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Posted in News Roundup at 7:53 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
I cannot tell you how many times I get asked by collaborators, colleagues, friends and family, “Why do you never put spaces in file and folder names?” The answer to that question is generally met with either blank stares or cries of “What?” Way back when, in the mid-1990s, when I was still using Windows, spaces in file and folder names were commonplace for me.
Then I made the switch to Linux in 1997, and everything changed on every level. That included the names I gave files and folders. Back then, creating a folder name with a space was in very bad form and could cause you all sorts of trouble navigating the directory structure.
Lenovo is keeping to its promise of delivering more and more Linux laptops, and now the hardware giant is selling the 9th Generation of the ThinkPad X1 Carbon notebook with the Fedora Linux or Ubuntu as default operating systems.
Last year in August, Lenovo was selling the ThinkPad X1 Gen 8 with Fedora Linux, but now you can buy the newer model, which features ultra-thin and ultra-light redesigned chassis, an impressive 16:10 display, a wider touchpad, and larger battery.
Have you ever left an important file on your home computer or wished you could try out a new OS without going through the dual-boot hassle? Shells may just be the solution you’ve been looking for. It’s your own personal workspace powered by the cloud. Think of as a personal computer you can access from any device with an Internet connection – even TVs.
I recently bought a couple of PowerEdge T320 servers, so now to learn about setting them up. They are a little newer than the R710 I recently setup (which had iDRAC version 6), they have iDRAC version 7.
RAM Speed
One system has a E5-2440 CPU with 2*16G DDR3 DIMMs and a Memtest86+ speed of 13,043MB/s, the other is essentially identical but with a E5-2430 CPU and 4*16G DDR3 DIMMs and a Memtest86+ speed of 8,270MB/s. I had expected that more DIMMs means better RAM performance but this isn’t what happened. I firstly upgraded the BIOS, as I expected it didn’t make a difference but it’s a good thing to try first.
On the E5-2430 I tried removing a DIMM after it was pointed out on Facebook that the CPU has 3 memory channels (here’s a link to a great site with information on that CPU and many others [1]). When I did that I was prompted to disable advanced ECC (which treats pairs of DIMMs as a single unit for ECC allowing correcting more than 1 bit errors) and I had to move the 3 remaining DIMMS to different slots. That improved the performance to 13,497MB/s. I then put the spare DIMM into the E5-2440 system and the performance increased to 13,793MB/s, when I installed 4 DIMMs in the E5-2440 system the performance remained at 13,793MB/s and the E5-2430 went down to 12,643MB/s.
This is a good result for me, I now have the most RAM and fastest RAM configuration in the system with the fastest CPU. I’ll sell the other one to someone who doesn’t need so much RAM or performance (it will be really good for a small office mail server and NAS).
In this video, we are looking at how to install OpenTTD on Deepin 20.2.
In recent weeks, the most requested Linux distro for me to take a look at has been Peux OS. It’s an Arch-based distro that claims to be minimal and beautiful. Their flagship edition uses the Xfce desktop, and many people asked me to try out the Xmonad edition.
Decentralization seems to be everyone’s favourite buzzword right now, whether that be in social media, video sharing and even in finance but decentralization doesn’t have 1 definition and most people using it never bother to explain which one they’re using.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’re headed to Jill’s Museum for another treasure hunt. Then we take a look at the new refreshed Firefox and we also have some discussion on how everyone is leveraging Linux inside their OS and what this means for Linux in the future. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
Linus Torvalds, the principal developer of the mainline Linux kernel, has expressed mild concern about the size of the fifth release candidate (RC) of the upcoming kernel, version 5.13.
Linux kernels typically go through seven RCs, pushed out every Sunday by Torvalds after the week’s submissions have been reviewed and pooled. Due to the sheer number of changes, some kernels need an extra rc8 release (like the previous 5.12 release) to allow for an extra week of testing.
After releasing 5.13-rc5 over the weekend, Torvalds explained he was mildly surprised by the activity in the preceding week, although it is too early to say if this release will require an additional RC.
Queued up now into the EXT4 file-system’s “dev” tree is the recent work on a journal checkpoint ioctl (EXT4_IOC_CHECKPOINT) and optional support for TRIM/discard or zero-out support on journal flushes. This is the work that came about in recent months in working to ensure the privacy of deleted file names from the system.
The new journal checkpoint ioctl allows triggering a checkpoint from user-space and flushes the journal. EXT4_IOC_CHECKPOINT forces all the transactions to the log, checkpoints the transactions, and flushes to disk. “Systems that wish to achieve content deletion SLO [service level objective] can set up a daemon that calls this ioctl at a regular interval such that it matches with the SLO requirement. Thus, with this patch, the ext4_dir_entry2 wipeout patch, and the Ext4 “-o discard” mount option set, Ext4 can now guarantee that all file contents, file metatdata, and filenames will not be accessible through the filesystem and will have had discard or zeroout requests issued for corresponding device blocks.”
The fifth release candidate for version 5.13 of the Linux kernel has emerged, and project boss Linus Torvalds has expressed only mild concern about progress.
“Hmm,” opened Torvalds’ weekly State of the Kernel post. “Things haven’t really started to calm down very much yet, but rc5 seems to be fairly average in size. I’m hoping things will start shrinking now.”
Torvalds hasn’t found anything to worry him so far in the 5.13 release cycle.
The first release candidate saw him opine that the community could expect “a fairly big merge window, but things seem to have proceeded fairly smoothly.” He added that assessment could represent “Famous last words.”
It looks like AMD’s rising marketshare in the data center is paying off as AMD is hiring more Linux kernel engineers.
On top of hiring more Linux engineers earlier this year as part of a client-focused push, it’s been brought to my attention they are now looking to hire several more Linux kernel engineers. This time around they appear to be focused on Linux kernel work in the server / EPYC space but some of that work does also carry over to benefit AMD desktop/mobile efforts as well.
Vulkan 1.2.180 is out as the latest revision to this graphics/compute interface. Vulkan 1.2.180 comes with a number of fixes/clarifications to the spec plus the addition of two more extensions.
Earlier this year in February, I talked about Collabora’s latest work on the Wayland driver for Wine, which is considered an alternative to XWayland for running Windows applications and games via the Wine compatibility layer on GNU/Linux distributions that use the Wayland display system.
Collabora worked hard these past few months to further improve its Wayland driver for Wine and managed to add a few exciting new features, including support for the Vulkan graphics API, support for multi-monitor configurations, cursor clipping and relative movement, as well as HiDPI and Wayland keymap handling.
Sadly there isn’t much to report on at this time around improved open-source “Nouveau” driver support for the recent GeForce RTX 20 and RTX 30 series while even the GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series graphics processors are in poor shape for this unofficial driver. But when it comes to the aging GeForce 200 series, select models there are finally seeing OpenGL ES 3.1 supported by this open-source driver.
Mesa 21.2 with the latest Git development code for the Nouveau NV50 Gallium3D driver has exposed OpenGL ES 3.1 for select GeForce 200 series GPUs. Receiving GLES 3.1 support in the GeForce 200 series are the DirectX 10.1 class GPUs, which amount to the GT21x GPUs as with the GeForce GT 210/220/240 where as the other 200 series parts were only at DirectX 10.0.
MESA_D3D12_DEFAULT_ADAPTER_NAME can be set with a substring of the given GPU you desire to use with the driver, whether it just be the GPU vendor name or a portion of the graphics card model, depending upon the GPU makeup of your system.
As part of the curiosity-driven benchmarks and areas of technical interest now that we’ve gotten some of our initial Intel Xeon Platinum 8380 “Ice Lake” benchmarks out of the way has been looking into the performance of Linux’s P-State CPU frequency scaling driver on the 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable server. Benchmarked for the latesting testing was the power/efficiency out-of-the-box with P-State powersave as used by default with many Linux distributions against the P-State “performance” mode as well as putting P-State into passive mode to be able to via intel_cpufreq to try the Schedutil governor that relies on the kernel’s scheduler utilization data for making frequency scaling decisions. Here is a number of power/performance governor benchmarks with the dual Xeon Platinum 8380 server in these varying kernel configurations.
Subtitles make the experience of watching a video seamless. You do not need to necessarily understand the language of the video, the subtitle helps you figure out what’s happening with a text version of the audio in your preferred language.
You get subtitles for most of the content in streaming platforms you might have to add subtitles for some videos that you have in your local collection.
While you can do that by simply downloading SRT files and loading it up using the video player, how do you edit it, remove it, or transcribe a video? Subtitld is an open-source subtitle editor that comes to the rescue.
When it comes to terminal based text editors, it is usually Vim, Emacs and Nano that get the limelight.
That doesn’t mean there are not other such text editors. Neovim, a modern enhancement to Vim, is one of many such examples.
Along the same line, I would like to introduce yet another terminal based text editor called Helix Editor.
First and foremost: compartmentalize your digital life. Not only this makes it much more resilient in terms of data loss (replication of backups over multiple accounts is key), but it also guarantees that a compromised account held in one badly maintained service does not spread out to your remaining online identity (if any).
AlmaLinux is an RHEL-based Linux distro that debuted in 2021 as a direct replacement to CentOS, which has now become CentOS Stream. It’s an enterprise-grade operating system that’s ideal for servers and production environments. Best of all, it’s free.
This guide will show the step by step instructions to install AlmaLinux. You can follow these steps whether you are installing AlmaLinux onto a physical computer or a virtual machine such as VirtualBox or VMware. If you are currently using CentOS, check our guide on migrating from CentOS to AlmaLinux.
Have you ever encountered situations where one application dominated your all network bandwidth? If you have ever been in a situation where one application ate all your traffic, then you will value the role of the trickle bandwidth shaper application.
Either you are a system admin or just a Linux user, you need to learn how to control the upload and download speeds for applications to make sure that your network bandwidth is not burned by a single application.
The average disk queue length is the average number of read and write operations that were queued during a selected interval for the chosen device. It’s important to watch them as these values provide one of the representations of the storage performance. Higher values indicate that the quantity cannot continue with the requests from the appliance, leading to higher response times.
In this guide, we will walk you through the migration of CentOS 8 to AlmaLinux 8.4 using an automated migration script that is available on Github.
In this article, we will be looking at what is the use of the declare command in bash and how to use it. A declare is a bash built-in command that provides type-like behavior for your scripts.
If you have any prior experience in any programming language like Java, C you may know what is a type of system. Sadly, bash does not have a strong type system. With declare command, you can get type-like behavior and you can set attributes for your variables.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Snipe-IT on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Snipe-IT is a free, open-source IT asset management system written in PHP. With Snipe-IT, you can manage your IT assets easily with its user-friendly portal, including management of users and security roles.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Snipe-IT open-source information technology asset management tool on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Today we are looking at how to install Muck by Dani on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install TeamViewer on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, TeamViewer is remote assistance software that enables desktop screens to be shared between two computers. With TeamViewer, you can control computer systems running Linux, Windows, and Mac OS remotely as if you were sitting right in front of that system.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of TeamViewer remote desktop access on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
Jenkins is a free and open-source Continuous Integration server written in Java. It helps developers to automate the build and deployment process. It can be installed on a Cloud platform to run self-hosted pipelines.
Jenkins uses master-slave architecture to achieve clustering. Where a build process can be deployed across multiple worker nodes. This will allow you to deploy multiple projects within a single cluster.
In this post, we will walk you through the step-by-step process of setting up the Jenkins cluster on the RoseHosting Cloud Platform. We will use Jenkins DevOps Pack from the RoseHosting Cloud Marketplace to set up the cluster. We will also build a Java project from GitHub using the Maven plugin.
