● 10.25.17

● Links 25/10/2017: New Linux Report, Qt 5.10 Beta 2, CAINE 9.0

Posted in News Roundup at 11:11 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxGNU/Linux

Desktop

• For those looking at assembling a new system around Intel’s 8th Gen Core “Coffee Lake” CPUs, the motherboard I’ve been conducting most of my Linux tests from has been the ASUS PRIME Z370-A. A few weeks of use with this motherboard, I’m happy with this Intel Z370 motherboard.

• Recently, Linux desktop usage has grown from 2.14 percent to 3.23 percent according to NetMarketShare. Much of this increase appears to have come from Linux-based Chromebooks, which are likely undercounted due in part to their widespread use in schools.

• Yet, there are signs of Linux desktop life beyond Google’s Chrome OS, which exists in a somewhat parallel universe to mainstream Linux. Ubuntu, for example, continues to expand into the mainstream, although at a grindingly slow pace. As with Chrome OS, most of the action is happening in lower end laptops, often emerging from hacker board projects. The newly shipping Olimex Teres-A64 and upcoming Reform laptop, for example, are based on open hardware and software. Two of the most popular new low-end Linux laptops — the newly revised Pi-top and Kano products — are hackable Raspberry Pi based kits aimed primarily at education.

• VLC pioneer PureLiFi has announced the LiFi XC, a USB stick-sized dongle that lets tablets and laptops connect to the internet via visible light.

• Teased earlier this year at Mobile World Congress, the LiFi XC is about three times smaller than the bulky LiFi X dongle and roughly 14 times smaller than the huge Li-Flame proof of concept product launched in 2014.

Server

• Red Hat launches storage delivered via containers and predicts a future in which costly and inflexible storage hardware and pricey hypervisors will be a thing of the past

• Back in August, Jason Hibbets asked whether I had any interest in building a DevOps community on Opensource.com. The obvious answer was an astounding YES! Jason and I have assembled a fantastic consortium of DevOps minds to write on Opensource.com. But, one thing I’ve always wanted was a way to ask smart people hard questions and get an actual answer. Joining this DevOps community and my desire to get help led to the idea for a Dear DevOps community column.

• The first release candidate is now available for the upcoming Xen 4.10 hypervisor update.

• Among the changes being worked on the past several months for the Xen 4.10 hypervisor are NVIDIA Tegra SoC support, Xen transport for the 9pfs back-end, various para-virtualized driver updates, memory bandwidth allocation and L2 cache allocation technology support.

• The OPNFV Euphrates release is the fifth since the project was initially launchedin September 2014. “Euphrates brings a deeper level of maturity to the platform,” Tapio Tallgren, chair of Technical Steering Committee (TSC), OPNFV, and lead software architect, Nokia’s Mobile Architecture Unit stated.

• When OPNFV first launched containers were in their infancy and so too was the Kubernetes container orchestration project, but that’s no longer the case in October 2017. One of the key new features in OPNFV Euphrates is integration with container technologies, including Kubernetes.

• OPNFV has released OPNFV Euphrates, the project’s fifth platform release, focused on enabling service providers to accelerate network functions virtualization (NFV) transformation via open-source NFV.

• Today, I want to introduce Univention Corporate Server (UCS), an enterprise Linux distribution based on Debian GNU/Linux and built by Univention. Let me begin with Univention, the organization behind UCS. Univention builds Open Source software for organizations to make the access to applications and devices for their members as easy as possible. Basically, this involves three core topics:

• Cisco and Google announced a new partnership on Oct. 24 in a bid to help enable a hybrid cloud solution that uses Cisco hardware on-premises and Google Cloud Platform.

• On Oct. 25, Cisco and Google announced a new technology partnership, which went by the internal name Goodzilla. This will enable Cisco customers to run and move their applications between Cisco-powered data centers and the Google Cloud Platform in a new kind of hybrid cloud.

• The glue that will bind them together: Kubernetes and Istio.

• Kubernetes is an open-source container manager. Originally developed by Google as Borg, today, it’s controlled by the The Linux Foundation’s Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). It has quickly become the most popular container orchestration program. Except for Amazon Web Services (AWS), it’s available on all major public clouds and works with all containers.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Linux PulseAudio Doesn’t Suck (that much). Despite what you may hear elsewhere, there are aspects of PulseAudio that make it pretty interesting. PulseAudio seen here on Ubuntu MATE 16.04 for example, provides a ton of useful functionality.

Kernel Space

• Among the changes implemented in the Subsurface 4.7.1 update, we can mention a new map widget that deprecates the rotating globe, the ability for the green gas icon to change when switching to EAN100, as well as better support for importing dive data from Datatrak, Shearwater desktop, DL7, and other third-party formats.

• The data planner component was improved as well in this release with user-friendly cylinder handling, faster planning for long decompression times, compute plan variations, the ability to print delta pressure in results for minimum gas calculations, and support for identifying overlapping dives when calculating dive plans.

• It’s 2017 and Linux rules the computing world. Don’t believe me? The Linux Foundation reports that Linux runs 90 percent of the public cloud workload, 82 percent of the world’s smartphones, 62 percent of the embedded market, oh and a mere 99 percent of the supercomputer market. All that rests on the Linux kernel. In its 2017 Linux Kernel Development Report, Jonathan Corbet, Linux kernel developer and editor of LWN.net, and Greg Kroah-Hartman, stable Linux kernel maintainer, report on Linux’s recent evolution.

• This report was released at the invitation-only Linux Kernel Summit in Prague, Czech Republic. Since 2005 and adoption of Git version control system, 15,637 developers from over 1,400 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel. Since last year, over 4,300 developers from more than 500 companies have contributed to the kernel. Of these, 1,670 contributed for the first time, or about a third of contributors.

• With its new open data licensing framework, announced on Tuesday, the Linux Foundation has created legal frameworks around sharing raw, unorganised data to tempt generous companies, nonprofits, government agencies and researchers to do so.

• Those who have followed the spread of open source software (OSS) know that a bewildering thicket of OSS licenses were created in the early days. They also know that although the Open Source Initiative was formed in part to certify which of these documents should be permitted to call itself an “open source software license,” that didn’t mean that each approved license was compatible with the other. Ever since, it’s been a pain in the neck to vet code contributions to ensure that an OSS user knows what she’s getting into when she incorporates a piece of OSS into her own program.

• For many years Linux storage enthusiasts have dreamed of having the ZFS file-system part of the mainline Linux kernel. But since Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems that outlook has looked much more bleak that they would re-license the ZFS kernel code under a license compatible with the upstream GPLv2 Linux kernel. But an Oracle engineer presented today that the ZFS Linux dream might still come true.

