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Links 22/6/2021: KDE Plasma 5.22.2, FreeBSD 13.0 Compared to DragonFlyBSD 6.0



  • GNU/Linux

    • Desktop/Laptop

      • Slimbook Executive lightweight Linux laptop
        Slimbook has launched a new Linux laptop this week in the form of the Slimbook Executive which is capable of running either Linux or Windows operating systems and is equipped with a 14 inch display offering users a resolution of 2880 x 1800 pixels. Pricing for the laptop starts at €1299 or roughly $1540 and the Linux laptop is now available to configure over on the Slimbook website. A number of Linux operating systems are available to install when you purchase the laptop including Ubuntu, Ubuntu Mate, Linux Mint, KDE Neon, Manjaro, Fedora and more.

      • Put the Classic PDP-8 Minicomputer on Your Shelf

        This Raspberry Pi–powered replica runs all the original PDP-8 software with enough cycles left to double as a media server

      • Chrome OS is getting old-school cool with an upcoming productivity feature [Ed: Google is just mimicking GNU/Linux ('proper'), poorly. Just wipe ChromeOS and install a real distro. It would do far more than the malicious OS made by Google.]

        Chrome OS has been steadily growing up over the years, with Linux and Android app support helping it to stray from its "just a browser" roots. Thanks to powerful multitasking features like virtual desks and window snapping, Google's operating system is a solid productivity choice for consumers and many professionals. To help you work even faster, Chrome OS will soon pick up a classic productivity feature that will give your Chromebook the old-school coolness you never thought you needed.

    • Server

      • VMs were a fad fit for the Great Recession. Containers’ time has finally come

        Welcome to the latest Register Debate in which writers discuss technology topics, and you – the reader – choose the winning argument. The format is simple: we propose a motion, the arguments for the motion will run this Monday and Wednesday, and the arguments against on Tuesday and Thursday.

        During the week you can cast your vote on which side you support using the poll embedded below, choosing whether you're in favor or against the motion. The final score will be announced on Friday, revealing whether the for or against argument was most popular. It's up to our writers to convince you to vote for their side.

        [...]

        Even the early container efforts in Free BSD Jails and Solaris containers, which had a shared kernel and a collection of userland sandboxes – were too much.

        At some point, thanks to the advent of VMware’s ESXi, XenSource’s Xen, Microsoft’s Hyper-V, and Red Hat’s KVM, server virtualization hypervisors and the VM as software distribution package became normal because it was relatively easy to explain and justify, even if VMs are a bit heavy in terms of server overhead.

        All those monolithic applications running in the enterprise will have to die a slow death before VMs and hypervisors disappear from the datacenter, and the container platform security model has had to improve, too.

        But the direction for the future seems clear. Some years ago, when Docker and Kubernetes were first gaining steam, we treated containers as a special kind of application running atop virtual machines, but now we are starting to treat VMs as a special kind of container running atop bare metal.

        New applications will be written in new ways and with new tools, and they will be containerized because this is the easiest way to get the benefits of the microservices approach that the hyperscalers have demonstrated is the best way to build and deploy software.

      • 6 steps to reduce SRE toil

        The work around an IT platform can be separated into two types: work that adds value to the business and work that keeps the platform running. The aim of an IT operations team should be to maximize the amount of the former while minimizing the time and cost spent on the latter.

        Work that keeps the IT platform running has many different names -- "keeping the lights on" is one -- but one term, toil, is growing in acceptance. The way to reduce toil is to adopt site reliability engineering (SRE).

    • Kernel Space

      • Graphics Stack

        • PanVK Merged Into Mesa 21.2 For Open-Source Vulkan Driver With Arm Mali GPUs - Phoronix

          Hitting mainline Mesa today for Mesa 21.2 next quarter is PanVK as the open-source Vulkan driver in development for newer Arm Mali GPUs.

          Earlier this year the PanVK driver was started for this open-source Vulkan API driver part of the "Panfrost" initiative. Panfrost has only been focused on a Gallium3D OpenGL driver for Arm Mali GPUs while PanVK is bringing things up for Vulkan.

        • Ricardo Garcia: VK_EXT_multi_draw released for Vulkan

          The Khronos Group has released today a new version of the Vulkan specification that includes the VK_EXT_multi_draw extension. This new extension has been championed by Mike Blumenkrantz, contracted by Valve to work on Zink, an OpenGL implementation that’s part of Mesa and runs on top of Vulkan. Mike has been working very hard to make OpenGL-on-Vulkan performant and better, and came up with this extension to close an existing gap between the two APIs. As part of the ongoing collaboration between Igalia and Valve, I had the chance to participate in the release process by reviewing the specification text in depth, providing feedback and fixes, and writing a set of CTS tests to check conformance for drivers implementing the extension. As you can see in the contributors list, VK_EXT_multi_draw had input and feedback from more vendors. Special mention to Jason Ekstrand from Intel, who provided an initial review of the text, and Piers Daniell from NVIDIA, who was also involved since the early stages.

        • Nvidia DLSS has arrived on Linux – will this tempt gamers to switch from Windows 10?

          Nvidia has brought DLSS to Linux, or rather, Team Green has made it available on Proton for Vulkan titles with its latest graphics driver, which further introduces DLSS support for a trio of games including Doom Eternal.

          The new Game Ready driver means that those gamers running Linux rigs with GeForce RTX graphics cards will be able to benefit from DLSS when using Proton to play Windows 10 games.

          [...]

          Speaking of Doom Eternal, Nvidia’s new Game Ready driver introduces the double whammy of ray tracing and DLSS to the shooter, although it won’t officially be live until the game gets its incoming big update delivered on June 29.

          Rust has also been announced as getting DLSS on July 1 – the survival game already has support for Nvidia Reflex – and Lego Builder’s Journey launches on PC today with both ray tracing and DLSS, with the latter promising up to 92% frame rate boosts.

        • NVIDIA 470.42.01 for Linux adds DLSS for Proton, Xwayland, asynchronous reprojection | GamingOnLinux

          This is it. The big one! NVIDIA has today released the NVIDIA 470.42.01 beta driver which brings in lots of fun new things and further improves their Linux support.

          Firstly, as promised, they've now added an NVIDIA NGX build for use with Steam Play Proton and Wine. This means Windows games and applications can use DLSS when run through Proton and Wine, providing they have been updated to support the features of this new driver. You should at least be able to try out the Windows versions of DOOM Eternal, No Man's Sky and Wolfenstein: Youngblood with this new driver and Proton, as they use Vulkan. DirectX support for DLSS with Proton arrives "this Fall".

          Support for the VK_QUEUE_GLOBAL_PRIORITY_REALTIME_EXT from the VK_EXT_global_priority extension was added, finally giving Linux / NVIDIA users asynchronous reprojection in SteamVR. For Linux users, you need the Beta version of SteamVR which added support for this as of version SteamVR 1.18.2 - so Valve were quick to have it readied.

