Summary: “Windows is the new Internet Explorer,” Ryan Farmer says. The above screenshot is minutes old and with tablets, phones and so on taken into account it’s a lot lower (as low as 28% this past May).
Ryan has just sent us this graph too:
The current strategy involves a “dangerous cocktail” of low-quality patents (in large quantities) and low-qualified staff being recruited as examiners, equipped with examination guidelines that violate the EPC
Summary: The EPO‘s attack on its very own staff and on the quality/validity of European Patents is an issue that Office leadership has long been warned about (but it chose to ignore the warnings)
2022 is just around the corner or right around the edge, but it’s never too late to glance back at warnings from patent examiners, who repeatedly cautioned António Campinos about his destruction of patent quality — an endeavour started years earlier by his ‘appointing authority’, fellow Frenchman Benoît Battistelli.
Today we reproduce, herein, an old document, two years old as a matter of fact, as it very much relates to the present; it speaks about the erosion of patent quality and staff being crushed as if examiners are just some people to be used as “rubber stamp operators” (helping to print money for the 'bank').
06.11.2019
su19021mp – 0.2.1/1.3.1The Financial Survey: A divisive exercise
Dear colleagues,
[Mr Campinos has asked you] to inform your team managers which of the “measures 1 to 10” have your support. This question is wrong at many levels.
- these “10 measures” presume that huge (5.8 billion) savings are necessary. We do not believe this to be true.
- these savings are to be obtained by cutting staff benefits and a further high (25-30%) increase in productivity. We believe that the EPO should, on the contrary, invest in staff and in quality.
- asking individual staff members which of the “10 measures” they prefer is divisive since many of the measures affect one category of staff more than another.
- only giving staff the choice between measures that target them excludes other options and a wider discussion about the future direction of the Office.
- the proposed consultation procedure is intransparent and open to manipulation. The alleged outcome cannot be verified.
- be aware that replying by selecting a measure may render an appeal against such a measure a certain loser.
At the moment the only measure directly affecting staff that SUEPO supports is the increase in the pension contributions as recommended by the actuaries (CA/56/19) who regularly review the performance of the RFPPS.
All the other measures proposed need further analysis and discussion. Alternatives that have not been proposed (adopting fees to follow inflation, asking a contribution of the Member States, less ambitious building plans) must also be considered.
We kindly ask that you keep the above considerations in mind if you wish to discuss the “10 measures” with your team managers or directors.
SUEPO and the staff representation are currently in deliberations of what is the best way forward for staff. We will publish soon information on each and every measure and the impact these will have upon you.
SUEPO Munich
Earlier today in Daily Links we gave not one but several examples of European Patents being crushed in courts or invalidated upon demand, which is neither simple nor cheap. The long-term costs of granting by default (to enrich oneself) could very well be seen in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) about a decade ago. This is why the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) was established over 10 years ago (AIA), and inter partes reviews (IPRs) have since then eliminated many thousands of fake patents, sometimes using 35 U.S.C. § 101 and Alice (SCOTUS, 2014).
Publishers like JUVE, Managing IP, and IAM don’t want us to mind the externalities; look who funds those publications, which are also part-time propaganda mills (lobbyists) for Team UPC, i.e. those who ‘mentor’ Campinos.
The avalanche of fake European Patents will rattle the European economy and meanwhile those who conspired to destroy the EPO are trying to do the same thing to European patent courts, in effect crushing the law and numerous constitution with their falsely-advertised UPC. Earlier today in Daily Links we gave several examples of classic “fake news” about the UPC. █
Click below for full-sized version
Summary: It’s no secret that the bribery hub EUIPO and EPO have exchanged a lot of staff — even top-level staff — all this despite patent law and trademark law being profoundly different (the current EPO President, António Campinos, barely understands patents, nor do his old mates from EUIPO, whom he brought to the EPO for their loyalty to him rather than their skills/qualifications)
A Few Little Pricks and Science 2.0. By Dr. Andy Farnell
Series parts:
Summary: Dr. Andy Farnell shares his experiences from this past year — a sporadic collection of thoughts that can hopefully start a dialogue about unhealthy and unethical trends in today’s increasingly regressive if not Orwellian technology; he now focuses on pandemic response and knowledge sharing, as opposed to privateering and profiteering (this includes a modest proposal/critique of some problematic aspects of patent and copyright laws)
What does Digital Veganism have to do with being a scientist? What is it’s relation to trusting technology and trusting in the expertise of others?
Years ago, I was a member of a group of Humanists 1. Their key philosophy is the celebration of rational enquiry and a sceptical rejection of superstition. That’s a hard life. Whether it’s old religion or modern superstition, most of us would rather “just take someone’s word for it”. And since ninety nine percent of everything is rubbish we spend much of our lives filling our attics with junk. But that’s still one percent better than blindly submitting to partisan suspect authority, rumour and superstition, misinformation and disinformation.
My philosophy advanced in subtle ways this year in seeing the danger not just of solutionism but of Scientism (as opposed to the practice of Science itself). Maybe not so obviously; while science ultimately converges on truth, in any epoch scientists will disagree, and the socio-political issues come about from who gets to say what is science. Who picks the experts? Since for health and safety reasons we stopped teaching all but the most tepid schoolroom physics and chemistry, actual empiricism has given way to a view most of us have of science as a political competition for grant money.
Three doses of experimental mRNA technology entered my body this year, each left me feeling physically rotten for a day. I trusted the doctor who gave them to me, and I trusted the lab that made them. For a dozen reasons it was the right thing to do. None of those reasons are apropos here, so I won’t try to persuade or bore you with them. Still, I had to arrive at a decision. To do so, like everyone else, I had to use the same information systems. Good technology should be a tool for accessing good information. Intelligence Amplification (IA) as opposed to Artificial Intelligence (AI) is what I value and seek out as a Digital Vegan.
Unfortunately we don’t have much of that technology, we have the “Modern Web” (whatever that is), which Sir Tim Berners-Lee himself has thrown up his hands in exasperation at. As Marshall McLuhan mcluhan64 reminded us, content and mechanism cannot be neatly separated. So in 2021 I spent a great deal of time reading about viruses and risks, where the target architecture was not a computer but my own body. I therefore spent a good deal of time pondering the reliability of information, trust, provenance, and whether we can build reliable, benign authoritative info-systems.
Of course we need better technologists in government. Perhaps by paying more. But my point is that “Trust Is Everything”. We cannot build anything in a society lacking trust. Yet “Trusted Computing” is being used to enact betrayal, and “Trustless Systems” are taking away our capacity to trust, even in principle. What this means is hard to imagine. Will we face an assault on computational autonomy? In what kind of a world can an author no longer attest to the provenance of their own work? I think that ironically, the imposition of “instruments of trust” will sow the seeds of a colossal breakdown of trust in all info-systems when these devices are inevitably abused or go wrong.
Mentally fortified by the prospect of not dying from Covid and being less likely to kill someone I love, I say “Hooray for the biologists!”. But in the technologist’s room our view is of the £35bn elephant’s arse that was “Track and Trace”. Early in the pandemic (March 2020) I ran a workshop for students on models of contagion, percolation and dissemination. We explored how we might use dining cryptographers and zero knowledge proofs to build ephemeral anonymous contact graphs for forward and reverse tracing. QR codes, Wifi beacons and printed tokens were all ideas we played with. That exciting and sometimes heated conversation, in which we debated privacy and abuse along with Utilitarian philosophies of public health, seems a lifetime away now. It’s taken over a year, three changes of direction and a bonfire of public confidence for the “NHS app” to almost get there, and despite all my good will towards the spirit of the project its a total chocolate teapot to me as a non-smartphone user. Meanwhile Bluetooth-LE chipsets have gotten so tiny and cheap they’re being embedded into disposable test kits.
Imagine the clever, life-saving applications these could be put to if we adopted a civic utilitarian model and abandoned the authoritarian, centralised and punitive misadventure we are on. I would pay £10 for a little keyfob device that would light up if I had potentially been infected and needed to take a fresh test or isolate for a few days. That perfectly feasible voluntary and anonymous technology can’t happen in our present broken society because it doesn’t feed into the surveillance-capitalist machine.
This shows how subtle aspects of culture have enormous effects in concert with technology. In 2021 governments have been burning trust like rocket-fuel. By trying to pass off a surveillance system as a public health measure, and involving crony consultancy with creepy data-vampire corporations they let us all down. Like so much mismanagement in this pandemic, pride, dishonesty and a fear of being forthright was our weakness. Science barely won through.
A key component for success in a pandemic is fast uptake and participation, so a good strategy is to carefully explain systems, and get people to ‘buy in’, instead of just lying about stuff. I spoke cynically on how authorities would prefer to ratchet on power and intrusive “social legibility” rather than progress an elegant solution that solved the immediate problem. I predicted a market for forged digital “vaccine passports” nearly two years ago.
Listening back to those predictions saddens me. Low tech privacy respecting technology involving printable tokens and a good enough way forward was within reach from the start, based on the premise that people don’t want to get Covid. We lost an opportunity to genuinely change culture toward elective social responsibility because a few profiteers saw an opportunity for a data grab.
This is crucial from a digital-realist’s perspective. Tech is realpolitik and what I hope is recognised as a lesson of this pandemic is how the intrusion of perverse power incentives against the common good was a key factor in failure. With no punitive stick attached, and no kick-back for the data-brokers, our government let precious weeks and months slip past when we could have quickly deployed life-saving solutions and inspired public confidence.
All that said, it’s been a year of miraculous advances in mRNA research yielding potential jabs against HIV, Lyme’s Disease and an ever growing list. A great time to revel in science and feel proud to be a scientist! My mum had a hip replacement performed by a robot and was on her feet again in a week! All hail our surgical robot overlords.
Yet I believe it’s not that crisis engenders innovation so much as it forces down the hand of those resisting change. The Gates Foundation had to be shamed into releasing their grip (with an unknown cost in lives). The backstory of Robert and Jill Malone’s long struggle to advance a “shelved” mRNA research project seems typical of the frustration felt by scientists in so many fields who must swim against the tide of patent madness, and other rackets that constitute scientific research and publishing today. I really think we are facing 21st century problems with hands tied by an 18th century mentality.
This sad and wasteful pattern is repeated in climate science and security engineering. So this year I wrote about the helplessness and Cassandra Complex felt by many of us working within a collective delusion around cybersecurity. After educating myself more on distributed file-systems and delving into the crazy legal debacle around SciHub, I wrote a little fictional piece set in a world freed from the parasites that feed on science. I hope that 2022 will continue the trend of scientific truth triumphing over the apparatchik of petty politics and profiteering.
In the Digital Vegan book I wrote much about the need for a new wave of digital literacy. How, in the ’80s we taught programming and computer science in schools to bolster innovation and our economy, and how that was eventually replaced with a dumbed-down curriculum teaching “IT skills” like how to use Microsoft Word. Today we need something else, that I and Edward Snowden have both called “Digital Self Defence”. That really just means “sceptical thinking applied to technology” – including the free selection of benevolent tech and the rejection of malevolent systems. We need to be teaching kids as young as five. All the amazing Internet and Web we have built amounts to nothing if it’s not an Intelligence Amplifier to make a society that builds on technology but does not feebly depend upon it. █
_______
1 “Non-secular humanist” (or just a plain Humanist), which for millennia before the 19th century was the only form of Humanism in which people are at the centre of a world that includes spiritual morality.
Approximately 5.6 million developers around the world use Kubernetes, according to a recent State of Cloud Native Development Report compiled by SlashData for the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). “This represents a 67% increase from a year ago when, adjusting for a change in the question methodology, there were 3.9 million Kubernetes developers worldwide,” per the CNCF blog.
Overall, there are now 6.8 million cloud-native developers. “This includes 4.6M developers using container orchestration tools and 4M developers using serverless platforms; the numbers correspond to 28% and 24% of backend developers, respectively,” the report states.
