9to5Linux Weekly Roundup: October 24th, 2021

This week has been really educational for Linux fans as we were able to install the UnityX desktop environment on Arch Linux, as well as the KDE Plasma 5.23 desktop environment on Kubuntu 21.10. In addition, we were able to test drive the upcoming Ubuntu 22.04 LTS distribution and Ubuntu’s new Desktop Installer.

On top of that, this week we saw new releases of the lightweight and systemd-free MX Linux 21 distribution, Gentoo-based Redcore Linux, as well as the Porteus Kiosk distribution for public computers and kisoks.

Linux Weekly Roundup #153

Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup.

We had another wonderful week in the world of Linux releases with Rosa Linux 12, MX Linux 21, and the first stable release of CarbonUI.

May you have a wonderful week!

Audiocasts/Shows

• This Week in Linux 173: Steam Deck Verified, SFC Sues Vizio, Raspberry Pi, PS3 Emulator | TuxDigital

  On this episode of This Week in Linux, Valve Launches “Steam Deck Verified” Program, SFC Sues Vizio For GPL Violations, Raspberry Pi Price Increase, RPCS3 Can Now Boot All PS3 Games, Ubuntu 21.10 Flavours Released, AlmaLinux ELevate, MX Linux 21, Redcore Linux 2102, GIMP 2.99.8 Released Closer To 3.0, Humble Bundles. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!

• GNU World Order 431

  **Pkgconfig** or **pkg-config** , a BSD make command called **pmake** , and listener feedback about assemly code, and Perl, and using udev for mobile connection.

• Unvanquished Pits Aliens Against Humans In Fast-Paced Shooter – Invidious

  Unvanquished is a free, open-source first-person strategy game shooter. It is cross-platform, available on Windows, Mac and Linux. The game pits technologically advanced human soldiers against hordes of highly adaptable aliens. You can join either the Alien team or the Human team

• Spicy Tech Industry Secrets from a Technical Program Manager – Invidious

  If you’ve ever wondered what the life of a technical program manager is like, and how to work with them, here’s an interview with a TPM!

Kernel Space

• Bareflank 3.0 Hypervisor Released With Microkernel Design, AMD Virtualization Support – Phoronix

  Bareflank, as what started a few years ago as a Linux hypervisor written in modern C++ and focused on security and other new features as a “hypervisor SDK” of sorts, is now up to version 3.0.

• AMD Continues Work On USB4 Support In Their Linux Graphics Driver – Phoronix

  Earlier this month AMD’s open-source driver engineers began posting patches for the AMDGPU kernel driver to handle USB4 DP tunneling. That tunneling for DisplayPort with USB4 is for upcoming Yellow Carp / Rembrandt APUs. The USB4 driver bring-up within AMDGPU continues.

• Google Continues Work On User-Managed Concurrency Groups For Linux – Phoronix

  Earlier this year was news that Google is finally working to open-source their Fibers user-space scheduling framework. For the better part of the past decade they have been developing this user-space scheduling framework and finally now are working on offering public, open-source code intended for upstream around their work.

  As part of this opening of Fibers, Google published their “User Managed Concurrency Groups” code as the kernel patches introducing some new kernel-side primitives for their user-space scheduling framework. This can also be used for security sandboxes and other use-cases.

Instructionals/Technical

• How to use and install Stremio on Linux

  Stremio is a media center that allows users to watch movies, TV shows, and even YouTube videos instantaneously. It also supports DLNA and many other features. Here’s how to use Stremio on Linux.

• Deploying containers with Consfigurator

  For some months now I’ve been working on some patches to Consfigurator to add support for Linux containers. My goal is to make Consfigurator capable of both performing the initial setup of a container and of entering the running container to apply configuration. For the case of unprivileged LXCs running as non-root, my work-in-progress branch can now do both of these things. As Consfigurator enters the container directly using system calls, it should be decently fast at configuring multiple containers on a host, and it will also be possible to have it do this in parallel. The initial setup for the container uses Consfigurator’s existing support for building root filesystems, and it should be easy to extend that to support arbitrary GNU/Linux distributions by teaching Consfigurator how to invoke bootstrapping tools other than debootstrap(8).

• Vincent Bernat: FRnOG #34: how we deployed a datacenter in one click

  The presentation, in French, was recorded. I have added English subtitles.

• How to install FileZilla on a Chromebook

  Today we are looking at how to install FileZilla on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.

• How to Install Zoom Client on Fedora 35 – LinuxCapable

  Zoom is a communications technology platform that provides videotelephony and real-time online chat services through a cloud-based peer-to-peer software platform and is used for teleconferencing, telecommuting, distance education, and much more.

• How to Install Sails.js Framework with Nginx on Rocky Linux 8 – LinuxCapable

  Sails.js is a Javascript framework that you can use to easily and quickly build customized enterprise-grade for Node.js. It resembles the MVC architecture from such frameworks as Ruby on Rails, but with improved support for the more data-oriented modern style of developing web applications and is compatible with other front-end including Angular, React, iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and much more.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Sails.js and access the web-based interface by installing and configuring an Nginx reverse proxy setup on Rocky Linux 8.

• How to Zip and Unzip Files on Android (RAR, ZIP, 7Z) – Make Tech Easier

  If your job demands that you send many large files, or if you just want an easy way to send a large number of pictures to someone, zip files are a necessity – even on your phone! This article shows how to compress or decompress large files on your Android smartphone.

• How to Install Python Pip / PIP3 on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable

  PIP is the standard package manager for installing Python packages. With PIP, you can list, search and download to install packages from the Python Package Index (PyPI). PIP was first included with the Python installer since version 3.4 for Python 3 release and 2.7.9 for Python 2 and is well utilized with many Python projects.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the PIP / PIP2 or PIP3 on Debian 11 Bullseye operating system.

• How to Install Google Chrome on openSUSE Leap 15 – LinuxCapable

  ogle Chrome is the most used Internet Explorer software on the earth, with a recent update in 2021 that Chrome is currently the primary browser of more than 2.65 billion internet users. However, as you would know, after installing openSUSE, only Mozilla Firefox is packaged with the distribution but luckily, installing Google Chrome is a straightforward task.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Google Chrome in three various ways in stable, beta, or unstable versions on openSUSE Leap 15.

• How to browse Reddit from the Linux desktop with Giara

  If you like Reddit but prefer to browse from an app, Giara may be for you. It is a Linux app that allows users to consume Reddit content from the desktop. In this guide, we’ll show you how to install it and use it on your system.

  Note: You must have a Reddit account to make use of the Giara application on Linux. To create a new Reddit account, head over to Reddit and click on the new “sign up” button.

• How to Install Brave Browser on openSUSE Leap 15 – LinuxCapable

  Brave is a free and open-source web browser developed by Brave Software, Inc. based on the Chromium web browser. Brave is a privacy-focused Internet web browser, which distinguishes itself from other browsers by automatically blocking online advertisements and website trackers in its default settings. Brave has claimed its browser puts less strain on your computer’s performance than Google Chrome, regardless of how much you ask of it. Even with multiple tabs open at once, Brave uses less memory than Google Chrome-like, up to 66% less.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Brave on openSUSE Leap 15.

• How to Install / Upgrade to Latest Nginx Mainline or Stable on openSUSE Leap 15 – LinuxCapable

  For those using openSUSE 15 Leap, you might have noticed that installing Nginx directly from its repository does not install the latest stable or mainline version. This is a common trend in most distributions that focus on the stability of packages and provide only urgent bug or security updates until the subsequent major distribution.

  For most, using the default Nginx that comes bundled with the repository will be preferred, but often many require and want the latest version of stable or mainline for updated features. The following tutorial will cover installing the last stable or mainline versions of Nginx on openSUSE 15 Leap.

• How to Add a User to Sudoers on openSUSE – LinuxCapable

  When installing openSUSE, the user account that was created during the initial setup has sudo rights. However, there may be a need to add additional sudo users or make the default user have sudo rights. This is a straightforward process with a few commands.

  In the following tutorial, you will learn to add a user to the sudoers group on any openSUSE system.

• How to easily download and install apps on Linux with AppImage Pool

  AppImagePool is an AppImageHub client for Linux. With it, users can easily browse and download AppImages from the AppImageHub store. Here’s how to get it working on your Linux system.

• How To Install vnStat on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install vnStat on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, vnStat is a console-based utility that monitors network traffic ( transmit and received ) on the selected network interface and stores it. To generate the logs, vnStat uses the information provided by the kernel.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the vnStat monitor network traffic on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• How do I Redirect Output to a File in Linux

  Redirecting is a method of changing the standard input and output devices when executing a command. Linux commands work by taking input and producing an output.

  We can use redirection to send and use the data present in the system so far. By using Redirect, we will not send copies of our data to the system. The following article explains how to use redirect output to a file in Linux.

• How To Install Gitea on Debian 11 – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gitea on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Gitea is an open-source Git service written in the Go language. It is a version control platform similar to GitHub. It is robust, scalable, and offers many features including issues and time tracking, repository branching, file locking, and tagging, merging, and many others. Since Gitea was created using the Go language, it supports a lot of operating systems includes Linux, macOS, and Windows, on architectures like amd64, i386, ARM, PowerPC, and others.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Gitea on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).

• How To Easily Send Files Between Devices With Sharik | Tom’s Hardware

  The quickest and easiest way to install Sharik is via snap – integrated into the Software Store from Ubuntu 16.04 or later, or you can install it directly from the command line.

  $ sudo snap install sharik-app
  At time of writing, the latest version for Ubuntu 20.04 on snap was 2.5. If you want the very latest version – 3.0 – then install it through its own repo instead.

  1. Open a terminal and use curl to download the GPG key and add it to your list of approved keys. This gives us assurance and security that the repository which stores the application is secure.

• How Do I Force Kill a Screen Session Linux

  Almost everyone uses different tools and software in their system to complete their daily tasks efficiently. However, sometimes bugs and glitches create trouble for the software. These glitches can clog the system screen, and it gets hard to close the program. That’s why many operating systems offer a feature to force-kill a screen session. So, in this article, we will explain the procedure to force-kill a screen in Linux.

• How Do I Create a Dedicated Crontab History Log

  Scripts and commands can run automatically at a set date and time by using cron jobs. Cron jobs are logged by default to a file called /var/log/Syslog. To view the most recent entries, we can use the systemctl command. So Crontab is a great command option, but many users do not know how to create or check the history. If you also don’t know how to do it, read this blog from start to end, as we will provide a brief on how to create a dedicated crontab history log.

• How do I Remove Lines from a File Using the SED Command

  The sed command is known as a stream editor. The sed command is used in Linux to do basic text transformation.

  One of the many essential commands of Linux is also the sed command which plays a vital role in file manipulation. It is used for many purposes; some of the main ones are as follows.

  Remove or delete that particular line that matches the given patterns.

• How do I whitelist an IP address on fail2ban?

  This tutorial explains how to whitelist IP addresses using fail2ban and includes instructions for fail2ban installation on Debian and other Linux distributions.

• How to Use Sed Command with Regex

  The sed command has longlist of supported operations that can be performed to ease the process of editing text files. It allows the users to apply the expressions that are usually used in programming languages; one of the core supported expressions is Regular Expression (regex).

  The regex is used to manage text inside text files, with the help of regex a pattern that consists of string and these patterns are then used to match or locate the text. The regex is widely used in programming languages such as Python, Perl, Java and its support is also available for command line programs such as grep and several text editors too like sed.

  Although the simple searching and sorting can be performed using sed command, using regex with sed enables advanced level matching in text files. The regex works on the directions of characters used; these characters guide the sed command to perform the directed tasks. In this article, we will demonstrate the use of regex with sed command and followed by the examples that will show the application of regex.

• How to Use Sed to Edit File in Place

  Linux supports various types of command line utilities to automate the tasks which makes Linux in the leading line of OS; because of its importance and usage, it has hundreds of distributions that are based on Linux and they do support numerous commands to perform actions automatically.

  There is a huge pool of commands available for Ubuntu and sed command utility is one of them; the sed command can be used to perform fundamental operations on text files like editing, deleting text inside a file.

• If your domain is not sending email, set these DNS settings to avoid spoofing and phishing

  As you may know, email spoofing allows attackers to pose as someone else to gain illegal profit. For example, I only use webmaster@cyberciti.biz for communication, but someone might create a spoofed-up email, say info@opensourceflare.com, to trick someone.

• New Features of Synology DSM 7

  Disk Station Manager, or DSM in short, is the operating system for the Synology NAS devices. Synology released DSM 7 recently – the latest version of the DSM operating system for Synology NAS devices.

  You can upgrade the DSM operating system software of your Synology NAS if you’re running DSM 6.2 or later and your NAS has more than 1 GB of RAM/memory installed.

• Remove All Files with Extension Linux Command Line

  Every file consists of a specific extension. If we want to delete files of the same or different extensions from our Linux system, we must follow many different types of commands. In this article, we will see how to remove all files with the extension Linux command line.

• Setup Sudo No Password for Specific Command Only

  Are you a Linux or Unix operating system user? Then yes, sudo is your extensive helper command in Linux. On the Linux operating system, you can run commands as another user using the sudo command. Sudo is the most commonly used tool in the Linux system. But before running commands, sudo needs user authentication.

  Users need to log in using their user ID and password before using the command. But entering the password every time might become hectic. This article will discuss the sudo command, how to use the sudo command, and set up the sudo no password for commands in the next sections.

  Using a root account, you must be done with the initial setup before running the commands. You can access the root by using the $sudo command. But you must know the password initially.

• cd Up One Level Linux

  We often use directories when working on a computer system. The directory is nothing but a folder or a location where a file is stored. We store our files in different directories. And sometimes we may need to change the folders. Instead of going to the folder directly, we can do this using cd (Change Directory) command.

  On Linux and other Unix-like operating systems, the cd command can change the current working directory. Working in the current directory of a computer is also referred to as the user’s current directory. In this article, we will dive deeper into the cd command and give you a brief on cd up one level Linux.

• Bash Print All Environment Variables and Values

  Your shell compiles multiple types of information while interacting with the server from the shell session. It provides information about the shell behavior and its access to the resources. Configuration settings contain some of these settings, and user input determines others.

  In this way, the shell keeps track of all settings and information to maintain the environment. Shells build an environment each time they start a session that contains variables that define a system’s properties. So, if you want to know the methods to bash print all environment variables and values, then read this blog to get a brief on it.

• What are umask bits and How to Use Them in Linux?

  In Linux, every file and directory has some permissions that help to manage the access level of every user on the system. User file creation mode mask bits set the permissions for newly created files or directories. Linux umask consists of nine bits: three bits for the user(owner), group, and other users. The umask changes the default permission of newly created files to prevent other users from accessing them. We can change these permissions by using umask commands.

• Case files of a TSE: A CoW ate my filesystem
  

• Accessing the internet from the terminal with the curl command | FOSS Linux

  CURL is a command-line utility that developers use to transfer data via several network protocols. Client URL (cURL) or (curl) is considered a non-interactive web browser that uses URL syntax to transfer data to and from servers. It can pull information from the internet and display it in your terminal or save it to a file in your local drive.

  This is essentially what web browsers like Firefox or Chromium do, except they render the information. However, curl downloads and displays basic information. Curl is powered by ‘libcurl’, a free and easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library.

  cURL works without user interaction, unlike popular web browsers like Firefox. To use cURL, you launch the curl command while at the same time you issue the web address. You also have to specify if you want the data saved to a file or displayed in the terminal. Therefore, using curl for novice users can create a few challenges, especially when interacting with a site that requires authentication or an API.

• Tunneling and Port Forwarding

  The process of network traffic redirection from one port to another port is called Port Forwarding or Tunneling. Port Forwarding provides numerous advantages, i.e., it can be used for secure communication between two systems. It can also be used for communications that aren’t possible in cases where a port has been blocked but needs to be accessed locally or remotely. This article provides a brief overview of tunneling and port forwarding the network traffic locally and remotely using different techniques, i.e., SSH Tunneling, Rinetd, ngrok.

Games

• Indie dev finds that Linux users generate more, better bug reports

  An indie developer has found an interesting observation: Though only 5.8% of his game’s buyers were playing on Linux, they generated over 38% of the bug reports. Not because the Linux platform was buggier, either. Only 3 of the roughly 400 bug reports submitted by Linux users were platform specific, that is, would only happen on Linux.

  The developer, posting as Koderski for developer Kodera Software on Reddit, makes indie game ΔV: Rings of Saturn—that’s Delta V, or DV, for the non-rocket-science-literate. It’s a hard science, physics-based space mining and piracy game that I quite like, personally, for its blend of playability that still honors the basics of spaceflight. If you quite like the space combat of, say, The Expanse, DV is a sim that might be for you.

