10.01.20
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 11:38 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Can fake(d) enthusiasm do the trick?
Summary: Team UPC is trying to give the false impression that the UPC is coming (even though people who crafted the UPCA have already admitted that it’s doomed)
LAST MONTH the FFII wrote to the Bundesrat about why the UPC(A) is illegal and must not be allowed. Nobody wrote about the outcome of the Bundesrat’s agenda back then, but yesterday Bristows mentioned it, several weeks late. It’s composed by Gregory Bacon but it was bearing the name “Edward Nodder” and later “Andrew Bowler” (something odd going on; account sharing?); on the FFII it said:
There remains the risk of another challenge in the German constitutional court (BVerfG) preventing, or delaying, the German legislation coming into force. One potential challenger is the FFII (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure), which published here on 17 September an open letter to the Bundesrat raising objections to ratification of the UPC Agreement, and also requesting it to send the Agreement back for renegotiation so that the CJEU could rule on software patents.
The part about software patents in Europe isn’t the most important one. There are many, countless issues associated with the UPC (other than this one aspect). The FFII’s President told us yesterday (when asked regarding the above) that “as we said, this “Preparatory Committee” does not have the power to reinterpret the treaty [...] only Member States within the Council of the EU have [...] yet another abuse of power, undemocratic at best…”
“…those who push for it are discrediting themselves.”At the end it’ll just be a major embarrassment to the German ministry of injustice, the Bundesrat, and the Bundestag. The UPC isn’t happening; those who push for it are discrediting themselves.
Sadly, we know whose pockets the media is in. Some people do point this out when they say: “Roy Schestowitz’s website, Techrights has been saying the UPC has been dead for years, and has been charting the behaviour of UPC supporters for a long period. It would be safe to say his opinion of the UPC (and the European Patent Office) is not uniformly positive. I don’t know enough to say whether his criticisms are well-founded (they appear to be to my inexpert eye), but he does give a different view on things. An El Reg journalist might like to use it as a contrast to some of the press releases issued by other interested parties.”
So far everything we’ve said about the UPC turned out to be correct; the opposite can be said about UPC proponents (profiteers). █
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 11:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Leslie Byrne, a Democrat from Virginia, was told by a colleague, “Always lean to the green. … He was not an environmentalist” — Lawrence Lessig
Summary: The greenwashing agenda of the EPO is rather revealing; we’re supposed to respect the EPO as if it’s a saviour of the planet whilst it’s crushing its staff, breaking the law, stealing money and so on
Corrupt EPO management carries on with truly ridiculous greenwashing for the third time in September. The majority of September “news” in the EPO’s site can be described as 100% greenwashing. Team Campinos, covering up for Battistelli and actively participating in more of the same corruption, is trying to play the “good citizen” card.
“The EPO is trying to champion PR tactics while its crimes are being investigated to some degree.”This tactic isn’t unique to the EPO. That’s why it already has a widely used term, namely “greenwashing” (we did not make up the word). Days ago there was “EPO marks EMAS 25th anniversary” (warning: epo.org link) and shortly afterwards “EPO and IEA team up to shed light on trends in sustainable energy technologies” (warning: epo.org link) — basically repetition of the old nonsense that the EPO’s PR people used to plant a bunch of puff pieces in the press throughout September.
The EPO is trying to champion PR tactics while its crimes are being investigated to some degree. There are inquires.
The first one says:
The Office today celebrates the 25th anniversary of the Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS). The EPO is one of thousands of organisations worldwide registered for the scheme, highlighting the importance of corporate environmental and climate protection initiatives.
So they celebrate something of somebody else, predating by 1.5 decades the Battistelli/Campinos regime. More of that greenwashing propaganda said that the “IEA is supporting clean energy transitions all over the world in order to help achieve global sustainability goals.”
“So they celebrate something of somebody else, predating by 1.5 decades the Battistelli/Campinos regime.”Again, this is pride by association. The opening sentence says: “The EPO and the International Energy Agency (IEA) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding on bilateral co-operation with the aim of promoting innovation in sustainable energy technologies. Under the MoU, the two organisations will publish a series of joint studies over the next three years to inform policymakers and the public about technology trends in areas that are critical for the energy transition and climate change mitigation.”
But the EPO actually grants monopolies of these things, hence discouraging their widespread use. We wrote about this before. In that sense, EPO does the exact opposite of “climate change mitigation.”
“And this is basically what today’s EPO boils down to: PR and crime. The former helps distract from the latter.”Separately, on the same say, the EPO said it had signed a “Memorandum of Co-operation” over webchat (no photo ops, obviously, as that would show how ridiculous the whole thing is). No flight then, eh? One passenger fewer is green enough… and whether Mr. Campinos can board a plane without getting drunk out of his mind may forever remain a mystery (it's hard to rely only on an eyewitness testimony on planes). The EPO says (warning: epo.org link) that “[o]n Friday 25 September EPO President António Campinos met [sic] with the Commissioner of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), Toshihide Kasutani, who took office on 20 July 2020. In their video conference, the two Heads of Office agreed to further strengthen their co-operation, which is based on a comprehensive Memorandum of Co-operation concluded in 2019.”
Another bunch of fluff, this time sans the handshakes and photo ops. No substance to it, just pure PR. And this is basically what today’s EPO boils down to: PR and crime. The former helps distract from the latter. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:29 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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For those unfamiliar with what NAS is, it is an abbreviation for Network Attached Storage. It is a storage solution that is affordable and can be quickly built by anyone. Furthermore, servers are pretty expensive, and for small businesses, NAS offers the perfect data storage. However, if you are familiar with Linux, chances are you already know what you are doing since Linux is mostly used by people familiar with the tech.
With that being said, we did add a few software solutions that do not require an expert level of comprehension. Plus, we also have some robust NAS apps that Linux enthusiasts might already be using, and if not, they will appreciate using it. So, without further ado, here is a list of the ten best Linux NAS Solutions that you should give a shot.
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Desktop/Laptop
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The last model is actually pretty much the same hardware as the first. But Dell has been selling Developer Edition models of select laptops that are powered by Ubuntu Linux for a number of years, and the newest version is one of the first Linux Laptops to ship with a Tiger Lake processor.
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Linux marketshare for September 2020 fell dramatically on that of August, according to NetMarketShare who’ve just published their latest tracking stats.
September saw the third successive month of contraction for Linux’s share of desktop operating since posting huge leaps back in the spring.
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Over the past few years, Microsoft has wholeheartedly embraced Linux and open source which is why the developer and writer Eric S. Raymond (ESR) believes that the next version of Windows could end up running entirely on Linux.
In a new blog post, ESR points to the fact that the software giant recently released its Windows System for Linux 2 (WSL2) and that it is currently porting its Edge browser to Linux as reasons why the company could one day retire the Windows kernel in favor of the Linux kernel.
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The biggest news is the fact that the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop now features 11th Generation Intel Core 10nm “Tiger Lake” processors, which integrates the Intel Iris Xe graphics card for better gaming, as well as Thunderbolt 4 support for lightning fast data transfers.
Two processor options are available in this update, the 11th Generation Intel Core i5-1135G7 processor with 8MB cache and a clock speed of up to 4.2 GHz, as well as the 11th Generation Intel Core i7-1165G7 processor with 12MB cache and up to 4.7 GHz clock speed.
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Server
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The Xen Cloud Platform is an open source virtualization product that provides both virtualization and cloud computing capabilities. The Xen Cloud Platform includes VM lifecycle management, resource pools, event tracking, Open vSwitch support, real-time performance monitoring and Storage XenMotion.
Similar to alternative open source virtualization products, the Xen Cloud Platform (XCP) relies on a hypervisor to perform virtualization operations in the data center. XCP enables IT administrators to consolidate server workloads, save power, increase cooling and improve management. Xen licenses XCP under the GNU General Public License, and it comes in two variants: XCP ISO for installing XCP onto admins’ hosts from an ISO, and XCP toolstack packages for building an XCP-like system from specified packages distributed via admins’ host OSes package manager.
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When most people think of contributing to an open source project, I suspect they probably think of contributing code changes, new features, and bug fixes. As a software engineer and a long-time open source user and contributor, that’s certainly what I thought. Although I have written a good quantity of documentation in different workflows, the massive size of the Kubernetes community was a new kind of “client.” I just didn’t know what to expect when Google asked my compatriots and me at Lion’s Way to make much-needed updates to the Kubernetes Development Guide.
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One of the primary traits of the relationship between our writing and our traditional clients is that we always have one or two primary points of contact inside a company. These contacts are responsible for reviewing our writing and making sure it matches the voice of the company and targets the audience they’re looking for. It can be stressful — which is why I’m so glad that my writing partner, eagle-eyed reviewer, and bloodthirsty editor Joel handles most of the client contact.
I was surprised and delighted that all of the stress of client contact went out the window when working with the Kubernetes community.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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It’s been a long time since a GamingOnLinux Podcast and we’re coming back, with quite a different style to what we were doing before. Technically this is ‘Episode 22′.
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Here are your Linux, Open Source and Privacy news for the end of september 2020! This time, we’ve got Geforce Now running on Linux, Microsoft Edge on our platform, tons more hardware supporting Linux, and Mozilla shutting down some more projects.
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I recently switched over from Netrw to Fern.vim and then you guys started telling me about another vim file tree called coc explorer and I knew I had to give that one a try as well. They all have their limitations in some way so what you’ve got to do is find the one that fits you perfectly and I think this one is fairly close in that respect.
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Kernel Space
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It’s always great starting off a new month seeing new work on low-level kernel optimizations.
Jens Axboe, Facebook engineer and maintainer of the Linux block subsystem and lead IO_uring developer, sent out a new optimization today. The optimization is to decouple TASK_WORK TWA_SIGNAL handling from signals.
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We are happy to announce a new release of the freely available cross-compilation toolchains we provide at toolchains.bootlin.com, version 2020.08-1.
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The function tracer (ftrace) subsystem has become an essential part of the kernel’s introspection tooling. Like many kernel subsystems, ftrace uses a ring buffer to quickly communicate events to user space; those events include a timestamp to indicate when they occurred. Until recently, the design of the ring buffer has led to the creation of inaccurate timestamps when events are generated from interrupt handlers. That problem has now been solved; read on for an in-depth discussion of how this issue came about and the form of its solution.
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The discussion started out as a straightforward patch set from Thomas Gleixner making a minor change to how preemption counting is handled. The resulting discussion quickly spread out to cover a number of issues relevant to core-kernel development in surprisingly few messages; each of those topics merits a quick look, starting with how the preemption counter itself works. Sometimes a simple count turns out to not be as simple as it seems.
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The kernel contains a wide variety of locking primitives; it can be hard to stay on top of all of them. So even veteran kernel developers might be forgiven for being unaware of the “seqcount latch” lock type or its use. While this lock type has existed in the kernel for several years, it is only being formalized with a proper type declaration in 5.10. So this seems like a good time to look at what these locks are and how they work.
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Micron’s Mpool is at the heart of their HSE Open-Source Storage Engine in providing an object storage media pool built atop block storage devices. Micron engineers are now looking at possibly having Mpool upstreamed into the mainline Linux kernel.
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For those making use of the “MT76″ WiFi driver for Mediatek MT76 series wireless support, the Linux 5.10 kernel should be a nice upgrade.
The MT76 Linux driver covers a wide range of Mediatek wireless ASICs and with Linux 5.10 has a number of improvements, particularly around better performance.
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The third release candidate of OpenZFS 2.0 is now available for this open-source ZFS file-system implementation currently for Linux and FreeBSD platforms.
OpenZFS 2.0 is nearing its official release with support for Linux going back to old 3.10 era kernels while on FreeBSD the code can work on 12.1 through FreeBSD 13-HEAD. OpenZFS 2.0 is a huge update in mainlining the FreeBSD support, Zstd compression support, performance improvements throughout the code-base, persistent L2ARC, sequential resilvering, fast clone deletion, and a lot of other enhancements.
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Graphics Stack
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Mesa’s Vulkan software implementation built atop LLVMpipe was developed as Vallium (Vulkan + Gallium3D) but has been renamed to Lavapipe within Mesa 20.3.
Vallium merged to mainline back in August for Mesa 20.3 as a still maturing Vulkan software implementation just like LLVMpipe is to OpenGL on CPUs. The name has always been a bit odd considering the similarities to Valium, a prescription drug for calming purposes around anxiety, muscle spasm, etc. But now ahead of the Mesa 20.3 stable release later this quarter this Vulkan software code has been renamed.
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In addition to the last minute AMDGPU fixes for Linux 5.9 that include work on the RDNA2 new GPU support and promoting Navi 12 out of the experimental status, an initial batch of fixes for AMDGPU were also sent in to DRM-Next on Wednesday in addressing early fallout from the new feature code slated for Linux 5.10.
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Applications
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Enjoying YouTube without YouTube means you can watch and download all videos from it everywhere by alternative ways so that you don’t run nonfree software or surrender your privacy. There are good news I want to share with you as there are already Invidious and CloudTube for computer users while NewPipe for phone users. They are all free libre open source software developed by community you can trust. I am happy with these solution so I want you to share my happiness as well. Enjoy!
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FreeTube app is easy to install on Ubuntu computer. Download the program file (AppImage) and run it right away. You do not need complicated ways and commands at all. Here is the step by step tutorial with pictures for everyone who wants to run it. Enjoy!
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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 *.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Games
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Couch party game Unspottable is now confirmed to be releasing on Steam on October 22, and they recently expanded the demo again with a new level.
The idea is to have up to four people playing together either in local competitive multiplayer, or through Steam Remote Play (where only one person needs to own it) and across each level you need to pick out the other players from a crowd. It’s a huge amount of fun, with each level mixing up the gameplay mechanics. Some levels have AI characters punching anyone near them, some have a big flashlight that reveals real players and much more. Genuinely good fun.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The app is called Identity and it’s built in GTK (which is always great to see) and is, in my opinion, a must-have for content makers and video editors. Using GStreamer as its media-handling backend, Identity lets you compare the quality (or play spot the differences) between multiple videos or images.
Unlike playing two videos side by side (which is how I would normally compare) both clips play at the same time, in sync, and in the same window, controlled by the same seek bar. You switch between them using on-screen tabs or keyboard shortcuts (e.g., 1 to show video one, 2 to show video two, and so on).
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In this part I’ll go through the actual porting process of the libebur128 C code to Rust, the approach I’ve chosen with various examples and a few problems I was running into.
It will be rather technical. I won’t explain details about how the C code works but will only focus on the aspects that are relevant for porting to Rust, otherwise this blog post would become even longer than it already is.
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This step could’ve been skipped if all I cared about was having a C API for the ported code later, or if I wanted to work with the tests of the C library for validation and worry about calling it from Rust at a later point. In this case I had already done safe Rust bindings around the C library before, and having a Rust API made it much easier to write tests that could be used during the porting and that could be automatically run at each step.
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Also the dependency on clang makes it hard to run bindgen as part of every build, so instead I’ve made sure that the code generated by bindgen is platform independent and included it inside the repository. If you use bindgen, please try to do the same. Requiring clang for building your crate makes everything more complicated for your users, especially if they’re unfortunate enough to use Windows.
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I just merged a new regex implementation for GtkSourceView’s language specifications. Previously it used GRegex (based on PCRE) and now it uses PCRE2 directly similar to what VTE did.
Not only does this get us on a more modern PCRE implementation, but it also allows us to use new features such as a JIT.
JITs are interesting in that you can trade a little bit of memory and time to generate executable code upfront for huge gains in execution time. Given that you only compile language specifications once per regex, but execute them many, many times, it’s a worthwhile feature for GtkSoureView.
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Flexbox had a lot of early problems, but by mid-May 2020 where our story begins, both Firefox and Chromium had done a lot of work on improving things with this feature. WebKit, however, hadn’t caught up. Prioritizing the incredible amounts of work a web engine requires is difficult. The WebKit implementation was still passable for very many (most) cases of the core features, and it didn’t have problems that caused crashes or something that urgently demanded attention, so engineers dedicated their limited time toward other things. The net result, however, was that as this choice repeated many times, the comparative state of WebKit’s flexbox implementation had fallen behind pretty significantly.
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GNOME Internet Radio Locator 3.4.0 features updated language translations, new, improved map marker palette and now as well as C-SPAN from United States Supreme Court, Congress and Senate, also includes streaming radio from Washington, United States of America; WAMU/NPR, London, United Kingdom; BBC World Service, Berlin, Germany; Radio Eins, Norway; NRK, and Paris, France; France Inter/Info/Culture, as well as 119 other radio stations from around the world with live audio streaming implemented through GStreamer.
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Screenshots/Screencasts
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Deepin Project Team has been released and announcement the latest version of beautiful Linux distribution, Deepin 20. This release powered by stable Debian 10.5 Buster series and supports dual Kernel. That means while installing you get to choose which Kernel you want. Deepin 20 offers you Kernel 5.4 (LTS) and Kernel 5.7 (Stable). This allows support of a wide range of hardware, graphics card while improving the stability of your desktop.
Deepin 20 has improvised the design style of Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE) and system installer. To make desktop more user-friendly and good-looking, v20 has introduced ingenious colorful icons, fresh graphics interface, natural and smooth animation effects, unique rounded-corner windows, and an exquisite multitask view.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation.
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Waterfox Classic is a free and open source web browser based on Firefox but with additional optimizations.
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SUSE/OpenSUSE
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For third sprint in a row, the YaST Team has been focusing on enhancing both AutoYaST and the management of storage devices, together with some improvements in our development infrastructure. Let’s take a quick glance at some of the results.
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As we usually remind our readers, these blog posts only show a very small part of all the work, improvements and bug fixes we put into YaST on every sprint. So don’t forget to keep your systems updated and to stay tuned to this blog and all other openSUSE channels for more information!
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced collaboration with Samsung to deliver 5G network solutions built on Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s most comprehensive enterprise Kubernetes platform, and will help service providers make 5G a reality across use cases, including 5G core, edge computing, IoT, machine learning and more.
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Red Hat’s Quarkus framework modernizes Java software by making it cloud-native
Revolutionary open-source project helps applications consume 1/10th the memory and startup 300x faster when compared to traditional Java
Quarkus helps Java maintain its platform leader status through modern innovation designed to meet the fast-paced, ever-changing demands of today’s businesses
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Inventors don’t always get the credit they deserve, even for world-changing breakthroughs.
Season 6 of Command Line Heroes tells the stories of ingenious inventors who haven’t been given their full due. These heroes did nothing less than create new industries, dazzle our imaginations, and reshaped the world as we know it.
The first episode drops October 13, 2020. Subscribe today and sign up for the newsletter to get the latest updates.