• The other project that CNCF has taken under its wing is called The Update Framework. Created by New York University professor Justin Cappos, TUP is the specification on which Notary is based. Developers can use the technology to equip their own software with capabilities for fending off attempts to corrupt code. A group of automakers, for example, has created a version of TUP for securely patching car systems.

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation continues to vigorously build its portfolio of open source cloud-native technologies. CNCF’s Technical Oversight Committee voted to accept both the Docker-developed Notary trusted content framework and the specification Notary was built on, TUF, as the 13th and 14th hosted projects, respectively.

• The organizations announced the new members at the Open Source Summit Europe, being held this week in Prague.

• The Cloud Native Computing Foundation on Oct. 24 announced that it is expanding its project roster with the addition of the Notary container trust project and The Update Framework security effort.

• The Notary project was originally developed by Docker and provides a content signing framework to help verify the cryptographic integrity of a container application image. Notary makes use of The Update Framework (TUF), which is a specification for enabling secure software updates.

• The company’s open source contributions include support for The Linux Foundation projects like Open Network Automation Platform (ONAP), Cloud Foundry, Open Container Initiative, Open vSwitch, Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), EdgeX Foundry and IO Visor, as well as projects such as OpenStack.

• The Linux Foundation is releasing its 2017 Linux Kernel Development Report to examine progress that has been made to the Linux kernel as well as who is using and contributing to it. This year’s report details Linux kernel 4.13, with a focus on 4.8 to 4.13.

• The Linux kernel forms the core of the Linux operating system. The kernel is used to manage hardware, run user programs and maintain security. “The kernel is a relatively small part of the software on a full Linux system (many other large components come from the GNU project, the GNOME and KDE desktop projects, the X.org project, and many other sources), but it is the core which determines how well the system will work and is the piece which is truly unique to Linux,” the report states.

Graphics Stack

• Intel has already landed a lot of new Intel DRM code in DRM-Next for the upcoming Linux 4.15 cycle while one final batch is now ready for testing.

• Intel has been planning the past few days to squeeze in one more feature batch into Linux 4.15. Normally David Airlie cuts off the merge window to DRM-Next of new feature material when hitting the -RC6 stage of the current kernel cycle, but Intel is planning on squeezing in this last pull in the next few days. Linux 4.14-rc6 was just released this morning, but then again with 4.14 we will likely see a RC8 release, so the late adds by Intel likely won’t cause much of an issue. Plus Intel’s DRM driver stack goes through pretty good QA.

• Yesterday I posted some fresh benchmarks of the RX Vega between the AMDGPU+RadeonSI/RADV open-source vs. AMDGPU-PRO drivers, which showed the pure open-source driver stack performing admirably well for the latest-generation AMD graphics architecture and the community-driven RADV Vulkan driver was even performing nicely. Due to how well RADV has matured during the Mesa 17.3 cycle, here are some benchmarks using a Radeon RX 580 “Polaris” graphics card showing off its more mature support for Vulkan.

• Next month’s Mesa 17.3 release won’t have OpenGL 4.6 that debuted this summer, but they are getting close to supporting this latest version of the OpenGL graphics API.

• OpenGL 4.6 was released back in July with the big addition being the Vulkan/SPIR-V ingestion support and that’s what has held up OpenGL 4.6 from being officially supported by mainline Mesa.

• Well known open-source AMD graphics driver developer Marek Olšák has sent out patches offering ARB_compatibility support with OpenGL 3.1.

• As further sign of Feral Interactive continuing to pursue Vulkan for their Linux games, a Feral developer today posted a patch for implementing the brand new AMD_shader_info extension for the RADV Mesa driver.

• Alex Smith of Feral posted the patch today wiring in AMD_shader_info. This AMD-developed shader information extension debuted just days ago with the Vulkan 1.0.64 update. This Vulkan extension provides a means of querying information about a compiled shader from the shader disassembly to statistics, but the extension itself places no mandates about what is exposed.

• There’s been a theme recently with the open-source graphics drivers of working on priority scheduling support from AMDGPU priority scheduling for VR use-cases and tied into RADV to Intel also allowing context priority support that in turn is exposed through EGL. The Freedreno driver has also been working on a context priority implementation.

• Rob Clark of the Freedreno project this week posted new patches for implementing context priority support for his Gallium3D driver with supported Qualcomm Adreno hardware and on a supported kernel with the MSM DRM code. The work also includes some generic Gallium3D plumbing for adding a new capability for drivers that want to expose per-context priorities. This Gallium3D driver implementation allows for low, medium, and high context priorities or for all non-Freedreno drivers right now just doesn’t expose the cap.

• Mesa’s support for the OpenGL KHR_no_error extension is now treated as “done” for all drivers.

Benchmarks

• With Mesa 17.3 now having been branched for its stable release next month and that bringing much improved RADV Radeon Vulkan performance and more mature RX Vega support along with a ton of other improvements, here is a fresh comparison of the newest open-source Radeon Linux graphics driver code compared to the latest NVIDIA Linux driver on a range of graphics cards.

Applications

• Two months after the 17.4 point release, the Kodi team announced today the release and immediate availability for download of the Kodi 17.5 maintenance update with a handful of bug fixes.

• While not a major update, Kodi 17.5 adds support for the FFMpeg 3.1.11 open-source multimedia backend, as well as Retina support for Apple’s devices, improves power message handling for CEC, enables playback of DVD files over network on GNU/Linux systems, and fixes the up/download buttons of IR remotes for Apple’s macOS High Sierra 10.13.

• Meet YakYak, a Google Hangouts desktop app for Linux, Windows and Mac. It supports most Hangout features and has a couple bonus features of its own.

Proprietary

Instructionals/Technical

Games

• This will be really great news for any still playing Minecraft [Official Site], as the 1.13 version currently in development will finally get an updated LWJGL.

• Cities: Skylines – Green Cities [Steam] is the latest expansion to the city-builder and possibly one of the biggest yet.

• Valve developer Pierre-Loup Griffais‏ who is heavily involved in their Linux efforts as well as those around virtual reality has commented the VR market-share is already larger than the entire Steam Linux market-share.

• Just one month ago was the big SDL 2.0.6 feature update that had been baking for about one year while now it’s already been succeeded by SDL 2.0.7.

• Unreal Engine 4.18 is now out and it brings in a ton of new feature as usual for a new game engine release.

• This latest release adds a rather nice feature: support for Visual Studio Code on Linux, Mac and Windows. So you can use that to write all code for games, which great since VSC has a Linux version which is one less barrier for people familiar with it to develop on Linux directly.

