08.25.21
Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:49 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Series index:
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part I – More Captured Delegates?
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part II – Old Wine in New Bottles…
- You are here ☞ Introducing the Finnish “Facilitator”
Martti Enäjärvi (centre) in 1992 flanked by WIPO Director-General Arpád Bogash (left) and his predecessor as head of the Finnish PRH, Timo Kivi-Koski (right).
Summary: An enabler of Benoît Battistelli, Martti Enäjärvi, as seen from the eyes of suppressed Finnish journalists
Finland enjoys a reputation as a country blessed with a low level of corruption.
For example, Transparency International’s 2017 Corruption Perception Index rated Finland as the third-most-transparent country in the world (after Denmark and New Zealand).
“Finland enjoys a reputation as a country blessed with a low level of corruption.”While it is generally accepted that there is little direct corruption in Finland, it is also recognised that there is a significant amount of hidden structural corruption which relies on what the Finns call “hyvä veli-verkosto” or the “good brother” network.
The Finnish “good-brother” network is the Nordic equivalent of the British “old boy” network and it is basically a by-word for cronyism in business and political circles.
“The Finnish “good-brother” network is the Nordic equivalent of the British “old boy” network and it is basically a by-word for cronyism in business and political circles.”As we shall see in due course, such networks played a significant role in the career of Martti Enäjärvi, both inside Finland and beyond.
Enäjärvi was at the helm of the Finnish Patents and Registration Office (PRH) for 24 years.
Finland acceded to the European Patent Convention in 1996 so this means that he spent 14 years of his tenure on the Administrative Council of the EPO.
Finland had also joined the EU a year earlier in 1995 and this led to Enäjärvi becoming heavily involved with the EU trademark agency OHIM/EUIPO for many years.
“Finland had also joined the EU a year earlier in 1995 and this led to Enäjärvi becoming heavily involved with the EU trademark agency OHIM/EUIPO for many years.”Between 1998 and 2001, he served as deputy Chairman of OHIM’s Administrative Board (the equivalent of the EPO’s Administrative Council) and between 2004 and 2007 he was the Chairman of the Board.
As we shall see later on, Enäjärvi’s retirement from the Finnish PRH didn’t end his relationship with the EU trademark agency. As recently as 2018 he was still active as a “Special Advisor” to the executive director of EUIPO, António Campinos.
Enäjärvi’s departure from the PRH in 2010 was deemed worthy of a mention in the Annual Report [PDF] of the national patent office in neighbouring Estonia:
There was a change of generations in the National Board of Patents and Registration of Finland. The Director General Martti Enäjärvi, a good friend of Estonia and a steady cooperation partner, retired. Here I would like to express my sincere gratitude for everything he has done for the Estonian Patent Office! We hope that the successful cooperation of almost 20 years will continue. This is our wish.
In 2017, the PRH included a tribute to Enäjärvi in a publication celebrating its 75th anniversary.
In a publication [PDF] celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2017, the Finnish PRH also included a short tribute to its former Director-General which reads as follows (in translation):
The lawyer Martti Enäjärvi, followed Timo Kivi-Koski at the helm of the PRH. His career is the longest of any Director General of the PRH, starting in early 1986 and ending with his retirement in August 2010. Martti Enäjärvi came to the PRH from his position as Director of Public Relations at Kymi Strömberg.
He led a reform programme to overhaul the organisation of the PRH, reduce processing times and improve advice and customer service. The agency moved to results-based budgeting, management and governance. Labour productivity increased significantly and customer satisfaction improved. New activities were transferred from the Ministry of Justice to the PRH in the area of associations and foundations.
Mr Enäjärvi was President of the WIPO General Assembly from 1989 to 1991 and Chairman of the Board of the EU’s Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market (OHIM) from 2005 to 2007. He continues to hold a position of trust even after retirement, as a senior advisor to the EU Intellectual Property Office (formerly OHIM).
As you might have guessed already, these official encomia omit the most interesting facts about the career of this elder statesman of the “European IP network”.
But with the help of publicly accessible material from Finnish news archives it becomes possible to fill in at least some of the gaps …
Martti Jaakko Juhani Enäjärvi was born in Helsinki on 14 August 1942. His father was Jaakko Eljas Eklund, a lawyer and senior civil servant who later became a member of the Finnish Supreme Court and served as Chancellor of Justice from 1965 to 1970.
“It’s not clear what motivated him to do this, but Eklund is a Swedish name and he may have thought that having a more Finnish sounding name would improve his career prospects in the newly independent Finland.”For some reason Jaakko Eklund decided to change the family name to Enäjärvi in 1922. It’s not clear what motivated him to do this, but Eklund is a Swedish name and he may have thought that having a more Finnish sounding name would improve his career prospects in the newly independent Finland. Enäjärvi is the name of a lake in the municipality of Vihti, near Helsinki, where Jaakko Eklund was born.
Martti Enäjärvi studied law and after graduation he worked for some time as the Director of Public Relations at Kymi Strömberg. This was an electromechanical manufacturing subsidiary of the Kymmene Corporation, an industrial conglomerate, at that time owned by the Finnish magnate Caisimir Ehrnrooth.
In 1986, Enäjärvi was plucked from obscurity and placed in charge of the PRH by the then Minister for Labour, Urpo Leppänen from the Finnish Rural Party, a predecessor of the contemporary True Finns party.
“In 1986, Enäjärvi was plucked from obscurity and placed in charge of the PRH by the then Minister for Labour, Urpo Leppänen from the Finnish Rural Party, a predecessor of the contemporary True Finns party.”Twelve years later, in the autumn of 1998, an anonymous whistle-blower contacted the police in Helsinki to inform them of suspected irregularites in which Enäjärvi was allegedly implicated.
The anonymous whistle-blower also tipped off the crime reporter Harri Nykänen who wrote for the leading Finnish daily newspaper, Helsingin Sanomat (HS).
Investigative journalist Harri Nykänen from the Helsingin Sanomat tried to put the spotlight on Enäjärvi in 1998, but his efforts were obstructed by his bosses.
Nykänen started investigating the allegations against Enäjärvi. By the end of October 1998 [PDF], he had established the background and had written an article about the case for the HS.
The article explained how a rental contract for PRH premises had come under investigation by the Finnish tax authorities.
“…Helsinki Criminal Police had opened a preliminary investigation against Enäjärvi on suspicion of bribery as a public official due to his role in the negotiation of the rental contract.”The disputed lease was for more than FIM 250 million with a real estate company Merita Kiinteistöt Oy. Enäjärvi led the lease negotiations on behalf of the PRH and was advised by his friend Martti Jokinen. Merita Kiinteistöt paid Jokinen’s company a sum of FIM 240,000 for his assistance and Jokinen did not declare the income to the tax authorities. This led to an official investigation by the Corporate Tax Office.
In a follow-up article published in December 1998 [PDF], Nykänen described how the Helsinki Criminal Police had opened a preliminary investigation against Enäjärvi on suspicion of bribery as a public official due to his role in the negotiation of the rental contract.
Nykänen’s attempts to cover the case were frustrated by his bosses at the HS who barred him from reporting on it while the police investigation was in progress.
“But Enäjärvi was now on the public radar and – as we shall see in the next part – he was soon being subjected to renewed scrutiny by the Finnish media.”Nykänen gave his account of the affair in an interview with the Finnish student magazine Ylioppilaslehti, published [PDF] in March 2000.
In the end, it seems that Enäjarvi was let off the hook by the public prosecutor because – according to the official story – there was not enough evidence to indicate any wrongdoing on his part.
But Enäjärvi was now on the public radar and – as we shall see in the next part – he was soon being subjected to renewed scrutiny by the Finnish media. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 6:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Today we are looking at Pardus 21.0, the XFCE edition. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.10, based on Debian 11, XFCE 4.16, and uses about 1GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
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In this video, we are looking at Pardus 21.0, the XFCE edition. Enjoy!
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Software libraries are incredibly useful but with the advent of javascripts package manager NPM micro libraries are becoming more and more prevalent and sometimes those libraries disappear this is the tale of one of those times and some other problems that arise from this practice
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Guy Martin has worked for everybody and done everything… or at least it seems that way. He also has 100% interesting, deep and knowing thoughts about important issues that have come up in his long career, especially in his current work in the standards world, running Oasis. All of that and more—IoT, standards +/vs open source, substitutability, multiple ecosystems—are on stage for a fact and thought-filled hour of conversation with Doc Searls and Guy’s old friend and colleague Simon Phipps.
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Download Safing’s Portmaster for FREE and take control of your network traffic: https://safing.io/portmaster Get your Linux desktop or laptop here: https://slimbook.es/en/ Today, we’re going to start a new series, exploring each desktop environment, and seeing if we could call them “user friendly”, or not. We’ll begin with GNOME, one of the most interesting to study, because it doesn’t do things as other, more well known desktop experiences.
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In this video, I am going to show an overview of Manjaro 21.1.0 Xfce Edition and some of the applications pre-installed.
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Kernel Space
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A year by year summary of the most significant events in Linux’s history to date.
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In 1991, Unix was an important but secondary x86 operating system. That year, on August 25, a mild-mannered Finnish graduate student named Linus Benedict Torvalds announced on the Usenet group comp.os.minix that he was working on “a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones.” No one knew it, not even Torvalds, but the technology was going to change forever.
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By the end of 1991, it was gaining more attention than the still-born GNU Hurd or Minix [Andrew Tannenbaum's ground-breaking free software educational Unix operating system]. Torvalds explained…
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On the 30th anniversary of the announcement of Linux by Linus Torvalds, Red Hat has said that it worked because of the way the OS was licensed.