/proc/mdstat is a special file that shows you the state of the Linux kernel’s md driver. md (multiple device) driver is the software RAID implementation that allows you to create any number of RAID devices based on the disk devices (physical or virtual) available to your Linux system.
With its huge collection of tools and utilities, Kali Linux is the first choice of many users when it comes to penetration testing and ethical hacking. While many penetration testers use Kali as their primary operating system, this is not a feasible choice for users who just want to try the OS.
Installing Kali Linux on a hypervisor like VirtualBox is viable in such situations. Anything you do inside the virtual machine won’t affect your host system and vice versa. Also, you’ll be able to use both operating systems at the same time without any issue.
In this article, you will learn how to install Kali Linux in VirtualBox.
The which, whereis and whatis commands on a Linux system provide information about commands. They provide related but not identical information. In this post, we’ll check out the differences and provide a script for getting information that’s available from all three commands. We’ll also explore some sample commands for looking at secondary (i.e., not section 1) man pages.
We have recently contributed support for NV-DDR interfaces to parallel NAND flashes in the Linux kernel, which brings performance improvements for a number of NAND flash devices. In this article, we will detail what are the ONFI specifications, the historical SDR interface, then the introduction of faster interfaces in the ONFI specification, and finally our work to support such interfaces in the Linux kernel.
This tutorial explains how one can join online chat at Libera Chat IRC. This includes how to join alternatively with an IRC client program, like Hexchat, and also register a nickname or username so nobody else can use it. This tutorial can also be viewed as a practical beginner’s guide to IRC. Happy chatting!
Since version 89, the free and open-source Firefox web browser makes use of the new ‘Proton’ UI design.
For those who do not like the new Firefox appearance, the configuration options to re-enable the old style interface is still available in the 89 release.
We begin the installation of React JS by installing npm – short for the node package manager, is two things. Firstly, it is a command-line tool that is used for interacting with Javascript packages, which allows users to install, update, and manage Javascript tools and libraries.
Secondly, npm is an online open-source software registry that hosts over 800,000 Node.JS packages. Npm is free and you can easily download software applications that are publicly available.
If you’ve tried exploring what Linux had to offer in gaming since the “big push” of 2018 to 2019 to develop ports and workarounds for as many Windows/Mac titles as possible, you’ll know about Steam’s infamous contribution to this effort in the form of Proton. At the same time, if you try to run some of the more dependency-heavy titles, you’ll quickly notice that Proton isn’t completely spick and span when it comes to smoothing the transition from Windows to Linux for a number of games.
In this tutorial, we will see how to install the HestiaCP control panel on Ubuntu, which is alternative and similar to VestaCP and made by the developer of the vestaCP.After December’2019, Vestacp is not updating their software, and it seems dead project already, as there are no significant updates made in Github.So, in that case, Hestiacp is a good choice. Also, it has some extended features, regular maintenance, and its forum support is excellent.
The date command is a command-line utility for displaying or setting date and time in the Linux system. It uses the system default time zone to display the time.
In this article, I will show you 12 examples of how to best use the date command on Linux. To demonstrate the examples below I have used an Ubuntu 20.04 system. As the date command is pre-integrated in all Linux systems we don’t need to install it.
Pip is a package management system that simplifies installation and management of software packages written in Python such as those found in the Python Package Index (PyPI).
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Python Pip on Ubuntu 18.04 using the apt package manager.We will also walk you through the basics of installing and managing Python packages with pip.
In our Day in and day out works while using various linux Distributions, file downloaders are needed. By default, we use the wget command line tool to download data to our system. wget is a very versatile tool. It supports many protocols like HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and also allows us to download multiple files and directories. But one problem which sticks to it is speed. The download speed associated with it is not too quick. To boost up the download speed we can use the Axel download accelerator. Axel not only download the multiple files simultaneously but also speed them up as well. Axel can download files from HTTP, HTTPS and FTP links simultaneously. In this we will install and configure axel on ubuntu.
In this tutorial I will guide you through all the detailed steps to install and configure Axel on ubuntu. Axel can use multiple connections to retrieve files. Axel can be configured to use multiple mirrors as well. It also supports automatic aborting and resuming for unresponsive connections. Unlike other Download accelerators ,it stores all the data in a single file.
Laravel is an open-source PHP web framework, designed for the faster development of web applications. It is based on the Symfony framework, follows the model–view–controller architectural pattern. At the time of writing this tutorial, Laravel 8 is the latest stable version available.
The Laravel comes with a powerful command-line utility known as Artisan. Which is useful to perform multiple command-line operations.
Load balancing and clustering are very important in a production environment to achieve high availability for your database system. MariaDB Galera Cluster provides a multi-master clustering solution and supports XtraDB/InnoDB storage engines. A multi-master cluster allows read and writes to any cluster node. If you modify data on any node, they are replicated to all other nodes. Galera cluster also supports cloud and WAN environments to build a distributed cluster across countries and continents. In this post, we will show how to set up a three-node MariaDB Galera cluster on Ubuntu 20.04 server.
For the past few months we have been improving the experimental Wayland driver for Wine, which allows Windows applications to run directly on Wayland compositors. Our goal is to eventually remove the need for XWayland for many use cases, and thus reduce the overall system complexity while eliminating points of potential inefficiency.
We first announced our work on the driver last December, and posted an update earlier this year. We are now happy to announce a second update for this driver, adding several major features which increase its scope and utility. You can read all the details in the new upstream mailing list RFC (Request for Comment) post.
Announced at the end of last year was an experimental Wayland driver for Wine providing native Wayland support without relying on X11/XWayland. In the months since that yet-to-be-merged driver has continued supporting more functionality and with the latest update is much more viable.
This newest Wayland driver update for Wine now has working Vulkan support, multi-monitor setups are correctly handled, HiDPI is also now available, cursor clipping and relative moment is working too, and Wayland keymap handling is also in place.
With these latest features wired up, the Wayland Wine driver is closer to being functional for daily usage and also meeting the needs of modern Linux gamers. The Vulkan support with this Wayland driver is working both directly within Wine as well as through the likes of WineD3D and DXVK.
Playing Windows games on Linux is a unicorn. Magical. Weird. But in recent years, it’s sort of become a large-nosed horse. Maybe. Whatever the analogy or whatnot, the gaming parity between these operating systems remains one of the primary reasons why people, even if all other circumstances align just right, cannot use Linux as their everyday driver. Games!
For years, I’ve been exploring the different solutions and tools, which promise this or that level of support for Windows games. I tried pure WINE, I tried various WINE helper scripts. I fiddled with PlayOnLinux, and I also tried the early release of Proton, the Steam gaming compatibility framework, which is designed to bridge the gap between the two worlds. It was also the most reasonable solution so far. If you think about it, if there’s chance to make Linux gaming truly happen, it’s Steam. So I figured, let’s do another Proton review.
After a fresh pixel-art action-adventure? Look no further than Astalon: Tears of the Earth, which just released recently with Linux support from LABS Works and DANGEN Entertainment.
Set in a dying world “where life is cruel”, with death apparently just being a stepping stone towards something else. Full of various creatures to slay down, powerful artifacts to find, puzzles to solve and a story about “friendship and sacrifice, building up the courage to take down giants to protect the weak and powerless”. Certainly sounds like it could be quite interesting. Seems it’s scored quite well around the web, with a great 88 score on Metacritic and user reviews on Steam seem to be quite positive about it too.
After the first episode being available for some time, Critters for Sale is officially released in full now and it’s certainly an wild and weird experience to go through.
Spread across 5 episodes each a different short story, it touches on different themes like time travel, black magic, and immortality across different eras and locations. What’s truly unique is the visual style and story-telling, it’s unlike anything else I can remember.
Thankfully, it seems they’ve solved the previous graphical corruption seen on NVIDIA GPUs on Linux, so it’s probable they upgraded the version of Unity used since the original first episode release. It’s looking good on Linux. Well as good as it can with the visual style that is, which is — different.
The absolute classic that is Soldat, which went fully open source back in 2020 is now in need of someone to take over as the original creator has announced.
“Soldat is an exciting unique side-view multiplayer action game. Played by hundreds of players at this moment. It takes the best from games like Liero, Worms, Quake and Counter-Strike and gives you fast action gameplay with tons of blood and flesh. Little ragdoll soldiers fight against each other on 2D battle arenas using a deadly military arsenal. This is what multiplayer was invented for.”
fheroes2 is a game engine reimplementation project we highlighted recently for playing Heroes of Might & Magic II on modern systems, and they have a big new release available.
They said that in past releases, it had only basic support for The Succession Wars campaign, which they’ve now nicely polished up across all parts of it including the missing video scenes. On top of that, there’s also now full support for The Price of Loyalty campaigns. With the new 0.9.4 release, you can play through all original 6 campaigns present in Heroes of Might & Magic II!
Both powerhouses in the gaming industry are trying to make the experience on Linux much improved, by way of DLSS.
DLSS stands for Deep Learning Super Sampling and is a temporal image upscaling technology developed by Nvidia for Nvidia graphics cards. This technology makes it possible to upscale lower-resolution images into higher-resolution images, so they can be better displayed on higher-resolution displays.
PC gaming is diverse largely due to the range of software and hardware available for the platform. While things operate fundamentally the same way, there’s a lot of small things to account for. One of those is the user’s operating system, which greatly affects which games are available to play. Valve has long heralded Linux OS, and it could see some big improvements soon thanks to a partnership with Nvidia.
As reported by The Verge, Nvidia has announced that it’s bringing DLSS to Linux operating systems, which will allow RTX users on the OS to take advantage of DLSS – Deep Learning Super Sampling – to improve a game’s performance and graphics quality. The support will come by way of Steam Proton, software that allows Windows games to work with Linux. If successful, gamers will see a significant change in how their games run.
Mainframe Defenders released back in February 2020 is a quality turn-based tactics game with a very retrofuturistic visual style like old terminals and now there’s a free Mainframe Defenders: Meltdown – Prologue to play.
It’s incredibly slick, the interface and visual style is really quite something when everything is in motion. The gameplay matches up nicely too, with simple but interesting tactical choices you need to make throughout the different types of missions.
Goblinz Studio / TavroxGames have announced Legend of Keepers: Return of the Goddess, the first expansion for the popular dungeon defending management game Legend of Keepers: Career of a Dungeon Manager.
With a plan to release it in “Q3 2021″ for all platforms, they’re also planning a free update for everyone. The free update is due “this Summer” which will include new heroes to fight against (no other details mentioned yet). Not played before? It mixes together dungeon management and defending. You setup various trap and monster rooms, while heroes invade to try and take down your boss. It’s very much like the Boss Monster card game.
While we have Beamdog taking care of the newer Enhanced Edition generation of classic RPGs like Baldur’s Gate, we also have the free and open source GemRB reimplementation which has a big update out.
GemRB works with the likes of Baldur’s Gate 1, Baldur’s Gate 2, Planescape: Torment, Icewind Dale 1 and Icewind Dale 2 so you can play the original classics with an updated and modern game engine. Eventually it seems they will even move onto working with the Enhanced Edition of each.
Dying Light – Hellraid, the much unloved expansion to the zombie-slasher that puts you into dungeons fighting skeletons has received a huge upgrade. Maybe now people won’t hate it so much?
What was originally going to be its own game that was canned, Techland have mostly moved onto Dying Light 2 development but it seems they still have a team going on the original. This new upgrade for the Hellraid DLC adds in quite a lot by the sounds of it, with more to come that will be revealed and added into Hellraid over time
Highlights of the KDE Plasma 5.22 release include the implementation of the new Plasma System Monitor app introduced in the KDE Plasma 5.21 release as the default system monitoring app and a replacement for the KDE System Guard, also known as KSysGuard, application.
