Coming up on this week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re going to hold the first ever battle in the DL Battledome! This inaugural event will see BTRFS face off against one and only ZFS! Who will become the champion of the OCTAGON! Then we’ll answer some questions about systemd in the Community Feedback. This week we’re joined by Eric the IT Guy & Brandon Johnson, the hosts of the newest podcast on the Destination Linux Network, the Sudo Show! We’ve got some Linux News in the mix and then we’ll round out the show with our famous Picks of the Week with the Software Spotlight and our Tip of the Week. All that and so much more on this week’s episode of Destination Linux.
new goodies, microcenter, streaming shows and packages, anime, camping
Use of verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers.
Explaining Self-sovereign identity and the use of verifiable credentials and decentralized identifiers, Kaliya Young, also known as "Identity Women," joins the show hosted by Doc Searls and Jonathan Bennet. They dive deep into what identity means and the future of identity. Kaliya is a vital part of the Internet Identity Workshop. This workshop brings talent together to design and build an identity system that empowers individuals. They also discuss the critical difference between open source and open standards and the implementations of what that means for identity.
Mozilla suspends its Firefox Send service due to misuse by hacking groups, SUSE is acquiring Rancher Labs, Google launches the Open Usage Commons, and the Flutter framework arrives on Linux.
One of the most often asked questions is what is the best "Linux?" Well, the answer to this question is obvious. But first, I'd just like to interject for a moment...
Linus Torvalds has decided to up the compiler build requirement for the Linux kernel to GCC 4.9.
Recently the compiler requirement was upped to GCC 4.8 while as a late change for Linux 5.8 is now bumping the base compiler version supported to GCC 4.9.
Torvalds updated the requirement on the basis of the Linux kernel currently having to workaround multiple pre-4.9 GCC bugs and other headaches. Shifting the requirement to GCC 4.9 will allow kernel developers to make better assumptions and clean-up a lot of code moving forward.
Developers who were excited by Nvidia’s May announcement of an upcoming CUDA release can finally hop over to the company’s dev portal to download version 11 of the parallel computing platform and programming model for GPUs.
The number of those actually able to make the most of CUDA 11 seems to be comparatively small, given that its most notable features can be subsumed under support for the newest generation of Nvidia GPUs. The A100 is one example, built with the new Ampere architecture that should now work well with CUDA. It was developed to help compute some of the more complex tasks that can be found in the realms of AI, data analytics, and high-performance computing and is also central to the company’s data centre platform.
NVIDIA appears to have quietly promoted CUDA 11.0 to its stable channel.
CUDA 11.0 was announced back in May at the virtual GTC and release candidates subsequently available. On Tuesday though a reader tipped us off that the official CUDA 11.0 binaries are indeed now available. CUDA 11.0 downloads for Linux and Windows are available as always from developer.nvidia.com.
The Panfrost Gallium3D driver providing open-source OpenGL support for Arm Mali graphics hardware now has working multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) for Arm Midgard hardware.
Alyssa Rosenzweig has merged her work on supporting multi-sampling with Midgard using this reverse-engineered Gallium3D driver. This gets the driver close to the multi-sampling requirements mandated by the OpenGL ES 3.0 specification.
I’ve been blogging pretty in-depth about Zink and related code for a while, so let’s do a quick roundup with some future blog post spoilers.
More than a year in the works, KeePassXC 2.6 is finally here with lots of goodies for those who like to keep their passwords in a safe place. The first thing you’ll notice when installing the new version is the totally revamped user interface.
KeePassXC’s user interface now supports both light and dark themes, monochrome tray icons, a compact mode, and a new View Menu that lets you more easily switch between themes, compact mode, as well as to toggle various UI elements.
Linux users also get browser-like tab experience using the Ctrl+[Num] or Alt+[Num] keyboard shortcuts. Also, the built-in browser now lets Linux users define a custom browser location.
There are many Kubernetes administration tools to choose from, whether you prefer a command-line utility or a graphical user interface. I recently covered k9s, a text-based interface that many day-to-day Kubernetes administrators enjoy, but you have to navigate through many Kubernetes-specific terms to use it. A lot of people who use Kubernetes less often would rather have a colorful, clean visual guide. This is where Lens, an open source integrated development environment (IDE) tool for administering Kubernetes clusters, comes in.
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Lens is a beautiful and powerful alternative to managing Kubernetes from the command line. There are some times when you'll want to use the command line, mostly due to the drawbacks of manually editing charts before launching them or for tracking environmental changes. If you have good log-keeping practices in your cluster, this may not be a problem. If you are a visual person, Lens is a great way to explore your Kubernetes cluster and handle 95% of your administrative tasks.
Enter a futuristic, TRON-like environment, where your goal is to try and save your friend’s daughter from…something. From getting hacked, perhaps? Who knows. Per the press sheet, Black Ice is inspired by cyberpunk novels from the 80s and 90s, including Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson and Neuromancer by William Gibson. It’s a game developed by Garrett Cooper and Eric Ford. Their company name is Super Duper Game Company and is based in Austin, Texas.
BOMBFEST, an explosive party game that released last year seems to have been missed by most and it's seen very few user reviews which is a shame due to how fun it actually is. Note: key provided by the developer.
The developer says it's like 'sumo wrestling with explosives' and that's hilariously accurate. Four players run around a small map, while throwing around blocks and bombs to attempt to knock the other players off. Simple, highly accessible as it only needs a few buttons and it's also hilarious. A sweet style too, with everything made to look like children's toys as you battle across wooden forts, on folding chairs, and inside the kitchen sink.
With the next massive update 'Rise of Avalon' coming to Albion Online in August, Sandbox Int have started giving out more in-depth details about the new features coming to this MMO.
Some big new features are arriving and one of these are the Corrupted Dungeons, finally giving solo players something truly interesting to play with as Albion has somewhat lacked dedicated content aimed at solo players. I'm genuinely excited about them too! As you explore the world, you will come across entrances that appear like regular dungeons but they look 'a good deal more sinister' with plenty of demons and corrupted creatures inside.
In the fifth week of GSoC, I worked on adding stars in the 3d Painter backend along with grids. Code for Qt3D is shifted to a new Skymap3D now.
Hello,
GNOME 3.36.4 is now available. This is a stable bugfix release for 3.36. All distributions shipping GNOME 3.36 are advised to upgrade.The GNOME 3.36 flatpak runtimes have been updated as well.
If you want to compile GNOME 3.36.3, you can use the official BuildStream project snapshot:
https://download.gnome.org/teams/releng/3.36.4/gnome-3.36.4.tar.xz
The list of updated modules and changes is available here
https://download.gnome.org/core/3.36/3.36.4/NEWS
The source packages are available here
https://download.gnome.org/core/3.36/3.36.4/sources/
Regards,
Abderrahim Kitouni GNOME Release Team
A day after the GNOME 3.37.4 development release, out today is GNOME 3.36.4 as the latest stable point release for the current desktop series.
GNOME 3.36.4 predominantly brings just a bunch of bug fixes and translation updates as used to seeing out of these point releases. But making GNOME 3.36.4 a bit more noteworthy is back-porting of the Mutter fix for addressing its previously broken windows culling that still led to fully obscured windows being rendered and thus wasting resources
In the old days, you configured your desktop session on a Linux system by editing the .xsession file in your home directory. The display manager (login screen) would invoke the system-wide xsession script, which would either defer to your personal .xsession script or set up a standard desktop environment. You could put whatever you want in the .xsession script, and it would be executed. If you wanted a specific window manager, you’d run it from .xsession. Start emacs or a browser or an xterm or two? .xsession. It was pretty easy, and super flexible.
For the past 25 years or so, I’ve used X with an environment started via .xsession. Early on it was fvwm with some programs, then I replaced fvwm with Window Maker (before that was even its name!), then switched to KDE. More recently (OK, like 10 years ago) I gradually replaced KDE with awesome and various custom widgets. Pretty much everything was based on a .xsession script, and that was fine. One particularly nice thing about it was that I could keep .xsession and any related helper programs in a git repository and manage changes over time.
More recently I decided to give Wayland and GNOME an honest look. This has mostly been fine, but everything I’ve been doing in .xsession is suddenly useless. OK, fine, progress is good. I’ll just use whatever new mechanisms exist. How hard can it be?
I’m aware that this blog is mostly read by the GNOME community. That’s why in this blog post I want to talk especially about how a large piece of desktop software like GNOME is affected by JavaScript Date being so terrible.