Kubernetes has demonstrated impressive growth over the past 12 months – 5.6 million developers use Kubernetes today – according to the most recent State of Cloud Native Development Report developed for CNCF by SlashData. This represents a 67% increase from a year ago when, adjusting for a change in the question methodology, there were 3.9 million Kubernetes developers worldwide. This group now represents 31% of all backend developers, an increase of 4 percentage points in the last year.
This is our third time working with SlashData to gain insights on cloud native development. Since then, the global cloud native developer population has also continued to grow. Today there are 6.8 million cloud native developers – 4.6 million using container orchestration tools and 4 million developers using serverless platforms, with an overlap of 1.8 million using both. The first report, published in May 2020, reported 4.7 million cloud native developers, and the second, published in August 2020, saw a big jump to 6.5 million.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Manjaro 21.2.0 GNOME Edition and some of the applications pre-installed.
With the recent release of Pop!_OS 21.10, a version for the Raspberry Pi was also released. In this video, I’ll check out the new Pi spin and give you my thoughts.
Queued into the sound subsystem’s “for-next” branch ahead of the Linux 5.17 cycle are some Alder Lake audio updates.
First up, another variant of Alder Lake P has been added to the hda_intel driver. Alder Lake P support was already in place but another PCI ID ended up being introduced (0x51cd). That’s now present for Linux 5.17 and can be easily back-ported if warranted.
Meanwhile Alder Lake N is seeing its initial audio support appear for Linux 5.17. The Alder Lake N support is just adding a new PCI ID (0x54c8) and the rule to use the DSP-based Sound Open Firmware (SOF) driver or the plain intel_hda driver for other systems. No other changes for Alder Lake N support are necessary from the sound side.
Docker is the best known containerization platform but it doesn’t exist in isolation. An entire ecosystem of complementary tools and spin-off projects has sprung up around the shift to containers.
Here’s a round-up of 10 open-source analyzers, indexers, and orchestrators that make Docker even more convenient and useful. Whether you’re still early in your Docker journey, or you’re a seasoned practitioner using the tech in production, you might find something here that’s worth including alongside your next project.
Ubuntu is the most popular among the Debian-based Linux distribution which is composed of free and open-source software. Server, Core for IoT, and Desktop are the three official editions released by Ubuntu.
Nowadays most Linux users who are new as well as experienced developers and programmers prefer Ubuntu in day-to-day life. Whenever you install the new OS on your system people will initially download and install all the necessary packages and software as well as setup environment variables. In this article, I present to you with 10 important things you might need to set up after you install Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (as it is the latest Long Term Support released). The lists are as follows.
Going forward with migrating to Wayland. There are several smalls things to fix in my setup, one of them is adding a custom layout to workaround the fact that my child broken the Up key of my laptop’s keyboard. I had mapped F9 to Up using $HOME/.Xmodmap, which does not work in Wayland. I have figure out how to that in Wayland [1] [2] and maybe this can help other people.
In this tutorial, we are going to explore how to install go on Rocky Linux 8.5
Golang is an open-source programming language that is easy to learn and use. It is built-in concurrency and has a robust standard library. It is reliable, builds fast, and efficient software that scales fast.
Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel-type systems enable flexible and modular program constructions.
Go compiles quickly to machine code and has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection.
In this guide, we are going to learn how to install golang 1.18 on Fedora 35.
Go is not yet released. There is so much work in progress with all the documentation.
Also running on that same Raspberry Pi is a rudimentary local file server. It’s a simple Samba setup, mostly in existence because I read a blog post on it and thought I’d give it a try. It’s set up with a small USB flash drive connected to the Pi and I’ve been using it to share files across my home network that I don’t need long-term or syncing to all my devices. It probably won’t be around too much longer, but it’s been handy.
In kindergarten, you learn that you should share. But for computer security, sharing is often a bad thing. The Linux kernel introduced the concept of namespaces starting with version 2.6.24. That’s been a few years ago, but namespaces are not used by many even though the tools exist to manipulate them. Granted, you don’t always need namespaces, but it is one of those things that when you do need it, the capability is priceless. In a nutshell, namespaces let you give a process its own private resources and — more importantly — prevents a process from seeing resources in other namespaces.
Turns out, you use namespaces all the time because every process you run lives in some set of namespaces. I say set, because there are a number of namespaces for different resources. For example, you can set a different network namespace to give a process its own set of networking items including routing tables, firewall rules, and everything else network-related.
Learn the simple steps to install the Docker container on Linux Mint 20, 18, or any other versions you are using with the help of the command given below using the terminal.
This simple tutorial shows how to easily create encrypted vaults in which you may store files safely in Ubuntu and Debian based systems.
Remmina is a well-documented remote desktop control software, here we see the command to install Remmina on Debian 11 Bullseye using the terminal.
Remote access to a desktop, simply means you will use software or protocol to get a display and use the entire computer located somewhere else directly on your local system. While accessing, Remote Desktop, it feels that you are right in front of the remote computer. Keyboard and Mouse can be used to control the remote systems. Well, it sounds amazing but requires server software on the remote computer and client software on your local device. There are many ways to do this. For example in Windows, the RDP server is already there, hence using any RDP client software such as XRDP or Remmina we can access a remote Windows server or desktop system. Of course, you have to enable the RDP in Windows first.
Apart from RDP; VNC, NX, and XDMCP are some other protocols to access the remote PC. Well, if you are using a remote machine with a command-line interface then SSH will be the best way to access it.
Well, as we don’t have any GUI software to establish a remote desktop connection on Linux out of the box. In such situations, Remmina can be a good option.
Easy has hardware-profiling for etc/asound.conf and /etc/asound.state. What this means is that the files are backed up for each hardware configuration. So if Easy on a USB-stick is booted on a different computer, or if the audio hardware is changed on the same computer, the correct file will be used.
You should be able to bootup on any computer, and if you have previously configured the audio, those settings will be automatically used.
Podman (the POD MANager) is an OCI-compliant container engine, developed by Red Hat as a drop-in replacement of Docker. It is used to manage and run, containers, images, and volumes via a command-line interface. Both Docker and Podman are similar software. The only difference is that Podman doesn’t require a daemon to run containers, while Docker needs the Docker Engine daemon. Podman uses the libpod library to manage an entire container ecosystem.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and use Podman on Debian 11.
Remmina is software available for Linux to get access to remote computer systems over a network. Here we learn the steps and commands to install Remmina on the latest Linux Mint 20.1| 20.2 or earlier version system using the terminal.
Unlike Windows, Linux Mint doesn’t have any software to facilitate the service of remote desktops. Therefore, the user either has to go for some third-party solution such as Teamviewer. Well, what if you don’t want to use the internet for connecting a local system in an organization. There are some solutions like RDP and VNC protocols. Today in this article we are going to talk about Remmina, a remote desktop client for Linux that has several protocols for remote control of computers.
It is a remote maintenance software that supports the VNC, NX, RDP, XDMCP, and SFTP protocols. Furthermore, it is possible to route a connection through an SSH tunnel, which makes it useful if you normally want to use unencrypted protocols such as VNC over the Internet.
The wait command is something that comes with Linux so that you can find it in all Linux distributions. Before a process stops, it waits for it to finish. When you include a process or job ID, you should use the wait command. Simply put, wait commands containing an ID will continue to wait until the process finishes and returns to termination status. So if you also want to use the wait command, we recommend you to read this article thoroughly.
We are going to use our Kubernetes homelab to run speed tests and store results in InfluxDB. We will then configure Grafana with InfluxDB datasource to visualise data.
InfluxDB is an open-source time series database. We were previously running speedtest-cli with –csv flag and storing results in MySQL. Needless to say that MySQL was too much. We therefore decided to move on InfluxDB.
I know the PlayStation 5 is out, but emulators are usually years behind the console. But for some users, the old games are the ones they love the most.
The i3 window tiling manager is a Linux desktop environment that’s stripped down to its absolute minimum. That might sound limited and restrictive, but for the right workflow, it’s a form of freedom.
As we hit the end of 2021 for those wondering about the X.Org vs. (X)Wayland gaming performance difference for both GNOME Shell and KDE Plasma, here are some fresh benchmarks using the latest open-source Radeon graphics driver stack and desktops on Ubuntu 21.10.
This round of tests with an AMD Radeon RX 6800 was using the latest graphics driver stack in the form of Mesa 22.0-devel as of Christmas with Linux 5.16 Git. KDE Plasma 5.22.5 and GNOME Shell 40.5 as packaged on Ubuntu 21.10 were in use as the primary desktops tested both for their Wayland and X.Org sessions. As an additional perspective, Xfce 4.16 with its X.Org session was also included as part of this round of Linux gaming performance benchmarks.
This article is primarily to deliver some fresh performance numbers for how GNOME vs. KDE is looking when it comes to gaming performance and the X.Org vs. (X)Wayland impact. Similar tests on the NVIDIA side using their 495 driver series with GBM support is forthcoming as well on Phoronix. Several other year-end type Linux GPU driver/performance comparisons are also coming out over the days ahead.
It was already a while ago that I refreshed my ‘steamclient‘ package for Slackware.
The steamclient package is meant to bootstrap the installation of Valve’s Steam gaming platform on your Slackware computer. The package installs a couple of scripts and a 32-bit Linux runtime based on Ubuntu. When you first start ‘steam’ from the menu or from the X terminal commandline, the client will download a larger set of runtime libraries, including 64-bit support. Onwards, the client will keep its runtime libraries up-to-date automatically, every time it starts up and connects to the Steam servers.
The Slackware package has a couple of tweaks because we obviously do not have Ubuntu tools on board. As a result, on Slackware-current (32bit and 64-bit with multilib) Steam works out of the box.The reason for a package refresh is a recent bug report on Valve’s github, about an ALSA related crash on Slackware. The root cause was eventually found and it was part of the customization I added to the steam launcher 6 years ago when we were still on release 14.1 and we did not have pulseaudio as part of the Operating System.
So I removed (actually, commented-out) these lines, and that should fix the root cause for that bug. If you do not use Pulseaudio or want to enforce ALSA sound regardless, just un-comment the relevant lines at the top of the ‘/usr/bin/steam’ script again – it’s self-explanatory.
I have also refreshed the READMEs for Slackware and additionally removed support for all Slackware versions older than 14.2. To be realistic, I assume that gamers are all on the -current platform already.Have fun playing games on Steam!
This is our review of Ubuntu 21.10 Impish Indri, the thirtieth release of the world class United Kingdom-based computer operating system made by Canonical. We hope you will find this review amusing and useful. Now, let’s dig in!
Ubuntu 21.10 is a milestone to the future desktop technology of GNU/Linux operating systems. We saw the trend starts here, like the universal software packages, new A/V system, and new display system, which we think would be followed by many other distros sooner or later. We would see Ubuntu next release, 22.04 LTS, taking after Impish. It has its own shortcomings like huge image file, longer install time, instability of Wayland+Pipewire inside, but its benefits outweigh them by being faster, better, more apps and just work. Congratulations to Canonical and the whole Ubuntu community!
The Web and design team at Canonical run two-week iterations building and maintaining all of the Canonical websites and product web interfaces. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
Aaeon’s “NanoCOM-TGU” Type 10 module features Tiger Lake-U “E” and “GRE” with up to 16GB LPDDR4x with optional ECC, an up to 256GB NVMe drive, a 2.5GbE controller, and I/O including 4x PCIe, 2x SATA, DDI, eDP, and 10x USB including 2x Gen2.
In November, Aaeon announced a 95 x 95mm COM-TGUC6 COM Express Compact Type 6 module, which despite the name is larger than most community backed SBCs these days. Now, the company has followed up with a Type 10 module with a Raspberry Pi like 84 x 55mm footprint.
The NanoCOM-TGU is only the second Type 10 Tiger Lake module we have seen after Advantech’s SOM-7583. No OS support was listed, but we imagine that like the SOM-7583, Linux and Windows are supported.