• This is an open source game inspired by the classic Puzznic, a tile-matching puzzle arcade game developed and produced by Taito in 1989. The game is way more than a clone of Puzznic. But like Puzznic, it’s a frighteningly addictive game. If you like puzzle games, Wizznic! is definitely a recommended download.

• Good news for fans of EVERSPACE [Steam, Official Site], as the DLC has released today and it should work on Linux soon. Also, the Linux version will come to GOG.

• Observer [Steam, Official Site], the cyberpunk horror game from Aspyr Media and Bloober Team is now available on Linux. Strap in and become a neural detective! Also, it’s 15% off on Steam!

• Aspyr Media has released Observer for Linux and macOS as their newest game port.

• Observer is a “cyberpunk horror” video game released for Windows and the game consoles earlier this year. Observer is powered by Unreal Engine 4 and is the first new Linux game port by Aspyr Media in a while.

• Epic Games has today released Unreal Engine 4.18 as the newest version of their cross-platform game engine.

• Unreal Engine 4.18 is a big feature update that rolls out volumetric lightmaps, developer preview support for Google ARCore, HTML5 output improvements, and a variety of other AR / VR / mobile improvements. There are also a number of tooling improvements for developers making use of Unreal Engine 4.

Desktop Environments/WMs

• One of the coolest things you can do to your Linux desktop is tweaking it to suit you. One key part of the tweaking process is to change your icon theme and you probably are going to want to do this as some distros ship some displeasing icon themes. Fortunately, the Linux community provides a ton of themes that you can use to turn your Linux desktop around and looking good. Let’ take a look at some ten awesome available for your desktop.

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• Thursday, 24 October 2017. Today KDE releases a Bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.11.2. Plasma 5.11 was released in October with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.

• The KDE Project announced today the second point release of the KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment, versioned 5.11.2, a minor maintenance update that fixes a total of 15 bugs.

• Coming only one week after the first point release, KDE Plasma 5.11.2 addresses various issues reported by users in the Plasma Discover package manager, as well as the System Settings, Plasma Desktop, Plasma Workspace, Plasma Networkmanager (plasma-nm), Plasma Addons, and KDE GTK Config components.

• The KDE Project is announcing today the release and immediate availability for download of the eighth maintenance update to the long-term supported KDE Plasma 5.8 desktop environment.

• Qt 5.10 is up to its second beta milestone ahead of its expected stable debut by the end of November.

• The Qt 5.10 Beta 2 milestone is coming out on time, giving hope that Qt 5.10.0 will be officially released as scheduled on 30 November rather than being delayed as has become common for Qt5 releases.

• Qt 5.10 beta2 is now available. Instructions how to get the release are here: https://wiki.qt.io/How_to_get_snapshot_via_online_installer.

• Please take a tour and and test the release. And please make sure all issues which must be fixed before final Qt 5.10.0 release are visible in rc blocker list (https://bugreports.qt.io/issues/?filter=18957#)

• Diff to first beta can be found as an attachment.

• It is worth noting that the package is a “git snapshot” and is mid re-branding (it still refers to QupZilla in many places), there are many bugs/issues and the software is no-where near release quality.

• This is just a quick round-up to keep you in the loop and point you to KDE Promo activities that you can join.

• If you missed the previous report, or just want to refresh your memory, you can read it here.

• This version for Raspberry Pi was made possible thanks to the new “light” mode that we’ve been working on (read the previous post to learn more about this new rendering mode).

• It was built and tested on Raspberry Pi 3, where it works good. Since it was not tested a lot yet, this first package is considered beta. Please report any issue you may experience with it. If you can try it on a Pi 2, please let us know the result. It was also not tested on Pi 1, but those probably don’t have enough cpu and/or ram to run it.

• Behind the scenes with Kubuntu, we build packages, then test and finally release to our users. We mostly rely on the building services provided by Canonical on Launchpad, but also are lucky enough to have services donated by some third parties. A lot of our developers are working on quite slow internet connections and when working with large source-code tarballs this takes a very long time, is painful and quite honestly leads to developers burning out.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• This blog post is intended for GNOME Foundation members or people interested in part of our budget management. I have good news for you, the board has decided new policies to empower the individuals of our community!

• GNOME developer Adrien Plazas has written a blog post about some of the big work items he’s engaged in for retro-gtk, the GNOME user-interface for running various libretro cores / game emulators.

• As a small helper object for this kind of processing model, I wrote GstParallelizedTaskRunner which might also be useful for other pieces of code that want to do the same.

• In the end it was not much work, but the results were satisfying. For example the conversion of 1080p to 4k video in the v210 color format with 4 threads gave a speedup of 3.2x. At that point it looks like the main bottleneck was memory bandwidth, but I didn’t look closer as this is already more than enough for the use cases I was interested in.

Distributions

New Releases

• The KDE Plasma 5.11 desktop environment was released only two weeks ago, and it already arrived on a number of GNU/Linux distribution, but now Chakra GNU/Linux users can install it too, the latest version of packages being 5.11.1.

• The KDE Plasma 5.11.2 maintenance update arrive today as well, but it could take a while until it hits the repositories of Chakra GNU/Linux, which now contain the latest KDE Applications 17.08.2 and KDE Frameworks 5.39.0 software stacks.

• A very quick announcement for now, just to let you all know that antiX-17 “Heather Heyer” is now available.

• Get the various iso files from here for now.

• CAINE (Computer Aided INvestigative Environment) is an Italian GNU/Linux live distribution created as a Digital Forensics project Currently the project manager is Nanni Bassetti (Bari – Italy). CAINE offers a complete forensic environment that is organized to integrate existing software tools as software modules and to provide a friendly graphical interface.

PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva Family

• LXQt is a desktop environment that is under heavy development. Unfortunately, there are still some rough edges in it.

• ROSA Desktop Fresh R9 is not the first distribution from that team to feature LXQt. But you still can feel these rough edges here and there.

• It generally feels OK. The only major issue I can name is a problem with video playback on one of the tested sites. But there were many smaller issues. All-in-all, I would say that ROSA R9 LXQt is still a distribution for those who like to get their hands dirty, who like to help developers and who like some challenges. It is not a distribution for newbies, but a a good distribution for real Linux fans to have fun with.

OpenSUSE/SUSE

• While Plymouth has become widely-used as a bootsplash screen on most Linux systems these days and is much better off than the RHGB days, SUSE has sent out initial patches as part of their proposal for having a new in-kernel bootsplash system.