Another major change in this release is the new adaptive panel transparency feature that promises to help you make both the panel and the panel widgets more transparent. In addition, KDE Plasma 5.22 has great overall Wayland support, especially for activities and support for searching through menu items from the Global Menu applet.
While there wasn’t an official release for GNOME 40.1, the GNOME 40.2 update is now available, rolling out soon to most GNU/Linux distributions, and comes with lots of fixes and improvements for your favorite apps, as well as general performance enhancements.
Highlights include improved touch interaction of app grid actions, screencastsing improvements on fractional scaling, improved workspace placeholder in Activities Overview’s minimap, improved fingerprint authentication, support for animated backgrounds set via the wallpaper portal, and better performance during Night Light transition on NVIDIA GPUs.
This year I applied for Google Summer of Code again and chose Fractal to work on multi-account support. I got accepted (that’s why I’m writing this), so today I start the coding (and design) period to achieve that.
Any of you who had followed what happened in my internship in 2020 and afterwards might remember that I had the same goal back then. The problem was that the way the app was structured internally made it incredibly difficult to do so without all hell breaking loose. You can remind (or read) the details in my final report last year and what I learned in the process.
Hello, I’m Kai. I’m a computer science student at the KIT in Germany. This year I am participating in my second Google Summer of Code at the GNOME foundation to work on Fractal. My mentor is Julian Sparber, who works towards end-to-end encryption in Fractal and already gave me a warm welcome. I created this blog to keep everyone interested updated on my progress over the course of the summer.
Manjaro and Pop!_OS are two of the most popular Linux distributions taking second and fourth places in Distrowatch’s distro rankings. For starters, Manjaro is an Arch-based distro, whereas Pop!_OS is Ubuntu-based. After two years of using Pop!_OS, I finally switched to Manjaro, and here are my two cents on Manjaro Vs Pop!_OS.
After testing out and writing the Manjaro Vs EndeavourOS article, I was quite surprised about how well Manjaro handles packages using Pamac. The next day I woke up to find out that something went wrong during the Pop!_OS 21.04 beta update installation as my PC refused to boot due to broken packages. I found this a great opportunity to finally try out something different and ended up installing Manjaro Xfce.
I’ve been a NetBSD developer for three years and it’s been my primary operating system for a long time too – on everything: routers, laptops, Raspberry Pis, PowerPC mac minis, Vortex86 embedded boards, and servers.
I’ve recently been using FreeBSD a lot at work. We have a lot of servers and embedded boards running it, and I was given the option of installing anything I wanted on my workstation. I chose FreeBSD to maintain a separation of BSDs between my work and home life
I thought I’d write a little bit about some differences that stand out to me. Since everyone that knows me well knows that typical use cases like web hosting aren’t really my jam, and I’m more of an embedded, audio, and graphics person, maybe I can offer a more uncommon perspective.
 Mageia 8 was released Feb 26th, 2021. Mageia 7 will receive updates up until the 30th of June, including security updates. It is then highly recommended upgrading to Mageia 8 as soon as possible.
As usual, before the upgrade, do a thorough backup of your data and documents.
You have a few ways to install Mageia 8…
Sysadmins are asked regularly to quickly complete service requests to better serve business and user needs, with more and more admins relying on Ansible to do so. How can we, as sysadmins, respond faster when these requests come up?
IT service management (ITSM) is a collection of policies and processes for the management and support of IT services. The main focus of ITSM is increasing the value of the customers’ service chain. But without the proper automation support, providing IT services can quickly become a major time-sink for administrators.
Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 07 June at 1300UTC in #fedora-neuro on IRC (Libera.chat). The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend. You can join us over:
Red Hat’s single sign-on (SSO) technology is an identity and access management tool included in the Red Hat Middleware Core Services Collection that’s based on the well-known Keycloak open source project. As with other Red Hat products, users have to acquire subscriptions, which are priced according to the number of cores or vCPU used to deploy the product.
This presents an interesting problem for pre-sales engineers like me. To help my customers acquire the correct number of subscriptions, I need to sketch the target architecture and count how many cores they need. This would not be a problem if off-the-shelf performance benchmarks were available; however, they are not.
This article will help colleagues and customers estimate their SSO projects more precisely. We will examine the performance benchmarks I ran, how I designed them, the results I gathered, and how I drew conclusions to size my SSO project.
Mankind Pharma upgraded its existing SAP systems to a new SAP S/4HANA platform, supported by a highly resilient and scalable IT infrastructure. The company selected IBM Power Systems servers, which it deployed as its primary data center and disaster recovery site. Each server runs multiple virtual environments and uses SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications as the host operating system for the SAP S/4HANA applications and databases, as well as other systems.
In June 2009, I was given the opportunity to work in Fedora Infrastructure as Mike McGrath’s assistant so that he could take some vacation. At the time I was living in New Mexico and had worked at the University of New Mexico for several years. I started working remote for the first time in my life, and had to learn all the nuances of IRC meetings and typing clearly and quickly. With the assistance of Seth Vidal, Luke Macken, Ricky Zhou, and many others I got quickly into ‘the swing of things’ with only 2 or 3 times taking all of Fedora offline because of a missed ; in a dns config file.
For the last 4300+ days, I have worked with multiple great and wonderful system administrators and programmers to keep the Fedora Infrastructure running and growing so that the number of systems using ‘deliverables’ has grow into the millions of systems. I am highly indebted to everyone from volunteers to paid Red Hatters who has helped me grow. I want to especially thank Kevin Fenzi, Rick Elrod, and Pierre Yves-Chibon for the insights I have needed.
Over the years, we have maintained a constantly spinning set of plates which allow for packagers to commit changes, build software, produce deliverables, and start all over again. We have moved our build systems physically at least 3 times, once across the North American continent. We have dealt with security breaches, mass password changes, and the undead project of replacing the ‘Fedora Account System’ which had been going on since before I started. [To the team which finished that monumental task in the last 3 months, we are all highly indebted. There may be pain-points but they did a herculean task.]
What is attack surface anyway? In one of Aesop’s Fables, The Town Mouse & the Country Mouse, the country mouse says to the city mouse, “You may have luxuries and dainties that I have not,” … “but I prefer my plain food and simple life in the country with the peace and security that go with it.” This is a concept familiar to even the ancient Greeks. In any system, there’s less headache, less stress, and less risk when you depend on fewer moving parts. In computer security, we refer to this concept as attack surface. And, we are in a constant battle to reduce the attack surface, a struggle between convenience and minimization.
Before and during FOSDEM 2020, I agreed with the people (developers, supporters, managers) of the UBports Foundation to package the Unity8 Operating Environment for Debian. Since 27th Feb 2020, Unity8 has now become Lomiri.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 686 for the week of May 30 – June 5, 2021. The full version of this issue is available here.
Network Function Virtualization (NFV) and Cloud native network functions continue to draw immense attention from the telecom sector. From the beginning, virtualisation is trying to fulfill the promises of reducing CapEx and OpEx by decoupling Network Functions from the underlying infrastructure and ensuring flexibility and scalability. However, despite the huge traction it has gained, there are still obstacles to overcome before it can be part of day-to-day operations.
One of the important challenges associated with this transformation is implementing the process for management and orchestration of network functions. Telcos need to build virtualized network functions while maintaining a high quality of service and keeping up with a constantly evolving technology landscape. The 5G stage will likely last for the next 5-8 years before the transition to 6G, and so on. The switch to a new generation network is costly, and if the average revenue per user does not grow as fast as CapEx, telcos will not be able to maintain profitability.
Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, announced today that it is working with King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), a postgraduate university in Thuwal, Saudi Arabia, on a major upgrade of its cloud computing infrastructure. The project makes it easier and more economical for KAUST to manage its cloud environment while ensuring the high levels of computing performance that researchers need.
Axiomtek’s rugged, robotics focused “AIE900A-NX” edge AI system runs Ubuntu on a Jetson Xavier NX and supplies 4x PoE ports plus GbE, HDMI, MIPI-CSI, DIO, serial, CAN, 2x USB 3.1 Gen2, mini-PCIe, and 2x M.2.
Axiomtek has added to its line of edge AI systems built around Nvidia’s Jetson Xavier NX module, including its general purpose AIE100-903-FL-NX system and IP67-protected AIE800-904-FL gateway. The PoE-enabled AIE900A-NX is larger and more feature rich than either system and is primarily aimed at the mobile robotics market.
Intelligent Agent’s $149 “Recore A5” 3D printer board runs Linux on an Allwinner A64, using the SoC’s AR100 core for real-time control. The SBC provides 6x stepper motor drivers, 3x heater outputs, a heated bed, 4x USB, and GbE and HDMI ports.
Norway-based Intelligent Agent has begun selling the 5th Gen model of its open-spec Recore 3D printer control board for $149. The product is still in development and targeted at early adopters and software developers assisting in the Recore project.
Arduino library submissions have a new, easier and more transparent workflow.
Libraries are one of the pillars of the Arduino ecosystem. At time of writing, more than 3,780 open source libraries are available to perform any kind of task. This includes communication with external components and using algorithms for data processing. Such a variety of shared building blocks helps achieve things quickly without the need to write low-level code.
Beyond the official libraries maintained by the Arduino team, most are contributed by the community. Anyone can submit a new library for inclusion, provided it meets the specification and passes the Arduino Lint checks.
Merely looking at the latest Mars rover, Perseverance, will make almost any nerd giddy with excitement over the amount of cool tech that’s crammed into the vehicle before it gets shot into space. This feeling is what probably inspired Dejan of How to Mechatronics to create his own scaled-down version of the interplanetary vehicle, but not only would it look great, his DIY rover would also be able to drive and show what it’s “seeing” to the operator.
After designing a CAD model in Solidworks, Dejan got to work printing out the myriad of pieces required. The frame and structure of the rover is comprised of aluminum T-slot extrusions and tubes, while the rest is built from 3D-printed plastic. Each wheel was made to resemble the ones that are on the actual rover, and they are each driven by their own independent DC motor. Additionally, the four outer wheels are steered by separate servo modules. At the heart of the project is an Arduino Mega, which handles the DC motor drivers, servos, and the A4988 stepper driver that pans the camera horizontally.
Community managers, maintainers, and foundations seek metrics and insights about open source communities. Because each open source project works differently, its data needs to be analyzed differently. Yet, all projects share common challenges with getting data and creating visualizations. This presents an ideal use case for an open source project to solve this problem generically with the capability to customize it to users’ needs.
The open source GrimoireLab project has been working on ways to measure the health of open source communities. In addition to powering large-scale open source metrics solutions, it also serves as the backbone of the new Cauldron platform.
GrimoireLab solves some hard problems related to retrieving and curating data. It was designed to be a flexible metrics solution for analyzing open source communities. LibreOffice and Mautic are among the communities using GrimoireLab’s open source tools to generate community health metrics.
The latest development release of libsoup 3, 2.99.8, now enables HTTP/2 by default. So lets look into what that means and how you can try it out.
Performance
In simple terms what HTTP/2 provides for improved performance is more efficient network usage when requesting multiple files from a single host. It does this by avoiding making new connections whenever possible and over that single connection allowing multiple requests to happen at the same time.
It is easy to imagine many workloads this would improve, such as flatpak downloading a lot of objects from a single server.
Wouldn’t it be nice if instead of having to pick one software project from column A all the way to selecting one from column Z if you could simply set up cloud-based edge computing using an already integrated software stack? The Open Infrastructure Foundation heard your cries and its answer is StarlingX. This is an open-source edge computing and Internet of Things cloud platform that combines Ceph storage, OpenStack cloud, Kubernetes container orchestration, KVM virtualization and, of course, Linux to provide you with everything you need for an easy-to-deploy cloud/edge computing software stack.
