01.18.21
Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 7:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Speaking out against proprietary software in voting machines is not “supporting Trump”
Summary: Cheating/driving the left out of the Democratic Party seems like a longstanding tradition and we know who stands to gain from it; moreover, problems remain in the voting process because it’s controlled by secret code of companies like Microsoft (in spite of the openwashing)
THE latest taboo subject is legitimacy of US elections. Or the voting machines. Dare mention anything about back doors, which do exist, and you will be called a “Trump supporter” who also supports sedition. Berate the person whom Trump fired for calling the election secure (never mind if that person himself came from Microsoft) and be labeled a conspiracy theorist (or worse).
“Don’t let the media conflate free speech with “violence”, sedition/insurrection with “riot”/”protest” and questions about proprietary voting machines with “fascism”.”Long before the ‘Trump card’ (a year and a half before the 2016 election) we wrote about the issues associated with election security in the US. The OSI’s General Manager (who left abruptly last year) had done some work towards Free software in voting machines.
Don’t let the media conflate free speech with “violence”, sedition/insurrection with “riot”/”protest” and questions about proprietary voting machine with “fascism”. There’s an agenda there and it’s not pretty. Our dear ol’ Ryan, who comes from Indiana and hates Trump, notes: “There can’t be a good reason for not printing out a physical, human-readable ballot. It certainly would make stealing an election in Indiana easier.” █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Hardware at 7:06 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Today (or tonight) we release the first ‘phase’ of InteLeaks in a sensibly redacted form; coming up next is a surprise from Team Microsoft
A FEW hours ago the new (upcoming) CEO of Intel was mentioned in this article entitled “Gelsinger Waves Farewell – Can VMware Navigate The Course Ahead?”
A better question to ask is, “Can Intel Navigate The Course Ahead With Gelsinger?”
“It’s all that we’ve shown so far, including redaction.”As we noted before, in this ongoing series, Intel has very severe issues that include brain drain. Hiring a CEO from a highly notorious GPL violator doesn’t seem like a strategically wise move. The article starts as follows: “Pat Gelsinger stunned the enterprise computing world recently with the announcement of his jump from VMware to Intel.”
What does that say about Intel? Considering VMware’s management, which for many years was infiltrated and controlled by Microsoft (we covered this before)…
In any event, after careful assessment, we’ve decided to release in raw (but slightly redacted) form some of the material that makes up this series. It’s all that we’ve shown so far, including redaction.
This series is far from over. Stay tuned for a lot more. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 6:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: It is rather sad that blogs like IP Kat have turned into proponents of abusive EPO management and Team UPC increasingly resorts to lying using pseudonyms (to avert criticism and accountability); much of the rebuttal or response that’s hinged on reality/facts can only be found in comments, which are still subjected to a face-saving moderation process (conducted by Team UPC)
EVERY now and then we stumble upon misinformation, half-truths, and outright lies about the EPO and UPC. It’s counterproductive and harmful to those who do it; lies provoke people and beget responses, which in turn disgrace lie tellers. Look no further than the very major blowback in the comments regarding Team UPC’s spin after the ratification efforts have again been tossed out (32 comments at the moment, almost all of which negative, except Team UPC showing up in the comments if or when it feels courageous enough to speak). It seems like Bristows LLP not only writes misleading blog posts (anonymously of course) but also comments on those posts. It’s like an army of shills and liars. They turn their entire firm into a laughing stock. Earlier today we saw other sections of Team UPC trotting out those same lies about UPC being merely “delayed” — an utter lie they certainly tell their clients in order to save face. What will happen when clients realise that money they paid those firms was deposited in a sewer of lies? Money down the drain, almost literally…
The above video also speaks about “ViCo”, which is not legal for reasons we explained here several times before. Not only have the Boards of Appeal lost their independence; stakeholders too don’t enjoy fair trials and due process. That’s of course perfectly fine in the eyes of Rose Hughes (AstraZeneca) whose latest article is a megaphone for those who agree with the employer. Due process? EPC? Not interested…
To quote:
The COVID-19 pandemic will change many aspects of life as we know it. One particularly prominent change has been the accelerated adoption of video-conferencing (VC) as a risk free way of ensuring business continuity. The European Patent Office (EPO) has not been left behind, with the ready adoption of oral proceedings by VC as the new norm. However, the European patent community is divided over whether this is a welcome and inevitable modernisation of EPO proceedings or a dangerous erosion of the right to be heard that should not outlast the pandemic.
Before COVID-19, all EPO Opposition Division and Boards of Appeal oral proceedings required in person attendance at the EPO by all the parties. The global pandemic, and the accompanying plethora of national lockdowns and travel bans across Europe, initially caused all in-person oral proceedings to be postponed. To keep the business of the EPO going, the EPO was forced to transition to oral proceedings by video-conference (VC). It now seems, with the introduction of a new rule of procedure of the Boards of Appeal, that oral proceedings by VC might well become the default from now on.
No, the EPO was not “forced to transition to oral proceedings by video-conference” as it was a choice to bypass the law and then make it permanent, even against the will of involved parties.
It is hardly surprising that — quite frankly as usual — the comments are dissenting (at least those that were permitted/authorised to appear).
Proof of the pudding wrote:
It is difficult to know what to make of the submissions from CIPA and the IP Owners Association. I know for a fact that members of both have expressed views directly contrary to the submissions made by the organisations (for example, Bardehle Pagenberg is currently listed as a member of the IP Owners Association).
It is also worth noting that the submission of Business Europe was strongly against the making VICOs the default mode, and that the submission of epi advocated (again) making face-to-face the default mode as soon as the pandemic is over.
The most remarkable thing about the consultation exercise, however, is that the EPO has not commented upon the CONTENT of the submissions that it received. Combined with the extremely short period (2 weeks) that stakeholders had to prepare and submit their comments, this is both extremely unusual and highly suspicious. Why bother asking for comments if you are not going to reveal which changes were made in the light of those comments, and why those changes were made?
SUEPO has not said anything since last year, but certainly it can relate to that comment, which mostly echoes the sentiments of EPO staff. Here’s another new comment:
As per the post ending hint, the debate is inevitably affected by (heavy) business considerations. As long as the ViCo was presented as an emergency – thus, intrinsically pro tempore – solution to hold OP so as not to freeze EPO business, that’s fine. But taking advantage of the situation to draconianly eternalize ViCo, all the more (probably? Need to see how the “appropriate” will be construed) as default option, leaves me uncomfortable. Forgetting for a second the diverging interests of UK and German firms, the key point to me is whether EPO stakeholders feel that moving from in person to ViCo OP may lead to an unfair treatment by the EPO or a risk for legal/technical misunderstanding of the party’s arguments. If this is the case, yes, the change is negative and should be strongly opposed. But if the argument is simply that the importance of the proceedings in writing would overwhelm the OP, then I see little room to complain. We are brutally invited to play a different game, with different rules. Personally, I would have adopted different solutions for ex parte and inter partes proceedings. Also, the fact that the UK firms are against a mixed solution makes me think that that being physically in front of the Board – assuming the Board is in the EPO premises, of course – is somehow perceived as being advantageous (or maybe only preferable to have your client accept a negative decision)
As I explained in this video, the most disheartening thing (to me at least) is how this blog, IP Kat, turned from critic of EPO management into its cheerleader. The likes of CIPA infiltrated the blog, adding to the likes of Bristows and AstraZeneca. No wonder the media is so worthless in this area/domain and most of the signal (facts, not noise and lobbying) has been relegated to comment sections. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, GNU/Linux at 5:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
tl;dr Transparency prevents embarrassment
Summary: To reduce or alleviate suspicions and a potential of mistrust the FSF needs to become more transparent and liberate information (such as the real reason Bradley Kuhn left, as noted in the previous part)
THERE are past stories about the FSF. Those stories may seem like “old news”, but there are aspects of those stories long suppressed. The public needs to understand what actually happened. Otherwise, people can shape their views based on mere speculations and misunderstandings.
“The payments can be called “sponsorship” or “patronage” or whatever; there are strings attached to such money, especially if there’s a prospect of annual renewal (subjected to periodic assessment and sometimes pre-imposed conditions).”In Part I, Part II, and Part III we explained that corporate impact or moneyed factors sought to steer institutions that would otherwise antagonise them. The payments can be called “sponsorship” or “patronage” or whatever; there are strings attached to such money, especially if there’s a prospect of annual renewal (subjected to periodic assessment and sometimes pre-imposed conditions). This happens a lot in politics and it imperils free speech because of that ‘sixth sense’ about financial ramifications associated with the expression of particular views.
Just to be very clear right from the start/outset, the donors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) are reasonably benign. It’s nowhere as grotesque as what goes on at the OSI and Linux Foundation. This year and last year’s page says a lot; the FSF’s donors page suggests that they increasingly rely on members, not companies like Google and IBM. That’s a positive thing.
I am very saddened by the departure of Alex Oliva from the FSF. Having said that, he explained to me that it was a decision both himself and RMS (the FSF’s founder) were generally OK with and I recently noticed that he had moved on to other very interesting endeavours. My main concern is that people inside the FSF falsely accused him of things he had never done. “I suppose you can see how easy it would be for someone to blame any leaks from within the FSF on me,” he recently told me. Some leaks that we received (if those even qualify as leaks at all) were wrongly blamed on him. That’s just beyond unfortunate. We’ve had many people with inside knowledge approach us over the years. My communications with Oliva are actually out there, in public, in open domains such as Diaspora. I don’t need to speak to him privately to better understand what goes on at the FSF because he’s very transparent about it — to the point of causing himself trouble (as was the case after publishing the “GNU year” blog post). As he noted the other day, “you’ve seen how I’m striving to keep my commitments and obligations of confidence on FSF internal information I’ve had access to.”
That’s correct. Here in Techrights we publish almost everything, sometimes in mildly redacted form. This way we have very little to hide (except maybe names) and scrutiny can be done in the open, with no speculations necessary. People who are in IRC can see what happens almost in real time and those who just lurk or read IRC logs need to wait for (at most) 24 hours.
If this series reopens some old wounds or sores (or sores code), then fine. We strive to better understand what goes on at the FSF. Sometimes I debate these things openly with a whole bunch of people, including RMS. The FSF oughtn’t try to guard its reputation by secrecy because such a strategy does not scale when dealing with panels or large teams which in turn speak outwards (with other people, those outside the circle of trust). In the next part we’ll give an example of that. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 4:20 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
In this video, we are looking at how to install Blender 2.91 on Linux Mint 20.1.
-
Different use cases will have different security requirements but there’s a certain base line that every Linux server should be at before you even think of deploying anything further like disabling certain ways to connect to the server and adding some ssh keys.
-
Hello and welcome to the 387th episode of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this episode, the hosts discuss concepts related to building software from source code. Topics include proper build environments, packages to install for easy building of software, how to get source, commands for building software and much more. We hope you find this talk interesting and informative and we hope you come back for Episode 388.
-
-
Kernel Space
-
While in recent years there has been growing interest in enhancing Linux’s Thunderbolt security with offering security levels and other functionality to authorize supported/known Thunderbolt devices, surprisingly it’s taken until 2021 to see the ability for Linux’s Thunderbolt software connection manage to handle de-authorizing devices.
If wanting to de-authorize a previously authorized Thunderbolt device for whatever reason or if wanting to establish policies like where on user log-out that devices would be automatically de-authorized, it’s looking like Linux 5.12 will support this ability.
-
I'm announcing the release of the 5.10.8 kernel.
All users of the 5.10 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.10.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.10.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
-
-
-
-
-
-
A new Linux-based distribution called JingOS was recently introduced, with the developers promising to provide the same level of functionality as iPadOS.
JingOS was created with the goal of improving the functionality and performance of tablets in general. The team behind the new operating system took inspiration from iPadOS to offer a simple, powerful and beautiful solution for turning tablets into computers that you can use on the go.
-
Newer wireless Logitech keyboard/mice supporting “unified battery” reporting will be supported beginning with Linux 5.12 as a newer interface compared to the existing battery reporting support.
While Logitech doesn’t engage much with seeing good Linux support by their consumer devices (there has been only a handful of commits from Logitech developers over the past decade – in most cases providing just some basic bits), the open-source community through reverse engineering and widespread testing have filled in the voids. Wireless Logitech devices on Linux have generally enjoyed working battery reporting under Linux while now support for an interface found with newer devices is forthcoming.
-
While Intel formally discontinued the Itanium processors just under two years ago, the Linux software support for IA-64 continues. However, as a possible sign of the times, the Linux 5.11 kernel build for it has been broken the past month.
As what might set off Linus Torvalds on a Monday morning, it turns out since the Linux 5.11 merge window the Itanium “IA64″ kernel code has been broken and unable to even successfully carry out a “defconfig” default configuration kernel build. This wasn’t due to some foreign change within the kernel regressing the support but a change made by IBM to the IA64 Kconfig to enable SPARSEMEM by default.
-
Applications
-
In case you’re not aware of mpv, it is a free and open-source command-line based media player. Okay, there is a minimalist GUI for MPV but at the core, it is command line.
You might also find several open-source video players that are basically the GUI front-end to mpv.
Haruna video player is one of them along with the ability to use youtube-dl. You can easily play local media files as well as YouTube content.
Let me give you an overview of the features offered with this player.
-
Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem.
