The European Processor Initiative (EPI) has demonstrated Linux booting on the first version of its RISC-V core for high performance computing (HPC) on an FPGA The EPI project has 28 partners from 10 European countries working on an independent core for HPC. A subset of the European Processor Accelerator (EPAC) 1.0 core was implemented on programmable FPGA hardware to boot the operating system. This is expected to be used as multiple cores alongside the ARM Zeus-based cores to handle artificial intelligence, machine learning and other high performacne applications.
The boot took “a few dozens of seconds” compared to weeks using cycle-accurate software simulation. The system is fully usable and interactive for system software and application development and it also includes Ethernet connectivity to enable running large and complex software packages such as OpenMP and MPI.
One key segment of EPI activities is to develop and demonstrate fully European processor IPs based on the RISC-V Instruction Set Architecture, providing power efficient and high throughput accelerator core named EPAC (European Processor Accelerator). Using RISC-V will allow leveraging open-source resources at hardware architecture level and software level, as well as ensuring independence from non-European patented computing technologies.
First silicon implementation of EPAC 1.0 test chip is expected in the second half of 2021 and as an important technical milestone towards that goal, we have successfully booted Linux on a subset of EPAC 1.0 synthesized on FPGA. The FPGA design includes the Avispado RISC-V core, the Vector Processing Unit (VPU), the Network on Chip (NoC), the Shared L2 Cache with Coherence Home Node (L2HN), interrupt controllers, IO peripherals and several other components. This implementation will enormously speed-up software development on the EPI HPC architecture as well as testing and improving the architecture for next generations EPAC chips.
...to at least try. We all love free software (especially when it's open-source); so here are some of my top recommendations of 25+ open source apps that are amazing in their own right!
In this video, We'll be having a look at the Top 5 Ubuntu-based Linux distros that you should be using in 2021. While Ubuntu is an amazing distro in itself, These 5 Ubuntu-based distros provide you with an even better computing experience with exceptional user interfaces and stunning features.
In today's episode of Linux Essentials, I go over the basics of the Linux filesystem, as well as some commands you would use to navigate it. Also, I'll describe the purpose of some of the more common directories.
Just two days after the release of Linux 5.11.4 it has now been succeeded by Linux 5.11.5 and the maintained LTS kernels also saw new releases this morning.
Among the fixes in this latest round of point releases is a USB audio fix for the Corsair Virtuoso SE, disabling VCN for a new Navi 12 SKU, enabling headset mic support on the Acer Swift, several Btrfs file-system fixes, a fix to resume from suspend if the system is running on battery and has a RTL8105e ASIC, and several other fixes.
I'm announcing the release of the 5.11.5 kernel.
All users of the 5.11 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.11.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.11.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
I’ve been trying Canva since a few months ago, and truth is, it has blown my mind. HEY, I still LOVE inkscape, but when I started giving workshops to people who wanted to improve their social networks, reality was that my students were not experts on design, and tools like this became my allies.
I’ve always supported Freeware, since those are simply apps that have a free version along their paid features. Best from Canva is that their free version doesn’t expire, which is definitely a highlight. And that’s why today I want to tel you some of the pros and cons that I found along the way.
Hello! I made a small tool to make DNS queries over the last couple of days, and you can try it at https://dns-lookup.jvns.ca/.
I started thinking about this because I’m working on writing a zine about owning a domain name, and I wanted to encourage people to make a bunch of DNS queries to understand what the responses look like.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Sublime Text on Manjaro 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Sublime Text is a cross-platform text and source code editor with a Python API. It is a sophisticated text editor for code, markup, and prose. Its functionality is extendable with plugins. Most of the extending packages have free-software licenses and are community-built and maintained.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Sublime Text on a Manjaro 20 (Nibia).
I have lived in 100-plus-year-old brick houses for most of my life. They look nice, they are comfortable, and usually, they are not too expensive. However, humidity is high in the winter in my climate, and mold is a recurring problem. A desktop thermometer that displays relative humidity is useful for measuring it, but it does not provide continuous monitoring.
In comes the Raspberry Pi: It is small, inexpensive, and has many sensor options, including temperature and relative humidity. It can collect data around the clock, do some alerting, and forward data for analysis.
Yesterday I learned about a cool new way of streaming events from a server I hadn’t heard of before: server-sent events! They seem like a simpler alternative to websockets if you only need to have the server send events.
I’m going to talk about what they’re for, how they work, and a couple of bugs I ran into while using them yesterday.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenOffice on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache OpenOffice, commonly known as OpenOffice.org or OpenOffice, is an open-source office productivity software suite whose main components are for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, and databases.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of OpenOffice on a Debian 10 (Buster).
It is important to be able to see line numbers when working with shell scripts or configuration files. In this Linux quick tip we will show you how to quickly show line numbers in the vi editor. We will also show you how to make displaying line numbers the default behavior for vi. Finally, we will discuss using the line numbers to jump to a specific line in a file.
To show line numbers in vi or vim, simply set the number parameter. To do this enter the :set number command to turn on the number parameter. This will add a line number to each row down the left hand side.
Sometimes there could be a need to increase the disk space of your servers. It is always recommended to take a snapshot of the volume before you extend it or increase the disk size. Also, it is not advisable to decrease the disk size. Increasing the size of a volume does not increase the size of the partition, its file system must be extended. One needs to use a file system-specific command to resize the file system of the volume.
In this article, we will increase the disk space of the boot volume (root partition) with the filesystem of type ext4 of Ubuntu 20.04 Server.
ONLYOFFICE Docs is an open-source office suite distributed under GNU AGPL v3.0. It comprises web-based collaborative editors for text documents, spreadsheets, and presentations highly compatible with OOXML formats (docx, xlsx, pptx). ONLYOFFICE Docs can be used with various cloud storage platforms such as Nextcloud, ownCloud, Seafile, Alfresco, HumHub, Plone, etc., as well as embedded into your own solution. ONLYOFFICE Docs can also be used together with ONLYOFFICE Groups, a free open-source collaboration platform distributed under Apache 2.0 (the complete solution is available as ONLYOFFICE Workspace). In this tutorial, we’ll learn how to update the Docker version of ONLYOFFICE Docs. If you’re new to ONLYOFFICE Docs, learn how to install the suite on your Ubuntu machine in this article.
Linksys produces a series of wifi mesh routers under the Velop line. These routers use MQTT to send messages to each other for coordination purposes. In the version I tested against, there was zero authentication on this - anyone on the local network is able to connect to the MQTT interface on a router and send commands.
Got a video playing upside down? Here’s an easy way to rotate it via a single command in Ubuntu.
There are a few video players, e.g., SMPlayer, support for rotating by 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise during video playback.
If you want to make it permanent by exporting video rotated, besides using a heavy video editing tool, e.g., Pitivi and Openshot, the single command in this tutorial may help.
In my opinion, Linux apps are far more helpful on Chromebooks than Android apps. You get a full-fledged desktop experience and the performance remains top-notch. I love the fact that you can run the Linux version of Skype, Libre Office, Steam. etc. on a Chromebook without a hitch. Clearly, things are improving so users want all the features in Linux apps on Chromebook. For example, users want to print directly from Linux apps such as Libre Office on a Chromebook, but there is no native support. So in this article, we bring you a handy guide on how to use a printer in Linux apps on Chromebook. On that note, let’s go through the guide.
Linux has long been a favorite operating system for server administration because it’s a secure open-source operating system that’s able to be both stable and flexible.
We released a course on the freeCodeCamp.org YouTube channel that will teach you how to configure servers running the Linux operating system, including the boot process, kernel modules, network connection parameters, localization groups, and more.
Kubernetes is a very helpful tool for cloud-native developers. But it doesn't cover all the bases on its own – there are some things that Kubernetes cannot solve or that are outside its scope.
This is one of the reasons why open source projects are so great. They help amazing tools become even more amazing when we combine them with other awesome open-source tools. And often these tools were developed for the sole purpose of filling the gaps. One of these tools is Helm.
A refinery is a distributed system. There are specs and basically internal contracts on each sub-unit regarding the quantity it should process per day, what the requirements for inputs and the desired output characteristics are. Instead of queries, the inputs and outputs are, you know, oil and gas.
There are continuous and batch processes. Just like in tech, the interface between these is the subject of a lot of literature and ops knowledge.
In tech, services have availability and latency SLOs. In a refinery, there are input and output SLOs (plus specs like purity, sulfur content, water content, etc.).
In tech, there are error budgets. In a refinery, you have emission budgets as a limiting factor. You may only send x amount of NOx or SOx or CO2 into the air over the course of the day. You may only go over the target value for n hours per month, otherwise the company pays a fine. The water that leaves the grounds may only be so-and-so polluted and have at most y degrees of temperature, otherwise there is another fine. And so on.
And just like in tech, contractors do the darndest things, although in tech, you rarely get a truckload of methanol dumped into your waste water stream.
There are far more variables in the Hi-Fi and Head-Fi experiences than most realize, and depending on your current state the best way to upgrade varies significantly. Here are some examples.
If you have consumer gear, the best thing you can do to upgrade your experience is to upgrade your gear
If you have audiophile-level gear, the recording quality becomes the most important factor
High-resolution files only matter if you’re doing everything else really well
If you have a perfect recording and phenomenal gear, then (and only then) does high-res start to matter
What this snippet of code is doing, is stripping out .html from the URL path. It will also redirect anyone who visits a URL with .html appended to it, so you shouldn’t get any 404 errors if people visit the full URL.
On 04th February I flipped back to WordPress from Jekyll. This was relatively simple to do, as my guestbook was already running WordPress and used a theme that look exactly like the theme on my Jekyll site.
So, I restored a backup of my WordPress site from before the switch to Jekyll, so I had most of my content ready. I then dumped any posts I had made with Jekyll back into WordPress, and I was done. After an hour or so of work, I updated the DNS to point to my server…
And no-one even noticed!