        • NVIDIA Posts 470 Linux Driver Beta With Better Wayland Support, DLSS + Improved PRIME - Phoronix

          NVIDIA announced yesterday they would be releasing DLSS Linux support tomorrow and indeed they have delivered on that first milestone of Deep Learning Super Sampling support for Linux gamers. NVIDIA has published their first 470 driver series beta in the form of the NVIDIA 470.42.01 build.

          NVIDIA's Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS) has been popular among Windows gamers as a temporal image upscaling technique leveraging AI and accelerated using the tensor cores with NVIDIA GeForce RTX graphics cards. Today's driver support allows Windows games with DLSS that supports the Vulkan API to make use of the upscaling feature. It won't be until the autumn where the NVIDIA driver and DXVK/VKD3D-Proton support is in place for Direct3D DLSS usage on Linux over Vulkan.

        • AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution Source Code Coming Next Month - Phoronix

          AMD today released FidelityFX Super Resolution that was announced earlier this month at Computex. Today it's Windows-only with no Linux support being introduced. FidelityFX Super Resolution is open-source but the code drop will not be until next month.

          AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution is now available for Windows as the company's alternative to NVIDIA DLSS. For launch day there are seven Windows games supporting this technology. FidelityFX Super Resolution works across all supported AMD GPUs and even NVIDIA GPUs too.

        • AMD releases FidelityFX Super Resolution, source code dropping mid-July

          Today AMD released FidelityFX Super Resolution, their attempt to answer NVIDIA's DLSS and the source code to it is coming soon for developers to look at.

          What exactly is it then? It's AMD's solution for producing high resolution frames from lower resolution inputs. From what AMD say: "it uses a collection of cutting-edge algorithms with a particular emphasis on creating high-quality edges, giving large performance improvements compared to rendering at native resolution directly. FSR enables “practical performance” for costly render operations, such as hardware ray tracing.".

          It supports Vulkan and DirectX, although currently it seems it's actually limited to Windows as mentions of Linux have been absent from any press materials and official announcements from AMD. Once it's properly open source, which AMD say will happen "mid July" on GPUOpen, there should hopefully be nothing to stop Mesa developers hooking up support for it to then work for Linux native titles and Windows games run through Steam Play Proton. The latest "official" AMD driver (being the Radeon Software for Linux) had an update only yesterday, June 21, which simply bumped up the supported Linux distribution version.

        • AMD Drops Pre-Polaris GPU Support From Their Mainline Radeon Software Driver

          AMD has shifted all their graphics processors and APUs prior to Polaris / GCN 1.4 to being legacy and will not be supported by their new Radeon Software Adrenalin releases.

          AMD announced that products ranging from their A-Series APUs up through the Radeon R9 300 series (including R9 Fury) are now legacy and will not see new releases with their mainline driver. On Monday for Windows users they published the Radeon Software Adrenalin 21.6.1 release while 21.5.2 is the last for these pre-Polaris graphics processors.

    • Applications

      • 5 Best Linux Video Players on Which You Can Rely on

        In this article, we have compiled a list of what we think are the 5 best Linux video players and thoroughly discuss their features.

        There are a lot of free and open-source video players available for Linux today. Most of them do the basic job pretty well. However, some players provide additional features and you can pick which one would suit you best depending on the feature list.

      • Security-Focused Tutanota Mail’s Linux Desktop Application is Now Available

        Tutanota is an open-source privacy-oriented email service. It is an impressive secure email service as an alternative to Gmail.

        In fact, our ethical web portal LinuxHandbook hosts emails on Tutanota.

        While it is already a full-fledged service with constant improvements added regularly, the desktop client was something in beta since 2018.

        Now, they have finally announced the availability of their desktop client for Linux, Windows, and macOS for every Tutanota user.

    • Instructionals/Technical

      • LFCA: Learn the Basic Concepts of Using Containers – Part 22

        Over time, as demand for rapid testing and deployment of applications grew coupled with faster business cycles, organizations were compelled to innovate in order to keep up with the fast-paced business environment.

        The quest to modernize applications and build new ones to create agile workflows led to the concept of using containers. Containerization technology is nearly as old as virtualization. However, containers didn’t ignite much excitement until Docker exploded into the scene in 2013 and evoked a frenzied interest among developers and other IT professionals.

      • Kubernetes Operators 101, Part 2: How operators work

        Kubernetes Operators might seem complex at first, but if you understand Kubernetes, you can easily extend that knowledge to Kubernetes Operators. Part 1 of this series provided an overview of Kubernetes Operators and what they do. This article explains aspects of how a Kubernetes cluster works, including the structure of a cluster, how workloads are managed, and the reconciliation process.

      • Introduction to the Node.js reference architecture, Part 4: GraphQL in Node.js | Red Hat Developer

        In this part of our ongoing introduction to the Node.js reference architecture, we dig into some of the discussions the team had when developing the GraphQL section of the reference architecture. Learn about the principles we considered and gain additional insight into how we developed the current recommendations for using GraphQL in your Node.js applications.

      • Using a compressed diff instead of lines of code | Bryan Quigley

        Lines of code (LOC) has some known flaws, but one of its advantages is that it lets humans visualize it for a small enough number. For bigger numbers like 100,000 vs 200,000 lines of code it really doesn't help us humans picture it.

        For big enough changes, you could switch to just compressing the diff and measuring that. That also nicely tracks what developers would have to actually download to get the new changes. It also helps with understanding the bandwidth requirements of contributing to a project.

      • Linux / BSD command line: process monitoring and control with top, htop & Co.

        Users and admins regularly need more detailed information about the processes running on a GNU / Linux or Free / Net / OpenBSD system. You have to identify which processes are particularly demanding on the CPU and locate crashed and frozen programs in order to be able to terminate them in a targeted manner.

        For system monitoring and process management, there are many tools (including graphical ones) that help you sift through and clear the process list. But these are not always available on servers or appliances such as firewalls / routers or NAS. Classic tools such as ps and kill. In the area of ​​system management, more extensive command line programs such as top and its numerous further developments, however, significantly more. top and some derivatives of this we present in this article and explain the basic operation using small practical examples.

      • How I automatically run things after waking up my computer | Hund

        Some time ago, Gentoo deprecated pm-utils, which didn’t come as a surprise considering it hasn’t been updated upstreams for 11 years now.

        pm-utils was a small collection of scripts that handles suspend and resume on behalf of HAL. One of the things that pm-utils allowed me to do, was to automatically run any scripts when I woke up the computer.

        With the deprecation of pm-utils, I was left with two alternatives; 1) elogind (the systemd project’s logind, extracted to a standalone package) and 2) s2ram. Considering the fact that I’m not a big fan of systemd, I really only had one choice.

      • How to Disable ‘Recommended by Pocket’ Articles Suggestion in Firefox New Tab [Ed: Mozilla should just disable this by default, but Firefox isn't about the users anymore]

        Now, I don’t like an algorithm to tell me which articles I should be reading. I use feed readers and read articles from the sources I choose to follow.

        If you don’t like these article recommendations and you prefer not to see it in your new tab area, there is an easy way to disable it. Let me show it to you.

      • How to Install Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo [Step by Step]

        Ubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo is the first short-term release of 2021 which brings moderate changes and updates. In case you missed it, here’s a quick recap of the new features of Ubuntu 21.04.