[Ziggurat29] had been playing around with infrared protocols, and realized he had a spare point-of-sale printer kicking around in his junk box. So he decided to whip up his own calculator infrared printer by bolting on an STM32 Blue Pill module and an IR receiver. [Ziggurat29] initially thought such a homemade printer would be cheaper than a commercial HP 82240 IR printer, even a used one. In hindsight, these point-of-sale printers can be pricey. If you don’t have one laying around, it may be cheaper to buy one, but not as fun as building it yourself.
After attempting to incorporate a few AK80-9 actuators from T-Motor into a robotic arm project, YouTuber Nikodem Bartnik was forced to pivot to a different kind of project: a universal robotic chassis/platform. By using these high-power and high-precision motors, his robot could be both fast and accurate while moving along the floor.
Once a flat plate had been cut from a piece of plywood with the help of a CNC router, Bartnik mounted the two motors and attached a wheel to each one. To control the motors, he went with a single Arduino Uno and fabricated a custom PCB that routes CAN bus signals between the Uno and the two motors. Power was provided to everything via a pair of LiPo battery packs for a total of around 24 volts.
Updates from the enigmatic [NODE] are unfortunately few and far between these days. In fact his latest post is only the second time we’ve heard from the hacker in 2021. But as we’ve come to expect from his white-on-sorta-black releases, it certainly doesn’t disappoint.
Fabio Antonini loves to ride his bike, and while nearly all bike computers offer information such as cadence, distance, speed, and elevation, they lack the ability to tell if the cyclist is sitting or standing at any given time. So, after doing some research, he came across an example project that utilized Edge Impulse and an Arduino Nano 33 BLE 33 Sense’s onboard accelerometer to distinguish between various kinds of movements. Based on this previous work, he opted to create his own ML device using the same general framework.
Our fifteenth annual International Day Against DRM (IDAD), might be over, but the fight against Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) continues. Each year, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) and its Defective by Design campaign distill what we’ve learned throughout the year in our anti-DRM activism on one “special” day: a day especially supportive to those retailers and publishers who rightly refuse to foist DRM on their customers, and a day especially critical of those who haven’t gotten the message that our real digital rights cannot be restricted. For those of us steeped in the Defective by Design campaign, IDAD never fails to provide moments that inspire us in our work for the coming year.
This year, those moments came in the form of reviews that activists around the world left for Disney+ following our call to help educate those who are about to subscribe to the platform on what they really need to know about Disney+: not its alleged features, not the films or television shows it might have, but the way it infringes on their rights by its use of DRM. We couldn’t agree more with one reviewer, who said that they wanted to be “treat[ed] as a valued client and not as a revenue source to be exploited.”
We hope that this review, and others like, it are helping people to see the true “value” of Disney+. No matter what or how many film classics it’s offering, nothing can justify the unjust restriction of their subscribers. For those who’ve never heard the term “DRM” or thought of digital restriction before, we hope it sparked a curiosity to find out more, and start them on the path to anti-DRM activism. At the same time, we hope that the reviews also provided people who already do know something about DRM with the resolve necessary to forego it entirely and live DRM-free. Reading the variety of messages different members of the community shared with Disney+ and the Defective by Design campaign has been an invigorating experience, and as always, it’s shown the dedication of the wider anti-DRM community, beginning with our community IDAD planning meeting and continuing through the Day Against DRM itself.
We’ve written previously about Disney+’s distinctive position among other streaming platforms. Few are sponsored by corporations with such enormous amounts of capital, and few have grown in as short of a time as Disney+ has. Considering its vast resources (and the amount of legal know-how it’s taken to unfairly extend copyright for decades), Disney+ is in a position to provide a positive example to other streaming platforms and resolve to end their practice of shackling users to their “service” by means of DRM. Instead, and like other large streaming providers such as Netflix, they fall back on the bogus excuse of “copyright infringement,” something that we’ve long known DRM does not help prevent. That reason could also never justify the measures taken, which involve taking rights away from users and making them agree to give up control of their computers in order to have access to culture and education. Yet until they do heed the wake-up call, the Defective by Design campaign and the worldwide community of anti-DRM activists will be there to let them know that no use of DRM is acceptable.
In a recent ruling by Italian courts on open source licensing, a software vendor has lost a civil case for failing to comply with open source license requirements, reports Christine Hall.
“On December 13, the law court of Venice, Italy quietly affirmed the legal enforceability of open source software licenses in a case involving the GNU General Public License,” Hall writes.
Recently there was the whole OBS vs Streamlabs drama but recently they reached an agreement and have decided upon a new long term partnership
Yesterday afternoon, we filed a Motion for Remand in our lawsuit against Vizio for their flagrant GPL & LGPL violations, alleged with great detail in our complaint in California state court. Vizio’s response to that complaint was to “remove” the case to federal court. Vizio argues that the lawsuit can only be brought by a copyright holder as a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court. In response, we have asked the federal court to return (“remand”) the case to state court.
While Vizio’s original request to “remove” the case from state court to federal court is, in the general sense, a standard litigation tactic and our response is a relatively standard response (on which we expect to prevail), the implications of these early procedural maneuvers deserve special attention for those of you that care deeply about copyleft as a strategy to achieve software freedom and rights. If you seek a deeper understanding of these essential issues in copyleft policy, we encourage you to first read our motion to remand, and then read this article as supplemental strategic context for that filing.
Many of our longstanding Sustainers will recall that we previously have enforced the GPL for BusyBox in federal court. As part of that large lawsuit against 14 defendants, we learned how the process of copyright-only GPL enforcement works in US federal court. We still believe that federal litigation brought by copyright holders is an essential component of copyleft enforcement.
Three weeks into my internship and it’s been great so far with Awesome Mentors. I am currently learning a new Language which is Ruby and this is the perfect time to remind myself that everyone struggles! I struggled a bit getting farmiliar with the codebase and pushing my first merge request during the internship. I won’t say i have a perfect understanding of how everything works, but i am learning.
Answering my own question Isn’t there an easier way to do this?, I wrote a shell script that starts with a YAD form dialog. After I enter the strings in their appropriate form boxes, the script does the three jobs listed above automatically.
An unusual aspect of my script is that it creates a formatted ODT without involving a GUI word processor. To do this I use LibreOffice Writer to convert an HTML file to an ODT on the command line. The HTML doesn’t have to be up-to-date, either, or use CSS for styling. You and I may have forgotten (or never knew) the HTML of 25 years ago, but it’s apparently still in the Writer code base.
The current state of the art of embedded motion sensing is based around micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) devices. These miracles of microfabrication use tiny silicon structures, configured to detect acceleration and rotational position in three dimensions. Accumulate these accelerations and rotations, and you’ve got a device that can find its orientation and track movement without any external waypoints.
Why do we care about dead reckoning anyway? Surely GPS and related positioning systems are good enough? Above ground GPS is usually good enough, but underwater and underground this simply won’t work. Even heading indoors has a dramatic effect on the GPS signal strength, so yes, we need another way for some applications.
Right now, the current state of the art in portable sensors are MEMS devices, and you can get them for the cost of a hamburger. But if you want the ultimate in accuracy, you’ll want a quantum atomic interferometer. What that is, and how it will be possible to make one small enough to be useful, is half of the story. But first, let’s talk MEMS.
Disasters in the world of tech are frustrating for everyone, not just the company that experienced the incident. In this episode, Jay and Joao discuss thoughts around what it actually means to recovery from a disaster, and why it’s typically not a quick process.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (djvulibre, libzip, monit, novnc, okular, paramiko, postgis, rdflib, ruby2.3, and zziplib), openSUSE (chromium, kafka, and permissions), and SUSE (net-snmp and permissions).
Cryptojacking software can also attempt to blend in by pretending to be a process that belongs to a legitimate application. They can use techniques such as DLL sideloading where a malicious DLL replaces a legitimate DLL. The DLL is called by a bone fide application when it launches, or a doppelgänger application that has been downloaded behind the scenes.
Once it is called, the fraudulent DLL launches a cryptomining process. If the high CPU load is noticed and investigated, it appears that a legitimate application is misbehaving and performing in an adverse fashion.
Huawei has entered into a patent licence agreement with Japanese networking and storage company Buffalo for its Wi-Fi 6 technology, the Chinese telecoms company announced today.
The agreement is Huawei’s first-ever overseas, Wi-Fi 6-focused licence, which provides Buffalo with access to certain Wi-Fi 6 enabled products under Huawei’s portfolio of standard essential patents (SEPs).
“We have broader licence agreements covering both Wi-Fi 6 and legacy Wi-Fi products, but this agreement marks the emergence of Wi-Fi 6 as the dominant Wi-Fi technology,” said Alan Fan, global head of intellectual property at Huawei.
If you are a policy-maker, prospective business partner or investor, IP Australia wants you to know that a useful way to identify small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with high growth potential is to look at their IP activity. A new research report from the Office of the Chief Economist, titled Intellectual property rights and enterprise growth: The role of IP rights in the growth of SMEs, describes a study using data on the full population of Australian businesses – around 600,000 SMEs over the period 2002–2017 – to examine correlations between IP activity, employment, and growth of SMEs. The study finds that, on average, SMEs that own IP rights (IPRs) are 3.5 times larger than SMEs with no IP rights (7 employees compared to 2 for SMEs with no IP rights). Furthermore, rights-holders pay their employees better, with median annual wages being A$53,755 per employee compared to A$43,304 for SMEs with no IP rights.
[...]
IP Australia’s research confirms that the overwhelming majority of SMEs do not own any formal registered IP rights. In 2017, only around 4% of Australian SMEs owned IPRs. The good news – such as it is – is that this proportion doubled since 2002.
By far the biggest contributor to IPR ownership was trade marks.
Of the SMEs with any IPRs, 89.1% owned only trade marks, while a further 6.6% owned trade marks in combination with one or more other forms of registered IPR (patents and/or registered designs). While most trade mark owners did not own any other types of rights, owners of patents and/or designs were more likely than not to also own trade marks.
This is not very surprising. Almost all trading businesses operate under some form of branding – and it is therefore disappointing that so few Australian SMEs own registered trade marks (PATENTOLOGY, incidentally, is protected by Australian trade mark registration no. 1412805). However, most small businesses are not based on the development and commercialisation of patentable inventions or registrable designs. On the other hand, it is to be expected that many businesses that engage with the IP system via the more complex and costly process of patent or design registration will be conscious of the benefits of also registering their trade marks.
Further to our earlier publication (https://www.aathornton.com/court-of-appeal-dabus-case/) reporting a UK Court of Appeal decision concerning the naming of an AI system DABUS as an inventor for a patent application, the European Patent Office (EPO) has now issued a decision on the corresponding European applications.
[...]
On 21st December 2021, the Legal Board of Appeal at the EPO announced its decision to dismiss the appeal in cases J 8/20 and J 9/20, therefore refusing applications EP 18 275 163 and EP 18 275 174, for which an artificial intelligence system was designated as inventor.
The requisite number of Member States have now ratified the Unified Patent Court Agreement and the Protocol on the Provisional Application of the UPC Agreement (Protocol).
Germany, following significant constitutional challenges, ratified the UPC Agreement and the Protocol in late September 2021. Slovenia subsequently ratified both instruments in October 2021. Austria followed suit on 2 December 2021 as the 13th and final Member State required to launch the United Patent Court (UPC).
This week, the European Patent Office published its decision revoking PlantLab’;s patent EP2348841.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has announced plans to relocate the Boards of Appeal from Haar (a suburb of Munich) back to the city centre area of Munich, where the rest of the EPO is based.
Before the move goes ahead, a detailed proposal will need to be approved by the EPO member states at the next Administrative Council in March 2022. The EPO currently plans for the relocation to take place in 2025/2026.