Well, that’s not strictly true. A couple of people noticed, but over the course of the month, I even had 2 emails from readers who commented on how performant my site was and how awesome static site generators like Jekyll are for this.
Getting the thing to work as an SSH agent was, however, not the easiest thing I’ve ever done. There are multiple options here – you can use the OpenPGP applet and then configure GnuPG to work as an SSH agent, but that’s a brittle solution in my experience (gpg-agent is quite flaky, and often requires restarting when it forgets about the YubiKey). Instead, I wanted to see whether I could use the YubiKey’s PIV (Personal Identity Verification) applet to get this working.
If you're unfamiliar with async I/O, it allows you to queue up reads and writes to run in the background, and check back later to see if they're done, without having to wait before you start doing other things (like submitting even more requests). This ain't no fancy pantsy high-level javascript event loopy memory safey framework though. It's a ring buffer in memory shared directly with the kernel, and you're responsible for reading and writing the right things at the right time. Luckily the io_uring authors wrote a handy library that eases some of the pain of this.
I'm not sure if it's okay on SSDs, so here's my view. Reads aren't slowed by being deduplicated, but writes (and deletes) require a synchronous check of the DDT for every block, which means a synchronous SSD read IO if the necessary section of the DDT isn't in RAM. It's not clear to me what latency SSDs have for isolated synchronous reads, but my vaguely measured numbers suggest that we should assume on at least a couple of milliseconds per read.
As you might already know, SSH (Secure Shell) is a network protocol for securely accessing a computer remotely. The server and client software in Linux are thereby known as SSH Server and SSH Client respectively and have many implementations.
By default, SSH allows you to log in to any user of the computer, as long as you have the password for the user. However, this comes with the same problem which is faced by any software using password-based authentication: an invitation for an attacker to exploit and gain admin access.
Today, we will see how to disable SSH login to a specific user, and more importantly, to the root user.
You don't what's vulnerable until you know what's exposed. Nmap can help you find out what.
Godot 3.2.4 is going to be incredibly feature-packed, and we're taking the time necessary to ensure that it will also be stable. That's why we're releasing a fourth Release Candidate now, focused mostly on fixing issues reported against the previous RC 3. Thanks to all pre-release testers who help us find and debug regressions!
Things should now be in a pretty good shape and we hope to be able to release 3.2.4 stable soonââ¢.
For macOS, both the standard and Mono editor builds are now signed and notarized! Thanks to Prehensile Tales for the certificate and the work on the infrastructure.
The first bug fix release of Kongress, the conference companion application of the KDE community, is now available. Several fixes have been included in this release...
Kongress is available in various desktop and mobile Linux distributions. You can also install the flatpak version of Kongress from the software repository of your distribution or directly from flathub. Android users can also try the nightly build from the F-Droid repository of KDE.
A long time ago, I wrote a post about creating custom shapes in Qt Quick, via the scene-graph APIs. That post covered defining suitable geometry to draw a part of a circle, known also as a ‘sector’, efficiently, since such sectors occur commonly in instrument and vehicle interfaces. I started writing the second part, about implementing the material and shaders to make the complete functioning item.
Then, somehow, life and customers intervened, and I forgot all about publishing the second part, and now it’s an embarrassingly long time later. Not as bad as the wait for A Dance With Dragons or Duke Nukem forever, but still, embarrassing. This is all my way of saying, here’s a post about writing shaders and QtQuick scene graph materials, which is interesting but also more than three years late, and that WordPress apparently doesn’t remind you that you have drafts sitting around.
In the previous post, I talked about creating the geometry for the custom sector item. We saw that I need to define the geometry as a collection of triangles (since GPUs love triangles), each triangle having three points, or vertices. Additionally, we saw that we can create our triangles somewhat larger than we need, to allow us to make a perfectly curved edge for our sector, as well as to permit some other effects such as anti-aliasing (reducing the appearance of steps or ‘jaggies’ on the edge) and even adding borders. And UX designers love borders almost as much as they love gradients and rounded corners.
Making our triangles larger also means we need fewer. The extreme case of this is just to make two triangles (a square) covering the whole circular area of the sector. But that’s wasteful, especially as our fragment shader grows more complex, which it’s about to do. Also, on a tiled renderer (which means almost every mobile GPU in practice), if we can reduce how many tiles the geometry intersects, we get some additional performance wins. So, we want to have enough triangles that our geometry approximates our real shape, but not so many that we’re making the scene-graph or vertex processing elements do unnecessary work.
Please do not hesitate to give your feedback on Haiku in the survey - your feedback can influence decisions we make in the future. Additionally, if you have any feedback on how the survey should be conducted, please let kallisti5 know either through the forums or on the Haiku mailing lists.
Trisquel Linux is one of those computing staples you wished you knew about much sooner. This Linux distribution has been around literally for years and is extremely polished.
Trisquel GNU/Linux is based on Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS (Bionic Beaver) but comes with the Linux-Libre kernel using Ubuntu’s 4.15 kernel. That should not matter to newcomers or seasoned Linux users.
But if you are driven by the notion of purity in free software, you might have to pause to ponder where you want to straddle the line. This issue is a battle cry for some Linux users, much like their choice of, for instance, Debian versus Arch or any other Linux family.
Unlike the Debian Linux kernel, the Linux-Libre kernel lacks by design any non-free firmware. It also prevents users from loading non-free firmware even if they wish to do so. That is a major sticking point with the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which has endorsed Linux-Libre for its commitment to truly free software standards.
The definition of what constitutes true free software is a technicality. Both kernels are free software, but the FSF takes issue with the Debian GNU/Linux distribution’s inclusion of non-free repositories on the same infrastructure.
For clarity’s sake, users of distros running the Debian Linux kernel do not pay for firmware or software from distro download repositories. The developers front those costs. Trisquel is one of the few Linux distributions endorsed by the Free Software Foundation.
So technically, users ride for free either way. The Trisquel project, based in Spain, is 100 percent free to download and use. It is managed by independent developers and is partially funded by donations.
Trisquel offers a family of Linux editions that meet or exceed the needs of home users, small enterprises, and educational centers. Trisquel can also be an ideal platform for multimedia workstations.
I was catching up on podcasts yesterday and realised that Benedict Reuschling and Allan Jude had discussed my follow-up post about FreeBSD jails on episode 391! Better still, I made them both laugh, so mission accomplished :).
Allan mentioned that in addition to what I described, ZFS feature flags can be enabled for specific jails. I’ve been dealing with an issue where extended attributes aren’t being passed to Mac guests from a jail running Samba, but on the host they do. This might be an avenue of inquiry to check out.
Given the beta phase of openSUSE Leap 15.3 having started earlier this month, here are some preliminary benchmarks looking at the performance for openSUSE Leap 15.3 with the initial beta snapshot against Leap 15.2 with all stable release updates against the rolling-release openSUSE Tumbleweed.
For this initial round of benchmarking for the openSUSE Leap 15.3 beta phase, a single Intel system was used for the preliminary benchmarks while once Leap 15.3 is out this summer there will be plenty more benchmarks. The Intel system used was the recently reviewed OnLogic Helix 500 IoT/edge computer system with Core i7-10700T Comet Lake processor.
OpenSUSE Leap is set to become an identical twin to the commercial distribution SUSE Linux Enterprise in a way that CentOS never was to RHEL.
The IT skills gap continues to widen. IDC’s 2019 Worldwide CIO report shows that 30% of high-demand roles for emerging technologies will remain unfilled through 2022. As a result, training existing teams remains a top priority for CIOs, and SUSE is here to provide the level of support needed to accomplish this.
Arch Linux developers are considering some default enhancements to their Linux distribution that would increase the out-of-the-box performance.
Following openSUSE Tumbleweed using LTO by default, Fedora 33 doing it too, and Ubuntu 21.04 set to ship with LTO'ed packages, Arch Linux is finally looking at enabling link-time optimizations by default for their package builds.
Turning on link-time optimizations (LTO) often enhances the performance of the resulting binary thanks to the added optimizations that can be done at link-time on the entire binary. LTO can also provide some size benefits and other enhancements but at the cost of slower compilation times and increased memory usage. LTO though is normally working quite well these days on both the GCC and LLVM Clang compilers.
Remember when I told you about CloudLinux donating up to $1 million to a CentOS replacement annually? Well, the operating system is finally here in the form of AlmaLinux – a free, open-sourced, community-driven, 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL 8. In case you missed that news, get yourself up to speed by reading all about it here.
AlmaLinux is a community-inspired free and open-source Linux operating system developed to be the perfect replacement for CentOS 8. It was launched with the code name Project Lenix with the intention of it to be a 1:1 binary compatible fork of RHEL€® 8 after the demise of the CentOS stable release.
Built for anyone who relies on the CentOS stable release for their computing objectives, AlmaLinux is targeted at individuals and organizations that need an enterprise-grade distro similar to Fedora but can’t afford the RHEL license.
Fedora, the technology leading computer operating system, reaches version 33 last year. Fedora is family to Ubuntu as both came from GNU/Linux -- that is, variant of GNU operating system with Linux as the kernel. This article is a collection of all download links of The Editions including Workstation, Server, IoT, and The Spins so everyone can grab easily by one click. Happy downloading!
While Fedora 34 will be out around the end of next month, there are already change proposals being filed for Fedora 35 that will come in the autumn. One of those early changes for that next release cycle is referring to the OS as "Fedora Linux" within its OS release information.
Arguably most users refer to this Red Hat sponsored Linux distribution as "Fedora" and have been doing so since the original "Fedora Core" days for the distribution prior to merging of the Core and Extras repositories. But as the Fedora Project technically provides a distribution (Fedora Linux) as well as related efforts like the Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL), moving ahead they are looking at ensuring the OS is branded as Fedora Linux.
