Around a decade ago, an India-based company called Datawind got a nod from the Central government to make and market a low-cost tablet PC called Aakash for students in the country. About half a decade before that — 2004, to be exact — the country launched GSAT-3 aka EDUSAT, its first satellite to be used entirely for the education sector.
Cut to the present, and it is more than two months since Datawind shut down permanently. Meanwhile, EDUSAT was deactivated in 2010, and has since been moved to a part of space that the world refers to as "graveyard orbit."
They were both examples of a political class thinking a little too ahead of time when it came to the technology needed for education. Something similar is now happening at the other end of the spectrum: While the world is agog about the latest iteration of the Raspberry Pi and an increasing number of people is adopting one or the other distro of Linux, most of India seems to be oblivious to both.
I let the Windows setup procedure run on first boot, until I got to the point where it became clear to me that it is now impossible to install Windows without a Microsoft account. Absolutely impossible. Windows 10 has always asked for a Microsoft account during setup, but there was a tiny (nearly invisible) option to use only a local account, which I always did. Well, now that option is gone, and if you dig around long enough you can eventually find an explanation that says if you don't want to use a Microsoft account, well, you have to anyway, but after the installation is complete you can go back into the configuration and change it to use a local account.
So, that was the end of Windows on this new system. I have never had a Microsoft account, and I never will. I booted a Linux Live USB stick, deleted the Windows partition, and set about the task of installing a few of my favorite Linux distributions.
The first thing I had to do was get into the BIOS Setup Utility to disable UEFI Secure Boot. That turns out to be a bit more tricky than you might think, because there is a "POST hotkey delay (sec)" parameter in the BIOS which is initially set to 0, so there is very little time after power-on to press F10 before it starts to boot Windows (or at least tries to). Once into the BIOS Setup, I went to System Configuration / Boot Options / Secure Boot, and changed that to Disabled. While I was in there, I also changed the POST hotkey delay to 5 seconds. Save that (F10) and exit.
[...]
Installation was easy and uneventful; I noticed that Mint has improved their installer on UEFI systems so that it now allows you to choose the EFI Boot Partition, that's nice. Unfortunately it still installed the bootloader to a directory called "ubuntu", which can be inconvenient if you also have Ubuntu installed on the system.
Booting after the installation completed still brought up openSUSE by default, which is actually what I wanted – but if you wanted to boot Mint by default, it would simply require a trip through the BIOS Configuration again. In my case, I just generated a new grub configuration file on openSUSE (grub2-mkconfig), and it added Mint to the Grub boot menu.
Recently, I bought and started using a Tuxedo Book BC1507, a Linux laptop computer. Ten years ago, if someone had told me that, by the end of the decade, I could buy top-quality, "penguin-ready" laptops from companies such as System76, Slimbook, and Tuxedo, I probably would have laughed. Well, now I'm laughing, but with joy!
Going beyond designing computers for free/libre open source software (FLOSS), all three companies recently announced they are trying to eliminate proprietary BIOS software by switching to Coreboot.
Big Red has unleashed Oracle Linux version 8, which could the OS of choice for those using the database giant’s cloud or appliances – or who just can’t bear to see the words Red Hat (or IBM).
The database giant took the wraps of its Linux flavour yesterday, with director of product management Simon Coter flagging up a raft of new features, including the introduction of the concept of Application Streams which allow “multiple versions of user space components [to] be delivered and updated more frequently than the core operating system packages.”
He also flagged up improved systems management with the inclusion of the Dandified Yum package manager, which “installs, updates, and removes packages on RPM-based Linux distributions” and Cockpit, “an interactive server administration interface that offers a live Linux session via a web browser.”
Oracle yesterday announced the release of Oracle Linux 8. New features include Application Streams, a "Dandified Yum", RPM improvements and much more. From the announcement: "With Oracle Linux 8, the core operating environment and associated packages for a typical Oracle Linux 8 server are distributed through a combination of BaseOS and Applications Streams. BaseOS gives you a running user space for the operating environment. Application Streams provides a range of applications that were previously distributed in Software Collections, as well as other products and programs, that can run within the user space."
Perhaps, many years hence, we will call the company that, more than any other, created the enterprise computing environment Big Purple now that it has acquired the company that made open source software in the enterprise safe, sane, and affordable.
Twenty years ago next month, Red Hat went public and everything about enterprise software changed. A company with some tens of millions of dollars in revenues, providing subscription support for a commercial Linux distribution for systems within a few months had a ridiculous market capitalization in excess of $20 billion and the mad dash for open source projects to be commercialized was on.
Fast forward two decades, and Red Hat is the touchstone for how to work with upstream open source software projects related to datacenter infrastructure and to bring them downstream to harden them to be enterprise grade, package them up, and then sell support for them. Red Hat is by far and away the most successful provider of commercial support for open source code, and has moved well beyond its foundational Enterprise Linux distribution, mostly through key acquisitions including the companies behind the GNU compilers, JBoss application server, the KVM hypervisor, the Gluster parallel file system, the Ceph object storage, the innovative CoreOS Linux distribution, and the Ansible software provisioning tools as well as the OpenShift container controller (a mix of in-house and Kubernetes code these days), the OpenStack cloud controller, and the CloudForms hybrid cloud management system (also largely done in-house). Red Hat, we think, still needs to have a heavy duty open source database management system distribution – perhaps several different ones with different architectural tenets – but it was also perhaps prescient in that it stayed out of the Hadoop storage and data analytics racket, which has not panned out as planned.
This is the second post of our blog series on Red Hat OpenShift and Splunk Integration. In the first post, we showed how to send application and system logs to Splunk. The second part is focused on how to use Splunk Kubernetes Objects.
Command Line Heroes explores how beginner languages bring people into the world of programming. BASIC lowered the barrier to entry. Now, the next generation is getting their start modifying games, like Minecraft. Listen to the episode.
How do you want to manage your systems? That probably depends a lot on the type of environment you have -- whether your systems are primarily on-prem, or if they reside in the cloud. Or a mixture of both. Either way, Red Hat is looking to meet you where you're at and provide management tools to suit your needs with Red Hat Smart Management.
We introduced Red Hat Smart Management at Red Hat Summit earlier this year in Boston as a layered add on for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), as well as including Red Hat Insights with RHEL subscriptions.
This week we’ve been buying a new phone and playing with QEMU. We discuss the release fo Debian 10, Ubuntu users saying “Thank you”, Nvidia drivers, WSL and Ubuntu MATE for the GPD MicroPC. We also round up some events and tech news.
It’s Season 12 Episode 15 of the Ubuntu Podcast! Mark Johnson, Martin Wimpress and Stuart Langridge are connected and speaking to your brain.
How do we get kids excited about programming? Make programming tangible with embedded devices. Did you know that after kids learned to code with the BBC micro:bit, 90% of kids "thought coding was for everyone" and 86% said it made CS topics more interesting?
Whether Linux is inherently secure, the next phase of online interaction, and wasting our free time.
Plus where to focus your contributions, and a tricky hypothetical question.
Following EXT4 getting initial (and opt-in) support for case-insensitive directories/files, the Flash-Friendly File-System has a set of patches pending that extend the case-folding support to this F2FS file-system that is becoming increasingly used by Android smartphones and other devices.
Sent out today were a revised set of two patches and just 300+ lines of code that implement case-folding support inside the F2FS file-system. This case-folding support for case-insensitive file-name look-ups is based upon the support found within EXT4 on the latest kernels.
While the Linux 5.3 kernel merge window isn't even over until this weekend when it will kick off with 5.3-rc1 and headlining new features like Radeon RX 5700 series support, AMD has already sent in a batch of AMDGPU/AMDKFD fixes. Making these fixes notable are some early fixes around the new open-source Radeon RX "Navi" support.
With the RISC-V support in Linux 5.3 there is now support for huge-pages, image header support (based on the ARM64 kernel image header), initial page table setup is split into two stages, CONFIG_SOC support has been started with initially catering to the SiFive SoCs, high resolution timers and dynamic ticks have now made it into the default RISC-V 64-bit default configuration, and other low-level work.