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Disabling SELinux is, perhaps sadly in some ways, a time-honored tradition for users of Fedora, RHEL, and other distributions that feature the security mechanism. Over the years, SELinux has gotten easier to tolerate due to the hard work of its developers and the distributions, but there are still third-party packages that recommend or require disabling SELinux in order to function. Up until fairly recently, the kernel has supported disabling SELinux at run time, but that mechanism has been deprecated—in part due to another kernel security feature. Now Fedora is planning to eliminate the ability to disable SELinux at run time in Fedora 34, which sparked some discussion in its devel mailing list.
SELinux is a Linux Security Module (LSM) for enforcing mandatory access control (MAC) rules. But the “module” part of the LSM name has been a misnomer since a 2007 change to make the interface static and remove the option to load LSMs at run time. So kernels are built with a list of supported LSMs, and they can be enabled or disabled at boot time using kernel command-line options. Certain architectures had bootloaders that made it difficult for users to add parameters to the command line, though, so the SELinux developers added a way to disable it at run time. The need for that functionality has faded, and removing it will allow another kernel hardening feature to be used.
The post-init read-only memory feature provides a way to mark certain kernel data structures as read-only after the kernel has initialized them. The idea is that various data structures are prime targets for kernel exploits; function-pointer structures, like those used by the LSM hooks, are of particular interest. So the LSM hooks were protected that way. However, that hardening is only enabled if the ability to disable SELinux at run time is not present in the kernel. The presence of the SELinux feature is governed by the CONFIG_SECURITY_SELINUX_DISABLE kernel build option.
In order to get that hardening feature, Ben Cotton posted a proposal for Fedora 34 to remove the support for disabling SELinux at run time. The proposal is owned by Petr Lautrbach and Ondrej Mosnacek; it would migrate users to the selinux=0 command-line option if they are currently disabling SELinux via the SELINUX=disabled setting in /etc/selinux/config. The proposal, which has been updated on the Fedora wiki based on feedback, would not change the ability to switch SELinux between enforcing and permissive modes at run time using setenforce
The 5.6 kernel deprecated the run-time-disable feature for SELinux. The kernel currently prints a message to that effect, but there are plans to make using it even more painful by sleeping for five seconds when it is used. It may get even more obnoxious over time; eventually the plan is to remove it altogether. Red Hat distributions (Fedora, CentOS, RHEL) are the only known users of the feature at this point, so once they have all moved away, the feature can be removed from the kernel. RHEL and CentOS systems will stick around for a lot longer than Fedora systems, since it is only supported for a bit over year. But Red Hat will just continue to maintain the feature in the RHEL/CentOS kernels; removing the run-time disable from Fedora presumably means that the next RHEL/CentOS major release will no longer support it either.
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Autonomous driving is movie-level science fiction poised to become our everyday reality. To remain competitive and relevant, manufacturers are employing the latest autonomous capabilities and partnering to develop self-driving vehicles. There is no shortage of investor or consumer enthusiasm.
Self-driving vehicles bask in the media spotlight, so it’s easy to overlook how hard automotive IT teams are working to transform the underlying infrastructure and processes needed to create that reality. The goal is to both support autonomous driving capabilities and, perhaps more importantly, improve their organizational agility, security, data focus, and ultimately, innovation.
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Debian Family
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The 9th monthly Sparky project and donate report of 2020:
• Linux kernel updated up to version 5.8.12 & 5.9-rc5
• added to repos: Browsh, Ciano, Brackets, Cherrytree
• Sparky 2020.09 of the rolling line released
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Do not configure Mailman to replace the mail domains in From: headers. Instead, try out my small new program which can make your Mailman transparent, so that DKIM signatures survive.
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DKIM is a new anti-spoofing mechanism for Internet email, intended to help fight spam. DKIM, paired with the DMARC policy system, has been remarkably successful at stemming the flood of joe-job spams. As usually deployed, DKIM works like this:
When a message is originally sent, the author’s MUA sends it to the MTA for their From: domain for outward delivery. The From: domain mailserver calculates a cryptographic signature of the message, and puts the signature in the headers of the message.
Obviously not the whole message can be signed, since at the very least additional headers need to be added in transit, and sometimes headers need to be modified too. The signing MTA gets to decide what parts of the message are covered by the signature: they nominate the header fields that are covered by the signature, and specify how to handle the body.
A recipient MTA looks up the public key for the From: domain in the DNS, and checks the signature. If the signature doesn’t match, depending on policy (originator’s policy, in the DNS, and recipient’s policy of course), typically the message will be treated as spam.
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Here is my transparent report for my work on the Debian Long Term Support (LTS) and Debian Extended Long Term Support (ELTS), which extend the security support for past Debian releases, as a paid contributor.
In September, the monthly sponsored hours were split evenly among contributors depending on their max availability – I was assigned 19.75h for LTS (out of my 30 max; all done) and 20h for ELTS (out of my 20 max; all done).
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I’m attempting to step down from the Outreach team, which is more work than I thought it would be. I had a very complicated relationship with the Outreach team. When no one else was there to take on making sure we did GSoC and Outreachy, I stepped up. It wasn’t really what I wanted to be doing, but it’s important. I’m glad to have more time to focus on other things that feel more aligned with what I’m trying to work on right now.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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As the Linux Mint team is progressing to release the first point version of Linux Mint 20 series, its founder and project leader Clement Lefebvre has finally revealed the codename for Linux Mint 20.1 as “Ulyssa”. He has also announced that Mint 20.1 will most probably arrive in mid-December (just before Christmas).
Until you wait for its beta release to test Linux Mint 20.1, Clement has also shared some great news regarding the new updates and features that you’ll get in Mint 20.1.
First, packaging of open source Chromium web browser and its updates directly through the official Mint repositories. As the team noticed delays between the official release and the version available in Linux distros, it has now decided to set up their own packaging and build Chromium package based on upstream code, along with some patches from Debian and Ubuntu as well.
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Ok, now I have decided to switch to Linux but here comes the first question. Which distro will satisfy my needs both in terms of GUI and other aspects? Linux is not something new to me since I have been working with RHEL based distros in my work for the past 4 years with the command-line.
I know RHEL based distros are good for enterprises but not for personalized desktop environments, at least that’s what I am thinking till now. So I started my research to find the distro that should be easy for me to use and at the same time should have good community support if in case I ran into some problem. Among many Linux distros, I drilled down my list to 4 flavors.
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Linux Mint is on a mission to make sure you get your to-dos done!
The Ubuntu-based distro is scouting feedback on a new “Sticky Notes” app that’s being built as a side project within the Linux Mint community. The app is designed for Linux Mint though will presumably work elsewhere, just like Mint’s new Warpinator tool does.
Although in early development the app already looks the part. Visually it resembles a cross between the GNOME To-Do app Ubuntu ships with, and macOS’s long-surviving ‘Stickies’ tool.
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Development on Ubuntu 20.10 kicked off earlier this year, shortly after the launch of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa), but since it’s not a long-term supported (LTS) series, there aren’t any major new features and enhancements to be expected in the upcoming release.
The biggest things you already know about them. Ubuntu 20.10 will be shipping with the latest and greatest Linux 5.8 kernel series, which, of course, brings better hardware support, as well as the latest and greatest GNOME 3.38 desktop environment, which I took for a first look this week.
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Ubuntu 20.10 is due for its official release on 22 October while the beta serves as the prime opportunity for testing it to avoid any last minute snafus. Ubuntu 20.10 is riding high atop the stable Linux 5.8 kernel, migrated to the GCC 10 compiler this cycle, Active Directory support was added to the installer, continued work on the opt-in ZFS root file-system support, restricting access to dmesg, and on the desktop side is rounded out by the recently released GNOME 3.38 that has many improvements in its own right.
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The Ubuntu team is pleased to announce the Beta release of the Ubuntu
20.10 Desktop, Server, and Cloud products.
20.10, codenamed "Groovy Gorilla", continues Ubuntu's proud tradition
of integrating the latest and greatest open source technologies into a
high-quality, easy-to-use Linux distribution. The team has been hard at
work through this cycle, introducing new features and fixing bugs.
This Beta release includes images from not only the Ubuntu Desktop,
Server, and Cloud products, but also the Kubuntu, Lubuntu, Ubuntu
Budgie, UbuntuKylin, Ubuntu MATE, Ubuntu Studio, and Xubuntu flavours.
The Beta images are known to be reasonably free of showstopper image
build or installer bugs, while representing a very recent snapshot of
20.10 that should be representative of the features intended to ship
with the final release expected on October 22nd, 2020.
Ubuntu, Ubuntu Server, Cloud Images:
Groovy Beta includes updated versions of most of our core set of
packages, including a current 5.8 kernel, and much more.
To upgrade to Ubuntu 20.10 Beta from Ubuntu 20.04, follow these
instructions:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/GroovyUpgrades
The Ubuntu 20.10 Beta images can be downloaded at:
http://releases.ubuntu.com/20.10/ (Ubuntu and Ubuntu Server on x86)
This Ubuntu Server image features the next generation Subiquity server
installer, bringing the comfortable live session and speedy install of
the Ubuntu Desktop to server users at last.
Additional images can be found at the following links:
http://cloud-images.ubuntu.com/daily/server/groovy/current/ (Cloud Images)
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/20.10/beta/ (Non-x86)
As fixes will be included in new images between now and release, any
daily cloud image from today or later (i.e. a serial of 20200930 or
higher) should be considered a Beta image. Bugs found should be filed
against the appropriate packages or, failing that, the cloud-images
project in Launchpad.
The full release notes for Ubuntu 20.10 Beta can be found at:
https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/groovy-gorilla-release-notes
Kubuntu:
Kubuntu is the KDE based flavour of Ubuntu. It uses the Plasma desktop
and includes a wide selection of tools from the KDE project.
The Beta images can be downloaded at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/kubuntu/releases/20.10/beta/
Lubuntu:
Lubuntu is a flavor of Ubuntu which uses the Lightweight Qt Desktop
Environment (LXQt). The project’s goal is to provide a lightweight
yet functional Linux distribution based on a rock-solid Ubuntu base.
The Beta images can be downloaded at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/lubuntu/releases/20.10/beta/
Ubuntu Budgie:
Ubuntu Budgie is community developed desktop, integrating Budgie
Desktop Environment with Ubuntu at its core.
The Beta images can be downloaded at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-budgie/releases/20.10/beta/
UbuntuKylin:
UbuntuKylin is a flavor of Ubuntu that is more suitable for Chinese
users.
The Beta images can be downloaded at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntukylin/releases/20.10/beta/
Ubuntu MATE:
Ubuntu MATE is a flavor of Ubuntu featuring the MATE desktop
environment.
The Beta images can be downloaded at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-mate/releases/20.10/beta/
Ubuntu Studio:
Ubuntu Studio is a flavor of Ubuntu that provides a full range of
multimedia content creation applications for each key workflow: audio,
graphics, video, photography and publishing.
The Beta images can be downloaded at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntustudio/releases/20.10/beta/
Xubuntu:
Xubuntu is a flavor of Ubuntu that comes with Xfce, which is a stable,
light and configurable desktop environment.
The Beta images can be downloaded at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/20.10/beta/
Regular daily images for Ubuntu, and all flavours, can be found at:
http://cdimage.ubuntu.com
Ubuntu is a full-featured Linux distribution for clients, servers and
clouds, with a fast and easy installation and regular releases. A
tightly-integrated selection of excellent applications is included, and
an incredible variety of add-on software is just a few clicks away.
Professional technical support is available from Canonical Limited and
hundreds of other companies around the world. For more information
about support, visit https://ubuntu.com/support
If you would like to help shape Ubuntu, take a look at the list of ways
you can participate at:
https://ubuntu.com/community/participate
Your comments, bug reports, patches and suggestions really help us to
improve this and future releases of Ubuntu. Instructions can be found
at: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/ReportingBugs
You can find out more about Ubuntu and about this beta release on our
website, IRC channel and wiki.
To sign up for future Ubuntu announcements, please subscribe to Ubuntu's
very low volume announcement list at:
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-announce
On behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team,
Łukasz 'sil2100' Zemczak
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With the final Ubuntu 20.10 release fast approaching it’s time to get testing — yes, its beta release time!
Developers and non-developers alike can download the new Ubuntu 20.10 beta to try out all of Groovy’s proposed changes (which we recap below) ahead of the final stable release due later this month.
This is the only beta release planned for the Groovy development cycle (though a release candidate will arrive in few weeks time) but if you do install it you can upgrade to Ubuntu 20.10 final later this month.
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Devices/Embedded
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The Librem AweSIM is the latest string in the social-purpose company’s bow. It costs $99 a month. For this price buyers get a new sim, a new phone number, and unlimited talk, texts, and data (including over 5G where available) that works with the Librem 5 phone.
And since the cellular account is registered under Purism’s name rather than yours it could provide you with an additional later of privacy protection from nefarious carrier tactics.
Purism say the plan can be cancelled at any time too, meaning you won’t be locked into a 12 or 24-month contract.
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Kontron announced a Linux-friendly “COMe-cTL6” COM Express Compact Type 6 module and “VX3060” VPX blade with Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake CPUs. A 3.5-inch SBC is in the works.
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GUI toolkit for Linux from Microchip Technology enhances 32bit microprocessor capabilities for low- and mid-range- resolution graphical displays
Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) and interactive touchscreen displays provide intuitive user experiences in applications from robotic and machine controls to medical user interfaces, automotive instrumentation and home and building automation systems.
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We previously covered Charmed Labs PIXY2 computer vision camera based on an NXP LPC4330 microcontrollers that worked with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and other development boards.
The company is now back with a fully integrated more powerful solution with Vizy AI camera featuring a Raspberry Pi 4 SBC with up to 8GB RAM.
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Stealth is a Canadian company that specializes in rugged displays, computers, and other ruggedized electronics for the industrial, defense, and marine markets. The company published a press release for a new rugged fanless mini PC equipped with a dedicated NVIDIA GeForce graphics card, and older Intel 6th and 7th Generation Core i5, i7 & Xeon processors.
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The growing complexity in embedded systems has accelerated the need for scalability and flexibility in today’s software development environments. This is especially true for the development of automotive embedded systems, where the Renesas RH850 MCUs are used. IAR Systems’ build tools for Linux streamlines the building and testing processes, making it possible for organizations to optimize resources when it comes to the time developers spend in their projects, as well as to manage and utilize licenses and servers in an optimal way. With the integrated static analysis tool C-STAT, developers can ensure code quality throughout the development and testing process. C-STAT proves code alignment with industry standards like MISRA C:2012, MISRA C++:2008 and MISRA C:2004, and also detects defects, bugs, and security vulnerabilities as defined by CERT C and the Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE).
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Over the years, Bootlin has grown a significant expertise in U-Boot and Linux support for flash memory devices. Thanks to this expertise, we have recently been in charge of rewriting and upstreaming a driver for the Arasan NAND controller, which is used in a number of Xilinx Zynq SoCs. It turned out that supporting this NAND controller had some interesting challenges to handle its ECC engine peculiarities. In this blog post, we would like to give some background about ECC issues with NAND flash devices, and then dive into the specific issues that we encountered with the Arasan NAND controller, and how we solved them.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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Not only are mosquitoes extremely annoying, they can also carry deadly diseases like malaria, yellow fever, dengue, and the Zika virus. In order to prevent epidemics, Pranav Agarwal has developed the Solar Scare Mosquito — a solar-powered repellent device that allows the insects to lay their larvae at dusk and dawn, then produces intermittent ripples during the day to prevent the offspring from breathing at the surface of standing water.
A finalist in this year’s Hackaday Prize, Agarwal is currently developing the second version of the platform that will be able to sense mosquito presence via a built-in microphone, and even help determine the sex and type of the pest by its wingbeat frequency.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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The PinePhone is one of the first smartphones designed specifically for open source software enthusiasts. It’s an affordable phone with a starting price of $150 that ships with a GNU/Linux distribution pre-installed, but which can also boot from a microSD card if you want to try a different operating system (or 13) before deciding whether to flash it to internal storage.
It’s not a particularly powerful phone, and the software available for it is very much a work in progress. But there are a lot of developers and early adopters working to help make Ubuntu Touch, postmarketOS, Arch, Manjaro, openSUSE, Sailfish OS, Mobian, and other open source operating systems feel at home on smartphones like the PinePhone (and its much pricier cousin/competitor, the Purism Librem 5).
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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It is a pretty rare event to see a nearly 21-year-old bug be addressed—many projects are nowhere near that old for one thing—but that is just what has occurred for the Mozilla Thunderbird email application. An enhancement request filed at the end of 1999 asked for a plugin to support email encryption, but it has mostly languished since. The Enigmail plugin did come along to fill the gap by providing OpenPGP support using GNU Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG), but was never part of Thunderbird. As part of Thunderbird 78, though, OpenPGP is now fully supported within the mail user agent (MUA).
The enhancement request actually asked for Pretty Good Privacy (PGP) support; PGP is, of course, the progenitor of OpenPGP. The standards effort that resulted in OpenPGP started in 1997. Back in 1999, PGP was the only real choice for email encryption, though the initial version of GnuPG had been released a few months before the request.
Early on, the main concerns expressed in the bug tracker were about the legality of shipping cryptographic code. The US government’s attempts to restrict the export of cryptographic systems, known as the “crypto wars”, were still fresh in the minds of many. It was not entirely clear that adding “munitions-grade crypto” to a MUA like Thunderbird was legal or wise. Early in 2000, the US revised its export-control regulations, which removed that particular concern.
There was work done toward adding support for OpenPGP and Secure/Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (S/MIME), which is another email encryption standard, over 2000 and 2001, but the code never actually landed. Thunderbird (called “mailnews” in those days) was in fire-fighting mode; fixing bugs and getting basic functionality working took precedence over new features like encryption. There was also a need to design a reasonable plugin mechanism.
Eventually, Enigmail showed up, which took some of the pressure off the Mozilla developers. Enigmail could be used on all of the supported platforms for Thunderbird to encrypt and decrypt PGP-style email (either inline or PGP/MIME) using GnuPG. Its initial maintainer, Ramalingam Saravanan, updated the bug with new information about Enigmail several times.
In the bug, multiple people suggested that Enigmail be incorporated into Thunderbird and the Enigmail developers were not opposed. In 2003, Patrick Brunschwig, who was a new maintainer for the plugin, said that doing so would help in getting rid of some of the “hacks” that were done to make Enigmail work with Thunderbird. But nothing like that ever happened.
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In 2018, we launched Firefox Extension Workshop, a site for Firefox-specific extension development documentation. The site was originally built using the Ruby-based static site generator Jekyll. We had initially selected Jekyll for this project because we wanted to make it easy for editors to update the site using Markdown, a lightweight markup language.