The Open Mainframe Project (OMP), an open source initiative that enables collaboration across the mainframe community to develop shared tool sets and resources, today welcomes ASG Technologies, BMC Software and High School Technical Services as well as COBOL Check and ConzoleZ to its growing global community.
In this week's Training Tuesday blog we will begin with the first in a series of blogs about Linux on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Each blog provides pointers to free, short videos that you can watch at your own pace to get a better at understanding of the products.
This first blog focuses on deploying components of your cloud. You will learn to build and administer compute instances to support your solution in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. This comprehensive set of videos includes Oracle Autonomous Linux, enabling and using the oci-utils and cloud-init utilities, working with boot volumes, the Oracle Linux KVM image, OS Management for Linux, and using Terraform to deploy Oracle Linux on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
“Rocket Software, a trusted terminal emulation partner to global companies who need access to mission-critical host systems, has launched Rocket Terminal Emulator to address terminal emulation needs more efficiently, at a lower cost, for every organisation that relies on IBM Z mainframes, IBM I, or other VT-based systems that need a terminal emulator for host access,” she says. “Rocket Terminal Emulation solutions provide a cost-effective alternative to ageing emulators. Highly configurable with native security to ensure that your critical business data remains protected, this is a cost-effective alternative that delivers exceptional value.”
Rocket Terminal Emulator (formerly Rocket BlueZone) provides a fast, reliable, and cost-efficient way to access terminal-based applications like IBM i (TN5250), IBM Z (TN3270), and UNIX/DEC (VT) from desktops, Web, or mobile devices. Rocket Terminal Emulator can deliver faster emulation with advanced functionality at a fraction of the cost of incumbent emulation technologies.
When you think of the tools a sysadmin relies on every day, an IDE isn't necessarily the first thing that comes to mind. IDEs are for developers. It's literally in the name: Integrated Development Environment (IDE). Setting aside the reality that most sysadmins by necessity do a lot more than their official job description lets on, an IDE is still a useful tool for any resourceful sysadmin with a personal collection of utilitarian scripts, a Git repo full of important Ansible plays, and half a dozen custom web portals to help their users navigate to all the important sites on the intranet.
What can be said about 2020 that hasn’t been said already? It definitely was a year where things happened and there certainly were several of those things that involved security. Looking across the vulnerability landscape, we see that more than 176,447 CVEs were reported.
Within the Red Hat portfolio, we identified 2,040 unique CVEs that impacted components we supply and support. This was far-and-away the highest volume of CVEs we’ve fixed in any calendar year on record. This translates to a significant amount of work an operator or administrator needs to do in order to keep their systems running at peak patch levels.
In 2018, Sberbank initiated a project, codenamed SberSynapse (referred to as Synapse hereafter), to develop a robust integration architecture for their banking application. Their goal was to build a cloud-native solution, so the Synapse team chose a service mesh — and, specifically, Istio — to manage communication between various banking applications and services.
In this blog post, Brad Topol, IBM Distinguished Engineer, asked the Sberbank project team to comment on their work modernizing the current integration layer, key challenges, decisions made, and lessons learned.
[...]
Vladimir Alekseev, Client Technical Architect, IBM: IBM and Sberbank have been partners for a long time, with both companies valuing open source development. IBM was a co-creator of Istio and is still one of its lead contributors, so our team was able to help Sberbank make architectural decisions and map non-functional requirements to Istio deployment in terms of performance, availability, and security.
Istio contributors from the IBM Research team in Haifa worked with experts from the IBM’s Moscow office to help the Synapse team fully understand the specifics of designing and running Istio in production and take advantage of the flexibility offered by a hybrid cloud environment.
SparkyLinux releases its first 2021 edition with the first-ever KDE Plasma flavor and it is based upon Debian 11 "Bullseye". And this release brings all packages and desktop base to its latest versions.
Designs for the new Ubuntu installer have been shared by the Canonical design team, giving us our first proper look at what’s in store for this critical system element.
As you’re probably aware of by now Ubuntu’s revamped installer leverages the new technologies underpinning its server set-up tool, and its UI is made using Flutter, Google’s open source web-based UI framework.
“Consolidating the installer for server and desktop on common technologies will mean we can deliver a consistent, robust, installation experience across the Ubuntu family and focus our efforts on maintaining a single code base,” (now ex) Ubuntu desktop lead Martin Wimpress explained back in February.
Our friends over at Portainer have been recently experimenting with Canonical’s Kubernetes distributions and created tutorials on how to run their container management system, which significantly simplifies the Kubernetes experience through an intuitive UI. They started small with MicroK8s, a lightweight Kubernetes for edge and IoT, and then looked at more complex enterprise use cases with Charmed Kubernetes on the Azure cloud.
Advantech’s “RSB-3720” Pico-ITX SBC and “EPC-R3720” system run Linux on an i.MX8M Plus with up to 6GB LPDDR4, 2x GbE, 2x USB, HDMI, serial, M.2, mini-PCIe with SIM, and expandable I/O.
Advantech has posted product pages for a Pico-ITX SBC and compact fanless industrial computer that appear to be its first products based on NXP’s NPU-equipped i.MX8M Plus. A modified version of the RSB-3720 appears to be the mainboard of the EPC-R3720 embedded computer.
Codasip, the leading supplier of customizable RISCââ¬âV processor IP, announced three commercially licensed add-ons to the Western Digital SweRV Core€® EH1. The add-ons enable the SweRV Core EH1 to be designed into a wider range of applications.
The SweRV Core EH1 is a 32-bit, dual-issue, RISC-V ISA core with a 9-stage pipeline, open-sourced through CHIPS Alliance. Codasip is now offering three add-on options to EH1...
Bluetrum, a Shenzhen-based fabless company focusing on audio chips, has designed the AB32VG1 board based on its AB5301A Bluetooth RISC-V MCU for general-purpose and audio applications.
[...]
On the software side, the Bluetrum AB32VG1 board runs RT-Thread open-source IoT real-time operating system and can be programmed with the RT-Thread Studio IDE. A getting started guide in Chinese has been made available using a simple audio player with two WAV controlled by the user buttons.
Making a CPU or indeed a whole computer system from scratch using discrete logic chips is by no means an unusual project, but it’s still one that requires quite a lot of technical ability and understanding of how computers work. Similarly, writing a UNIX-like operating system from scratch is something that’s been done more than once, but which definitely puts the author in an exclusive breed. Creating a CPU and computer system from discrete logic and then writing a UNIX-like OS for it? That’s definitely something new, but here’s [RobotMan2412] with both CPU and operating system to prove it!
The GR8CPU as he calls it is an 8-bit design with a 16-bit address space, making it equivalent to a typical mid-to-late 1970s 8-bit chip. He’s on revision 3 of the processor, and even makes the bold suggestion that it might be the most complex breadboard CPU ever made. That’s impressive enough, but to add a UNIX-like operating system makes it special.
Among the many unique features of the Commodore 128 was that it had two separate video systems! It’s 40-column mode was used when running in C128 and C64 compatibility mode, but a separate 80-column display could be invoked with a toggle keyswitch or the use of a GRAPHIC5 BASIC command.
When you think about the most popular DC characters, Batman will be the first one, comes to your mind. The number of Batman fans indeed is not less than any other heroes of the DC world. Just a few series and comics on the life of this superhero may not fill your curving for Batman things. Let’s thank some of the Android game developers. In PlayStore, there are lots of Batman games available. Some of the Batman games for Android collapse with the other heroes and let you enjoy fighting with them. So, your ultimate Batman craze must get a good thing where you can just play the role of your favorite superhero.
For many of us, our calendar is a centre point of our life. We are seeing fewer households with a wall calender or a paper day planner to organize their schedule. Instead, more households have moved over to managing their life with a digital calendar helping them to keep track of events, appointments and everyday tasks.
As with countless other tools, you don’t need a proprietary hosted solution for your calendar needs. There might just be an open source project that’s a perfect fit.
To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 8 high quality open source calendar software. Hopefully, there will be something of interest here for anyone who wants to manage their daily activities.
Many enterprises use open source enterprise support from a vendor, such as Red Hat or Canonical, to boost uptime and peace of mind. Others choose to use open source without any additional vendor support, relying on one of the major benefits of open source – the robust community support that is freely available. Oftentimes, those choices are driven by use cases, with teams opting for added support when running mission-critical workloads vs relying on community support for staging and dev environments.
Ubuntu and CentOS are both popular examples of open source Linux operating systems adopted because of the breadth of community support, but also because of the availability of enterprise-grade support. However, since the announcement last December, the CentOS project as we knew it, will be discontinued. Many CentOS users are currently looking for other OS migration options, and our team has been connecting with users wanting to find out the best way to move workloads from CentOS to Ubuntu.
If you are running CentOS in your estate and are looking to migrate to a stable, supported OS, this post outlines resources and guidance on migration from CentOS to Ubuntu.
I work for a company, Tidelift, that supports the work of open source maintainers. We care deeply about understanding the reality of maintainer life—good, bad, and otherwise—to advance the global conversation and provide better-targeted support for maintainers (in addition to paying them).
I used to be launched to open supply, as an idea, when working with some very proficient builders years in the past. All of them had “free software program” (that’s what open supply was referred to as on the time)—easy utilities that they gave away totally free, code and all.
The time period “open supply” changed free software program after a time, actually to rebrand this idea to mirror a extra commercially minded group that regarded for the business prospects on this rising motion. This gave start to Linux, MySQL, MongoDB, Puppet, and so forth. (all nonetheless broadly used in the present day) and the rise of enterprises that choose, or no less than use, open supply software program.
