This has been quite a week. A lot has happened, especially the CentOS EOL decision from Red Hat which has shaken some of the companies and users. Here's a weekly roundup from debugpoint.com.
“We see Kubernetes as our platform forward for the future and we will continue to drive more and more of our application landscape to Kubernetes as time goes by,” Joe Searcy, a member of T-Mobile US’ technical staff on platform engineering, said during a webinar sponsored by Portworx. “We don’t see a lot of reasons not to put everything on Kubernetes at this point.”
In the "Linux for Noobs" series, I take the viewer from being an absolute beginner to knowing how to use Linux on their desktop or laptop. In this debut episode, I talk about why there are so many distributions.
In "Linux for Noobs" , I'll help you get up to speed on Linux. In this series, I'll take you from absolute beginner to using Linux as your daily driver! In this episode, I go over a few things you should do BEFORE you install Linux.
Are you having trouble getting your IT career off the ground? Is life constantly getting in the way? It was hard for me too, and in this video, I tell you a very personal story so that you can hopefully feel that whatever the odds are that are stacked against you, no matter how much trouble you have learning the concepts, you CAN do it!
Adding to the Linux 5.11 changes and set of new drivers is "lcd2s" as a driver for supporting a 20x4 LCD character display connected via SPI/I2C and with this support can serve as a kernel console output device.
The LCD2S driver is for supporting the Modtronix LCD2S character display. This is a single-color, 20x4 serial LCD display that can interface with the system via SPI/I2C.
There are a lot of changes coming with Linux 5.11 and on the AMD side includes the likes of VanGogh and Dimgrey Cavefish graphics support, AMD EPYC Zen 3 support in the AMD_Energy driver, AMD RAPL Zen1/Zen2/Zen3 PowerCap support, an AMD SoC PMC driver, and the AMD Sensor Fusion Hub driver for Ryzen laptops is finally being mainlined... Another new addition was queued up this weekend by way of hwmon-next and that's the AMD SB-TSI sensor driver.
Going back to early in 2020 we reported on Google engineers working on this AMD SB-TSI code for the Sideband Temperature Sensor Interface. This is about reading the AMD SoC temperature connected to a BMC.
[...]
The Linux kernel already supports the AMD Zen CPU temperature monitoring via the k10temp driver.
While our last release has matured for quite a little time, there raised demands within our community for a new release. The development has settled this fall and @sni was already using master for a while in production, so we thought about to release. Anyway Debian Freeze is coming, let's cut a new upstream release! The last question was: Who should cut the release?
The last releases was done by @JeremyHolger, but these days everybody is short on time. Fortunately Holger has documented the whole release process very well, so I jumped on the band wagon and slipped into the release wizard role.
Zrythm v1.0.0-alpha.6.0.1 has been released!
Demo: https://www.zrythm.org/videos/panos-alevropoulos-geometry.webm (by Panos Alevropoulos, CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Zrythm is a digital audio workstation designed to be featureful and easy to use. It allows limitless automation through curves, LFOs and envelopes, supports multiple plugin formats including LV2, LADSPA, DSSI, SFZ, SF2, VST2 and VST3 (via Carla), works with multiple backends including JACK, RtAudio/RtMidi and SDL2, assists with chord progressions via a special Chord Track and chord pads, and can be used in multiple languages including English, French, Portuguese, Japanese and German.
Zrythm is free software written in C using the GTK+3 toolkit and can be extended using GNU Guile (Scheme).
Zrythm is currently in alpha and we are working towards stabilizing the project format and entering the beta phase.
Earlier this year we covered Zrythm as an open-source digital audio workstation that is cross-platform, supports a wide variety of plug-ins, and built atop GTK3. Back then it was on the pre-1.0 version numbering while this weekend marks the release of 1.0 Alpha 6.
Zrythm kicked off the 1.0 Alpha releases in September and that has routinely continued through this weekend's release of 1.0 Alpha 6. This latest release continues bringing fixes and other changes.
Mumble is an open-source voice chat application that advertises itself as free, secure, and high-quality. It's free in that anyone willing to put up the server space can host a Mumble server. Services exist that will host one for you, but they typically operate on a paid or freemium basis.
If you want to avoid fees and have complete control over your Mumble server, then read on.
The server-side app for hosting Mumble is called Murmur. You can set Murmur up on Windows, Linux, or macOS, but we're using Linux Mint in our example pictures. Your screen may look a little different.
ArcoLinux has printer support enabled by default.
If you are working on Arch Linux then you need to read up about cups.
Cups and its packages provides support for thousands of printers but maybe not (yet) the latest printers.
Check out this page to know more about your particular brand.
Do not forget the AUR. It hosts many drivers you can install.
Watch the video to see all the options.
Suppose you do want another person to have complete access like you in your system. Then you are in the right place.
In Linux, every user has restrictions based on permission they have; while creating, you can achieve level security in your system by providing correct permission to every single user who tries to access your system locally or remotely.
Suppose you want to restrict a particular user from accessing a specific file and want to give access to another user. Here changing ownership cannot solve this big problem.
So, what should we do? If you think to add that particular file in a specific group and allow users to access who will be in that group, then yes, you are absolutely correct.
In the default Gnome desktop when you trying to open an application, the app window sometimes does not get into focus immediately, instead it pops up ‘xxx’ is ready notification and opens the window behind the current focused window.