Google has been working on a new, experimental tool to help developers discover the dependencies of the open source packages/libraries they use and known security vulnerabilities they are currently sporting.
According to data from Statcounter, Huawei has, over the past year, been holding steady at about 10% of the global Mobile Vendor Market Share, trailing behind Korean tech giant Samsung at about 31% and Apple at 25% market share.
This is rather impressive, especially seeing as Huawei’s sales outside of China have been greatly handicapped owing to the ongoing tension between the Chinese tech giant and the U.S.
In theory, competition and data protection laws should provide the tools to keep Google from getting out of control, says Fielding. But in practice, “that doesn’t seem to be working for various reasons – including disparities of wealth and power between Google and national regulators”. Fielding adds that Google is also useful to many governments and economies and it is tricky to enforce national laws against a global corporation.
Firebird Project is happy to announce general availability of Firebird 4.0 — the latest major release of the Firebird relational database.
Firebird 4.0 introduces new data types and many improvements without radical changes in architecture or operation, the most important are: Built-in logical replication; Extended length of metadata identifiers (up to 63 characters); New INT128 and DECFLOAT data types, longer precision for NUMERIC/DECIMAL data types; Support for international time zones; Configurable time-outs for connections and statements; Pooling of external connections; Batch operations in the API; Built-in cryptographic functions; New ODS (version 13) with new system and monitoring tables; Maximum page size increased to 32KB.
The database market continues to be splintered among open source and commercial products, with multiple options in each camp. PostgreSQL, a three-decades-old, community-supported open source project, continues to gain in popularity and is used in production by large enterprises in many parts of the world.
Yandex, for example, stores petabytes of data in PostgreSQL, which enables the company’s email service to handle more than 150 million emails a day. GitLab, which has been using Postgres for years, maintains a large cluster that handles 181,000 transactions per second. IKEA, which moved to PostgreSQL to reduce its total cost of ownership (TCO), has a number of databases running multiple terabytes of data.
In 2020, the documentation community released many updated guidebooks, translated them into several languages, and participated in the Google Season of Docs
WP Engine, the world’s most trusted WordPress technology company, announced the results of a new, first-of-its-kind research study examining the combined global economy for WordPress, which was estimated at $596.7 billion in 2020, and is expected to grow to $635.5 billion by the end of 2021. The study examined both the economic value of the WordPress ecosystem and the social impact of this ever-expanding community of open source developers, agencies and users.
To put the global WordPress economy in context, if WordPress were a country, its economy would rank 39th in the world according to an IMF list of countries by GDP. The estimated 2021 economy facilitated by WordPress is comparable to that generated by the Apple App Store at $643B, and if it were equivalent to the market cap of a company it would come in at no. 10 on the list of companies by market capitalization (as of May 13th), bigger than that of the world’s most valuable automaker, Tesla at $550.72B.
WordPress is open source software, maintained by a global network of contributors. There are many examples of how WordPress has changed people’s lives for the better. In this monthly series, we share some of the amazing stories.
This month to coincide with WordCamp Europe, we feature Tijana Andrejic from Belgrade, Serbia, about her journey from fitness trainer to the WordPress world, with the freelance and corporate opportunities it introduced.
[...]
Tijana was hired as a Customer Happiness Engineer for a hosting company, where she discovered the benefits of having a team. She realized that having close working relationships with colleagues is helpful for business success and accelerates personal growth.
Tijana hopes that by sharing her story, she can help others who are either starting their career or are moving roles. She describes the opportunities she discovered in the WordPress community as ‘a huge epiphany’, especially in the world of freelancing.
To Agree, disagree, and everything in-between. In this episode, Josepha talks about forming opinions and decision-making in the WordPress project.
It’s a great day for Bangladesh. It’s a great day for public health! Today, GNU Solidario and the International Federation of Medical Students Association, IFMSA Bangladesh, have signed an initial 5-year partnership on the grounds of the GNU Health Alliance of Academic and Research Institutions.
IFMSA Bangladesh is a non-for-profit, non-political organization that comprises 3500+ medical students from over 65 schools of Medicine across Bangladesh. They are a solid organization, very well organized, with different standing committees and support divisions.
IFMSA vision and mission fits very well with those of GNU Solidario advancement of Social Medicine. IFMSA has projects on Public Health (reproductive health; personal hygiene; cardiovascular disease and cancer prevention, … ), Human rights and peace (campaigns to end violence against women; protection of the underprivileged elders and children.. ). I am positive the GNU Health ecosystem will help them reach their goals in each of their projects!
The GNU Health Alliance of Academic and Research Institutions is extremely happy to have IFMSA Bangladesh as a member. IFMSA Bangladesh joins now a group of outstanding researchers and institutions that have made phenomenal advancements in health informatics and contributions to public health.
Today GitLab Inc., the company that offers the single application for the DevOps lifecycle, announced it has acquired UnReview, a machine learning (ML) based solution for automatically identifying appropriate expert code reviewers and controlling review workloads and distribution of knowledge. This acquisition is expected to advance the user experience within GitLab’s Dev Section including Manage, Plan and Create stages by improving a user’s ability to perform impactful code reviews by using ML to recommend code reviewers based on their previous contributions to areas of code as well as current reviewer workload. With this, teams can increase their velocity, code quality and security.
“Integrating UnReview’s technology into the GitLab platform marks our first step in building GitLab’s Applied Machine Learning for DevOps,” said Eric Johnson, CTO of GitLab. “By continuing to incorporate machine learning into GitLab’s open DevOps platform, we are improving the user experience by automating workflows and compressing cycle times across all stages of the DevSecOps lifecycle. We’re also building new MLOps features to empower data scientists.”
GitLab Inc. has acquired UnReview, a machine learning (ML) solution that can automatically identify appropriate code reviewers, as a step toward expanding its open DevOps platform with ML capabilities.
GitLab has acquired UnReview, a ML-based solution for automatically identifying appropriate expert code reviewers and controlling review workloads and distribution of knowledge, for an undisclosed sum.
In 2012 I wrote a blog post titled curling the metalink, describing how we added support for metalink to curl.
Today, we remove that support again. This is a very drastic move, and I feel obliged to explain it so here it goes! curl 7.78.0 will ship without metalink support.
I am happy to announce we have released the Qt 6.1.1 today.
While Qt 6.1 released just one month ago, Qt 6.2 as of today is already into its feature freeze. This quicker than normal time to feature freeze comes due to this year’s Qt releases being tightened up following the Qt 6.0 debut at the end of last year. Qt 6.2 will be the first Long Term Support (LTS) release of the Qt6 series.
With the tightened cycle this year, Qt 6.2.0 should debut around September rather than November~December when the second Qt release of the year normally occurs. For making that happen, as of today the Qt 6.2 feature freeze has taken place. The freeze was announced this morning though given a QML CMake API change hasn’t yet landed, they haven’t started the code branching from dev to 6.2 quite yet. Some feature freeze exceptions are also planned around Qt Multimedia and Qt WebEngine.
This week saw an interesting interaction between several Raku community members, discovering new ways of making the Raku Programming Language work for them.
In a characteristically bleak 1986 interview with Asta Scheib only a few years before his early death, Thomas Bernhard observed, “One always depends on people. There is no one who doesn’t depend on somebody. Someone, who is always alone with himself, will go under in no time, will be dead.” The idea of a necessary but unwanted reliance on others is threaded throughout Bernhard’s novels. Constituted by an endless running away or going against, his characters are incapable of creation or independence. Often supported by inherited wealth, they devote themselves to senseless projects or burn the books they have barely started, before being drawn ineluctably back to their decaying family estates. They despise their dependency on these places and figures, yet in the end cannot help giving into it.
Grand Duke Henri, Prime Minister Bettel, and Minister of the Economy Franz Fayot will all be present at the inauguration. MeluXina is one of eight super computers that are being installed across Europe at the moment. Super computers allow users to substantially increase their research capacities.
Scholars who conduct studies that seek to confirm a hypothesis are more prone to stress, low motivation and boredom than those who carry out more open-ended investigations, according to a new analysis highlighting the “unintended negative consequences” caused by the rise of preregistered reports.
Our iconoclastic age is smashing images that keep the powerful in full control of their money and privileges, while giving the underclass the illusion of change, that their lives are getting better.
Teaching Greek and Latin in selected colleges and universities is now becoming the venom of the iconoclasts. These include people of non-Western traditions who feel angry for having being exploited in the past and, possibly, are being exploited now.
Fowler, former vice president of public policy and external affairs at Wellpoint, the giant health insurance company that later became Anthem, wrote the reform policy to protect the future and the profits of the industry from which she came. Thanks to her efforts, Anthem and other for-profit insurance companies prospered from Fowler’s ability to craft the Affordable Care Act to their liking. In 2020, Anthem reported over $4.5 billion in net income. Now Liz Fowler is back, writing U. S. health care policy in line with insurance company desires. President Biden appointed her to head up the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation (CMMI) within the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). She’s back to the top spot to direct the future of health care.
Back in 2009, the insurance industry and anti-single payer policy experts promoted CMMI and wrote it into the Affordable Care Act to promote cost cutting in Medicare, Medicaid and CHIP through value-based payment models. But CMMI’s work is based on the wrong-headed theory that U. S. healthcare is too expensive because of overuse. Value-based payment advocates claim that too many doctors and hospitals are giving too much care. CMMI wants to reverse the payment scheme and pay doctors and hospitals more for doing less. They contend they will be paying for quality or value rather than quantity. Their attempts to force doctors to fill out endless forms are stressing physicians, but they have yet to find a way to accurately measure value. CMMI is working from a false premise: in the U.S., patients see their doctors an average of 4 times annually while in the U. K., France, Canada, Australia, Germany and Japan, patients see their physicians from 5 to over 12 times a year. In the U.S., Americans spend an average of .6 days per year in the hospital, whereas residents of other wealthy countries spend up to three times that number. So, if Americans are seeing their doctors less and spending fewer days in the hospital, why are we still spending more than wealthy countries on health care?
A recent Yahoo News/YouGov poll found that worries about the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States are at their lowest level since it began. Only half of Americans are either “very worried” (15%) or “somewhat worried” (35%) about the virus, while the other half are “not very worried” (30%) or “not worried at all” (20%).
If, as I have, you’ve been paying attention to these things for a number of years, you know that, whenever there is a major outbreak, epidemic, or pandemic of infectious disease, one conspiracy theory always—and I do mean always—arises. That conspiracy theory is that the causative microbe was developed in a laboratory and/or escaped a laboratory. HIV, H1N1, the original SARS, Ebola virus, every single one of them gave birth to such conspiracy theories. Unsurprisingly, given its global scope and death toll, so it was with SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, and the hypothesis that this coronavirus originated in a lab has become known as the “lab leak” hypothesis, with major news outlets devoting a lot of ink, both digital and real, as well as TV air time to the idea.
On June 3, President Joe Biden finally announced his plan to send part of America’s vaccine stockpile overseas. The first step, he declared, is to share some 25 million doses with other countries. At least three-quarters of those shots will go to COVAX, the international effort intended to route vaccines from rich countries to poor ones. The United States will dispatch the remainder to “countries experiencing surges, those in crisis, and other partners and neighbors, including Canada, Mexico, India, and the Republic of Korea,” as Biden put it.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said Sunday that she supports a law that would ban companies from paying ransom to [crackers] holding their information hostage after a recent spate of cyberattacks on companies responsible for crucial parts of the U.S. infrastructure.