      • How to Install, Remove, Manage Flatpak Apps in Ubuntu Command Line | UbuntuHandbook

        This simple tutorial shows how to search for, install, remove, and manager Flatpak apps in Ubuntu Linux.

        Flatpak is an universal Linux package format developed by an independent community. Like snap, it runs in sandbox and bundles most runtime libraries.

        Flatpak is supported out-of-the-box in many Linux Distros, e.g., CentOS, Fedora, Linux Mint. And it’s available in the most Linux repositories. Since many software developers publish binary packages via flatpak, it’s a good choice to install external apps in Ubuntu Linux.

      • How to install Oracle Linux 8.4

        In this video, I am going to show how to install Oracle Linux 8.4.

      • How to compress images on Linux with Curtail

        If you’ve got large image files on your Linux PC and need to compress them, the easiest way to do it is with Curtail. What is Curtail? It’s a super user-friendly, easy-to-use application that Linux users can use to compress image files. Here’s how it works.

      • How to play Tetris on the Ubuntu command line

        Tetris is our childhood favorite falling blocks game. The 90s generation has literally grown up playing this game and the best thing about it is that even today, it is as popular as it was years ago. Many of the Computer Science students are asked to build this game in different programming languages as a part of their different course projects. On a commercial level also, this game has undergone several revisions and today, many different variations of Tetris are available out there. If we talk about the rules of this game, then there is a rectangular boundary defined inside which you are supposed to play. Once your selected level of the game starts, the blocks of different shapes start falling and you have to move them and adjust them in a way that they fall perfectly on the block that has already fallen on the ground. The blocks continue to fall until the upper limit of the defined boundary has reached. After that, the game terminates and your score is presented to you on the screen. While playing Tetris, your goal should be to align as many blocks in symmetry as possible. That is the exact factor on which the score of your game depends. As a Linux user, you might also like to have this amazing game installed on your system. Therefore, today, I will show you how to install theTetris clone 'Tint' on a Ubuntu 20.04 system. Apart from that, we will also learn how we can actually play this game once it is installed on our system. Finally, we will share with you an additional tip about Tetris.

      • How to read Wikipedia from the Linux desktop

        Have you ever wanted to read Wikipedia from the comfort of your favorite Linux desktop environment rather than relying on Firefox or Chrome? As it turns out, thanks to the Wike app, it is possible.

      • Fix Linux Server Server Issues With These 5 Troubleshooting Steps

        If your Linux server isn't performing to its full potential, it's likely there is an underlying issue that needs resolving.

        Follow these five simple yet practical steps to troubleshoot a Linux server and reduce the downtime to an absolute minimal.

      • Gitlab setup tutorial - Things to do after installation - LinuxTechLab

        Earlier we have discussed the detailed installation of the Gitlab server on CentOS & Ubuntu systems. Once we have our Gitlab server ready, we must be able to perform common operations, some post-installation Gitlab setup like the ones mentioned below,

        Add SSH keys Create/Remove User Create/Remove Groups Create Project

        In this Gitlab tutorial, we are going to discuss just that. We will learn how we can perform all these things step by step with the help of some screenshots.

      • How to install Diskonaut on Linux - Unixcop

        diskonaut is a Terminal Disk Space Analyzer & Navigator for Linux. It is a simple terminal disk space navigator built using Rust and supports Linux and macOS.

      • How to Get macOS Monterey Universal Control Feature on Windows and Linux

        In this tutorial, we are going to use Barrier, an open-source application, which allows you to share your mouse and keyboard between Windows, Linux, and macOS devices. Its functionality is similar to the Universal Control feature on macOS Monterey. The best part is that Barrier is completely free to use and also offers clipboard sharing and keyboard shortcuts. Synergy is also an excellent alternative, but it’s a paid application ($29).

      • Secure Your Apache Web Server Best Practice - Unixcop

        Apache is the most popular web server used on the internet. And it is ideal for most situations and allows flexibility for shared environments. In this tutorial, we will see how to secure an Apache webserver. For this tutorial, we will use Centos 8. you can find the apache installation tutorial here. We will see how to modify Apache configuration on Ubuntu/Debian system also.

      • Hold Or Prevent A Package From Upgrade In Debian, Ubuntu - OSTechNix

        Rocky Linux 8, code-named Green Obsidian, stable version has been released! This guide explains how to migrate to Rocky Linux 8 from CentOS 8 Linux using migrate2rocky script.

      • 15 things to do after installing MX Linux | FOSS Linux

        X Linux is currently one of the most popular Linux distributions out there and the most highly rated Linux distribution on DistroWatch. Thanks to its focus on delivering a highly stable and performance-optimized system, that too with a beautiful and highly customizable interface.

        But with all that being said, the distribution isn’t without its fair share of issues and user complaints. Luckily, most of these problems are avoidable if you follow the best practices from the get-go, ensuring an optimized user experience.

        And so, for this read, we have put together a detailed list of the top 15 things to do after installing MX Linux and how to do them. All the points are arranged serially, starting with the most important stuff, to things that are optional yet useful.

        Just follow the guide step by step, and by the end, you will have for yourself an optimized and personalized MX Linux system.

      • How To Install MySQL Workbench on Debian 10 - idroot

        In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MySQL Workbench on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, MySQL Workbench is a GUI tool to manage MySQL servers. You can use this tool to manage your MySQL Server installed locally or remotely. It has many important tools you need to create, edit, delete databases, create and edit users, tables, and many more.

        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 MySQL Workbench on a Debian 10 (Buster).

      • Replace du with dust on Linux | Opensource.com

        If you work on the Linux command line, you will be familiar with the du command. Knowing commands like du, which returns information about disk usage quickly, is one of the ways the command line makes programmers more productive. Yet if you're looking for a way to save even more time and make your life even easier, take a look at dust, which is du rewritten in Rust with more intuitiveness.

        In short, dust is a tool that provides a file's type and metadata. If you trigger dust in a directory, it will report that directory's disk utilization in a couple of ways. It provides a very informative graph that tells you which folder is using the most disk space. If there is a nested folder, you can see the percentage of space used by each folder.

      • What To Do When Linux GUI Freezes - ByteXD

        Once in a while, your operating system might hang or freeze when you run too many resource-intensive applications.

        Of course, you might not even be running any heavy software at times, but because two apps are struggling to access a single system resource, you might fall into a deadlock.

        Unfortunately, Linux systems are also not spared in GUI (Graphical User Interface) hanging/ freezing.

    • Games

      • Heroic Games Launcher for Epic Games sees a small bug fix release ahead of the big 1.8 | GamingOnLinux

        Heroic Games Launcher is an application built on top of the a command-line client called Legendary, and Heroic has a fresh bug fix release out to help ahead of a major release.

        The application itself is built for Linux upon tech like Electron, and it does work very nicely. Why the need for it? Well, Epic Games don't support Linux with their official client or with the games on the service even if they have a Linux build elsewhere. With that in mind, games downloaded will run in a compatibility layer like Wine and Proton.