This usually happens when another window is getting focused during the process of launching a desired application.
The ip command is a useful tool for assigning an address to a network interface and/or configure network interface parameters on Linux operating systems. It is used to bring interfaces up or down, assign and remove addresses and routes, manage ARP cache, and much more. This command replaces old good and now deprecated ifconfig command on modern Linux distributions. In this article, we will discover the practical use cases of this command
Ethtool is a useful linux utility that we can use to view and modify the ethernet device settings. By following this article, you will learn how to change the speed in your network card, modify auto-negotiation settings and changing duplex modes in your network card.
KDE apps are always being improved and enhanced. But not only that, KDE developers are also constantly working on new applications to cover users' needs. Today’s release is no different: the new bundle updates email, calendar and contact suite, Kontact; adds new travel assistant apps Itinerary and KPublicTransport to the list of available programs; and, for the first time, includes Partition Manager, the Konversation chat client, and KTorrent into our regular release service.
KDE Applications have been updated to 20.12.0 and shipped to the software repository.
The KDE Frameworks packages have been updated to 5.77.0 and shipped to the software repository.
I more or less always start my Kate session inside a terminal, to let the project plugin auto-load the right one for the current working directory.
What I ignored for a long time is the noise this produces inside the terminal.
[...]
As nice this might be for debugging, I think for the normal user this is pointless.
No valid suggestion in Sonnet is just a valid API result, no need to inform the user on the terminal/log.
Same for Samba stuff: In many cases the user not even configured that at all or isn’t able to modify the potential “bad” Samba configuration. In my case these settings are even intentional the way they are out of compatibility constraints in the local network.
Since 2013, the KDE Student Programs has been running Season of KDE. Season of KDE is a program similar to, but not quite the same as, Google Summer of Code. It offers an opportunity for everyone (not just students) to participate in both coding and non-coding projects that benefit the KDE ecosystem. In the past few years, SoK participants have not only created new application features, but have also developed the KDE Continuous Integration System, statistical reports for developers, a web framework, ported KDE applications, created documentation, and contributed to KDE with lots and lots of other tasks.
[...]
There is already a list of proposed projects available in the wiki. You have little less than a month to find a project that interests you and your mentor. Your goal is to get noticed by the mentors by, for example, sending Merge Requests to their projects, sending high-quality bug reports, or simply by starting to interact with them. Remember that many KDE developers have a life beyond KDE and won't respond immediately. Also, it is recommended you contact the mentors in the public channel so that if they can't respond, someone else can.
Once you find a project and a mentor, you can submit a proposal for a project at the Season of KDE site. Note that you will need a KDE Identity account to register. We have some guidelines for proposals on the wiki. Your mentor will review your idea and, if nothing goes wrong, your proposal will be accepted on the 11th of January.
Greetings,
Unfortunately an issue has been discovered with the 3.6 release, specifically during an upgrade. Fortunately it's easy to fix. In the near future a 3.6.1 minor release will replace it, but if you have already upgraded from 3.5 to 3.6 using the 3.6 release ISO, the fix is simple.
Either:
1. Uninstall 'openrdate' and install 'rdate'. 2. Uninstall 'mesa3d' and install 'mesa'.
or:
1. Manually edit /var/lib/pkg/db and rename 'openrdate' to 'rdate'. 2. Manually edit /var/lib/pkg/db and rename 'mesa3d' to 'mesa'.
If you do not use mesa3d and it was not installed, ignore the mesa-related parts of this.
Apologies for the confusion if you've already upgraded and run into this!
Regards, Matt
We are happy to announce the release of Mageia 8 Beta 2. After a long time since the beta 1, we look forward to hearing your feedback and thoughts so that we can continue to get Mageia 8 ready for release.As we said in a previous post, a lot of work had to be done for the basesystem upgrade, java, kernel, and the graphical stack. These upgrades are now in a state that allows for the Beta 2 ISO’s to be built and tested.
[...]
A full list of included packages is available in the .idx file for the classical installation media or the .lst file for the live iso images.
For those that want to jump in and test straight away, the images can be downloaded here, as always with pre-release images, use your best judgement.
The set of available ISO images is the same as in Mageia 7, offering installation media for both 32 and 64 bit systems, 64bit live images for Plasma, GNOME and Xfce, as well as a 32bit live image for Xfce. Some of the major improvements in ISO are that our netinstall can now be used to install over WIFI connections with WPA encryption. Previously, only WEP encryption was available.
Mageia 8 Beta 1 came all the way back in August while ahead of Christmas that has now been succeeded by a second beta release for this Mandriva/Mandrake-derived Linux distribution.
Mageia 8 has been admittedly slow to see its release as the developers involved have been working on killing off their remaining Python 2 usage, switching to Zstd for RPM packages, improving the ARM support, and better supporting the likes of the F2FS and NILFFS2 file-system coverage.
Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,
The weekly review for 2020/50 is a bit late, but technically, it is still week 50, so ‘just in time’. Since my last review, Tumbleweed has managed to publish 5 snapshots (1203, 1205, 1207, 1209 and 1211). The fact that they are 2-day intervals is pure co-incidence and by no means planned. 1204 simply never was published, as 1205 reached QA before all reviews could be completed and the snapshot was discarded. 1206 was not produced, as I skipped the check-ins last Sunday. 1208 was again a ‘too fast build compared to test time; and 1210 was discarded due to packaging / build issues around the kubernetes 1.20 updates.