• SUSE® today announced that SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for SAP Applications will be available as an operating system for SAP® solutions on the IBM Cloud. In addition, IBM Cloud is now a SUSE Cloud Service Provider, giving customers a supported open source platform that makes them more agile and reduces operating costs as they only pay for what they use.

Slackware Family

• Someone asked me to build a package for Netsurf. I had never heard of Netsurf before. It turns out that Netsurf is a cross-platform web browser which also runs on Linux. Its rendering engine is written from scratch, therefore the browser does not share code with any of the big browsers. Netsurf is actively developed and has a healthy community. A new version was released last week – 3.7. Functionally speaking, this browser is not as versatile or capable as other modern browsers, but its advantage is that it is small, fast, suited for low-end hardware, and more importantly: it works on the Linux framebuffer. This means that you can have a basic graphical web browser on your server console. It looks better than “links -g”.

• Last year August 2016 I experimented with Wayland, the alternative to the X Window system. My goal was to see if it is possible to run a Plasma5 desktop session on a Wayland compositor instead of using X.Org. There was one big showstopper at the time. Kwin_wayland has a dependency on the ‘logind’ DBus API and at that time last year, this API was only provided by systemd-logind. Luckily, someone treated the logind component of systemd similarly to its udev component. Where Slackware already uses “eudev” which is a standalone udev source extracted from the systemd source, there’s also “elogind” which is the standalone logind sourcecode, extracted from systemd sourcecode. With some difficulty I managed to create a Slackware package for elogind and everything compiled. I just could not get a working Wayland session. As it turns out today, that failure to get Wayland working was an omission on my side… more on that later.

Red Hat Family

Finance

Fedora

• There were two primary reasons for the substantial delay of this release. The first was our discovery of the security issue that would come to be known as XSA-237. As part of our coordination with the Xen Project Security Team, we had to wait through the embargo period until XSA-237 was publicly released before integrating various PCI passthrough fixes.

• The second reason for the delay was the last-minute discovery of a bug related to resizing the root filesystem of a qube. We faced a choice between (1) keeping the partition layout the same at the cost of increasing maintenance complexity in the future or (2) changing the partition layout to simplify the code at the cost of rebuilding all the templates and delaying the release. We chose the second option, which resulted in an additional one week delay, but we’re confident that this is the most prudent move in the long run.

Debian Family

Derivatives

• Arriving more than three months after Proxmox VE 5.0 release, Proxmox VE 5.1 is a point release adding updated components based on the upstream repositories of the Debian GNU/Linux 9.2 “Stretch” operating system, along with the Linux 4.13 kernel series and the latest Ceph 12.2 “Luminous” and ZFS 0.7.2 releases.

• “Proxmox VE 5.1 comes with production-ready Ceph cluster packages. The virtualization platform integrates Ceph v12.2 Luminous, the long-term stable release of the software-defined storage solution. Users can now implement Ceph clusters as distributed storage solution in production,” reads today’s announcement.

Canonical/Ubuntu

• Congratulations to Team *Buntu on the release of our Artful Aardvark 17.10, featuring all your favourite desktop environments, kubernetes 1.8, the latest OpenStack, and security updates for 9 months, which takes us all the way to our next enterprise release, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

• A brumous development cycle always makes for cool-headed work and brisk progress on the back of breem debate.

• As always, 18.04 LTS will represent the sum of all our interests.

• For those of you with bimodal inclinations, there’s the official upstream Kubernetes-on-Ubuntu spell for ‘conjure-up kubernetes’ with bijou multi-cloud goodness. We also have spells for OpenStack on Ubuntu and Hadoop on Ubuntu, so conjure-up is your one-stop magic shop for at-scale boffo big data, cloud and containers. Working with upstreams to enable fast deployment and operations of their stuff on all the clouds is a beamish way to spend the day.

• If your thing is bling, pick a desktop! We’ve defaulted to GNOME, but we’re the space where KDE and GNOME and MATE and many others come together to give users real and easy choice of desktops. And if you’re feeling boned by the lack of Unity in open source, you might want to hop onto the channel and join those who are updating Unity7 for the newest X and kernel graphics in 18.04.

• The Ubuntu 18.04 LTS name has been revealed — say hello to ‘Bionic Beaver’!

• Announcing the name with his trademark alliterative flair set firmly to full, Mark Shuttleworth says the 18.04 LTS release will “represent the sum of all our interests.”

• In the past couple of days, Canonical released its latest version of Ubuntu 17.10, now it’s time for the company to look ahead to its next release 18.04 LTS (Long Term Support). As will all versions before it, 18.04 will carry a goofy codename with it. The company’s CEO, today, announced that the upcoming release will be dubbed “Bionic Beaver”.

• Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, the recently named “Bionic Beaver”, will most likely be shipping with a Linux 4.15-based kernel.

• If you’re running Ubuntu 17.10 (or any distro that uses GNOME Shell) you can do so easily by installing a network monitor GNOME extension.

• A wealth of network monitor extensions are available for GNOME Shell (and by extension, excuse the pun, Ubuntu too) including ‘netmonitor‘ and ‘simple net speed‘.

• But one of my favourites (because of its sheer simplicity) is the perfectly titled NetSpeed.

• Ubuntu’s decision to ditch Unity took all of us — even me — by surprise when announced back in April.

• Now Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth shares more details about why Ubuntu chose to drop Unity.

• And the answer might surprise…

• Actually, no; the answer probably won’t surprise you.

• Back in April, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth, in a move that shocked everyone, announced that the company was ending support for Unity in Ubuntu. For the uninitiated, Unity was the company’s plan to build a converged Linux desktop that would work on mobile devices, desktops, and even TVs. Its latest release, Ubuntu 17.10, marks the first version of the OS to ship without Unity, employing GNOME instead. After several months of speculation, Shuttleworth has finally outed the rationale behind the decision.

• Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth has been telling the world+dog why he killed off Unity and it is all about getting busy, ready for an IPO.

• The Unity desktop was introduced back in 2011 and while Shuttleworth was rather keen on it, other Ubuntu fans were not.

• Based in Dallas, Texas, Cinergy operates a chain of three cinema entertainment centres (CECs) with ambitious expansion plans. CECs are an all in one entertainment venue incorporating cinemas, restaurants, bowling and other activities such as escape rooms. With so many activities to communicate including the latest promotions and film times, Cinergy’s digital signage set up needs to be efficient, secure and effective.

• One of the hottest events this month for Linux/Ubuntu users is the release of Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark). For those who are not fans of Ubuntu and Linux in general, this might be just one more release to miss, but this is a release you should take note of. The major news here is that this is the first release since Canonical decided to move away from Unity. But there is more!