      • Peachleaf Valley is an upcoming farming-sim inspired otome visual novel | GamingOnLinux

        Peachleaf Valley, currently having a big success on Kickstarter is a visual novel inspired by farming life sims like Harvest Moon and Stardew Valley. It's an "otome" visual novel, which if I do have my lingo correct means it's primary target is towards women.

      • Residual aims to give us a 'new breed' of survival platformer in Q3 2021 | GamingOnLinux

        Residual, a "new breed" of survival platformer from OrangePixel and revived publisher Apogee Entertainment is set to release in "Q3 2021" and there's a new trailer.

        What makes it different? Well there's no traditional combat, and there's no focus on shooting or anything like that at all. It's a survive the elements kind of experience, across worlds generated new each time with their fancy sounding "Nature Engine" (not based on Unity or Unreal).

        "When designing Residual, my goal was to offer players something brand new every time they sat down to play," said Pascal Bestebroer of one-man studio OrangePixel. "Every world tells its own story, shaped by your personal journey through it. The experience will always be challenging, but never unfair, and a rich story awaits for those who choose to seek it."

    • Desktop Environments/WMs

      • K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

        • KDE Plasma 5.22.2 Released with Better Flatpak and Wayland Support

          Coming just one week after KDE Plasma 5.22.1, the KDE Plasma 5.22.2 point release is here to further improve the Plasma Wayland session by fixing an issue with the mouse cursor being invisible for a short period of time after the screen comes back from sleep, as well as to implement activities window rule.

          It also improves the Plasma Discover package manager by addressing a regression that made the graphical package manager to notify users all the time about Flatpak app updates even when there weren’t any.

    • Distributions

      • BSD

        • FreeBSD 13.0 vs. DragonFlyBSD 6.0 vs. Linux On AMD EPYC 7003 Series "Milan"

          For those wondering how well the likes of FreeBSD 13.0 and DragonFlyBSD 6.0 performance on AMD's EPYC 7003 "Milan" processors launched earlier this year, here are some initial benchmarks of those BSDs alongside a few Linux distributions. With recently having a Tyan 1U server in the lab with EPYC 7543 32-core processor, I've been running a number of BSD benchmarks on it given these recent BSD releases have been running well on this 1P server.

          This initial round of BSD operating system testing on AMD EPYC 7003 series was carried out using a retail Tyan Transport CX GC68-B8036-LE barebones server. A full review of this server will be posted on Phoronix in the coming weeks along with more (Linux) benchmarks of this 1U1S cloud server while today we are just looking at the BSD support and performance.

      • IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

        • Rocky Linux 8.4 Released

          Rocky Linux, a distribution created to fill the void left when CentOS Linux was discontinued by Red Hat, announced general availability of Rocky Linux 8.4.

        • Rocky Linux 8.4 is officially available to replace your CentOS deployments
          Sometimes it's hard to believe the speed at which technology evolves. One minute Distribution X is all the rage, the next it has become a pariah and we find myriad forks in the road—each of which can lead to success. In this case, CentOS made a crucial misstep and we find ourselves having more than enough replacements to select from.

          That's the way of open source; the second one door closes, a handful of newer, better doors open.

          When CentOS opted to become an option many businesses could no longer trust, it came as no surprise when AlmaLinux and Rocky Linux appeared. What did surprise me was that AlmaLinux beat Rocky Linux to the punch. Rocky Linux already had the pedigree of being led by the same gentlemen (Gregory Kurtzer) who originally launched CentOS.

        • Rocky Linux is Finally Ready as a CentOS Replacement with 8.4 Stable Release - It's FOSS News

          One of the most anticipated release in 2021 — Rocky Linux, as an alternative to CentOS, is finally here with its first stable release 8.4 (Green Obsidian) ready for production use.

          If you have been keeping up with the news, it was interesting to see that Rocky Linux 8.3 release candidate was not slated for a stable release. Instead, it was followed by another 8.4 RC 1 release, which finally made its way to the general availability.

          Not to forget, it was also one of my favorite distros to look forward to in 2021.

          Now that it is here as a CentOS replacement, potentially dropping the need to switch to CentOS Stream, what’s on board in this release (changes from upstream)?

        • Rocky Linux 8.4 Released, Aims to Fill the Void Left by CentOS



          Rocky Linux, one of the most anticipated CentOS replacements, has announced the general availability for Rocky Linux 8.4 “Green Obsidian”.

          Rocky Linux 8.4 is designed as a drop-in CentsOS replacement. It was created by the same person who birthed CentOS into being, Gregory Kurtzer, and Rocky follows the same mission of offering an enterprise-ready version of Linux. The name was chosen as a tribute to early CentOS co-founder Rocky McGaugh.

          Rocky Linux 8.4 is a complete binary-compatible release using the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.4 operating system source code. The release is launching more than a half year after Red Hat deprecated its support for the widely popular CentOS server operating system.

          Rocky Linux and competitor AlmaLinux, which released its own binary compliant RHEL clone in March, are built from the same source code as RHEL. This ensuring that a wide range of proprietary software designed with only RHEL in mind will “just work”.

          Users of other RHEL 8.4 binary-compatible distributions can use the free migrate2rocky tool for convenient, in-place migration to Rocky Linux 8.4. It has been tested to be useful for migrating from Alma Linux 8.4, CentOS Linux 8.4, RHEL 8.4, and Oracle Linux 8.4 but to be used at your own risk.

        • Red Hat Process Automation Adds New End-to-End Kubernetes-Native Decision Management Capabilities

          Red Hat has announced new end-to-end Kubernetes-native decision management capabilities as part of the latest release of Red Hat Process Automation.

        • Mindshare Committee F2F Readout

          The Mindshare Committee held a face-to-face spread over two days, June 7th & 14th. We met for a total of four hours, spending half our time on discussion and half playing GeoGuessr. We discussed topics such as new logo swag and what we want to do at Nest. We also got a sneak peak at the Community Survey results. Another goal of the F2F was to actually see each others faces and spend a bit of time out of IRC hanging out with each other. In a pre-COVID world, we definitely would have met up a couple times already—we miss each other!

      • Debian Family

        • Digital Forensics Company Modernizes Data Management

          Over the years, they have become expert at using open source tools and have built their foundation on the OpenZFS file system and the open source Linux-based Debian operating system. To handle data management and storage, for example, the team used ZFS-based file stores running on Debian-run servers with replication between sites. ZFS uses snapshots to track changes in the file system.

        • A higher purpose: Alumnus John Goerzen uses personal plane to help others

          Goerzen’s written books about programming and operating systems and he’s developed multiple programs as Free Software. He’s been a volunteer developer for the Debian GNU/Linux operating system since the late 1990s.

    • Devices/Embedded

    • Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

      • Haiku R1/Beta3 Timeline Approved

        The release timeline for Haiku R1/Beta 3 has been approved after a 7 day RFC (Request for Comment) period on the mailing list.

      • Haiku R1 Beta 3 Aims For Release In About One Month - Phoronix

        The Haiku open-source operating system inspired by BeOS has been in development since 2001. It took until September 2018 for the Haiku R1 Beta and then last summer was succeeded by Haiku R1 Beta 2. Now a year later the third beta for this inaugural release is now approaching.