In 2002, Red Hat, in response to customer needs for supportable Linux operating systems, Red Hat created Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1 which in 2003, was renamed as Red Hat Enterprise Linux 2.1. This change to a subscription based model of consumption of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, upset the community who have been consuming Red Hat Linux since the launch of RHL in 1994.
Yes, I was part of that user community that was not happy with the change. And, yes, I did try to see what I could do to continue to benefit from what RHL used to provide in the new RHEL space.
I was not alone in that pursuit. There were many efforts around the world to create a RHL-like system available at no cost to the end user but based on the RHEL code base. The code base of RHEL is available for download because Red Hat complies to and exceeds the requirements of the GNU General Public License of making available the code that goes into a product. [See here for a twitter thread on how Singtel and Aztech have failed to respect the terms of GPL license of the code running in their products]
Of all those efforts, two of them stood out – Community Enterprise Operating System and White Box Enterprise Linux. Both projects took the code of RHEL and compiled the binaries from the code so that users can freely download the ISOs and/or rpms and do as they pleased.
There is another distribution, Scientific Linux, maintained by Fermi Lab, that is primarily used by research institutions around the world and is a downstream of RHEL Naturally, anyone is free to use SL for their own uses as well.
As we know RHEL is the upstream version of CentOS, therefore, the 8.x version of Redhat used by CentOS will be discontinued at the end of 2021. Yes, the decision has been taken by the RedHat team, however, they are not completely abandoning the CnetOS project but only the LTS version that has been used widely on various servers, especially by hosting ones. The company will continue with CentOS Stream, a variant of the Linux distribution that has been available since September 2019, a “rolling-release” means the latest update every month and thus fresher packages than Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
The reason why they want to still continue the rolling-release is to make the enterprise RedHat OS more stable and bug-free. Therefore, this will force users to look for CentOS alternatives for their servers and most of them for sure will go for Ubuntu LTS versions. Oracle Linux and OpenSUSE are also good contenders in the list. The only issue that will be there is the migration. For example, CPanel (WHM) runs on CentOS, therefore either the hosting companies have to go for RHEL, a paid solution, or CloudLinux.
I have a CentOS 7 laptop where every time I close the lid, the system suspends. I’d like to change this behaviour so that nothing would happen instead.
RedHat, sponsors/owners of the CentOS project, announced a new direction for CentOS in the first week of December 2020 that has thrown the web hosting industry into some unrest. Essentially, CentOS, as it is, would be discontinued with the project being moved to a new model that is more upstream and taps new features and fixes from Fedora directly, instead of RHEL.
[...]
Someone has opened a petition on change.org with about 7,500 signatures at the time of writing, to try to convince RHEL against their new move though the new direction is very unlikely to be reversed.
Rockchip RK3399 powered NanoPi R4S router SBC launched at the beginning of the month, and FriendlyELEC kindly sent a review sample to CNX Software. I intended to test thermally performance, Ethernet, and USB like I did for NanoPi R2S and NanoPi NEO3, but Armbian is not available right now, so I could not use some of the tools I normally used right now.
So instead, I tested the board/gateway with the image from FriendlyELEC. First FriendlyCore based on Ubuntu Core 20.04, but there some issues which we’ll detail in this preview, so I then switch to FriendlyWrt built upon OpenWrt 19.07 which works better, but I still encountered some problems. That’s just to say it might be better to wait a little longer until Armbian images are released, or until FriendlyELEC fixes some of the shortcomings.
The setup is designed to interface with the Honda's OBD2 port wirelessly. Through it, he can monitor data from the OBD2 adapter or even play music.
The device is designed to automatically turn on when the car is started. It then searches for and connects to the Bluetooth LE OBD2 adapter after booting. The interface loads onto a 3.5-inch Waveshare IPS screen connected via GPIO.
This article in Forbes identifies four misconceptions that have harmed Cobol’s reputation but also continues the misconception that Cobol is just a mainframe language when in reality companies such as Micro Focus have made Cobol available on Windows and Unix. The language created by Grace Murray Hopper to make computers easier for normal people to program lives on – as well it should!
The Brackets text editor is an editor geared primarily at web developers. Appropriately, its Edit menu is full of functions especially useful to users of web programming languages, with a focus on the classic combination of HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
However, it supports many languages and formats relevant to the internet, including XML, Markdown, YAML and JSON, PHP, Lua, Java, and Python, as well as some common general languages like C, C++, and even the output of diff commands.
Objective-C is a general-purpose, dynamic, object-oriented programming language that adds Smalltalk-style messaging to the C programming language. It’s designed to be easy to use and read, while enabling sophisticated object-oriented design.
Objective-C was the main programming language supported by Apple for macOS, iOS, and their respective application programming interfaces (APIs), Cocoa and Cocoa Touch, until the introduction of Swift in 2014.
Apple would prefer Objective-C to be considered dead and buried. But some developers prefer Objective-C to Swift. The TIOBE Index currently ranks Swift in 13th place and Objective-C in 19th place.
Here’s our recommended free books to learn Objective-C.
