● 01.19.20

● Links 19/1/2020: Wine 5.0 RC6, Alpine 3.11.3

Posted in News Roundup at 4:54 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

Desktop/Laptop

• Now, if you think that Linux is intimidating, confusing, or (and I mean this nicely) for nerds: I hear you. At first glance it can often look that way.

• But Linux suffers from poor marketing rather than poor product. With no multi-million dollar marketing campaign out there promoting one specific flavour of Linux it’s left to enthusiasts to ‘sell’ each system, usually on its technical merits — which is what makes things seem rather niche.

• However it’s 2020 and Linux-based operating systems (called ‘distros’) like Ubuntu and Linux Mint are very user-friendly. They let you continue to do pretty much all of that you currently do on Windows 7 just as easily, but with safety first.

• After 10 years of service, Microsoft has finally decided to cease support for Windows 7. This means that the OS will no longer receive any type of updates and that anyone still using it will be exposed to online threats.

• Given this change, many users are left wondering what they should do. Most think that they are limited to just three choices…

• As per the information available, there are 200+ million devices that are still running Windows 7. The number might increase, as, it is difficult to estimate the offline devices which might be still running Windows 7.

Server

IBM

• With the release of RedHat Linux 8.1 Enterprise, we knew that it was only a matter of time for CentOS V8 (1911) to be released. Now that it is finally here let’s have a look at what this new update has in store for us.

• What’s New

• Since RedHat Linux 8.1 Enterprise powers this version of CentOS, it’s going to accompany all the features and improvements that came with the latest RHLE. If you’ve not been keeping up with RHLE, you need not worry as we’re going to discuss all the changes that were implemented with this update.

• Open source projects are the epicenter of technology innovation today. Docker and Kubernetes are revolutionizing cloud-native computing, along with data-focused projects like Mongo and Redis and many others. Even as open source projects drive innovation, however, sponsoring companies face a growing existential threat from hyper-scale cloud providers.

• Red Hat is the recognized leader in enterprise open source support. It’s a successful public company with a track record of growth, so it was somewhat puzzling to understand why the Red Hat board decided to sell to IBM this past year.

• Red Hat engineers have been developing virtual data path acceleration (vDPA) as a standard data plane that is more flexible than VirtIO full hardware offloading. The goal is providing wire-speed Ethernet interfaces to virtual machines in an open manner.

• This patch series was sent out on Thursday by Red Hat’s Jason Wang. This implements the vDPA bus for the Linux kernel as well as providing a vDPA device simulator and supporting vDPA-based transport within VirtIO.

• I read an interesting question on the Red Hat Learning Community forums recently. What is the latest kernel version for my version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)? In this post we’ll see how you can find out.

• Some users, trying to be helpful, gave a specific version of the kernel package. Unfortunately, that might only be valid at the time of writing. A better approach would be to understand where to get that information about the latest kernel version for a given version of RHEL.

• When Red Hat releases a major or minor update to RHEL, they ship it with a specific branch of the kernel version. This page in the customer portal shows the kernel version “branch” associated with a release of RHEL (e.g. RHEL7.6).

• Security updates play a crucial role in safeguarding your Linux system against cyber-attacks and breaches which can have a devastating effect on your critical files, databases and other resources on your system.

• You can manually apply security patches on your CentOS 8 system, but it is much easier as a system administrator to configure automatic updates. This will give you the confidence that your system will be periodically checking for any security patches or updates and applying them.

Kernel Space

• I’m announcing the release of the 5.4.13 kernel.

• All users of the 5.4 kernel series must upgrade.

• The updated 5.4.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.4.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:

• https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s…

• After months of work by Facebook engineers, it looks like the new async discard support for Btrfs is ready for the upcoming Linux 5.6 cycle as a win for this Linux file-system on solid-state storage making use of TRIM/DISCARD functionality.

• Btrfs has been handling its DISCARD functionality synchronously during the transaction commit, but that can lead to performance issues depending upon the amount of TRIM’ing required and how the drive behaves. With this async discard support, the work is punted off the transaction commit.

• This video goes over BTRFS in-depth, and in this guide, you will learn basic commands, structure, snapshots, and raid capabilities.

Ryzen

• This week our AMD Ryzen 9 3950X review sample finally arrived and so we’ve begun putting it through the paces of many different benchmarks. The first of these Linux tests with the Ryzen 9 3950X is looking at the performance up against the Ryzen 9 3900X and Intel Core i9 9900KS in 149 different tests.

• The Ryzen 9 3950X is AMD’s new $749 USD processor just below the Threadripper 3960X. The 3950X offers sixteen cores / 32 threads with a 3.5GHz base clock and 4.7GHz maximum turbo clock. Over the 3900X at $499 is four extra cores / eight threads, a 300MHz lowering of the base clock, 100MHz higher maximum boost clock, and larger L1 and L2 caches while both of these Zen 2 processors share the same TDP of 105 Watts.

Applications

• Presentation always plays a vital role in decision making, and in closing any kind of deal. It provides graphical descriptions and clears the situation. In ancient times, we used papers for presentation. With the revolution of our modern technology, we shifted to screens from the papers and developed a lot of tools for making our work easy. If any company’s core system in Linux, then they should go through the whole post and find out the best presentation software for Linux.

• Our world has many types of operating systems for our personal computers and laptops. Among them, Linux is one of the most popular ones because it’s free and has a lot of open-source tools. With that, a user can customize his/ her’s operating system at his/ her will. But getting the right presentation software for Linux distributions can be quite tough. Don’t fear, and we will discuss the presentation software in our content today. I hope you will get the right match for your work.

• Written in C, PostgreSQL which is also known as Postgres is one of the most popular relational database management systems. macOS server has it as default database and is also available for other operating systems such as Windows, FreeBCD, OpenBCD and Linux. As PostgreSQL is one of the most used database management systems in the world, it is used as the backbone of many small to large applications and software’s.

• Even though I feel working in command-line is best way to learn anything in the world of application and software development, there are some limitations while working with databases in command-line. It requires great experience of working in command-line or it could get really messy for newbies as well as for professionals.

• As I already wrote in my last blog post there’s much development in XMPP, not only on the server side, but also on the client side. It’s surely not exaggerated to say that Conversations on Android is the de-facto standard client-wise. So, if you have an Android phone, that’s the client you want to try&use. As I don’t have Android, I can’t comment on it. The situation on Linux is good as well: there are such clients as Gajim, which is an old player in the “market” and is available on other platforms as well, but there is with Dino a new/modern client as well that you may want to try out.

• The situation for macOS and iOS users are not that good as for Windows, Linux or Android users. But in the end all clients have their pro and cons… I’ll try to summarize a few clients on Linux, macOS and iOS…

Instructionals/Technical

• With all the talk of VPN (Virtual Private Network) services to keep you safe and my general lack of interest in the subject, I was talking to Eric Adams, my co-host on the DLN Xtend podcast about the subject. He was telling me that he was hesitant to recommend any service so he gave me some option to try out. The one I chose, after doing a little reading was Windscribe.

• I am new to the VPN game so I want to be careful in saying, I am recommending this as the perfect solution but rather demonstrating how I set it up and how I am using it on my openSUSE Tumbleweed system. Much in the same way Eric informed me about it.

• The cURL utility is a simple yet powerful command-line tool for transferring files to/from remote locations. Its full form stands for ‘Client URL’. It has cemented its position as one of the best tools for remote data transfer over the internet. cURL offers a robust collection of commands that enable many advanced functionalities. Additionally, most curl command in Linux works exceptionally well for headless agents and/or automated scripts. To help you get started with cURL, our editors have compiled this thoughtfully curated introductory guide. Although it’s meant as a starting point for beginning Linux users, seasoned users can use it as a reference guide.

• The cURL utility supports a wide variety of protocols and features. We’ve outlined the essential commands with appropriate examples and suggest readers try them interactively for gaining first-hand experience on them. As with any Linux tool, your expertise with cURL will only grow when you continue to use it in everyday life.

• in 1997, directly after University, I started as an IT specialist and have been working in this area ever since in different roles. During these more than 20 years of being part of and later also leading IT related projects, our teams were using several methods and supporting software to plan our projects in the best possible way. Not all were equally successful. Currently our teams are working in a Scrum approach which is part of the Agile methodology. To support this way of working we use among others a Kanban board to plan and monitor our work. Kanban is nothing new but seems extremely popular at the moment. It is not only a great approach for large and complex projects, but also on a smaller scale for your study and your personal projects. In this article, which will be a part of a series on productivity apps, I want to explain three topics: What is Kanban, Why should you use Kanban to be more productive and What are the best Kanban apps for Linux.

• The beginning of a new year is always a great time to evaluate new ways to become more efficient. Many people try out new productivity tools or figure out how to optimize their most mundane processes. One area to assess is the terminal. Especially in the world of open source, there are tons of ways to make life at the terminal more efficient (and fun!) with shortcuts and commands.

• We asked our writers about their favorite terminal trick. They shared their time-saving tips and even a fun terminal Easter egg. Will you adopt one of these keyboard shortcuts or command line hacks? Do you have a favorite you’d like to share? Tell us about it by taking our poll or leaving a comment.

Wine or Emulation

• We’ll likely see the Wine 5.0 stable release next week or the following week, but for now Wine 5.0-RC6 is available as the newest weekly release candidate.

• Given the code freeze that’s been in place for over the past month, there are no new features but only bug fixes at this stage. Wine 5.0-RC6 ships with 21 known bug fixes in total.