Of course most improvements to the JavaScript language are driven by the needs of the web.1 But a few months ago this merge request caught my eye, fixing a bug that made the date displayed in GNOME wrong by a full 1,900 years! The difference between Date.getYear() not doing what you expect (and Date.getFullYear() doing it instead) is one of the really awful parts of JavaScript Date. In this case if there had been a better API without evil traps, the mistake might not have been made in the first place, and it wouldn’t have come down to a last-minute code freeze break.
In the group working on the Temporal proposal we are seeking feedback from people who are willing to try out the Temporal API, so that we can find out if there are any parts that don’t meet people’s needs and change them before we try to move the proposal to Stage 3 of the TC39 process. Since I think GNOME Shell and GNOME Weather, and possibly other apps, might benefit from using this API when it becomes part of JavaScript in the future, I’d be interested in finding out what we in the GNOME community need from the Temporal API.
It seems to me the best way to do this would be to make a port of GNOME Shell and/or GNOME Weather to the experimental Temporal API, and see what issues come up. Unfortunately, it would defeat the purpose for me to do this myself, since I am already overly familiar with Temporal and by now its shortcomings are squarely in my blind spot! So instead I’ll offer my help and guidance to anyone who wants to try this out. Please get in touch with me if you are interested.
Released on Tuesday was GNOME 3.37.3 but missing the mark in time for that proper milestone were the all important GNOME Shell and Mutter components. But a few hours past the mark, they were released and come with some big changes.
GNOME Shell and particularly Mutter bring some big performance improvements for their v3.37.3 releases plus other improvements. This work makes the forthcoming GNOME 3.38 all the more exciting. GNOME Shell 3.37.3 brings many improvements for GNOME 3.38 including:
- Support for caching labels on the GPU that in some cases can almost double the performance.
If you’ve ever used the GNOME Shell on your Linux system, you’ve probably noticed that there are some ways it works that don’t make sense right away. The workspaces are arranged vertically, and there’s no dock, panel, or desktop icons to get to your applications easily. That’s where GNOME Shell Extensions come into play. Let’s check out some Gnome extensions that make the desktop easier to use.
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This, along with the default four-finger gesture in Wayland, makes me feel like I’m using a system that is designed for the modern user on a laptop or a user with a trackpad attached to their desktop. It would be a great way to make use of an Apple Magic Trackpad on Linux, as it would allow you to work with one of the best trackpads in the world and use it for more than just clicking and scrolling.
Now that you’ve taken your Linux laptop to the next level with GNOME Shell Extensions, make sure you learn how to get notified of updates for your extensions, check out some of the best laptops for Linux, and fix your touchpad that is not working in Linux.
Jeff Fortin Tam announced today the revival and general availability of a new version of the Getting Things GNOME free and open-source to-do list and personal tasks application.
Probably not many of you reading this remember Getting Things GNOME, especially because it’s been more than six years since it received an update.
Getting Things GNOME is a personal taks and to-do list items organizer for the GNOME desktop environment, inspired by the “Getting Things Done” methodology.
The new release, Getting Things GNOME 0.4, is here to prove that the app isn’t dead and that it is here to stay for a long time to come, helping you getting your everyday stuff done and be more productive.
Unsurprisingly, Linux Mint 20 Ulyana Xfce falls into that mid-range good category of distros. Some nice things, some average things, some bad things. The problem is, the differentiating factors by which the Linux desktop could once sway hearts and create hope - especially for wavering Windowsers - are long long gone. So having a decent desktop that checks some boxes simply isn't enough. Mint 20 Xfce is fast and does most of the basics reasonably well.
But then, the ergonomics are off, the printing thing is weird, the software selection can be better, there are quite a few rough spots, and at the end of the day, there are few super-awesome features that would distinguish this system over dozens of other Linux distros. But as long as there's no ultra-rigorous QA across the entire ecosystem, as long as even simple things like the boot sequence or fonts cannot be taken for granted, the Linux desktop will not be the "killer" replacement for Windows. Anyway, on its own Ulyana Xfce get 6/10, and now, it's time to see what the Cinnamon version can do. Stay tuned.
Neptune 6.5 is out now. Its codename is 'Jet' which is the name of the mechanic and pilot of the Bebop in the anime Cowboy Bebop.
In this video, we are looking at Releax OS 0.5 Beta.
SUSE, a major Linux and cloud company, has announced it will acquire Rancher Labs. Based in Cupertino, Rancher is a privately held open-source company with more than 37,000 active users and 10 0million downloads of its flagship Kubernetes management program, Rancher.
Rancher provides a complete Kubernetes software stack. This stack can handle the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across almost any infrastructure. Specifically, it supports any Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-certified Kubernetes distribution. This includes Google GKE, Amazon EKS, and Microsoft AKS.
Open-source company SUSE has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Rancher Labs. According to SUSE, it wants to use the acquisition to establish the companies as the main open source innovators for Enterprise Linux, Kubernetes, edge computing and AI.
“By combining Rancher and SUSE, we not only gain massive engineering resources to further strengthen our market-leading product, we are also able to preserve our unique 100% open source business model,” said Sheng Liang, the CEO of Rancher. “SUSE’s strong ecosystem will greatly accelerate Rancher’s on-going efforts to transform how organizations adopt cloud native technology.”
SUSE is upping their container game by acquiring Rancher Labs.
Rancher Labs is one of the leading enterprise Kubernetes management platforms. The six year old, California-based company has their Rancher enterprise command center for Kubernetes, RKE as their Kubernetes distribution, Longhorn as their open-source distributed block storage solution, and K3s as their Kubernetes distribution for agile development in the cloud.
Rancher Labs says that under SUSE ownership they will continue to preserve their "100% open-source business model" and their commitment to open-source in general remains strong.
SUSE, a major Linux and cloud company, has announced it will acquire Rancher Labs. Based in Cupertino, Rancher is a privately held open-source company with more than 37,000 active users and 10 0million downloads of its flagship Kubernetes management program, Rancher.
Rancher provides a complete Kubernetes software stack. This stack can handle the operational and security challenges of managing multiple Kubernetes clusters across almost any infrastructure. Specifically, it supports any Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)-certified Kubernetes distribution. This includes Google GKE, Amazon EKS, and Microsoft AKS.
Cockpit is the modern Linux admin interface. We release regularly. Here are the release notes from version 223.
As stated earlier, a virtqueue is just a queue of guest’s buffers that the host consumes, either reading them or writing to them. A buffer can be read-only or write-only from the device point of view, but never both.
The descriptors can be chained, and the framing of the message can be spread whatever way is more convenient. For example, to spread a 2000 byte message in one single buffer or to use two 1000 byte buffers should be the same.
Also, it provides driver to device notifications (doorbell) method, to signal that one or more buffers have been added to the queue, and vice-versa, devices can interrupt the driver to signal used buffers. It is up to the underlying driver to provide the right method to dispatch the actual notification, for example using PCI interruptions or memory writing: The virtqueue only standardizes the semantics of it.
As stated before, the driver and the device can advise the other to not to emit notifications to reduce its dispatching overhead. Since this operation is asynchronous we will describe how to do so in further sections.
Google’s goal for Flutter has always been to provide a portable framework for building beautiful UIs that run at native speeds no matter what platform you target. To validate this capability, we started by focusing on the mobile platforms, Android and iOS, where we’ve seen more than 80,000 fast, beautiful Flutter apps published to Google Play.
To build on this success, for more than a year we’ve been expanding our focus to include desktop-class experiences, both for the web and for the desktop OSes: macOS, Windows and Linux. This work includes extensive refactoring of the engine to support desktop-style mouse and keyboard input as well as resizable top-level windows. It also includes new UI capabilities that adapt well to desktop, like Material Density support and the NavigationRail and experiments with deep integration into the underlying desktop OS with experiments in Dart:FFI and access to the system menu bar and standard dialogs. All of this work was to ensure that in addition to being suitable for mobile-style experiences, Flutter is ready to handle full-featured, full-sized desktop apps.
It has long been our vision for Flutter to power platforms. We’ve seen this manifest already at Google with products like the Assistant so now we’re thrilled to see others harnessing Flutter to power more platforms. Today we are happy to jointly announce the availability of the Linux alpha for Flutter alongside Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, the world’s most popular desktop Linux distribution.
Canonical and Google have partnered to add Linux as one of the target platforms for the Flutter framework.
Flutter is a popular UI framework Google created to make it easier to develop cross-platform apps. Unlike some other cross-platform frameworks, such as React Native or NativeScript, Flutter does not use the target operating system’s (OS) native controls. Instead, it uses its own rendering engine to mimic native controls.