  Koderski says he’s sold a little over 12,000 copies of his game, and about 700 of those were bought by Linux players.

  “I got 1040 bug reports in total, out of which roughly 400 are made by Linux players,” says Koderski’s post. “That’s one report per 11.5 users on average, and one report per 1.75 Linux players. That’s right, an average Linux player will get you 650% more bug reports.” Koderski’s numbers are a limited sample size drawn from one person’s experience, but tell a compelling story.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

  • Some big usability improvements and fixes, fixes, fixes — Kalendar devlog 20

    In our last week of KDE Review, we have been focused on fixing as many bugs — big and small — as we have been able to. Thank you to everyone who has reported bugs, and thank you even more if you have helped in fixing them!

    Besides bug-fixes, we also have some pretty nifty usability improvements in store that should make Kalendar more intuitive, more user-friendly, and more pleasant to use than ever!

    We have continued fixing bugs and making improvements during this week of KDE Review. This Sunday, KDE Review will be over, and (hopefully!) we will have passed! From then on, we will be able to start using KDE’s infrastructure to create actual releases. Exciting!

    More exciting is the fact that we will be sharing more details about a beta very, very soon…

Distributions

• New Releases

  • EasyOS version 3.1 released

    EasyOS version 2.9 was released on September 3, 2021 and 3.0 released on October 5, 2021. Version 2.9 was announced on Distrowatch, but not 3.0 as it was really a testing release for the 3.x version numbering. Thanks to the guys who tested 3.0, there have been many enhancements. Always more to do of course, and my to-list keeps getting added to. But, this is a point where we can feature-freeze and bring out a new release.

• Screenshots/Screencasts

  • MX Linux 21

    Today we are looking at MX Linux 21, the XFCE edition. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.10, based on Debian 11, XFCE 4.16, and uses about 700-800MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!

  • MX Linux 21 Run Through – Invidious

    In this video, we are looking at MX Linux 21.

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • Rocky Linux: An Enterprise-Ready CentOS Replacement

    For a long time, CentOS was a reliable choice for a Linux-based servers, because it was effectively a free version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). All the features that made RHEL the dominant enterprise-class Linux were included in CentOS.

    On December 8th, 2020, Red Hat, which had acquired the CentOS project, abruptly announced a change in its focus in the wake of Red Hat’s acquisition by IBM. They announced they would be shifting all of their investment in CentOS Linux from the popular downstream CentOS distribution.

    This move also meant that CentOS would be upstream of RHEL, rather than downstream, so CentOS users would be in effect beta testers for RHEL. Since there were so many users relying on a CentOS version that would be unsupported sooner than they planned for, the community sensed a need for a new project.

    In response, the original CentOS founder Gregory Kurtzer is leading the effort to create a new version of the distro, to achieve the original goals of CentOS.

    Kurtzer told he was thinking about creating a new version of CentOS ever since Red Hat acquired it in 2014.

Devices/Embedded

• Raspberry Pi BMO is Fully Assembled and Ready for OctoPrint

  In a recent episode of our weekly Raspberry Pi podcast, The PiCast, we had the honor of featuring developer and Artist Geeky Faye Art who’s been hard at work creating a huge BMO figure, a character from the show Adventure Time, with a Raspberry Pi inside. According to Geeky Faye Art, the goal of this project is to create a figure that looks like BMO, talks like BMO, and runs OctoPrint, an open-source system developed just for the Raspberry Pi to help manage and control 3D printers.

  Inside BMO, you’ll find a Raspberry Pi with a dedicated screen where BMO’s face usually is. A speaker is mounted inside the body for audio output. A custom PCB was developed to make the front-facing buttons functional. These buttons look just like the originals found on BMO and are printed using PLA filament.

• Create a Nintendo Switch clone with a Raspberry Pi | ITIGIC

  Let’s be honest and admit that nothing that we are going to see next is going to surprise us, because it has already been shown on more than one occasion that the development board created by The Raspberry Pi Foundation gives a lot of play and incredible things can be done with a bit of skill. Even so, none of that detracts from this project that allows you to create a portable console practically identical to the Nintendo Switch.

  The only big difference is the catalog of games capable of running, but believe us when we tell you that you are going to have so many options that you don’t even remember not being able to play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild or some Super Mario.

  Retro Lite CM4 is the name of this portable console that uses a Raspberry Pi 4 Compute module. That is, it is a slightly different version of the model that most users know and where the USB ports and other connections are “removed” to be able to adjust their size and use it in projects with more limited spaces or that must meet certain requirements. .

  This time the interesting thing is that thanks to the use of this Raspberry Pi model, a 5.5-inch LCD screen can be integrated plus a 4,000 mAh battery, and all the other components such as controls, speakers, etc., to have a device that copies the form factor of the popular Nintendo portable console.

• Pinephone Pro: Finally, A Tangible Alternative

  The Pinephone Pro is the answer I was expecting for a while. I am happy to see the (slow) progress made on the original Pinephone, but I was never too excited by anything I had seen or heard about it online: yes, a true Linux phone, with many different distributions – but not usable as a daily driver because of the general sluggishness of the device.

  I could compromise a great many things, but when I saw how slow Firefox was on the Pinephone, I’m not yet ready to go back so far in the past in terms of responsiveness and performance. Also, watching Youtube (or videos in general) is a must on my phones, and the Pinephone barely delivers in that register. In other words, it’s a great phone for development, but not so great for end users.

  The Pinephone Pro changes that equation completely, by upgrading the phone from 10 years old hardware to 5 years old one. Agree, it’s still not going to challenge any kind of flagship device of 2021, but 5 years old hardware is at least going to be decently fast for most typical tasks. Browsing and playback of media should be much more comfortable as long as the hardware is properly supported.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Automating Pool Monitoring And Chemical Dosing | Hackaday

    The project uses a TI SimpleLink wireless-enabled microcontroller to run the show, which allows data to be offloaded to a base station for graphing with Grafana. The system can monitor pH levels as well as ORP (oxidation/reduction potential) levels using probes attached via BNC connectors. Based on these readings, the device can dose chlorine into the pool as needed using a peristaltic pump driven by a TI DRV8426 stepper motor driver.

  • $99 Lepton FS module cuts the cost of FLIR thermal cameras by half – CNX Software

    Thermal cameras based on FLIR Lepton modules are pretty cool, but also quite expensive. Teledyne FLIR Lepton FS offers a much more cost-effective solution with the non-radiometric 160 x 120 resolution micro thermal camera module going for $99, or about 50% less than other FLIR thermal camera modules.

    The lower cost was achieved with some tradeoffs, notably a reduction of thermal sensitivity and scene dynamic range, as well as up to 3% inoperable pixels. But Ron Justin, GroupGets founder, told CNX Software that the lower specs are more than worth it for users only needing an imager, as opposed to a radiometric sensor.

  • Raspberry Pi Weekly Issue #374 – Raspberry Pi <3 LEGO Education

    The collaboration of your dreams launched this week. We worked with LEGO® Education to design the new Raspberry Pi Build HAT, a brand-new product that for the first time makes it easy to integrate LEGO® Technic™ motors and sensors with Raspberry Pi computers.

  • Bring That Old Hi-Fi Into The 2020s | Hackaday

    It’s a distressing moment for some of us, when a formerly prized piece of electronic equipment reaches a point of obsolescence that we consider jettisoning it. [Jon Robinson] ran into this dilemma by finding the Kenwood Hi-Fi amplifier his 17-year-old self had spent his savings on. It was a very good amp back in the day, but over two decades later, it’s no longer an object of desire in a world of soundbars and streaming music boxes. After a earlier upgrade involving an Arduino to auto-power it he’s now given it an ESP32 and an i2S codec which performs the task of digital audio streaming as well as a better job than the Arduino of controlling the power.

  • This Arduino Terminal Does All The Characters | Hackaday

    The job of a dumb terminal was originally to be a continuation of that performed by a paper teletype, to send text from its keyboard and display any it receives on its screen. But as the demands of computer systems extended beyond what mere ASCII could offer, their capabilities were extended with extra characters and graphical extensions whose descendants we see in today’s Unicode character sets and thus even in all those emojis on your mobile phone. Thus a fully-featured terminal has a host of semigraphics characters from which surprisingly non-textual output can be created. It’s something [Michael Rule] has done some work on, with his ILI9341TTY, a USB serial terminal monitor using an Arduino Uno and an ILI9341 LCD module that supports as many of the extended characters as possible.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Android 12: 20 of the best new features [Video] – 9to5Google

  • Five features in Android 12 you should try right now | Technology News,The Indian Express

  • These iQOO phones will get Android 12 beta from December-end | NewsBytes

  • Does It Really Matter if Your Phone Doesn’t Get Android 12?

  • Android Updates: Google releases Android 12, Samsung and Xiaomi beta tests pending

  • The Top 10 Best Nitrome Games for Android – Droid Gamers

  • 16 new Android games from the last week: The best, worst, and everything in between (10/17/21 -10/24/21)

  • Xiaomi Pad 5 review: An iPad Air for the Android masses

  • The Worst Problems You May Encounter When Using An Android Betting App In Nigeria

  • This Squid Game app can put malware on your Android phone. What you need to do

  • Google Launches First Vulnerability Rewards Program for Android Enterprise / Digital Information World

  • How To Install Fortnite On Mobile For Android

  • How to Transfer Your Signal Account to a New Android Device

  • Boom Beach Frontlines Android, How to install and download? – Breakflip

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Events

  • Linux Application Ecosystem Salon 2021 Changsha

    This weekend I traveled to Changsha for the Linux Application Ecosystem Salon 2021 Changsha, which is held by Ubuntu Kylin in the campus of Central South University. The journey itself is uneventful. I’ve never been to any offline Linux events before, I wanted to go to FOSDEM, but then the COVID hit. So anyway, it’s a first time for me. You can view the full news in Ubuntu Kylin’s post

    My first Open Source contributing is the writing of KWeather for KDE Plasma Mobile. And then I’ve became KDE developer and join the Plasma Mobile team. In the whole process I didn’t meet any Chinese developer online, and actually I didn’t know if there is any Chinese contributer out there. Thanks to Ubuntu Kylin reached out to KDE which in turn reached out to me, I can meet some Chinese contributors. There were six contributers given talks in event. Felix Yan from Arch Linux unfortunately can’t come in person due to COVID. Talking with KDE people online is really fun, more so in person! Houge is especially humorous! After the meeting, Handsome Feng, Houges, Burgess Chang and me with the support team all went for dinner together. During the dinner, it’s really interesting to hear Houge sharing his stories as a doctor.

• FSF

  • GNU Projects

    • GNU Toolchain Begins Landing LoongArch Support – Phoronix

      In addition to Loongson working on Linux kernel support for their MIPS-derived LoongArch CPU architecture, the first bits of the GNU toolchain support for this Chinese CPU architecture have been merged.

      The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) LoongArch support hasn’t yet been merged but the GNU Binutils archive saw the initial collection of LoongArch patches merged on Sunday morning.

• Programming/Development

  • Capacitive Touch Controller for FPGAs

    Most projects that interface with the real world need some sort of input device. Obviously this article is being written from a standardized “human interface device” but when the computers become smaller the problem can get more complicated. We can’t hook up a USB keyboard to every microcontroller since we often only need a few buttons, but even buttons can be a little bit too cumbersome for some applications. For something even simpler, we would like to turn your attention to capacitive touch controllers.

  • Meson v0.60 Build System Brings Numerous Improvements

    Meson 0.60 was released on Sunday as the newest version of this increasingly popular and widely-used cross-platform build system.

  • Josef Strzibny: You can in fact use schemas in migrations

    I saw well-intended recommendations not to use schemas in migrations lately. Although the advice of switching to raw SQL is a good one, we don’t have to give up on schemas entirely.

  • Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) Automation

    Gone are the days when manual labor used to go through a rigorous time taking process in order to furnish quality products. Today, organizations have shifted their attention towards automated software. Each software goes through a development lifecycle to meet customer requirements of a high-quality product known as SDLC. In the growing software industry, developers compete to produce high-quality software while remaining within their range of cost and time limits.

    SDLC Automation helps achieve the above goals with minimum manual labor, time, and cost while maintaining a high level of productivity as well as efficiency. This article expounds upon the need for automation in the SDLC process and further sheds light on some of the aspects that software companies must start automating.

  • What is the Difference Between =, == and === in JavaScript?

    JavaScript is a programming language that allows us to create and develop web applications and web pages as well as make our websites more dynamic/interactive. Data can be calculated, manipulated, and validated using JavaScript.

    Like any other language, JavaScript has operators. An operator produces a result by performing some action on a single or multiple operands (data value). Let’s look at an example of 2+2 where the numbers are left and right side operands and the + is the operator. This + operator adds the two numbers together.

    With examples, we’ll examine and answer the question that what is the difference between the =,==, and === operators in JavaScript in this article.

  • Is JavaScript Object-Oriented?

    Object-Oriented Programming (OOP), is a programming approach that is used by every developer at some point in their life to organize software design around objects or data rather than logic or functions where an object is an entity that has some properties and some type. The benefits of using the OOP technique include modularity, reusability, security, productivity, flexibility, and is easily scalable and upgradeable.

  • TOAST.UI: Free, Open-source Interactive JavaScript application components

    While working on a project, I need a calendar library. As I do for every project, I tend to not use previously used libraries and try to learn and use something new.

    That’s how I found Toast.ui, an open-source features-rich UI library for building production-ready apps.

  • YAML vs JSON – Which is better?

    Nowadays, almost every person is familiar with the standard format of JSON. Contrarily, individuals who use Docker are surely familiar with YAML. In simpler words, Docker is a toolkit which permits developers to run, build, deploy, modify as well as stop packages through a single API or commands. YAML is a new but popular language used to serialize data. First of all, we should perceive what data serialization is. Data serialization is the most common way of transforming data objects into byte streams used to store, transfer and distribute data on devices. However, they have similar objectives to store structures and data objects into files but distinctive ways to work.

    In this article, we first go through the features of JSON and YAML, then compare them in-depth to completely comprehend their advantages, and then briefly discuss which one is better.

  • Perl/Raku

    • Some Perl Code In Memory of a Great Scientist | martin [blogs.perl.org]

      On August 21, 2021, famous Polish mathematician Andrzej Schinzel passed away at the age of 84. He was one of the great minds behind modern number theory. May he rest in peace. I have extended one of my CPAN modules relating to his work and dedicated the release to his memory.

  • Python

    • Remove None from the List Python

      In python, when a function returns nothing, it indirectly returns ‘None’. Due to the forthcoming ML (Machine Learning), our focus is now on understanding the None values. The goal behind this is that it is the crucial phase of data preprocessing. Hence, elimination of None values is crucial, so you must know how important it is. Let’s discuss certain techniques in which this is achieved. To replace none in python, we use different techniques such as DataFrame, fillna, or Series. No keyword in python declares the null objects and variables. In python, none refers to the class ‘NoneType’.

      We can allot None to many variables, and they all point toward a similar object. The interesting fact about none is that we can’t consider false as any. None is a blank string or a 0. Let’s demonstrate it with the help of examples. We use the Spyder compiler or different strategies to explain how python removes null values from the list.

    • Python LDAP example

      LDAP is a LIGHTWEIGHT DIRECTORY ACCESS PROTOCOL. It is an internet protocol that works on TCP/IP, and it is used to access/fetch the information from the directories. All the directories are not preferable; it is usually used to access those directories that are active.

    • Python Multiply List by Scalar

      In Python, the most elementary data building is the sequence. Each sequence element allotted a number – its index or placement. The starting point of the index is ‘0’, the second point is ‘1’, and so forth. Python offers six in-built types of sequences, but the most important or commonly used are lists, which we would discuss in this guide. Python list is the most useful data type. It can be written within a square bracket, and a comma separates every item in the list.

Hardware

• Dactyl Chimera Leaves The Learning Out Of The Curve | Hackaday

  Have you been wanting to build your own keyboard, ergonomic or otherwise, but are hesitant to spend all that time and filament on something that may not be a good fit for your hands? Glad as we are that the dactyl is open-source, to get in there and really mess around with it requires intimate knowledge of either OpenSCAD or Clojure.

  Well, not anymore. [WolfIcefang]’s dactyl chimera is an ergo sandbox, a test bench for column curvature, stagger, and height that should keep you from having to iterate all day and night. It was designed in FreeCAD and has three parts — the rack, the tenting foot, and the arches. The rack acts like a bottom plate and has slots for holding the columns (arches) in place. Underneath that is the tenting foot, which changes the lateral inclination. Thirdly are the arches, the business part where the switches go.