Once the site had been created and more documentation was added, the build times started to grow. Every time we made a change to the site and wanted to test it locally, it would take ten minutes or longer for the site to build. The builds took so long that we needed to increase the default time limit for CircleCI, our continuous integration and continuous delivery service, because builds were failing when they ran past ten minutes with no output.
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For the last several years, Mozilla has participated in the Google Summer of Code and Outreachy internship programs. Both programs offer paid three-month internship opportunities to students or other industry newcomers to work on a programming project with an open source organization. This year, we were joined by Lisa Chan and Atique Ahmed Ziad, from Outreachy and Google Summer of Code, respectively.
With mentorship from addons.mozilla.org (AMO) engineers Bob Silverberg and Andrew Williamson, Lisa built a Homepage Curation Tool to help our editorial staff easily make changes to the AMO homepage. Atique was mentored by Firefox engineers Luca Greco and Rob Wu, and senior add-on admin reviewer Andreas Wagner, and he developed a privileged extension for Firefox that monitors the activity of other installed extensions. This prototype is the starting point of a new feature that will help extension developers, add-on developers, and Firefox engineers investigate bugs in extensions or in the browser’s WebExtensions APIs.
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It’s noisy out there. We are inundated with sensational headlines every minute, of every day. You almost could make a full-time job of sorting the fun, interesting or useful memes, feeds and reels from those that should be trashed. It’s hard to know what to pay attention to, and where to put your energy. With so much noise, chaos and division, it seems that one of the only things we all have in common is relying on the internet to help us navigate everything that’s happening in the world, and in our lives.
[...]
You probably don’t know the name Mozilla. You might know Firefox. But we’ve been here, fighting for a better internet, for almost twenty years. We’re a non-profit backed organization that exists for the sole purpose of protecting the internet. Our products, like the Firefox browser, are designed with your privacy in mind. We’re here to prove that you can have an ethical tech business that works to make the internet a better place for all of us. We stand for people, not profit.
But we can’t fight this fight alone. Big tech has gotten too big. We need you. We need people who understand what it is to be part of something larger than themselves. People who love the internet and appreciate its magic. People who are looking for a company they can support because we are all on the same side.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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We celebrate our community of translators, which is providing LibreOffice in 119 different languages (with other 26 hopefully becoming available in the future), more than any other software, fulfilling one of the most important objectives of The Document Foundation: “to support the preservation of mother tongues by encouraging all peoples to translate, document, support, and promote our office productivity tools in their native language”. Today, there are over 4 billion people in the world who can use LibreOffice in their native language, and this is an achievement which deserves a recognition.
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FSF
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GNU Projects
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Javier Sepúlveda will give a talk in Spanish about GNU Taler at Valencia at an event organized by the GNU/Linux group from Valencia, which is a public organization supported by the Valencia City Hall to promote urban innovation and entrepreneurship.
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binutils-2.35.1
bison-3.7.2
dico-2.10
gama-2.10
global-6.6.5
gnuastro-0.13
gnunet-0.13.3
gnupg-2.2.23
gnu-pw-mgr-2.7.2
grep-3.5
parallel-20200922
pspp-1.4.1
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Licensing/Legal
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Software Freedom Conservancy, the only organization actively engaged in General Public License (GPL) enforcement and compliance work for Linux, announces today a new strategy toward improving compliance and the freedom of users of devices that contain Linux-based systems. The new work has received an initial grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC).
[...]
We take this holistic approach because compliance is not an end in itself, but rather a lever to help people advance technology for themselves and the world. Bradley Kuhn, Conservancy’s Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence remarked: “GPL enforcement began as merely an education process more than twenty years ago. We all had hoped that industry-wide awareness of copyleft’s essential role in spreading software freedom would yield widespread, spontaneous compliance. We were simply wrong about that. Today, we observe almost universal failure in compliance throughout the (so-called) Internet of Things (IoT) market. Only unrelenting enforcement that holds companies accountable can change this abysmal reality. ARDC, a visionary grant-maker, recognizes the value of systemic enforcement that utilizes the legal system to regain software freedom. That process also catalyzes community-led projects to build liberated firmware for many devices.”
[...]
Rosy Wolfe, ARDC’s Executive Director commented: “GPL enforcement is notoriously difficult, and yet it is necessary to deter self-serving actors who want the benefits of community software but won’t follow the rules. Thus Conservancy’s efforts in this arena are critical, and we are honored to support them in this work.”
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Programming/Development
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The holy grail of computer languages is to write code once and have it deploy effortlessly everywhere. Java likes to take credit for the idea, but UCSD P-Code was way before that and you could argue that mainframes had I/O abstraction like Fortran unit numbers even earlier. More modern efforts include Qt, GTK, and other things. Naturally, all of these fall short in some way. Now Google enters the fray with Flutter.
Flutter isn’t new, but in the past, it only handled Android and iOS. Now it can target desktop platforms and can even produce JavaScript. We haven’t played with the system enough to say how successful it is, but you can try it in your browser if you want some first-hand experience.
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When you need a unified way to install CRuby and alternative Ruby implementations these days, it comes down to ruby-build and ruby-install. Is there a difference?
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Back in April was the provisional release of OpenCL 3.0 with making CL 2.x features optional while adding async DMA extensions and more. Today the finalized version of OpenCL 3.0 has been released plus also introducing an official Khronos OpenCL SDK.
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Following yesterday’s release of the finalized OpenCL 3.0 specification, open-source Intel developers have released OpenCL Intercept Layer 3.0.
The Intel OpenCL Intercept Layer is one of the company’s efforts around helping to improve debugging and analyzing of OpenCL application performance. This cross-platform layer intercepts the OpenCL API calls through the OpenCL ICD loader to analyze/debug CL applications.
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I’ve not spent too much time using RR, but I like what I see. The program uses the familiar, robust fundamentals from gdb, which means you don’t need to re-learn Linux troubleshooting from scratch. On top of that, it adds a layer of powerful flexibility, allowing you to minimize the time pressure that is often associated with IT problems – like software crashing. You can record and replay at your own convenience. This also means you’re more likely to find the issue, especially if you’re dealing with complicated, long executions of tasks.
Hopefully, you will find this short tutorial useful. In a world where there are ten chefs to every meal, and fifty redundant Linux tools to every need, it’s nice to see software that offers meaningful extra functionality rather than a rehash of the same old. Well, you now have another utility in your arsenal, which also means one less excuse for not being able to resolve those pesky software problems quickly enough. That’s how it works, no.
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It’s no secret we’re evolving in a world that’s highly tech-driven. And given the global pandemic, this is probably the best time to pick up a new skill and learn programming.
While many are often intimidated by programming, opting for a practice-based approach can actively steepen the learning curve. Plus, this is definitely a skill worth investing your time and energy in, given that the IT sector has not been severely hit by the pandemic compared to other industries.
How Do I Learn Programming in 2020?
After all my years of programming and teaching people how to code, I’ve learned a few things. Most of us think that if you are going to achieve any success as a learner you should dedicate as much time, commitment, and perseverance as possible, and that’s all you need. Honestly, that’s not totally correct. At the end of the day, anyone can learn how to program. It all boils down to the right approach to learning.
Rest assured, in this article I will navigate you through some tips and hints based on my own experiences and struggles. I hope you’ll enjoy it!
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Perl/Raku
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In my last post, a meta issue for modules: bug tracking, I had noticed a problem with the bug tracking link for a module and discussed that problem. In the comments, one person said he preferred rt.cpan.org. I began thinking about where to have bugs tracked for my modules. Since I have not published one yet, this is something I would like to know. I would like to know the good and bad and ugly of the various systems to make a more educated choice on issue tracking before my first release.
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Python
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In this issue of Wing Tips we revisit how to use multiple concurrent selections in Wing’s editor. These can be used to replace all occurrences of some text or to apply the same edits to any number of selections, for example surround them all with quotes or remove common surrounding characters. Multiple selections can be created from the keyboard, from the mouse, or by using commands that select all occurrences of some text found within a selected code.
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Python 3.9.0rc2 was released on September 17, with the final version scheduled for October 5, roughly a year after the release of Python 3.8. Python 3.9 will come with new operators for dictionary unions, a new parser, two string operations meant to eliminate some longstanding confusion, as well as improved time-zone handling and type hinting. Developers may need to do some porting for code coming from Python 3.8 or earlier, as the new release has removed several previously-deprecated features still lingering from Python 2.7.
Python 3.9 marks the start of a new release cadence. Up until now, Python has done releases on an 18-month cycle. Starting with Python 3.9, the language has shifted to an annual release cycle as defined by PEP 602 (“Annual Release Cycle for Python”).
A table provided by the project shows how Python performance has changed in a number of areas since Python 3.4. It is interesting to note that Python 3.9 is worse than 3.8 on almost every benchmark in that table, though it does perform generally better than 3.7. That said, it is claimed that several Python constructs such as range, tuple, list, and dict will see improved performance in Python 3.9, though no specific performance benchmarks are given. The boost is credited to the language making more use of a fast-calling protocol for CPython that is described in PEP 590 (“Vectorcall: a fast calling protocol for CPython”).
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We are now on the home straight leading up to the 5.8 release. However, there will be some more changes over the next few weeks.
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In this episode, I integrated the bandit static analysis tool to do automated security checking of my code before each commit. We talked about pre-commit and how to add in a new hook. After finishing that tool addition, we got deep into Django while removing some messages inserted by django-allauth on sign up.
We began by talking about what the bandit tool does and how it works. Once I explained bandit, I focused on the bandit documentation to see how to add the tool. We found the pre-commit config hook in the bandit README docs.
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In the previous two essays I showed how to search chembl_27.fps to find records with similar fingerprints to a query fingerprint, then how to implement a nearest-neighbor search and replace Tanimoto similarity with cosine similarity. The final program took about 5 seconds.
In this essay I’ll show how to increase the search performance by shifting more of the work to a load step. This sort of precomputation can be useful if the load step is done once, with the extra overhead shared over multiple searches.
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In yesterday’s essay I changed the scan-based Tanimoto search to an in-memory search and showed that after a start-up cost of about 5 seconds I was able to do about 2 searches per second of the 1.9 million ChEMBL fingerprints.
I ended by pointing out how chemfp was over 100x faster.
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Hi folks. I’ve uploaded a fast-paced, seven part intro to python for developers who already know at least one other turing complete, imperative programming language, to youtube. I hope people find it useful.
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PHP
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The PHP team is pleased to announce the eighth testing release of PHP 8.0.0, Release Candidate 1.
At this time, we’re not planning to adjust the GA date, however this may change during the course of the RC cycle. The updated release schedule can, as always, be found on the PHP Wiki page about the PHP 8.0.
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The first release candidate of the big PHP 8.0 is now available for testing.
PHP 8.0 is continuing to enhance the performance with the introduction of the PHP JIT and other optimizations as a big upgrade over PHP 7.x and now an insanely different beast from the sluggish days of PHP 5.x. PHP 8.0 also brings the JSON support into PHP core rather than an optional extension, improves the PHP GD imaging library, cryptographic message syntax support within PHP OpenSSL, PHP Zip improvements, and countless other enhancements. The PHP language now supports union types, the nullsafe operator, attributes, match expressions, and more.
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Science
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Recent research from Accenture and Girls Who Code showed that half of women who go into tech drop out by the age of 35.
The “Resetting Tech Culture” report said that women “have actually fallen further behind at the very moment when tech roles are surging and vital to the U.S. economy and its continued leadership around the globe. Unbelievably, the proportion of women to men in tech roles has declined over the past 35 years.” Additionally, the report said:
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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The Cloud Native Landscape: The Runtime Layer Explained [Ed: "The Cloud Native Computing Foundation and VMware are sponsors of The New Stack." Read as: we print a bunch of propaganda for proprietary monopolists, but we disguise that as 'articles'.]
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Google and Facebook have selected the Zephyr Real-Time Operating System (RTOS) as one of the key technologies that will be used to build their next generation of infrastructure and products. They will collaborate with other Platinum members of The Zephyr™ Project, an open source project at the Linux Foundation that builds a safe, secure and flexible RTOS for the Internet of Things (IoT) in space-constrained devices, including Intel, Nordic Semiconductor, NXP and Oticon to ensure IoT security and critical safety challenges
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Security
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Linux 5.10 is set to bring a major rework to the Spectre mitigation handling for the 64-bit ARM architecture.
Arm Linux developers have been working on “Ghostbusters” as a major rework to the ARM64 mitigation code around Spectre Variant Two and Spectre Variant Four.
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The Apple T2 security chip has finally been jailbroken! Here’s all you need to know about it.
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Defence/Aggression
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Today we are joining with organizations from across the world that have endorsed the Black Alliance for Peace (BAP)’s International Day of Action on U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM). The International Day of Action on AFRICOM aims to raise the public’s awareness about the U.S. military’s existence in Africa, and how the presence of U.S. forces exacerbates violence and instability throughout the continent.
Green Party presidential candidate Howie Hawkins noted, “The US military is in Africa to protect US-based global corporations and banks with interests in oil, minerals, cheap labor, and illegitimate debt collection. The US is not there to protect the people in America or in Africa. The real security threat that Americans and Africans share is the climate crisis. The US should disband AFRICOM and offer aid in a Global Green New Deal to help Africa leap out the destructive 19th century fossil-fuel age into a sustainable 21st century solar age. Africa needs reparations for centuries of slavery, colonization, and today’s neocolonial exploitation, not more outside military intervention. The most effective way for the US to promote peace and prosperity in Africa and the world is with aid, not arms.”
[...]
The United States always had its hand in the exploitation of Africa, but it has never been widely regarded as a colonizer. This country benefits from its inaccurate reputation as a benevolent justice-loving democratic nation. However, the United States has played a leading role in maintaining an imperialist grip on Africa.
Green Party Vice Presidential candidate Angela Walker expressed, “I cannot fight for the liberation of Black people inside the United States without acknowledging the oppression of African peoples under U.S. imperialism. The same capitalist forces that seek to deny the right of self-determination to Africans are the same forces that murder Black Americans with impunity. On this day, the Hawkins-Walker campaign and I personally are proud to stand with the Black Alliance for Peace in calling for the end of AFRICOM. We add our voices to demand the complete withdrawal of US forces from Africa, the demilitarization of the African continent, and the closure of US bases around the world. We amplify the demand that the Congressional Black Caucus oppose AFRICOM and conduct hearings on AFRICOM’s impact on the African continent, with full participation of members of US and African civil society. There is no liberation for Black people on US soil without an end to the oppression of Africans throughout the Diaspora.”
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Finance
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Putting a number to this is interesting, but what’s more important at this point—since everyone agrees on the importance of innovation—is figuring out where innovation comes from. For example, do big multinational corporations produce most of our innovation from their well-oiled R&D teams, or are small, scrappy startups responsible for most of it? I would personally like to believe in the scrappy startups, but there’s a fair amount of evidence suggesting that large firms in concentrated industries produce a considerable amount of innovation too (for example, see here, here, and here).
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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The Green Party of New Jersey is excited to welcome the Original Green New Dealer to the Garden State. Howie Hawkins. Howie was the first candidate to run on a fully developed Green New Deal in 2010, combining an Economic Bill of Rights that focused on jobs, income, housing, health care, and education with 100% clean energy by 2030 in order to reconstruct the economy for economic justice and climate safety. He is also one of the original Greens in the United States, having participated in the first national meeting to organize a US Green Party in St. Paul, Minnesota in August 1984. In July. he was nominated to be the 2020 Presidential candidate for the Green Party.
Meet Howie in person at a safe, socially distanced outdoor Meet & Greet in Garwood, New Jersey on Friday, October 2nd at 7 p.m. Howie will talk about his historic Left Unity campaign and his vision for tackling problems that the Democrats and the Republicans won’t touch – from re-building the economy from the economic crash brought on by the coronavirus to tackling the environmental crisis looming from climate change, Howie will talk about his Ecosocialist Green New Deal and how it presents real solutions that can’t wait.
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Monopolies
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This chapter explores the interplay of intellectual property and social justice. Part I constructs a philosophical framework for thinking about the many cross-currents between intellectual property and social justice. Part II distinguishes between the internal, largely utilitarian analysis of particular modes of intellectual property protection and the external interplay of intellectual property systems and broader social justice concerns. Part III examines the macro interplay of intellectual property and inequality, gender and racial inclusion, and global justice challenges, highlighting complexities, tensions, and paradoxes. The chapter considers how intellectual property law and policy can be seen not just as an engine of economic progress, but also as an engine of human and cultural flourishing, dignitary values, access, inclusion, and empowerment.
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Patent law’s doctrine of ineligible subject matter is widely agreed to be in a bad state of repair. Even those welcoming the Supreme Court’s return to express subject-matter bars have been left disoriented by the Court’s pronouncements in this area. Which subject matter is ineligible, why it is ineligible, and how it might become eligible have all remained enshrouded in mystery. The nub of the problem, this Article contends, is two-fold. First, from its 19th century origins to the present, courts grappling with ineligibility doctrine have remained in the grip of a series of “physicalist” misconceptions of the object of patent rights, and hence of the subject matter claimed in the patents at issue. In a nutshell, courts have not fully internalized that the object of patent rights is always and only an intangible space of “knowledge of” something, and never some “thing” itself. As a result, they have failed to characterize accurately the content of the ineligible subject matter categories, much less specify why they are ineligible. Removing these physicalist errors dissipates much of the fog in this area. In its wake emerges a second distinct theme of ineligibility case law: the intimation by the courts of a set of embryonic “functionality” concerns, which seek to restrict patents to zones of applied rather than basic knowledge. But these concerns have remained inchoate, owing to their entanglement in a physicalist web. Reconstructing eligibility doctrine requires, then, extricating incipient functionality concerns from the physicalist thicket, developing their independent basis, and, finally, properly following through on their doctrinal implications. Doing so yields three large gains. First, it provides a unified account of this body of law, something scholars have despaired of realizing. Second, it cures each of the three defects marring the existing doctrinal framework. Finally, it fully reintegrates the common law of ineligibility with the statutory and constitutional framework of patent law.
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The Epic Games v. Apple preliminary injunction hearing took place this morning (Pacific Time) before Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in the Northern District of California. The first and longest part–during which the court discussed with counsel for both parties the likelihood of success on the merits–was particularly key. In fact, Cravath’s Katherine Forrest, one of two attorneys who argued for Epic, acknowledged that an injunction would not issue in this case unless the court agrees with Epic on its likelihood of prevailing on the merits.
Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who asked counsel for both parties tough questions, appeared at least hesitant–if not very reluctant–to conclude at this early stage of proceeding that Epic was on the road to victory. That doesn’t mean she thinks Epic is likely to lose. It’s just that under the current circumstances the court would have to reach a conclusion based on a limited amount of briefing. What’s in the record now is almost nothing compared to what will be available at trial time (i.e., in July 2021).