The attraction is greater than it simply being free. Those that select open supply expertise achieve this to take away the chance of some distributors going below or being acquired by an organization that will pull help, to call only some unfavorable outcomes. If this occurs, they’ll take the code and transfer ahead on their very own.
These already within the public clouds perceive that open supply software program is a part of the providing. There are two flavors: first, a third-party software program system that runs within the cloud. Second, some model of open supply that has been rebuilt and rebranded to be a cloud-native providing however is functionally based mostly and depending on the open supply code tree.
The GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2) mandates every Android device manufacturer to publicly release the part of Linux kernel code that they have shipped on their devices. An ideal kernel source release should be accompanied by appropriate commit history, and all the dependencies are expected to be properly documented. While we don’t expect every company to maintain such a high standard, there are a few OEMs who regularly publish the source code for all the software revisions they roll out. We are happy to report that a couple of new devices now have had their kernel sources released, namely the Xiaomi Redmi Note 10 Pro and the Redmi K40 Pro. Motorola has also updated its official GitHub repository with the kernel source code release for the Motorola Edge S and several other smartphones. The OnePlus Nord grabbed our attention as well, for which OnePlus has published kernel sources corresponding to the phone’s stable Android 11 update.
Have you ever submitted a patch to Phabricator only to have reviewbot reveal dozens of lint errors all over? Or worse yet, have you landed before reviewbot had a chance to analyze your patch and been backed out over lint failures? If so fear not, we’ve all been there. Still, it’s hard not to feel a little embarrassed when it happens. Luckily for you, it’s pretty easy to eliminate the possibility of it ever happening again!
There are many places where one might want to run linters. In an editor for early and rapid feedback. At commit or submit time in case you forgot to run it in an editor. At review time in case you forgot to run it before submitting. Finally in CI in case all of the above fails. The key area to focus on here is at submit time. While running linters in your editor or at commit time can be beneficial, it’s at submission that you’ll want to have your backstop. That way you will be only person to ever know how many lint mistakes you let slip!
For YottaDB to be a Web Application database, it must be integrated with a Web Server. The Web Server provides the outward-facing HTTP/HTTPS interface by which web browsers and REST clients communicate with the web application server.
I read up and discovered LanguageTool, a LibreOffice add-on. It requires Java, which made me nervous about performance, but it’s been fine for the past week or so. It’s not blowing my mind, but it behaves much more like a modern spellcheck, so it was worth the installation for me.
We’ve put the flyer source file on our wiki (in ODG format, for opening in LibreOffice Draw), so translations in more languages would be great! If you make a translation, please email it to us and we’ll add it to the wiki.
And then: let’s get the flyers out there! We’ll print copies of these flyers, so if you want to distribute them in your school or university, send us an email and we’ll talk further.
Yay! We are participating in GSoC once again this year and our org features in the list of this year’s accepted organizations.
For 2021, GNU has not been selected as a GSoC organization. This also means that GNUnet GSoC projects will not be offered through the GSoC programme. Thanks to all of those interested in our proposed projects and their efforts in preparing proposals, including preliminary discussions with us. If you are still interested in tackling any of the proposed open issues, you are very welcome to do so.
Until this week I did not know about the column command.
Dictionaries are the Python programming language's way of implementing data structures. A Python dictionary consists of several key-value pairs; each pair maps the key to its associated value.
For example, say you're a teacher who wants to match students' names to their grades. You could use a Python dictionary to map the keys (names) to their associated values (grades).
Sylvestre Ledru who is a director at Mozilla by day while also being prolific to Debian/Ubuntu and LLVM/Clang development has managed to get a Rust version of Coreutils packaged and running well enough on Debian.
Using "uutils" as a Rust implementation of the key Coreutils - GNU core utilities, some of the key CLI tools found on Linux systems - Ledru has managed to get a booting Debian system. Not only is Debian booting with the Rust-based Coreutils implementation but it's handling the most popular Debian packages, building Firefox / Linux / Clang, and more. Ledru wrote more than 100 patches to get the code along this far and used it as an exercise to get more involved with Rust.
Founded on March 7, 1981, the Leningrad Rock Club was the first and largest venue in the Soviet Union where young people could legally perform rock music. Located on Rubinstein Street in what is now St. Petersburg, in the 1980s the Leningrad Rock Club counted more than 150 bands among its members, including groups like Aquarium, Kino, Alisa, Zoopark, and DDT that would go on to become Russian rock legends. While the rock club is also known for its connections to the KGB (indeed, it was officially overseen by the Soviet security agency) this shouldn’t overshadow the fact that real art was created within its walls; despite the censorship and constant pressure, the Leningrad Rock Club gave birth to new music, the best of which rivaled Western rock.
“To the memory of Christopher Columbus,” reads the inscription to the large Columbus Fountain in Washington, D.C., “whose high faith and indomitable courage gave to mankind a New World.” The monument was erected in 1912, and one cringes reading those words now. Columbus did not give mankind a New World. As the statue of the Native American man kneeling by Columbus’s side suggests, that world was already fully possessed by humanity.
In a lot of ways, I have it easy. I have enough experience with software development and security research under my belt to basically ignore the requirements that HR puts on job listings and still get an interview with most companies. (If you want a sense of what this looks like, look no further than rawr-x3dh or my teardown of security issues in Zed Shaw’s SRP library… which are both things I did somewhat casually for this blog.)
The irony is, I’m probably deeply overqualified for the majority of the jobs that come across my inbox, and I still don’t meet the HR requirements for the roles, and the people who are actually a good fit for it don’t have the same privilege as me.
So if the rules are made up and the points don’t matter, why do companies bother with these pointlessly harrowing job requirements?
"HCA and the Frists join the ranks of pandemic profiteers that have seen their fortunes soar during a time of national tragedy."
Expanding health care incrementally through the American Rescue Plan will help save lives now, and lay the groundwork for health care for all later.
COVID-19 and its variants reduce poor nations to producers of pathogens that will continue to disrupt economic and social life in wealthy nations.€
Everything looks the same on either side of the Texas-New Mexico border in the great oil patch of the Permian Basin. There are the pump jacks scattered across the plains, nodding up and down with metronomic regularity. There are the brown highway signs alerting travelers to historical markers tucked away in the nearby scrub. There are the frequent memorials of another sort, to the victims of vehicle accidents. And there are the astonishingly deluxe high school football stadiums. This is, after all, the region that produced “Friday Night Lights.”
The city of Hobbs, population just under 40,000, sits on the New Mexico side, as tight to the border as a wide receiver’s toes on a sideline catch. From the city’s eastern edge to the Texas line is barely more than two miles. From Hobbs to the Texas towns of Seminole and Denver City is a half-hour drive — next door, by the standards of the vast Southwestern plains.
John Oliver has demolished many institutions in his time (not literally, unfortunately, in most cases) as the host of HBO's Last Week Tonight. It's rare when a mainstream program chooses to address more esoteric matters often discussed at this website. But Oliver does it more than most and, for that, we truly appreciate him.
The Trump administration has outsourced Medicare to€ insurance companies€ and other for-profit middlemen,€ placing them between Americans and their doctors.€
It was a chilly Wednesday in January when Kaylynn Begaye, six months pregnant, walked into the lobby of the Changing Woman Initiative, her mother, Christine, by her side. Begaye, 33, found herself in this clinic in Santa Fe, N.M., after one too many doctor visits in nearby Albuquerque had left her stressed out. Since giving birth to a son eight years ago, followed by a daughter five years later, Begaye, who is Diné (Navajo), said the treatment she endured during both of those deliveries left her dreading having to go through it all over again: getting separated from her newborns at birth without her consent, being rushed out of her hospital room while still in postpartum recovery, seeing her family treated poorly by a mostly white staff. The birth of her third baby would be different, she vowed. This time, it would be on her own terms.1
Martin Bolz began to smoke marijuana at 16. Now, three years later, he’s still smoking, though he says he won’t smoke forever. His “marijuana habit,” as he calls it, won’t help him get into the U.S. Air Force. No, he doesn’t want to drop bombs.€ He wants the Air Force to pay€ for grad school. “I’m a productive stoner,” Bolz tells me. “I’ve been able to train my mind to do the same things with cannabis that I do without it.”
When asked to describe his relationship to weed, Bolz says, “It’s complicated.” Many if not most Norcal teens deplore weed and praise it, insist they’d like to stop but€ go on using€ it. Are they addicted? Depends on how one defines addiction.
Recently, I’ve seen a presentation by a pediatrician named Dr. Elizabeth Mumper being promoted by antivaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his antivaccine organization Children’s Health Defense entitled “How will we know that a COVID vaccine is safe?” It’s a great example of antivaccine propaganda disguised as “concerns” that are portrayed as seemingly reasonable but fall apart upon closer inspection. Before I get to that closer inspection of the video itself, however, let me explain how Dr. Mumper’s video is a perfect teaching tool to help identify antivaccine propaganda, particularly in the way that it basically answers the question with antivaccine talking points and an impossible standard.
The Irish Nurses and Midwives Organisation (INMO) has today joined with nursing and healthcare unions around the world in calling for the waiving of Intellectual Property rules regarding Covid-19 vaccines.
Alongside members of the Global Nurses Union (GNU), the INMO is calling on the Council for Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (Trips) of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to support the proposed waiver “to ensure equitable and speedy vaccine production and distribution”.
Executive summary: many people who had plenty of money and stability in February 2020 now have have at least as much, often more. All the others are worse off. Sometimes a lot.
Disclosed today is CVE-2021-21300 as a security vulnerability affecting git clone that could lead to specially crafted repositories being able to execute code during the Git clone process.
Git versions back to v2.15 are affected by this security vulnerability. Specially crafted repositories could execute code during the git clone process on case-insensitive file-systems supporting symbolic links. The vulnerability stems from clean/smudge filters being abused like those used by Git LFS.
