Linux systems can provide more help with your schedule than just reminding you what day today is. You have a lot of options for displaying calendars — some that are likely to prove helpful and others that just might boggle your mind.
If you're okay with using a Linux laptop, which you should be, the Librem line of laptops would make a very solid investment. Combine the specs with the incredibly well-built hardware and the privacy features, and you have a laptop that is sure to please most business users that are ready to make the jump to Linux.
So after a couple of pretty small rc's, rc7 is much too big for my taste. By this time in the release, things should have calmed down more than they apparently have.
That said, I do blame most of it on the timing variation, notably how rc6 didn't have any networking updates in it, and the rc5 network pull was right after the rc4 release. As a result, we have 2.5 weeks worth of networking stuff, and that makes rc7 look artificially bigger.
That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
Well, I'm sticking to it at least for now. I'm still not *planning* on an rc8 this release, because while rc7 is bigger than usual, nothing in here makes me go "Hmm, maybe we should delay the release". But let's see what happens this upcoming week - if next Sunday comes around, and there's lots of new stuff, I'll reconsider then.
Anyway, rc7 may be about 45% networking, but there's certainly other things in there too. There's the usual driver updates: while networking is a bulk of it on that side too, we also have gpu, pinctrl, rdma, iio, and misc other fixes.
Linus Torvalds is pretty sure he’ll release version 4.16 of the Linux kernel next week.
The development cycle for this version has been quiet. So quiet that Linus’ weekly pronouncements have been brief, dull and unremarkable, just like each weekly code rollup.
But in the last week, Torvalds told the kernel mailing list on Sunday March 25th, “rc7 is much too big for my taste.”
“By this time in the release, things should have calmed down more than they apparently have.”
The problem this week was the arrival of “2.5 weeks worth of networking stuff, and that makes rc7 look
Many AI tools today are difficult to implement and require significant domain expertise. Acumos is the first to give users a visual workflow to design AI and ML applications, as well as a marketplace for freely sharing AI solutions and data models. The Acumos framework is user-centric and simple to explore. The Acumos Marketplace packages various components as microservices and allows users to export ready-to-launch AI applications as containers to run in public clouds or private environments.
AMD's GPUOpen group in cooperation with Khronos today is announcing V-EZ, a new project of theirs designed to make the barrier to entry for the Vulkan graphics API lower. V-EZ provides a middleware layer and simplified API for making it easier to get started with Vulkan development.
With the latest Etnaviv DRM code there is now performance counters support for being able to read the hardware counters via perfmon domains. The patches have now been published for making use of these Vivante performance counters from user-space.
Besides DriConf or the newer ADRICONF, another tool for open-source Radeon Linux driver users for monitoring their GPU(s) is RadeonTop. RadeonTop 1.1 is now available as the independent project's latest feature release.
The Vega 12 Linux kernel patches posted last week will now be appearing in the Linux 4.17 kernel with the work having been merged into DRM-Next.
Details on what the Vega 12 GPU is remain scarce, but most readers are speculating that it's either for a discrete mobile GPU or a successor to the Radeon RX 500 "Polaris" GPUs.... Time will tell, but based on the timing of these kernel patches, hopefully we won't need to wait too much longer to find out.
Intel has announced it is ‘discontinuing’ the ‘Intel Graphics Update Tool for Linux‘.
The tool (which was known as “Intel Graphics Installer for Linux” for a while) was created in 2013 to give Linux users a reliable way to upgrade to the latest stable firmware, driver and other components for Intel graphics chips.
Owners of newer Intel hardware often had to use the tool in order to get the most from their GPU when using Linux.
Ubuntu and Fedora were the officially supported distros the tool targeted, but users of related distributions, including Linux Mint, often made use of it too.
With the Linux 4.16 kernel release expected in just a matter of days, here are some fresh file-system benchmarks on this near-final kernel using a solid-state drive and hard drive while testing out the popular mainline file-system choices of Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS.
This round of reference benchmarks provides a look at how these four leading mainline Linux file-system choices are comparing on a consumer-grade HDD and SSD. Coming in the days ahead are also some fresh NVMe SSD tests using the Linux 4.16 kernel, including when pairing two Samsung 960 EVO 500GB NVMe SSDs in RAID0/RAID1.
Kali Linux is undoubtedly one of the best operating systems ever built for ethical hackers. It is the most advanced penetration testing operating system based on Linux. Kali Linux has a lot of tools available to learn and practice. If you are a good programmer and wants to become an ethical hacker, Kali Linux got all the tools you are looking for. Here is the list of Top 10 among all popular Kali Linux tools.
When you need to save a code snippet or a URL, an idea or a quote, you probably fire up a text editor or turn to a desktop or web-based note-taking tool. But those aren't your only options. If you spend time working in terminal windows, you can use one of the many note-taking tools available for the Linux command line.
Let's take a look at of those four apps.
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Do you want to start a blog to share your latest adventures with various software frameworks? Do you love a project that is poorly documented and want to fix that? Or do you just want to create a personal website?
Many people who want to start a blog have a significant caveat: lack of knowledge about a content management system (CMS) or time to learn. Well, what if I said you don't need to spend days learning a new CMS, setting up a basic website, styling it, and hardening it against attackers? What if I said you could create a blog in 30 minutes, start to finish, with Hugo?
Ternimal (not terminal, yes, we also read it as terminal the first time) is a simple, very flexible program that simulates an animated lifeform in your terminal using Unicode block symbols. It simply colors distance fields from a segment of a meandering path.
It works in most Linux terminal emulators and with most monospaced fonts, and has been tested on Linux (almost all terminal emulators render ternimal flawlessly), Mac OS as well as Windows.
One Wine related project I completely missed writing anything about is DXVK [GitHub], a Vulkan-based compatibility layer for Direct3D 11 for use with Wine.
I've been keeping an eye on it, but I only realised today I've not even put up even a most basic article letting people know it exists. It's seeing rather fast-paced development too, with a new version being released only yesterday.
GZDoom, the enhanced Doom engine has a new release out to add in new features, bug fixes and collect some hardware information.