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Among the three most powerful members of the current European Commission, EU commissioner Thierry Breton (Twitter profile) is “Monsieur Non” with respect to enforcing EU competition law against standard-essential patent (SEP) abuser Nokia. He and his cabinet are the ones who adamantly oppose what would not only be right from an antitrust perspective but also benefit Europe’s economy at large, from small Internet of Things startups to car makers.
For the EU, it should be a no-brainer to require SEP holders to extend exhaustive component-level SEP licenses to component makers. The enforcement priorities of the Commission’s Directorate-General for Competition (DG COMP) appear to pursue only one principle: protectionism. By letting Nokia and its partners in crime (the Avanci gang) get away with what they’re doing (they’ve already obtained two Germany-wide patent injunctions against Daimler and are seeking many more), while coming up with novel and at times even absurd theories of harm concerning American companies, the Commission is systematically destroying the reputation as a competition regulator that it worked so hard to build in earlier decades. But Mr. Breton doesn’t care.
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Patents
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In Khan v. Hemosphere, Inc., the Federal Circuit disagreed with my analysis of the rule. In particular, the court held that the Khans were sufficiently “on notice of [defendants’] intent to seek sanctions” based upon a series of letters sent to the Khans indicating that a sanctions-motion was coming. Thus, although the Khans were not served with “the motion” they were sufficiently on notice.
Khan Petition for Rehearing: In their petition, the Khans argue that the Federal Circuit’s “conclusion that warning letters of the type at issue here can take the place of the ‘motion’ required by Rule 11(c)(2) breaks sharply with the text of the Rule, and with every other Court of Appeals to consider the issue—including the Seventh Circuit.” Here, the 7th Circuit is important because this case arose in Illinois and the regional circuit’s law should apply to this non-patent related issue.
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Optis Wireless Technology, LLC et al filed a complaint against Tesla Inc. for patent infringement on Sunday in the Eastern District of Texas alleging that defendant Tesla has infringed the asserted patents by using cellular connectivity in its vehicles.
The patents-in-suit are United States Patent Nos. 8,149,727 (the ’727 patent); 8,199,792 (the ’792 patent); 8,223,863 (the ’863 patent); 8,254,335 (the ’335 patent); and 8,320,319 (the ’319 patent). The plaintiffs asserted that these patents “are necessary to practice the 3GPP LTE cellular technical specification,” which Tesla purportedly did not have a license to use. Furthermore, the plaintiffs stated that they have tried to reach a licensing agreement with Tesla, but were unable to do so. The plaintiffs claimed that the “(c)ellular technologies 3rd Generation Partnership Project (‘3GPP’) has enabled companies, including Tesla with no history in the wireless communication development, to sell products such as electrical vehicles equipped with integrated cellular connectivity.” The 3GPP “produces technical specifications that define cellular technologies.”
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Recent figures published by Chinese media outlets show that companies in China have filed for over half of all global blockchain patents.
According to a report titled “2020 Blockchain Industry Development”, Chinese companies have applied for 4,435 blockchain patents following Chinese president Xi Jinping’s endorsement of the industry. The study was jointly compiled by Tsinghua University, Peking University, and China Institute of Communications.
During a committee session in October 2019, President Xi called for the country to accelerate its adoption of blockchain technologies as a core for innovation.
According to the study, tech giant Alibaba Group had applied for the highest number of blockchain patents in 2020 at a whopping 200 patents. That is 10x more than the number filed by IBM during the same period.
Major multinational companies have also shown immense interest in filing blockchain patents in China. Cointelegraph reported a study that suggested 35 multinationals including Microsoft, Walmart, Mastercard, Sony, and Intel had applied for a total of 212 blockchain patents as of March 2020.
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Sonos has filed another patent lawsuit against Google, alleging that the search giant is infringing five wireless audio patents across the entire line of Nest and Chromecast products. The move comes on the eve of Google’s fall hardware event on September 30th, where it is expected to announce a new Chromecast and Nest smart speaker alongside new Pixel phones.
Sonos filed its first patent lawsuits against Google in January in California federal court and with the International Trade Commission; the federal case has been put on hold while the ITC reaches a decision on whether to block Google’s allegedly infringing products from market. The new case is filed only in the federal court for the Western District of Texas — an emerging patent lawsuit hotspot — and represents a more aggressive approach from Sonos.
“We think it’s important to show the depth and breadth of Google’s copying,” says Eddie Lazarus, Sonos’ chief legal officer. “We showed them claim charts on 100 patents that we claimed they were infringing, all to no avail.”
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In In the Matter of Gitler (Proc. No. D2019-48), a patent lawyer was suspended for 90 days by Virginia on May 8, 2019. The District of Columbia and New York also suspended the practitioner. The practitioner notified the OED of his Virginia suspension on May 29, 2019, and, while agreeing reciprocal suspension by the USPTO was proper, requested it be ordered nunc pro tunc — so it would have run with the Virginia suspension. The OED declined that request.
Significantly, the OED took a very technical and literal reading of the provisions governing nunc pro tunc orders.
First, the rule requires practitioners to withdraw from pending cases. He had told his clients he was not representing them but his name was still associated with a customer number and so they were handling the matters. The OED stated this did not excuse his failure to withdraw.
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Software Patents
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On October 1, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 6,931,382, owned by Kioba Processing, LLC, an IP Investments affiliate and well-known NPE. The ’382 patent is generally directed to blocking and unblocking payment instruments, and it has been asserted against Discover and American Express.
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On October 1, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 9,757,066, owned by Fat Statz, LLC, an NPE. The ’066 patent is generally directed to a behavioral management system that tracks biometric data from a plurality of users and allows users to filter the data to compare themselves to others in similar demographics. The ‘066 patent was asserted against Samsung in early 2020.
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On October 1, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 9,449,484, owned by Richman Technology Corp, an NPE. The ’484 patent is generally related to security hardware and real-time security monitoring software systems . The ‘484 patent has been asserted against security system makers such as ADT, Assa Abloy, Skylink Technologies, Google, and others.
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On October 1, 2020, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 7,756,507, owned by Monarch Networking Solutions LLC, an NPE and an Acacia Research entity. The ‘507 patent is generally directed to device-based dual-factor authentication using one-time passwords. The ‘507 patent is currently being asserted against Cisco, Meraki, and Duo Security.
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Copyrights
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Last week ago, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation issued a far-reaching decision on authorship and proof thereof. It is said that the deposit of a work in the Register of the Russian Authors’ Society does not in itself confirm the right of authorship and does not constitute a guarantee of authorship. While the plaintiff referred to the register of the Russian Authors’ Society, the defendants referred to the register of the World Intellectual Property Organization, where other authors are indicated. Three judicial instances felt that this did not refute the presumption of authorship, and thus the plaintiff was found to have successfully proved his exclusive rights. The Supreme Court of the Russian Federation took, however, a different position on this dispute.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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As we welcome the return of Linux Journal, it’s worth recognizing the impact of the September 22nd announcement of the magazine’s return and how it sparked many feelings of nostalgia and excitement in thousands among the Linux community. That being said, it is also worth noting that the ways in which journalism has changed since Linux Journal’s first publication in 1994. The number of printed magazines have significantly decreased and exclusively digitally published content has become the norm in most cases. Linux Journal experienced this change in 2011 when the print version of the magazine was discontinued. Although many resented the change, it is far from the only magazine that embraced this trend. Despite the bitterness by some, embracing the digital version of Linux Journal allowed for its writers and publishers to direct their focus on taking full advantage of what the internet had to offer.
Despite several advantages of an online publishing format, one concern that was becoming increasingly concerning for Linux Journal until September 22nd, 2020 was the survival of the Linux Journal website. If the website were to have shut down, the community would have potentially lost access to hundreds (or thousands) of articles and documents that were only published on the Linux Journal website and were not collectively available anywhere else. Even if an individual possessed the archive of the monthly issues of the journal, an attempt to republish it would be potentially legally problematic and would certainly show a lack of consideration for the rights of the authors who originally wrote the articles.
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Desktop/Laptop
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Dell has introduced the XPS 13 and XPS 13 2-in-1 devices with 11th-gen Tel Tiger Lake processors at a starting price of $999 and $1,249 respectively. Dell has mostly bumped up the specs. There’s upgraded memory and support for Thunderbolt 4 along with Intel Xe graphics. The design is mostly the same but the screen appears slightly bigger. The company has also launched a XPS 13 developer edition. This device comes with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Dell will also allow any XPS 13 user to download to use Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on their device whether it’s the developer edition or not.
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Dell’s XPS 13 devices are getting an upgrade on Wednesday. XPS 13 and XPS 13 2-in-1 are getting new refreshes. They are getting Intel’s 11th Gen Tiger Lake processors and will be available from September 30 in the US and Canada.
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This week, Dell announced the availability of its XPS 13 Developer Edition, preloaded with Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, has been updated with Intel’s® new 11th generation core™ processors. This is the first laptop to preload Linux together with Intel’s 10nm Tiger Lake processor. The XPS 13 Developer Edition is focused on bringing out-of-the-box usability, stability and performance for software engineers.
Intel’s 11th generation Core processor brings two key updates to the XPS 13 Developer Edition. First, it includes the option of an integrated Intel Iris Xe graphics card, which brings gaming-capable graphics to light and thin laptops, and can scale up to 32GB RAM, which means developers can do more right from their workstation. Second, Intel’s 11th gen Core processor supports Thunderbolt 4 ports, to make the XPS 13 compatible with data, video and storage devices, achieving a minimum of 40GBPS transfer speed.
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When Intel announced 11th Gen “Tiger Lake” last month it wasn’t clear how long it would be until seeing systems actually appear with these new processors. Fortunately, the new Dell XPS systems with Tiger Lake and Intel EVO certification are on sale beginning today with shipping dates reported to be later this month.
Coming at the same time as the new Dell XPS 9310 with Windows 10 is a Dell XPS Developer Edition update with the same hardware but running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. It’s really great seeing the “same day” support for this next-generation of Intel hardware from Dell compared to previously where the Ubuntu preload option didn’t tend to come until months later.
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A developer edition of the XPS 13 will be available, too (via The Verge). A Linux-based device that’ll be the first laptop to have Ubuntu 20.04 LTS pre-installed on it, so you can start developing right out of the box.
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While I did not take the time to install a GNU/Linux distro to local storage and test battery life and long-term performance, I did take an Ubuntu 20.04 LTS LiveUSB for a spin and found that almost everything seemed to be working out of the box.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The world’s first OpenZFS based live image, FreeBSD Subversion to Git Migration video, FreeBSD Instant-workstation 2020, testing the shutdown mechanism, login_ldap added to OpenBSD, and more
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This week we have been writing a computer game. We take the tiling window manager challenge and discuss our experiences, bring you some command line love and go over all your wonderful feedback.
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Stuart Langridge, Jono Bacon, and Jeremy Garcia present Bad Voltage, in which no news is good news, hardware makes us hard-wary…
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We provoked quite a response and cover the feedback that puts us in our place. Then we dive into the wild era of text editor of yore and solve an age-old question.
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Unfettered Freedom is a video podcast that focuses on news and topics about GNU/Linux, free software and open source software. On this freedom-packed episode: 0:00 – Intro 2:04 – Eric S. Raymond has some predictions about Windows 10 and Linux.
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Kernel Space
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I’m announcing the release of the 5.8.13 kernel.
All users of the 5.8 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.8.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.8.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s…
thanks,
greg k-h
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I asked Greg Kroah-Hartman to tell me about the work that goes into making computer peripherals do — mostly — what we ask them to. Greg is the maintainer of the Linux kernel’s stable releases and an author of books about writing Linux drivers. He took me on a journey from a tiny processor embedded in a mouse to deep inside the guts of an operating system.
Oh, and he explained printers to me, too.
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Graphics Stack
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This test loops 5000 times, using a different sampler texture for each draw, and then destroys the texture. This is supposed to catch drivers which can’t properly manage their resource refcounts, but instead here zink is getting caught by trying to dump 5000 active resources into the same command buffer, which ooms the system.
The reason for the problem in this case is that, after my recent optimizations which avoid unnecessary flushing, zink only submits the command buffer when a frame is finished or one of the write-flagged resources associated with an active batch is read from. Thus, the whole test runs in one go, only submitting the queue at the very end when the test performs a read.
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Today I’m taking a break from writing about my work to write about the work of zink’s newest contributor, He Haocheng (aka @hch12907). Among other things, Haocheng has recently tackled the issue of extension refactoring, which is a huge help for future driver development. I’ve written time and time again about adding extensions, and with this patchset in place, the process is simplified and expedited almost into nonexistence.
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Applications
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A Content Management System (CMS) is software designed to simplify the publication of Web content. In particular, it enables content creators to submit content without requiring technical knowledge of HTML or the uploading of files. A CMS is most commonly used in creating an intranet or in establishing a presence on the Web.
This type of software that keeps track of every piece of content on a Web site. Content can be simple text, photos, music, video, documents, or just about anything you can think of.
Most CMS use databases to hold their content. This can make installation and maintenance confusing, complicated, and require some technical skill. Other problems can surface over time. For example, it can be difficult to modify, edit, or migrate content, although some CMS make things a little less complicated.
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A system profiler is a utility that presents information about the hardware attached to a computer. Having access to information about your hardware can be indispensable when you need to establish exactly what hardware is installed in your machine. For example, the information helps a technical support individual diagnose problems, or help evaluate whether a system will support certain software or hardware.
This type of software lets individuals establish hardware details without opening the computer case. This may not be an option if you do not have direct access to the hardware, relying on the internet to connect to the machine. System profilers let you remotely interrogate a system.
In Windows circles, CPU-Z is a popular freeware tool that gathers information on the main devices of a system without having to conduct technical and manual searching. CPU-Z lays out the raw technical data out to read in easy-to-read tables and is well presented.
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Sayonara Player is a free and open-source audio player written for Linux and BSD operating systems using the C++ programming language. It is built with support for the Qt framework and it uses GStreamer as its audio backend.
From the moment you launch Sayonara for the first time, you will notice that it is built with speed in mind. Its simple, clutter-free UI makes it easy to navigate without sacrificing the feel of familiarity even for those using it for the first time.
In as much as this audio player offers blazingly fast performance, it packs a lot of features that are seldom available in some supposedly advanced MP3 players and they are categorized into Main, Nice to have, web-based, and Look and feel. Some of these include a crossfader, an MP3 converter, speed and pitch control, an equalizer, customizable spectrum analyzer, and level meter, an inbuilt tag editor, etc.
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KDiskMark is a free and open source alternative to CrystalDiskMark (which is Windows only) for Linux, a GUI HDD / SSD benchmarking software.
KDiskMark comes with a simple user interface, very similar to the one used by CrystalDiskMark, with presets. Under the hood, it uses FIO (Flexible I/O Tester), and it features configurable block size, queues, and threads count for each test. The application can also generate benchmark reports (File -> Save) that you can use to easily share the benchmark results with others, and for future comparisons.
Despite its name (starting with K), this Qt5 application does not have any KDE-specific dependencies, so you can install it no matter what desktop environment you’re using without having to install a large number of dependencies.
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Instructionals/Technical
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This blog post covers some of my favorite settings for configuring the behavior of an ssh client (i.e. what is in the man pages for ssh_config). Whether you are looking to add some additional security constraints, minimize failures, or prevent carpal tunnel, ssh_config is an often underutilized, yet powerful tool.
This article will take a look at a few useful ways to modify your ssh_config file to achieve a greater degree of security and control. This post is not about server-side configuration via sshd_config, which deserves its own separate article.
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Stacer is a GUI based application written in C++ to monitor and optimize Linux OS. The latest build version of Stacer is 1.1.0, which provides all in one stop for our common activities we perform using Terminal like package management, process management, Host details, CPU, Network and Disk monitoring, startup applications, and a few more.
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Games
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After being in Beta for quite some time now, the team behind Zombie Panic! Source are almost ready to push out the big overhaul with Linux support into the stable version for everyone.
This has been a long time coming, after initially announcing their Linux plans back in 2018. Work on Zombie Panic! Source version 3.1 went on a lot longer than they originally planned for but it’s sounding like all their effort is going to be worth it with a much better game.
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Love your digital adaptions of board games, or those that got turned into some form of real-life board game? Well, Valve are going to run a festival dedicated to all that.
Starting on October 21 and running until October 26 there will be all sorts going on. Talks, sales and more.
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Here is a look back some of the most popular articles on GamingOnLinux for September 2020, an easy way to for you to keep up to date on what has happened in the past month for Linux gaming, open source and other general Linux news that we cover! If you wish to keep track of these overview posts you can with our Overview RSS – we might bring this back as a regular overview column to enable some catch-up and a place for chat in the comments.
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Sword Slinger is a unique physics-based puzzle game about slaying goblins by controlling a sword with magical behaviours. You’ll combine chains of magical behaviours together to create complex and original solutions.
Made in the wonderful Godot Engine, it’s now confirmed to be releasing along with Linux support on October 20, although the Steam page mentions October 21 so there might be some timezone differences there.
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Rip Them Off is a fresh puzzle game that in a small way resembles tower defence, with you trying to make as much money from people passing by as you can.
Just like in a tower defence game, you’re dealing with waves of enemies. This time your enemy is the people, and you need to satisfy the demands of the people upstairs. You go through various levels, all of which act like puzzles for you to find the best way to earn enough monies to complete it.
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Lord Hector’s Demise is the name of the first major free update to Dying Light – Hellraid, the dungeon-crawling DLC for the open-world zombie smasher from Techland.
The problem with this DLC is how far the negative user reviews have gone on Steam. People seemed to have really high expectations for what’s quite a small DLC overall. Perhaps this update will be the beginning of a turnaround for it. Techland said this is “just the beginning”.
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This is brilliant! Unity Technologies creators of the Unity game engine, which is ridiculously popular with indie developers, have started a series of open source game development projects.
With this idea they’re hoping to pull together people as part of Unity’s first open-source game development program. Part of the reason is due to the ongoing COVID19 pandemic, with people often unable to meet and miss out on vital experience and team work. So, why not work together online to build something? That’s the plan here. Not only that though, it’s an opportunity to see how game development can work out in the open from all sides – using the Unity game engine as the base for it all.
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Inspired in parts by Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and Puyo Puyo Tetris with its own unique spin on block-matching battles, Aloof has a demo up now.
What’s interesting about Aloof, is that the blocks don’t fall by themselves. You’re not racing to find a position against a timer. You can move them down, to the side and back up to position them exactly where you want them. The developer said it’s all about keeping up with your opponent, taking your time and thinking about what you’re doing.