In a post today celebrating the anniversary, Red Hat said: “The reason that Linux has been arguably the most successful operating system of all time is due to the fact that its license allowed copying, improvement, distribution and required sharing of changes. (Note that the license does not require collaboration, but the reciprocal nature of Linux strongly encourages it.)”
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Red Hat is perhaps the most commercial of Linux distros and it appears that it started as it meant to go on. The first public release was issued by Marc Ewing in November 1994 with the top feature listed as “Retail price $49.95 – introductory special: $39.95.”
Red Hat confessed that this “was actually a paid beta and not a 1.0.”
The company now argues that the ability to charge for Linux was important to its success. “By removing restrictions to commercial use and so forth, Torvalds opened the door to companies improving and distributing Linux,” said today’s post.
Has Linux become too commercial and corporate? Mike McGrath, Red Hat VP of Linux Engineering, told us: “The big thing has been the competition for that community talent. If you are a developer that wants to get involved in open source, there has never been more opportunity… the corporate side of it, I don’t view that as a negative. It’s a positive consequence of the success of Linux in businesses.”
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On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, sent a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup soliciting feature suggestions for a free Unix-like operating system he was developing as a hobby.
Thirty years later, that software, now known as Linux, is everywhere.
It dominates the supercomputer world, with 100 per cent market share. According to Google, the Linux kernel is at the heart of more than three billion active devices running Android, the most-used operating system in the world.
Linux also powers the vast majority of web-facing servers Netcraft surveyed. It is even used more than Microsoft Windows on Microsoft’s own Azure cloud. And then there are the embedded electronics and Internet-of-Things spaces, and other areas.
Linux has failed to gain traction among mainstream desktop users, where it has a market share of about 2.38 per cent, or 3.59 per cent if you include ChromeOS, compared to Windows (73.04 per cent) and macOS (15.43 per cent).
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On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds, then a student at the University of Helsinki in Finland, sent a message to the comp.os.minix newsgroup soliciting feature suggestions for a free Unix-like operating system he was developing as a hobby. Thirty years later, that software, now known as Linux, is everywhere.
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It was 30 years ago that Linus Torvalds announced the operating system, just a hobby!
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Our lovely operating system Linux is turning 30 today so we will like to wish a very happy birthday to the Linux.
It all started on August 25th, 1991. A single student, studying computer science at the University of Helsinki, made his now-legendary announcement (you can read the entire mailing thread here) on the comp.os.minix newsgroup:
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By adopting the GPL license, a free software license that essentially commits participating developers to grant their contributions to the Linux project into the public domain, the Linux operating system was able to successfully build up a complete, if at times discoherent platform that offers, for many users, power and flexibility with comparable or better features than proprietary solutions. Indeed, many other operating systems owe a great deal of their inspiration if not their codebase to the GNU/Linux project.
Relying on a vast army of volunteer contributors from across the world, from the ranks of commerce, research, academia and government, Linux has grown to sit at the top table of computing over the past thirty years. It has arguably become an iconic emblem for human achievement.
By gifting a mature, comprehensive, freely available and freely adaptable software base to the world, Linus and his project has granted us all a powerful and resilient resource for the future, regardless of what the future may bring.
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To Linux system admins and developers, the extended Berkeley packet filter, or eBPF, can feel almost like magic. With eBPF, IT pros can do something that, until recently, seemed unimaginable: deploy kernel-mode programs in Linux without writing complex code, compiling special kernel modules or bloating the system’s resource consumption.
For monitoring — and observability in particular — eBPF’s simple deployment and low resource consumption are powerful features. Teams can collect monitoring data from deep within the Linux kernel in a highly efficient, user-friendly way.
Learn what eBPF is, how it works and why it’s especially valuable for monitoring and observability.
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The panelists covered what work is being done by Functional Safety Special Interest Group to bring Xen on Arm mainline to regulated domains such as Automotive: creating maintainable Xen documentation, applying some defensive programming techniques, implementing safety-related features.
In the talk, they elaborated on activities that will be useful for non-safety cases as well so that the whole Xen community may benefit from FuSa SIG work. Additionally, they explained how safety-only processes and tools may be introduced without significant impact on existing community processes.
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One last reminder that LWN editor Jonathan Corbet will be presenting a version of The Kernel Report at 9:00 US/Mountain (15:00 UTC) on August 26. This live presentation is part of a test of the infrastructure for the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference, but anybody is welcome to attend regardless of whether they are registered for LPC or not. The meeting “room” will open one hour ahead of the talk at meet.lpc.events; we hope to see you there.
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The call for nominees for the 2021 Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board election has gone out.
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The work I initially wrote about last week for AMD optimizing their C3 entry handling to avoid an unnecessary cache flush will now be picked up for the upcoming Linux 5.15 kernel cycle.
As explained in the prior article, this optimization around entry to the ACPI C3 sleep state is already applied for Intel, Zhaoxin, and Centaur processors on Linux. Unfortunately, it’s just AMD CPUs are late to the party with the kernel code not having marked them as safe for this optimization until an AMD engineer submitted a patch last week.
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Applications
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I am proud to announce the release of OpenShot 2.6.0, which I hope is the finest version of OpenShot ever made! We have so many improvements, it’s hard to pick a favorite!
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OpenShot, the free and open source Qt video editor for Linux, FreeBSD, Windows, and MacOS, had a new major release which adds new computer vision / AI effects, audio effects and much more. Also, with this release, Chrome OS (Crostini) is officially supported and available on the OpenShot downloads page.
OpenShot is an easy to use yet powerful video editor for Windows, macOS and Linux. It features curve-based key frame animations, unlimited tracks / layers, clip resizing, scaling, trimming, snapping, rotation and cutting. Using it you can also add video transitions with real-time previews, compositing, image overlays, watermarks, animated 3D titles and effects, and much more.
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OpenShot 2.6 has been released as the newest version of this non-linear open-source video editing system for Linux.
OpenShot 2.6 adds new computer vision and AI effects, new audio effects, UI improvements, a new transform tool, improved snapping, FFmpeg 4.x support, updated Blender support, better performance and stability, and much more.
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The terminal is the core of the Linux operating system. Many users do prefer it over using a GUI app for managing their system. If you are tired of the looks of the command line and want a change, you should check out other apps for a customized terminal.
In that case, here are some of the best terminal apps to spice up your Linux experience. There are many terminal emulators out there, and some of them let you use multigrid for multitasking, which in turn, increases your productivity.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Are you tired of typing your sudo password any time that you need to execute a command with root privileges? We’ve got good news: it’s possible to disable the sudo password, which will bypass the password prompt whenever you type a command with sudo.
These instructions will work the same whether you’re using Ubuntu, Debian, Arch Linux, Manjaro, Fedora, or any other system that has sudo access configured.
Obligatory warning: Disabling the sudo password is a bad idea unless you’re on a test system or you’re the only user on the computer. Otherwise, anyone logging into your account will have root permissions.
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The writing on the wall has become incredibly clear and Linux administration is in your future. Your company has probably realized just how much money they can save and much more ore agile they can be by working with Linux as a server platform.
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Today we are looking at how to install RPG Maker VX Ace on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
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All of our important data sits in a file system of one type or another, and file system issues are bound to happen. On Linux, we can use the fsck command to find and fix file system errors.
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Has the time come to update your Arch Linux system? Whether you’re on pure Arch or an Arch-based distro like Manjaro and Garuda Linux, we’ll show you how to safely update your system with one or two simple commands.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Certbot on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Certbot is a client that fetches the SSL certificate from the Let’s Encrypt authority and automates its installation and configuration. This eliminates the pain and hustle of accomplishing the entire process manually.
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 Certbot on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.
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If you are just getting started with penetration testing and ethical hacking, you will need a penetration testing lab to practice your skills and test the different security tools available.
This post will give you a step-by-step guide on setting up your virtual penetration testing lab and install the various operating systems and vulnerable machines you can start with.
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The shell scripts in Linux allow you to write programs with hard-coded values and programs that can take user inputs at runtime. These user inputs are known as parameters or arguments. All of us are generally familiar with passing normal arguments to the shell scripts. However, you might sometimes feel the need to pass “Named Arguments” to your shell scripts. This article will guide you more about what exactly are named arguments and their need in shell scripts. After that, we will share an extensive example of passing the named arguments to a shell script in Ubuntu 20.04.
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When you switch to Linux from Microsoft Windows, especially if you are a programmer, there is a possibility that you might struggle to copy and paste commands or lines in the Linux Terminal window.
Even when I ported to Ubuntu from Windows a decade ago, I struggled to copy and paste lines in the Linux terminal. At that time, I thought I’m the only user struggling to copy and paste. However, while searching on the Internet, I realized that it is a global problem.
The reason is a keyboard shortcut and mouse keys to copy and paste lines in the Linux terminal windows are not the same as the ones we use on Windows.
The key bindings for copy and paste operations are dependent on the specific terminal emulator you are using. In Linux, by default CTRL + C key binding is used for sending an interrupt signal to the command running in foreground. Hence, the Linux terminals do not use the standard CTRL + C and CTRL + V for copy and paste operations.
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Before getting into wlan0 and how to enable it, let us dig a little into the difference between WLAN and Wi-Fi and look at how it works. To begin with, the abbreviation, WLAN, stands for “Wireless Local Area Network.” Local in WLAN generally means a network contained in a geographical location, building, or campus. The W stands for wireless.
These two terms (“WLAN and Wi-Fi) are interlinked and used interchangeably, thus creating misunderstandings among many users.
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The steps given here to install Chromium on Debian 11 will also work for Debian 10 Buster and other previous versions including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, MX Linux, Kali Linux, and more…
Chromium is an open-source browser from Google, on which “Google Chrome” is based. With this web app, developers and users always get the latest version of the browser for their system. It is available for Windows, Linux, macOS, and Android, which is mainly not intended for end-users, but only for developers because Google tweaks the Chromium source code almost every day, hence you should always use the latest version.