Shell literacy is one of the most important skills you ought to possess as a programmer. The Unix shell is one of the most powerful ideas ever put to code, and should be second nature to you as a programmer. No other tool is nearly as effective at commanding your computer to perform complex tasks quickly — or at storing them as scripts you can use later.
Informal writing is not entirely new, of course. We've had personal letters for nearly as long as we've had writing, not to mention private notes, diaries, and other writing intended for tiny audiences. But consider who wrote private letters and, on top of that historical filter, whose private letters were preserved for linguistic research. Until relatively recently, only the upper classes were literate and had access to the infrastructure to write and send letters. Someone's letters or private notes were unlikely to be preserved unless they were someone famous and important, and thus often well-educated and more likely to take a more formal tone in writing.
If you compare this to the Internet-driven blizzard of work and personal email, SMS conversations, chatrooms, and social media posts, the difference is obvious in both volume and level of informality. We're all on the Internet, we all read and write with a frequency that would be staggering to the average person from even fifty years ago, and while one may take a bit of additional care with a tricky email to one's manager, the SMS message to one's friend is as informal of a use of language as a conversation over coffee.
The trouble is, there aren’t many alternative venues in AI that can fund accountability-focused research. Because of the massive computational costs associated with building out AI models, much of the major work in the field gets concentrated in the hands of a small number of companies and universities that can afford it.
When Hannah Watts received a reminder notice in the mail in January for the $701.56 she still owed for her childrens’ textbook fees from last year, she decided to use her tax refund to pay it off in the spring. But two months later, the coronavirus pandemic shut down Indiana. Watts is a dental assistant, and her hours at work were slashed. She had no choice but to use the refund to cover household expenses.
Watts, of Mishawaka, Indiana, says she didn’t hear anything else about the bill until Aug. 7, when a notice appeared on her door. School City of Mishawaka, the public school district her three children attend, had filed a lawsuit against her.
Low-wage warehouse workers, many of whom are temporary, are demanding access to the vaccine.
But in some cases, rural hospitals' woes have been exacerbated by the practices of for-profit owners, an NBC News investigation has found. In June, for example, federal prosecutors accused a for-profit owner of a dozen failed hospitals of conducting a fraudulent reimbursement scheme. And court documents and regulatory filings show other for-profit owners have been accused of failing to pay health insurance benefits and payroll taxes for workers or defaulted on debt obligations.
Campaigners are warning that nine out of 10 people in poor countries are set to miss out on Covid-19 vaccine in 2021.
The pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests have shown New York's mutual aid collectives how to navigate the line between mutual aid, solidarity, and charity.
Steve says his case study proves the CDC was wrong when it said the first cases were in Seattle in mid to late January ... he thinks there was an untold number of people infected way before the alarm was sounded in the U.S.
The Health Ministry has confirmed 32,106 more Covid-19 infections, including 5,607 symptomatic patients, over the past 24 hours.
The total number of cases reached over 1.78 million with the latest additions, the data showed.
In an alert from the FBI and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), officials said that data from the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center (MS-ISAC) shows that in August and September, 57 percent of ransomware incidents reported to the MS-ISAC involved K-12 schools, compared to just 28 percent of all reported ransomware incidents from January through July.
Ransomware is not the only problem, though – CISA and the FBI said that trojan malwares, distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, phishing and credential theft, account hacking, network compromises and more have all been on the rise since the beginning of the school year.
Apple Inc. has become a chip powerhouse in the past decade, beating some of the semiconductor industry’s leading companies at their own game. But the iPhone maker is embarking on its biggest challenge to date as it tries to replace Qualcomm Inc. cellular modems with its own design.
“This attack is different from the tens of thousands of incidents we have responded to throughout the years,” Mandia shared.
“The attackers tailored their world-class capabilities specifically to target and attack FireEye. They are highly trained in operational security and executed with discipline and focus. They operated clandestinely, using methods that counter security tools and forensic examination. They used a novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past.”
The attackers’ discipline, operational security, and techniques point to it being a state-sponsored attack, thought Mandia refrained from saying or speculating about which nation-state might be behind it. (According to The New York Times, the lead suspects at this moment are Russian hackers.)
The attackers accessed and stole FireEye’s Red Team tools, which the company uses to probe other organizations’ security posture to help them improve it.
Google has, as part of their involvement in the Open Source Security Foundation (OpnSSF), come up with a “Criticality Score” for open source projects.
I just now found about Open Source Project Criticality Score under the Open Source Security Foundation (OpnSSF) from Daniel Stenberg's blog post.
He wrote about the critical C projects (all calculations are done only for Github based projects), so I decided to look at the list of the Python projects.
Cooper was a partner at law firm Covington & Burling before he was nominated 2013 and joined the court in 2014. Boasberg, a former homicide prosecutor, was nominated in 2010 and joined the court in 2011.
The twin lawsuits filed against Facebook this week by the government and more than 40 attorneys general are the most serious effort to break the social media giant up to date.
The cases, which differ slightly, focus on the allegation that Facebook made acquisitions in an effort to decrease competition in the social network marketplace and ultimately worsened the quality of options available to consumers.
The Federal Trade Commission and 48 state and territory attorneys general propose a solution to that issue: divestiture.
They accuse Facebook of, as the FTC puts it, "suppressing, neutralizing, and deterring serious competitive threats" to its own dominance in social media.