This new release adds in dynamic spot lights, it adjusts Mod-defined aliases no longer permanently change CVARs (Console Variables), it fixes 'precise' rendering in OpenGL, new rocket smoke sprites by Talon1024 and also a new Materials Shader system to allow textures to show new properties such as glossiness and specularity, affected by dynamic lights, or with PBR, reflecting their direct surroundings. As usual it also fixes plenty of other bugs, so while it's not a huge release in terms of new features it's good to see the project continue to see some spit and polish.
Tala [Kickstarter], a beautiful point and click adventure game that blends together nature photography and traditional animation is currently on Kickstarter and they've added Linux support with their demo.
Note: I did some basic testing for the developer, to enable them to make sure their build actually worked.
For those who have fond memories of Marble Madness, you might want to drop what you're doing and check out The Little Ball That Could [Steam, Official Site]. Heck, even if you've never played Marble Madness you would be…mad to miss out on this one.
As said above, the Beta update is currently only for Windows and it's Steam-only (GOG doesn't really deal with Beta versions like this), with the full update expected sometime in the next 2 weeks for Linux, Mac and Windows.
Plasma 5.12.2 brings in a lot of real, noticeable improvements, and it's a delight to see a living, breathing desktop environment that is pushing hard to become better and more accessible to its users. That said, the expectation of overnight miracles should be avoided, otherwise, you will, a bit like me, wrestle (naked) with frustration. Plasma is on the right course, but it will take a while before it becomes the dreamland bucket of code we want it to be. But the sooner the better, because competition, history and relevance won't wait.
I know it's easier to fix small things - but the ones that need attention and focus are the big ones. The things that ordinary people will see first, no matter how seemingly trivial they might seem. This is even more important for new users, because those already dabbling in Plasma will have made custom configurations that already cater to their needs and work around the system inefficiencies and problems. But then, if it were so easy, I'd have nothing to write and complain. I'm happy. Catch you in the sequel.
Plasma Mobile reference images are based on halium, which uses the propietary binary blobs to make use of phone hardware. This requires the libhybris which allows us to use bionic based binary blobs in the traditional libc based environment. Halium based devices also use very old vendor-provided kernel trees, these vendor trees generally range from version 3.4 to 3.18, most of the kernel versions listed here are already marked as EOL on kernel.org.
Last weekend the core KDE Connect development team met for a sprint at the amazing Verse office in Barcelona. It was an amazing opportunity to get to know each other (most of us have never met before) and discuss the future of KDE Connect in an amazing and productive atmosphere.
It's a common misconception that Linux Mint, is entirely free; just for example. This statement could be taken as true, if looked at from the perspective of cost to the end-user, you; however not if taken at the perspective of free meaning freedom.
Many packages, drivers, and applications used in modern GNU/Linux distributions are not open-sourced, and therefore not really 'free' in the same sense.
There are some users who make the switch to GNU/Linux, away from systems like Windows and MacOS, for the explicit purpose of using only free software, operating systems, drivers, and everything in between, as a way of 'taking back their computing' or other similar concepts.
Whatever the reason one may have, there are a number of distributions to choose from, so here's a few to pique your curiosity.
In this review I have only really scratched the surface. Earlier, I mentioned that you can use the Cards package manager to build packages from source. That was something I wanted to cover in this review, and I did test the "ports method" in a virtual environment. Sadly, I failed at the first hurdle: the very first package, xorg-server, wouldn't install because of a missing dependency (xcb).
At that point I decided to give up on NuTyX's more esoteric features. There was another interesting option I had wanted to check - moving from SysV to systemd - but, frankly, I was slowly losing the will to live.
That is not to say that I had enough of NuTyX. I am happy with the NuTyX MATE install on my laptop. True, I didn't get everything to work but it does feel like it is my own distro. Plus, it is the most responsive distro I have ever used. The system boots very fast, searching and installing packages takes just a few seconds and even large applications such as Firefox and GIMP launch instantly. I am not sure if that is the result of less bloat but it sure is a pleasant experience.
In summary, if you like tinkering and are interested in Linux From Scratch then NuTyX is an excellent place to start. Getting everything to work will take plenty of effort and the project's documentation isn't great, but there is a forum with a friendly and helpful developer. Also, there are plenty of interesting features to explore. You will need stamina though - lots of it!
In this briefing, Red Hat’s OpenShift Product Managers Marc Curry and Steve Speicher discussed what ‘s in the upcoming release of OpenShift Container Platform v3.9. The release notes, downloads, and other information are available on the Red Hat OpenShift customer portal.
Today marks 25 years since Red Hat was incorporated by Bob Young and Marc Ewing, and to help us celebrate, State of North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper and City of Raleigh Mayor Nancy McFarlane have declared March 26, 2018, as Red Hat Day across North Carolina and in Raleigh, respectively.
Red Hat was established in 1993 and has remained a proud resident of North Carolina since. We grew from our first corporate headquarters in Durham to North Carolina State University’s Centennial Campus to our current global headquarters in downtown Raleigh, “the open source city.”
CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise now available on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform
CloudBees. Inc, the hub of enterprise Jenkins and DevOps, recently announced the availability of CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise on Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform.
This installment of the Heroes of Fedora series will focus on work done on Fedora 26 Beta release.
Welcome back to another installation of Heroes of Fedora, where we’ll look at the stats concerning the testing of Fedora 26 Beta. The purpose of Heroes of Fedora is to provide a summation of testing activity on each milestone release of Fedora. So, without further ado, let’s get started!
The most prominent change in the Slax 9.4 release is a new method for installing apps, which makes it a breeze for newcomers to install popular Linux apps, but only if the developer will add a placeholder for them in the distribution's app drawer (see the attached screenshot for details).
According to the developer, Slax will now show launchers for not-installed apps, which, when clicked, they will fetch and install the respective application from the official software repositories. The first such app installer are available for the VLC Media Player and VoteCoin anonymous cryptocurrency wallet.
Following the very short RC period, the lightweight Slax 9.4 distribution is now available.
Since being revived last year as a lightweight Linux distribution now based on Debian rather than Slackware and shifting to Fluxbox and Compton for its desktop stack, the 9.4 release continues pulls in the latest Debian stable package updates.
Ubuntu 18.04 LTS release date, new features, upgrade procedure and everything important associated with it.