Well, if you don’t want the proprietary Chrome browser but the open-source one then Chromium which is identical to that of Chrome can be installed easily.
However, there are some restrictions such as Chromium does not have a Flash Player, and PDFs cannot be displayed in the browser.
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Bash is a very popular shell and command language, and it can be used with the Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems. This language is extensively used for task automation and running repetitive tasks with more ease and convenience. The programs that you write in this language are known as Bash scripts. This discussion is focused on the different methods of running a Bash script on an Ubuntu 20.04 machine.
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Games
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Ready for another bundle of treats? You better be quiet on this one, it’s all about stealth and there’s some good games included in it.
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Splitgate, the huge free to play first-person shooter with portals from 1047 Games announced recently that it shall remain in Beta for the foreseeable future and now Splitgate Season 0 has officially launched.
Along with the fresh season, a new update also dropped adding in quite a few goodies. The new stuff includes a Contamination game mode where the contaminated team starts off only with Bats and needs to take down the “human” team who have shotguns. When a human dies, they respawn on the contaminated team. There’s also a new map with Karman Station, which is a reimagining of the original map from an earlier version.
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New Releases
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Clonezilla Live 2.7.3 is here based on Debian Sid. The new version adds support for mounting BitLocker device as image repository.
Clonezilla is a free and open source disk imaging and cloning application which runs from a live CD or live USB drive. It is created for disk partition, disk imaging, and cloning tasks as well as bare metal backup and recovery. It enables you to clone disks and partitions, storing resulting images on a backup storage device of your choice.
Clonezilla is for any IT pro looking for a reliable, cost-effective tool to enable them to image and restore machines quickly and safely.
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Kiss Linux nearly run aground by the founder’s good willing nature, and open and free spirit that was naively expected to be engulfed with respect by the community. Kiss since day 1 was a bet, to build a hard core base proposal, lay some values and principles down, and allow the interested community to build a quilt of packages around those principles. He (Dylan Araps) shared his project with those that became initially involved. So what happened? Not all those actors paid much attention to those values and principles, did things on their own violating the principles, and still wanted to call this a Kiss Linux community. Before anyone knew it, Kiss community violating the principles was more Kiss than Kiss itself, and the community’s looser principles (or lack there of) were characterizing Kiss more than it could maintain character itself.
So after a much needed break and settling of the situation forming, the restructuring came in July 2021 as yet a new shot with stricter values and principles.
Community repositories are still there, the base has changed a bit and so has the kiss package manager/builder. But kiss is just the core base project and from that point on anything you want to do with it is your own prerogative. You may set an installation up once and go on from there never looking back, you can follow it as close as you can, you can fork it and make it your own (MIYO), but don’t dare expect Kiss to call your contraption Kiss linux.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Debian Family
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A terminal in the shot shows that it is running a pre-release of the 5.14 Linux kernel, Debian Linux, and GNOME 3.38.4. “No, it’s not GPU accelerated,” she said, adding: “Honestly, it’s usable. Not great, but usable, on a near mainline kernel. If ‘missing most drivers’ is this snappy, when everything is done @AsahiLinux will run like a dream on these machines.”
The important caveat though is that currently that desktop experience is relying just on LLVMpipe for OpenGL acceleration as needed by the GNOME desktop. LLVMpipe is the Mesa Gallium3D software implementation for accelerating OpenGL on the CPU.
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The Debian Janitor is an automated system that commits fixes for (minor) issues in Debian packages that can be fixed by software. It gradually started proposing merges in early December. The first set of changes sent out ran lintian-brush on sid packages maintained in Git. This post is part of a series about the progress of the Janitor.
Linux distributions like Debian fulfill an important function in the FOSS ecosystem – they are system integrators that take existing free and open source software projects and adapt them where necessary to work well together. They also make it possible for users to install more software in an easy and consistent way and with some degree of quality control and review.
One of the consequences of this model is that the distribution package often lags behind upstream releases. This is especially true for distributions that have tighter integration and standardization (such as Debian), and often new upstream code is only imported irregularly because it is a manual process – both updating the package, but also making sure that it still works together well with the rest of the system.
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I’ve appreciated the bullseye upgrade, like most Debian upgrades. I’m not quite sure how, since I was already running a backports kernel, but somehow the entire system is snappier. Maybe newer X or something? I’m really pleased with it. Hardware integration is even nicer now, particularly the automatic driverless support for scanners in addition to the existing support for printers.
All in all, a very nice upgrade, and pretty painless.
I experienced a few odd situations.
For one, I had been using Gnome Flashback. Since xmonad-log-applet didn’t compile there (due to bitrot in the log applet, not flashback), and I had been finding Gnome Flashback to be a rather dusty and forgotten corner of Gnome for a long time, I decided to try Mate.
Mate just seemed utterly unable to handle a situation with a laptop and an external monitor very well. I want to use only the external monitor with the laptop lid is closed, and it just couldn’t remember how to do the right thing – external monitor on, laptop monitor off, laptop not put into suspend. gdm3 also didn’t seem to be able to put the external monitor to sleep, either, causing a few nights of wasted power.
So off I went to XFCE, which I had been using for years on my workstation anyhow. Lots more settings available in XFCE, plus things Just Worked there. Odd that XFCE, the thin and light DE, is now the one that has the most relevant settings. It seems the Gnome “let’s remove a bunch of features” approach has extended to MATE as well.
When I switched to XFCE, I also removed gdm3 from my system, leaving lightdm as the only DM on it. That matched what my desktop machine was using, and also what task-xfce-desktop called for. But strangely, the XFCE settings for lightdm were completely different between the laptop and the desktop. It turns out that with lightdm, you can have the lightdm-gtk-greeter and the accompanying lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings, or slick-greeter and the accompanying lightdm-settings. One machine had one greeter and settings, and the other had the other. Why, I don’t know. But lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings had the necessary options for putting monitors to sleep on the login screen, so I went with it.
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DebConf21 is taking place online, from 24 August to 28 August 2021. It is the 22nd Debian conference, and organizers and participants are working hard together at creating interesting and fruitful events.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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There are many Linux distributions (distros) that people claim are good replacements for Windows or macOS. But there are few that have that explicit goal, other than elementary OS, whose sixth major release, “Odin,” was released on August 10, 2021.
The focus with Odin is on empowering people to be in control of their PC, including additional privacy controls, upgrades related to ease-of-use and inclusivity, and other minor new features. If you’ve been thinking about switching to Linux or looking for a new distro to call home, here are the highlights of elementary OS 6.
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The Robot Operating System (ROS) has been powering innovators for the last decade. But as more and more ROS robots are reaching the market, developers face new challenges deploying their applications. Why did we start using ROS & Docker? Is it convenient? Does it solve our challenges? Or is it simply a tool from another domain that we are trying to incorporate into an entirely different and possibly inappropriate field?
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The Turing Pi V2, which clusters 4x RPi CM4 modules with a Layer-2 managed switch, has added a BMC and support for Nvidia Jetson modules. Meanwhile, Kobol called it quits, but will release its Helios64 NAS design to the masses.
Open hardware projects that lack the backing of sizable tech companies often have more freedom to innovate, but they also face additional challenges in bringing products to market. Combined with the recent industry-wide chip and container shortages, the preeminence of the Raspberry Pi, and increasing market saturation, it has been tough going for community backed hardware projects, as reflected in a lower number of new open-spec SBCs.
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Wallys’ 65 x 35mm “DR4019S” router board runs Linux on a quad -A7, Wave 2 WiFi equipped IPQ4019 SoC via a compute module. The carrier adds 2x GbE and USB 3.0.
Wallys’ Communications has launched a DR4019S router board with an 802.11ac Wave 2 radio that offers a more affordable and compact alternative to its more feature rich and similarly Qualcomm IPQ4019 equipped DR4019. The DR4019S name appears to apply both to the compute module and the full $80 development board.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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id you know your finger is larger than one pixel? I mean, sure, your physical finger should always be larger than one pixel, unless your screen has a really low resolution. But did you know that when using Firefox for Android, your finger is actually 6×7 millimeters large? Now you do!
Unlike a pixel-perfect input device like a mouse or even a laptop’s trackpad, your finger is weird. Not only is it all soft and squishy, it also actively obstructs your view when touching things on the screen. When you use a web browser and want to click on a link, it is surprisingly difficult to hit it accurately with the center of your fingertip, which is what your touchscreen driver sends to the browser. To help you out, your friendly Firefox for Android helps you out by slightly enlarging the “touch point”.
Usually, this works fine and is completely transparent to users. Sometimes, however, it breaks things.
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With Listen, you can have your articles in Pocket read out loud. This is perfect for those times when you’re doing chores around the house or driving during your commute, when your eyes and hands are busy.
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Save what inspires you. Pocket is your save button for the internet. When a story catches your eye anywhere online, save it to Pocket and it’ll go straight to your list, ready for you to dig into when you’re free.
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Pocket has long been the go-to place to discover, save, and spend time with the most thought-provoking and entertaining content from around the web.
Now, Pocket – a Mozilla product – has teamed up with Slate’s world-class podcast hosts to provide deep dives into the episodes their listeners can’t stop thinking about. Through curated Pocket Collections, podcast and Pocket fans will have their very own ‘back-stage pass’ to explore the stories behind their favorite Slate podcast episodes—straight from the hosts’ notes.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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At The Document Foundation, we try to grow and strengthen our community in many ways. We’d like to improve our support for existing community members who’re working on LibreOffice, but also increase the number of contributors (and TDF members).