MPD is a powerful server-side application for playing music. In a home environment, you can connect an MPD server to a Hi-Fi system, and control the server using a notebook or smartphone. You can, of course, play audio files on remote clients. MPD can be started system-wide or on a per-user basis.
I’ve covered a fair few MPD clients over the past year or so including Cantata, Ymuse, mpdevil, ympd, myMPD, ampd, ncmpy, and ncmpc. My favorite of them is Cantata although Ymuse is a simple alternative. There’s lots of differences between these front-ends. For example, Cantata uses the Qt widget set, whereas Ymuse and mpdevil offer a GTK front-end. ympd, myMPD and ampd are web-based clients. And ncmpy and ncmpc are terminal-based clients. So there’s something for everyone.
ncmpcpp is a terminal-based MPD client with a user interface that seeks inspiration from ncmpc and shares a lot of similarities. But it adds some useful features. Let’s check it out. Before doing so, here’s the obligatory installation section.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
Are you looking for an open-source messenger that respects your privacy? Here’s how to install Signal Messenger on your Linux PC. We show the installation on popular Linux distros such as Ubuntu, Fedora, and Manjaro.
-
Several months ago, I wrote a review of UBlock Origin. It’s a powerful, nerdy browser extension, available across the wider range of browsers out there, with the sacred purpose of making the Internet palatable for intelligent use. It does so by being a sophisticated adblocker and content blocker.
Since, I’ve received requests for additional tutorials – and also found myself tackling a few real-world issues with somewhat overzealous content blocking. For example, on Bing images, if I clicked on an image, they would show up for a second, flicker and then disappear. Not consistently – but always with UBlock Origin active. So I used this opportunity to write a little guide on how to create custom filters. Let’s have a look.
-
For those prefer installing applications via apt method, the desktop publishing software Scribus 1.5.6 is finally made into PPA available for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, and Linux Mint 20.
Scribus 1.5.6 was released a few months ago as the latest development release for the next major version 1.6.0. It feature
-
This article explains how to securely add OpenPGP keys and third-party APT repositories on Debian, Ubuntu, and Linux distributions based on these, like Linux Mint, Pop!_OS, Elementary OS and so on, to replace the deprecated apt-key.
When you try to add an APT repository key using apt-key on Debian, Ubuntu and Linux distributions based on these, you’ll see the following message: “Warning: apt-key is deprecated. Manage keyring files in trusted.gpg.d instead (see apt-key(8))”.
The apt-key man page mentions that the “use of apt-key is deprecated, except for the use of apt-key del in maintainer scripts to remove existing keys from the main keyring”. What’s more, “apt-key will last be available in Debian 11 and Ubuntu 22.04.”
-
For various reasons you may want to know in how many lines of code given open-source software is implemented. For example, you want to estimate the effort devoted to developing a particular open-source program. Or you want to gauge the size and complexity of a program before trying it. There is some controversy as to using source lines of code (SLOC) as a metric to determine the size of a software program, since existing programming languages differ greatly in terms of clarify and brevity.
In any rate, if you would like to count the number of source code lines quickly and accurately, you can use a command-line tool called cloc (short for “Count Lines Of Code”). cloc is a Perl program that is dedicated to counting the number of lines of code. To estimate the size of codebase accurately, cloc automatically detects different types of programming/scripting languages, and discounts comment lines and blank lines based on the type appropriately.
-
When working with the Linux file system, its important to know some of the different ways you can list directory contents on Linux.
This article will look at some of the commands you can use to list directory contents, which will work on whichever version of Linux you are using. These commands will also work to list directory contents on VMware ESXi.
It will cover how to do a basic directory listing, how to list specific information such as file size and permissions, and how to sort and filter the directory list output.
Let’s start by looking at the basic usage of the ls command, before moving onto some more advanced examples of how you can use ls to list directories and their contents.
-
Etcher is a free and open-source utility developed by Balena licensed under Apache License 2.0. It is used to create a bootable USB device using ISO and IMG files.
There are many tools available to create a bootable USB stick in Linux. Etcher is one of them, and we recommend using it as it is way faster to create a bootable USB stick than other utilities.
Today, we guide you on how to install Etcher and make your first bootable USB stick.
-
Inkscape is a free and open-source professional vector graphics editor software that runs on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows desktop computers.
It is suitable for illustrators and web designers and it is an alternative to Adobe Illustrator. It supports many SVG features (markers, alpha blending, clones, etc..) and easy to use.
-
The PowerTools repository, which is available on CentOS/RHEL 8, provides developer related tools and libraries. Some EPEL packages depend on packages available from PowerTools. Thus if you have set up the EPEL repository on your CentOS, it is recommended that you enable PowerTools as well.
-
gscan2pdf a GUI tool used to produce PDF’s or DjVus from Scanned documents,gscan2pdf works on all Linux / BSD machines
gscan2pdf team released a newer version 2.11.0 recently and yet to be updated in official Jeffrey Ratcliffe PPA for Ubuntu 20.04 and lower versions.
This tutorial will be helpful for beginners to install gscan2pdf 2.11.0 in Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 20.04, Linux Mint 20.1, and lower versions of Ubuntu and Linux Mint.
-
Traditionally, VPN implementation has existed in two forms. In-kernel VPN implementation such as IPsec performs heavy-duty per-packet crypto processing in the kernel in a “bump-in-the-stack” fashion (i.e., between IP stack and the network drivers). This gives speed as there is no context switch between kernel and userspace during packet processing. But it comes with high management complexity in separate userspace control plane (e.g., IKE). An alternative form of VPN implementation is userspace TUN/TAP-based solutions such as OpenVPN, Tinc, n2n, where crypto processing is performed by a userspace VPN daemon. Naturally, these TUN/TAP-based VPN solutions have poor performance compared to IPsec mainly because network packets traverse the kernel and userspace boundary multiple times, resulting in frequent context switches and packet copies. Despite their performance disadvantage, userspace VPN solutions enjoy more popularty than the in-kernel counterpart due to their ease of use and configuration.
-
We can use the Lifecycle Policy to manage the objects in S3 Bucket so that they are stored cost-effectively throughout. An S3 Lifecycle Policy is a set of rules used to define actions that Amazon S3 applies to objects in the bucket.
-
In a Local Area Network (LAN) environment, computer systems need to communicate with each other based on their IP addresses. To learn and remember these IP addresses and sharing them when needed is a tricky business. In order to avoid such trouble, users tend to rename their system’s hostname for their own ease. The simpler hostnames will allow all computer users to coordinate easily without an exchange of large IP addresses. This whole scenario is quite related to the URLs and DNS server address, where the user is totally unaware of long addresses and simply use the URLs in their search engine.
In this tutorial, I will show you two methods to change the hostname of an Ubuntu 20.04 system via the command line terminal and GUI. Users can opt either way to update the names and share them once they have finalized them.
-
You might have downloaded several versions of Vagrant boxes and some of them might be pretty outdated! If they are no longer required, you can safely delete outdated Vagrant boxes in Linux as described in this brief guide.
Check for outdated Vagrant boxes
I have been using Vagrant for the past few months for testing purposes. Since Vagrant version 1.5, boxes support versioning. The Box Versioning allows the developers who make boxes to push updates or fixes and the users to easily update the underlying box.
-
-
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Java on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Java is a very popular language when it comes to programming. It is a common language for android development and other enterprise solutions. It was first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. Many programs and scripts require Java to run it, but usually, Java is not installed by default on a VPS or Dedicated Server.
-
Prompted by tweets from Lesley and Dave, I thought about KVM switches again and came up with a rather cheap solution to my individual situation (YMMY, as usual).
As I’ve written last year, my desk has one monitor, keyboard and mouse and two computers. Since writing that post I got a new (bigger) monitor, but also an USB switch again (a DIGITUS USB 3.0 Sharing Switch) – this time one that doesn’t freak out my dock \o/
However, having to switch the used computer in two places (USB and monitor) is rather inconvenient, but also getting an KVM switch that can do 4K@60Hz was out of question.
Luckily, hackers gonna hack, everything, and not only receipt printers. There is a tool called ddcutil that can talk to your monitor and change various settings. And udev can execute commands when (USB) devices connect… You see where this is going?
-
Always wondered how to make use of a checksum? This introduction shows you what they mean, and how to use the proper tools to verify the integrity of a file.
-
Noisetorch is an open-source Linux application that allows you to create a virtual microphone that suppresses background noise. To filter out background noise in an application, simply select the virtual microphone instead of your regular microphone, and the application will filter out background noise.
-
The ps program gives a snapshot of the processes running on your Unix-like system. On most Linux installations, this will be the ps program from the procps project.
While you can get a lot of information from the tool, a lot of the fields need further explanation or can give “wrong” or confusing information; or putting it another way, they provide the right information that looks wrong.
One of these confusing fields is the %CPU or pcpu field. You can see this as the third field with the ps aux command. You only really need the u option to see it, but ps aux is a pretty common invokation.
-
Wine or Emulation
-
Wine developer Zebediah Figura has sent in a proposal to work on a new Linux Kernel interface for Wine synchronization primitives, one that gets closer to performance and behaviour of Windows NT.
The basic idea is that the Wine team are “looking to introduce a kernel API that will allow us to implement Windows NT synchronization object API with at most one syscall per operation, and without managing object state in user managed shared memory, for the sake of performance”. This might sound familiar if you follow Wine and Steam Play Proton closely, as it’s part of what both esync and fsync were supposed to help with.
-
The open-source Windows-Linux compatibility layer project, Wine, has announced the stable release of Wine 6.0 and it’s even bigger than the previous stable release from mid-2020.
This update is the culmination of an entire year of development effort and contains over 8,300 individual changes – or 900 more changes than shipped in the last release from July 2020.
[...]
“This requires the vkd3d-shader library in order to translate Direct3D shaders to SPIR-V shaders. In this release, shader support in the Vulkan renderer is limited to shader model 4 and 5 shaders. In practice, that limits its usefulness to Direct3D 10 and 11 applications. The Vulkan renderer can be enabled by setting the Direct3D “renderer” registry setting to ‘vulkan’,” the Wine team explains in release notes.
This release brings support for several Direct3D 11 features, including per render-target blend states, dual-source blending, and multi-sample anti-aliasing sample masks.
There is a new mechanism to associate a Unix library with a PE module, which allows PE calls to Unix libraries for functions that can’t be handled with Win32 APIs.
-
Wine recently received an update that improves Windows apps running on Linux. The update comes in the form of Win3 6.0, and includes over 8,300 changes, according to its full release notes (via Tech Radar).
Wine is a compatibility layer that allows you to run thousands of Windows applications on Linux systems. Wine currently supports over 27,000 Windows applications and games, though it’s worth noting that some games require special configuration. Popular supported apps and games include Office, Adobe Photoshop, and World of Warcraft.
[...]
Wine 6.0 also includes an experimental Vulkan rendered that translates Direct3D shaders to SPIR-V shaders. In another change related to Direct3D, the Direct3D graphics card database now recognizes more graphics cards and includes updated driver versions.
-
Wine, the popular compatibility layer for running Windows apps on Linux, recently released v6 with major improvements. It is the first major release by the project in 2021, following Wine’s schedule of making one major release per year.
Wine, which was originally a recursive acronym for Wine Is Not an Emulator, is a compatibility layer that allows apps and games designed for Microsoft Windows to run on non-native environments such as Linux, with varying degrees of success.
Using Wine, Linux users can run over 27000 Windows apps and games on Linux, including popular ones such as Microsoft Office, and Adobe Photoshop. Wine 6.0 comes after a year’s worth of development that saw over 8300 changes, shared Wine developer Alexandre Julliard, in the release announcement.
-
Games
-
Odin has finally had enough sacrifices and shall be releasing Valheim from Iron Gate AB will enter Early Access with Linux and Windows support on February 2.
What is it? A brutal multiplayer exploration and survival game set in a procedurally-generated purgatory inspired by viking culture. Battle, build, and conquer your way to a saga worthy of Odin’s patronage! With low-poly artwork and a very flexible building system it looks absolutely brilliant. The early builds they had available were seriously promising back in 2018 so I’m personally excited to see how far they’ve progress with it in that time.
-
One of the features Google talked about early with Stadia is finally coming and that is State Share. Allowing players to share specific playable moments of captures and it’s launching with HITMAN 3. This is another tick in the box, finally, of nearly all the features promised by Google for Stadia well over a year after launch.
-
Currently in development by a father and son team, Harvest Days is another fresh 3D take on the casual farming-life RPG and it will be coming to Linux too.
There’s quite a few of these appearing in the last year or two both 2D and 3D, many like this being directly inspired by the likes of Stardew Valley, Harvest Moon and Animal Crossing, among others. Perhaps this one might catch your attention where others have not? It actually looks pretty darn charming.
-
Lenna’s Inception is a top-down Zelda-like action-adventure game with a world that is glitching, with a style that can switch between 8-bit and 32-bit pixel art styles.
It’s now been available for a year so Tom Coxon of Bytten Studio has written up a postmortem for how it went, and it was a thoroughly interesting read. First, a refresher on who they are. Bytten Studio was initially just Tom Coxon who previously worked for Chucklefish on titles like Starbound and the multiplayer for Stardew Valley, Coxon was later joined by Jay Baylis who also worked for Chucklefish in the past on titles like Starbound and Wargroove.
[...]
So the Linux version sold approximately 340 copies which at their normal price of £7.19 that would be somewhere around £2,444.6 (it went on sale once previously, so likely a bit lower). For a small indie developer, that can make all the difference.