Current and previous versions for the Tor Onion Router software have two undisclosed Denial Of Service vulnerabilities with the potential to cause problems for the Tor networks authority servers. The Torproject will release a new version with a fix "early next week". Everyone who is using Tor Browser or running a Tor node should upgrade when it becomes available.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced the sigstore project. sigstore improves the security of the software supply chain by enabling the easy adoption of cryptographic software signing backed by transparency log technologies.
sigstore will empower software developers to securely sign software artifacts such as release files, container images and binaries. Signing materials are then stored in a tamper-proof public log. The service will be free to use for all developers and software providers, with the sigstore code and operation tooling developed by the sigstore community. Founding members include Red Hat, Google and Purdue University.
“sigstore enables all open source communities to sign their software and combines provenance, integrity and discoverability to create a transparent and auditable software supply chain,” said Luke Hinds, Security Engineering Lead, Red Hat office of the CTO. “By hosting this collaboration at the Linux Foundation, we can accelerate our work in sigstore and support the ongoing adoption and impact of open source software and development.”
OpenSSF, a cross-industry collaboration to secure the open source ecosystem, today announced new membership commitments to advance open source security education and best practices. New members include Citi, Comcast, DevSamurai, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Mirantis, and Snyk.
Open source software (OSS) has become pervasive in data centers, consumer devices and services, representing its value among technologists and businesses alike. Because of its development process, open source has a chain of contributors and dependencies before it ultimately reaches its end users. It is important that those responsible for their user or organization’s security are able to understand and verify the security of this dependency supply chain.
Get authenticated access to an Exchange server without needing a password.
[...]
To start with, we’re going to use a compact and stripped-down scripting language called Lua as an example. (Lua is a bit like Perl, Python, Ruby and their ilk, only much smaller.)
Like all those languages, it comes with a shell, often also referred to as a REPL, short for read-evaluate-print loop, which does what the name suggests.
Simply put, instead of running an existing program directly, a REPL typically prints a prompt and waits for you to type in a command or language statment, whereupon it executes the statement immediately, prints any results and goes back for more.
You can therefore work interactively, computing results, constructing new programs in memory and running them, building data structures, creating files, and even running external programs found elsewhere on your computer.
With a REPL or a shell you can quite literally make it all up as you go along, rather than being stuck with a program you created earlier.
Last autumn, we learned about a severe attack called NAT Slipstreaming, which ultimately enables a remote attacker to establish arbitrary TCP and UDP connections to the victim's client behind a NAT firewall, bypassing the firewall ruleset configured. No complex user interaction is required for this, visiting a malicious website - or a legitimate one with malicious content from third parties such as advertisement or tracking servers embedded - while having JavaScript enabled is sufficient.
In addition, NAT Slipstreaming allows an attacker to execute port scans out of the victim's browser against local networks the victim has access to. This can be used to detect vulnerable clients such as network printers or IoT devices, even if they are not allowed to establish connections to the internet themselves because of a corresponding firewall ruleset. Such IT equipment is unfortunately rarely patched, and vendors tend to discontinue support and updates for them quickly.
A second, improved version of this attack was disclosed in late January, extending the attack vector to establish arbitrary TCP and UDP connections to any device behind the victim's NAT. While the portscan method already exposes vulnerable internal clients to a significant risk, this reduces the effort needed to compromise them drastically.
To stress the meaning of this again: Any network device the victim's client can establish connections to can be scanned and subsequently targeted effectively by a remote attacker, either directly or indirectly, just by having the victim visiting a website. In terms of security, things hardly can get worse than this.
I’d always say the biggest security threat to any system is the human using it. That’s not because said human is malicious or incompetent – people make mistakes, after all. But that’s compounded when you’re effectively tricked into making mistakes by phishing attacks or malware. A lot of phishing is carried out to compromise online accounts and Linux is lucky that most malware still targets Windows.
But equally those puny human design systems that are flawed, and not always in obvious ways. Two-factor authentication is an awesome tool and it can make you feel super secure… even when the system is flawed. After all, when you can just select a “forgot your password” link and have everything reset, then any extra security goes out the window.
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (firefox, kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, libebml, and wpa_supplicant), openSUSE (mbedtls), Oracle (kernel, kernel-container, and screen), Red Hat (curl, kernel, kernel-rt, kpatch-patch, nss-softokn, python, and virt:rhel and virt-devel:rhel), Scientific Linux (screen), SUSE (389-ds, crmsh, openldap2, openssl-1_0_0, and wpa_supplicant), and Ubuntu (glib2.0, gnome-autoar, golang-1.10, golang-1.14, and libzstd).
In June 2016, the Green Bay Police Department was investigating a hit-and-run accident and vehicle fire. Since Burch had previously driven the vehicle at issue, the police questioned him. Burch provided an alibi involving text messages with a friend who lived near the location of the incident. To corroborate his account, Burch agreed to an officer’s request to look at those text messages on his cell phone. But, despite initially only asking for the text messages, the police used a sophisticated mobile device forensic tool to copy the contents of the entire phone. Then about a week later, after reviewing the cell phone data, a Green Bay Police officer wrote a report that ruled Burch out as a suspect, finding that there was “no information to prove [Burch] was the one driving the [vehicle] during the [hit-and- run] accident.”
But that’s not where things end. Also in the summer of 2016, a separate Wisconsin police agency, the Brown County Sheriff’s Office, was investigating a homicide. And in August, Burch became a suspect in that case. In the course of that investigation, the Brown County Sheriff's Office learned that the Green Bay Police Department had kept the download of Burch’s cell phone and obtained a copy of it. The Brown County Sherriff’s Office then used information on the phone to charge Burch with the murder.€
Burch was ultimately convicted but argued that the evidence from his cell phone should have been suppressed on Fourth Amendment grounds. Last fall, a Wisconsin intermediate appellate court certified Burch’s Fourth Amendment challenge to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, writing that the “issues raise novel questions regarding the application of Fourth Amendment jurisprudence to the vast array of digital information contained in modern cell phones.” In December, the Wisconsin Supreme Court decided to review the case and asked the parties to address six specific questions related to the search and retention of the cell phone data.€ €
The FBI wants these terms to sound scary, but they actually describe security best practices. End-to-end encryption is what allows users to exchange messages without having them intercepted and read by repressive governments, corporations, and other bad actors. And “user-only access” is actually a perfect encapsulation of how device encryption should work; otherwise, anyone who got their hands on your phone or laptop—a thief, an abusive partner, or an employer—could access its most sensitive data. When you intentionally weaken these systems, it hurts our security and privacy, because there’s no magical kind of access that only works for the good guys. If Wray gets his special pass to listen in on our conversations and access our devices, corporations, criminals, and authoritarians will be able to get the same access.€
It’s remarkable that Wray keeps getting invited to Congress to sing the same song. Notably, Wray was invited there to talk, in part, about the January 6th insurrection, a serious domestic attack in which the attackers—far from being concerned about secrecy—proudly broadcast many of their crimes, resulting in hundreds of arrests.€
It’s also remarkable what Wray, once more, chose to leave out of this narrative. While Wray continues to express frustration about what his agents can’t get access to, he fails to brief Senators about the shocking frequency with which his agency already accesses Americans’ smartphones. Nevertheless, the scope of police snooping on Americans’ mobile phones is becoming clear, and it’s not just the FBI who is doing it. Instead of inviting Wray up to Capitol Hill to ask for special ways to invade our privacy and security, Senators should be asking Wray about the private data his agents are already trawling through.€
Brendan Eich emphasizes that Brave Search (and the Browser behind it) will not treat its users or its users’ data the way that€ Google does. Eich emphasized:
On February 19, the Utah House of Representatives passed an amended version of the controversial bill that would mandate a default “porn filter” on any phones, computers, tablets or any other electronic devices sold in the state starting in 2022.
HB 72, sponsored by Rep. Susan Pulsipher (R-South Jordan) — a realtor with no technology experience — was speedily passed by the House only hours after it had cleared the committee stage by the narrowest of margins (a 6-5 vote).
The University of Idaho is one of hundreds of colleges and universities that adopted fever scanners, symptom checkers, wearable heart-rate monitors and other new Covid-screening technologies this school year. Such tools often cost less than a more validated health intervention: frequent virus testing of all students. They also help colleges showcase their pandemic safety efforts.
But the struggle at many colleges to keep the virus at bay has raised questions about the usefulness of the technologies. A New York Times effort has recorded more than 530,000 virus cases on campuses since the start of the pandemic.
One problem is that temperature scanners and symptom-checking apps cannot catch the estimated 40 percent of people with the coronavirus who do not have symptoms but are still infectious. Temperature scanners can also be wildly inaccurate. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has cautioned that such symptom-based screening has only “limited effectiveness.”
In spite of repeated rulings by the European Court of Justice against data retention, a group of EU governments insist that new legislation is ââ¬Å¾urgently needed“. France, Spain and five other countries spoke in favour of a new data retention law at a closed-door video meeting of member states on February 8, a working paper drawn up by the Portuguese council presidency reveals (full document here).
Data retention laws require providers of telecommunications service to keep records of their customers data for use by law enforcement. However, the ECJ has struck down the EU’s 2006 Data Retention Directive and has ruled against similar provisions in national law for violation of fundamental rights.
And finally, access control should recognize the distributed nature of organizations and services, and encode the identity that could be independently verified. We can establish it as an identity property.
This might not be a complete set of properties to build such a system, but it might be a minimally required one.
It does not. At best, it’s an improvement in factoring — and I’m not sure it’s even that. The paper is a preprint: it hasn’t been peer reviewed. Be careful taking its claims at face value.