Until now, Flutter primarily targeted Android, iOS, Fuchsia, macOS, Windows and web apps. While it could run on Linux and be used to develop Android and iOS apps, it did not target Linux. Still, for developers looking for a fast way to develop cross-platform apps, Flutter has been steadily gaining in popularity. Google’s latest move is sure to improve that popularity even more, as it has worked with Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, to bring full Linux support to Flutter.
Flutter, the open-source and cross-platform UI toolkit and portal framework created by Google is now available on Linux, thanks to Canonical’s Snap universal software deployment and package management system for GNU/Linux distributions.
Flutter can be used to develop and deploy cross-platform apps for some of the major mobile and desktop platforms, including Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, and even Google Fuchsia. And, as of today, it can also be used on Linux.
Flutter is Google's cross-platform application framework that allows developers to create responsive apps for Android, iOS, and even macOS. The toolset has already been used by countless applications, including the mobile Stadia app, and now Google is teaming up with Ubuntu Linux to bring Flutter apps to desktop Linux.
"Today we are happy to jointly announce the availability of the Linux alpha for Flutter alongside Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, the world’s most popular desktop Linux distribution," Google said in a blog post. "Canonical is making a significant investment in Flutter by dedicating a team of developers to work alongside Google’s developers to bring the best Flutter experience to the majority of Linux distributions."
Canonical is making a significant investment in Flutter.
Google has been hard at work creating and expanding Flutter for the past few years. When we last talked about Flutter, Google rebuilt DevTools entirely from scratch in Flutter for better performance, greater versatility, and to demonstrate their confidence in this app development framework. Google envisions Flutter as a programming framework that developers can use to build apps that target multiple systems, so the team is constantly working to improve Flutter’s support for platforms. Today, Google has announced that it is partnering with the Ubuntu Desktop Team at Canonical to bring Flutter apps to Linux.
Google announced today that it is partnering with Ubuntu maker Canonical to bring Linux desktop app support to its Flutter developer environment.
“For more than a year we’ve been expanding our focus to include desktop-class experiences, both for the web and for the desktop OSes [like] macOS, Windows and Linux,” Google’s Chris Sells and Canonical’s Ken VanDine write in the announcement post. “This work includes extensive refactoring of the engine to support desktop-style mouse and keyboard input as well as resizable top-level windows, new UI capabilities that adapt well to desktop, and access to the system menu bar and standard dialogs. All of this work was to ensure that in addition to being suitable for mobile-style experiences, Flutter is ready to handle first-featured, full-sized desktop apps.”
This might be quite big news! Flutter, the UI toolkit from Google that's used in tens of thousands of Android applications is coming to the desktop. Google and Canonical have announced their push for Linux too.
Why is this a big thing? Well, anything that boosts easy cross-platform development is a great thing. It can make Linux more attractive to developers to work on, plus publishing onto Linux becomes easier again. Writing in a Medium post, Chris Sells (Google) & Ken VanDine (Canonical) talk a little about what's going on.
They said that the goal for Flutter has "always been to provide a portable toolkit for building beautiful UIs that run at native speeds, no matter which platform you target" although initially starting on mobile. Now though, they announced "we are happy to jointly announce the availability of the Linux alpha for Flutter alongside Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu". On the Linux side, they've hooked it up with "a new GTK+ based host for Flutter apps on all Linux distros".
Linux has a lot to offer the automation industry. It is a stable and scalable alternative to Windows operating systems that allows for arguably greater connectivity between devices and systems. It is open-source software, which is a plus, and therefore can allow a large amount of development flexibility. Linux also generally doesn’t have as much downtime as Windows and is arguably less susceptible to cyber attacks. The fact is that as the industry leans towards Linux, so too must we adapt.
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Well, some industries prefer Linux for the aforementioned reasons, and because of that, we could see changes in how new manufacturing technologies and techniques are designed. Overall, as Linux becomes more prevalent, we may see the OS evolve to suit a variety of needs that are specific to each industry. Advancements are in progress every day, and it’s a possibility that automation will be made much easier as the OS adapts (at an increasing rate) to the needs of its consumers. Higher quality performance, increased security, greater versatility, and many other features are being looked forward to from the next iterations of Linux.
ROS 2 Foxy Fitzroy was released on June 5 for Ubuntu 20.04. Foxy supports many under-the-covers performance and stability improvements. Two of our favorites that continue improving robot security include a ROS Node Definition Library (NoDL) and enhanced security monitoring.
NoDL defines configurations for each ROS node and how it interfaces with other nodes. By defining normal behaviors, ROS now can also enforce compliance with those behaviors, and robots can be monitored for abnormal behavior.
Foxy improves on security monitoring by enabling logging for DDS communications. Once ROS 2 security features are enabled, environment variables can be configured to log security events to a file or publish them through DDS. Now not only can you monitor operational robot behaviors, you can also monitor communications security!
This LTS release will be supported through May 2023. See Kyle Fazzari’s blog post for more information about ROS Foxy.
ROS 2 now also has a rolling release for preparing for the next stable distribution development. Rolling Ridley is continuously updated and will at times include breaking changes.
Adi Singh, is the Product Manager in Robotics at Canonical. Canonical specializes in open source software, including Ubuntu, the world’s most popular enterprise Linux from cloud to edge, and they have a global community of 200,000 contributors.
Ubuntu is the most popular Linux distribution for large embedded systems. As autonomous robots mature, innovative tech companies turn to Ubuntu, we discuss advantages of building a robot using open source software and other key considerations.
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Building anything on open source software is usually a wise idea as it allows you to stand on the shoulders of giants. Individuals and companies alike benefit from the volunteer contributions of some of the brightest minds in the world when they decide to build on a foundation of open source software. As a result, popular FOSS repositories are very robustly engineered and very actively maintained; allowing users to focus on their innovation rather than the nuts and bolts of every library going into their product.
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Ubuntu is the platform of choice for developers around the world for frictionless IoT and robotics development. A number of popular frameworks that help with device engineering are built on Ubuntu, so the OS is able to provide several tools for building and deploying products in this area right out of the box. For instance, the most widely used middleware for robotics development – ROS – is almost entirely run on Ubuntu distros...
The web team here at Canonical run two-week iterations. Here are some of the highlights of our completed work from this iteration.
The CutiePi is a Linux tablet with a built-in handle, a custom user interface, and a Raspberry Pi single-board computer at its heart.
Set to begin shipping in November, the CutiePi is up for pre-order through a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign. And now that the campaign has surpassed its original $35,000 goal, the developer has started promising “stretch goal” features.
One of those is a new Sidekick mode that lets you use the tablet as a controller when you connect it to an external display.
So he started to look for a software solution to get him the rest of the way. Luckily the MODX runs Linux, and Yamaha has made good on their GPL responsibilities and released the source code for anyone who’s interested. While poking around, he figured out that the device uses tslib to talk to the touch screen, which [sn00zerman] had worked with on previous projects. He realized that the solution might be as simple as finding a USB touch screen controller that’s compatible with the version of tslib running on the MODX.
Vecow’s rugged “RCX-1000 PEG” series runs Linux or Win 10 on 8th or 9th Gen Coffee Lake CPUs with up to 2x PCI/PCIe x16 slots for graphics plus PCIe x4, 2x M.2, 2x mini-PCIe, 4x SATA, 6x USB 3.1 Gen2, and 2x GbE ports.
Vecow announced another rugged, PCIe-enabled system with Intel 8th/9th Gen Coffee Lake processors to join its GPC-1000 and water-cooled RCX-1500W systems. While those models have up to 4x PCIe x16 slots for graphics cards, the RCX-1400 PEG has only 2x PCIe x16 slots, but also offers other PCIe and/or PCI interfaces, depending on the model.
Nexcom’s Linux-ready “ICES 675” is a COM Express Basic Type 6 module with an 8th Gen Coffee Lake-H CPU and Intel CM246 chipset, triple display support, multiple PCIe connections, and an optional ICEB 8060 carrier.
Irene Wolf is the owner a Passap E6000, a computerized knitting machine which features pair of needle beds, and decided it was time to give it an upgrade. In particular, she wanted the ability to control its rear needle bed automatically in a similar manner to the way the front is normally operated for extra functionality.
You may have seen Mark Rober’s automated dartboard or Stuff Made Here’s backboard, which use advanced engineering to create apparatuses that ensure you “can’t miss.” Now that summer is in full swing, what about a robotic cornhole board?
Michael Rechtin decided to take on this challenge using a webcam pointed at the sky for sensing and DC motors that move the board along an X/Y plane on a set of sliding drawer rails.
