includes the following distributions: Arch Linux ARM, KDE Neon, Lune OS, Maemo Leste, Mobian, postmarketOS with fbkeyboard, postmarketOS with GNOME, postmarketOS with Phosh, postmarketOS with Plasma Mobile, postmarketOS with sxmo, PureOS, Sailfish OS, and Ubuntu Touch.
One of the most important things to do well in a modern enterprise is to collect company knowledge. Organizations need shared workspaces where individuals and teams can collaborate and share their experience and knowledge. This makes knowledge-management systems essential in today’s agile environments.
Some companies use Confluence, others use GSuite, and still others use SharePoint. But they’re all proprietary software, which means they don’t offer their source code for you to audit or modify. If you are uncomfortable entering your company’s shared knowledge into software that you don’t own or control, the open source projects BlueSpice, XWiki, and DokuWiki are excellent alternatives.
Load balancing is defined as the methodical and efficient distribution of network or application traffic across multiple servers in a server farm. Each load balancer sits between client devices and backend servers, receiving and then distributing incoming requests to any available server capable of fulfilling them.
The underlying concept is simple but powerful. Imagine you’re working with a website that needs to serve a huge number of users. Currently, the domain points to the IP address of a single web server. Responding to each request consumes some fraction of the server’s resources. When the server is using all of its resources, it will either take longer to respond to requests or the requests will fail entirely and the user experience will suffer. You can add more RAM, more storage capacity, and, in some cases, additional CPU cores, but you can’t scale forever. Enter load balancers.
In Miranda’s previous role at CloudBees, she served as the Director of Open Source Community. She has used her impressive technical, community building, writing and speaking skills to improve the Jenkins, JenkinsX, and CI/CD developer community. The CDF welcomes her extensive experience and excitement as we work to establish best practices and industry specifications for the world’s fastest growing projects.
Join the CD Foundation for a two-day virtual event, CDCon Oct 7-8, focused on improving the world’s capacity to deliver software with security and speed. Become part of the conversation that drives continuous delivery by meeting peers, sharing ideas, and talking to industry leaders on all things software delivery and DevOps.
For a long time, there was a hard-and-fast division between two legal classes of software. Free or open source software could be copied, changed, and redistributed. Proprietary or closed software was closely controlled by the vendor, and its use was encumbered with restrictions. There are other categories of software that lie somewhere between these two extremes (such as software that can be viewed but not changed and redistributed). In this article, however, we stick to the categories of free and proprietary and explore the relationship between cloud services and free software.
Wordfence, which itself produces a plugin for the platform, revealed news of the zero-day bug at the start of September. It affects File Manager which, as the name suggests, is a plugin that helps users to manage files on their WordPress sites.
The plugin is installed on around 700,000 WordPress sites, and although Wordfence estimates that only around 37%, or 262,0000, are still running a vulnerable version, this hasn’t stopped attackers from trying their luck against a much larger number of users.
Tor 0.4.4.5 is the first stable release in the 0.4.4.x series, coming exactly four months after Tor 0.4.3.5. It brings some important enhancements, such as the implementation of the HiddenServiceOnionBalanceInstance option in the torrc configuration file to enable v3 onion services to act as backend instances for OnionBalance, the Tor load balancer.
This release also replaces the 148 fallback directories from previous releases with a list of more recent 144 fallbacks generated in July 2020, re-implements support for GUARD NEW/UP/DOWN control port events, and improves the guard selection algorithms to address load balancing issues with older versions and improve security.
On the joys of go-oo I agree it was fun; there was a community of peer / developers, who were good to each other, and a clear shared problem. Meritocracy was present there, in a way it is not at TDF, on that I agree. However – go-oo was an alliance of packagers, with a few developers that provided some polish and minor features around the incredible work that Sun/StarDivision was investing in around OpenOffice.org. It was rather easy to look good filling in the gaps they left. The code is still there.
This year, LibreOffice was once again a mentoring organization in the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) a global programme focused on bringing more student developers into free and open source software development. We ran six projects – and all were finished successfully. Students and mentors enjoyed the time, and here we present some of the achievements, which should make their way into LibreOffice 7.1 in early February 2021!
Markdown is a plain text formatting syntax created by John Gruber in 2004. It’s designed to be easy-to-read and easy-to-write.
Readability is at the very heart of Markdown. It offers the advantages of plain text, provides a convenient format for writing for the web, but it’s not intended to be a replacement for HTML. Markdown is a writing format, not a publishing format. You control the display of the document; formatting words as bold or italic, adding images, and creating lists are just a few of the things we can do with Markdown. Mostly, Markdown is just regular text with a few non-alphabetic characters included, such as # or *.
While Git tools and add-ons abound, these seven utilities can help any user make the most of Git.
Git, the version control system originally written by Linus Torvalds, is one of the most widely used Linux commands. Like other popular commands, such as apt or vim, an entire ecosystem of tools has grown up around it. In fact, Debian’s stable repository alone lists over 60 secondary tools whose names start with “git” and around 70 with unique names.
Want to quickly learn about the fundamentals of Raku with a book? Raku Fundamentals by Moritz Lenz has just arrived on the physical bookshelves as well as on the virtual ones. Formerly known as “Perl 6 Fundamentals”, the second edition has been completely updated and has a chapter on Cro web services added. Be sure to leave a review when you have become the owner of a copy!
Today I released Zydeco::Lite, a re-implementation of Zydeco but just using standard Perl syntax. So for example, class { … } becomes class(sub { …});.
This has the advantage of much faster compile time, similar run time speed, fewer dependencies, and compatibility with older versions of Perl before the keyword API was introduced. Of course, in some circumstances these aren’t important concerns, so the nicer syntax of the full Zydeco will be preferred.
JupyterLab and Jupyter Notebook provide a great environment to scrutinize my laptop-based life.
My exploration is powered by the fact that almost every service I use has a web application programming interface (API). I use many such services: a to-do list, a time tracker, a habit tracker, and more. But there is one that almost everyone uses: a calendar. The same ideas can be applied to other services, but calendars have one cool feature: an open standard that almost all web calendars support: CalDAV.
As with the previous release, this release keeps on improving the support for type hinting and MyPy.
On the MyPy front, besides showing an error it will also show the related notes for a message on the tooltip (which would previously be available only in the output view) and MyPy processes are no longer launched in parallel when using the same cache folder (as this could end up making MyPy write wrong caches which required the cache folder to be manually erased).
In the type inference front there are multiple improvements to take advantage of type hints (such as support for Optional[] in code completion, handle types given as string and following type hints when presenting an option to create a new method in a class).
The debugger had a critical fix on the frame-evaluation mode (the mode which works by adding programmatic breakpoints by manipulating bytecode) which could make it skip breakpoints or even change the behavior of a program in extreme cases.
In a previous essay I talked about the new licensing model in the recent chemfp 3.4 release. In short, no-cost academic licensing is now available, a pre-compiled version of the package, with some restrictions on use, is available for no-cost use on for Linux-based OSes.
The 3.4 release had the unofficial title back in action. I took time off from development to (among other things) write a paper about the chemfp project and take parental leave for our second kid.
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There are a number of small tool improvements, like adding a –help-formats command-line option to give more detailed information about the support format types and options for each of the toolkits. (Previously much of this information was available from –help but that lead to information overload.)
One nice change is that simsearch now accepts a structure query as command-line input or a file, rather than an FPS file. Simsearch will read the target file to get the fingerprint type, then use that to parse the query structures correctly.
Adding the capability of processing Python command line arguments provides a user-friendly interface to your text-based command line program. It’s similar to what a graphical user interface is for a visual application that’s manipulated by graphical elements or widgets.
Python exposes a mechanism to capture and extract your Python command line arguments. These values can be used to modify the behavior of a program. For example, if your program processes data read from a file, then you can pass the name of the file to your program, rather than hard-coding the value in your source code.
The pip team has been working on improving the usability of pip since the start of this year. We’ve been carrying this work out remotely – by interviewing pip users, by sending short surveys, and doing usability tests of new pip functions.
We want to thank everybody who is contributing input to this work and are taking part in this research, which is still ongoing. We’ve learned a lot about who uses pip and how you use it. This has helped the team make decisions to improve pip, such as error messages and documentation to help you fix dependency conflicts.
Our team has put together a User Experience (UX) section in pip’s documentation to tell you about this UX work. It covers what has happened so far, how you can contribute, and what is coming in the future.
JavaScript Object Notation, more commonly known as JSON, is a lightweight data interchange format inspired by JavaScript object literal syntax. JSON is easy for humans to read and write. It is also easy for computers to parse and generate. JSON is used for storing and exchanging data in much the same way that XML is used.
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Python’s json module uses the dump() function to serialize or encode an object as a JSON formatted stream to a file-like object. File-like objects in Python are things like file handlers or objects that you create using Python’s io module.
This is the third post in the series “TDD in Python from scratch” where I develop a simple project following a strict TDD methodology. The posts come from my book Clean Architectures in Python and have been reviewed to get rid of some bad naming choices of the version published in the book.
What I introduced in the previous two posts is commonly called “unit testing”, since it focuses on testing a single and very small unit of code. As simple as it may seem, the TDD process has some caveats that are worth being discussed. In this chapter I discuss some aspects of TDD and unit testing that I consider extremely important.