Originally on Thursday was finally the Nouveau-next 5.3 pull request that offered improvements to the display color management, fixes to Secure Boot on newer hardware, and Turing TU116 mode-setting support. But that was rejected by the DRM maintainers for being way too late as usually the cut-off for new feature material is when hitting RC6 on the previous cycle, just not days before the end of the current merge window. Not that those changes were all too exciting or notable, but this pushes back the color management and other work to Linux 5.4.
Nouveau DRM maintainer Ben Skeggs of Red Hat as a result today sent in Nouveau-fixes 5.3. This pull request has support still for the TU116 GPU since that shouldn't regress any existing support as well as having fixes around KMS, a memory leak, and a few other basic fixes.
Wayland's Weston compositor for the past year has provided a remoting plug-in for virtual output streaming that was built atop RTP/GStreamer. Now though a new plug-in has landed in the Weston code-base making use of Red Hat's promising PipeWire project.
The PipeWire plug-in was merged into Weston today and is similar to the GStreamer-powered remoting plug-in but instead leverages PipeWire. The compositor's frames are exported to PipeWire and the same virtual output API is shared between these plug-ins. The virtual outputs can be configured using the weston.ini configuration file. Any PipeWire client in turn can read these frames.
Three large changes have been completed this week. The first is a change to the wire format used for waypipe. The previous protocol, dating back almost to the start of this project, sent a single large message containing a series of subblocks, each of which either contained Wayland protocol data, indicated that a new file descriptor was sent by the connected Wayland program, or provided all the information needed to update a given file descriptor. These file descriptor update messages used a 16-byte header containing the object id, size, type, and a very overloaded metadata field. Furthermore, the content following the header was sometimes context-dependent. For example, the first data transfer to replicate a shared memory buffer sent its initial data, while all successive messages sent a diff relative to the previous state. Because so much in the update messages was implicit, the code acquired a few unusual workarounds; for example, size extensions to a shared memory buffer were only supported by assuming the newly extended region to have contained all zeros and then sending a diff relative to that state.
The replacement wire format protocol operates with much smaller transfer units, with distinct types for the various file operations that used to be combined into a single generic header. To keep individual message sizes small, file data update operations can be split into distinct messages corresponding to different shards of a buffer. While having distinct messages for each operation does very slightly increase the bandwidth needed for a connection, it ensures that operations can be performed as soon as the corresponding message block arrives; a remote pipe or video-type DMABUF can be created before the data for its contents has fully arrived.
Linux input expert Peter Hutterer of Red Hat shipped the much anticipated release candidate today for libinput 1.14, the open-source input handling library used by both X.Org and Wayland systems.
The first RC for libinput 1.14 is now available.
We have new and improved thumb detection for touchpads, thanks to Matt Mayfield. On Clickpad devices this should make interactions where a thumb is resting on the touchpad or dropped during an interaction more reliable. A summary of the changes can be found here: https://who-t.blogspot.com/2019/07/libinputs-new-thumb-detection-code.html
The Dell Canvas Totem is now supported by libinput. It is exposed as a new tool type through the tablet interface along with two new axes. Note that this is only low-level support, the actual integration of the totem needs Wayland protocol changes and significant changes in all applications that want to make use of it. A summary of the changes can be found here: https://who-t.blogspot.com/2019/06/libinput-and-dell-canvas-totem.html
Touch-capable tablets now tie both devices together for rotation. If you set the tablet to left-handed, the touchpad will be rotated along with the tablet. Note that this does not affect the left-handed-ness of the touchpad, merely the rotation.
Tablet proximity out handling for tablets that are unreliably sending proximity out events is now always timeout-based. It is no longer necessary to add per-device quirks to enable this feature and it is completely transparent on devices that work correctly anyway. A summar of the changes can be found here: https://who-t.blogspot.com/2019/06/libinput-and-tablet-proximity-handling.html
Tablets that send duplicate tools (BTN_TOOL_PEN and BTN_TOOL_ERASER) now ignore the latter. This is an intermediate fix only but at least makes those tablets more usable than they are now. Issue #259 is the tracker for this particular behaviour if you are affected by it.
The handling of kernel fuzz has been slightly improved. Where our udev rule fails to reset the fuzz on the kernel device, we disable the hysteresis and rely on the kernel now to handle it. Previously our hysteresis would take effect on top of the kernel's, causing nonresponsive behaviour.
Note to distribitors: the python-evdev dependency has been dropped, the tools that used it are now using python-libevdev instead.
And of course a random assortment of fixes, improvements, etc. Many thanks to all contributors and testers.
As usual, the git shortlog is below.
Currently in "Open Access" on Fig, a hybrid Early Access/Crowdfunding model, Vagrus - The Riven Realms seems to be doing well.
It's only been going for a couple of months but they've already managed to raise $23,071. It's an interesting system, where you back the campaign with your pledge and get immediate access. At various funding points, it unlocks the next part of their development roadmap with the very next milestone very close to being hit.
Love insects and other creepy crawlies? Hive Quest might be a game you will enjoy, one that's coming to Linux and it's now crowdfunding on Kickstarter.
Inspired partially by the classic Black & White from Lionhead Studios, it's not meant to be graphically impressive. In fact, the developer opted to go for a more retro 3D look with it. Gameplay involves you managing a tribe, along with gathering resources like food to keep them going. It's a bit of an odd one, due to the mix of gameplay involved. It blends a strategy game with puzzles, exploration and a little mystery wrapped in an ancient magical theme with insects and spirits.
Carcassonne is that you? Well if you want to play something almost the same, ATRIUM just recently released from Black Potion.
ATRIUM is a tile-based digital board game, where the board gets built as you go. On each turn, a player can place down a tile which you're given two at random each time and a person, with different tiles giving different benefits. Some might turn your people into a powerful character, some might give you extra points and so on. You basically play each turn, until you run out of tiles and the person who has the most territory wins.
Ask some Linux users why they still sticks with Windows dual boot, probably the answer would be – “Games!”. It was true! Luckily, open source gaming platforms like Steam and Lutris have brought many games to Linux platforms and improved the Linux gaming experience significantly over the years. Today, I stumbled upon yet another Linux gaming-related, open source tool named GameMode, which allows the users to improve gaming performance on Linux.
GameMode is basically a daemon/lib combo that lets the games optimise Linux system performance on demand. I thought GameMode is a kind of tool that would kill some resource-hungry tools running in the background. But it is different. What it does actually is just instruct the CPU to automatically run in Performance mode when playing games and helps the Linux users to get best possible performance out of their games.
GameMode improves the gaming performance significantly by requesting a set of optimisations be temporarily applied to the host OS while playing the games.
Leaving Early Access today after nine months with a fresh update is Elemental War, a Tower Defense game from Clockwork Origins.
This one is a little unusual, in the way that unlike a lot of Tower Defense games there's no story campaign to play through. Instead it offers multiple game modes for single-player including a standard 60 wave defence mode, a survival mode to go as long as you can and a hero mode where your enemies are given random abilities. On top of that, there's also a level editor and a versus online mode to send waves against other players.
This is awesome. TerraTech is actually a really fun game for those who like to build vehicles and then go exploring and it just got a big update.
Version 1.3 was released yesterday, building on the work they did in a previous update to give a co-op creative mode it now has a fully online co-op campaign mode. You will be sharing everything from the blocks available to the mission log, so it will require working together.
After waiting a whole year, the seventh chapter of the Higurashi When They Cry Hou is now available with Higurashi When They Cry Hou - Ch.7 Minagoroshi.
Continuing to support Linux just like all the other chapters, this highly rated series is worth a look for anyone who enjoys a good mystery. This is a kinetic/sound novel, not one if you like to pick lots of options and change the story. It's a linear experience but still worth going through if you like your novels.
Warm up that cup of speculation, as it appears Valve are working on another game that seems to be going by the name of Citadel.
Linking into Half-Life, since the Citadel is the HQ from where the Combine govern Earth. Apparently though, this is entirely separate to the unannounced Half-Life VR game with Citadel being a completely different Source 2 project. As always though, do not take this as any form of confirmation.
As you go about your daily tasks, you’re probably unaware that Plasma runs on the computers in one of Europe’s largest research facilities. We were also oblivious – until we met Sergi Blanch-Torné at FOSDEM 2019.