The plans reverse the move made in 2017 when the Boards of Appeal relocated from the centre of Munich to Haar. The move was not hugely popular at the time and indeed resulted in a referral to the Enlarged Board of Appeal in G2/19 (see our report here). It is expected that the return to the city centre of Munich will be welcome news for users of the European patent system.
. In September, China’s State Intellectual Property Office invalidated Honeywell’s R1234yf manufacturing patent no. ZL200780007465.8 following a challenge from Chinese manufacturer Zhejiang Huanxin Fluorine Materials Co.
On December 27, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 10,824,696. The patent is owned by RightQuestion, LLC, an NPE and entity of Bjorn Markus Jakobsson. The ’696 patent generally relates to an authentication translation. The patent has been asserted against Samsung.
Video download link | md5sum 98648f8b7d1111dade0c31369082cae3
Summary: Corporations that are not European are taking over the EPO itself and are meanwhile buying monopolies (control) in Europe; this should make one wonder if the “European” in EPO (misleading acronym) denotes the selling of European sovereignty to the highest corporate bidders, which the EPO calls “clients” and “customers”
THE recent press articles about the EPO were mostly puff pieces with revisionism, composed by megaphones of EPO management and Team UPC. As we showed last night, the EPO now hires PR people whose role is to manipulate the media because apparently the problem — as Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos see it — isn’t the decreased quality but the public finding out about it.
“Is this a patent office?”The video above concerns EPO staff and persistent attacks on the staff — self-harming attacks which only discourage qualified patent examiners from pursuing a career at the EPO. If the EPO, Europe’s second-largest institution, covertly becomes like a large bank selling off monopolies/influence inside Europe — like the unconstitutional ‘right’ to sue in the whole of the EU in one fell swoop (UPC) — to foreign corporations (about two thirds of patent applications come from them) while crushing the very people who do all the work, what on Earth are we dealing with here? Is this a patent office? What is it? █
Money? Which money? No, our budget is reserved for gambling.
macOS (Previously OS X) is the default operating system for desktop and laptop computers from Apple. It is a proprietary operating system that only works on Apple hardware by default.
Users, however, can choose to install Linux on their Apple computers if they wish to. The process is so simple and straightforward, and almost identical to installing Linux on any ordinary machine from other companies.
This is not quite an uncommon practice; even Linus Torvalds, the Linux creator, uses a Macbook Air after installing Linux on it. He likes the quality of the hardware offered, but still wants a more open source ecosystem to work with, including his own kernel-powered OS.
If you start using computers with Windows, you are likely to use the term folder.
But when you switch to Linux, you’ll find that folders are often termed as directory.
This may confuse some new Linux users. Should you call it folder or directory? Is there even a difference?
Here’s the thing. You can call it folder if you want or directory if you like. It won’t make a difference.
But if you wonder why a folder is called directory in Linux, here is some explanation.
The release of Linux Kernel version 5.16 has suffered a slight delay. Said delay was St. Nick and the holiday season. This is fairly typical, as, during the months of November and December, development on the Linux kernel does slow down. To that, Linux keeper Linus Torvalds wrote:
With the holidays coming up, things are probably going to slow down both on the development and testing front, and as a result, I expect that I will also extend the [release candidate] series by another week not because it’s necessarily needed (too early to tell, but doesn’t feel that way), but simply because nobody will want to open the next merge window immediately in the new year.
So, if you were hoping Santa Claus would leave you a shiny new kernel in your stocking, you’re going to be disappointed to find that particular repository a bit empty.
Fret not, that new kernel will be here soon after the holidays.
But what does it promise? Truth be told, there are no show stoppers in this release. That being said, kernel 5.16 won’t be one to shrug off. Why? Because there’s plenty of new hardware support and features to get excited about.
Let’s unwrap that give and find out what’s hidden underneath that shiny paper.
Mold, a modern drop-in replacement for current Unix linkers, has reached version 1.0. Written by the original creator of the LLVM lld linker, mold aims to be several times faster than its predecessor.
With the continuously growing set of features and functionality provided by systemd, this year saw the project hitting record growth in terms of commit activity that easily surpassed prior years. Surprisingly, Lennart Poettering dropped from his spot as the one responsible for the most commits each year.
With the end of the year upon us, I ran some systemd GitStats in being curious how this year panned out from a quantitative perspective on the development pace… Systemd in 2021 features like unlocking encrypted volumes using TPM2 / FIDO2 / PKCS#11 hardware, introduction of the system extension images concept, an option for simple whole file-system A/B updates, maturing of systemd OOMD, and the massive set of changes in systemd 250 released earlier this month.
AMD Smart Trace Buffer “STB” support is ready for the upcoming Linux 5.17 kernel cycle.
AMD Smart Trace Buffer is an APU/SoC feature for helping to isolate failures on the SoC by analyzing the last feature the system was utilizing when hitting a failure. AMD STB runs transparently in the background and a trace is then stored into the SoC for newer AMD hardware supporting this functionality. The Smart Trace Buffer trace after a hardware failure can then be read by the user via a DebugFS interface.
The code enablement patches don’t make clear all what hardware is covered by AMD STB currently, but from other code hits point to it being supported in at least current generation Cezanne SoCs.
While not nearly as featureful as say OpenShot or Kdenlive, Avidemux is an open-source video editor that is simple to use and has been around for a long time. Avidemux 2.8 is now available as the latest feature release.
Avidemux 2.8 features a variety of improvements for this non-linear open-source video editor. Among the many changes with Avidemux 2.8 are:
- Support for converting HDR vide to SDR with tone mapping.
- Support for decoding TrueHD audio tracks.
Avidemux 2.8 open-source, free, and cross-platform video editor software has been released today as a major update that brings exciting new features and many improvements.
Almost ten months in development, Avidemux 2.8 is here to add the ability to convert HDR (High Dynamic Range) video to SDR (Standard Dynamic Range) with tone mapping using a variety of methods, decoding support for the WMA9 Lossless codec, the ability to decode TrueHD audio tracks and support for them in Matroska (MKV) containers.
MySQL is a relational database management system based on SQL (Structured Query Language). It is one of the most widely used database software for several well-known applications. MySQL is used for data warehousing, e-commerce, and logging applications, but its more commonly used feature is a web database storage and management.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MySQL 8.0 using the Community Release edition.
Grep is a Linux / Unix command-line tool used to search for a string of characters in a specified file. It’s name comes from the ed command g/re/p (globally search for a regular expression and print matching lines), which has the same effect.
In the simplest terms, grep (global regular expression print) will search input files for a search string, and print the lines that match it. Beginning at the first line in the file, grep copies a line into a buffer, compares it against the search string, and if the comparison passes, prints the line to the screen. Grep will repeat this process until the file runs out of lines.
NGINX is an open-source, free HTTP server software. In addition to its HTTP server capabilities, NGINX can also function as a proxy server for e-mail (IMAP, POP3, and SMTP) and a reverse proxy and load balancer for HTTP, TCP, and UDP servers.
The goal behind NGINX was to create the fastest web server around, and maintaining that excellence is still a central goal of the Nginx project. NGINX consistently beats Apache and other servers in benchmarks measuring web server performance and is now the most popular used web server according to W3Tech.
In the tutorial, you will learn how to install and configure Nginx on openSUSE Leap 15 with a free TLS/SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt.
Redis is an open-source (BSD licensed), in-memory key-value data structure store used as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperlog logs, geospatial indexes, and streams. Redis also provides high availability with Redis Sentinel software logic, creating automatic partitioning across Redis nodes with Redis Cluster.
You will know how to install and configure Redis on your openSUSE Leap 15 operating system.
Vivaldi is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It had grown from the downfall of Opera with many disgruntled when it changed from the Presto layout engine to a Chromium-based browser. This platform angered traditional Opera users. Since then, Vivaldi has become one of the most popular alternative Internet Browsers amongst the big three Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
Vivaldi promotes itself as a leading browser with faster navigation, clever bookmarking, more intelligent browsing, extensive tab management, and a more visual approach.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Vivaldi Browser on openSUSE Leap 15.
Opera is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Opera Software and operates as a Chromium-based browser. Opera offers a clean, modern web browser that is an alternative to the other major players in the Browser race. Its famous Opera Turbo mode and its renowned battery-saving mode are the best amongst all known web browsers by quite a margin, along with a built-in VPN and much more.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Opera Browser on openSUSE Leap 15.
Kannel is an open source WAP and SMS gateway for GSM networks. Moreover, Kannel can send/receive SMS using a Serial or USB GSM Modem. It is accessible via HTTP API and can be used in sending bulk SMS, OTP etc.
Windows users are restricted to the NTFS file system, and Linux users often stick to the ext4 file system while installing the new Linux distribution.
Besides Ext4, there are btrfs, exfat, ext2, ext3, ext4, f2fs, fat16, fat32, hfs, hfs+, jfs, linux-swap, lvm2 pv, minix, nilfs2, ntfs, reiser4, reiserfs, udf, xfs, and many more. Take a pause, don’t hesitate because most of them are deprecated.
Through TCP/IP protocol, Samba makes file sharing possible between two operating systems not sharing the same architecture. Through CIFS (Common Internet File System) and SMB (Server Message Block) protocols, this open-source software has made file and print sharing services easier for major operating system distributions.
Network File System or NFS is a distributed file system protocol that allows remote hosts to mount file systems over a network and perform file operations on them as though they are mounted locally. This is particularly useful when you want to share resources from one server over multiple clients or allow multiple clients to write to single storage space.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and configure the NFS Server and NFS Clients based on Rocky Linux 8. For this, we will set up a host or server to share files and a client to access the host files using an NFS mount.
Remmina is software available for Linux to get access to remote computer systems over a network. Here we learn the steps and commands to install Remmina on the latest Linux Mint 20.1| 20.2 or earlier version system using the terminal.
Unlike Windows, Linux Mint doesn’t have any software to facilitate the service of remote desktops. Therefore, the user either has to go for some third-party solution such as Teamviewer. Well, what if you don’t want to use the internet for connecting a local system in an organization. There are some solutions like RDP and VNC protocols. Today in this article we are going to talk about Remmina, a remote desktop client for Linux that has several protocols for remote control of computers.
It is a remote maintenance software that supports the VNC, NX, RDP, XDMCP, and SFTP protocols. Furthermore, it is possible to route a connection through an SSH tunnel, which makes it useful if you normally want to use unencrypted protocols such as VNC over the Internet.
For xmass I got few Shelly lamps to play with. Shelly lamps are simple IoT devices. Super easy to install, configure and use. The Youtube is full with instructions on what can be done with these smart lamps. Naturally my main motivation was to figure out how to hack these devices and how ready my openSUSE servers are with tools and services (spoiler: they are ready)
Look daddy no cloud
Needless to say that like most smart home automation devices the Shelly lamps can be operated via the Shelly cloud. I may cover that area in the next post. But now I am interested in what can be done without the cloud. After all, one big selling point of the Shelly devices is that they are fully operable and functional even without Internet connection just on a WiFi LAN. It means that if I am concerned about the security of my home infrastructure I have an option not to expose my smart devices.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Asterisk on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Asterisk is an open-source framework used for building communications applications including VoIP gateways, and conference servers. Asterisk uses a VoIP protocol that allows you to make a call using the TCP/IP without any cost. Asterisk also supports all currently used protocols such as SIP, IAX2, GSM, G.711, or ISDN.
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 Asterisk VoIP Server on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
This article is about how to install and use Vorta, a graphical frontend for BorgBackup application. If you are new to using the borg backup tool, please take a look at our guide on how to use borg backup before proceeding with this guide.
On my Lenovo desktop PC, the monitor is connected via a HDMI cable, and “aplay -l” lists HDMI as one of the possible outputs. However, pavucontrol only lists “Speakers”, “Headphones” and “Line Out”.
Someone posted recently to the forum that there are many blog posts about EasyOS that really should be mapped to some kind of wiki at easyos.org. Yes, I know about this problem; an informative blog post will fade away into obscurity as time goes on, people who don’t regularly read the blog posts will not see it. I will attempt to improve the mapping of informative blog posts to easyos.org.