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It’s quite a fully featured demo too with single-player, online play which is cross-platform for Linux / macOS and Windows plus there’s even local multiplayer too.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Continuing with our series of Desktop Environment Reviews, today is a choice that definitely has a specific purpose. Enlightenment is an extremely lightweight window manager that has a huge amount of utility baked into it. It’s a really specific choice that you either like or dislike. In this Enlightenment review,we will cover its user experience, notable features, performance, and recommendations as to who should use it and where to experience Enlightenment.
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Landing in master, plasma has an optional new startup method to launch and manage all our KDE/Plasma services via a system –user interface rather than the current boot scripts. This will be available in Plasma 5.21.
It is currently opt-in, off by default. I hope to make it the default where available after more testing and feedback, but it is important to stress that the current boot-up method will exist and be supported into the future. A lot of work was put into splitting and tidying so the actual amount of duplication in the end result is quite small and manageable.
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While Plasma 5.20 isn’t shipping until later this month, already for Plasma 5.21 down the pipe is a big change and that is the optional support for systemd starting up of the Plasma session. This can lead to faster startup/load times and other improvements while even the process of bringing up the systemd support helped uncover other KDE bugs.
Longtime KDE developer David Edmundson who was involved in this process of optional startup support via systemd has provided a deep dive on the process. This KDE Plasma 5.21 feature (not the imminent 5.20) allows for using systemd startup in place of the conventional boot scripts though those boot scripts will continue to be supported into the future for still being able to run the KDE desktop without systemd.
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There are lots of new features mentioned in the release announcement, I like in particular the ability that settings changed from the default can now be highlighted.
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These packages require Qt 5.15, which is only available in the experimental suite, and there is no way to simply update to Qt 5.15 since all Qt related packages need to be recompiled. So as long as Qt 5.15 doesn’t hit unstable, I cannot really run these packages on my main machine, but I tried a clean Debian virtual machine installing only Plasma 5.19.90 and depending packages, plus some more for a pleasant desktop experience. This worked out quite well, the VM runs Plasma 5.19.90.
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The wiki instance we use, there migrated to MediaWiki 3.34 the latest LTS version, this bring a few improvement in the translations module and fix the problem that translated pages couldn’t be moved arround. The commenting plugin was sadly discountinued in this version and instead the Echo extension was added and provide a way to ping people.
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The Season of KDE is a 3 weeks long program that provides an opportunity for people to do mentored projects for KDE.
We are still looking for more mentors for SoK 2021. So please consider mentoring for this year season and adding ideas related to the project you are working on in the Wiki page. And joining the #kde-soc channel.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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The GTK 3.99.2 release continues the topics from 3.99.1: api cleanup, new and polished demos, better documentation. You can see the details here.
One small note on the topic of documentation is that we are relying on some unreleased gtk-doc features. Therefore, we now include gtk-doc as a subproject in the gtk release tarball. If you are a distributor, don’t be surprised that building GTK installs gtk-doc tools now.
The big news in this snapshot is our work on exposing the power of the new GL-based rendering stack a bit more.
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This is not our first attempt to make a shadertoy lookalike. When we first looked at it, we thought that we would make a shader abstraction that applications could use. We put it to the side when it turned out that making it work across different renderers and backends would require us to write our own shader compiler—too much work.
But after our shadertoy success, we revisited the idea of shaders as first-class objects, with more modest goals: We use GLSL, and don’t attempt to make the shaders work with anything but the OpenGL renderer.
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As you may have heard, GNOME 3.38 is out and it’s packed with goodies, which will please long-time fans of the desktop environment (that includes me, of course). But it’s not yet on any distro, so you’ll have to wait a few more weeks for it to land on some of the most popular Linux OSes out there to enjoy the new improvements.
One of the upcoming GNU/Linux distributions that will ship with GNOME 3.38 by default is Canonical’s Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla), which is expected to be released next month on October 22nd. If you can’t wait until then, you’ll be able to take it for a spin as soon as October 1st when the beta release hits the streets.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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The 2016 movie, Hidden Figures, highlighted IBM technologists who played a crucial role in NASA’s mission to put a man on the moon. Fifty years later, IBM is still actively working to open possibilities for the new space age. The IBM Blue Tech Innovation, Space Tech Hub team, led by Naeem Altaf, IBM’s Distinguished Engineer and CTO Space Tech, designs and builds framework and technical prototypes for cubesats and space situational awareness, at times with varying degrees of collaborations from space agencies, universities, and space technology companies.
Today, the Space Tech Hub team is excited to announce two new open source projects, the Space Situational Awareness project and the Kubesat project. By open sourcing these two projects, we hope to give more people access to space tech and democratize access to space for all. Developers with an interest in space technology can help take these projects to the next level. These two containerized solutions are built with cloud-native principles and run on Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud.
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Red Hat is helping our customers succeed across a variety of industries. This month, we’re highlighting stories on customers in financial services, energy, and telecommunications that have turned to Red Hat to help improve their IT infrastructure.
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Migrating to a private cloud environment based on Red Hat OpenStack Platform has helped Grupo ASD optimize its hardware use. By repurposing more than 100 underused servers, the company can now provide faster, more stable services to customers. “For example, we had hardware that was used for services related to the Colombian electoral process,” said Morales. “With Red Hat OpenStack Platform, we can now use it to support new, cloud-like services based on Kubernetes containers and run workloads on either physical or virtual machines.”
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Red Hat has announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.9. This is the last RHEL 7 minor release as RHEL 7 enters the Maintenance Support 2 phase.
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The future release of Red Hat OpenStack Platform director will bring some changes to how the overcloud nodes are configured during the deployment and how it makes it faster with custom Ansible strategy plugins.
Note: if you haven’t read about “config-download” yet, we suggest you take a look at this previous post (“Greater control of Red Hat OpenStack Platform deployment with Ansible integration”) before reading this one.
This post is going to take a deep dive on the changes we made regarding how Ansible strategy plugins can impact the way overcloud nodes are deployed at a large scale, and present a new feature which allows a certain amount of nodes to fail during a deployment or day 2 operation.
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A recent article, The present and future of CI/CD with GitOps on Red Hat OpenShift, proposed Tekton as a framework for cloud-native CI/CD pipelines, and Argo CD as its perfect partner for GitOps. GitOps practices support continuous delivery in hybrid, multi-cluster Kubernetes environments.
In this two-part article, we’ll build a CI/CD workflow that demonstrates the potential of combining Tekton and GitOps. You’ll also be introduced to Red Hat OpenShift Serverless, as we’ll use Knative service resources in our CI/CD workflow. Let’s start with an overview of the CI/CD workflow that we’ll implement for the demonstration.
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Red Hat OpenShift‘s web console simplifies many development and deployment chores to just a few clicks, but sometimes you need a command-line interface (CLI) to get things done on a cluster. Whether you’re learning by cut-and-paste in a tutorial or troubleshooting a deep bug in production (also often done by cut-and-paste), you’ll likely need to enter at least a line or two at a command prompt.
Starting with version 4.5.3, OpenShift users can try out a tech preview of the new Web Terminal Operator. The new OpenShift web terminal brings indispensable command-line tools right to the web console, and its Linux environment runs in a pod deployed on your OpenShift cluster. The web terminal eliminates the need to install software and configure connections and authentication for your local terminal. It also makes it easier to use OpenShift on devices like tablets and mobile phones, which might lack a native terminal.
This article introduces the new OpenShift web terminal, including how to install and activate the Web Terminal Operator.
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Open Liberty 20.0.0.9 lets developers experiment with the type-safe SmallRye GraphQL Client API, and write and run GraphQL queries and mutations more easily with a built-in GraphiQL user interface (UI).
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One of the fundamental changes with Fedora 33 is making use of systemd-resolved by default for network name resolution. A number of users testing out Fedora 33 on desktops and servers have run into various issues with systemd-resolved and sought to revert and delay this default behavioral change until a later release.
Following a lengthy mailing list discussion that ticked back up in recent days over systemd-resolved by default in Fedora 33, feedback was sought from the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) on delaying this change until a later release.
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Debian Family
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This month I started working on ways to make hosting access easier for Debian Developers. I also did some work and planning for the MiniDebConf Online Gaming Edition that we’ll likely announce within the next 1-2 days. Just a bunch of content that needs to be fixed and a registration bug then I think we’ll be ready to send out the call for proposals.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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We are pleased to announce that the beta images for Lubuntu 20.10 have been released!
While we have reached the bugfix-only stage of our development cycle, these images are not meant to be used in a production system. We highly recommend joining our development group or our forum to let us know about any issues.
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The Linux Mint project unveiled today the codename of the upcoming Linux Mint 20.1 release and an approximate release date of mid December. What’s coming after Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana”? Linux Mint 20.1, of course, and it’s codename has been revealed today by Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre as “Ulyssa,” continuing the long tradition of naming new Linux Mint releases alphabetically.
Linux Mint 20.1 is the first point release of the Linux Mint 20 series, so the codename also uses the “U” letter. As expected, it will be based on Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS (Focal Fossa) point release, which includes various updated packages, but not a major kernel or Mesa graphics stacks bump.
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The codename for Linux Mint 20.1 will be “Ulyssa”. The release is planned to arrive just before Christmas.
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Devices/Embedded
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Hailo has launched a line of M.2 and mini-PCIe cards for Linux systems equipped with its up to 26-TOPS, 3-TOPS per Watt Hailo-8 NPU. The Hailo-8 is featured in Foxconn’s BOXiedge v2 AI edge server.
In May we reported on Foxconn’s BOXiedge v2, which runs Linux on Socionext’s 24x Cortex-A53 SynQuacer SC2A11 SoC and a 3-TOPS per Watt Hailo-8 NPU that can run at up to 26 TOPS. Now Hailo has launched an M.2 implementation of the Hailo-8, with a mini-PCIe version on the way. The M.2 M-key 2242 form-factor accelerator is the world’s highest performance AI M.2 module, claims Hailo.
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Arm has announced new CPU, GPU, and ISP specifically designed for autonomous automotive and industrial applications with respectively Cortex-A78AE CPU, Arm Mali-G78AE GPU, and Arm Mali-C71AE ISP.
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STMicro launched STM32H7 single-core Cortex-M7 microcontroller family a while ago, followed by some dual-core Cortex-M7/M4 models, with most clocked up to 480 MHz.
The company has now announced five faster parts clocked at up to 550 MHz with STM32H723, STM32H733, STM32H725, STM32H735, and STM32H730 which STMicro claims is “the fastest core speed in the market among MCUs that integrate Flash storage on-chip to run deeply embedded applications”. The embedded flash storage is important, as you may now NXP i.MX RT1170 Cortex-M7/M4 crossover processor can reach up to 1 GHz but does not include flash storage.
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We’ve heard about Amlogic S905X4 processor for 4K TV boxes with AV1 support for about year, and while we’ve written about upcoming S905X4 TV boxes such as SDMC DV8919, none of them have launched so far, as silicon design and/or software development have taken a bit longer than expected, and we’re now far from the Q4 2019 launch date shown on the roadmap.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Almost everybody collects something. But keeping up with that collection isn’t always easy. You could just write it all down, but wouldn’t an app be easier? There are plenty of great apps just for collecting one type of thing, like books. However, collection organizing Android apps are ideal for managing nearly any type of collection and even multiple collections in a single app.
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Here’s the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software.
The table above shows articles updated in September 2020.
For our entire collection, check out the categories below. This is the largest compilation of recommended software. The collection includes hundreds of articles, with comprehensive sections on internet, graphics, games, programming, science, office, utilities, and more. Almost all of the software is free and open source.
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Early this morning I read a post from Colin Levy on Twitter informing the open movie Sintel had its 10th anniversary today. Ten years… This project really influenced so many components of my life (especially about the software and licenses I use now). I also met a lot of great people on it and my artworks started to get a lot of visibility at that time. So, I took my stylus, opened Krita 4.4beta2 and started a quick painting to meditate about it. I hope you’ll like it! Thank you again Sintel team and happy anniversary!
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One of the more popular operating systems, Linux, is open source. Linux powers the servers for many of the services we feel comfortable sharing personal information on every day.
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Web Browsers
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In a recent article I wrote: Web browser developers are failing their most important task, I took aim at web developers for forgetting the most important task of a web browser was rendering web pages. In this article, it’s time I took a turn at web developers.
Once upon a whimsical time, web sites were nothing more than simple HTML. Those now ancient relics were static, sometimes hard to read (remember Geocities and all those black backgrounds and red fonts?), but a lot of fun to explore. They also, for the most part, were rendered the same across the board. Even text browsers like Lynx could faithfully render those sites, minus the animated backgrounds and various images. But the text? Oh yeah, Lynx could handle it.
So too could Netscape Navigator, Internet Explorer (IE), Opera (which actually came into being on April 10, 1995), and Mozilla (the original Firefox).
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Thunderbird 78.3 open-source and free email client has arrived with more improvements and bug fixes, and you can now finally upgrade from older Thunderbird releases. When Thunderbird 78 launched earlier this year, it didn’t support automatic upgrades from version 68 or earlier.
Automatic upgrade was blocked intentionally due to the revamped extension system that only supports MailExtensions, not classic extensions, to no break your Thunderbird installations. Three months later, Mozilla enabled automatic upgrades in Thunderbird with version 78.2.2 released a couple of weeks ago. Now Thunderbird 78.3 is out and it disables the installation of “legacy” MailExtensions.
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Firefox 81.0.1 is here only a week after the launch of Firefox 81 to fix a bunch of nasty issues that could disturb your web browsing. One of the important issues addressed in this point release is a high memory bug that occurred when add-ons like Disconnect were installed, causing the web browser to become unresponsive.
Also fixed in Firefox 81.0.1 is an issue with the Picture-in-Picture (PiP) controls not being visible on web pages with audio-only elements, several issues that affected the printing functionality, the missing content on Blackboard course listings, as well as an issue with legacy preferences not being properly applied if they’re set via GPO.
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Firefox puts people first. In fact, we’re backed by a not-for-profit and our profits go back into making the internet UNFCKING BELIEVABLE FOR YOU.
Luckily, we aren’t the only ones who believe that the internet works best when your privacy and security are protected. There are a number of us out there pushing for an internet that is powered by more than a handful of large tech companies, because we believe the more choice you have the better things are for you — and for the web. We vetted these companies for how they treat your data and for their potential to shake up things up. In short: they’re solid.
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It’s noisy out there. We are inundated with sensational headlines every minute, of every day. You almost could make a full-time job of sorting the fun, interesting or useful memes, feeds and reels from those that should be trashed. It’s hard to know what to pay attention to, and where to put your energy. With so much noise, chaos and division, it seems that one of the only things we all have in common is relying on the internet to help us navigate everything that’s happening in the world, and in our lives.
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Pale Moon, an open-source Goanna-based web browser, released version 28.14.0 (and 28.14.1 with quick fix) with stability and security improvements.
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Mozilla and the African Telecommunications Union (ATU) have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) for a joint project that will promote rural connectivity in the Africa region. “The project, pegged to the usage of spectrum policy, regulations and practices, is designed to ensure affordable access to communication across the continent,” said ATU Secretary-General John OMO. “Figuring out how to make spectrum accessible, particularly in rural areas, is critical to bringing people online throughout the African continent,” said Mitchell Baker, CEO of Mozilla, “I’m committed to Mozilla making alliances to address this challenge.”
While half the world is now connected to the internet, the existing policy, regulatory, financial, and technical models are not fit for purpose to connect the poorer and more sparsely populated rural areas. More needs to be done to achieve the United Nations’ universal access goals by 2030. Clear policy and regulatory interventions that can support innovation, and new business models to speed up progress, are urgently required.
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We have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to unfck the internet. We should take it. How we talk, work, and play online depends on it.
Dramatic? No, Kardashians is dramatic. The truth is we have more than a few problems to deal with. A whole sh*tton of how we communicate is controlled by a few centi-billionaires. That’s a new word for all of us: centi-billionaire. It means worth over $100 billion USD. Each.
[...]
People deserve to feel safe with the knowledge that their personal information is shielded from hackers, spies and strangers. Let’s Encrypt, an alliance Mozilla helped found, now delivers greater security to over 85% of web transactions — while adding the “s” in “https://” — proving that security is possible on a large scale. With security comes trust, and trust will be the bedrock of a better internet.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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In talking to a number of friends, one mentioned that the idea of ‘gratis everything’ is an increasing problem in many FOSS projects. It’s interesting, many years back the fashion was to talk about Open Standards (which are of course great) instead of Open Source (which is better). Noawadays that’s less popular and I hear people emphasising the vital Freedom from Price (or even reminders to contribute) in place of Software Freedom. Possibly both of these betray an emphasis on users’s rights rather than the responsibility to contribute.
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FSF
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The LibrePlanet call for sessions is open now and will be open until November 20 and we want to hear from you!
Speaking at a conference, and even submitting a proposal, can be intimidating or hard. Luckily, some great, experienced speakers are volunteering their time to help out during the CFS office hours.
Whether you want to propose a talk and want feedback on your idea, proposal wording, talk title, or just advice on how to deal with nerves, there is one more office hour slot scheduled over the next few weeks.
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GNU Projects
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Not bad, eh? Also with plenty of cute characters on the Spritely site (thank you to David Revoy for taking my loose character sketches and making them into such beautiful paintings!)
But those cute characters are there for a reason! Spritely is quite ambitious and has quite a few subprojects. Here’s a video that explains how they all fit together. Hopefully that makes things more clear!
Actually that video is from ActivityPub Conference 2020, the talks of which have now all have their videos live! I also moderated the intro keynote panel about ActivityPub authors/editors. Plus there’s an easter egg, the ActivityPub Conference Opening Song! 
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Licensing/Legal
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When a game was out of date, and he had developed a whole new gaming engine, he would remove licensed third-party code and toss the source out for all to play with under a GPL license, and see what they came up with. All kinds of mods would be made, but more important, it gave coders a chance to show off their chops.
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Governance plays a crucial role in our world by determining and defining acceptable ways of interacting and doing business with one other. When governance is done well, it provides a supportive framework that facilitates interaction and fades into the background. When it’s done poorly, things don’t run as smoothly. The same is true within open source projects, where governance is key to providing overall operating guidelines, defining rules of conduct, and stating specific goals.
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Programming/Development
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For the last couple of years, DigitalOcean has run Hacktoberfest, which purports to “support open source” by giving free t-shirts to people who send pull requests to open source repositories.
In reality, Hacktoberfest is a corporate-sponsored distributed denial of service attack against the open source maintainer community.