We’re always looking for interesting stories from people who use KDE software at their workplace, in school, or in government institutions. You can imagine our delight, then, when we met Sergi Blanch-Torné at this year’s FOSDEM.
Sergi is a Controls Software Engineer at ALBA, a KDE user, and a Free software advocate and contributor. Not only was he willing to tell us about his favorite KDE apps, but he also works at one of the most amazing places on Earth! In this interview, he tells us what it’s like to work at ALBA, and answers the burning question: “what even is a synchrotron?”.
ALBA is a third-generation synchrotron radiation facility in the Barcelona Synchrotron Park, in Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain. Managed by the Consortium for the Construction, Equipping and Exploitation of the Synchrotron Light Source (CELLS), it is jointly funded by the Spanish and the Catalonian Administration.
This release of Clonezilla live (2.6.2-15) includes major enhancements and bug fixes. ENHANCEMENTS and CHANGES from 2.6.1-25
I already posted about French and German editions, this one is the English build.
Today we are looking at Feren OS Next 19.07 Beta. Feren OS Next is Feren's distro in development, a work in progress, but it is improving a lot and this is a major release for this distro, as it is now called Beta.
It is based on Ubuntu 18.04.2, uses Linux Kernel 4.18 and KDE Plasma 5.16.3. It uses about 700MB of ram when idling.
Since the last point release, its highly customized features have been stabilized, not perfect yet as expected, and new features and graphical art has been added. It is truly becoming a beautiful and unique KDE Plasma distro.
In this video, we look at Feren OS Next 19.07 Beta.
In 2016, when serious accusations of sexual misconduct were made against a volunteer who participates in multiple online communities, the Debian Account Managers sent him a threat of expulsion and gave him two days to respond.
Yet in 2018, when Chris Lamb decided to indulge in removing members from the Debian keyring, he simply did it spontaneously, using the Debian Account Managers as puppets to do his bidding. Members targetted by these politically-motivated assassinations weren't given the same two day notice period as the person facing allegations of sexual assault.
Two days hardly seems like sufficient time to respond to such allegations, especially for the member who was ambushed the week before Christmas. What if such a message was sent when he was already on vacation and didn't even receive the message until January? Nonetheless, however crude, a two day response period is a process. Chris Lamb threw that process out the window. There is something incredibly arrogant about that, a leader who doesn't need to listen to people before making such a serious decision, it is as if he thinks being Debian Project Leader is equivalent to being God.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Article 10 tells us that Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations. They were probably thinking about more than a two day response period when they wrote that.
Any organization seeking to have a credible code of conduct seeks to have a clause equivalent to article 10. Yet the recent scandals in Debian and Wikimedia demonstrate what happens in the absence of such clauses. As Lord Denning put it, without any process or hearing, members are faced with the arbitrary authority of the despot.
deepin is a Linux distribution devoted to providing a beautiful, easy to use, safe and reliable system for global users. deepin is an open source GNU/Linux operating system, based on Linux kernel and mainly on desktop applications, supporting laptops, desktops, and all-in-ones. It preinstalls Deepin Desktop Environment (DDE) and nearly 30 deepin native applications, as well as several applications from the open source community to meet users' daily learning and work needs. In addition, about a thousand applications are offered in Deepin Store to meet users' various requirements. Welcome to deepin 15.11 release. Compared with deepin 15.10, deepin 15.11 comes with new features - Cloud Sync in Control Center and disc burning function in Deepin File Manager. Besides, kwin window manager was fixed and optimized for better stability and compatibility, and a number of bugs were fixed. In deepin 15.11, you will enjoy smooth and better user experiences!
Kubuntu 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish was released on October 18th 2018 with 9 months support. As of 18th July 2019, 18.10 reaches ?end of life?. No more package updates will be accepted to 18.10, and it will be archived to old-releases.ubuntu.com in the coming weeks.
The official end of life announcement for Ubuntu as a whole can be found here [1].
Kubuntu 19.04 Disco Dingo continues to be supported, receiving security and high-impact bugfix updates until January 2020.
End of life is the term used for the date after which an operating system release won’t get updates. Ubuntu provides security and maintenance upgrades in order to keep your systems safe from cyber attacks.
After Ubuntu 18.10 reaches end of life, you won’t get the security updates, you won’t get maintenance updates on your installed software and soon you won’t even be able to install programs from Ubuntu repositories.
Canonical's server team is working on a new means of carrying out automated installations of Ubuntu Server in time for their 20.04 LTS release.
Traditionally Ubuntu Server has supported automated installations in the same manner of Debian as they had been relying upon the text-based Debian Installer and thus allowed using pre-seeds. But since Ubuntu 18.04 LTS when they rolled out their new text-based installer for Ubuntu Server that isn't based on the long-standing Debian Installer, they lost the pre-seed support.
Rather than trying to support pre-seeds as in the same format as the Debian Installer, they are working on a new approach they hope to have ready by Ubuntu Server 20.04 LTS. Their proposed approach is using YAML as the format for specifying the server installation data and makes different assumptions about what to do in the case of missing data and other behavior.
Lifecycle management entails fulfilling changing requirements over time. However, there is a gap that the existing robot development frameworks do not address, making it challenging to tackle system-level requirements (fault tolerance, system safety, maintainability, interoperability or reusability etc…). Ubuntu Core aims at closing this gap by complementing existing frameworks with a set of tools that enable the long term viability of robotic projects. Referring to system life cycle standard ISO/IEC 15288, we will describe how Ubuntu Core enables success in each specified stage.
Did you know that Ubuntu MATE is besties with the GPD Pocket & Pocket 2?
Well it is; the pair of pocket-sized PCs, which were made possible through various crowdfunding efforts, got their own, customised, and 100% official Ubuntu MATE 18.10 install image last year, and a follow-up with the 19.04 release this year.
I guess making a custom-spun ISO is the distro equivalent of weaving a friendship bracelet!
Accordingly, it’s no major surprise to learn Ubuntu MATE 19.10 will also come tailored for use on China-based GPD’s latest mini-marvel, the GPD MicroPC.
Interestingly, the device is sold with Ubuntu MATE 18.10 pre-loaded.
i2SOM offers its PanGu SBC based on ST’s dual-core STM32MP1 series SoC. It supports both Yocto and Debian and provides 1GB DRAM, HDMI, Ethernet, LCD, USB OTG, USB Host, TF Card, audio and other interfaces.
i2SOM has unveiled its PanGu SBC based on the STMicroelectronics (ST) STM32MP1 series SoC. The PanGu Board uses the STM32MP157AAA3 version of the SoC series. This version combines a 650MHz Arm dual-core Cortex-A7 core and 209MHz Cortex-M4 coprocessor with an FPU, MPU, and DSP instructions.
The PanGu Board integrates HDMI, 1000Mbps Ethernet, LCD, USB OTG, USB Host, TF Card, audio and other interfaces. The 70 mm Ãâ 105.5mm form factor board is designed for applications including industrial systems, the IoT, portable consumer electronics, automotive electronics and others. The PanGu supports Yocto Linux as well as the Jessie version of Debian.
Our hardware and software puts users back in control of computing–but, you may be wondering, can we do the same with our services? With Librem One, the answer is yes. We have big, no, huge dreams about what we can achieve with your support and the wealth of free software that already exists. But we need to keep our feet firmly on the ground.
In this post we will outline the touchstones we have used to do just that–engineer trustworthy services that everyone can use–with a design process called user-centered software engineering. We hope it will facilitate communication with friends and colleagues as we hack towards a common goal… and also show all non-technical readers that human beings are at the center of our bits and bytes. So, how did we do it?
The Kubernetes API is amazing, and not only are we going to break it down and show you how to wield this mighty weapon, but we will do it while building a video game, live, on stage. As a matter of fact, you get to play along.
5 years ago, Kubernetes was born and quickly became one of the most important open-source platform innovations. Today, its Github repository boasts 55,384 stars and 2,205 contributors! We?re not just celebrating Kubernetes and how much easier it makes our lives, but we?re also celebrating the open-source community that added to the container management tool; making it what it is today. When you have an entire community working together to innovate and improve, the possibilities are endless.