Moving forward to 2022, it’s time to expect some exciting distro releases! Here are some of our picks that we think you should keep an eye on.
The BSDs continue to lag behind Linux when it comes to the graphics driver support, but this time the Intel Whiskey Lake graphics should have been in long ago — and believed to be — but adding the PCI IDs were forgotten.
Back in December of 2020 was a syncing of the Intel graphics driver PCI IDs from Linux 5.8 into the DragonFlyBSD kernel at the time. It should have been a straight-forward update for expanding the support given the commonality of the Intel Gen9 graphics at the time and DragonFlyBSD routinely porting over code from Intel’s i915 Linux kernel graphics driver. Last year’s commit was intended to bring support for Coffee Lake, Amber Lake, Whiskey Lake, and Comet Lake graphics on Intel processors. Unfortunately, the Whiskey Lake PCI IDs didn’t end up being added to the driver list at the time.
Learn how to increase your earning potential, improve your soft skills, develop your technical knowledge, and more.
The world of work has changed significantly over the past two years. Senior managers’ expectations have shifted, and emotional intelligence has never been more important. According to a Businessolver survey, 83 percent of Gen Z employees (one-third of the global workforce) would choose an employer with a strong culture of empathy over one offering a higher salary. The same survey found that 79 percent of respondents would choose an empathetic employer even if it meant going to the trouble of changing their role, industry, or chosen career path.
Vibrant workplace cultures value emotionally intelligent leadership above all else. Self-aware leaders recognize the importance of creating and maintaining psychological safety and model behavior and work ethics that lead to collective success. These leaders are approachable and productive, and they set expectations clearly and bring out the best in others.
This year we learned a lot about our community as we embraced our new work-from-home lives. We also met some amazing folks who are leveraging Linux and open source software in their organizations.
After the release of Fedora Linux 35, I conducted a retrospective survey. I wanted to see how contributors felt about the release process and identify possible areas we can improve. There was no particular reason to start this with F35 except for that’s when I got around to doing it. So how did F35 go? Let’s look at the results from the 63 responses.
[...]
I asked respondents to rate the stress of F35 compared to previous releases. 21 people (33%) said it was the same and 19 (30%) said it was less stressful. Only 9 people (14%) felt F35 was more stressful.
2021 has been an interesting year for the Kubernetes and cloud native ecosystem. Due to the pandemic, cloud adoption saw a big spike in adoption. As the year wraps up soon, we wanted to reflect on the top findings from the Kubernetes and cloud native operations report and we have a cool infographic for you. The new version of the report for 2022 is due some time in January so stay tuned!
NanoPi R2C Plus is a variation of NanoPi R2C dual Gigabit Ethernet SBC powered by a Rockchip RK3328 processor that adds an 8GB eMMC flash for storage and replaces a 10-pin 2.54mm pitch I/O header with an 8-pin 1.25mm pitch header.
FriendlyELEC introduced the NanoPi R2C last August as a lower-cost version of NanoPi R2S replacing Realtek RTL8211E Gigabit Ethernet transceiver with a Motorcomm YT8521S chip for availability and pricing reasons. NanoPi R2C Plus is just an evolution of the original design.
Wiretrustee carrier board for Raspberry Pi CM4 was unveiled about one year ago with four SATA connectors to help people build their own 4-bay NAS. Unfortunately, the company decided to discontinue the project due to the semiconductors market situation.
The good news is the board is now open-source hardware with all resources shared publicly including the Allegro schematics and PCB layout, Gerber files, 3D models for the heatsink, and case designs for 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drives. All files are available under “CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 – Permissive”.
One of the problems with a classic Turing machine is the tape must be infinitely long. [Mark’s] Turing Ring still doesn’t have an infinite tape, but it does make it circular to save space. That along with a very clever and capable UI makes this one of the most usable Turing machines we’ve seen. You can see a demo in the video below.
The device uses an Arduino Nano, a Neopixel ring, an encoder, and a laser-cut enclosure that looks great. The minimal UI has several modes and the video below takes you through all of them.
Finding that his recently purchased LED Christmas lights defaulted to an annoying blinking pattern that took a ridiculous seven button presses to disable each time they were powered up, [Matthew Millman] decided to build a new power supply that keeps things nice and simple. In his words, the goal was to enable “all lights on, no blinking or patterns of any sort”.
Connecting the existing power supply to his oscilloscope, [Matthew] found the stock “steady on” setting was a 72 VAC peak-to-peak square wave at about 500 Hz. To recreate this, he essentially needed to find a 32 VDC power supply and swap the polarity back and forth at the same frequency. In the end the closest thing he could find in the parts bin was a HP printer power supply that put out 30 volts, so the lights aren’t quite as bright as they were before, but at least they aren’t blinking.
Speech commands are all the rage on everything from digital assistants to cars. Adding it to your own projects is a lot of work, right? Maybe not. [Electronoobs] shows a speech board that lets you easily integrate 255 voice commands via serial communications with a host computer. You can see the review in the video below.
He had actually used a similar board before, but that version was a few years ago, and the new module has, of course, many new features. As of version 3.1, the board can handle 255 commands in a more flexible way than the older versions.
Six years ago, I wrote a post speaking out against the use of Slack for the instant messaging needs of FOSS projects. In retrospect, this article is not very good, and in the years since, another proprietary chat fad has stepped up to bat: Discord. It’s time to revisit this discussion.
In short, using Discord for your free software/open source (FOSS) software project is a very bad idea. Free software matters — that’s why you’re writing it, after all. Using Discord partitions your community on either side of a walled garden, with one side that’s willing to use the proprietary Discord client, and one side that isn’t. It sets up users who are passionate about free software — i.e. your most passionate contributors or potential contributors — as second-class citizens.
By choosing Discord, you also lock out users with accessibility needs, for whom the proprietary Discord client is often a nightmare to use. Users who cannot afford new enough hardware to make the resource-intensive client pleasant to use are also left by the wayside. Choosing Discord is a choice that excludes poor and disabled users from your community. Users of novel or unusual operating systems or devices (i.e. innovators and early adopters) are also locked out of the client until Discord sees fit to port it to their platform. Discord also declines service to users in countries under US sanctions, such as Iran. Privacy-concious users will think twice before using Discord to participate in your project, or will be denied outright if they rely on Tor or VPNs. All of these groups are excluded from your community.
Mozilla Firefox 95.0.2 was released on December 19, 2021; it fixes a single crash issue that affects certain AMD processors on Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 devices.
The new version of the Firefox web browser comes just a few days after the release of Firefox 95.0.1, and about two weeks after the release of the last major version release of 2021, Firefox 95.0.
Firefox 95.0.2 is already available. Installations should receive the update of the browser automatically, provided that automatic updates have not been turned off. Affected users, those on AMD devices on which Firefox crashed frequently recently, may want to run the update as soon as possible to address the issue.
From all of us at Firebird Project, we’d like to wish you a safe and happy holiday season and a peaceful and prosperous new year!
We are happy to announce that our GNS specification is currently under review by the IETF Independent Stream Editor (ISE). We have already received feedback from the ISE and made significant, mostly editorial changes to the specification.
We are inviting anyone reading this to review and provide feedback to the draft and send it to gnunet-developers@gnu.org . Even better, you could write an implementation in your favourite programming language.
Bootlin has been offering since 2017 a large set of ready to use pre-compiled cross-compilation toolchains at toolchains.bootlin.com. These toolchains are available for a wide range of CPU architectures and CPU variants, and support either the glibc, uClibc-ng or musl C libraries, where applicable.
It’s been quite some time since the last release of those toolchains, so we took the opportunity of this quiet period between Christmas and New Year to finally update the toolchains. We’re happy to announce that we have now published a total of 187 toolchains targeting 46 different CPU architecture variants. As the toolchain release name suggests, they are now built with Buildroot 2021.11.
Coq is a dependently typed language. This means that the types of the language may depend on the values of variables. In this respect, it is similar to other related languages such as Agda, Idris, F*, Lean, and others. Via the Curry-Howard correspondence, programs, properties and proofs are formalized in the same language.
Coq is developed in OCaml and shares some syntactic and conceptual similarity with it. Coq is a language containing many fascinating but difficult topics.
Here’s our recommended tutorials to learn Coq.
Why
You never lose control over your data and everything is encrypted …
• when stored on any device
• when transferred over a network
How
Using open-source products on your own devices instead of commercial services.
The idea behind rio is to simplify the process of importing data into R and exporting data from R. This process is, probably unnecessarily, extremely complex for beginning R users. Indeed, R supplies an entire manual describing the process of data import/export. And, despite all of that text, most of the packages described are (to varying degrees) out-of-date. Faster, simpler, packages with fewer dependencies have been created for many of the file types described in that document. rio aims to unify data I/O (importing and exporting) into two simple functions: import() and export() so that beginners (and experienced R users) never have to think twice (or even once) about the best way to read and write R data.
The core advantage of rio is that it makes assumptions that the user is probably willing to make. Specifically, rio uses the file extension of a file name to determine what kind of file it is. This is the same logic used by Windows OS, for example, in determining what application is associated with a given file type. By taking away the need to manually match a file type (which a beginner may not recognize) to a particular import or export function, rio allows almost all common data formats to be read with the same function.
By making import and export easy, it’s an obvious next step to also use R as a simple data conversion utility. Transferring data files between various proprietary formats is always a pain and often expensive. The convert function therefore combines import and export to easily convert between file formats (thus providing a FOSS replacement for programs like Stat/Transfer or Sledgehammer).
Import ODS (OpenDocument Spreadsheet) into R as a data frame. Also support writing data frame into ODS file.
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This package should be a silent member of rio, so that you don’t need to care about file format anymore.
Use the read.ods() function from the readODS package to read in your OpenDocument spreadsheets into R and put them into data frames: [...]
“Breaking the food chain that supports billions of creatures” is horrific to contemplate. It sends a powerful signal of trouble dead ahead. In that regard, scientists agree that what happens up North signals what’s in store to the South, and what’s happening up North is a gut-wrenching reality of life on a knife’s edge of catastrophe.
It’s never been more urgent and timely for the world to change its ways and abandon the current economic maelstrom that haunts all life on the planet. The pros and cons of capitalism’s experiment with neoliberal tendencies that enrich the few and bury the many should be debated in the context of strained resources throughout the biosphere, including all life forms. The GDP-to-infinity paradigm is barreling towards a wall of impending extinction. It’s already on a fast track.
But do these highbrow distinctions have any meaning anymore? Are there even “films” now? There’s still (barely) a Film Forum in NYC, where I would regularly migrate to in the late 70s from college in “film” deprived DC. Fortunately, there’s still Film Comment, a safe space for lofty talk about the current “cinema.” There are even a few holdout directors who insist on shooting on film and having their films run through actual projectors and shown on large, arced screens before live audiences. But they’re mostly insufferable filmmakers–Tarantino, Nolan, Villeneuve, Scott–whose films are artistically attenuated, their visions much smaller than the screens they’re projected on.
The last film I saw in a theater was Tarantino’s bloated, self-infatuated and nasty Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and, as so often with his movies, it was the soundtrack that kept me hitting the exit after the first hour. The last “film” that rewarded the hassle of getting to the theater (or “cinema,” as we used to say)–no easy journey from the rim of our little canyon–was an immaculately restored copy of “Barry Lyndon” (empty, but sumptuous) shown in a less-than-immaculately restored old movie palace (but no worse for that). The film, like most of Kubrick’s work, was a financial flop. It’s something of a mystery to me as to how Kubrick kept raising money to make expensive visual feasts that were commercial failures. More power to him. But after Barry Lyndon the big screens were commandeered by even emptier, much less sumptuous films made by a pair of his young acolytes, Spielberg and Lucas, who knew how to make the big screens pay even if they didn’t know (or care) how to make them say anything.