When a bean bag is thrown, the camera feeds the video over to a laptop running a Processing sketch to analyze its trajectory and passes adjustment info to an Arduino. This then controls the motors for repositioning, which attempts to predict where the bag will land and guide it into the hold for three points!
The together.jolla.com (TJC) website has served us well, with the first question inserted back in December 2013 just after we released the first Jolla smartphone. Since then it has been the place for discussion around Sailfish OS, carrying our core message of building an independent mobile OS – together. We are now at the point where we will upgrade the discussion platform. There are different reasons why the upgrade has become a necessity. First and foremost, we would like to enable a better platform for developer collaboration. TJC has not been the optimal forum for serving developers’ needs. Topics are often not in question-and-answer form, but require discourse and deeper analysis of the situation. On the other hand, we are very pleased with the active and productive dialogue with our Sailfish X users that TJC has facilitated, and we do hope this new forum will maintain this relationship we have with the community. We’ve also come to the conclusion that the technology running TJC (Askbot) is not aging well; the site requires a lot of unnecessary maintenance effort from our Service team.
The second trend that has caught my attention lately is the development of Linux phones. In some ways, this trend is nothing new. Hobbyists and Linux enthusiasts have been experimenting with running lightweight Linux distributions on smartphones for years.
The thing that has changed is that those who wish to run Linux on a smartphone no longer have to take the do-it-yourself approach. A company named Pine64 is now selling the PinePhone, a fully functional Linux phone that you can buy today. This $149.99 phone is being marketed toward Linux enthusiasts, those for whom security is an absolute must, and people who simply have had enough of iOS and Android.
I haven't yet had the opportunity to try out the PinePhone for myself (although I plan to), so I can't tell you how well it works. Regardless, I think it's great that someone has taken the initiative to bring a Linux phone to market.
LMMS was first introduced to the world as Linux MultiMedia Studio. Today, this digital audio workstation application program is available in 20 different languages, enabling musicians around the world to use this cross-platform tool to make music. What makes it unique is that it is a completely free, open-source, community-driven project, released under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GPLv2). So, despite the many music-making software products available online, LMMS is worth a download.
In May 2017, IBM and Google jointly announced the launch of Istio, a merger of Google’s Istio and IBM’s Amalgam8 projects. As a founding member of the Istio project, IBM is strongly invested in the engineering, leadership, and success of the Istio project.
Today’s announcement by Google of the creation of the Open Usage Commons (OUC) is disappointing because it doesn’t live up to the community’s expectation for open governance. An open governance process is the underpinning of many successful projects. Without this vendor-neutral approach to project governance, there will be friction within the community of Kubernetes-related projects.
At the project’s inception, there was an agreement that the project would be contributed to the CNCF when it was mature. IBM continues to believe that the best way to manage key open source projects such as Istio is with true open governance, under the auspices of a reputable organization with a level playing field for all contributors, transparency for users, and vendor-neutral management of the license and trademarks. Google should reconsider their original commitment and bring Istio to the CNCF.
Intellectual property and how it is shared have been the cornerstone of open source. Although it is more common to discuss “code” or “copyright,” there are other IP concerns around patents and trademarks that must be considered before investing time and effort in a major open-source project. There are long-established practices that govern these matters. Companies and lawyers involved in open source have been working on and evolving open source project trademark matters for decades.
Neutral control of trademarks is a key prerequisite for open source projects that operate under open governance. When trademarks of an open source project are owned by a single company within a community, there is an imbalance of control. The use of any trademark must be actively controlled by its owner or the owner will lose the right to control its use. The reservation of this exclusive right to exercise such control necessarily undermines the level playing field that is the basis for open governance. This is especially the case where the trademark is used in association with commercial products or solutions.
Open source licenses enable anyone to fork the code and distribute and modify their own version. Trademarks, however, operate differently. Trademarks identify a specific source of the code. For example, we all know MariaDB is not the same as MySQL. They’ve each developed their own brand, albeit they’re derived from a common codebase. The key question is who decides when a company should be allowed to associate its product or solution with the brand of the community?
A trademark is a word, phrase or design that denotes a “brand” that distinguishes one source of product or solution from another. The USPTO describes the usage of trademarks “to identify and distinguish the goods/services of one seller or provider from those of others, and to indicate the source of the goods/services.” Under US trademark law you are not able to effectively separate ownership of a project mark from control of the underlying open source project. While some may create elaborate structures around this, at the end of the day an important principle to follow is that the project community should be in control of what happens to their brand, the trademark they collectively built up as their brand in parallel with building up the functionality of their code.
Google has announced it is launching a new organization, Open Usage Commons (OUC), to host the trademarks for three of its most important new open-source projects. These are Angular, a web application framework for mobile and desktop; Gerrit, a web-based team code-collaboration tool; and Istio, a popular open mesh platform to connect, manage, and secure microservices.
While it only covers three Google projects, for now, OUC is meant to give open-source projects a neutral, independent home for their project trademarks. The organization will also assist with conformance testing, establishing mark usage guidelines, and handling trademark usage issues. The organization will not provide services that are outside the realm of usage, such as technical mentorship, community management, project events, or project marketing.
Open source maintainers don’t often spend time thinking about their project’s trademarks, and with good reason: between code contribution, documentation, crafting the technical direction, and creating a healthy contributor community, there’s plenty to do without spending time considering how your project’s name or logo will be used. But trademarks – whether a name, logo, or badge – are an extension of a project’s decision to be open source. Just as your project’s open source license demonstrates that your codebase is for free and fair use, an open source project trademark policy in keeping with the Open Source Definition gives everyone – upstream contributors and downstream consumers – comfort that they are using your project’s marks in a fair and accurate way.
Open Usage Commons is a new organization announced today that is backed by Google for helping open-source projects in managing their trademarks.
Open Usage Commons was started by Google in conjunction with academia, independent contributors, and others for helping to assert and manage project identities through trademark management and conformance testing.
Google has announced the creation of the Open Usage Commons, which is intended to help open-source projects manage their trademarks.
Google has deep roots in open source. We're proud of our 20 years of contributions and community collaboration. The scale and tenure of Google’s open source participation has taught us what works well, what doesn’t, and where the corner cases are that challenge projects.
Tor's anti-censorship team writes monthly reports to keep the world updated on its progress. This blog post summarizes the anti-censorship work we got done in June 2020. You can find a Chinese translation of this blog post below. Let us know if you have any questions or feedback!
Tor Browser 10.0a3 is now available from the Tor Browser Alpha download page and also from our distribution directory. This is an Android-only release.
Note: This is an alpha release, an experimental version for users who want to help us test new features. For everyone else, we recommend downloading the latest stable release instead.
The Malaysian government’s decision to initiate criminal contempt proceedings against Malaysiakini for third party comments on the news portal’s website is deeply concerning. The move sets a dangerous precedent against intermediary liability and freedom of expression. It ignores the internationally accepted norm that holding publishers responsible for third party comments has a chilling effect on democratic discourse. The legal outcome the Malaysian government is seeking would upend the careful balance which places liability on the bad actors who engage in illegal activities, and only holds companies accountable when they know of such acts.
Intermediary liability safe harbour protections have been fundamental to the growth of the internet. They have enabled hosting and media platforms to innovate and flourish without the fear that they would be crushed by a failure to police every action of their users. Imposing the risk of criminal liability for such content would place a tremendous, and in many cases fatal, burden on many online intermediaries while negatively impacting international confidence in Malaysia as a digital destination.
When an add-on is submitted to Firefox for validation, the add-ons linter checks its code and displays relevant errors, warnings, or friendly messages for the developer to review. JavaScript is constantly evolving, and when the linter lags behind the language, developers may see syntax errors for code that is generally considered acceptable. These errors block developers from getting their add-on signed or listed on addons.mozilla.org.
Today I’d like to talk about passwords. Yes, I know, passwords are the worst, but why? This is the first of a series of posts about passwords, with this one focusing on the origins of our current password systems starting with log in for multi-user systems.
The conventional story for what’s wrong with passwords goes something like this: Passwords are simultaneously too long for users to memorize and too short to be secure.
It’s easy to see how to get to this conclusion. If we restrict ourselves to just letters and numbers, then there are about 26 one character passwords, 212 two character passwords, etc. The fastest password cracking systems can check about 236 passwords/second, so if you want a password which takes a year to crack, you need a password of 10 characters long or longer.
The situation is actually far worse than this; most people don’t use randomly generated passwords because they are hard to generate and hard to remember. Instead they tend to use words, sometimes adding a number, punctuation, or capitalization here and there. The result is passwords that are easy to crack, hence the need for password managers and the like.