F-Droid won’t tolerate oppression or harassment against marginalized groups. Because of this, it won’t package nor distribute apps that promote any of these things. This includes that it won’t distribute an app that promotes the usage of previously mentioned website, by either its branding, its pre-filled instance domain or any other direct promotion. This also means F-Droid won’t allow oppression or harassment to happen at its communication channels, including its forum. In the past week, we failed to fulfill this goal on the forum, and we want to apologize for that.
Yet Mozilla turns out to be much more consequential than its mixed record and middling numbers would have you believe. There are three reasons for this.
The Travel Support Program (TSP) provides travel sponsorships to openSUSE community who want to attend the openSUSE.Asia Summit and need financial assistance. openSUSE.Asia Summit 2019 will be in Bali, Indonesia, at Information Technology Department, Faculty of Engineering, Udayana University on October 5 and 6.
The goal of the TSP is to help everybody in and around openSUSE to be able to attend the openSUSE.Asia Summit!
The JNU Data Depot is a joint project between rogue archivist Carl Malamud (previously), bioinformatician Andrew Lynn, and a research team from New Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University: together, they have assembled 73 million journal articles from 1847 to the present day and put them into an airgapped respository that they're offering to noncommercial third parties who want to perform textual analysis on them to "pull out insights without actually reading the text."
This text-mining process is already well-developed and has produced startling scientific insights, including "databases of genes and chemicals, map[s of] associations between proteins and diseases, and [automatically] generate[d] useful scientific hypotheses." But the hard limit of this kind of text mining is the paywalls that academic and scholarly publishers put around their archives, which both limit who can access the collections and what kinds of queries they can run against them.
HackMD.io is an open source, collaborative Markdown editor. It allows people to share, comment, and collaborate on documents. As open source software, users can choose between using the online platform or installing it as a local service using the upstream project CodiMD.
HackMD's primary feature is obviously the text editor; it leverages the Markdown language, provides handy tools like inserting checkboxes and horizontal separator lines, and allows users to visualize the Markdown rendering while they're working on a document. But HackMD's real power is in enabling collaboration. Let's have a closer look at those features.
In this article, we'll examine multiple ways to sort lists in Python.
Python ships with two built-in methods for sorting lists and other iterable objects. The method chosen for a particular use-case often depends on whether we want to sort a list in-place or return a new version of the sorted list.
There are many IDEs for Python, and it’s time for one more. ExpressPython is a lightweight, small code editor for Python 3. Originally built to help teach students how to code, it can be used in programming competitions, or just when you need a fast, small, clean code editor. There are a wide variety of Python IDEs and code editors available for programmers. Between PyCharm, VS Code, IDLE, Spyder, just to name a few, programmers have many to choose from depending on their needs and preferences. Add one more editor to the fray.
ExpressPython is a small, lightweight Python 3 editor that can help with learning and competitive programming, such as coding challenges. Its creator started work on it in 2014 in order to fulfill a few needs, such as the ability to work offline.
It is not made with the intent of becoming a fully-featured IDE, and does not include debugging features. However, it does have a few noteworthy features, so let’s take a look.
The Go language will not be adding a "try" keyword in the next major version, despite this being a major part of what was proposed for version 1.14.
Go, an open source language developed by Google, features static typing and native code compilation. It is around the 15th most popular language according to the Redmonk rankings.
Error handling in Go is currently based on using if statements to compare a returned error value to nil. If it is nil, no error occurred. This requires developers to write a lot of if statements.
"In general Go programs have too much code-checking errors and not enough code handling them," wrote Google principal engineer Russ Cox in an overview of the error-handling problem in Go.
Feature work is over on LLVM 9.0 as the next release for this widely-used compiler stack ranging from the AMDGPU shader compiler back-end to the many CPU targets and other innovative use-cases for this open-source compiler infrastructure.
Ongoing LLVM release manager Hans Wennborg branched the LLVM 9.0 code-base this morning while in turn opening LLVM 10.0 development on trunk/master. This also marks the 9.0 branching for all LLVM sub-projects.
Mu made a number of appearances at last week’s wonderful EuroPython 2019 conference in Basel, Switzerland.
PyCharm 2019.2 is almost ready to be released, and we’re happy to announce that a release candidate is available for download now.
NASA’s plan to return to the Moon is called Artemis, and like Apollo, the program requires a giant rocket as well as landers to take people to the lunar surface. Perhaps the biggest thing that sets Artemis apart from the Apollo program is that this time, the emphasis is on sustainability. Rather than just send people to walk around the Moon for a few hours, NASA wants to build some kind of sustainable outpost near the lunar surface for the foreseeable future. That’s why Artemis includes a separate component dubbed the Gateway — a space station meant to be built in orbit around the Moon. Instead of people traveling directly to the lunar surface from Earth, they’d travel to the Gateway first and then travel in landers to the Moon.
The development of space thus far has been focused on facilitating activity down below—mainly satellite communications for broadcasting and navigation. Now two things are changing. First, geopolitics is stoking a new push to send humans beyond the shallows of low-Earth orbit. China plans to land people on the Moon by 2035. President Donald Trump’s administration wants Americans to be back there by 2024. Falling costs make this showing off more affordable than before. Apollo cost hundreds of billions of dollars (in today’s money). Now tens of billions are the ticket price.
The feds charged Darryl Varnum in late June after he told the Congresswoman he was ‘gonna kill your ass if you do that bill,’ report The Beast's Jackie Kucinich and Lachlan Markay.
“I’m gonna kill your ass if you do that bill. I swear,” Varnum’s voicemail began. “I will fucking come down and kill your fucking ass. And you’re a Congressperson, that’s fine. I hope the fucking FBI, CIA and everybody else hears this shit.”
As it relates to memory technologies, the future looks very promising and very exciting. Will the SSD completely replace the traditional spinning HDD? I doubt it. Look at tape technology. It's still around and continues to find a place in the archival storage space. The HDD most likely will have a similar fate. Although until then, the HDD will continue to compete with the SSD in both price and capacity.
At the end of last year I decided it was time to upgrade my home server. I built it back in 2013 as an all-in-one device to be my only always-on machine, with some attempt towards low power consumption. It was starting to creak a bit - the motherboard is limited to 16G RAM and the i3-3220T is somewhat ancient (though has served me well). So it was time to think about something more up to date. Additionally since then my needs have changed; my internet connection is VDSL2 (BT Fibre-to-the-Cabinet) so I have an BT HomeHub 5 running OpenWRT to drive that and provide core routing/firewalling. My wifi is provided by a pair of UniFi APs at opposite ends of the house. I also decided I could use something low power to run Kodi and access my ripped DVD collection, rather than having the main machine in the living room. That meant what I wanted was much closer to just a standard server rather than having any special needs.
The first thing to consider was a case. My ADSL terminates in what I call the “comms room” - it has the electricity meter / distribution board and gas boiler, as well as being where one of the UniFi’s lives and where the downstairs ethernet terminates. In short it’s the right room for a server to live in. I don’t want a full rack, however, and ideally wanted something that could sit alongside the meter cabinet without protruding from the wall any further. A tower case would have worked, but only if turned sideways, which would have made it a bit awkward to access. I tried in vain to find a wall mount case with side access that was shallow enough, but failed. However in the process I discovered a 4U vertical wall mount. This was about the same depth as the meter cabinet, so an ideal choice. I paired it with a basic 2U case from X-Case, giving me a couple of spare U should I decide I want another rack-mount machine or two.
WHO defines a global emergency as an "extraordinary event" that requires a co-ordinated international response.
"This is still a regional emergency and by no means a global threat," Robert Steffen, head of the emergency committee on Ebola in Congo, told reporters.