In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Granholm acknowledged that she is not sure whether Congress or President Joe Biden are ready to take that step, but she warned that paying ransom only emboldens [crackers]. And she said private companies need to take responsibility and tell the government when they are attacked for the good of the country.
The U.S. Department of Justice said today it has recovered $2.3 million worth of Bitcoin that Colonial Pipeline paid to ransomware extortionists last month. The funds had been sent to DarkSide, a ransomware-as-a-service syndicate that disbanded after a May 14 farewell message to affiliates saying its Internet servers and cryptocurrency stash were seized by unknown law enforcement entities.
Colonial Pipeline, a network that provides around 45 percent of the East Coast’s fuel, was the target of a crippling cyberattack last month that forced it to shut down operations for several days.
Joseph Blount, the company’s CEO, later revealed in an interview with The Wall Street Journal that he authorized the company to pay the cyber criminals behind the attack the equivalent of $4.4 million in bitcoin on the day of the breach in exchange for the keys to decrypt the network.
The FBI recommends against paying the ransom, as it may encourage the [attackers] to go after another group, and the payment may be used for criminal operations. The Biden administration has reiterated this stance in recent weeks.
U.S. law enforcement officials say they have hit back at the Russian-based criminal network that caused gas pipelines to shut down across parts of the country last month, seizing much of the multimillion-dollar ransom payment before it could be used.
The Justice Department announced Monday it recovered $2.3 million of the approximately $5 million Colonial Pipeline paid to the DarkSide Network following the ransomware attack, which resulted in fuel shortages along the U.S. East Coast.
The FBI was able to seize control of DarkSide’s proceeds by gaining access to a central account holding about 63.7 bitcoins, worth around $2.3 million, Deputy Director Paul Abbate said. A court document said that the seizure took place in Northern California, putting it within reach of U.S. law, and that the FBI was able to access the “private key,” or password, for one of the gang’s bitcoin wallets. It was unclear how the key was compromised.
When Granholm was asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper about vulnerabilities in the electricity grid and whether a foreign actor has the ability to shut it down, Granholm said, “Yeah, they do. There are thousands of attacks on all aspects of the energy sector and the private sector generally.”
Senate Sergeant at Arms Karen Gibson said Saturday she is more concerned about a cyberattack on the government than another insurrection like the one that rocked Capitol Hill on Jan. 6.
Organizations running Windows containers in their Kubernetes cluster have a brand-new threat to worry about.
Researchers from Palo Alto Networks (PAN) have discovered what they say is the first known malware targeting Windows containers. The malware, named Siloscape, is designed to escape from a Windows container into the Kubernetes node so it can spread in the cluster.
Attackers can use the malware to carry out a variety of malicious actions, such as credential and data theft, deploying ransomware, and breaching enterprise software development and testing environments.
Daniel Prizmant, senior staff researcher at PAN’s Unit 42 threat intelligence team, says the malware is a manifestation of the growing attacker focus on cloud environments. “Attackers are undergoing their own digital transformation and exploiting the massive enterprise shift to the cloud and new technologies like containers,” he says. “As a result, container security has become important.”
The first-ever Zephyr Developer Summit is open to the public, free of charge, and full of Zephyr leaders from around the world presenting real-world use cases, best practices, mini-conferences, and more.
Zephyr is an open-source project at the Linux Foundation that builds a safe, secure, and flexible real-time operating system (RTOS) for resource-constrained devices. Led by Kate Stewart, Vice President of Dependable Embedded Systems at the Linux Foundation, a visionary behind the project since day one, participation continues to soar with new members.
Linux Foundation Training & Certification and TransTech Social Enterprises have joined hands to provide scholarships for technology training and certification to 50 TransTech members.
We’re proud to announce that we are partnering with TransTech Social Enterprises, an incubator for LGBTQ talent with a focus on economically empowering the T, transgender people, to provide scholarships to promising individuals to help them get started working with open source software.
It seems like every week you hear of some sort of cyber attack on a business or government agency, but it shouldn’t really be news to us. These type of attacks are as old as the Internet itself.
Since the time of the earliest computer worms, like the Morris Worm in 1988, these little parasites have been infecting computers and networks around the world. But what are computer worms, and why should we pay attention to them?
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libwebp, python-django, ruby-nokogiri, and thunderbird), Fedora (dhcp, polkit, transfig, and wireshark), openSUSE (chromium, inn, kernel, redis, and umoci), Oracle (pki-core:10.6), Red Hat (libwebp, nginx:1.18, rh-nginx118-nginx, and thunderbird), SUSE (gstreamer-plugins-bad), and Ubuntu (linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-gcp, linux-hwe-5.8, linux-kvm, linux-oracle).
With enterprise customers now driving roughly half of its business, the company is making a concerted effort to cater to them.
KrebsOnSecurity recently had occasion to contact the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian equivalent of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the process of doing so, I encountered a small snag: The FSB’s website said in order to communicate with them securely, I needed to download and install an encryption and virtual private networking (VPN) appliance that is flagged by at least 20 antivirus products as malware.
Consumer personal genetics companies like Ancestry, 23andMe, GEDMatch, and FamilyTreeDNA host the DNA data of millions of Americans. The data users share with consumer DNA databases is extensive and revealing. The genetic profiles stored in those databases are made up of more than half a million single nucleotide polymorphisms (“SNPs”) that span the entirety of the human genome. These profiles not only can reveal family members and distant ancestors, they can divulge a person’s propensity for various diseases like breast cancer or Alzheimer’s and can even predict addiction and drug response. Some researchers have even claimed that human behaviors such as aggression can be explained, at least in part, by genetics. And private companies have claimed they can use our DNA for everything from identifying our eye, hair, and skin colors and the shapes of our faces; to determining whether we are lactose intolerant, prefer sweet or salty foods, and can sleep deeply. Companies can even create images of what they think a person looks like based just on their genetic data.
Law enforcement regularly accesses this intensely private and sensitive data too, using FGGS. Just like consumers, officers take advantage of the genetics companies’ powerful algorithms to try to identify familial relationships between an unknown forensic sample and existing site users. These familial relationships can then lead law enforcement to possible suspects. However, in using FGGS, officers are rifling through the genetic data of millions of Americans who are not suspects in the investigation and have no connection to the crime whatsoever. This is not how criminal investigations are supposed to work. As we have argued before, the language of the Fourth Amendment, which requires probable cause for every search and particularity for every warrant, precludes dragnet warrantless searches like these. A technique’s usefulness for law enforcement does not outweigh people’s privacy interests in their genetic data.
Up until now, nothing has prevented law enforcement from rifling through the genetic data of millions of unsuspecting and innocent Americans. The new laws in Maryland and Montana should change that.
Because only a portion of Ring users also are Neighbors users, and some of them may opt out of receiving police requests, this new system may reduce the number of people who receive police requests, though we wonder whether Ring will now push more of its users to register for the app.
This new model also may increase transparency over how police officers use and abuse the Ring system, especially as to people of color, immigrants, and protesters. Previously, in order to learn about police requests to Ring users, investigative reporters and civil liberties groups had to file public records requests with police departments–which consumed significant time and often yielded little information from recalcitrant agencies. Through this labor-intensive process, EFF revealed that the Los Angeles Police Department targeted Black Lives Matter protests in May and June 2020 with bulk Ring requests for doorbell camera footage that likely included First Amendment protected activities. Now, users will be able to see every digital request a police department has made to residents for Ring footage by scrolling through a department’s public page on the app.
But making it easier to monitor historical requests can only do so much. It certainly does not address the larger problem with Ring and Neighbors: the network is predicated on perpetuating irrational fear of neighborhood crime, often yielding disproportionate scrutiny against people of color, all for the purposes of selling more cameras. Ring does so through police partnerships, which now encompass 1 in every 10 police departments in the United States. At their core, these partnerships facilitate bulk requests from police officers to Ring customers for their camera footage, built on a growing Ring surveillance network of millions of public-facing cameras. EFF adamantly opposes these Ring-police partnerships and advocates for their dissolution.
EFF first pointed out the problem with Venmo friends lists in early 2019 with our “Fix It Already” campaign. While Venmo offered a setting to make your payments and transactions private, there was no option to hide your friends list. No matter how many settings you tinkered with, Venmo would show your full friends list to anyone else with a Venmo account. That meant an effectively public record of the people you exchange money with regularly, along with whoever the app might have automatically imported from your phone contact list or even your Facebook friends list. The only way to make a friends list “private” was to manually delete friends one at a time; turn off auto-syncing; and, when the app wouldn’t even let users do that, monitor for auto-populated friends and remove them one by one, too.
This public-no-matter-what friends list design was a privacy disaster waiting to happen, and it happened to the President of the United States. Using the app’s search tool and all those public friends lists, Buzzfeed News found President Biden’s account in less than 10 minutes, as well as those of members of the Biden family, senior staffers, and members of Congress. This appears to have been the last straw for Venmo: after more than two years of effectively ignoring calls from EFF, Mozilla, and others, the company has finally started to roll out privacy settings for friends lists.
As we’ve noted before, this is the bare minimum. Providing more privacy settings options so users can opt-out of the publication of their friends list is a step in the right direction. But what Venmo—and any other payment app—must do next is make privacy the default for transactions and friends lists, not just an option buried in the settings.
Apple paid millions of dollars to a student after iPhone repair technicians posted explicit photos and videos from her phone to Facebook, legal documents have revealed.
The tech giant agreed a settlement with the 21-year-old after two employees at a repair facility uploaded the images from a phone she had sent to Apple to be fixed, resulting in “severe emotional distress”.
The incident, which occurred in 2016 at a centre in California run by Pegatron, an Apple contractor, is one of the most significant privacy violations to be revealed at an iPhone repair facility.
The confidentiality agreement was meant to avoid “substantial business harm”, as Apple insisted on confidentiality throughout the settlement. For this reason, Apple was simply referred to as a “customer” throughout the proceedings.
The tech major was only recently named as the customer during a separate, unrelated lawsuit it faced. Apple confirmed the incident to The Telegraph.
The confidentiality agreement left many details of the incident hidden. What is known is that the two employees have been fired after an “exhaustive” investigation by Apple. Apple has also been reimbursed for the settlement by Pegatron. Pegatron and its insurers, who refused to pay the bill, have now settled the matter privately.
The incident shows a glaring loophole in the tall claims repeatedly made by Apple over the strict control of its repair facilities. The company has often cited this as an argument against legislation that would make it easier for third parties to fix its devices. It seems like Apple’s case does not seem too strong if such incidents can occur within the company’s well-monitored facilities.
This is a sneak peek into a 2019 report by the Joint Chiefs of Staff called “Nuclear Operations,” which Brian Terrell quoted recently. The document was, for some reason, publicly posted in the waning days of the Trump administration, then — oops — quickly removed, but not before it was downloaded by the Federation of American Scientists.
As The Guardian noted, the document, the first of its kind in 14 years, seemed to indicate a creepy shift in Pentagon thinking: from nuclear deterrence to actually fighting (and of course winning) a nuclear war.
There’s a saying lots of cops and cop defenders use. It rhymes, so it’s easy to remember and even easier to deploy carelessly anytime someone expresses doubts about excessive force or excessive sentencing.
Let me start with my friend and the boat. Admittedly, they might not seem to have anything to do with each other. The boat, a guided-missile destroyer named the USS Curtis Wilbur, reportedly passed through the Straits of Taiwan and into the South China Sea, skirting the Paracel Islands that China has claimed as its own. It represented yet another Biden-era challenge to the planet’s rising power from its falling one. My friend was thousands of miles away on the West Coast of the United States, well vaccinated and going nowhere in Covid-stricken but improving America.