Snapcraft 2.40 comes with a bunch of goodies for application developers who want to package their apps as Snaps for easy deployment across multiple Linux-based operating systems, including Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, Fedora, OpenSuSE, Arch Linux, Solus, and Gentoo Linux.
Among the new features and improvements implemented in this release, we can mention initial support for bases to possibly target a new core base snap, for example, which is done by adding the "base: 'newcore'" entry to your snapcraft.yaml configuration file (where 'newcore' represents the new core base snap version).
CircleCI helps developers test software and deploy it quickly but at a high standard. It is a key element of many developer’s DevOps toolsets. Ricardo Feliciano wears two hats – one as an avid community advocate (under the guise of FelicianoTech) and the other as Developer Evangelist at CircleCI. Ricardo joined the Snapcraft Summit in January to advance CircleCI’s plans to publish a snap. That snap has now been published and is available in the store now. Ricardo has also blogged about his experience on CircleCI’s own blog.
Despite being an Ubuntu user for a long time, he really appreciates the efforts Snapcraft and snaps are making to bridge the cross-distro gap.
If you’re a regular visitor to Snapcraft.io or any of its associated sites, you will have noticed a change recently to the logo and overall branding which has been in development over the past few months. We have developed a stand-alone brand for Snapcraft, the command line tool for writing and publishing software as a snap. One of the challenges we faced was how to create a brand for Snapcraft that stands out in its own right yet fitted in with the existing Ubuntu brand and be a part of the extended family. To achieve this, we took reference from the Suru visual language. The Suru philosophy stems from our brand values alluding to Japanese culture. Working with paper metaphors we were inspired by origami as a solid and tangible foundation.
Ubuntu 18.04 is codenamed Bionic Beaver. This is not surprising considering the logic behind the codename and versioning of Ubuntu releases.
The company is currently working hard on Pop!_OS Linux 18.04, a release that's based on Canonical's upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system and built around the GNOME desktop environment. One essential feature of the next Pop!_OS Linux release appears to be support for Nvidia's Titan V GPUs.
"We now have support for the NVIDIA Titan V, one of the most powerful GPUs on the market today! One of the value adds we do as a company is the ability to quickly incorporate support for new hardware. It’s available in our latest ISO if you want to check it out," said System76 in their latest blog announcement.
Search ‘Ubuntu based distros’ on Google and laugh at the recommendations as Google shows Arch, Debian etc in the search result.
Ubuntu is based on Debian. Debian is not based on other distribution. Arch Linux is a distribution independent of Debian or any other Linux distribution.
This is what every Linux user already knows.
But not Google, apparently.
Linux needs as many "it just works" systems as it can get if we want more people using the Windows 10 alternative. Dell is offering that for mobile users by selling laptops running Ubuntu. Linux Mint is catering to desktop users with the MintBox Mini, and the much-improved MintBox Mini 2 launches in June.
The Linux Mint project unveiled a “MintBox Mini 2” mini-PC with Linux Mint 19 preloaded on a Compulab Fitlet2 with a quad-core Celeron J3455, up to 8GB RAM and 120GB SSD, dual GbE, wireless, and mini-DP.
Linux Mint recently announced the new MintBox Mini 2. The new Mini is "just as small as the original MintBox Mini and the MintBox Mini Pro but with much better specifications, better performance and a few more features". The new Mini 2 has an Intel 8260 chipset, which provides WiFi 802.11ac and Bluetooth 4.2. You can upgrade the RAM to 16GB, and the device is easy to open. The front has two USB 3.0 ports, audio and micro jacks and a microSD slot, as well as two LEDs. The MintBox Mini 2 will be around the same price as the original MintBox Mini and is expected to be available worldwide in June 2018.
Interestingly, Wear OS by Google which was formerly known as Android wear is having a market tie with Samsung’s Tizen. Although, Wear OS has been leading by a slight margin increase in the past weeks.
The simple web app lets you create a home menu icon for your phone that looks like it’s for Twitter or Facebook. The twist: a certain percentage of the time it opens Pocket or Kindle instead of your social media addiction. The idea is to prompt you to read something substantial instead of just scrolling through your feeds.
Managing an infrastructure of servers is a non-trivial task. When one cluster is misbehaving, logging in to multiple servers, checking each log, and using multiple filters until you find the culprit is not an efficient use of resources.
The first step to improve the methods that handle your infrastructure or applications is to implement a centralized logging system. This will enable you to gather logs from any application or system into a centralized location and filter, aggregate, compare, and analyze them. If there are servers or applications, there should be a unified logging layer.
Thankfully, we have an open source stack to simplify this. With the combination of Elasticsearch, Fluentd, and Kibana (EFK), we can create a powerful stack to collect, store, and visualize data in a centralized location.
Let’s start by defining each component to get the big picture. Elasticsearch is an open source distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine, or simply an object store where all logs are stored. Fluentd is an open source data collector that lets you unify the data collection and consumption for better use and understanding of data. And finally, Kibana is a web UI for Elasticsearch.
Coreboot is off to a busy start of the week with a number of notable enhancements having been merged to Git this morning.
The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the all-volunteer developers, stewards, and incubators of more than 350 Open Source projects and initiatives, announced today its 19th Anniversary, and its meritocratic, community-driven process known as "The Apache Way" as the key to its success.
The world's largest Open Source foundation is home to dozens of freely-available (no cost), enterprise-grade Apache projects that serve as the backbone for some of the most visible and widely used applications in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning, Big Data, Build Management, Cloud Computing, Content Management, DevOps, IoT and Edge Computing, Mobile, Servers, and Web Frameworks, among many other categories.
The second day of LibrePlanet 2018 began on a contemplative note with Seth Schoen's keynote speech, "Incompossibilities: Ubiquitous Engineering Tradeoffs." No, that's not a typo: "incompossible" describes multiple things that can't exist at once -- conditions in which it's impossible to satisfy every requirement.
Schoen, who is a Senior Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, explored the impossibility of creating absolutely perfect software, discussing how the inherent tradeoffs in software development echo those in political science, ethical philosophy, and more.