• This is not surprising considering the logic behind the codename and versioning of Ubuntu releases. All Ubuntu releases are codenamed with two words, both starting with the same letter. The first word of the codename is an adjective and the second word is usually an endangered species and sometimes mythical characters. The release codenames are in incremental order as well.

• Canonical has announced the release of the Ubuntu 17.10 operating system featuring a new GNOME desktop on Wayland and new versions of KDE, MATE and Budgie to suit a range of tastes.

Flavours and Variants

• After finishing installing Linux Mint, you might think you’re all set and ready to go. And while Linux Mint does have some great software pre-installed, there is still some some things you need to configure and lock down. In this article, I’ll share my configuration and security setup that I recommend if you’re running Linux Mint.

• At first, users might wonder why Linux Mint offers both its Ubuntu-based Linux Mint Standard Edition and the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE). Since Debian, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu all derive from the Debian repositories, isn’t the family resemblance too close to bother?

• To the casual user, the choice may appear to be no more than the result of Linux Mint trying to accommodate as many users as possible. However, depending on your needs and preferences, you may find that one edition suits your needs more than the other.

• In general, the two editions have much in common. Both the Debian and the standard editions are available in 32- and 64-bit downloads that default to the Cinnamon or Mate desktops. Both use the same installer, and both open for the first time on desktops with similar wallpapers and tools. Both, too, can add other desktop environments from the Mint repositories that they both share. According to Linux Mint, LMDE is faster than the standard edition, but in practice the difference is slight enough that many users probably never notice.

• However, look closer, and the differences start to appear — although these difference have changed over the years. For example, it is no longer true that the LMDE is a rolling release — one that adds new packages as they become available, rather than waiting for a general release — although LMDE 1 was.

• Also, contrary to a widely circulating story, LMDE 2 is fully capable of using Ubuntu PPA repositories for packages in development. The PPAs simply have to be added as a package source in /etc/apt/. Alternatively, their packages can be downloaded and installed using the dpkg command. Since Debian and Ubuntu have been different distros for well over a decade now, you may find that some packages from PPAs are not compatible with Debian, but these cases are relatively rare, particularly if you stick to productivity applications rather than core system components.

• Xubuntu 17.10 was just released, but planning for Xubuntu 18.04 – the next long-term support (LTS) release – began quite some time ago. For our users, LTS releases mostly mean a system that is going to be more stable and supported for longer. For us contributors, this means a bunch of things.

• As a repercussion of the longer support cycle and the sought out stable nature of the LTS releases, we do not want to introduce (too many) new components, libraries or other technical changes, as each change has regression potential. This is also a delicate balancing act between getting bugs fixed but keeping enough things as they are.

• The Linux Mint crew has confirmed today they will be discontinuing future releases of their KDE spin following next month’s Linux Mint 18.3 release.

• Linux Mint 18.3 will be the last version of this Ubuntu-derived distribution to feature a dedicated KDE Plasma Edition.

• They are dropping their KDE support as the Linux Mint team envisions themselves as a “production distribution…a complete desktop operating system”, and as part of that focus on their own Cinnamon Desktop Environment. But they will continue their support for Cinnamon-like desktops include MATE and Xfce where their custom tools still play nicely.

• Linux Mint 18.3 will have “full support” for Flatpak, the ‘next-gen’ app distribution format for Linux, the project has announced in its latest monthly newsletter.

• Linux Mint is a fine Ubuntu-based operating system, although I am not sure it needs to exist anymore. After all, its popularity is largely thanks to the historic disdain for Canonical’s Unity desktop environment. With the Unity DE now dead, fewer people will seek out the alternative that is Mint.

• While both the Cinnamon and Mate versions of Linux Mint are decent choices for computer users, there was one version that was always utterly bizarre — the KDE Edition. Don’t get me wrong, KDE is a fine environment, but Kubuntu already exists. Having a version of Mint using KDE was redundant and confusing. Thankfully, today, the Linux Mint team announces it is finally killing the KDE edition.

Devices/Embedded

• SinoVoip has launched an open source “Banana Pi M2 Magic” SBC with a quad -A7 Allwinner A33, WiFi and BT, a 40-pin RPi header, and a 51 x 51mm footprint.

• SinoVoip has introduced its smallest and lowest cost Banana Pi hacker board to date. The open-spec, 51 x 51mm Banana Pi M2 Magic — AKA BPI-M2 Magic or BPI-M2M — is now selling for $23 on AliExpress, making it competitive with other tiny, low-cost hacker boards with Raspberry Pi style 40-pin headers such as FriendlyElec’s $25, 40 x 40mm NanoPi Neo Plus2 or Shenzhen Xunlong’s $14, 60 x 45mm Orange Pi R1.

• Italian RFID technology producer Datalogic has unveiled a high-end RFID portal reader designed for real-time inventory management in warehouse, automatic gate, and retail environments. The Linux-driven DLR-PR001 is essentially an IoT gateway for RFID and other inputs. It’s especially suited for “complex AutoID scenarios where data can be collected and fed directly to the reader from multiple sources such as smart card readers, bar code readers, GPS and other in-field sensors,” says the company.

• Both boards can run 64-bit Fedora Linux, as well as Windows builds up to 64-bit Windows 10. The boards are said to be suitable for embedded applications including digital signage, rolling stock, industrial robots, and aerospace.

Tizen

• Samsung unveiled extra-secure versions of its Artik COMs, including a new Artik 055s model, and it’s switching its Artik 530 and 710 from Fedora to Ubuntu.

• At last week’s Samsung Developer Conference (SDC) 2017 in San Francisco, Samsung announced several updates to its Artik line of computer-on-modules. The Korean CE giant has always touted the security features of its Artik modules, but it now has taken the extra step of releasing new security enhanced versions of its major Artik modules. The ultra-secure Artik 053s, 530s, and 710s COMs are priced the same as the earlier, almost identical Artik 053, 530, and 710, which will presumably be phased out.

Android

• We can publish the first global survey of Nokia HMD Android smartphone marketing support, by the carrier community. This is an informal, unscientific, incomplete survey but enough countries are covered to make a posting about the topic. We can already cover 30 countries with at least some data.

Free Software/Open Source

• Not all that many years ago, pretty much every webpage on the Internet was, at some level, designed painstakingly by hand. It was tough, and before CSS really took hold and became well supported across most common browsers, it often involved hacking a layout together by using HTML tables in a way they were never really envisioned to support.

• While some designers developed workflows completely based around manual editing of raw HTML files, the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor began to emerge as a tool of empowerment to millions of amateur and professional designers who didn’t know, or at least hadn’t mastered, the art of hypertext markup.