Red Hat OpenShift Serverless recently became GA, and with it came new options for application deployment. This article introduces one of those new options, Knative Serving. I provide an overview of OpenShift Serverless and Knative Serving, then show you how to deploy a Node.js application as a Knative Serving service.
In Éric Rohmer movies, the men talk too much. Almost all that talk is about women. His men obsess over women, philosophically musing on the desire for new female companions to a maybe-ex-girlfriend even as they’re already yoked to a significant other (Claire’s Knee); they detail the Catholic morals that prevent them from acting on their desires, replacing sex with conversation (My Night at Maud’s); and they bemoan sexually liberated women who leave the men’s desires unfulfilled (La Collectionneuse). Few capture the pitiful foibles of man in such an entertaining, witty, visually splendid manner as Rohmer.
The year 2020 is a time of high anxiety not unlike 1918 when the last year of the First World War One coincided with the first year of the Spanish Flu. Far more lives were lost in those calamities: 20 million in the case of the First World War; 50 to 100 million in the Spanish Flu. Nevertheless, the United States faced a free and fair election in 1920 that produced a new president from a different political party. The decade that followed was known as the “Roaring Twenties.”
While headlining at a festival over the weekend in Yekaterinburg dedicated to “traditional family values,” “Therr Maitz” frontman Anton Belyaev spoke from the stage in defense of LGBTQ rights. The musician later posted footage of his remarks on Instagram.
As students return to college this fall, Americans committed to racial equity and justice must awaken to the situation beyond the walls of their own institutions and alma maters. As usual, challenges facing predominantly white institutions are dominating public dialogue, Congressional hearings and dinner conversations.
Human calamities abound. The unrelenting coronavirus pandemic has already claimed more than 900,000 lives worldwide. The images of exploding wildfires from the American Southwest—California, Colorado, Oregon, and Washington—look apocalyptic. Racial injustice and inequity in the United States marches on. And, the economic suffering?—painful.
Veteran journalist Bob Woodward said he was shocked when he learned from President Donald Trump earlier this year that he had knowledge about the deadly nature of COVID-19 but deliberately withheld that information from the American people.
On September 8, reports emerged that Russia’s healthcare watchdog, Roszdravnadzor, had issued a warning to the medical supply company UNIDENT, which imports the OraQuick rapid HIV test. According to the AIDS Center, the Roszdravnadzor document says that the test is registered for professional use in Russia and although the instructions say it can be used at home, this violates the law. At the same time, OraQuick is registered abroad as a test available for at-home use. UNIDENT said that now the tests are being “practically seized” from pharmacies.
“If you were trying to somehow increase the amount of virus in the community, what you would do is gather thousands of people shoulder to shoulder without masks and have them scream and yell and laugh for a few hours.”
“When I first heard about the virus, it was April. I was in Pittsburgh, staying with friends,” “Rosy,” a 45-year-old Haitian farmworker, said through a face mask. She’d come to the United States, eager for work, she explained. But when a job materialized offering decent wages for picking tomatoes in upstate New York, she hesitated. “We knew New York was the worst,” she said, regarding the spread of Covid-19. “But,” she shrugged, “I needed money. I needed to work.”
The Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus has called for an investigation into the practice of sending infected coronavirus patients into hospice facilities or back home to their families to die.
The legislators’ demands follow reporting by ProPublica that found that while many hospitals around the country decided not to use home hospice care for coronavirus patients — due to the infectious nature of the disease and the unpredictable and sometimes difficult-to-control symptoms — Ochsner Health, the largest hospital network in Louisiana, sent COVID-19 patients in New Orleans home with hospice care. Several families said that Ochsner staff pressured them into discontinuing treatment, even as they pushed back.
As an editor, I’ve long had mixed feelings about the journalistic tradition of marking particular chronological or numerical milestones. No one wanted to avoid the “Sept. 11: One Year Later” package — and I was eager to do it given the six previous years I’d spent directing global coverage of al-Qaida — but the annual stories seemed far more forced by Sept. 11, 2005.
More recently, we’ve seen stories like “World War I: A Century Later” or “The 75th Anniversary of the End of World War II.” They’re often illuminating, but they don’t have deeper meaning than stories that might have been published on the 99th or 74th anniversary of those events.
In late April, as COVID-19 raced through meatpacking plants sickening and killing workers, President Donald Trump issued a controversial executive order aimed at keeping the plants open to supply food to American consumers.
It was a relief for the nation’s meatpackers who were being urged, or ordered, to suspend production by local health officials worried about the spread of the coronavirus.
The legislation would also require private sector groups providing devices to the federal government to notify agencies if the [Internet]-connected device has a vulnerability that could leave the government open to attacks.
The bill is sponsored in the House by Reps. Robin Kelly (D-Ill.) and Will Hurd (R-Texas) and more than two dozen others.
If the whole Microsoft thing is getting too complicated or too expensive for your pocketbook, we’ve reviewed the major alternative programs to Office, including Google’s online application, LibreOffice, FreeOffice and more. Because they’re all free, there’s little risk to trying them.
Yesterday I did the first release of my OpenPGP compatible keyserver, onak, in 4 years. Actually, 2 releases because I discovered my detection for various versions of libnettle needed some fixing.
It was largely driven by the need to get an updated package sorted for Debian due to the removal of dh-systemd, but it should have come sooner. This release has a number of clean-ups for dealing with the hostility shown to the keyserver network in recent years. In particular it implements some of dkg’s Abuse-Resistant OpenPGP Keystores, and finally adds support for verifying signatures fully. That opens up the ability to run a keyserver that will only allow verifiable updates to keys. This doesn’t tie in with folk who want to run PGP based systems because of the anonymity, but for those of us who think PGP’s strength is in the web of trust it’s pretty handy. And it’s all configurable to taste; you can turn off all the verification if you want, or verify everything but not require any signatures, or even enable v3 keys if you feel like it.
The security implications of Just-in-Time (JIT) Compilers in browsers have been getting attention for the past decade and the references to more recent resources is too great to enumerate. While it’s not the only class of flaw in a browser, it is a common one; and diving deeply into it has a higher barrier to entry than, say, UXSS injection in the UI. This post is about lowering that barrier to entry.
If you want to understand what is happening under the hood in the JIT engine, you can read the source. But that’s kind of a tall order given that the folder js/ contains 500,000+ lines of code. Sometimes it’s easier to treat a target as a black box until you find something you want to dig into deeper. To aid in that endeavor, we’ve landed a feature in the js shell that allows you to get the assembly output of a Javascript function the JIT has processed. Disassembly is supported with the zydis disassembly library (our in-tree version).
To use the new feature; you’ll need to run the js interpreter. You can download the jsshell for any Nightly version of Firefox from our FTP server – for example here’s the latest Linux x64 jsshell. Helpfully, these links always point to the latest version available, historical versions can also be downloaded.
Security updates have been issued by CentOS (dovecot), Debian (gnome-shell and teeworlds), Mageia (libetpan and zeromq), openSUSE (libxml2), Red Hat (chromium-browser and librepo), SUSE (compat-openssl098, firefox, kernel, openssl, and shim), and Ubuntu (gupnp).
Google is hoping to make confidential computing — the encryption of data in-use — as easy as the click of a button for cloud native users. To this end, the company has released into general availability Confidential Virtual Machines (VMs), unveiled as a beta in July, as well as beta launched Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) Confidential Nodes.
Every week EFF receives emails from members of homeowner’s associations wondering if their Homeowner’s Association (HOA) or Neighborhood Association is making a smart choice by installing automated license plate readers (ALPRs). Local groups often turn to license plate readers thinking that they will protect their community from crime. But the truth is, these cameras—which record every license plate coming in and out of the neighborhood—may create more problems than they solve.
Some members of a community think that, whether they’ve experienced crime in their neighborhood or not, a neighborhood needs increased surveillance in order to be safe. This is part of a larger nationwide trend that shows that people’s fear of crime is incredibly high and getting higher, despite the fact that crime rates in the United States are low by historical standards.
The committee defines non-personal data as anything that is not defined in the Personal Data Protection Bill, 2019, and that does not contain personally identifiable information. This would cover a wide array of information, including, for example, anonymised datasets that companies collect from their users or customers, traffic pattern and weather data, agricultural data and datasets containing information that is not directly linked to an individual. Given that datasets are an important aspect of many businesses today, any non-personal data regulation would affect most companies and entrepreneurs. They would also have significant implications for providing benefits and enabling individuals and communities to exercise their civil liberties, due to the inferences that can be drawn even from data that is anonymised.
The TikTok saga, which was insanely stupid to begin with, kicked into overdrive last month when President Trump issued a blatantly unconstitutional executive order that was designed to force ByteDance to sell TikTok to an American company. We had all sorts of questions about this, but effectively ByteDance had until this week to find a buyer. While Microsoft was rumored for a while, late last night Microsoft announced that its proposal had been rejected and the only competitor left standing was… wait for it… Oracle. This led many to conclude that Oracle was buying TikTok. That is not the case. But hold on, we’ll get there.