• Some of the fixes in Wine 5.0-RC6 are for Brothers In Arms – Hell’s Highway, Tomb Raider, The Witcher Enhanced Edition, Serious Sam Classic, and other games. There are also fixes for applications like 7-Zip, Acrobat Reader, and Pale Moon.

• The Wine team have released a sixth and perhaps final Release Candidate for the upcoming stable release of Wine 5.0. What’s going to be one of the biggest releases ever, with some truly massive feature improvements since Wine 4.0 back in January last year.

• Going by how many Release Candidates they’ve done before (7 for 4.0 and 6 for 3.0 and 6 for 2.0), the final stable Wine 5.0 release could well be next week.

• For this sixth Release Candidate of Wine 5.0, they noted 21 bug fixes. As always, some might have been fixed in older versions that have been retested recently. From the recent fixes you should see a better experience with The Witcher Enhanced Edition, Dark Messiah of Might and Magic, Serious Sam Classic, Far Cry 5 and probably more too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE is running a competition in search of the next great promotional video for KDE’s Plasma desktop and KDE’s applications.

• The prizes are two fantastic TUXEDO computers, one per category, which will undoubtedly boost your film rendering capacity. There are also 12 goodie packages for runner-ups, and who doesn’t need more Linux shirts, caps and stickers?

• Although we have already received some interesting entries, we feel it may be time to help video artists out there with ideas from the judges themselves.

• Below, Julian Schraner, Ivana Isadora Devčić, and Paul Brown from the Promo team and Farid Abdelnour from the Kdenlive team give their views on what a KDE promotional video should look like, where to find resources, and which pitfalls may hurt your film if you fall for them.

• In a product like Plasma, knowing the kind of things our existing users care about and use sheds light on what needs polishing or improving. At the moment, the input we have is either the one from the loudest most involved people or outright bug reports, which lead to a confirmation bias.

• What do our users like about Plasma? On which hardware do people use Plasma? Are we testing Plasma on the same kind of hardware Plasma is being used for?

• Some time ago, Volker Krause started up the KUserFeedback framework with two main features. First, allowing to send information about application’s usage depending on certain users’ preferences and include mechanisms to ask users for feedback explicitly. This has been deployed into several products already, like GammaRay and Qt Creator, but we never adopted it in KDE software.

• The first step has been to allow our users to tune how much information Plasma products should be telling KDE about the systems they run on.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• I used to have an Arch GNU/Linux setup with tons of tweaks and customizations. These days I just run vanilla Fedora. It’s not perfect, but for actually getting things done it’s way better than what I had before. I’m also much happier knowing that if something goes seriously wrong I can reinstall and get to a usable system in half an hour, as opposed to several hours of tedious work for setting up Arch. Plus, this is a setup I can actually install for friends and relatives, because it does a decent job at getting people to update when I’m not around.

• Until relatively recently I always set a custom monospace font in my editor and terminal when setting up a new machine. At some point I realized that I wouldn’t have to do that if the default was nicer, so I just opened an issue. A discussion ensued, a better default was agreed upon, and voilà — my problem was solved. One less thing to do after every install. And of course, everyone else now gets a nicer default font too!

• I also used to use ZSH with a configuration framework and various plugins to get autocompletion, git status, a fancy prompt etc. A few years ago I switched to fish. It gives me most of what I used to get from my custom ZSH thing, but it does so out of the box, no configuration needed. Of course ideally we’d have all of these things in the default shell so everyone gets these features for free, but that’s hard to do unfortunately (if you’re interested in making it happen I’d love to talk!).

• Years ago I used to maintain my own extension set to the Faenza icon theme, because Faenza didn’t cover every app I was using. Eventually I realized that trying to draw a consistent icon for every single third party app was impossible. The more icons I added, the more those few apps that didn’t have custom icons stuck out. Nowadays when I see an app with a poor icon I file an issue asking if the developer would like help with a nicer one. This has worked out great in most cases, and now I probably have more consistent app icons on my system than back when I used a custom theme. And of course, everyone gets to enjoy the nicer icons, not only me.

Distributions

• TROMjaro is based on Arch Linux but is much simpler to install and maintain. That makes it a good computing platform to investigate.

• While it is easier to install and use than most other Arch Linux-based distributions, users already familiar with how the Linux OS works will have a less challenging experience than newcomers to Linux migrating from macOS and Microsoft Windows.

• The TROMjaro desktop has its own unique look and feel, and its own approach to handling software.

• Existing TROMjaro users do not have to do anything special to update their systems if they installed an earlier ISO. Just update the TROM repository.

New Releases

• The Alpine Linux project is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 3.11.3 of its Alpine Linux operating system.

Screenshots/Screencasts

• Linux Lite eases Windows 7 users transition to Linux much more comfortable by offering simple software like Team Viewer, VLC, Firefox, TimeShift backup utility, and a full Microsoft Office compatible office suite in LibreOffice.

• There are many myths in the Linux community, with one of them being that Pop!_OS is just an Ubuntu clone.

• In this video, I am going to show an overview of Astra Linux Common Edition 2.12.22 and some of the applications pre-installed.

Arch Family

• The Manjaro/Tuxedo Computers partnership will also offer some intense customization options, Forbes adds.

• “Want your company logo laser-etched on the lid? OK. Want to swap out the Manjaro logo with your logo on the Super key? Sure, no problem. Want to show off your knowledge of fictional alien races? Why not get a 100% Klingon keyboard?”

Fedora Family

• Fedora’s CoreOS Released Now: The team Fedora officially announced that the CoreOS stable and testing version are released for users. CoreOS is designed for handling the running containerized workloads securely and at scale. Fedora’s CoreOS combines the OCI support, SELinux security for atomic host, provisioning tools and automatic update model of container Linux with the packaging technology.

• As per the official blog, Fedora CoreOS does not give guaranteed stability, which is challenging to achieve along with the incremental and evolving development required by Fedora CoreOS.

• However, Fedora CoreOS is still under active development. The CoreOS team promises to provide tools and work over the time to manage the impact of any regressions or breaking changes from automatic updates.

• Future of CoreOS Container Linux and Fedora Atomic Host

• CoreOS Container Linux will be maintained for a few more months, as mentioned in the latest blog by Fedora CoreOS team, whose end-of-life date will be announced later this month.

• Fedora Atomic Host has already reached end-of-life, and the users are highly recommended to migrate to Fedora CoreOS as soon as possible.

• Upcoming Enhancements

• Fedora CoreOS also serves as the upstream to Red Hat CoreOS. It aims to provide the best container host to run containerized workloads securely and at scale.

Debian Family

• For a decade now snapshot.debian.org has been around for accessing old Debian packages and to find packages by dates and version numbers. Only now though is a guide materializing for leveraging this Debian “wayback machine” in order to help in bisecting regressions for the distribution that span multiple/unknown packages.

• The bisecting is intended for Debian Sid users of the latest bleeding-edge packages and to helping track down what specific package versions may have introduced a regression. This Debian snapshot archive offers a JSON-based API to query changed packages based upon dates and from there with leveraging Git can make the bisecting manageable.

• There is a new tool available for Sparkers: Stremio

• What is Stremio?

• Stremio is a one-stop hub for video content aggregation. Discover, organize and watch video from all kind of sources on any device that you own. Movies, TV shows, series, live television or web channels like YouTube and Twitch.tv – you can find all this on Stremio.

• Events have ended my upgrade procrastination. Last week my hard drive started having many errors. Fortunately it lasted long enough for me to copy all of its contents to my USB backup drive. (My /home/brad directory is automatically backed up daily, but I also have separate partitions for downloaded files, PDFs, Linux CD images, and archived photos from my digital camera…and those only get backed up now and then.) Then a quick trip to the store for a new SATA hard drive.

• I suppose I could have copied my old root partition over to the new drive. But I’ve been running 32-bit Debian 8 (“Jessie”), which is now two versions behind. And I’ve been noticing more and more applications that I want to run are only being distributed for 64-bit Linux. So I decided to do a clean install of 64-bit Debian 10 (“Buster”), with my preferred MATE desktop (now a standard option with Debian).

• remember: only the installs are counted where the user said yes during setup to: „do you want to participate in popularity contest?“ (guess that many Linux users are privacy sensitive and a lot of them probably say „no“)

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• The second iteration of this year is the last one before our mid-cycle sprint next week.

• Here’s a short summary of the work the squads in the Web & Design team completed in the last 2-week iteration.

• IoT businesses are notoriously difficult to get off the ground. No matter how good your product is or how good your team is, some of the biggest problems you will face are just in getting to market and maintaining your devices once they’re in the field. The webinar will take a look at how Canonical’s Brand Store product allows you to get to market while catering for long term problems and the need to keep your product up to date in the future.

• More specifically, this webinar will look at the common problems we see organisations facing on their way to getting an IoT device to market, and cover five key steps to solve these problems. Along the way we will dig a little into serval case studies Canonical has done with various customers and partners to show you what has already been achieved with these solutions.

Devices/Embedded

• E-Con has launched a $69, 5-megapixel “e-CAM50_CUNANO” camera for the Jetson Nano Dev Kit with a MIPI-CSI2 interface and Linux driver. Meanwhile, Nvidia launched a revised “B01” version of the kit with a second CSI connector and support for the Xavier NX.

• E-Con Systems has followed its 3.4-megapixel e-CAM30_CUNANO camera for the Jetson Nano Dev Kit with a 5-megapixel model. Like the 3.4MP model, the e-CAM50_CUNANO uses a MIPI-CSI2 interface, but is built around OnSemi’s 1/2.5″ AR0521, a 2.2µm pixel CMOS image sensor with integrated ISP.