      • Edit text like Emacs in FreeDOS | Opensource.com

        On Linux, I often use the GNU Emacs editor to write the source code for new programs. I learned GNU Emacs long ago when I was an undergraduate student, and I still have the "finger memory" for all the keyboard shortcuts.

        When I started work on FreeDOS in 1994, I wanted to include an Emacs-like text editor. You can find many editors similar to Emacs, such as MicroEmacs, but these all take some shortcuts to fit into the 16-bit address space on DOS. However, I was very pleased to find Freemacs, by Russell "Russ" Nelson.

        You can find Freemacs in FreeDOS 1.3 RC4, on the Bonus CD. You can use FDIMPLES to install the package, which will install to \APPS\EMACS.

      • SaaS/Back End/Databases

        • PostgreSQL Weekly News - June 21, 2021

          pgMustard 4, a user interface for 'explain analyze' which provides performance tips, released.

          psycopg2 2.9.0, a Python connector for PostgreSQL, released.

          pgAdmin4 5.4, a web- and native GUI control center for PostgreSQL, released.

        • Upgrade: pgCenter 0.9.0

          "The new version of command-line admin tool for observing and troubleshooting Postgres – pgCenter, has been released."

      • Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

        • Design the LibreOffice Conference 2021 logo!

          Our next LibreOffice Conference will take place from September 23-25, 2021 (and it’ll be online, due to the ongoing pandemic situation). LibreOffice developers, supporters and users from around the world will share their work, ideas and suggestions. And we’ll have fun with online social events and more!

          But we need a logo. For last year’s conference, we had a competition and Kukuh Syafaat from Indonesia won with this great design, which includes the openSUSE logo too, as it was a joint conference...

        • A More Realistic Light Bulb for LibreOffice's Tips of The Day

          With the arrival of new trends like neomorphism, glassmorphism in the design world, using realistic assets is not always a bad thing. I took the initiative to update the childish light image in the tips of the day LibreOffice 7.1 to make it more pleasing to the eye.

          In addition to making the lights more realistic, I've also made the icons sharper. Unfortunately, the thing that might be a little annoying is the incompatibility of this realistic style with the Colibre's default icons. That's why I've suggested that the image of this asset can be changed according to the icon theme (see tdf#13177). Meanwhile, enjoy what has been made first.

      • Programming/Development

        • Janet Blackquill: C++ Coroutines Three: More Than Asynchrony

          If you haven't read my previous blogposts on C++ coroutines, I would recommend doing so.

          This post isn't an explanation of implementing something, as much as it is an explanation of something cool you can do in C++ using coroutines. Warning: this is very esoteric from a C++ perspective, and you're probably going to have problems understanding this post without knowing what algebraic effects are from other languages (mostly research ones), despite my best attempts to explain them.

          In short, you can implement a rudimentary version of algebraic effects using C++ coroutines.

        • Qt for Android Automotive tech preview released

          It is no secret that Google's Android Automotive OS (AAOS) has made waves in the automotive space; built to offer openness, customization, and scale to automotive information systems and head units, its adoption in production vehicles is constantly rising as it is set to further disrupt the industry.

        • GitLab 14 signals shift to modern DevOps: A DevOps platform with velocity, trust, and visibility | GitLab

          There is a better way to build software. GitLab 14 delivers modern DevOps with a complete DevOps platform, for a streamlined experience that unleashes the power of DevOps. Over the past year, GitLab has shipped advanced DevOps platform capabilities that enable any team to build and deliver software with velocity, trust, and visibility – no matter their size, industry, or location.

          With enhancements across the software development lifecycle, GitLab has placed strongly in several market reports across a broad range of areas from Enterprise Agile Planning and Application Security Testing to Continuous Delivery and Release Automation. Tying it all together with a platform approach is a keystone of the next shift in the DevOps movement. GitLab was named a representative vendor in a market overview of DevOps platforms.

          As a “new normal” is taking shape after the pandemic, companies worldwide are coming to grips with what it means to work in hybrid and remote environments. A modern DevOps solution needs to meet the emerging demands for a more flexible workplace. GitLab has been a pioneer and champion of remote work for years and was recently mentioned by Fast Company as a world-changing idea. Having unlocked many of the secrets to remote work success, GitLab stepped up to help others out by shipping a Remote Work Playbook and a Coursera course on “How to Manage a Remote Team.” Our all-remote know-how and experience went into the development of GitLab 14 to build capabilities that work wherever you do.

        • GitLab 14 Features Built-in Application Security For Risk Mitigation

          GitLab has announced the next iteration of its single application with its 14 release. This release enables global businesses to advance their adoption of modern DevOps by replacing disparate technologies and toolchains with a single DevOps platform that is configured to work by default.

          With GitLab’s CI/CD dashboard, deployment frequency charts, and monitoring, organizations gain confidence in their ability to drive both team performance and competitive advantage, with visibility on lead time for changes, change failure rate, deployment frequency, time to restore service (collectively known as the DORA4 metrics), and supporting value stream analytics that identifies and breaks down bottlenecks.

        • Rust

          • Google is Trying Hard to Use Rust Code in the Linux Kernel

            Google said on Thursday that they are funding a project to improve the security of Linux by writing the kernel part of the operating system in the Rust programming language.

            The recently announced proposal to make the Rust programming language one of two main languages for the Linux kernel is getting a major boost. The main goal of the push to bring Rust to Linux is to wipe out an entire class of memory-related security bugs in the kernel.

            Google’s investment in Rust will take the form of a contract for Miguel Ojeda, who’s worked on programming language security, to write software in Rust for the Linux kernel. The new contract gives Ojeda a full-time paycheck to continue memory safety work he was already doing on a part-time basis.

            As you can guess, introducing a second language into the Linux kernel isn’t a light decision. Historically, the major Linux drivers that make up the kernel were written in C, which isn’t memory-safe, but Rust does.

    • Standards/Consortia

      • W3C Publishes Working Draft For Web Neural Network API - Phoronix

        The latest JavaScript API to see a public working draft out of the W3C is for a Web Neural Network API.

        The W3C and their stakeholders have been developing the Web Neural Network API as a means of allowing neural network inference hardware acceleration from the browser. This follows the W3C launching a web machine learning working group earlier in the year. Google and Microsoft have been among the companies involved with this working group in looking to be able to exploit dedicated machine learning hardware accelerators and native instructions from within web browsers.

  • Leftovers

    • Integrity/Availability

      • Proprietary

        • Security

          • 8 Great Static Application Security Testing Tools

            No matter how good an app is made and how talented and experienced the team behind it is, you can never render it safe without adequate testing.

            Testing apps is done in a number of different ways, from deliberately trying to compromise the security of an app to analyze every line of the code for potential vulnerabilities.

            Static Application Security Testing (SAST), or static analysis, is a set of technologies designed to scan and analyze source code to find security vulnerabilities, which helps developers fix security issues.

          • Wormable DarkRadiation Ransomware Targets Linux and Docker Instances [Ed: Microsoft has NSA back doors, but let's focus on what can be done on "Linux" provided it is already compromised, somehow...]

