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Links 9/4/2021: Tanglet 1.6.0 and HPVM 1.0



  • GNU/Linux

    • Audiocasts/Shows

    • Kernel Space

      • 5.13 Will be the First Linux Kernel With Initial Support for Apple M1 Device

        While we have already witnessed Ubuntu run on Apple M1, there was another community project that was also working to bring Linux support to Apple’s M1-powered devices – Asahi Linux.

        Now, it looks like Hector Martin from Asahi Linux sent in a pull request to include Apple M1 SoC platform in the upcoming Linux Kernel 5.13 release.

      • Graphics Stack

        • X.Org Server Git Lands Support For Hardware-Accelerated XWayland With NVIDIA - Phoronix

          The NVIDIA-led work to allow XWayland OpenGL and Vulkan acceleration with their proprietary driver has just been merged into X.Org Server Git.

          The XWayland changes needed to allow the NVIDIA proprietary driver to work in an accelerated manner have landed in X.Org Server 1.21 Git. The main change is xwayland: implement pixmap_from_buffers for the eglstream backend that was merged just a few minutes ago.

          Before getting too excited, this support is contingent upon a new NVIDIA proprietary driver release. That much anticipated driver update looks to be the forthcoming NVIDIA 470 Linux driver series.

        • Xwayland work for hardware accelerated NVIDIA support has been merged in

          Another exciting moment for fans of Wayland and the future of Linux, especially if you're an NVIDIA user, as the work to provide hardware accelerated rendering for NVIDIA GPUs was merged in for Xwayland. We've been following this work for a while, as an upcoming NVIDIA driver will have the code in for everything to be in place (likely NVIDIA 470).

    • Applications

      • Kubernetes 1.21 Released; CronJobs Finally Graduate to Stable

        The Kubernetes release team has announced its latest release 1.21, with the CronJob resource reaching general availability (GA). The team has also substantially improved the performance of CronJobs since Kubernetes v1.19, by implementing a new controller.

        The release consists of 49 enhancements: 15 enhancements have graduated to stable, 15 enhancements are moving to beta, and 19 enhancements are entering alpha.

        CronJobs (previously ScheduledJobs), meant for performing regular scheduled actions such as backups, report generation, and so on, has been a beta feature since Kubernetes 1.8! With 1.21, we get to finally see this widely used API graduate to stable.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • Possible rescue when you run into issues with the livedvd

        You can login via TTY in ArcoLinux – No password required

        Bare metal = CTRL + ALT + F2 till F6

        VirtualBox = right CTRL + F2 till F6

        Then you need to update the pacman database with

        sudo pacman -Syyu Then you can install and remove packages with pacman.

        With df you can see that we gave you 10GB of cowspace or space to install applications.

        We also show you how to stop and start lightdm.

      • Configuring RHEL 8 for compliance with crypto-policy related to Cipher Block Chaining

        In this post, we’ll walk through an example of how to configure Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8 crypto-policy to remove Cipher block chaining (CBC), but let’s start with a little background on CBC and default crypto-policy on RHEL 8.

        At an operational level, most of us have experienced situations where there is a complex configuration on a system, and there is either too much or too little information to understand everything.

      • How to install adobe pdf on ubuntu 21 04 - LateWeb.Info

        Adobe pdf is a family of application software and Web services developed by Adobe Inc. to view, create, manipulate, print and manage files in Portable Document Format (PDF).

        The main function of Adobe Acrobat is creating, viewing, and editing PDF documents. It can import popular document and image formats and save them as PDF. It is also possible to import a scanner‘s output, a website, or the contents of the Windows clipboard.

      • How To Install Pidgin on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Pidgin on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Pidgin is an instant messaging client. It is a free and open-source cross-platform application. This means that you can be chatting with friends on AIM, talking to a friend on Google Talk, and sitting in an IRC chat room all at the same time. Pidgin also supports many features of these chat networks, such as file transfers, away messages, buddy icons, custom smilies, and typing notifications.

        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 the Pidgin instant messaging on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

      • Getting Started With Toolbox On Fedora Silverblue

        In this guide, we will be looking at what is Toolbox and how to create and manage containerized development environment using Toolbox on Fedora Linux.

      • Using Cockpit to Monitor and Manage Multiple Linux Servers Graphically From a Web Browser

        How do you manage your Linux server(s)?

        The most likely answer is by logging into the server via SSH and then using the Linux commands for all kind of tasks.

        That's what most of us sysadmins do. But there is also a tiny percentage of the population who have to manage Linux servers despite not being too comfortable with the command line.

        If you are one of those few people, I have good news for you. There are several tools that allow you to manage Linux servers graphically.

        Webmin and Cockpit are the most popular tools in this category.

      • 7-Zip Arrives on Linux: Here's How to Install It...

        7-Zip is a popular file archiver providing high compression ratios using the LZMA, LZMA2, and the new 7z format for compression. It's prevalent among users of the Windows operating systems, making its use quite widespread.

        However, there wasn't any official release of 7-Zip for Linux until recently. The 21.01 alpha version of 7-Zip is now released for the Linux operating system. In this article, we will discuss how to install 7-Zip on any Linux distribution.

    • Games

      • Tanglet 1.6.0 released

        FIXED: Could not type name in scores dialog FIXED: Out of bounds errors in solver Added tabs to high scores Added unlimited timer mode Added option to reset new game to defaults Added support for Qt 6

      • Charles Games (Attentat 1942) sound positive about porting to Linux in their recap

        Ondrej Trhon of Charles Games (Attentat 1942) has written up a blog post on Gamasutra about how things went after setting up an indie studio 13 months ago. Their game was originally released in 2017, so the studio itself wasn't formally created until much later.

      • Selaco is an upcoming GZDoom-powered shooter that looks awesome

        Never one to miss out on a good first-person shooter fuelled by GZDoom, today I came across Selaco and it instantly grabbed my attention for looking awesome. It's an original upcoming shooter (not a Doom mod), inspired by the likes of F.E.A.R.

        "You take on the role of Dawn, a captain of the security force known as ACES, Selaco's first line of defence. With Dawn's promotion to captain, she's been given additional clearances that allow her to dive into the murky past of Selaco.

        But who or what is invading Selaco, and what secrets will Dawn uncover?"

        [...]

        Since it's powered by the open source and cross-platform GZDoom, running it on Linux should be easy. The developer has confirmed Linux will be supported when asked on Twitter too!

      • Isometric city builder Nebuchadnezzar gets a huge update with freeplay maps

        Nebuchadnezzar, the great looking isometric city-builder that's very much like the old Impressions Games titles like Pharaoh and Zeus has a first post-release upgrade out and it's a big one.

        This 1.1 update aims to tackle some of the bigger shortcomings of the initial release. While it is a good game, it's interesting and does give the feel of Pharaoh it was missing certain big things. Added in this update is a whole new freeplay mode with multiple maps to build up however you wish - which is fantastic.

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • Advanced Comic Book Linking

          In my previous post about Peruse's support for ACBF Textareas, i talked about how the formatting system there allowed for all manner of niftiness with languages, and rotating text, and making it coloured, and styled, and all of that visual fanciness. In this one, i'm going to talk a bit more in depth about a quite powerful feature the Textareas have that i kind of glossed over in that one: Hyperlinks.

          Yes, hyperlinks. Links, like the one you just clicked on above to work out what that last post actually said about textareas (thanks for reading! :) ). Except that these links are inside any of the things in an ACBF document which can hold paragraphs of text, being primarily Textareas, References, and Annotations. The reason this is a separate post (apart from the fact the other one had a different focus) is that ACBF recently gained the ability to add a resource target (that is to say, a href property) to the Jump element.

