Audiocasts/Shows

• [Krita artist Revoy] Torreya

  A concept-art of Torreya, who appears on episode 35 of Pepper&Carrot. I was a bit sad with her ceremony clothes, not really well adapted to riding a dragon. So, here is more work to update her character design for episode 36. I made this artwork while testing the Gaomon M10K 2018. I finished the video editing this evening, release of the video is planed for within the next 48h.

• [KDE] I’ve Done My Website – And It’s 3D! – Kockatoo Tube

Kernel Space

• 
  Quick thoughts on GNU/Linux on the M1 Mac and open hardware.

  I see that work is underway to support the “M1” (ARM) based Macs.

  While people are obviously and unfortunately buying Macs, which Apple forces into early retirement when there’s nothing wrong with the computer and it should have many years of service life left (I mean come on, there’s still a few people using PowerPC Macs for _something_.), and it will be important to have an OS that works once the people buying these things get tired of them or give up because Apple says “no more updates” in a few years, I think that people looking for a dedicated GNU/Linux computer need to look elsewhere.

  A while ago, I noticed a project to create a compatible replacement for the Hitachi SuperH. The Instruction Set Architecture for the SH, which is the processor used by the Sega Dreamcast (which already ran GNU/Linux at one point!) is so old now that most of it is not covered by any patents.

  Instead of taking on the, likely impossible, task of getting a dedicated Fab vendor, the j-core system is implemented in firmware that can be loaded onto a cheap ($50 USD, apparently) Field Programmable Gate Array.

• Linux 5.16 Aims For Better USB Low-Latency Audio Playback – Phoronix

  The Linux kernel is trying again to enhance the low-latency playback mode of its USB audio driver.

  Takashi Iwai of SUSE who oversees the Linux kernel’s sound subsystem and has been responsible for many of the sound improvements to the kernel drivers over the past number of years has taken a fresh stab at enhancing the low-latency playback support.

Applications

• HandBrake 1.4.2

  HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or BluRay sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.

Instructionals/Technical

• How To Install and Set Up WordPress with Ansible

  WordPress is considered one of the best and easiest content management system (CMS) tools. It doesn’t require any coding skills and web-developing skills to get started with WordPress. There are many ways to install the WordPress CMS on a server to localhost, and some of them are easy, and others are a bit trickier. You can set up WordPress with Ansible despite the conventional method of installing WordPress and other CMS applications. Moreover, Ansible is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

• How to Install or Upgrade to Linux Kernel 5.14 on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

  Linux kernel 5.14 is out and is famous for testing out with many new features, support, and security. The Linux 5.14 kernel release has gone through seven release candidates over the last two months and benefits from the contributions of 1,650 different developers. Those that contribute to Linux kernel development include individual contributors and prominent vendors like Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle, and Samsung.

• How to install Shoutcast Server on CentOS 8 – Unixcop

  Shoutcast is proprietary software that is being used to stream media over the Internet, especially used in music live streaming by the radio stations on Internet. It is specially for creating or listening to Internet audio broadcasts. Shoutcast allows us to broadcast a stream of music to the remote client connected to the server.

  Once Shoutcast is in your server, you can use media players like Winamp or Mixxx to connect to a streaming server and broadcast audio playlists to the Internet.

  This tutorial covers installation of Shoutcast on CentOS 8.

• How To Use Tail Command

• How to Install Rootkit Hunter in Linux – Unixcop

  rkhunter (Rootkit Hunter) is is an open-source Unix/Linux based security monitoring and analyzing tool. It is a shell script which carries out various checks on the local system to try and detect known rootkits and malware.

  rkhunter is a Unix-based tool that scans for rootkits, backdoors and possible local exploits. It does this by comparing SHA-1 hashes of important files with known good ones in online databases, searching for default directories (of rootkits), wrong permissions, hidden files, suspicious strings in kernel modules, and special tests for Linux and FreeBSD. rkhunter is notable due to its inclusion in popular OS (Fedora, Debian, etc.)

  The tool has been written in Bourne shell, to allow for portability. It can run on almost all UNIX-derived systems.

  This article will help you with the installation and config. rkhunter.

• Setting up Zswap in Debian 11 GNU/Linux. – BaronHK’s Rants

  A compressed cache, or Zswap, sitting between your physical memory and your SWAP partition can yield benefits, whether you have a lot of RAM, or very little.

  In the case of a low memory system, you risk running out, swap thrashing, and either lots of unnecessary writes to an SSD (which only have so many before they’re finished) or swapping out to a hard drive, which is terribly slow.

  In the case of a large memory system, well, it’s still not a good idea to run without a SWAP partition, because your needs can always be bigger than the amount of RAM available.

  The OOM-KILLER (or to a lesser extent EarlyOOM) is not your friend.

  If you run out of memory and there is no swap available, the OOM-KILLER (or the iron fist in a velvet glove, EarlyOOM) fires up and starts KILLING (hence the name) things that it thinks will help keep the system up. On a desktop, this could be literally anything, although it’s always more likely to be something that’s using a ton of memory.

• How to install and configure Icinga2 and Icinga2 Web on CentOS 8 – Unixcop

  Icinga 2 is a free and open source monitoring tool designed to be scalable and extensible. Icinga 2 checks the availability of your network resources, notifies users of outages, and generates performance data for reporting. We can monitor large and complex environments across multiple locations using Icinga2.

  We can also setup Icinga2 with high availability clusters with a distributed setup for large / complex environments.

  In this guide we will learn how to install and configure Icinga 2 and Icinga Web 2 on CentOS 8.

• Further reducing write amplification to an SSD in Debian GNU/Linux. Put /tmp in RAM.

  Most GNU/Linux distributions put the /tmp folder (where all sorts of temporary files the OS needs to have around for a little while go, as the name implies) on a RAM drive, using tmpfs.

  Debian, it appears, doesn’t. Having /tmp mounted on an SSD in a modern computer will cause many unnecessary writes to the SSD and will contribute to the drive wearing out too quickly.

  I did some investigating and the Debian Wiki gives two ways to enable /tmp on a RAM drive.

  You can either edit /etc/fstab by hand, but it’s easier to screw something up if you do, or you can just let systemd handle it. Since systemd has a service for this, why not just let it do that?

  Open a terminal:

  sudo cp /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system/

  sudo systemctl enable tmp.mount

  After that, you can reboot and the OS should just clear the temp folder, come back up, and mount /tmp on tmpfs.

  You can verify this with:

  mount | grep /tmp

  It should say something like:

  tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,nr_inodes=409600)

  I hate systemd.

  God knows we’ve had much more trouble out of it than it was ever worth, and Debian should have known better than to bring it in. I would have much preferred Upstart.

• How To Install Memcached on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Memcached on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Memcached, the high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, is extremely useful in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. This reduces the number of times an external data source must be read, which lowers overheads and speeds up response times. The memory caching software is a free, open-source project that anyone can use.

  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 Memcached on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• How to Disable Touchpad While Typing in Ubuntu (When Built-in Option Not Working) | UbuntuHandbook

  While typing in my Ubuntu laptop, I was often making mistakes by tapping on touch-pad accidentally. The text cursor (aka caret) jumped to another place, and/or app window lost focus. It made me crazy since the built-in ‘disable touchpad while typing‘ option does not function in my HP laptop.

  GNOME has the option to disable touchpad while typing, which is enabled out-of-the-box in current Ubuntu releases. Users may access the settings either via ‘/org/gnome/desktop/peripherals/touchpad/’ in Dconf Editor or using Gnome Tweaks tool.

Games

• Discover the Top 16 New Games to Play on Linux With Proton Since September 2021 – Boiling Steam

  We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much?) perfectly with Proton since September 2021 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks:

• Hot Wheels Unleashed: Reliving My 8-Year-Old Self – Boiling Steam

  I remember being at the toy store as a kid, tugging on my Dad’s sleeve and begging him to get me a Hot Wheels set. Every quarter when I got my report card from school, I was that giddy child that always looked forward to seeing what my grades were. The better they were, the more money my Dad gave me to treat myself. Some kits were too expensive for him. Others he was willing to get, even though it might not have been as nice as the other.

  I’d eagerly take that set of tracks home and, with the help of some of my older brothers, we put it together. I remember one track that I constructed that, even though it was simple in design, it had one of those accelerator things where the car starts. Once the toy car touched it, it would go flying with great speed, enough that it could go around an upside-down loop without falling. That car would loop around the track, hit the accelerator, and just keep going until the accelerator was turned off. It was fascinating to see that as a child.

  There was another kit that I had, which I think was a car wash thingy? As well as some other kits that unfortunately have escaped my memory. Even without a track kit, getting the cars themselves were a blast; I’d take a few out to the back deck of the house and ride those along the railing with great enthusiasm. It’s kind of a shame that I never kept any of this stuff as I grew up. It would have been nice to relive the nostalgia.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Massive new features: a new week view, KCommandBar, and more — Kalendar devlog 17 – Stuff I wrote down

    Up until now, Kalendar has allowed you to view your events on a day-by-day basis through both the month view and the schedule view. This week, we are introducing the week view, which gives you a more detailed perspective of your incidences.

    Another big new feature: we have reimplemented the KCommandBar in QML. What does this mean? Well, those of you who are power users will be able to leverage the same Command Bar you have enjoyed using in other KDE apps in Kalendar too.

    Lastly, we have some improvements for the month view on mobile that should make it far better to view your incidences.

Distributions

• Distros Which Adopted Flatpak in 2021

  Flatpak is one standardized way for computer end-users to get applications on any GNU/Linux distro any version. With Flatpak there is Flathub, a central place on the internet where users can download applications in Flatpak format like LibreOffice, 0AD Strategy Game, and VLC Media Player. Now, there are several distros which included Flatpak out-of-the-box (called “Flatpak distro” here) so their users could simply click and install applications they want. This article is a simple, practical explanation of Flatpak for everyone especially computing beginners. Let’s dive in!

• BSD

  • helloSystem 0.6 distribution released based FreeBSD and similar to macOS

    Simon Peter ( Simon by Peter ), the creator of the format of self-contained packages AppImage , published release distribution helloSystem 0.6 , based on FreeBSD 12.2 and positioned as a system for regular users, which may go macOS fans, unhappy with Apple policies. The system is free of the complications inherent in modern Linux distributions, is under complete user control and allows former macOS users to feel comfortable. To get acquainted with the distribution kit, a boot image of 1.4 GB in size ( torrent ) has been generated .

    The interface resembles macOS and includes two panels – the top one with the global menu and the bottom one with the application bar. The panda-statusbar package developed by the CyberOS distribution kit (formerly PandaOS) is used to form the global menu and status bar . The Dock is based on the cyber-dock project , also from the CyberOS developers . For managing files and placing shortcuts on the desktop, the Filer file manager is being developed , based on pcmanfm-qt from the LXQt project. The default browser is Falkon , but Chromium is optionally available.

    ZFS is used as the main file system, and exFAT, NTFS, EXT4, HFS +, XFS and MTP are supported for mounting. Applications are delivered in self-contained packages. To launch applications, the launch utility is used , which finds the program and analyzes errors during execution. The system for building Live images is based on the toolkit of the FuryBSD project .

  • FreeBSD-based helloSystem 0.6.0 Released. This is What’s New

    A new release of FreeBSD-based helloSystem 0.6.0 is here with important updates and bug fixes. We round up the release in this post.

Devices/Embedded

• How to Build A Person-Following Creepy Head for Halloween with a Raspberry Pi

  Halloween is coming, and what better way to celebrate the season than by using machine learning and a Raspberry Pi to accomplish something spooky! This year I’ve built a mannequin head that uses person detection and a simple servo motor to detect when a person is walking by and turn the head to follow them. I’m using a simple styrofoam mannequin head with some coloured in eyes from the dollar store, but you’re welcome to dress it up to fit your house’s theme or use a completely different kind of head or object. As long as you can use a servo to rotate it, the result is the same.

• MochaBin-5G SBC offers 10GbE, WiFi 6, 5G for $159 and up (Crowdfunding) – CNX Software

  Globalscale Technologies has a follow-up to their low-cost ESPRESSOBin SBC based on Marvell Armada 3700LP SoC. The MochaBin-5G SBC is powered by a Marvell Armada 7040 quad-core Cortex-A72 processor, and offers 10GbE networking for as little as $159, with as well as optional WiFi 6 and 5G connectivity.

  The single board computer is equipped with 16GB eMMC flash, up to 8GB DDR4, and plenty of high-speed interface with multiple Ethernet ports, USB 3.0 ports, M.2 socket for SATA and Cellular, and a mini PCIe for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Samsung Galaxy Z Fold2 gets October 2021 Android security patch with the latest update – GSMArena.com news

  • Lenovo Legion Play leaked: Handheld game console running Android – Liliputing

  • Xiaomi Pad 5 review: An exceptional Android tablet | Laptop Mag

  • Vivo X60 Pro review: A solid Android phone but there’s better at this price | Express.co.uk

  • Android apps, games can now run on Google Chrome due to Bluestacks X

  • 13 new Android games from the last week: The best, worst, and everything in between (9/26/21 -10/3/21)

  • The Best Match Three-Style Puzzlers for Android – Ticket to Earth, Tiny Bubbles, Ruya and More – Droid Gamers

  • Asus sets up Android 12 beta program for Zenfone 8

  • How to screen record on Android – TechStory

  • How to Lock Apps on Android

  • OPPO Ranked First in Global 5G Smartphone Shipments Among Android Manufacturers | News | wfmz.com

  • Bedrock syncs your Minecraft worlds between your Android devices

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Huawei drives wider operating system (OS) plans

  Chinese telecommunications, data and cloud company Huawei also makes software.

  Logically, its smartphones, tablets and other devices carry a degree of home-baked goods, with its Emotion User Interface (now known as just EMUI) forming the Android-based operating system that users would be perhaps most familiar with.

  The company’s other self-developed OSs include HarmonyOS and MagucUI, all of which share elements of common DNA.

  Huawei’s has now formally launched an updated version its openEuler operating system (OS), which has arrived in its latest expanded form this month.

• Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Open Access/Content

    • The Advanced Research Consortium Joins the Open Library Foundation as Project Member

      ARC provides BigDIVA as a free service for searching open-access materials. Institutional subscriptions to BigDIVA are available and allow institutions to enable searches of open-access material along with proprietary databases to which they subscribe.

    • Wings, scripts and medical tips: Meet India’s Wikimedians of the year – Hindustan Times

      Three Indians have been awarded by the foundation that runs Wikipedia, for their contributions to its open-source platforms. One winner created a toolkit for Indian language scripts, another runs a virtual butterfly project, and a doctor has received honourable mention for busting myths about health.

• Programming/Development

  • A simple HTML table for comma separated variable files. | Adam Young’s Web Log

    Enough of us are looking at the cluster that I want an easy to read snapshot of the node state. So, I convert the csv output of the openstack command into a simple HTML table.