• Tricky Screw Heads Have Disappearing Slots | Hackaday

  The screw’s disc-like appearance looks as if it’s a metal trim piece to cover a bolt hole. But in the video below [Andrew] shows us the trick, pushing a brass rod into the middle of the disc to reveal the hidden three-point slot. The center of the disk is actually a separate bit of finely machined metal that is spring loaded to stay flush. A specially designed wrench keys into the rounded concave triangle shape cut into the face.

Health/Nutrition

• A hospital dumps a Black man on a sidewalk with tubes still attached. He is found unresponsive

  A Georgia hospital dumped a seriously ill Black man, with tubes and a catheter still attached to him, on a sidewalk after his Medicare ran out. The 68-year-old patient, who had “a fever, signs of sepsis, a urinary tract infection and an elevated heart rate,” according to WSB-TV, was found collapsed and unresponsive.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Openwashing

      • What is the controversy with Hot Reload

        During the last days a huge controversy has been generated around .NET, the development environment promoted by Microsoft and that, in recent years, has been part of the efforts carried out by the company to establish a good relationship with the free software community. And it would be unfair to undermine their efforts in this regard, because since the appointment of Satya Nadella as CEO of Microsoft, technology has stepped on the accelerator in this regard.

        [...]

        The elimination of this function generated even more friction with the developer community (including company personnel, according to some media), since Despite being removed from .NET 6, it will be kept in Visual Studio 2022, Microsoft’s development environment whose launch will take place on November 8. Thus, in this way, a function that was initially going to be found in .NET 6, will suddenly become available only in the development environment, paid, of course, from Microsoft, thus moving away from free software.

  • Security

    • Critical RCE Vulnerability in Discourse

      Discourse—an open source discussion platform—has released a security advisory to address a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2021-41163) in Discourse versions 2.7.8 and earlier.

    • New York Times Journalist Ben Hubbard Hacked with Pegasus after Reporting on Previous Hacking Attempts

      New York Times journalist Ben Hubbard was repeatedly targeted with NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware over a three-year period from June 2018 to June 2021. The targeting took place while he was reporting on Saudi Arabia, and writing a book about Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

    • Lines Of Code Isn’t A Measure Of Quality – Invidious

      One thing I see every so often is someone talking about how many lines of code a project has as a metric for how good that project is and while it does relate to some aspects, it’s by no means the only or even an important measure.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Latest Federal Court Cases – October 2021 #3 [Ed: The case of Wyatt is just provocation]

    Hyatt v. Hirshfeld, Appeal Nos. 2020-2321, -2323, -2324, -2325 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 18, 2021, opinion modified Oct. 12, 2021)

    The case concerns a Section 145 action brought by Mr. Hyatt, which we discussed here. In August 2021, the Federal Circuit issued an opinion concerning the fee shifting provisions of Section 145. We covered that prior opinion here. This week, the Court issued a modified version of that opinion, removing one phrase in the background portion of its opinion concerning the motivation for Mr. Hyatt’s delays in prosecuting his patents.

  • Life as USPTO director: three past chiefs relive their experiences [Ed: Patrick Wingrove does not speak to Michelle Lee, only to corrupt officials [1, 2] who undermined the USPTO for personal gain]

    Jon Dudas, David Kappos and Andrei Iancu tell Managing IP about the good and bad of the top USPTO job and share advice with aspiring future chiefs

  • Webinar on Impact of Article 4 of Paris Convention [Ed: Patent extremists, radicalised by their greed, still trying to undermine law and crush common sense to have patents on life and nature (not inventions)]

    Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC will be offering a webinar entitled “Don’t End Up Like the Owner of That CRISPR Patent” on October 25, 2021 from 3:00 to 4:30 pm (Mountain Time). Carl Oppedahl of Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC will discuss a January 2020 decision by the Board of Appeal at the European Patent Office relating to CRISPR and Article 4 of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. The webinar will address what went wrong in the various patent filings that led to the findings of invalidity of the CRISPR patent, spell out the traps for the unwary in the filing of a PCT application or other “second patent application”…

  • Albright will choose new patent judge in late November [Ed: Patrick Wingrove continues to whitewash his 'buddies' the crooked judges who turned patent courts into for-profit corporations which treat lawsuits like business and trolls like clients]

    The de-facto patent judge for the Western District of Texas says he hopes to make a decision on his new magistrate judge soon after he’s interviewed candidates

  • AI – A Rushing Snowball: Can AI-made Inventions Be Patented? [Ed: Following sites of lying 'law' firms and lying lawyers you might think that patents can now be granted to 'bots' as if they're "inventors" and "natural persons"; reality is, only two rather insignificant patent islands (AU, SA) said OK and the rest all reject that.]

    Human intelligence has developed over thousands of years. Meanwhile, AI, including deep learning algorithms, is the result of just a few decades of work and development. There is no doubt that this snowball cannot be stopped. Artificial intelligence already has a huge impact on key areas of the economy. It also raises a number of critical legal issues, including those relating to innovation and creativity, faced by states, regulators and competent authorities across the globe. One of the most current legal challenges in this field is the admissibility and conditions for patenting inventions made by or with the use of artificial intelligence algorithms.

  • This week in IP: Slovenia deposits UPC ratification, IV sues three car makers, and more [Ed: This is intentionally misleading; Slovenia did not ratify and even if it did, UPC is still dead because it requires the UK, which cannot ratify anymore]

    Slovenia completes its UPC protocol ratification

    Slovenia completed ratification of the Protocol on the Provisional Application of the Unified Patent Court Agreement and the UPC Agreement itself on Friday, October 15.

    According to the UPC preparatory committee, Slovenia’s move has brought the agreement one step closer to its launch.

    The country’s legislation that ratified the protocol under the UPC agreement came into force on September 24.

    Only one more nation needs to ratify the protocol now to trigger the provisional application phase and the implementation of the UPC as an international organisation.

    The committee has said the provisional application phase will entail the adoption of the secondary legislation prepared by the preparatory committee, the completion of the electronic case management system and the beginning of the process to select and appoint the UPC’s judges.

    In August, the committee estimated that the UPC would start operations around mid-2022. But whether or not the UPC will start on this date will depend on when the decisive member state ratifies the protocol.

  • FOSS Patents: Nokia tries to drown OPPO in patent infringement lawsuits, makes Germany (15 patents-in-suit and anti-antisuit injunction) center of gravity of multijurisdictional enforcement campaign

    Nokia v. OPPO is presently the most massive 5G-centric patent dispute out there. In July, Nokia sued the Chinese smartphone maker–one of the largest in the world–in a multiplicity of European and Asian jurisdictions, and has made additional filings since. OPPO, which holds many 5G patents itself, has started to bring counteractions against Nokia, four of which I have found out about in Germany. The stakes are even higher in Ericsson v. Apple, but those two parties still have a license agreement in place (while the one between Nokia and OPPO expired at the end of June), which is why there aren’t any Ericsson v. Apple infringement cases yet.

    There is consensus in the wireless industry that Apple underpays. In a UK litigation it turned out that Apple’s cumulative patent royalty costs are–and this is just an order of magnitude–at a level of about 1% of its sales. If major standard-essential patent (SEP) holders like Nokia and Ericsson can’t seize the 5G opportunity to get Apple to pay a lot more this time around, it won’t ever happen–or at least not for approximately another decade.

    Compared to major smartphone patent disputes, Nokia v. Daimler (10 patents-in-suit) was just a B movie, though it had an effect of transcendental importance as it proved that the automotive industry can and will take car-level patent licenses in the end. OPPO is no Daimler, though. First, while car makers generally exhibit behavior that exposes them to ever more credible accusations of being unwilling licensees, OPPO does not have any history of infringement: it merely appears to disagree with some patent holders on royalty rates, but there are no signs of hold-out. Second, OPPO alone is a more sophisticated and effective litigant than the totality of Daimler and its tier 1 (i.e., direct) suppliers.

  • Athenex and the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy Announce Allowance of Our First U.S. Patent Claims Around CAR-NKT Cell Therapy

  • How to navigate complex IP issues in European tech M&A [Ed: They mean patents, not "IP", and they misuse buzzwords like "Hey Hi" to push a toxic agenda]

    That task is complicated, however. Developing case law around the licensing of patents ‘essential’ to standardised technology, the fallout from Brexit, and possible reforms to IP law, including in the context of artificial intelligence (AI), will all play into due diligence exercises.

  • Judge Vyskocil Allows Amino Acid Case to Go Forward Despite “Group Pleading” and “Inconsistent Allegations” of Infringement

    On September 27, 2021, U.S. District Court Judge Mary Kay Vyskocil held that plaintiffs Ajinomoto Co., Inc. and Ajinomoto Heartland Inc. had alleged plausible claims for relief for infringement under 35 U.S.C. § 271(g), for inducement of infringement, and for willful infringement, despite the complaint’s purported “group pleading” and “inconsistent allegations” of infringement by the three related defendant corporations.

    Plaintiffs alleged infringement of two patents directed to methods for producing amino acids by three related corporate defendants: the parent corporation CJ CheilJedang Corp. (CJ Korea), and the subsidiary/sister corporations PT CheilJedang Indonesia (CJ Indonesia) and CJ America, Inc. (CJ America). The defendants moved to dismiss the claims asserted against CJ Korea and CJ Indonesia for infringement under Section 271(g) by importing, offering for sale, and/or selling products made by a patented process. The defendants also moved to dismiss the claims asserted against all three defendants for inducement of infringement and willful infringement. Defendants argued, inter alia, that the complaint “engaged in improper group pleading by lumping all the Defendants together as a unitary entity,” and contained “circular and contradictory pleadings with respect to the relationship/separate corporate existence of the defendants it groups together that preclude Plaintiffs’ own arguments” as to infringement.

  • Innovation patents: options for challenging problematic cases [Ed: Law firms know that patents and innovation are not the same thing; patents are monopolies, which oftentimes restrict innovation]

    The phase out of Australia’s innovation patent system caused a flurry of filing activity in 2021, so what are your options if you identify an innovation patent that affects your freedom to operate?

  • Inside the life of a patent prosecution boss [Ed: Whitewashing the very same thugs and bullies that pay the salary of these writers]

    Carla Ji-Eun Kim, chair of Sterne Kessler’s patent prosecution practice in Washington DC, reveals the perks and challenges of her job – and where she gets her coffee

  • [Older] It’s tech, not patents, that makes Qualcomm a royalty-generating machine [Ed: More nonsense as it is patents that the companies are licensing]

    Qualcomm is an IP licensing superpower because it produces world class technology that others cannot afford to be without

  • IBM delivers hundreds of patents to DoorDash in latest big startup transaction

    Recent deal shows that IBM patent sales to startups can generate their own momentum – and that they are not limited to pre-IPO companies

  • IEEE patent policy decision looms; Big Q3 for Ericsson royalties; Medtech IP deal surge; Volvo Group’s Avanci 4G licence; DoorDash lands IBM portfolio; plus much more [Ed: The patent propaganda mill says IBM passes more patents to parasites and drops some more lies about the UPC]

    IBM has transferred 237 US patent assets to delivery platform DoorDash Inc, in its latest deal with an internet upstart. Read more here

    With the implementation of the UPC Agreement moving closer, Bayer IP head Joerg Thomaier says the EU should act quickly to develop a unitary SPC regime. Read more here

  • The world is fighting for COVID treatments, here’s how Israel is helping [Ed: Too much patent propaganda in there; monopolies do not help]

  • Software Patents

    • Database management and information retrieval systems – has their time finally come? [Ed: Litigation companies with deep pockets lean on EPO to allow illegal patents on software; since the EPO is nowadays run by criminals, what’s going to stop them? They abolished the EPC already.

      The realm of computer-implemented inventions is a challenging one, with traps and pitfalls for the unaware and unwary. The guidance provided by the European Patent Office (EPO) to its examiners for assessing the patentability of computer-implemented inventions provides valuable insight into how to navigate this troublesome area.

      As we reported earlier in the year, the EPO Guidelines for Examination were updated in March 2021, bringing about a number of changes in how computer-implemented inventions are handled. In particular, these updated Guidelines introduced for the first time a section relating to database management systems and information retrieval (G-II, 3.6.4), which provides some welcome clarification as to how to obtain a patent in this area.

• Trademarks

  • New airline takes off, but does old IP hit the ground? [Ed: Trademarks are not "IP"; quit calling trademark law something that it clearly is not because it is intentionally misleading]

    As a new state-owned Italian airline purchases its predecessor’s IP, counsel say the old brand could yet resurface

  • No more paper trade mark registration certificates from 2022, says China’s trade mark office – The IPKat

    On 12 October 2021, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) issued Announcement No. 453 (see the full Chinese text here). According to that directive, from 1 January 2022, the CNIPA will only provide an electronic version of trade mark registration certificates. These should be easy to both access and download for logged-in users.

    As strange as it may sound in today’s world of electronic formality, ‘paper’ is a big deal for the registration process in China. Many may recall an incident that occurred in April 2016, under the State Administration for Industry and Commerce (SAIC). At the time, the Trade Mark Office (TMO) was a division under the SAIC (before the 2018 government administration overhaul). The SAIC made a public apology for a six-month delay in issuing trade mark registration certificates. The surprising cause of this long delay turned out to be a shortage of paper.

• Copyrights

  • Facebook says it will pay French publishers for news content

    Facebook said Thursday that it has struck a deal with a group of French publishers to pay for links to their news stories that are shared by people on the social network.

    The company says it inked the licensing agreement with the Alliance de la Presse d’Information Generale, which represents 300 French publishers, to “improve the quality of online information for Internet users and publishers on Facebook.”

Instructionals/Technical

• 9 time-saving tricks for your command line

  How do you write great code? By being efficient. If you want to create something awesome, you’ll have to eliminate the time dumps that slow you down. With just a few tricks, you can speed up your work and focus on what matters.

  [...]

  Say you’re searching for the file foo.txt, but you have no idea where you’ve put it. Then from your home directory, type:
  find . -name foo.txt

  Here, the . stands for the current working directory, and you specify the file name with the option -name. You can also use wildcards. For example, this command will return all files in txt format:
  find . -name *.txt

• A Look At Alacritty The OpenGL Powered Terminal Application – gHacks Tech News

  There are more terminal applications for Linux systems than you can shake a stick at… And frankly, most of them are like choosing what socks to wear; very little difference, save maybe for some special purposes, like thermal socks, or tiling terminals…But, every once and a while I come across one that does things a little differently, and makes me curious to check it out further; such as Alacritty.

• How to run a speed test using the Linux command line – Anto ./ Online

  This guide will show you how to run an Internet speed test from the Linux command-line interface (CLI) and cron. You will also see a sample Jenkinsfile if you want to use a Jenkins for the automation instead of cron.

Games

• Why ‘Borealis’ (Steam gaming for Chromebooks) may still arrive in 2021

  Borealis, the official Steam gaming support in Chromebooks, has been in development for at least a year now (and likely much longer). Let’s go over some new revelations we’ve found and then take a look back at what we know so far. There are many signs that point to a release of Borealis in the coming months so let’s dive right into the details!

• RPCS3 Emulator Now Boots Every PS3 Game

  RPCS3 was initially released in May 2011 and has gradually been improving its compatibility over the past decade. Each game is classified on a compatibility list as Nothing, Loadable, Intro, Ingame, and Playable. As Kotaku reports, the emulator has now reached a point where no known game is classed as “Nothing” anymore, so every title is at least Loadable, which means “games that display a black screen with a framerate on the window’s title.”

• Boiling Steam Has Its Own SubReddit Now

  Last week we just launched (silently) our Boiling Steam Subreddit. You can find it at the expected address, i.e. www.reddit.com/r/Boiling_Steam. There is already a large community of Linux Gamers on Reddit (as evidenced by the recent 200k subscribers on r/linux_gaming) so it’s probably a good idea for us to be present there as well with our own channel. After all, we also like to touch upon a variety of different topics not just limited to games – we do hardware reviews, we interview people with different backgrounds, we write about how we operate, so it’s not always strictly about gaming only.

Distributions

• IBM/Red Hat/Fedora

  • IBM details Kyndryl spinoff, business reorg and earnings

Devices/Embedded

• The Coolest Raspberry Pi Projects You’ll Find

  When it comes to DIY maker technology, few bits of hardware have had the versatility and outright longevity of the Raspberry Pi. Launched in 2012, the Raspberry Pi is a silent, energy-efficient, single-board computer that fits inside the palm of your hand—or inside just about anything you might want to make computer-controlled.