    • Distributions

      • MX Linux MX-19.3 patito feo - A year later, things be spiffier

        More distro testing. And hopefully, today's experience shall be pleasant. To that end, I'm sort of going with a safe bet - MX Linux. Over the years, this small distro has grown and grown, but also matured, becoming a reasonable choice for serious desktoping. Well, for me, MX-18 was the best release, and I wasn't too keen on the latest yesteryear offering, version 19, as it was.

        A year has passed, and MX Linux has had three dot revisions, which should be sufficient time to spit and polish any early bugs and bring back the old robust glory of the '17 and '18 crop. I will test the distro on me new scapegoat box, a triple-boot IdeaPad with an AMD processor and Vega graphics. Ought to be interesting. Follow me.

      • What Makes MXLinux So Popular?

        MXLinux may not have the same brand recognition as other Linux distributions, and it doesn't have the cachet of widespread familiarity, says Jack Wallen. So, why is it the most downloaded Linux distribution on Distrowatch?

      • We are astonished by your generosity and loyalty

        EndeavourOS has been around the block for almost two years now, so we are a pretty young distro that still is exploring and discovering new options whilst making its journey. When we started our journey back in the last days of Antergos in 2019, there were a few thoughts of doubt that did linger in the back of my mind.

        Will we be able to produce and maintain a distro and how are we going to reach new users? Given the fact that none of us had any experience in creating a distro and also, from the start, we had a fair share of an existing community watching over our shoulders, which didn’t make things easier to push that lingering feeling aside.

      • Screenshots/Screencasts

      • SUSE/OpenSUSE

        • openSUSE Tumbleweed – Review of Weeks 2021/13 & 14

          Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

          Dominique has been enjoying a vacation these last two weeks and left Tumbleweed in my hands. Thanks to all who’ve helped out as I got to grips with holding the reins solo for the first time.

          These two weeks also saw the long Easter weekend. That said, we still managed to release 5 snapshots (0325, 0329, 0330, 0401 and 0406) during this fortnight, with 0408 currently in testing and an 0409 likely to be checked in tonight.

        • Private cloud based on openSUSE Leap 15.3 beta and Nextcloud

          I used to have a Synology DS414 server what worked well for about 8 years. Naturally, occasionally I had to change disks in the RAID5 system in it, but other than that it did its job. But regardless of the really smooth user experience and the low maintenance needs I never really liked that system as the Synology Disk Station Manager OS is not like many “real” Linux distributions and the community behind that OS is basically non existent. And to be honest I do not really feel that Synology is very eager to build and maintain a community around their OS. It looks more like that they just barely comply with the GPL. All in all, I had just enough motivation to migrate my private cloud and NAS to a proper OS.

          I guess it is hardly a surprise that my choice is openSUSE. I was hesitating to use Tumbleweed, the rolling development release of openSUSE, but then I thought that will do a conservative decision and go with the Leap 15.3 release. Leap is stable, thou I had no problem running my daily driver computer on Tumbleweed.

      • IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

        • How to install Gradle build automation tool on CentOS 8

          Developed in Java, Kotlin, and Groovy, Gradle is an open-source build automation tool that is used mostly in Java projects. It automates the building process of applications which includes compiling, linking, and packaging of code without manual input. Gradle also supports Groovy, which is an object-oriented dynamic language created for Java applications. Let’s install Gradle on CentOS Linux 8.

        • How to install Ansible on Ubuntu Server 21.04

          Ansible is an open-source software provisioning, configuration management, and application-deployment tool enabling infrastructure as code. It runs on many Unix-like systems, and can configure both Unix-like systems as well as Microsoft Windows. It includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. Ansible was written by Michael DeHaan and acquired by Red Hat in 2015. Ansible is agentless, temporarily connecting remotely via SSH or Windows Remote Management (allowing remote PowerShell execution) to do its tasks.

        • 5 reasons to attend the Digital Developer Conference: AIOps & Integration on April 20

          Decentralized applications bring several benefits over traditional application architectures, but they also increase the need for AIOps and integration capabilities—especially for the enterprise. Open source technologies, like Kubernetes and Docker, allow for consistent and explicit deployment of portable workloads across hybrid cloud environments, but developers and IT operations engineers need new skills to optimize deployments, monitor apps, and remedy problems quickly, with confidence, using advanced AIOps techniques.

          This Digital Developer Conference on AIOps & Integration focuses on the integration development and AIOps communities, and it provides you with the opportunity to design, develop, operate, and experience secure, AI-powered automation for IT operations and integration in your hybrid cloud environments. Whether you’re a developer, architect, SRE, or IT Ops engineer, you’ll discover ways to invest in AIOps and integration so that you can address challenges with decentralized, microservices-based applications. Subject matter experts will guide you through the essentials, experiences, and exercises to help you develop these worthwhile skills. For information on the conference and to explore the agenda, go to ibm.biz/devcon-aiops

        • To be an open leader, listen to your heart

          Allowing talented leadership to excel in a more open organizational structure can determine a young company's success. But in order to transform into a more open organization, you'll need to provide that space for talented leaders to grow.

        • Fedora 34 Adding SEVCTL Utility For Managing AMD SEV - Phoronix

          The upcoming release of Fedora 34 will make it the first major Linux distribution to have sevctl available, an open-source utility for managing AMD EPYC systems with Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV).

          SEVCTL is a utility for managing AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization with displaying various SEV details, managing of certificates, resetting the platform's persistent state, and other features for what is exposed by the SEV management API with EPYC processors.

      • Debian Family

        • Michael Prokop: A Ceph war story

          One part of the upgrade included 3 Debian servers (we’re calling them server1, server2 and server3 here), running on Proxmox v5 + Debian/stretch with 12 Ceph OSDs each (65.45TB in total), a so-called Proxmox Hyper-Converged Ceph Cluster.

          [...]

          During the first two servers’ reboots, we noticed configuration glitches. After fixing those, we went for a reboot of the third server as well. Then we noticed that several Ceph OSDs were unexpectedly down. The NTP service wasn’t working as expected after the upgrade. The underlying issue is a race condition of ntp with systemd-timesyncd (see #889290). As a result, we had clock skew problems with Ceph, indicating that the Ceph monitors’ clocks aren’t running in sync (which is essential for proper Ceph operation). We initially assumed that our Ceph OSD failure derived from this clock skew problem, so we took care of it. After yet another round of reboots, to ensure the systems are running all with identical and sane configurations and services, we noticed lots of failing OSDs.

    • Devices/Embedded

      • New Jetson TX2 NX appears on compact edge AI computers

        Aaeon has unveiled a pair of edge AI systems based on Nvidia’s new Jetson TX2 NX: The “Boxer-8230AI” offers 5x GbE while the “Boxer-8233AI” has dual GbE with PoE/PSE plus HDMI in and out.

        Aaeon is a prolific manufacturer of new embedded systems by any measure. Yet, many of its Boxer line of fanless, compact embedded computers are respins of earlier models with new processors or a few feature modifications. The new Boxer-823xAI models are based closely on earlier Boxers based on Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier NX, but instead tapping the new Jetson TX2 NX.

      • Open Hardware/Modding

        • 10 Best Microcontrollers on the Market

          As with SBCs (single board computers), CPUs, GPUs, and other electronics on the market, microcontroller production has been impacted by the pandemic, leaving manufacturers with limited resources. That being said, the chip shortage is expected to end in the coming months, with replenished supplies following shortly after. Regardless of said shortage, manufacturers have released many new microcontrollers before the pandemic, along with some new revisions to popular platforms. In this roundup, we will take a look at some of the best microcontrollers and microcontroller boards for 2021.

          [...]

          The Arduino Uno has been around for the better part of a decade in one form or another and is used as the foundation for many great projects. The latest board, Arduino Rev3, uses an ATMega328p microcontroller, with 32Kb of Flash, 2K of SRAM, and 1K of EEPROM. The board packs 14X digital input/output pins (6 can be used as PWM outputs), 6X analog inputs, a 16 MHz ceramic resonator (CSTCE16M0V53-R0), a USB connecter, a power jack, an ICSP header, and a reset button. It contains everything needed to support the microcontroller; users connect it to a computer with a USB cable or power it via an AC-to-DC adapter or battery to begin building their projects.