America’s love affair with lunacy continues undimmed. Along with flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, and fans of perpetual motion, according to a May 21 Ipsos poll, 53 percent of Republicans now assert that Donald Trump is the current president of the United States.
Israel is cracking down on Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank, occupied East Jerusalem and inside Israel amid the ongoing ceasefire between Israel and Gaza. Israeli police have arrested nearly 2,000 Palestinians over the past month in an attempt to quell protests and uprisings against the occupation, according to the newspaper Haaretz. “Israel is criminalizing our right to say we’re Palestinian, our right to say we want to live in our homes in dignity, our right to be free,” says Mariam Barghouti, a Palestinian writer and researcher.
Shocking reports have been surfacing from during the bombardment and since the ceasefire over the past few weeks. A 14-year old Palestinian boy committed suicide following the death of all his family members. Eleven of the 67 Palestinian children killed in Israeli airstrikes, aged between five and 15, were participating in the Norwegian Refugee Council’s “psycho-social programme aimed at helping them deal with trauma”.
It is not just children traumatised. Palestinian youth know their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents are also suffering, keeping up a brave face as they deal with their long-term PTSD. Nobody can become resigned to such continuous systemic violence.
Neither Biden nor his three predecessors (Bush, Obama, and Trump) have made headway in pursuing a stronger stance toward Russia. The United States has focused on a strategic relationship with Ukraine as a way to intimidate Russia. This has been both counter-productive and destabilizing. European leaders, particularly France’s Emmanuel Macron and Germany’s Angela Merkel, have had no success in persuading the United States that Ukraine is a “red line” for Russia and that Putin will not tolerate closer U.S.-Ukrainian ties, let alone membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Putin has emphasized this on numerous occasions, but the Biden administration stubbornly insists on strengthening military ties to Ukraine and referring to a “strategic relationship” with Ukraine.
Nevertheless, Putin may well favor a more predictable relationship with the United States, which would provide diplomatic openings for Biden if he chooses a negotiable path. If the issues of election interference and cybersecurity dominate the discussions, then the outcome will be problematic. There is a more conciliatory path and, at the risk of being charged with “appeasement,” the United States could take the lead in reducing the acrimony over the issue of Ukraine and addressing the stalemate on arms control and disarmament.
Governments at the United Nations have been debating for months whether a global pact should be agreed on the use of armed drones, autonomous and otherwise, and what restrictions should be placed on them. The U.N.’s Libya report is adding urgency to the debate. Drone advances have “a lot of implications regionally and globally,” says Ziya Meral of the Britain’s Royal United Services Institute, a defense think tank.
“It is time to assess where things are with Turkish drones and advanced warfare technology and what this means for the region and what it means for NATO,” he said at a RUSI-hosted event in London.
The development comes after a review by Sara Khan, the Government’s extremism commissioner, and Sir Mark Rowley, the former head of counter-terrorism policing, warned that many “hateful extremists” who are not involved in terror are able to operate with “impunity”.
It warned extremists were “creating a ‘chilling’ impact on freedom of expression”. It singled out Cage, an advocacy group whose “senior leaders have advocated supporting violent jihad overseas”, accusing the group of “misleading and inflammatory” attempts to label counter extremism efforts as Islamophobic.
However the Government is believed to have rejected the review’s separate recommendation that ministers should expand current criminal offences relating to the stirring up of hatred.
As a young Red Army soldier, Dushman flattened the forbidding electric fence around the notorious Nazi death camp with his T-34 tank on Jan. 27, 1945.
He admitted that he and his comrades didn’t immediately realize the full magnitude of what had happened in Auschwitz.
“Skeletons everywhere,” he recalled in a 2015 interview with Munich newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung. “They stumbled out of the barracks, they sat and lay among the dead. Terrible. We threw them all of our canned food and immediately drove on, to hunt fascists.”
The announcement by Ankara has triggered immense backlash and international condemnation. Human rights groups around the world spoke out against the move, calling the cancelling of the Convention a terrible regression for women in Turkey. Many have called on Turkish authorities to rescind on the withdrawal. “Exactly ten years after it was signed, women are speaking today with one voice to demand that the Turkish authorities reverse a decision that will put the safety and even the lives of millions of women and girls in peril,” said Amnesty International’s Secretary General, Agnes Callamard.
But buried in the Times story is also an allegation of financial misconduct that governance and tax experts say should trigger official investigations into the foundation, and prompt us to rethink governance rules over billionaire philanthropy.
In the Times’ reporting of Michael Larson’s alleged bullying, it noted that when one of his employees found a job at another company, Larson retaliated by making financial trades designed to hurt that company’s stock price.
Not even a global pandemic could stop carbon dioxide concentrations from spiking. They reached historic levels yet again in May 2021, the month that scientists compare CO2 concentrations from year to year.
Planet-heating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere averaged 419 parts per million this May, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). That pileup of CO2 is comparable to where it was a little over 4 million years ago, when the average global temperature was about 7 degrees Fahrenheit hotter and sea levels were a whopping 78 feet higher than they are today.
Without much more drastic action, scientists warn, CO2 levels will keep trending upward — which also brings the world closer to more inhospitable temperatures and coastal flooding.
The Biden White House has put tackling climate change near the top of its priorities, rejoining the Paris climate accord, hosting a Climate Summit in April and staking out 50 percent emissions reduction for the United States by 2030, measured against a 2005 baseline. The administration is championing the introduction of electric vehicles like the new Ford F-150, and just suspended drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. But Biden’s team is also defending a Trump-era decision to greenlight a massive oil and gas project elsewhere in Alaska.
And even as the president and his team seek to reestablish American climate leadership, the surge in U.S. oil exports underscores how challenging fighting global warming in a globalized economy will be. If American consumers finally begin to tame our fossil fuel gluttony, only to have American companies flooding the global market with cheap, fracked-in-the-USA crude — delaying a transition from fossil fuels abroad — is that truly progress?
Sea Shepherd is launching a new conservation research campaign in Brazil to protect the dolphins of the Amazon River. The scientific expedition, known as Boto Da Amazônia, was announced by Sea Shepherd’s founder, Captain Paul Watson, during a virtual event on June 5.
Sea Shepherd is partnering with scientists from the National Institute for Research in the Amazon, renowned for their expertise in the study of the Amazon river dolphin (Inia geoffrensis) and Tucuxi (Sotalia fluviatilis). The collaboration, which begins in October 2021, will contribute to the scientific body of research about these species and allow for greater environmental protections to be put in place. Both species are currently listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List.
The first wave of the 1918-19 influenza pandemic did not have much impact in India; it was the second wave that was the most devastating.
Thanks to the Troubled Asset Relief Act (TARP), eight banks survived because the federal government made investments in those banks that were to be repaid to the government in future years. As recent events have shown, the banks were outraged when the shoe was, as it were, on the other foot.
In March 2021, Congress enacted the $1.9 trillion stimulus package designed to help those who had been adversely affected by the pandemic. That was similar to how TARP had helped banks and certain other industries that suffered during the crisis of 2008. A part of the 2021stimulus package included a $4 billion debt relief package. The $4 billion debt relief was intended to be given to black and other minority farmers who, in addition to the effects of the pandemic, have suffered for years as a result of discriminatory lending practices by the banks in their dealings with the minority communities. According to a report in the New York Times, the number of Black-owned farms in the country has gone from approximately one million in the 1920s to fewer than 40,000 today. The decrease is attributable in part to onerous loan terms imposed by lenders on the minority community and the resulting high foreclosure rates.
The announcement by Biden is clearly a capitulation to corporate interests, McConnell and Republicans of truly historic dimensions. It’s a ‘double reversal’, not only cutting corporate taxes instead of raising them, but unilaterally, and without obtaining any concessions from Republicans, slashing his infrastructure spending proposals further again, than a week after his prior spending cut of $550B.
Biden now plans CUTTING corporate taxes to 15%. Trump had cut corporate tax rate from 35% to 21%. Biden ran for office pledging to raise that back to 28%. He then reneged in February and said the corporate tax hike would be to only 25%. He then agreed with European Union finance ministers last week to cut taxes on US multinationals to only 15%. Now he announces, after latest talks with McConnell and Republicans, he’ll CUT US corporate taxes in general to 15%–instead of raising to even 25%.
The May employment report was somewhat weaker than had generally been expected, with the economy adding 559,000 jobs. On the household side, the unemployment rate fell by 0.3 percentage points to 5.8 percent. While this is still high by any reasonable measure, it is worth noting that the unemployment rate did not get this low following the Great Recession until October of 2014.
The employment-to-population ratio (EPOP) edged up to 58.0 percent, which is 3.1 percentage points below the pre-pandemic level. By this measure, the gender differences in the hit from the pandemic have largely disappeared, the women’s EPOP for May was 53.1 percent, down 2.3 percentage points from its average in 2019. For men the May EPOP was 63.4 percent, down 3.2 percentage points from its year-round average of 66.6 percent in 2019. However, in payroll employment, women’s share was 49.8 percent in May, compared with 50.0 percent before the pandemic.
There are still no grocery stores across a wide swath of northern Flint, Michigan, where a Kroger and a Meijer closed after lead was found in the water in 2015.
So Reginald Flynn, a local pastor and community activist, convened a few people in the auditorium of a charter school he runs to talk about starting a grocery store. He wanted to start a cooperative — a community-owned business not bound by the decisions of a huge grocery chain — and began selling shares to neighbors at $250 each. But he still needed more startup money and had no success getting a bank loan.
Green campaigners have expressed concern about the GMB union’s newly elected leader, who has called for Glasgow to ditch the upcoming COP26 climate summit and enthusiastically backed fracking.
Gary Smith was previously Secretary of GMB’s Scotland branch but on Thursday was elected as the union’s new UK-wide General Secretary and Treasurer. GMB is the third largest union in the UK, with some 620,000 members covering work across a range of industry sectors, including oil and gas, aviation and manufacturing, as well as the public sector.
Finance ministers from seven of the world’s wealthiest nations have backed a plan to set a minimum global corporate tax rate of at least 15% on multinational companies. The agreement, which was reached during a meeting in Britain of the G7, or Group of 7, is “historic” but should have aimed higher, says economist Joseph Stiglitz. “If you have too low of a tax rate, that minimum tax becomes, de facto, the maximum tax,” he says.
Vice President Kamala Harris is traveling to Guatemala this week to discuss solutions to the poverty, violence, and corruption that are among the driving forces of migration. Contributing to these drivers are neoliberal arrangements, such as the Central America–Dominican Republic Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA-DR), which have been imposed on Guatemalans. This framework favors the development of large-scale mining and energy projects that are devastating to the well-being of rural communities and Indigenous peoples, while allowing private corporations to sue governments over hard-fought social and environmental protections.
I write as a lifelong activist, a New Yorker, and a member of The Nation editorial board (the views expressed here are mine). The city is at a crossroads, with vastly different futures possible as we emerge from Covid. The contest for mayor is therefore unusually important. For nearly a year, Andrew Yang, famous for being famous, managed to dominate and trivialize the race, while more accomplished candidates had trouble breaking through. But in these last weeks, the race has begun to clarify the issues and the stakes. Progressives now face familiar dilemmas. Who shares my values? Who can win and govern effectively? And who do I want to make sure loses? Happily for us, for substantive and strategic reasons, there is an obvious choice: Here’s why I urge you to put Maya Wiley as your #1 choice for mayor.