We filed a friend-of-the-court brief—primarily written by the First Amendment Clinic at the Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law—in support of a TikTok employee who is challenging President Donald Trump’s ban on TikTok and was seeking a temporary restraining order (TRO). The employee contends that Trump’s executive order infringes the Fifth Amendment rights of TikTok’s U.S.-based employees. Our brief, which is joined by two prominent TikTok users, urges the court to consider the First Amendment rights of millions of TikTok users when it evaluates the plaintiff’s claims.Notwithstanding its simple premise, TikTok has grown to have an important influence in American political discourse and organizing. Unlike other platforms, users on TikTok do not need to “follow” other users to see what they post. TikTok thus uniquely allows its users to reach wide and diverse audiences. That’s why the two TikTok users who joined our brief use the platform. Lillith Ashworth, whose critiques of Democratic presidential candidates went viral last year, uses TikTok to talk about U.S. politics and geopolitics. The other user, Jynx, maintains an 18+ adult-only account, where they post content that centers on radical leftist liberation, feminism, and decolonial politics, as well as the labor rights of exotic dancers.Our brief argues that in evaluating the plaintiff’s claims, the court must consider the ban’s First Amendment implications. The Supreme Court has established that rights set forth in the Bill of Rights work together; as a result the plaintiff’s Fifth Amendment claims are enhanced by the First Amendment considerations. We say in our brief:
EFF, the First Amendment Clinic, and the individual amici urge the court to adopt a higher standard of scrutiny when reviewing the plaintiff’s claims against the president. Not only are the plaintiff’s Fifth Amendment liberties at stake, but millions of TikTok users have First Amendment freedoms at stake. The Fifth Amendment and the First Amendment are each critical in securing life, liberty, and due process of law. When these amendments are examined separately, they each deserve careful analysis; but when the interests protected by these amendments come together, a court should apply an even higher standard of scrutiny.The hearing on the TRO scheduled for tomorrow was canceled after the government promised the court that it did not intend to include the payment of wages and salaries within the executive order’s definition of prohibited transactions, thus addressing the plaintiff’s most urgent claims.
But the last-minute sale is strange in a number of ways — for a start, it’s not a sale at all. After months of insistence that TikTok sever its US operations from Chinese ownership, we’re now settling for a vague partnership between Oracle and the US TikTok operation. It’s still unclear exactly what Oracle’s “trusted tech partner” status entails, but it’s definitively not a sale, and it’s unlikely Oracle is taking over any significant operations from the US TikTok offices. Microsoft’s version of the deal would have severed American TikTok from Europe and Asia entirely, but Oracle’s version of the deal leaves it mostly intact. US TikTok will stay the same as Korean TikTok and Nigerian TikTok; it’s just getting an extra babysitter. That makes it less of a sale and more of a glorified hosting deal. It lets Trump say he’s solved the problem but doesn’t do much else.
A fired Facebook data scientist has written a 6,600-word memo condemning the company for ignoring evidence the platform was wielded to sway public opinion and manipulate elections around the world, according to a report from BuzzFeed News, which obtained a copy of the memo. The data scientist, Sophie Zhang, was fired earlier this month and posted the memo on her final day, the report reads.
Zhang implies she was fired after bringing her concerns to upper management and being told to stop focusing on issues beyond the scope of her role, which involved analyzing the platform to identity “coordinated inauthentic behavior,” Facebook’s phrase for bot networks and other malicious activity with ulterior motives like influencing election outcomes and promoting or undermining various political candidates and controversial topics. The memo indicates she also turned down a $64,000 severance package because it involved signing a non-disparagement agreement that would have restricted her ability to speak publicly about the company.
“We must ban the use of kinetic impact projectiles in crowd-control situations due both to the life-threatening injuries they can cause and their potential to violate freedom of expression and assembly,” says Physicians for Human Rights.
A popularly-elected republic overturned by a reactionary armed revolt—there are myriad reasons why the painful history of the Spanish Civil War might pop into one’s head at this particular moment.
With the September 11, 2001 attacks now nineteen years past, Mickey hosts two truth-and-accountability activists still at work on unresolved issues. Jon Gold reviews the many failures of the 9/11 Commission, and notes that important pieces of information are still being kept secret. And architect Richard Gage summarizes a recent university study which disputes the official explanation of why WTC Building 7 collapsed, as well as multiple legal actions his organization is pursuing.
Hong Kong was once a non-issue in American politics. For decades, the former British colony dutifully served as a semi-autonomous go-between for US and Chinese capital, processing billions of dollars of trade and investment between the countries each year. But over the last 14 months, this meeting ground for global capitalism has transformed into the front lines of a new Cold War. An increasingly confident China has calculated that it no longer needs to honor its long-standing international agreement to grant Hong Kong elections by universal suffrage, and since last summer, it has accelerated its devastating crackdown against pro-democracy Hong Kongers. The United States has responded by ending its recognition of Hong Kong as a separate territory from China and enacting sanctions against officials who have violated Hong Kong protesters’ human rights.
Col. Inocente Orlando Montano led an elite U.S.-trained army unit that massacred six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her teenage daughter during El Salvador’s 12-year civil war.
For years there was a long-running struggle in Charlottesville, Virginia, to remove a 26-foot-high statue of Robert E. Lee from a local park. On August 12, 2017, during a Unite the Right rally, clashes broke out between supporters of the statue, who marched under Confederate flags, and peaceful counter-protesters. During the rally, counter-protester Heather Heyer was killed and 19 others were injured when a car was deliberately driven into the crowd. That statue is one of 1,700 Confederate monuments in the U.S.
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As Business Insider reported, Trump has frequently entertained the idea of pursuing a third term — or more. That flies in the face of a two-term limit, a convention set by George Washington and officially codified in the 22nd amendment when it was ratified in 1951. According to the National Constitution Center, a nonprofit organization in Philadelphia, only one constitutional amendment has ever been repealed — the 18th, a.k.a. Prohibition, which was overturned only by a second constitutional amendment, the 21st.
A mound of charred and blood-stained clothing, shoes, and scarves is heaped within a large glass container. They’re the everyday items belonging to brothers Asadullah and Hikmatullah Shafayee – two victims of a July 2016 suicide attack that killed dozens of people in Kabul.
The display is one of 36 “memory boxes” found in the Afghanistan Center for Memory and Dialogue, a basement museum that opened in a Kabul suburb last year to commemorate the untold stories of the victims of Afghanistan’s 40-year conflict – and to highlight elusive justice and accountability for ongoing violence.
“This country has not come to terms with the legacies of the past, with war crimes, systematic torture, human rights abuses,” said Kazim Ehsan, the museum’s programme manager.
“They sold her out, and they messed it up so that she would get caught, and they didn’t protect their source,” her mother, Billie Winner-Davis, said in a telephone interview last week. “The best years of her life are being spent in a system where she doesn’t belong.”
Failing to protect an anonymous leaker is a cardinal sin in journalism, though the remarkable thing in this instance is that The Intercept didn’t seem to try to protect its source. The outlet immediately opened an investigation into its blunder, which confirmed the details that the Justice Department had gleefully announced after it arrested Ms. Winner. They included the fact that The Intercept led the authorities to Ms. Winner when it circulated the document in an effort to verify it, and then published the document, complete with the identifying markings, on the [I]nternet.
There are more such cases in academia than you might think. Social media seem to encourage academics – critical thinkers by profession – to drop their guard and take things (sometimes outrageous things) at face value, partly because of the polarisation such platforms encourage. Asking sceptical questions easily gets someone branded a bigot, and whoever has the most followers also has the largest voice, meaning they can drown out opposition.
So, drawing on my own and friends’ experiences, here is a list of signs that your woke academic friend is actually a manipulative sock puppet.
Researchers behind the comprehensive study of Earth’s atmospheric record over tens of million of years say “immediate and stringent action” could prevent most dire outcomes.
Aldabra is a UN World Heritage Site that’s home to a stunning array of wildlife, including tens of thousands of wild giant tortoises, far more tortoises than in the Galapagos Islands. Sir David Attenborough, the documentary filmmaker, has called Aldabra “one of the wonders of the world.” The atoll is exceedingly difficult to visit, not only because it’s so remote, but also because new arrivals must contend with a $225 per-visitor daily environmental impact fee — as well as piracy in the region.
What is noteworthy is that none of the funding for fossil fuel – be it in the form of capital, direct subsidy or loan guarantee – is conditional on emission cuts, despite the government’s objective of ensuring the recovery effort facilitates its departure from fossil fuels.
The government outlined in its second supplementary budget of the year that the stimulus effort should be designed to support its objectives of becoming carbon-neutral, reducing the reliance on fossil fuels and transitioning toward a carbon-free circular economy.
“The hots are getting hotter, the dries are getting drier,” he said. “We submit the science is in and observed evidence is self-evident: that climate change is real and that is exacerbating this.”
Oregon Governor Kate Brown has said her state is facing “the perfect firestorm” and called the moment “truly the bellwether for climate change on the West Coast.
“And this is a wake-up call for all of us that we have got to do everything in our power to tackle climate change.”
The West is burning. Wildfires in California, Oregon and Washington are incinerating homes, killing scores of people, sickening many others, causing hundreds of thousands to evacuate, burning entire towns to the ground, consuming millions of acres, and blanketing the western third of the United States with thick, acrid and dangerous smoke.
The West Coast of the continental United States is on fire, producing images of apocalyptic desolation running from California to Oregon to Washington state. An entire time zone is burning.