    Yes, there are many other better ways to do this.

    This one steps over the line for a simple tool. Ideally, it would just perform the csv to table part, with no style or HTML body. But, for my purposes, it makes it much easier to visualize if I get some formatting.

  • Select only the Jades

    Some custom jq for RegEx selection of OpenStack Ironic baremetal nodes. Our Server types show up in their names. I want to be able to build lists of only the Mt. Jade Servers, which have names that look like this…

Hardware

• Supercapacitor E-Bike With DIY Motor | Hackaday

  Supercapacitor technology often looks like a revolutionary energy storage technology on the surface, but the actual performance numbers can be rather uninspiring. However, for rapid and repeated charge and discharge cycles, supercaps are hard to beat. [Tom Stanton] wanted to see if supercaps have any practical use on e-bikes, and built a DIY electric motor in the process.

  One of the problems with supercaps is the rapid voltage drop during discharge compared to batteries, which can limit the amount of usable energy. In an attempt to get around the voltage limitation, [Tom] built his own axial flux motor for the bike, using 3D printed formers for the coils and an aluminum rotor with embedded magnets. He expected torque to be severely limited, so he also machined a large sprocket for the rear wheel. He built a capacitor bank using six 2.7V 400F supercaps, only equivalent to the capacity of a single AA cell. Although it worked, the total range was only around 100 m at low speed. When he hooked the motor up to a conventional battery, he did find that it was quite usable, if a bit underpowered.

Health/Nutrition

• EPA Whistleblowers Exposed Minutes After Filing Complaint

  In response to a whistleblower complaint alleging corruption within the EPA’s New Chemicals Division, agency officials immediately notified those accused of misconduct.

• Antibody and cellular therapies for treatment of covid-19: a living systematic review and network meta-analysis

  Global cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) continue to rise. As of 14 September 2021, more than 225 million people have been infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and total deaths have surpassed 4.6 million

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Openwashing

      • Sigstore aims to close the trust gap in open-source software [Ed: Monopolisation and centralisation ploy in ‘security’ clothing?]

        One of the great virtues of open-source software – which is that anyone can contribute – is also one of its greatest weaknesses.

        The issue is that supply-chainlike process by which projects involving multiple contributors come together is based to a large degree on faith that no one will introduce malicious code or backdoors that sabotage a project.

        As open source has increasingly worked its way into commercial and enterprise applications, however, some people see the reliance on trust as a vulnerability. Kim Lewandowski and Dan Lorenc of Google LLC’s open-source security team recently noted that the process of installing most open-source software today “is equivalent to picking up a random thumb-drive off the sidewalk and plugging it into your machine.”

      • ONF Announces Formation of Ananki, A New Company Delivering Commercial Private 5G Service Based on ONF Open Source

      • ONF Announces Formation of Ananki, A New Company Delivering Commercial Private 5G Service Based on ONF Open Source

        Furthering its mission to provide industry leading open source solutions to transform networking, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) today announced the launch of Ananki™, an independent venture-backed company to deliver open source-based Software-Defined Private 5G as a commercial service to address enterprises’ unique requirements of Industry 4.0.

  • Security

    • Google Allocates $ 1 Million to Work to Improve the Security of Open Source Software [Ed: More of a corporate PR stunt from a company that spies on everybody and puts back doors in things]

      Google introduced the Secure Open Source (SOS) initiative, which will provide bonuses for work related to hardening critical open source software. A million dollars have been allocated for the first payments, but if the initiative is recognized as successful, the investment in the project will continue.

    • Google stakes new Secure Open Source rewards program for developers with $1M seed money

      As part of Google’s recently announced $10 billion commitment to cybersecurity defense, the company announced Friday the sponsorship for the Secure Open Source (SOS) Rewards pilot program run by the Linux Foundation.

    • Exclusive Interview with CrowdSec CEO Philippe Humeau

      With the widespread adoption of cloud and container infrastructure, protecting servers, services, containers and virtual machines exposed on the Internet with a reliable, intelligent intrusion prevention system is more important than ever. Cloud-native environments foster rapid growth and innovation, but also introduce an element of added complexity, along with new security challenges.

      Recently, LinuxSecurity researchers had the opportunity to speak with CrowdSec CEO Philippe Humeau about modern cyber risk, CrowdSec’s unique and advantageous community-powered approach to intrusion prevention with an extremely accurate IP reputation system, what users can expect from the latest CrowdSec release, what the future holds for CrowdSec, and more! We’re excited to share key insights and highlights from this exclusive interview with our readers to help them better understand the modern cyber threat landscape and how they can bolster their intrusion prevention strategy to prevent attacks.

    • Virtual Panel: DevSecOps and Shifting Security Left [Ed: Will more buzzwords and cargo cults make us safer?]

    • Thank you, SonarSource – openSUSE admin – openSUSE Project Management Tool

      There are times, when keeping your system up-to date does not help you against vulnerabilities. During these times, you want to have your servers and applications hardened as good as possible – including good Apparmor profiles. But even then, something bad can easily happen – and it’s very good to see that others take care. Especially if these others are professionals, that take care for you, even if you did not ask them directly.

      Tuesday, 2021-08-31, was such a day for our openSUSE infrastructure status page: SonarSource reported to us a pre-auth remote code execution at the https://status.opensuse.org/api/v1/incidents endpoint.

      SonarSource, equally driven by studying and understanding real-world vulnerabilities, is trying to help the open-source community to secure their projects. They disclosed vulnerabilities in the open-source status page software Cachet – and informed us directly – that our running version is vulnerable to CVE-2021-39165. Turned out that the Cachet upstream project is meanwhile seen as dead – at least it went out of support by their original maintainers since a while. It went into this unsupported state unnoticed by us – and potentially also unnoticed by many others. A problem, that many other, dead open source projects sadly share.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • ‘Dangerous Move’: Over 500 Individuals, Orgs Decry EC Proposal to Link Aadhaar, Voter ID

        Pointing out that far from cleaning up voter rolls, like the Election Commission has claimed, the move will create mass disenfranchisement and increase voter fraud, the signatories have called on the EC to withdraw the proposal.

      • The pandemic is testing the limits of face recognition

        At first glance, JB, an artist based in Los Angeles, perhaps doesn’t look much like the picture on their driver’s license. For one thing, the ID photo is from a few years ago. Hair that was once long and dark is now buzzed and bleached. And there’s the fact that JB is transgender and has been taking testosterone for over two years, which has led to changing facial features, thicker eyebrows, and acne that wasn’t there before. (They asked to be identified only by their first initials because of privacy concerns.)

Environment

• Hawkins Decries Democrats’ Surrender to Climate Collapse in Scaled-Down “Build Back Better” Reconciliation Bill

  Howie Hawkins, the Green Party’s 2020 presidential candidate, blasted Democrats today for accepting token climate measures in the shrinking Build Back Better reconciliation bill.

  “Biden’s original climate proposals in his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan last March were inadequate to begin with. Only about $100 billion a year in that proposal were climate- and energy-related spending. Its policies included counter-productive measures like further natural gas development,” said Hawkins who made a detailed critique of the plan’s climate provisions at the time.

  “As the Democrats keep cutting the Build Back Better reconciliation bill, they are surrendering to climate collapse as the global climate summit prepares to convene in Glasgow at the end of this month. The climate movement needs to recognize this reality and demand an emergency Green New Deal to really deal with this existential crisis,” Hawkins said.

  President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that Democrats should accept a bill that spends around $2 trillion, which is down from the 10-year $3.5 trillion budget blueprint that Congress agreed to in August. The $3.5 trillion plan was itself down from the $6.1 trillion that Biden had proposed in the spring in his American Jobs Plan for physical infrastructure, including climate measures, and his American Families Plan to expand the social safety net.

• Energy

  • China’s cryptocurrency ban clouds the dream of decentralized finance [Ed: This implementation was a waste of energy and equipment anyway; it could be done better]

Finance

• China, Wall Street and the New Global Economy with James Corbett

  Whitney is joined by James Corbett of the Corbett Report to discuss the overlap between the oligarchs of China and the United States and how the rise of China is intimately tied to Wall Street and Globalism. Published on 09/28/21.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • VVC’s Adoption Hampered by Patent Uncertainty and Low Value [Ed: Unified Patents ought to just work to abolish all software patents but judging by who it works for that's not going to happen (same for EFF)]

    Unified Consulting’s Craig Thompson has written an article covering the potential risks and uncertainty around the adoption of Versatile Video Coding (VVC). VVC is entering a competitive codec market where its future will depend more on royalty demands than on its technical specifications. As is detailed in an VVC economic report recently published by Unified Patents and authored by Charles River Associates, VVC is faced with strong competition from MPEG’s new Essential Video Codec (EVC), and existing HEVC, AVC as well as from Alliance for Open Media’s Advance Video 1 codec (AV1). The royalty pricing pressure on VVC is exerted, first, by MPEG-LA’s AVC pool, which is viewed by courts in the United States and in Europe as being a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) rate, and, second, by AV1 and EVC, which have been developed specifically to incur less if any royalties.

  • VVC’s Adoption Hampered by Patent Uncertainty and Low Value
    

    VVC’s plight stems from its predecessor High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and the excessive royalties and licensing uncertainties that have stymied HEVC’s adoption since its launch in 2013. As shown below, the formation of 3 competing pools to extract royalties from HEVC has led to licensing inefficiencies and royalty stacking that has increased licensing costs for HEVC to be 9-12 times higher than AVC. If this is repeated, VVC’s adoption could be in jeopardy.

  • Counsel predict Leahy’s PTAB bill will pass, but with changes [Ed: They bother asking nobody except for patent maximalists; lobbying in 'news' clothing]

    In-house and private practice lawyers say Leahy’s attempt to strengthen the PTAB will probably succeed, but it is unclear whether all of his reforms will pass

  • Healthcare wearables – 5 useful things to know about patenting their use (part 1: diagnostic uses) [Ed: While some people try to save lives the mass litigation firms push patents and monopolies, many of which covering software and nothing physical]

    In recent years there has been an explosion in the field of healthcare wearables; high-tech devices now range from patches, rings, watches and scarfs to insoles, headbands, contact lenses and glasses. Their functionality encompasses everything from counting steps to diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease,
    tracking fertility to delivering wound sealant in the event of trauma. The wearable medical device market is expected to reach over US $47,000 million by 2026 and the current COVID crisis has only driven innovation in this area1.

  • Lawyers split on how badly Italy wants London’s UPC seat [Ed: Team UPC propaganda outlets continue to churn out propaganda based on false assumption, loaded headlines and crap like this. It makes them look like thugs. It’s like Team UPC has an agenda or a plan like, which fake news we need to plan where, and what falsehood we need to seed in order to follow with another falsehoods for lobbying purposes?]

    Milan may be the frontrunner, but some lawyers fear politicians’ lack of interest in IP could put the bid at risk

  • Aptahem receives Turkish patent for the protection of patent family 2
    [Ed: Patent validation is a waste of human activity, but it keeps some law firms rich at the expense of everybody else]

    Aptahem AB (publ) announces today that the Turkish patent office has approved the patent application as the first validated country in Europe. The patent was published with the patent number TR2021/013877 T4.

  • AI inventorship: ‘The Rise of the Machines’ in Australia [Ed: Aggressive pushers of software patents, AJ Park, pushing rather extremist patent agenda again]

    On 30 July 2021, the Federal Court of Australia held that an artificial intelligence (AI) system could be validly named on a patent application. In a historic decision (Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879) of the Australian Federal Court, Beach J delivered a judgement that the owner of the AI system can derive title to the invention from a non-human i.e. an AI inventor.

  • 
    5 Penny Stocks To Watch This Week With Potential Biotech Catalysts

  • Life sciences A to Z – V is for valid claim – Stevens & Bolton LLP [Ed: “Patents are risky assets,” it says, but patents are not property or assets; wrong metaphors from people who sell monopolies as a service and litigation as instrument of coercion]

    Patents play a crucial role in protecting innovation in the life sciences sector and are often essential to attracting investment and funding for new medicines and treatments. However, despite rigorous examination and opposition procedures at patent office level, a large number of invalid patents make it onto patent registers in Europe and worldwide. Estimates differ widely, but some suggest that up to 60% of granted patents are invalid. So the risk of invalidity cannot be disregarded by parties entering into patent licensing and other patent-heavy commercial arrangements.

  • UK headquartered N4 Pharma granted European patent for cancer treatment and vaccine delivery system

  • N4 Pharma EPO has now formally granted European Patent – DirectorsTalk Interviews [Ed: Are they aware of the EPO granting loads of fake patents?]

  • N4 Pharma Shares Rise on European Patent for Nuvec

  • N4 Pharma granted Europe patent with China equivalent on its way

  • N4 Pharma secures patent in Europe for Nuvec, expects China to follow

  • Unified Files Amicus Addressing Manipulation of Venue Rules

    On September 28, 2021, Unified filed an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in support of a mandamus petition related to what it views as systemic delays in decisions on venue in patent-heavy District Court dockets, and how they are frustrating the Congressional intent of the America Invents Act. The writ, In re: Netflix, was filed by Mark Lemley of Durie Tangri.

  • Preserve Access to Affordable Generics and Biosimilars Act [Ed: Recognition that patent monopolies on medicine and patents being seen as supreme has contributed to the needless deaths of millions]

    The House Judiciary Committee has voted in favor of H.R. 2891, the Preserve Access to Affordable Generics and Biosimilars Act. The Bill was also referred to the House Energy & Commerce Committee and so may have a few more hurdles before it moves to the House Floor.

  • Rankings: Managing IP’s Rising Stars 2021 [Ed: Marketing spam disguised as 'ratings'; it is their business model and they do it all the time (conflict of interest too prevalent for one to take this seriously)]

    We are delighted to announce the release of the 2021 edition of Managing IP’s Rising Stars publication.

  • Restoring the America Invents Act [Ed: The patent litigation firms-funded Dennis Crouch puts “poor-quality patents” in quotes like it's a fiction; these people just want patents on everything so they can sue more and cause a mess for profit]

    Sen. Leahy and Sen. Cornyn have introduced the “Restoring the America Invents Act” designed to further address problems caused by the USPTO’s issuance of “poor-quality patents.”

    [...]

    Attempting to Eliminate Outside Influence on Panels from Within the USPTO: “EX PARTE COMMUNICATION.—An officer who has review authority, supervisory authority, or disciplinary authority with respect to an administrative patent judge of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (or a delegate of such an officer), and who is not a member of a panel … shall refrain from ex parte communication with such a judge who is a member of that panel concerning any pending matter before that panel, except as allowed under the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.”