A group of House Democrats is demanding answers from Attorney General Merrick Garland about the US Justice Department’s role in Brazil’s wide-ranging anti-corruption probe, known as Operation Car Wash, or Lava Jato in Portugese. In a letter, obtained by The Nation, that was sent to Garland today, 23 House Democrats, led by Georgia Representative Hank Johnson, renewed concerns over the secretive collaboration between the US Justice Department and Brazilian officials in Lava Jato, which led to the wrongful imprisonment of former president Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and paved the way for far-right nationalist Jair Bolsonaro to win the presidency.
As a socialist—mainly in socialism’s libertarian wing—since my teenage years, no one could be more thrilled by this development than I. However, the arrival on the scene of tens of thousands of young socialists has understandably resulted in some growing pains for the American socialist movement of today.
Especially because many of these new entrants are from upper-middle class families or even wealthy ones. Which itself is a good sign. When the children of those who have benefitted most handsomely from capitalism—either as members of the professional managerial class who use their expertise to keep capitalism going or as members of the ruling class who own and control capital itself—decide from direct experience that the dominant political economic system is flawed, dangerous to humanity’s well-being, and desperately needs to be replaced by a more democractic and fair political economic system.
Back at the beginning of the year – and just two days before January 6—I was writing about the dire situation on Capitol Hill, and mentioned Profiles in Courage, the book John F. Kennedy and Theodore Sorensen wrote about brave US senators in our history who took unpopular stands in the face of loud opposition.
Sunday morning, West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin announced in the Charleston Gazette-Mail that he’s a “no” on the For the People Act—and a no for ending the filibuster.
↺ Neoliberalism in Their Hearts, Proto-Fascism in Their Heads: The Political Identity of Today’s GOP
With becoming the party of Trump, analysts have sought to come to terms with the political identity of today’s GOP. The general consensus among mainstream pundits seems to be that the Republican Party is no longer a conservative party, but has instead become something of an authoritarian outlier. Many from the progressive and radical community, on the other hand, go even further and claim that the GOP is now a fascist party.
Social media giant Facebook has announced it has suspended former President Donald Trump’s account until at least 2023. He was initially suspended from the platform for comments to supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6 and is permanently banned on Twitter. Facebook’s move could have implications for other world leaders who use Facebook, like Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Jameel Jaffer, director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, said he is not sure the decision struck the right balance for protecting free speech but is defensible because Facebook “has a responsibility to ensure that the people using its platform aren’t using it to undermine democracy or incite violence.” But he argues the much bigger issue is Facebook’s engineering and design decisions, such as ranking algorithms, which really determine which speech gets heard or marginalized.
The Federal Government on Monday summoned the envoys of the United States, United Kingdom, and the European Union in Nigeria over comments on the suspension of Twitter in the country.
The invitation was contained in a statement issued and made available to newsmen on Monday by the spokesman of the Crisis Monitoring and Public Communications Division of the Nigerian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Kimiebi Ebienfa.
Harpers has a giant and fascinating article by Barrett Swanson entitled The Anxiety of Influencers that has received some attention online. Most of the reactions are the kind of typical tut tutting about the existence of TikTok/Instagram influencers whose entire (quite short) careers as “influencers” are based on their ability to get famous on social media for influencing. I do understand why people — especially older folks (a category I now inhabit myself) — look down upon these stories and shake their heads and wonder “what has happened to the children these days?” However, I’m more in the camp of recognizing this kind of thing happens in every generation, and I don’t begrudge kids these days from trying to chase a dream, even if it feels like a silly one to someone not of that generation. There will always be young people chasing dreams, and along with it old people complaining about the kids these days. I don’t think that approach is particularly useful, so I’ll just say that the article is an interesting window into some of the “collab houses” that have sprung up all over (though mostly in LA), full of kids trying to become famous as influencers.
If you want to see what censorship is, let’s take a look at Nigeria banning Twitter indefinitely in response to Twitter removing a tweet by President Muhammadu Buhari that it believed violated the site’s policies. The tweet was read to be a threat to brutally kill those engaging in attacks on public infrastructure, in particular police stations in Southeast Nigeria. Buhari’s tweet harkened back to the way dissenters were dealt with during the Nigerian Civil War:
Back then, Facebook executive Nick Clegg, a former politician himself, famously pondered: “Would it be acceptable to society at large to have a private company in effect become a self-appointed referee for everything that politicians say? I don’t believe it would be.”
Perhaps Clegg had a point—we’ve long said that companies are ineffective arbiters of what the world says—but that hardly justifies holding politicians to a lower standard than the average person. International standards will consider the speaker, but only as one of many factors. For example, the United Nations’ Rabat Plan of Action outlines a six-part threshold test that takes into account “(1) the social and political context, (2) status of the speaker, (3) intent to incite the audience against a target group, (4) content and form of the speech, (5) extent of its dissemination and (6) likelihood of harm, including imminence.” Facebook’s Oversight Board recently endorsed the Plan, as a framework for assessing the removal of posts that may incite hostility or violence.
Facebook has deviated very far from the Rabat standard thanks, in part, to the policy it is finally repudiating. For example, it has banned elected officials from parties disfavored by the U.S. government, such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK), all of which appear on the government’s list of designated terrorist organizations—despite not being legally obligated to do so. And in 2018, the company deleted the account of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov, claiming that they were legally obligated after the leader was placed on a sanctions list. Legal experts familiar with the law of international sanctions have disagreed, on the grounds that the sanctions are economic in nature and do not apply to speech.
“How do I know what I think till I see what I say?” was a maxim of E.M. Forster’s—and a fine one. But the Simon & Schuster workers who petitioned to break their company’s contract with former vice president Mike Pence were sure they knew what he thought before he said it. To publish his memoir would be “legitimizing bigotry,” since Pence was the tool of Donald Trump, and Trump had “unequivocally advocated for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, anti-Blackness, xenophobia, misogyny, ableism, islamophobia, antisemitism, and violence.”1
Another leak investigation that involves the DOJ going after journalists’ communications has been revealed. This would be the third time since Biden took office that subpoenas targeting journalists have had their gag orders removed, allowing the public to see what the DOJ was up to during Trump’s unceremonious reign as president.
The New York Times has revealed shocking details about an unsuccessful attempt by the Trump administration, and then the Biden administration, to secretly obtain the email logs of four reporters at the newspaper. As part of the campaign, the Biden Justice Department placed a gag order on the Times in March to prevent many at the paper from even knowing about the request until a federal court lifted it. In recent weeks the Justice Department also disclosed the Trump administration had secretly obtained the call records of four journalists at the Times, as well as three journalists at The Washington Post and one at CNN. Jameel Jaffer, founding director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, says subpoenas for journalists’ records are “really troubling” because of their potential chilling effect on critical journalism. “It’s about the right of the public to have access to information about the government,” he says.
We speak to Jameel Jaffer about a petition asking the Supreme Court to review whether the public has a right to access the decisions of the special federal court that rules on the legality of government surveillance, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, or FISA Court. The American Civil Liberties Union submitted the request with support from the Knight First Amendment Institute, whose director, Jameel Jaffer, notes the court routinely issues rulings that have far-reaching implications for Americans’ privacy and freedom of speech rights. He says the argument free speech advocates are making is that the First Amendment guarantees the public a right of access to the FISA Court rulings like other courts that also deal with national security issues.
The Protocol now heads to members of CoE’s Parliamentary Committee (PACE) for their opinion. PACE’s Committee on Legal Affairs and Human Rights can recommend further amendments, and decide which ones will be adopted by the Standing Committee or the Plenary. Then, the Council of Ministers will vote on whether to integrate PACE’s recommendations into the final text. The CoE’s plan is to finalize the Protocol’s adoption by November. If adopted, the Protocol will be open for signatures to any country that has signed the Budapest Convention sometime before 2022.
The next step for countries is at the signature stage. Countries can present a signature without reservation as to ratification, acceptance, or approval. At that time, they can reserve the right not to abide by certain provisions in the Protocol, in particular Article 7 on direct cooperation between law enforcement and companies holding user data.
If countries sign the Protocol as it stands and in its entirety, it will reshape how state police access digital data from Internet companies based in other countries by prioritizing law enforcement demands, sidestepping judicial oversight, and lowering the bar for privacy safeguards.
I’d like to share with you our experience with Verizon. We have a simple residential landline with no bells and whistles. We started getting calls every day that went “Ping, ping, ping, ping,” with no robocaller trying to sell anything. It began with a “ping” and ended some 90 seconds later if we didn’t hang up.
The other problem was that we were cut off in the middle of a conversation with a human being on a 1-800 line.
For years we’ve noted how a lack of competition means consumers across the country pay dramatically different prices for the same or worse service. For example a customer in Chattanooga, Tennessee can pay $70 or less for gigabit service, thanks to competition between Comcast and the regionally owned community broadband network.
Credits: Question Period, House of Commons, June 4, 2021
Librarians and broadband enthusiasts affiliated with the Gigabit Libraries Network discussed the benefits of connectivity from new satellite broadband services.
Soon after the beginning of the pandemic, the group has been hosting sessions around the theme of “what is a library when a physical building itself is closed.”
Showtime’s refund policy does not mention technical difficulties, only if an event is canceled. “If the PPV event is canceled in its entirety, and you purchased the event through the SHOWTIME app, you will automatically be refunded in full to the payment method you used when you purchased the event,” reads the message. “Refunds may take time to be credited to your account. Refund processing times may vary depending on your billing method.”
Transmission and transaction trouble for major events are nothing new for Showtime or other outlets as traditional media outlets move into direct-to-consumer business models. CBS has had trouble meeting demand for streaming of major live events such as the Grammy Awards and Super Bowl in the past. HBO generated consumer grumbling when its server capability was swamped by eager demand in May 2019 for series finale of “Game of Thrones.” Meanwhile, Disney bought a strong streaming platform with its 2017 acquisition of BamTech, which was a stepping stone for the launch of Disney Plus and ESPN Plus.
Fans in America were unable to watch the opening fights of the night due to the Showtime stream failing to work
However, most companies refuse to make those tools available to farmers, making it exceptionally difficult to fix broken machinery on their own. They can’t even go an independent mechanic, since manufacturers won’t sell them parts or diagnostic tools either. This leaves farmers essentially no choice but to take their broken equipment to a licensed dealership.
This isn’t cheap. A farmer might spend thousands of dollars on a simple adjustment they could have done themselves with the appropriate resources. On the other hand, this arrangement has proven wildly lucrative for manufacturers; for Deere, as an example, parts and repairs are up to six times more profitable than selling the equipment itself.
But money isn’t the only problem – it’s also a matter of time. Oftentimes on a farm, tasks like planting and harvesting have to be done within a window of just a few days when the moisture content, ripeness, or weather conditions are just right. If, god forbid, machinery breaks during that window and a dealership can’t make an appointment immediately, the wait can cut severely into the farmers’ annual yields and income.
Unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of alternatives for farmers who want to buy equipment they can fix. About 95 percentof large farm tractors are made by just three companies: Deere, CNH Industrial, and AgCo, all three of which engage in the kind of resource restriction that prevents on-farm repairs. Instead, some farmers have resorted to buying decades-old tractors that don’t require copyrighted software to repair.
Apple is bringing video and music sharing to FaceTime through a feature it’s calling SharePlay. Using SharePlay, people will be able to watch or listen to content in sync with everyone else on the call, either by casting the content to an Apple TV device while staying on the call or by watching both on the same screen using Picture in Picture.
The commitments under the settlement are only binding in France, but the Wall Street Journal reported that they could become a template for how Google resolves similar cases in other countries.
Google agreed to pay a fine of $270 million and make changes to its online ad tools in a settlement with French regulators announced Monday.