Could the source lie in the complete idiocy of the Italian colonial ‘masters’? How about the fissiparous constellation of sultanates? Or, better yet, let’s blame it on Cold War eye-pokery, with the Soviets backing the frankly disgusting dictator Mohammed Siad Barre to the hilt. Maybe it’s U.S. support for favoured post-Barre warlords that led to the current assholery. Or the total lack of functional state institutions. The secessionist dreams of Somaliland and Puntland? Could the Saudis have a shine for fundamentalists Al-Shabaab? It might make sense if you want control over the vital Gulf of Aden.
No answer comes: the web of potential causes is too knotted. Al-Shabaab has control of much of the countryside. And that means these days that it’s a free-fire drone zone, with multiple platforms aloft and killing people at any given time of day. It’s such a ‘rich target environment’ that the CIA’s drones are all over, flying off aircraft carriers or from the surprisingly numerous regional U.S. bases, including a secret one in Mogadishu reported on by the indefatigable Jeremy Scahill.
In 2000, Viktor Mokhov abducted two women, then 14 and 17 years old, and kept them in his basement where he raped and abused them. One of the two women gave birth to two children while living in the basement, with the other prisoner aiding the delivery. Mokhov abandoned these children in the entrances of residential buildings. After his arrest in 2004 and trial, Mokhov served his entire sentence of 16 years and 10 months. Now 70 years old, Mokhov has returned home, but rumors are circulating that a television network paid him for an exclusive talk-show appearance. The whole thing could, however, be a sick joke.
British authorities continue to participate in many EU instruments in the area of justice and home affairs, and cooperation in some cases even goes further than with the Schengen states Norway, Iceland or Switzerland. The exit from Europol and the Schengen Information System could strengthen the secret services.
There's a lot of competition for Worst Police Force in America. The NYPD is known for its casual approach to human life and its antagonistic approach to public records requesters. The Chicago PD operated its own black site to separate residents from their rights while interrogating them. The Pasco County Sheriff's Department thinks it should be in the business of turning students into criminals. The list goes on and fucking on.
In practical terms, this would translate into the projection of US military power over the Korean Peninsula through a de facto trilateral military alliance between the US, Japan and South Korea as part of the enlarged “Indo-Pacific plan.”
It would also mean returning to the doomed pressure policies of€ Obama’s “strategic patience” approach toward North Korea, which emphasized containment via sanctions and deterrence while demanding substantial concessions from Pyongyang up front.
The Cuban government denied over and over again that it was responsible for this strange disease that neither the laws of physics nor dozens of scientists from a wide variety of disciplines could explain. If, according to various versions by Trump’s State Department, the cause were a sonic or microwave weapon, how could the waves have been perceived by certain people gathered in the same place and not others? How could a strong energy emission have had a selective effect? Did someone have James Bond’s magic ray gun? Was it SPECTRE (Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion), the secret organization that the most famous spy in British films fought against?
The National Security Archive, an independent nongovernmental research institute, based at George Washington University, recently released the executive summary of a 2018 report from the State Department’s Accountability Review Board (ARB) after a four-month investigation. The strange attacks against U.S. diplomats in Havana served as a pretext to initiate the Trump administration’s sanctions against Cuba—242 measures in four years applied against a single country, an unprecedentedrecord in U.S. foreign policy.
"What matters most now are concrete actions in 2021 to stop funding fossil fuel expansion and setting a timeline for phasing out fossil fuel financing overall."
Global shutdown during Covid-19 has forced down carbon emissions. But no inadvertent pause can replace global resolve.
The Swedish climate activist, who encouraged her social media followers to vote for Biden in 2020, said the president's current climate policies are not in line with efforts to keep global temperatures below 1.5 degrees Celsius—a crucial global warming benchmark set by the Paris climate conference.
You can't put a fire out and pour millions of barrels of tar sands on it at the same time.
"It's up to President Biden to continue with the country's renewable energy agenda and reduce our reliance on fossil fuels. After his action to halt Keystone XL, stopping Line 3 is essential."
The combined power usage of all these devices which I use in a typical work day tops out at just under 110 watts. This quite an accomplishment in my opinion. My work has not been hampered in any significant way either. I have enough processing power and enough RAM and enough software compatibility to do all the things I need to do. I can even run heavy legacy Windows 10 VMs which are required for some legacy contract work I am still on the hook for without skipping a beat.
With the Oregon Legislature taking up bills to overhaul or eliminate the Oregon Forest Resources Institute after a news investigation last August, lobbyists have repeatedly attacked the reporting as incorrect.
The institute is a quasi-governmental agency meant to promote forestry education. The joint investigation by The Oregonian/OregonLive, Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica found that the institute had acted as a de facto lobbying arm of the timber industry, in some cases skirting legal constraints that forbid it from doing so.
"We need to stop destroying forests and other nature, for the sake of our health, biodiversity, and climate."
If all goes well, the Migizi Aviary and Rehabilitation Center could open in the next two years and launch a new chapter for tending to a formerly endangered species whose numbers are slowly recovering in the state.
Even before the pandemic hit, the feeling was pervasive: When we’re raising children in America, we’re going it alone. Demands for more support are growing, but the persistent lack of interest by our government in the essential work of child-rearing has fueled the sense that launching children safely into the world is something we have to figure out on our own. We were struggling—some much more than others—even before Covid-19 roared into our lives. But the pandemic has fully exposed the brutal logic of modern parenting. Too many families entered the crisis with too little. With schools shuttered, many of these children lost access to meals, counseling, and clean clothes. Suddenly without child care, thousands of mothers were pushed out of the workforce. Shut inside our homes, cut off from family and friends, robbed of the solidarity forged at the playground, we battle an isolation that feels more acute than ever.
Jing Fong, Manhattan’s largest Chinese restaurant, is dead. When I visited on March 2, the two grand escalators ascending to the third-floor banquet hall were frozen. The restaurant could once seat a thousand people upon red carpet, beneath golden dragons and resplendent chandeliers. But last week only two of its six heaters were working, and next to the dining room’s entrance were just a handful of patrons eating out of takeout containers. After nearly three decades on Elizabeth Street, Jing Fong limped through its final days—its dining room closing for good on March 7.
Sen. Bernie Sanders called the American Rescue Plan "the most significant piece of legislation to benefit working families in the modern history of this country."
A federal consumer watchdog agency has launched an investigation into a company that aggressively sued thousands of Latino borrowers in Texas during the coronavirus pandemic while depicting itself as a financial ally of the community.
Oportun Inc., a Silicon Valley-based installment lender, which was founded to help Latino immigrants build credit so they can go on to achieve the American Dream, disclosed to investors last week that it had received a civil investigative demand from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
"There's really no good argument for not doing this except that Wall Street is very nervous about this escalating into the first successful progressive tax reform in 50 years."
The household survey showed the unemployment edging down to 6.2 percent, while the employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) also ticked up 0.1 percentage point to 57.6 percent. That is down 3.5 percentage points from its year-ago level.
Small Businesses and Older Workers Hit Hardest Small businesses continue to be hard hit in the recession. The number of incorporated self-employed is down by 797,000 over the last year, or 12.3 percent. There is relatively little change in the number of unincorporated self-employed, but these businesses tend to be smaller and are often part-time, like selling items on the web.
House and Senate Democrats have made passage of the democracy-strengthening For the People Act a top priority. Given our intense partisan divisions, it is not surprising that Republicans have not yet gotten on board. But this isn’t and shouldn’t be a partisan issue. There are good reasons for principled Republicans to embrace the For the People Act just as many congressional Republicans embraced the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act in the 1960s.
"The government's increasingly brutal counter-insurgency campaign... no longer makes any distinction between armed rebels and non-combatant activists, labor leaders, and rights defenders."
"The election starts today," said one prominent political reporter. "It's virtually impossible Lula won't be a candidate.
Remember Michael Pack? That's the Steve Bannon protégé who Trump appointed last year to head the US Agency for Global Media. USAGM is the organization that oversees Voice of America, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, Radio Free Asia, Middle East Broadcasting and the Open Technology Fund. It was an open secret that Pack was appointed to turn those widely respected, independent, news organizations into pure Breitbart-style propaganda outfits. He wasted little time causing a huge fucking mess, firing a ton of people in a manner so upsetting that even Republican Senators were concerned. It also turned out that many of the people he fired... he legally had no right to fire.
Today is the 8th anniversary of the untimely death of President Hugo Chávez.
Immediately after, the USA, Canada and allies intensified their attempts to overthrow the Venezuelan government, believing his successor, Nicolás Maduro, would be unable to follow in Chávez’ shoes and would fall easily.
Guantánamo is a crime against humanity and there will never be any justification to rationalize why hundreds of people were held indefinitely, without trial, without due process, without international observers and without ever seeing their families and loved ones.€
A new feature film, “The Mauritanian,” tells the story of Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man who was held without charge for 14 years at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo and repeatedly tortured. We speak with Mohamedou Ould Slahi, who says the film is not just about his struggle. “This is not my movie. This is the movie of so many people,” he says. “Some of the people who were kidnapped after 9/11 were tortured to death. They did not have a chance to tell their story.” We also speak with Kevin Macdonald, director of “The Mauritanian”; Nancy Hollander, the lead lawyer for Mohamedou Ould Slahi; and actor Tahar Rahim, whose portrayal of Slahi earned him a Golden Globe nomination.
“That’s certainly our goal and our intention.” This was the non-committal answer given by White House Press Secretary, Jen Psaki, when, on February 12, she was asked by a reporter whether the new Joe Biden administration intends to shut down the notorious Guantánamo Bay Prison by the end of the president’s first term in office.
