● 04.15.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 15/04/2023: KDE ISO Image Writer Beta 0.9.2 and PowerDNS DNSdist 1.7.4

Posted in News Roundup at 7:06 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Kernel Space

• Kernels 6.2.11, 6.1.24 LTS and 5.15.107 LTS have been updated for PCLinuxOS and are now available in the Synaptic Software Repository.

Instructionals/Technical

• Transport Layer Security (TLS) is an essential part of securing web applications and their communications. Ensuring that your Apache server is using the appropriate TLS version can significantly enhance your website’s security. This article will guide you through the process of configuring your Apache server to use a specific TLS version.

• Linux is a powerful and versatile operating system that offers countless tools to manage and manipulate data. One such tool is “grep,” which allows users to search for specific patterns in files.

• Having problems while installing mysql-server? Check this guide to completely uninstall mysql-server and reinstall MySQL.

• I was reading on the Internet, someone reporting hundreds of dbus-daemon instances, and impacting on system performance. I was googling this topic, as was having a problem with some AppImages and Flatpaks not working with dbus.

• The ZFS ARC is ZFS’s version of a disk cache. Further general information on it can be found in two highly recommended sources, Brendan Gregg’s 2012 Activity of the ZFS ARC and Allan Jude’s FOSDEM 2019 ELI5: ZFS Caching (also, via). ZFS exposes a lot of information about the state of the ARC through kstats, but there isn’t much documentation about what a lot of them mean. Today we’re going to talk about some of the kstats related to size of the ARC. I’ll generally be using the Linux OpenZFS kstat names exposed in /proc/spl/kstat/zfs/arcstats.

Games

• Super excited to have SimCity 2000 running in DOSBox 0.74-3 on OpenBSD 7.3. There are still a couple issues to work around, but it works.

• In order for this game to run, Windows 3.1 needs to be installed first. I followed this tutorial to get everything running: https://medium.com/@egee_irl/lets-install-windows-3-1-in-dosbox-300c87d648f9

• I know the screenshots are showing the game running in a window, but for some reason the cursor is only captured when DOSBox is in fullscreen mode. For now, I just launch DOSBox in fullscreen so I can move the cursor around in order to actually play it.

• After another ~2 weeks, the latest development release is out for the Windows translation layer with Wine 8.6. Part of what makes Steam Play Proton run some of the most popular games around! This is the usual fortnightly release with the latest work, and then once a year they put up a new stable release that will be Wine 9.0.

• The Wine development release 8.6 is now available.

• What’s new in this release: – Bundled math library from Musl libc. – Gecko engine updated to version 2.47.4. – Improved spool file support in the PostScript driver. – Various bug fixes.

• The source is available at:

• https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/8.x/wine-8.6.tar.xz

• Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:

• https://www.winehq.org/download

• You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation

• You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.

• Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.

• XDefiant is an upcoming free-to-play, first-person arena shooter from Ubisoft and it seems they need a bit more Linux talent. In an advert on their careers website there’s one noted for “Linux Systems Engineer – XDefiant”, with the option to work remotely too.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• https://download.kde.org/unstable/isoimagewriter/0.9.2/

• I have started some documentation for developers that want to assist in getting their KDE app snapped here: https://invent.kde.org/teams/neon/-/wikis/Snaps

• Being a part of the KDE community in the Season of KDE 2023 and contributing to this exceptional Free & Open Source project is a great experience for me. I am grateful to the KDE community for giving me this opportunity to contribute.

• I am Mohamed Ibrahim, a 4th year student of systems and biomedical engineering at Cairo University, Egypt. I have experience in different domains of building software, such as web development, computer vision, digital signal processing, and embedded systems for biomedical applications. I also have some professional experience as a member of a team in the fintech industry. I find Free & Open Source Software very interesting and I am happy to start my journey with FOSS by contributing to KDE.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from April 07 to April 14.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• If you’re already running older versions (E.g. FreeBSD 13.1), you can easily upgrade FreeBSD 13.1 to FreeBSD 13.2. In this step by step guide, let me show you how to upgrade to FreeBSD 13.2 from FreeBSD 13.1 version.

• FreeBSD 13.2 has been released a few days. FreeBSD 13.2 edition is shipped with so many updates and features. This step by step guide explains how to download the latest FreeBSD version, how to create a FreeBSD Bootable USB and how to install FreeBSD 13.2 latest edition with screenshots.