• MediaTek has launched two “Pumpkin i300 EVK” SBCs with a quad -A35 MediaTek i300 and unveiled a Pumpkin i500 EVK based on the octa-core -A73/-A53 i500. The SBCs feature a BayLibre-developed, MediaTek Rich IoT SDK v20.0 with Yocto and Android 10.

• At CES last week, MediaTek teased an OLogic built Pumpkin i500 EVK AI Vision SBC built around its powerful octa-core Cortex-A73 and -A53 MediaTek i500. Due in February, the SBC will join two recently launched Pumpkin i300 EVK SBCs built around different variations of the quad-core, Cortex-A35 based MediaTek i300 (MT8362) SoC.

• I wrote last year about my experience with making my first PCB using JLCPCB. I’ve now got 5 of the boards in production around my house, and another couple assembled on my desk for testing. I also did a much simpler board to mount a GPS module on my MapleBoard – basically just with a suitable DIP connector and mount point for the GPS module. At that point I ended up having to pay for shipping; not being in a hurry I went for the cheapest option which mean the total process took 2 weeks from order until it arrived. Still not bad for under $8!

• Just before Christmas I discovered that JLCPCB had expanded their SMT assembly option to beyond the Chinese market, and were offering coupons off (but even without that had much, much lower assembly/setup fees than anywhere else I’d seen). Despite being part of LCSC the parts library can be a bit limited (partly it seems there’s nothing complex to assemble such as connectors), with a set of “basic” components without setup fee and then “extended” options which have a $3 setup fee (because they’re not permanently loaded, AIUI).

• Sadly, my meter is really dirt under the glass and i couldn’t manage to clean it. This will cause problems down the road.

• The initial idea was easy, add a webcam on top of the meter and read the number on the upper half it. But I soon realized that the project won’t be that simple. The number shows only the use of 1m^3 (1000 liters), this means that I would have a change only every couple of days, which is useless and boring. So, I had to read the analog gauges, which show the fraction in 0.0001, 0.001, 0.01 and 0.1 m^3. This discovery blocked me, and I was like “this is way to complicated”.

• I have no idea how I found or what reminded me of OpenCV, but that was the solution. OpenCV is an awesome tool for computer vision, it has many features like Facial recognition, Gesture recognition … and also shape recognition. What’s a analog gauge? It’s just a circle with an triangular arrow indicating the value.

• Launched in March 2019, NVIDIA Jetson Nano developer kit offered an AI development platform for an affordable $99.

• We’ve had some reports of people finding cases that pretend to be official Raspberry Pi products online — these are fakes, they’re violating our trademark, they’re not made very well, and they’re costing you and us money that would otherwise go to fund the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s charitable work. (Reminder, for those who are new to this stuff: we’re a not-for-profit, which means that every penny we makes goes to support our work in education, and that none of us gets to own a yacht.)

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• The long-anticipated PinePhone Linux-powered smartphone has finally started shipping to customers who were brave enough to purchase the first batch.

• The PinePhone Linux phone has been available for pre-order since mid-November 2019, and those who bought one paid as low as $149 USD for the device, which doesn’t ship with an operating system preinstalled. After a bit of delay, the PinePhone is now finally shipping to customers, starting today, January 17th.

• “We’re now ready and I am happy to confirm that PinePhones will begin shipping on January 17th, 2020,” said PINE64′s Lukasz Erecinski. “The dispatch process will take a couple of days, however, so your unit may ship anytime between the 17th and 25th. At any rate, you’ll have your PinePhone soon.”

• In our current mobile world, there are essentially two worlds: Android and iOS. But for the oddballs who aren’t satisfied with either option, Pine64 has started shipping the PinePhone, a Linux-based, kinda-DIY smartphone that sells for just $150.

• Originally a crowdsourced startup, Pine64 has made single-board computers and the PineBook laptop in the past, so it isn’t new to developing alternative hardware for Linux. As ArsTechnica wrote, the company’s efforts are not an attempt to create a third mainstream category for smartphones, but the PinePhone still looks to be an interesting concept.

• Computer and developer-board maker Pine64 has started shipping the first edition of its much-anticipated – at least in the open-source community – PinePhone, after pre-orders sold out. Dubbed “Brave Heart”, the device is indeed designed only for the keener hobbyists.

• Shipping at only $149.99, Brave Heart is a fully open-source smartphone running Linux, which the company claims was developed “with the community for the community”, which means with developers and early adopters, and for developers and early adopters; and in this case, preferably for those who have extensive Linux experience.

• In a departure from Android and iOS, Pine’s new project provides a platform for customers to develop Linux-on-phone projects. It does not come with a pre-installed OS, but supports all major Linux phone projects such as Ubuntu Touch, Sailfish OS and Plasma Mobile.

• Although buyers get to choose their OS, therefore, it will be up to them to upload the platform to the Pine Phone – meaning the device is not designed for the average Joe.

• Here we go. I’ve had the Motorola One Zoom for about a month now, and I have to say it’s a good phone. In fact, let’s do it systematically. Pros: excellent camera, good sounds, fast performance, splendid battery time, configurable operating system that is steadily improving. Cons: the phone is super heavy and cumbersome to hold, you need a lot of patience getting everything configured and tweaked, especially if you care about privacy.

• But did I accomplish my mission? Yes I did. I have found a worthy successor to my Lumia. One Zoom matches and even supersedes some of the aspects of my previous phone, which makes me happy, as my degrees of freedom and my sense of nerdy control have not changed (for the worse). I really disliked Android many years ago, but it has evolved into a pretty solid system, and even someone like me, with almost zero interest in the mobile nonsense, can appreciate the improvements and advancements. You have the tools to change anything you like, and while the defaults are silly and lax, you can make Android work as you please.

• Now, Android will most likely never be as clean and elegant as Windows Phone. But the super-rich app ecosystem does compensate for that. At the end of the day, it is a small compromise, here and there, but overall, 95% of things are just as good as they were, or even better. I’d say that qualifies as a pleasant and successful transition from one platform to another. It was a little bit traumatic due to the SIM card mistake and the manual data transfer, but I might even say that I’m cautiously, mildly enjoying it.

• So there we are. An end of an era, and a start of a new one. Motorola One Zoom seems like a really nifty mid-range phone. I do wonder what high-end devices offer, but that’s a story for another time. Meanwhile, if you want a capable, fast phone with lots of juice and a splendid camera with a real optical zoom, this is a really clever choice. I’m happy with my decision. 9.5/10. Bye Lumia, welcome One.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• I’m currently involved—heavily involved—in Enarx, an open source (of course!) project to support running sensitive workloads on untrusted hosts. I’ve had involvement in various open source projects over the years, but this is the first for which I’m one of the founders. We’re at the stage now where we’ve got a fair amount of code, quite a lot of documentation, a logo, and (important!) stickers. The project will hopefully be included in a Linux Foundation group—the Confidential Computing Consortium—so things are going very well indeed.

• I thought it might be useful to reflect on some of the things we did to get things going. To be clear, Enarx is a particular type of project, one that we believe has commercial and enterprise applications. It’s also not mature yet, and we’ll have hurdles and challenges along the way. What’s more, the route we’ve taken won’t be right for all projects, but hopefully, there’s enough here to give a few pointers to other projects or people considering starting one up.

• Recently, a few bits of newsworthy information hit the open source landscape. Separately, these pieces of news were not that glaring, but when you put them together something a bit more ominous comes into focus–something I never would have thought to be an issue within the open source community.

• Before I get into this, I want to preface this by saying I am not usually one to cry foul, wolf, or squirrel! I prefer to let those pundits who make a living at gleaning the important bits out of the big bowl of alphabet soup and draw their own conclusions. But this time, I think it’s important I chime in.

• Yes, at this very moment I am donning my tin foil hat. Why? Because I think it’s necessary. And with me sporting that shiny chapeau, understand every word you are about to read is conjecture.

• Nextcloud announced their latest release and among the many new features is itinerary extraction from emails. That’s using KDE’s extraction engine, the same that powers similar features in KMail as well.

• Last year, I brought you 19 days of new (to you) productivity tools for 2019. This year, I’m taking a different approach: building an environment that will allow you to be more productive in the new year, using tools you may or may not already be using.

• Instant messaging and chat have become a staple of the online world. And if you are like me, you probably have about five or six different apps running to talk to your friends, co-workers, and others. It really is a pain to keep up with it all. Thankfully, you can use one app (OK, two apps) to consolidate a lot of those chats into a single point.

• “At Northwestern Mutual, we’ve finally gotten past that curve,” said Sean Corkum (pictured, right), senior engineer at Northwestern Mutual. “Now we’re trying to make it even easier for our internal developers to participate in open source … and contribute more to the community.”

• Hello testers, the Kiwi TCMS team sat down together last week and talked about what we feel is important for us during the upcoming year. This blog post outlines our roadmap for 2020!

Events

• In this episode of Let’s Talk, we sat down with Neal Gompa of the Fedora community at openSUSE Conference

• FOSSCOMM (Free and Open Source Software Communities Meeting) is a Greek conference aiming at free-software and open-source enthusiasts, developers, and communities. This year was held at Lamia from October 11 to October 13.

• It is a tradition for me to attend this conference. Usually, I have presentations and of course, booths to inform the attendees about the projects I represent.

• This year the structure of the conference was kind of different. Usually, the conference starts on Friday with a “beer event”. Now it started with registration and a presentation. Personally, I made my plan to leave Thessaloniki by bus. It took me about 4 hours on the road. So when I arrived, I went to my hotel and then waited for Pantelis to go to University and set up our booths.