        • Ubuntu Blog: The State of Robotics – March 2021

          It’s never too late to learn. As any reinforcement learning agent, we get rewarded by the new knowledge that we acquire. Likewise, we learn by doing, by rolling up our sleeves and getting to work. (Do you want a hands-on book on Reinforcement Learning? Here is my personal favourite)

          March has shown us great examples of this. From robots learning to encourage social participation to detect serious environmental problems, it was a learning month.

          [...]

          Last month we learned about Perseverance and Ingenuity. But NASA keeps developing new robots to explore Mars. Led by NASA JPL’s Team CoSTAR, they presented the results of the first Martian Analog testing with autonomous quadruped, referred to as Au-Spot.

          Perseverance is a wheeled rover. This limits the robot to flat, gently-sloping terrains and agglomerate regolith. Rovers cannot tolerate instability and operate within a low-risk envelope (i.e., low-incline driving to avoid toppling).

          Here is where legged robots have an advantage. NASA’s ‘Mars Dog’ is a four-legged robot capable of navigating through hard-to-access planetary surfaces. The robot has unique failure-recovery behaviours, providing a major breakthrough in planetary navigation.

        • Rugged, fanless quad-camera system brings AI and Machine Vision to rolling stock and automotive applications

          Eurotech BoltGPU 10-31 is a rugged fanless embedded system powered by NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX module, equipped with four FAKRA connectors for GMSL camera, and designed to bring Edge AI and machine vision to rolling stock (e.g. trains) and automotive applications.

          The BoltGPU 10-31 also features 16 GB of eMMC flash, NVMe SSD support, three Gigabit Ethernet interfaces, WiFI 6 and Bluetooth 5.1, two USB3.1 ports, as well as isolated CAN-FD, optoisolated DIO, video out, and GNSS with optional RTK.

        • Test your Arduino projects with GitHub Actions [Ed: Very disappointing to see Arduino shilling proprietary software and vendor lock-in of Microsoft monopoly]
      • Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • The Apache News Round-up: week ending 9 April 2021
      • Web Browsers

        • Mozilla

          • Spidermonkey Development Blog: Top Level Await Ships with Firefox 89

            Firefox will ship Top Level Await by default starting in Firefox 89. This new feature introduces a capability to modules allowing programmers to do asynchronous work, such as fetching data, directly at the top level of any module.

            [...]

            If you are curious about this proposal, you can read more about it in the explainer. The proposal is currently at stage 3, but we have high confidence in it going to stage 4.

      • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

      • Programming/Development

        • HPVM v1.0 released

          HPVM ("heterogeneous parallel virtual machine") is a compiler for targets like GPUs and FPGAs based on LLVM; the 1.0 release is available now.

        • The Simplicity of Making Librem 5 Apps

          The “quick start” video below that I made for the Librem 5 developers documentation demonstrates how quickly you can get up and running with making your own GTK applications on a Librem 5.

          In this video, I have attached a Librem 5 to an external keyboard, mouse and monitor through a USB-C hub, and I use GNOME Builder to quickly create a new GTK application project, build it and run it on both the big desktop monitor and the small mobile screen with just a drag and drop across the screens.

          Yes, I do all that with the computing power of the Librem 5 only! There are no special effects nor a hidden desktop computer. I even did the screencast recording with an external device so it shows the real speed of the Librem 5 when driving a 32″ Full HD monitor.

        • Stream event data with this open source tool

          An event stream is a pipeline between a source you define and a destination of your choice. Rudderstack provides you with SDKs and plugins to help you ingest event data from your website, mobile apps, and server-side sources — including JavaScript, Gatsby, Android, iOS, Unity, ReactNative, Node.js, and many more. Similarly, Rudderstack's Event Stream module features over 80 destination and warehouse integrations, including Firebase, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Zendesk, Snowflake, BigQuery, RedShift, and more, making it easy to send event data to downstream tools that can use it as well as build a customer data lake on a data warehouse for analytical use cases.

        • Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

          • Linux Fu: Shell Script File Embedding | Hackaday

            You need to package up a bunch of files, send them somewhere, and do something with them at the destination. It isn’t an uncommon scenario. The obvious answer is to create an archive — a zip or tar file, maybe — and include a shell script that you have to tell the user to run after unpacking.

            That may be obvious, but it assumes a lot on the part of the remote user. They need to know how to unpack the file and they also need to know to run your magic script of commands after the unpack. However, you can easily create a shell script that contains a file — even an archive of many files — and then retrieve the file and act on it at run time. This is much simpler from the remote user’s point of view. You get one file, you execute it, and you are done.

  • Leftovers

    • Roberto Di Vicenzo and the 1968 Masters Golf Championship: Enhancing Ethics In Sports

      On the final day of the 1968 Masters the Argentine golfer, Roberto Di Vicenzo, ended up in a tie with the American Bob Goalby. An 18-hole playoff would be take place the next day to determine the champion. Di Vicenzo had won the British Open championship in 1967 at the age of 44 and was one of the best players of his generation, a player who had he competed regularly on the American tour could easily have been included with Palmer, Player, Nicklaus, and Casper among a quite proper Big Five of the 1960s. But it should be added that had Charlie Sifford, the African American golfer who in 1969 at the age of 46 won the prestigious Los Angeles Open, been allowed to compete regularly on the American tour during his prime, he could very likely have achieved the kind of greatness of the aforementioned. As it was, Di Vicenzo, in limited playing on the American and European tours won 8 and 9 times respectively and won 131 times on the Argentine tour.

      But Di Vicenzo did not get to compete in the playoff with Goalby to determine the championship. He was disqualified for having signed an incorrect scorecard, a scorecard that gave him what would have been a more disadvantageous total of 71 rather than the 70 he actually scored that day. A player’s official scorecard is not kept by the player him or herself but rather by the player’s opponent and vice-versa. Each player also keeps his own score on an unofficial card and at the conclusion of the round each player checks the official against the unofficial card and then signs the official card.

    • Health/Nutrition

      • What Should We Learn from India’s Farmers’ Protests?

        As the protest concludes in D.C.,€ my family and I leave; a woman stops us, spotting our posters. She asks me, “it makes sense that protests are going on there [India], but why are you all protesting here?” She was really asking, in an era of protests, why the hell should the global community care and why have these particular protests gathered such sustained momentum? The answer lies not so much in what the protests counter, but how protesters are actually protesting in New Delhi.

        The eerie parallel of images of Sikh protestor€  Ranjit Singh’s€ face under the boot of an Indian police officer and the€  photo€ of an American policeman’s knee on George Floyd’s neck reminds us that injustice unchecked reverberates beyond borders. For over four months, farmer protesters have peacefully camped in their tractors and trolleys outside New Delhi.€ € India’s farm bills, aimed at deregulating agriculture, would abruptly halt farmers’ agrarian livelihoods and cause ecological degradation, a shift reminiscent of American agricultural deregulation that historically€  crippled small-scale farmers€ and accelerated€  desertification.

      • “Real world evidence” vs. COVID-19?

        It’s been a while since I wrote anything about the use of hydroxychloroquine, but leave it to WND to give me a reason to revisit the topic. Hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), as you might recall, is an antimalarial drug that also has mild immunosuppressive properties that make it also useful to treat rheumatoid arthritis and other autoimmune diseases. Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, HCQ was portrayed as a “miracle” drug to treat COVID-19, even though the evidence supporting its use for this indication was slim to nonexistent. To some extent, I could understand trying HCQ. The early days of the pandemic were desperate times. COVID-19 was a new disease, and it was making patients very, very sick in large numbers. There were no known treatments other than supportive care, and, back then, no vaccine. A year ago, somehow HCQ seemed to find its way into pretty much every hospital’s protocol to treat COVID-19 based on anecdotal evidence. The FDA even granted it an ill-advised emergency use authorization (later rescinded). Meanwhile, the dedication to the use of this drug in many sectors became almost cult-like, and the cult continues today, as I saw in an op-ed in WND by Joel Hirschhorn entitled COVID scandal: Feds ignored 2016 law requiring use of real world evidence.