So far today, on a single repository, myself and fellow maintainers have closed 11 spam pull requests. Each of these generates notifications, often email, to the 485 watchers of the repository. And each of them requires maintainer time to visit the pull request page, evaluate its spamminess, close it, tag it as spam, lock the thread to prevent further spam comments, and then report the spammer to GitHub in the hopes of stopping their time-wasting rampage.
The rate of spam pull requests is, at this time, around four per hour. And it’s not even October yet in my timezone.
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We would like to contribute our supports for Motorola 68000 series CPU (also known as M68k or M680x0) into LLVM. And we want to hear feedbacks from you
Here is some background for M68k: Motorola 68000 series CPU was one of the most popular CPUs used by personal computers in the ‘80, including some of the earliest Apple Macintosh. Fast-forwarding to modern days, M68k is still popular among retrocomputing communities – a bunch of people doing cool stuff, mostly porting modern software and systems, on old computers. For example, Planet m68k (http://m68k.info/ <http://m68k.info/>) is a portal and a bulletin board for many communities that focus on specific M68k computer models, Amiga, Atari, Mac68k to name a few, to share their news. Major operating systems like Debian [1] (Adrian in the CC list can back me up on the Debian part) and NetBSD [2] also support M68k. Long story short, there is a big community and a huge amount of developers in this ecosystem.
Some of you might remember that LLVM backend for M68k has been brought up in the mailing list sever times. The latest one was in 2018 [3]. Though those attempts never went through, we learned precious lessons: It’s important to show who’s behind this backend, how sustainable they are, and how we can make these changes easy to review.
As I illustrated earlier, majorities of the participants in the M68k community are hobbyists and non-profit groups. So do the people behind this backend: Currently there are three core members (CC’ed): Adrian, Artyom, and me. All of us participate in this project as individual contributors. I know the fact that we’re not supported (financially) by any institution or organization will put us in a lower hand when it comes to reliability. However, the quality of the backend has improved quite a lot since the last discussion. We’ve also settled down the code owner / primary maintainer. Not to mention we’ve been working closely with the rest of the M68k community to help us improve the testing. On the financial side, we’re trying to open up a donation campaign (e.g. Patreon). Though that involves many other practical issues so we’re still discussing that. LLVM is an open and inclusive community accepting contributions from talented people all over the world, regardless of their backgrounds. I believe this virtue can still be seen in the support of hardware backends, where each of the targets is judged by its code quality, maintenance, and user base. Rather than which company supports it.
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Hobbyist developers are trying once again to get a Motorola 68000 back-end merged into the upstream LLVM compiler. Yes, the M68k processors that are some 30+ years old.
The Motorola 68000 series processors have been around since the 80′s thanks to the likes of the early Apple Macintosh computers. Fast forward to 2020, the Motorola 68000 is still a popular target for vintage computer enthusiasts and hobbyists. Community developers have worked on improving the Linux kernel support for M68k hardware like early Apple Powerbooks as recently as a few years ago and the compiler support is a continued target.
[...]
We’ll see how this attempt pans out over the weeks ahead if LLVM could finally see a mainline Motorola 68000 series back-end in 2020/2021.
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Perl/Raku
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This month I interview Damian Conway, one of the Guardians of Perl. Damian is computer scientist and excellent communicator—his presentations and courses are widely popular around the world. He was the Adjunct Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information Technology at Melbourne’s Monash University between 2001 and 2010.
It was an honour to interview my idol. I enjoyed talking to him and I am sure you would have many “aha” moments. For example, Raku’s built-in grammar construct is inspired by the work of Damian’s Parse::RecDescent.
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Well, ever since I decided to go slow on submitting Pull Request, I find it hard to find anything simple and easy to work with. Another reason, I don’t spend much time review latest upload on CPAN. Earlier, I would constantly watch every upload on CPAN and find anything needed helping hand.
Most of my spare time these days dedicated to “The Weekly Challenge”, I rarely find time to review any CPAN module. Having said, I still manage to submit just few to keep the continuity. I struggle to even get 2-digits number each month. Last month, I could only submit 6 Pull Request, at least it is better than August.
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During the quarantine I was able to find the good side of the home confination: I hadn’t enough time to read a book due to school’s tests, but for my luck, I had enough time for reading one or two Request For Comments (RFC) documents.
Since my first days studying computer security, the concept of “protocol” fascinated me. Maybe for their enormous diffusion in almost every computer system, our daily lives heavily depends from these processes. As I say “trust on machines but don’t trust humans”. The RFC approach reminds the open source philosophy, which has the same objective (give everyone the opportunity to learn new things through sharing) and the same propagation channel: the internet.
I find it too hard to search for these documents on the IETF website, so I made a fast and efficient script that permits me to download RFCs through a keyword and lets me decide which ones to read and which ones to ignore.
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I’ve previously written about Stupid Open Tricks, so know it’s time for some stupid DATA tricks. You probably already know that you can “embed” a file inside a Perl program then read it from the DATA filehandle. David Farrell wrote about this in Perl tokens you should know and he’s the one who reminded me about the curiousity that I’ll demonstrate here.
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Python
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Logging is a crucial step to be performed by a programmer during software development. It helps developers to track events happening during the execution of a program, which can be helpful for the future debugging process. If you are a new learner or working on a new project, it is a good practice to use logging for tracking the code flow and for solving errors.
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Being a Python developer is a fantastic career option. Python is now the most popular language with lots of growing job demand (especially in the fields of Web, Data Science and Machine Learning). You have many job opportunities, you can work around the world, and you get to solve hard problems. One thing that is hard, however, is staying up to date with the constantly evolving ecosystem. You want to be a top-performing python developer, coder, programmer, software developer, but you don’t have time to select from hundreds of articles, videos and podcasts each day.
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Using is is around 60% slower than if variable (17.4/10.9≈1.596), but using == is 120% slower (24.9/10.9≈2.284)! It doesn’t matter if the variable is actually True or False – the differences in performance are similar (if the variable is True, all three scenarios will be slightly slower).
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The release package and checksums are available from our downloads page, as well as from the Python Package Index. The PGP key ID used for this release is Mariusz Felisiak: 2EF56372BA48CD1B.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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Most Linux admins are hard-pressed to avoid the terminal window. It’s almost as though it’s in your blood to automatically use commands. And when you do, you usually work with Bourne Again Shell, also known as Bash.
But what is a shell? It is a program that accepts input from a keyboard and hands it off to the OS. As you type commands, the shell interprets them such that the OS can understand them.
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Rust
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This is the second weekly changelog for Knurling-rs, our push to sustainably build better tooling for developing and debugging Rust software for embedded systems. Knurling-rs includes a suite of tools that make it easier to develop, log, debug, and test your embedded Rust libraries and applications!
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We’re announcing the start of the Portable SIMD Project Group within the Libs team. This group is dedicated to making a portable SIMD API available to stable Rust users.
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Java
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Developers in search of a Java application server have no shortage of options to consider. But before any enterprise selects and ultimately adopts a Java application server for development and deployment, there are multiple variables that need to be considered.
Development teams will need to know what exactly the application server will be used for in deployment. Is the main goal to act as a basic file server? And if that’s the case, what sorts of file formats will be used the most?
Let’s compare Apache Tomcat with other servers on the market and examine which one will make the most sense for your situation.
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Science
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However, the survey of around 32,000 people across the globe found wide variation between some countries and according to which side of the political divide respondents occupied.
The study, conducted for the Pew Research Center in the US before the main onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, found that a median of 36 per cent of people across 20 nations trusted scientists “a lot” to do what was right for the country, the same result as for the military.
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Education
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My book, Designing Data-Intensive Applications, recently passed the milestone of 100,000 copies sold. Last year, it was the second-best-selling book in O’Reilly’s entire catalogue, second only to Aurélien Géron’s machine learning book. Machine learning is obviously a hot topic, so I am quite content with coming second to it!
To me, the success of this book was totally unexpected: while I was writing it, I thought that it was going to be a bit niche, and I set myself the goal of selling 10,000 copies over the lifetime of the book. Having passed that goal tenfold, this seems like a good opportunity to look back and reflect on the process. I don’t want to make this post too self-congratulatory, but rather I will try to share some insights into the business of book-writing.
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Health/Nutrition
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Robert Redfield, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was overruled by other members of President Trump’s coronavirus task force over whether a “no-sail ban” on cruise ships should continue for another four months, apparently thwarting a public health expert’s understanding and concern about COVID-19 in favor of appeasing the cruise ship industry.
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America’s first COVID death was on February 29 of this year, roughly 200 days ago. In that time, more than 200,000 Americans have died of the disease, the equivalent of 1,000 people a day.
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Africa reports 1.3 million positive COVID-19 cases, leading some health officials to consider that the continent may have escaped the worst of the coronavirus.
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During the first presidential debate, former Vice President Joe Biden repeatedly criticized President Trump over his handling of the coronavirus pandemic, which has killed over 205,000 people in the United States — the highest death toll in the world. Trump mocked Biden for wearing a mask, while claiming that a vaccine would be available within weeks. “It was very bizarre,” says Marc Lamont Hill, author and professor of media studies and urban education at Temple University. “The idea of not erring on the side of caution is representative of the entire Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 crisis.”
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As one of the largest private employers in the world, it probably shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that McDonald’s is fairly protective of its trademarks. The company, large legal coffers though it has, is not undefeatable, however. It was only a year or so ago, for instance, that McDonald’s famously lost its “Big Mac” trademark in Europe when another chain, Supermacs, got it cancelled as it expanded into more European markets.
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“To recap here: The drug didn’t get any better, the cancer patients didn’t get any better, you just got better at making money—you just refined your skills at price gouging.”
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This summer Stacy Brosius, a third-grade public school teacher in Peoria, Ariz., painted a message for Republican Governor Doug Ducey on the rear window of her car: “We are not sacrificial lambs.”
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“Like just about everything else he has said over the last five years, Donald Trump’s claims on lowering drug prices in last night’s debate, particularly his outrageous claim about insulin, were nothing but spin and lies.”
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“He’s been blocking the original HEROES Act for 138 days. As always, his priorities are appalling.”
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According to the Covid Tracking Project, the Midwest is currently experiencing a coronavirus surge. And while there’s a mix of reasons behind this new surge— including the (possibly premature) reopening of some cities, universities and schools, and big gatherings like the the Sturgis motorcycle rally— there is a strong link between the low likelihood of public mask-wearing and the places where cases are rising, as The New York Times has reported. Indeed, the Midwest seems to struggle uniquely with mask-wearing, as the Times county-level data reveals.
Given what we know about the success of mitigation strategies like donning a mask, it may seem peculiar for states like Iowa to suddenly surge in cases. That suggests that the midwestern surge originates not because of lack of public health knowledge, but because of cultural reasons, or because of the politicized nature of masks, or both — something that is borne out by locals’ observations.
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Integrity/Availability
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On Monday, the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) released a study (PDF) that tracked a large uptick in phishing attacks in Q2 of 2020. The surge involves rogue sites using the cryptographic protocol Transport Layer Security or TLS, most commonly referred to by its legacy name Secure Sockets Layer, or SSL.
SSL padlocks indicate that a browser is using a secure and encrypted communication pipe to the server hosting the desired website. SSL warnings are also complemented by the additional “HTTPS” indication within a browser address bar, meaning the browser is transmitting information safely using Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure.
According to the APWG report, 80 percent of phishing sites used SSL certificates in Q2. Attacks ranged from phishing lures pointing to bogus wire-transfer sites, to social-media platforms Facebook and WhatsApp being pelted with links to shady domains.
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Proprietary
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In his blog post, Raymond had this to say:
“The economic motive is that Microsoft sheds an ever-larger fraction of its development costs as less and less has to be done in-house.”
There are several factors why Raymond’s theory around open-source, Linux based Windows operating system in the future is far from bizarre and far-fetched. In fact, it’s quite the opposite.
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Emergency 911 systems were down for more than an hour on Monday in towns and cities across 14 U.S. states. The outages led many news outlets to speculate the problem was related to Microsoft‘s Azure web services platform, which also was struggling with a widespread outage at the time. However, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity the 911 issues stemmed from some kind of technical snafu involving Intrado and Lumen, two companies that together handle 911 calls for a broad swath of the United States.
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Here is a practical example found in the wild. The initial PowerShell script has a VT score of 8/59 (SHA256:f4a4fffaa31c59309d7bba7823029cb211a16b3b187fcbb407705e7a5e9421d3). The script is not heavily obfuscated but the technique used is interesting. It uses the CSharpCodeProvider[1] class: [...]
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A Russian [attacker] was sentenced to more than seven years in a U.S. prison for stealing the logins of 117 million users of LinkedIn, Dropbox and the defunct social media site Formspring, according to federal prosecutors.
Yevgeniy Nikulin, 32, was convicted in July after a six-day jury trial in San Francisco in what was said to be one of the largest data breaches in U.S. history.
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (ruby-json-jwt and ruby-rack-cors), Fedora (xen), SUSE (aspell and tar), and Ubuntu (ruby-gon, ruby-kramdown, and ruby-rack).
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Privacy/Surveillance
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It is hardly news that we are being tracked as we visit Web sites, and move around the Internet. As this blog has reported, it’s the basis of today’s main online business model: using information about where we go, and what we view, in order to allow advertisers to offer highly-targeted advertising based on the profile that can be constructed from that data. That’s despite the fact that such microtargeted advertising has real risks, is not wanted by the public, and isn’t even very effective. Nonetheless, it’s clear this kind of “surveillance capitalism” is not going away anytime soon. The question is: what can we do to minimize its harmful effects?
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At least five bar owners in Grenoble, France have been arrested for providing WiFi at their businesses without keeping logs. The bar owners were arrested under a 2006 law that technically classifies WiFi hotspot providing establishments as ISPs, and require them to store one year’s worth of logs or connection records for anti terrorism purposes. This requirement is in place even if the WiFi network is password protected.
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The San Francisco Police Department has found a way — perhaps inadvertently — to bypass the city’s ban on facial recognition use. As Megan Cassidy reports for the San Francisco Chronicle, all the SFPD has to do is notify other law enforcement agencies about crimes it’s investigating.
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Now, two never-before-seen documents, “Intermediate Course” and “Advanced Course” training manuals, reveal how the Los Angeles Police Department has taught its officers to use Palantir Gotham, one of the most controversial and powerful law enforcement tools in the world.
Much of that LAPD data consists of the names of people arrested for, convicted of, or even suspected of committing crimes, but that’s just where it starts. Palantir also ingests the bycatch of daily law enforcement activity. Maybe a police officer was told a person knew a suspected gang member. Maybe an officer spoke to a person who lived near a crime “hot spot,” or was in the area when a crime happened. Maybe a police officer simply had a hunch. The context is immaterial. Once the LAPD adds a name to Palantir’s database, that person becomes a data point in a massive police surveillance system.
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Defence/Aggression
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After nearly four years of the Trump administration, U.S. voters have a pretty good idea of the policies that the President and his Republican allies champion when it comes to America’s dealings with other nations. These policies include massive increases in military spending, lengthy wars abroad, threats of nuclear war, withdrawal from climate and nuclear disarmament treaties, a crackdown on refugees, and abandonment of international institutions.
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Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron said he would comply with a judge’s order to release the grand jury recording in the Breonna Taylor case after a grand juror alleged that Cameron had misrepresented the deliberations.
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“Trump fans the flames of racism, embraces white supremacy, and employs state violence against Americans exercising their rights,” said Sen. Elizabeth Warren. “That’s Donald Trump’s America.”
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Donald Trump and Joe Biden were asked about how to address racism during the first presidential debate held in Cleveland. While Biden expressed sympathy with victims of police brutality, President Trump insisted that most violence came from left-wing groups — a false claim ignoring that the vast majority of political violence in the U.S. comes from right-wing extremists, according to the FBI and others. Trump’s refusal to reckon with the issue “poses a real and grave threat to Black and Brown people in particular in our country who are often the victims of racial violence,” says Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.
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“Trump has repeatedly made it clear that he considers violent white supremacists to be a valued part of his base, even after people are murdered.”
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Asked at yesterday’s presidential debate if he would condemn white supremacist violence by groups like the Proud Boys, President Trump was defiant, remarking: “Almost everything I see is from the left-wing, not the right-wing.” But that very same day, the FBI issued an intelligence report warning of an imminent “violent extremist threat” posed by a far-right militia that includes white supremacists—identifying the current election period up to the 2021 inauguration as a “potential flashpoint.”
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The white mobs didn’t care whom they killed as long as the victims were Black. They murdered people in public with guns and rocks. They set fire to houses and slaughtered families trying to escape the flames. In East St. Louis in July 1917, white vigilantes lynched Blacks with impunity.
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As hundreds of people flooded into Peninsula Park in Portland, Oregon, last weekend despite the pouring rain, they brought a level of energy that few would expect months into an unending protest in the city. While the city braced itself for dueling rallies between an influx of far right Proud Boys on the one side and anti-fascists on the other, instead, the latter triumphed in a celebration of the strength they have found in continually taking a stand against the far right and police violence.
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President Trump refused to condemn white supremacists during the first of three scheduled presidential debates with Joe Biden. When pressed by moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News to disavow far-right extremism, Trump name-checked the Proud Boys and told them to “stand back and stand by,” words widely denounced as a tacit endorsement of the violent, white supremacist organization classified by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group. The Proud Boys almost immediately responded by changing its logo online to include the Trump quote. Christian Picciolini, a former neo-Nazi who now leads the Free Radicals Project, a group focused on helping people disengage from violent extremism, says Trump’s words were a clear encouragement for “continued violence” from far-right groups. We also speak with Temple University professor Marc Lamont Hill, who says Trump’s performance at the debate is a continuation of his white supremacist project. “He wants violence in the streets, he wants chaos at the polls, because he wants Americans to feel a sense of unsafety. It’s its own kind of diplomatic terrorism,” he says.
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President Trump once again refused to take a hard stance in condemning white supremacy and white supremacist violence during Tuesday night’s tumultuous and bizarre presidential debate with his Democratic challenger Joe Biden.
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On August 26th, during the Republican National Convention, Vice President Mike Pence closed out his acceptance speech with a biblical sleight of hand. Speaking before a crowd at the Fort McHenry National Monument in Baltimore, he exclaimed, “Let’s fix our eyes on Old Glory and all she represents. Let’s fix our eyes on this land of heroes and let their courage inspire.” In doing so, he essentially rewrote a passage from the New Testament’s Book of Hebrews: “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross.”
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Donald Trump and Joe Biden were asked about how to address racism during the first presidential debate held in Cleveland. While Biden expressed sympathy with victims of police brutality, President Trump insisted that most violence came from left-wing groups — a false claim ignoring that the vast majority of political violence in the U.S. comes from right-wing extremists, according to the FBI and others. Trump’s refusal to reckon with the issue “poses a real and grave threat to Black and Brown people in particular in our country who are often the victims of racial violence,” says Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. We also speak with Marc Lamont Hill, author and professor of media studies and urban education at Temple University.