President Joe Biden is facing new calls to close the U.S. military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an enduring symbol of U.S. abuses in the “war on terror.” Since 2002, about 770 men and boys have been held at the prison, and only eight have been convicted of a crime. Three of the convictions were later overturned on appeal. Today the prison’s population is down to 40, and shortly after Biden’s inauguration, seven former prisoners penned an open letter to the new president pleading with him to finally close the facility. One of the seven authors was Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian man who was held without charge for 14 years, during which time he was repeatedly tortured, before his release in 2016. He says he also wrote a personal letter to Biden asking him to close the prison. “I really believe he’s a good man,” Slahi says. We also speak with Slahi’s lead defense attorney, Nancy Hollander, who says there is no justification for keeping “forever prisoners” at the facility. “If the political will is there, President Biden can get Guantánamo closed,” Hollander says.
Manchin floated a return to the talking filibuster, which would represent a major change to the current "no-show filibuster" that allows obstruction via email.
One of the favorite tropes in Washington journalism is “Democrats in disarray.” It’s a much-recycled story line for a good reason: It’s often true. Compared to the overwhelmingly white and evangelical-dominated Republican Party, the Democrats are a very diverse coalition and very quick to fracture. Still, it’s a bit odd to see this narrative trotted out after the Democrats successfully passed a $1.9 trillion stimulus bill, a major legislative achievement by any measure.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has refused to recognize Viktor Lukashenko (Viktar Lukashenka) — the eldest son of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko (Alyaksandr Lukashenka) — as the head of Belarus’s National Olympic Committee (NOC). This was announced in a press release on the IOC’s website on Monday, March 8.
This past weekend, the Moscow bar Rovesnik hosted its most recent “Zvonok Drugu” (“Phone a Friend”) party, where only non-professional DJs are invited to perform guest sets. Ahead of the event, the nightclub advertised that a “mystery girl from the northern capital” was coming to the party to DJ her first set. Reports quickly followed that the “mystery girl” was Luisa Rozova — the alleged illegitimate daughter of Russian President Vladimir Putin. During the party itself, journalists reported increased security and the presence of anti-extremism agents — but the bar’s owner later denied these claims. Here’s what happened at Rovesnik on Saturday night.
Many of today’s do-nothing Republicans pretend they believe in the tooth fairy, sex trafficking Democrats running pedophile rings and beholden to Satan and nearly every other conspiracy and horror story that’s swimming in the internet sewer.
Biden at the same time has been charging full speed ahead since even before he sat down at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, looking and acting all presidential all of the time, not always following in the footsteps of his former leader, President Barack Obama.
America is again approaching a crucial decision-point on the most fundamental right of all in a democracy – the right to vote. The result will either be the biggest advance since LBJ’s landmark Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965, or the biggest setback since the end of Reconstruction and start of Jim Crow in the 1870s.
The Hennepin County Courthouse will soon be teeming with satellite-equipped news media trucks and throngs of reporters from around the country as the trial of former Minneapolis police officer, Derek Chauvin for the killing of George Floyd is only weeks away. Charged with two counts of second-degree manslaughter and second-degree unintentional murder, Chauvin could soon face an additional charge of third-degree murder.
A new report from Washington D.C.-based think tank the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) concludes that the U.S. government should work closely with social media companies to ensure that protest movements around the world result in an outcome more conducive to American interests. Along with intern Riley McCabe, the organization’s senior fellow, Samuel Brannen, argued that the White House, State Department, and intelligence community must explore deeper coordination with major tech companies that provide global media platforms:
The Brazilian Supreme Court on March 8 dismissed all charges against former President Luis Inacio “Lula” da Silva made during the Lava Jato investigation, a little over a month after the investigation was officially ended. The termination came shortly after the Supreme Court admitted 6 terabytes of leaked Telegram chats between public prosecutors and judges as evidence in the case.
“We have terminated a number of channels and removed several videos from YouTube in accordance with our community guidelines and applicable laws,” a YouTube spokeswoman said in a statement in response to a Reuters question.
The channels taken down include the state network, MRTV, (Myanma Radio and Television) as well as the military-owned Myawaddy Media, MWD Variety and MWD Myanmar, YouTube said.
“I didn’t realize Dr. Seuss made us all racists,” he quipped.
As usual, a flippant retort to a flippant remark moves the conversation nowhere. One has to dig a bit deeper.
The three biggest terrorist organizations in the world today are ISIS, Boko Haram, and al-Shabaab. Boko Haram has been operating in Nigeria since 2009, and ISIS started a splinter group there in 2015 called Islamic State West Africa Province (ISWAP). Al-Shabaab operates out of Somalia and mainly in East Africa.
There is also another lesser known group which we at ICC term “Fulani militants.” This is a hostile group of individuals who attack Christian farming communities throughout the Middle Belt of Nigeria.
Network data from the NetBlocks Internet Observatory confirm the disruption of social media and messaging apps in Senegal as of Friday 5 March 2021. Metrics show that Facebook, YouTube, WhatsApp, and some Telegram servers were restricted on leading cellular network operator Orange/Sonatel as of early morning Friday. Affected services have subsequently been restored from 7:30 a.m. UTC.
At least 1,129 female media workers in post-Soviet countries were subjected to attacks for their work last year, says a new report from the Justice for Journalists Foundation (JFJ). This figure includes three female journalists who lost their lives.€
"The trauma inflicted on this little girl and her mother will be a permanent scar and will ripple out into the community for years to come."
William Anderson, then 64, breathes a tiny sigh of relief when he sees his youngest son, Naeem, sitting across the table from him. His son looks back with the same wide brown eyes he’s always remembered. At 23, Naeem (a pseudonym, as are all the names of the family members in this article) still has a baby face, more pronounced now that he’s clean-shaven, his coiled locks no longer sprouting wildly from his head. Unlike the many times before, however, he isn’t visiting his father in prison; this day, he’s housed in the same facility. William and Naeem have only this one face-to-face visit to connect in real time before Naeem embarks on his own long sentence. William hopes to mentally and emotionally prepare his son for “the life inside.”
Toward the end of a weekend trailer visit to my incarcerated father in New York State in 1992, when I was 12, I had an emotional meltdown—and not for the first time. Trailer visits are occasional overnight accommodations provided to family members of people serving long sentences who’ve kept a good disciplinary record. On that particular weekend, I’d brought a stack of homework that I had to complete before school on Monday. We’d had a couple of happy days together, cooking epic meals of fresh vegetables, tofu, and brown rice, playing chess and cards, watching movies—even as I refused his advice to do my homework the whole time. (Sound familiar?) On the second and last night, I had a temper tantrum: I didn’t want to do my homework, or at least that was the trigger for a lot of pent-up emotion. The joy of every prison visit was punctured by the grim realization that I was going to have to leave, and that my dad would not be coming with me. In a fit, I threw all my homework out the window into the dark, windy yard. In that otherwise banal act of rebellion, I created a terrible dilemma for my father. He could leave the trailer to chase down my papers in the dark before they blew away, violating a prison rule and risking a discipline violation, or “ticket,” which would not only tarnish his perfect record but also forfeit future visits with me. Or he could protect himself and our access to the trailer visits by doing nothing, sending me home the next day without my schoolwork. He put me first.1
Ana brushes her hair in front of the mirror with a haunted look in her eyes. Minutes pass; her hair is still wet. She feels cold and realizes she was lost in her own thoughts again. In a rush, she puts her hair in a ponytail and leaves her small bedroom. Her head is spinning. I have to take the children to school, clean the house, go to the supermarket, worry about money… and lunch! Will my husband find work today?1
Feminist activists in St. Petersburg held a protest on Monday, March 8, in honor of International Women’s Day, reports the local news site Bumaga (Paper).€
"This is the struggle of a whole people who know they are thirsty for justice and have the wisdom to forge their liberation."
"Because gender equality not only serves to advance the cause of women—a fairer society benefits us all."
Women are the first to pay the price for decades of budget cuts and privatization of essential services.
COVID-19 is the enemy of us all, but to women it has felt like a meteor made of pure misogyny, shattering our lives on impact.
"Let us recommit to the principle that our nation, and the world, is at its best when the possibilities for all of our women and girls are limitless."€
Last year on March 8, International Women’s Day, Nuriluz Hermosilla joined nearly a million feminists in the streets of Santiago, Chile, in what has become an annual protest across Latin America against gender-based violence. A day later, the same women who marched vanished from the workplace to show how a world without women would look. After years of localized efforts to change abortion and domestic violence laws, the demonstrations were the largest feminist mobilizations Latin America had ever seen and indicated the movement’s growing power.
In a nutshell, the statement exposes that the Joe Biden Administration has blinked for a second time on the human rights situation in West Asia by refusing to even acknowledge that the ICC investigation into the “Palestinian situation” is about human rights first and foremost.
The State Department’s argument essentially narrows down to a bureaucratic point questioning the ICC’s jurisdiction to investigate the human rights violations issues that involve the state of Israel and, secondly, that “Palestinians do not qualify as a sovereign state and therefore, are not qualified to obtain membership as a state in, participate as a state in, or delegate jurisdiction to the ICC.”
Millions of women around the world are taking to the streets today to mark International Women’s Day — in a year where women have been disproportionately impacted by rising poverty, unemployment and violence during the pandemic. We hear voices from protests in the Philippines, Mexico and Guatemala.
The landlord who rents out office space to the anti-domestic violence group “Nasiliu.net” (No to Violence) has demanded that they vacate the premises within a month. This was reported by the organization’s director Anna Rivina in an open letter published on Facebook.
On Saturday I asked a friend of mine who lives in Walsall whether he had been vaccinated yet. He replied that he had not, because he is an illegal immigrant, which I had forgotten. He has been here for seven years now, and I know him from before that in Nigeria. After some online research, I called him back and asked him if he knew that the government had announced that illegal immigrants could receive the vaccine through registering with a G.P., with no details asked. He said he did not have a G.P. and certainly would not be providing the state with all the information needed to register.
It’s time Jeep and Stellantis, the huge automaker that owns the popular and profitable brand, pay their debt to the Cherokee Nation of American Indians. It won’t be easy, it shouldn’t be free, but it’s the right thing to do.