  The Pi planet has seen four main releases of Raspberry Pi boards, along with various mods and variants, over the last decade, with the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B the latest and greatest revision. (That will stand, at least, until the Raspberry Pi Foundation reveals the next rumored Pi model in 2022 or 2023.)

  Some of the older pre-Pi 4 models, though, are still available for less than the cost of an entrée at your local diner, and the creativity they have spawned is near limitless. Let’s take a look at some of the best Raspberry Pi projects we’ve seen in 2021.

• Open Hardware/Modding

  • Chip shortage forces temporary Raspberry Pi 4 price rise for the first time

    The price of a 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 single-board computer is going up $10, and its supply is expected to be capped at seven million devices this year due to the ongoing global chip shortage.

    Demand for components is outstripping manufacturing capacity at the moment; pre-pandemic, assembly lines were being red-lined as cloud giants and others snapped up parts fresh out of the fabs, and the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak really threw a spanner in the works, so to speak, exacerbating the situation.

    Everything from cars to smartphones have been affected by semiconductor supply constraints, including Raspberry Pis, it appears. Stock is especially tight for the Raspberry Pi Zero and the 2GB Raspberry Pi 4 models, we’re told. As the semiconductor crunch shows no signs of letting up, the Raspberry Pi project is going to bump up the price for one particular model.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Forget the ‘free’ software, the real value of open-source is the collaboration [Ed: No, the Free means freedom, not price. Collaboration is not just a side thing.]

  It’s a cliché, but why are we still reinventing wheels?

  It is increasingly clear that the real value and opportunity in open-source isn’t so much the actual software itself, but the collaborative mindset and ecosystem that produces and maintains it. All too often, though, it can be a challenge for open-source advocates to persuade risk-averse board members who are used to conventional methods and thinking.

• 2021 Best of Open Source Software Awards Identify the Most Groundbreaking Products Available to Developers and IT Organizations

• Events

  • Take Five: Takeaways from KubeCon North America 2021 — Virtualization Review

    The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship Kubernetes (K8s) conference, KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2021 (aka “KubeCon”), was held as a live event at the Los Angeles Convention Center and virtually Oct. 13-15, 2021 (with a pre-event on Oct. 11-12). The virtual event had around 17,000 attendees, and around 4,000 attended in person. Below are some of the items that I found especially interesting at KubeCon.

  • Diversity in Coding: Software bootcamp Makers teams up with Muslamic Makers [Ed: Turning code into a race and religion issue may serve to distract from matters that should count like software freedom and class/topology issues like software "masters" treating users like "slaves"]

  • DigitalOcean Announces deploy Conference for Developers and Businesses

• FSF

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Donald Trump’s New Social Network Violated Software-Licensing Terms, Tech Org Says

      A test version of Donald Trump’s Twitter-like social network violated open-source software licensing terms, according to the not-for-profit Software Freedom Conservancy.

      The Software Freedom Conservancy, which enforces open-source software agreements, said Trump’s Truth Social website — launched by the newly formed Trump Media & Technology Group — failed to provide the source code to users, as required under the Affero General Public License (AGPL), a “copyleft license” published by the Free Software Foundation.

      Truth Social’s site was using the free, open-source Mastodon social networking software, which is governed by the AGPL. TMTG ignored the licensing terms and “once caught in the act, Trump’s Group scrambled and took the site down,” Bradley Kuhn, policy fellow and hacker-in-residence at Software Freedom Conservancy, wrote in a blog post Thursday.

How Collaboration Creates New Ideas and Projects – Hawaii Business Magazine

But we wanted specifically to know how innovation and creativity can happen more often in Hawai‘i, so Hawaii Business Magazine spoke with and listened to local artisans, art festival organizers, creative consultants, and even political leaders and businesspeople. We heard about how to foster creativity, and about the shared spaces, technological infrastructure and information sharing that might help Hawai‘i become a more innovative place.

Health/Nutrition

• Can tech solve the UK radiologist staffing shortage?

  The UK is facing a sustained shortage of radiologists across the country, which is having a devastating impact on patients and the healthcare system. Currently, the NHS is short of nearly 2,000 radiologists and 200 clinical oncologists, numbers which the UK’s Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) says could hit 6,000 and 700 respectively within just nine years.

  The NHS is currently facing the biggest backlog in its history, expanding to all areas of medicine from surgery to general practice appointments. Around a third of patients are currently waiting over six weeks or more from referral for diagnostic imaging procedures like MRI and CT scans, with some waiting as long as three months.

• Molecular Sciences Software Institute receives $15M grant from NSF

  The Molecular Sciences Software Institute, based in Virginia Tech’s Corporate Research Center, has received a $15 million renewal grant from the National Science Foundation.

  The five-year grant is a massive boost of support for the multi-university organization of software scientists dedicated to designing and building new, powerful software tools that can help researchers of all stripes tackle wide-ranging, complex, data-heavy issues, such as cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s disease, as well as creating new energy storage systems that can help stem climate change. It also led the creation of an international open-source website that allowed biomolecular scientists from around the world to share computer-aided drug-testing simulations targeting the protein at the center of COVID-19.

Integrity/Availability

• Global Displacement System, A Gpsd Bug Will Hit Unpatched Systems This Sunday – PC Perspective

  You might not remember what Gpsd is but it is in the news every 19.6 years, or more specifically every 1024 weeks, thanks to lazy timekeeping implementation for GPS satellites, which keep track of the number of weeks since January 5, 1980 as an unsigned 10-bit integer. That means when it hits 1023, the next week it rolls over to 0 and many systems which interface with GPS using timestamps will suddenly have corrupted location data.

  Gpsd is an example of this, it is a a service daemon that translates data from Global Positioning System (GPS), Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), and Automatic Identification System (AIS) and is used in a huge variety of applications. Some applications such as Kismet, GpsDrive, and roadmap will be affected but are not necessarily mission critical but more an annoyance when they stop functioning properly. However Gpsd is also used in things driverless cars, marine navigation, and military IFF; small errors in those systems can have large real world effects.

• CISA: GPS software bug may cause unexpected behavior this Sunday

  The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned that GPS deices might experience issues over the weekend because of a timing bug impacting Network Time Protocol (NTP) servers running the GPS Daemon (GPSD) software.

• Disable Time Sync NOW—Ugly GPSd Bug Brings Sunday FAILs

  On Sunday, you might find some equipment thinks it’s 2002. That’s because of a weird bug in gpsd—the code on which a bunch of Network Time Protocol servers rely.

• A GPS-Based Bug Could Roll Back Your Devices to 2002 [Ed: Put another way, GPS (US) basically broken. There are alternatives to it.]

• If your apps or gadgets break down on Sunday, this may be why: Gpsd bug to roll back clocks to 2002

  Come Sunday, October 24, 2021, those using applications that rely on gpsd for handling time data may find that they’re living 1,024 weeks – 19.6 years – in the past.

  A bug in gpsd that rolls clocks back to March, 2002, is set to strike this coming weekend.

  The programming blunder was identified on July 24, 2021, and the errant code commit, written two years ago, has since been fixed. Now it’s just a matter of making sure that every application and device deploying gpsd has applied the patch.

  The Network Time Protocol (NTP) provides a way for devices and services to keep accurate time using a hierarchical set of servers rated in terms of precision, with “stratum 0″ representing the most accurate time sources.

• Proprietary

  • Library provides free online learning opportunities [Ed: Shilling Microsoft proprietary software under the guise of “training” with LinkedIn (nothing “free” about it); Microsoft spam and vendor lock-in disguised as ‘freebies’ here as well.]

    The Humboldt County Library is providing free online learning and career development opportunities through LinkedIn Learning.

  • Appointments at Royal Free hospitals ‘wiped’ after IT failure

  • Avast at Web Summit 2021: Taking back control of the internet [Ed: Avast is a notorious spying company which ships secret code; it's not taking back control of anything, it put itself in control of people]

  • California tried to save the nation from the misery of tax filing — then Intuit stepped in

    Stanford professor Joe Bankman helped guide California through a test run of a “return free” tax system and still advocates for the project that he said participants loved. “People were thanking the government for taking something that drove them crazy and improving it.”

    [...]

    An unexpected letter from the state tax board is the kind of thing known to spike blood pressure. But the note that arrived in tens of thousands of Californians’ mailboxes in 2005 promised to ease anxiety.

    The state proposed that these mostly modest-income taxpayers skip the aggravations of hunting for W-2s, the hassling with tax software, the lost evenings and weekends completing returns. Instead, the state could do it for them.

    Californians participating in this test run of a “return free” tax system — a goal tax reformers had been chasing since President Reagan proposed it to the nation in 1985 — were so impressed that the thousands of comments that poured into a survey brought tears of joy to Joe Bankman, the Stanford Law professor who guided the state’s effort, which was branded “ReadyReturn.”

    “They were just so touching,” he said of the comments about ReadyReturn, which was designed as a voluntary offering targeted at taxpayers on the lower end of the income scale. “One said, ‘Finally the government is doing something to make my life better for a change.’ Almost all the comments had the words ‘thank you.’ People were thanking the government for taking something that drove them crazy and improving it.”

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Openwashing

      • There’s nothing Automattic about balancing commercial growth with an open source developer community [Ed: False dichotomy]

      • Rewriting the code: The commercialisation of computer code collaboration [Ed: A more suitable headline would be, the privatisation or plunder of the Commons by Microsoft and its cohorts, using sieves like GitHub, which is the biggest threat to software freedom]

        In the world of the computer and cloud networks however, things are different. In September 1991, Linus Torlvalds, created a family of ‘open source’ operating systems kernels that were similar to Unix, a prevalent operating system at the time for multi-user computing. Being open source, Linux gained quick popularity with computer programmers who wanted to write programs independent of closed operating systems, and since 2004, Linux has been able to run on Windows based operating systems. It also runs seamlessly on Macs and other hardware.

      • L0phtCrack password auditing tool goes open source [Ed: L0phtCrack is pointless as if you use Microsoft Windows there are already back doors in there. Moreover, L0phtCrack is just being outsourced to Microsoft proprietary software in the pockets of the NSA and management from the NSA.]

        Christien Rioux (DilDog), one of the original authors of L0phtCrack while a member of hacker collective L0pht Heavy Industries more than 20 years ago, first said he planned to release an open source version of the tool in early August, around the time of the DEF CON conference.

      • The Open Group October Virtual Event To Celebrate 25 Years of Open Technology Standards

        The Open Group, the vendor-neutral technology standards consortium, is hosting its upcoming “Open Digital Standards” event October 25 – 27, 2021.

        The Open Digital Standards event will bring together vendors and end-user organizations from across the globe to discuss how the cross-industry development of open standards is helping businesses become digital-first.

      • The Open Group October Virtual Event to Celebrate 25 Years of Open Technology Standards

  • Security

    • IoT Device Security: Getting Started [Ed: Maybe start without resorting to unhelpful buzzwords and without requiring that site visitors run proprietary JavaScript programs just to access and to merely mender text]

    • Microsoft asks admins to patch PowerShell to fix WDAC bypass [Ed: The real solution is to delete this stuff because Microsoft works for the NSA and security isn’t the goal, not even an afterthought; the goal is back doors, based on NSA leaks.]

    • AMD SME causing boot failures and black screen issues on Ryzen Linux systems [Ed: Marketed as 'security', it only gives you defects; meanwhile, all those AMD chips come with NSA back doors (PSP). So security is a mirage.]

      AMD’s Secure Memory Encryption (SME) feature has been found to be causing issues to certain Linux systems and as such, the feature will be disabled by default from now on. The issue was discovered on October 5 by Linux engineer Paul Menzel.

      The SME feature is apparently causing boot failures on certain AMD Raven Ridge systems The issue was detected on a Ryzen 3 2200G system which was paired up with an MSI B350M MORTAR motherboard. In other Ryzen PCs, with SME enabled, black screen problems – something AMD is closely familiar with – have also been reported. Hence, the problem might be present on other Zen-based processor families too.

    • 3 top Chrome VPN extensions for 2021 [Ed: Some people choose #privacy tools online and then they use Chrome. But Chrome itself is not trustworthy.]

      A quick search on the Chrome Web Store can give us hundreds of results for VPNs. Some of those services can be as malicious as the sites we’re trying to protect ourselves from when online. It is hard to know which VPN extensions are safe, secure, and easy to use. To help you choose, here are 3 of the top Google Chrome-compatible providers that you can trust. The list is based on the security, reliability, and performance of each service. Let’s start with a little bit more information about Google Chrome.

    • REvil ransomware shuts down again after Tor sites were hijacked[Ed: This (REvil) is a Microsoft Windows problem, but Microsoft’s booster Lawrence Abram leaves that part out completely. How can one write and publish an entire article about Microsoft Windows ransomware without mentioning Windows even once? It’s intentional.]

      The REvil ransomware operation has likely shut down once again after an unknown person hijacked their Tor payment portal and data leak blog.

      [...]

      After REvil conducted a massive attack on companies through a zero-day vulnerability in the Kaseya MSP platform, the REvil operation suddenly shut down, and their public-facing representative, Unknown, disappeared.

    • New OpenSSF GM Sets Open Source Security Course

Environment

• From green hydrogen to coral reef restoration: Winners of the Earthshot Prize announced

  Projects that create fuel from agricultural waste, restore coral reefs and green hydrogen technology are among the winners of the Duke of Cambridge’s Earthshot Prize and will now receive support from businesses to scale their solutions.

• Plastic additives found in 52% of seabirds around the globe: study | ABS-CBN News

  More than half the world’s seabirds have accumulated plastic chemical components in their bodies, a recent study showed.

• Gentoo penguins proving to be the sturdiest in Antarctica

  A forty year study on a remote Antarctic island shows that while populations of two penguin species are declining, while a third is increasing. Analysis of census data from Signy Island in the South Orkney Islands reveals that, between 1978 and 2016, the number of chinstrap penguin pairs declined by nearly 70%.

  Pairs of Adélie penguins dropped by more than 40% but the number of gentoo penguin pairs more than trebled.

• An icy world is in meltdown, as penguin population shifts signal trouble

• Wildlife/Nature

  • The International Order Isn’t Ready for the Climate Crisis | Foreign Affairs

    As we plunder the planet, we risk rendering it uninhabitable—a crisis that cries out for global solidarity and collective action.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Inside the fraught effort to create a Christian nationalist internet [Ed: This is used as a whipping boy for Internet censorship]

  It was late September when Andrew Torba, founder of the social media platform Gab, tapped out a message to his users declaring the website would update its online infrastructure. Upgrades are common in the tech industry, but Torba’s reasoning for expanding Gab’s data center was anything but: He wanted to touch up the tech, he said, to “preserve a parallel Christian society on the internet for generations to come.”

  “One day our great grandchildren will learn what really happened during the greatest Spiritual war of our time,” Torba wrote, “and how we laid the foundations for a new parallel Christian society.”

• Christian nationalism and social media: Believers skirt the power of Big Tech [Ed: This is how Bezos media characterises its opposition; The oligarchs have media advisers. They intentionally pick the most extreme voices, conflating them with “free speech” and associating opposition with cranks.]

Censorship/Free Speech

• Book supporting Western powers’ 1900 invasion of China disappears from Hong Kong bookstores

  A Taiwan-owned bookstore in Hong Kong said it has no more in-store copies a historical book arguing that the eight-nation invasion of China at the turn of the 20th century was justified, amid reports in media backed by the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) that it had removed the book from its shelves.

  “The Eight-Nation Alliance Was a Just Cause,” penned by Canada-based author Liu Qikun and published in democratic Taiwan, was reportedly “removed” by Eslite bookstores in Hong Kong, the CCP-backed Global Times newspaper reported.

  The pro-CCP South China Morning Post cited an Eslite employee as saying the book was sold out, but may not be fully restocked due to “the current situation.”

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Fifty Years On – What to Expect in the Next 50 Years of the Internet

  When did the Internet begin? It all gets a bit hazy after so many years, but by the early 1970s, research work in packet-switched networks was well underway, and while it wasn’t running TCP at the time (the flag day when the ARPANET switched over to use TCP was not until 1 January 1983) but there was the base datagram internet protocol running in the early research ARPA network in the US. Given that this is now around 50 years ago, and given that so much has happened in the last 50 years, what does the next 50 years have in store? This was the question posed in a recent workshop hosted by IBM Research on “Future of Computer Communications Networks,” and I was invited to present at this workshop. I’d like to share my thoughts on this rather challenging topic, based on a presentation I made to this workshop.

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Canon printers refuse to scan when out of ink – lawsuit • The Register

  Canon USA has been accused of forcing customers to buy ink cartridges when they only want to scan and fax documents using the manufacturer’s so-called All-In-One multi-function printers.