• Open source software is everywhere these days — from Microsoft to government agencies to (maybe) your car. In a world where open source is so pervasive, I can’t but wonder: Do the myriad companies that now push open source really believe in it, or is it mere virtue signaling?

• This is a fair question to ask. Many of the companies that are now very publicly promoting open source were once antithetical to open source.

• Adjoint, developer of smart contracts and distributed ledger technology for the financial industry, announced today the release of their open source platform Uplink. Adjoint will use this platform to propel development of domain-specific applications in the financial sector across banking, capital markets, insurance, asset management, and commodities trading.

• You can’t update what you can’t find. Too many people end up rewriting their entire resume from scratch because they lost the file. Do yourself a huge favor: Use a version control system for your resume and all other important files. Version control: It’s not just for code. I use GitLab for this purpose, but GitHub, BitBucket, or any other version control service will also work very well. Not only will your file stay safe and backed up, it’s also stored offsite in case of disaster or hard drive crash. Also recommended: If you use a version control service, have a private repository for your resume. Few people want to receive a pull request on their own resume.

Events

• Many companies that provide an API also include SDKs. At SendGrid, such SDKs send several billions of emails monthly through SendGrid’s Web API. Recently, SendGrid re-built their seven open source SDKs (Python, PHP, C#, Ruby, Node.js, Java, and Go) to support 233 API endpoints, a process which I’ll describe in my upcoming talk at APIStrat in Portland.

• Fortunately, when we started this undertaking, Matt Bernier had just launched our Developer Experience team, covering our open source documentation and libraries. I joined the team as the first Developer Experience Engineer, with a charter to manage the open source libraries in order to ensure a fast and painless integration with every API SendGrid produces.

Web Browsers

Chrome

• A few moments ago, Google promoted its latest Chrome 62 release to Android devices, giving users a heads up of what to expect the next time they update their favorite web browser.

• Google Chrome 62 was promoted last week to the stable channel for Mac, GNU/Linux, and Windows devices, a rather smaller update that introduces a more aggressive “Not secure” warning for websites that are still using the HTTP protocol instead of the more secure HTTPS one, along with support for OpenType Variable Fonts.

Databases

• SQLite 3.21 is now out as the newest feature release for this widely-used embedded database library.

• The first feature up for SQLite 3.21 when running atop the Flash-Friendly File-System and with SQLite built with batch atomic write enabled, it now supports the atomic-write capabilities of F2FS. This mode should yield “greatly reduced” transaction overhead. F2FS is the first file-system supporting batch atomic write behavior for SQLite and then doesn’t write to the rollback journal for making transactions up to twice as fast while reducing SSD wear and tear.

Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

• Developer ecosystems grow and thrive in a vibrant and supported community – something Oracle believes in, has invested in, and continues to invest in with projects including EE4J, OpenJDK, MySQL, GlassFish, Java, Linux, PHP, Apache, Eclipse, Berkeley DB, NetBeans, VirtualBox, and Xen. This required significant investment in resources for developing, testing, optimizing, and supporting these open source technologies. As a Platinum member of the Linux Foundation and a member since day one, Oracle participates in a number of other Linux Foundation projects, including the Open Container Initiative (OCI), Xen Project, Hyplerledger, Automotive Grade Linux, and the R Consortium.

Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

• Tesla CEO Elon Musk always said that the mission of the company is to accelerate the advent of electric transport (and later they added renewable energy). They want to achieve that by producing competitive electric cars, but also by accelerating the whole industry’s transition, which is why they open-sourced their patents.

Funding

BSD

• We are excited to announce the release of pfSense® software version 2.4.1, now available for new installations and upgrades!

• pfSense software version 2.4.1 is a maintenance release bringing security patches and stability fixes for issues discovered in pfSense 2.4.0-RELEASE.

• pfSense 2.4.1-RELEASE updates and installation images are available now!

FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

• The EU is currently revising its copyright rules in its proposal for the EU Copyright Directive in the Digital Single Market, so that they may be more suitable for the modern digital age. Instead of recognising the realities of how different content is being shared online, the current EU Copyright Directive proposal, and in particular its Article 13 targeted at online hosting providers, threatens our ability to access public code repositories and share code online. The new rules enshrined in Article 13 intend to introduce new obligations for code hosting platforms in order to prevent any possible copyright infringement: if they do not implement these, the platforms will end up being directly liable for their users’ activity. [...]

• When glibc 2.26 was released in August it was a noteworthy release with plenty of optimizations and introduced its own per-thread cache. With the next installment of the GNU C Library there will also be many more optimizations.

• A few days back I wrote about more functions receiving FMA optimizations including powerf/logf/exp2f/log2f. That article also mentioned how replacing some old Assembly versions of functions with generic C code has also resulted in significant performance improvements. That’s not all.

• Intel has published more patches for supporting new instruction set extensions that will debut with “Ice Lake” processors when launched in late 2018 or early 2019.

• Besides Intel recently landing CET support in GCC as the Control-flow Enforcement Technology, their compiler engineers have been working on supporting the other instruction set extensions coming with Icelake processors, which is the successor to the next-gen Cannonlake CPUs.

Public Services/Government

• The global movement for open access to publicly-funded research stems from the sensible proposition that if the government has used taxpayers’ money to fund research, the publication of the results of that research should be freely-licensed. Exactly the same rationale underpins the argument that software code that the government has funded to be written should be made available as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Public Money, Public Code is a campaign of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) that seeks to transform that ideal into European law.

Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

• We’ve seen that transparency in the workplace can be a very powerful tool. If used properly, it can ensure that the right people have access to the right things. It can enable outside perspectives and additional context that might’ve been lost without it. If you choose to make some parts of your organization (or all of it!) embrace transparency, then be willing to tackle problems that your team encounters and be passionate about solving them.

Open Hardware/Modding

• Inception Machines based in the United Kingdom have created a new open source high-performance large format desktop 3D printer aptly named the Inception X1. Which is now available to back via Kickstarter with pledges starting from £1,595 and shipping expected to take place during May 2018.

• Most readers saw it for what it was: a proof of concept to spark discussion about the use of open source technology, government spending, and one man’s desire to build cool stuff from his couch.

Programming/Development

• The Apache Software Foundation said today that it’s designating open-source machine learning software first developed by Salesforce.com Inc. as its latest top-level project.

• The pace of machine learning technology development got another boost this week with the announcement that an open source platform donated last year by Salesforce has been promoted by the Apache Foundation.