This analysis isn’t wrong, precisely; but if you’ve ever watched a movie where someone tries to break into a computer by typing passwords over and over, you’re probably thinking “nobody is a fast enough typist to try billions of passwords a second”. This is obviously true, so where does password cracking come into it?
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This design is a huge improvement over just having a file with cleartext passwords and it might seem at this point like you didn’t need to stop people from reading the password file at all. In fact, on the original UNIX systems where this design was used, the /etc/passwd file was publicly readable. However, upon further reflection, it has the drawback that it’s cheap to verify a guess for a given password: just compute H(guess) and compare it to what’s been stored. This wouldn’t be much of an issue if people used strong passwords, but because people generally choose bad passwords, it is possible to write password cracking programs which would try out candidate passwords (typically starting with a list of common passwords and then trying variants) to see if any of these matched. Programs to do this task quickly emerged.
The key thing to realize is that the computation of H(guess) can be done offline. Once you have a copy of the password file, you can compare your pre-computed hashes of candidate passwords against the password file without interacting with the system at all. By contrast, in an online attack you have to interact with the system for each guess, which gives it an opportunity to rate limit you in various ways (for instance by taking a long time to return an answer or by locking out the account after some number of failures). In an offline attack, this kind of countermeasure is ineffective.
The rustup working group is happy to announce the release of rustup version 1.22.1. Rustup is the recommended tool to install Rust, a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.
There are some older videos on the channel, too, including some GNU Radio material. We hear some of the upcoming videos will have some new GNU Radio content, too, including some on the GNU Radio implementation for Android.
Marc-André Lureau has landed GUri support in GLib, and it’ll be available in GLib 2.65.1 (due out in the next few days).
GUri is a new API for parsing and building URIs, roughly equivalent to SoupURI already provided by libsoup — but since URIs are so pervasive, and used even if you’re not actually doing HTTP conversations, it makes sense to have a structured representation for them in GLib.
Modern Linux operating systems provide many tools to run code more securely. There are namespaces (the basic building blocks for containers), Linux Security Modules, Integrity Measurement Architecture etc.
In this post we will review Linux seccomp and learn how to sandbox any (even a proprietary) application without writing a single line of code.
At the end of the last year I wrote a long blog post summarizing the main work I was involved with as part of Igalia’s Chromium team. In it I mentioned that a big chunk of my time was spent working on the migration to the new C++ Mojo types across the entire codebase of Chromium, in the context of the Onion Soup 2.0 project.
For those of you who don’t know what Mojo is about, there is extensive information about it in Chromium’s documentation, but for the sake of this post, let’s simplify things and say that Mojo is a modern replacement to Chromium’s legacy IPC APIs which enables a better, simpler and more direct way of communication among all of Chromium’s different processes.
Everyone should follow standard conventions for branch naming, tagging, and coding. Every organization has standards or best practices, and many recommendations are freely available on the internet. What's important is to pick a suitable convention early on and follow it as a team.
Also, different team members will have different levels of expertise with Git. You should create and maintain a basic set of instructions for performing common Git operations that follow the project's conventions.
Qt for MCUs 1.3 is now available in the Qt installer. Download it to get the latest improvements and create stunning GUIs with the newly available timeline animation system.
Since the initial release of Qt for MCUs 1.0 back in December last year, we've been hard at work to bring new features to MCUs with the 1.1 and 1.2 releases. Efforts haven't slowed down and it's already time to bring you another batch of improvements. Besides the new features, One of the goals has been to make Qt Quick Ultralite a true subset of Qt Quick and align their QML APIs to ensure both code and skills can be reused from traditional Qt platforms to microcontrollers. With Qt for MCUs 1.3, QML code written for Qt Quick Ultralite is now source-compatible with Qt 5.15 LTS.
Coding terms like ‘master’, ‘slave’, ‘blacklist’, and ‘whitelist’ could soon be a thing of the past as the likes of Linux, Twitter, Git, and IBM’s Red Hat begin purging non-inclusive phrases from their code.
Twitter Engineering announced last week that it wanted to “move away from” certain phrases that the social media company said was not reflective of its values.
“There is no switch we can flip to make these changes everywhere, at once,” the company said.
“We will continue to iterate on this work and want to put in place processes and systems that will allow us to apply these changes at scale.”
Along with terms like ‘blacklist’ and ‘whitelist’, Twitter said it wants to move away from gendered pronouns and even ‘dummy value’.
Add your message with all the required information on top of your file, just right after the shebang.
[...]
Halfway done, now need to get this message in runtime with sed.
Among other programs, Office suites and browsers tend to hit the gettimeofday() very frequently, and this should lessen the CPU usage of those programs, and make things feel a bit snappier. Ted Unangst wrote about this in this post on running ktrace on a browser, and in this post about mplayer consuming lots of CPU while decoding MP3s.
In Python, you use the import keyword to make code in one module available in another. Imports in Python are important for structuring your code effectively. Using imports properly will make you more productive, allowing you to reuse code while keeping your projects maintainable.
This tutorial will provide a thorough overview of Python’s import statement and how it works. The import system is powerful, and you’ll learn how to harness this power. While you’ll cover many of the concepts behind Python’s import system, this tutorial is mostly example driven. You’ll learn from several code examples throughout.
I joined the Spyder team almost two years ago, and I never thought I was going to end up working on docs. Six months ago I started a project with CAM Gerlach and Carlos Cordoba to improve Spyder’s documentation. At first, I didn’t actually understand how important docs are for software, especially for open source projects. However, during all this time I’ve learned how documentation has a huge impact on the open-source community and I’ve been thankful to have been able to do this. But, from the beginning, I asked myself “why am I the ‘right person’ for this?”
Improving Spyder’s documentation started as part of a NumFOCUS Small Development Grant awarded at the end of last year. The goal of the project was not only to update the documentation for Spyder 4, but also to make it more user-friendly, so users can understand Spyder’s key concepts and get started with it more easily.
This probably is the fourth (or is it fifth) time, I’ll be attempting to learn how to program. And probably the same number of attempts at #100DaysOfCode.
Notes I’ve taken from the videos I watched, today. This is my attempt at Feynman-ing (below), what I learnt so far.
Classes and Object Oriented Programming started to come together for me, when I saw Kushal using them.
To use my father’s carpentry analogy, I could in theory just hammer nails into wood to join them. But to make a really strong joint, I could use other methods. I could screw pieces of wood together, which is markedly better than just nailing them. I could chisel wood and create a dovetail or mortise joint.
Python is a powerful programming language used for web application development. It is also a widely popular programming language used for machine learning and artificial intelligence applications.
With Python, complex programming problem-solving becomes simpler. There are several approaches to problem-solving in Python. OOP is one of those approaches.
In this article, I will introduce you to some fundamental OOP principles in Python development.
The developers of HPN-SSH at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center (PSC) have recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation to develop and incorporate new features and optimizations. This grant will provide direct support to developers at PSC for two years. The goal of this grant (NSF Award#: 2004012) is to provide HPN-SSH with the level of performance required in modern high performance computing.
What is HPN-SSH?
HPN-SSH is a series of modifications to OpenSSH, the predominant implementation of the ssh protocol. It was originally developed to address performance issues when using ssh on high speed long distance networks (also known as Long Fat Networks: LFNs). By taking advantage of automatically optimized receive buffers HPN-SSH could improve performance dramatically on these paths. Later advances include; disabling encryption after authentication to transport non-sensitive bulk data, modifying the AES-CTR cipher to use multiple CPU cores, more detailed connection logging, and peak throughput values in the scp progress bar. More information can be found on HPN-SSH page on the PSC website.
What are you working on?
We’ve identified six different areas where we would like to focus our efforts. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list but is more of a starting point for our deliverables. Depending on community input this list may change to develop advances of highest interest. The six initial proposed areas of work are: [...]
Bastion is a military term meaning “a projecting part of a fortification.”
In the same way that a home WiFi router sits between the vast and perilous internet and the often insecure devices on a local network, a bastion host sits between the public internet and an internal network (a VPC, for example), acting as a gateway to reach the internal hosts while protecting them from direct exposure to the wilds of the public internet. Bastion hosts often run OpenSSH or a remote desktop server.
A bastion host serves as an important choke point in a network. Given its position, it can take on a lot of responsibilities: auditing and session logging, user authentication for internal hosts, and advanced threat detection. But it doesn't need to do all that. We're going to keep things simple here and build a bastion from scratch that supports the proxying of SSH connections. Then we'll talk about some fancier stuff we could do.
Arm said it will hand over its IoT Platform and Treasure Data businesses to SoftBank in order to focus exclusively on the semiconductor intellectual property business that has helped it become ubiquitous in mobile devices.