  David Leacraft bought a Canon PIXMA MG2522 All-in-One Printer from Walmart in March, and was appalled when his device was incapable of scanning or a faxing documents if it ran low, or out, of ink. Unlike printing, scanning and faxing documents do not ordinarily require ink.

  He wouldn’t have spent the 100 bucks on Canon’s printer if he had known this, his legal team noted. Feeling cheated, Leacraft fired a lawsuit at Canon USA, seeking class-action status on behalf of other disgruntled customers.

Monopolies

• Belarus: Unfair Competition In The Use Of Intellectual Property Objects: Problems And Ways To Protect A Trademark In Belarus [Ed: Perpetuating the mythology of "Intellectual Property" in Belarus; at least they deal with monopolies and competition-related aspects]

  In the course of carrying out its business activities, the company may face unfair actions of a competitor. One of the common methods of unfair competition is the illegal use by a competitor of a designation that is identical or confusingly similar to the trademark of another business entity. In Belarus, the prohibition on committing such actions is established in the civil and antimonopoly legislation.

  The Civil Code of the Republic of Belarus (hereinafter – the Civil Code) stipulates that all actions that can in any way cause confusion in relation to legal entities, individual entrepreneurs, goods, works, services or business activities of competitors should be recognized as unfair competition (Article 1029 of the Civil Code ).

• Patents

  • [Old] Oktoberfest for the UPC? [Ed: WIPR has been hijacked by Team UPC for propaganda purposes; they used to do actual journalism, not it’s lobbying for the corrupt]

  • Illumina Trade Secrets Dispute Spared From High Court Review

    The U.S. Supreme Court rejected review of a Second Circuit decision regarding a group of researchers alleging that Illumina Inc. and others misused their trade secrets in patent applications.

    The researchers waited too long to bring claims against Illumina, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in December 2020, affirming a Manhattan federal court decision. The circuit court said the researchers should have been aware of earlier public proceedings, adding that the statute of limitations had run out.

  • Nippon Steel Seeks Injunction Against Toyota in Patent Suit (1)

    Nippon Steel Corp. is seeking an injunction against Toyota Motor Corp. to prevent the automaker from manufacturing and selling electric and hybrid vehicles that use a type of steel critical for the performance of motors.

  • Surgisil, Subject Matter, and Scope [Ed: Design patents are absolutely crazy as a concept and Sarah Burstein made a career studying this craziness]

    In an earlier post, Professor Crouch discussed the Federal Circuit’s recent decision in In re Surgisil. In that decision, the Federal Circuit recognized that 35 U.S.C. § 171 provides for the grant of patents for designs for articles of manufacture, not designs in the abstract. In doing so, the court’s decision was in accord with the rationale—if not the limited express holding—of its earlier decision Curver Luxembourg.

    Professor Crouch is correct that this holding means that the scope of § 102 prior art for designs is limited. And yes, it means you could take a shape developed for one article of manufacture and apply it to a different type of article and potentially get a design patent for it. But there is nothing wrong with that. Designing a shape for a binder clip, for example, is a different design problem than designing a shape for a handbag. Using the shape of the former for the latter could be a valuable act of design, as I argued in this article (which was relied on heavily by Surgisil though not cited by the court).

    There may be cases where this kind of shape adaptation might be obvious, but that is a problem for § 103, not § 102. It is true that, for utility patents, the universe of prior art for § 102 is broader than it is for § 103. But, given the different nature of the inventions protected and the different claiming conventions, it makes sense to treat designs differently.

  • South Africa Grants A Patent With An Artificial Intelligence (AI) System As The Inventor – World’s First!! [Ed: Patent litigation people are so deluded that they celebrate, with two exclamation points in fact, an insanity. Imagine how they'll react when the world's first cat is ruled an "inventor" and gets a patent from some niche patent office.]

    In July 2021, the South African Patent Office granted a patent for a patent application relating to “food container based on fractal geometry” with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) system named “DABUS” (Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) listed as an inventor. This happens to be a world’s first, wherein an AI system has been recognized as an inventor. Why has recognition of AI created so much buzz in IPR? What’s the fuss with the inventorship of AI all about?

  • Pending patent legislation: [Ed: Not hard to see which of these are promoted by bribed officials or de facto moles of litigation firms, e.g. Coons]

    S.2891 – Restoring the America Invents Act. Substantial changes to the IPR system to favor the patent challenger. (Sponsored by Sen. Cornyn, R-TX; Sen. Crapo, R-ID; and Sen. Leahy, D-VT).

  • What in-house think of Vidal for USPTO chief [Ed: Patrick Wingrove has not, as usual, bothered asking anyone except patent maximalists (who also pay his salary); this is lobbying, not journalism]

    Senior IP sources at five companies say the Winston & Strawn litigator could be great or ‘more of the same’ – either way, they want someone in the role soon

  • EGEB: This floating wind platform with tilted towers earns a European patent [Ed: More greenwashing opportunities for corrupt EPO management and for monopolies in general]

    Stockholm-based floating offshore wind company Hexicon will be granted a European patent by The European Patent Office for a floating platform with two tilted towers that makes it possible to install two turbines on the same platform.

  • Patent Case Summaries – October 2021 #3 [Ed: Hyatt keeps losing, only to be cheered by the patent extremists in sites funded by litigation giants]

    Gilbert Hyatt, a prolific patent filer and litigant, sued the PTO in district court under 35 U.S.C. § 145 after receiving undescribed “adverse results” in connection with certain patents. The district court ordered the PTO to issue some of the patents and awarded attorneys’ fees to Mr. Hyatt as a prevailing party. The district court also denied the PTO’s request for expert witness fees under § 145, holding that the statute’s shifting of “[a]ll expenses of the proceedings” to the applicant does not overcome the American Rule presumption against shifting expert fees.

    In an earlier appeal, the Federal Circuit vacated and remanded the district court’s decision ordering the issuance of patents, making Mr. Hyatt no longer a prevailing party. Therefore, the Federal Circuit vacated the award of attorneys’ fees.

    In this appeal, the Federal Circuit addressed—and affirmed—the district court’s denial of expert fees “because § 145 does not specifically and explicitly shift expert witness fees.”

    [...]

    In affirming, the Federal Circuit described the American Rule presumption that litigants pay their own fees unless a statute or contract provides otherwise. The Federal Circuit also discussed at length the Supreme Court’s NantKwest decision, where the Court held that the reference to “expenses” in § 145 does not invoke attorneys’ fees with enough clarity to overcome the American Rule.

    Ultimately, the Federal Circuit recognized that “this is a close case” and that “there are many arguments” why expert fees should be included under the phrase “[a]ll expenses of the proceedings.” The Federal Circuit also acknowledged “that district courts have been awarding expert witness fees under the statute ever since the PTO began using experts.” And the court stated that it does not “lightly overturn decades of practice in federal district courts.” But in the end, “§ 145 does not specifically and explicitly invoke expert witness fees,” and therefore they are not covered.

  • Mercedes-AMG Prepares To Dial The One Hypercar Up To Eleven [Ed: Ridiculously bad article that cannot tell the difference between the EPO and the EU or between patents and trademarks]

    Mercedes-Benz recently filed a new name patent with the European Union Intellectual Property Office. The name in question is Vision One-Eleven.

  • PTO’s Financial Benefits from IPR Don’t Render PTAB Unconstitutional [Ed: The patent maximalists (defending bogus patents) repeatedly fail to undermine or sink PTAB; all the phony ‘scandals’ they make up cannot carry water]

    A split panel of the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit concluded that the structure and functions of the Patent Trial & Appeal Board (PTAB) survived yet another constitutional challenge, this time based on the PTAB’s fee and compensation structure, lack of director review over the institution decision and applicability of the Takings Clause. Mobility WorkX, LLC v. Unified Patents LLC, Case No. 20-1441 (Fed. Cir.) (Dyk, J.) (Newman, J., dissenting).

    With the dust barely settled after the Supreme Court’s ruling in US v. Arthrex, Inc. that the PTAB’s rendering of final written decisions without director review violated the Appointments Clause, this case presented a whole new slate of potential deficiencies with the PTAB. Although none of these deficiencies were initially raised with the PTAB, the Court exercised its discretion to nonetheless consider the challenges based on publicly available records that it could judicially notice.

    The first challenge, already made in many other cases, was that the Federal Circuit remand for the director to consider a rehearing petition in view of Arthrex. This remedy, already afforded in other post-Arthrex challenges, was a simple grant. Yet, here, Mobility asked for something more, arguing that because the director did not resolve the inter partes review (IPR) within the 12-month statutory period, the director must confirm the claims or dismiss the IPR. The Court declined to rule on this issue, instructing Mobility to raise the issue on remand.

  • CAFC Patent Cases, 10/5/21–10/19/21

    Hughes, J. Vacating award of attorney’s fees and affirming denial of expert fees. “The central logic of NantKwest is applicable to our decision here, indicating that § 145 does not shift expert witness fees. The American Rule sets a high bar that vague definitions cannot overcome, particularly considering the many instances in which Congress has explicitly shifted expert fees. We therefore affirm the district court’s holding that the PTO is not entitled to reimbursement of its expert witness fees… We do not lightly overturn decades of practice in federal district courts. But the phrase ‘[a]ll the expenses of the proceedings’ in § 145 does not specifically and explicitly invoke expert witness fees.”

  • T 1197/18: clarification of the video conferencing order issued on G 1/21 [Ed: G 1/21 was a classic case of EPO corruption and abuse of judges; but the litigation firms don’t want people to know this. They’ve basically hijacked the patent office.]

    T1197/18 provides some clarity on the scope of the term “impairing” in the order concerning video conferencing (ViCo) issued on G1/21 by the Enlarged Board of Appeal.

  • Courts split on AI inventorship and patenting [Ed: More deception if not fake news from operatives and hacks funded by corrupt EPO officials and litigation firms. All the major courts said “no”, with clear majority against. Only a couple of small markets considered accepting this lunacy.]

  • Patents to tackle plastic waste on the rise [Ed: Corrupt EPO officials have managed to seed their whitewashing or greenwashing propaganda, likely for a fee, to help distract from EPO crimes; they're reached as far as Oman and it's a waste of EPO budget for the sake of cover-up]

    There are currently thousands of different types of plastic available and the lion’s share of new plastic soon ends up as waste. As mountains of the used stuff continue to pile up around the world, people are looking for new ways to reduce, reuse and recycle some of it. But getting rid of even a tiny amount of it will be a gargantuan job, especially with the popularity of hard-to-recycle products and single-use plastic.

  • Healthcare at the forefront of innovation in alternative plastics [Ed: Corrupt EPO management spent a lot of money buying these shallow pieces whose objective is to distract from EPO crimes and inner crisis]

    A new study published by the European Patent Office (EPO) shows that from a global perspective, Europe and the US are leading innovation in plastic recycling and alternative plastics technologies.

  • Prosecution Pointers 295-299 [Ed: Litigation firms, like Finnegan in this case, always try to sell their most expensive products, patent lawsuits in this case. And notice the blog name: "Prosecution First Blog"]

  • U.S. Patents of the early industrial revolution [Ed: USPTO recalls how patents used to be granted on actual inventions, actual things you can operative, not mere thoughts/maths and visual designs like drawings]

    The industrial revolution began in Great Britain in the late 18th century, with new devices such as the power loom and the spinning mule increasing output. Then, in the early 19th century, as industrialization spread to the United States and continental Europe and factories became more common, machines meant to speed up economic activity and industrial and agricultural production soon flooded the market. Here are five of the most important such inventions patented in the United States between 1794 and 1851.

  • Jaguar Land Rover Ends Volkswagen Fight Over Luxury SUVs (1) [Ed: Patent on cars; so buyers pay a lot more for cars, as a sort of 'litigation tax' that also interferes with innovation and makes cars less useful than they would otherwise be]

    Jaguar Land Rover Automotive Plc has settled patent fights it lodged against Volkswagen AG and its brands over a feature used in luxury sport utility vehicles that simplifies off-road driving for affluent but inexperienced drivers.

  • UK’s CIPA to become Earthshot nominator [Ed: UK-based puff piece for scandals-ridden CIPA, which is essentially attacking British companies on behalf of exploitative law firms that also push unconstitutional legislation and cooperate in EPO crimes]

    The Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys is to become an affiliated nominator organisation to the Earthshot Prize, an awards scheme run by Price William to award inventors’ environmentalist efforts.

  • FOSS Patents: Germany’s chief patent judge: amended injunction statute is merely a ‘clarification and consolidation of the case law’

    The final part of the conference provided definitive clarity. First, Presiding Judge Dr. Matthias Zigann of the 7th Civil Chamber of the Munich I Regional Court said that it’s his task to apply the law as it is, and it’s clear that this year’s amendment to the German Patent Act is designed to ensure continuity. In other words (my words), there’s nothing disruptive or revolutionary there.

    During his closing remark, Munich-based law professor Ansgar Ohly shared the latest information he had just received from a co-worker. At a Shanghai conference, Presiding Judge Klaus Bacher of the 10th Civil Senate of the Federal Court of Justice–the highest-ranking German patent judge–reported said that the 2021 patent bill is merely “a clarification and consolidation of the case law” (i.e., Heat Exchanger).

    Let that sink in. It’s game over for all those who thought infringers could avoid patent injunctions in Germany. There’s not going to be any change on the bottom line. What the judiciary is concerned about is the potential for delay of some proceedings, and I’m not even worried about that: the courts will figure out shortcuts.

  • FOSS Patents: STUNNING: High-ranking German judge publicly states that patent law may do more harm than good, but critics would have to lobby for fundamental reform

    Yesterday I reported on the first panel of the CIPLITEC online conference on German patent reform, where it became very clear once again that injunctions will remain the customary patent remedy as I had been predicting all along. The conference is continuing today, and what just happened this morning was nothing short of astounding.

    In a virtual panel discussion, Judge Fabian Hoffmann of the patent-specialized 10th Civil Senate of the Bundesgerichtshof (Federal Court of Justice) replied to certain infringer-friendly positions taken by others on the question of how punitive the compensation owed by an infringer to a patentee should be in cases in which an injunction is denied or, far more likely, tailored by means of a use-up or workaround period.

    [...]

    This is a lot of food for thought for some people, and I’d like to leave it at that for the time being. I’m going to continue to make the very same distinction as Judge Hoffmann made today: there’s the question of what innovation policy is desirable, and there’s the question of what the law–in its current form–says. There’s the world in which some would like to live, and the world in which we actually live. The German patent enforcement system is going to be the same except that time and money will be wasted on proportionality arguments (mostly by defendants). There’s room for lots of academic discussion, and parts of the CIPLITEC conference–with the greatest respect–were more about the trees than the forest. But patentees will still get the same leverage from bringing infringement cases in Germany as before. In fact, compared to where statutory and case law stood when the reform process began, patentees even have a lot more leverage now.

  • L2 Mobile Technologies claims Qualcomm chips in Ford, Lincoln cars infringe 3G standard-essential patents originally obtained by ASUSTeK [Ed: These patent trolls are infesting Germany, which wants to be a patent litigation hub like Texas

    Ford Motor Company appears to have a history of standard-essential patent (SEP) hold-out. It was unwilling to take an actual long-term license from Nokia a few years ago, so the parties entered into what was more of a standstill than license agreement. Last week I found out about an IP Bridge v. Ford infringement action in Munich. An injunction looms large, and just today Germany’s chief patent judge said that a recent amendment to the patent injunction statute was merely “a clarification and consolidation of the case law”. One of his side judges told another audience that any proposals to soften patent enforcement should be directed to the legislature. Therefore, Ford can expect to be enjoined in Germany unless it agrees to take a FRAND license or is cleared of infringement of any valid SEP.

  • UP & UPC: are you ready for the Unified Patent Court and unitary patent? [Ed: This is classic fake news from Team UPC; UPC can never start because the UK left the EU, so now they try to fake it and to cheat courts; they always say UPC is about to start and they always lie to their clients about it because lying is profitable when you’re a lawyer.]

    Following countless number of false starts over the last few years, the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and unitary patent (UP) may have dropped to the bottom of many patent owners’ “to do” lists. September and October 2021 have seen, however, a flurry of activity and as a result, both the UPC and UP may actually become a reality between mid-2022 and early 2023.

  • Let us keep you up to date [Ed: This article refers to the European Patent Convention, but the corrupt EPO has already abandoned the European Patent Convention and is, in effect, operation outside the law, granting loads of fake/illegal patents]

    This in turn may be because the definition of an individual module typically will be “closed” in the sense that it is self-contained. This of course is desirable from the standpoint of patent office clarity requirements such as Article 84 of the European Patent Convention; but it can lead to a situation of a dependent claim (to a plurality of interconnected modules) implying modification, or perhaps even outright contradiction, of an independent claim directed to a module when considered on its own.