According to the complaint, the two "fraudulent" acts alleged to have been performed by defendants were 1) failing to disclose that "one of its competitors had not obtained FDA approval [for its competing drug] during the time period for which Defendants were making critical market share comparisons between Zytiga and its biggest competitor, Xtandiۨ" and "withheld material information from the Patent Office that the claimed commercial success of Zytiga lacked any nexus" to the invention claimed in the '438 patent. Their allegation is "but for" -- by engaging in inequitable conduct, Defendants were able to exclude generic competition and thus their reimbursement by the Federal government amounted to filing false claims with the government. The complaint lays out the course of patent prosecution for the '438 patent, whose claims were repeatedly rejected on obviousness grounds under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 103. Defendant patent owner Janssen asserted so-called "secondary considerations" or objective indicia of non-obviousness in response to these rejections, specifically that the commercial success of Zytiga rebutted the prima facie obviousness case established by the Office. The course of prosecution of the application (U.S. Application No. 13/034,340) was not excessively lengthy, the application having been filed in February 2011 and granted on September 2, 2014. The defect in applicants' assertion of commercial success is purportedly due to a failure to properly establish commercial sales with the benefits of the putatively obvious invention to be patented, which the complaint further states must show "increasing market share and the maintenance of such shares in the face of competitors and other adverse market forces," citing Gaderma Labs L.P. v. Tolmar Inc. and Ashland Oil v. Delta Resins & Refractories. (The complaint includes the further caveat that the success cannot be due to blocking patents or other "reasons other than the merits of the claimed invention.")
Many server hardening or server security guides directly start with installing software packages and changing some configuration files. This is fine for experienced server administrators. However, people who try to set up their first server hit on problems and most importantly they very likely forget things that aren’t covered by such guides.
So, please do not start to set up your first server by blindly following any guide on the internet (including our guides!).
I need all reviews back by 5 August. This gives me time (if everything goes well) to have the book in print for vBSDCon. Assuming they accept my proposal, that is.
Basically, this doesn't strike me as even a tiny bit interesting. The template of '$EVILCODE does $STUFF to your system if you run it' raises the obvious question of 'What about _not_ running it?' By and large, code doesn't run itself, so failure to answer that 'one interesting question' means the interesting bit got omitted.
A veteran Linux kernel developer at Germany-based SUSE says the one thing that keeps him and his team busy these days is CPU vulnerability mitigations...
Security updates have been issued by Debian (bzip2), Fedora (freetds, kernel, kernel-headers, and knot-resolver), openSUSE (bubblewrap, fence-agents, kernel, libqb, libu2f-host, pam_u2f, and tomcat), Oracle (vim), SUSE (kernel, LibreOffice, libxml2, and tomcat), and Ubuntu (libmspack and squid, squid3).
Many of us have extremely sensitive data on our systems. Emails to family, medical or bank records, Bitcoin wallets, browsing history, the list goes on. Although we have isolation between our user account and root, we have no isolation between applications that run as our user account. We still, in effect, have to be careful about what attachments we open in email.
Only now it’s worse. You might “npm install hello-world”, and audit hello-world itself, but get some totally malicious code as well. How many times do we see instructions to gem install this, pip install that, go get the other, and even curl | sh? Nowadays our risky click isn’t an email attachment. It’s hosted on Github with a README.md.
Not only that, but my /usr/bin has over 4000 binaries. Have every one been carefully audited? Certainly not, and this is from a distro with some of the highest quality control around. What about the PPAs that people add? The debs or rpms that are installed from the Internet? Are you sure that the postinst scripts — which run as root — aren’t doing anything malicious when you install Oracle Virtualbox?
[...]
One thing a person could do would be to keep the sensitive data on a separate, ideally encrypted, filesystem. (Maybe even a fuse one such as gocryptfs.) Then, at least, it could be unavailable for most of the time the system is on.
Of course, the downside here is that it’s still going to be available to everything when it is mounted, and there’s the hassle of mounting, remembering to unmount, password typing, etc. Not exactly transparent.
I wondered if mount namespaces might be an answer here. A filesystem could be mounted but left pretty much unavailable to processes unless a proper mount namespace is joined. Indeed that might be a solution. It is somewhat complicated, though, since nsenter requires root to work. Enter sudo, and dropping privileges back to a particular user — a not particularly ideal situation, and complex as well.
Still, it might well have some promise for some of these things.
Workers, peasants and youth in Ecuador began a five-day strike Monday against the draconian policies of the Lenín Moreno administration, which is seeking to strengthen its ties to Washington and its military-intelligence apparatus.
The strike constitutes the first major industrial action in the world demanding the freedom of Julian Assange. The demand is presented in the framework of growing opposition to the attacks against social and democratic rights associated with the Moreno administration’s totally servile policy toward US imperialism.
[...]
The organizers of the strike include the Peasants National Movement (FECAOL), the main Workers Union Federation (FUT), dozens of activist organizations grouped in the National Citizens’ Assembly (ANC), and Social Compromise, the new party of ex-president Rafael Correa. They claim this is the broadest strike in 14 years.
On Tuesday, the main day of planned demonstrations, protesters set up dozens of roadblocks—from the coastal highways of Manabí, Guayas and El Oro, surrounding the port city of Guayaquil, to the capital of Quito, east on the PanAmerican Highway to Colombia and south to the Morona Santiago province and Perú along the Andean range—that brought the country to a virtual standstill.
Most of the signs of protesters were hand-made and focused on firings, social cuts and the role of the “International Misery Fund,” as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is labelled, in the cities, and on land, water rights and mining concessions in the rural areas. Ecuadorian migrants in Bolivia, Spain, the United States and other countries carried out rallies in support of the strike.
About 11,800 public employees, mostly in the health care sector, were fired during Moreno’s first year in office as part of the austerity conditions of a $4.2 billion loan approved by the IMF in March.
Another issue raised in the strike call is “the rejection of the handing over of the Galapagos for the interests of North American imperialism,” referring to a recent agreement with the Pentagon to use the Ecuadorian archipelago, designated by the UN as a biosphere reserve and World Heritage Site, as an air base.
All 83 counties in Michigan are getting hotter, and a report released Tuesday predicts it will only get worse, as the number of days with heat indexes over 90 degrees will quadruple in the next 20 years.
The report from the Union of Concerned Scientists, a Massachusetts-based nonprofit science advocacy group, predicts extreme temperatures will soar nationwide if nothing is done to curb climate change.
Van Tilburg says all those vacationers are causing damage to the island's delicate ecosystem, on top of "disrespecting the statues by climbing on them, sitting on graves, and trampling preserved spaces." There are signs reminding people to act like adults and stay the heck off the statues, but noses that large are just begging someone to step right up and pick a winner.
And though the Moai may be huge and heavy, the volcanic rock from which they were carved is actually quite porous and easily damaged ... as rock goes, anyway. Now, in addition to being slowly destroyed by wind, rain, and lichen, their demise is being accelerated by a bunch of outsiders climbing all over them and shoving fingers up their snot boxes. Such is the price of progress, and by "progress" we mean "a Facebook profile picture you'll change in two weeks."
For years now conservationists have warned that many of Madagascar’s iconic lemur species face the risk of extinction due to rampant deforestation, the illegal pet trade and the emerging market for the primates’ meat.
Yes, people eat lemurs, and the reasons they do aren’t exactly what we might expect.
One 2016 study found — perhaps not surprisingly — that Madagascar’s extreme poverty drives the poorest families to hunt and eat lemurs and other wildlife. The study was conducted in Masoala National Park, home to ten of Madagascar’s 110-plus lemur species, including several critically endangered species.
Local hunters know that killing lemurs is against the law, but there’s a reason that doesn’t stop them. The study, published in Biological Conservation, found that “almost all children in lemur-hunting households were malnourished.” Wild-caught meat, tragically, is the only readily available solution for hungry families. The authors concluded that “unless lemur conservation efforts on the Masoala [peninsula] prioritize child health, they are unlikely to reduce lemur hunting or improve lemur conservation.”
Although poverty is endemic in Madagascar, it’s not the only factor driving lemur consumption. Two additional studies published that year in PLOS One and in Environmental Conservation revealed that Madagascar’s wealthier and middle-class citizens are equal participants. The studies uncovered a massive supply chain that transports meat from lemurs and other endangered species into urban and semi-urban areas, where it is sold in restaurants, open-air markets and even supermarkets.