To achieve this, we’ve created a survey for active members inside the LibreOffice community, to identify areas where focused activity is needed, and address the needs of local projects around the world.
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CMS
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Before the release of WordPress 5.0 in 2018, the Classic Editor plugin was published to help ease the transition to the new block editor. At the time, we promised to support the plugin through 2021 and adjust if needed as the deadline got closer. After discussing this with Matt, it’s clear that continuing to support the plugin through 2022 is the right call for the project as well as the community.
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Programming/Development
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GitLab has updated its code repository and DevOps platform to version 14.2, including a private beta of a macOS “build cloud” for compiling applications for Apple’s operating system.
“Today, Apple ecosystem developers on GitLab SaaS need to install, manage and operate GitLab Runner on their own macOS systems to execute CI/CD workflows,” said the company.
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The scanf function is one of the most famous and useful C functions. It allows a C program to accept input from the standard input stream, mainly the keyboard. Once scanf reads data from the standard input, it stores the value according to the specified parameter format.
This tutorial will give you the basics of how to use the scanf function in the C programs.
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In this guide, we will discuss how to use the sprintf function in C programs. The sprintf function is used to write a formatted string to a character string buffer.
Let us discuss how to use this function and illustrate with various examples.
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Strings are one of the fundamental building blocks in C and other major programming languages.
This quick guide will walk you through using one useful string function: strcat.
The strcat function allows you to concatenate or join two strings to form a single string value.
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In this guide, we will discuss how to use the strcpy() function in C language. The strcpy() function is a part of the C standard library and is used to perform string copy operations. It is included in the string.h header file and needs to be imported before using the function.
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In this tutorial, we will discuss how to use the strncpy() function in the C programming language. The strncpy function in C is used to copy specified bytes of characters from a source to a specified destination. It is defined in the string.h header file which need to be included before using the function.
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In C, a structure is a user-defined variable used to store a collection of variables under a single entity. Let us use a simple analogy to explain structures implementation and usefulness in C.
Suppose we want to store information about users using a specific service. Such information can include the username, email, address, service mode, and such. To store such information, we can go about creating each attribute as a standalone variable. However, when we have ten plus users, the code can spiral out of control and become very difficult and tiresome to read.
To solve this, we can create a structure. Inside the structure, we can store all the attributes shared by all the users and then add unique variables for each user.
Let us take a look at various examples to see how to implement this.
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The strstr() function in C is used to parse and locate the occurrence of a substring in a string. It is defined in the string.h header file.
This short tutorial will show you how to use C’s strstr() function to locate a set substring.
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This guide will discuss the perror function in C, how it works, and how we can use it.
The perror function prints error messages to the stderr stream based on the error state in the errno.
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This article will show you how to use the MySQL WHERE clause to filter rows for a specific condition. Using the where clause, we can specify a search condition for rows that return true for the condition and perform actions on them.
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This article focuses on the MySQL BIGINT data type and looks into how we can use it to store integer values. We will also learn its range, storage size, and various attributes, including signed, unsigned, and zero fill.
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A MySQL temporary table is a unique type of table that allows you to store data temporarily within a single user session. MySQL temporary table is not that different from a normal MySQL table, except that it is volatile.
Once a table has initialized in a specific user session, only that user can view, edit, or delete the table. Other logged-in users have no access to it. Once a session dies, MySQL automatically drops the table and the data stored in it.
In this tutorial, we will quickly discuss how you can create and use the MySQL temporary table.
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Version 2.0.0 of KD Reports has just been released!
KD Reports creates all kinds of reports from within Qt applications. These reports are printable and exportable from code and XML descriptions. KD Reports is a developer tool used in source code, but it allows the use of templates that are created by design staff. Reports may contain text paragraphs, tables, headlines, charts, headers and footers and more. Read more about KD Reports here.
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Cambalache is a new RAD tool that enables the creation of user interfaces for Gtk and the GNOME desktop environment. It’s main target is Gtk 4 but it has been designed from the ground up to support other versions. It is released under LGPL v2.1 license and you can get the source code and file issues here
[...]
Even tough the workflow is similar to Glade, there are some key differences like multiple UI files support in the same project, which means new concepts like import and export where introduced. Since I do not like writing documentation, who does? I made an interactive tutorial to show up the work flow.
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Python
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Gyroscopes and Accelerometers are basic features of modern smartphones. But they are vital for such projects as drones and self-balancing cars. These two kinds of sensor can be achieved with a single chip: the MPU6050. As it can communicate with a I2C interface, you can use it with Raspberry PI Pico
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to connect and use an MPU6050 with Raspberry PI Pico and MicroPython.
The MPU6050 is a Micro-Electro-Mechanical System (MEMS), which are small form factor devices able to convert mechanical movements into electrical signals. The MPU6050 specific case includes a 3-axis accelerometer and a 3-axis Gyroscope (built inside the accelerometer). The accelerometer will measure the acceleration given from a movement (values will be different from zero while it will change its moving speed), while the gyroscope will measure the speed of movement (values will be different from zero while it will move). From this, derives that MPU6050 can measure movement but it will not fit perfectly the aim to define an absolute position. For this purpose, you will need to add a magnetometer as a slave device to MPU6050, by using its auxiliary pins (not explained in this tutorial).
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This post will show what a meshgrid is and how it can be created and used in python.
A meshgrid is a rectangular grid of values made out of coordinate vectors. It is also that the values in the meshgrid are a function of the coordinate vectors.
Let’s say you want to create a meshgrid out of the coordinate vectors x and y. The naive way to do it is create a new rectangular grid and assign the values of the grid by evaluating the function at each point of the meshgrid. The following code illustrated the naive way:
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A cursor is an object which helps to execute the query and fetch the records from the database. The cursor plays a very important role in executing the query. This article will learn some deep information about the execute methods and how to use those methods in python.
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This article will cover a guide on using the “Decimal” module in Python. It can be used to run various mathematical operations on floating point numbers or numbers containing decimals points. All code samples in this article are tested with Python 3.9.5 on Ubuntu 21.04.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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The not equal “-ne” controller inside the Linux Bash programming language compares two possible values when they’re not equivalent. The not equal function in Ubuntu bash is denoted by the symbol “-ne,” which would be the initial character of “not equal.” Also included is the “!=” operator that is used to indicate the not equal condition. The exclamation point, i.e., “!=” is also commonly used in certain computer languages to indicate that something is not equal. In addition, for the not equal expression to operate, it must be enclosed by brackets [[…]]. The not equal operation yields a boolean result of True or False. The not equal expression is often used in conjunction only with if or elif expressions to check for equality and run instructions.
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Most of us use Bash scripts for maintenance and certain other tasks. However, we aren’t always acquainted with the various Bash options. Whenever a user is a novice to the Bash shell and Linux, the user tends to seek a pre-written Bash script. This is due to some users finding the unique Bash characters such as $@, $_, and $1 confusing. Beginning with the $@ Bash parameter, it is being used to extend into the positional arguments. Each parameter extends into something like a distinct word whenever expanding happens within double-quotes. Separate parameters should be enclosed in quotations and distinguished by a space if $@ is used. Remember that $@ should be quoted to function properly. Nonetheless, it behaves similarly to arguments as distinct strings.
We will be looking at several examples to elaborate on the functionality of $@ in the Bash Script while using Ubuntu 20.04 system:
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Hardware
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So that means you could register an account for free, albeit a credit card or debit card is required for a $1 hold released after a few days, and use up to four Arm-based Ampera A1 cores with 24GB RAM for evaluation for free forever.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Security
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Security updates have been issued by Debian (openssl), openSUSE (libspf2, openssl-1_0_0, and openssl-1_1), Oracle (libsndfile), SUSE (nodejs10, nodejs12, openssl, openssl-1_0_0, openssl-1_1, and openssl1), and Ubuntu (openssl).
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Security is at the top of mind for our customers, and understanding the language and practices around security is vital for teams delivering applications and managing infrastructure. Understanding how Red Hat reports and evaluates security vulnerabilities — as well as the tools Red Hat uses to communicate and address vulnerabilities — goes a long way towards protecting your IT environment.
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All supported versions of FreeBSD are affected by various security bugs that need to be applied ASAP. For example, a memory corruption bug exists in the bhyve hypervisor. Another overwrite the stack of ggatec and potentially execute arbitrary code. There are two issues fixed for OpenSSL in this security advisory too. Let us see what and how to fix these security vulnerabilities on FreeBSD.
The excellent news is fixed are released for FreeBSD version 11, 12 and 13 for bhyve, openssl, GEOM and libfetch.
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In July, Red Hat brought together a group of security experts, partners, and industry peers to discuss some of the hybrid cloud security problems organizations face and solutions to tackle those challenges.
Those sessions were recorded and are now available for free on-demand viewing.
If you’re a security professional who finds it increasingly difficult to keep up with the complexity of changing risks, compliance requirements, tools, and architectural changes introduced by new cloud and container technologies, these videos may help.
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odix’s Ubuntu is preconfigured to meet the CIS recommendations Benchmarks for hardening.
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After months of intricate development, user testing and detailed configuration odix is excited to provide our complimentary Linux Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Operating-System, which exceeds industry benchmarks and streamlines deployment of Ubuntu 20.04 LTS for administrators, security specialists, auditors, help desk professionals, and platform deployment personnel.
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Defence/Aggression
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In this episode, Whitney is joined by investigative journalist and author Nick Bryant to discuss one of the most sordid child abuse rackets in American history, one that rose to the pinnacle of US political power. The Franklin Scandal, as it’s now known, shows that Jeffrey Epstein was hardly an anomaly.
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Finance
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Tags for identifying bitcoin, ethereum and other crypto assets will be launched in September in the latest sign of how the fast growing, unregulated market is adopting the hallmarks of mainstream investing.