      • Opinion | The Impossibility of an "Informed Choice": The Covid-19 Vaccine and Pregnant Women

        And why scientific protocols should move away from protecting women from research and support women through research.

        Women’s struggle for reproductive justice has historically involved complex layers of negotiation. In the 1960s and the 1970s, “My body, my choice” became a widely popular slogan to fight for women’s bodily integrity and autonomy regarding issues such as abortion, birth control, and reproductive and sexual health. No one can and should deny the importance of enacting women’s individual choice over matters that impact their sexual and reproductive experience, specifically in a context where that choice has been targeted again and again in campaigns for restricting access to abortion, birth control methods, and sex-positive sex education.

      • We’re at the Beginning of the End of Covid-19. Now What?

        Where are we now? This time last year, even President Trump knew the virus was a “plague” that “rips you apart.” Many of us tried to hold it together, hoping as the summer of 2020 rolled around that the worst was over, hunkering down as much as we could but with the respite of warmer weather allowing us some comfort. But hundreds of thousands didn’t make it to see the autumn leaves or the first snow last year, as the pandemic went into overdrive in the United States: 200,000 dead by September, 300,000 dead by December, 400,000 dead by Trump’s last day in the White House in January 2021. As of April 6, according to The New York Times’ running tally, we’ve lost 556,016 men, women, and children.

        But there is hope. Physicians and nurses have gotten better at treating Covid-19, even if the drugs we have against the disease are still few. And the best news has been the most surprising. A year ago I was deeply pessimistic about the prospect of SARS-CoV-2 vaccine development, citing the scientific obstacles that even money wouldn’t likely overcome. But I was wrong and am happy to say so. We now have multiple effective vaccines against this plague, and over 60 million Americans have been jabbed, representing close to 20 percent of the US population.

      • How can Congress create infrastructure for the next pandemic?

        After approximately 200 Infrastructure Weeks, policymakers now appear to be actually talking about passing legislation about infrastructure! Congress also seems like it might take action to lay the groundwork for combatting the next pandemic; bipartisan efforts are underway. Putting the two together: how should Congress think about creating innovation infrastructure, broadly defined, to help combat the next pandemic?

        Even before COVID-19, experts were sounding alarms about insufficient infrastructure to address the foreseeable risk of a global pandemic. In 2019, an expert group convened by the World Bank and WHO concluded that “[t]he world is not prepared” for the “very real threat of a rapidly moving, highly lethal pandemic of a respiratory pathogen,” among other things because “[t]oo many places lack even the most rudimentary health-care infrastructure.” COVID-19 has magnified these global health inequalities. But inadequate infrastructure investment is not just a problem in low-income countries: COVID-19 has also drawn increased attention to long-apparent weaknesses in many U.S. infrastructure sectors. We suggest priorities for three types of infrastructure: physical infrastructure, knowledge infrastructure, and human infrastructure (recognizing that these categories may overlap).

        [...]

        Policymakers might also think about the ability of existing scientists to reallocate or redirect their research when urgent needs arise, such as in the pandemic context. Extramural researchers are often unable to redirect their lab capacity or expertise without obtaining permission from their funding organizations (if their funding agreements permit it at all). Funding agencies could seek to increase flexibility in reallocating extramural grants in the event of particular declared public health emergencies. Similarly, policymakers might seek an increase in intramural research done by government-employed scientists at NIH, and particularly at NIAID, which might be able to be reallocated more quickly in the event of a pandemic.

        Congress should pay special attention to using funding to ameliorate disparities in medical and scientific education, which are driven by factors including structural racism (as we have discussed in previous posts). The American Rescue Plan contains an important template of this approach, specifically directing $3 billion (of the $40 billion in the Higher Education Emergency Relief Fund) to historically Black colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions, some of which, like Xavier University, serve as sources of training for a disproportionate number of Black health professionals.

        Yet human infrastructure is not only about training new scientists and public health professionals. It must also be about building connections between them to enable them to cooperate, share knowledge, and develop new insights at the intersection of their fields. These efforts might take many forms, such as encouragement of interagency coordination, or through support for interdisciplinary scientific work. There is also surely an important role to play for particular individuals or entities as hubs of connections, such as a pandemic response team, or even a broader innovation regulator, to better our pandemic preparedness infrastructure.

      • 'Cartoon Villain Stuff': Howard Dean Urges Biden to Oppose Lifting Covid Vaccine Patents

        Dean currently works in the lobbying division at Dentons, a law firm that has represented Pfizer and other industry giants.

        Former Vermont governor and erstwhile Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean is publicly urging President Joe Biden to oppose a South Africa- and India-led effort to temporarily lift coronavirus vaccine patents, a move that would help facilitate broad-based generic production of vaccines for developing nations.

      • ‘It’s in the Interest of Everyone in the US to Vaccinate the World as Quickly as Possible’

        Janine Jackson interviewed Public Citizen’s Peter Maybarduk about global vaccination for the April 2, 2021, episode of CounterSpin . This is a lightly edited transcript.

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Security

          • Security updates for Friday

            Security updates have been issued by Debian (lib3mf, php-pear, and python-django), Fedora (perl-Net-Netmask), openSUSE (flatpak, libostree, xdg-desktop-portal,, fwupd, fwupdate, and hostapd), Oracle (kernel, libldb, nettle, and squid), Red Hat (nettle), and SUSE (fwupdate, tpm2-tss-engine, and umoci).

          • Windows and Linux devices are under attack by a new cryptomining worm [Ed: Microsoft-funded Ars says nothing or not much about how such malware gets onto systems in the first place. Windows has NSA back doors and as far as we know GNU/Linux hasn't.]

            The Sysrv binary is a 64-bit Go binary that’s packed with the open source UPX executable packer. There are versions for both Windows and Linux. Two Windows binaries chosen at random were detected by 33 and 48 of the top 70 malware protection services, according to VirusTotal. Two randomly picked Linux binaries had six and nine.

          • PHP Maintainers Shared Update On PHP Source Code Compromise [Ed: Microsoft's GitHub is even worse when it comes to security because nobody is accountable and it's in the NSA's bag]

            PHP maintainer Nikita Popov have released a report after an unknown actor pushed backdoored code onto the official PHP Git repository.

            The maintainers of the PHP programming language have issued an update regarding the security incident that came to light late last month, stating that the actors may have gotten hold of a user database containing their passwords to make unauthorized changes to the repository.

          • Privacy/Surveillance

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Coup Attempt in Jordan Leaves a Trail

        He disclosed that “extensive investigations carried out by Jordan’s security forces” concluded that Hamzeh, the half brother of King Abdullah II; Sharif Hasan, a member of the royal family and Bassem Awadullah, a former senior official in the royal court and special Jordanian representative to the Saudi government, had engaged in activities that amounted to “promoting sedition.”

        Safadi added, “The investigations had monitored interferences and communications with foreign parties over the right timing to destabilise Jordan.” He went on to drop a bombshell that the activities included cultivating relationships with members of the Jordanian opposition abroad and there was also evidence of a person with foreign ties offering services to Hamzeh’s wife, including the immediate use of a private jet to leave Jordan. (That person has since been identified as an Israeli.)