  • UK: New UK IPO ‘IP Access’ Grant Scheme Is Now Available For UK SMEs [Ed: UK-IPO trying top pretend it's not just fronting for big corporations, foreign corporations, and their law firms (at the expense of small businesses)]

    The UK Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO) has recently launched ‘IP Access’, a new funding scheme for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The scheme offers a contribution of £5,000 for eligible SMEs in the UK that have ambitions to grow, to help them recover from and overcome COVID-related challenges and to encourage them to invest in their IP.

    The grant can be used as a contribution towards many IP related costs including the management of IP assets, consultancy, IP insurance and valuation and tax relief advice, as well as fees for IP advisers.

  • Guest Post by Prof. Trimble: The False Sense of Victory in Bypassing The Hague Convention on Service of Process

    On September 10, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied mandamus in In re OnePlus Tech. (Shenzhen) Co., confirming that the plaintiff may bypass Article 5 of the Hague Convention on the Service of Process and serve the Chinese defendant through alternative service to attorneys located in California who had represented the defendant in the past. Commentators heralded the decision as an important improvement in the enforcement of patent rights against foreign, and in particular Chinese, defendants (Law360). However, in many IP cases involving foreign defendants, this sense of victory might be premature.

    What ultimately matters is whether a judgment resulting from a U.S. dispute is enforceable—either in the United States or abroad. If a foreign defendant has assets in the United States and a U.S. judgment can be enforced in the United States, bypassing The Hague Convention does not matter. But if a foreign defendant has no assets in the United States and a plaintiff must seek enforcement of a U.S. judgment abroad, bypassing the Convention—even if the end run is sanctioned by a U.S. court and is legal under U.S. law—might be for naught. Once a plaintiff requests recognition and enforcement of a U.S. judgment abroad, a foreign court may deny recognition and enforcement of the judgment if a defendant was not served in accordance with The Hague Convention. Avoiding recognition and enforcement abroad is not always possible; the August 2021 decision in Next Investments, LLC v. Bank of China shows that seizing a defendant’s foreign accounts by using the U.S. branches of Chinese banks might not work.

  • Germany ratifies PAP protocol as UPC edges closer [Ed: Team UPC has ‘embedded’ itself in Managing ‘IP’, so of course they’ll just parrot the official propaganda line without asking basic questions or fact-checking]

    Germany has completed ratification of the Protocol on Provisional Application of the Unified Patent Court Agreement.

    The Federal Ministry of Justice confirmed on Monday, September 27, that the country had deposited its instrument of ratification, leaving just two more nations to complete ratification before the provisional application period (PAP) can begin.

    Slovenia and Austria have already confirmed they will deposit before the end of the year.

    Germany’s participation had been in doubt until June this year, when the country’s Federal Court of Justice dismissed a constitutional challenge to the agreement.

    Without Germany, the project could not have gone ahead. Now, however, the UPC Preparatory Committee predicts the court will become operational by mid-2022.

    There is a significant amount of work to be done before that deadline. Once two more countries have ratified the protocol, the final stage of preparations, or the PAP, will begin.

    This period will be used to recruit judges and finalise the bespoke IT system for the court. There is also the question of which city will host the central division seat vacated by London.

    Milan has been considered the front-runner, although Amsterdam is in contention as well. Managing IP has reported on differing views among the Italian IP sector on whether there is enough political will in Italy to secure Milan’s candidacy.

    Separately, today, September 30, the Irish Business and Employers Confederation urged the Irish government to advance Dublin as a candidate for the seat.

    It remains to be seen whether these issues can be resolved by next summer, but Germany’s ratification of the PAP protocol at least brings the project one step closer to completion.

  • How five lawyers manage work-life balance amid remote work [Ed: What work? Suing and threatening to sue people? They cause people a lot of stress and take away their money.]

    With working patterns changed for good, attorneys say careful planning and picking when to check email can help them find the ideal balance

  • Preliminary injunction dismissed for sorafenib tosylate [Ed: Monsanto (Bayer) is blackmailing Europe with patents]

    In the Order of 19 July 2021 (ECLI:ES:JMB:2021:2692A) Commercial Court No. 1 of Barcelona dismissed a preliminary injunction request by BAYER

  • Women in Business Law Awards Americas 2021: winners announced [Ed: More fake awards or marketing (PR) 'badges', which are the business model of this propaganda mill (it also lobbies for those same firms, pushing lies disguised as "news" (e.g. UPC).]

  • [The Viewpoint] On the horns of a dilemma: Inventorship of AI-generated inventions [Ed: Those are not inventions but machine output or bots; the patent system going nuts in South Africa and Australia, so litigation fanatics (profiteers) salivate over the same everywhere]

    Inventions generally refer to products or processes involving an inventive step and having industrial application. Such novel creations are recognized and protected under patent laws. A patent entitles the holder to certain exclusive rights over his invention for a prescribed period of time, generating economic rewards.

    Such protection is founded on the rationale that allowing an inventor to reap the benefits of his creation will incentivize innovation and will also prevent people from obtaining undue benefits from the invention (subject to fair and unreasonable terms).

  • U.S. Trade Body Rules Against Import of IQOS Heat-Not-Burn Tobacco Devices

    Altria Group Inc. and Philip Morris International Inc. must halt imports and sales of their IQOS heated tobacco device, the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled Wednesday in a patent case brought by rival R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.

    The case now moves to administrative review, which is expected to last two months; the decision must be signed by President Biden before it takes effect. PMI said it plans to appeal the ruling.

  • The improved competitiveness and good functioning of the single market are imperative for a successful green transition [Ed: Notice that last paragraph; Slovenia's government is greenwashing gross abuses of the laws and violations of the constitutions by pushing patently false 'news' for Team UPC]

    At the meeting, the Slovenian Presidency also highlighted the situation regarding the Unified Patent Court, as given the progress made in the last year and considering that Germany and Slovenia have completed the procedures, we are only one step away from the entry into force of the preparatory procedures for the operation of the Court. The ratification of the Protocol on the Provisional Application of the Unified Patent Court Agreement by just one more member state is needed to make the unitary patent operational.

  • Software Patents

    • MicroPairing patent challenged

      On October 1, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,953,816, owned by MicroParing Technologies LLC, an NPE. The ’816 patent is currently being asserted against Toyota and GM and is directed to connecting wireless audio devices to in-vehicle audio systems.

• Trademarks

  • At a glance: trademark registration and use in Germany

    A wide-ranging Q&A guide to trademark registration and use in Germany, including key legal and practical considerations.

  • Two for the price of one: When do R&D activities amount to ‘genuine use in the course of trade’; when is partial revocation appropriate? [Ed: Trademarks overused and the overuse encouraged by the people whose job is to make themselves seem necessary]

    Can R&D activities amount to genuine use of a trade mark in the course of trade? This question was considered recently in the decision in Singapore of Baidu Europe B.V. v Baidu Online Network Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. [2021] SGIPOS 8.

    Here, the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (“IPOS”) found that, even absent any evidence of actual sales, R&D activities and collaborative projects by a mark proprietor can amount to genuine use of the mark in the course of trade. IPOS also reiterated that the objective of a partial revocation is to obtain a “fair specification” that provides the mark proprietor with a commercially sensible zone of exclusivity.

  • Austria: Unregistered Community Designs: A Secret Weapon In Design Protection? [Ed: What they call "community design" has nothing whatsoever to do with communities]

    An unregistered community design is established merely by the disclosure of a design and triggers protection for three years from the date of disclosure. This informal right was created to satisfy the demands of the industry and creatives for a design protection right providing broad-ranging territorial protection and safety for short-lived products without an elaborate and costly registration procedure.

    Our Legal Insight delves into the particularities of the unregistered community design and its relationship to its big brother – the registered community design. We take a closer look at the uncertainties, but also consider how the designer can utilise this informal right.

  • Navalny, Google and more: the curious case of the ‘Smart Voting’ trademark [Ed: What we have here is trademark law in service of dictators]

    Rospatent’s speedy registration of a term linked to Alexei Navalny and its immediate enforcement in court has sparked controversy among counsel

  • Is Veuve Cliquot’s orange a colour or a figurative mark? [Ed: Monopolies on single colours are a step too far and they typically serve to discredit trademark law]

    Mistakes happen. We all make them; it’s part of what makes us human. But what happens when the EUIPO makes a mistake?

    As background to a (lengthy) case leading to interesting decision of the General Court, the EUIPO’s department responsible for the trade mark register erroneously rectified the registration of Veuve Cliquot’s iconic orange mark as “another mark” or a “colour mark”, in lieu of a figurative mark.

    [...]

    In 2000, the EUIPO Examiner dismissed the application on the ground that it was devoid of distinctive character within the meaning of what is now Article 7(1)(b) of the EU Trade Mark Regulation (EUTMR). The examiner stated that the trade mark was not a colour mark per se but rather a figurative mark in colour. If the subject of the application was a colour, it would follow that the box ‘other’ should be ticked on the application form instead of the ‘figurative mark’ box.

    [...]

    It is a fact that colour marks are devoid of any shape whereas figurative marks have a clearly defined contour. The difference between the two types of marks influences consumer perception and affects the assessment of the distinctive character of a mark.

    Notwithstanding the EUIPO’s error in this particular case, the broader teaching is that the choice of the nature of a mark is a matter for the applicant: choosing one classification in lieu of another is usually not regarded as a manifest error, since a contested mark could be considered, according to its depiction, as a figurative mark claiming even if it is a specific colour.

    This said, the choice eventually made has a decisive impact on the assessment of registrability and validity of the mark at issue. This is also why it is very important for potential applicants to carefully consider which heading their trade mark should fall under.

  • Oktoberfest – how a local festival became a world-famous brand [Ed: People want to drink beer, whereas the law firms are busy looking for someone to sue]

    It is the end of September and normally the city of Munich would be crowded with tourists from all over the world to celebrate the Oktoberfest, Wiesn or, as the citizens of Munich also call it, the “fifth season”. Unfortunately, this event – which first took place in 1810 – has been cancelled again due to covid-19. Yet this still provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at the festival from a trademark point of view.

    [...]

    More recently, another trademark application in the name of the Landeshauptstadt Munich was registered with the EUIPO, namely EU trademark 015535008 for OKTOBERFEST. After year-long proceedings, not only due to an initial refusal raised by the examiner but also due to numerous third-party observations, the Board of Appeal (Appeal R 1840/2019-4) finally issued its decision on the matter, ruling that the mark is to be considered descriptive for goods and services that have to do with festivals. However, no descriptiveness objection applies for such goods and services that fall under the notion of souvenir and merchandising articles. Thus, the mark was registered on 31 August 2021 for a variety of goods and services in Classes 3, 4, 6, 9, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43 and 45 but not Classes 29, 30, 32, 33 and 41.

Audiocasts/Shows

• GNU World Order 428

  The **oprofile** and **p2c** packages.

Kernel Space

• Initial Linux Kernel Patches Posted For The Fairphone 4 – Phoronix

  Announced this week was the Fairphone 4 as the latest iteration of this smartphone focused on being “sustainable and ethical” and now the initial patches have been sent out for providing mainline Linux kernel support.

  The Fairphone 4 is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 750G and depending upon model has 6GB or 8GB of RAM and 128GB or 256GB of internal storage. There is a 6.3-inch full HD+ display, dual SIM with 5G support, and the device is backed by a five year warranty. Fairphone 4 pricing starts out at €579 for the 6GB RAM / 128GB storage option or €649 for the upgraded version. More details on the Fairphone 4 are available from fairphone.com.

• Intel

  • Intel Compute-Runtime 21.39.21127 Brings Broader Alder Lake S Support – Phoronix

    Intel’s newest weekly Compute-Runtime update providing open-source OpenCL and oneAPI Level Zero support for their graphics hardware is now reader with broader support for upcoming Alder Lake S processors.

    Intel Compute-Runtime 21.39.21127 was released on Friday and in addition to upgrading its Intel Graphics Compiler (IGC) snapshot and other routine updates, it does add a number of ADL-S PCI IDs.

  • Intel Sends Out 11th Revision Of Linux Kernel Patches For AMX – Phoronix

    While Intel Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” processors with Advanced Matrix Extensions are set for a Q2’22 ramp in production, one of the key new features that has yet to be properly plumbed in the mainline Linux kernel is for supporting AMX.

    For more than one year now that has been various LLVM/Clang and GCC compiler patches as well as the kernel-side work around bringing up Advanced Matrix Extensions as one of the exciting additions for Sapphire Rapids. On Friday the Linux kernel work around supporting AMX was revised for an 11th time.

Instructionals/Technical

• How To View Nginx Log Files on Linux – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to view Nginx log files on Linux. For those of you who didn’t know, When managing Nginx web servers, one of the most frequent tasks you’ll perform is checking the log files. Nginx logging to help you troubleshoot and quickly resolve any problem you may encounter on your Nginx web server. Logging is a very powerful tool that will give you valuable data about all the operations of your server. Nginx writes records of its events in two types of logs: access logs and error logs. Access logs write information about client requests, and error logs write information about the server and application issues.

  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 view of Nginx web server log files on Linux.

• How to Install Vivaldi Browser on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

  Vivaldi is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It had grown from the downfall of Opera with many disgruntled when it changed from the Presto layout engine to a Chromium-based browser. This platform angered traditional Opera users. Since then, Vivaldi has become one of the most popular alternative Internet Browsers amongst the big three Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.

  Vivaldi promotes itself as a leading browser with faster navigation, clever bookmarking, more intelligent browsing, extensive tab management, and a more visual approach.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Vivaldi Browser on Debian 11 Bullseye.

• Watch Online Video Streams Using Streamlink In Linux – OSTechNix

  Streamlink is a command line streaming utility that allows you to watch online video streams in popular media players, such as VLC, MPlayer, MPlayer2, MPC-HC, mpv, Daum Pot Player, QuickTime, and OMXPlayer etc.

  It extracts the videos from various online services and pipes them into a media player of your choice. Streamlink currently supports popular live video streaming services, such as YouTube, Dailymotion, Livestream, Twitch, UStream, and more. Streamlink is built upon a plugin system which allows support for new services to be easily added.

  Streamlink is written using Python programming language, and was forked from LiveStreamer, which is no longer maintained. Streamlink supports GNU/Linux, *BSDs, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X.

• How to Install Microsoft Teams on Ubuntu/Debian Linux [Ed: Well, technically is malware and it spies a lot]

• SSH Port Forwarding and the Command Cargo Cult

Games

• HW News – CaseLabs Resurrected, Linux Gaming Grows, Valve Steam Deck Updates

Desktop Environments/WMs

• Xubuntu Development Update September 2021

  Thanks to the Ubuntu Community Fund, the Xubuntu web server has been funded for another two years. Elizabeth announced the news on Twitter early in September. If you want to sponsor Xubuntu and the other flavors, the community fund is the way to go. Other options are available on the Xubuntu website.

  [...]