Jeep has reaped billions of dollars from positive perceptions of what "Cherokee" means since the first vehicle bearing the name — the 1974 Cherokee SUV — went on sale nearly 50 years ago. Jeep sells two vehicles bearing the name today, and is about to add a third.
However, the boy was younger than 14 years old at the time of the crime and is therefore regarded as unable to contract guilt in Germany – in other words, he cannot be criminally convicted for his crimes.
After the death of his half-sister, he disappeared at some point, possibly he is in Turkey. That is where his father had fled to escape the German investigators.
As our recent Greenhouse policy forum on broadband made abundantly clear, COVID is shining a very bright light on US broadband dysfunction. The high cost of service, spotty coverage, slow speeds, and high prices are all being felt acutely in an era where having a decent broadband connection is the pathway to education, employment, healthcare, and opportunity. And after 25 years of US apathy to its telecom monopoly problem, COVID-19 is applying pressure on lawmakers and regulators in an entirely new way to do something about the 42 million without broadband, the 83 million under a monopoly, and the tens of millions who simply can't afford service due to limited competition.
This is why EFF joined a coalition of private-sector companies and organizations to support H.B. 1336, authored by Washington State Representative Drew Hansen. This bill would remove restrictions in current Washington law preventing public entities from building and providing broadband services. In removing these restrictions, Hansen’s bill would allow public entities to create and implement broadband policy based on the needs of the people they serve, and provide services unconstrained and not beholden to big, unreliable ISPs.€
Over the past two days, at least one person has been killed in clashes between riot police and supporters of Ousmane Sonko, who say his detention on Wednesday in the wake of a rape allegation is politically motivated.
NetBlocks said social media and messaging apps including Facebook, WhatsApp, and Youtube had been restricted early on Friday ahead of a planned demonstration by civil society and opposition parties led by protest movement "Y En A Marre" (Enough is Enough).
To accelerate this process, then, will take global collaboration. Attribution alliances, global information sharing, joint investigations and a global signature repository are among the ways nations should support one another. This could even take the form of a “Cyber WHO,” a global body that could develop norms about behavior in cyberspace; share knowledge about threats and attacks, specifically their digital signatures; establish attribution where possible; establish protocols to share best practices; and provide technical support to countries at all stages of cyber building. This also will have the added benefit of supporting countries at earlier stages of cyber capacity building.
This will work if there are clear benefits to participation, including strategic and financial support to countries that are serious about addressing the four fundamental building blocks of cyber capacity. This can also create a new market of cyber rating mechanisms, similar to the S&P global credit ratings.
Countries that continue down a path of isolation and willingly break global cyber redlines established by a cyber WHO should have a clear understanding of the consequences, such as a poor cyber rating with economic implications, sanctions, or even removal from a newly formed global cyber defense arrangement.
Russian lawmaker Vyacheslav Volodin has called for new laws aimed at “protecting digital sovereignty,” after Facebook blocked access to articles published by several Russian news sites.
It’s the vaccine Hunger Games. Or, as the creator of the Minneapolis Vaccine Hunter Facebook group told the New York Times, “It’s like buying Bruce Springsteen tickets.”
In the private Los Angeles Vaccine Hunter Facebook group in which I lurked for a few days, both as a bona fide member and as a journalist, I observed Southern Californians sharing tips about how to obtain leftover doses at Kedren Community Health Center in South Los Angeles, a private clinic serving a vulnerable community. Vaccine hunters reminded one another to be polite and considerate to the community they obviously did not hail from, and some even said they made a donation after getting their shots. Obtaining leftover doses requires standing in a separate line, sometimes for hours, with no guarantee of getting a vaccine. Many fear being judged.
After a week of congressional hearings following a 16-month, bipartisan investigation into competition in the digital marketplace, it’s clear Republican and Democratic congresspersons alike are skeptical of Big Tech. That’s fine—healthy, even. But that doesn’t make rewriting antitrust legislation to allow Congress to pick winners and losers in the marketplace a good idea.
Apple and Intel just threw a book at Softbank's patent assertion conglomerate Fortress Investment. Not literally, but what I meant by book is a 161-page complaint with a 17-page table as its Exhibit A.
[...]
Let's put it that way: either complainant got slapped last week. But they keep on fighting, and in the Fortress context I'm glad Apple doesn't cede an inch (an Apple trait that left me no choice but to root for the app store liberation movement started by Spotify and Epic Games).
[...]
I understand the point Intel and Apple want to make there: those exorbitant demands can materialize in the form of damages awards. However, the second paragraph of the complaint says "Defendants [...] aggressively pursue meritless litigation have long been recognized to harm and deter innovation," and Fortress will be sure to counter this by pointing to its (non-final and hopefully never final) victory in Texas.
A patent holder may file an application to include the drug in the Pharmaceutical Register. The application shall comprise INN, patent claims protecting pharmacologically active substance, information about drugs registered within the EAPO along with relevant evidence.
As of 1 March 2021, a demo version of the Pharmaceutical Register includes above 100 INNs and patents.
Similar registers have long been set up worldwide to settle disputes between patent holders and generic producers (e.g., the US Orange Book).
The EAPO Register will certainly lower the burden of proof for patent holders in infringement cases and make the possibility to challenge SPCs (a 3-month statute of limitation applies in most jurisdictions) more complicated. It will also help in regulatory and contractual issues for the local market.
The EPO has successfully held its first-ever eEQE (online European Qualifying Examination). For the first time since the exam was established in 1979, the EPO held the written test online from 1 to 5 March 2021. According to the EPO the digital edition, which was adapted to follow European coronavirus guidelines, involved “almost 4000 candidates, five exams split over eleven flows, 130 exam pages in a choice of languages, 24 hours of examination in five days, 80 online invigilators, 400 people involved in preparations, a secured examination environment, and audio and image supervision.”
However, it appears the EPO’s long-term planned already involved this transition to digital. It says, “What had initially been planned as a major change for the years ahead was fast-forwarded due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Under the Strategic Plan 2023, the EPO plans to deliver a complete, end-to-end digital EQE with a possible revision of the EQE legal framework, format and content of the exam. Due to the pandemic, and after the cancellation of the EQE2020, the greatest challenge of holding the exam online was achieved within just a few months.”
The EQE is a pre-requisite exam for almost anyone wishing to be admitted as a qualified European patent attorney, and to represent clients before the EPO.
The German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht - BVerfG) has published here its annual preview, i.e. “a list of important cases in which it intends to reach a decision over the course of the year”. The list does not include the two constitutional complaints (2 BvR 2216/20 and 2 BvR 2217/20) filed on 18 December 2020 against the draft legislation enabling Germany to ratify the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement and its Protocol on Provisional Application. The previous complaint, filed in March 2017 and decided in February 2020, was included in the 2018, 2019 and 2020 lists – every year very few cases listed are actually heard and many are just carried over.
Can a rightholder restrict linking by contract, eg by imposing the adoption of technological measures?
This, in a nutshell, is the core issue at the heart of the referral to the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in VG Bild-Kunst, C-392/19, which was decided this morning. The Court answered in the affirmative.
[...]
Today’s ruling is an important one that substantially adds to the construction of the (not-always-idyllic) relationship between linking and the right of communication to the public.
The CJEU endorsed the AG’s recommendation to revisit existing case law and focus on the prohibition of exhaustion under Article 3(3) of the directive. However, it did not adopt his proposed differential treatment between different types of links, nor did it offer to revisit the 'new public' criterion. After today, it appears - first of all - that different links might have to be (still) treated alike. Whilst this may serve to avoid the risk of technological obsolescence of CJEU case law, it may also lead to outcomes that are not necessarily balanced. Secondly, the 'new public' will likely continue raising interpretative doubts and very concrete questions of application.
The key aspect of the ruling is the conditions at which contractual restrictions to linking can be imposed. The CJEU was explicit in saying that consent can be only limited by adopting technological measures. This is functional to ensuring legal certainty and the proper functioning of the internet. This part of the judgment is important also from a broader perspective: for instance: Article 4 of the DSM Directive allows rightholders to reserve the doing of text and data mining activities in relation to their content. The VG Bild-Kunst judgment may serve to clarify further, beyond the language of that directive, how such reservation is to be done.
Our hope is that these conversations will inspire you to reflect on your own stories and ideas. We also hope it will motivate you to think about how you can help make open sharing more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable. Put simply, we want to make sharing better—to do that, we need your help.
Our hope is that these conversations will inspire you to reflect on your own stories and ideas. We also hope it will motivate you to think about how you can help make open sharing more inclusive, equitable, and sustainable. Put simply, we want to make sharing better—to do that, we need your help.
A group of independent movie companies, including the makers of "The Hitman’s Bodyguard" and "London Has Fallen," has filed a lawsuit against a widely used Popcorn Time app and several of its users. The companies don't stop there either. The complaint also accuses VPN service VPN.ht and hosting provider Voxility of copyright infringement.
Four men accused of criminal copyright infringement for operating major Spanish streaming sites SeriesYonkis and PeliculasYonkis have been acquitted by a local court. The men, who were previously cleared in 2019, faced an appeal but the court found that at the times the sites were operational, no crimes were being committed.
Back in December, the Copia Institute submitted comments to Senator Tillis, who wanted feedback on making changes to the DMCA. It was a tricky needle to thread, because there's a lot about the DMCA that could be improved and really needs to be improved to be constitutional. At the same time, having protection for platforms is crucial for there to be platforms, and we did not want to encourage anything that might lead to the weakening of the safe harbors, which are already flimsy enough. So our advice was two-fold: address the First Amendment problems already present with the DMCA, and check what assumptions were driving the reform effort in order to make sure that any changes actually made things better and not worse.