As devastating fires burn across the West Coast, some of the most vulnerable people are farmworkers — many of whom are undocumented. Despite the risks of the pandemic and the climate-fueled fires, many feel they have to keep working even if that means working inside evacuation zones. The state of California has repeatedly allowed growers to continue harvesting despite evacuation orders putting workers at great risk. Estella Cisneros, legal director of the agriculture worker program for California Rural Legal Assistance, says farmworkers who speak out against unsafe working conditions risk losing their jobs. “Farmworkers have continued to work during this whole time, despite fears of contracting COVID-19 in the workplace, despite fears of getting heat stress while they’re at work, and now despite fears of the dangers that wildfire smoke brings,” Cisneros says.
The hardest part of this sense of loss to grasp is that, because of the way the climate crisis works, places are gone long before we can see it with our own eyes. Just as these wildfires in California were long predicted by scientists, the fact that the wildfires and heat will get worse in coming summers is already a done deal.
Let me say that again, just to make it clear: Even if we cut global carbon pollution to zero tomorrow – which is not going to happen – because of the fact that CO2 lingers in the atmosphere for centuries, temperatures will not decline for a very long time. There is no going back to the gentle California climate of the past (in the 19th century, ranchers used to call what is now Silicon Valley “The Valley of Heart’s Delight” because the climate was so mild and the soil so rich that virtually anything would grow there). And every additional ton of CO2 we dump into the air – and the way things are going, we’re going to dump plenty of it — will make the west a hotter, more flammable place.
There are two big implications of this. The first is, every action we take today matters. Every ton of CO2 avoided slows the rate and degree of warming. It’s very simple: The quicker we get off fossil fuels, the better chance we have of preserving something like a hospitable planet.
Sen. Bernie Sanders used a virtual town hall on Saturday to call out his fellow members of Congress who — in the midst of record-shattering heat waves, massively destructive storms, and unprecedented wildfires — continue to insist that a Green New Deal aimed at combating the climate emergency and creating millions of good-paying jobs in the process would be too costly.
“I thought I’d find it funny watching this, but instead it’s just chilling: as the West Coast faces a climate catastrophe, the president laughs at them and denies the problem exists.”
“This avalanche of climate litigation is Exxon’s worst nightmare. The public increasingly understands Big Oil’s role in causing and lying about the climate crisis.”
Three years ago, on October 5, 2017, fighters with the Al Sunnah wa Jama’ah (ASWJ) entered the town of Mocímboa da Praia in northern Mozambique. They attacked three police stations, and then withdrew. Since then, this group—which has since proclaimed its allegiance to the Islamic State—has continued its battle, including capturing the port of Mocímboa da Praia in August 2020.
During the reign of the Emperor Justinian I (527-565 AD), a mysterious plague spread out of the Nile Valley to Constantinople and finished off the Roman Empire. Appearing first in China and North India, the “Black Death” (Yersinia pestis) radiated throughout the Mediterranean and into Northern Europe. It may well have killed close to half the world’s population, some 50 million people.
President Trump has said little about the wildfires raging in California, Oregon and Washington for three weeks, other than to suggest poor forest management was primarily to blame. But the states’ governors are pushing back and directly linking the fires to the climate crisis. “These are climate fires,” says Timothy Ingalsbee, an Oregon-based wildland fire ecologist and former wildland firefighter who now directs Firefighters United for Safety, Ethics, and Ecology. “Though some scientists hesitate to attribute a single event to climate change, these are exactly the conditions predicted by climatologists.”
As devastating fires burn across the West Coast, some of the most vulnerable people are farmworkers — many of whom are undocumented. Despite the risks of the pandemic and the climate-fueled fires, many feel they have to keep working even if that means working inside evacuation zones. The state of California has repeatedly allowed growers to continue harvesting despite evacuation orders putting workers at great risk. Estella Cisneros, legal director of the agriculture worker program for California Rural Legal Assistance, says farmworkers who speak out against unsafe working conditions risk losing their jobs. “Farmworkers have continued to work during this whole time, despite fears of contracting COVID-19 in the workplace, despite fears of getting heat stress while they’re at work, and now despite fears of the dangers that wildfire smoke brings,” Cisneros says.
(To protect the guilty and for fear of retribution, this essay does not use real names. Rich land owners in this part of the world tend to keep us common folk intimidated and quiet through liberal deployment of lawyers. Other than proper names, everything else is factual.)
In The Deep End: The Literary Scene in the Great Depression and Today (OR Books, 2020), the journalist Jason Boog writes about the plight of writers in the United States since the stock market crash of 2008 and compares their challenges to those of poets, novelists, and journalists in the 1930s. When focusing on the mid-20th Century, Boog, the West Coast correspondent for Publishers Weekly, highlights better-known literary figures from the Great Depression (Richard Wright, Cornell Woolrich, Muriel Rukeyser, Nathaniel West, Kenneth Fearing) along with more obscure authors (Edward Newhouse, Maxwell Bodenheim, Orrick Johns, Anca Vrbovska).
Moderation at scale is impossible. And yet, you’d still hope we’d get better moderation than this, despite all the problems inherent in policing millions of transactions.
“Companies across all sectors need to take more ambitious action to ensure otherwise devastating impacts of climate change are avoided while they still can be.”
Trump voters are not inclined to change their minds. Some of them are forever Republicans and will only vote the GOP ticket; they are called hereditary voters. Others can’t stand the Democratic Party nominees, won’t vote for the Libertarian ticket, and will only vote for Trump. Some love Trump because of his anti-immigrant stance, deregulation of law enforcement on businesses, and nominations of anti-choice and right-wing corporatist federal judges.
On September 13, Russia completed its first three-day elections in races across the country for governors, mayors, and local city council members. Gubernatorial candidates with the authorities’ backing won first-round victories everywhere in record-high numbers, and United Russia racked up majorities in all regional assemblies. Three of the four new party projects that are considered to have the Kremlin’s support got seats in regional parliaments, exempting them from the need to collect signatures to compete in future State Duma elections. The opposition did, however, achieve some success in elections for the city councils in Novosibirsk and Tomsk. Meduza special correspondent Andrey Pertsev breaks down the weekend’s voting results.
During a phone call on Monday, September 14, French President Emmanuel Macron told Russia’s President Vladimir Putin that French specialists have come to the same conclusion as German experts on opposition figure Alexey Navalny’s poisoning, confirming that he was poisoned with a Novichok-type paralytic nerve agent, reports the French newspaper Le Monde, citing an official statement.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been known to have an interestin eugenics, but despite the persistence of support for this discredited idea over the years, eugenics is a scientific and moral failure.
On today’s episode, Nicholas Baham II (Dr. Dreadlocks), Janice Domingo, and Nolan Higdon discuss decolonizing education and the CIA’s Operation Sea Spray with Gerardo Munoz.
With less than two months before November, the Poor People’s Campaign has launched a push to register tens of millions of poor and low-income voters, who could decide the fate of the election. “Voting is power unleashed,” says Rev. Dr. William Barber, co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign and president of Repairers of the Breach. “We’ve got to train the people on the power of the vote, the power to protect the vote, and the power to shape public policy by the vote.” The initiative is called MORE, which stands for Mobilizing, Organizing, Registering, Educating People for a Movement That Votes.
The fog of Trump, like the fog of war, is choking the country in a cloud of situational uncertainty and grief. Its effects are extending to the whole world, which is now watching in revulsion the self-destructive implosion of the United States. The America we’ve all known is no more, and it will never be the same again.
Kenosha, Wis.—Former vice president Joe Biden visited Kenosha just before Labor Day, making the first visit by a Democratic presidential nominee to Wisconsin since 2012. Biden was not campaigning in any traditional sense. He came to this historic industrial city on the shores on Lake Michigan to talk with residents who were shaken by the August 23 police shooting of a 29-year-old Black man, Jacob Blake, and by the August 25 killing of two demonstrators for racial justice by a 17-year-old white vigilante.
Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny, who is undergoing treatment for nerve agent poisoning at Berlin’s Charité Hospital, has been “successfully removed from mechanical ventilation,” the hospital stated in a press release.
Over the weekend, Russians voted in dozens of local elections, each spread over three days. In all, the contests included four single-seat State Duma constituencies, 18 gubernatorial races, 11 regional parliament elections, city council votes in 22 regional capitals, and competitions for city government offices in 33 other cities.
Sixteen of Russia’s political parties are now able to participate in the 2021 State Duma elections without collecting endorsement signatures, announced Central Election Commissioner Ella Pamfilova during a press conference (broadcast on Youtube) on the results of the local elections that took place over the weekend.
Donald Trump recently held his first indoor rally since the super-spreader event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June. The campaign sent out a snotty statement to justify this:
Holding giant rallies, as he did over the weekend, will lead to increased infection spreads and more deaths. There will be other Herman Cain’s who will die in a few months because of what Trump is doing right now.
As I wrote 11 months ago, Raab and Johnson sought legal advice on breaking the Withdrawal Agreement even before signing it, in a truly shocking example of bad faith negotiation. If mainstream journalists did the slightest actual journalism, they would have realised this was always Johnson’s plan.
“I think Biden is in an excellent position to win this election, but I think we have got to do more as a campaign than just go after Trump,” the Vermont senator said on Sunday.