-
Sega Mega Drive (Sega Genesis)? That’s not a piece of Linux gaming hardware last I checked? No but Irena Genesis Metal Fury is a new game coming for the retro console and will provide the ROM file for your favourite emulators.
Here’s the thing: I’m a huge retro fan and I grew up with the Sega Mega Drive so it always holds a special place in my early gaming years and helped me really appreciate games. Irena Genesis Metal Fury looks awesome too and the developer, White Ninja Studio, aren’t ignoring Linux either.
-
The Godot team just keep on adding in big new features to make this one of the best free and open source game engines around and the next Beta update for Godot 3.2.4 is out now.
[...]
In other somewhat recent Godot news, the team recently blogged about their work on a glTF 2.0 scene exporter. What is glTF? A royalty-free specification for the efficient transmission and loading of 3D scenes and models by engines and applications, overseen by The Khronos Group (the same behind OpenGL, Vulkan and so on). Godot has been able to import glTF for some time now but the option to export it from Godot enables developers to quickly put it back into something like Blender, to make any changes needed to then bring the updates back into Godot. All very useful sounding.
-
Desktop Environments/WMs
-
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
-
Madness! 8-hour BBB calls all weekend for the KDE e.V. board. On the social front, I won at Skribbli, and workshopped the FLA, wrote a bunch of mail to keep people informed about what is going on, read even more email, listened to bits and pieces, but – as can be seen in the photo, vaguely – I still haven’t gotten around to shaving off my scary sideburns.
-
GNOME Desktop/GTK
-
We have often seen apps telling us that “You are offline. Check your network status.”. It is not only convenient to do so but adds to a great UX. In this blog, we will look at how can we display a toast notification in a Nuxt/Vue app whenever the user goes offline or online. This will also help us to understand how to use computed and watch properties together.
[...]
Hurray! Our toast notifications are working perfectly fine. So using the combined magic of computed and watch properties, we can create outstanding workflows and take our Nuxt/Vue app to next level. If you any doubts or appreciation for our team, let us know in the comments below. We would be happy to assist you.
-
-
Screenshots/Screencasts
-
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Ubuntu Unity Remix 20.10 and some of the applications pre-installed.
-
SUSE/OpenSUSE
-
The openSUSE Project welcomes our followers to participate in two planned meetups to discuss results from the End of the Year Community Survey on Jan. 23 and Jan. 30.
Both sessions will start at 13:00 UTC on openSUSE’s Jitsi instance and go for 1:30 hours.
Members of the “let’s improve the openSUSE learning experience” initiative will share results and analysis from the survey.
-
IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
-
We would like to introduce you to Davie Street Enterprises (DSE). DSE is a fictitious 100-year-old multinational corporation that is beginning its digital transformation journey. In this post we will lay the groundwork for a series following DSE as an illustration of how some Red Hat customers are preparing for and succeeding at digital transformation to save money, become more efficient, and compete more effectively.
The company isn’t real, but its struggle is very real for many organizations. Throughout this series, we will explore the business problems any number of organizations are challenged with and how DSE, with the help of Red Hat and its partners, plan to solve those problems. To start, let’s learn more about DSE, its business, and some of the associates involved in its digital transformation journey.
-
When reflecting on 2020, I do what many people do and think about what things were like prior to this year. For me, I immediately go back to a spring day three years ago. Red Hat was hosting our EMEA Partner Conference; a mix of distributors, independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators and solution providers from across the region. Alongside the usual product updates and market insight sessions you might expect, we decided to do a little drumming. A lot of drumming, in fact — 900 people banging bongos and clashing cymbals. Other than the noise, what I remember was the genuine sense of togetherness; embarrassment and egos put to the side in the pursuit of the perfect tempo.
It seems drumming is a good signal of solidarity. Even in a large group, it’s easy to notice someone beating to a different rhythm. Trainers and coaches use this drumming technique frequently to promote unity and coordination. Our coach that day later congratulated me on “having such a tight knit group of employees.” When I told him they weren’t our employees but partners from 550 different companies, he couldn’t believe it.
-
When it comes to performance metrics data collection and visualization on Linux, PCP metrics collection and visualization are key. Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 provides an excellent framework for collecting performance metrics and visualizing them! The days of poring over command line output to try and figure out what is happening on a system are gone. In this series, I’d like to introduce the power of using Performance Co-Pilot (PCP) and Grafana to visualize system performance data in RHEL.
By default, Performance Co-Pilot is not installed on RHEL 8. We believe in giving users choices and as such, you have to opt-in to using Performance Co-Pilot.
-
Canonical/Ubuntu Family
-
I tend to run Ubuntu on my computers as the primary operating system. Given I work for Canonical, this isn’t especially surprising. However I have run Ubuntu on pretty much everything since 2005 or so – long before I started working at Canonical (in 2011). Mostly I will upgrade as each new release comes out, only doing a clean install once in a while.
I ran GNOME 2 for all the years from 2004 through to Unity being released, then switched to that. After Ubuntu switched from Unity to GNOME Shell I went along with that in late 2017, and have mostly been running it ever since. I sometimes run other distros in VMs, or play with live environments, but I tend to stick to Ubuntu. Not for any company imposed reason – there’s a bunch of people at Canonical who run Arch, MacOS or something else. I just prefer Ubuntu.
-
-
We spend a lot of time looking at retrocomputing in the form of gaming and home computers, but it’s true to say that minicomputers are less common than hardware projects. Perhaps it’s the size, cost, or even relative rarity of the original machines, but DEC minicomputers are a bit unusual around here. [Sprite_TM] hasn’t bought us a PDP11 or a VT102 terminal, but he’s done the next best thing in the form of a miniature working VT102 that also conceals a PDE11 emulator. It runs Tetris, which was originally developed on a Russian clone of the PDP11 architecture, and the 2.1BSD operating system.
Powering it all is an ESP32 module, and the PDP11 emulator is the well-known SIMH software. Porting this to the slightly limited environment of the microcontroller required a few compromises, namely the network stack and the configuration interface. In a particularly clever move [Sprite_TM] enabled BSD networking by writing an ESP32 layer that takes network packets via SIMD directly from BSD. It includes its own DHCP client and wireless network configuration tool, allowing an ancient UNIX-derived operating system from the 1970s to connect to the 21st century Internet through an emulator with its network code stripped out.
-
In spite of being a beloved companion to computer hobbyists the world over, the Raspberry Pi doesn’t get enough credit. In fact, single-board computers of all stripes haven’t gotten their due — I just happen to have a Raspberry Pi. It was upon casting a stray glance into the corner of my room where my Pi is, churning away on the previous task I assigned it, that I pondered all the loftier projects I have in mind for it.
It will probably be a while before I tackle those grand designs. But the next best thing to following my dreams is to share them. The ideas here are charcoal sketches, not full illustrations, but they yield a rough picture.
I should also note that these projects all contain Linux in their blueprints (shocking, I know). As this is the preliminary stage, we can leave the exact distribution blank for now. You can safely trust, though, that any services we might need our Pi to run will fasten flush onto a Linux base.
-
The Xtra-PC Linux USB-Stick might be your solution if you have problems with your old and slow PC. It’s a small flash drive stick and it’s using Linux OS to boost you PC’s operations. Check out now.
-
Open Hardware/Modding
-
Peter Turczak’s toddler son loves “technical stuff,” especially things like keyboards and computers that adults use. After discussing this with other likeminded technical parents, the idea of giving new life to an old (PS/2 or AT) keyboard as a teaching tool was hatched.
-
SiFive in cooperation with Tynker and BBC Learning have launched a Doctor Who themed HiFive Inventor Coding Kit. This Initial HiFive Inventor Coding Kit is intended to help kids as young as seven years of age get involved with computer programming through a variety of fun exercises and challenges involving the RISC-V powered mini computer and related peripherals like LED lighting and speaker control.
[...]
So for those looking to get their kids involved with computer programming and looking for an IoT-type device with some fun sensors and various themed exercises to get them experimenting, the HiFive Inventor Coding Kit is worth looking into further. More details on the programming platform can be found via Tynker.com and on the hardware at HiFiveInventor.com. The HiFive Inventor Kit is available from Amazon.com and other Internet retailers for $75 USD.
-
Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
-
-
Web Browsers
-
Mozilla
-
In mid-January 2021, the Text Encoding menu in Firefox looks like this:
Automatic
Unicode
Western
Arabic (Windows)
Arabic (ISO)
Baltic (Windows)
Baltic (ISO)
Central European (Windows)
Central European (ISO)
Chinese, Simplified
Chinese, Traditional
Cyrillic (Windows)
Cyrillic (KOI8-U)
Cyrillic (KOI8-R)
Cyrillic (ISO)
Cyrillic (DOS)
Greek (Windows)
Greek (ISO)
Hebrew, Visual
Hebrew
Japanese
Korean
Thai
Turkish
Vietnamese
[...]
For users who have telemetry enabled, we collect data about whether the item “Automatic” was used at least once in given Firefox subsession, whether an item other than “Automatic” was used at least once in a given Firefox subsession, and a characterization of how the encoding that is being overridden was determined (from HTTP, from meta, from chardetng running without the user triggering it, from chardetng as triggered by the user by having chosen “Automatic” previously, etc.). If things go well, the telemetry can be analyzed when Firefox 87 is released (i.e. when 86 has spent its time on the release channel). The current expectation for this is 2021-03-23.
-
FSF
-
GNU Projects
-
Dear SDR community most likely to travel in time to save the present,
The future is not set, there is no fate but what we make for ourselves. In this
very spirit, GNU Radio 3.9 packs a whole bunch of power when it comes to
transforming the way GNU Radio and its ecosytem can be developed in the future.
You'll find the release tags and signed tarballs now on github, and later on
https://www.gnuradio.org/releases/gnuradio/ .
Not only did we have great progressions from old dependencies that proved to be
all too problematic (SWIG, Python2), but also did we see an incredibly influx of
people actively working on how maintainable this code base is. This will nurture
the project for years to come.
All in all, the main breaking change for pure GRC users will consist in a few
changed blocks – an incredible feat, considering the amount of shift under the
hood. Mentioning large shifts, the work that went into the PyBind binding, the
CMake modernization, the C++ cleanup, the bug-fixing and the CI infrastructure
is worthy of explicit call out; I especially thank
* Josh Morman
* Thomas Habets
* Jacob Gilbert
* Andrej Rode
* Ryan Volz
here.
For developers of OOTs, I'm sure PyBind11 will pose a surprise. If you're used
to SWIG, yes, that's more code to write yourself. But in effect, it's less code
that breaks, and when it breaks, it breaks in much more understandable ways.
Josh has put a lot of effort into automating as much of that as possible.
There's certainly no shortage of demand for that! The ecosystem (remember GNU
Radio's tagline?) is in a steady upwind. We've seen more, and more stable,
contributions from OOT maintainers. That's great!
For in-tree development, newer dependencies and removal of anachronisms will
make sure things move much smoother. Our CI is getting – lately literally every
day – better, which means we not only catch bugs earlier, but also allow for
much quicker review cycles.
One central change:
If you're contributing code upstream, we no longer need you to submit a CLA;
instead, we ask you to just certify, yourself, that you're allowed to contribute
that code (and not, e.g. misappropriating someone else's code).
That's what the DCO (Developer Certificate of Origin) is: Just a quick, "hey,
this code is actually for me to contribute under the project's license"; nothing
more.
-
Openness/Sharing/Collaboration
-
Open Access/Content
-
-
As the online encyclopedia turns 20-years-old, its founder reflects on the internet’s halcyon days.
-
Wikipedia, which has been referred to as a world treasure, turns 20 on Friday. According to research conducted over the years — including a scientific study published by the journal Nature in 2005 and a report commissioned by the site’s Wikimedia Foundation in 2012 — Wikipedia’s entries are comparable in quality to those in prestigious encyclopedias such as Britannica. However, it is difficult to measure the consistency of information that can be altered at any time.
-
This year, Wikipedia celebrates its 20-year anniversary, having been launched on January 15, 2001. The free online encyclopedia, which is completely written, edited, and verified by volunteers, is the sixth-most visited website in the world, according to an interview with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in the New Statesman. “The English-language edition is the most comprehensive, with around 6.2 million articles, making it around 90 times longer than the Encyclopaedia Britannica,” the article states.
Like all published references, Wikipedia is also subject to bias and even vandalism. As DW notes, “Many of the entries are well-documented, checked for quality and—as opposed to reference books—often completely up-to-date, but, 20 years after its creation, the online encyclopedia is not 100% reliable, because information can be manipulated, and sometimes almost undetectably.”
-
Programming/Development
-
GCC 11 entered its final stage of development today as it works towards releasing around the end of Q1 / early Q2 if their past cadence holds up. Before GCC 11.1 can debut as the first stable version, there are some 60+ “P1″ high priority regressions that need to be resolved or otherwise demoted to lesser priority regressions.
GCC 11 release manager Richard Biener this morning announced GCC 11 is now in stage four development meaning only regression fixes and documentation fixes are allowed. As of this morning the code-base is at 62 P1 regressions, another 334 P2 regressions, 35 P3 regressions, and more than 200 regressions of the lower P4/P5 status.
-
Perl/Raku
-
The course of the Raku Programming Language by Andrew Shitov made it to the top 20 of Hacker News and spurred quite a few comments. The first associated Grant Report was also published.