Web Browsers

Chromium

• The end of support for Chrome apps has been a long time coming — Google announced more than two years ago that it was going to start winding things down.

• The Chrome Web Store has already been stripped of the App section on Windows, macOS and Linux, and now Google has announced that it is to be pulled from Chrome OS too. The company has also revealed the dates on which support will be dropped completely for all platforms.

• The good news is that plans have been in the works since March of last year to allow you to reclaim some of that space by shrinking or resizing the Linux storage. The bad news is that after being pushed back twice since the feature is being put off again; this time until Chrome OS 81.

• You’d think this would be a relatively simple thing to implement but in reality, it’s not. That’s because the Chrome OS filesystem has evolved in the past year and due to expected support for a particular file type for older Linux kernels never worked out. I’d rather the Chromium team take their time for a well designed and implemented solution so as not to break any functionality. Plus there’s the challenge of having enough free storage to restore a container backup.

Mozilla

• The Tor Browser sends all traffic data through the Tor Network. Some also call it the anonymity network. It does so by connecting to a server with a list of Tor nodes and bouncing the connection through three different proxies.

• There’s an entry node, a middle relay, and an exit node that are selected at random. The connection between these different nodes is encrypted, and the IP addresses aren’t public. It makes the whole process safe and anonymous.

• The Tor Browser is easy to download and install and doesn’t cost a penny to boot. Volunteers created and run the Tor Project, so donations are welcome. Moreover, the code is open-source, which means anyone can review it. It ensures that the code stays secure, and no one can use it for any hidden exploitative money-making purposes.

FSF

GNU Projects

• GNU Guile, a programming and extension language for the GNU Project, is now available as version 3.0.0. According to the team, this is the first release in the stable 3.0 release series.

• The major new feature in this version is just-in-time (JIT) native code generation, which helps speed up performance. In this release, microbenchmark performance is twice as good as the 2.2 release, and some individual benchmarks have seen improvements up to 32 times as fast, according to the project maintainers.

• Other new features include support for interleaved definitions and expressions in lexical contexts, native support for structured exceptions, and improved support for R6RS and R7RS Scheme standards.

• As of this morning experimental support for C++20 coroutines has been merged into the GCC 10 compiler!

• Coroutines allow a function to have its execution stopped/suspended and then to be resumed later. Coroutines is one of the big features of C++20. Sample syntax and more details on C++ coroutines can be found at cppreference.com.

• Coroutines support for GCC has been under development for months and now as a late addition to GCC 10 is the experimental implementation.

• With GNU Binutils 2.34 comes debuginfod support, which is the HTTP server catching our eye while the debuginfod server is distributed as part of the latest elfutils package. This isn’t for a general purpose web server thankfully but is an HTTP server for distributing ELF/DWARF debugging information and source code. With debuginfod enabled, Binutils’ readelf and objdump utilities can query the HTTP server(s) for debug files that cannot otherwise be found. Enabling this option requires building Binutils using –with-debuginfod.

Licensing / Legal

• Regula rules are written in Rego, the open source policy language employed by the Open Policy Agent project and can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines to prevent cloud infrastructure deployments that may violate security and compliance best practices.

• “Developers design, build, and modify their own cloud infrastructure environments, and they increasingly own the security and compliance of that infrastructure,” said Josh Stella, co-founder and CTO of Fugue.

• “Fugue builds solutions that empower engineers operating in secure and regulated cloud environments, and Regula quickly and easily checks that their Terraform scripts don’t violate policy—before they deploy infrastructure.”

Programming/Development

• Git-cinnabar is a git remote helper to interact with mercurial repositories. It allows to clone, pull and push from/to mercurial remote repositories, using git.

• myrepos is an excellent tool for applying git operations to multiple repositories, and I use it extensively.

• I’ve written several scripts to dump remote repository-lists into a suitable configuration format, and hopefully I’ve done that for the last time.

Perl / Raku

• This is the module included in Perl core that provides support for ANSI color escape sequences.

• This release adds support for the NO_COLOR environment variable (thanks, Andrea Telatin) and fixes an error in the example of uncolor() in the documentation (thanks, Joe Smith). It also documents that color aliases are expanded during alias definition, so while you can define an alias in terms of another alias, they don’t remain linked during future changes.

Python

• I’m sure it’s been blogged about a buncha times before but, I couldn’t find it, and I had to search too hard to find an example of this.

• In the previous post, I have written a python program to create the database, earning table as well as input the first row of data into the earning table. In this chapter, I will create a simple UI to accept the user’s input so we do not need to hardcoded the values into the SQL query. I will leave the SQL commit code to the next chapter, we will only create a simple input’s UI in this chapter first.

• A description box and the earning box of the Earning Input user interface As you can see I will create the above simple UI with tkinter which can then be further upgraded in the future to include more stuff.

• To increase the security of PyPI downloads, we have added two-factor authentication (2FA) as a login security option, and API tokens for uploading packages. This is thanks to a grant from the Open Technology Fund, coordinated by the Packaging Working Group of the Python Software Foundation.

• If you maintain or own a project on the Python Package Index, you should start using these features. Click “help” on PyPI for instructions. (These features are also available on Test PyPI.)

• For some time now I have been working with Python but I just got to try out Flask recently, so I felt it would be nice to write about it. In this aritcle I’ll discuss about Flask and how you can use it to build RESTfull APIs.

• Flask is a Python-based microframework that enables you to quickly build web applications; the “micro” in microframework simply means Flask aims to keep the core simple but extensible.

• When you deal with external binary data in Python, there are a couple of ways to get that data into a data structure. You can use the ctypes module to define the data structure or you can use the struct python module.

• You will see both methods used when you explore tool repositories on the web. This article shows you how to use each one to read an IPv4 header off the network. It’s up to you to decide which method you prefer; either way will work fine.

• Django like any website development and framework implementation requires security settings and configurations. Today I will present some aspects of this topic and then I will come back with other information.

• Sometimes we need to show the one-time notification, also known as the flash messages in our Django application. For this Django provides the messages framework. We are going to use the same here.

• To show flash messages in the Django application, we will extend our previous project Hello World in Django 2.2. Clone the git repository, check out the master branch and set up the project on your local machine by following the instructions in the README file.

Leftovers

• In violation of the separation of church and state, American tax dollars are funneled to fundamentalist private schools teaching crackpot absurdities – such as a claim that Noah probably took two baby dinosaurs onto his ark.

• One of Brecht’s best-loved and most-performed works, The Caucasian Chalk Circle was written in Los Angeles in 1944 while the playwright was still in exile. He returned to Germany in 1947, but the play remained behind, a parting gift to the country that had offered him refuge from the Nazis, but which, with the Cold War heating up and the House Un-American Activities Committee in full lather, had turned against his socialist politics. With Brecht back in East Berlin, The Caucasian Chalk Circle received its premiere in May of 1948 in a student production at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota under the direction of the young theater professor Henry Goodman, a World War II veteran.

• A native of Minneapolis, Goodman had been stationed in Berlin during the occupation and had seen Brecht’s work onstage in the devastated city. From America Brecht had tried to stop such productions. In September of 1945 he wrote to the Soviet cultural official Mikhail Apletin requesting that all further stagings of his work be forbidden until his own repatriation to Germany. Brecht was appalled that a production of his Threepenny Opera—utterly inappropriate given the circumstances, he thought—had been mounted in August of 1945, just a few months after the end of the war, and likely seen by Goodman. In the new post-Nazi, post-War world, Brecht felt all his plays needed at least some revision. The only work he believed ready for immediate presentation was Fear and Misery of the Third Reich.

Education

• Obviously, I am making an analogy with free college. And obviously, people who don’t support free college (and probably many who do) are going to reject this analogy. Here are some possible counterarguments: [...]

Health/Nutrition

• In new world-first research, a team of Australian scientists has discovered how B. pertussis strains are adapting to the current acellular vaccine (ACV) used in Australia, which is similar to the ACVs used for whooping cough in other countries around the world.

• “We found the whooping cough strains were evolving to improve their survival, regardless of whether a person was vaccinated or not,” explains microbiologist Laurence Luu from UNSW.

• Newark Beth Israel Medical Center’s heart and lung transplant program was putting patients in “immediate jeopardy” before the hospital began to implement corrective measures, according to federal regulators.

• In a pair of reports sent to the Newark, New Jersey, hospital on Dec. 12, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services found that the transplant program repeatedly failed to fix mistakes. Spurred by ProPublica articles, the CMS investigation uncovered a series of incidents in which the hospital identified areas for improvement following botched surgeries but didn’t carry out its own recommendations, allowing “subsequent adverse events to occur.”

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

• The news comes following the release of internal documents showing employees knew about problems with pilot training for the 737 MAX and tried to conceal them from regulators. In the documents released by US lawmakers, Boeing employees said the aircraft was “designed by clowns, who in turn are supervised by monkeys,” in an apparent reference to regulators.

• Forensic evidence shows signs that a Georgia election server may have been hacked ahead of the 2016 and 2018 elections by someone who exploited Shellshock, a critical flaw that gives attackers full control over vulnerable systems, a computer security expert said in a court filing on Thursday.

• Shellshock came to light in September 2014 and was immediately identified as one of the most severe vulnerabilities to be disclosed in years. The reasons: it (a) was easy to exploit, (b) gave attackers the ability to remotely run commands and code of their choice, and (c) opened most Linux and Unix systems to attack. As a result, the flaw received widespread news coverage for months.