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Poll watching can be a very safe and very nice thing, but it isn’t just random people in MAGA hats the president has summoned to descend on polling places. This can lead to voter intimidation. In fact, it already has. Earlier this month, a group of flag-toting Trump supporters obstructed voters from entering a polling place in Fairfax, Virginia, forcing officials to open up another portion of the facility.
This is voter suppression, it’s fundamentally anti-democratic, and it’s exactly what Trump was calling for emphatically Tuesday night at the debate. He wants more of this.
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A few years back, the gift shop of The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum used to sell this poster with 14 early signs of fascism listed on it. Apparently, the list was originally created by self-proclaimed amateur historian Laurence Britt in 2003 for an article published by Free Inquiry magazine. Even though the gift shop of the museum doesn’t sell this poster anymore, it still goes viral on the internet every once in a while. Why, you ask? Apparently, people find it particularly familiar at this point in American politics.
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Everybody honest knows that last night’s debate didn’t matter to most voters. Trump’s ignorance and incompetence have contributed to over 206,000 American deaths; if you’re still willing to vote for Trump, there’s nothing he can say in a two-hour “debate” that’s going to change your mind.
What’s harder for people to wrap their minds around is the fact that we’ve already lost. I know I’m supposed to say that “the 2020 election is the most important election of our lifetime,” but it’s not. The 2016 election was the most important election of our lifetime, and we, as a nation, failed. The media failed, and still fails, to cover Trump accurately. The left failed to get enthused by an imperfect candidate. The right failed to demonstrate any moral or intellectual integrity. Over 100 million people failed to show up. I failed to help enough people understand what was coming, because I understood the inherent danger of John Roberts’s disastrous decision to gut the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder.
So the 2020 election is not, in fact, our last chance at victory. It’s not an opportunity to right the wrongs of the past. This electoral battle is more like the Battle of Dunkirk. We’re fighting for the chance to retreat. We’re fighting for the chance to fight another day.
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After nearly a decade of war, aid workers in Syria say untreated trauma and the abuse of pain medications are leading to addiction problems they don’t have the resources to treat – both inside the country and outside its borders.
Dr Sulaiman Haj Ibrahim was working for Syria Relief and Development, a Syrian NGO, in 2018 when a young man came to his hospital in the city of Azaz, northwest of Aleppo, desperately seeking help to get off drugs.
The patient was taking the opioid painkillers tramadol and dextropropoxyphene for injuries sustained during an airstrike in his hometown of Eastern Ghouta, outside Damascus. His leg had been amputated; he walked with crutches and had undergone reconstructive surgeries that required medication to ease the pain. He was hooked and he knew it.
He asked the doctor, a urologist by training, for any kind of assistance that might curb his drug use. “He was crying, ‘Please help me, support me’,” Haj Ibrahim told The New Humanitarian during an interview conducted in Gaziantep, a city on Turkey’s southern border with Syria that is home to around half a million refugees.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The conspiracy originated on social media before appearing in a text message sent by President Trump’s re-election campaign to supporters. It was then regurgitated by media outlets like Fox News and New York Post, who cited the Trump campaign, throughout the day, according to NBC News.
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A conspiracy theory that Joe Biden would wear an electronic device in his ear during the first presidential debate went wildly viral Tuesday in the hours before the debate, and the groundless theory was later amplified by conservative news outlets that claimed that Biden had backed out of an ear “inspection.”
The conspiracy theory, which was pushed in a text message sent by the Trump campaign after it went viral on Facebook and YouTube, claimed that Biden had declined to “undergo inspection for electronic ear pieces before debate.”
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Environment
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Amazon collapse could soon mean the end of one of Earth’s richest habitats, leaving the rainforest destroyed by humans.
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After massive outcry from activists and young voters, debate moderator Chris Wallace questioned President Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden about the climate crisis at the first presidential debate. He did not include it in his initial list of debate topics. Kate Aronoff, author and staff writer at The New Republic, says she didn’t expect climate change to come up, but was unsurprised by the responses. “We’ve known for years that Donald Trump denies the science of climate change,” she says. “And we know that Joe Biden doesn’t support a Green New Deal.”
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“They talked about climate for 10 minutes and 30 seconds. This is an existential threat we have 10 years to address. We need a climate debate.”
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Ten years ago, some humans came to the table. We sat down together and looked at the facts. We looked at each other. Looked at the world. And looked at the facts again. The scientific facts. The planet is warming, we said to each other. Species are dying. The Sixth Mass Extinction, we murmured under our breath. What can be done. Must be done. So we made a pact. Signed a treaty. Nodded our heads and dusted our hands and went back to our respective countries. Masters of solutions. Inventive solvers of problems. Phew, we thought to ourselves. That was a close one.
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During its planning process for Point Reyes National Seashore, the National Park Service received overwhelming public input opposing commercial ranching on and supporting the recovery of the rare tule elk. The Trump administration, after sparring with the California state government on climate issues, has now unveiled a proposed plan that would expand ranch operations, and further harm elk recovery on these Park Service lands. It’s shaping up to be an anti-environmental decision that advances extractive industries and undermines efforts to maximize carbon sequestration on public lands.
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The resolution’s success, said one organizer, “is a testament to the social movement power demanding both transformative climate action and concrete steps to remedy the legacy of systemic racism.”
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What can you say about people for whom the beauty of Nature does not inspire, and the fear of its destruction does not motivate?
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Energy
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For years, the Chamber opposed action to slow climate change, prompting activists to dub the organization the “Chamber of Carbon.”
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Wildlife/Nature
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“At a time of rapid biodiversity loss, we are failing to access the treasure chest of incredible diversity on offer and missing a huge opportunity for our generation.”
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Finance
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The organizers of the Moscow International Film Festival have pulled Armenian director Jivan Avetisyan’s film “Gate to Heaven” about the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh from the festival’s non-competitive program.
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A profound transformation of food systems is needed and such a shift must happen rapidly to constructively address the multiple crises that are threatening humanity.
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In the decade since Leonard Green & Partners, a private equity firm based in Los Angeles, bought control of a hospital company named Prospect Medical Holdings for $205 million, the owners have done handsomely.
Leonard Green extracted $400 million in dividends and fees for itself and investors in its fund — not from profits, but by loading up the company with debt. Prospect CEO Sam Lee, who owns about 20% of the chain, made $128 million while expanding the company from five hospitals in California to 17 across the country. A second executive with an ownership stake took home $94 million.
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This story is published as part of StudentNation’s “Vision 2020: Election Stories From the Next Generation,” reports from young journalists that center the concerns of diverse young voters. In this project, working with Dr. Sherri Williams, we recruited young journalists from different backgrounds to develop story ideas and reporting about their peers’ concerns ahead of the most important election of our lives. We’ll continue publishing two stories each week over the course of September.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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“This is a sad state of affairs when thousands are dying from a pandemic, an economic crisis is destroying millions of lives and climate change is burning down the planet’s ecosystem.”
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The Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) announced on Wednesday that it would seek to make changes to the format of future debates in this year’s election cycle in response to the chaos that took place in Tuesday night’s debate between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee for president Joe Biden.
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Before the first presidential debate, I had both hopes and fears. Hopes that Biden would be able to call out Trump’s lies, or at least expose the president’s callous indifference to the terrible suffering Americans have experienced these past few months. Fears that Trump—a far more gifted television performer than he’s usually given credit for—would present a sufficiently plausible counterfeit of competence and leadership to con the tiny, but potentially decisive, sliver of voters who still haven’t made up their minds. (And yes, “Where the f**k have you people been?!” is a totally fair question.)
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Trump knows that the white nationalists, championed by misshapen rags like Breitbart, are part of his constituency and he cultivates them with his racist rhetoric.
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“If you believe in democracy, if you believe in the Constitution and in the rule of law, Trump has got to go.”
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We cannot blame the Founding Fathers for the “democracy” that we have because we don’t truly have a democracy. In fact, the Founding Fathers did everything they could to avoid the possibility that the entire citizenry would have an essential role in electing our government. After all, they created the Electoral College that placed Donald Trump in the White House in 2016…and could keep him there for another four years.
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If Trump stays in office, can The Purge be far behind?
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In the first confrontation between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, democracy lost and the audience took a beating.
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The only winner of last night’s “debate” was dictatorship and oligarchy.
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I don’t know about you, but I held my breath for almost two hours Tuesday night. I knew it was obvious, by any decent standard, that Donald Trump was lying and bullying his way through the first debate—cheating, really—but I’m not used to my mainstream colleagues’ calling him out on it. Instead, I thought former vice president Joe Biden should have entered the trash talk contest and challenged Trump for who could be more obstreperous.
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Mikhail Popov, the head of the Federal Center of Informatization (FCI) at Russia’s Central Election Commission, has resigned following controversy over the addition of a captcha test to the website where the commission publishes official data on election results. His resignation was reported by Central Election Commission Chairwoman Ella Pamfilova.
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On September 29, the Karelian Supreme Court considered an appeal in the case of historian and human rights activist Yuri Dmitriev. The court ended up overturning his previous three and half year sentence and sentencing him to 13 years in prison. This decision is unprecedented, even among Russian courts — the historian’s defense lawyer has already announced plans to challenge the verdict. Meanwhile, human rights defenders and Dmitriev’s colleagues are calling the sentence the “system’s revenge” for his research on the Soviet Gulag. In a (not so successful) attempt to discuss the political dimension of Dmitriev’s case, Meduza spoke to his defense lawyer, Viktor Anufriev, and attorney Igor Perov, the representative for the victim in the case, Dmitriev’s foster daughter.
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President Trump and his allies are already working to cast doubt on the fairness and integrity of the election as early voting begins in some states and the president trails Democratic nominee Joe Biden in the polls. Across the country and especially in battleground states, the Republican Party has worked to restrict access to the ballot as political operatives seize on irregularities arising from a hasty pandemic-era transition toward mail-in voting in order to bolster Trump’s false claims about widespread voter fraud.
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“The people stealing everything won last night’s debate.”
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We’re seeing an egomaniacal incumbent who’s so weak and nefarious that he and his obsequious political party are actually spending untold millions of dollars in a disgraceful effort to try to keep American voters from casting ballots.
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“President Donald Trump, in need of another dose of fear to keep his sputtering reelection bid afloat, is now, officially, throwing the kitchen sink of chauvinism at American voters.”
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In the lost innocence of yesterday morning, I wrote, “If a thumb-sized Winston Churchill on a spring bursts from Trump’s forehead tonight and bellows ‘Buy War Bonds!’ at the audience, his base will nod sagely to themselves and say it’s all part of The Plan.”
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Best practices in election administration matter, and fully institutionalizing vote-by-mail across all states could reduce socioeconomic and racial disparities in voting and improve the accuracy of election results.
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Barrett acknowledges she applies a “religious test” to every legal decision. Her legal philosophy should disqualify her.
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The first presidential debate of 2020 was a wretched affair, more a verbal brawl than a discussion. The candidates were constantly interrupting each other, with Trump especially given to heckling while Joe Biden made a forlorn effort to get a few words in edgewise. Trump was manic and Biden often seemed dispirited and baffled.
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As the battle to restore voting rights in Florida continues, I experienced Florida Voter Suppression 2.0.
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“This is a clear voter suppression tactic,” said one critic after the president urged his backers to show up at polling places and “watch very carefully.”
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Among the stream of authoritarian remarks President Donald Trump let loose during his disastrous performance at Tuesday night’s presidential debate, one of the most alarming to voting rights advocates came at the tail-end of the 90-minute event, when the incumbent openly encouraged his supporters to “go into the polls and watch very carefully.”
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Here in the United States, we’re used to the FBI radicalizing terrorists in order to arrest terrorists. If you don’t have any aspiring terrorist friends, the FBI can set you up with some. Don’t have a plan to do some terror stuff? No problem, the FBI has all kinds of ideas. Low on cash and unable to pick up your own terrorist supplies? Petty cash has you covered, my man. Just looking for a little acceptance? The FBI can fill that void in your life, just before it arrests you and takes that life away.
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“It’s a rigged election,” claimed President Trump when he and his Democratic challenger Joe Biden were asked about election integrity during last night’s debate as the two men sparred over mail-in voting. Trump ended the debate by calling for poll watchers. We speak with Kristen Clarke, president and executive director of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who says Trump is promoting unlawful intimidation and voter suppression, and has vowed to go to court to block any attempt to discourage or block people from freely casting their ballots.
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I first reached out to Stephen Cohen because I was losing my mind.
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“It’s critically important that people understand the forces at work and also understand that this is not the year to skip voting,” says the director of Right Wing Watch.
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One new measure could be to cut the microphones if the candidates try to interrupt each other, US media report.
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In a number of the adverts, it has been doctored to show Mr Biden wearing wireless Apple headphones. This was not the case in the original image. Some versions circle the ear featuring the headphone.
By Wednesday evening, there were at least 15 different versions of the advert, and according to Facebook’s Ad Library, they had reached at least 10 million users.
Facebook has pledged to label posts containing voting misinformation and point users towards accurate information ahead of the election. However its policy does not involve fact-checking political speech, including in advertisements.
The company declined to comment about the latest Trump ad campaign.
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Malcolm Bligh Turnbull served as a member of Parliament from 2004 until 2018, and as Prime Minister from September 2015 until August 2018. But he has been a public figure in Australia for decades. He’s an Oxford-educated lawyer who studied there under a Rhodes scholarship, he’s worked as a journalist, as the personal lawyer to Australian media baron Kerry Packer and was a leader of the ultimately unsuccessful campaign to make Australia a republic in the 1990s.
He can also list a number of achievements in the business world. In 1994 he invested half a million dollars into Australian ISP Ozemail, selling his stake to Worldcom in 1999 for $57m.
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The money raised by the Judicial Crisis Network (JCN) comes from untraceable sources — and Barrett previously rebuffed a Democratic senator’s request that she ask outside groups to refrain from spending big money to try to influence a congressional review of her appellate court nomination.
JCN previously spent as much as $27 million to block President Barack Obama’s 2016 Supreme Court pick and place conservative jurists Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh on the high court. As the Daily Poster previously reported, JCN received $15.9 million from a single anonymous donor between July 2018 and June 2019, the tax period covering the Kavanaugh fight.
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“2020’s a raging hellscape,” he sings while asking the first question. “Any ideas on how to stop a worldwide plague?” Yankovic also addresses the economy, the Supreme Court and climate change as the candidates’ words are turned into auto-tuned, sung responses.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Another day, another truly terrible bill to “reform” Section 230. This is another “bipartisan” bill, which should be a reminder that bad Section 230 ideas are happening across the entire spectrum of political ideologies in Congress. It’s being released by Senator Joe Manchin along with Senator John Cornyn, and it’s obnoxiously called the See Something Say Something Online Act. I do wonder if they licensed that term, because it was the NYC Metropolitan Transit Association who holds the trademark for “see something, say something” and is notoriously litigious about it. Indeed, the DHS program under the same name “licensed” the name from the MTA, though I still fail to see how either has anything to do with “commerce.”
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Summary: After a UK teen took her own life in response to bullying on social networking site, ask.fm, her father asked both the site and the UK government to take corrective measures to prevent further tragedies. This wasn’t an isolated incident. Reports linked multiple suicides to bullying on the teen-centered site.
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The grand mufti of Russia’s North Caucasus region of Chechnya, Salakh Mezhiyev, has approved a sentence of torture and humiliation for a 19-year-old Chechen blogger and warned of consequences for an exiled member of the Chechen separatist government, Akhmed Zakayev, who condemned the penalty.
In a video statement posted on Instagram on September 13, Mezhiyev called the teenager “a dirty creature, who received what he deserved.”
Video of the torture and humiliation of the young Chechen, who criticized Chechen police and the region’s authoritarian leader Ramzan Kadyrov on the opposition 1ADAT Telegram channel, circulated over the Internet last week and shocked people in Chechnya and beyond.
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“To put it simply, freedom of speech is in bad shape around the world. Including in Denmark, France and throughout the West. These are troubled times; people prefer order and security to freedom.” — Flemming Rose, Le Point, August 15, 2020.
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The father of Ali Hassan, a young man who stabbed two persons in an attack using a meat cleaver outside the former Paris office of the controversial Charlie Hebdo magazine last week, has said he is “proud” of his son. In an interview to the web-based channel Naya Pakistan, the father, whose name is not revealed, said his son has “done a great job” and he is “very happy” about the attack.
The French government had condemned the stabbing on Friday outside the former office of the satirical magazine as an act of “Islamist terrorism”.
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A man who injured two people in a knife attack outside the former offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris last week admitted that he wanted to set its offices on fire, the lead prosecutor in the case said Tuesday. The suspect also said he lied to police about his age, later confessed to being 25 years old.
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Ricard said the suspect planned to force his way into the magazine’s offices but when he came across a man and a woman smoking beside a mural to the victims of the 2015 attack on the publication in which 12 people were killed, he thought they were staff at Charlie Hebdo and attacked them with the meat cleaver.
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In an interview published in the August 13 issue of the center-right magazine Le Point, titled “Have the Islamists won?” Charlie Hebdo’s lawyer Richard Malka, however, argued that “the situation [of freedom of expression] is much worse than five years ago.” The threats are real. After the republication of the cartoons Al-Qaeda again threatened Charlie Hebdo, the staff of which has been under police protection for years since before the attack and now works from a secret place. On September 21, the magazine’s human resources director had to be rushed to a safe place by the police after death threats against her were considered imminent.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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The defense read several witness statements aloud in court today, including two statements from anonymous former employees of UC Global, the Spanish security company led by David Morales which spied on Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The witness statements testify to the particular zeal Morales had in recording conversations between Assange and his lawyers as well as his contract with an American company to report the recordings back to American intelligence officials.
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The defense read several witness statements aloud in court today, including two statements from anonymous former employees of UC Global, the Spanish security company led by David Morales which spied on Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. The witness statements testify to the particular zeal Morales had in recording conversations between Assange and his lawyers as well as his contract with an American company to report the recordings back to American intelligence officials.
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A former warden at ADX Florence has described doing time in the Colorado prison as “a fate worse than death.”
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An IT expert who worked for UC Global, the Spanish security company which engaged in an espionage operation against Julian Assange while he was in the Ecuador embassy, refused to install numerous microphones and camera systems with “streaming capabilities” because they believed it was illegal.
UC Global director David Morales was told Assange would discover the cameras were streaming in order to “restrain Morales.”
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September 29. Central Criminal Court, London.