The company did so, the authorities allege, by swallowing some rivals — most notably photo-sharing app Instagram and messaging service WhatsApp — and suffocating others by cutting off valuable access to Facebook's data and systems.
Here are four key takeaways: [...]
The Cellebrite used to gather evidence in that case was owned and operated by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office. But these invasive phone-cracking tools are not only being purchased by police departments. Public documents reviewed by Gizmodo indicate that school districts have been quietly purchasing these surveillance tools of their own for years.
Mr Jackson’s is one of several new books to warn that America’s far right is now more active than at any time since the early 1990s. The Department of Homeland Security agrees, and in testimony to Congress this autumn the FBI’s director, Christopher Wray, called the far right—and white supremacists in particular—America’s gravest domestic-terror threat. Last year, when 48 people were killed in 16 attacks, was their most lethal in a generation. A previous bout of such violence eased only after an anti-government fanatic, Timothy McVeigh, bombed a federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995, killing 168 people.
On Thursday, Morocco became the fourth Arab state this year to announce it would establish relations with Israel. It was another diplomatic win for the Trump administration, with US President Donald Trump tweeting that it was "a massive breakthrough for peace in the Middle East!"
Setting aside the hyperbole -- Morocco and Israel have long had a quietly amicable relationship -- the Moroccans extracted a high price from the US: recognition of Moroccan sovereignty over the long-disputed territory of Western Sahara.
The case and the Republican House members’ support of it illustrates the biggest problem Biden will face in office — and one that will inform or impede his ability to deal with the towering crises of the Covid-19 pandemic and our precarious economic situation: How can a U.S. president govern, let alone solve major problems, if one of our political parties is openly hostile to our entire political system?
And it meant that Republican leaders now stand for a new notion: that the final decisions of voters can be challenged without a basis in fact if the results are not to the liking of the losing side, running counter to decades of work by the United States to convince developing nations that peaceful transfers of power are key to any freely elected government’s credibility.
The United Kingdom’s former Home Secretary Sajid Javid has just published an op-ed The Sun in which he appears to be calling for a new realism in response to the Islamic jihad threat, but a closer look reveals that he is just indulging in the same old wishful thinking and willful ignorance that we have heard thousands of times from politicians all over Europe and North America.
The attitude of successive French governments every time a serious attack is carried out -- the less serious ones go unnoticed -- has been the same. The president and his ministers give speeches denouncing the danger and promising firmness; then nothing happens. On February 16, 2015, Prime Minister Manuel Valls actually instructed his countrymen that "the French should get used to living with the terrorist threat".
While the State Department has authorized the sale of the unmanned aerial vehicles, the sources said, it was not known if the US officials have approved exporting the drones with weapons attached, two of the people said.
"If we don't change course," he warned, "we may be headed for a catastrophic temperature rise of more than 3 degrees this century."
Hopefully Biden will nominate leaders who understand the severity of the climate crisis and the environmental injustices that burden communities of color and low-income communities.
— the international accord intended to limit global temperature rise to below 2 degrees Celsius — and the lawsuit is the latest in a cascade of litigation around the world aimed at holding governments and polluters accountable for fuelling climate€ change.
The tariffs did not prevent the industry from growing, but it slowed its previously exponential growth and probably cost 60,000 jobs.
Candidates should be pushed to say if they stand with the super-rich profiteering, callous Big Business tycoons or with the people who work for pitiful wages, on the rugged frontlines, and keep our society running.
The super rich owe their super fortunes to factors that have little to do with their "genius."
"It's over over over over and 90% of GOP needs to recognize reality."
This was just one of Trump’s tweets that was not only flagged by Twitter as a disputed claim, but was restricted to user engagement. However, Twitter soon restored interaction to Trump’s tweets.
HEATHER COX RICHARDSON: Millions of people are not necessarily reading the Arizona GOP Twitter feed. And there is a lot of posturing going on I think in this particular moment. So, I think that the fears that I see of people thinking that we are in fact on the verge of a civil war are probably overblown. That being said, I do think we have a real problem in this country and have had one at least since the overturning of the Fairness Doctrine in 1987. And possibly from before that, with the rise of Ronald Reagan, and maybe even before that with the concept of William F. Buckley Jr., for example, that rather than making arguments based in fact, what we really need to do is indoctrinate people to believe a certain narrative about the way America works. And what we really have now is a whole bunch of people who no longer are in a relationship with reality, if you will. And they really do want to have their lives mean something. They want to care about something. They want to be important. And they are laying their ideology on the line in this moment to say that they’re going to fight for what they believe is America. Now, that being said, we’ve been here before. We were here in the 1850s, and after 1860, when, in fact, our leaders did manage to bring those people into a civil war, they discovered pretty quickly that what they were fighting for was not some version of America in which ordinary Americans would go ahead and be able to have a future. What they were fighting for was the very wealthy, who essentially walked away from that war and left that entire Southern region devastated. And that’s the thing I always worry about, is so many of these keyboard warriors are really brave until the rubber meets the road. And then they discover that they’re actually burning down their own homes. It’s all fun and games until the actual shooting starts, as people like Kyle Rittenhouse found out.