Donald Trump played host to what can only be described as a deliberate COVID super-spreader event in Nevada on Sunday. It is journalistically perilous to bandy words like “deliberate” and “super-spreader,” but I watched every galling second of his rally at the Xtreme Manufacturing plant in Henderson, and those words deserve to share the same space as “water” and “wet” in the context of what went down in the desert yesterday.
Moscow hasn’t changed its mind about Alexander Lukashenko, whom Vladimir Putin congratulated on his re-election last month and met face-to-face on Monday in Sochi. Speaking to journalists after the meeting, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stressed that the Russian government views Lukashenko as Belarus’s legitimate leader, despite more than a month of widespread protests against Lukashenko’s supposed landslide election victory.
Vladimir Putin and Alexander Lukashenko have begun negotiations in Sochi, where the two leaders are meeting in person for the first time since mass protests began in Belarus, following a contested presidential election on August 9. The meeting is taking place at Putin’s Bocharov Ruchey summer residence located in Sochi’s Tsentralny City District. Sources told the Russian state news agency RIA Novosti that Putin and Lukashenko are speaking one-on-one, alone in a room.
Vladimir Putin: We are in favor of the Belarusians sorting out the situation themselves, without any external help. I think that starting work on changing the Belarusian constitution is timely and appropriate. Russia remains committed to all agreements within the framework of the Collective Security Treaty Organization and the Union State, we will fulfill all of our obligations. We will give Belarus a $1.5 billion loan and continue our cooperation in the defense sphere. Belarus will be the first country to receive our coronavirus vaccine. Alexander Grigorievich, I’m glad to see you, welcome.
A panel of the 10th Circuit US Court of Appeals has ruled, in the case of Mglej v. Gardner, that it is “clearly established law” that police in Utah may not require suspects (or anyone else they detain, except operators of motor vehicles) to show ID documents, and therefore that the Garfield County Sheriff who wrongly arrested Matthew T. Mglej for “refusing to identify himself” is not entitled to qualified immunity and can be held liable for damages.
In the summer of 2011, Mr. Mglej, then 21 years old, set out on his motorcycle from his family home in Portland, OR, to visit relatives in Dallas, TX. Mid-way on that road trip, his motorcycle developed problems, and he stopped in Boulder, UT (population around 200), to see if he could get his bike repaired and replace a tire that was threatening to blow.
Latest move called nothing more than a public relations stunt “intended to distract Americans from the president’s broken promises to seniors and the 200,000 Americans that have died from the coronavirus as a result of his failed Covid-19 response policies.”
Trump’s lack of empathy has been on full display during the 18 interviews with Woodward that have been previously reported. During the 19th and final recording, obtained by CNN the president shows a laser-like focus on what he cares about most. Because this call happened after Woodward submitted the book to his publisher, it will not be a part of Rage.
Green Party nominees for President and Vice President, Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker, rejected the decision handed down earlier today by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, to deny placing them on the November 2020 ballot. The Green Party has been on the ballot in Wisconsin for every presidential election since 1996.
Several years ago, the workers of Wisconsin occupied the state capitol building with shouts of “this is what democracy looks like.” Angela Walker mobilized her Milwaukee transit workers local union into that defense of workers’ rights. Unfortunately, today, the state Supreme Court demonstrated something completely different from what most people consider to be democracy: a choice on their ballot.
“The court majority failed to recognize the partisan Wisconsin Election Commission’s repeated unlawful actions, said Andrea Mérida, campaign manager.” Mérida continued, “now we have a dangerous precedent where a major party can effectively decide which minor parties can participate in elections, by conjuring up arbitrary requirements on the fly to remove its opposition. Regardless, the fact remains that we met all of the legal requirements for ballot access and followed the WEC’s instructions to the letter with regards to Angela Walker’s change of residence.”
Fight for the Future has unveiled a new website and campaign to Save Free Speech Online: SaveOnlineFreeSpeech.org. The website helps you make a comment on the public record against President Trump’s most recent plan to destroy free speech online. Last year, President Trump unveiled a plan to bring a damaging dark veil of censorship to the internet with his “Censor the Internet” executive order. The order wishes to gut Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA 230) which has long been the cornerstone of free speech on the internet because it provides immunity to platforms for things posted online. In the blackhole that would result from a diminished CDA 230, President Trump would call on the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to start enforcing the popular censorship flavor of the week instead of letting platforms police themselves.
Paused last week due to a COVID19 scare, Julian Assange’s extradition hearing resumed today with witness testimony from Eric Lewis, chairman of the board of Reprieve and a lawyer who “represents Guantanamo and Afghan detainees in litigation, seeking redress and accountability for torture and religious abuse while in US custody.”
The legal team for Julian Assange strongly believes if the WikiLeaks founder is extradited to the United States he will be detained in harsh and abusive conditions, and if convicted, he will be incarcerated in a supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, in conditions that amount to solitary confinement.
Such conditions would likely violate Article 3 of the Human Rights Act in the United Kingdom, which is supposed to protect individuals from torture or cruel and inhuman treatment. But during the fifth day of proceedings in Assange’s extradition trial, James Lewis, the prosecutor, focused on a prior ruling from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) that clearly sided with the U.S. government.
On May 25, 2020, African American George Floyd, was arrested and killed by a white Minneapolis police officer. The officer, Derek Chauvin, knelt forcefully on Floyd’s neck, and in effect crushing Floyd’s wind pipe. Three other officers were involved, two helping to restrain Floyd, and another standing guard between witnesses and the actual killing. Eight minutes passed and Floyd was dead. Video taken by onlookers was posted world-wide which led to protests and riots in Minneapolis and throughout the United States. Protests also broke out in countries around the world, most notably Europe. Absent the video, the question being asked is how many more killings are taking place at the hands of the police, specifically black men.
This was a curious opening weekend in the National Football League. After a summer of marches in all 50 states against racism and police violence following the murder of George Floyd, the NFL has been desperate to avoid a players’ strike for racial justice. Since police shot Jacob Blake in Kenosha, the struggle has escalated into labor action in almost every other sports league and the NFL, with billions of dollars at stake, has been trying to avoid any cancellation of games.
The world is watching as Donald Trump and his team incite violence against nonwhite Americans across the United States. Trump’s team spans a broad array of warriors: his core staffers at the White House, senior Justice Department officers, many police departments across the country, key politicians in Congress, Fox News and other extreme media outlets, invisible right-wing trolls behind keyboards, armed vigilante militias, and many others. Their violent rhetoric spawns physical violence and emotional trauma on the vulnerable. For viewers afar, these flashpoints are baffling as they are incompatible with the imagined promised land of the U.S. Yet, for Black America, this is a continuation of the American odyssey. History is replete with unfathomable violence against Black people.
Law enforcement agencies in the Pacific Northwest region of the United States are struggling to dissuade people from buying into conspiracy theories alleging extremists are starting many of the wildfires currently ravaging the area.
As total coronavirus deaths in the United States approached 200,000, President Trump held his first indoor campaign rally in almost three months on Sunday, hosting an event in Henderson, Nevada, without enforcing social distancing protocols.
The Albuquerque Police Department (APD) works closely with a data management company whose CEO was investigated by the New Mexico Office of Attorney General (NMOAG) in 2018 for allowing users on its network to store and distribute child pornography. This same CEO, whose company hosts APD’s connectabq.org website, was at the center of a massive National Security Agency (NSA) intelligence gathering operation in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, according to BlueLeaks documents leaked by the hacking group Anonymous in June 2020 and documents leaked by Edward Snowden in 2013.
Law enforcement officials love to defend asset forfeiture. While sidestepping the fact that it almost always directly enriches the agency doing the forfeiting, these officials love to claim it’s an invaluable tool that helps cops dismantle dangerous criminal organizations.
San Francisco – The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce the 2020 Barlow recipients at its Pioneer Award Ceremony: artificial intelligence and racial bias experts Joy Buolamwini, Dr. Timnit Gebru, and Deborah Raji; sex worker activist and tech policy and content moderation researcher Danielle Blunt; and the global Internet freedom organization Open Technology Fund (OTF) and its community.
The virtual ceremony will be held October 15 from 5:30 pm to 7 pm PT. The keynote speaker for this year’s ceremony will be Cyrus Farivar, a longtime technology investigative reporter, author, and radio producer. The event will stream live and free on Twitch, YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, and audience members are encouraged to give a $10 suggested donation. EFF is supported by small donors around the world and you can become an official member at https://eff.org/PAC-join.
Homeland Security and its various sub-organizations have a fairly tragic history of seizing things they shouldn’t, claiming that non-infringing works are “counterfeits.” And DHS continues to cluelessly push out press releases that only highlight how ignorant they are regarding the basics of the very laws they’re supposed to be enforcing.
Every time legislation is looming that could threaten its broadband monopoly, AT&T attempts to get in front of it and steer the conversation away from subjects it doesn’t want tackled by legislation. The biggest of those subjects is the lack of overall competition caused by sector monopolization, and the high prices, crappy customer service, and patchy availability that usually results. With COVID-19 resulting in folks realizing the importance of affordable broadband more than ever, it’s becoming pretty clear that AT&T is worried somebody might just try to finally do something about it.