In my neighborhood at least, as this year draws to a close, that old Lone Ranger line, “Who was that masked man?,” again applies to just about anyone. In fact, as Delta cases rise in New York City and Omicron arrives on the scene in a startling fashion, indoor mask wearing in my own apartment building — from the halls to the elevators to the laundry room — has been reinstituted (not that I ever stopped) and the city’s indoor public-mask mandate is also being restored.
It’s been that sort of a year, but sadly, as we know, not everywhere in this all-too-unmasked, unvaccinated, disputatious, confrontational, conspiratorial, unnerved, and disturbed country of ours. A year of illness, death, mourning, and ever-increasing political chaos on a striking, if not unparalleled, scale threatens the American system as we’ve known it. Meanwhile, a new kind of weather threatens the world as we’ve known it.
Out of Office opens with the provocative assertion that you were not working from home during the pandemic, even if you were among the 42% of Americans who were able to work remotely.
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This was a fascinating book to read in conjunction with A World Without Email. Warzel and Petersen do the the structural and political analysis that I sometimes wish Newport would do more of, but as a result offer less concrete advice. Both, however, have similar diagnoses of the core problems of the sort of modern office work that could be done from home: it’s poorly organized, poorly managed, and desperately inefficient. Rather than attempting to fix those problems, which is difficult, structural, and requires thought and institutional cooperation, we’re compensating by working more. This both doesn’t work and isn’t sustainable.
Newport has a background in productivity books and a love of systems and protocols, so his focus in A World Without Email is on building better systems of communication and organization of work. Warzel and Petersen come from a background of reporting and cultural critique, so they put more focus on power imbalances and power-serving myths about the American dream. Where Newport sees an easy-to-deploy ad hoc work style that isn’t fit for purpose, Warzel and Petersen are more willing to point out intentional exploitation of workers in the guise of flexibility. But they arrive at some similar conclusions. The way office work is organized is not leading to more productivity. Tools like Slack encourage the public performance of apparent productivity at the cost of the attention and focus required to do meaningful work. And the process is making us miserable.
It’s a pity that more electronics enthusiasts haven’t taken the hobby to its ultimate level: making your own semiconductors. There are plenty of good reasons for that: chief among them is the huge expense involved in obtaining the necessary equipment. But for the sufficiently clever, there are ways around that.
[Zachary Tong] is dipping his toes into the DIY semiconductor world, and further to the goal of keeping costs to a hobbyist scale, is experimenting with laser doping of silicon. Doping is the process of adding impurities to silicon wafers in a controlled manner to alter the electrical properties of the semiconductor. [Zach]’s doping method is a more localized version of the simple thermal diffusion method, which drives a dopant like phosphorus into silicon using high temperatures, but instead of using a tube furnace, he’s using a fiber laser.
The video below shows his two-step process, which first blasts the silicon oxide layer off the wafer before doping with the laser shining through a bath of phosphoric acid. The process is admittedly fussy, and the results were mixed at best. [Zach]’s testing seems to suggest that some doping occurred, and it even looks like he managed to make something reasonably diode-like using the method.
When Dr. Wilson began his career in evolutionary biology in the 1950s, the study of animals and plants seemed to many scientists like a quaint, obsolete hobby. Molecular biologists were getting their first glimpses of DNA, proteins and other invisible foundations of life. Dr. Wilson made it his life’s work to put evolution on an equal footing.
“How could our seemingly old-fashioned subjects achieve new intellectual rigor and originality compared to molecular biology?” he recalled in 2009. He answered his own question by pioneering new fields of research.
As an expert on insects, Dr. Wilson studied the evolution of behavior, exploring how natural selection and other forces could produce something as extraordinarily complex as an ant colony. He then championed this kind of research as a way of making sense of all behavior — including our own.
Mark R. Levin’s American Marxism, a polemic against all manner of progressive ideas and movements, may rival its predecessors in popularity. Published this past summer, it spent weeks perched at or near the top of the best-seller list. But American Marxism represents a distinct dumbing-down of the kind of book-length attacks on the left that have appeared over the past century. Hayek and Bloom produced rigorous critiques of the liberal ideology and left policies they abhorred, which required them to take the time to learn about them. Levin just slaps the label of “Marxism” on the various political phenomena he detests—from critical race theory and “genderism” to environmental justice, teachers unions, and the bias of the liberal media. He also accuses the Democratic Party of embracing these ideas and institutions and “adopting Marx’s language of class warfare” in order to put its own “interests…before those of the country,” thereby destroying what makes (or made), in his view, America so great. American Marxism is a virtual digest of familiar attacks on all the favorite targets of the contemporary right, and it suggests the depths of the right’s commitment to depicting its opponents not just as wrongheaded but as sworn enemies of the nation itself. Of course, liberals and leftists revile conservatives, too. But most of us refrain from accusing the entire Republican Party of harboring treasonous thoughts or wanting to overthrow the republic (the January 6 insurrectionists notwithstanding).
We’ve just written about an ESP32 UWB board equipped with an ultra-wideband module designed for indoor positioning with about 10 centimeters accuracy, which should be good enough for many applications, but it turns out UWB sensors can be made to be much more accurate.
NOVELDA has just announced the UWB X4/X4F103 sensor and development kit that can detect submillimeter micro-movements such as breathing for human presence detection and does so at a really low power consumption of under 2mW.
Hospitals were overflowing with sick and dying patients, while ventilators and personal protective equipment were in short supply. Patients sat for hours or days in ambulances and hallways, waiting for a hospital bed to open up. Some never made it to the intensive care unit bed they needed.
I’m an infectious disease specialist and bioethicist at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus. I worked with a team nonstop from March into June 2020, helping my hospital and state get ready for the massive influx of COVID-19 cases we expected might inundate our health care system.
Jennifer Jinot didn’t expect to retire early from her role as an environmental health scientist for the federal government. She’d spent 26 years assessing the dangers of toxic chemicals for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The job could be frustrating but, more than that, rewarding.
Early in her career, Jinot evaluated the health impacts of secondhand smoke exposure. It took four years — a pace she remembers thinking was “crazy slow” — to develop a final risk assessment, published in 1993, that determined secondhand smoke causes lung cancer in adults and impairs the respiratory systems of children. The tobacco industry sued the agency. But, in the end, her work spurred changes to the law. The victory was invigorating for Jinot, who had long dreamed of doing what she calls “socially useful” science.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Sunday demanded that Congress act urgently to ensure the widespread distribution of N95 masks to U.S. households as the highly contagious Omicron variant continues to rip through the country, overwhelming already-strained hospitals nationwide.
“As we face the rapidly spreading Omicron variant, we should remember that not all face masks are created equal,” Sanders (I-Vt.), chair of the Senate Budget Committee, wrote on Twitter. “Congress must demand the mass production and distribution of N-95 masks, the most effective way to stop the spread of the Covid virus.”
“I made this Digital Civil Ulydighed because I have a child and she shouldn’t be left a future which involves forced vaccinations twice a year,” Bæk told TV2 News.
Bæk estimates that hundreds of people are part of the operation relating to the vaccination appointments. And it’s just the beginning, he contends.
The group will soon send a massive number of document access requests to ministries as a protest of ‘offentlighedsloven’ – the public access to information act.
He needed a routine eye exam, and the optometrist took forever. We had a 2 PM appointment, and we weren’t done until nearly 5:30 because the whole process was so slow. They even tried to skip over us in line when we were called because they ran out of room in the waiting area, forcing us to sit inside the store.
At the end, we got a hard copy of his prescription and left. I knew not to even ask for the PD measurement, because only three states in America mandate that they give it to you, while the other 47 let you leave with a partial prescription and figure out how to get that last number yourself. The FTC’s eyeglasses rule does not require a PD value, and few optometrists will tell it to you.
See, about a decade ago, online eyeglasses became a thing. No longer were savvy shoppers bound to the physical stores where Luxottica controls 80% of the market and Walmart controls most of the rest (although they also sell some Luxottica brands).
Budget-conscious shoppers found out how badly they were getting screwed over at the Big Boys, and they took their prescription and went online.
A woman who returned from a flight to Europe with more than $3,000 worth of gifts in her luggage found the contents gone — and replaced with dog food.
Cybersecurity researchers have offered a detailed glimpse into a system called DoubleFeature that’s dedicated to logging the different stages of post-exploitation stemming from the deployment of DanderSpritz, a full-featured malware framework used by the Equation Group.
DanderSpritz came to light on April 14, 2017, when a hacking group known as the Shadow Brokers leaked the exploit tool, among others, under a dispatch titled “Lost in Translation.” Also included in the leaks was EternalBlue, a cyberattack exploit developed by the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) that enabled threat actors to carry out the NotPetya ransomware attack on unpatched Windows computers.
Photography company Shutterfly announced this week that it had been hit by a ransomware attack that had impacted some services, making it the latest in a string of companies to be targeted by hackers looking for a payout.
The company announced the attack in a statement posted to its website on Sunday, noting the incident had impacted portions of the Lifetouch and BorrowLenses business, along with Groovebook, manufacturing and some corporate systems. Shutterfly.com and other related websites were not hit.
The Linux Foundation (LF) has little concern from within the open-source community over diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), according to the first open-source DEI study in at least four years.
LF, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, on Dec. 14 announced the release of its latest LF Research study, “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Open Source.” The study includes the results of qualitative interviews and a worldwide survey with more than 7,000 initial responses from the open-source community.
Tirthankar Ghosh: My formal education was in electrical engineering in the early ‘90s. After a few years of working as an electrical engineer, I decided to go back to school and got a master’s and a PhD in computer and electrical engineering.
Forget the expertly illustrated political sketches, cutting cartoons, and lampoons of Americana — what has appealed most to readers and meme recyclers for the last 30 years has been the concept of online anonymity.
Both appear tied together, for example, in renewed attempts to compel individuals to give their biometric data in order to access mobile phone services, as we saw in México and Paraguay in 2021, with fierce opposition from civil society. The Supreme Court in Mexico indefinitely suspended the creation of the Padrón Nacional de Usuarios de Telefonía Móvil (PANAUT), a national registry of mobile users associated with their biometric data, after the federal agency assigned to implement the registry filed a constitutional complaint affirming its budgetary autonomy and its duty to ensure users’ rights to privacy, data protection, and access to information. In Paraguay, the bill forcing users to register their biometrics to enable a mobile telephone service was rejected by a parliamentary commission and has been halted in Congress since then.
This post highlights a few relevant developments this year regarding communications privacy in Latin America in its relation with other rights, such as freedom of expression and assembly.
In the wake of Colombia’s tax reform proposal, demonstrations spread over the country in late April, reviving the social unrest and socio-economic demands that led people to the streets in 2019. Media has reported on government crackdowns against the protestors, including physical violence, missing persons, and deaths. Fundación Karisma has also stressed implications for the right to protest online and the violation of rights due to internet shutdowns and online censorship and surveillance. Amid the turmoil, EFF has put together a set of resources to help people navigate digital security in protest settings.
According to GSM Arena, the latest rumours claim Apple will ditch the physical SIM card slot beginning with the iPhone 15 series in 2023. Word comes from a Brazilian publication Blog, which says that the 2023′s Pro models (tentatively called iPhone 15 Pro) will not have physical SIM card slots and will rely entirely on eSIM technology for connectivity.
Given that iPhone 15 Pro models are still two years away from being released, this rumor should be treated with some skepticism until it is corroborated by other sources. Blog do iPhone is also not a well-established source of Apple rumors.
The rumour stems from a Brazilian Blog post, which says that the 2023 Pro models will not have physical SIM slots and will rely entirely on eSIM technology for connectivity. The source also claimed that these iPhones will come with dual e-SIM support. At the moment, Apple’s iPhones feature an eSIM along with a slot for a physical SIM card.
Sometimes tough questions about rights have to be asked even when central figures are far from sympathetic. Good case law is sometimes made by bad people (or, at least, people accused of doing terrible things).