Other morning sessions included a roundup of device and personal privacy technology; a workshop on free software desktops for kids; a talk on the progress the free software community has made on diversity (and how we still have a way to go); a talk about the necessity of ethical standards in the free software world; and more.
In mid March, the European Commission published the final report of the High Level Expert Group (HLEG) on Fake News, “A Multi-Dimensional Approach to Disinformation”. The group was established in early January of this year, and comprised a range of experts and stakeholders from the technology industry, broadcasters, the fact checking community, academics, consumer groups, and journalists. The group was expertly chaired by Dr Madeleine De Cock Buning of Utrecht University, specialised in Intellectual Property, Copyright and Media and Communication Law.
I represented Mozilla in the HLEG, in close cooperation with Katharina Borchert, our Chief Innovation Officer, who spearheads the Mozilla Information and Trust Initiative. Mozilla’s engagement in this High Level Expert Group complements our efforts to develop products, research, and communities to battle information pollution and so-called “fake news” online.
The HLEG was assigned an ambitious task of advising the Commission on “scoping the phenomenon of fake news, defining the roles and responsibilities of relevant stakeholders, grasping the international dimension, taking stock of the positions at stake, and formulating recommendations.” The added challenge was that this was to be done in under two months with only four in-person meetings.
We also got Servo running under the hood of Firefox Focus on Android as a proof of concept.
By default, GitHub’s pull request (or GitLab’s merge request) will merge with a merge commit. That means your feature branch will be merged into the master by creating a new commit, and both the feature and master branch will be kept.
Let’s illustrate with an example:
Let’s assume we branch out a feature branch called “new-feature” from the master branch, and pushed a commit called “Finished my new feature”. At the same time someone pushed another commit called “Other’s feature” onto the master branch.
The process is now more clear how Linux distributions can be adapted to run on Microsoft's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with the company now having open-sourced a "WSL Sample" to build WSL distribution packages for the Microsoft Store and for allowing custom Linux distribution packages to be sideloaded onto systems.
Advocating fiercely for the term free software was Richard Stallman, who notes that the free software movement began in 1983, and argues that “In 1998, a part of the free software community splintered off and began campaigning in the name of ‘open source’…”
“The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, essential respect for the users’ freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software ‘better’ — in a practical sense only… Most discussion of ‘open source’ pays no attention to right and wrong, only to popularity and success.”
In the 2001 documentary “RevolutionOS,” Eric Raymond counters that the problem with the phrase “free software” is the connotations it brings up for business executives.
This is a maintenance release, which brings GNU Foliot up-to-date with Guile-2.2, which introduced an incompatible module - goops related - change.
During these few-times-a-year hackfests, we worked crazy-long hours, lived on fast food, and de-prioritized sleep– an energizing combination that fostered collaboration and focused our attentions in uniquely fruitful ways. As a result of some of our hackfests, core and prominent features were created that still reside inside GNU Radio today.
[...]
Out of the many decades of work on free and open source software (FOSS) projects have come debugged and optimized software that now is helping us address technical challenges more quickly and effectively that we could before these tools became available. Although this remains true, we learned from our hackfest experience in California that there still are many hard problems to solve.
The latest program joining the Zstd bandwagon is Tar.
Zstd is now the latest compression format supported by GNU Tar along with Gzip, Bzip2, Lzip, LZMA, Lzop, and XZ.
Kevin Wang, CEO of FOSSA, has a different approach. The 22-year-old founder told me at Open Source Leadership Summit in Sonoma, CA: "Code scanning is not enough anymore. FOSSA's approach to dependency scanning leverages both static and dynamic code analysis. Dynamic analysis allows FOSSA to get an accurate, live view of what dependencies are pulled into builds. Static analysis supplements the results with metadata on how dependencies are included to power deep intelligence features and recommendation engines. Both these approaches are used to build the most accurate, performant, and intelligent infrastructure for managing your open source."
When Cologne Regional Court issued an injunction in October 2017 (case no. 14 O 188/17) it should have been clear that infringing licence conditions for open source software carries dramatic consequences. Then at the oral appeal hearing before the Cologne Higher Regional Court on 7 March 2018, the claimant, software developer Patrick McHardy, withdrew a request for an interim injunction, which was issued in the first instance to avoid a decision with negative implications for him.
[...]
Despite this partial victory, the basic question of how to achieve sufficient open source compliance still remains. Even in the case presented here, the claimant can still initiate main proceedings and prove alleged co-authorship through further submissions and expert evidence. Complaints about a lack of open source compliance are increasing as well.
For some time now, the open source community has been critical of this claimant’s approach. The community prefers to take enforcement of open source licences into its own hands, and has previously taken action against licence infringements. Since no applications today are developed without open source software, compliance with licence conditions is becoming increasingly important. We advise the use of standardised analysis methods, and to develop appropriate compliance guidelines. Many companies have already created this capacity in their organisations.
2016 was the year when Apple’s homegrown programming language Swift made waves and started growing at a fast pace. In 2017, Kotlin made similar strides after Google announced the official support for Android. Overall, it means that trends keep changing each year and the developers should adapt themselves accordingly.
Just earlier this month, a report from HackerRank focused on the shrinking gender gap in tech and helped us gain more insights into the programming language priorities of female coders. But, what about the overall popular and best programming languages?
The 2018 Open Networking Summit is happening this week in Los Angeles. Just prior to opening day, we talked with John Zannos, Chief Revenue Officer at Inocybe, to get his view on the state of open networking and changes in the foreseeable future. Zannos, is on the governing board of the Linux Foundation Networking effort, and has formerly served on the OpenStack and on the OPEN-O boards.
Inocybe has been involved with OpenDaylight since the beginning. The company is one of the top five contributors, and its engineering team is involved in helping solve some of the toughest questions associated with SDN and OpenDaylight. For example, company engineers lead the community effort focused on solving the problems associated with clustering, security, and service function chaining.
The industry’s traditional big infrastructure vendors aren’t exactly playing ball when it comes to what a group of leading operators are looking for, so they’re taking it upon themselves to create a new supply chain around open source and next-gen networks.
Those operators include AT&T, China Unicom, Comcast, Google, Deutsche Telekom, NTT Group, Telefonica and Turk Telecom, all of which are partners in the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), which today announced a new strategic plan for the ONF to move open source, next-generation SDN solutions into production mode.