Concerns over the health of the Dalai Lama have renewed uncertainties in recent years over his possible successor after he dies, with Beijing claiming the right to name his successor and the Dalai Lama himself saying that any future Dalai Lama will be born outside of China.
Meetings between the Dalai Lama and foreign leaders have meanwhile drawn the anger of Beijing, which regards the exiled spiritual leader and Nobel laureate as a separatist seeking to split Tibet from China’s rule.
In what he calls a Middle Way Approach, though, the Dalai Lama says that he seeks only a “meaningful autonomy” for Tibet as a part of China, with guaranteed protections for the region’s language, religion, and culture.
A formerly independent nation, Tibet was invaded and incorporated into China by force nearly 70 years ago, following which the Dalai Lama and thousands of his followers fled into exile in India and other countries around the world.
Belarusian security agents have seized the computer and documents of a journalist at Minsk's airport after briefly holding him upon arrival from Ukraine.
Roman Vasyukovich, a correspondent for Current Time, the Russian-language network led by RFE/RL in cooperation with VOA, said some of his possessions were seized at the airport without explanation.
Ruhollah Zam was hanged on Saturday after the supreme court upheld a death sentence against him, state television reported.
Zam, who had been living in exile in France, was reportedly detained after travelling to Iraq last year.
Dissident Iranian journalist Rouhollah Zam was hanged in Iran on Saturday morning, according to state television IRIB.
Zam was found guilty of "corruption on earth," a charge that does not specify a crimeââ¬â¹ but is sometimes used by the Iranian government for alleged attempts to overthrow it.
Zam ran the ââ¬â¹online opposition news site Amad News, which was accused by Tehran of inciting violence during deadly protests in 2017 and 2018, the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported in 2019.
The semiofficial ISNA news agency reported on December 12 that Tehran's Revolutionary Prosecutor's Office announced Zam's execution by hanging.
The execution comes days after Iran's judiciary announced the Supreme Court had upheld a death sentence against the 47-year-old journalist, drawing international condemnation.
Following confirmation that the execution had been carried out, international media watchdogs issued statements of protest.
Iran on Saturday executed Ruhollah Zam, a former opposition figure who had lived in exile in France and was implicated in anti-government protests, state television said.
The broadcaster said the "counter-revolutionary" Zam was hanged in the morning after the supreme court upheld his sentence due to "the severity of the crimes" committed against the Islamic republic.
Many people in Arizona have developmental disabilities. These are sometimes called DD. DD includes:
Arizona has a system to protect people with DD. The state created it 40 years ago. Volunteers make sure people with DD are safe and healthy. The volunteers include:
More than 40 years ago, Arizona set up a revolutionary system to protect the safety of residents with developmental disabilities like Down syndrome, autism and cerebral palsy.
The state created panels of volunteers — family members, nurses, disability advocates — in different regions to oversee the agency charged with the care of those with developmental disabilities.
When President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris take office, their administration must act quickly to protect the rights of and promote opportunities for people with disabilities.
West Resendes is a Skadden Fellow in the ACLU's Disability Rights Program, where he is primarily working on efforts to divest from law enforcement in schools and reinvest in school-based mental health staff. His national work uses integrated advocacy and disability rights framing to highlight and address how police disproportionately target students with disabilities and students of color. West is also engaged in ongoing litigation to reform the statewide carceral and parole systems in Georgia for Deaf and Hard of Hearing people. West is the first culturally Deaf attorney to work at the ACLU since its co-founder, Helen Keller.
Zoe Brennan-Krohn is a staff attorney at the ACLU's Disability Rights Program.
Brian Dimmick is a senior staff attorney at the ACLU's Disability Rights Program.
There were chaotic scenes at the school on Saturday as desperate parents and security personnel gathered to search for roughly half of the school's 800 students who were still missing, one parent and a school employee told Reuters.
Katsina, the home state of President Muhammadu Buhari, is plagued by violent bandits who regularly attack locals and kidnap for ransom. Attacks by Islamist militants are common in northeastern parts of the country.
The country will be listed alongside Iran, China and North Korea. That's because, like those countries, Nigeria is either unwilling or unable to provide this fundamental human right to its citizenry.
It's an astonishing indictment of Africa's largest economy and most populated country. It is a direct signal that the patience the United States has long reserved for its great African friend is wearing thin. It also demonstrates a change in public opinion in the United States—Americans will no longer sit idly by amid reports and images from almost daily atrocities. "Why," they and many elected officials are beginning to ask, "are we sending one billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer assistance annually?"
Saper, who managed to escape Iran with her husband and children to the US in 1987, chronicles her unique story in her concise memoir, “From Miniskirt to Hijab: A Girl in Revolutionary Iran.” The bookwon the 2020 Chicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award for traditional non-fiction and is nominated for the Clara Johnson Award for Women’s Literature.
In speaking recently with The Times of Israel from her home near Chicago, Saper, 59, emphasized that her experiences in Iran differed from her Jewish peers in another key way.
Separatists have waged a low-key insurgency for decades in a quest for self-rule. Calling for independence in West Papua is considered treason under Indonesian law, and raising the independence flag can bring a prison sentence of up to 15 years.
Two years after Papuans declared independence in 1961, Indonesia sent troops to occupy the former Dutch territory, and has maintained a military presence ever since. In 1969, in a vote regarded by many Papuans as rigged, Indonesia rounded up a thousand tribal leaders and held them until they agreed to join Indonesia.