            DarkRadiation's infection chain involves a multi-stage attack process and is noteworthy for its extensive reliance on Bash scripts to retrieve the malware and encrypt the files as well as Telegram API to communicate with the C2 server via hardcoded API keys.

          • Do you want speed or security as expected? Spectre CPU defenses can cripple performance on Linux in tests [Ed: Let's talk not about Microsoft back doors but about how hardware defects (nothing to do with Linux) can cause Linux to slow down a bit]

            The mitigations applied to exorcise Spectre, the family of data-leaking processor vulnerabilities, from computers hinders performance enough that disabling protection for the sake of speed may be preferable for some.

            Disclosed in 2018 and affecting designs by Intel, Arm, AMD and others to varying degrees, these speculative execution flaws encompass multiple variants. They can be potentially exploited by malware via various techniques to extract sensitive information, such as cryptographic keys and authentication tokens, from operating system and application memory that should be off limits.

            Though a lot of research has gone into the Spectre flaws, and work done to prevent their exploitation, basically no miscreants are abusing the weaknesses in the real world to steal information, to the best of our knowledge. There in lies the rub; does one keep the protections on and take whatever performance hit arises (it does depend enormously on the type of workload running) or switch them off because the risk is low? Or, from another point of view, put speed promised by chip manufacturers over security that was supposed to be present.

          • Software bills of materials (SBOM) could help improve cybersecurity - CNX Software

            There have been some widely publicized hacks in recent months including the SolarWinds hack and the Colonial pipeline cyber attack. Those two were particularly costly and disruptive, and the US government issued an executive order that lists some of the requirements to stretch cybersecurity.

          • Security updates for Tuesday

            Security updates have been issued by Fedora (audacity), openSUSE (chromium), Oracle (glib2), SUSE (Salt and salt), and Ubuntu (apache2 and openexr).

          • Nvidia Jetson chips make IoT devices vulnerable to attack | IT PRO

            Nvidia has patched several vulnerabilities in its Jetson system-on-module (SOM) series chips that hackers could have exploited to escalate privileges and mount denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.

            The products affected by the vulnerabilities include the Jetson TX1, TX2 series, TX2 NX, AGX Xavier series, Xavier NX, Nano, and Nano 2GB running Jetson Linux versions before 32.5.1. The product line comprises embedded Linux AI and computer vision compute modules and developer kits for AI-based computer vision applications and autonomous systems, such as mobile robots and drones.

          • NVIDIA Jetson Chipsets Found Vulnerable to High-severity Flaws

            U.S. graphics chip specialist NVIDIA has released software updates to address a total of 26 vulnerabilities impacting its Jetson system-on-module (SOM) series that could be abused by adversaries to escalate privileges and even lead to denial-of-service and information disclosure.

            Tracked from CVE‑2021‑34372 through CVE‑2021‑34397, the flaws affect products Jetson TX1, TX2 series, TX2 NX, AGX Xavier series, Xavier NX, and Nano and Nano 2GB running all Jetson Linux versions prior to 32.5.1. The company credited Frédéric Perriot of Apple Media Products for reporting all the issues.

          • Bugs in NVIDIA’s Jetson Chipset Opens Door to DoS Attacks, Data Theft | Threatpost

            Chipmaker patches nine high-severity bugs in its Jetson SoC framework tied to the way it handles low-level cryptographic algorithms.

            Flaws impacting millions of internet of things (IoT) devices running NVIDIA’s Jetson chips open the door for a variety of hacks, including denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or the siphoning of data.

            NVIDIA released patches addressing nine high-severity vulnerabilities including eight additional bugs of less severity. The patches fix a wide swath of NVIDIA’s chipsets typically used for embedded computing systems, machine-learning applications and autonomous devices such as robots and drones.

    • Defence/Aggression

      • Live Updates: U.S. Prepares New Sanctions on Russia For Navalny Poisoning

        ● The Biden administration is preparing new sanctions against Russia for the poisoning of jailed dissident Alexei Nalvany. On CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Fiona Hill, the former National Security Council official for European and Russian Affairs, called the sanctions “obligatory,” because he was poisoned with the banned nerve agent Novichok. President Joe Biden said he warned Russian President Vladimir Putin during their summit in Geneva on Wednesday that if Navalny died in Russian custody, the consequences “would be devastating for Russia.” Putin in separate remarks did not mention Navalny by name but said had repeatedly broken Russian laws, including by “deliberately” going abroad to Germany after he was poisoned. Biden also gave Putin a list of 16 critical areas of infrastructure he said were “off-limits” to cyberattack, guidelines Hill said the Russians will test. “President Biden, by sitting opposite Putin, looking him in the face, as he said, and then being very clear about what the red lines are, is already setting the tone for next sets of meetings,” she added.

    • Monopolies

      • Patents

        • Duke-NUS and GenScript Announce Notice of Allowance for U.S. Patent Application for SARS-CoV-2 Surrogate Virus Neutralization Test [Ed: Instead of solving coronavirus pandemic we're granting monopolies. Coronavirus loves patents because patent monopolies help it spread further and faster. The business model is, let it spread further, we'll have more clients. And stopping it by abundance of solutions is no longer the real objective. Not from a fiscal perspective. The corporate media says "vaccine nationalism" to hide the reality of actual nationalism and racism... as if to say, don't get angry at the patents. Patent monopoly isn't bad... it's just that awful "vaccine nationalism"... fight racism, not patents]

          GenScript Biotech Corporation ("GenScript", Stock Code: 1548.HK), a world-leading life sciences research and application service and product provider, and Duke-NUS Medical School, a premier, research intensive medical school, announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trade Office has issued a notice of allowance for the patent application for a novel Surrogate Virus Neutralization Technology (sVNT). Neutralizing antibodies have been scientifically shown to play a major role in preventing infection by blocking a virus from infecting cells.

        • How Do I Protect My Business Idea – Our Step By Step Guide [Ed: This promotes the lie or propaganda of "Intellectual Property", conflating actual laws with something that they're not]

          IP can be generated through commercial activities such as research and development, a manufacturing process or a creative action such as writing lyrics or a novel. There are four main areas of IP: copyright, trademark, design rights and patents. All four types of IP can be protected at the UK Intellectual Property Office – but not all need to be.

        • Ensuring Data Integrity, Facilitating Centralized Control Of Logistics Plants And Improving Data Exchange To Other Logistics Plants: Non-technical [Ed: More fake patents from the EPO; in this case, Team UPC and proponents of software patents (litigation profiteers, they don't code anything) comment on this kangaroo court]

          This decision concerns a data exchange system in the area of logistics. However, none of the effects produced by said system were considered technical by the EPO. Here are the practical takeaways from the decision T 2522/16 () of March 25, 2021 of Technical Board of Appeal 3.4.03...

          [...]

          The subject-matter of claim 1 of the main request differs from such a conventional networked information system only by aspects relating to an administrative information exchange process which do not provide a technical effect, as set out by the Examining Division (see points 2.3.1 to 2.3.10 of the Reasons).