    In other words, the module as defined in its closed, individual format may not reflect the feature combination that arises when modules are combined – for example because connections between the interiors of modules need to be defined, thereby taking away any characteristic of imperviousness.

    Whether one addresses this problem by (a) defining an open module in the first place – thereby perhaps excluding from protection a single, closed module but allowing connection and substance exchange features; or (b) including a second independent claim directed to two or more operationally connected modules, will depend on circumstances and budgets. However, it should prove possible to argue that when two independent claims (to single and connected modules) are included they are unitary with one another, and this may make such claims easier to contemplate.

  • EU-wide SPCs would make unitary patent system more attractive, says Bayer IP chief [Ed: The propaganda site of Joff Wild is lying about the UPC on behalf of companies like Monsanto; these vilains and liars are trying to villains Europe with patents and some corrupt ‘journalists’ profit from acting as their agents of propaganda]

    With the implementation of the UPC Agreement imminent, Bayer’s Joerg Thomaier believes the EU should act quickly to address lack of harmonisation in Europe’s SPC system.

  • Extraordinary Writ or Ordinary Remedy? Mandamus at the Federal Circuit – Part 1 [Ed: Rant from patent extremist Rantanen. The patent extremists have long attempted to ‘scandalise’ the higher court for simply throwing out fake patents.]

    This is the first post in a series about our new research project on mandamus practice in the federal courts of appeals generally and the Federal Circuit’s peculiar use of mandamus in patent cases specifically.

    There has been a lot of talk recently about the Federal Circuit and mandamus. Our current research project aims to answer whether the Federal Circuit is an outlier among the circuit courts in its use of mandamus, and if so, what explains the court’s apparent infatuation with mandamus?

  • Extraordinary Writ or Ordinary Remedy? Mandamus at the Federal Circuit – Part 2

    Yesterday’s post described the high number of petitions for a writ of mandamus that the Federal Circuit has granted relative to other federal appellate courts over the last few years. In this post I’ll give further context and detail about the petitions for writs of mandamus at the Federal Circuit.

  • Extraordinary Writ or Ordinary Remedy? Mandamus at the Federal Circuit – Part 3

    Even if a plaintiff has filed its case in a federal court in which personal jurisdiction and venue exist, 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a) permits the judge to transfer the case to another district “[f]or the convenience of parties and witnesses, in the interest of justice.” Transfer motions under § 1404(a) are a common tactic in patent litigation, particularly for California-based tech companies sued in the Eastern and Western Districts of Texas. When defendants lose those motions—as they often do in Texas—they frequently seek immediate review in the Federal Circuit by petitioning for a writ of mandamus.

    [...]

    The Federal Circuit is exceptional among the federal courts of appeals in using an extraordinary writ to engage in what is essentially interlocutory error correction. On first glance, we might view this as a flaw with the Federal Circuit: the specialized court is too zealously exercising its final authority over patent law and wasting party and judicial resources by policing discretionary district court rulings on an issue that’s entirely separate from the merits of the case. But Judge Albright’s aggressive efforts to attract patent cases to Waco—and his seeming disregard of appellate precedent on transfer of venue—have forced the Federal Circuit’s hand. Predictable judge assignments have encouraged what is essentially a race to the bottom among district judges who want to attract patent infringement plaintiffs. The mechanism for competition is procedural rules—and procedural rulings—that are extremely favorable to plaintiffs. And so the stakes over transfer of venue decisions are unusually high in patent cases. This suggests that the writ of mandamus—a procedural mechanism from the dustiest corner of civil procedure—will play a crucial role in determining the future of the U.S. patent system.

  • FOSS Patents: EU competition chief’s tough talk on cartels doesn’t bode well for automotive SEP licensing negotiation groups

    This is my second of at least three consecutive posts on automotive patent licensing issues. The previous one discussed the L2 Mobile Technologies v. Ford Motor Company case that is pending in the District of Delaware.

    At the annual conference of the Italian Antitrust Association, the European Commission’s Executive Vice President and competition commissioner Margrethe Vestager gave a speech yesterday that ushered in–as its title promised–”a new era of cartel enforcement.” The manuscript was published on the Commission’s website.

    1+1+1=3. Mrs. Vestager vowed to crack down, inter alia, on (i) novel types of cartels and (ii) buyer cartels, and (iii) recalled recent enforcement action against (German) car makers. Automotive standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing negotiation groups (LNGs) are the combination of all of that. Further below I’ll quote the relevant passages, which speak for themselves. If this doesn’t serve to discourage car makers from advocating a solution that is inherently worse than the alleged problem it purports to solve, what else will?

  • Software Patents

    • Big Brother Is Watching: IP Protection in the Era of Machine Learning and AI [Ed: They don't mean "IP" (fiction) and "AI" is a misnomer; the media has become a self-discrediting marketing hive or buzzwords mill]

      As modern life continues to revolve more and more around technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning have quietly assumed a major role in shaping how we interact and live within the digital world. Machine learning and AI algorithms operate behind the scenes of our social media platforms and news feeds, online shopping carts and Netflix, silently organizing what we see and interact with. As these programs have grown more sophisticated and expansive in their application, the societal (and technical) implications of them require exploration and consideration. For example, the U.S. House of Representatives Financial Services Committee (HFSC) Task Force on Artificial Intelligence continues to examine how AI and machine learning are impacting social justice and equality in financial services markets, holding a hearing this month titled “Beyond I, Robot: Ethics, Artificial Intelligence, and the Digital Age.” As HSFC Chairwoman Maxine Waters (D-CA) explained, the goal of the task force and such hearings, including one previously on May 21, is to “make sure policy can keep up with the changes to our financial services, and do its part to make sure technology is not being used to discriminate or exacerbate existing biases under the guise of innovation.”

    • Joao entity Caselas’ patent likely invalid

      On October 19, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 9,715,691, which is being asserted by Caselas, LLC, a Raymond Anthony Joao entity. The ’691 patent is generally directed to providing transaction history information including charge-back information.

    • TikTok Denied Patent Challenge Over Agency ‘Road Mapping’ Worries

      TikTok Inc. and its parent, ByteDance Ltd., lost their bid for review of a second set of claims in rival Tiller Inc.’s video synching patent, as an administrative tribunal expressed concerns about “road mapping.”

      TikTok challenged a number of claims in U.S. Patent No. 9,691,429 in the fall of 2020. The Patent Trial and Appeal Board agreed in April to review those claims. Less than two weeks before the institution decision, TikTok filed a second petition challenging the rest of the patent’s claims.

    • Key issues in enforcing software patents [Ed: The IAM propaganda mill of the EPO is pushing the illegal software patents agenda; they've already decided for themselves that this is acceptable and they relentlessly push fake patents, frivolous litigation etc.]

      Today, it is impossible to imagine life or business without a computer – whether it is an electronic wristwatch, a food mixer or a mobile phone. All these devices contain a computer, of varying levels of complexity, for controlling the function of the device. But a computer cannot operate without instructions. These instructions are summarised in computer programs or software and may be incorporated in a computer or other apparatus, but are often stored, reproduced and distributed on portable media (eg, CD-ROMs) or transmitted online. This software is not tangible and once created it can be reproduced easily at very low cost and in unlimited quantities. Much like the development of tangible assets, the development of software consumes many resources. Therefore, the owner of a software product has a justified interest to protect their investment. Although copyright protection is available for the source code of software, it does not protect the idea of the software, which is a core part of its commercial value. The patent system might therefore be an adequate means for protecting the software designer’s rights. Patent protection is – among other requirements – granted for an invention that brings a new and non-obvious technical solution. After a patent is awarded, the patent owner has an exclusive right to prevent others from commercially using the patented invention.

    • Germany: Improving The Classification Of Email Content: Non-technical [Ed: Rejection of software patents as explained by a lobbyist for such patents, Bardehle Pagenberg, which helps patent trolls prey on European firms with bogus, abstract patents]

      In this decision, the European Patent Office refused to grant a software patent on an efficient spam filter. Here are the practical takeaways of the decision T 2147/16 of September 7, 2021 of Technical Board of Appeal 3.4.03:

    • Google Wins Patent Trial in Texas Over Nest Mounting [Ed: Sometimes even the most notorious patent courts in Texas are not impressed by software patents]

      Google’s Nest Hub doesn’t infringe a patent owned by Profectus Technology for a digital picture frame, a federal jury in Waco, Texas, found.

    • AI in drug discovery – technical and IP challenges [Ed: They just mean algorithms or computer and they're certainly -- inter alia -- also pushing illegal software patents disguised as something "medical" or "life-saving"]

      Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) are not new concepts – they have been the subject of academic investigation for decades. However, real-world applications have had to wait longer for the availability of the computing power and rich data sets necessary to successfully implement such approaches.

• Trademarks

  • TTABlog Test: How Did These Three Section 2(e)(1) Mere Descriptiveness Appeals Turn Out?

    The TTAB recently ruled on the appeals from the three Section 2(e)(1) mere descriptiveness refusals summarized below. No hints this time. Let’s see how you do with them. Answer will be found in the first comment.

  • Sports Leagues’ Trademark Win Appealed by Online Seller

    An overseas online retailer that allegedly sold counterfeit items bearing trademarked sports logos will ask the Seventh Circuit to hold that a federal court in Illinois lacks jurisdiction to hear claims by the NBA, MLB, NFL, NHL, and others.

  • India-Pakistan Tug Of War Over Gi Tag For Basmati Rice Takes A New Turn

    Pakistan’s claim that the latest EU court judgement upholds its rights over Basmati rice is unsubstantiated, says expert.

• Copyrights

  • Nigeria quietly, but surely, embracing balance, openness and flexibility in her copyright regime?

    Sometime in 2012, Nigeria began the process of reforming her over three-decade old copyright law. The extant Copyright Act was enacted in 1988, with some amendments in the early and late 90s. The reform process led to the production of a Draft Copyright Bill (DCB), which was open for comments sometime in 2015 by the Nigeria Copyright Commission (NCC), to repeal the extant Act and re-enact a new Act in Nigeria.

    The DCB was eventually approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC) in 2018 for transmission to the National Assembly for consideration. The National Assembly in Nigeria, the legislative arm of government, comprises the Senate (upper chamber) and the House of Representative (lower chamber). The FEC approved bill was eventually sent to the Senate in May 2021. Before then, however, another Copyright Bill developed by private individuals drawing from the DCB, but sponsored by a Senator had found its way to the Senate and had passed through the second reading. Thus, two Copyright Bills – the executive or public Bill (SB769) and the private Bill (SB688) – are currently before the Senate.

Kernel Space

• Embedded Linux Boot time optimization: training and webinar

  Bootlin has been helping its customers optimize the boot time of embedded Linux systems for many years, ensuring that these systems meet their startup time requirements. Thanks to this, Bootlin has accumulated a significant experience in this field.

• Mediatek Posts 8k Lines Of New Linux Kernel Driver Code For AI Processing Unit Support – Phoronix

  For a number of months Mediatek engineers have been posting some Linux kernel driver code for bringing up the AI Processing Unit (APU) within the MT8192 SoC while out this weekend is the complete patch series at more than eight thousand lines of code.

  There has been some APU power handling and IOMMU patches previously posted while on Saturday was the complete set of patches for bringing up the MT8192 APU with power control, tinysys controller (a micro-controller on the APU), and middleware support. In total it’s 8.1k lines of new kernel code.

• Graphics Stack

  • xwayland 21.1.2.901

    This is a release candidate for Xwayland 21.1.3.
    
    Most notable change is a fix for the GBM backend to work with the
    Nvidia driver series 495.
    
    Unless any major issues turn up, I'm planning to make the final release
    in the coming weeks.
    
    James Jones (1):
           Use EGL_LINUX_DMA_BUF_EXT to create GBM bo EGLImages
    
    Olivier Fourdan (5):
           xwayland/shm: Avoid integer overflow on large pixmaps
           xwayland: Set GLVND driver based on GBM backend name
           xwayland: Clear tablet cursor pending frame cb
           xwayland/test: Don't catch errors in run-piglit.sh
           Bump version to 21.1.2.901
    
    Povilas Kanapickas (1):
           glamor: Fix handling of 1-bit pixmaps
    
    Simon Ser (1):
           xwayland: fix xdg_output leak
    
    git tag: xwayland-21.1.2.901
    

  • XWayland 21.1.3 Nears With Support For NVIDIA 495 Driver’s GBM – Phoronix

    The release candidate to XWayland 21.1.3 is out today with just a few changes but made significant by support for the NVIDIA 495 series driver GBM code path.

    XWayland 21.1.3 is the next point release to this code that is spun out from the upstream X.Org Server for delivering standalone XWayland releases separate from tagged xorg-server versions. XWayland 21.3. has only a handful of fixes like an XDG_Output memory leak fix, fixed handling of 1-bit pixmaps in GLAMOR, avoiding possible integer overflows on large pixmaps, and other maintenance items.

  • Vulkanised Fall 2021 Material Available – Autodesk Has Begun Using MoltenVK – Phoronix

    Last week was the virtual Vulkanised Fall 2021 event hosted by The Khronos Group. The two-day event was focused on all things Vulkan and for those that missed it all of the slide decks and other material are now available.

    This was a two-day virtual affair focused on the high performance graphics and compute API featuring a current status update around features like ray-tracing and video encode/decode, interesting usages of Vulkan, and related work like Arm’s astcenc encoder, HLSL shader compilation, and more.

Benchmarks

• An Early Look At The GCC 12 Compiler Performance On AMD Zen 3 – Phoronix

  GCC 12 isn’t seeing its stable release until around March~April as usual, but with feature development slowly wrapping up as approaching the next stage of development next month to focus on fixes, recently I wrapped up some preliminary benchmarks for how GCC 12.0 is currently performing against GCC 11.2 on an AMD Ryzen 9 5950X (Zen 3) system.

  This is just an initial look at the GCC 12.0 performance as it stands right now for the speed of the resulting binaries compared to when built under GCC 11.2. The benchmarks under test were built under both GNU Compiler Collection releases with “-O2″, “-O3″, “-O3 -march=native”, and “-O3 -march=native -flto”.

  The results at this time and on this hardware though didn’t end up being too eventful. There were no dramatic differences overall but largely on-par with GCC 11 performance while this next compiler release has been busy adding new C/C++ language features, new CPU targets, and other improvements.

Instructionals/Technical

• Iterating on how we do NFS at Wikimedia Cloud Services

• Iterating on how we do NFS at Wikimedia Cloud Services

  NFS is a central piece of technology for some of the services that the Wikimedia Cloud Services team offers to the community. We have several shares that power different use cases: Toolforge user home directories live on NFS, and Cloud VPS users can also access dumps using this protocol. The current setup involves several physical hardware servers, with about 20TB of storage, offering shares over 10G links to the cloud. For the system to be more fault-tolerant, we duplicate each share for redundancy using DRBD.

  Running NFS on dedicated hardware servers has traditionally offered us advantages: mostly on the performance and the capacity fields.

  As time has passed, we have been enumerating more and more reasons to review how we do NFS. For one, the current setup is in violation of some of our internal rules regarding realm separation. Additionally, we had been longing for additional flexibility managing our servers: we wanted to use virtual machines managed by Openstack Nova. The DRBD-based high-availability system required mostly a hand-crafted procedure for failover/failback. There’s also some scalability concerns as NFS is easy to grow up, but not to grow horizontally, and of course, we have to be able to keep the tenancy setup while doing so, something that NFS does by using LDAP/Unix users and may get complicated too when growing. In general, the servers have become ‘too big to fail’, clearly technical debt, and it has taken us years to decide on taking on the task to rethink the architecture. It’s worth mentioning that in an ideal world, we wouldn’t depend on NFS, but the truth is that it will still be a central piece of infrastructure for years to come in services like Toolforge.

• How To Install Google Cloud SDK on Debian 11

  Google Cloud Platform is Google’s solution for cloud computing. Now in this post, you will learn how to install the Google Cloud SDK on Debian 11 through a step-by-step guide.

• How To Install Prospect Mail on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

  In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Prospect Mail on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Microsoft has yet to release a native Linux client for its Outlook email service. To get Outlook on Ubuntu and other Linux distributions, you’ll have to settle for a workaround app called Prospect Mail (an unofficial Outlook client for Linux) powered by Electron.