      • How the Supreme Court Gave Cops a License to Kill

        There is nothing unique or interesting about the defense strategy employed by the lawyers for Derek Chauvin. The trial has produced no made-for-television stunts or rhetorical flourishes. There’s no bloody glove, no rhyming couplets. Chauvin’s defense is so basic that an attorney straight out of law school could pull it off. His lawyers are simply arguing that cops have the right to kill people, if they think they need to.

        That strategy might seem foolish to the untrained eye. After all, there is incontrovertible video evidence that Chauvin did not “need” to kill George Floyd. The video shows that Floyd posed no threat to the police or anybody else: He was prone and handcuffed while Chauvin slowly choked the life out of him over the course of eight minutes and 46 seconds. Any reasonable human being can see that Chauvin should have taken his knee off of Floyd’s neck.

      • Western Media Incite Anti-Asian Racism When They Join in Cold War Against China

        Over the past few weeks, the subject of anti-Asian racism has received an unusual degree of Western media attention, ever since a video showing the January 28 killing of Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai immigrant in San Francisco, was widely shared on social media. Coverage intensified when gunman Robert Aaron Long targeted three Asian-owned spas on March 6, killing six Asian women among eight victims in Atlanta, Georgia. Local and national media centered the gunman’s professed motive of a “sex addiction” and police statements disputing whether the crime was racially motivated, even though gendered racism is still a factor when racist incidents don’t meet the narrow and arbitrary requirements of what constitutes a hate crime ( FAIR.org, 3/26/21).

      • The Far Right in Uniform: How Extreme is the U.S. Military?

        I’m not particularly sentimental about anyone-can-grow-up-to-be-president and all that — in 2017, anyone did — but damn! This was democracy under actual, not rhetorical, attack.

        As the list of people charged in connection with that insurrection rose, ways of analyzing their possible motivations grew ever more creative: at least nine of the rioters who broke into the Capitol had a history of violence against women; almost 60% had had money troubles; and above all, 50, or 14.5%, of the 356 people arrested at last count, had military connections, as did the woman killed by a policeman that day. (Veterans and active-duty personnel account for 7.5% of the U.S. population.) More than a fifth of the arrested veterans have been charged with “conspiracy.”

      • White Supremacist Organizations and White Workers

        Many of these activists had been in the forefront of the thousands of rallies in hundreds of cities and towns that erupted last Spring and Summer in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. The tireless work of black activists, especially black women, brought millions of new voters to the polls. Those efforts may very well have proved decisive in key swing states like Michigan, Georgia, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

        Protest Organizing and the Election Victory

      • The US War on Drugs is Driving the Displacement Crisis

        These migrants are not fleeing some Act of God — drought or hurricanes or the like — that could not be anticipated or prevented. Rather, they are fleeing cartel violence and governmental corruption.

        As CNN recently noted, “poverty, crime, and corruption in Latin America have long been drivers of migration.” Indeed, many Central Americans have concluded that the risks of the journey, of the smugglers, and of the possibility of losing their children are outweighed by the near certainty of violence or death at home.

      • Opinion | Back to the Future—and the Cold War—at the Pentagon

        Why 2021 looks so much like 1981—and why that should frighten us all.

        The future isn’t what it used to be. As a teenager in the 1970s, I watched a lot of TV science fiction shows, notably Space: 1999 and UFO , that imagined a near future of major moon bases and alien attacks on Earth. Movies of that era like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey envisioned colossal spaceships and space stations featuring international crews on mind-blowing missions to Jupiter and beyond. Who’d have thought that, 20 years after Kubrick’s alternate reality of 2001, we humans would effectively be marooned on a warming “ sixth extinction” planet with no moon bases and, to the best of my knowledge, no alien attacks either.

    • Environment

      • Invasive alien species exact huge ecosystem cost

        At last, a global price on invasive alien species: it runs to billions of dollars and doubles every six years.

      • Should Governments Consider Engineering the Atmosphere?

        Governments should consider solar geoengineering for two reasons. The first is that other ways to avoid the worst effects of climate change may not prove achievable in the world as it really is. The other is that, if there is a risk that another government might attempt to transform the atmosphere, it would be delinquent not to have thought through how to react. That means trying to understand what the effects of such engineering might be on your own country and the world. 1

        There is little doubt that lacing the stratosphere with particles that reflect sunlight back into space would decouple Earth’s surface temperature from greenhouse gas levels, allowing for cooler temperatures than otherwise would occur. On a planet with greenhouse gas levels expected to deliver 2.5 degrees Celsius of warming above pre-industrial levels, solar geoengineering could in principle limit the actual warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It could also allow temperatures to be decreased even as greenhouse gas levels stayed the same or declined only slowly. Both of these possibilities seem, on the face of it, worth examining as ways to avoid global catastrophe. 2

      • Energy

      • Wildlife/Nature

    • Finance

      • New York to Offer Unemployed Migrants Up to $15,600 in Pandemic Relief

        "Today, our work today has been recognized," said one undocumented worker and organizer. "Our dignity has been recognized, and our dignity has been lifted by passing this fund."

        Immigrant and worker rights advocates welcomed this week's passage of a New York state budget package containing a provision authorizing payments of up to $15,600 to undocumented migrants who have been adversely affected by the coronavirus pandemic.€ 

      • 'Passing the PRO Act Is Not a Spectator Sport': AFL-CIO Leads National Day of Action

        "Stronger unions mean higher wages, safer working conditions, and dignity for all people who work. The PRO Act is our first step to get there."

        The AFL-CIO is encouraging people to call U.S. senators on Thursday to urge them to support the passage of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act, a historic piece of legislation that would significantly strengthen workers' right to form unions and help reverse a decades-long assault on labor waged by corporations and their political allies.

      • While Hospital Janitor Got a $6 Cafeteria Voucher, Its CEO Took Home $30 Million

        "We need to do better for working people," said one advocate.

        In a dramatic but all-too-common illustration of the intensification of income inequality in the U.S., a janitor at a medical center in Missouri who contracted Covid-19 on the job last year was named Employee of the Month and given a $6 cafeteria voucher upon his return to work, while the CEO of the firm that owns the hospital saw his total compensation package grow to $30.4 million.

      • Decades-Long Corporate Assault on Unions Has Cost Typical Worker $3,250 a Year: Report

        "This decline of unions wasn't inevitable—it was a deliberate policy choice made on behalf of wealthy interests and corporations, and it can be reversed."

        The decades-long assault on organized labor by corporations and their allies in government resulted in a dramatic erosion of union membership that cost the median U.S. worker $3,250 per year between 1979 and 2017, according to a new report released Thursday morning by the Economic Policy Institute.

    • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

      • The Lawyer Behind Georgia’s New Anti-Voting Law

        Attorney Poy Winichakul was about 12 minutes into her testimony before the Georgia legislature’s Special Committee on Election Integrity. She was summing up how 47 states using absentee ballots had never discovered “widespread fraud,” and how the same could be said of Georgia in the 2020 elections. “Voting fraud” using absentee ballots, the voting rights attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center concluded, “is even less of a problem than being struck by lightning.”

        Without missing a beat, Representative Barry Fleming, chairman of the committee, asked her, “What are the odds of getting struck by lightning?” Winichakul said she didn’t have the figure. Fleming, who is also an attorney, said, “It sounds like you’re admitting there is fraud in elections.”

      • As Texas Lawmakers Attack Voting Rights, GOP Official Aims to 'Build an Army' of Poll Watchers

        "When I hear someone say he needs 'courageous' volunteers to be part of an 'army' that will keep an eye on voters in minority neighborhoods, I hear all the same old dog whistles with a slightly updated harmony."

        Common Cause Texas on Thursday shared a leaked video of a Harris County GOP official discussing plans to "build an army" of 10,000 election workers and poll watchers, including some who "will have the confidence and courage" to go into Black and Brown communities to address alleged voter fraud that analyses show does not actually exist.