-
Standards/Consortia
-
From time to time I like to bring up fun adventures in LaTeX. In these stranges times in the United States it is important to look at somewhat practical applications beyond the normal reports and formal papers most people think of. With a Minimum Working Example we can mostly look at an idea.
The Comprehensive TeX Archive Network has a package known as newspaper which is effectively subject to nominative determinism. You can make things with it that look like newspapers out of the 1940s-1960s in terms of layout. The page on CTAN shows nice examples of its use and provides a nice story as to why the package was created.
The example source file on CTAN has a bug in it, though. We’re going to make a new one based on it. I am also going to add but not yet utilize the markdown package to the example.
-
-
I have already discussed the long-term dangers of students behaving “online properly, for the WRONG reason”, and the paradox of algorithms grading students who are explicitly encouraged to cheat algorithms.
At first sight, that true story may seem more of the same, maybe even too commonplace to be still newsworthy. The NYT article I summarize above notes that Student 1 is only one of “many incoming freshmen across the country whose admissions offers were revoked by at least a dozen universities after videos emerged on social media of them using racist language.” Some students gained acceptance to Harvard University only to have that acceptance rescinded for, again, “inappropriate social media posts”.
This specific story, however, has something that is new, at least for me, and is definitely worrying anyway.
-
In prior years, this annual series covered individual apps. This year, we are looking at all-in-one solutions in addition to strategies to help in 2021. Welcome to day 8 of 21 Days of Productivity in 2021.
There is a term you hear a lot these days: Self-care. This concept is possibly one of the most critical things we need to do in a world where we are mostly working from home, social distancing, and spending a lot more time on video conferences.
And let’s not kid ourselves: Self-care is hard. Even before 2020, disconnecting and letting our minds and bodies rest was no picnic. Finding a moment of peace between work, family, chores, social obligations, and so on was work in and of itself. The pressure to always be available, always weigh in on a subject or answer a question, and always be there to support friends and family has grown in the last year.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
The COVID-19 pandemic has spread throughout the globe, infecting more than 90 million people and causing almost two million deaths (see “Tracking coronavirus’ global spread”). SARS-CoV-2 infection is the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic; this virus is recognized as the latest viral infection in humans of zoonotic origins, in this case bats first arising in Wuhan, China. The infection is known to be introduced into the lungs, and infection due to the viral Spike protein binding to the angiotensin 1 converting enzyme 2 (ACE-2) receptor expressed in the lung.
Among the many consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection are respiratory disease, as well as effects in the liver as well as neurological tissues. The capacity of SARS-CoV-2 to infect brain is supported by finding viral RNA and proteins in brain tissue on autopsy, but the frequency of neurological infection remains unknown. Regarding COVID-related disease in brain, there are a number of possible bases for the anecdotal reports of impaired function (including persistent headache and impaired consciousness and cognition), including inter alia reduced blood-borne oxygen due to impaired respiration. This is a particular risk in patients with mild disease symptoms, because humans sense lack of oxygen indirectly by increased levels of carbon dioxide in the blood and thus brain and other neurological tissues can be oxygen-deprived unknowingly. In addition, it has long been known that there can be psychological sequellae to severe, life-threatening, debilitating diseases and thus the effects of psychology rather than pathology is not easy to tweeze out of the clinical presentation of these effects.
-
-
Integrity/Availability
-
Proprietary
-
Pseudo-Open Source
-
Privatisation/Privateering
-
Linux Foundation
-
LF Edge has announced the addition of four new general members (FII, HCL, OpenNebula, and Robin.io) and one new Associate member (Shanghai Open Source Information Technology Association).
Additionally, Home Edge has released its third platform update with new Data Storage and Mult-NAT Edge Device Communications (MNDEC) features.
-
Security
-
Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (atftp, coturn, gitlab, mdbook, mediawiki, nodejs, nodejs-lts-dubnium, nodejs-lts-erbium, nodejs-lts-fermium, nvidia-utils, opensmtpd, php, python-cairosvg, python-pillow, thunderbird, vivaldi, and wavpack), CentOS (firefox and thunderbird), Debian (chromium and snapd), Fedora (chromium, flatpak, glibc, kernel, kernel-headers, nodejs, php, and python-cairosvg), Mageia (bind, caribou, chromium-browser-stable, dom4j, edk2, opensc, p11-kit, policycoreutils, python-lxml, resteasy, sudo, synergy, and unzip), openSUSE (ceph, crmsh, dovecot23, hawk2, kernel, nodejs10, open-iscsi, openldap2, php7, python-jupyter_notebook, slurm_18_08, tcmu-runner, thunderbird, tomcat, viewvc, and vlc), Oracle (dotnet3.1 and thunderbird), Red Hat (postgresql:10, postgresql:12, postgresql:9.6, and xstream), SUSE (ImageMagick, openldap2, slurm, and tcmu-runner), and Ubuntu (icoutils).
-
Well this is a doozey. Made public a while back was a security vulnerability in many Snap Packages and the Snapcraft tool used to create them. Specifically, this is the vulnerability identified as CVE-2020-27348. It unfortunately affects many many snap packages…
[...]
The problem arises when the LD_LIBRARY_PATH includes an empty element in its list. When the Dynamic Linker sees an empty element it will look in the current working directory of the process. So if we construct our search paths with an accidental empty element the application inside our Snap Package could be caused to load a shared library from outside the Snap Package’s shipped files. This can lead to an arbitrary code execution.
It has been common to put a definition of the LD_LIBRARY_PATH variable into a Snap Package’s snapcraft.yaml that references a predefined $LD_LIBRARY_PATH as if to extend it. Unfortunately, despite this being common, it was poorly understood that SnapD ensures that the $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is unset when starting a Snap Package’s applications. What that means is that where the author tried to extend the variable they have inadvertantly inserted the bad empty element. The empty element appears because $LD_LIBRARY_PATH is unset so the shell will expand it to an empty string.
-
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
-
Security flaws can be incredibly stupid and dangerous. Of course, I’m not judging anyone, we are humans after all. But this little incident is quite funny.
-
Privacy/Surveillance
-
Check out this recent story, straight from the “you should only have to make up stuff like this” department.
A lawyer was defending a deposition of an absolutely ordinary person, maybe someone just like you: someone who “liked to hang out with her friends and traveled a lot [and] wore a Fitbit to track her fitness level, workouts, and sleep”.
One day, one hand of that person was injured when her car was smashed from behind.
Then, the lawyers of the insurance company for the other driver got full access to her Facebook account, because “it’s now almost impossible to prevent this from happening”.
-
Whatsapp Privacy Policy, this is for those who are concerned about their privacy. We do not want the encroachment in our personal life. Initially when Facebook started people were not aware of the privacy policy is a thing. They only knew that they have found a way to express a way to share their life with the whole world. Everyone was on Facebook, those who did not join Facebook were talking about it all the time. Our minds adopt new things very easily, this exactly what happened in the case of Facebook.
-
Defence/Aggression
-
At least 100,000 people have fled their homes in Central African Republic as a rebel coalition calling for the resignation of the president launches attacks around the county, throwing into question almost two years of peace efforts.
The capital city, Bangui, has come under fire and major towns are occupied by the coalition of some of CAR’s strongest rebel groups, which formed shortly before December elections won by President Faustin-Archange Touadéra but contested by the opposition.
By capturing the western town of Bouar, the rebels – known as the Coalition of Patriots for Change, or the CPC – have cut off the main trade route linking Cameroon to Bangui. Other roads leading to the capital have also been seized in what could be a strategy to “asphyxiate” the city, according to Hans De Marie Heungoup, a Central Africa analyst at the International Crisis Group.
-
Civil Rights/Policing
-
Concretely, it means that the officer kneeling to death on George Floyd could have been identified by anybody, even if he had been masked during that episode.
In perspective, it means the same exposure, potentially, for every cop who, during any future riot, anywhere, keeps hitting a rioter even when she’s already fallen wound, or is otherwise harmless.
It means that any mobster worldwide could do the same to identify a particularly “obnoxious”, but especially annoying officer investigating his activities.
-
Monopolies
-
IFIM event: The Year of the COVID Vaccines [Ed: These zealots don't care about your health. They only care about patents on vaccines as that helps barons steal taxpayers' money...]
Taking place on 8 February 2021, The Year of the COVID Vaccines will feature a panel discussion tackling the most significant legal and regulatory challenges facing the COVID vaccines.
[...]
The vaccination race has now officially begun. But what are the most relevant regulatory and legal issues that have arisen and will arise in connection with the COVID vaccines?
Join IFIM’s expert panel discussion to find out more: from regulatory aspects to liability considerations, from ethical concerns to patentability issues, IFIM’s invited experts will tackle the thorniest regulatory and legal aspects facing this unprecedented period in the history of humankind.
-
December brought another fascinating conference, this time organised by the Institute of Intellectual Property and Market Law (Institutet för immaterialrätt och marknadsrätt) of Stockholm University, which has a tradition of inviting junior academics and lawyers to speak in its annual Holiday seminar. The 2020 seminar featured researchers who successfully defended their PhD theses in 2020: David Johansson (Uppsala Universitet), Tito Rendas (Universidade Católica Portuguesa) and Giulia Priora (Sant’Anna School of Advanced Studies Pisa), with commentary provided by Jan Rosén and fellow Kats Frantzeska Papadopoulou and Eleonora Rosati.
If your interest has been piqued, you can watch the full IFIM seminar on YouTube here with the commentary (not covered in this event report).
-
Five ways IP firms furthered diversity and inclusion last year [Ed: Painting thugs, bullies, patent trolls and profiteers who facilitate monopolies with the "diversity" brush to manufacture consent on the cheap]
Lawyers at Finnegan, Sterne Kessler, HaynesBoone, Morrison & Foerster and Fish & Richardson reveal what they did through 2020 to improve D&I in their firms
-
Patents
-
European Unified Patent Court is delayed again [Ed: Team UPC keeps trotting out those lies about UPC being merely "delayed" -- a lie they certainly tell their clients to save face]
As reported by the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), a German newspaper, two new constitutional complaints were lodged with the German Federal Constitutional Court shortly before the turn of the year. The complaints were lodged shortly after the German parliament had passed the legislation necessary to ratify the UPC Agreement – an international treaty that provides for the creation of the UPC, and upon which the introduction of the European patent with unitary effect also depends.
In order for the German legislation to have effect, and for Germany’s ratification of the UPC Agreement to be confirmed, the legislation must be signed into law by Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier. However, according to the FAZ, the Constitutional Court has requested that Steinmeier “wait until a decision has been made on an urgent appeal before issuing the necessary law”. It is not yet known when the court will decide on the complaints and the associated emergency application.
-
Day One Project: USPTO Proposals for the Biden Administration [Ed: Biden already subjected to a mobbing assault of propagandists and lobbyists calling for protectionism for the rich, using utterly false narratives. The USPTO could use someone like Michelle Lee again.]
Day One Project is not part of the BIDEN Transition, but the organization has put together a strong group of pro-BIDEN IP experts and relative insiders who have drafted and published a Transition Document for the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
-
US software company Adaptive Spectrum and Signal Alignment (ASSIA) has brought another set of proceedings against Dutch telcommunications company KPN. The latter party is a customer of Nokia, with Nokia providing support in the proceedings. However, Assia has once again been unsuccessful.
The District Court of The Hague ruled against Assia’s arguments, finding that KPN had not infringed patent EP 18 69 790. The patent, which is concerned with the controller for a DSL line, is not standard essential. Assia claims that KPN infringes EP 790, because KPN applies the process laid out in the patent’s claims one through 12. Assia also argues that its DSL product operates with the patent’s claims from 13 to 17. However, the court threw out the claim of infringement.
KPN and Nokia also filed a counterclaim for invalidity of EP 790. However, regarding the counterclaim, the court did not arrive at a decision in the final judgment. Currently, Assia is still able to distribute its products, although the court ordered the company to cover the court fees.
-
2020 Highlights in Canadian Life Sciences IP and Regulatory Law [Ed: "Life Sciences IP" is just fancy crypto-language for patent monopolies on life and nature -- patents that are antithetical to the law and to morals]
In 2020, Rx IP Update reported on a number of developments in Canadian life sciences IP and regulatory law.
-
-
-
A new law updating the FDA’s drug patent database aims to increase access to generic medications but falls short of addressing barriers to lower prices, attorneys say.
H.R.1503 requires the Food and Drug Administration to promptly remove invalidated patents from a publication identifying agency-approved drug protections. The law, dubbed the Orange Book Transparency Act, also calls on drug companies to provide more information on their products while clarifying what sorts of patents need to be listed.
Signed by President Donald Trump this week, the law was introduced to make it easier for more generic producers to enter the marketplace. But health policy watchers say the effort doesn’t tackle deep systemic problems that lead to higher drug costs.
“The main problem is that there’s just a lot of patents that get added to extend the life of the drug that we feel shouldn’t have been issued and aren’t valid,” Matthew Lane, executive director of the Coalition Against Patent Abuse, an advocacy group composed of health-care providers, consumer groups, and others.
-
From tech giants like Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Apple Inc., to pharmaceutical giants like Canada’s Apotex Inc., industry titans facing infringement lawsuits turn to the Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board to invalidate their rivals’ intellectual property.
But in Arthrex Inc. v. Smith & Nephew Inc., the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found a flaw in that process that has upended dozens of patent fights: the constitutionality of how the tribunal’s judges are appointed.