          Since the distinguishing aspects represent pure business matter, they can be included in a non-technical requirement specification given to the technically skilled person in line with what was set out in T 1463/11 (see point 13 of the Reasons).

          Thus, it is not appropriate to formulate the objective technical problem as suggested by the appellant. Instead, the objective technical problem can be formulated as how to implement the administrative information exchange process as defined by the Examining Division in points 2.3.1 to 2.3.10 of the Reasons of the contested decision on a generally known conventional networked information system.

          Such an implementation would have been a straightfor€­ward task for the technically skilled person.

        • Brazil counsel embrace creative enforcement after SC ruling [Ed: Instead of obeying high courts they try to work around the courts and around the law, at least until they get their lobbyists and bribed politicians to pass the next round/s of legislation to protect the rich and abolish courts' decisions (or people's interest). Publications funded by litigation giants never quote actual folks or ordinary people (they pretend they don't know anything, need corporate lawyers as 'nannies'), or most stakeholders with a stake in outcomes; instead they quote corporations or people looking to profit from litigation, change the law etc.]

          Counsel in Brazil are becoming more creative with their enforcement strategies after the Supreme Court ruled last month to remove the 10-year guarantee for successful patents and to make that judgment retroactive for pharmaceutical and medical device patents.

          Lawyers at Daniel and a pharmaceutical company told delegates at the Managing IP Life Sciences Forum on Thursday, June 17, that secondary patents and exclusivities provided by food and drug law could become much more important as a result of the ruling.

          They pointed out that companies might enforce these rights more actively if the Supreme Court judgment significantly reduces the terms of their main patents, particularly chemical compound patents, which are extremely valuable to pharma companies.

        • From the US to Europe: how counsel manage global litigation [Ed: When the litigation profiteers fund the publications and the so-called 'news' sites it hardly surprises anyone that everything is seen in the framing of litigation and the talking points come from echo chambers]

          With companies increasingly taking on cross-jurisdictional patent litigation, it's more important than ever to understand how the courts work and what remedies are available in different countries, according to counsel at Johnson & Johnson, Ferring Pharmaceuticals and Dentons.

        • BioCardia Announces European Patent Office Decision to Grant Patent on Autologous Cell Therapy Patient Selection Diagnostic
        • BioCardia Announces European Patent Office Decision to Grant Patent on Autologous Cell Therapy Patient Selection Diagnostic Assay [Ed: This overlooks the fact that a very high proportion of patents granted by today's EPO are invalid and not in compliance with the EPC; hardly a cause for celebration]
        • Pharmaceutical Industry and Intellectual Property Rights – An Indian Perspective [Ed: There is no such thing as "Intellectual Property Rights"; They're not Intellectual, not Property, and not Rights. Does a law degree entitle you to lie to the public?]
        • Long-lasting data storage with encapsulated DNA [Ed: Another publisher that writes spam for corrupt EPO management in order to distract from EPO crimes]

          The European Patent Office (EPO) honoured Austrian and Swiss researchers Robert N. Grass and Wendelin Stark with the European Inventor Award 2021 in the "Research" category. Their technology for encapsulating data in DNA inside tiny glass spheres provides a novel means of preserving information, as well as a robust DNA barcode for use in supply chains.

        • Technical primers where infringement / essentiality / equivalents case involves complex technology – Mitsubishi & Sisvel v OnePlus & Xiaomi [2021] EWHC 1639 (Pat) [Ed: Is Bristows still boosting patent trolls such as Sisvel? Does it work for them?

          On Wednesday 16 June 2021, Mr Justice Mellor handed down his judgment in the second technical trial in the Mitsubishi & Sisvel v OnePlus & Xiaomi proceedings ([2021] EWHC 1639 (Pat)), holding that the patents in suit were valid and essential to the LTE standard.

          The proceedings had been brought in an attempt to persuade the defendants to take licences to a pool of patents administered by Sisvel (referred to as ‘the MCP Pool’) which were alleged to be essential to various telecoms standards. The two patents in suit (one of which was a divisional patent) related to the use of pilot signals to request uplink resources in a telecommunications network and were alleged to be essential to the transmission of scheduling requests on the uplink control channel in LTE. The judgment is a mammoth 85 pages long and deals with issues of essentiality and validity based on lack of inventive step and added matter. The arguments raised were very facts specific and many of them turned on points of construction which are unlikely to be of wider interest, save perhaps for the judge’s finding at paragraphs 165 and 166 that a subsidiary claim is very frequently but not necessarily narrower than an independent claim (depending on the circumstances). What strikes this author in particular is the very large proportion of the judgment devoted to explaining the underlying technology, not just in relation to the patents and common general knowledge, but also the operation of the LTE standard. It is perhaps not surprising that Mr Justice Mellor took the opportunity in his judgment to issue some guidance to practitioners regarding the provision of technical primers in future cases.

        • SCOTUS vacates and remands Arthrex; preserves PTAB [Ed: Patent extremists and profiteers are sobbing a lot this week. Pass them a cup to soak the tears and explain to them that patents aren't rights and many granted patents are simply fake and part of a scam to protect the few, at everyone else's expense

        • United States v. Arthrex: Supreme Court Preserves the PTAB [Ed: Of course the court supports the notion that fake patents need to go away]

          The Supreme Court has confirmed that PTAB Judges yield unreviewable authority during inter partes review and therefore acting as Principal Officers under the US Constitution. Therefore the APJs should have been nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate.

          BUT, the Court solved the problem in a new way–by making PTAB determinations reviewable by the USPTO Director. This leaves the PTAB system in-place, but will place major insider political pressure on the PTO Director (and current Acting Director).

          [...]

          Regarding the Appointments Clause, Hamilton wrote that the President should appoint the officers so that the President can be held directly accountable for the good and the bad. “[S]ole and undivided responsibility of one man will naturally beget a livelier sense of duty and a more exact regard to reputation.” The Federalist No. 77.

          In its opinion, the Federal Circuit found that APJ’s were improperly appointed, but then issued a savings-severance. The appellate court invalidated the tenure protections for APJs guaranteed by statute and concluded that was enough to reduce APJs to inferior officers who did not need presidential appointment. On reflection, the Supreme Court wrote “This satisfied no one.”

        • Patents are Political [Ed: Patents are Political, says someone who takes money from litigation firms to do political lobbying for software patents and other ludicrous patents (they made it about business, not science)]

          I have been repeating this mantra for quite a while – patents are political. In US v. Arthrex, the Supreme Court added an exclamation point. By design, the US governmental system places presidential political appointees at the top of each executive agency, including the US Patent & Trademark Office so that the US President can then be held directly accountable for the successes and failures. Note here that the accountability we’re talking about is political accountability.

          The Federalist Papers (Hamilton) repeatedly focused on this issue, albeit not in the patent context: “The blame of a bad nomination would fall upon the President singly and absolutely.” Federalist 77, for example. Now, in the words of the Supreme Court, the Presidentially Appointed USPTO Director “is the boss.”

          [...]