• With AD Bridge 2.0, organizations can leverage existing infrastructure authentication, security as well as policy, in order to simplify the migration of on-premises Linux Active Directory to the cloud, resulting in fully secured and managed Linux virtual machines in the cloud.

Pseudo-Open Source

Openwashing

• Facebook has announced that it will be making its wav2letter@anywhere online speech recognition framework more readily available as an open source platform. The framework was developed by Facebook AI Research (FAIR), which claims that it has created the fastest open source automatic speech recognition (ASR) platform currently on the market.

Security

• Jason Corden-Bowen, of the CPS, said: “Moonie had no right to access confidential patient and staff records. He admitted his earlier wrongdoing and accepted a police caution yet he went ahead to reoffend knowing fully well it was not just against hospital procedures but it was wrong and illegal.

Privacy/Surveillance

• Attorney General William Barr and his DOJ and FBI have really ramped up their bullshit campaign against the public being able to use encryption. President Trump himself weighed in himself with some ignorant statements, suggesting that Apple owes him some sort of quid pro quo, because his policies may have helped them on trade:

• A recent article by Thomas Brewster at Forbes highlights the fact that the FBI is able to unlock iPhones using a product called Graykey. Specifically, a product called Graykey was used in a case against Baris Ali Koch to unlock Koch’s iPhone – an iPhone 11 Pro. Graykey works by bypassing the timeout functionality in iOS and allows for brute forcing of the passcode or password.

• Last month, this blog wrote about governments around the world continuing to trial facial recognition systems, and the growing concerns this is provoking. There’s one area in particular where facial recognition systems are deployed: law enforcement. That’s hardly a surprise, since the legal system can only operate if it identifies alleged criminals that need to be arrested, tried and punished. But it also emphasizes how facial recognition is seen by many as a natural tool for controlling populations. The most famous example is in China, where facial recognition systems are widely deployed, especially in the turkic-speaking region of Xinjiang. The situation is getting so bad that even Chinese citizens are becoming concerned.

• There are at least 875,000 keys, which represent different file types, including videos, marketing materials, photographs, clips and screenshots of video chats, and zip files. Within each zip folder – and there is apparently one zip folder per model – there are often multiple additional files (e.g. photographs and scans of documents), and many additional items that we chose not to investigate.

• The folders included could be up to 15-20 years old, but are also as recent as the last few weeks. Even for older files, given the nature of the data, it is still relevant and of equal impact as newly added files.

• Our commitment to privacy extends to our donors. We execute our fundraising in a way that is very different than other nonprofits. We never share your information with third parties. We never receive potential new donor information from outside sources. We do not track the behavior of our donors when you open our emails. We allow donors to choose what information you share with us. You can be more anonymous by sending a money order to our physical address or utilizing cryptocurrency to protect your personal information. Privacy is limited by requirements of the most popular donation methods, PayPal or credit card, but we are committed to offering privacy-preserving methods of making donations.

• “They don’t care about the impact on children. They don’t care about truth,” she said, adding that Facebook’s only interest is turning a profit. Facebook has “schmoozed” the administration—a likely reference to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s secretive dinners with President Trump—because “all they want is their tax cuts and no antitrust action against them.”

• “I think that what they have said very blatantly, very clearly, that they intend to be accomplices for misleading the American people with money from god knows where. They didn’t even check on the money from Russia in the last election. They never even thought they should,” Pelosi said, before returning to the topic at hand, the Senate’s looming impeachment trial.

• Clearview has shrouded itself in secrecy, avoiding debate about its boundary-pushing technology. When I began looking into the company in November, its website was a bare page showing a nonexistent Manhattan address as its place of business. The company’s one employee listed on LinkedIn, a sales manager named “John Good,” turned out to be Mr. Ton-That, using a fake name. For a month, people affiliated with the company would not return my emails or phone calls.

• While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.

Defence/Aggression

• One of the world’s worst humanitarian crises is unfolding on the shores of Lake Chad, according to the United Nations. In Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon and Chad, people are suffering from more than just extreme poverty. Boko Haram and other violent Islamist groups combined with corrupt governments and the absence of any functional state administration are making their lives hell — not to mention diseases, natural disasters and overpopulation. All these problems are now being made worse by climate change.

• Police are scouring the internet for clues about plans for mayhem, workers are putting up chain-link holding pens around Virginia’s picturesque Capitol Square, and one lawmaker even plans to hide in a safe house in advance of what’s expected to be an unprecedented show of force by gun-rights activists.

• Let’s talk about nuisance abatement laws. These are laws cities can use to shut down businesses that appear to draw more than their fair share of the criminal element.

• Police fired volleys of tear gas and rubber bullets in Lebanon’s capital Saturday to disperse thousands of protesters amid some of the worst rioting since demonstrations against the country’s ruling elite erupted three months ago. More than 150 people were injured.

• The latest album by rapper Eminem is facing backlash over lyrics that seemingly make light of the 2017 bombing of an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England.

• “Lots of Iraqis believe in Iran,” says Hisham al-Hashemi, a security analyst with the European Institute of Peace. “They believe in it as an Islamic Revolution, and the right for this revolution to cross borders everywhere.”

• The recent history of the Christians of the Khabur Valley is a nightmare in a loop. They are descendants of those who fled Anatolia during the 1915 genocide. Iraq was a first stop for many, but life there was far from easy either. After a massacre in northern Iraq in 1933, many crossed to French-controlled Syria, where they settled along the Khabur River.

• Once a thriving community of 15,000 individuals in the Khabur Valley, local NGOs say there are a “few hundred” left in the area following the IS offensive in 2015.

• “It was IS back in 2015 and it’s very much the same people right now,” said Lunan. Videos continue to emerge of Turkish-backed Islamists committing atrocities against civilians.

Environment

• The discovery of toxic PFAS chemicals at a contaminated site in Madison Heights could triple the cost of an already expensive cleanup effort, a state official told lawmakers Wednesday.

• And taxpayers could get stuck with the bill to clean up the green ooze site, since it’s unclear if its imprisoned owner can pay for it.

• “Is it $2 million? Is it $20 million? I don’t know, but it’s not in the hundreds of thousands. It’s in the millions,” said Tracy Kecskemeti, southeast district coordinator for the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE).

• Meanwhile, in southern Brazil, the Kaingang are working to reforest their land with araucaria, an indigenous tree which produces a fruit they can eat and sell, and that supports indigenous wildlife. For Marcio Kokoj of the Kaingang Guarani Indigenous Environmental Association, the Bolsonaro government feels like a throwback to Brazil’s military dictatorship that murdered thousands of indigenous people, drove thousands more from their lands, and tortured many and enslaved others between 1964 and 1985.

• “The greatest concern today is with the attacks on the demarcations of our lands, we therefore need to make self-demarcation,” Kokoj said. “If it depends on Bolsonaro, he will open up areas for large-scale agricultural production, multinationals, mining. That worries us a lot.”

• Self-demarcation is when indigenous communities draw the boundaries of their own territory, often expelling illegal occupants, such as loggers.

• Climate change is costing cities as they try to adapt and mitigate. Farmers are facing increasing challenges, which can lead to consumers paying more for food. Extreme weather disasters are on the rise in Canada and costing insurance companies, leading to higher premiums. People are dying in heat waves which are set to become more frequent as the planet warms; and hurricanes are stalling, meaning more people are in danger for longer periods of time.

• NAFTA 2.0 cleared another hurdle on January 16 as the U.S. Senate approved the trade deal with bipartisan support.

• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned in October 2018 that we have 12 years to keep global temperatures increases at 1.5 degrees Celsius or less. Now, we have more like 10 years.

• Their suit against Formosa Plastics Corp. USA resulted in a $50-million-dollar settlement and a range of conditions in an agreement known as a consent decree. Key among the conditions was the company’s promise to halt releasing the nurdles it manufactures into local waterways leading to the Texas Gulf Coast by January 15.

Energy

• “We are really concerned about candidates who have taken money from fossil-fuel executives. So that includes Joe Biden as well as Pete Buttigieg.”

• The six-month Croatian presidency of the Council of the EU has signed a deal with the country’s national oil company INA to supply its fuel. The part state-owned firm is now designated as the EU council presidency’s “official gasoline supplier” – and comes during the launch of the European Commission’s European Green Deal, a seminal policy that seeks to cut carbon emissions and fossil fuel consumption across the European Union over the next three decades.

• “INA is proud to be official fuel supplier during Croatian’s presidency of the Council of the European Union in the first half of 2020. The company will provide fuel for official vehicles,” it said when asked for a comment. The deal, described as an in-kind contribution, was confirmed to EUobserver by the secretariat of the Croatian Presidency (EU2020HR) whose spokesperson, in an email, also noted it had signed sponsorship deals with six other Croat companies.

• “The EU2020HR has so far signed seven sponsorship agreements with exclusively Croatian companies. When we complete the list of sponsors full information will be posted on the EU2020HR website,” said the secretariat on Wednesday (15 January).

Wildlife/Nature

• For this new study, published in the journal PLOS One Wednesday, researchers from the University of Washington, the United States Geological Survey, and other institutions determined that approximately 62,000 murre carcasses had washed ashore from central California through Alaska between the summer of 2015 and spring of 2016.

• In some locations, the number of carcasses was 1,000 times more than normal. In total, the researchers estimate that one million murres died during the time period they studied, making the event the largest mass death of seabirds in recorded history.