Now, the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to determine whether the Federal Circuit’s fix, which has left the validity of major global companies’ intellectual property in limbo, actually solved the PTAB’s problem. Oral argument is scheduled for March 1.
-
Combating complex diseases, climate change, and the loss of biodiversity requires shared innovation on an unprecedented global scale. Patent law plays a significant role in innovation, but to facilitate the coalescence of diverse groups of researchers, scientists, and innovators, policymakers need to increase the worldwide compatibility of patentability requirements. In particular, policymakers need to harmonize the so-called grace period, the specified period of time preceding the filing a patent where an inventor’s own disclosures do not become part of the prior art.
This Article contends that the grace period variances between the five largest patent offices in the world—those of China, the United States, the Republic of Korea, Japan, and the European Union—decrease the likelihood of international coordination of research and international collaborative partnerships, as well as increase administrative costs and uncertainty. The solution, this Article argues, is for these five patent offices to adopt a semi-uniform grace period that covers pre-patent disclosures made in reasonable, research-related endeavors. The new, more synchronized grace period would provide a higher level of domestic and international certainty than currently exists. At the same tune, the new grace period would preserve flexibility that is needed because of inevitable cultural differences and varying local needs of innovators.
-
Copyrights
-
The Nazi practice of economic Aryanisation, the destruction of so-called ‘degenerate’ books and artworks, and cultural plunder all form elements of the regime’s attempted cultural and economic extermination policy. These intensified after Kristallnacht in 1938, with efforts to restore property and citizenship continuing to the present in a number of European countries.
Intellectual property, too, forms a part of this history of expropriation. Alice Urbach, a Jewish native of Vienna, published a bestselling cookbook in 1935: So kocht man in Wien! (How to Cook in Vienna!). In 1938, the publisher, Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, ‘Aryanised’ the work, with Urbach forced to transfer the rights and the book swiftly republished under the name ‘Rudolf Rösch’, who may not even have ever existed.
Though around 40% of the text was removed or altered, Urbach’s hand could still be detected in the work: not just in the original 60% of the text, but quite literally, as photographs of her cooking demonstrations were retained. However, where Urbach praised Vienna’s diverse culinary influences at the heart of Europe, the revised version was instead concerned with portraying Vienna as a quintessential city of the Reich. Then-Ernst Reinhardt manager Hermann Jungck claimed as late as 1974 – nearly a decade before Urbach’s 1983 death at the age of 97 – that ‘Rösch’ had in 1938 simply ‘modernised’ the original 1935 publication.
After the war, the theft continued to cast a shadow on Urbach’s life. She even personally found a copy of the revised work in a Viennese bookshop in 1949. Written from 1950-54, a series of letters located by the publisher – despite earlier claims that archival material had been lost – reveal her requests for the rights’ return so that she might be able to translate and re-publish the book in her new home, the United States. Commemorative editions of the plagiarised book came out in 1974 and 1999, with Jungck acknowledging in the 1974 edition that he had felt compelled to ‘search for a new author’ in the 1930s on account of Urbach’s ethnicity. Urbach had rejected his suggestion that the text be attributed both to her and to ‘Rösch’.
[...]
It is interesting to note that these Aryanised works are concerned with topics central to the idea of a nation: cuisine, language, and law. Dr. Angelika Königseder (TU Berlin) has conducted similar research into the archives of the de Gruyter scientific publishing house, revealing its involvement in the practice. A 1939 protocol document advises to “check how far new editions can be brought out by Aryans” in the case of ‘non-Aryan’-authored works.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in GNU/Linux, Hardware, Microsoft, Windows at 2:42 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link (see this series’ index for more)
Summary: Things aren’t rosy at Intel because the hires aren’t suitable for the job of documenting and/or presenting GNU/Linux-centric products (whose target audience is Free software developers)
THE situation at Intel seems grim because everywhere one looks there are Microsoft boosters who deal with GNU/Linux like it’s just Windows. They don’t understand GNU/Linux and probably never used it.
This is clearly a recipe for disaster.
“…Intel is choosing Microsoft, not GNU/Linux, and Intel snubs software freedom except when it needs openwashing PR perks, shoehorned for money by the Linux Foundation (another faker full of people who never even used Linux).”Before we proceed to the second ‘phase’ of this series — a phase that deals with other kinds of documents — we explain in some brevity the sort of scenario GNU/Linux professionals find themselves in when they work for Intel. They’re basically surrounded if not besieged by people who don’t understand Free software and don’t even wish to understand it. They impose bad practices on everybody else and it should come as no surprise that many skilled and experienced developers are leaving (I personally know two who left last year).
As we shall show in the next so-called ‘phase’, Intel is choosing Microsoft, not GNU/Linux, and Intel snubs software freedom except when it needs openwashing PR perks, shoehorned for money by the Linux Foundation (another faker full of people who never even used Linux).
Intel is risking becoming a fossil, circling down the abyss of irrelevance. Hours ago Phoronix published “Itanium IA-64 Was Busted In The Upstream, Default Linux Kernel Build The Past Month,” saying that:
While Intel formally discontinued the Itanium processors just under two years ago, the Linux software support for IA-64 continues. However, as a possible sign of the times, the Linux 5.11 kernel build for it has been broken the past month.
As what might set off Linus Torvalds on a Monday morning, it turns out since the Linux 5.11 merge window the Itanium “IA64″ kernel code has been broken and unable to even successfully carry out a “defconfig” default configuration kernel build. This wasn’t due to some foreign change within the kernel regressing the support but a change made by IBM to the IA64 Kconfig to enable SPARSEMEM by default.
The world is moving past the Intel monopoly (and by extension x86). The Wintel monoculture won’t save Intel anymore because this monoculture too is rapidly eroding, becoming perhaps a mere niche some time later in this decade. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Site News at 9:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Our daily bulletins now have inside them coarse graphics, depicted using characters alone, and the tool used to generate them announced a new release earlier today; we showcase some of its features (in a new video)
SLOWLY but surely, behind the scenes at times, we’ve been enhancing the experience or the layout of the daily bulletins, which are served either over HTTP or over IPFS. This is the general direction we hope to embrace, seeing that the World Wide Web rapidly becomes unbearably bloated, so people rightly demand practical and lightweight alternatives.
“Chafa itself is Free software, unlike GitHub.”Over the weekend we began experimenting with image conversions into text, knowing we can use neither colour nor more than 79 columns (in width). Here’s some of the sorts of stuff we’re able to produce in the terminal:
Video download link
The tool in question is called Chafa; sadly enough it’s hosted and controlled by Microsoft servers (GitHub), but this new announcement was made outside that monopolistic platform which is proprietary software. Chafa itself is Free software, unlike GitHub. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in News Roundup at 8:40 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
-
-
Here’s this week’s (ending Jan 17, 2021) roundup series, curated for you from the Linux and the open-source world on application updates, new releases, distribution updates, major news, and upcoming highlights. Have a look.
-
We had a peaceful week in the world of Linux Releases and only KaOS 2021.01 and ArcoLinux 21.03.1 have been released to the end of this week. We look at them in the new week.
-
Thank you everyone for following 9to5Linux on social media; we’re nearing 6K followers on Twitter and that’s only possible thanks to you guys! Thank you again to everyone who donated so far to help me keep this website alive for as long as possible.
This week has been quite interesting despite the fact that no major releases were planned. We saw the launch of a new PinePhone Linux phone edition, the release of the Flatpak 1.10 and Wine 6.0 software, and much more.
-
Audiocasts/Shows
-
Josh and Kurt talk about the new right to repair rules in the EU. There’s a strange line between loving the idea of right to repair, but also being horrified as security people at the idea of a device being on the Internet for 30 years.
-
Impressive updates for some beloved open source projects, and AlmaLinux—a leading CentOS alternative—is born.
Plus Google’s surprise for Chromium users, and we go hands-on with Podman’s docker-compose support.
-
This time we have the KDE roadmap for the year, Nvidia preparing to better support Wayland and ray tracing on Linux, the death of Flash Player, and an open source epic games store client for Linux.
-
In this video, we are looking at how to install ONLYOFFICE on Linux Mint 20.1.
-
LibreWolf is a fork of Firefox, focused on privacy, security and freedom. Librewolf strips out all of the telemetry from Firefox and enables a bunch extra security settings out of the box. It has uBlock installed by default and it supports privacy conscious search engines.
-
I’ve been running BSPWM for the past year and it’s a great window manager but I wanted a change so I’ve been convinced to try out AwesomeWM and I’m genuinely impressed, it’s very different to what I’ve become used to but this is a really solid window manager experience.
-
Kernel Space
-
Apple-focused security/virtualization startup Corellium has posted a very primitive build of Linux for Apple M1 Mac devices.
Corellium is one of several efforts working to bring bare metal Linux to Apple’s new ARM based systems. This week the developers involved got the Linux kernel booting on M1 Macs but still is in early form. In fact, the initial build does not have working USB yet but that is said to be imminent. Obviously this is also only booting in console mode and any Apple M1 graphics support will be a long way out… It’s probably unlikely seeing a satisfactory Linux desktop experience on Apple M1 hardware in 2021.
-
Linux is a developer-preferred operating system that differs from the more user-friendly OS in the world, which is the Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac. The operating system faced the trials of time, usability, and number of users, to which it did not falter, and remained to be one of the most preferred, being a kernel that eluded UNIX and its core code.
The company that is known for creating a bug finder in Apple’s operating system (and initially won a lawsuit against the Cupertino giant), Corellium, has developed a Linux OS that can run on the latest ARM-based chip. While macOS 11, also known as the “Big Sur,” is the main OS, Apple’s Mac also accommodates other OS like Windows and Linux on its platform.
[...]
Corellium’s Linux for M1 Macs is called the “Linux Macho,” which features the early beta stages of the operating system that aims to work on Apple’1 M1-powered Mac computers. This feature would allow users to use the robust powers of the Silicon chip to run Linux and perform or proceed to do their work or what’s needed.
The early beta download of the Linux Macho is available on Corellium’s website and is recommended for advanced users who know how to manipulate both the macOS and Linux OS to make it work. Instructions are to follow from Corellium.
-
Linux 5.10.8 is out today as the latest stable release for the Linux 5.10 LTS series. Making this point release notable is that it finally addresses the 5.10 Btrfs performance regression.
As noted back on Christmas, Linux 5.10 was seeing significant slowdowns on Btrfs. For simply unpacking a Linux kernel source .tar.zst file it could easily take multiple times longer on this stable kernel version.
While patches for addressing this poor Btrfs behavior on Linux 5.10 were floating around since before the end of the year, it’s taken until now to get them tested and queued up for mainline integration. Linux 5.11 meanwhile has a plethora of Btrfs improvements.
-
More improvements for Microsoft Surface laptops on Linux are set to land for Linux 5.12.
The previously discussed work around Microsoft Surface System Aggregator Module handling that was developed through reverse engineering is now queued for introduction in Linux 5.12 once its merge window opens in February.
-
The 5.11-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing.
-
-
Things continue to look fairly normal for this release: 5.11-rc4 is
solidly average in size, and nothing particularly scary stands out.
In the diff itself, the new ampere modesetting support shows up fairly
clearly - it's one of those hardware enablement things that should be
entirely invisible to people who don't have that hardware, but it does
end up being about a fifth of the whole rc4 patch.
If you ignore that oddity, the rest looks pretty normal, with random
patches all over, and a lot of it being quite small. All the usual
suspects: drivers (gpu, sound, rdma, md, networking..) arch updates
(arm64, risc-v, x86), fiesystems (ext4, nfs, btrfs), core networking,
documentation and tooling. And just random fixes.
The appended shortlog gives the details as usual..
Linus
-
Applications
-
Youtubedl-gui is a simple new graphical interface for the popular command-line YouTube downloader youtube-dl.
The tool is quite simple to use, just paste the video URL, select audio quality and format, video resolution and format, and click download! And of course, there’s an option to change the destination folder of your downloads.
Once you click download, a small dialog will pop up with the process bar.
-
Here’s another one from the terminal graphics extravaganza dept: Chafa 1.6.0 brings fullwidth character support, so in addition to the usual block elements and ASCII art, you now get some mean CJK art too. Or grab as many fonts as you can and combine all of the Unicode into one big glorious mess. Chafa can efficiently distinguish between thousands of symbols, so it also runs fast enough for animations — up to a point.
Since some users want this in environments where it’s not practical to build from source or even to have nice things like GLib, I’ve started adding statically linked builds. These are pretty bare-bones (fewer image loaders, no man page), so look to your steadfast distribution first.
Speaking of distributions, a big thank you to the packagers. Special thanks go to Florian Viehweger for getting in touch re. adding it to OpenBSD ports, and Mo Zhou (Debian), Michael Vetter (openSUSE), Herby Gillot (MacPorts), @chenrui and Carlo Cabrera (Homebrew) for getting 1.6 out there before I could even finish this post.
-
Instructionals/Technical
-
You might say, “I’m all for not using master in master-slave technical relationships, but this is clearly an instance of master-copy, not master-slave.”
-
To connect some local running server application via browser, access FTP server, and many other times we require to know our system Ip address. Thus, if you are running some Linux operating system then here is the way to check out your current IP Address using the command terminal.