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Tuesday has been another day on which the testimony focused on the extreme inhumane conditions in which Julian Assange would be kept imprisoned in the USA if extradited. The prosecution’s continued tactic of extraordinary aggression towards witnesses who are patently well informed played less well, and there were distinct signs that Judge Baraitser was becoming irritated by this approach. The totality of defence witnesses and the sheer extent of mutual corroboration they provided could not simply be dismissed by the prosecution attempting to characterise all of them as uninformed on a particular detail, still less as all acting in bad faith. To portray one witness as weak may appear justified if they can be shaken, but to attack a succession of patently well-qualified witnesses, on no basis but aggression and unreasoning hostility, becomes quickly unconvincing.
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Turkish journalist Abdullah Bozkurt, who is exiled in Sweden, was attacked near his home in Stockholm by three men on 24 September. The International and European Federations of Journalists (IFJ/EFJ) stand in solidarity with Abdullah Bozkurt and join the Swedish Union of Journalists in calling for a thorough investigation into the attack.
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Bozkurt and his team of journalists in Sweden run the Nordic Monitor news website which provides exclusive and critical coverage on Turkey and exposes the clandestine activities of the notorious Turkish intelligence agency.
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Bozkurt and his team of journalists run Nordic Monitor, which covers Turkey with exclusive stories backed by documents on rampant rights violations in the country and the activities of the Turkish intelligence agency (MİT).
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Similarly, last week another attack on a dissident was carried out last week in Sweden. Abdullah Bozkurt, a Turkish journalist forced to live in exile, was attacked by three men near his home in Stockholm. After the violent attack, the perpetrators ran away, while the journalist sustained injuries to the face, head, arms and legs.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Imagine if you could be sued for blocking other users on Twitter, or limiting who could see your Facebook posts. Or if every website were full of racial slurs, conspiracy theories, and fake accounts. Parental control tools could no longer prevent your kids from seeing such heinous content. If that sounds like the Internet you’ve always wanted, then you’ll love Republicans’ new “Online Freedom and Viewpoint Diversity Act” and “Online Content Policy Modernization Act!”
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Massive opposition to SYSTEMIC RACISM… a racism and the inseparable generalized social inequality that permeate every institution in U.S. society, are the only serious explanations for the magnificent, unprecedented, defiant daily multi-racial mass mobilizations in 2000+ U.S. cities and towns. In the face of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic and police repression courageous millions have taken to the streets. The resounding declarations of Black Lives Matter! and No Justice, No Peace! have reverberated across the world. An unprecedented 84 percent of the U.S. population, according to CNN polls, agree with the anti-racist demonstrators.
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Phoenix—In 2010, after the passage of the most punitive anti-immigrant law in the nation, Arizona Senate Bill 1070, I stood up at a meeting of mostly white community and business leaders and angrily lamented: “My people are being hunted.” No one in the room said a word, but I’m sure most knew it was true.
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On July 22, the Petrozavodsk City Court in Russia’s Karelia handed down a three-and-a-half-year prison sentence to Yuri Dmitriev for sexually assaulting his underage foster daughter. Had this ruling been allowed to stand, Dmitriev — a historian and activist who led the Karelian chapter of the human rights group Memorial — would have gone free in November of this year, due to the time he has already spent in pre-trial detention.
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“Compton—and Los Angeles as a whole—was chock-full of great lyricists with something viable to say,” Marcus Moore writes about rapper Kendrick Lamar’s hometown, “so what made Kendrick the one to rise above it all?” It’s a question at the heart of his new book, The Butterfly Effect: How Kendrick Lamar Ignited the Soul of Black America, out in October, and one Moore uses to guide readers through wider discussions of artistic achievement and what it means to be the voice of a generation.
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The fight for Ms. Doe’s vision of “reproductive freedom for all” is far from over, including for others trapped in immigration detention.
Meagan Burrows is a Staff Attorney for Reproductive Freedom Project at ACLU.
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The election of Donald Trump and the upsurge of protest against police violence has catalyzed a new wave of activism among professional athletes. Colin Kaepernick, Megan Rapinoe, LeBron James, and Sean Doolittle are among the growing number of athletes who have been using their celebrity platforms to speak out. Players on championship baseball, football, basketball, and soccer teams have refused to attend White House ceremonies with Trump. Entire leagues were shut down last month when players went on a political strike for Black lives following the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wis.
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“No mayors in good conscience should agree to attend the U20 Summit until Loujain and the other imprisoned Saudi human rights defenders are freed and the bombing and blockading of Yemen ceases.”
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The United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF, on Tuesday, urged the Federal Government to grant Presidential amnesty to 13-year-old Omar Farouq, who was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment by a Sharia Court in Kano State for alleged blasphemy.
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I find this notion that there is something wrong that there aren’t this or that group of people in a field and they must be pushed and pulled in to be extremely infantilizing. I find the notion that is is racist and horrible that there aren’t that many black microbiologists — or Jews in the NBA — to be based on a faulty assumption: that it’s important that all groups be equally “represented” in each area.
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In July, Dmitriyev was sentenced to 3 1/2 years after he was convicted of “violent acts of a sexual nature committed against a person under 14 years of age,” allegations he denies and that he believes are aimed at curbing his research into the crimes of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
[...]
Under Stalin, millions of people were executed, sent to labor camps, or starved to death in famines caused by forced collectivization. During World War II, entire ethnic groups were deported to remote areas as collective punishment for alleged collaboration with the Nazis.
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During his research in the late 1990′s, Dmitriyev located the secret mass graves at Sandarmokh and Krasnyi Bor in the Republic of Karelia, where thousands of people, including hundreds of Finns, were shot and buried during Stalin’s Great Terror in the late 1930s.
According to Reuters news agency, due to time he’d already served, Dmitriyev would have been freed in November. But on Tuesday the supreme court announced that the 64-year old’s sentence would be increased to 13 years, in a high-security penal colony.
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UN rights experts asked Nigeria on Monday to release a 22-year-old singer who was condemned to death over an allegedly blasphemous song, and said the sentence broke international law.
Yahaya Aminu Sharif was sentenced last month by a sharia court in Kano, in Nigeria’s mostly Muslim north, after he performed the song and shared it on WhatsApp.
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The seeds for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s pioneering sex-discrimination Supreme Court briefs were planted in the early years of her legal career of the 1960s, from an unlikely source: Sweden, under the prime ministership of social democrat Olof Palme.
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Hillary Clinton warned us.
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Vladimir Putin’s spokesman declined on Wednesday to comment on the Karelian Supreme Court’s damning ruling against historian and human rights activist Yuri Dmitriev, though the Kremlin vowed to “take a closer look” at the case. “We know there are media reports [about the new verdict], but honestly this issue is outside our control. I don’t think the president knows about it,” Press Secretary Dmitry Peskov told journalists.
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Media headlines in the UK have been dominated by the Tory government’s endless bungles and mishaps in its handling of the Covid pandemic.
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Undoubtedly one of the most quoted of Marx’s many quotable lines is the opening of The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, where Marx quipped ‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.’ Such a wonderful observation is timeless and is certainly applicable in the present day. It is easy to see Trump as the reincarnation of Nixon, simply copying the ancient dog-whistle playbook of protecting the suburbs from urban chaos. Back in October 1975, the New York Daily News published the headline ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’, the most infamous headline in New York’s history. If Ford had real power over a city in crisis at the time, the Trump administration now futilely threatens to withhold federal funding for ‘anarchist cities.’ Back in June 1975, the city’s police unions, in protest of large proposed cuts to the department’s budget, were part of the brief Fear City campaign. That campaign featured leaflets emblazed with a hooded gothic skull titled Fear City: A Survival Guide for Visitors to the City of New York, which advised tourists to ‘stay away from New York City if you possibly can.’ That campaign was quickly squashed due to public outrage. Today police unions openly applaud the threat to cut federal funding to the city they are meant to protect and serve. In July, Ed Mullins, the president of the Sergeants Benevolent Association, the second-largest police union in the city, gave at least two television interviews with a mug emblazoned with QAnon imagery clearly seen in the background.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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After the federal government rolled back net neutrality protections for consumers in 2017, California stepped up and passed a bill that does what FCC wouldn’t: bar telecoms from blocking and throttling Internet content and imposing paid prioritization schemes. The law, SB 822, ensures that that all Californians have full access to all Internet content and services—at lower prices.
Partnering with the ACLU of Northern California and numerous other public interest advocates, businesses and educators, EFF filed an amicus brief today urging a federal court to reject the telecom industry’s attempt to block enforcement of SB 822. The industry is claiming that California’s law is preempted by federal law—despite a court ruling that said the FCC can’t impose nationwide preemption of state laws protecting net neutrality.
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For years now we’ve discussed how large ISPs have (ab)used the lack of competition in the broadband market by imposing completely arbitrary and unnecessary monthly usage caps and overage fees. ISPs have also taken to exempting their own content from these arbitrary limits while still penalizing competitors — allowing them to use these restrictions to tilt the playing field in their favor (or the favor of partners with the deepest pockets). For example an AT&T broadband customer who uses AT&T’s own streaming service faces no penalties. If that same customer uses Netflix or a competitor they’re socked with surcharges.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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A new WhatsApp update will allow users to delete an image, video or gif on someone else’s phone after sending it to them.
The Expiring Media feature, first spotted by the website WaBetaInfo, causes media to disappear after being viewed within a chat.
In order to enable the feature, the sender needs to select a “view once” button when sending the image, video or gif.
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These features are developed in such a way that users are unable to take a screenshot of the media in order to save the image to their phone or device.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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One area that does not appear to have been affected by a worldwide pandemic are patent disputes, as they appear to be tracking higher than the last several years. The third quarter saw a 13.7% decrease in litigation from last quarter, but assuming this stays the same 2020 litigation is set to reach its highest level since 2017, largely driven by an increase in NPE litigation. On the other hand, PTAB filings increased 16.1% compared to last quarter, its highest level since the fourth quarter of 2018. Combined patent disputes are tracking to increase 12.7% from 2019. One might think a second wave of disputes since winter is coming.
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Figure 1: Assuming current trends continue, 2020 litigation is expected to be the highest since 2016 (3777 cases) and PTAB will be the highest since 2018 (1513). View all District Court and PTAB litigation on Unified’s Portal.
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Trademarks
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In the context of trade marks, bad faith jurisprudence usually falls into one of two camps. First are cases based on a wrongful claim of proprietorship: these cases commonly involve ex-employees, ex-suppliers, or ex-licensees who may have registered the trade mark of an employer or principal. The second are cases based on providing misleading or false information to the Registrar, e.g. where an applicant declares a bona fide intention to use the mark where no such intention exists.
However, the opposition in the case of Comite Interprofessionnel du Vin de Champagne v. Keep Waddling International Pte. Ltd. [2020] SGIPOS 10 falls into neither of these camps. Here, an allegation of bad faith was levelled against the Applicant simply because its trade mark contained the word “CHAMPENG.” To the French trade associations charged with the protection of champagne, this made-up word came too close for comfort.
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Copyrights
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Creative Commons and exceptions and limitations—Creative Commons is strongly committed to furthering exceptions and limitations in international copyright law, as we recently stated in relation to our engagement in policy work at WIPO. It’s also worth recalling that, by design, CC licenses do not reduce, limit, or restrict any rights under exceptions and limitations to copyright. If a use of CC-licensed material would otherwise be allowed because of an applicable exception or limitation (such as those provided in the Marrakesh Treaty, where they apply), one does not need to rely on the CC license or comply with its terms and conditions. This is a fundamental principle of CC licensing. *Learn more.
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Techdirt recently wrote about how copyright companies are not satisfied with the already one-sided EU Copyright Directive, but want to tilt the playing-field even further in their favor. In particular, they want to ignore one of the few safeguards that the new law includes: the requirement that legal content must not be blocked by the upload filters that will inevitably be introduced by Article 17 (formerly Article 13). The bad news is that the German government is planning to give the copyright maximalists what they want in its national implementation of the new EU legislation.
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UKTVEverywhere, an IPTV service that streamed UK TV channels globally, has reached a shutdown settlement with the BBC and ITV. After being championed as a great platform by business giant Lord Sugar and outspoken broadcaster Piers Morgan, the domain of UKTVEverywhere is now in the hands of Britbox, the digital subscription service owned by the BBC and ITV.
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Nintendo has come to an agreement with Uberchips.com, an online store it sued for offering Team-Xecuter’s Switch hacks and chips. Ohio-based Uberchips.com and its operator agreed to a $2 million judgment. The consent agreement, which has yet to be signed by the judge, also requires the store to destroy all remaining stock.
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Posted in Antitrust, Bill Gates, Microsoft at 4:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
“He [Bill Gates] acted like a spoiled kid, which is what he was.”
–Ed Roberts, Gates’ employer at MITS in the 1970′s (Atlanta Journal-Costitution, 04-27-97)
Summary: Today we start our reproduction of old deposition tapes, which are getting harder to find in an age of imperial overstretch by Bill Gates and co.
IN OUR sort of ‘preface’ or introduction we explained why we needed to reproduce a lot of old videos (several gigabytes of them). The Internet has ‘short memory’ and those standing to benefit from collective amnesia have very deep pockets.
“At this stage Gates is still relatively relaxed, not rocking back and forth like a madman or pausing in complete silence for almost a minute, refusing to answer very simple questions (lawyer’s instincts).”Today we publish the first of a dozen parts. Bill Gates is being grilled, totally unaccustomed to it (having been born with a golden spoon in his mouth). It’s about an hour long. At this stage Gates is still relatively relaxed, not rocking back and forth like a madman or pausing in complete silence for almost a minute, refusing to answer very simple questions (lawyer’s instincts). We’ve decided to highlight this original page (while it lasts). And “don’t forget to download the WordPerfect version of the transcript,” Chaekyung noted. “That’s another way history dies, people publish in WordPerfect format.”
We’ve produced a PDF version identical to the WordPerfect one (thankfully, even in 2020, LibreOffice still copes well with WordPerfect format). We may come back to this antitrust transcript file later on.
Notice how Bill Gates resorts to statements like “you could show it to me” (around 7:16) as if to put the burden on the interrogators. Quite revealing of the arrogance. Donald Trump comes to mind…
Mr. Gates does not seem to know how depositions work. He never did them before. He has not done them since (Microsoft and his dad protected him from that). He hired loads of lobbyists (more than any other company) and 'bought' himself a President, who scuttled the whole thing.
If interrogators don’t scare Gates, what will? You don’t get to grill the interrogators, but Gates isn’t accustomed to being in positions like these, being a spoiled brat since childhood. So said people who knew him in person. He still refuses to talk about his ties to a child-trafficking sex ring. He just hides behind spokespeople and lawyers.
Without further ado, here’s part one of a bully put on the ‘hot seat’:
Quoting the monopolists themselves, the interrogator calls or describes Windows as “the one unique and valuable asset,” (27:40) recognising that grossly misusing it to also monopolise the application layer was a priority. It was all about maintaining the platform monopoly, not doing what actual users wanted or needed. Nothing has really changed since. As an associate of ours put it this morning: “There is probably a lot of stuff relevant to what’s going on nowadays.” █
“He [Bill Gates] is divisive. He is manipulative. He is a user. He has taken much from me and the industry.”
–Gary Kildall
“Microsoft is, I think, fundamentally an evil company.”
–Former Netscape Chairman James H. Clark
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, OSI at 3:17 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: The profound changes caused by coronavirus since one year ago (COVID-19) are generally beneficial to GNU/Linux, even if they’re anything but beneficial to the economy (and the status quo) at large
“WHEN will things be/get back to normal?”
Each and every one of us heard/read that question quite a lot back in April (if not much earlier, depending on where one lives).
A common reply was, especially as time went on, “there’s no going back to normal” or “there will be a new normal…”
Remember those who lied, arguing with unbridled optimism that there would be a vaccine by year’s end? ‘Pump and dump’ of their shares (stock)? Either way, as we’ve said all along, it can take a very long time to develop an effective vaccination programme/regimen and the substances manufactured must undergo a lot of testing before being injected into the bloodstream/circulation of billions of people. We also noted long-term effects of COVID-19 and mentioned that just because one got it and then recovered from it doesn’t imply immunity; mutation and recirculation trumps innoculation. This thing is here to stay for quite some time to come and landlords of office buildings would be foolish to wait for a resurgence. The workers aren’t coming back. Not any time soon (if ever).
“This past summer Microsoft laid off about 5,000 workers, though the media hardly paid attention to that (Microsoft worked hard to ensure people would barely notice).”In the meantime, as expected, more OEMs (even the very largest ones) offer GNU/Linux as a standard option (in the OS selector, configurator and so on). This is undoubtedly a positive development.
ESR already falls all over himself with more of his crazy theories (albeit not political but technical this time around) and sleazy ZDNet amplifies his theories not once but several times (second time a few hours ago, this time by SJVN). Expect this propaganda site of Microsoft to push that narrative wherein Microsoft sort of ‘owns’ Linux in the same sense it owns and controls GitHub. This is an attack, definitely not an embrace. They have plans. They have a nefarious strategy.
As GNU/Linux becomes more and more mainstream expect the attacks on it to intensify (e.g. “security” FUD) and vary some more. Creative new attack vectors will be explored and we’ve covered some of them. GNU/Linux is winning in the “market share” sense (software freedom is another matter). It’s the “platform to beat” right now. COVID-19 has generally changed business models, harming some old technology companies that aren’t accustomed to the ‘new norm’. This past summer Microsoft laid off about 5,000 workers, though the media hardly paid attention to that (Microsoft worked hard to ensure people would barely notice).
When we say there’s no “back to normal” and “there’s a new normal” we also mean to say that Free software becomes a lot more prevalent, partly for economic reasons. But that in itself does not guarantee software freedom; at the moment we see many attacks on copyleft, with the goal of developing proprietary software by exploiting the work of volunteers, then using this software to spy, maim, and sometimes even kill people. When they tell us stuff like “Open Source has won” they mean to say openwashing (of proprietary programs) has “won” or GitHub (i.e. Microsoft monopoly) is taking control of the competition. This isn’t quite what Richard Stallman envisioned or how he foresaw it developing back in the early 1980s. But we’re evolving as the threats become better understood. Even Bruce Perens (who created OSI) speaks about those new threats. He quit OSI earlier this year, citing the openwashing trend which deeply concerned him. Unlike the other OSI co-founder (ESR), Perens does not need to beg for money. Perens is no crackpot. He supports neither political fascism nor technical fascism. Perens also supports Stallman, whereas ESR saw OSI as an opportunity to ‘cancel’ Stallman back in the 1990s. Halloween is coming, but ESR seems to have forgotten about the Halloween Documents (which he published). Scary times. Collective amnesia calls for recollection. Gates deposition tapes are coming back. Microsoft leaks too. Stay tuned. We have some “October Surprises”… █
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