• Apache PredictionIO, designated a “top-level” project on Tuesday (Oct. 24), aims to democratize machine learning by giving developers a full stack for creating intelligent applications that could be deployed in production “without having to cobble together underlying technologies,” said Simon Chan, founder of Prediction IO who now services as senior director for Salesforce’s AI initiative called Einstein.

• Milinkovich also noted it will take time to get all this accomplished and interaction with the Java community still needs to be defined. Eclipse has created the ee4j-community mailing list and developers are encouraged to provide feedback and to contribute.

• Google today has pushed out Android Studio 3.0 as the latest stable release of this integrated development environment for their mobile operating system.

• These are the steps I take to solve problems when coding, and the ones I try to impart to students and junior developers when I’m helping them with an issue. I’d like to see more coding education programs—whether in academic computer science, bootcamps, or self-paced tutorials—provide their own instructions on this process. The exact process will depend on the person, the organization, and the work they’re doing—but knowing how to solve problems is a foundational skill to being a programmer. If you work with students or less experienced developers, see what you can do to help them develop this skill.

Leftovers

Health/Nutrition

Security

• According to the chief executive of J.P. Morgan‘s investment and corporate banking, Daniel Pinto, governments should be taking steps to create and implement new standards for cyber security. At the same time, there’s a demand for an increased insight into the information available on cyber threats in the marketplace.

Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

• Singapore is capping the number of private passenger cars allowed on its streets, the city’s transportation regulator announced on Monday.

• Singapore is a city of 5.6 million people packed into an area smaller than New York City. Like any big city it has to worry about traffic congestion, but as a sovereign city-state it is able to take more extreme measures than most cities.

• To own a car in Singapore, you need a certificate of entitlement from the Singapore government. The supply is limited, and certificates are distributed by auction. Each year, the government sets a target for the growth of private vehicles and auctions off a corresponding number of certificates. Next year, the growth target will be zero.

Finance

• Congress overturned a rule by an Obama-appointed financial regulator that would have made it easier for consumers to sue banks in groups, with Vice President Mike Pence casting a tiebreaking vote in the Senate.

• The 51-50 vote handed the financial industry its most significant legislative victory since President Donald Trump took office and was a rebuke of Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray, who pressed ahead with his agenda in defiance of Republicans.

• As the biennial World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference is drawing closer, a number of stakeholders are pushing for their priorities to be heard. For its part, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has called on WTO members to protect smallholder farmers.

• In a 24 October press release, FAO director general José Graziano da Silva said ongoing international trade negotiations should focus on global trade agreements, harmonised food safety standards and measures that benefit rather than harm poor family farmers in the developing world.

• The imbroglio which might cause a major impediment to the World Trade Organization’s functioning is thickening as the United States continues to block the selection process to fill vacancies in the WTO Appellate Body, according to sources.

• The WTO Appellate Body is a standing body of seven members appointed by the WHO Dispute Settlement Body (DSB), who hear appeals from reports issued by panels in disputes brought by WTO members, according to the WTO.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Vice President Pence cast the final vote to break a 50-50 tie. The banking industry had been lobbying hard to roll back the regulation from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The bureau had moved to ban most types of mandatory arbitration clauses found in the fine print of agreements consumers often enter into when opening a checking account or getting a credit card.

• None of these appalling features of our current politics should ever be regarded as normal. We must never allow ourselves to lapse into thinking that this is just the way things are now. If we simply become inured to this condition, thinking that this is just politics as usual, then heaven help us. Without fear of the consequences, and without consideration of the rules of what is politically safe or palatable, we must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal. They are not normal.

• If a president is dangerous, he should be checked and balanced by Congress. But this Republican Congress still chooses partisanship over principle.

• This is the final proof that USA needs more than a “two-party” system. Clearly there are more than two views on just about everything and the dispossessed politically are not participating in the so-called democracy of USA. The Democrats have an extremely liberal wing pushing for single-payer healthcare. The Democrats have a centrist group who mostly seek individual liberty and support for the disadvantaged. The GOP have a centrist group who mostly seek individual liberty and want to curtail government to a large extent. The GOP also have an extreme group who want to return to the Stone Age of government where it was about armies and holding territory and little else. Why aren’t there four parties or more representing four segments of society? Isn’t that more democratic than having a tyrant in the Oval Office and a bunch of sycophants in the Senate? There isn’t even a hint of “bipartisan” legislative action there, just constipation.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A scandal is emerging in Russia after several officials of Russian site-blocking body Rozcomnadzor were charged with fraud. Those arrested include the watchdog’s spokesman and top lawyer, both of whom have been placed under house arrest. It’s alleged that the telecoms authority ‘employed’ ghost staff whose salaries were actually paid to existing employees, on top of their own money.

• In a nutshell, the experiment is a localised test taking place in Bolivia, Cambodia, Guatemala, Serbia, Slovakia and Sri Lanka that splits brand content into its own ‘Explore’ tab, leaving the News Feed for personal (friends and family) and sponsored posts.

• he First Amendment was crafted in an era when the government was the most powerful entity on Earth. That’s no longer necessarily true.

• Sure, when it comes to physical power, the government reigns supreme. Nobody can compete with an institution legally allowed to possess tanks, hellfire missiles, and nuclear bombs. But in the arena of information, agencies like the CIA and FBI no longer remain unchallenged. Instead, internet companies like Google and activist websites like Wikileaks have become the global gatekeepers of knowledge.

• With the BJP objecting to “incorrect references” in Vijay’s Mersal, here’s a look at some films that hit a roadblock due to objections raised by political parties and groups, before and after they hit the screens.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Congress is poised to vote on extending or reforming NSA surveillance powers in the coming weeks, and one issue has risen to the forefront of the fight: backdoor searches. These are searches in which FBI, CIA, and NSA agents search through the communications of Americans collected by the NSA without a warrant. This practice violates the Fourth Amendment. But the government argues that since the NSA originally collected the communications under statutory surveillance powers, the government doesn’t need a warrant to search through them later. This is a “backdoor” around the Constitutional rights that protect our digital communications.

• However, it is significant that the two largest EU Member States – Germany and France – did not sign the letter. Their absence reflects concerns by many citizens in those countries about transferring data out of the EU. Edward Snowden’s revelations of massive surveillance by the NSA – and the UK’s GCHQ – as data crosses the Atlantic have heightened fears that once personal data is transferred abroad, there are few constraints on what might be done with it. Although spying also takes place within the EU, there seems to be a view that the closer to home that personal data remains, the greater the control people retain over it.

• Wray, speaking at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Philadelphia on Sunday, says that in just 11-months, the FBI failed to gain access to nearly 7,000 smartphones.