The transfer of the IoT Services Group businesses is still pending review from the company’s board, and will also have to face standard regulatory reviews. However, Arm said it’s confident the transfers will be completed by about September.
The move would effectively remove ISG from Arm’s brand, but the businesses will still collaborate with one another, Arm said. However, the spinoff plan doesn’t involve Arm’s IP for IoT chips.
The administration has repeatedly sought to cut food assistance.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency said it would not allow holders of student visas to remain in the country if their school was fully online for the fall. Those students must transfer or leave the country, or they potentially face deportation proceedings, according to the announcement.
The ICE guidance applies to holders of F-1 and M-1 visas, which are for academic and vocational students. The State Department issued 388,839 F visas and 9,518 M visas in fiscal 2019, according to the agency's data.
"Universities need to speak out about how valuable international students are," McEntee says. "Other countries are so welcoming to foreign students, but in the U.S., [the government is] trying to get rid of them as fast as they can. We need people here to spend money, stimulating the economy. They pay for their groceries, their rent, their cars, all that stuff. But now for those that do decide to leave, they will take their money with them."
The Associated Press reported that five states led by California Attorney General Xavier Becerra (D) and Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel (D) allege that the Education Department is using $13.2 billion in Title I funding set aside for low-income areas and attempting to distribute it based on total population, instead of targeting schools that need the aid the most.
If the United States had quick-thinking and efficient leadership, the pandemic would have infected about 100,000 people and killed only a couple thousand. That’s the experience of South Korea, times seven to account for the difference in population.
Jackson, Miss.—Before Covid-19, I would travel around the country, listening to people’s stories as we walked their block, or plotted the “beautiful next” in some center or meeting room. Now we are all in little boxes, trying to connect, trying to make it more human. People with wild virtual backgrounds or cute hats. It reminds me of freshman year moving into the dorms. There you are with your teddy bears and your posters to make your room feel a little less like the drab, institutional rectangle it is.
And so it continues, the saga of hydroxychloroquine for COVID-19. It’s been a while since I’ve written about this particular drug. Indeed, it’s hard to believe that it’s been well over three months since I railed against the FDA’s premature issuance of an emergency use authorization (EUA) for hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus and over three weeks since I noted that the FDA had finally backtracked and revoked its EUA for hydroxychloroquine. In the age of the pandemic, weeks seem like months, and months seem like years. Be that as it may, there have been…developments…that have led me to conclude that an update is in order. The saga of hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine remain, as it has from the beginning, a cautionary tale about medical science in the age of a pandemic. The saga also reminded me how, in the context of this pandemic, not only has science become politicized, but narratives often not grounded in science saturate news coverage, which brings us to this Tweet from President Trump:
HOUSTON — When Karen Salazar stopped by to check on her mother on the evening of June 22, she found her in worse shape than she expected. Her mother, Felipa Medellín, 54, had been complaining about chest pains and fatigue, symptoms that she attributed to a new diabetes treatment she’d started days earlier.
Medellín, who had seen a doctor that day, insisted she was fine. But Salazar, 29, noticed that when Medellín lay down, her chest was rising and falling rapidly — as if she couldn’t catch her breath.
Desperate to acquire masks to slow the spread of the novel coronavirus, two federal agencies gave nearly $20 million in contracts to a newly formed California company without realizing it was partly run by a man whose business activities were under sanction by the Federal Trade Commission, court records show.
On Tuesday, a U.S. District Court judge froze the company’s assets, most of which had come from the Department of Veterans Affairs in a $5.4 million mask deal. A story by ProPublica revealed Jason Cardiff’s role in operating VPL Medical LLC in June.
Speaking during a Facebook Live event on Tuesday, Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a member of the White House’s coronavirus task force, seemingly contradicted notions put forth by President Donald Trump about the death rates from the disease.
The Ayanda Capital contract to supply €£250 million of PPE to the NHS has not caused anything like the stir it should, because UK citizens appear to have come to accept that we live in a country with a Banana Republic system of capitalism. I suppose when you have a Prime Minister who handed out €£60 million of public money for a Garden Bridge that there was no chance would ever be built, and who had no qualms about directing public funds to one of his many mistresses, the norm has changed.
Behind a veil of corporate media PR, the Gates Foundation has served as a vehicle for Western capital while exploiting the Global South as a human laboratory. The pandemic is likely to intensify this disturbing agenda.€
Taiwan’s Central Epidemic Command Center (CECC) head Chen Shih-chung (éâ¢Â³Ã¦â¢âä¸Â) said on Wednesday (July 8) that the U.S. exit from the World Health Organization (WHO) will have a serious impact on the world of public health.
The U.S. has officially sent notification to the UN that its plan to exit the WHO will become effective as of July next year.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (roundcube), Fedora (chromium, firefox, and ngircd), Oracle (firefox and thunderbird), Scientific Linux (firefox), Slackware (seamonkey), SUSE (djvulibre, ffmpeg, firefox, freetds, gd, gstreamer-plugins-base, icu, java-11-openjdk, libEMF, libexif, librsvg, LibVNCServer, libvpx, Mesa, nasm, nmap, opencv, osc, perl, php7, python-ecdsa, SDL2, texlive-filesystem, and thunderbird), and Ubuntu (cinder, python-os-brick).
CVE-2020-5902 is a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the configuration interface (aka Traffic Management User Interface – TMUI) of BIG-IP devices used by some of the world’s biggest companies.
So today we are going to demonstrate how it is being used.
To exploit CVE-2020-5902, an attacker needs to send a specifically crafted HTTP request to the server hosting the Traffic Management User Interface (TMUI) utility for BIG-IP configuration.
Facebook came under renewed public scrutiny Wednesday with the release of an independent audit slamming the platform’s progress on civil rights issues, adding to internal and external pressure on the company to rein in hate speech and misinformation.
The audit was the third shoe to drop this month after a group of high-profile advertisers launched a boycott of the site and following a Democratic National Committee memo bashing the company just months before a crucial election.
Andreas Antonopoulos discussed how he desired to see Bitcoin have more “privacy features” in a recent live stream Q&A session published on Youtube on July 7. Antonopoulos discussed the privacy-centric coin monero and concepts like stealth addresses and ring signatures.
The purpose of all of this appears to be both fingerprinting and preventing ad fraud. I’ve determined that udkcrj.com belongs to White Ops. I have infered this from the name of Reddit’s feature flag, and mentions of White Ops which is a “global leader in bot mitigation, bot prevention, and fraud protection”. They appear to do this by collecting tons of data about the browser, and analyzing it. I must say, their system is quite impressive.
Back to the DRM issue, it appears that the script is checking what DRM solutions are available, but not actually using them. However, just checking is enough to trigger Firefox into displaying the DRM popup. Specfically, it looks for Widevine, PlayReady, Clearkey, and Adobe Primetime.
Such customers often include parts of the U.S. government and the private defense establishment. Furthermore, In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, previously awarded the firm venture capital funds.
Most recently, Palantir has worked with various countries, as well as the Department of Health and Human Services and the U.S. Coast Guard, to coordinate coronavirus responses.
Palantir has so far resisted calls to go public due to the secretive nature of its contracts. U.S. regulation requires that publicly listed companies adhere to a certain standard of transparency — a fact that the company is perceived to have thought of as a hindrance to their business model.
But Mr. Zuckerberg is not enabling free speech, he’s just privileging some of it. “When it means that powerful politicians do not have to abide by the same rules that everyone else does, a hierarchy of speech is created that privileges certain voices over less powerful voices,” the report found.
That means posts by regular folks who are less likely to be believed and or widely read can be taken down with impunity. Mr. Zuckerberg should listen to his auditors. He should listen to his employees, some of who walked off the job in protest last month.
However, the social media site Reddit, which received US$150 million in investment from China's Tencent in 2019, was much more reticent in its response to the new draconian law. In a statement, Reddit wrote "All legal requests from Hong Kong are bound by careful review for validity and with a special attention to human rights implications," reported Financial Times.
Email has been discussed a lot lately. Perhaps it's because we all rely on it more during this period of lockdown. Maybe it's due to Hey being released? Or are we all realising that email is an old technology and we need to move on? Whatever the reason may be, people are talking about email; heres my take on it.
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While some providers allow you to sign up anonymously on Tor, email will never be private. It will also never be as secure as platforms like Signal or Briar. You can improve the privacy of emails by encrypting their contents or using a provider that encrypts account data at rest. Email is not private and shouldn't be treated as such. Instant messaging is more secure and private than email, but email still has many benefits.