The result was called “The Act of Free Choice,” and, after ratification by the United Nations, became Indonesia’s legal foundation for controlling West Papua. Many Papuans see their region as occupied and would like a true referendum to decide its status.
"This is something we in the industry have known about for a long time, but often the trafficking or child porn headlines will drown out our voices," cam model Mary Moody told me. "We saw a similar issue unfold under SESTA/FOSTA when survival or full service sex workers were unable to verify through Backpage and had to move to the more risky street based work, where a disproportionate amount of minority groups are arrested."
Porn performers have dealt with deplatforming and discriminatory payment processing practices from the beginning of the internet and beyond, but have always adapted, finding new ways to continue their work. But if two of the biggest credit card companies in the world can choose to deny service to Pornhub—a household name for online porn—some worry that nothing's stopping them from denying service to smaller platforms, too.
California Attorney General Xavier Becerra wants to join the antitrust lawsuit against Alphabet Inc.’s Google filed by the Justice Department and a group of states.
Becerra’s office filed court papers Friday seeking a judge’s approval to be added to the case as a plaintiff. California would be the first state led by a Democratic attorney general to join the case.
IP relevance, portfolio value, managing the patent process, interacting with IP offices, the impact of COVID-19 on counterfeiting and how the pandemic is affecting working practices: these were just a few of the topics discussed over 3 days at the third annual summit hosted by Kilburn & Strode and Berkeley Center for Law & Technology this week.
Titled “Invigorating your Portfolio: Optimize IP assets, reduce risk and increase value”, the summit was held virtually over three days, with a mix of keynote presentations, panel discussions and open Q&A. Participants included in-house counsel, US and European attorneys and IP office representatives.
Is your IP relevant?
The big question posed on the first day was: how do you demonstrate the value of your IP portfolio? Key to achieving this is ensuring the portfolio is relevant (to products and revenue streams, both yours and those of competitors) and ensuring executive attention. The two aims ultimately go together: CEOs and CFOs are likely to focus on relevance when evaluating the strength of an IP portfolio.
Verdant Technologiesââ¢, a recently launched technology company focused on product life extension for perishable products, announces that the European Patent Office had granted Patent No. 15 735 823.5-1107 to Verdant for the electrostatic printing process, or photocopy process, used in their growth regulator technology HarvestHoldââ¢. The USPTO granted Verdant two patents (US 9,421,793 and 10,376,472) for its 1-MCP electrostatic printing press technology in 2016 and 2019. The addition of the EPO patent signals a milestone in protecting their revolutionary postharvest plant life extension delivery technologies as Verdant’s HarvestHold technology enters the global market.
As mentioned above, the most important proposed innovation is the introduction of a national patent based on a fully fledged patent examination by the Intellectual Property Institute (IPI). Under current law, the IPI carries out only a limited examination of national patent applications dealing only with the technical character of the claimed invention, sufficiency of disclosure, clarity, uniformity of the inventive concept, amended subject matter and formal requirements.(2) If the new law becomes effective, the IPI would also examine the two crucial requirements of novelty and inventive step. The R-PatA extends the IPI's examination powers and brings its competence on a par with that of the European Patent Office, which has always examined patent applications in detail (EPC Patent Guide, p 47 et seqq). While novelty and inventive step have always been a condition for a legally valid Swiss patent, the two requirements have never been examined in the context of examination proceedings in Switzerland. Third parties that want to invalidate a Swiss patent because of alleged lack of novelty or inventive step must initiate revocation action proceedings before the Federal Patent Court under the current law.
The second major revision is the planned introduction of a utility model as a further protective right for technical inventions. This so-called 'small patent' is intended by the legislature to replace the current national Swiss patent, but it would have a validity term of only 10 years. In addition, a utility model cannot protect inventions in the field of biotechnology, pharmaceuticals and chemical substances and processes. Most importantly, the utility model is subject only to a limited examination procedure, which is simpler and more time and cost effective but at the same time competent enough to exclude obviously abusive applications. Novelty and inventive step will not be examined during examination proceedings concerning utility models. The utility model should therefore meet the needs of Swiss applicants which are looking for an uncomplicated and affordable protection of their inventions. The utility model is a possibility to ensure prompt protection while a patent application is still pending. It also qualifies for the so-called 'patent box' under Swiss tax law.
This proposed dual system with fully examined patents on the one hand and utility models on the other offers companies and inventors more choices for the protection of their inventions. It is one of the goals of the new system to enhance the attractiveness of Switzerland as a location for innovation.
[...]
As is well known, Switzerland is not a member of the planned unitary EU patent system comprising a European patent with unitary effect and the Unified Patent Court, so a revision of the Swiss patent system could make sense in this context.
Diego Alonso-Martinez and Wannes Weymiens of NLO review patentee and opponent nationalities in opposition procedures before the EPO during the 2017-2019 period
EPO opposition proceedings are on the increase, with German entities holding sway in representation instructions against a growing challenge from UK-based firms.
The EPO also writes that ratification by Italy is essential, in place of the UK. Italy ratified the agreement in 2017, and the UK withdrew its ratification earlier this year. As well as the positive conclusion of the procedure in Germany, a further two Signatory States need to agree to be bound by the Protocol on Provisional Application in order for the project to move into its final phase. The EPO has said it is "ready to register the first Unitary Patents. For Unitary Patents to become available, the UPCA has to enter into force which requires the ratification by 13 of the 25 participating EU Member States, including France, Germany and Italy."