• Victoria Police say the fires engulfing the eastern part of Victoria are not being treated as the work of arsonists, as claimed by a widespread social media campaign.

• In the past week, a Twitter hashtag #ArsonEmergency – mimicking the popular #BushfireEmergency hashtag – attracted thousands of tweets linking the fires to arsonists and casting doubt on the role of climate change in exacerbating the bushfires’ severity.

• But authorities have moved to dispel those claims.

• “Police are aware of a number of posts circulating in relation to the current bushfire situation, however currently there is no intelligence to indicate that the fires in East Gippsland and north-east Victoria have been caused by arson or any other suspicious behaviour,” a police spokeswoman said.

• In times of crisis, social media can become a hotbed of misinformation. Often it’s accidental—people sharing faulty information they think is true, based on unconfirmed initial reports, or comical trolling, like the now-nearly-decade-old “shark on the highway” photoshop that gets shared during seemingly every hurricane landfall. But there is increasingly another sort of misinformation, and it’s much more sinister. It’s the deliberate injection of lies, disinformation, employing a combination of high profile trolls and bot armies to wage a public disinformation campaign.

• The bushfires currently engulfing Australia offer an unwelcome example, one that I’m watching from front row seats here in the country. Little did I know when I planned my sabbatical in Sydney to study the impact of climate change on extreme weather events in Australia, that I would be here in the country to witness what is arguably the most profound example yet of that phenomenon. As I write this commentary, I’m looking out at smoke-tinged skies while the faint smell of smoke wafts in through an open window. Living through its consequences, even as we study it, is a recurring irony of climate science in the 21st century.

Finance

• This is not the first time that Australia has been devastatingly burned. More than ten years ago, in February 2009, fires in Australia killed 173 people, injured thousands more and destroyed 2,000 homes. The day of the February 2009 blaze, which became known as Black Saturday, constituted the country’s most deadly wildfire event in history. The fires were sudden and moved with alarming speed.

• Though absolutely wrongheaded and naive, his latest New York Times column is very useful.

• ProPublica has covered how budget cuts at the IRS have made it harder for the agency to ensure the billionaires of the world pay up, but the cuts haven’t affected everyone equally.

• In short: Wealthy taxpayers haven’t faced as much scrutiny.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• You may recall that last summer we wrote about how American aviation legend Chuck Yeager decided to sue Airbus when the company mentioned the fact that Yeager broke the sound barrier in marketing material. Yeager’s lawyer is Lincoln Bandlow, who has spent much of the past few years as a copyright troll after a formerly respectable career in which he once touted himself a free-speech fighter. His complaint, however, served mostly as comedic material. There were claims of trademark infringement and violation of Yeager’s publicity rights. Neither made much sense, as repeating a historical fact, even in marketing material, does not constitute either violation and is clearly protected speech. It was only a matter of time before Airbus responded and now we have that response.

• During the 22-24 January conference, Marin also meet with leaders of major tech firms including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook and Microsoft President Brad Smith to discuss “new technologies and data policy, corporate social responsibility, sustainable development and job creation,” the statement says. Google has a major data centre in Hamina, while Microsoft shut down its product development operations in Finland in 2016.

• Goodbye, your royal highnesses. Hello, life as — almost — ordinary civilians.

• After President Donald Trump earlier in the day accused Democrats in Congress of “rigging the election again against Bernie Sanders,” the 2020 presidential candidate shot back Friday evening to say the president’s effort to divide Democrats would be unsuccessful.

• 2020 candidate says only reason for impeachment trial is president’s effort to “use the power of the federal government for his own political benefit.”

• I have been rather unwell this last week with atrial fibrillation, and at 5am last Sunday morning had the paramedics out and puzzling over the ECG results. This particularly severe episode was a result of being out in the cold and storm for hours on the AUOB march, and I felt so guilty at being a self-inflicted drain on the NHS that I declined their offer to take me into hospital and decided to recover at home.

• The recent scandal alleging that Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren a woman couldn’t beat Trump captured attention for days. The manufactured narrative shows how the media repeats cynical, bad-faith attacks until they get seen as fact.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Between targeted killings, retaliatory air strikes, and the shooting of a civilian passenger plane, the last few weeks have been marked by tragedy as tensions rise between the U.S. and Iranian governments. In the wake of these events, Iranians within the country and in the broader diaspora have suffered further from actions by both administrations—including violence and lethal force against protesters and internet shutdowns in Iran, as well as detention, surveillance and device seizure at the U.S. border and exacerbating economic conditions from U.S. sanctions. And to make matters worse, American tech companies are acting on sanctions through an overbroad lens, making it much harder for Iranian people to be able to share their stories with each other and with the broader world.

• The Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S. Department of the Treasury administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions that target foreign countries, groups, and individuals. Some of these sanctions impact the export to Iran (or use by residents of the country) of certain types of technology, although trying to parse precisely which types are affected appears to have left some companies puzzled.

• Michael Leidig, the owner of Central European News, wasn’t thrilled BuzzFeed called him the “King of Bullshit News” in a 2015 article. The BuzzFeed investigation dug into CEN’s publishing business and found the company did nothing more than generate a steady stream of salacious and rarely plausible “news” stories, which were then picked up by other “news” agencies (Mirror, Sun, etc.) less concerned with accurate reporting than with racking up page views.

• Joe Biden is the latest Democratic candidate for President interviewed by the NY Times editorial board, and if you’re interested in tech policy, well, it’s a doozy. Biden seems confused, misinformed, or simply wrong about a lot of issues from free speech to Section 230 to copyright to video games. It’s really bad. We already knew he was on an anti 230 kick when he gave a confused quote on it late last year, but for the NY Times he goes even further:

• Internet rights group Turkey Blocks first reported the block on April 29 2017, establishing technical evidence of a nationwide restriction in the absence of a court order or official notice. After the initial blocking, authorities explained that the entirety of Wikipedia was restricted because attempts by state officials to amend specific articles via the platform’s own editorial process and legal demands had both been unsuccessful.

• The site uses TLS encryption to enforce HTTPS security, an industry standard that provides user confidentiality and makes it impossible for governments to censor individual web pages. Hence, network operators blocked the entire platform in order to comply with the order. The sites were blocked with a combination of SNI filtering and DNS poisoning at the ISP level, with each telecom operator responsible for technical implementation of restrictions.

• A massive, blown-up photo of the 2017 Women’s March on Washington, D.C., currently on display in the National Archives, has been altered to remove anti-Trump messages, in order to avoid “political controversy.”

• As reported in the Washington Post, the photograph, taken by Mario Tama for Getty Images, sits near the entrance to a National Archives exhibit on the women’s suffrage movement. But upon closer inspection, it’s clear that the exhibited photo has been quietly changed, with any mentions of President Donald Trump, as well as references to parts of female anatomy like “vagina” and “pussy,” blurred out from the protestors’ signs.

• As news broke about HB 2044, legislation proposed in the state of Missouri which would open wide the doors to rampant censorship of library material and prosecution of librarians, librarians and library advocacy groups got to work.

• “Public libraries already have procedures in place to assist patrons in protecting their own children while not infringing upon the rights of other patrons or restricting materials. The Missouri Library Association will always stand against censorship and for the freedom to read, and therefore opposes Missouri House Bill 2044,” reads the statement from Missouri Library Association president Cynthia Dudenhoffer. “Public libraries exist to provide equitable access to information to all of its users, as it is key to having an informed populace. Missouri Library Association will always oppose legislation that infringes on these rights.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Expand

• Former RFA reporters Uon Chhin and Yeang Sothearin speak to the media outside of the Phnom Penh Municipal Court, Aug. 29, 2019.

• The country that Manning stepped into in 2017 was very different from the one she essentially left in 2010. For one, Donald Trump was president, and his administration was already outwardly hostile toward her—only days after he was inaugurated, Trump called Manning an “ungrateful traitor” in a tweet.

• “There is no additional safety or security brought by bringing such a device into reporter work space and gives the impression that it is being done mostly to protect Senators from the bright light of the public knowing what they are doing in one of the country’s most important moments,” the Standing Committee of Correspondents wrote in a letter Tuesday to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer.

• “To reduce electronic waste and make consumers’ life easier, MEPs want binding measures for chargers to fit all mobile phones and other portable devices,” claims the briefing.

• The parliament plans to vote on the measures in the next month.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Doctors and advocates for incarcerated immigrants are demanding that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) release five South Asian asylum seekers on hunger strike at a remote ICE jail in Louisiana, where at least three strikers are being force-hydrated and at least two are being force-fed after refusing to eat and drink for over 75 days.

• When, on January 2, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden responded to a questionnaire from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) about anti-Semitism, Zionism, and his relationship to Jews and Jewish culture in the U.S., there was a noticeable absence in his response: practically any mention of American Jews.

• Some 55,000 motorists will regain their right to drive this year after Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed legislation Friday that ends the practice of suspending licenses over unpaid parking tickets.

• The law, known as the License to Work Act, goes into effect in July.

• Once again, the Chinese authorities are trying to accuse others for their own failures there – the people of Hong Kong are the loudest and strongest voices demanding democratic freedoms and the rule of law. The current situation is a direct result of Beijing’s increasing encroachment on Hong Kong’s freedoms and its rigid disregard of the legitimate grievances of the Hong Kong people.

• The police operation identified 57 girls who had been exploited, including one who died after being injected with heroin by her abuser, but the case was shut down in 2005 and “very few” offenders were brought to justice.

• Thousands gathered in cities across the country Saturday as part of the nationwide Women’s March rallies focused on issues such as climate change, pay equity, reproductive rights and immigration.