      • Biden Praised for Taking 'Crucial First Step' to 'Prioritize People Over Guns'

        "The idea that we have so many people dying every single day from gun violence in America is a blemish on our character as a nation," the president said.

        Advocates of stricter firearms laws on Thursday welcomed President Joe Biden's announcement of six initial actions to address what his administration is calling the nation's "gun violence public health epidemic."

      • The Fecalnomics of The Filibuster

        With two Senators from each state, the U.S. Senate is a geographical body, not a democratic body. The two Senators from California represent more people than the 44 Senators representing the smallest 22 states. That makes the U.S. Senate neither representative nor democratic.

        Property Holds a Majority of Senate Seats

      • 'Why the US Senate Is So Broken': Manchin Vow to Preserve Filibuster Imperils Voting Rights and Much More

        "Manchin represents a state that is 1/22 the population of California and 92% white, yet he can singlehandedly block policies supported by 70-80% of Americans."

        Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia late Wednesday reiterated his opposition to abolishing—or even weakening—the 60-vote legislative filibuster, a stance that could imperil his party's hopes of passing popular legislation to protect voting rights, reform the inhumane U.S. immigration system, raise the federal minimum wage, and more.

      • Four Words Gates and His Pals Despise: Democracy & Minimum Support Price

        These neoliberal evangelists despise democracy and believe that state machinery and public money should only facilitate the ambitions of their unaccountable mega-corporations.

        Corporations are jumping on the ‘sustainability’ bandwagon by undermining traditional agriculture and genuine sustainable agrifood systems and packaging this corporate takeover of food as some kind of humanitarian endeavour.

      • Media Manage to Both-Sides Georgia GOP’s Suppressing Democracy

        Georgia’s new voting law—one of the first in a crowded field of breathtakingly brazen state voting bills the GOP is pushing across the country—has made national headlines. As voting rights reporter Ari Berman ( CounterSpin, 3/16/21) has explained, these bills are essentially “an effort to overturn the election by other means.” But despite Republicans’ obvious—often explicitly stated—goal of rigging future elections more successfully than they have in the past, many of those national media outlets can’t give up their commitment to both-sidesing the story, giving cover to the anti-democratic campaign.

      • Opinion | Corporate Media Not Gonna Both-Sides Voter Suppression in Georgia, Are They?

        Oh yes they are.

        Georgia’s new voting law—one of the first in a crowded field of breathtakingly brazen state voting bills the GOP is pushing across the country—has made national headlines. As voting rights reporter Ari Berman ( CounterSpin, 3/16/21) has explained, these bills are essentially “an effort to overturn the election by other means.” But despite Republicans’ obvious—often explicitly stated—goal of rigging future elections more successfully than they have in the past, many of those national media outlets can’t give up their commitment to both-sidesing the story, giving cover to the anti-democratic campaign.

      • Opinion | The Progressive Left Must Embrace Martin Luther King Jr's Vision of Democratic Socialism

        King's full radical vision is still the best guide for how to lead America to the promised land.

        Fifty-three years ago last Sunday, America’s greatest prophet of freedom, Martin Luther King Jr., was shot dead by an assassin. On the same date a year earlier, he first proclaimed his then-scandalous opposition to the Vietnam War. Inevitably, this anniversary highlights both one part of the often-ignored portion of King’s witness — his fierce challenge to American militarism — and the brutality of how his work was cut short and his vision rejected by America’s regressive forces. Thus, perhaps more than the national holiday centered around his birthday, this solemn anniversary compels us to reflect on King’s full legacy, why his vision was so powerful and so viciously resisted, and what they mean right now for we who inherit the struggle to redeem our nation.

      • Republicans Using Incredibly Sketchy And Manipulative 'Dark Patterns' To Dupe People Into Donating Way More Than Intended

        Last week the NY Times had an incredible article about how the Trump campaign tricked donors into giving way more money than they meant to, using so-called "dark patterns" (i.e., tricky UI design and wording) that got many people to think they were donating one time, but instead accidentally signed up to contribute the same amount every month. The Trump campaign ended up having to return an astounding $122 million of the money it raised in refunds, much of it due to these tricks.

      • The Last Gentleman: An Homage To The Duke Of Edinburgh’s Impeccable Style Through The Decades

        In a list of advice to young people published through his Duke of Edinburgh scheme last year, Prince Philip advised that we should “dress for ourselves and not others”. His own taste leant towards the timeless, and relied heavily on British greats: Turnbull & Asser for shirts, ties, and pocket squares, and tailoring from his long-term collaborator John Kent, of Kent, Haste & Lachter. Throughout his decades in service, the Duke remained a meticulous dresser in every sense. “The Duke of Edinburgh had that understated, English gentleman style that is completely timeless, embodying all the divine traits of Savile Row,” says Manolo Blahnik. “Whether he was in a suit or in uniform, he looked impeccable.”

        [...]

        Although never openly discussed by the Prince, he was born into the royal family of Greece in 1921, spending his youth at boarding schools in Scotland before joining the Royal Navy. “Before he took the role of Queen’s consort in his younger days, he was out there,” says Sexton. “He was a playboy and he dressed for the part.” Among the common descriptions of the Duke around town? A “blonde Greek Apollo” and “handsome as any film star”.

    • Civil Rights/Policing

      • Tribute to George Floyd
      • Open Borders Is Socialism

        Are we slipping past the point of no return? Where the resistance to the neoliberal order is the fascist order and the resistance to the fascist order is the neoliberal order? I don’t think so. I think in some ways the left still has a say and one has to look in the right places (on the ground) to find it.

        Zizek’s formulation is that fascism does not arise to stop neoliberalism (its fake rival) but rather to stop socialism. I am going to argue that neoliberalism also emerges to stop socialism. In fact the whole game being played is one to stop socialism. What actually happens is inconsequential in comparison to this.

      • How Hollywood Neuters the 60s: Sorkin's "Trial of the Chicago 7" Sentences American Radicalism€ to Oblivion

        “THE CHICAGO 7”: CROSS-EXAMINATION € 

        There is a short sequence in “The Trial of the Chicago 7” that neatly exemplifies the quality of the historical narrative of the whole “based-on-real-events” film. €  To my mind, these brief scenes are a measure of the degree of authenticity we see in the whole picture. € 

      • Opinion | The Fate of Those at the US Border Is Our Fate Too

        The United States created a hellish world for millions and now demonizes those trying to escape it.

        You’d think that the “border crisis” begins and ends as a problem for Americans.

      • NYPD Training Document Shows How A Terrorist Response Group Was Weaponized To Attack Protesters

        The protests that swept the nation following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin were often greeted by police violence -- exactly the sort of police activity protesters were protesting against.

      • Emails Reveal Amazon Pushed USPS for Private Box at Alabama Warehouse as Union Vote Began

        "Amazon felt it was above the law and worked with the Postal Service anyway to install one. They did this because it provided a clear ability to intimidate workers."

        Leaders of the effort to unionize workers at Amazon's Bessemer, Alabama fulfillment center were outraged following the revelation Thursday that the tech titan pressured the United States Postal Service into installing a private mailbox outside the warehouse just as employees began voting on the measure.€ 

    • Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

      • Filecoin Foundation Donates $10 Million Worth Of Filecoin To Internet Archive

        Some really fantastic news if you believe in (1) the wonderful work the Internet Archive does and (2) the future of a more decentralized internet (and, for what it's worth, you should believe in both of those things). The Filecoin Foundation has donated 50,000 FIL to the Internet Archive. This is approximately $10 million worth of Filecoin, which represents the largest single donation to the organization. Obviously, by the amount alone, this is a big deal and hugely important for an Internet Archive that is currently facing an existential legal attack by publishers who hate the very idea of libraries.