European pharma sources respond to the European Commission’s IP Action Plan, saying COVID has shown that IP does not block access to medicine
BMS, Sanofi and others say a Federal Circuit ruling, if affirmed in a rehearing, could reshape Hatch-Waxman litigation. Others think it only affects Mylan
The European Patent Office (EPO) updated information on extensions and interruptions in member states. Effective January 4, 2021, oral proceedings before the Examining and Opposition Divisions will be held remotely. Oral proceedings that cannot be held remotely will be postponed until after September 15, 2021. More information here.
Lawyers say the EPO may need to be lenient for next year’s virtual exams, which will provide a test run for a potentially paper-free future
Bühler and swisca today announced that they have been able to settle their dispute out of court. The background to the case was that several long-standing employees terminated their employment contracts with Bühler in February 2018 and founded the company, swisca, in September that same year.
swisca operates in the market as a competitor of Bühler in certain product segments including in feed technology applications.
Bühler claimed that due to the rapid market entry of swisca, a dispute arose between the two parties regarding the use of intellectual property (IP) and know-how by swisca.
The companies, it said, had different views on this matter and the facts of the case were subject to legal proceedings.
Feed group BioMar has won its battle against a patent infringement claim by competitor, STIM AS. STIM’s request to ban the sale of BioMar’s Intro Tuning has been denied. The Norwegian courts have ruled that BioMar’s smoltification feed does not infringe STIM’s patent and the production and sale of the feed will continue as per normal. In July, STIM AS submitted a request to the Norwegian courts, stating that BioMar should be prohibited from the sale of their smoltification feed Intro Tuning. According to STIM, the feed violated a new European patent that STIM has recently been granted.
[...]
“We are very happy with the outcome of this case. The decision from the court is in accordance with the European Patent Office’s (EPO) understanding of STIM’s patent, and thus as expected. This decision means that fish farmers can continue to choose feed from our product portfolio that promotes growth and health during smoltification and transfer to seawater”, said HÃÂ¥vard Jørgensen, Managing Director of BioMar Norway.
Verdant Technologiesââ¢, a recently launched technology company focused on product life extension for perishable products, announces that the European Patent Office had granted Patent No. 15 735 823.5-1107 to Verdant for the electrostatic printing process, or photocopy process, used in their growth regulator technology HarvestHoldââ¢.
The USPTO granted Verdant two patents (US 9,421,793 and 10,376,472) for its 1-MCP electrostatic printing press technology in 2016 and 2019. The addition of the EPO patent signals a milestone in protecting their revolutionary postharvest plant life extension delivery technologies as Verdant’s HarvestHold technology enters the global market.
Figure 1 shows the cumulative number of 5G patent families from January 2017 to September 2020. The blue area shows declared 5G patent families by declaration month. The red line shows granted 5G patent families that have at least one granted patent as of October 5 2020. Some of the patent applications in the declared 5G patent families become granted patents over time. In each dot in the red line, we determined whether the declared 5G patent families in each declaration month have at least one granted patent as of October 5 2020, rather than as of each declaration month.
[...]
Figure 6 shows the distribution of the technical specification groups (TSGs) of the declared 5G patent families. The three main TSGs are radio access network (RAN), services/systems aspects (SA), and core network and terminals (CT). RAN defines radio communications between user equipment (UE) and the core network. SA is responsible for overall architecture and service capabilities. CT is responsible for the core network. All of the top 15 companies declare more 5G patent families in RAN compared with SA and CT. This is because the majority of the enhancements of 5G technology lie within the radio access part of the network. Huawei and Nokia have a larger number of patent families in SA and CT than the other 15 companies, and it is expected that they are also actively working on standardisation in these areas.
The USPTO’s request for comments on contributory liability for e-commerce platforms could help shape the proposed Shop Safe Act
In November, as we were finally coming to the day when CD Projekt Red's newest opus, Cyberpunk 2077, was going to be released to the world, we wrote about how the developer had included a setting for the game specifically to keep streamers safe from copyright strikes. Essentially, the setting was meant to strip out all licensed music from the game and replace it with music that wouldn't land streamers in copyright jail while doing let's-plays. On the one hand, it was nice to see a developer so in favor of having its games streamed do this sort of thing. On the other hand, the fact that CD Projekt Red had to do so showed both what a failure Amazon/Twitch and the like have been at supporting their streamers through music licensing deals and, more importantly, what a hellscape copyright enforcement has become that all of this was even necessary.
After being targeted in a copyright infringement lawsuit featuring backbone provider Hurricane Electric, a US-based ISP that operates a VPN service helping people circumvent Internet censorship in Iran, China and Russia has agreed to block several major pirate sites. These include The Pirate Bay, RARBG and YTS but there is plenty of scope for scaling up.
The Danish State Prosecutor has confirmed its role in shutting down two popular torrent trackers and the arrest of the alleged operator of Danishbits. The operator of Nordicbits, who confirmed his involvement, was apprehended in Spain but has sinced passed away. Police, meanwhile, aren't ruling out the possibility that users of the site will be identified.