(Subscribe to our Today’s Cache newsletter for a quick snapshot of top 5 tech stories. Click here to subscribe for free.)
The ability to monitor cryptocurrencies has become a major worry for regulators as the ballooning market, which reached a record $2 trillion capitalization in April, has experienced wild volatility and central bank warnings that investors could lose their shirts.
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Monopolies
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Trademarks
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In addition to being known as a source for great chocolate, Swiss chocolate producer Lindt may be known to Kat readers as a source of interesting developments of trade mark law, especially in the field of non-traditional trade marks (see Katposts on Lindt’s 3D golden bunny marks here, here and here). Last week, the German Federal Court of Justice published the reasons of its decision “Golden Bunny III”, holding that Lindt owns an unregistered trade mark in the abstract colour gold, claiming the product “chocolate bunnies”.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:55 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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TUXEDO Computers have returned with a splash today to show off their new Polaris 15 and 17 Linux laptops. They’ve been refreshed and upgraded with some powerful updated components with both AMD and Intel options.
“The choice between AMD and Intel has never been more difficult, as both processors are now almost on par – so our customers have a hard decision to make.” — Herbert Feiler, CEO TUXEDO Computers
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Server and Ubuntu
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A team of scientists from Switzerland’s University of Applied Sciences Graubünden claim they have broken the world record for calculating the value of Pi. The researchers used a supercomputer to calculate the value of Pi to 62 trillion digits, breaking previous records set by Google and Engineer Timothy Mullicon, who holds the current record for calculating Pi’s value to 50 trillion digits.
“The calculation of the new pi-digit world record by the DAViS team at the University of Applied Sciences in Graubünden took 108 days and 9 hours. It is therefore almost twice as fast as the record that Google set in its cloud in 2019, and around 3.5 times as fast as the last world record from 2020,” the researchers said in a statement.
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Not only can the financial risks associated with security breaches be significant, but further cost can come in the form of user trust, which in light of evolving use cases post-Covid-19, can be even more critical to businesses.
With offices changing and transport networks set to adapt in line with new commuter behaviors, IoT solutions need to be safety-first to ensure they can guarantee positive user experiences that do not provoke alarm or concern. The customer confidence that is achieved through having a secure, user-friendly IoT device enables further development and investment. As the world moves into a ‘new normal’, it is vital that trust is at the heart of this, and safety-first IoT is the most effective means of achieving this.
IoT device manufacturers of all sizes should review and commit to developing and executing a sound cybersecurity strategy for all new products. As the threat landscape becomes more complex, manufacturers should leverage trusted computing technologies to provide more agility and speed of deployment – to be safe in the knowledge that all layers of security are implemented to protect against the growing sophistication of the threats of the future.
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In the August 2021 survey we received responses from 1,211,444,849 sites across 263,733,974 unique domains and 11,327,711 web-facing computers. This reflects a loss of 4.99 million sites, but a gain of 1.64 million domains and 67,600 computers.
The number of unique domains powered by the nginx web server grew by more than a million this month, while Apache’s count fell by 916,000. This has extended nginx’s lead in the domains metric, giving it a 29.8% share compared with Apache’s 25.5%.
OpenResty gained 234,000 domains, but its market share remained static at 14.5%, while Cloudflare gained 726,000 domains and increased its market share to 7.72%.
The number of web-facing computers using nginx has continued to increase, this month by 49,000 (+1.18%). There are now 4.19 million web-facing computers running nginx, compared with 3.52 million that run Apache. Microsoft follows in third place with 1.38 million computers.
The web-facing computers metric has painted a remarkably stable trend over the past several years, as is evident in the graph below, with both Microsoft and Apache steadily falling while nginx has progressively climbed to first overtake Microsoft in 2017, and then Apache during 2020. There has also been a rise in “Other” web servers, which includes several nginx-based spinoffs such as OpenResty and Tengine.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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1:28 The News
24:36 Security Update
28:51 Bi-Weekly Wanderings
42:30 Announcements & Outro
First up in the news OpenSSH takes another step, Firefox and Thunderbird match now, Lots of new releases and AV1 headed for kernel support
In security, you were this close to having all games on Steam
Then in our Wanderings Joe started Joe’s Plumbing Service and I’ve been boring
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Things are worse than we ever thought, but that doesn’t prevent us from taking a victory lap.
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Kernel Space
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When 21-year-old Linus Torvalds, a then computer science student from Helsinki, released a new type of computing system built on a kernel he created on Aug. 25, 1991, he laid the foundation for what became the Linux operating system.
Today the Linux community is estimated to be 86 million users strong. It has become the backbone of large enterprises and is installed in government systems and embedded in devices worldwide.
That percentage of Linux users is a bit misleading. When we dig down under that 86 million figure, we find that server, network, and enterprise use of Linux is extensive. But the number of desktop Linux users is vastly less large.
[...]
The Linux desktop offers users a reliable and rigorously secure computing alternative to Windows and macOS. But with no real marketing plan for desktop Linux, typical computer users are clueless that Linux exists as a viable and free operating system.
Even computer users preferring other platforms benefit from Linux. It has been ported to more hardware platforms than any other operating system, thanks to the popularity of the Linux-based Android operating system.
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Android is the world’s most beloved consumer operating system (OS), powering billions of smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and other gadgets all around the globe. While there are many other popular operating systems in use, none have accomplished quite such a broad reach as Android. The OS’ success story is a long and winding one but today we’re looking back to the true origin story.
Although Google (rightly) takes the credit for Android’s development, the operating system’s early building blocks owe their existence to the similarly ubiquitous but lesser-recognized Linux OS. Today, Linux distributions span Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and many, many others, powering PCs, servers, and Raspberry Pis all around the globe.
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On August 25, 1991, Linus Torvalds posted his famous message to the comp.os.minix USENET group…
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Today is the 30th birthday of our favorite operating system Linux. It is one of the biggest day in the history of technology. Right now, Linux is one of the most popular and powerful operating systems that is being used in wide range of sectors. It is powering laptops to mobiles, washing machines to super computers and so on.
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It was on this day 30 years ago that a younger Linus Torvalds announced a free operating system to the comp.os.minix group and from there it exploded across servers, desktops and plenty more.
Now one of the most popular operating systems in the world, you can find it nearly everywhere you look including 100% of the top 500 supercomputers. There’s a Linux distribution for everything, and Linux is what will also be powering the upcoming Steam Deck with Valve using SteamOS that’s based on Arch Linux. What Torvalds said “won’t be big and professional like gnu” has changed the world.
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A year ago, I first announced libei – a library to support emulated input. After an initial spurt of development, it was left mostly untouched until a few weeks ago.
[...]
First, a short recap of what libei is: it’s a transport layer for emulated input events to allow for any application to control the pointer, type, etc. But, unlike the XTEST extension in X, libei allows the compositor to be in control over clients, the devices they can emulate and the input events as well. So it’s safer than XTEST but also a lot more flexible. libei already supports touch and smooth scrolling events, something XTest doesn’t have or is struggling with.
Terminology refresher: libei is the client library (used by an application wanting to emulate input), EIS is the Emulated Input Server, i.e. the part that typically runs in the compositor.
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Loongson this summer rolled out their 3A5000 processors built on their own “LoongArch” ISA. While the company continues claiming that LoongArch is “not MIPS”, the Linux kernel code they continue proposing for the mainline Linux kernel points to it being a close facsimile to MIPS.
LoongArch is the Chinese company’s effort to have a domestic processor not dependent upon foreign technology. While the company has long produced MIPS-based processor designs, with their new processors they are using LoongArch as they describe as “a new RISC ISA” for the Chinese CPU market.
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AMD engineers continue working on preparing the Linux kernel for the Frontier supercomputer.
Much of the Frontier bring-up for the Linux kernel over the past number of months has been around supporting the coherent interconnect between AMD EPYC CPUs and the Instinct “Aldebaran” GPUs/accelerators with allowing CPUs coherent access to the GPU memory. The latest patch series out today for the Linux kernel is again focused on this GPU device memory handling.
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AMD is building the world’s fastest supercomputer, Frontier, which will deliver exascale-class performance for the US Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). The supercomputer brings a lot of new technologies to the table, and AMD is laying the groundwork for the software stack that will enable the Frontier to run smoothly. As reported by Phoronix, that work continues in the form of newly-submitted Linux kernel patches.
The Frontier supercomputer is a $600 million project that aims to provide more than 1.5 ExaFLOPs of computational power that will be used by ORNL for work on various government projects. Using next-generation EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct graphics cards from AMD, this system will bring a combination of novel memory, storage, and processing elements into one system.
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Today marks the 30th birthday of Linux since it was announced by Linus Torvalds. Meanwhile in just a few days the Linux 5.14 kernel is expected to be released as stable. Here is a look back at the most prominent features coming for this kernel release.
In our close monitoring and testing of Linux 5.14 over the past number of weeks, here is what has us most excited with this forthcoming kernel:
- Continued bring-up around Intel Alder Lake support. Some more pieces / device IDs are still landing for Linux 5.15 but it appears Linux 5.14 should have Alder Lake in fairly good shape… One of the big additions for 5.14 was having Alder Lake P graphics support enabled. The elephant remains though around Thread Director with there not yet being any Linux scheduler patches — queued or otherwise staging — around Thread Director on Linux.
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Benchmarks
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Earlier this month the AMD Ryzen 5 5600G and Ryzen 7 5700G desktop APUs officially launched for retail availability. Unfortunately we were not seeded with any review sample for being able to conduct Linux testing on these Zen 3 APUs with Vega graphics, but ended up purchasing one afterwards due to the number of readers inquiring about the Linux support. Here are some preliminary benchmarks of the AMD Ryzen 7 5700G.