-
Nmap (or Nmapper) is a free and open-source network scanner used for analysis, security audits, and network exploration. You use it to discover hosts and services on a computer network by sending packets and analyzing the responses all in an easy-to-use manner. Let us take a look at how to use Nmap.
-
You may have seen me struggle with the Arch Linux servers in one of my videos.
Time to dive into the application reflector. Read all about it on your own computer.
Type reflector –help in the terminal and read more.
Servers speed and service all depend on your own network, your isp, your country’s policy (port blocking) and the servers around you.
As a result we have now several aliases to get the best servers out there.
-
Terraform is an infrastructure as a code platform developed by HashiCorp. You can simply write code in the human-readable format following HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) and deploy it to get the infrastructure in the cloud. Terraform is supported in many cloud providers like Google, Amazon, Alibaba, etc.
Here in this article, we are going to install the latest version of terraform on Ubuntu. We are performing terraform installation on Ubuntu 20.04 however you can do the same procedure on all Linux platforms.
Also, learn how to use terraform with simple example by launch an ec2 instance and create s3 bucket.
-
Operators are one of the ways to package, deploy, and manage application distribution on Red Hat OpenShift. After a developer creates an Operator, the next step is to get the Operator published on OperatorHub.io. Doing this allows users to install and deploy the Operator in their OpenShift clusters. The Operator is installed, updated, and the management lifecycle is handled by the Operator Lifecycle Manager (OLM).
-
Today it is very common for open source projects to distribute their software via container images. But how can these containers be run securely in production? This article explains how to deploy a Matrix server on Fedora CoreOS.
-
Recently, the microSD (secure digital) card in my Raspberry Pi stopped working. It had been in constant use as a server for almost two years, and this provided a good opportunity to start fresh and correct a few problems. After its initial installation, it began experiencing disk problems and the official Raspberry Pi operating system (OS) received a significant update (and was renamed from Raspbian to Raspberry Pi OS). So I acquired a new microSD card and preceded to rebuild.
Although this Raspberry Pi 3 Model B isn’t the latest hardware, it is still adequate for running a minimal server for various services. I think my original installation used the full operating system image that includes the graphical user interface and a lot of other software packages unnecessary for my needs.
This step-by-step guide shows how I set up my Raspberry Pi with the most minimal configuration to conserve precious system resources.
-
There are multiple ways to automate the system administrator task on Linux.
It drastically reduces human efforts and saves reasonable time.
shell script is one of the methods to automate frequent jobs.
For a scenario, you want to run a weekly job or EOD job to populate some data for reporting purposes.
To do so, you need to kill all ssh sessions that are currently accessing the application on the system before beginning the job.
-
Today we are looking at how to install GSnap, a free VST plugin, in Audacity on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
-
GitLab is a free and opensource front-end Git repository that features a Wiki and an issue tracking feature. It allows you to host Git repositories on your own server and setup DevOps platform. In this guide, we are going to install GitLab CE (Community Edition) on Debian 10 (Buster) system.
-
Wow, 2020 just flew by! With one lockdown after another, most of the year was spent working from home and checking local government websites for guidance around when schools and after-schools would re-open.
I didn’t blog as much as I hoped but stayed sane and otherwise productive – so can’t complain much about 2020.
-
ShellCheck is easy to use, free, and open-source static analysis tool that automatically finds bugs in your shell scripts. If you write shell scripts for automation or containers, you need this tool. Let us see how to install and use ShellCheck on the FreeBSD development Unix server.The post How to install ShellCheck on FreeBSD to analysis scripts appeared first on nixCraft.
-
Squid proxy server is an open-source proxy server for Linux distributions. You can install the Squid proxy server on your network to pass all your bandwidth through the proxy server. Now, you may ask why you would use the Squid proxy server? Here is the answer, the Squid allows you to connect your computers without an active internet connection through the proxy server.
You can also enable the DNS cache, web cache, memory cache, and other internet caching to faster load the web pages. You can see that the Squid proxy server can enable caching, increase your server’s efficiency, improve the network performance, reduce bandwidth usages, and make your server secure.
-
-
Dashboard is a web-based Kubernetes user interface.
-
In our previous article, we demonstrated how we would push our git repositories from our local system out to GitHub. In this article, we will demonstrate how we would actually make changes in a file within a repository on GitHub and then pull the changes/updates to our local machine.
-
In our previous article on the git version control system, we explained how we could modify our files in repositories in our GitHub account and then pull the changes from GitHub to the git repositories on our local system and keep the files in synchronization. Now, what if we modified the same piece of information in a file on GitHub as well as within our local git repository? In this article, we will demonstrate how we would proceed if we modified the same information in a file on GitHub as well as locally within our git repository.
-
In this guide I will show you how to install Ubuntu Mate on the Raspberry PI 400.
[...]
Raspberry PI Imager is available for Windows, MacOS, Ubuntu and Raspberry PI OS.
If you are using Windows open Windows Explorer and double click on the downloaded file (called something like imager_n where n is the verson number).
When the installer pops up click “Install” and then click “Finish”. Raspberry PI Imager should start automatically but if it doesn’t you can find it by clicking on the Windows start menu and searching for “Imager”.
If you are using Ubuntu, the downloaded file can be found in the “Downloads” folder. Open the file manager and click on the downloaded Raspberry PI imager file and you will be able to install the application as you would any other .deb file.
-
In Linux, we can use the command terminal to check various system hardware configurations and information such as CPU, Memory, hard disk, etc., and here are those to use…
Although there are tools that can display Linux system info graphically, however, here we are going to use the inbuilt commands.
The question of how a system is equipped and how it performs in harsh everyday life is not only of theoretical interest. Lot’s of time to solve a problem we need to know hardware and its utilization to remove some bottleneck. Thus, if you are new to Linux systems or running any cloud server where you want to know about the system load, the network interface, and type of processor and chipset, or what hardware is actually in the system? Then here some top commands to follow…
-
Yarn is an open-source dependency manager for javascript developed by Facebook. It is an alternative to the popular npm package manager. Yarn provides an easier way to automate the process of installing, updating, configuring, and removing packages from the system. Yarn is faster because it caches every package it downloads. So you don’t need to download it again.
-
Cockpit is an open-source and free remote server management software that is sponsored by Red Hat. This software has a simple, web-based interface for managing the administrative tasks of a Linux-based server through a web browser. Cockpit can run on several Linux-based operating distributions, including Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, CentOS, and more.
Cockpit gives you a real-time report of the CPU, RAM, and disk utilization of your system. Using this application, you can perform server tasks management remotely, such as creating user accounts, configuring the network, managing services, monitoring the system, managing the firewall, configuring OpenVPN, and more. Cockpit supports the Openshift cluster and Kubernetes. You can also measure your system performance and update your system using the Cockpit tool.
-
For any operating system, the kernel is at the core. Linux is the kernel, rather than the entire operating system, of any Linux distribution. The kernel is responsible for interacting between the hardware of the computer and the software.
The Linux kernel is regularly updated to offer the best possible experience. This guide shows you how to check the version and update the kernel of Fedora.
-
Google Chrome OS is based on the open-source Chromium OS. It is a browser-based operating system. You will only have the Google Chrome web browser installed on it. You can install Chrome web apps or extensions from the Chrome Web Store and add more functionality to the operating system.
Sadly, the Google Chrome OS is not publicly available for download, and only the source code of Chromium OS is publicly available. So, you can’t run the Google Chrome OS or Chromium OS directly on your computer.
Luckily, a few Chromium OS-based operating systems are available that you can download and install on your computer. The most popular one is Neverware’s CloudReady OS.
This article will show you how to make a Live bootable USB thumb drive of Neverware’s CloudReady OS and run it from the USB thumb drive. So, let’s get started.
-
PostgreSQL is a free and open-source, community-driven, standard-compliant, and most popular object-relational database management system. It is used by popular IT companies like Uber, Netflix, Instagram, Spotify, etc.
Recently I installed PostgreSQL and getting an error while running daemon. This is mainly because PostgreSQL not getting sufficient permission to create the folder required to store database information.
-
Wine or Emulation
-
While there is the prior “ESYNC” and “FSYNC” work pursued by Wine for the Linux kernel, it appears Wine developers are back to the drawing board in coming up with a Linux kernel implementation for Wine synchronization primitives that will address all their needs and match the Windows behavior well.
CodeWeavers developer Zebediah Figura sent out a lengthy mailing list post on Sunday night outlining the current state and objectives of coming up with kernel-based Wine synchronization primitives. While the ESYNC/FSYNC patches were successful in improving the performance of many Windows games running on Linux, they are still working towards a more all encompassing solution and to match the behavior well for Windows and with optimal speed.
-
-
Despite loving Linux, I’m not willing to use a Linux-powered mobile operating system unless it looks and feels fantastic. It’s why I’m not enamored with Ubuntu Touch. It’s why I’m less than enthusiastic about ARM-based variants of popular distros like Manjaro and KDE Neon, despite wishing them success. Call me silly, call me selfish, but they’re just not flashy enough.
More importantly, there’s not a mobile Linux OS in existence that screams “hey, I’m tablet-first design!”
-
JingOS was built with the idea of improving the functionality and productivity of a tablet overall. So, the team behind the new operating system took inspiration from the Cupertino based giant’s iPadOS platform to offer a simple/clean, yet productive and efficient UI design that can ensure that your tablets are a mini computer that one can work on, on the go. JingOS is not only a tablet OS but a full function Linux distro.
-
Reviews
-
Here is my review of Trisquel 9.0 Etiona the newly released computer operating system. It is the successor of Flidas and now based on Ubuntu 18.04. It brings the latest improvements by excellently keeping its user friendliness from the family of most secure operating systems on earth. As always, I choose the Regular Edition, with MATE Desktop choice, to report this to you. We will see what’s new in this release and why I call it Software Freedom Vehicle now continuing Successful Freedom in the past. With Etiona, everyone can see that Free Software as well as copyleft are already practical and now we can see that even clearer than before. Let’s go!
-
Coming into the new year I decided I wanted to simplify things a bit and explore a distribution that didn’t have as many features and distractions. I decided to kick off my week with CRUX, an independent distribution with a keep it simple (KIS) approach. CRUX runs on x86_64 computers exclusively and the latest version, 3.6, appears to be focused almost entirely on package upgrades rather than new features.
CRUX runs the classic SysV init software on top of version 5.4 of the Linux kernel. Shortly after CRUX 3.6 was released the project published a minor update to fix a package issue. According to the documentation it is recommended that people do not attempt to upgrade to CRUX 3.6.1 from an earlier version…
-
Gentoo Family
-
The pandemic didn’t adversely impact the Gentoo Linux project’s operations with seeing the overall number of commits grow by nearly 42% last year within the Gentoo repository. Gentoo also saw commits from 333 unique authors in 2020, up from 333 the year prior. Plus they’ve made other improvements too for this technical-minded Linux distribution too during 2020.
-
-
PinePhone Mobian Community Edition is powered by Mobian Linux, which offers a pure Debian GNU/Linux experience on the Linux phone, and uses the Phosh (Phone Shell) user interface by default, which is based on the GNOME Stack and developed by Purism for their privacy-focused Librem 5 Linux smartphone.
PinePhone Mobian Community Edition is built from plastic and features the Debian logo on the back. It features a generous 5.95-inch HD IPS capacitive display with 16M colors, 1440×720 pixels resolution, and 18:9 ratio.
-
42Gears today announced its capability to enable kiosk mode on Linux devices using the 42Gears mobile device management (MDM) solution, SureMDM. 42Gears SureMDM is now capable of managing, monitoring, and securing Linux, Android, iOS, iPadOS, and Windows devices from a single pane of glass.
-
Raspberry Pi cluster boards / solutions pop-up from time to time. But so far, I think we’ve seen only one based on Raspberry Pi CM4 modules with the upcoming Turing Pi 2 mini-ITX cluster board supporting four of those.
TECHBASE has now unveiled a different kind of Raspberry Pi CM4 cluster with ClusBerry 9500-CM4 integrating up to eight Raspberry Pi Computer Module 4 in a DIN-Rail housing for industrial applications.
-
-
Open Hardware/Modding
-
If you feel nostalgic and misses the days of the rotary dial phone, Sky’s Edge “Rotary Un-Smartphone” is an open-source hardware rotary dial phone controlled by an Arduino board and equipped with a multi-mode 4G/3G/2G module.
It’s a bit more advanced that you old rotary phone with recent cellular technology, ePaper & OLED displays, quick dialing buttons, and the rotary dial can both be used to dial full phone number or quickly access your contact list.
-
The Over:Board is a mini-ITX motherboard designed to make it easy to use the CM4 in any mini ITX computer case. The developer is running a crowdfunding campaign for the project and says it should be ready to ship by September (although folks who want something sooner can reserve a prototype or pre-production unit).
-
Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
-
-
Opensource.com exists to educate the world about everything open source, from new tools and frameworks to scaling communities. We aim to make open source more accessible to anyone who wants to use or contribute to it.
Getting started in open source can be hard, so we regularly share tips and advice on how you can get involved. If you want to learn Python, help fight COVID-19, or join the Kubernetes community, we’ve got you covered.
To help you begin, we curated the 10 most popular articles on getting started in open source we published in 2020. We hope they’ll inspire you to learn something new in 2021.
-
Programming/Development
-
There are two entity types in C++, the fundamental types and the compound types. The fundamental types are the scalar types. The compound types are the rest of the entity types. Conversion can take place from one entity type to another appropriate type.
[...]