U.S. Rep. Cori Bush declared Monday that lawmakers should commemorate the upcoming one-year anniversary of the deadly January 6 attack by passing her resolution to “investigate and expel the members of Congress who helped incite the violent insurrection at our Capitol.”
“They have broken their sacred oath of office.”
Last week, at a press conference with 500 journalists, Vladimir Putin reiterated his suspicions about American intentions toward Russia, recalling that one of President Woodrow Wilson’s advisers once endorsed the partition of Russia, writing more than a century ago: “It would be better for the whole world if a state in Siberia and another four states emerged in the European part of what is now greater Russia.” The quotation is real — it belongs to Edward House, Wilson’s informal chief adviser on European politics and diplomacy during World War I. To find out more about America’s proposal to carve up the Russian Empire (and to get some much-needed historical context), Meduza turned to historian Alexander Etkind, who recently authored a book about William Bullitt, the U.S. diplomat sent to negotiate with Lenin on behalf of the Paris Peace Conference. It was Bullitt who devised the plan in 1918 to partition Russia.
As the United States withdrew militarily from Afghanistan in August, US TV news interest in the plight of the country’s citizens spiked, often focusing on “the horror awaiting women and girls” (CNN Situation Room, 8/16/21) to argue against withdrawal (FAIR.org, 8/23/21).
Sharply contrasting with the $778 billion in new military spending authorized Monday by President Joe Biden, the U.S. Agency for International Development reportedly can’t find the funds to pay for the Biden administration’s effort to help vaccinate the world’s population against Covid-19, according to two agency officials interviewed by Politico.
In an article published Monday by the website, a pair of unnamed sources at USAID—the main goverment agency in charge of distributing coronavirus vaccine doses to COVAX, the global vaccine equity program—are concerned that efforts could stall in the coming spring should the administration fail to find new funding sources.
This is so bizarre. Last month we wrote about how the incredibly hypocritical oafs at Project Veritas were, on the one hand, screaming about their own press freedoms (for potentially legitimate reasons) while simultaneously trying to get a prior restraint order against the NY Times using the famed press silencers at the censorial thuggish law firm Clare Locke. Somewhat incredibly, on Christmas Eve a New York Supreme Court judge granted the request.
Throughout 2021, we have tried to raise awareness around the various policies and projects that the Central and State government have developed and introduced. By utilising the Right to Information Act, 2005 as well as the Information Technology (Guidelines for Intermediaries and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021 (‘IT Rules 2021’), we have tried to bring transparency & accountability in the working of every public authority and significant social media intermediary. These transparency efforts are towards ensuring that the gap between the public and public policy can be bridged and more people get to engage in processes that set the digital frameworks that govern their present and future.
State investigators conducted 58 inspections across 13 counties from 2015 to 2021 and said they found classified hazardous and medical waste in each store’s trash compactors, as well as customer information that should have been rendered indecipherable. The California DOJ estimates that Walmart’s unlawfully disposed waste totals 159,600 pounds or more than 1 million items each year.
The strategy has worked like a dream because Americans prize personal responsibility. Ronald Reagan was speaking for many of us when he said: “It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”
Which brings us to climate change. Once again, it is individual consumers and not the fossil fuel industry who are being blamed for the potential destruction of our planet. Only this time it isn’t just powerful corporations and their trade groups wagging the finger at individuals for not doing enough to halt global warming. It is also many climate change activists, who continue to press individuals to do more, to, for instance, purchase expensive solar panels for their homes.
The treachery of the Republicans
The country, but especially its political class, is divided sharply as if on the eve of civil war. The so-called Republican senators are united in their opposition to any government measures to diminish the consumption (perpetual burning) of fossil fuels, prime causes of climate chaos.
A new report out Monday shows that 2021 continued the trend of annual climate devastation worldwide that is costing the global economy hundreds of billions of dollars as planet-heating emissions unleash exactly the kind of damage scientists have warned about for decades.
“The costs of climate change have been grave this year, both in terms of eye-watering financial losses but also in the death and displacement of people around the world.”
Most contemporary satirical films are compared to Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove: How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Bomb.” It is the standard by which critics and viewers decide if the satire succeeded. Yet in the past decades no film has come close to matching the sharpness and wit of the classic.
However, Adam McKay and David Sirota’s “Don’t Look Up” nearly equals the potency of “Dr. Strangelove,” and as time passes, “Don’t Look Up” may prove to be even more sophisticated and meaningful.McKay and Sirota recognize climate disruption is hurtling humanity toward mass extinction, and corporate, media, and political elites in the United States would rather not act than jeopardize their self-interest. Developing a farce about their lack of a response would probably have a limited impact. So McKay and Sirota take what is most distressing and infuriating about climate inaction and map it onto a story about a comet hurtling toward Earth.
However, since the full arc of the Climate Change story is several decades long, for dramatic punch DON’T LOOK UP has compressed that timeline down to six months — from first detection to final impact — by being an allegorical satire where the real problem of Climate Change has been substituted for in the movie’s story by a planet-killing comet larger than the Chicxulub bolide of 66Mya heading straight toward Earth.
Mass media, Trump-style American government, Gates-Zuckerberg tech fantasy grandiosity and Bezos-Musk-Branson billionaire space privatization fantasy (the last two types of fantasts being wrapped up in one character), are all deliciously eviscerated in this movie.
The new feature film “Don’t Look Up,” a dark comedy satirizing the complacency and mendacity of elites in the face of an existential threat to human civilization, is now the most popular movie on Netflix worldwide, according to data compiled by FlixPatrol.
“Absolutely love to see a climate movie hitting this huge a global audience on the world’s largest platform,” journalist David Sirota, who co-created the story for the film, tweeted Monday. “An amazing success for the team that made the movie and for everyone who has been spreading the word.”
On Christmas Eve, Louise and I watched on Netflix the brilliant Don’t Look Up! starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, written and produced by Adam McKay and David Sirota.
As the impacts of fossil fuels and air pollution on the world’s climate became ever more apparent in 2021, it was easy to miss some of the slower-brewing stories of the past year.
That’s in part because it was a year marked by disruption by climate-related disasters, as many reading this likely experienced personally. We now live in a world that’s 1.1 degrees hotter, where one out of every three Americans lived in a federally-declared disaster area because of a flood, wildfire, or other weather-related catastrophe — over the past summer alone.
The Biden administration inherits the interconnected climate and biodiversity crises from predecessors of both political parties, and now is embarking on an ambitious, multi-faceted campaign to find solutions. The stalled Build Back Better Act, representing the administration’s priorities, places heavy emphasis on promoting and subsidizing utility-scale renewable energy projects on public lands, while largely missing out on the opportunity to focus on distributed renewable solutions sited in urban and/or already developed areas to avoid environmental impacts and preserve public land.
Time magazine recently chose Elon Musk—the “richest private citizen in history” and the CEO of rocket firm SpaceX and electric vehicle company Tesla—as its “2021 Person of the Year”. In the first paragraph of the lengthy profile of Musk accompanying the accolade, we learn that the man “tosses satellites into orbit and harnesses the sun”, sends the stock market soaring and swooning with a “flick of his finger,” and also “likes to live-tweet his poops.”
In a far cry from the austere New Year celebrations imposed by Covid 20 years later, fireworks, music and lights blazed out at midnight January 1, 2002 to mark the biggest monetary switch in history.
On the first day of the new year, Eric Adams will be sworn in as the 110th mayor of New York City. The former police captain, state senator, and borough president has, in one sense, taken an entirely conventional path to one of the most celebrated offices in America. He painstakingly scaled the ladders of city and state government, working corporate boardrooms and Democratic club dinners, forging alliances with outer borough pastors and Manhattan finance titans alike.
Yet, there is more than just Senator Joe Manchin’s coal and Omicron fears in our stockings this holiday season. There are some reasons to be hopeful too.
The first reason to be hopeful is — us. We the people.
The Grayzone — Leaked documents have revealed a state-sponsored influence operation designed to undermine critics of the British government’s coronavirus policies by astroturfing a prominent founder of the BreadTube clique of “anti-fascist” YouTube influencers.
Biden has never been the sharpest knife in the drawer and now he finds a knife in his back. However, the idea that any of this is surprising is just plain wrong and it’s so obvious to everyone on the outside. Biden acting betrayed by Manchin gives a message that Biden is naive and completely unable to read the room. That is true. But it also demonstrates just how weak Biden is. He has no intention of being a President and he likely never wanted to be one in the first place.
That doesn’t mean Biden didn’t lie to the American people by promising Build Back Better. He can run all he wants but the fact is he’s the President and this failure falls squarely on his shoulders. However, I would push back on two assumptions I see going around. The first assumption is that Biden is toast politically. If you’re foolish enough to put hope in Joe Biden then you aren’t paying attention. The American people know as much. The second question I have is if Biden really wanted to get any of this done in the first place.
Rep. Pramila Jayapal warned her fellow Democratic lawmakers and President Joe Biden on Sunday that failure to deliver their promised social spending and climate agenda could have disastrous political consequences, feeding voter disillusionment and leaving millions of people without badly needed economic aid amid a deadly pandemic.
“Democrats must prove that their voices and their votes matter, and that we can produce tangible economic assistance.”
Once upon a time, in the ancient kingdom of Lydia, a shepherd called Gyges found a magic ring, which, when rotated on his finger, made him invisible. So, Gyges walked unseen into the royal palace, seduced the queen, murdered the king, and installed himself as ruler. If you were to discover such a ring or another device that granted you exorbitant power, Socrates asked, would it be wise to use it to do or get whatever you want?
About a year ago, I wrote about how 2020 had been a year of physicians behaving badly—or perhaps I should say more badly than even before the pandemic, when they behaved plenty bad. Of course, it’s been long documented on this blog and elsewhere how badly certain doctors and scientists have been behaving, be they quacks, antivaxxers, grifters, or cranks, but the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic provided a golden opportunity for quackery to the point that “magic dirt” and nebulized hydrogen peroxide (for example) have been peddled as cures for COVID-19 and turbocharged antiscience conspiracy theories even more than they had been a year ago. As I sat down yesterday to consider what to write—too many possible topics, I fear!—I rapidly encountered a piece of misinformation about vaccines of the sort that has dominated 2021 and looks to continue to be a major antivaccine technique to spread fear, uncertainty, and doubt (a.k.a. FUD) about COVID-19 vaccines in 2022; so I thought I’d discuss it now. I had thought about saving this topic for a year-end post next week, but it’s on Joe Mercola’s website, which means that it will disappear by tomorrow. The reason is that a few months ago, in a pique about “censorship”, über-quack “Dr.” Mercola removed all the articles from his website and set all new articles to “expire” and disappear after 48 hours. (Mercola also set his robots.txt file to exclude all his articles from being archived by the almighty Wayback Machine over at Archive.org). So I thought I should write about Jessica Rose now, as she appears in an article from Sunday titled “What the VAERS Data Tell Us About COVID Jab Safety“.
Disquietingly, Congress was nearly split on the vote. While 219 voted in favor of the resolution, 212 voted against it. What is so objectionable about the resolution, which was introduced by Rep. Ilhan Omar, that prompted a ‘nay’ vote by such a large number of American representatives?
The resolution – ‘Combating International Islamophobia Act’ – merely called for establishing the position of a “Special Envoy for monitoring and combating Islamophobia”. Arguably, HR 5665 would have not passed, were it not for the embarrassing episode last September, when Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado mouthed off such obscene and racist language, in which she suggested that Rep. Omar was a terrorist.
As anti-choice lawmakers ramp up attacks on reproductive freedom across the United States, new reporting on Monday raised alarm about Big Tech companies limiting access to scientifically accurate content from abortion rights organizations while allowing the spread of misinformation.
“When there are efforts or blockages that are imposed by these companies, that impacts our ability to get the word out.”
Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, is one of the very few establishment figures to denounce the judicial lynching of Julian Assange. Melzer’s integrity and courage, for which he has been mercilessly attacked, stand in stark contrast to the widespread complicity of many human rights and press organizations, including PEN America, which has become a de facto subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.
Nils Melzer, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture, is one of the very few establishment figures to denounce the judicial lynching of Julian Assange. Melzer’s integrity and courage, for which he has been mercilessly attacked, stand in stark contrast to the widespread complicity of many human rights and press organizations, including PEN America, which has become a de facto subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee.
The whereabouts of a prominent Afghan TV station owner remains unknown a day after he was arrested by the Taliban on Sunday, according to the executive’s son.
Mohammad Arif Noori, the founder and owner of Noorin TV, one of Afghanistan’s leading private TV networks, was taken from his home in Kabul on Sunday afternoon, according to his son Roman Noori.
The younger Noori accused Taliban forces of “raiding” and searching his family’s house without a warrant before taking his father to an unknown location.
Don’t kid yourselves, techbros. Predictive policing is regular policing, only with confirmation bias built in. The only question for citizens is whether or not they want to pay tech companies millions to give them the same racist policing they’ve been dealing with since policing began.
Compared to many other part-time faculty, I am lucky—I still have a job teaching the same number of classes. Those who lost their jobs are taking a 100% cut in pay.
In a May 8, 2021 union bulletin, the leaders of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) 2121, representing CCSF faculty, described the one-year agreement as consisting of “progressive concessions on salaries” in which the cuts “range from 4% to 11%,” a sacrifice that would preserve jobs. Their description grossly understated the impacts of the cuts on part-time faculty.[1]
In the first full year of the Covid pandemic, Elon Musk’s wealth skyrocketed from $25 billion to $150 billion. Jeff Bezos became the first person on the planet to possess a fortune of more than $200 billion. The Financial Times has been fretting all of this past year about a crisis in superyacht production, and lately it’s been reporting on another crisis afflicting the rich. Flexjet and NetJets, two of the most well-known private-jet charter companies operating in the United States, recently stopped accepting new clients because they simply can’t acquire enough jets to accommodate the explosive growth of the billionaire class. Not only is this eye-popping wealth not being hidden; it’s being flaunted. After being propelled by his Blue Origin rocket for fewer minutes than the lifetime of a female mayfly, Bezos enthusiastically thanked Amazon’s employees and customers for allowing him to act as if he’d joined the ranks of astronauts like John Glenn and Neil Armstrong. Our new Gilded Age of obscene wealth and arrogance stands in stark contrast to the everyday struggles faced by tens of millions of exhausted workers fighting just to stay healthy and alive, avoid eviction, make the next month’s rent payment, or find the kind of job that will leave enough free time to help their children with homework. In April, 3.8 million Americans quit their jobs, which prompted headlines about “the Great Resignation” and “the Big Quit.” By July, that number would climb to over 4 million in a single month, bested again in August (4.27 million) and then again in September (4.43 million). By October, pundits in the mainstream media began invoking a new trope, “Striketober,” as 10,000 workers walked off the job in the first strike against John Deere since 1986, with another 60,000 film production workers and 50,000 health care workers at Kaiser Health threatening to strike, along with dozens of small and medium strikes and work stoppages scattered across the country (including at Kellogg, Nabisco, and Catholic Health, in Buffalo). Although there’s no doubt that the abysmal treatment at the hands of absentee corporate bosses during the pandemic has led individual workers to resign in droves—and has caused a small uptick in strikes—anger at the elite and collective action by workers predate Covid.1
It seems very important to mention, because of the way this man is already being remembered by the world’s pundits and politicians. As anyone could have predicted, Tutu is being remembered as the great opponent of apartheid in his native South Africa, who was one of the most recognized and most eloquent leaders of the anti-apartheid struggle there, for most of his adult life.
Being a leader in the movement to end apartheid in South Africa was probably the greatest achievement of the man’s life work, and it should come as a surprise to no one that this is the focus of his many obituaries, along with the Nobel he was awarded in 1984. After Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, he was remembered by the establishment in much the same way, as a leader of the movement against apartheid in the US. The fact that he had become one of the most well-known and well-loved voices of the antiwar movement in the United States and around the world at the time of his death has largely been written out of the history books, a very inconvenient truth.
Racism and policing go hand-in-hand. It’s been this way ever since police forces were created for the purpose of tracking down escaped slaves and returning them to their owners. Flash forward 150 years and very little has changed other than the ending of slavery.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the South African anti-apartheid icon, has died at the age of 90. In 1984 Desmond Tutu won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work fighting to end white minority rule in South Africa. After the fall of apartheid, Archbishop Tutu chaired the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where he pushed for restorative justice. He was a leading voice for human rights and peace around the world. He opposed the Iraq War and condemned the Israeli occupation in Palestine, comparing it to apartheid South Africa. We reair two interviews Archbishop Tutu did on Democracy Now!, as well as two speeches on the Iraq War and the climate crisis.
We’ve long written about how you don’t really own what you buy in the modern era. Books, games, and other entertainment can stop working on a dime due to crappy DRM. Game consoles you’ve purchased can find themselves suddenly with fewer features. Or worse, hardware you’ve bought thinking you’d own it for a decade can wind up being little more than a pricey paperweight.
For years a growing number of US towns and cities have been forced into the broadband business thanks to US telecom market failure. Frustrated by high prices, lack of competition, spotty coverage, and terrible customer service, some 750 US towns and cities have explored some kind of community broadband option. And while the telecom industry routinely likes to insist these efforts always end in disaster, that’s never actually been true. While there certainly are bad business plans and bad leaders, studies routinely show that such services not only see far better customer satisfaction scores than large private ISPs, they frequently offer better service at lower, more transparent pricing than many private providers.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has been participating in WIPO’s Digital Access Service (DAS) for the exchange of certified copies of priority documents since 2018 (see our earlier report here). Initially, the EPO’s participation in DAS did not affect pre-existing arrangements through which the EPO automatically obtained copies of Japanese, Chinese, Korean and US priority applications even when a DAS code was not provided.
However, the EPO announced in March 2020 that its arrangement with the Japanese patent office would cease on 31 December 2021 and that the EPO would no longer automatically obtain copies of Japanese priority documents from 1 July 2020 onwards (for further details, please see the EPO announcements here and here).
The EPO has now announced that it will also be ceasing its arrangements with the Chinese, Korean and US patent offices on 30 June 2023 and will no longer automatically obtain copies of Chinese, Korean and US priority documents from 1 January 2022 onwards (for further details, please see the EPO announcements here and here).
In early November Pearce IP reported on a number of Federal Court decisions which appear to indicate flaws in the Australian Patent Office’s interpretation of the eligibility requirements for a patent term extension (PTE). Orders made yesterday in the Biogen v Pharmacor (Tecfidera®) litigation refusing Biogen’s interlocutory injunction application may add to that trend, although the reasons have not yet been published. The orders also indicate that the tide may be turning against patentees in relation to interlocutory injunctions.
[...]
In her first substantive patent judgment, Justice Rofe refused the interlocutory injunction application. The judgment was not published pending an opportunity for the parties to seek suppression of any confidential information in it. As such, we do not yet know the Court’s findings on the above issues. The reasons for judgment will be published on 23 December 2021, and will no doubt contain important lessons for patent litigators and prosecutors alike.
However at a more general level, the Pharmacor’s successful resistance of an interlocutory injunction seems to at least widen the hole in what has been a largely impenetrable interlocutory injunction net for generics to date. In recent years, Courts hearing such applications have placed increasing emphasis on the strength (or lack thereof) of the infringement case when viewed in the context of the invalidity arguments. We assume that the strength of Pharmacor’s invalidity arguments was a key factor for the Court in this case too. Additionally, recent damages inquiry cases have highlighted the difficulties in establishing and quantifying the damage to a generic if an injunction is wrongly granted, with several judges sounding warnings to this effect in interlocutory injunction contexts. It may be that Rofe J’s judgment in this case indicates a further application of these principles to limit cases in which interlocutory injunctions will be granted in pharmaceutical cases.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has announced that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Digital Access Service (DAS) will be used to manage the electronic retrieval of European (EP) priority applications beginning on January 1, 2022.
The EPO Board of Appeal confirmed on Tuesday, December 21, that European patents must name human inventors, in a defeat for the legal team behind the Artificial Inventor Project.
The decision emerged from an appeal seeking to have the AI tool DABUS recognised as an inventor.
The board has yet to issue a written decision but explained that under the European Patent Convention (EPC), an inventor had to be a person with legal capacity.
Where no such natural person exists, there can be no patent, the board contended.
Ryan Abbott, the lead for DABUS’s legal team, commented in a social media post: “The board recognised this means that there is no way to patent AI-generated inventions under the EPC despite widespread support, including from EPO, for protecting such inventions.”
Speaking to Managing IP earlier this month, Marcus Rieck, one of the lawyers representing the DABUS team at the EPO, expressed hope that the office might find a solution to this problem.
His comments came after Germany’s Federal Patent Court ruled that applicants must name human inventors but could specify if AI tools were also involved in the inventive process.
The edict demonstrated that intellectual property offices were keen to find a solution to the problem of how to protect AI-generated inventions, Rieck said.
The EPO appeal was the DABUS team’s final shot in what has been something of a breakthrough year for the AI tool.
A judge at Australia’s Federal Court ruled in favour of recognising DABUS as an inventor in July, leading to an appeal from the country’s IP office.
The team has also filed an appeal at the UK Supreme Court against the refusal to grant a UK patent naming DABUS as the inventor.
The England and Wales Court of Appeal ruled in a two-to-one decision in September that a successful patent application required a human inventor.
Notably, Lord Justice Colin Birss dissented, although his opinion turned mostly on points of procedure.
The board that oversees European Patent Office appeals said on Tuesday that only humans can be listed as inventors on patents, shooting down a scientist who is trying to get an artificial intelligence machine named on patents.
Under the European Patent Convention, patents can only be granted with humans as inventors, according to the Legal Board of Appeal. The board was reviewing an appeal filed by Stephen Thaler, who has been trying to get patents around the world for inventions by his AI machine called DABUS — Device for Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience — that did not involve human intervention….
Implementers say the review gives them an opportunity to drive necessary change in the post-Unwired Planet patent stronghold
In Germany, Allen & Overy hired former Hogan Lovells partner Stephan Neuhaus as partner in an important move to strengthen the firm’s presence in Düsseldorf. Then, in November, IP boutique Finnegan Henderson Farabow Garrett & Dunner became the latest US firm to pitch up on German soil.
Hey The North Face! Hi, how are you? We keep meeting like this and I really wish it would stop. As you may recall, last month, the “brand protection” company that you hired, Yellow Brand Protection, currently owned by Corsearch, sent us a completely bogus legal threat claiming that our news story from nine years earlier — about someone you threatened for creating a parody image of a patch (not an actual patch and not for sale) saying “Hey Fuck Face” — was somehow infringing.
INTA has published the November-December, 2021 (Vol. 111 No. 6) issue of The Trademark Reporter (TMR). [pdf here]. Willard Knox, Editor-in-Chief, summarizes the contents as follows (and below): “In this issue, we offer our readers the 2021 Ladas Memorial Award-winning articles in the Student category—one on cultural misappropriation and the other on obscene, profane, and vulgar trademarks—and a review of an essential one-volume treatise on likelihood of confusion.”
A GitHub user who goes by the name “Widevinedump” has published several repositories that allow people to download HD video from popular streaming platforms, including Disney+, Amazon, and Netflix. The code appears to be the real deal but the ‘free’ use is fairly limited and may not be very secure either.
Triller’s legal campaign against sites that allegedly streamed the Jake Paul vs. Ben Askren boxing match last April has suffered another setback. Alleged pirate streaming site Online2LiveStream has been sued twice by the promotor but in common with the first dismissal, a court has thrown the second case out after Triller failed to comply with the court’s orders.
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