• Fresh off a recent arrest, along with other altercations, rapper DaBaby has been caught on video assaulting a hotel worker.

• Some of the cases date back 30 years, suggesting the Saudi government had spent decades subverting the U.S. criminal justice system and leaving untold numbers of victims without any recourse.

• In April, a story co-published by The Oregonian/OregonLive and ProPublica showed how the FBI, Homeland Security and other agencies have been aware of the Saudi machinations since at least 2008 yet never intervened.

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• Remember cord cutting? The trend that cable and broadcast execs and countless sector analysts spent years claiming either wasn’t real, didn’t matter, or would most certainly end once Millennials started procreating? It set records in 2019, and despite some wishful thinking among cable TV executives, there’s no real sign that the trend is going anywhere thanks to the continued rise of new streaming services.

• Over 21,000 people, 660 organizations, and now six Members of Congress have asked ICANN, the organization that regulates the Internet’s domain name system, to halt the $1.135 billion deal that would hand control over PIR, the .ORG domain registry, to private equity. There are crucial reasons this sale is facing significant backlash from the nonprofit and NGO communities who make the .ORG domain their online home, and perhaps none of them are more concerning than the speed of the deal and the dangerous lack of transparency that’s accompanied it.

• Less than three months have passed from the announcement of the sale—which took the nonprofit community by surprise—to the final weeks in which ICANN is expected to make its decision, giving those affected almost no chance to have a voice, much less stop it. The process so far, including information that the buyer, Ethos Capital, provided to ICANN in late December, raises more questions than it answers. U.S. lawmakers are correct that “the Ethos Capital takeover of the .ORG domain fails the public interest test in numerous ways.”

Monopolies

• Trad pub certainly sells a bunch through Amazon. Traditional publishers put even more effort into diversification than I do. I’m going to assume that they’re at least as successful as I am, and roughly one-third of my trad pub income comes through Amazon. This means Amazon backs roughly 42% of my income.

• One of the subjects that IP laws have had to grapple with in the 21st century is that of 3D printing technology. 3D printers manufacture physical objects based on input from a digital file. The range of 3D printable products includes medical products, aesthetic products, plane parts, toys, buildings, guns etc. With the opportunities offered by 3D printing technology comes the worry from the IP community that the technology is susceptible to abuse and undue exploitation of IP rights. In 3D Printing and Intellectual Property, Lucas S. Osborn explains the technical aspects of 3D printing in plain language before going on to address how various aspects of IP laws (copyright, trademarks, patent and design laws) confronts the issues raised by 3D printing technology. A primer chapter on the foundations of IP law provides a much-needed context for the issues at the root of IP law concerns about 3D printing.

• [...]

• This book will be relevant to a variety of readers: lawyers, lawmakers, policymakers and judges. For its plain, easy-to-read language and its coverage of technical aspects of the 3D printing technology, this book will also be relevant to technologists and artists. Having said that, legal practitioners and scholars in the US, Europe and many countries in the Global North might find the book more relevant than practitioners from the Global South and the African continent, as it focuses on the former jurisdictions.

Patents

• The debate over a draft patent reform bill presented by the German Federal Ministry of Justice and Consumer Protection is raging. I outlined some fundamental issues on Wednesday. Meanwhile, the ministry has published its draft bill.

• On his (strongly recommended) Comparative Patent Remedies blog, Professor Thomas Cotter indicated my reaction to the draft bill made more sense to him after reading the explanations provided by the ministry. The rationale provided for the measure, and the legislative intent expressed in the “Eckpunktepapier,” are very clear that they don’t mean to change anything about where the case law already stands under the current statutory framework. Yesterday, CIPLITEC hosted a speech by Presiding Judge Ulrike Voss (“Voß” in German) of the Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court (not to be confused for Andreas Voß of the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court, formerly Mannheim Regional Court). The last question an attendee had for the appellate judge was about what the reform bill would change, and essentially she said this:

• There’s the statute, and there’s the rationale given by the ministry. As a judge, she’ll be sure to read the rationale part as well, but the statute will be the law to apply. The rationale says that there’s no intent to change anything, and the language of the statute is consistent with existing case law. Yet the courts may ask themselves whether the fact that the law was amended means that some change of the situation was intended anyway, contrary to the official statement by the ministry. She certainly predicted that the statute would encourage defendants to argue proportionality more frequently than before.

• The judge went on to say that there might be a bit more of an opening for exceptional cases in which the defendant would, on the basis of proportionality, be granted not only a transitional (workaround/”use-up”) period as stated by the Federal Court of Justice in the Heat Exchanger decision, but in some cases might be able to elude injunctive relief on a permanent basis. She did, however, note that “it would take a lot” to get to that point, and in response to a follow-up question agreed that the standard for that would be clearly more demanding than the one for a transitional period. In my opinion, while Heat Exchanger addressed the hypothetical possibility of a use-up period and stopped short of suggesting a permanent denial of injunctive relief, it didn’t preclude that from being the outcome in some extreme cases either. So the door was never closed, but the judge has a point that it may be slightly more open now.

• When I first wrote about Amgen v. Amneal, I focused on the patent law issue regarding Markush groups in the patent claims. Here, I want to circle back to the question appellate jurisdiction. I’ll be teaching the 2nd semester of Civil Procedure at Mizzou this spring and appellate jurisdiction is the the first topic up for grabs.

• Most patent infringement litigation reaches the Federal Circuit under the “final judgment rule” which creates appellate jurisdiction over cases “appealed from a final decision of a district court.” 28 U.S.C. 1295(a)(1). Final decisions “are decisions that end litigation on the merits and leave nothing for the court to do but execute the judgment.” Slip op.; Coopers & Lybrand v. Livesay, 437 U.S. 463, 467 (1978). Thus, in a patent case involving infringement claims and invalidity defenses, both must be resolved before appeal. (Note here, that there are some, albeit limited, options for interlocutory appeals prior to final judgment).

• [...]

• Too Short Analysis: The Federal Circuit did not cite any precedent or statute to support its conclusion that the oral-argument waiver can cure the lack of final judgment. The procedure principles here fall within the umbrella of “cumulative finality.” Most courts have accepted the notion that a premature appeal can be cured by a subsequent entry of final judgment by the district court. However, some courts have taken an alternative approach.

• Thanks to both those favoring and those opposing patent injunction reform in Germany who gave me feedback. What I hear for the most part is that people appreciate my relentless pursuit of harsh analysis. The injunction-related part of the German patent reform bill is redundant boilerplate of the kind that’s not really going to move the needle. Someone has to tell it like it is. The only good news so far is that Ingmar Jung, the rapporteur of the CDU/CSU (= the chancellor’s party) group in the German Federal Parliament, told Handelsblatt that they’re going to “scrutinize and discuss” the proposal.

• I’m quoted in that same article, saying that the proposed reform, a draft version of which was revealed earlier this week, fails to deliver meaningful progress as a prevailing patentee simply needs to make a licensing offer that may be excessive, but just not excessive enough for the court to categorize as unreasonable based on a superficial analysis. In that case, the “infringer” will be considered an “unwilling licensee,” and the injunction will come down regardless of the damage it may do.

• While I agree with at least one of the thought leaders of the reform movement who says that he sorely misses (as do I) a reference to the commercial value of an invention underlying an injunction patent relative to the accused product, even that perspective isn’t comprehensive enough. At the heart of the single biggest issue there’s the total absence, from the statute as well as the government’s rationale, of the second eBay v. MercExchange factor: the requirement for an injunction that monetary relief (= a damages award) be “inadequate” to make the patentee whole. That includes, but is not limited to, the intrinsic value of the invention at issue and its relevance to the accused product.

• As an early Christmas gift, on 18 December 2019, His Honour Judge Hacon handed down a judgment in the matter of Adolf Nissen Elektrobau v Horizont Group. This case concerned the field of electric road traffic signs. Horizont’s UK patent (the ‘Patent’) claimed a board to be mounted on to vehicles which had an arrangement of lights which included flashing directional arrows and a warning cross which was shown in a different colour in a constant light. The benefits of the invention was said to be causing “increased levels of attention” to road users due to the “unusual – and thus unexpected – form and colour”. Oddly the Patent specification described mobile electric road traffic devices that were known in the art as those that include directional arrows and warning crosses both of which flash and are in a yellow colour. This, however, was not in line with UK road traffic regulations which require that the crosses are constant (not flashing) and are red. It was noted in the decision that yellow flashing arrows and crosses are consistent with German road traffic regulations.

• Adolf Nissen (‘Nissen’) sought to revoke Horizont’s Patent for lack of inventive step over three pieces of prior art: DE007 (a German Utility Model), a US Patent (‘Pederson’) and the prior use of one of Nissen’s traffic boards. The court held that Horizont’s Patent was invalid as it lacked inventive step over DE007 and one of Nissen’s traffic boards. DE007 described a panel with flashing lights which could be “interconnected to represent a leftward or rightward arrow or a diagonal cross”. Horizont argued, among other things, that DE007 differed from the Patent as it did not display a constant (i.e. not flashing) red cross. It was held that it would be obvious to adapt DE007 to show a constant red cross as well as flashing yellow arrows as these were conventional road traffic signals in the UK. The skilled person would have known how to achieve this as part of his common general knowledge (‘CGK’) using LEDs of two colours in the spotlights. Further it was held that the any reservations the skilled person might have concerning safety or regulatory approval were not relevant to the assessment of obviousness. Turning to the other successful piece of prior art: Nissen’s traffic board. This was supplied with a purely yellow LED display which contained a full library of possible signs, including a cross or flashing yellow arrows. As this yellow LED display was not in line with UK regulations, it was argued that the skilled person would not find this purely yellow LED display useful and therefore it would be obvious to incorporate red LEDs to allow the optional display of a red cross, so as to comply with UK regulations. This would make the device familiar to UK road users.