The output is 2, 2, meaning that the program has returned the square root of 5 as 2 and the square root of 8 also as 2. So, the first two statements in the main() function have floored the answers of the square root of 5 and the square root of 8. This article does not discuss flooring or ceiling in C++. Rather, this article discusses the conversion of one C++ type to another appropriate C++ type; indicating any approximation in value made, loss of precision, or constraint added or removed. Basic knowledge of C++ is a prerequisite to understand this article.
-
I’ve always wanted to be able to set up a full consul, nomad, vault, etc. environment (along with hosted applications) with a single “terraform apply.” I’ve spent a few weekends on this now and wanted to give a small tour, although it’s still a work in progress.
-
Perl/Raku
-
IRC is a good place to find answers. Often I find the questions found there to be even more enlightening.
-
-
A few years ago I posted “Goodbye, Google” as a guide to eliminating all traces of Google from your life. At the time I remarked “one overlarge, overbearing tech behemoth is much like another.” Well, that’s no longer true — I now consider Google to be far more dangerous and abusive than Microsoft. So here, long overdue, is an updated list of alternatives to help you break your dependence on Google services. As always, suggestions are welcome.
-
Science
-
Motorised devices on each drone moved to ensure that the receivers and transmitters always lined up, and photons were focused and steered through the relay drone by a short piece of fibre-optic cable. The state of each photon was measured at the ground station and the results proved that the photons remained entangled.
-
The best idea, though, is to attack the problem at its roots. The littering of space is an example of the “tragedy of the commons”, in which no charge is made for the use of a resource that is owned collectively. So why not charge the beneficiaries for the right to put something into orbit and keep it there? The longer an object stays up, the more the satellite owner pays. The more popular (and hence crowded) the orbit chosen, the more expensive it would be to add a satellite to it.
-
The Florida Department of Law Enforcement confirmed it has an active arrest warrant for Jones. Spokeswoman Jessica Cary could not provide details about any charges against Jones before she was booked.
Jones lost her job in May after creating a widely-praised state dashboard tracking COVID-19 cases, deaths, testing and other data. She claimed she was fired because she refused to manipulate data to support the state’s plans to ease lockdown restrictions.
-
The scientist tweeted Saturday that her arrest warrant is tied to documents she received or downloaded from state sources while at the Department of Health. Jones said she and her attorney were not told what she’s being prosecuted for, just that she faces one criminal charge.
-
Rebekah Jones, the fired Florida Department of Health data scientist-turned-whistleblower, said Saturday she will be “turning herself in” to Florida police on Sunday after a warrant was issued for her arrest.
Florida Department of Law Enforcement spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger confirmed there is an active arrest warrant for Jones.
-
It’s unclear what exact charge she might face. Jones said on Twitter that “the warrant was based on a lie” and noted a state agent told her the arrest warrant is unrelated to the December raid.
-
Jones said in a tweet that the incident happened at 8:30 a.m. on Monday morning. She wrote: “At 8:30 am this morning, state police came into my house and took all my hardware and tech. They were serving a warrant on my computer after DOH filed a complaint. They pointed a gun in my face. They pointed guns at my kids..”
-
Education
-
Perhaps if they’d read to the end and actually seen Winston captured, brainwashed, embracing the figurehead of a totalitarian regime, they might have seen themselves in the text in a way that would have opened their eyes to their own folly. It’s hard to say. Poisonous ideas, like viruses, travel quickly and are not easily eradicated. But even those of us who do not find ourselves in this seditious camp can reflect on our own failures, both in our understanding of America’s legacy and our own participation in its most violent acts. We can seek out texts that are true windows and allow them to move us, to change us, to make us reconsider our place in the world and our role in the march toward justice. We can smash our own paperweight, the one we’ve filled with the myths we’ve told ourselves about America’s greatness, its rightness, its inability to fall prey to humanity’s worst inclinations, and expose those myths as false and insufficient for the task ahead. “How small,” we’ll say as we see their shattered remains strewn about the floor, “how small they always were.”
-
Internet propaganda is becoming an industrialized commodity, warns Phil Howard, the director of the Oxford Internet Institute and author of many books on disinformation. In an interview, he calls for greater transparency and regulation of the industry.
-
The belief that children must be attended—or even attended to—at all times by their parents or a direct proxy came to dominate America’s child-rearing philosophy from the last decade of the 20th century forward. My style, which revolves around limiting kids’ independence only to the extent necessary to protect them from risks that are both serious and fairly likely to materialize, is now known as “free-range parenting” in the United States, despite the fact that much of the world—including the majority in countries like Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, France, and Israel—just calls it “parenting.”
-
NCLB is the legal mechanism that required schools to treat students as receptacles of information, much like computers, to be trained in regurgitating information. Input and output became the guiding dynamic of the classroom. NCLB increased the level of sorting, segregating, and ranking of students by tying test scores to funding.
This method of classifying people has an ugly history in eugenics and has historically been used in advancing a white supremacist agenda. NCLB further established the American education system as a factory Unfortunately, its main product has proven to be what I call Educational Trauma.
-
Health/Nutrition
-
Norway said Covid-19 vaccines may be too risky for the very old and terminally ill, the most cautious statement yet from a European health authority as countries assess the real-world side effects of the first shots to gain approval.
-
Karen Weaver, the former mayor of Flint, said that she was disappointed with the choice.
“I hope she does better with climate control than she did with Flint,” she told MLive-The Flint Journal.
-
Integrity/Availability
-
Proprietary
-
Citrix Systems Inc. is in advanced talks to buy the work-management platform company Wrike Inc. for more than $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.
A deal for Wrike, owned by the technology-focused buyout firm Vista Equity Partners, could be reached as soon as this week, the people said, asking not to be identified because the information was private. It would be the largest acquisition to date for Citrix.
The deal isn’t finalized and talks could still fall apart.
-
Security
-
Attackers are using the normally harmless Windows Finger command to download and install a malicious backdoor on victims’ devices.
The ‘Finger’ command is a utility that originated in Linux/Unix operating systems that allows a local user to retrieve a list of users on a remote machine or information about a particular remote user. In addition to Linux, Windows includes a finger.exe command that performs the same functionality.
-
Malware, where aren’t thou found? Well, even our wonderful Ubuntu can be infected. So what can we do about it? Hope and pray we keep our system safe and better yet, audit our systems regularly for malwares and rootkits. There are 4 system auditors for Ubuntu that we will review – lynis, rkhunter, chkrootkit, and clamav.
[...]
Oddly enough, there aren’t many tools to scan for malware out there for Linux. Why? I’m not sure. However, these 4 tools are more than enough to detect malwares, rootkits, and viruses.
-
The California-based nonprofit aims to produce recommendations that will help governments and the private sector tackle the scourge of ransomware attacks.
[Attackers] have increasingly used these types of attacks — which involve accessing and encrypting the victim’s network and demanding payment to allow access again — to hit major targets, with city governments in Atlanta, Baltimore and New Orleans severely impaired by ransomware attacks over the past two years.
More recently, hospitals have become a target during the COVID-19 pandemic, with cyber criminals seeing vulnerable hospitals as easy targets more likely to pay a quick ransom as health care systems struggle to keep up with coronavirus cases. In some instances, the cyberattacks have been blamed for deaths due to delayed care.
-
A zero-day exploit has been discovered that can crash your Windows 10 device – and, even more worrying, can be delivered inside a seemingly harmless shortcut file. The vulnerability can corrupt any NTFS-formatted hard drive and even be exploited by standard and low privilege user accounts.
Security researcher Jonas Lykkegaard referenced the vulnerability on Twitter last week and had previously drawn attention to the issue on two previous occasions last year. Despite this, the NTFS vulnerability remains unpatched.
There are various ways to trigger the vulnerability that involve trying to access the $i30 NTFS attribute on a folder in a particular way. One such exploit involves the creation of a Windows shortcut file that has its icon location set to C:\:$i30:$bitmap. Bleeping Computer found that this triggered the vulnerability even if users did not attempt to click on the file in question. Windows Explorer’s attempts to access the icon path in the background would be enough to corrupt the NTFS hard drive.
-
Jonas says that this Windows 10 bug isn’t new and has been around since the release of Windows 10 April 2018 Update, and remains exploitable on the latest versions, as well. BleepingComputer shared that the problematic command includes $i30 string, a Windows NTFS Index Attribute associated with directories.
[...]
After running the command, Windows 10 will start displaying prompts to restart the device and repair the corrupted drive. Apparently, the issue also impacts some Windows XP versions and similar NTFS bugs have been known for years but are yet to be addressed by the Windows maker.
-
Nidhi Razdan, a career journalist, became a victim of an elaborate phishing attack that made her quit her 21-year-old job and part with many of her personal details.
-
An unpatched zero-day in Microsoft Windows 10 allows attackers to corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive with a one-line command.
-
Privacy/Surveillance
-
As millions shun WhatsApp and download new chat platforms in search for a secure experience, mind you that security is nothing but an illusion and there is no guarantee that Telegram or Signal may not be [cracked] in the future, especially when nation-state actors with highly sophisticated tools and huge resources are on the prowl.
-
-
“When Republicans controlled the Senate they used the reconciliation process to provide huge tax breaks for the rich and large corporations,” said Sanders on Saturday. “We’re going to use reconciliation to protect working families, the sick and the poor.”
-
If we are to save the country, we must find the wisdom to think anew and the courage to act anew.
-
-
End-to-end encrypted messaging platform WhatsApp has put off privacy changes it planned, after pushback from users who have been moving over to Signal and Telegram in droves.
-
Defence/Aggression
-
Two new books look at different aspects of that grim history, both of them building on connections their authors developed with Indonesians who made it through that grueling period. Historian John Roosa’s meticulously researched Buried Histories: The Anticommunist Massacres of 1965-1966 in Indonesia focuses on events leading up to and during the months of slaughter, with extensive testimony from survivor interviews which Roosa and a team of Indonesian researchers conducted over several decades. In The Jakarta Method: Washington’s Anticommunist Crusade & The Mass Murder Program That Shaped Our World, journalist Vincent Bevins shows connections between the Indonesian killings and brutal crackdowns the U.S. government has supported elsewhere in the world.
Roosa’s first book, Pretext For Mass Murder, built on his research into the September 30 Movement, a short-lived group that killed six generals, an ill-fated maneuver which gave the military (known as the TNI) an excuse to systematically attack the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) throughout the archipelago. Buried Histories presents survivor accounts and information from Indonesian language primary sources and previous studies, most of them skimpy, about the scorched-earth campaign against the PKI. The book looks at orchestration of violence at the national and local levels, focusing extensively on case studies from four regions: Bali, Central Java, and two provinces on Sumatra.
-
A small Islamist militant group has claimed responsibility for an attack on Turkish forces in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib.
The Ansar Abu Bakr al-Siddiq Squadron said it was behind the attack Saturday that targeted a Turkish military outpost in the northern countryside of Idlib.
-
Tech companies are sharing more information with law enforcement in a frantic effort to prevent violence around the inauguration, after the government was caught flat-footed by the Capitol siege.
Between the lines: Tech knows it will be held accountable for any further violence that turns out to have been planned online if it doesn’t act to stop it.
-
The fact that the insurrectionists filmed their crimes in real time, thus presenting clear proof of their misdeeds to the authorities, isn’t just evidence of their limited intellectual capacities. It also demonstrates a certain loss of touch with reality among these self-proclaimed “patriots.” Nourished by QAnon conspiracy narratives, fantasies of election fraud and Trump’s unceasing stream of lies, they believed they were in the right and felt unassailable. As such, the events of Jan. 6 could also be seen as their arrival in a world where they don’t feel at all at home: The real one.
The fanatics on the front lines weren’t the only ones who had one foot in the virtual world throughout that Wednesday. Hundreds of people in the crowd of supporters outside filmed what they saw on their mobile phones, posted selfies on social networks, sent pictures to friends and liked the images posted by others. The world became witness to the intoxicating narcissism of a mass of people who are constantly online and searching obsessively for clicks and likes. Trump’s mob both inside and outside the Capitol were essentially an assault team made up of digital-world friends who had forgotten that they weren’t in a video game, but at the seat of Congress, a place where the glass actually does break and people actually do die when shots are fired.
-
Iran has been accelerating its breaches of the nuclear deal and earlier this month started pressing ahead with plans to enrich uranium to 20 percent fissile strength at its underground Fordow nuclear plant. That is the level Tehran achieved before striking the deal with world powers to contain its disputed nuclear ambitions.
The Islamic Republic’s breaches of the nuclear agreement since President Donald Trump withdrew the United States from it in 2018 (and subsequently imposed sanctions on Tehran) may complicate efforts by President-elect Joe Biden, who takes office on January 20, to rejoin the pact.
-
My impressions of this election is that not very many voters came out to vote. A majority of them stayed away. Remember there were 18 million, but we are thinking of about 12 million that showed up to vote. That means about seven million did not vote and tells you that either they had no one to vote or they decided to abscond for reasons best known to them. But most likely they didn’t know who to vote for or they were even just making a statement that maybe they don’t want to be caught in this political tide altogether.
-
Officers located and arrested the suspect. Investigators do not believe the incident was a hate crime.
-
Environment
-
Energy
-
The Austrian capital is unveiling a new app on 26 February that will reward car-free travel with free tickets to museums and concerts. A total of 1000 users will test Vienna’s “Culture Token” app during a six-month trial period. The app will track the user’s movements and calculate carbon savings. Once the user has stored up 20km of CO2 savings, they’ll receive a token which they can exchange for a ticket to a concert, theatre or museum.