  Xfce 4.18 is still very early in its development, with Xfce 4.17 as its development series. Our Debian package manager, Unit 193, has started publishing Xfce 4.17 builds to the Xubuntu QA Experimental PPA for testing and development. There’s not much to see here yet, but if you’re curious (and don’t mind the occasional breakage), check it out! If you prefer not to install bleeding-edge packages on your system, you can also use the XFCE Test docker image to try out the latest changes.

Distributions

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Junichi Uekawa: Using podman for most of my local development

    Using podman for most of my local development environment. For my personal/upstream development I started using podman instead of lxc and pbuilder and other toolings. Most projects provide reasonable docker images (such as rust) and I am happier keeping my environment as a whole stable while I can iterate.

• Debian Family

  • Sparky news 2021/09

    The 9th monthly Sparky project and donate report of 2021:

    – Linux kernel updated up to version 5.14.9 & 5.15-rc3
    – Added to repos: SonoBus, The Lounge, KDiskMark, Webapp-Manager
    – Sparky 2021.09 & 2021.09 Special Editions of the rolling line released
    – waterfox-current-kpe package changed name to waterfox-g3-kpe
    – Sway desktop configured in APTus AppCenter

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Linux Mint 20.3 is Planned to Arrive for Christmas This Year

    Linux Mint is preparing a Christmas present for their users with the upcoming 20.3 release, which will come with a refreshed look-and-feel.

    The good news for fans of the popular Linux disro Linux Mint does not stop. As you probably know, earlier this month the project got a new revamped website. It looks really minty and it looks modern.

    Linux Mint Website
    Linux Mint’s original website looked dated and potentially unattractive to new-age computer users. The new Mint’s website does a better job than before at welcoming newcomers, explaining what Linux Mint is, why people love it and how to install it.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Steppers And ESP32 Make This Retro-Modern Flip-Clock Tick | Hackaday

    Granted, [David Huang]’s ESP32-based flip clock is worlds apart from the flip cards of the “I Got You, Babe” era. Unfortunately, the video below is all we have to go on to get the story behind this clock, but it’s pretty self-explanatory. [David] started the build by making the flip cards themselves, a process that takes some topological tricks as well as a laser cutter. 3D-printed spools are loaded with the cards, which are then attached to frames that hold a stepper motor and a Hall-effect sensor. The ESP32 drives the steppers via L298N H-bridge drivers, but it’s hard to say if there’s an RTC chip or if the microcontroller is just getting time via an NTP server.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Skype teases “next version”, promises all browser support, forgets Firefox icon [Ed: Microsoft is screwing over Mozilla while Mozilla experiments handing over Firefox users to Microsoft through Bing; self-harm and sabotage of Mozilla is an understatement. Microsoft ruined Skype… it bought a near-monopoly and turned that into 100% malware without p2p capabilities (it’s all centralised for spying now). Now it hates and discriminates against everyone (no wonder market share plunged).]

Ritesh Raj Sarraf: Human Society

Help with finding a job: I’ve learnt many times, that when people reach out asking for help, say, for helping them with finding a job; it isn’t about you making a recommendation/referral for them. It, instead, implies that you are indirectly being asked to find and arrange them a job.

Hardware

• Some Pleasing Experiments In 8-Bit Video Cards | Hackaday

  These days, supply chain factors and high demand have made it incredibly difficult to lay one’s hands on a GPU. However, if you’re into older computers, you might find it hard to source old-school video cards too. Fear not, for [Dave’s Dev Lab] has been cooking up some experiments with a goal of eventually producing a new 8-bit ISA video card from scratch.

• What Goes Into a High Voltage Diode?

  Revealing the inner workings of an unusual component is fascinating, and the lapping technique used is definitely worth a look. It’s something we’ve seen before, for example in reducing CPU thickness for increased performance.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Security

    • VMware vCenter under widespread attack – Security

      A set of vulnerabilities in the VMware vCenter virtualisation management platform and the company’s Cloud Foundation are under active attack currently with users strongly adviced to patch their instances as soon as possible.

    • Google-backed program will pay developers for open-source software security improvements [Ed: But Google is the company that works for the NSA and has already put 'weakened' (bad) encryption inside the Linux kernel until the backlash and pushback removed this 'back door']

      Few companies are as devoted to the cause of open-source software as Google LLC, and as if to underline that point, the company said today it’s sponsoring the Linux Foundation’s new Secure Open Source Pilot Program.

      The SOS program is an initiative that’s promising to reward developers financially for enhancing the security of what are deemed to be “critical open-source projects” that many organizations depend on. To get the ball rolling, Google said it will donate $1 million to fund those payouts.

Environment

• Wildlife/Nature

  • Young wildebeest Gnu and mother leap from cliff edge

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Wuesthoff & Wuesthoff team launches new patent firm in Munich [Ed: Spam? Ad? Marketing? All the above? What happened to JUVE? It used to do actual journalism even 5 years ago. The wording here is 100% promotional nonsense. Journalism died.]

  • Hyatt; Prosecution Laches; and more Civil Actions [Ed: Charlatan and fraud promoted by a puppet of the patent litigation industry, Dennis Crouch (who is paid by those greedy fanatics)]

    In a June 2021 decision, the Federal Circuit supported the USPTO in its arguments that Gilbert Hyatt long-pending patent applications could be rendered moot based upon the doctrine of Prosecution Laches. Hyatt v. Hirshfeld, 998 F.3d 1347 (Fed. Cir. 2021). Those cases are now on remand and the district court is setting up for trial on the question of whether the 20+ year delay in prosecution was due to Hyatt’s unreasonable behavior and whether the delay has resulted in prejudice. The parties now are arguing about whether the court will allow a full presentation of new evidence or limit the trial only to Hyatt’s justifications of his actions.

    [...]

    Each of these cases involve a PTO refusal to issue the patent based upon prosecution laches.

  • Ratification by Germany and Slovenia revives prospects for EU unitary patent [Ed: Hardly surprising that longtime propaganda partners of EPO thugs are pushing this misleading nonsense. Journalism is dead. It’s marketing and lobbying now (the headline is also false; they did NOT ratify). The body repeats the lie and the summary contains loaded statements. Journalism is dead the moment people publish falsehoods to appease corrupt sponsors.]

    The news has moved the optimism needle in Brussels, but lots of administrative and legal hurdles remain, including where the life sciences court that was due to be based in London will now be located

  • UK Court Rules That AI Can’t Be An Inventor Of A Patent, Do You Agree? [Ed: Hey, let's grant patents to rodents and insects too; unlike those bots, they do some innovative things and may want to sue fellow rodents and insects to protect their monopolies... I mean, innovations]

    In 2014, it was established that the U.S. Copyright Office would “not register works produced by nature, animals, plants, or through divine or supernatural spirits.” This declaration stemmed from a monkey who took a selfie and a photographer who thought they had the rights to the image. We are now facing a similar problem with artificial intelligence and patents across the pond in the United Kingdom, where a court has ruled that patents must list humans as inventors, not AI.

    In 2015, Stephen Thaler filed a U.S. patent for something dubbed Dabus (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience), an “Electro-optical device and method for identifying and inducing topological states formed among interconnecting neural modules.” While that description may seem like a fair amount of nonsense, in short, it is artificial intelligence with the capability to design inventions. For example, Dabus was used in 2018 for a type of food container and a flashing light, both of which Mr. Thaler attempted to patent in the United Kingdom.

  • Supreme Court appeal and legislation possible after latest UK DABUS patent decision [Ed: IAM is still nothing but a shameless megaphone of the patent litigation ‘industry’ (“Mark Marfé and Sarah Taylor of Pinsent Masons explain”)

    The UK is aiming to become a world leader in AI. Part of that may mean a change of approach to the patenting of AI-created inventions. Mark Marfé and Sarah Taylor of Pinsent Masons explain

  • UK: Important Step Forward For UPC As Germany Ratifies PAP-Protocol [Ed: Strange that this is flagged “UK”; because of the UK the UPCA is already dead and obsolete]

    Following rejection of the constitutional challenge against Germany’s participation in the Unified Patent Court (UPC) reported here, on 27 September 2021 Germany ratified the Protocol on the Provisional Application of the UPC Agreement (PAP-Protocol). The PAP-Protocol brings certain aspects of the UPC Agreement into force provisionally, allowing the UPC to be set up as an institution before the UPC system itself is fully operational. This includes the recruitment of judges and budgeting arrangements for the court.

    Two further countries are required to ratify the PAP-Protocol before the phase of provisional application of the UPC agreement can officially start. It has been reported that Slovenia has also recently ratified the PAP-Protocol and that Austria is likely to do so soon. Completion of the remaining ratifications of the PAP-Protocol will effectively establish the UPC as an operational international organisation.

    This is an important step forwards for the UPC. Once the UPC preparations are complete, it is intended that Germany will deposit the final ratification required for the UPC Agreement to come into force. This will start the four-month period leading to the day the UPC is able to take its first cases.

    The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.

  • ILOAT cases: EPO repays excessive strike deductions, tensions remain

    According to a SUEPO report, EPO president António Campinos published a communiqué on 14 September 2021, explaining that the Office intends to apply the outcome of the judgments to all staff on strike since July 2013 only insofar as they concern excessive strike deductions or for unauthorised absence on 2 and 3 July 2013. The payments should be completed by the end of the year.

    However, no moral damages will be awarded by the EPO to those who neither filed a complaint in front of the Tribunal nor an application to intervene.

    An important element in the judgments (see this post) was the June 2013 decision CA/D 5/13 of the EPO’s Administrative Council, “creating a new Article 30a of the Service Regulations for permanent employees of the European Patent Office concerning the right to strike and amending the existing Articles 63 and 65 concerning unauthorised absences and the payment of remuneration. (…) Paragraph 10 of Article 30a authorises the President to lay down further terms and conditions (…) Relying on that provision, the President issued Circular No. 347 containing ‘Guidelines applicable in the event of strike’. This text entered into force on 1 July 2013, at the same time as CA/D 5/13.”

    The ILOAT concluded that Circular No. 347 was unlawful and also that the EPO management had excessively reduced salaries of staff members who participated in strikes. In case 4433 for instance, a lawfully called strike was illegally considered as unauthorised absence and not as a day of strike and the complainant’s salary was punitively deducted by 1/20th instead of 1/30th.

    [...]

    The EPO didn’t react to a Kluwer IP Law request for comment on the issue of the ILOAT judgments and/or the SUEPO’s publication about the meeting of 15 September.

  • UK court advises Apple to take FRAND licence in dispute with Optis [Ed: ETSI as patent pool, tax, and trap]

    In the third of six trials in the wide-ranging battle between Apple and non-practising entity Optis, presiding judge Richard Meade has clarified that Apple, as an implementer, must commit to enter into a court-determined FRAND licence to avoid an injunction. He also dismissed Apple’s threat to leave the UK market altogether to avoid the implications of a potential global FRAND licence.

    At the previous technical trial, the judge found that Apple had infringed a valid Optis SEP. Now, if Apple does not commit to a court-determined FRAND licence, it could face a sales ban in the UK.

    Optis and Apple at blows

    The latest trial, known as Trial F, arose due to Optis amending its pleadings to determine whether Apple is an unwilling licensee. This was due to Apple’s apparent disinclination to take a court-determined licence on FRAND terms. Optis argued that, if this was the case, Apple was disentitled from relying on Optis’ ETSI FRAND commitments. As such, Optis sought an injunction against Apple between the technical trials and next year’s upcoming FRAND trial.

    The High Court has found that Apple can only rely on Optis’ undertaking to ETSI if it commits now to enter the licence determined at next year’s FRAND trial. However, the judge declined to grant an injunction against Apple until this completion. The application of a court-determined licence follows last year’s Huawei vs. Unwired Planet decision in its setting of global rates.

  • Cantargia’s extensive patent protection for IL1RAP-targeting cancer therapy remains in force after concluded opposition

  • Cantargia : Cantargia’s extensive patent protection for IL1RAP-targeting cancer therapy remains in force after concluded opposition

  • Cantargia’s extensive patent protection for IL1RAP-targeting cancer therapy remains in force after concluded opposition [Ed: The patents that don’t help]

    Cantargia AB holds a large number of granted patents related to IL1RAP as a target for antibody treatment of cancer. One of Cantargia’s European patents for treatment of solid tumors, EP 3020730 B1, was opposed by a third party in 2019. Following a hearing at the European Patent Office (EPO), the Opposition Division confirmed the validity of this European patent and rejected the opposition. Cantargia’s extensive patent protection for IL1RAP-targeting therapy is thus fully maintained with unchanged claim scope.

  • CVC Files Reply to ToolGen’s Opposition to CVC’s Responsive Motion No. 1 [Ed: Some of the most ridiculous and the world's most outrageous patents, asserting that humans 'invented' life and nature and now deserve patents or are entitled to a monopoly over that]

    On June 11th, Junior Party the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Vienna; and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, “CVC”) filed its Responsive Preliminary Motion No. 1 in Interference No. 106,127 to be accorded benefit of priority to U.S. Patent Application No. 13/842,859, filed March 15, 2013, or in the alternative U.S. Patent Application No. 14/685,504, filed April 7, 2015, or U.S. Patent Application No. 15/138,604, filed April 26, 2016, pursuant to 37 C.F.R. §§ 41.121(a)(2) and 41.208(a)(3) and Standing Order ¶ 208.4.1. CVC filed this motion contingent on the Board granting Senior Party ToolGen’s Substantive Preliminary Motion No. 2 to deny CVC priority benefit to U.S. Provisional Application No. 16/757,640, filed January 28, 2013 (“P3″). On July 15th, Toolgen filed its Opposition, and on August 27th CVC filed its Reply.

  • A Japanese version Amicus Brief system will be introduced in spring 2022 [Ed: Well, there is a patent law... there's no such thing as "intellectual property" but the litigation profiteers perpetuate this propaganda term]

    On 14 September 2021, the Japan Patent Office (JPO) announced that most of the amendments to the Patent Act and other intellectual property laws, which were promulgated on 21 May 2021, will come into force on 1 April 2022. The amendments cover various matters such as the introduction of online oral hearings at the trial board of the JPO, which will come into force on 1 October 2021, and the prohibition of acts in relation to third parties bringing into Japan from abroad goods infringing trademark or design rights. This new provision in effect makes counterfeits sent in small lots from overseas to Japanese residents infringing goods. Regarding patent infringement litigation, the amendment introduces a new system to widely gather opinions from the third parties, which is called a Japanese version Amicus Brief system.

    This new system provides that, upon a request from one party and hearing the other party’s opinion, the Tokyo or Osaka District Court handling patent infringement litigation and the IP High court handling appeal cases may invite opinions regarding an issue of the case from the public. The subject of the opinion may be a legal issue or a factual matter, which the court thinks necessary. Each party can select among the gathered opinions those they think useful or supportive to their position and submit copies of the selected opinions as documentary evidence.