After a difficult start to the week, World Intellectual Property Organization delegates on 23 March agreed on a revision of a set of articles of a potential treaty preventing the misappropriation of genetic resources through IP protection. The revised text will serve as a basis for further discussions at the next session of the WIPO committee dealing with the protection of genetic resources, in June.
The court granted in part plaintiffs' motion for monetary sanctions after defendant disclosed corrected stability dissolution testing data during a bench trial and directed that the FDA be informed of defendant's conduct.
The Xi’an company which won China’s first-ever SEP injunction last May has issued an update on its ongoing court battles, in an effort to combat what it calls ‘speculation and rumours’ in Chinese media. The statement reveals the status of Sony’s appeal against the 2017 Beijing IP Court injunction as well as an escalating conflict between the Chinese company and Apple. Most IAM readers will remember that Iwncomm (also known by its Chinese name Xi’an Xidian Jietong) is the developer of a wireless standard called WAPI.
After years of development and 28 drafts, the Internet Engineering Task Force has approved Transport Layer Security 1.3 as a proposed internet standard. The new standard aims to provide improved security and cryptographic assurances for the internet.
"TLS allows client/server applications to communicate over the Internet in a way that is designed to prevent eavesdropping, tampering, and message forgery," the IETF announcement message for TLS 1.3 states.
A 35-year-old man in Sweden appealed for donations to the Islamic State (Isis) terror group using statuses posted to his open Facebook account.
In Siberia, at least 64 people were killed when a fire tore through a shopping mall in the city of Kemerovo Sunday. At least 16 people are still missing, and authorities say the death toll is likely to rise.
Iran has called the appointment of the former UN Ambassador John Bolton to the role of National Security Adviser of the United States shameful, Iranian media reported on Sunday, citing his involvement with an opposition group once named a terrorist organisation.
A senior Iranian official said on Sunday it was “shameful” that U.S. President Donald Trump had named John Bolton as national security adviser because of his ties with rebels whom Iran sees as “terrorists,” the state news agency IRNA reported.
“For a seemingly superpower country, it is shameful that its national security official would be receiving a salary from a terrorist sect,” IRNA quoted Ali Shamkhani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, as saying.
The bankruptcy filing allows Remington to stay in business and keep making guns while restructuring its massive debt. The company plans to reduce its debt by $620 million through the Chapter 11 process.
The company said, when it first announced its plan to file for bankruptcy in February, that operations "will not be disrupted by the restructuring process."
Founded in 1816, Remington is "one of America's oldest and largest manufacturers of firearms," according to court filings. Remington is also one of the best-known gun makers in the world. It's owned by Cerberus Capital Management, which plans to shed ownership once the bankruptcy is complete.
When the “War on Terror” was launched in 2001, mainstream media – especially cable TV news – started a parade. It was a narrow parade of hawkish retired military and intelligence brass promoting war as the response to the crime of 9/11, predicting success and identifying foreign enemies to attack.
Mr Assange, who has been holed-up in the Ecuadorean embassy in London for five years, drew a historical comparison between an event that took place in Nazi Germany and Mr Puigdemont arrest and said “In 1940 the elected president of Catalonia, Lluís Companys, was captured by the Gestapo, at the request of Spain, delivered to them and executed.
“Today, German police have arrested the elected president of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, at the request of Spain, to be extradited.”
He also took Britain’s side against the European Union while unleashing his anger on Twitter over the arrest - saying the European Arrest Warrant was one of the “key intellectual reasons” why people voted for Brexit.
WikiLeaks founder Mr Assange accused the European Union of turning to an “abusive instrument that requires no evidence” to “persecute” countries’ “opponents” such as Mr Puigdemont.
"Nature is in alarming decline. Halting its loss is urgent and crucial as much as tackling climate change," said Marco Lambertini, director general for WWF International, in a statement. "Biodiversity and nature is the foundation of life, essential to our wellbeing. Yet, we continue to take nature for granted while our actions are pushing it to the brink."
The Eiffel Tower in Paris, the London Eye, the Sydney Opera House, and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur were just some of the global landmarks that went dark to mark the event.
Give me a break. While Google's market share in the EU search market is a fact, it's not a result of any wrongdoing. There simply isn't enough innovation in Europe. Otherwise some European company could have built a great search engine with a focus on European languages and websites. Last year, the EU's "digital" commissioner (from Bulgaria, the least advanced but highest-crime country in the 28-member bloc) said in an interview that Europe didn't need its own Google. But apparently some people in Brussels believe they cannot leave Google alone either.
Breakups are the most extreme antitrust remedy. They're talked about far more often than actually ordered. But below a certain threshold it's simply inappropriate to mention the possibility of a breakup. Whatever charges the EU has brought against Google to date fall far short--"far" in terms of lightyears--of where a breakup could even be contemplated.
Many headlines stated opinions as fact this week — here are five particularly distorted ones about the economy, politicians and their emotions. Should media outlets insert their own opinions and speculation without acknowledging them as such? Take a look at this week’s distorted headlines and let us know.
After he became Director of the CIA, Mike announced plans to establish a chaplaincy on the CIA campus similar to what the military has at its installations. His speeches were reportedly infused with references to Christianity. He attends weekly prayer meetings in government buildings. According to a report, in Foreign Policy, there are concerns that his religious zeal is leaking into the CIA. Complaints from some employees are that supervisors want to hold Bible study sessions during work hours. Some of the senior people in the CIA are importuning lower ranking individuals at the agency to attend Bible study in the evenings. According to the report, veteran employees at the CIA are becoming estranged from the agency they have long enjoyed serving.
President Donald Trump's favorite TV network is increasingly serving as a West Wing casting call, as the president reshapes his administration with camera-ready personalities.
Trump's new national security adviser, John Bolton, is a former U.N. ambassador, a White House veteran - and perhaps most importantly a Fox News channel talking head. Bolton's appointment, rushed out late Thursday, follows Trump's recent attempt to recruit Fox guest Joseph diGenova for his legal team.
Bolton went on Fox to discuss his selection and said it had happened so quickly that "I think I'm still a Fox News contributor."