And now, we shall talk about one of life’s great pleasures: beer. This nectar of the gods has been something of a focus of mine, particularly given the explosion of the craft brewing industry and how that explosion has created an ever-increasing trademark apocalypse over the past decade. It is important context for the purposes of this post that you understand that the craft brewing industry, before it exploded but was steadily growing, had for years operated under a congenial and fraternal practice when it came to all things intellectual property. Everything from relaxed attitudes on trademarks, to an artistic bent when it came to beer labels, up to and including the regular willingness of industry rivals to regularly collaborate on specific concoctions: this was the basic theme of the industry up until the past decade or so. It was, frankly, one of the things that made craft beer so popular and fun.
Counsel at Pfizer, Novartis and Wolf Greenfield, and one of the bill’s authors, are concerned that COVID could compel parties to misuse a 40-year-old act that stimulates US innovation
Guest post by Paul R. Gugliuzza & J. Jonas Anderson. Paul Gugliuzza is Professor of Law at Temple University Beasley School of Law. Jonas Anderson is Associate Dean for Scholarship and Professor of Law at American University Washington College of Law.
Move over Marshall. The new capital of American patent litigation is Waco, Texas. Waco’s sole federal judge, Alan Albright—who took the bench less than two years ago—now hears more patent cases than any other judge in the country.
It’s all happened quickly. As recently as 2018, the Western District of Texas, which spans from Waco, Austin, and San Antonio in the central part of the state to El Paso in its far western reaches, received only 90 patent cases, a mere 2.5% of patent cases filed nationwide. Two years later, the Western District is on pace to receive 850 patent cases by year’s end, roughly 22% of patent cases filed nationwide and more than any other district in the country.
Practically all of those cases are on Judge Albright’s docket. As the figure below shows, the Waco Division received a mere 28 patent cases in 2018, the year he took the bench. If current trends hold, Judge Albright alone will receive 779 patent cases in 2020, an increase of 2682%!
Combined EBA decisions G 2/12 and G 2/13 were published in 2015 and related to the relevance of Article 53(b) EPC to the patentability of plant products obtained by the excluded “essentially biological processes”. In those decisions, the EBA stated Article 53(b) EPC did not exclude such products from patentability, other than plant varieties specifically.
However, Rule 28 EPC was subsequently amended by a decision of the Administrative Council (AC) in July 2017 to include an interpretation of Article 53(b) EPC under new Rule 28(2) EPC. The amended rule states, under Article 53(b) EPC, European patents shall not be granted in respect of “plants or animals exclusively obtained by means of an essentially biological process”. This clearly conflicts with the EBA’s interpretation of Article 53(b) EPC in G 2/12 and G 2/13.
The EBA in G 3/19 has affirmed the earlier Enlarged Board decisions, but has also stated the situation is different now than in 2015 when G 2/12 and G 2/13 were published, because of the amendment to Rule 28 EPC to explicitly exclude plants or animals exclusively obtained by means of an essentially biological process. Given this changing context and to allow for continued legal certainty for patent applicants and third parties, G 3/19 will only be relevant to patent applications filed on or after 1 July 2017, i.e. the date of entry into force of the AC decision.
In addition to overturning an earlier EBA decision, G 3/19 is notable because the EBA considered a “dynamic” interpretation if the EPC. Under a “dynamic interpretation”, it is accepted that considerations may arise after a treaty is signed that might give reason to believe a literal interpretation of the provision’s wording would conflict with the legislator’s aims. We believe this is the first time the EBA has used this approach to law interpretation. The EBA noted the amendment of Rule 28 EPC means “the legal and factual situation underlying decision G 2/12 has substantially changed” (para XXVI.4 of G 3/19). The very fact that this Rule was amended “allows and indeed calls for a dynamic interpretation of Article 53(b) EPC” (para XXVI.7 of G 3/19).
A patent infringement appeal brought against the UK branch of the telecommunications company Huawei has been dismissed by the UK Supreme Court after the company challenged the decision by the English Court of Appeal to uphold the trial judge’s order.
Unwired Planet International Ltd, the respondent to the appeal, claimed that Huawei had infringed five of its UK patents, which it claimed to be Standard Essential Patents without which it would be impossible to make, sell, use, or operate mobile phones compliant with international standards for mobile telephony. An order in respect of two of those patents was made and then upheld on a previous appeal.
A recent Board of Appeal decision at the European Patent Office, T 697/17, has reaffirmed a key practice point in the drafting of software-based patent applications for Europe: make the technical considerations which were at play when designing an invention the main focus of your application.
In its decision, the Board provides further guidance on how features of an invention should be assessed to determine whether they contribute to providing a patentable “technical effect”. The key conclusion is that features which are specifically chosen with the intention of overcoming a technical problem in the prior art are more likely to be considered relevant for patentability than features chosen based on business-related motivations.
In practice, it might be difficult to prove whether a feature was motivated by technical or business considerations during prosecution without supporting evidence. Our advice is therefore to draft your applications to include as many technical considerations and motivations which went into devising the invention as possible. It might not always be possible to “fix” applications for Europe at a later stage due to the strict approach taken by the EPO in relation to added subject matter, so getting this detail in at the outset is of the utmost importance. It will be harder to convince an Examiner that a technical consideration was at play if it appears to have been “made up” during prosecution.
Emphasising technical considerations is especially important when patenting technology in areas the EPO tends to consider non-technical, like fintech, e-commerce or even aspects of AI. When drafting, ask yourself and the inventors why each identified feature is needed and how such a feature disrupts existing solutions in a technical way. That is, what does the feature in question do to bring about technical advantages such as security of data exchange, speed of computing, reliability of services and the like.
On September 14, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) holding all claims of US Patent 9,838,720 unpatentable. Owned by the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Korean Broadcasting System (KBS), KAIST seeks to license patents allegedly essential to the HEVC / H.265 standard (such as the ‘720 patent). Unified filed this challenge as part of its ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone.
On September 11, 2020, the Central Reexamination Unit of the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Unified Patents’ request for ex parte reexamination of U.S. Patent 6,725,456, owned and asserted by Sound View Innovations, LLC, finding substantial new questions of patentability for the challenged claim. 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.
“Upon examining the shipment in question, a CBP import specialist determined that the subject earbuds appeared to violate Apple’s configuration trademark. Apple has configuration trademarks on their brand of earbuds, and has recorded those trademarks with CBP,” the spokesperson said. Configuration trademarks cover the general appearance of a product, if you were wondering. “Based on that determination, CBP officers at JFK Airport have seized the shipment under 19 USC 1526 (e).”
The CBP spokesperson also tried to address the common response that many people have had to this incident: couldn’t their officers tell that the OnePlus Buds were a genuine product (and not a “counterfeit” posing as AirPods) just by looking at the box and branding? “CBP’s seizure of the earbuds in question is unrelated to the images or language on the box. A company does not have to put an ‘Apple’ wordmark or design on their products to violate these trademarks.”
Despite the US Supreme Court’s ruling in Booking.com, ‘generic.com’ trademark applicants still need to carefully document the protectability and registrability of their brands, say Victoria Doyle and Theodore Davis of Kilpatrick Townsend
This was frustrating, not only because I own all the fucking copyright to my own fucking music, but also because of the weird language used in the notice. Maybe they weren’t mad that I was playing my own music, and shut me down for some other reason — I don’t know, because I have no idea who “[FB Test Page]” is. (Others have had a similar problem.)
Whatever the truth is, that vagary is a central part of the problem. Because days later, Facebook announced new formal plans to crack down on “music listening experiences,” beginning October 1. The new regulations include these details: [...]
The Dutch state is not liable for pirating citizens based on statements made by Government officials. The Court of Appeals rejected a damages claim from Dutch filmmakers who argued that government officials induced piracy. The statements indeed suggested that downloading pirated movies and TV-shows was allowed, which was factually correct at the time.
Embedding copyright works in a webpage from other websites using inline linking requires permission from the rightsholder, EU Advocate General Szpunar has advised the EU Court of Justice. However, when content is embedded using the framing technique, authorization is not needed, even when that circumvents technological measures imposed by rightsholders.
Can a sign representing an artwork be registered as a trade mark? Can trade mark registration be used to monopolize artworks? If so, can any such intention and behaviour be repressed?
The answer to all these questions is in the affirmative, as Pest Control – a handling service acting on behalf of elusive artist Banksy – learned yesterday, when the Cancellation Division of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) ordered that its EU trade mark (EUTM) registration representing one of Banksy’s best known artworks, the Flower Thrower, be declared invalid on the ground of bad faith.
[...]
Conflicts between real and intellectual property are not novel, and there is interesting case law on this point. However, it would be problematic to hold in principle that only works realized out of legality, and not also works realized out of illegality, would be eligible for copyright protection. Possibly even more problematic is the Office’s suggestion that the public display location of an artwork may “annul” any ownership rights in copyright. Both are unacceptable conclusions.
In any case, let’s stay tuned for the next episodes in the ‘Banksy in IPland’ saga …
I think if I stopped writing about other stuff, I could still fill Techdirt with the same number of posts just covering the problems facing copyright trolling lawyer Richard Liebowitz. Today we have a story of Liebowitz being in trouble, yet again. This is in the Chevrestt v. Barstool Sports case. We mentioned this one back in May, where a judge sanctioned Liebowitz and benchslapped him pretty significantly for failing to follow “simple” orders from the court. The judge in that case noted that in the case last year where Liebowitz lied about the death of his grandfather, that he had promised to attend some courses on how to better manage his legal practice. The judge asked for some details about whether or not he actually carried that out:
The Creative Commons Global Network (CCGN) consists of 45 CC Country Chapters spread across the globe. They’re the home for a community of advocates, activists, educators, artists, lawyers, and users who share CC’s vision and values. They implement and strengthen open access policies, copyright reform, open education, and open culture in the communities in which they live.