  • [Older] IP Insights: The Right To Inspection Under German Patent Law

    According to Sec. 140c of the German Patent Act the patent owner may request documents and inspect an object if there is a sufficient likelihood that such object infringes their patent rights. If this infringement is of a commercial nature (which only excludes acts in the private sphere for noncommercial purposes), the right to request documents also extends to banking, financial and commercial documents. Accordingly, the right to inspection is meant to secure necessary evidence for the preparation of a patent infringement suit and also, but no less importantly, to prevent possibly unnecessary legal disputes in advance.

    Coping with information deficits

    Paramount for the success or failure of a patent infringement dispute is that the patent owner has all the information needed to demonstrate and prove the use of their invention in a court of law. This is less trivial than it may sound: patent infringements often take place behind closed doors, in production halls, laboratories or operating rooms. Thus, it is good news for anyone who can get hold of a patent-infringing object on which he can demonstrate the infringement of their patent. But what if such an object cannot be obtained because the invention is merely used internally, or if you cannot tell by looking at the object that it makes use of the teaching of the patent, for example because such patent is about a production process? Information deficits in the area of infringement of trade secrets are almost notorious (see Ess, WRP 2020, 988). The law comes to the rescue of the patent owners with a right to inspection (Sec. 140c of the German Patent Act).

  • Leahy and Cornyn Introduce Bill To Restore The America Invents Act

    Yesterday, Senate Judiciary IP Subcommittee Chair Sen. Leahy (D-VT) and committee member Sen. Cornyn (R-TX) introduced the Restoring the America Invents Act (RAIA). RAIA would roll back changes introduced by former USPTO Director Andrei Iancu and by the courts, restoring the America Invents Act (AIA) to what it was always intended to be—a cost-effective alternative to litigation, providing a way to accurately determine whether a patent should have been issued in the first place. These changes would protect innovators from the assertion of low quality patents and allow them to spend money on engineering, not lawyers.

    RAIA addresses a number of aspects of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and the inter partes (IPR) and post-grant review (PGR) programs. This post explains how RAIA would implement an Arthrex fix, overturn Return Mail, expand eligible categories of prior art, eliminate the Fintiv doctrine, modify the time bars and estoppel provisions, add a statutory stay mechanism, affirmatively require decisions on multiple procedures, bar ex parte communications to PTAB panels, place the burden of proof of patentability for new claims on patent owners, set a firm final date for issuance of certificates modifying patents after appeal is complete, and enhance statutory standing provisions. CCIA strongly supports this legislation.

    [...]

    RAIA would be overwhelmingly positive for the patent system and for innovation. While there are minor concerns about a few aspects of it, the overall impact would be the restoration of the PTAB to its place as an effective and efficient reviewer of patent validity—and that, in turn, would enable innovators to spend their time and money on engineering instead of lawyering. IPR has saved billions of dollars in legal fees since its creation, but changes like Fintiv threaten that. RAIA would make sure that Congressional intent is respected, with the PTAB serving to provide a second look at patents that never should have issued.

    And by making these changes through legislation, rather than through rulemaking, RAIA would ensure that future USPTO Directors can’t try to sabotage the IPR system.

  • 2021 Patent Dispute Report: Third Quarter in Review

    With patent reform clearly on the horizon, as three different bills were introduced this past month, patent disputes still show no sign of slowing down. In fact as Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the Restoring the America Invents Act to address the uncertainty with Fintiv, reexaminations have made a significant comeback and are expected to continue to grow by 33%. This comes on the heels of much uncertainty in 2021 with the pandemic still ongoing, the critical Arthrex decision, and several proposed changes to the patent system. Other factors, such as Qualcomm leaving Velos, could signal a new wave of litigation related to video codecs with a fractional pool approach. Despite the uncertainty this year, the constant variable has been NPEs continually asserting low quality patents against start-ups, small businesses, and manufacturers that are vital for economic recovery and growth.

    [...]

    Figure 23: Unified Patents recently produced an independent economic study on VVC’s licensing value as a follow up to its 2019 study on the licensing value of HEVC. The study points out that “[f]or VVC to capture market share among cellular device manufacturers, [its] royalty rates will have to be very attractive compared to the rates for AVC and AV1.” VVC is entering a fragmented, multi-codec market and its adoption is uncertain in the face of competitive video solutions that are subject to lower or no royalties. Much of this is due to the excessive royalties and licensing uncertainties that continue to plague VVC’s predecessor, HEVC.

  • The path to Wall Street is paved with patents for Biotech companies [Ed: Spam disguised as news or, put another way, patent propaganda from litigation profiteers, perpetuating the unjust myth that without patents (monopolies) you can never succeed]

    It would be no exaggeration to see the past year as a golden age of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) for Israeli startups and tech companies. The prominent offerings over the past year include Kaltura, monday.com, WalkMe, Global-e, Playtika, SimilarWeb, SentinelOne, Taboola, ironSource, and Payoneer. Together they have raised more than $2 billion and are traded with combined market caps of more than $50 billion.

    Although these tech IPOs have reverberated loudly with huge media coverage, biotech has not been part of the trend. For Biotech companies, an IPO is usually less of an exit and more of a financing event intended to fund expensive research, development, and clinical trials.

    [...]

    It is also important to consider the time it takes from filing for a patent to be registered. The United States Patent and Trademark Office, the European Patent Office (EPO), and the Israel Patent Office (ILPO), allow for expedited examination. Expediting examination can be important when companies need to show the market – and in many cases the investors– that their patent portfolio includes registered patents found innovative by patent offices. Conversely, there are also cases, where it is important to carefully manage the patent registration process. This allows a company to ensure that its patent applications are published and later registered at the appropriate time from the company’s standpoint.

  • Software Patents

    • IP Edge entity, Paradise IP, patent challenged

      On September 29, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 7,200,613 owned by Paradise IP, LLC, an NPE and IP Edge entity. The ’613 patent relates to asset management databases and has been asserted against 15 companies such as Spotify, Box, Iron Mountain, Citrix Systems, and others.

• Trademarks

  • Brexit, Brand Owners And Their Trade Marks [Ed: The litigation companies trying to profit from brexit as well]

    If you are cancelling others’ EUTM registrations, you should consider whether to cancel the newly cloned UK trade mark registrations.

    Cancellations based on grounds other than non-use: EUTM registrations with pending cancellation proceedings based on other grounds as at 31 December 2020 would have been cloned into UK trade mark registrations. If the cancellations are based on rights other than UK rights, the proceedings will continue; if the EUTM registrations are totally or partially cancelled, the cloned right in the UK will have the same consequences.

    If the cancellations are based on UK prior mark(s) only, the cancellations would have been concluded. The EUTM registrations will remain registered and the cloned UK trade mark registrations may be subject to fresh cancellation proceedings.

    If you are cancelling others’ EUTM registrations, you should consider whether to cancel the newly cloned UK trade mark registrations.

  • Turkey: SAMSONITE v SAMS: Higher Board Issues Exemplary Decision On Similarity, Taking Into Account Well-Known Status Of Earlier Mark

    On 19 November 2018 a Turkish company filed an application for the registration of the word mark SAMS in all classes (Classes 1 to 45).

    Following the publication of the application in the Official Trademarks Bulletin, the owner of the well-known SAMSONITE trademarks filed a partial opposition against the application based on a likelihood of confusion for some of the goods in Classes 6, 9 and 18.

    In its decision dated 1 October 2019, the Trademarks Department of the Patent and Trademark Office rejected the opposition due to a lack of similarity of the trademarks and a lack of likelihood of confusion, including a likelihood of association.

  • Turkish Patent and Trademark Office Published an Updated Trademark Examination Guideline [Ed: Well, who needs journalism when litigation profiteers tell you what suits their financial agenda?

    Turkish Patent and Trademark Office (“TPTO”) has published an updated Trademark Examination Guideline (“Updated Guideline”) on 18 August 2021. The guideline has been updated for the fourth time since 2011, and for the second time since the entry into force of Industrial Property Law (“IPL”) numbered 6769 in 2017.

• Copyrights

  • Porn and IP: OnlyFans users looking to enforce their rights [Ed: Can't tell the difference between copyright law, which is a real thing, and this fiction they call "IP" (and even call their site after)? It's not property.]

    OnlyFans, mainly known for adult content, has handed power to savvy content creators who are starting to explore the IP rights and tools available to them

On blood-lines, forks and survivors

GNU/Linux, which is not a direct descendant of the original bits of either AT&T or BSD, and thus not heir to the title of UNIX in the eyes of some purists, ironically brought UNIX to the masses in ways that the more pure-breeds could not. Capitalizing on the confusion created by the AT&T / BSD battles, Linux set its sights on world domination (albeit unwittingly), and the rest as they say is mostly history.

Today, GNU/Linux leads the pack among the Open Source UNIX variants that are active today (such as FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD). The commercial variants, still alive in data centers, continue to be pushed by big-name vendors, despite being caught in a death spiral and struggling to stay afloat in the face of the penguin tsunami. The once inimitable SunOS/Solaris fizzled away without even a proper goodbye, but continue to live on in Illumos and OpenIndiana, a shell of its former self.

And so it comes down to a handful. On the one hand, GNU/Linux, the irreverent and bastard poster-child that continues to evolve at break-neck speed, and the Right Honourable BSDs that continue to keep the original philosophy alive in its purest form and fighting valiantly into the next decade and into the twilight of most of its developer and user base.

Audiocasts/Shows

• How To Install Printers On Linux – Invidious

  The good news is that on the vast majority of Linux distributions, installing a printer is as easy as plugging it in. But what about minimal Linux distros like Arch Linux? What programs do you need to install? How do you get your printer drivers?

• Self Documenting Code Is Just A Meme – Invidious

  I’ve talked frequently about self documenting code and how I don’t particularly like the concept but today I thought I’d explain why I think and where concepts of self documenting code can actually provide some value.

Kernel Space

• Paul E. Mc Kenney: Rusting the Linux Kernel: Compiler Writers Hate Dependencies (Address/Data)

  An address dependency involves a load whose return value directly or indirectly determines the address of a later load or store, which results in the earlier load being ordered before the later load or store. A data dependency involves a load whose return value directly or indirectly determine the value stored by a later store, which results in the load being ordered before the store. These are used heavily by RCU. Although they are not quite as fragile as control dependencies, compilers still do not know about them. Therefore, care is still required, as can be seen in the rcu_dereference.rst Linux-kernel coding guidelines. As with control dependencies, address and data dependencies are very low cost, so they are used heavily in the Linux kernel via rcu_dereference() and friends.

• Paul E. Mc Kenney: Rusting the Linux Kernel: Compiler Writers Hate Dependencies (Control)

  At the assembly language level on many weakly ordered architectures, a conditional branch acts as a very weak, very cheap, but very useful memory-barrier instruction. It orders any load whose return value feeds into the condition codes before all stores that execute after the branch instruction completes, whether the branch is taken or not. ARMv8 also has a conditional-move instruction (CSEL) that provides similar ordering.

  Because the ordering properties of the conditional branch involve dependencies from the load to the branch and from the branch to the store, and because the branch is a control-flow instruction, this ordering is said to be due to a control dependency.

  Because compilers do not understand them, control dependencies are quite fragile, as documented by the many cautionary tales in the Linux kernel’s memory-barriers.txt documentation (search for the “CONTROL DEPENDENCIES” heading). But they are very low cost, so they are used on a few critically important fastpaths in the Linux kernel.

• Paul E. Mc Kenney: Rusting the Linux Kernel: Compiler Writers Hate Dependencies (OOTA)

  Out-of-thin-air (OOTA) values are a troubling theoretical problem, but thus far do not actually occur in practice. In the words of the Bard: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

  But what is life without a little sound and fury? Besides, “mere theory” can loom large for those creating tools to analyze software. This post therefore gives a brief introduction to OOTA, and then provides some simple practical solutions, along with some difficult ones.

• Paul E. Mc Kenney: Can Rust Code Own Sequence Locks?

  Sequence locks vaguely resemble reader-writer locks except that readers cannot block writers. If a writer runs concurrently with a reader, that reader is forced to retry its critical section. If a reader successfully completes its critical section (there were no concurrent writers), then its accesses will have been data-race free. Of course, an incessant stream of writers could starve all readers, and the Linux-kernel sequence-lock implementation provides extensions to deal with this in cases where incessant writing is a possibility. The usual approach is to instead arrange things so that writers are never incessant.

• Linus Torvalds On Community, Rust and Linux’s Longevity

  “I really love C,” Torvalds said at one point. “I think C is a great language, and C is, to me, is really a way to control the hardware at a fairly low level…”

• Linus Torvalds on Community, Rust and Linux’s Longevity

  This week saw the annual check-in with Linux creator Linus Torvalds at the Open Source Summit North America, this year held in Seattle (as well as virtually).

  Torvalds took the stage Tuesday in the ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Seattle for the event’s traditional half-hour of questions from Dirk Hohndel, an early Linux contributor (now also the chief open source officer and vice president at VMware) in an afternoon keynote session.

  The ceremony opened by acknowledging a special moment in time with a birthday cake ceremoniously delivered to Torvalds to mark Linux’s 30th anniversary, drawing a round of applause from the audience. Hohndel added he was offering 30th-birthday wishes “to all of the kernel developers — it really is a community also.”

• Open Source Changed Linux Otherwise It Was Done: Linus Torvalds

  Torvalds also added that as far as he is concerned, Linux is done for the past 29 years. Every other feature that has been added later is about what other people needed, wanted or were interested in.

  Many developers would relate to this. You work on a project and think that it has reached a ‘done’ state. If the project does not get enough traction, you lose interest to work on it and move to something ‘new and exciting’. The real motivation to continue the project comes from the users and the recognition.

  When asked about what they should be doing for the 50th anniversary of Linux, Torvalds said that he doesn’t see himself doing kernel programming at the age of 70. Then he also chipped in that he didn’t imagine himself doing kernel programming at the age of 50 as well and yet he is doing that at present.

• Graphics Stack

  • Nearly Two Decades Later, ATI Radeon R300 Linux Driver Sees Occasional Improvement

    While earlier this year AMD shifted their Radeon Software driver focus to only supporting Polaris / GCN 1.4 and newer, when it comes to the open-source driver support on Linux there still is occasional activity going back to the ATI Radeon R300 days from nearly two decades ago.

    The ATI R300 GPUs were first introduced in 2002 and ended up spanning the legendary Radeon 9000 series through the X300/X500/X600 series. (As well, the R300 Gallium3D driver also supports through the ATI Radeon X1000 series.) While AMD’s open-source Linux developers no longer focus on this R300g driver in a long time or even the R600g driver for that matter in the rest of the pre-GCN GPUs, the community is able to make the occasional improvement to this legacy hardware support thanks to the nature of open-source.