    • Digital Restrictions (DRM)

      • Game Publishers: If Your DRM, Anti-Cheat Software Does Creepy Installs, Warn Your Customers First

        Any cursory review of our stories involving DRM will leave a sane reader with only one impression: the spectrum of customer viewpoints on video game DRM ranges from total and complete disgust and hatred to tolerance of DRM as an annoyance. In other words, there is no positive side of this spectrum. There are no gamers that are pro-DRM, only those that put up with it. On the flip side, there are many folks who not only hate DRM in video games, but also many who are quite wary of what that DRM is and is doing on or to their machines. There are historical reasons for this, from DRM support falling off and bricking previously bought games to DRM practices that appear to install shady shit on gamers' PCs.

    • Monopolies

      • Trump's standards czar makes unbelievably stupid statements in amicus brief supporting Ericsson against Samsung's Federal Circuit appeal of anti-antisuit injunction

        Under President Trump, Dr. Copan was Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology, which means he also served as Director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). NIST joined the DOJ's Antitrust Division under Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim and the USPTO under Andrei Iancu (who has, as I predicted, returned to the L.A. patent litigation firm of Irell & Manella, which typically represents NPEs) in replacing a really good and balanced policy statement on standard-essential patent (SEP) enforcement with pro-patentee crap.

        While I disagreed with that policy paper, it was undoubtedly well-thought-out in its way. That's more than the authors of Dr. Copan's amicus brief in support of Ericsson can say. That amicus brief contains at least two statements that are--no kidding--among the absolutely most stupid things I've ever read in the SEP context.

        The word "provincial" occurs four times in the Copan brief, in each case as a derogatory attribute to the Wuhan Intermediate People's Courtin China that granted Samsung an antisuit injunction against Ericsson in December...

      • Kessler Doctrine: Does it Survive?

        In May 2020, the Supreme Court decided the trademark case of Lucky Brand Dungarees, Inc. v. Marcel Fashions Grp., Inc., 140 S. Ct. 1589 (2020) and expressly refused to extend preclusion doctrines in the trademark realm beyond their traditional bounds set by the doctrines of issue and claim preclusion.

        One month later, the Federal Circuit decided In re PersonalWeb Techs. LLC, 2020 WL 3261168 (Fed. Cir. June 17, 2020) and happily extended a quirky patent law preclusion doctrine beyond those traditional bounds. See Kessler v. Eldred, 206 U.S. 285 (1907) (Kessler doctrine). In its decision, the Federal Circuit explained its expansion of Kessler “fills the gap left by claim and issue preclusion.” see Brain Life, LLC v. Elekta Inc., 746 F.3d 1045 (Fed. Cir. 2014).

      • Patents

        • Elon Musk Doesn’t Care About Patents. Does That Matter? [Ed: Good luck explaining this to patent maximalists]

          Early last month, Harvard Business Review published an interesting intellectual property-related article, in which declared that Tesla Motors CEO and SpaceX founder-slash-CEO Elon Musk “doesn’t care about patents.” The article’s authors Michael Heller and James Salzman followed up on this attention-grabbing assertion by asking, “Should you?” The opening lines of the article very much set the tone, “Ownership seems straightforward in business: Get a patent or copyright when you create something. Charge for its use. Avoid ambiguity about who owns what.”

          [...]

          Leaning into ambiguity – Finally, the authors argue that legal clarity as to ownership is less important than many believe. Ownership ambiguity, the authors assert, creates “legitimate and valuable business opportunities.” They point to Uber, which started a business where car owners charge people for conveying passengers, and Airbnb, which launched a company that enables apartment owners charge holiday-goers, as examples of this; neither had a clear legal framework at the outset.

          With the foregoing assertions in mind, should brand owners throw protections to the wind and follow in the footsteps of Mr. Musk? Not necessarily. While there may be arguments in favor of this approach, there are those that weigh against it. A recent joint report of the European Patent Office (“EPO”) and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (“EUIPO”), for instance, asserts that businesses with at least one registered patent, design or trademark have an average of 20 percent higher revenue per employee than businesses without any of those rights. And actually, while a 60 percent premium exists for entities that have a combined portfolio of patent, trademark, and design rights, of these three types of intellectual property rights, the EPO/EUIPO found that patents pay the greatest dividends. Specifically, the EUIPO and EPO found that “greatest effect” in terms of value was demonstrated by companies that own at least one patent, which resulted in a 36 percent increase in revenue per employee. These figures appear to establish a clear link between intellectual property ownership and commercial success.

        • Design or patent, what is the right property right for my product? [Ed: Litigation giants are promoting patents on designs (well outside the scope of patent law)]

          Industrial property protection offers different instruments for the protection of different products in order to reward the creator for their contribution and thus to advance innovation. A patent can protect technical innovations for up to 20 years (Art. 63 EPC, ۤ16 PatG), whereas protection for a design is even granted for up to 25 years (Art. 12 CDR, ۤ27 (2) DesignG).

          Patents are granted for technical innovations (Art. 52(1) EPC, ۤ1 PatG) and the design or registered design for appearances of a product (Art. 3(a) GGV, ۤ1 No. 1 DesignG).

          Patents are known to be national property rights which, although they can be granted alongside national patent offices through a uniform granting procedure for the contracting states of the European Patent Convention, fall apart into national rights after the granting procedure.

          Designs can be registered either with the relevant national authorities or as Community designs with the competent EU authority, the European Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). A Community design is thus a right that is valid and enforceable throughout the EU. Another major difference to patent law is that a Community design is only examined for formal requirements and can therefore be registered and enforced within a very short time.

        • How a three-pronged IP strategy could help biosimilar manufacturers [Ed: Law firms keep pushing this idea that we need patents on life rather than a strategy that saves lives of most possible patients]

          Biosimilar manufacturers should assess the patent portfolios of third parties, determine whether they can obtain patent protection of their own, and identify opportunities for licensing, to take advantage of the opportunities for growth in the market in the years ahead.

        • Late But Not Too Late | Submitting Post-Filing Data During Patent Prosecution in Selected Jurisdictions

          Post-filing data can be used at the European Patent Office (EPO) to address inventive step rejections and sufficiency rejections, in most circumstances. However, purely speculative applications usually cannot be supported by post-filing data.

          The EPO Guidelines for Examination explicitly state “[t]he relevant arguments and evidence to be considered by the examiner for assessing inventive step may either be taken from the originally-filed application or submitted by the applicant during the subsequent proceedings,” but “[c]are must be taken, however, whenever new effects in support of inventive step are referred to. Such new effects can only be taken into account if they are implied by or at least related to the technical problem initially suggested in the originally filed application.”16 Such data can also be used to confirm that the invention does indeed work across the claim scope to address a sufficiency rejection.

          Post-filing data are usually used when the specification contains preliminary data and there is a question whether the stated effects are achieved at all and/or across the claim scope. A relatively common example is when the claim is a medical use and the application as filed contains in vitro or animal model data, and then more substantial post-filing data (e.g., human data) are filed during prosecution. Another example is to provide post-filing comparative data to demonstrate an improvement relative to the closest prior art cited by the EPO. A further example is to provide additional exemplification of an effect suggested in the application as filed. For example, the application as filed may suggest an improved drug formulation or sustained release on the basis of initial technical observations, and confirmatory in vivo pharmacokinetic data provided post-filing.

          The post-filing data will only be considered if the application as filed makes it plausible or credible that the technical problem is solved by the claimed invention. The data must therefore be related to what is in the application as filed and must confirm what is already predicted or extrapolated from the technical disclosure present in the application as filed. If the post-filing data are completely new and not confirmatory of what was described in the specification as filed, i.e., if the post-filing data provide the first credible evidence that the problem has been solved, then the post-filing data cannot be used.

          These principles were established by the EPO Boards of Appeal in cases T939/92 and T1329/04 for inventive step, and T609/02 for sufficiency of disclosure.