• Data is providing both headaches and solutions for corporates, according to in-house lawyers, who say that data mining has proven to be a useful means of tracking down infringers.

• While the majority of U.S. patent litigation is now NPE litigation (and has been since at least 2009), litigation between operating companies continues to occur at roughly the same rate as it has for the past 20 years. (So much for the idea that IPR or eBay destroyed the ability for patent owners to enforce their intellectual property.)

• These two categories of litigation are often fundamentally different, occurring for completely different reasons. For every Smartphone War, there are dozens of cases that are fundamentally about getting a competitor to pay a little more for the license they were probably already discussing taking. That’s true in cellular technology, but it’s true in a lot of other areas as well, ranging from semiconductor manufacturing to automotive to digital video. It’s relatively rare for an operating company to file a lawsuit without discussing the possibility of a license first—after all, patent litigation is expensive and if you can avoid it, why wouldn’t you? (This is also why large companies employ entire teams of people whose sole job is to make deals to license patents—at least, once they’re aware those patents exist and have a chance to evaluate infringement.)

• But there are a couple of considerations that can make it hard to get to an agreement as to that license. These considerations can result in litigation being filed—and often quickly settled after the parties refocus on negotiations, realizing that they’d far rather have a deal than spend tens of millions on protracted patent litigation.

• [...]

• Another issue is royalty stacking. When you have a complex multi-component product it could potentially require licensing hundreds or thousands of patents. Smartphones might implicate more than 250,000 patents. And if each licensee asks for 1% of the sales price, you can very quickly wind up paying more for licenses than you’ll make from the product—at which point you just don’t make the product. That’s the essence of the royalty stacking problem.

• One analysis, examining the royalty stack problem for smartphones, arrived at an estimate of more than $120 in patent royalties for a $400 smartphone. Each licensee, individually, might only receive $0.50 or $1.00 or $9.00 per phone—but, when summed up, the licenses approach the cost of the hardware. That situation recurs in many consumer products—for example, consumer audio-visual devices may need to license Wi-Fi patents, A/V codecs, user interface patents, and other features, all of which can add up quickly on a $50 or $100 device.

• Effectively, the royalty stacking problem is a species of tragedy of the commons. Licensors are incentivized to extract the highest possible royalty from the manufacturer, but if every licensor does so, they run the risk of the product becoming unprofitable and the manufacturer ceasing to manufacture it. Even worse, licensors generally don’t have knowledge of the total royalty stack of the party they’re negotiating with, meaning that their idea of a reasonable portion of the stack may be very different from what the licensee knows is possible. (And licensees are generally obligated to keep their licenses secret, meaning they can’t share how much they’re paying as a way of reducing this knowledge gap during negotiation.)

• At the end of the day, the licensor may think they’re asking for something reasonable, while the licensee knows the requested royalty is out of line with licenses for similar patents and paying that rate would drive the product into unprofitability, a net loss for all involved. Again, this can make it difficult to reach a settlement.

• The debate over standard-essential patents (SEPs) is typically distinguished as much by concerns over competition than issues of patent law per se. Erixon argues: ‘…SEP disputes are less concerned about the rights and boundaries of patents, and more about antitrust limits to market behavior.’ At the European level EU institutions acknowledge the policy concern that the owners of patents on technological standards (SEPs) could block competitors from making use of standards, and thus obstruct the development of efficient and thriving ICT and Internet of Things (IoT) sectors, an acute point in the 5G era. The aim is to balance the role of monopolistic patent rights (granted at the non-EU EPO) in the context of the EU’s overriding focus on competition (embedded in Articles 101 to 109 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU)).

• The inherent fragmentation of the European patent system, which has significant EU and non-EU aspects, works against the regulatory centralisation typically favoured by the EU. Further fragmentation is caused by the self-regulation model of standard-setting, which occurs at independent standard organisations such as ETSI and ISO. Yet, the EU is still able to exert a great deal of influence – in particular, in disputes over SEPs national courts are obliged to follow the CJEU’s guidance on what amounts to fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing of standard-essential patents (FRAND). At the judicial level, the challenges of resolving this issue are compounded by tension between the CJEU’s role in making prescriptive rulings on matters of intellectual property and the implementation of these rulings by national courts in complex domestic litigation.

• [...]

• Key questions concern the global nature of SEP disputes, the interpretation of the CJEU guidance in Huawei (2015), and assessing the effect of the non-discrimination component of the FRAND (does it mean that materially the same licence terms as offered to Samsung must be offered to Huawei in the circumstances of the Unwired case?). The question of royalty-rate calculation is also the subject of appeal. In a linked case, the UKSC will also decide a case involving Conversant, Huawei and ZTE concerning whether England & Wales is an acceptable forum to decide global patent licensing disputes regarding patents valid in other territories.

• Huawei seeks to overturn the earlier Court of Appeal and High Court rulings that held that seeking a global FRAND licence (rather than a territory-by-territory one) is fair and reasonable approach in the context of SEPs. In this view, if an implementer of the SEP technology refuses a FRAND global licence, an injunction can be sought by the SEP holder and granted by the court (as it will not constitute abuse of dominance). The UKSC will consider whether Unwired Planet, as SEP holder, made use of a ‘time advantage’ to improve its negotiation position.

• Will the decision be handed down before the UK’s formal exit from the EU on 31st January 2020? What could the impact of a ‘no deal’ or ‘bare-bones’ exit mean for the UK’s legal system post-transition at the end of 2020? Could the impact of Brexit mean UK courts choosing (in coming years) to depart from the CJEU’s guidance in Huawei v ZTE and develop an alternative approach? Looking to the year ahead, 2020 ought to bring a measure clarity on at least some these issues.

Software Patents

• On January 17, 2019, Unified added a new PATROLL contest with a $4,000 cash prize for prior art submissions for US 7,721,222. The ’222 patent generally relates to a non-English text generation system by which text can be generated in any language without a keyboard. The ‘222 patent is owned by Universal Cipher, LLC (an NPE) and has been widely asserted in district court. To protect innovation and deter future frivolous assertions, Unified is offering a $4,000 cash prize for the best prior art on this patent.

Copyrights

• Many researchers, including the authors of this post, are members of learned societies whose mission is to support research and advance scholarly values. At the end of last year, we saw these values betrayed when over 100 societies joined with the Association of American Publishers in signing the letter to the White House. It is unsurprising that corporate publishers would resist reform. For them, any change to the rules threatens their profits. But why would learned societies purporting to represent researchers sign on? One reason is that some scholarly societies have come to depend on the lucrative business of journal publishing to subsidize their operations. In the case of one of the signatories, the American Psychological Association, publishing income accounts for ~80% of their revenue. Such learned societies face a dilemma: Their stated mission is to support scholarship, but the funds to do it come from a publishing system that has worked against scholarly values for more than three decades. We are saddened that these societies have decided to side with the publishers against the public interest.

• Monday Red Hat and IBM jointly filed their own amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in the “Google vs. Oracle” case, arguing that APIs cannot be copyrighted.

• “That simple, yet powerful principle has been a cornerstone of technological and economic growth for over sixty years. When published (as has been common industry practice for over three decades) or lawfully reverse engineered, they have spurred innovation through competition, increased productivity and economic efficiency, and connected the world in a way that has benefited commercial enterprises and consumers alike.”

• The Open Source Initiative is proud to join OSI affiliate members Creative Commons, Mozilla Foundation, Software Freedom Conservancy, and Wikimedia Foundation along with other small, medium and open source technology organizations in filing an amicus curiae (“friend of the court”) brief in the Google v. Oracle case pending before the U.S. Supreme Court.

• In Google v. Oracle, Oracle successfully convinced the appeals court that Google’s reuse of a limited number of Java declarations in its creation of the Android operating system is a copyright infringement and that a jury finding it fair use was mistaken. The brief asks that the Court reverse this decision and confirm that, as has been the common understanding for decades, API interfaces are not copyrightable and that their reuse by others is a fair use under copyright law.

• A rapper is suing pop star Ariana Grande for copyright infringement, claiming that she copied the chorus of “7 Rings” from one of his songs.

• The Pirate Bay, YTS and Animeflv are well-known pirate brands that are hugely popular in many countries. The same can’t be said for Mrpiracy, Filma24, and Cimaclub. However, the latter and many other ‘local’ sites dwarf these major brands on their ‘own’ turf.

• Adult movie company AMA Multimedia has obtained a DMCA subpoena from a Washington court to help it track down individuals who uploaded content to various ‘tube’ sites. The subpoena orders Cloudflare to hand over the identities of uploaders and potentially site operators too but given the way the content seems to be delivered, it remains a question whether the former will be possible.

• Huge scanlation platform MangaDex recently revealed that legal pressures had, among things, restricted its ability to receive donations from users. Following our report, a server administrator connected to several other groups gave us additional insight into these anti-piracy efforts. Amid the hostilities, however, it appears that all the scanlation community really wants is to improve the chances of manga titles arriving in the West.

• Six pirated movie screeners have leaked in the span of just a few hours. The screener dump includes a copy of Golden Globe winner 1917, one of the most prominent leaks thus far. Also notable is the involvement of the group TOPKEK, which hasn’t released any screeners before.

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