Ironically, such values-based arguments, however one feels about them, are undercut by rising inequality. As the rich pull away from the rest, their increased political power may stymie tax rises needed to fund universal public services. Meanwhile for progressive politicians the need to target available funds at the worst-off in society grows more urgent; in America, the argument that the children of billionaires should not receive a government-funded education takes on greater moral as well as practical weight. It is probably no coincidence that tuition fees are lowest in places with the most equal income distributions (see chart). Strong safety-nets compress the income distribution. But inequality may also make the sorts of comprehensive public services that underpin egalitarian societies ever harder to sustain.
To quote a friend: "If you upload your address book to 'the cloud', I don't want to be in it." (And while I think so, I'm not angry for past actions. But if would like you to be considerate in the future.)
As an SMS user from 1997 until today it's very interesting to taste some of the same survailance as the rest of the the whole planet. And I have to admit, it's tasty, but consciously I know it's tasty in a bitter-sweet way. What also puzzled me that Telegram chats are unecrypted by default. In 2019.
And now let's do something about it. Or sing this karaoke version of the yellow submarine: we all live in global world surveillance, global world surveillance. Cheers!
The European Commission has announced a formal anti-trust investigation into Amazon to find out whether the firm's use of sensitive data from independent retailers, who use its marketplace, breaches competition rules within the political bloc.
Artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technologies are enabling detailed studies of patient information that weren’t dreamed of until a few years ago. Now, researchers, drugmakers and tech companies are clamoring for access to data to help streamline patient care, develop better products -- and even prevent serious disease.
In order to operate the application, users must provide the company full and irrevocable access to their personal photos and data. According to its privacy policy, users grant FaceApp license to use or publish content shared with the application, including their username or even their real name, without notifying them or providing compensation.
Furthermore, it is unclear how long FaceApp retains a user’s data or how a user may ensure their data is deleted after usage. These forms of “dark patterns,” which manifest in opaque disclosures and broader user authorizations, can be misleading to consumers and may even constitute a deceptive trade practices. Thus, I have serious concerns regarding both the protection of the data that is being aggregated as well as whether users are aware of who may have access to it.
Indeed, China does not share the United States’ values on individual freedoms and privacy. And yes, breaking up Facebook could weaken its products like WhatsApp, providing more opportunities for apps like Chinese tech giant Tencent’s WeChat to proliferate.
But letting Facebook off the hook won’t solve the problems China’s influence poses to an open and just internet. Framing the issue as “strong regulation lets China win” creates a false dichotomy. There are more constructive approaches if Zuckerberg seriously wants to work with the government on exporting freedom via the web. And the distrust Facebook has accrued through the mistakes it’s made in the absence of proper regulation arguably do plenty to hurt the perception of how American ideals are spread through its tech companies.
The Ugandan police statement cited a July 8 Facebook post by Kabuleta criticizing Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni as the reason for his arrest, and said police will "continue using the acquired capabilities to monitor comments on social media."
The police statement alleged that the post was a criminal violation of Section 25 of Uganda's 2011 Computer Misuse Act, which pertains to "[a]ny person who willfully and repeatedly uses electronic communication to disturb or attempts to disturb the peace, quiet or right of privacy of any person with no purpose of legitimate communication."
To reiterate the madness at hand: Your name, exact age, address, vehicle make, vehicle model, vehicle year, vehicle registration status, weight, height, eye color, hair color, and more is all for sale at the right price and used to target you in direct mailer advertisements – and there is nothing you can do about it because it is essentially compulsive to get an identification card to be a productive member of society. When the government can’t be trusted, it’s necessary to take privacy into your own hands.
I-Team Investigator Adam Walser obtained records showing the state sold information on Florida drivers and ID cardholders to more than 30 private companies, including marketing firms, bill collectors, insurance companies and data brokers in the business of reselling information.
DWeb Camp is going on from July 18-21 in Pescadero, CA.
Q: What excites you most about the decentralized web?
A: The Internet for me has always been a vision of autonomy among equals — being able to create, share and communicate with your peers as quickly and easily as possible.
Somehow, so much of that communication now goes through a handful of chokepoints: silos where the data of our lives goes in, but never escapes.
Decentralizing — or re-decentralizing — the Web, is about continuing the project, after a brief diversion into the Google/Amazon/Facebook world.
The pair began collaborating on what they called BMW Group China High Performance D3 Platform, which is scheduled to begin operations by the end of the year, according to a statement on Friday. Tencent operates one of the largest cloud platforms in China, providing services from data storage to online computing.
Managing IP reports from the England & Wales High Court as discussions on database rights and copyright, plus a debate over the inadvertent revealing of trade secrets, formed the opening of a dispute pitting mapping agency Ordnance Survey against an SME
A court case pitting Ordnance Survey (OS) against a geospatial data specialist may have to be heard largely in private after a disagreement between counsel and the judge over whether a public hearing could reveal trade secrets inadvertently.
According to CPJ research, journalists have been imprisoned, threatened, and detained by all parties to the conflict in Yemen.
A Moroccan court on Thursday sentenced three suspected jihadists to death for the murders of two Scandinavian women beheaded while on a hiking trip in Morocco.
Another defendant received a life sentence, while 20 others were sentenced to terms ranging from five to 30 years on charges of being accessories to the crime, abetting or propagating material that condoned the attack, the Medias24 news website reported. The verdicts can be appealed.
Morocco has had a freeze on executions since 1993.
It got so bad that Nuril recorded one of the explicit phone calls as evidence of the sexual harassment she said she endured on more than 50 occasions, starting in 2012.
The recording, she says, was forwarded by a colleague to the local Department of Education. Shortly after, Nuril was fired from her job and her boss sued her for defamation.
Nuril -- who says she put up with the sexual harassment for more than a year -- spent two months in jail during the initial investigation in 2017.
Needless to say, this has raised "significant concerns" by the sort of people most likely to be concerned about false positives. Needless to say, this does not include the London Metropolitan Police, which continues to deploy this tech despite its only marginally-improved failure rate.
In 2018, it was reported the Metropolitan Police's tech was misidentifying people at an astounding 100% rate. False positives were apparently the only thing the system was capable of. Things had improved by May 2019, bringing the Met's false positive rate down to 96%. The sample size was still pretty small, meaning this had a negligible effect on the possibility of the Metropolitan Police rounding up the unusual suspects the system claimed were the usual suspects.
Perhaps this should be viewed as a positive development, but when a system has only managed to work its way up to being wrong 81% of the time, we should probably hold our applause until the end of the presentation.
As it stands now, the tech is better at being wrong than identifying criminals. But what's just as concerning is the Met's unshaken faith in its failing tech. It defends its facial recognition software with stats that are literally unbelievable.
Netflix has certainly enjoyed its flight to the top of the heap of the streaming space, now streaming video to 60.1 million US subscribers. That's more than pay TV giants like AT&T or even Comcast, who've done their best (via usage caps and lobbying shenanigans) to unsuccessfully hamper Netflix's meteoric rise.
But there's some indication that the company may have started to reach its high water mark. Netflix this week revealed it lost 130,000 subscribers last quarter, the company's first quarterly subscriber loss in history. The losses come despite Netflix having spent $3 billion on programming last quarter, and another $600 million to market its its wares.
The European Commission has hit American processor maker Qualcomm with a €242 million ($385.6 million) fine for abusing its market dominance in 3G baseband chipsets.
Uber has never made a profit and has actually lost over $14 billion in the last four years alone. In the prospectus, Uber insists that these five major metropolitan markets are essential to its path to profitability. In reality, what Uber actually relies on is the $20 billion in funding raised over the past decade and the $8 billion in new investments after going public in May. This investor welfare covers the cost of low prices that render each rideshare trip unprofitable, of driver incentives to combat the high turnover rate of drivers, and of promotions used to drive up demand.
The investors have continued piling that money onto Uber because they believe Khosrowshahi when he talks about becoming the “Amazon of transportation” or the platform on which all transportation happens. In other words, a monopoly. After achieving a monopoly, some commentators warn that Uber will then charge whatever price it wants and use its dominant position to both pay back investors and kill potential competitors. As an added bonus, Uber promises it will turn its labor costs to zero by deploying a fleet to autonomous vehicles (which may prove to be difficult to widely adopt). That is Uber’s path to profitability.