The National Election Commission (NEC) of Sierra Leone released an official statement on Twitter on March 18 to set the record straight. The tweet quoted the NEC Chair Mohamed Conteh saying that “the NEC has not used, and is not using blockchain technology in any part of the electoral process.”
It is sickening that Spanish courts continue to jail, and remove from political life, Catalan politicians who are the victors in democratic elections. That the European political class and media is almost entirely complicit and supportive in this truly vicious repression of the Catalan people, has shocked many of us to our core, and made us realise how thin is the veneer of democracy and how fragile are the rights we believed we held.
If the UK were any kind of a democracy, opposition parties would have held firm against the rush to conflict with Russia, until serious and thorough investigation of the Skripal case had yielded real results. At the very least, you would expect to see a select committee of the House of Commons call the head of Porton Down to give evidence and quiz him about the level of certainty they have of the identity and the Russian manufacture of the substance which poisoned the Skripals.
Instead, we have seen all the establishment parties fall over themselves to appear as belligerent and faux-Churchillian as May and her pipsqueaks, in order to placate the tabloids. This is ludicrous. You cannot out-jingo the Tories, and the rush to increase international tension benefits nobody except the armaments and security industries.
I am obliged to say I was disgusted by Nicola Sturgeon and the SNP leadership and their premature condemnations of Russia. By coincidence I spent much of last week at pro-Indy events and I have to say I found this disgust almost universal.
President Donald Trump's favourite TV network is increasingly serving as a West Wing casting call, as the president reshapes his administration with camera-ready personalities.
Trump's new national security adviser, John Bolton, is a former UN ambassador, a White House veteran — and perhaps most importantly a Fox News channel talking head. Bolton's appointment, rushed out late Thursday, follows Trump's recent attempt to recruit Fox guest Joseph diGenova for his legal team.
Sex workers are reporting that their Google Drive files are mysteriously locked or vanishing.
It seems like there should be nothing to decide. Obviously Dubé had zero interest in commenting on a story about her alleged impersonation of a licensed lawyer. Fine, but this scenario absolutely reeks of vindictive bullshit from a person who couldn't stop a negative story from being posted and felt she should spread the misery around.
Needless to say, Trépanier's employer, Radio-Canada, is deeply concerned with this turn of events. The director of its French services says he's never seen anything like this in three decades of journalism. The police likely haven't either, but they're sticking to their guns.
Assuming you haven't been living under a rock, you know that on Sunday night, porn star Stephanie Daniels (real name: Stephanie Clifford) did a big interview with Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes. Much of what was in there had been previously reported, though this is the first time many of the claims came directly from Daniels herself. But there was one "big" new claim, which hadn't previously been reported, and which is now getting lots of attention.
ONE voice to rule them all.
China’s President-for-life Xi Jinping has created a new mega media outlet — the Voice of China — by merging 14,000 employees from China Central Television (CCTV), China National Radio and China Radio International.
It has been given the job of “propagating the party’s theories, directions, principles and policies” as well as “telling good China stories,” the state news agency Xinhua reports.
All of the remainder — Xinhua itself, the People’s Daily and others — must now answer directly to his Central Propaganda Department.
As of April this year, internet users in Kazakhstan will no longer be able to leave anonymous comments online. In late December 2017, President Nursultan Nazarbayev signed a law obliging websites to register every internet user who wishes to leave a comment, either by SMS verification or digital signature. Websites who fail to abide by the new rules could face fines of up to $750. Kazakhstan’s Minister of Information and Communications Dauren Abayev said that everyone “must be responsible for what they want to say.” “In cases of incitement to interethnic discord or calls for unconstitutional actions, I think it should be possible for law enforcement agencies to track down commenters,” Abayev told the press before the bill was passed.
In response to the new law, several independent media outlets including regional newspaper Uralsk Week and news portal Ratel have completely removed the option of leaving a comment from their websites. Lukpan Akhmedyarov, editor-in-chief of Uralsk Week, said that he is against the new rule and decided to remove the comment section from the newspaper's website.
For no imaginable reason, Twitter continues to allow Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan to cleanse the internet of stuff he doesn't like. This doesn't begin and end with Twitter -- other social media platforms have obliged the president as well -- but Twitter is where it's most quickly noticed that something has gone missing.
Kurdish-American activist and attorney Samira Ghaderi recently saw one of her tweets memory-holed in response to a Turkish court order. Now, it's one thing when social media companies start geoblocking/vanishing posts originating in the country where the legal complaint was filed. It's quite another when they allow Turkish law to take precedence over US law, which is what appears to have happened here.
Right, then maybe you shouldn't have done a bunch of things that caused John Oliver and many others to mock you. And those mockable things include suing John Oliver for mocking you in the first place. Because the "harm" to your reputation was caused by you -- not John Oliver. There is no right in this country not to have people mock you, and considering how frequently Murray seems to be flag waving about how proud he is to be an American, he might want to take some time to read the First Amendment of the Constitution.
So, if 6,000 coal miner jobs really depend on your reputation (which, also: citation needed), then perhaps the first thing you should do is improve your reputation (pro tip: sending a hilariously dumb letter to the judge in your case does the opposite of improving your reputation).
YouTube, a popular media site for firearms enthusiasts, this week quietly introduced tighter restrictions on videos involving weapons, becoming the latest battleground in the U.S. gun-control debate.
YouTube will ban videos that promote or link to websites selling firearms and accessories, including bump stocks, which allow a semi-automatic rifle to fire faster. Additionally, YouTube said it will prohibit videos with instructions on how to assemble firearms. The video site, owned by Alphabet Inc.’s Google, has faced intense criticism for hosting videos about guns, bombs and other deadly weapons.
For many gun-rights supporters, YouTube has been a haven. A current search on the site for “how to build a gun” yields 25 million results, though that includes items such as toys. At least one producer of gun videos saw its page suspended on Tuesday. Another channel opted to move its videos to an adult-content site, saying that will offer more freedom than YouTube.
Over the last few months, YouTube has come under fire for its content moderation decisions. The company, like other hosts of user-generated content, is not obliged to take down most content under US law, nor can it be held liable for much of what it hosts, giving it significant power over its users’ expression.