  This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Prospect Mail Unofficial Outlook 365 Client on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

• Fixing hardware profiling and xorgwizard

  As the old saying goes “the devil is in the details”. Testing the Xorg Video Wizard, in the situation of fixing broken video, have run into issues with hardware-profiling of the video and module blacklisting.

  For Xorg video hardware profiling, the profile was a combination of the GPU PCI IDs and a checksum of the monitor edid. However, when no DRM GPU kernel module is loaded, unable to get the edid checksum, which means get a different hardware-profile, which confuses the Xorg Wizard.

• Run Nexus Repository Manager Behind Apache Reverse Proxy – kifarunix.com

  Follow through this tutorial to learn how to run Nexus repository manager behind Apache reverse proxy. According Reverse proxy guide page, Apache, apart from functioning as a “basic” web server, and providing static and dynamic content to end-users, it ca also act as a reverse proxy server, also-known-as a “gateway” server.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• GNOME Desktop/GTK

  • Dash to Dock now officially supports GNOME 40 (but not GNOME 41)

    One of the most criticized things about GNOME 40 is the fact that it broke compatibility with many extensions due to the large number of changes it introduced. Despite this, the extension developers have not given up, so after many months of waiting, Dash to Dock 70 has recently arrived as stable for GNOME 40 compatibility.

    This means that users no longer have to install Dash to Dock on GNOME 40 manually from the GitHub repository, but can instead go the standard way of going to the corresponding website within the GNOME Extensions site.

  • #15 Sepia and App Updates · This Week in GNOME

    Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from October 15 to October 22.

Distributions

• Development of New Open Source Operating System Distro Is Announced by the Largest Open-Source and Linux Technology User Group in North America, Jeff.pro

  Launched September 11, 2021 to an initial group of 44,000 subscribers on the Telegram app, Jeff.pro is the largest Open-source and Linux User Group in North America.

  The group announced plans to develop Mobile Linux, a new Open Source Operating System “Distro,” (Distribution) as a North American cross-border technology project.

  Veteran technology entrepreneur Jeffrey Peterson said: “Today, our group announced plans to develop Mobile Linux, as a North American cross-border technology project, with a special team we are building in America’s Southern heartland, in the beautiful city of Mobile, Alabama.”

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • New tech-preview Images for SUSE Linux Enterprise Base Container Image

    We are happy to announce a brand new set of lightweight hardened tech-preview container images (SLE BCI) targeted to developers and operators.

    SLE Base Container Images (BCI) are meant to run on any Linux and K8s distributions.

• Canonical/Ubuntu Family

  • First Ubuntu 22.04 Daily Builds Go Live

    And we’re off, kids — Ubuntu 22.04 daily builds are now available to download.

    Fresh from unveiling the Ubuntu 22.04 codename — “Jammy Jellyfish”, to save you a click — opening the archives, and sharing a tentative release date on Discourse, the first official development snapshots in the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS cycle are primed for action.

    Not that there’s much to see yet, of focus!

    At the time I write this the Ubuntu 21.10 release is less than two weeks old so devs haven’t had a lot of time to do anything. Plus, the first few weeks of any new Ubuntu development branch is all about getting imports synced, tooling updated, and the requisite foundations plumbed in for building on later.

    And we can expect quite a few new things this cycle, including GNOME 41 (or later) and more work on the new Ubuntu installer.

    If you’re technically minded (and like bugs) you can spin up a virtual machine or create a separate install to install Ubuntu 22.04 daily build and follow along with its development. Just install updates as they appear and you’ll be riding the 22.04 release cycle like a pro.

  • Trying Out Ubuntu’s New Flutter+Curtin-Powered Desktop Installer Was Disappointing

    An effort going on for a while at Canonical has been to develop a new desktop installer for Ubuntu. With the recent Ubuntu 21.10 release they are still using their classic Ubiquity installer by default but have published a new preview build of Ubuntu 21.10 with their new desktop installer option. Here is a look at Ubuntu’s forthcoming new installer.

    With a new daily preview build of Ubuntu’s new installer and today’s call for feedback on the new installer, I decided to give it a shot with this fresh ISO.

  • You can download Ubuntu Linux 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) daily builds right now

    Ubuntu 22.04 won’t be released in stable form until 2022. To be more precise, it will be officially available in April of that year. After all, that is what the 22.04 indicates — a two digit year followed by a two digit month.

    Of course, before the official release, there will be a Beta and other pre-release versions. If you like living on the edge, however, you can actually download and install Ubuntu Linux 22.04 immediately. Yes, folks, daily builds (very early versions) of the upcoming operating system are available starting today.

    What do we know about Ubuntu Linux 22.04? At this point, not much. With that said, the code name is not a mystery — it will be called “Jammy Jellyfish.” More importantly, it will be an LTS version. This stands for “Long Term Support” and indicates it will be officially supported until at least 2027.

  • Where To Purchase Lenovo Computers With Ubuntu Preinstalled

    This article is for you to find Lenovo desktop and laptop computers sold with Ubuntu preinstalled. We want everyone to know that Ubuntu computers exist and help them to buy quality computers they want. This article is part of our support to Free Software Business and also a response to Lenovo’s 2020′s announcement of the availability of their Ubuntu-powered ThinkPad and ThinkStation.

  • Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Daily Builds Are Now Available

    The development starts for Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and daily builds are now available for download.

Devices/Embedded

• QNAP TBS-464 ultra-thin NAS supports 4 M.2 NVMe SSDs, 2.5GbE networking – CNX Software

  Most NAS are large boxes that take several 3.5-inch SATA drives, but QNAP TBS-464 NASbook is a different beast with an ultra-thin design enabled by four M.2 PCIe slots for NVMe SSDs, plus two 2.5 GbE ports to match the higher data transfer speed allowed by the SSDs.

  The NAS is equipped with a recent Intel Celeron N5105/N5095 Jasper Lake quad-core processor coupled with 8GB DDR4 memory, and also offers USB 3.0 ports, as well as two HDMI 2.0 video outputs and an IR receiver that would make it suitable as a NAS & HTPC combo, for example, running Plex.

• BrainChip AKD1000 SNN AI SoC gets Raspberry Pi and x86 development kits – CNX Software

  BrainChip has introduced two development kits for its Akida AKD1000 neuromorphic processor based on Raspberry Pi and an Intel (x86) mini PC in order to enable partners, large enterprises, and OEMs to begin testing and validation of the Akida chip.

• Raspberry Pi Powers Neural Network Processor Dev Kit | Tom’s Hardware

  BrainChip, the neuromorphic AI specialist, has announced on Twitter that it is now taking orders for two new development kits for its Akida advanced neural networking processor, as spotted by CNX Software. One of the development kits comes with a Raspberry Pi 4, and the other, which is twice the price, comes with a barebones X86 mini PC.

• Rockchip RK3566/RK3568 SoM’s feature board-to-board connectors or castellated holes

  Rongpin Electronics has designed RK3566 and RK3568 systems-on-modules (SoM) with either board-to-board connectors or castellated holes for direct soldering to the carrier board, which adds competition to the Firefly Core-3568J AI Core Rockchip RK3568 system-on-module offered in a SO-DIMM form factor with an edge connector.

• Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

  • Best Free Android Apps: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup – roguelike game of exploration and treasure-hunting – LinuxLinks

  • 7 essential Android 12 features to tap on day one | Popular Science

  • These iQOO smartphones to get Android 12 Beta. Check list

  • Android Auto bugs, issues & problems tracker: Here’s the current status

  • Motorola Moto G Play (2021) review: Near-stock Android at a low price

  • PUBG Mobile Lite 0.22.0 update APK download link for Android devices: Complete installation guide

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• Open source gets dirty with 3D printing

  Developing an open source toolchain using a Lua script, in the IceSL slicer with a GUI enables researchers to create and configure their digital soil models, called monoliths. Done without using meshing algorithms or STereoLithography (STL) files because those reduce the model’s resolution.

  Monolith examples are fabricated in polylactic acid using open source fused filament fabrication technology with a layer thickness of 0.20, 0.12, and 0.08 mm. The images generated from the digital model slicing are analyzed using open source ImageJ software. ImageJ provides information about internal geometrical shape (porosity, tortuosity, grain size distribution, and hydraulic conductivities). The results show that the developed script enables designing reproducible numerical models that imitate soil structures with defined pore and grain sizes in a range between coarse sand (from 1 mm diameter) to fine gravel (up to 12 mm diameter).

• Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra

  • Transparent shadow for tables from PPTX in Impress

    Impress is now able to correctly render shadows for table shapes, even if the shadow itself or the fill of the table cells have transparency. The result is now compatible with PowerPoint.

    First, thanks to our partner SUSE for working with Collabora to make this possible.

• FSF

  • Licensing/Legal

    • Trump’s new social media platform could face legal issues after allegedly ripping off code

      This isn’t necessarily unusual — Mastodon is an open-source software (with an AGPLv3 license, specifically) which allows other sites to create modified versions of its technology, called “forks,” provided that they abide by a specific set of rules . This is where Trump’s latest venture appears to have gone wrong: TRUTH Social’s terms of service claim that “all source code” is proprietary, despite the fact that Mastodon requires anyone using its code base to acknowledge where its software came from and make any copied code public.

• Programming/Development

  • Petter Reinholdtsen: Debian still an excellent choice for Lego builders

    The Debian Lego team saw a lot of activity the last few weeks. All the packages under the team umbrella has been updated to fix packaging, lintian issues and BTS reports. In addition, a new and inspiring team member appeared on both the debian-lego-team Team mailing list and IRC channel #debian-lego. If you are interested in Lego CAD design and LEGO Minestorms programming, check out the team wiki page to see what Debian can offer the Lego enthusiast.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppQuantuccia 0.0.5 on CRAN: Updated and Calendar Focus

    Another new release of RcppQuantuccia arrived on CRAN today, just a couple of days after the previous release. RcppQuantuccia started from the Quantuccia header-only subset / variant of QuantLib which it brings it to R.

    As of this release, it concentrates on calendaring functionality taking advantage of the extensive collection of country-specific holiday information in QuantLib. The release updates the included code to the most recent QuantLib release. We added one calendar (for Brazil) and one utility function (of exporting all business days in a given range, which is the simple complement to the existing holiday list getter).

  • Perl/Raku

    • My Favorite Modules: diagnostics | Tom Wyant [blogs.perl.org]

      One of the things the Perl 5 Porters work hard on is issuing diagnostics that are actually diagnostic. I think they do a pretty good job at this, but sometimes I need a bit more explanation than the typical one-line message.

      Now, there is documentation on all of these in perldiag, but paging through that looking for my message is a pain.

      Fortunately, there is a module for that: diagnostics. This module causes diagnostics to be expanded into their full explanation as it appears in perldiag.

      Typically you would not put a use diagnostics; in your Perl code, though of course you could. Instead, you would load it via a command-line option to perl, or maybe via environment variable PERL5OPT.

  • Python

    • Typeerror: ‘list’ Object is Not Callable [Solved]

      While working in python language, you must have inserted and accessed elements from a list or dictionary several times. We have mainly used the index of that particular element to access it. We must have used the square brackets around the index number to fetch the elements. Whenever a user tries to fetch the list element by using any other brackets, the type error occurs saying: ‘list’ object is not callable. This guide will show how this error occurs and how it could be resolved with a little change using some examples. So, we have been using the Spyder3 python tool to illustrate our examples. Thus, let’s start looking at them.

Standards/Consortia

• RSS is Wonderful

  With blogs came RSS feeds. RSS stands for Real Simple Syndication. It’s a technical specification for a protocol designed to publish content. But over the years RSS became synonymous with other protocols, like Atom, that are designed to do the same thing. With RSS we can curate our own feed of information. We can collect feeds from all the blogs we like, and we can get notified of new posts by subscribing with an RSS Reader. Readers will aggregate posts and list them chronologically for us. When the blog publishes content to their RSS feed, then it will be in our RSS reader without being subject to an invisible ranking algorithm like that which exists in social media. RSS is far more honest in that way.

Health/Nutrition

• When Prison Guards Refuse Vaccines, Incarcerated People Pay the Price

• As COVID Travel Restrictions Ease, It’s Past Time to Repeal Title 42

• Facebook whistleblower warns ‘dangerous’ encryption will aid espionage by hostile nations

  In her interview, Ms Haugen expressed concern about the impact Facebook algorithms within its Instagram app may have had on British teenager Molly Russell, who took her life just six days before her 15th birthday in 2017.

  Her father, Ian, later accused Instagram of “helping to kill” his daughter after he discovered she had been viewing self-harm and suicide material on the app.

  An inquest is due to be held next year to establish if social media algorithms “overwhelmed” the teenager with the content they showed her, which is yet to be determined.

Integrity/Availability

• Proprietary

  • Pseudo-Open Source

    • Openwashing

      • Microsoft under fire again from open-source .NET devs: Hot Reload feature pulled for sake of Visual Studio sales [Ed: You can tell this a major PR crisis for Microsoft because the company’s media operatives work overtime doing ‘damage control’; Even Miguel de Icaza does not have good things to say about Microsoft’s GitHub CEO [1, 2]]

        Microsoft has enraged the open-source .NET community by removing flagship functionality from open-source .NET to bolster the appeal of Visual Studio, not least against its cross-platform cousin Visual Studio Code.

      • Microsoft is ‘sorry’ for angering developers by removing a key feature – Times of India

      • Microsoft reverses controversial .NET change after open source community outcry – The Verge

  • Security

    • Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 188 released

      The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 188. This version includes the following changes:

      * Add support for Python Sphinx inventory files, usually named objects.inv.
      * Fix Python bytecode decompilation tests with Python 3.10+.
        (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#278)
      

    • Popular NPM library hijacked to install password-stealers, miners [Ed: Misleading headline from Microsoft booster Lawrence Abrams; what it really should say is that Microsoft is sending malware to loads of machines while blaming the victims (those whom it sends malware to]

      Hackers hijacked the popular UA-Parser-JS NPM library, with millions of downloads a week, to infect Linux and Windows devices with cryptominers and password-stealing trojans in a supply-chain attack.

    • Privacy/Surveillance

      • WhatsApp, Facebook monetise users’ information, not legally entitled to privacy protection claim, Centre tells Delhi HC

        The Centre told the Delhi High Court on Friday that WhatsApp and Facebook that monetise users’ information for business/commercial purposes are not legally entitled to claim that they protect privacy. In fact, the regulators of various countries clearly hold that Facebook should be held accountable for its services and data management practices.

        Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY’s) through an affidavit opposed the petition of Whatsapp and Facebook challenging newly amended IT Rules, stating that WhatsApp has already violated the fundamental rights of the users in India by denying them any dispute resolution rights in the country.

      • EXCLUSIVE Dutch forensic lab says it has decoded Tesla’s driving data

        It was already known that Tesla cars store data from accidents, but the Netherlands Forensic Institute (NFI) said it had discovered far more data than investigators had previously been aware of.

        The NFI said the decrypted data showed Tesla vehicles store information about the operation of its driver assistance system, known as Autopilot. The vehicles also record speed, accelerator pedal position, steering wheel angle and brake usage, and depending on how the vehicle is used, that data can be stored for over a year.

      • Italy woos Intel over multibillion-euro chip plant: Sources

        Rome is already in talks with Intel about the potential investment, which according to preliminary estimates would be worth more than 4 billion euro ($4.7 billion), the sources who are involved in the discussions said.

        One of them said the total could even reach around 8 billion euros, depending on Intel’s plans.

      • [Crackers] lay claim to Donald Trump’s social app before its launch

        Former President Donald Trump declared Wednesday evening that he would start a “media powerhouse.” Its flagship operation would be Truth Social, a Twitter-like social network that would “stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” he said in a statement.

        Within two hours, [attackers] had gained access to a private version of the social network, creating fake accounts for Trump; far-right personality Steve Bannon; Ron Watkins, a QAnon conspiracy theorist; and Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who barred Trump from Twitter after his supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Defence/Aggression

• Opinion | Biden Administration Is Undermining the Venezuela Dialogue

  The talks between the Venezuelan government and the extreme-right wing opposition had been going well. There are still outstanding issues to be resolved, like ending the economic war, but the discussions held in Mexico led to concrete electoral developments. The European Union agreed to send an electoral observation mission. The United Nations decided to send a panel of electoral experts. (Both institutions refused to observe the 2018 presidential and 2020 legislative elections, despite invitations from the government.) Thousands of opposition candidates registered to run in the mega-elections, which include voting for governors and mayors, as regional and local legislators.

• Insurgency, secessionism and banditry threaten Nigeria

  Why, then, do most young Nigerians want to emigrate? One reason is that they are scared. Jihadists are carving out a caliphate in the north-east; gangs of kidnappers are terrorising the north-west; the fire of Biafran secessionism has been rekindled in the oil-rich south-east. The violence threatens not just Nigeria’s 200m people, but also the stability of the entire region that surrounds them.