          The practical result is that a political appointee is given direct input on each and every IPR decision. In some ways this is a fairly new thing for the PTO who has endeavored to keep its head down as a bureaucratic agency and create a sense of separation between the merits decisions and agency administration. That has now changed, and the PTO Director now has an express role to play with each and every merits decision. This court-ordered change will be done alongside changes required in the Trademark Modernization Act of 2020 which similarly provides the USPTO Director with authority in certain situations to “reconsider, and modify or set aside, a decision of the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board.”

        • Press Communiqué of 22 June 2021 on decision G 4/19 of the Enlarged Board of Appeal [Ed: Corrupt EPO management pushing some propaganda for its kangaroo court, EBA, which is nothing more than a rubberstamping tool of dictators who do illegal things and crave the veneer of judges]

          The Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office issued decision G 4/19 (Double patenting) today, in which it held that a European patent application can be refused by reason of the prohibition on double patenting.

        • China's high-speed validity trials can be hard to keep up with [Ed: Patent maximalists never liked the ability to throw out fake patents]

          Already quick by international standards, patent reviews are fast-tracked when parallel litigation is involved, China’s patent office has confirmed

        • German Parliament Adopts Patent Act Amendment

          One of the most hotly debated topics in the German patent community in recent years has been if, and to what extent, the legislature should limit the availability of injunctive relief.

          To date, it has been the invariable practice of German patent infringement courts to grant an injunction upon a finding of infringement. This practice was perceived as something of the holy grail of German patent law and never seriously challenged in principle for a long time.

          This began to change when German automakers began facing patent infringement claims from nonpracticing entities like Broadcom and Nokian over patents covering connectivity features of their vehicles. The influential German automobile industry was now faced with serious threats of having to stop their entire production and sales because of (potentially) infringing patents covering only minor vehicle connectivity features.

          [...]

          First, the predominant reasons for the injunction gap is insufficient staffing at the Federal Patents Court and the consequential case backlog. With that in mind, it is not at all clear whether the Federal Patents Court will actually be able to issue high-quality preliminary assessments that provide clear guidance to the infringement courts within the six-month deadline prescribed by the legislature.

          Second, the deadline only applies to German nullity proceedings, not to oppositions before the European Patent Office—which presently have an average duration of roughly 18 months in the first instance. Since a German nullity action cannot be brought while opposition proceedings against the same patent are pending with the European Patent Office, many infringement cases will not benefit from a swift preliminary assessment by the Federal Patents Court in the first place.

      • Trademarks

        • U.S. Patent Office rejects 'Washington Football Team' trademark

          The Washington Football Team was always meant to be a temporary name after Washington ditched their old nickname. Then it became somewhat popular with fans, leading to some consideration of making it permanent. That appears less likely now, as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office just “issued an initial refusal” of the team’s attempt to trademark the name, Sam Fortier of the Washington Post reports. The decision cited the “generic geographic nature of the request.”



Recent Techrights' Posts

Comparing U.E.F.I. to B.I.O.S. (Bloat and Insecurity to K.I.S.S.)
By Sami Tikkanen
New 'Slides' From Stallman Support (stallmansupport.org) Site
"In celebration of RMS's birthday, we've been playing a bit. We extracted some quotes from the various articles, comments, letters, writings, etc. and put them in the form of a slideshow in the home page."
Thailand: GNU/Linux Up to 6% of Desktops/Laptops, According to statCounter
Desktop Operating System Market Share Thailand
António Campinos is Still 'The Fucking President' (in His Own Words) After a Fake 'Election' in 2022 (He Bribed All the Voters to Keep His Seat)
António Campinos and the Administrative Council, whose delegates he clearly bribed with EPO budget in exchange for votes
Adrian von Bidder, homeworking & Debian unexplained deaths
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Sainsbury’s Epic Downtime Seems to be Microsoft's Fault and Might Even Constitute a Data Breach (Legal Liability)
one of Britain's largest groceries (and beyond) chains
 
People Don't Just Kill Themselves (Same for Other Animals)
And recent reports about Boeing whistleblower John Barnett
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, March 18, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, March 18, 2024
Suicide Cluster Cover-up tactics & Debian exposed
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 19/03/2024: A Society That Lost Focus and Abandoning Social Control Media
Links for the day
Matthias Kirschner, FSFE: Plagiarism & Child labour in YH4F
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Linux Foundation Boasting About Being Connected to Bill Gates
Examples of boasting about the association
Alexandre Oliva's Article on Monstering Cults
"I'm told an earlier draft version of this post got published elsewhere. Please consider this IMHO improved version instead."
[Meme] 'Russian' Elections in Munich (Bavaria, Germany)
fake elections
Sainsbury's to Techrights: Yes, Our Web Site Broke Down, But We Cannot Say Which Part or Why
Windows TCO?
Plagiarism: Axel Beckert (ETH Zurich) & Debian Developer list hacking
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 18/03/2024: Putin Cements Power
Links for the day
Flashback 2003: Debian has always had a toxic culture
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
[Meme] You Know You're Winning the Argument When...
EPO management starts cursing at everybody (which is what's happening)
Catspaw With Attitude
The posts "they" complain about merely point out the facts about this harassment and doxing
'Clown Computing' Businesses Are Waning and the Same Will Happen to 'G.A.I.' Businesses (the 'Hey Hi' Fame)
decrease in "HEY HI" (AI) hype
Free Software Needs Watchdogs, Too
Gentle lapdogs prevent self-regulation and transparency
Matthias Kirschner, FSFE analogous to identity fraud
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 18/03/2024: LLM Inference and Can We Survive Technology?
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, March 17, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, March 17, 2024
Links 17/03/2024: Microsoft Windows Shoves Ads Into Third-Party Software, More Countries Explore TikTok Ban
Links for the day
Molly Russell suicide & Debian Frans Pop, Lucy Wayland, social media deaths
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Our Plans for Spring
Later this year we turn 18 and a few months from now our IRC community turns 16
Open Invention Network (OIN) Fails to Explain If Linux is Safe From Microsoft's Software Patent Royalties (Charges)
Keith Bergelt has not replied to queries on this very important matter
RedHat.com, Brought to You by Microsoft Staff
This is totally normal, right?
USPTO Corruption: People Who Don't Use Microsoft Will Be Penalised ~$400 for Each Patent Filing
Not joking!
The Hobbyists of Mozilla, Where the CEO is a Bigger Liability Than All Liabilities Combined
the hobbyist in chief earns much more than colleagues, to say the least; the number quadrupled in a matter of years
Jim Zemlin Says Linux Foundation Should Combat Fraud Together With the Gates Foundation. Maybe They Should Start With Jim's Wife.
There's a class action lawsuit for securities fraud
Not About Linux at All!
nobody bothers with the site anymore; it's marketing, and now even Linux
Links 17/03/2024: Abuses Against Human Rights, Tesla Settlement (and Crash)
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, March 16, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, March 16, 2024
Under Taliban, GNU/Linux Share Nearly Doubled in Afghanistan, Windows Sank From About 90% to 68.5%
Suffice to say, we're not meaning to imply Taliban is "good"
Debian aggression: woman asked about her profession
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 17/03/2024: Winter Can't Hurt Us Anymore and Playstation Plus
Links for the day