YouTube’s emergence amid the blogging boom of the mid-2000s was revolutionary. Suddenly, anyone could easily share their own videos with the entire world. The platform, created by Chad Hurley and Steve Chen—both under 30 at the time—was quickly snatched up by Google for a whopping $1.65 billion just a year after its launch. In 2006, Time magazine named “you” its person of the year, dubbing YouTube “the people’s platform” and crediting it with the “opportunity to build a new kind of international understanding.” YouTube was on its way up.
But almost immediately, YouTube was faced with tough decisions about what types of content it should—or could, legally—allow. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (“CDA 230”)—two of the most important regulations governing user-generated content—had only been around for a decade, and had not yet been significantly applied in the international sphere. Both would soon come to be tested as YouTube and other platforms rapidly transformed the way people communicate and share content online.
Climate change was one of the top issues President Trump tackled in his campaign for presidency. He promised to pull the U.S. from the Paris Climate Accord, an international agreement that each country will reduce its contribution to climate change. On Jun. 1, 2017, Trump fulfilled his promise.
Now as president, Trump's refusal to accept climate change as a serious issue bleeds into other avenues of government as well. The most notable example is the censorship of “climate change” from numerous governmental websites including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which was once the herald of climate information.
Censoring any mention of climate change, however, does not make the issue disappear. The censorship only aids in clouting public understanding of the threat of climate change.
The Malaysian government proposed a bill imposing hefty fines and jail sentences on those found guilty of willfully publishing fake news on Monday.
The bill defined "fake news" as any form of written, audio or visual publication "wholly or partly false," concerning Malaysia or a Malaysian citizen, published by anyone, anywhere.
The law would punish such offenders with fines of up to 500,000 ringgit (equivalent to around $128,000), up to 10 years' imprisonment, or both. “The proposed Act seeks to safeguard the public against the proliferation of fake news whilst ensuring the right to freedom of speech and expression under the Federal Constitution is respected,” it read, as quoted in Reuters.
"Colleges are getting more and more into the business of censorship," he said. "We're going to silence speech we don't agree with -- that is nutty."
His remarks, made at a daylong conference on bipartisanship at Bellaire High School, broke with President Donald Trump's most recent statements on the topic.
Trump last week said threats to free speech on college campuses are "overblown" in an interview with Charlie Kirk of conservative group Turning Point USA.
There have been several press reports this week claiming that illegal images are stored on the Bitcoin blockchain, thus potentially creating a liability for anyone who has a copy of the blockchain. The articles cite a recently published academic paper, but the fact that arbitrary data can be included in the blockchain is not new. It is a phenomenon that a simple a Google search would have revealed has been well understood since at least 2013 if not earlier, and the facts of the matter are not as damning as recent headlines suggest. We are disappointed that so many are jumping to conclusions about what it means for Bitcoin that some despicable people have exploited it and linked it to the scourge of child pornography.
Cow Clicker, a parody Facebook game, collected personal data from 180,000 people back in 2010-2011.
If you don’t remember “clicker” games, Farmville was a famous example. These were games where you logged into Facebook every few hours, clicked something, then sent annoying invitations to your friends so they could click things too. Ian Bogost, an indie game developer, hated these games, so he made an intentionally stupid parody of them: Cow Clicker.
There is no such thing as a perfect or one-size-fits-all messaging app. For users, a messenger that is reasonable for one person could be dangerous for another. And for developers, there is no single correct way to balance security features, usability, and the countless other variables that go into making a high-quality, secure communications tool.
If the Cambridge Analytica story wasn’t enough, Facebook is again under fire for collecting people’s call logs and SMS history for years.
Per reports, the said data was discovered by many Android users after they obtained the offline copy of their Facebook data. Earlier, it was said that the company did so without asking the users. But according to Facebook’s latest blog post, it’s not true.
Surprise: Thanks to the Cambridge Analytica revelations, we’re finding out that Facebook allowed a much broader and deeper prostitution of our private data than it had previously claimed. Facebook’s disingenuous explanations call for more questions and even less trust.
Facebook has been collecting call records and SMS data from Android devices for years. Several Twitter users have reported finding months or years of call history data in their downloadable Facebook data file. A number of Facebook users have been spooked by the recent Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, prompting them to download all the data that Facebook stores on their account. The results have been alarming for some.
Sandberg said Facebook is open to regulation and other measures that could help re-establish trust with users.
Of all the counties in the word, China seems to be making the greatest use of facial recognition software, both in the public and private spheres. A new report charts the growth of image scanning systems that aim to improve security.
He risked his life exercising his rights to free speech and peaceful demonstration in modern day Russia and paid for it with nearly three years in prison during which time he was tortured both mentally and physically.
Ildar Ildusovich Dadin is still alive. Yet many like him, journalists, activists, people of conscience, have wound up dead at the hands of the Russian state. Here are just some of the names of recent victims: Sergei Yushenkov, Anna Politkovskaya, Galina Starovoitova, Stanislav Markelov, Anastasia Baburova, and, perhaps most famously, Boris Nemtsov. There are many more names that could be added.
It's really quite incredible how, at nearly every turn, the New Zealand government has managed to mess up the legal case against Kim Dotcom. The raid on his house was later declared to be illegal, using invalid warrants. Evidence that was seized from his home and illegally turned over to the FBI was ordered to be returned. Oh, and then there was the whole bit about conducting illegal surveillance on Dotcom, deleting evidence of that illegal spying, and ordered officials to "bury" information about that illegal surveillance to avoid embarrassing the Kiwi government.
And now we have the latest: A Human Rights Tribunal in New Zealand has declared that the New Zealand government violated Dotcom's rights in withholding information from him. Specifically, in July of 2015, Dotcom had made an information request (in New Zealand it's an "information privacy request" -- which appears to be a quasi-privacy/data protection-type right in New Zealand) to various officials in the government requesting whatever personal information they held on him. The recipients of the demands sent them to the Attorney General who refused to comply with the demands, claiming they were "vexatious and included information that was trivial."