On July 3, the Federal Circuit issued a per curiam Order in Athena Diagnostics, Inc. v. Mayo Collaborative Services, LLC, denying a petition for rehearing en banc filed by Plaintiffs-Appellants Athena Diagnostics, Inc., Oxford University Innovation Ltd., and the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft zur Forderung der Wissenschaften E.V. The Court also denied Plaintiffs-Appellants a panel rehearing.
The four page per curiam Order was accompanied by eight opinions, four concurring in the denial of the petition and four dissenting in the denial of the petition, adding an additional 82 pages to the Order. The four concurring opinions were authored by Circuit Judges Lourie, Hughes, Dyk, and Chen, with Chief Judge Prost and Circuit Judges Reyna, Taranto, and Hughes joining in one of the concurrences and Circuit Judge Chen joining in one concurrence and several parts of another. The four dissenting opinions were authored by Circuit Judges Moore, Newman, Stoll, and O'Malley, with Circuit Judges O'Malley and Stoll joining in one of the dissents and Circuit Judge Wallach joining in three of the dissents. Thus, a total of seven members of the Court (Chief Judge Prost and Circuit Judges Lourie, Dyk, Reyna, Taranto, Chen, and Hughes) authored or joined opinions concurring in the denial, and a total of five members (Circuit Judges Newman, Moore, O'Malley, Wallach, and Stoll) authored or joined opinions dissenting in the denial.
[...] Judge O'Malley begins her opinion by providing some "historical perspective" on "the 'invention requirement'—itself 'invented' by the Supreme Court rather than Congress or the Constitution," noting that "[i]f the invention requirement and its criticisms sound familiar, that is because they are." And Judge O'Malley suggests that even though, in 1952, "Congress attempted to address these criticisms by amending the Patent Act to replace the ill-defined and judicially-created invention requirement with the more workable anticipation and obviousness tests codified in Sections 102 and 103," "the search for an inventive concept—now enshrined in the €§ 101 inquiry via Mayo—calls back to the invention requirement that Congress quite deliberately abrogated through the Patent Act of 1952."
Back in 2018, Heat Tech sued Koehler Paper in N.D. Georgia federal court requesting correction of inventorship under 35 U.S.C. €§ 256 as well as damages for unjust enrichment and conversion under Georgia state law. U.S. Patent No. 9,851,146. The basic background of the lawsuit was that Heat Tech’s president (Plavnik) invented the paper-drying mechanism that was then disclosed to Koehler as part of a collaboration evaluation. In addition, Heat Tech argued that almost all of the information disclosed in Koehler’s patent was included in a prior Heat Tech patent application.
At the district court, Koehler filed a motion to dismiss the case — arguing that Heat Tech’s actual claim is for invalidity and that an inventorship-correction lawsuit is not appropriate when the same alleged facts would invalidate the patent for lack of novelty or obviousness. The district court denied the motion to dismiss, but agreed to certify the question for appeal to the Federal Circuit — noting some disagreement among the courts on the state of the law.
[...]
On appeal now, the Federal Circuit HeatTechDecisionhas denied the 1292(b) petition and effectively indicated that the district court’s decision was correct. In particular, the appellate panel found no “substantial ground for disagreement” because Section 256 jurisdiction “does not depend on whether the patent may be shown to be invalid.” Slip op. The appellate panel noted its lack of prior precedent directly and expressly on-point, but concluded that prior cases compel the answer. For example, in Frank’s Casing Crew & Rental Tools, Inc. v. PMR Techs., Ltd., 292 F.3d 1363, 1377 (Fed. Cir. 2002), the court wrote that an inventorship action could be maintained for an unenforceable patent.
The doctrine of equivalents, a Supreme Court-created patent doctrine of vintage similar to inequitable conduct, arose in Graver Tank & Mfg. Co. v. Linde Air Products Co., 339 U.S. 605 (1950) (an uncharacteristically pro-patent decision by the Court, the doctrine recognized that an "unscrupulous copyist" could practice a claimed invention without literal infringement in some circumstances, and as a consequence the patent right could be turned into a "hollow and useless thing")...
[...]
The District Court arrived at this conclusion despite evidence of differences in polarity, the presence of different functional groups, and the capacity to interact with crosslinking groups between polyisobutylene and acrylate-based and silicone-based adhesives, which the Court held were not substantial based on comparisons between Neupro and Defendants' generic alternatives.
Regarding Defendants' invalidity arguments, the panel affirmed the District Court's decision that failed prior art efforts to develop rotigotine transdermal patches neither anticipated nor rendered obvious the claims of the '434 patent. That art did not disclose a water-free patch having rotigotine in free base rather than salt form and thus comprised significant amounts of water (10-15% w/w) to solubilize the salt form of the drug. And none of the other art asserted by Defendants "fill[ed] the gap" in this disclosure, because they did not disclose rotigotine or other anti-Parkinson's disease drugs, and in particular did not disclose the free base form of the drug in the absence of water in the formulation. The Federal Circuit also affirmed the District Court's finding that other art, disclosing transdermal rotigotine administration by direct application to skin and transdermal patches not comprising water, did not render the claims of the '434 patent obvious because there was no "adequate rationale for combining the references' teachings" nor reasonable expectation of success at treating Parkinson's disease using a transdermal patch. The opinion finds the cited art as being "a list of thousands of possibilities out of which a skilled artisan would have to select the claimed combination as one to try" and thus would not have provided the skilled worker with a reasonable expectation of successfully achieving the claimed patch.
Turning to the '414 patent, the Federal Circuit affirmed the District Court's determination that the claimed rotigotine polymorph was used in the art prior to the earliest claimed priority date based on the presence of the polymorph in patches produced prior to that date, which constituted prior public use of the polymorph. Because (as with all factual determinations) appellate review of questions of fact before the district court is reviewed for clear error, the Federal Circuit found no clear error that Defendants had shown anticipation by clear and convincing error, and thus affirmed.
The English Court of Appeal yesterday handed down judgment in ZyXEL v TQ Delta [2019] EWCA Civ 1277. Guest blogger, Tristan Sherliker, reports:
This appeal judgment tells a tale of tactics and legal agility. After completely waiving any right to rely on RAND undertakings, ZyXEL have tested the bounds of the developing English law.
When a defendant has lost a patent trial, when would they decide that submitting to an injunction is better than taking a licence?
This claim was about enforcement of a number of TQ Delta's patents relating to the ITU-T's DSL telecoms standards.
Since the patents in suit had been declared essential to the ITU-T standards, they were encumbered by a RAND undertaking — that is, an undertaking made by TQ Delta that it would grant a licence to the patents on Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory terms.
[...]
Potentially of wider significance is the question of how this ruling might interplay with the pending cases of Unwired Planet v Huawei and Conversant v Huawei and ZTE. At the time of writing, the Court of Appeal's decisions are under appeal and to be heard before the Supreme Court in October 2019. The defendants (appellants) in both cases have criticised the currently-developing law before the High Court and Court of Appeal as being a case of jurisdictional expansionism, which they ask the Supreme Court to overturn.
It seems likely that the Supreme Court in those cases will be assisted by Floyd LJ's judgment and analysis here. Specifically, his statement of the principles extracted from Unwired Planet makes clear what the limits of the prevailing law are, and that the effect of the test will always depend on the facts of the case. What is more, he makes clear the Court of Appeal's view that FRAND does not only operate on a global scale, but that a national licence can be FRAND in the appropriate circumstances. He made this emphatic and disagreed with the judge at first instance in that regard. Equally however, he emphasised that in some cases, a global licence is an appropriate solution to the FRAND question.
But perhaps most profoundly, the decision in ZyXEL v TQ Delta illustrates by example the bounds of the developing case law under Unwired Planet. It may be taken to indicate that this is not an out-of-control expansionism, but that the tests operate within limits. Here, the Court of Appeal has applied the same law that previously benefited the patent holders in their cases — and it has shown that the right facts may well turn the tide in favour of the implementer.
Japan Patent Office (JPO) published an annual report on July 12 2019. According to the report, 313,567 patent applications were filed in Japan in 2018. And, 253,000 patent applications among them were filed by domestic applicants. It slightly decreased than last year.
[...]