The fatal flaws in the report the OAS used to subvert a member government, long obvious, are now undeniable even to the New York Times.
Vanessa Neumann, scion of one of Venezuela’s most elite families
Think of it as a war system that’s been coming home for years. The murder of George Floyd has finally shone a spotlight on the need to defund local police departments and find alternatives that provide more genuine safety and security. The same sort of spotlight needs soon to be shone on the American military machine and the wildly well-funded damage it’s been doing for almost 19 years across the Greater Middle East and Africa.
Representative Ilhan Omar was not elected to represent the status quo. The Minnesota Democrat speaks for her constituents, and for a future in which they might know economic, social, and racial justice. That horrifies conservatives.
Hong Kong is heading toward the same fate as Tibet after China imposed a new security law that criminalises calls for independence, the leader of the exiled Tibetan government has told AFP.
Lobsang Sangay said China was deceiving Hong Kong the same way it cheated Tibetan people in 1951 when it promised autonomy.
After three years of conflict, tentative ceasefire talks are underway between the Cameroon government and secessionist fighters demanding independence for the country’s two anglophone regions.
Cameroon is a majority French-speaking country, and its Northwest and Southwest regions complain that they have been deliberately marginalised by the government in Yaounde. What began as a protest movement in 2016 calling for federalism, degenerated into fighting and a demand for full independence after the government clamped down on protest leaders.
The conflict has since killed more than 3,000 people, forced over 900,000 people from their homes, and kept around 800,000 children out of school. In the violence, the security forces have been accused of widespread human right abuses – as have, to a lesser extent, the separatist forces fighting for an independent “Ambazonia”.
Talks have now begun between the government and a key separatist faction headed by imprisoned leader, Sisiku Julius AyukTabe. But those ceasefire discussions have been condemned by other separatists in Cameroon and abroad, who argue that Sisiku does not have a mandate to negotiate.
The world’s attention is rightly focused on the terrible new National Security Law in Hong Kong. But, as ever, there are bad things happening to human rights elsewhere as well. For example, in Brazil a new law that supposedly deals with “fake news” is close to being passed. That’s problematic in itself; but as so often, there are serious knock-on effects that will threaten privacy too.
However,€ for many communities of color living in close proximity to the petrochemical plants producing those plastics, the exact opposite is often€ true.
Once again the past shows the role of greenhouse gases in climate change. It also confirms human heating as the main cause of global warmth.
Researchers say that the Earth's average annual temperature is already more than 1C higher than it was in the 1850s - and will probably stay around this level over the next five years.
Previous studies had put the short-term chances of going above 1.5C at 10% - that's now doubled say the climate modellers, and it's increasing with time.
Some parts of the world will feel this rising heat more than others, with the scientists saying that the Arctic will probably warm by twice the global average this year.
Three pipelines were stopped in a twenty-four-hour period after years of opposition led by Indigenous and Black environmental justice groups.
Lithium-ion batteries play a central role in the world of technology, powering everything from smartphones to smart cars, and one of the people who helped commercialize them says he has a way to cut mass production costs by 90% and significantly improve their safety.
Hideaki Horie, formerly of Nissan Motor Co., founded Tokyo-based APB Corp. in 2018 to make “all-polymer batteries” -- hence the company name. Earlier this year the company received backing from a group of Japanese firms that includes general contractor Obayashi Corp., industrial equipment manufacturer Yokogawa Electric Corp. and carbon fiber maker Teijin Ltd.
"This decision solidifies the belief of numerous wildlife advocates and native tribes that protecting grizzly bears should be based upon science and the law and not the whims of special interest groups."
Yet so far it has produced only acrimony. Egypt, which depends on the Nile for 90% of its fresh water, sees the dam as an existential threat. Shortly after construction began in 2011, officials in Cairo considered sabotage; a former president even considered bombing it. Last month Ethiopia accused Egypt of sponsoring cyber-attacks to disrupt the project.
In between all the sabre-rattling the three countries have held talks over how fast to fill the reservoir, how much water will be released and how to resolve any future disagreements. So far no deal has been reached. But the latest round comes with a deadline of sorts: Ethiopia says it will begin filling the reservoir behind the dam later this month. Egypt has vowed to use “all means available” to protect its interests (see article). All sides will have to make concessions if conflict is to be avoided.
Each discusses strategies how the election could address minority and racial injustices that have long been ignored.
Trump is easily manipulated through praise and financial opportunities, and looking at the list above it appears that manipulation has worked.
Even if Trump loses in November, Putin will have executed the most devastating attack on America ever—an attack carried out by Trump’s on America’s most precious asset. Its reputation.
The question: "What does preserving private insurance really do for people?" Biden's answer: "It depends on the plan. Look..."
"This wouldn't even be an issue if healthcare wasn't tied to employment."
Federal agents have arrested Sergey Furgal, the sitting governor of Russia’s Khabarovsk Territory, on suspicion of orchestrating the murder of several entrepreneurs in the region between 2004 and 2005. Officials from Russia’s Investigative Committee and Federal Security Service are reportedly cooperating in the case.
Saying no to the law could force those internet companies to shut down service in Hong Kong. It would also be a public defiance of China’s government that we rarely see from global companies. No one knows what happens next.
Let me take a step back and talk about the constant tugs of war that U.S. online companies face between their made-in-America principles and U.S. laws, and the rules and standards of all the countries in which they do business.
First, we should feel a certain gratification that millions of Americans have learned to appreciate the necessity, even the beauty, of solidarity. I realize that applauding and making signs of gratitude for “essential workers” are hardly the same thing as supporting them when they go on strike. Sadly, such militancy has been frustratingly rare at a time when unemployment has zoomed to a sickening rate, and people who have a job are afraid to walk out on the only one they are likely to find. Still, the conviction that the people who do the indispensable labor of society—citizens and the undocumented—should, at minimum, earn a decent wage and have job security and their health protected has always been at the moral heart of the left.
This report investigates Transport Layer Security (TLS)-based blocking in India. Previous research by the Centre for Internet & Society, India (CIS) has already exposed TLS blocking based on the value of the SNI field. OONI has also implemented and started testing SNI-based TLS blocking measurements.
Recently, the Magma Project documented cases where CIS India and OONI’s methodologies could be improved. They specifically found that blocking sometimes appears to depend not only on the value of the SNI field but also on the address of the web server being used. These findings were later confirmed by OONI measurements in Spain and Iran through the use of an extended measurement methodology.
Without a hint of irony, the Massey College statement also described the school as “a beacon for the expression of the widest range of academic viewpoints.” But as my case shows, these two goals are completely contradictory. You can raise a beacon for free expression. Or you can run a puritanical campaign to enforce moral purity and root out heretics. You can’t have both. And to an astonishing extent, the people who run places with names like the Quadrangle Society have chosen moral purity.
The government is still trying to get Julian Assange out of the UK so it can ring him up on a variety of charges related to obtaining and publishing a large number of sensitive documents. Most of the charges are still related to the documents obtained from Chelsea Manning. The DOJ wants to use the oft-abused CFAA to put Assange behind bars because he supposedly helped Manning hack a CIA database.
"There are real-life consequences when social media networks provide platforms for violent white supremacists, allowing them to incubate, organize, and recruit new followers to their hateful movements."
What are we waiting for? If this is not the moment to finally come to terms with the United States’ 401-year legacy of government-sanctioned, anti-Black oppression, then, pray tell, when will that moment be?
Ofcom’s ruling in the Humphrey case said CCTV’s airing of footage of him in custody “had the potential materially and adversely to affect viewers’ perception of him”.
It “did not take sufficient steps to ensure that material facts had not been presented, omitted or disregarded in a way that was unfair to Mr Humphrey”.
From around 1920 to the early 1940s, there was a second wave of statue building. Jane Dailey, professor of American history at the University of Chicago, said this period of construction coincided with more Black Americans’ fighting for civil rights and pushing back against widespread lynchings in the South. “You have Black soldiers who have just fought for their country [in World War I] and fought to make the world safe for democracy, coming back to an America that's determined to lynch them,” said Dailey. “[T]hose were very clearly white supremacist monuments and are designed to intimidate, not just memorialize.”
And a significant portion of those monuments were erected on courthouse grounds. According to Lecia Brooks of the Southern Poverty Law Center, placing these memorials on courthouse property, especially in the 1950s and ’60s, was meant to remind Black Americans of the struggle and subjugation they would face in their fight for civil rights and equal protection under the law.
The day after the band's name change announcement, White told Rolling Stone she had been shocked by the news.