The Tribunal disagrees. It goes through in pretty great detail the procedural issues at play here, including an attempt to discover this information by way of his extradition case -- which was denied by the court. But that still left open the information privacy request. The court then goes through the question of whether or not it was even appropriate for everyone who received the request to hand them over to the Attorney General. This is done in almost excruciating detail, which we'll save you from having to go through yourself (unless you'd like to dig in below). However, the tribunal sums up the issue by basically pointing out that the recipients of the request were not supposed to transfer those requests to the Attorney General in the first place, as they had no legitimate reason to do so under the law (the fact that Dotcom was fighting the government in an extradition case is not enough).
Alarmed that the U.S. is the most dangerous affluent country in which to give birth, state and local lawmakers around the country are adopting a flurry of bipartisan bills aimed at reforming how maternal deaths are identified and investigated.
In Indiana earlier this month, Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb signed a bill creating a maternal mortality review committee to scrutinize deaths and near-deaths among expectant and new mothers and make policy recommendations to improve maternal health.
Oregon’s governor and Washington, D.C.’s mayor, both Democrats, are expected to sign similar legislation in the coming days. Proposals are pending in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland and New Jersey.
Donald Trump has a plan to solve America's drug crisis: kill the drug dealers.
"We have pushers and drugs dealers, they are killing hundreds and hundreds of people," Trump said at a recent White House summit on opioid abuse. "Some countries have a very, very tough penalty -- the ultimate penalty -- and by the way, they have much less of a drug problem than we do."
Trump claims he got the idea for killing drug dealers from his pal, Chinese president for life, Xi Jinping. That's a first: an American president openly borrowing a criminal justice program from an autocrat (and a Communist one, to boot). To be fair, Trump clearly also had in mind the experience of a democratic country. In the last two years, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte has encouraged a spree of extrajudicial police executions aimed at the drug trade that, according to Human Rights Watch, has left more than 12,000 Filipinos dead. Although the International Criminal Court has launched an inquiry into Duterte's "crimes against humanity," Trump has praised him for doing an "incredible job" with his anti-drug program.
Public records requests have shown that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- who have continued and intensified Obama's program of mass deportations and separation of families under Trump -- uses Facebook's logs, merged with logs from cellular carriers and analyzed by software from Palantir (Peter Thiel's police-state arms-dealer) to track immigrants.
Pompeo could join Trump in stigmatizing Muslims in America and around the world.
Following his campaign where he declared that “Islam hates us” and vowed to ban Muslims from entering the country, President Trump was quick to bring people who shared his hostility toward Muslims into his administration. Current and former officials like Steve Bannon, Sebastian Gorka, Mike Flynn, Ben Carson, Frank Wuco, Jon Cordova, and Carl Higbie have all expressed anti-Muslim views, something Trump likely considers to be an asset.
Another appointee with a long and troubling record of animosity toward Muslims, CIA Director Mike Pompeo, is now receiving a promotion to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, as Trump announced earlier this month.
Before leading the CIA, Pompeo was a member of Congress, where he used his position to smear Muslims as a threat not only to security but also to Christianity -- promoting the idea that religions are at war with each other and undermining our nation’s values of religious freedom and pluralism.
In one speech, he read a prayer that lamented that America “worshiped other gods and called it multiculturalism and endorsed perversion and called it an alternative lifestyle,” appearing to show disdain for the country’s religious diversity.
Cannes this week declared that the long-running festival would be banning streaming services like Netflix from being able to win the Palme d’Or. That said, festival leaders weren't able to offer a coherent reason why. Festival boss Thierry Fremaux apparently tried to offer something vaguely resembling an explanation to a variety of different news outlets, but wasn't particularly successful.
While it has experienced nearly exponential growth, the successful adoption and use of open-source by banking networks, mobile phone manufacturers, telecom networks, smart cars, cloud computing and blockchain platforms, among numerous others, was not a foregone conclusion. In 2003, there was an IP-based attack on Linux, the most prevalent open-source software project.
While the claims underlying the litigation ultimately were found to be without merit in the court proceeding, it was a wake-up call to several IP-savvy companies as to the potential negative impact of patent aggression on the growth of Linux and open source software projects. IBM, Red Hat and SUSE (then Novell) coordinated an effort with Sony, Philips and NEC to conceptualize and implement a solution designed to create a patent no-fly zone around the core of Linux.
It has been considered for years that China has not been as strong as developed country trading partners in protecting intellectual property rights. Now, as China gains ground in building its own patent war chest, it has received a World Trade Organization challenge from the top patent-filing nation in the world, arguing that China’s treatment of foreign companies’ IP rights is unfavourable and its policies violate international trade rules.
A February 22, 2018 order in Merial Inc. et al. v. Abic Biological Labs. Ltd (Sup. Ct. N.Y.), here, enjoined King & Spalding from representing Abic Biological Labs (“Abic”) and Phibro Animal Health Corporation (“Phibro”) in an ICC arbitration where Abic and Phibro were adverse to Merial Societe Par Actions Simplifiee (“Merial SAS”), which was a former K&S client.
[...]
The court enjoined K&S. What struck me as quite concerning was that there was no overlap between patents or licenses K&S had worked on for Merial SAS and those in the ICC arbitration. Instead, the court noted that K&S “clearly knows a great deal about how the Merial entities approach issues relating to patents and licenses in the animal health and animal vaccine space.” The trial court emphasized that Merial SAS had relied on “a highly credentialed ethicist, Roy D. Simon” and noted that, although the decision was for the court to make, “King & Spalding offered no expert testimony to rebut Mr. Simon’s expert opinion.” The court then noted that “a reasonable lawyer like Mr. Simon came to the conclusion that King & Spalding’s multiple representations of [Merial SAS entities] on issues meaningful to the limited number of players in teh animal health and animal vaccine space would materially advance Abic and Phibro’s interests vis-a-vis Merial,” particular because Dr. Jarecki-Black “will play an integral role in Merial’s defense” in the arbitration.
Hologic, Inc. v. Smith & Nephew, Inc., No. 2017-1389, 2018 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 14, 2018 (Before Newman, Wallach, and Stoll, J.) (Opinion for the court, Stoll, J.)
It’s never been a better time to be a music fan. Streaming services like Spotify serve up the latest hits, but you can dive deep and listen to true indie music. Here are some of the best places to get free, legal music.