This report also shows the utilization of Japanese patents. The utilization ratio in 2017 is 48.4%. This includes licensing to other parties. So, more than half of Japanese patents are not utilized. Also, it states that 37.0% of patents are maintained only for defensive purpose, and they are not used by themselves or other parties. As a result, the remaining 14.5% of patents are maintained for nothing. IP department must be asked for an explanation on that by their higher management sooner or later. Then, such patents may be withdrawn or put in the market.
The term of the Juncker Commission is nearing its end, and while I'm far from enthusiastic about his successor, I'm relieved that neither that conservative-in-name-only Weber nor "Poor Man's Bernie" (Timmermans, who's less reasonable than the real Senator Sanders) got the top job. However, my preference among reasonably likely candidates would have been Margrethe Vestager, the EU's competition commissioner, as I made clear on social media, despite disagreeing with some parts of her regulatory activism, such as the "state aid" case against Ireland and certain aspects of the Android case.
Last year I wrote that Qualcomm "won" the "Antitrust Grand Slam" when the European Commission joined the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and a couple of Asian regulators in fining Qualcomm. The Commission imposed a fine of €997 million ($1.2 billion) over exclusionary conduct in the years 2011-2016 when Apple was precluded from sourcing baseband chipsets from Qualcomm's competitors such as Intel. That exclusive dealing is one of the four counts on which the U.S. FTC defeated Qualcomm in court this year (my previous post discussed some support Qualcomm got for its motion for an enforcement stay).
Yesterday's fine, based on a supplemental Statement of Objections that came down in July 2018, amounts to "only" 242 million euros (272 million U.S. dollars), so it now got a "double whammy" from the EU. The latest one is about predatory pricing. At first sight, that's counterintuitive. We all know that the allegations usually brought against Qualcomm, besides exclusive dealing, are all about maximizing revenues even in the very short term, not just for the long haul. However, we have to keep in mind that Qualcomm is not just "a monopoly" (in the sense of U.S. antitrust law; over in the EU, this is called "market dominance"), but a dual monopoly: its SEP portfolio bestows monopolistic rights (not only on Qualcomm but also on any other patent holder, provided at least one patent in a portfolio is truly standard-essential), as does its position in certain segments of the chip market, and those monopolies are mutually-reinforcing as a result of Qualcomm's practices.
In a statement today, the Courts and Tribunals Judiciary announced his death with “great sadness.”
“On behalf of the entire judiciary, the Lord Chief Justice wishes to record his admiration for Sir Henry’s outstanding contribution to the administration of justice, which has been so tragically cut short.”
After studying jurisprudence at Hertford College, Oxford and obtaining an LLM from the University of British Columbia in Canada, Mr Carr begun his career as a barrister in 1982. He took silk 16 years later, in 1998, specialising in all areas of IP law.
[...]
Just over three weeks ago, on June 27, Managing IP interviewed Mr Carr at the Rolls Building in London. We found him to be warm, accommodating and eloquent. It goes without saying that as a judge at the England & Wales High Court who had previously been a successful IP barrister, he was one of the finest IP minds in the country.
During conversations before the interview, every lawyer we spoke to made it clear how highly regarded Mr Carr was. They said they enjoyed appearing in front of the judge and that he was a very nice man. This was obvious from our interview, in which Mr Carr spoke passionately and thoughtfully on a range of topics.
In-house counsel consider whether a new IP right for software inventions could help the UK compete after Brexit and discuss whether IP is enough of a priority for decision makers
In-house lawyers in the insurance and sustainable transport arenas say that developing new areas of business focus – including through full scale rebrands – prompts them to consider their approach to IP enforcement and administration.
Avid followers of Formula 1 racing are likely to be familiar with the energy drink brand "Rich Energy", and its colourful co-founder William Storey. In March 2018 it was reported that the company was in talks to buy the Force India team out of administration (the purchase did not ultimately proceed). Then, in October 2018, Rich Energy became the title sponsor of the Haas team, and quickly grabbed attention through its bold claims and marketing style.
But there seem to have been a few bumps in the road [sorry]. In recent weeks, relations between Haas and Rich Energy have broken down, and the sponsorship has been terminated. In parallel, a boardroom battle between Storey and his investors has resulted in Storey being forced out as a director of Rich Energy Limited (REL). It also seems that Rich Energy will now instead be "Lighting Volt" (despite the fact that a UK trade mark for RICH ENERGY was filed but two weeks ago). Goodbye, Rich Energy - we hardly knew ye.
Unfortunately, REL still faces a ghost of social media posts past. Along with Mr Storey, it is a defendant in a claim [IP-2019-000064] recently issued in the English High Court by Red Bull GmbH (RBG), owner of Haas' rival F1 team Red Bull Racing. RBG accuses REL and Mr Storey of trade mark infringement.
Sometimes ideas based in good intentions are so poorly thought out that they would actually make things worse. This seems to be especially prevalent in the copyright world of late (I'm looking at you, Articles 15 and 17 of the EU Copyright Directive), but the most recent example is the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2019 (CASE Act). This bill intends to give photographers and small businesses a more streamlined way to enforce their rights with respect to online infringements by reducing the costs and formalities associated with bringing infringement claims in federal court. Pursuing infringement claims can be expensive and time-consuming, so this may sound like a good thing, especially for rightsholders with limited resources. It is not.
The CASE Act would establish a quasi-judicial body within the Copyright Office (part of the legislative branch) empowered to hear a limited set of claims, make "determinations" about whether those claims are valid, and assign "limited" damages. The bill structures the process so that it is "voluntary" and lowers the barriers to filing claims so that plaintiffs can more easily defend their rights. Without the "quotes", this description might sound like a reasonable approach, but that's because we haven't talked about the details. Let's start at the top.
The bill would establish a Copyright Claims Board (CCB) in the Copyright Office. This would not be a court and would be entirely separated from the court system. The only option to appeal any of the CCB's determinations, based on the CCB's legal interpretation, would be to ask the Register of Copyrights to review the decision. It would be theoretically possible to ask a federal court to review the determination, but only on the grounds that the CCB's determination was "issued as a result of fraud, corruption, misrepresentation, or other misconduct" or if the CCB exceeded its authority. So if you disagree with the CCB's legal interpretation, or even its competence to make a decision, you are out of luck. This raises red flags about potential due process and separation of powers problems under the Constitution.
Creative works made by animals and discussions on their copyright ownership have frequently featured on the IPKat, be it Ella, the extensively covered selfie-taking black macaque [here, here] or the animal orchestra and its related questions of copyright ownership [here]. Noting the increasing attention paid to animal-created works, we consider whether such creations can and should be folded within the copyright system. We argue that, in some circumstances, animal-created works can be protected by a form of sui generis protection, which does not involve the strict standards of the conventional copyright regime.
We suggest that animal-created works have a spectrum of their own, on which independent creativity of the animal lies on one end while a degree of human agency interaction lies on the other. For the purposes of further discussion, we divide animal-created works into two categories: works created by animals acting independently, and works created by an animal under some form of human intervention. We propose a different framework of protection for each type of animal-made works. The welfare of the animal is a concern at the centre of each framework.
Perhaps the most interesting one there is the music. Spotify says it has over 50 million tracks on its service. That means a 256 terabyte microSD could probably hold every track on Spotify, and thus most of the recorded music that is generally available in a digital form. Even with today's one terabyte card, you can probably store the complete catalog of songs in a particular style or genre, which is what many people will be most interested in.
In any case, assuming Moore's Law continues to hold, it will soon be possible to buy a 256 terabyte microSD card. Yes, it will be pricey to begin with, but progressively cheaper. At that point, moves to stop unauthorized sharing of music online will be even more pointless than they are now. People won't need to download lots of stuff from dodgy sites any more; they'll just find a friend who has a 256 terabyte microSD card loaded up with all recorded music, and make a copy. After that, they just need to update the parts that interest them -- or find someone with a more recent complete collection.
As the EFF's Parker Higgins wrote:
Simply put, Section 1201 means that you can be sued or even jailed if you bypass digital locks on copyrighted works—from DVDs to software in your car—even if you are doing so for an otherwise lawful reason, like security testing.;
Section 1201 is obviously a big problem for software preservation, especially when it comes to games.