By now those potentially interested in the Ryzen 7 5700G are likely familiar with all of the technical details, but as a recap the 5760G offers eight Zen 3 cores plus SMT for sixteen threads. The Ryzen 7 5700G has a 3.8GHz base clock with 4.6GHz maximum boost clock. There is a 4MB L2 cache, 16MB L3 cache, and this APU has a 65 Watt TDP. On the graphics side is Radeon Vega 7 graphics with eight graphics cores.
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Applications
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Keeping tabs on your passwords can be a daunting task. Often you are prone to forgetting them with time especially after prolonged periods of inactivity. Most users result in writing them down somewhere on a sticky note or notebook, which is considered a risky practice. Unintended or malicious users can get hold of them and your guess is as good as mine what can happen next.
Password managers help users to improve their online security by not only securing their passwords but also assisting them to generate strong and randomized passwords and encrypting them in a digital vault. There are numerous password managers and they vary in features and the computing platform that they are supported. In this guide, we highlight some of the most popular and 8 best password managers for Linux in 2021. We have incorporated both free as well premium plan password managers.
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Have you ever thought about building your own small social network for you, your family, relatives, community, or team? Let’s say, something like Facebook but on a small scale for private use!
Well, all you need is a self-hosted social network software and a server, and this article is to choose from the best open-source self-hosted social medial solutions.
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Instructionals/Technical
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If you ever think about it, computers are exceedingly stupid. Even the most powerful CPU can’t do very much. However, it can do what it does very rapidly and repeatably. Computers are so fast, they can appear to do a lot of things at once, too and modern computers have multiple CPUs to further enhance their multitasking abilities. However, we often don’t write programs or shell scripts to take advantage of this. However, there’s no reason for this, as you’ll see.
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Plug is not the only interface with the middleware layer. Absinthe also comes with a middleware layer of its own and we can use it similarly to implement authorization for queries, mutations, and subscriptions.
If we want to authorize our GraphQL API and don’t want to do that within business logic (for various reasons), we can write a middleware that will handle it. I wrote about using Plug for authorization, but using a plain Plug wouldn’t work in this case.
Since GraphQL is essentially a graph, we need to cover authorization for all nested queries. Absinthe middleware can do that for us, and might also be used for specific query fields, which is quite handy.
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Using a Bash script, you can ensure certain configuration parameters are set in your sshd_config file.
Bash is the default shell on most Linux systems these days. It can be used as an interactive command-line interpreter as well as a scripting language to automate common tasks. This article shows you how to use a Bash script to ensure specific configuration parameters are set in your /etc/ssh/sshd_config file.
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TICKR is a news ticker desktop widget – a feed reader that displays news headlines as a small scrolling text line (ticker) on your desktop, available for Linux and Microsoft Windows.
Add your favorite website RSS feeds to TICKR, and the tool will show the latest headlines scrolling in a thin, semi-transparent window similar to those available on news TV channels. Hovering the mouse over the ticker pauses the scrolling, while pointing the mouse to a headline shows an excerpt of the article in a tooltip. Left-click the headline in TICKR to open it in your web browser.
This scrolling news desktop widget comes with the ability to import and export feeds (OPML), as well as a GUI to manage your RSS feeds, which includes some popular RSS feeds, and allows you to add, remove, re-arrange, enable or disable feeds.
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So you are planning to switch from Windows to Linux, or have just switched to Linux? Oops!!! what I am asking! For what else reason would you have been here.
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Follow this Docker Compose approach to make an easy deployment of Isso on a server based on the official Dockerfile from the devs.
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Ubuntu operating systems come with AppArmor, a Linux kernel security module that allows the system administrator to restrict programs’ capabilities with per-program profiles. Profiles can allow network access, raw socket access, and permission to read, write, or execute files on matching paths. Rhel family users would notice this is similar to Selinux; however, they work a bit differently and have pros and cons each.
The following will cover how to enable and disable AppArmor and individual profiles; normally, most users would not need to adjust any settings with AppArmor, but if the need arises, some simple commands are all needed in the tutorial will explain.
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Debian is known for its stability and reliability and preferred choice to set up a server for businesses and organizations. Debian recently got the latest release called Bullseye. Bullseye comes with many enhancements and upgrades. It offers a list of desktop environment support such as Gnome 3.38, KDE Plasma 5.20, LXDE 11, LXQt 0.16, and MATE 1.24. Moreover, this release has now 11,000 new packages and driverless printing and scanning support. This update also removes many obsolete packages. The manual page has also got significant improvements.
Seeing these enhancements and features will push every Debian user to upgrade except for the production servers. The production servers should wait for few months before upgrading to Debian 11 “Bullseye”. If you are using Debian 10 Buster and in search of a procedure to upgrade to Debian 11 then you are on the right spot.
This write-up will give you a thorough guide on how to upgrade from Debian 10 to Debian 11 Bullseye.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install HAProxy on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, HAProxy is one of the most popular open-source load balancing software, which also offers high availability and proxy functionality. It is particularly suited for very high-traffic websites and powers quite a number of the world’s most visited ones.
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 the step-by-step installation of the HAProxy high-performance TCP/HTTP load balancer on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
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All systems, applications, and software generate information that is stored in files called logs. These logs must be constantly monitored to ensure the proper functioning of the system in question and prevent errors or security risks. They are often scattered over several servers and, as the volume of data increases, their management becomes more and more complex.
Graylog is a free and open-source enterprise-grade log management system that comprises Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and a Graylog server. It consists of the main server, which receives data from its clients installed on different servers, as well as a web interface, which is used to view the data collected by the server. Graylog is a similar tool like Splunk and LogStash.
In this tutorial, we learn how to install Graylog 4 on Ubuntu 20.04. We will also secure the Graylog server with an SSL certificate using Let’s Encrypt.
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Gulp is a free, open-source, and cross-platform JavaScript toolkit that allows you to automate many development tasks. It is a task runner built on Node.js and npm and used for automating many time-consuming tasks such as minification, concatenation, cache busting, unit testing, linting, optimization, etc. Gulp plugins are simple and designed to do a single job.
In this post, we will show you how to install Gulp on CentOS 8.
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Basically, a Linux terminal environment enables a user to carry out various system functionalities like file management, system update, and applications management through a variety of executable commands. What if you are able to achieve all these Linux terminal environment objectives but in a flexible manner?
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Brackets code editor is an open-source program. It is a code editor that assists web developers and designers in developing the front-end interface and also backend code of their websites. It is quite light in weight. It is compatible with a wide range of operating systems, including macOS, Windows, and Linux.
We’ve covered some of the most important features of this code editor program. This program allows the user to work on many files at the same time. It supports the installation of many extensions. Almost all file types are supported by the brackets code editor. This tool is the ideal solution if you want to modify big amounts of code.
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A computer system without proper backup is as vulnerable as a piece of software without updates. The problem comes when we want to restore our system to a particular time point and can’t find the right tool to do so. In this guide, I will show you two tools that you can use to back up a Linux system. This tutorial doesn’t need a particular distribution running on your machine. You can have whatever you need. You must know how to choose a backup tool for Linux which is efficient and faster to get things done.
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Using the terminal is something inevitable for every Linux user. It is quite like a chatbox that allows you to talk to your machine. Using the terminal efficiently can reduce your workload a lot. To use the terminal with ease, every user must know a lot of the Linux terminal shortcuts. Utilizing the Linux terminal shortcuts is the key difference between a power Linux user and a regular user.
Just master the command line shortcuts; you will have such a comfortable feel with the terminal that you have never felt before. Stick to this post till the end to get a crystal clear concept about Linux terminal shortcuts.
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Games
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Star Traders: Frontiers from Trese Brothers Games, probably one of the best space strategy RPGs around had a huge upgrade and now there’s some proper mod support in. The mods work with the Steam Workshop, making it simple and you’re just a few clicks away from adding in some extra content to an already ridiculously in-depth game.
[...]
Since the mod support is rather new, there’s not a whole lot up there right now but they have a passionate and very active community of players so no doubt there will be plenty flowing in eventually. The mods that have released that the developer worked with during a Beta are impressive though. One named Merchant Marine: Fly Casual entirely rebalances the game taking inspiration by Space Opera and Western tales giving you small ships with small crews up against the universe – making it all a bit more intimate.
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What looks to be the fourth time, Might and Delight have decided to push the release date for Book of Travels. It was originally due out in October 2020, then Q2 2021, then August 9 and then August 30 and now they’ve put up another announcement because it just isn’t ready.
At least this time around, they’re not giving a date to avoid further disappointment. Writing about the delay, they mentioned how their Beta testers reports indicated their team just need more time to make it stable.
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Prepare for more retro-styled action with Stellar Valkyrie, another new GZDoom-powered first-person shooter coming to Linux. Developed by In The Keep Games it’s one we missed from Realms Deep 2021.
In Stellar Valkyrie you’ll be blasting through 8 different worlds each with their own theme, as you attempt to find your ex-girlfriend, Kat. As a bounty hunter, you’ll also be dealing with contracts to earn Cryptobucks, which you can then use to purchase upgrades for weapons and equipment and going back to previous worlds with new equipment might even allow you to discover more apparently.
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Psychonauts 2 from Double Fine Productions and Xbox Game Studios is out now for Windows but the native Linux support has been delayed with no current ETA.
Originally crowdfunded on the Fig website, where Double Fine pulled in close to four million dollars from Fig directly and backers, Linux has been a confirmed platform since day-1. Sadly though, shortly after our last article in an update on Fig they mentioned that Linux (and macOS) would arrive after release which was confirmed again in their Steam FAQ post.