“This is my life. Lady A is my brand, I’ve used it for over 20 years, and I’m proud of what I’ve done,” she told the outlet. “This is too much right now. They’re using the name because of a Black Lives Matter incident that, for them, is just a moment in time. If it mattered, it would have mattered to them before. It shouldn’t have taken George Floyd to die for them to realize that their name had a slave reference to it.”
This Lady A — a 61-year-old black woman whose real name is Anita White — has been playing the blues under the name for more than 20 years. She began singing as a gospel performer at church and started going by Lady A for karaoke nights in the Eighties. She’s released multiple albums with the name, and on top of her day job working with Seattle Public Utilities, she’s gearing up to release another album, Lady A: Live in New Orleans, on her birthday on July 18th.
On Wednesday, Facebook announced that it had removed accounts belonging to Roger Stone, a friend and confidant of President Donald Trump, after having linked them to fake accounts and pages that were active throughout the 2016 election.
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Facebook said that it removed 54 accounts, 50 pages, and four Instagram accounts on Thursday for being involved in coordinated inauthentic behavior in the US. According to the company, the individuals behind these accounts would pretend to be Florida residents and would post and comment on posts in order to amplify them, including material released by WikiLeaks ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Facebook kicked Roger Stone, the Donald Trump associate who faces prison time after being convicted of seven felonies, off Facebook and Instagram. The company said it had found evidence that Stone was behind a network of fake accounts in the U.S. designed make themselves appear “more popular than they were.”
The company said it “identified the full scope of this network” linked to “Stone and his associates” after the public release of search warrants and other documents from Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, which was the product of a lawsuit filed by media organizations.
According to data published last week by analytics company Net Applications, Chrome's share during June rose four-tenths of a percentage point to 70.2%. The browser has been on a sixth-month run, adding 3.6 percentage points to its account since January. The only other browser to end the first half of 2020 on a positive note was Opera Software's Opera, which gained just one-tenth of a point in that time.
More notable was that, by breaking the 70% bar, Chrome became only the third browser to reach such a dominant position, following Netscape Navigator (ancestor of Firefox) in the 1990s and Microsoft's Internet Explorer in the first decade of this century.
Chrome's continued climb may not be sustainable over the long run – that would require the extinction of at least one rival – but on a strictly linear basis, the browser's future looks rosy. Computerworld's latest forecast, based on a 12-month average change in share, puts Chrome at 71% by September and beyond 72% by year's end.
During prosecution of the application, the Examiner rejected claims 1-3 of the '162 application as being patent ineligible under ۤ 101. The Applicant, Mr. Zach Zunshine, appealed the rejection to the Board, which affirmed the Examiner's rejection. In particular, the Board agreed with the Examiner that the claims recite an abstract idea, concluding that the claims describe methods of managing personal behavior, and that the claims do not recite any limitations that integrate the abstract idea into a practical application.
In affirming the Board, the Federal Circuit similarly concluded that claims 1–3 are directed to an abstract idea. The Court explained that "[e]ach of claims 1–3 amount to nothing more than reducing food intake to achieve weight loss and snacking to curb hunger," adding that "[h]umans have long managed their personal diets in such a manner, and thus claims 1–3 are directed to an abstract idea." Citing Trading Techs. Int’l, Inc. v. IBG LLC, 921 F.3d 1084, 1092 (Fed. Cir. 2019), the Court also noted that "[t]he fact that the claims might add a 'degree of particularity' as to the amount that food intake is reduced 'does not impact our analysis at step one.'"
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The Court determined that the claims of the '162 application were different from those found to be patent eligible in Vanda, pointing out that the claims at issue here "merely direct a user to manage his or her food intake according to a series of rules that humans have long followed in managing their diets," and concluding that "[s]uch personal management of food intake is an abstract idea that is not patent eligible."
Turning to the second step of the Alice/Mayo inquiry, the Court determined that nothing in the claims, either individually or as an ordered combination, transformed the claims into a patent-eligible application of the abstract idea recited therein. In response to the Applicant's argument that the elements of claims 1–3 are not found in the prior art and together the elements produce "spectacular" weight loss, the Court responded that "[t]he purported inventive concepts . . . are nothing more than the abstract ideas themselves," and that the suggested novelty of the claims fails to transform the abstract idea of limiting food intake into a patent-eligible process. The Court therefore affirmed the Board's determination that claims 1-3 of the '162 application are patent ineligible under €§ 101. "/p>
Valencell’s US8923941 covers methods of generating data relating to blood oxygen level, heart rate, and other physical activity. The claimed method includes two primary steps: (1) sensing; and (2) processing. The sensing step requires a single device “attached” to a user that includes a motin sensor (accelerometer) and a pulse-oximeter (photoplethysmography – PPG). The processing step creates a signal that includes heart rate, respiration rate, and a plurality of physical activity parameters.
This setup is now common with many millions of such devices being sold across the country. According to its court filings, Valencell repeatedly approached various major players–including Fitbit and Apple–looking for partnership & licensing opportunities. The companies refused and Valencell eventually filed a set of infringement lawsuits back in 2016. Apple & Fitbit then petitioned for inter partes review.
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This setup is now common with many millions of such devices being sold across the country. According to its court filings, Valencell repeatedly approached various major players–including Fitbit and Apple–looking for partnership & licensing opportunities. The companies refused and Valencell eventually filed a set of infringement lawsuits back in 2016. Apple & Fitbit then petitioned for inter partes review.
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Slip Op. On remand, the Board will correct the error and actually judge the obviousness of these three remaining claims.
The USPTO has started its appeal fast-track program — “Fast-Track Appeals Pilot Program.” The program includes a $400 cut-in-line progrea launches July 2, 2020. The required petition fee for cutting-in-line is $400. There are already a group of cases that are treated “special” for appeals, including reissues, reexaminations, and cases “made special.” But, the USPTO Examination Track-1 cases are not currently treated as special on appeal.
The Patent Act provides a right to appeal to the PTAB once your claims have “been twice rejected” and you have “paid the fee.” 35 U.S.C. 134(a). The fee structure is a bit unusual. It costs $800 to file a notice-of-appeal at which point briefing begins. Quite often examiners withdraw their rejections after seeing the patent applicant’s brief. Once the briefing is complete the case is ready to be “forwarded” to the Board — which requires $2,240. [Current Fees] There is also a $1300 fee if you want an oral hearing rather than having the PTAB decide your case on the briefs.
This is a good move from the PTO. A modest fee for a modest timing improvement. The current pilot is limited to 125 per quarter for the next year. 500 total before a reevaluation.
On July 7, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) terminated proceedings in Unified Patents Inc. et al. v. Transactionsecure LLC et al., after Transactionsecure abandoned all challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,738,921. The ‘921 patent, directed to user authentication systems and methods, had been asserted in multiple district court cases against such companies as Formstack, Fitbit, Facebook, Stripe, and Github. All district court cases have been closed.
On July 8, 2020, Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in an IPR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 6,792,351, owned and asserted by AutoBrilliance, LLC, an NPE. The ‘351 patent, directed to multi-vehicle communication, has been asserted in district court litigation against Toyota.
On July 7, 2020, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) instituted trial on all challenged claims in a PGR filed by Unified against U.S. Patent 10,303,411, owned by Pebble Tide, LLC, an IP Edge affiliate and well-known NPE. The '411 patent is directed to capturing and outputting digital content. Prior to institution, Pebble Tide already abandoned some of the challenged claims and the PTAB instituted a trial on all of the remaining challenged claims.
The ‘411 patent has been asserted against over 25 companies, involving remote monitoring camera systems, mobile banking apps, online photo-sharing services, and auto insurance claims submission apps. All of the district court litigations have been terminated.
Jailbreaking tools are generally protected from copyright infringement claims through a DMCA exemption. This week, however, GitHub removed the Chimera13 jailbreak code. The takedown notice, which is disputed, doesn't come from Apple though, but was sent by the rival jailbreak solution Unc0ver.
Amazon Publishing has teamed up with publisher Penguin Random House and authors including Lee Child and John Grisham to sue 'pirate' sites operating under the Kiss Library brand. Filed in a Washington court, the lawsuit targets Ukraine-linked platforms while alleging rampant and willful copyright infringement.
Digital Music News obtained an exclusive copy of said legal filing, which Burning Man and Black Rock City’s lawyers submitted to a Washington, D.C. federal court. Towards its beginning, the sizable document reiterates many of the previously introduced allegations, including that the Department of the Interior (DOI) charged “excessive, unjustified and unreasonable permit costs” for Burning Man events between 2015 and 2019, delayed making decisions relating to the nine-day-long gathering, and denied Black Rock City refunds for “unreasonable and unjustified charges.”