France’s competition watchdog investigation had focused on Google’s alleged abuse of its leading role in the digital advertising sector.
Google did not dispute the facts of the case and opted to settle while proposing changes, according to the Competition Authority.
The European Patent Office (EPO) was due to hear the referral in G1/21 on Friday 28 May 2021 concerning the question of whether the conduct of oral proceedings in the form of a videoconference is compatible with the right to oral proceedings as enshrined in Article 116(1) EPC if not all of the parties to the proceedings have given their consent to the conduct of oral proceedings in the form of a videoconference. Our previous update on this referral can be found here.
The UK Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys (CIPA) has previously stated its support for videoconference oral proceedings, subject only to the underlying systems being fit for purpose (see here). The EPO President also provided comments on the referral in support of videoconference in advance of the hearing (see here).
Despite the composition of the Board already having been changed last month due to alleged partiality, in the oral proceedings held on Friday, the Enlarged Board heard and deliberated in a non-public forum for most of the morning on a further complaint regarding the partiality of the Board. The Enlarged Board decided late-morning that the oral proceedings could continue with the same composition. However, the appellant had further requested a postponement since they had only received formal notification of the President’s comments on 26 May 2021 i.e. two days before the scheduled oral proceedings. The appellant argued that their right to be heard would be violated if the proceedings continued without postponement since they had not had sufficient time to review the President’s comments with their client and provide comments in reply.
The meteoric rise of the Waco Division’s patent caseload is widely understood to be due to plaintiff-friendly policies on scheduling, transfer, and motions to dismiss.
But recently, some patentees have taken a different tack. They’ve claimed that the reason cases are headed there is because litigants want to take advantage of Judge Albright’s experience as a patent litigator.
That claim just doesn’t hold up.
[...]
Declaratory judgment cases are cases where an alleged infringer goes to court first, asking the court to issue a declaration that they don’t infringe or that the patent they’re accused of infringing is invalid. In recent years, declaratory judgment actions have comprised about 5% of all patent cases.
But in the Waco Division, since Judge Albright was seated in 2018, I could only identify a total of only 15 declaratory judgment cases in front of Judge Albright. And of those 15, many appear to be manufacturers who are indemnifying their customers who were sued in the Western District—not companies seeking out a Waco courtroom.
Given that the Waco Division has seen more than 1,000 patent cases during that timeframe, the proportion of declaratory judgment actions (~1.4%) filed in Waco is disproportionately low.
This suggests that alleged infringers do not believe that Judge Albright’s patent expertise is equally helpful to both sides.
During the past several months, we were pleased to welcome the USPTO’s intellectual property (IP) attachés to a series of virtual events in our respective regions covering the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain states.
Who are the IP attachés? They are U.S. diplomats with expertise in intellectual property. Their prior experience includes work in government, industry, major trade associations, and some of the best law firms in the country. They are currently assigned to 12 embassies, consulates or missions around the world, where they advocate U.S. positions on IP matters for the benefit of U.S. businesses. Three attachés cover China, two focus on multilateral issues in Geneva, and the others cover Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Eurasia, Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East and North Africa.
Aside from their diplomatic duties, the IP attachés also provide information to U.S. businesses entering foreign markets, including how to navigate foreign laws and protect their IP abroad. One way they do that is through the kinds of outreach efforts they conducted recently with stakeholders located in our two regions. These included a series of virtual meetings held with Utah stakeholders in October 2020 and another round of meetings held in April 2021 with stakeholders in Ohio and Kentucky.
The Patent Box is a quite complicated tax relief. It was introduced to encourage companies to keep and commercialise intellectual property and only applies to products that are either patented in their entirety or contain a patented item.
For those products that qualify, companies can reduce their rate of corporation tax to 10% for profits accumulated from their sale. For patents to be accepted, they must have been granted by the UK Intellectual Property Office or the European Patent Office.
Due to the complexity of this tax relief, it can be easy to misinterpret how much of a business’ income is relevant to a patent. To identify what does and doesn’t qualify, make sure you work closely with your accountant to establish robust accounting systems.
Nokia and Daimler settle SEP patent dispute, sign patent licensing agreement
Nokia and Daimler have announced that the companies have entered into a patent licensing deal which puts an end to all ongoing litigations between the Finnish networking giant and the German Automotive manufacturer. Daimler has agreed to pay Nokia, royalties for use of the latter’s technologies in navigation systems and communications used in Daimler’s cars. While the terms of the agreement remain confidential, reports suggest that Daimler will pay Nokia around 2 dollars per produced car. The deal between the two companies puts an end to a dispute which spanned over two and a half years.
EU submits alternative proposal to WTO against IP waiver
The European Union on Friday submitted a proposal to the World Trade Organization against IP waivers as an alternative to the proposal moved by India and South Africa. The European in its proposal has submitted that focus must be moved on removing the export restrictions and making use of flexibility in existing WTO rules as opposed to the call for waiver of IP rights. The EU in its proposal has contended that a waiver would not necessarily boost production of drugs and vaccines being used in the treatment and management of COVID19. Instead, by removing the export restrictions and encouraging vaccine developers to enter deals with producers in developing countries would help in boosting production. Further, the EU in its proposal has also highlighted that a number of countries already possess provisions of compulsory licensing which may be invoked at national levels. India has unfortunately held contrary positions at home and at the WTO. While at home, the Government is advocating voluntary licensing as a means to the solution, it has held a contradictory stand at the WTO arguing that IP waivers are the way forward.
A swarm of gnats (midges) can be annoying. Although each bug is almost too small to be seen or felt, 20,000+ of the critters buzzing around can cause some to panic or at least release a curse. I’d advise you to just act gnaturally. But imagine for a second that you are able to capture two of the creatures that were part of the swarm. Are you then able to pass judgment on those two captured individuals for the harm of the swarm? Will killing those two gnats provide any relief from the swarm? (I know you are thinking revenge, but that is gnot the kind of concrete and particularized relief I’m talking about.)
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The Case: After some litigation, Apple eventually licensed 20,000+ Qualcomm patents in a six-year-deal.* Meanwhile, Apple also pursued inter partes review (IPR) of two of the licensed patents. US7844037 and US8683362. The PTAB granted the IPR petitions but eventually sided with Qualcomm–holding that the challenged claims had not been proven obvious. Apple then appealed, but the Federal Circuit dismissed the appeal for lack of standing. The court held that Apple had not shown any “injury-in-fact” associated with the continued existence of the two challenged patents.
The SACEPO Working Party on Guidelines held its 21st meeting on 20 May, discussing the Guidelines for Examination in the EPO (EPC Guidelines) and the Guidelines for Search and Examination at the EPO as PCT Authority (PCT-EPO Guidelines). It was the first meeting of the working party in its new composition, now also including members of the International Association for the Protection of Intellectual Property (AIPPI), the Union of European Practitioners in Intellectual Property (UNION-IP) and the International Federation of Intellectual Property Attorneys (FICPI). The SACEPO Working Party on Guidelines meets at least twice a year to discuss practice at the EPO as described in the EPC and PCT-EPO Guidelines.
Today the oral proceedings regarding G1/21 concerning the question whether oral proceedings before the EPO in principle can be conducted by videoconference, even against the will of the parties, took place.
Due to a first objection for suspicion of partiality concerning the original Chairman and a legally qualified member said Chairman and legally qualified member were replaced for today’s hearing. Two other members also objected to were not replaced and formed part of the composition of today’s Enlarged Board of Appeal.
The initial Chairman and President of the Boards of Appeal was found biased since he performed legislative and managerial acts in relation to the new Article 15a RPBA. The legally qualified member who was replaced for today’s hearing was also found biased although he did not play a formal role in the decision-making process leading to the adoption and approval of Article 15a RPBA. However, his active involvement in the preparation of the proposal was visible to other actors in the process and those with an interest in the way oral proceedings are conducted before the Boards of Appeal.
The two further members were not found biased merely due to the fact that they are members of the Presidium of the Boards of Appeal and were consulted by the President of the Boards of Appeal on the proposal for new Article 15a RPBA. Their involvement was not considered sufficient to find suspicion of partiality.
This Q&A covers the procedures and practical considerations of litigation in Switzerland, including limitation issues, case management, submission of evidence and available remedies.
The chair and ranking member of the House IP subcommittee that covers intellectual property is now asking the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to investigate whether or not the Director of the Patent Office is pressuring the important Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) to make certain decisions on the validity of patents. There’s a lot of important background here, but it’s all kind of fascinating how two big legal issues are coalescing in this result, in which the USPTO’s own legal arguments may reveal how the Director has been unfairly influencing decisions. The two key points to understand are (1) the Inter Partes Review (IPR) process, and (2) questions about the constitutionality of certain appointments — both of which are issues that we’ve covered for years, that seem deep in the weeds, but turn out to be quite important.
The UK is home to many FinTech organisations. Intellectual property (IP) plays a key role in the success of these organisations. However, inadequate use of IP protection is not uncommon in this field, and is sometimes only considered as an afterthought, when it may be too late.
IP can be protected in various ways. It is possible to protect how things look (e.g. an app layout) using designs, and protect the organisation’s brands using trademarks. It is also possible to protect how things work using a patent. However, there seems to be much uncertainty from clients, especially start-ups in this field, about whether it is possible to obtain patent protection in this area.
The simple answer is that some FinTech technologies are patentable, whereas some are not. As an example, a common pitfall for FinTech applications in Europe is when the technology is considered to be a method of doing business. Pure business methods are going to struggle. Whereas, the chances improve where the invention is focussed instead on the manner of implementation at system level.
What makes matters more interesting is that different countries have different requirements for patentability. This means the same invention may be more successful in some territories than in others. For example, the UK is typically one of the more challenging countries for these types of applications. The European Patent Office on the other hand is generally more favourable, as is the US. On this point, it is worth noting that it is possible to obtain patent protection via a European patent. Do not worry too much about Brexit, as it has not affected this route.
There is also a pair of cases pending certiorari involving Obamacare reimbursement that could be big $$$$. United States v. Maine Community Health Options, No. 20-1432; Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative v. United States, No. 20-1200; United States v. Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative, No. 20-1536.
Europe is working hard to modernize copyright law and regulations. The implementation of the Copyright Directive is nearing its conclusion. At the same time, copyright takedown and liability regulations are further strengthened by the proposed Digital Services Act. Or are they? An MPA-controlled ‘hacker’ shows that, for now, pirates and cybercriminals have little to fear.
In 2020, Amazon teamed up with publisher Penguin Random House and authors including Lee Child and John Grisham to sue several pirate eBook sites operating out of Ukraine. After a cash-strapped local court reported that it had no stamps and envelopes so couldn’t correspond on paper, the publishers had to hire a private investigator in an effort to track down and serve a key defendant.
As a recent Techdirt article noted, the European Commission was obliged to issue “guidance” on how to implement the infamous Article 17 upload filters required by the EU’s Copyright Directive. It delayed doing so, evidently hoping that the adviser to the EU’s top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), would release his opinion on Poland’s attempt to get Article 17 struck down before the European Commission revealed its one-sided advice. That little gambit failed when the Advocate General announced that he would publish his opinion after the deadline for the release of the guidance. The European Commission has finally provided its advisory document on Article 17 and, as expected, it contains a real stinker of an idea. The best analysis of what the Commission has done, and why it is so disgraceful comes from Julia Reda and Paul Keller on the Kluwer Copyright Blog. Although Article 17 effectively made upload filters mandatory, it also included some (weak) protections for users, to allow people to upload copyright material for legal uses such as memes, parody, criticism etc. without being blocked. The copyright industry naturally hates any protections for users, and has persuaded the European Commission to eviscerate them:
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