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With a great soundtrack and action that won’t let your attention leave it, REVO is a fresh twin-stick bullet-hell that will make you sweat and it’s great. The first release from Cosmic Misfit Studio it’s inspired by the likes of Galaga, TRON, and The Last Starfighter so if you love retro themes and shoot ‘em ups you’re gonna love this.
From start to finish (if you ever finish such a game), REVO is absolutely dripping in style and the action is so intense your screen will be yelling at you in neon lights. It’s quite a sight once it gets going, and you have a few different weapons unlocked to unleash on various types of enemies. Some come in fast swarms to keep your attention, while others are slow with powerful weapons you’re really going to need to be quick on the stick to dodge. REVO doesn’t even start off slowly, with it launching wave after wave following a brief intro.
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Wasteland 3 : Cult of the Holy Detonation is the next expansion for the big RPG to come from inXile Entertainment. It was announced yesterday for the start of Gamescom 2021, and it’s going to be the final narrative expansion. Since they’re now owned by Xbox Game Studios, they’re probably moving onto something with a higher budget.
“Deep within the Cheyenne Mountain military complex, mutant cults worship an ancient deity they call the Holy Detonation—a nuclear explosion held in stasis. Whether god, science experiment, or accidental miracle, the Detonation’s energy could power Colorado Springs for hundreds of years, or level it in an instant. The warring cults have differing opinions on who should be allowed to honor their god, and you’re going to have to muscle your way to the altar.
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It’s possible to deep dive into the virtual reality gaming world on your Linux system. Want to explore VR games on Linux? This article takes you through the top 3 VR games available on Linux.
Ready to get amazed? Let’s start.
VR games are the new-gen computer games enabled with virtual reality, in short, VR technology. It gives players a first-person perspective of all the gaming actions. As a participant, you can enjoy the gaming environment through your VR gaming devices, such as hand controllers, VR headsets, sensor-equipped gloves, and others.
VR games are played on gaming consoles, standalone systems, powerful laptops, and PCs compatible with VR headsets including HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, HP Reverb G2, Valve Index, and others.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Let’s welcome Latte Dock v0.10.1 the 1st Official Bug Fix Release of v0.10.x branch!
In some systems Plasma Restore session mechanism is trying to restore Latte when you login to your desktop environment. Unfortunately this is not the intended way to autostart Latte. Please follow these steps in order to configure your system properly…
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I started my involvement focusing my activity in Open Source topics and, when senior talent was hired in this field, I incrementally focused on the infotainment platform, as part of the CEO Office. In the meantime I went from being hired by MBition directly (Berlin part-time) to work fully remotely from Spain (Daimler Group Services Madrid), becoming the front-line of a set up that is being consolidated nowadays, not just in Spain, but in other countries too, providing the company a path to become a global remote-friendly organization.
I am specially proud of the relation built by MBition with KDE, as example of the mutual benefit that Open Source communities and companies can enjoy when the company, in this case MBition, do the homework and take the right steps to build a sustainable relation. It sets a great example for MBition on how to build similar kind of relations with other communities and, at the same time, it brings a very interesting player to the KDE ecosystem, willing to use the technologies developed in the open into their vehicles.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Reviews
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We review the elementary OS 6 Odin and give you some glimpse on how it went for our test drive.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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Mozilla Firefox is a free and open source web browser descended from the Mozilla Application Suite and managed by Mozilla Corporation.
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A web-based administration interface for Unix systems. Using Webmin you can configure DNS, Samba, NFS, local/remote filesystems, Apache, Sendmail/Postfix, and more using your web browser.
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Exodus Desktop gives you a way to Secure, Manage, and Exchange your cryptocurrency in one beautiful application.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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This blog post is about a new Kubernetes feature introduced in v1.22, which adds an additional security layer on top of the existing seccomp support. Seccomp is a security mechanism for Linux processes to filter system calls (syscalls) based on a set of defined rules. Applying seccomp profiles to containerized workloads is one of the key tasks when it comes to enhancing the security of the application deployment. Developers, site reliability engineers and infrastructure administrators have to work hand in hand to create, distribute and maintain the profiles over the applications life-cycle.
You can use the securityContext field of Pods and their containers can be used to adjust security related configurations of the workload. Kubernetes introduced dedicated seccomp related API fields in this SecurityContext with the graduation of seccomp to General Availability (GA) in v1.19.0.
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The negative impact of poorly run meetings is huge. So leaders face a challenge: how do we turn poorly run meetings—which have a negative impact on team creativity, success, and even cause stress and anxiety—to meetings with positive outcomes? But to make the situation even tougher, we now find most meetings are being held remotely, online, where attendees’ cameras are off and you’re likely staring at a green dot at the top of your screen. That makes holding genuinely productive and useful meetings an even greater challenge.
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Memory access is one of the most basic operations in computer programs. It is also an unending source of program errors in C programs, because memory safety was never really a programming language goal in C. Memory-related issues also comprise a significant part of the top 25 security weaknesses that result in program vulnerabilities.
Memory access also plays an important role in performance, which makes memory management a prime target for performance tuning. It is natural, then, that dynamic memory management in the C runtime should have capabilities that allow fine-grained tracking and customizable actions on allocation events. These features allow users to diagnose memory issues in their programs and if necessary, override the C runtime allocator with their own to improve performance or memory utilization.
This article describes the clash between the quest for flexibility and introspection, on the one hand, and performance and security protections on the other. You’ll learn why this clash ultimately led to a major change in how memory allocation (malloc) is implemented in the GNU C Library, or glibc. We’ll also discuss how to adapt applications that depended on the old way of doing things, as well as the implications for future versions of Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
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IBM Observability by Instana APM provides a comprehensive observability platform for an entire enterprise, able to track requests spanning from mobile to mainframe, and supporting environments from bare metal machines to hybrid multi-cloud deployments.
Instana automatically discovers, maps and monitors infrastructure, platforms, services and applications in real time, and captures 100% of requests and transactions occurring across the environments.
To achieve this, Instana provides specific monitoring support for a broad and growing list of technologies, including a large set of programming languages and frameworks, web servers and proxies, messaging systems, and data stores. The following figure shows the technologies and capabilities, platforms, and systems that Instana supports.
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Auto-Updating containers can be very useful in some cases. Podman provides mechanisms to take care of container updates automatically. This article demonstrates how to use Podman Auto-Updates for your setups.
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A growing body of surveys and other research suggests that hybrid workplaces aren’t a short-term fad. Employee interest in a hybrid work model is particularly high: The overwhelming majority (83 percent) of more than 9,300 workers surveyed by Accenture said they’d prefer a hybrid model going forward, for example.
More business and technology leaders are evangelizing this approach – considering, implementing, or already managing hybrid teams.
“This is the future of work,” says Vivek Ranjan, chief human resources officer of Zensar. The firm had already embarked on a “work from anywhere” (WFA) transformation prior to the pandemic. It first rolled out in India, where the company has hired 500 remote employees, with plans to expand its hybrid WFA approach to its offices around the globe. “Hybrid workplaces are here to stay,” Ranjan says.
(Hybrid models entail some defined mix of both in-person and remote work. For more detail and examples, read our related article: What is a hybrid work model?)
Surveys also suggest there may be a difference of perspective between the C-suite and the rest of the organization in terms of building culture, equity, and other important issues in hybrid workplaces.
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Debian Family
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The Outreachy candidate is seated next to Chris Lamb at the DebConf19 dinner in Brazil. Despite the large expense of a long-haul flight from Europe to Brazil, the woman is not listed as a speaker. Notice the big gap between the two women: the Outreachy appears to be sitting closer to Lamb and has to lean away from him to speak to the other woman.
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In July, we put aside 2400 EUR to fund Debian projects. We haven’t received proposals of projects to fund in the last months, so we have scheduled a discussion during Debconf to try to to figure out why that is and how we can fix that. Join us on August 26th at 16:00 UTC on this link.
We are pleased to announce that Jeremiah Foster will help out to make this initiative a success : he can help Debian members to come up with solid proposals, he can look for people willing to do the work once the project has been formalized and approved, and he will make sure that the project implementation keeps on track when the actual work has begun.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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The Librem 5 phone is one of those rare computers that is getting faster and better with age. Find out how we are investing our time and resources to make the whole of mobile computing better.
This video compares PureOS 10 Byzantium to an outdated Librem 5 running PureOS 9 from June 2020:
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The Altair 8800 is one of the most important machines in computer history and many consider it to be the first personal computer. But not many computer users today would recognize it as such. At release, it couldn’t even output video and users could only interact with the Altair 8800 through a terminal or the front panel. Now you can relive history by emulating an Altair 8800, complete with front panel, on your Arduino Mega.
The front panel on the Altair 8800 contained several status lights and toggle switches. Those are cryptic when compared to our modern graphical interfaces, but the Altair 8800’s front panel was integral for working with the machine. Users would load programs and even key in bootloaders using the front panel. The panel would also give you useful debugging information, such as if data was moving from one memory address to another. Interacting with that front panel is a necessity if you want to get the full Altair 8800 experience.
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We’ve not released a time travel shield for Arduino yet. But when we do, this Eye of Agamotto project will be a perfect fit. So even though it may not bend time yet, it does everything else we’ve seen in Doctor Strange.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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allotropia provides innovative open source solutions for the digital collaboration age. Our customers value sovereignty over their data, and love the way Open Source software enables them to innovate with agency. Adding Collabora Online to our portfolio is the ideal addition, with highly compatible migration paths into hybrid and fully web-based product development.
Collabora Online is the powerful LibreOffice-based online office that supports all major documents, spreadsheets and presentation file formats, which can all be easily integrated in many infrastructures and solutions. Key features are collaborative editing and excellent office file formatting support. Collabora Online is excellent for enterprises that need a powerful office suite in the Cloud, or on-premises, that protects their privacy and allows them to keep full control of their sensitive corporate data. Collabora Online enables Hosting and Cloud businesses to include document viewing and collaborative editing functionality into their service offerings.