Applications

• HexChat IRC Client 2.16.0 Adds New IRCv3 Features, Strikethrough Formatting

  After almost two years of development, the HexChat IRC client finally released new 2.6.0 version with a number of new IRCv3 features and strikethrough formatting support.

  HexChat is a free open source Internet Relay Chat client that forked from XChat. It offers both command line and customizable graphical interface, allows to securely join multiple networks and talk to users privately.

  The app supports features such as DCC, SASL, proxies, spellcheck, alerts, logging, custom themes, Python/Perl scripts, and even transfer files.

• Top opensource virtualization software for Linux

  Virtualization in computing involves creating virtual machines, storage, hardware, computer network resources, or an operating system. You can create many instances of a given operating system on a single computer. These instances are called virtual machines. Virtualization software has become popular as they extend the capabilities of a system drastically. Virtualization is most preferred and applied for cloud computing.

  The Linux community has created several virtualization tools or Virt tools like QEMU, KVM, Libvert, or libguestfs which act as the basis for creating open-source virtualization software. The article will highlight several open-source virtualization software like Oracle VM VirtualBox, Linux-KVM, Redhat virtualization, Microsoft Hyper-V, Xen Project, oVirt, and boxes in Fedora.

• Best Free and Open Source Software – September 2021 Updates

  Here’s the latest updates to our compilation of recommended software.

  For our entire collection, check out the categories below. This is the largest compilation of recommended software. The collection includes hundreds of articles, with comprehensive sections on internet, graphics, games, programming, science, office, utilities, and more. Almost all of the software is free and open source.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to Install WhatsApp on Ubuntu 20.04 – Linux Nightly

  WhatsApp is a free messaging application used by over a billion people worldwide. WhatsApp provides secure, reliable voice and video calls that can be made locally or internationally with a Wi-Fi or cellular data connection. WhatsApp is available for multiple devices, like computers, tablets, and phones.

  Though there doesn’t exist a download link for Linux on the WhatsApp website, it’s still possible to install WhatsApp on Ubuntu. In this tutorial, you’ll learn two methods of installing WhatsApp on Ubuntu.

• Setting up a JMP SIP account on Asterisk

  JMP offers VoIP calling via XMPP, but it’s also possibly to use the VoIP using SIP.

  The underlying VoIP calling functionality in JMP is provided by Bandwidth, but their old Asterisk instructions didn’t quite work for me. Here’s how I set it up in my Asterisk server.

• How to Install or Upgrade Nvidia Drivers on Debian 11 Bullseye

  Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Debian come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.

  Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s proprietary drivers, along with lacking the newest features, software technology, and support for the latest graphics card hardware. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Nvidia Graphic Drivers for the series 470.xx / 465.xx / 460.xx / 390.xx and 340.xx from the Nvidia Proprietary Repository, giving you the latest in software available.

• How to Install or Upgrade Nvidia Graphic Drivers on Linux Mint 20

  Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Linux Mint come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.

  Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s, which lacks the latest graphics card hardware’s latest features, software technology, and support. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Nvidia Graphic Drivers for the series 470.xx / 465.xx / 460.xx / 390.xx and 340.xx from the Nvidia Proprietary Repository, giving you the latest in software available.

• Switch To A Directory Without Using Cd Command in Linux – OSTechNix [Ed: Old but newly-updated]

  Most of the intermediate and almost all advanced users prefer CLI over GUI mode, because there are plethora of command line tricks to make things much easier and faster. Today, I’d like to share one simple tip. This simple bash trick can help you to automatically switch to a directory without using cd command. All you need to do is just enter the path of the directory in the Terminal, and you will be landed in that particular directory. This could be useful in scripting and for those who use command line a lot at work. Read on.

• 2 ways to Install Mysql Workbench on Debian 11 Bullseye Linux – Linux Shout

  MySQL Workbench is a graphical modeling tool and development system available in a free and a commercial edition… It offers a collection of tools for working with MySQL databases. In short, it provides a Graphical user interface to easily design and edit databases, display them clearly, and administer them. Workbench can be used on computers with the Linux, macOS, or Microsoft Windows operating systems.

  The software is able to extract structures from existing databases and display them clearly. In addition, MySQL Workbench converts tables from SQL Server to MySQL tables; allow developers to visually design databases and then offline and host them on a MySQL server. The Community Edition can be downloaded for free. For advanced users who need additional functions, extensions with scripting languages ​​can be integrated into the tool.

• [Old] ProxyJump is safer than SSH agent forwarding

  An SSH jump server is a proxy standing between clients and the rest of the SSH fleet. Jump hosts minimize threats by forcing all SSH traffic to go through a single hardened location and minimizing an individual node’s SSH endpoints to the outside world. (Read more: “How to set up an SSH jump server.”)

  One way to configure a multi-hop setup is by storing a private key for the destination server on your jump server. Do not do this. A jump server is usually a multi-user environment, meaning any single party with elevated privileges could compromise any private key. A solution to this security threat is enabling agent forwarding. Given how common this method is, it may surprise you to learn this is not recommended. To understand why, let’s dig a bit deeper.

Games

• Lenovo Legion Play leaked: Handheld game console running Android

  Lenovo may be developing an Android-powered handheld gaming device called the Lenovo Legion Play.

  The company hasn’t officially announce the Legion Play yet, and might never do so, but a set of images found on the Lenovo website indicate that the company was at least considering introducing the handheld game console earlier this year.

  [...]

  If Lenovo does decide to bring the Legion Play to market, it wouldn’t be Lenovo’s first Android-powered handheld gaming device. The company launched the $500 Legion Phone Duel for the Chinese market last summer, and followed up this spring with the Legion Phone Duel 2, a $925 phone with a 144 Hz AMOLED display, a Qualcomm Snapdragon 888 processor, at least 12GB of RAM and 256GB of storage, RGB lighting on the back, plus a cooling fan.

• New Handheld from Lenovo leaked

Desktop Environments/WMs

• The 5 Best Window Managers for Linux

  No matter how many displays you use with your computer, you’ll never be able to fit all the app windows on your desktop. Unless, of course, you have the right tool.

  A window manager is a perfect tool that caters to this requirement very well and allows you to leverage the screen estate of your computer/external display to its full potential.

  But what exactly is it, what can it do, and what are some of the best window managers you can use on Linux? Here’s a guide with answers to all such questions.

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • The story behind Gwenview name

    The other day I was thinking about how I came to create Gwenview and realized the story of its genesis and the reason behind its unusual (for a KDE application) name is not widely known. Time to write an article on this topic. At least one long-hidden secret is going to be revealed in this article… so let’s get started!

    In the late 90s I was getting started with Linux, running Mandrake with GNOME on my PC. I probably tried KDE at that time, but either it did not work for me or I didn’t like it back then. I was using GQview to browse images, but was not super happy with it, so I decided to write my own image viewer. At that time my experience with UI development was on Windows, using Borland C++ Builder and its VCL toolkit. I looked at what was available to create graphical application using C++ on Linux. I found Qt, but quickly dismissed because of the infamous MOC. Heresy, that was not pure C++! Having been burned by the numerous extensions added by C++ builder to the language, I was not going to accept impurity again! I was young and foolish back then (Now I am less young, and hopefully a bit less foolish).

Distributions

• BSD

  • helloSystem 0.6 Released For macOS-Inspired FreeBSD

    Version 0.6 of helloSystem is now available as the FreeBSD-based open-source operating system project taking design cues from Apple’s macOS.

    helloSystem 0.6 brings improvements to window management, new window animations, Filer file manager enhancements, and a wide range of other desktop refinements and bugs have been fixed. HelloSystem 0.6 also marks the point in switching from the Openbox window manager over to KDE’s KWin window manager.

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • Maintaina Horde switches to openSUSE LEAP – ralf-lang.de

    Our Horde docker images have switched over from Tumbleweed to openSUSE LEAP once again.

    Recently our container build CI job in github.com broke down unexpectedly. An investigation showed that Tumbleweed’s core libraries, especially libc, were too new for the CI’s build system, based on Ubuntu LTS.

    This is the second time we abandoned the Tumbleweed basis for Horde docker containers. OpenSUSE Leap 15.3 uses a relatively old, but well-maintained, set of base libraries. Both Leap and Tumbleweed deliver PHP 7.4 as a basis for Horde. In both systems, we skip the packaged composer version for a static pick which we will update from time to time. We may switch over to packaged composer if we feel confident.

• Debian Family

  • New Finnix web site launched

    For the past 15 years, the main Finnix web site, finnix.org had been a MediaWiki site, being used as a CMS. Actually, for the first few years, it was a public wiki which anyone could edit, but spammers ruined that. But as of today, the site has been relaunched, as a single, simple HTML page which provides the essential information to download and use Finnix.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • Pop OS 21.10 Release May Support ARM (arm64/AArch64)

    Looks like arm64 build is coming up with Pop OS 21.10 Impish Indri release.

Devices/Embedded

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • The 10 Best Raspberry Pi Apps, Programs, and Software to Install

    The Raspberry Pi is an awesome little computer, whose capabilities won’t stop increasing. As such, you should make sure that you have the best apps installed on it. Whether you’re running Raspberry Pi OS (formerly known as Raspbian) some apps are unmissable.

    Here are the best Raspberry Pi apps you can install today.

  • A Cheap And Easy Picroft

    Came to around $60-$70. Considering the Mark I originally sold for $150 a pop, that’s not bad. True, it’s not as cheap as a Google or Amazon assistant, but then it’s not listening to my every word trying to gather as much information about me and my family as possible. That’s worth the extra cost to me.

  • Reverse-engineering an unusual IBM modem board from 1965

    The vintage IBM circuit board below has a large metal block on it that caught my attention, so I investigated it in detail. It turns out that the board is part of a modem, and the large metal box is a transformer. This blog post summarizes what I learned about this board, along with a bit of history on modems.

  • Water Is The Secret Ingredient When Laser Cutting Ceramics To Make Circuits | Hackaday

    A mask was made from vinyl sheet and a squeegee used to deposit a thick layer of silver and glass particles 1 um or less in size. This was then sintered in a small kiln, which was controlled with a Raspberry Pi running PicoFlow, and after a little bit of scrubbing, the surface resistance was a very usable 2 mΩ/square. Holes cut with the laser, together with some silver material being pushed through with the squeegee formed through holes with no additional effort. That’s pretty neat!

  • 3D Printed VTOL Craft Can Land And Recharge Itself, And Team Up With Other Drones

    The design is open source, with all the relevant information and files available on GitHub. This looks like a fun craft even if you don’t plan on doing research with it, and [Stephen] also created an FPV specific canopy cover.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Timetagger: an open-source time-tracker with precision

  Timetagger is an open-source time-tracker package for users who enjoy managing their time.

  It has a unique interface which is easy to use and learn in almost no time.

  Timetagger implements a Pomodoro method in a nice visualized time-flow view that makes it easy to track and monitor improvements and improve the user productivity.

  The application is a web-based self-hosted app, which means you can run it on your local machine or server.

• Events

  • 2021 Chaos Communication Congress Cancelled | Hackaday

    With mass vaccination programmes and careful application of public health measures it almost feels for some of us as though the pandemic is under control. Any thoughts of it being over are illusory though, and if further reminders were needed we have the news that once more this year’s Chaos Communication Congress has been cancelled due to the safety of its attendees and the extra precautions that its organizers would have to undertake.

    This event in Leipzig between Christmas and New Year is probably the largest of the European gatherings in our community, and its loss will be a great disappointment. Last year’s cancelled event was replaced by a remote one, we’ll see whether they repeat that feat in 2021. If so, we’ll be there, virtually.

• Web Browsers

  • Mozilla

    • Firefox on Unix is moving away from X11-based remote control

      The specific change has the title “Use DBus remote when Firefox is built with –enable-dbus”, and is apparently to fix bug 1724242, “Background update applied when mixing X11/Wayland and opening remote link”. The broad outline of the problem (which has been an issue for years) is that a Firefox running on Wayland must use D-Bus remote control, but if an X program running in XWayland then tries to start Firefox (for example to open a URL), the new Firefox may (only) try to find a running Firefox via the X mechanism and then fail, with various consequences. The Mozilla solution is to only use D-Bus remote control and basically drop X11 remote control.

    • Adding Let’s Encrypt’s new root and intermediate certificates to Mozilla applications

      Let’s Encrypt did, in fact, implement a new root and intermediate certificates some time ago, but after the built-in certificate stores in the Mozilla applications shipped with all versions of ArcaOS 5.0 to date (5.0 through 5.0.6) were configured. Thus, these new certificates were not included in those builds, and as a result, the new root certificate is indeed unknown.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • MySQL vs MariaDB: What Are the Main Differences Between Them

    An in-depth comparison of MariaDB vs MySQL based on license model, popularity, features, performance, and support.

    MySQL and MariaDB are relational database management systems (RDBMS) best known for their mutual compatibility and their identical command and query syntaxes. In fact, MariaDB is a free and open source fork of MySQL that inherited many of that database’s characteristics.

    The MariaDB and MySQL database management systems have a lot in common, which can make it difficult to choose when you need to decide on a database solution for your needs.

    But before we get into an in-depth analysis on the topic MySQL vs MariaDB, let’s start at the very beginning.

  • Fast, Parallel Database Tests

    Here are some of the different strategies you can use to write tests that read or write data from a database, and the benefits and drawbacks of each. I’m usually writing Go code, so the examples here are for Go, but the notes should generalize to any language that runs tests against Postgres, MySQL, or any other database.

  • Responsive Qml layout with scrollbars

    In this article I’ll show you how to make a responsive layout in Qt / QML that automatically adjusts the amount of columns and rows based on the window dimensions, including scrollbars for when the content does not fit inside the window. This also works if you have a portrait and landscape orientation of your application, since the screen or window dimensions will be different across those two builds. I also explain how the dynamic resizing works with an explanation of property bindings in QML and as a bonus this works on mobile (Android/iOS) as well.

• Programming/Development

  • My Vim history

    About two months ago, the Changelog had a show about Vim in general and why, after all these years, it’s still the favorite text editor of a lot of folks. That episode also contained a segment where each of the panelists talked about how they got into Vim in the first place. I thought I should share my story there too (at least as far as I can still remember it)!

  • Toolchains adventures – Q3 2021

    On top of the OpenBSD related changes I’ve been contributing upstream to LLVM, I’ve been continuing my experiments with the build system. I’ve also been reading documentation about various parts of the toolchain, sending diffs when encountering mistakes or things which could be improved.

  • Facebook Is Aiming To Make Compilers Faster Using Machine Learning With CompilerGym

    Facebook this week announced the open-sourcing of CompilerGym as their effort to improve compiler performance by leveraging machine learning to tackle optimization work.

  • OpenBLAS 0.3.18 Released With LoongArch64 Support, More Optimizations – Phoronix

    OpenBLAS 0.3.18 is out today as the latest feature update to this widely-used, open-source BLAS implementation.