The Cambridgeshire coroner recently held a final hearing into the death of Debian Contributor Lucy Wayland. Wayland died almost immediately after the Debian 2018 Christmas lynchings.
Before getting into where Debian has gone wrong, it is important to emphasize consideration for Wayland’s family at this time. Speculation about the details of Wayland’s death is both distressing for people and un-necessary when considering the problems in the Debian environment.
The purpose of this blog is not to focus on Wayland, rather, it is about the issues.
Do people understand?
With a tragedy like this, there are many emotions at play. Grief. Sadness. Anger. Shame.
Shame may be the worst. A previous blog examined shaming people back in March, shortly after Wayland died.
If the Debian community understood the dangers of shame, we wouldn’t see people like Molly de Blanc, as girlfriend of the former Debian Project Leader, standing up at a prominent event like FOSDEM and gloating about how she got to demote people in 2018.
Before de Blanc gave that speech about being an enforcer, most of us thought the term toxic woman had been relegated to history. It seems odd that somebody who claims to be a champion of diversity has brought it back so convincingly.
Out of respect for Wayland’s family, Debian needs to unilaterally acknowledge something went wrong at Christmas 2018 and furthermore, distance itself from the preaching of Molly de Blanc and other amateur-hour enforcers.
Personally, I became involved in the Linux movement in the early nineties and became involved in Debian in 1997. Yet it wasn’t until 2012 that I applied to be on the Debian keyring. There is no single reason for that delay: on the one hand, the bureaucracy appeared somewhat intimidating and on the other hand, it simply wasn’t necessary for my work. It isn’t even necessary today. I only applied to be on the Debian keyring in the hope that I could contribute to the community. I didn’t join to get one of Lamb’s Debian Developer Certificates for myself, I only wanted to give back and share.
At the time Wayland passed away, she was at the lowest tier of the Debian hierarchy, a Debian Contributor. When I resigned from my role in the GSoC team citing extraordinary personaly circumstances, Chris Lamb, Enrico Zini and other ruthless individuals suddenly decided to amuse themselves by “demoting” me to this same lowly tier. It was a deliberate and malicious attempt to humiliate me, but it also served to humiliate other people, like Wayland, at the same tier. None of them knew the pain my family was going through at that time. Their callous behaviour only made it worse.
When any organization goes through restructuring, it impacts everybody.
As noted in the blog about enforcers, all the witnesses to shaming suffer just as much, if not more, than the victims. How would Lucy Wayland feel seeing other experienced volunteers being subjected to cruel demotions at Christmas?
During the credit crisis, I spent a number of years working in London’s capital markets. Restructuring was a regular occurrence. In one case, a hedge fund decided to let us all go on a Monday morning. I had only joined and I was one week short of completing the probationary period. Technically, the firm was only obliged to pay me for one more week. After telling the team we had no jobs, the director immediately proceeded to advise that I would get the same payout as everybody else. The next thing he said is that one of our colleagues, who was on holiday, was not to be given the bad news until he returned. He was going to get an extra week added to his notice period. The firm didn’t want to disturb his holidays.
My next mission was at a large bank in Canary Wharf. It is a much larger firm. Even during the crisis, while some teams were being cut, other people were being hired to perform essential roles in the bank.
As a larger organization, the redundancies would come in waves, every few months and the rest of us would continue operating. First the contractors were released and a whole bunch of desks were empty. Then they started reducing some permanent staff members. Many of our project managers disappeared, only the key developers remained.
To say this was a little bit grim is an understatement.
Nonetheless, our managers tried to keep their feet on the ground. In one firm, I remember a manager walking out when HR tried to sack people behind his back.
Despite this tragedy, nobody was simply dumped into the street. Staff were given counselling, resources and payment for a transition period. Some things, like Christmas, were still sacred. Even at the height of the credit crisis, I don’t remember anybody being sacked at Christmas.
When I saw what Chris Lamb, Molly de Blanc and their underlings did to Dr Preining in Christmas 2018, I couldn’t help feeling outrage. If the supposedly ruthless merchant banks of London didn’t dare to violate Christmas, how could Debian, an organization constituted on volunteering, do so?
Yet it only got worse.
The more questions I asked, the more evidence of corruption emerged. For example, developers sending veiled threats to interns, behind the backs of the mentors. It reminded me of that case where a manager walked out on a plum job in Canary Wharf when HR sent communications behind his back.
Grievance procedures that give people inadequate time and information to respond to any complaint. In other words, Enrico Zini, Joerg Jaspert and Jonathan Wiltshire, the Debian Account Managers, running a kangaroo court, just like Guantanamo Bay military trials in Cuba.
The coroner recently found that Wayland died from an accident, alone in her home. Having reviewed the details carefully, it is not hard to imagine any volunteer dying in similar circumstances after being subjected to or simply exposed to such thuggery by the Debian cabal.
After a report found organization culture contributed to a series of tragic deaths in Amnesty International, their entire board offered to resign. Wayland’s death happened during Chris Lamb’s term as Debian Project Leader and immediately after lynchings that Lamb helped orchestrate. Lamb hasn’t even acknowledged it, simply putting out monthly reports about his technical works.
veiled threats regularly sent to a range of people, whether it is interns or experienced developers
pushing GSoC interns to work on weekends
developers who withdraw from an activity face punishments, right up to expulsion
when paying travel expenses, DebConf organizers humiliate people from poorer countries by telling them to pay their own visa fees, even though these costs are unavoidable
gloating about “fun” and “safety” immediately after the lynchings and the tragic and avoidable death of Lucy Wayland
It is ironic that as extremist members of the transgender community attempted to make a safe space for their uncompromising rhetoric within Debian, the death of another transgender volunteer appears to be an example of collateral damage. █
Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:23 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Taking personal risk by supporting fellow workers and confronting rogue management is simply the right thing to do
Summary: We gently issue a polite call for information about the EPO; it has sadly become somewhat of an information vacuum, likely by intention, as the management doesn’t wish to be held accountable for present and past crimes
THE situation in EPOnia is rapidly getting grimmer and grimmer. Albeit quietly/silently. As time goes by the illegal and corrupt behaviour gets ‘normalised’ (the unethical is presumed ethical). This harms people’s moral consciousness and corrodes the obligation to the mission. It destroys Europe’s largest patent office, yet nobody is allowed to speak about it (the media is even paid to lie about it or at least to look the other way).
“The worst one can do is become passive about it and let there be calm/quiet, allowing abuses to be perpetuated and extended even further.”EPO insiders talk to us regularly. They’re unhappy. Imagine being forced to switch on a webcam in your own home (with family around) or lose the job. And to face dozens of people (strangers) through that webcam, basically exposing them all to companies like Microsoft, which initiated the PRISM programme of the NSA. This isn’t just unethical but also illegal. There was recently a court ruling (outcome barely publicised) backing Snowden’s actions. He was a whistle-blower, not a criminal, and he helped raise awareness of unprecedented privacy abuses.
As we said before, we’re unable to find sufficient information about the EPO and we actively look for more. It’s difficult and we could use some help. The worst one can do is become passive about it and let there be calm/quiet, allowing abuses to be perpetuated and extended even further. Sometimes people come to assume that lack of resistance means acceptance and complacency. Union-busting tactics and techniques of authoritarian regimes boil down to that; it’s demoralising. See Belarus for a recent example.
There’s that one saying about loose lips sinking boats (or ships); at the moment at the EPO is a sinking boat not because staff is blowing the whistle but because that staff isn’t being listened to and little changes for the better. As we noted this morning, the EPO is adding another surveillance company (working closely with the FBI on eavesdropping; this is no secret!) to the EPO’s budget. They’ll be outsourcing yet more footage to the US whilst infringing principles of due process and fair trial. For particular aspects/elements of hearings, physical presence is imperative. We won’t name all the specific examples, but when it comes to debating technical inventions it helps to have one’s full body and field of vision (not a matrix of coarse pixels). Video streaming is not a substitute. Not even temporarily; laws don’t just get temporarily suspended and patents aren’t a matter of life and death anyway (even if the EPO pretends otherwise).
We’re aware that it’s harder for staff to organise and protest because of the pandemic; we also know that between home-schooling and overnight work the staff has little time/energy to research EPO scandals and gather evidence (limited physical access), but anything we can be given to substantiate facts would help colleagues. Many of them still read this site, which became a go-to place for EPO internal affairs. █
Summary: Swept under the rug are a bunch of perfectly legitimateEPO problems, which EPO staff (through the union and staff representatives) keeps bringing up, only to meet the deaf ears and iron fists of Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos since one decade ago
One of the revelations from the expulsion of Dr Norbert Preining is the role of Laura Arjona Reina (larjona) sending him nasty emails a few days before Christmas.
Drawing attention to an email chain like this inevitably encourages other victims to ask for help. We now know that Dr Preining isn’t the only recipient of harassment and abuse from Arjona. With that in mind, we are doing a more thorough analysis to see if other victims of the Anti-harassment team will come forward.
has a tone that is inappropriate for Planet Debian.