• Imagine, if you can, a smaller version of the web. A web without dickbars, or scroll jacking, or chum boxes, or popup video, but still a web filled with informative articles about the 27 blockchains you need to be using right now. The good news is this web exists, but unfortunately your browser doesn’t connect to it by default. For that, you need the miniwebproxy.

• As the Supreme Court readies itself for an important Fourth Amendment decision, the supporting briefs are beginning to trickle in. At stake is a potential redefining of the expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment, something that was diminished by the 1979 Supreme Court decision that created the so-called Third Party Doctrine.

• In Carpenter’s case, the third party records in question are something gathered by all cell phone companies: location data. The government used months of cell site location data to retrace Carpenter’s movements, all without a warrant. This warrantless access turns cell phones into proxy tracking devices for the government. The government is perfectly fine with this turn of events and is asking the Supreme Court to uphold the lower court’s decision.

• As Congress considers reforming Section 702, the NSA’s warrantless surveillance authority, EFF and ACLU are asking a federal court of appeals in New York to find this surveillance unconstitutional. Section 702 allows the government to collect billions of electronic communications—including those of Americans—and to use these communications in criminal investigations, all without a warrant. Our amicus brief in United States v. Hasbajrami argues that this practice represents an end run around the Fourth Amendment, which protects the privacy of e-mail and other electronic communications.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Demonstrations continue in St. Louis, Missouri, over the acquittal of former St. Louis police officer Jason Stockley of first degree murder charges in the 2011 killing of Anthony Lamar Smith. Very likely some protesters would tell you they are distraught and angry, not just about this case, but about the undeniable fact that US law enforcement rarely pay any penalty for murdering black people, whatever the circumstance. According to an FBI intelligence assessment recently leaked to Foreign Policy, that may make those people “black identity extremists.”

• You may remember that shortly after the first Muslim Ban was announced, public confusion erupted about whether or not it applied to lawful permanent residents (LPRs). But it wasn’t only the public that felt confused — top government officials did, too. These documents reveal deep confusion among DHS agencies on this question.

• Hours after the first Muslim Ban came down on January 27, Acting Commissioner of CBP Kevin McAleenan wrote to officials at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to ask, “Was it your understanding that the EO was intended to apply to LPRs?” Gene Hamilton, senior counselor to DHS, responded, “They should generally be provided the case-by-case exemption . . . provided that it is in the national interest to do so.” And McAleenan replied, “Understood. We want to faithfully and quickly execute the EO, but want everyone to know that this guidance changes our status.” In other words, Hamilton’s answer is not what McAleenan expected. Indeed, reflecting this, McAleenan’s estimate of affected travelers more than tripled from 175 to 600-800 individuals per day upon hearing that LPRs should be included in the estimate.

• In a Wednesday blog post, Robert Scoble, the Silicon Valley pundit who was recently publicly accused of sexual assault and harassment, now claims that he didn’t sexually harass anyone because they were never his employees. “I don’t have employees, I don’t cut checks for investment,” he wrote. “None of the women who came forward were ever in a position where I could make or break their careers. Sexual Harassment requires that I have such power.”

• [...]

• Joanna Grossman, a law professor at Southern Methodist University who has written extensively on this issue, told Ars that Scoble’s understanding of the law is “just wrong.”

• “Power in general isn’t what matters,” she said. “There is no requirement that the harasser have power or any specific relationship with the person.”

• Another law professor, Susan Carle, of American University, told Ars that Scoble’s claims are only correct in a very narrow sense—Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, a federal law that specifically deals with an employee-employer relationship.

Intellectual Monopolies

• A health advocacy group today announced that it has challenged a set of United States patents for a hepatitis C medicine. The group says drug maker Gilead Sciences has obtained unmerited patents for sofosbuvir, blocking millions of US patients from affordable treatment.

• The Initiative for Medicines, Access & Knowledge (I-MAK) filed the first-ever set of US patent challenges against sofosbuvir with the US Patent Trial and Appeal Board. The group challenged six patents, arguing that sofosbuvir’s patents do not meet patentability criteria such as novelty and non-obviousness, according to a press release.

• As reported on the SPC Blog, on 3 October 2017, the Swiss Federal Patent Court issued a judgment confirming the validity of Gilead’s Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPC) for a composition containing tenofovir disoproxil with emtricitabine (marketed as TRUVADA). The UK arm of the same dispute has led Arnold J to refer a question to the ECJ (“What are the criteria for deciding whether ‘the product is protected by a basic patent in force’ in Article 3(a) of the SPC Regulation?”, [2017] EWHC 13 (Pat)).

• Teva (or rather Mepha, its Swiss subsidiary) sought a declaration of invalidity of Gilead’s Swiss SPC for the combination of tenofovir disoproxil and emtricitabine. It did not attack the validity of the base patent EP 915 894. Neither was it disputed that a generic of TRUVADA would infringe the (expired) base patent and that Gilead’s SPC was therefore valid under the infringement test.

• The base patent explicitly mentions tenofovir disoproxil, but not emtricitabine. Teva argued that Switzerland should abandon the infringement test traditionally employed (BGE 124 III 375 – Fosinopril) in favour of the ECJ’s “core inventive advance” test. Applied to the combination of tenofovir disoproxil and emtricitabine, this would lead to the nullity of the SPC (Arnold J concurs).

• The United Arab Emirates (UAE) this week blocked the first request by Qatar for a World Trade Organization dispute settlement panel to rule on measures by UAE that Qatar alleges interfere with trade in goods and services and with protection of Qatar’s intellectual property rights. Neighbouring countries say they have taken actions out of concern that Qatar is providing financial support for terrorist groups.

• Epson are alleging that certain compatible ink cartridges infringe their patents B2433473 and amendment GB2465293. The alleged infringement concerns the alignment of chip contacts on their cartridges. So far, we know Epson have issued takedowns against compatible cartridges T16 XL; T18 XL; T24 XL; T26 XL; T27 XL; T29 XL; T33 XL plus T0715 XL; T0797 XL; T0807 XL.

• [...]

• At this stage, we cannot know if there is any merit to the Epson’s claim that these compatible cartridges infringe their patents but using patents in this way would undermine the legal regime that protects production of compatible products, including components, such as ink cartridges. That would be extremely bad for consumers.

Copyrights

• Just recently, The Walking Dead Season 8 was kicked off with the 100th episode of this zombie kill-fest. It could be watched legally on different networks. However, just like the rival Game of Thrones, TWD is also a victim of online piracy and the fans download the illegal torrents in large number.

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