• Danish Islamic Scholar Mundhir Abdallah Criticizes The Taliban For Compromising On The Goal Of Global Islamic Caliphate: You Cannot Recognize Countries Like China And Qatar; Your Goal Should Be To Liberate Humanity From The Filth Of Liberalism, The Injustice Of Capitalism

  In past sermons, Mundhir Abdallah has said that jihad necessitates the conquest of Europe and has called for the killing of Jews. In July 2018, Mundhir Abdallah was indicted in Denmark for calling for the murder of Jews in a 2017 sermon that was translated and published by MEMRI. [...]

• Afghanistan’s Sikhs to ‘make choice between converting to Islam or leaving country’: Report

  The community, which once numbered in the tens of thousands, has been ruined and devastated by years of emigration and death, driven by both systemic discrimination and an uptick in fanatical religious violence in Afghanistan, International Forum For Rights and Security (IFFRAS) said.

• Militants are targeting Hindu and Sikh civilians in Kashmir

  Most Pandits fled during a grim insurgency in 1990s. There are also some 80,000 Sikhs, some of whom are now being murdered too. But by far the largest, most vulnerable group of potential targets are the migrant workers who have come from the rest of India, mainly the poor states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, over the past two decades. Some are Muslim; most are Hindu. None speaks the local language and almost all relocated to escape penury. There may be 300,000-400,000, including many now scrambling to flee.

  An outfit calling itself the Resistance Front (TRF), which Indian security forces say has links to Pakistan, has claimed responsibility for the killings. Most Kashmiris of all religions are appalled at the violence aimed at the defenceless. It may be that TRF or other groups are attacking civilians around Srinagar because their forces have been worn down from the fight against armed forces in the countryside and are finding softer targets.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

• After 45 years, Randy Bachman’s cherished 1957 Gretsch guitar finally found — in Tokyo

  Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bachman was stuck at home recording YouTube videos when he received an email from a viewer from White Rock, B.C., claiming he had found Bachman’s missing Gretsch.

  “He said he’d done facial recognition of my guitar,” Bachman said. “I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘Well, we do it for faces. The guitar has a face, right?’”

  The viewer sent Bachman a video from Christmas 2019 of Japanese pop musician Takeshi playing the guitar. The facial recognition software pinged on what looked like a little blemish, which is actually just a knot in the wood.

  Bingo. Bachman’s lost guitar was found at last.

Environment

• How the 1% tricks you into thinking climate change is your fault

  Climate change isn’t a problem caused by all people equally; it is caused mostly by the rich, and since we live in a capitalist world, the suffering will fall disproportionately on the poor. Climate scientists, sociologists and economists are largely in agreement on this point. And it presages the way that things will need to change in order to stave off the extinction of humanity.

• Opinion | Now or Never: Will Glasgow’s COP26 Help Save the World From Disaster?

  Peering back through the tunnel of three frustrating decades, it’s hard to believe that, as the 1990s opened, the world expected to quickly agree on effective action to tackle climate change.

• Energy

  • US Plastics Industry Will Have More Emissions Than Coal by 2030, New Report Says

  • Limited Tracking of Pandemic School Aid Leaves Effectiveness of Funding Unclear

  • All manner of industries are piling into the hydrogen rush

    The other supermajors—BP, ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell and TotalEnergies—have also announced investments in hydrogen clusters and technologies. Ahmad al-Khowaiter, chief technology officer of Saudi Aramco, says that the state-controlled oil colossus intends to be the world leader in fossil-derived low-carbon hydrogen in the 2030s. The kingdom’s hope is also to maintain its energy superpowerdom as oil’s prospects fade by exporting hydrogen made using its world-class solar and wind resources.

    Aaron Denman of Bain, a consultancy, calls such bets a quest for “growth engine number two” in case the firms’ core fossil-fuel business falters. The same rationale may underlie the hydrogen efforts of other sectors with a spotty environmental record. On October 11th Andrew Forrest, a mining tycoon and Australia’s richest man, who controls Fortescue Metals Group, unveiled plans to build the world’s biggest factory for electrolyser machines, needed to produce green hydrogen from water.

Finance

• Opinion | Can Billionaires Save the World?

  Great wealth can do great damage. Grand personal fortunes, we’ve come to understand, can menace our democracy and distort our economic life. But these fortunes can also wreak a much more hidden havoc: They can mess up the minds of people who hold them. Great fortunes can leave their owners feeling supremely sure they themselves must be great.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Opinion | Corporate Cable Outlets Refuse to Report on Financial Conflicts of Manchin and Sinema

  As the October 31 deadline to vote on the bipartisan infrastructure bill approaches, the media have made a project of examining senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s opposition to the $3.5 trillion reconciliation bill, also known as the Build Back Better Act (FAIR.org, 10/6/01). Despite countless hours of coverage and conjecture about what might or might not get Manchin and Sinema to vote for the bill, the financial conflicts of interest that reinforce their reluctance to vote for the bill have been almost completely ignored. In a review of 21 relevant news programs, airing on October 3–4 on ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and MSNBC, financial conflicts were discussed for only 45 seconds.

• Opinion | Joe Manchin Is the One With an ‘Entitlement Mentality’

  At the end of September, Sen. Joe Manchin (D‑W.V.) told reporters he would not support President Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion Build Back Better Act—a generational investment in social programs, including public funding for childcare and paid family leave—because, “I cannot accept our economy or basically our society moving toward an entitlement mentality.” 

• Secretive House Caucus Is Appointing Corporate Democrats to Key Committee Seats

• ‘When We Organize, We Win’: Ocasio-Cortez Joins India Walton at Rally in Buffalo

  “When people say universal child care’s not possible, guaranteed healthcare is not possible… They say post-industrial cities cannot do that anymore, they don’t want to do that anymore… Buffalo is taking that excuse away.”

  “This is corruption at its finest,” said Walton on social media. “Federal money meant to serve our community has gone to line the mayor’s pockets. We cannot afford another four years of corruption at City Hall.”

• From Playboy Sports Star to Islamist Politician: The Strange Turn of Imran Khan

  Khan’s cricketing career peaked when he captained Pakistan to victory in the 1992 World Cup. After he retired from cricket, he pursued a career in politics. An intelligent man possessed of enormous self-belief, he was passionate about improving the lot of his countrymen and -women. Distrustful of the existing parties which were dynastic and corrupt, he established his own political party in 1996, Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) (Pakistan Movement for Justice). Upon entering the choppy waters of Pakistani politics, one factor has been constant—the centrality of Islam to his thinking, and to the PTI’s overarching goal of creating a theocratic welfare state.

• Turkey’s Erdogan orders expulsion of 10 ambassadors

  The envoys issued a highly unusual joint statement on Monday saying the continued detention of Parisian-born philanthropist and activist Osman Kavala “cast a shadow” over Turkey.

  The escalating row with the Western countries — most of which are also NATO allies — caps a torrid week for Turkey in which it was added to a global money-laundering and terrorism-financing blacklist and its currency plunged over fears of economic mismanagement and the risk of hyperinflation.

Misinformation/Disinformation

• How the ‘Stop the Steal’ movement outwitted Facebook ahead of the Jan. 6 insurrection

  By the time Facebook banned the first Stop the Steal group on Nov. 5 for falsely casting doubt on the legitimacy of the election and calling for violence, the group had already mushroomed to more than 360,000 members. Every hour, tens of thousands of people were joining.

  Facebook removed the group from its platform. But that only sent Stop the Steal loyalists to other groups on Facebook filled with misinformation and claims the election was stolen. It was a classic game of whack-a-mole that Facebook tried but failed to stay on top of. Droves of Trump fans and right-wing conspiracists had outwitted the world’s largest social network.

• Internal Alarm, Public Shrugs: Facebook’s Employees Dissect Its Election Role

  In each case, Facebook’s employees sounded an alarm about misinformation and inflammatory content on the platform and urged action — but the company failed or struggled to address the issues. The internal dispatches were among a set of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times that give new insight into what happened inside the social network before and after the November election, when the company was caught flat-footed as users weaponized its platform to spread lies about the vote.

Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press

• Cinematographer’s Death by Prop Gun Is Not Just a Tragedy. It’s a Labor Issue.

• Fatal Film Set Shooting Followed Outcry by Union Crew Members Over Safety Protocols

  “The backstory about the failure to listen to the union workers who had fought for the set to be safe is vital to know.”

• Taliban Attack Journalists Covering Kabul Women’s Rights Protest: Report

  The Taliban authorities allowed the women to walk freely for around an hour and a half, AFP journalists saw.

  However, one foreign journalist was struck with the butt of a rifle by one Taliban fighter, who swore and kicked the photographer in the back as another punched him.

  At least two more journalists were hit as they scattered, pursued by Taliban fighters swinging fists and launching kicks.

Civil Rights/Policing

• A Drug Dog’s Nose Poking Through The Open Window Of A Car Is Unconstitutional, Says Idaho’s Top Court

  How much of a violation needs to take place before it’s a Constitutional violation? It’s a trick question, at least in the hands of the right judge. With the wrong judge, a minimal violation is considered excusable, or at least salvageable by any number of Fourth Amendment exceptions.

• Russia puts torture video whistleblower on wanted list

  Russia on Saturday placed a former prison inmate who leaked harrowing videos of rape and torture inside a Russian prison on a wanted list.

  A notice on the interior ministry’s website said Sergei Savelyev — a Belarus national who is seeking asylum in France — was wanted in connection with an unspecified criminal case.

  Savelyev smuggled footage of abuse out of a jail in the central city of Saratov. Fearing reprisals, he fled the country in February and last week arrived in France, where he asked for asylum.

• This city will rely on bottled water for weeks because of high lead levels

  State officials on Thursday defended their response to a lead crisis in a small southwestern Michigan city, telling lawmakers that steps to reduce corrosion in aging water pipes began in 2019, just a few months after tests revealed troubling results.

Monopolies

• Patents

  • Teva and Bristows win obviousness claim against Bayer cancer drug [Ed: More fake patents from the EPO; Team UPC stenographer and EPO spammer Amy Sandys has turned this into Bristows (liars) self-promotional spam]

    The UK High Court has found a patent owned by Bayer, which protects the compound of a tosylate, of active ingredient sorafenib, invalid for obviousness. Sorafenib forms the basis of Bayer’s drug Nexavar, which is used to treat various types of cancer, including kidney, liver cell and thyroid cancer. Claim 12 of EP 2 305 255, which was valid until December 2022, covers the tosylate salt of sorafenib.

    Initially, Teva had levied more invalidity attacks than just obviousness against Bayer’s patent. For example, the generic drug company had argued that the patent contained lack of novelty on the basis of loss of priority and intervening prior art. However, Teva dropped the claim once Bayer agreed to drop a conditional amendment to claim 12.

    Thus, Teva argued solely that claim 12 was obvious over the prior art. Originally three patents, including EP 255, were in dispute. However, the parties settled over EP 18 68 579 and EP 17 97 037. Both patents are still in force.

  • Athenex Gets Patent Claims for NKT Cellular Immunotherapy Platform – MarketWatch

    Athenex Inc. and the Center for Cell and Gene Therapy at Baylor College of Medicine said the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has allowed patent claims around its NKT cellular immunotherapy platform.

  • Europe and the US lead the world patents for recycling plastics [Ed: Translation of EPO spam or automated spam made out of paid-for SPAM]

  • Europe leading region of innovation in plastic recycling and alternative plastics [Ed: Paid-for EPO propaganda; the media, instead of covering EPO crimes, produces these ads disguised as “news”]

    Europe is a leading region of innovation in plastic recycling and bioplastic technologies, a new study published today by the European Patent Office (EPO) shows. Europe (referring to the region covered by the 38 member states of the European Patent Convention) accounted for 30 percent of patenting activity worldwide in these sectors between 2010 and 2019. This was matched only by the US, which also accounted for 30 percent.

  • Belgium is global leader in plastic recycling and bioplastic innovations [Ed: Brussels Times has published paid-for EPO SPAM to help EPO crooks distract from their very serious crimes; when can the press be held accountable for doing this?

    Specifically, Belgium stood out for its higher specialisation in bioplastic technologies, the study by the European Patent Office (EPO) found, based on the number of international patents – which represent a high-value invention – that were filed in Belgium.

  • Bosch Rexroth must disclose purchase agreement with ZF Friedrichshafen

    The sale to ZF included patents for planetary gearboxes. As is usual in such cases, Bosch Rexroth paid a final sum to the inventor, who has now retired. However, the former employee doubted whether the amount paid by Bosch Rexroth was appropriate.

    In particular, the inventor criticised the remuneration settlement for the period dating from the sale in December 2019. Bosch Rexroth had calculated the settlement according to the licence analogy method, basing it on a fictitious turnover. However, the inventor demanded that the company determine the value of his invention on the basis of the net income for the invention sold.

    In 2019, the engineer sued his former employer before the Regional Court Mannheim (case ID: 2 O 2/19). He demanded disclosure of the purchase agreement between Bosch Rexroth and ZF. The inventor argued that this was the only way he could adequately calculate his entitled amount of employee compensation.

    On the other hand, the defendant referred to the Trade Secrets Directive, which came into force in 2019, as well as provisions under data protection law. The company also pointed to a confidentiality obligation contractually agreed with ZF.

  • AstraZeneca Wins Ruling Upholding Key Patent for Farxiga (1) [Ed: Just more patent #onopolies (profiting from ill people by denying them access to affordable medicines)]

    AstraZeneca Plc won a federal court ruling upholding a key patent for its diabetes drug Farxiga, staving off threats from cheaper versions.

  • Altria Working on Contingency Plan After Order Banning IQOS

    The U.S. International Trade Commission said Wednesday that both Altria and Philip Morris International Inc. — which sells the devices in other countries — infringe patents owned by rival Reynolds American Inc. That means IQOS products will be banned in 60 days unless the move is blocked by the Biden administration. The companies could also appeal, though that could take years.

  • How data platforms could make medtechs more appealing to investors [Ed: Casual EPO propaganda in Irish media, with buzzwords like “medtech” which often just means illegally-granted software patents]

    Some 14,295 patent applications were filed with the European Patent Office (EPO) in the field of medical technology in 2020. As new models of care continue to emerge, digital healthcare technology will spread right along the patient pathway and become an important driver of improved outcomes and higher efficiency.

  • Ireland ‘late to UPC party’, lawyers fear [Ed: Liars and frauds still give a megaphone to Team UPC; UPCA is dead, but they try to perpetuate the idea that it is not]

    Ireland needs to ratify the UPC Agreement by referendum, but IP lawyers still don’t know when the vote will take place

  • Intellectual Ventures predicted ‘IP reckoning’ for auto sector, then filed patent suits against General Motors, Toyota, Honda in Texas–even involving a former Daimler patent [Ed: Patent trolls of Microsoft and Bill Gates still causing major mayhem and we all pay for it]

    The automotive industry must license more patents. Some patent holders are patient because they recognize that car makers are relatively new to the wireless patent licensing business–but that doesn’t mean everyone will wait forever. On October 13, IAM published an opinion piece by Arvin Patel, the COO of non-practicing entity Intellectual Ventures (“IV”): “Why the auto sector is heading for an IP reckoning” (paywalled)

    IV is not going to take the alleged wholesale borrowing of technology in the connected-car era anymore. On October 19, less than a week after that op-ed, IV filed patent infringement complaints against General Motor in the Western District of Texas (over 12 patents), and against Toyota and Honda in the Eastern District of Texas (over 11 patents each).

  • Software Patents

    • Dominion Harbor’s entity Liberty Peak Ventures patent challenged

      On October 21, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,066,181, owned and asserted by Liberty Peak Ventures, LLC, a Dominion Harbor entity. The ’181 patent relates to generating an authentication tag for use in contactless transactions and has been asserted against Citigroup.

• Copyrights

  • Bad Bunny Sued For Allegedly Infringing Copyrights for ‘Safaera’

    Bad Bunny was hit with a lawsuit in federal court in California by BM Records, which says the Puerto Rican rapper unlawfully incorporated parts of three works by DJ Playero into his hit song, “Safaera.”

  • Triller Reportedly Agreed to Settle ‘Jake Paul’ Piracy Claim Then Returned Cash

    In June, Triller filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the YourEXTRA YouTube channel for allegedly pirating the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren fight. According to court documents the parties previously agreed to settle the claim and a fee was paid but Triller doubled back, returned the money, and filed a lawsuit anyway. And that’s not the only settlement controversy in Triller’s cases.