There’s no limit to the number of tokens a user can collect. But once the user reaches five, they’ll have to use one token before acquiring more. Participating venues for the trial period include the Kunsthalle, Wien Museum, the Volkstheater, and the Konzerthaus. According to local media, if the app is a success, it will be rolled out to the wider public in autumn.
-
Finance
-
How did rich corporations and finance capitalists come out of the pandemic in very good health in contrast to the general population?
-
AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
-
-
“How do you lecture about ‘unity’ and ‘healing’ after seeking to end American democracy?” asked one Democratic member of Congress in response.
-
The inconvenient truths about fascism, like learning about the climate and health crises, could lead us to actually shift our beliefs and lives.
-
From the perspective of his psychopathology, Trump’s coup attempt last week was wholly predictable.
-
“Do Senate Democrats want to keep the filibuster or do they want to pass comprehensive democracy, anti-corruption, and voting rights legislation to realize the promise of a multi-racial democracy?” said one progressive organizer. “I don’t see a way they can do both.”
-
-
-
-
The story of the shelving of participation in Venezuela’s revolutionary process is a little examined and little understood process. Yet it is crucially important. It was for the most part the work of middle cadres, in as much as they systematically undid the grassroots and organic structures in the Bolivarian movement and the PSUV party to protect their own power. This battle against organic structures was a gradual, iterative process. In effect, during the various election campaigns, organic structures of popular power took shape, including the Bolivarian circles formed before Chávez’s election, the 10-member groups that operated in the leadup to the referendum in 2004, and the party “battalions” formed in 2007. Unfortunately, after each of these organizational structures had achieved its short-term goals, the party cadres dissolved them, thereby blocking the formation of grassroots expressions of popular power, only to invent new ones when different tasks emerged.
The overall effect of this iterative process was to erode and eventually rout popular power, which came back weaker after every wave of demobilization. As a result, the above-mentioned tacit social contract was eventually consolidated, involving passive support for the government in elections in return for material well-being. The project underpinned by this arrangement was called “socialist” but in fact it had little to do with real socialist objectives. This is because a socialist project, to be meaningful and lasting, must turn on popular protagonism and the promotion of full human development.
-
The man’s smartphone camera pans the crowd on the east side of the U.S. Capitol. It’s smaller than what had amassed on the west side, but still an impressive sight. As he pans from atop the steps, he gives a front-line dispatch at 2:10 p.m., an hour after President Donald Trump had finished his remarks goading on the thousands of supporters who had come to Washington to protest the official certification of his electoral defeat.
“The cops were shooting us for a while, then they stopped,” the man says, referring to an earlier series of flash-bang grenades. “We’re up on the Capitol. I think they’re going to breach the doors. It’s getting serious. Someone’s going to die today. It’s not good at all.”
-
-
On Sunday, ProPublica published an interactive database that lets users sift through a trove of videos taken during the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 and uploaded to Parler, the social network popular among supporters of President Donald Trump that was dropped by its web host Amazon earlier this month. We also published an analysis piece about the videos by Alec MacGillis.
Since Parler was terminated by Amazon for its inaction on posts that encouraged and incited violence, we want to explain why we are reviving a subset of this material and why we believe it’s in the public interest for people to see the events of Jan. 6 as documented by, and from the perspective of, Parler users.
-
In the wake of the deadly January 6 riot at the US Capitol that President Donald Trump heavily promoted on social media, platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat, and others finally moved to ban the president.
The result? A sudden drop in the online spread of election misinformation.
According to research by Zignal Labs, which the Washington Post reported on Saturday, online misinformation about election fraud plunged 73 percent in the weeklong period following Twitter’s decision to ban Trump on January 8.
-
Political philosophers have been making these points for more than 2,000 years. Pre-modern theorists never tired of warning that, given the chance, the “many-headed monster” would trample the established order. Even liberal thinkers worried that democracy might give rise to “mobocracy”. They argued that the will of the people needed to be restrained by a combination of constitutional intricacy (individual rights, and checks and balances) and civic culture. The wiser among them added that the decay of such restraints could transform democracy into mob rule.
The first great work of political philosophy, Plato’s “Republic”, was, in part, a meditation on the evils of mob rule. Plato regarded democracy as little more than mob rule by another name—perhaps without the violence, at least at first, but with the same lack of impulse control. He compared the citizens of democracies to shoppers who see a “coat of many colours” in a market and buy it only to discover that it falls apart when it has been worn a couple of times. He noted that democracies are hard-wired to test boundaries.
-
The Russian authorities followed through on their threat to arrest opposition figure Alexey Navalny on Sunday, January 17, taking him into police custody after he landed at Vnukovo International Airport.
-
Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was detained upon his arrival in Moscow Sunday evening — his first time back in his home country since the Russian opposition politician was poisoned last August and evacuated for treatment abroad.
Traveling from Germany, Navalny was detained by police in black masks while entering passport control at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport.
His lawyer, who was traveling with him, was not allowed to accompany him. Navalny managed to kiss his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, before being led away.
-
After the 9/11 terrorist attacks, horrified Americans were ready to embrace virtually any proposal that promised to keep them safe. Government officials, for their part, were eager to curry favor with the fearful public and saw an opportunity to promote legislation and policies that had failed to win support in the past. The result was a surge of authoritarianism from which the U.S. has yet to recover. Now—with the public understandably concerned after the January 6 storming of the Capitol—we should brace ourselves for another wave of political responses that would, again, erode our liberty.
-
And over the past 20 years, I’ve seen the extremely sad decline of all these communications companies into branding and financing bureaus, and this has impacted my own business, because I used to sell software, and now I sell services, because no one can buy my software anymore, because none of these telecommunications companies are technical companies anymore.
I spend a lot of time thinking about that, why? Why is that going on? And why is it bad? And that brings me to the central question of this presentation.
In any organization, in any company, in any group, any country and even any continent, what level of technical capability, do we need to retain? How technical do we need to stay to remain viable as a company or a country or a continent? And is there a point of no return?
If you outsource too much? Is there a point where you cannot go back and relearn how actually making things work?
-
Censorship/Free Speech
-
The controversial firing came just two days after the employee warned colleagues in Washington DC to stay safe from Nazis — news first reported by Business Insider. He posted the message on January 6th, the day of the insurrection in Washington DC, as rioters associated with neo-Nazi organizations stormed the Capitol.
-
America needs to resolve its constitutional crisis through a political process, not censorship. And the world must seek a better way of dealing with speech online than allowing tech oligopolies to take control of fundamental liberties.■
-
Todon.nl permanently deleted my account without warning, irreversibly deleting everything I’d uploaded and written to it. I had invested a lot of time into it. The ban was not based on my activity on Todon.nl. The deletion was the result of the admin finding my blog post on my personal website and associating my identity with the Todon.nl user account he recognized.
-
“I was explaining to the students that this were the justifications that they were using for terrorist acts,” Damask said. “Al Qaeda would say where they get their example from. They would point to Mohammed and point to certain verses from the Quran. To relay this information to students shouldn’t be controversial at all.”
After refusing to give in, the college launched an internal investigation into Damask’s curriculum and came to a surprising conclusion. The test questions were explaining terrorism in context with major Islamic terrorist groups like Al Qaeda. Damask was merely presenting the claims of these global terrorist organizations as to why they commit such acts, AZ Central reports.
-
Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
-
The U.S. Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) on Friday warned about an increase in attacks on media professionals, following the violent takeover of the Capitol by President Donald Trump’s supporters.
-
Civil Rights/Policing
-
“I wanted a world where I could make my own decisions, go my own way and live according to my will. And I found it. A woman living under Sharia law is deprived of all her rights. We had to live under these Sharia laws. That’s why I was married young and was subjected to oppression and violence. I was looking for a place where I could freely express my thoughts and live according to my own will. I was looking for a place where I could breathe, and I found it here with the guerrillas.”
-
Monopolies
-
Silicon Valley corporations are far from neutral moral arbiters, and have a history of abusing their power. Trump was and remains a menace, but we further empower these corporate giants at our peril.
-
Parler claims that Amazon had an incentive to conspire against its platform: Namely, Amazon recently signed a deal to provide web services for Twitter. To support its claim of unfair treatment, Parler notes that Twitter was not reprimanded or punished by Amazon for the hashtag #HangMikePence, which was trending the day before Parler’s suspension. Parler asserts that Amazon’s choice to suspend its hosting was “designed to reduce competition in the microblogging services market to the benefit of Twitter.”
-
Following the [attack], Apple suspended the conservative leaning social media platform Parler from its App Store, noting in a statement: “We have always supported diverse points of view being represented on the App Store, but there is no place on our platform for threats of violence and illegal activity. Parler has not taken adequate measures to address the proliferation of these threats to people’s safety. We have suspended Parler from the App Store until they resolve these issues.”
-
The website for the social media platform Parler reappeared on Sunday after Amazon last week suspended the site from its web hosting service.
-
Amazon dropped Parler from its hosting platform earlier this month, saying in a letter it “cannot provide services to a customer that is unable to effectively identify and remove content that encourages or incites violence against others.” Parler was identified as a site where people who participated in the deadly January 6th assault on the Capitol had planned the attack.
The site is now hosted by Epik, as CNN notes, a hosting company that also supports far-right sites such as Gab and 8chan. Amazon’s suspension followed Apple and Google removing Parler’s app from their respective app stores. Matze said even Parler’s lawyers had cut ties.
-
The notification warns that organised crime groups may be preparing to produce counterfeit vaccines, spread disinformation about vaccines and illegally refill vials. It also notes that some dark web markets already feature adverts for fake COVID-19 vaccines.
In addition, the notification states: “Genuine COVID-19 vaccines will be highly valuable commodities and their supply chains (storage, transportation and delivery) will be at risk of being targeted by criminals seeking to obtain these pharmaceutical products.”
All of these activities are considered a serious threat to public health.
In October last year, the WHO issued a Medical Product Alert regarding three batches of the influenza vaccine Fluzone found in Mexico, which were not authorised by the manufacturer Sanofi Pastuer.
-
Copyrights
-
In a great start to the Sci-Hub litigation (Elsevier, Wiley, and ACS vs Sci-Hub, LibGen – for background context, see the bottom of this post), Justice Midha at the Delhi High Court repeatedly pointed out that the issues in this case involved ‘a matter of public importance’, while saying he would not want to pass any orders in the law suit without hearing the various parties that wanted to get their views heard in the case, for the interim application as well as the suit. The publishers had asked for a blocking order to be passed today, against the ‘rogue websites’ citing the self-proclaimed ‘pirate’ nature of these websites, and that certain other jurisdictions had also passed these orders. For clarity – these jurisdictions are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Spain and Sweden. Regardless of those jurisdiction’s fair dealing exception, a central question in this case will no doubt be to determine whether this falls within India’s very explicit and arguably expansive research exception, along the lines of Nikhil’s earlier arguments (here onwards)– so it seems a positive step that those reasons were not taken as sufficient to throw in a quick blocking injunction.
The Delhi Science Forum, and the Knowledge Commons, represented through Rohit Sharma, had filed an intervention application, and a group of various scientists, represented through Jawahar Raja had filed an impleadment application. The court therefore declined the plea for blocking the said websites today and ordered for the pleadings to be completed within the next 6 weeks, listing the matter for hearing after six weeks. The proceedings today otherwise mostly contained procedural and formal compliance issues, for which Sci-Hub received an extension of 2 weeks to fulfil, as well as the liberty to move an application for exemption from formal compliances, due to the peculiar nature of this case and Alexandra Elbakyan of Sci-Hub currently being in Russia. Senior counsel Gopal Sankaranarayan appeared on behalf of Sci-Hub, and senior counsel Amit Sibal appeared on behalf of the publishers.
-
On 11 November 2020, the Standing Committee of National People’s Congress of China passed the amendments to the China Copyright Law. The amended China Copyright Law will be effective as of 1 June 2021.
The China Copyright Law has been amended to address the concerns of copyright holders, enhance copyright protection, align with international standards and implement the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances that entered into force this year.
The current China Copyright Law has been enforced since 1991 and was amended in 2001 and 2010. After amendments, the China Copyright Law now consists of six chapters and 67 articles in total. The key amendments to the PRC Copyright Law include the following issues:
Statutory damages for copyright infringement have been raised to RMB5 Million compared to RMB500,000 in the current Copyright Law. And punitive damages for copyright infringement are set out.
According to the amendments to the Copyright Law, if the circumstances are serious for intentional infringement of the copyright or the rights related to the copyright, damages of one to five times the determined amount of loss or illegal income can be awarded.
-
When German engineer Karlheinz Brandenburg first released the MP3 format in the early 90s, it started a chain of events that disrupted the music industry. The RIAA initially viewed digital music files as an opportunity, but when Napster came around they became a threat. Steve Jobs came to the rescue, but that was temporary. Streaming soon changed the entire business again and the disruption continues today.
-
Video social networking service Tiktok is using the DMCA to prevent the spread of source code related to the Android variant of its software. The coder who placed the source online says that he reverse-engineered the APK to show that the company’s social media platform is a data collection engine and “legitimate spyware”.
Permalink
Send this to a friend
« Previous entries Next Page » Next Page »
Content is available under CC-BY-SA