    OpenBLAS 0.3.18 brings a wide assortment of improvements and fixes, some of the highlights include:

    - Support for LoongArch (LoongArch64) as the new Loongson MIPS-based CPU architecture.

  • Intel oneAPI 2021.4 Released With More Optimizations, Continues LLVM Adoption

    Intel on Friday formally released their oneAPI Toolkits 2021.4 release as the latest collection of their various software components for a multi-vendor, multi-architecture software platform across CPUs and XPUs (GPUs / accelerators).

Opinion | Don’t Abandon First-Class Postal Service

Starting with Benjamin Franklin, one postmaster general after another endeavored to speed up the U.S. Mail. In this ongoing quest to move mail faster, a series of transportation advances were eagerly adopted, from stagecoaches to steamships to railroads to airplanes. But the current postmaster general, Louis DeJoy, is pursuing a course of action that departs from the goals and aspirations of his predecessors. While previous postmasters generals sought faster mail delivery, DeJoy stands out for his wish to make it slower. Beginning this October 1, many Americans can expect permanently slower mail, especially if they live on the West Coast.   

Education

• How reading aloud can help you bond with your kids and make them a better reader

  Reading aloud is the best bang for your buck, Siriboe says, adding that she hasn’t seen anything yet that gives a higher return on investment.

• Forget TV and the internet. Radio is how you reach Zimbabweans

  You then realise that when we discovered that 2 million more people listen to the radio than use the [Internet]. The 2 million was mostly the rural based individuals.

  For urban users, almost the same proportion has access to both the [Internet] (74%) and the radio (70.7%).

Hardware

• Drone Replaces Kite In Recreation Of Famous Atmospheric Electricity Experiment | Hackaday

  Finally, someone decided to answer the question that nobody was asking: what if [Benjamin Franklin] had had a drone rather than a kite?

  Granted, [Jay Bowles] didn’t fly his electricity-harvesting drone during a thunderstorm, but he did manage to reach some of the same conclusions that [Dr. Franklin] did about the nature of atmospheric electricity. His experimental setup was pretty simple: a DJI Mini2 drone with enough payload capacity to haul a length of fine-gauge magnet wire up to around 100 meters above ground level. A collecting electrode made of metal mesh was connected to the wire and suspended below the drone. Some big nails were driven into the soil to complete the circuit between the drone and the ground.

• Mouse And Keyboard Controls On The N64 | Hackaday

  The Nintendo 64 was one of the consoles that properly heralded in the era of 3D gaming. However, its controller is of a design we wouldn’t consider ideal today. For the FPS games that were so popular on the N64, a mouse and keyboard could do much better. [The Hypocaust] set out to make it happen.

  The N64 polls the controller and receives button and analog stick data in return. Four bytes are sent by the controller, with 14 bits covering the buttons and 8 bits covering the horizontal and vertical axes of the analog stick, respectively. Thus, if keyboard presses and mouse movements from a PC could be pumped to a microcontroller which reformatted the data into signals the N64 could understand, everything would work nicely.

• Wild Lego-Bot Pronks About Your Patio | Hackaday

  Legged robots span all sorts of shapes and sizes. From the paradigm-setting quadrupeds built from a pit-crew of grad students to the Kickstarter canines that are sure to entertain your junior hackers, the entry point is far and wide. Not one to simply watch from the sidelines, though, [Oracid] wanted to get in on the quadruped-building fun and take us all with him. The result is 5BQE2, a spry budget quadruped that can pronk around the patio at a proper 1 meter-per-second clip.

• Secret Keychain Safe Looks Just Like A Bolt | Hackaday

  While conventional safes can be a good place to put valuables, sometimes it’s even better to hide your things where nobody will even look in the first place. [Wesley Treat] has a build that will allow you to do just that, which secrets away papers, money, or small items within the body of a bolt.

Health/Nutrition

• Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar Over Instagram’s Effect on Teens

  Facebook has been in an uproar over the past few weeks, which the meetings were held to quell. The tumult began after The Wall Street Journal published a series of articles last month that showed Facebook knew about the harms of its services, including teenage girls saying that Instagram made them feel worse about themselves. The articles were based on a trove of Facebook documents, which were leaked by an unidentified whistle-blower.

  The revelations immediately set off a wave of criticism from regulators and lawmakers, many of whom moved swiftly to call the company to account. As scrutiny mounted, Facebook delayed the Instagram service for children. On Thursday, Antigone Davis, Facebook’s global head of safety, was questioned for more than two hours by lawmakers about the mental and emotional toll its services could take on kids.

  [...]

  The furor is unlikely to die down. On Sunday, the whistle-blower who leaked the internal research and is a former Facebook employee is set to reveal her identity and discuss the documents on “60 Minutes.” She will then appear at a Senate hearing on Tuesday to testify about what she discovered while conducting research at Facebook.

• U.S. senators grill Facebook exec about Instagram’s potential harm to teen girls

  Senators fired a barrage of criticism Thursday at a Facebook executive over the social-networking giant’s handling of internal research on how its Instagram photo-sharing platform can harm teens.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Apple Pay with Visa [Cracked] to Make Payments via Locked iPhones

    The problem is due to unpatched vulnerabilities in both the Apple Pay and Visa systems, according to an academic team from the Universities of Birmingham and Surrey, backed by the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC). But Visa, for its part, said that Apple Pay payments are secure and that any real-world attacks would be difficult to carry out.

    The team explained that fraudulent tap-and-go payments at card readers can be made using any iPhone that has a Visa card set up in “Express Transit” mode. Express Transit allows commuters around the world, including those riding the New York City subway, the Chicago El and the London Underground, to tap their phones on a reader to pay their fares without unlocking their devices.

  • Apple’s latest right-to-repair trick is delightfully evil

    “If a customer gets their ‌iPhone 13‌ display replaced by a third-party repair store or provider, such as those not licensed or affiliated with Apple through its Independent Repair Program, Face ID on the iPhone will no longer be usable,” MacRumors reported. “Despite this, if an ‌iPhone 13‌ display is replaced with a ‘non-genuine’ or even a genuine, original ‌iPhone 13‌ display, Face ID stops working, despite there seemingly being no hardware within the display itself needed for Face ID to function.”

    In testing, the media outlet found that this apparently wasn’t a glitch. “The repair provider swapped two original ‌iPhone 13‌ screens and, in both cases, Face ID was inoperative after the new screens were installed. It seems to be the case that if the original screen is put back with the original ‌iPhone 13‌, Face ID returns, ruling out the possibility of an improper installation.”

  • Security

    • Cameron Kaiser: curl, Let’s Encrypt and Apple laziness

      The built-in version of curl on any Power Mac version of OS X will not be capable of TLS 1.1 or higher, so most of you who need it will have already upgraded to an equivalent with MacPorts. However, even for later Intel Macs that are ostensibly supported — including my now legacy MacBook Air with Mojave I keep around for running 32-bit Intel — the expiration of one of Let’s Encrypt’s root certificates yesterday will suddenly mean curl may suddenly cease connecting to TLS sites with Let’s Encrypt certificates. Yesterday I was trying to connect to one of my own Floodgap sites, unexpectedly got certificate errors I wasn’t seeing in TenFourFox or mainline Firefox, and, after a moment of panic, suddenly realized what had happened. While you can use -k to ignore the error, that basically defeats the entire idea of having a certificate to start with.

      The real hell of it is that Mojave 10.14 is still technically supported by Apple, and you would think updating the curl root certificate store would be an intrinsic part of security updates, but you’d be wrong. The issue with old roots even affects Safari on some Monterey betas, making the best explanation more Apple laziness than benign neglect. Firefox added this root ages ago and so did TenFourFox.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • How I Knew I Needed to Quit Instagram

        The impulse to pull out my phone and micromanage my persona was constant: post at the right time, tag the right people, pin comments that supported my views, leave my own smart, witty comments on other influential accounts, re-share mentions of my work with just enough faux humility so as to not appear gross — all of it had become as reflexive as scratching an itch. Except this itch never stopped.

        I realized I had become numb to the life I’d worked so hard to save when I got sober.

        So I decided to leave.

      • The Largest Autocracy on Earth

        What Bosworth failed to say is that Facebook doesn’t just have the capacity to poison the individual; it’s poisoning the world. When 2.9 billion people are involved, what’s needed is moderation in scale, not moderation in personal intake. The freedom to destroy yourself is one thing. The freedom to destroy democratic society is quite another.

        b Facebook sold itself to the masses by promising to be an outlet for free expression, for connection, and for community. In fact, it is a weapon against the open web, against self-actualization, and against democracy. All of this so Facebook could dangle your data in front of advertisers.

      • Facebook’s secrecy boomerang

        Driving the news: Facebook spent Thursday fielding attacks from senators over its internal research into Instagram’s negative impact on teen girls.

      • Apple adding spyware to iPhones to “detect” if you’re mentally ill, using the camera.

        Apple iPhones are adding spyware that uses the camera to detect mental illness.

        While there are many things that can be said about this, I think most people would agree that it’s intrusive, and it may even be illegal under various privacy laws, including the Biometric Information Privacy Act of Illinois.

        The first thing Apple will probably do with it is determine how to use people’s depression and insecurities to sell them more junk using “retail therapy”. Then what? Will they share it with the government? Potential employers? Advertising companies?

        If they do get sued, what compensation will you get? $50 after the lawyers get done taking $50 million out of the settlement pot?

      • Confidentiality

        • NSA, CISA Release Guidance on Selecting and Hardening Remote Access VPNs

          NSA is releasing this guidance as part of our mission to help secure the Department of Defense, National Security Systems and the Defense Industrial Base.

        • TLS in 2021

          How-To guides need to stop saying that by adding an TLS cert, somehow that has “secured the server.” It has not. TLS != Security

Defence/Aggression

• The ‘Trial of the Century’ Will Test French Values

  On that Friday night, Islamic State terrorists targeted six sites across the city—the Bataclan concert hall, the Stade de France soccer stadium, and numerus restaurants and bars—leaving 130 people dead and 416 injured. The attacks caused the worst loss of life on French soil since World War II and forged an indelible mark on French society.

  The trial will be historic for its sheer scale alone; an entirely new courtroom was constructed to accommodate everyone involved. There are 330 lawyers and nearly 1,800 plaintiffs—of which 300 are victims, a group that includes the wounded and families suing on behalf of killed relatives. Twenty men stand accused of planning and carrying out the attacks. Six are being tried in absentia, although sources suggest the terrorist network could be much wider.

• Mali’s plan for Russia mercenaries to replace French troops unsettles Sahel

  Some activists say the presence of the French forces itself was a catalyst of the jihadist violence. France has long opposed negotiations with jihadists, an option favoured by some Malians.

• Military’s RFID Tracking of Guns May Endanger Troops

  Capt. Andrew Wood succinctly framed the concerns when he told the AP that the RFID tags “[increase] the digital signature of Marines on a battlefield, increasing the security/force protection risks.”

  Security experts who talked to the AP said the tags would be detectable up to a much farther distance than advertised, meaning adversaries could track troop movements, make fake RFID tags and more.

• Facebook Is A Doomsday Machine

  The social web is doing exactly what it was built for. Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence. The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of QAnon, for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That’s because Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.

• Macron, France Reject American ‘Woke’ Culture That’s ‘Racializing’ Their Country

  After French President Emmanuel Macron recalled his ambassadors from the U.S. in the wake of a submarine deal with Australia that was torpedoed by President Joe Biden’s administration, French media are now reexamining everything about America.

  The latest target? “Woke” ideology.

  One of France’s leading magazines, Le Spectacle Du Monde, ran a cover story titled “The Suicide of America.” The magazine blamed America’s retreat from Afghanistan on “a woke dictatorship” and questioned whether the American “empire was collapsing.”

• [Breach] exposes law enforcement officers who signed up to join anti-government Oath Keepers

  Nonetheless, the Oath Keepers was always an extremist group, she said. It was founded in nonsensical and hateful conspiracy theories and always had an anti-government bent.

  She and other experts said they were concerned about law enforcement officers who joined the Oath Keepers at any point.

  “I don’t think police officers should be involved with extremist groups,” Beirich said. “You are a part of the government, you represent the full, whole community as a police officer, and there’s obviously a problem when you’re in a group that’s questioning the government’s right to do the things that the government has the right to do.”

• Subpoenas could shed light on how Jan. 6 rally came together

  The 11 subpoenas sent this week went to people who organized or worked at the rally at the Ellipse where Trump encouraged the crowd to march to the Capitol and told them “you’ll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to be strong.”

  Most of the organizers had worked on Trump’s presidential campaign or in his administration and could provide new details of how the rally that launched the violent attack came together.

• UN condemns Ethiopia expulsions, says 5.2 million need aid in Tigray

Environment

• To Protect Their ‘Sacred Water,’ Tribal Nations Take On an Oil Giant

  “Enbridge drills so far under the water that they risk hitting the aquifers,” Kier said, referring to a spill of drilling fluids known as a frac-out. Such frac-outs have released thousands of gallons of drilling fluids in the region this summer, which can disrupt ecosystems, including suffocating mussels and fish.

  [...]

  “You can live without oil,” said Kier, gesturing to the assemblage of tents and teepees around her, “But you can’t live without water.”

• Opinion | New Levels of Ambition Are Mandatory at Glasgow Climate Talks

• Energy

  • Judge Tied to Chevron Sends Lawyer Who Sued Oil Giant to Prison for 6 Months

  • As Bikers Throng the Streets, ‘It’s Like Paris Is in Anarchy’

    Mayor Anne Hidalgo, who is campaigning for the French presidency, has been burnishing her credentials as an ecologically minded Socialist candidate. She has earned admirers and enemies alike with a bold program to transform greater Paris into the world’s leading environmentally sustainable metropolis, reclaiming vast swaths of the city from cars for parks, pedestrians and a Copenhagen-style cycling revolution.

    She has made highways along the Seine car-free and last year, during coronavirus lockdowns, oversaw the creation of over 100 miles of new bike paths. She plans to limit cars in 2022 in the heart of the city, along half of the Right Bank and through the Boulevard Saint Germain.

    Parisians have heeded the call: A million people in a metropolis of 10 million are now pedaling daily. And Paris now ranks among the world’s top 10 cycling cities,

  • How China’s Ban on Cryptocurrency Will Ripple Overseas

    On Sept. 24, the People’s Bank of China, Beijing’s monetary authority, released a statement saying cryptocurrencies lack the status of other monetary instruments. The notice, issued in tandem with nine other government agencies, including the Bureau of Public Security, declared all related business illegal and warned that cryptocurrency transactions originating outside China will also be treated as crimes.

  • Far-right cryptocurrency follows ideology across borders

    The Daily Stormer website advocates for the purity of the white race, posts hate-filled, conspiratorial screeds against Blacks, Jews and women and has helped inspire at least three racially motivated murders. It has also made its founder, Andrew Anglin, a millionaire.