          Post-filing data are therefore often needed when there is a question regarding the reproducibility of the disclosure across the scope of the claim, or when there is a question of possible non-working embodiments. The Enlarged Board of Appeal, in case G1/03, explained that when a claim contains the technical effect—for example a medical use claim wherein the effect of treating the indication is a functional technical feature of the claim—then the claim is limited to embodiments that work so there is no problem under inventive step. For these functionally-limited claims, the question of reproducibility must therefore be considered under sufficiency of disclosure. The question is whether the invention does indeed work as claimed, and confirmatory post-filing data can be used to answer that question provided that the claimed invention is at least plausible from the specification as filed.

          Conversely, for a claim without a functional limitation, for example a product claim defined only by structural features—e.g., a Markush definition of a genus of compounds—then the assessment of potential non-working embodiments must be assessed under inventive step. The question here is whether substantially all embodiments within the claim scope provide the stated improvement and, again, post-filing data can be used to confirm a valid extrapolation from the technical disclosure that is present in the application as filed.

          Finally, there is no requirement that post-filing data must be submitted to the EPO in a declaration. However, a technical declaration prepared by an expert in the technical field may be more effective than attorney argument in presenting the post-filing data to the examiners for review.

        • Europe and China cooperate on PCT searching [Ed: EPO is not "Europe" and the EPO grossly violates human rights (not that the litigation sector will admits that; they don't care about people)]

          The Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) and European Patent Office (EPO) recently announced a pilot-programme, which will be of particular interest to Chinese and multinational companies with R&D in Mainland China and Hong Kong, especially if they wish to file patents in Europe, US or other jurisdictions outside of Mainland China.

          The programme concerns the PCT system, which allows an applicant to seek patent protection in up to 153 countries worldwide, but delays the deadline for entry into each country until 30 months from the priority date. All PCT applications are searched by an International Search Authority (ISA) and the applicant can review the results of this prior search before deciding whether to take the expensive step of proceeding in each county of interest.

          Until recently, for applicants located in Mainland China and Hong Kong, the only choice was for the prior art search to be carried out by CNIPA. This was the case even if the application was in English and even if the application was filed by a subsidiary of a multinational corporation.

          However, thanks to the pilot programme, launched on 1 December 2020, Mainland China applicants may now select the European Patent Office (EPO) to conduct the prior art search. The programme is also open to individuals and companies incorporated in Hong Kong.

        • Software Patents

          • Innovative Diagnostic Methods Remains Vital in the Fight Against Cancer

            The patent application specifically covers methods for capturing consistent data from infrared spectroscopy readers, as well as the application of various artificial intelligence algorithm development methods to the data. The ability of TBIA to make a diagnosis of cancer has first been applied to the detection of breast and colon cancers, where Todos has received CE Marks in Europe paving the way for commercialization initially focused on TMB-2 (dense breast / inconclusive mammogram secondary screening) and TMB-1 (general breast cancer screening) cancer detection tests.

      • Copyrights

        • Google vs Oracle: Resolved in Favor of Open Source

          We are pleased to report that Google vs. Oracle*, the landmark copyright case in the US courts about software interoperability, has been resolved favorably for open source developers. It’s been a long road to get here but it’s something the courts were always going to have to address -- is modern technology best served by the copyright maximalism that has long been promoted by the content industry or should we instead re-examine some of those assumptions to facilitate multi-company platform interoperability? The Supreme Court of the United States did not take on the full scope of the question but did provide some very helpful guidance.

          This was such an important question that OSI filed an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court to advocate on behalf of the open source community.** We filed in support of Google because the position Oracle was taking -- that it’s a copyright infringement to use API’s even when they are being used solely to create interoperability -- would’ve been disastrous for open source. Shared APIs (application programming interfaces) are essential for interoperability and innovation.



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Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
The Time Our Server Host Died in a Car Accident
If Debian has internal problems, then they need to be illuminated and then tackled, at the very least in order to ensure we do not end up with "Deadian"
China's New 'IT' Rules Are a Massive Headache for Microsoft
On the issue of China we're neutral except when it comes to human rights issues
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, March 27, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, March 27, 2024
WeMakeFedora.org: harassment decision, victory for volunteers and Fedora Foundations
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 27/03/2024: Terrorism Grows in Africa, Unemployment in Finland Rose Sharply in a Year, Chinese Aggression Escalates
Links for the day
Links 27/03/2024: Ericsson and Tencent Layoffs
Links for the day
Amid Online Reports of XBox Sales Collapsing, Mass Layoffs in More Teams, and Windows Making Things Worse (Admission of Losses, Rumours About XBox Canceled as a Hardware Unit)...
Windows has loads of issues, also as a gaming platform
Links 27/03/2024: BBC Resorts to CG Cruft, Akamai Blocking Blunders in Piracy Shield
Links for the day
Android Approaches 90% of the Operating Systems Market in Chad (Windows Down From 99.5% 15 Years Ago to Just 2.5% Right Now)
Windows is down to about 2% on the Web-connected client side as measured by statCounter
Sainsbury's: Let Them Eat Yoghurts (and Microsoft Downtimes When They Need Proper Food)
a social control media 'scandal' this week
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, March 26, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, March 26, 2024
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Windows/Client at Microsoft Falling Sharply (Well Over 10% Decline Every Quarter), So For His Next Trick the Ponzi in Chief Merges Units, Spices Everything Up With "AI"
Hiding the steep decline of Windows/Client at Microsoft?
Free technology in housing and construction
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
We Need Open Standards With Free Software Implementations, Not "Interoperability" Alone
Sadly we're confronting misguided managers and a bunch of clowns trying to herd us all - sometimes without consent - into "clown computing"
Microsoft's Collapse in the Web Server Space Continued This Month
Microsoft is the "2%", just like Windows in some countries
Links 26/03/2024: Inflation Problems, Strikes in Finland
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/03/2024: Losing Children, Carbon Tax Discussed
Links for the day
Mark Shuttleworth resigns from Debian: volunteer suicide and Albania questions unanswered, mass resignations continue
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 26/03/2024: 6,000 Layoffs at Dell, Microsoft “XBox is in Real Trouble as a Hardware Manufacturer”
Links for the day
Gemini Links 26/03/2024: Microsofters Still Trying to 'Extend' Gemini Protocol
Links for the day
Look What IBM's Red Hat is Turning CentOS Into
For 17 years our site ran on CentOS. Thankfully we're done with that...
The Julian Paul Assange Verdict: The High Court Has Granted Assange Leave to Appeal Extradition to the United States, Decision Adjourned to May 20th Pending Assurances
The decision is out
The Microsoft and Apple Antitrust Issues Have Some But Not Many Commonalities
gist of the comparison to Microsoft
ZDNet, Sponsored by Microsoft for Paid-for Propaganda (in 'Article' Clothing), Has Added Pop-Up or Overlay to All Pages, Saying "813 Partners Will Store and Access Information on Your Device"
Avoiding ZDNet may become imperative given what it has turned into
Julian Assange Verdict 3 Hours Away
Their decision is due to be published at 1030 GMT
People Who Cover Suicide Aren't Suicidal
Assange didn't just "deteriorate". This deterioration was involuntary and very much imposed upon him.
Overworking Kills
The body usually (but not always) knows best
Former Red Hat Chief (CEO), Who Decided to Leave the Company Earlier This Month, Talks About "Cloud Company Red Hat" to CNBC
shows a lack of foresight and dependence on buzzwords
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 25, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, March 25, 2024
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
Discord Does Not Make Money, It's Spying on People and Selling Data/Control (38% is Allegedly Controlled by the Communist Party of China)
a considerable share exists
In At Least Two Nations Windows is Now Measured at 2% "Market Share" (Microsoft Really Does Not Want People to Notice That)
Ignore the mindless "AI"-washing
Internet Relay Chat (IRC) Still Has Hundreds of Thousands of Simultaneously-Online Unique Users
The scale of IRC