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So, current LibreOffice git version now has support for drawing based on Skia also for the Mac. Both Raster and Metal (the Mac GPU framework). Below is the obligatory screenshot, and here is the hey-it-can-be-faster video.
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CMS
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Freelancers are often required to track their progress, time, invoices, and tasks in organized fashion to boost their productivity. It is not that easy to find one solution to do everything within one place. But, we are lucky with Kimai.
Kimai is the ultimate freelancing management solution, as it offers more than project and time management. It includes invoices management, customer support, activities, expanses management and more.
It also contains, multi-user support, team management and improved sharing and collaboration features and options which help freelancers build teams and track project progress.
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Programming/Development
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Perl/Raku
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This time is default internal data structure of the object.
Default internal data structure of the Object::Pad is hash reference. It feels good for me.
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Health/Nutrition
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Delta Air Lines on Wednesday said employees will have to pay $200 more every month for their company-sponsored healthcare plan if they choose to not vaccinate against COVID-19.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Advantech has added many key features to BIOS Wizard, the rapid custom BIOS configuration tool exclusively produced for its embedded hardware platforms. Now supporting Linux and Microsoft Windows, the latest version, BIOS Wizard 2.0, offers extra features that provide users even more control over their systems’ startup behaviour.
These new features incorporate the capability to configure the boot order according to particular use cases, as well as the possibility to customise the sign-on message, enabling easy identification and tracking of customised BIOS versions.
The tool has greatly improved parsing compatibility for multiple UEFI based images, supporting many extra company products, including older generations.
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Security
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Hacking and hackers are well-known terminologies in the world nowadays. When people hear these words, they adopt a false imagination related to crime.
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As you know ethical hacking is a very sensitive area.
When you join the ethical hacking class then You will have learned some advanced skills related to cybersecurity and finding the vulnerability, which is really good and appreciable but you can not practice these skills in the real world.
Because doing any type of activity, for example scanning, finding vulnerability, compromise system are illegal.
illegal activities will send you jail definitely.
If You use your skills to hack a system without the owner’s permission, you could send you jail. So hacking is a very sensitive field.
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Top Linux Malware? Not Ransomware, but Coinminers [Ed: Now the Microsoft sites are pushing this anti-Linux FUD; helps distract from current Microsoft blunders]
“Given that the cloud holds a seemingly endless amount of computing power, hackers have a clear motive in stealing computing resources to run their cryptocurrency mining activities.”
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Kernel at 11:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Original here
Summary: “If you were to believe the fake software freedom supporters who celebrate Linux today, you’d be celebrating a proprietary software pre-release announcement.”
Thirty years ago, on this day, a Finnish student announced his plans to the world: he wanted to develop an operating system, and he'd already ported some components of the GNU operating system to work with his kernel.
https://web.archive.org/web/1/http://lwn.net/2001/0823/a/lt-announcement.php3
He went on to release that which he referred to as a kernel under the name Linux, initially as proprietary software.
https://web.archive.org/web/1/https://mirrors.edge.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.01
https://web.archive.org/web/1/http://www.oldlinux.org/Linus/index.html
If you were to believe the fake software freedom supporters who celebrate Linux today, you’d be celebrating a proprietary software pre-release announcement.
They pretend the GNU operating system, that he credited and relied on, and that spared him from duplicating the effort of development of most of the operating system, does not exist, or is not relevant.
By relying on GNU software and freedoms, he could focus on developing the kernel, and he eventually turned it into a major contribution to humankind when he re-released it as FLOSS, and the combination of Linux and GNU went on to achieve significant interest, adoption, and user freedom. Historical records suggest the relicensing of Linux took effect on Feb 1st, 1992.
https://web.archive.org/web/1/http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12
Software freedom supporters have celebrated GNU on Sept 27. How about also celebrating the first (*) Linux liberation, the first major Free Software gift Linus Torvalds has given us all, on Feb 1st?
Thank you, Linus Torvalds!
So blong, █
_____
(*) That's not to be confused with the second liberation of Linux, in response to the integration of proprietary blobs in the kernel Linux, some of them present to this date. The second liberation efforts eventually became the GNU Linux-libre project.
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Posted in Europe, Fraud, Patents at 9:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Martti Enäjärvi, who was convicted a decade back, was a key enabler of EPO dictator Benoît Battistelli
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Posted in Europe at 9:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 0ccada7477b7aaf35cfb22856c718d1c
Summary: We’re progressing towards the ‘meat’ of the series about Finland and Baltic states, whose reckless policy wonks are partly responsible for the demise of the EPO
Having just published part two of the series, a series that deals with enablers of Benoît Battistelli (and to some degree António Campinos as well), we now publish another video about the EPO.
“We caution in advance any proud Finns who might wrongly perceive this as us ‘bashing’ Finland…”We recently learned that a lot of the lobbying for European software patents comes from Finland, not just from Nokia (we wrote about this way more than a decade ago and condemned Nokia for this) but also Finnish officials of Campinos, who go to the UK (not EU) to promote software patents. No coding experience required; it’s like a religion to them.
We caution in advance any proud Finns who might wrongly perceive this as us ‘bashing’ Finland; this isn’t about nationalism or racism or whatever… it is about explaining the patterns we see and political systems which enable abuses (countries aren’t monoliths; there are also political parties). A week ago, in a prior series, we already spoke about some of these issues. We said that “the Finnish media reported that the head of the Finnish Patent and Registration Office (PRH), Martti Enäjärvi, had been convicted on charges of repeated misuse of his official credit card over a period of five years between 2005 and 2010. The total amount involved was reported to be of the order of € 50,000.”
Stay tuned for Part III. There will be about 20 parts in total. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:08 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Series index:
- EPO Exposé: The Besieged Baltic States – Part I – More Captured Delegates?
- You are here ☞ Old Wine in New Bottles…
Summary: “The main focus of the present series is the relationship between the Baltic States and the European Patent Organisation.”
After regaining their independence in 1991, the Baltic States proceeded to re-establish various state institutions which had been abolished under Soviet rule, including their national patent offices.
The first directors of these offices were old-school technocrats who had learnt their “trade” under the Soviet regime:
- Estonia: Matti Päts (d.o.b. 10 April 1933)
- Lithuania: Rimvydas Naujokas (d.o.b. 21 April 1950)
- Latvia: Zigrīds Aumeisters (d.o.b. 28 March 1930)
These gerontocrats remained in charge of their respective national patent offices for at least two decades – in the case of Matti Päts in Estonia, for almost a quarter of a century.
The old guard in charge of the national patent offices of the Baltic States after independence in 1991.
From left to right: Rimvydas Naujokas (Lithuania), Matti Päts (Estonia), Zigrīds Aumeisters (Latvia)
The first to go was Aumeisters who retired as head of the Latvian office in June 2010. Naujokas retired as head of the Lithuanian office in June 2014 and Päts was finally put out to pasture in Estonia in March 2015.
Päts was already pushing 60 when he took up his position as director of the newly established Estonian Patent Office and he was over 80 when he retired in 2015.
Aumeisters was in his early sixties when he took up his position in Latvia and he had just passed the 80 mark when he departed in 2010.
“Aumeisters was in his early sixties when he took up his position in Latvia and he had just passed the 80 mark when he departed in 2010.”The youngest of the bunch was the Rimvydas Naujokas who was in his early forties when he took over at the Lithuanian Patent Office and was “only” 64 when he stepped down as director in June 2014. But even then he stayed around for another year and a half as a “chief advisor”.
The main focus of the present series is the relationship between the Baltic States and the European Patent Organisation.
The first thing to be noted here is that all of these countries were accepted as members of the EPO within a decade and a half after independence.
Estonia was the first through the door on 1 July 2002 [PDF], followed by Lithuania some time afterwards on 1 December 2004 [PDF] and joined by Latvia six months later on 1 July 2005. [PDF]
“The main focus of the present series is the relationship between the Baltic States and the European Patent Organisation.”At around the same time, all three Baltic States became NATO members (29 March 2004) and also joined the EU (1 May 2004).
On the Administrative Council of the EPO, Benoît Battistelli seems to have got on like a house on fire with the representatives of the Baltic States, Päts, Naujokas and Aumeisters.
These were old-school autocrats who seem to have viewed “democracy” and “fundamental rights” as some kind of abstract academic nonsense that shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of the practical business of “administration”.
“These were old-school autocrats who seem to have viewed “democracy” and “fundamental rights” as some kind of abstract academic nonsense that shouldn’t be allowed to get in the way of the practical business of “administration”.”When Battistelli put his name forward as candidate for the position of EPO President in 2009, all three Baltic patent bosses are reputed to have been enthusiastic supporters of his efforts to crown himself as the “Sun-King” of EPOnia.
Once he had been elected they continued to support him with unwavering loyalty for the duration of his eight-year term of office.
One of the best kept secrets of Battistelli’s relationship with the Baltic triumvirate is the role played by the then head of the Finnish Patents and Registration Office, Martti Enäjärvi.
“One of the best kept secrets of Battistelli’s relationship with the Baltic triumvirate is the role played by the then head of the Finnish Patents and Registration Office, Martti Enäjärvi.”Enäjärvi is reputed to have acted as the intermediary or “facilitator” who helped to open doors for Battistelli in the Baltic region.
In the following parts, we will take a closer look at this little known elder statesman of the the “European IP network” and his controversial career as head of the Finnish Patents and Registration Office which spanned almost a quarter of a century between 1986 and 2010. █
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:00 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: How Finnish hacks enabled French autocrats [1, 2] who nowadays ruin the EPO with their grifting friends… an ongoing series in Techrights
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