    Anglin has tapped a worldwide network of supporters to take in at least 112 Bitcoin since January 2017 — worth $4.8 million at today’s exchange rate — according to data shared with The Associated Press. He’s likely raised even more.

  • The Looming Fossil Fuel Crash

    So, one of two things is going to happen. Either the world is going to head for 3°C and society collapses, in which case the “Slow AIs” profits, stock prices and reserve assets are irrelevant. Or there will be a discontinuous drop in their stock prices and bond ratings as they are forced to cut production and restate the value of their reserves.

    Although it is 6 years since fossil fuel companies were counted in the top ten most valuable companies, as a group they are still very large. For example, as I write BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon Mobil, PetroChina, Royal Dutch Shell and Total Energy are together worth $1.1T, or a bit more than Facebook.

  • 46% of Zimbabwean electricity users have solar as main source

    A report released a few years ago stated that only 13% of rural households had access to any kind of electricity. Rural households account for 67% of the population and that would mean 100% of urban households had electricity. That’s obviously false. We can assume that the 13% figure referred to those connected to the national grid.

    Back to the 37.1%, that 37.1% is for households that are connected to the national grid and ignores all other sources of electricity. Turns out solar has been rising in popularity.

  • Europe is under attack from Putin’s energy weapon

    Nord Stream 2 is not yet operational, but the Kremlin’s tightening grip on energy supplies is already being felt across Europe. The price of gas futures continues to hit record highs and has increased by over 600% in a matter of twelve months.

    What we are currently witnessing in Europe is a rerun of the oil shocks America experienced in the 1970s. The commodity is different, the safeguards are stronger, but the underlying dynamics are the same. It was not a lack of oil tankers that pushed up prices of crude and triggered an economic recession in the US almost 50 years ago, but politically motivated decisions by the dominant oil producers to withhold supplies.

Finance

• Amid Labor Shortage and Supply Chain Disruption, Workers Have Historic Leverage

• Furry Porn Against NFTs: A Call to Forearms

  In A Furry’s Guide to Cryptocurrency, I briefly mentioned that NFTs are a dumb idea and not a valid reason for anyone–but especially furries–to get involved with cryptocurrency.

  The legitimate reasons for furries to consider cryptocurrency are to protect porn artists and sex workers from the overreach of the conservative finance sector. To bank the unbanked, especially if they provide your spank bank, as it were. Also, to offset the risk of chargeback fraud to cryptocurrency exchanges, which in turn have the lawyers and capital that independent artists do not–especially fursuit makers.

• US Empire Is Lining the Pockets of Defense Contractors

  Corporations large and small have left the financial feast of that post-9/11 surge in military spending with genuinely staggering sums in hand. After all, Pentagon spending has totaled an almost unimaginable $14 trillion plus since the start of the Afghan War in 2001, up to one-half of which (catch a breath here) went directly to defense contractors.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Opinion | While Americans Sleep, Our Corporate Overlords Make Progress Impossible

  “Polarization” is the word most associated with the positions of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress. The mass media and the commentators never tire of this focus, in part because such clashes create the flashes conducive to daily coverage.

• Third Parties May Disappear From Ballot Under Freedom to Vote Act Provision

• ‘Right > Rushed,’ Say Progressives as Conservative Dems Attack Over Delayed Infrastructure Vote

  House progressives hit back Friday night after right-wing Democrats accused them of trying to derail President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda by vowing to withhold support for the $1.2 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill until after the more ambitious $3.5 trillion budget reconciliation package is passed.

  “96% of Democrats agree on how we deliver the president’s entire Build Back Better agenda. A few conservative Democrats are standing in our way of delivering transformational change to families across America.”

• Nigeria’s govt will lift the Twitter ban if certain conditions are met

  Points two through four are pretty reasonable, we saw something similar in Kenya with its Digital Services Tax last year. However, point one is a little worrying because there are many ways to interpret “National Security and Cohesion”. I don’t want to speculate but in the African context that isn’t a good recipe. As for point five, I am pretty sure that Nigerians tweeting constitutes local content.

• Google Commits $1 Million to Secure Open-Source Program

  SOS won’t apply to all open-source projects. The Linux Foundation says that its criteria for critical projects is informed by the Executive Order on Improving the Nation’s Cybersecurity issued in May and corresponding guidance from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

  The foundation also says that it will consider the impact of the project—such as the importance of its security infrastructure and how many users it affects—as well as its rankings in the Harvard 2 Census Study of most-used packages and an OpenSSF Critically Score of 0.6 at minimum.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• ‘I feel like I’ve lost him’: The families torn apart by conspiracy theories

  “When he told me to ‘look out for the FBI report’ proving Hillary Clinton tortured babies and drank their blood to live forever, I knew with 200 percent certainty that I had lost him,” Mathieu* recalled. “It was finished. I would never again see the person he was before.”

• Rudy Giuliani openly admits his election fraud “evidence” came from social media posts

  Rudy Giuliani appears to have finally let slip the source for at least some of his evidence of widespread voter fraud in last year’s presidential election: social media.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Telegram censorship

  One would argue that censoring such channels would stop spreading such ideas. I would argue that one who wants to spread this kind of ideas would find its ways. They won’t be restricted or limited to one Telegram channel and Telegram is not the only place for them, it’s not even the safest.

• Digital Services Act: Legal Affairs Committee Attacks User Privacy And Free Speech Online

  “These proposals threaten the confidentiality of private correspondence, encourage error-prone ex-ante upload filtering, introduce excessively short content take-down delays, enforce excessive national laws (e.g. in Poland or Hungary) throughout the EU, turn ‚trusted flaggers‘ into ‚trusted censors‘ and much more. I don’t think all my colleagues in the Legal Affairs Committee are aware of the implications. They reflect massive lobbying by the content and rights holder industry.”

Civil Rights/Policing

• Thousands Mark Day for Indigenous Children Who Suffered in Residential Schools

• Mozambique: ISIS-linked Group Using Child Soldiers

  An Islamic State (ISIS) linked armed group in northern Mozambique is kidnapping boys and using them to fight government forces in violation of the international prohibition on the use of child soldiers, Human Rights Watch said today.

  The armed group, known locally as Al-Shabab, has abducted hundreds of boys, some as young as 12, trained them in bases across Cabo Delgado province, and forced them to fight alongside adults against government forces. In the town of Palma, parents said that they watched their sons wield guns when they returned with other fighters to raid their village.

• Women Rally for Abortion Justice Amid ‘Unprecedented Attack’ on Reproductive Rights

  Amid an escalating Republican assault on reproductive rights and a looming U.S. Supreme Court reckoning, women and allies across the United States and around the world took to the streets Saturday to #RallyForAbortionJustice and defend Roe v. Wade.

  Tens of thousands of demonstrators marched in Washington, D.C, New York City, Los Angeles, and more than 600 other cities and towns, according to Women’s March, the event organizer.

• Biden’s Expulsion of Haitian Migrants Is Racist, Illegal — and Trumpian

• Famous Turkish actress convicted of ‘insulting’ former soldier accused of rape

  Ezgi Mola, a popular Turkish actress, was convicted on insult charges after she protested in a tweet in August 2020 the release of a former soldier accused of raping an 18-year-old Kurdish woman, the Stockholm Center for Freedom reported on Friday, citing Turkish media outlets.

• The jail on Rikers Island is both appalling and generously funded

  The misery at Rikers is not for lack of resources. The jail’s population fell by half between 2012 and 2020, yet its budget grew by 24%. It costs $438,000 to jail one person there for one year. Of this $379,216 goes to personnel costs; less than 5% goes to services like substance-abuse treatment. The average salary for guards, after five and half years on the job, is $92,073. In 2012, the ratio of inmates to officers in the city was 7:5. In 2020 it was 1.6 officers per inmate.

• Obituary: George Holliday fortuitously filmed the beating of Rodney King

  The LAPD would not tell him, and at first showed no interest in the tape. But he and Maria both thought it should be seen. The local KTLA TV channel took it, cagily at first, and ran it on the news that evening. But then they shared it with CNN, and his world exploded. He opened the door on a sea of reporters, so that he could hardly get to work. His phone rang off the hook. Everyone wanted copies of the tape, but he had no equipment to make them. Instead he had left the master-tape with KTLA, for just $500, and soon enough higher authorities took it away and kept it.

  In 1992 the officers were tried and, despite his video, acquitted of assault. The southern section of Los Angeles went up in flames then for almost a week, with more than 60 dead and $1bn-worth of damage. And, having been a five-minute hero, he got the rap now for sharing the tape. Even in Lake View Terrace, a quiet, horsey, middle-class place which saw no riots, his customers blamed him, and death-threats were stuck on the windshield of his van.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • User survey on CNIPA-EPO pilot on ISA-files [Ed: Contrary to what EPO tells you about privacy (see bottom part), it is in breach of privacy laws.]

    The EPO and CNIPA have launched a user survey on the pilot that enables nationals and residents of the People’s Republic of China to select the EPO as their International Search Authority for PCT applications filed in English with CNIPA or the International Bureau of WIPO as receiving Offices. You can submit your comments in Chinese, English, French or German until 15 October 2021.

    Whether or not you have already participated in the pilot, we sincerely hope that you will share your input and expectations by taking a few minutes to complete the survey. Your feedback is essential as it helps the EPO and CNIPA continuously improve the services offered to patent applicants.

    [...]

    Survey replies are anonymous, confidential and personal data is processed in accordance with the Guidelines for the Protection of Personal Data in the EPO.

  • DABUS Again Denied in the US and the UK, Part I – the Approach in the US [Ed: Australian patent attorney on Australian lunacy, giving patents to bots]

    On 27 August 2021, the Commissioner of Patents lodged an appeal (case no. VID496/2021) against the decision of Justice Beach in the Federal Court of Australia finding that the ‘AI’ machine known as DABUS could be named as sole inventor on an Australian patent application. Unusually, and presumably in recognition of the media and public interest generated by this case, IP Australia took the step of announcing the filing of the appeal, while emphasising that ‘[t]he appeal is centred on questions of law and the interpretation of the patents legislation as it currently stands’ and that ‘[t]he decision to appeal does not represent a policy position by the Australian Government on whether AI should or could ever be considered an inventor on a patent application.’ The appeal will most likely be heard by a Full Bench of the Federal Court comprising three judges, although in rare cases deemed sufficiently significant a five judge panel may be assigned. A hearing could take place as early as November this year, but at this stage it seems more likely to be scheduled for early in 2022.

    [...]

    I will cover these latest developments in the DABUS saga over a series of three articles. In this first article, I will look at the approach taken to the role of the inventor in the US, how it differs from other jurisdictions, and the recent decision from the EDVA. The second article will cover the split decision in the UK, and how the differing opinions of eminent patent jurists Arnold LJ and Birss LJ stack up. Finally, in the third part I will look at where Australia sits, and consider whether either of the US and UK decisions may be of any relevance in the upcoming Full Court appeal.

  • DABUS Again Denied in the US and the UK, Part II – the Split Decision in the UK

    In the first article in this series I looked at the US approach to the role of the inventor in patent law and practice, and at the recent decision of Judge Leonie M Brinkema in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia (‘EDVA’) upholding the USPTO’s decision to refuse two patent applications on the basis that the ‘AI’ machine DABUS is not a human being and therefore cannot be an inventor under US law (Stephen Thaler v Andrew Hirshfeld and the US Patent and Trademark Office, Mem. Op. [PDF 998kB]). In this article, I shall turn my attention to the split decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales in Thaler v Comptroller General of Patents Trade Marks And Designs [2021] EWCA Civ 1374, in which parallel efforts to name DABUS as an inventor have also been rejected, with Thaler’s appeal being dismissed despite a weighty dissent by Lord Justice Birss.

    The issues in the UK case are somewhat different, and more nuanced, than in the US. While all three judges on the Court of Appeal agreed that an ‘inventor’ under the UK law must be a human being, the fact that DABUS is a machine was not immediately determinative of the outcome. An inventor is not required to play any active role in the filing, prosecution, or grant of a patent in the UK, so arguably there remains a question as to whether an application can be permitted to proceed even if a legally valid inventor has not been – or cannot be – named. In the event, the answer to this question turned on whether or not the applicant (i.e. Dr Thaler) could satisfy statutory requirements to name the inventor, and to indicate how he is entitled to be granted patents on inventions that he did not claim to have devised himself.

    [...]

    Arnold LJ is the preeminent patent law specialist on the Court of Appeal. He was elevated to the Court of Appeal in 2019, after being appointed to the High Court in 2008, and as Judge in Charge of the Patents Court in April 2013. In March 2016 he was appointed as an External Member of the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office. Impressive as this is, however, Birss LJ is no lightweight. In 2010 he was appointed as a Specialist Circuit Judge sitting in what was then the Patents County Court. In 2013 he was appointed to the High Court, and in 2019 he filled the place formerly held by Arnold LJ as Judge in Charge of the Patents Court, before being elevated to the Court of Appeal in January 2021.

  • Worldwide: DABUS: The ‘natural Person’ Problem [Ed: Patent extremists and litigation profiteers show their true colours; they don't care about science and inventors, all they want is lots of patents and lawsuits]

    The Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS) case dates back to August 2019, when a team of academics from the University of Surrey in the UK filed two patent applications in the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), the European Property Office (EPO) and the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), for inventions developed by artificial intelligence (AI).

    According to the applications of these patents, no human being was responsible for the development of the inventions they intended to protect, which instead were formulated by DABUS, created by AI expert Stephen Thaler. It was the world’s first AI to invent viable products without human intervention.

    DABUS uses its complex and varied interconnected neural networks to create its own “ideas”. By varying the connections between the neural networks, and then using a secondary layer to predict the potential critical consequences, it was able to create two different inventions.

    The first is a new type of plastic food container that uses fractal geometry to change shape. The second is a type of flashing light device designed to attract attention during an emergency incident, that can be used in search and rescue missions.

• Copyrights

  • Prosecutors Drop Fraud Case Against Danish ‘Copyright Troll’ Law Firm

    The system follows a familiar pattern – use an anti-piracy monitoring firm to collect IP addresses in BitTorrent swarms, obtain court orders compelling ISPs to hand over the personal details behind those IP addresses, and send letters asking for cash to make potential lawsuits go away.

    In Denmark, thousands of Internet users have paid settlements to the law firm equivalent to around $1,200 each but with a rising number of lawsuits being kicked out of court when they dared to venture there, this attracted the attention of the authorities.

    Following an investigation that began in 2020, in January it was revealed that the State Prosecutor for Serious Economic Crime (SØIK) had charged Njord Law and partner lawyer Jeppe Brogaard Clausen with serious fraud offenses in connection with their settlement work.