Maybe it’s written with no intention to do harm, but it seems it’s not written to *not do harm* either
Tone policing at its worst. Dr Preining didn’t do any harm but maybe he was thinking about it so trigger-happy Arjona censored him just in case. Beware the Thought Police!
Dr Preining replied politely to Arjona and after a week of radio silence, re-enabled his blog without that particular post being visible.
From Dr Preining’s perspective, the radio silence continued for another couple of weeks. Rather than trying to establish a dialogue with Dr Preining in a professional manner, Arjona was sneaking around in the corridors of the palace, trying to get support for a drone strike.
Out of the blue, days before Christmas, without any warning or any professional attempt at communication whatsoever, Dr Preining received:
have any intention of being a constructive member of Debian, and we see
little hope for improvement as it is.
Therefore, we are revoking your status as a Debian Developer with
immediate effect. You remain a Debian Maintainer for a minimum of 6
months, after which you can apply for getting your Debian Developer
status back.
How could they make such a conclusion about somebody who has done decades of work for Debian and free software users? It is completely out of touch with reality.
Imagine for a moment that you were a novice female developer and you want to have this level of influence to call these drone strikes and expel people high above your pay-grade. How do you get that power?
Most answers to that question are really degrading to women but this is what people say about Debian when they see the emails certain women are sending to the developers like Dr Preining. Nonetheless, there is at least one other possible explanation.
It appears that this was some kind of gangster’s initiation ceremony. For example, low level gangsters in London are challenged to prove themselves by sneaking into the backseat of a woman’s car while she pays for fuel.
One of the workers at the carnival convinced more junior colleagues that he was a representative of the carnival mafia. He offered them the opportunity to join this fearsome group if they would volunteer to snuff out some more senior carnival associates who operated a rival food van. It is a tale remarkably similar to the plot to snuff out the more experienced and respected developer Dr Preining. (alternative link to video)
Carnival novices followed their orders to the letter, just as Arjona may have been manipulated into this plot by those around her.
Detecting Thoughtcrime™
Arjona’s initiation task was to expel somebody for the evils of thoughtcrime™ and Dr Preining was the random victim she picked.
Unfortunately, one of the carnival victims was able to put in a call to the police before they had completed the killings and disposed of the bodies. In much the same way, Dr Preining was able to raise the alarm and now we can all see how Debian is propagating the most vulgar aspects of Debian culture to junior members like Arjona.
The non-developing developers
Our emphasis on gender is no accident. We believe in diversity.
Let’s have a closer look at where Laura Arjona Reina sits in the non-developing developer keyring.
The main developer keyring has less than two percent women. The non-developing developer keyring has thirty-one percent women. Why this huge gender disparity?
If you randomly select somebody from the non-developer keyring, they are almost sixteen times more likely to be female than somebody randomly selected from the main Debian Developer keyring. These people are permitted to vote and to participate in the debian-private (leaked) gossip network but are not trusted to do anything else.
Whenever a system of segregation like this appears, the same pattern emerges.
There are various Debian-specific explanations for this disparity.
Another theory is that this disparity represents and perpetuates mistrust of women. Being on the non-developing keyring implies that the person is not trusted technically to modify an operating system and furthermore, it implies there is no point trying to train these people. As females appear so much more likely to be shunted away there, it gives us an insight into the way Debian’s stalwarts perceive women’s future potential. In other words, most women will never be trusted, so they should not set their sights higher than non-developing developer status. This behavior in Debian is entirely consistent with practices in industry: for example, a recent study (Birminghamton University, State University of New York) found that 34 percent fewer women receive pay for college internships.
The most compelling theory is that the non-developing developer keyring is simply a giant gerrymandering exercise. Incumbents have created this inferior status which allows their wives, girlfriends, male partners and a few political allies to vote in project elections, diluting the votes of people who do the real development work. These votes act as a buffer against calls for accountability and reform.
When serious female developers recognise a barely-disguised system of segregation like this and they see the former leader’s girlfriend being catapulted into keynote speaking opportunities, they run a mile. Gender disparity is therefore perpetuated.
Call for witnesses
Have you experienced harassment and abuse from Laura Arjona Reina or anybody else in Debian’s Anti-Harassment team? Please email the Debian Community News Team so we can investigate and assist you. █
A number of people in the Debian world have been spreading false accusations of harassment and abuse.
These accusations are never accompanied by any evidence.
Harassment and abuse have a very clear meaning to most people, for example, sexual abuse.
In Debian, these words are being used to describe any uncomfortable questions about money. For example, if a volunteer asks about the secret $300,000 donation from Google, they are accused of harassing the leader.
In any other organization, asking those questions is simply being a good citizen.
The rogue developers who misuse the words harassment and abuse in these situations are guilty of character assassination and they are also stealing from the experiences of people who really have been harassed and abused, including some Debian volunteers. █
Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly, and applying the wrong remedies.”
–Groucho Marx
Summary: After a bunch of prominent UPC proponents have fled (early retirement, resignation, or radio silence) there are few firms/people still willing to lie in public for Team UPC; the responses (in comments) are rather revealing for many consider them to be utterly insane and infinitely dishonest
A couple of 'hoax' blog posts from Team UPC/Bristows called for a violation of international law and the responses were understandably critical. “Disenfranchised” wrote: “The approach is also narrow-minded. The Court is not something just to be divided up for political favours. That happened with Cameron in 2013 but only because there was no other way and look where that got us. The UPC needs amending (should have been amended 4 years ago) to recognise the Central Division as having a single seat (with freedom to delegate workload as required to local divisions) and remove the ridiculous Annex II. It should also reflect the post Covid reality that we hope to see – time for the first true CyberCourt.”
“Even patent professionals are somewhat shocked by what Team UPC is hoping to accomplish and the lies it keeps telling.”“Astonished” then wrote: “If – with the existing agreements – the UPC is started, it will be fun to see the first case tried in Milan go to the EuCJ because of the wrong venue (this gives a new meaning to “forum non conveniens”). But I don’t see a start of the UPC soon, the BVerfG mor or less invited new constitutional complaints, so I guess it will take some more years to resolve the open questions, assuming this is at all possible. With the mess made out of the UPC agreement, it would be best to completely scrap it and start from scratch – without interested litigators during the drafting.”
“MaxDrei” then responded to the above: “The post from “Astonished” puts its finger on the problem: who today shall draft new legislation, if not the powerful lobby interests (here, the international patent litigation industry)? The days are long gone, when draft legislation was written by a public office (such as, in the UK, the “Parliamentary Draftsman”) with provisions carefully crafted to coincide with “the public interest” or the “general welfare” of society. Today, nobody knows any longer what that is (or if they do, the lobbyists immediately render it invisible).”
“So they had a little webchat and they have not actually met for 3.5 years. OK, got it…”See all the comments here; 6 out of 6 are unequivocally negative. Even patent professionals are somewhat shocked by what Team UPC is hoping to accomplish and the lies it keeps telling.
Some hours ago we found in Lexology a promotion of another bundle of lies, this one from Herbert Smith Freehills LLP’s Sebastian Moore and Rachel Montagnon. Referring to the ‘meeting’ they say “albeit virtually” (i.e. just some webchat) and they speak of “good progress” without actually naming any. They allude to “European Industry” (meaning litigation ‘industry’, i.e. themselves) an then proceed with the same lies as Bristows told. They published this on 9/11, just like Bristows (in its own blog and in Kluwer Patent Blog) and said: “Yesterday (10 September 2020) the UPC Preparatory Committee met (albeit virtually) for the first time since March 2017. On the agenda were the issues triggered by the formal withdrawal of the UK from the UPC system and the events in Germany in relation to challenges to Germany’s participation.”
So they had a little webchat and they have not actually met for 3.5 years. OK, got it…
“The note of the meeting on the Committee’s website (here) states that the Committee took note of the “good progress” being made in Germany with regard to the legislation needed for the German ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement and the Protocol on Provisional Application.”
“This is the sort of moral depravity which causes Team UPC to be alienated and mocked by a growing proportion of the legal profession. Many lawyers want nothing to do with these liars, who are simply becoming a liability and an embarrassment to the entire profession.”Wait, does the UPC committee run Germany now? Does it tell the Government of Germany what to do? This committee is just like a lobbying group, partly overlapping the litigation profiteers (see the members). The term “pressure group” would be more suitable than “Committee”….
Here’s a lie: “The Committee also took note of the call from European Industry for a swift entry into operation of the Unitary Patent System.”
Nonsense. The actual industry very often opposed the UPC. But they’re often lied for/about. This is the sort of moral depravity which causes Team UPC to be alienated and mocked by a growing proportion of the legal profession. Many lawyers want nothing to do with these liars, who are simply becoming a liability and an embarrassment to the entire profession. █
I don’t as of yet put pre-OSI “Open” in the same category as the BRAND “Open Source” (or OSI), because I’m not at all certain that’s fair to do. I mean everything I’ve complained about with regards to Open Source is from 1998 onwards. So what about the rest?
There’s that one saying about loose lips sinking boats (or ships); at the moment at the EPO is a sinking boat not because staff is blowing the whistle but because that staff isn’t being listened to and little changes for the better. As we noted this morning, the EPO is adding another surveillance company (working closely with the FBI on eavesdropping; this is no secret!) to the EPO’s budget. They’ll be 
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