Fedora Family / IBM

• Use the %autorelease and %autochangelog tags simplify package maintenance and make it easier to contribute packages to the Fedora Project. These rpmautospec tags cause no noticeable difference in the packages from the end user’s perspective. As of the Fedora Linux 38 release, package maintainers should use these new tags.

• This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat.

• We provide you both infographics and text version of the weekly report. If you just want to quickly look at what we did, just look at the infographic. If you are interested in more in depth details look below the infographic.

• Fedora Linux 38 will be released on Tuesday — the early target date!

• This Set of Respins is the LAST Set for F37 becasue of the F38 being released nest week.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Over the years, our enterprise data centre users have told us how much they love the end to end experience of an application-centric solution like Juju to manage their entire infrastructure.  Juju is a software operator framework that abstracts the specifics of operating complex software and makes it simple and straightforward to deploy, operate and relate complimentary pieces of software, reducing cost and providing flexibility. Charmed Ceph uses Juju to manage the entire lifecycle of deployment, configuration, and operations of a Ceph cluster.

• But, what if the use case is different?  Maybe all that is required is simple and repeatable Ceph storage deployments.

Open Hardware/Modding

• It’s hard to believe that SparkFun turned twenty this year. It’s even harder to believe that I’ve been part of this ride for six of those years.

• If you have grown up with SparkFun you know our story. For those not familiar with it, SparkFun was started by a college student (Nathan Seidle) in his dorm room – completely bootstrapped – and it all started because he fried an electronic component and had a bit of a challenge getting a replacement. College courses are fine (text books, lectures, etc.), but Nate had this itch to get his hands dirty on the tech he was learning about in class. Here is a great read from Nate on how it all got started when we hit our 15-year anniversary.

• Speaking of affordable, small computers, it made perfect sense when we started seeing Raspberry Pis popping up inside checkout screens at supermarkets, and in dynamic directional signage directing customers around large Swedish furniture shops. Athens-based company Yodeck jumped on the trend at just the right time a decade ago, before the scene exploded, and built their offering around our hardware. Now their Raspberry Pi-powered digital signage is in 135 countries all over the world.

• The watch Toby and Alasdair purchased comes in two parts: a board with the screen, and a RP2040 main board. The watch came with a strap but not a battery, so they used this inexpensive rechargeable lithium polymer battery, although since the JST battery connector on the main board was an unusual size they both opted to pull it off and solder their batteries directly the contacts on the board rather than try and source the odd connector.

• TekMakerUK was inspired by Kevin Loughin’s YouTube video on the design and decided to make his own experimental version capable of 5W transmissions, which he could tune via an Android phone. The variable capacitor is from an old valve radio and has a central shaft that rotates to adjust the distance between the dielectric plates. In order to turn the coupling, a 5V stepper motor was added to the base along with a ULN2003 stepper motor driver. The driver was then connected to an Arduino Uno, although the board was replaced by a Nano Every for soldered connections.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

• What is a Knowledge Management Solution?

• A knowledge management solution is a software application designed to capture, store, and share information within an organization. It allows for the efficient management of data, documents, and other forms of content.

• I’ve been interested in photography ever since I co-opted my father’s Kodak 620 camera as a young boy. I used it to take pictures of the flora and fauna of our neighborhood. My love of photography led me to an Instamatic camera in high school, and eventually to digital cameras as they entered the marketplace in the late 1990s. Early digital cameras provided portability and the ability to quickly capture and easily share images on the internet. But they lacked the quality and complexity of the best of film photography. Of course digital cameras have improved a lot since then. But I have years of digital photographs that just look a little, well, little on modern devices.

• Until recently, my go-to tool for upscaling digital images has been GIMP. A couple of years ago, I tried to use GIMP to upscale a thumbnail image of my father that was taken in the mid-1940s. It worked, but the photo lacked the detail, depth, and clarity that I wanted.

• That’s all changed since I learned about Upscayl, a free and open source program that uses open source artificial intelligence to upscale low-resolution images.

• We are very happy to release DNSdist 1.7.4 today, a maintenance release fixing a few bugs reported since 1.7.3: [...]

Leftovers

• The University has filed a Protected Identity Harm Report in response to the discovery of the swastika. SUDPS is currently investigating the matter.

• Huerta, on behalf of the ASSU Appropriations Committee, aims to reaffirm support for student groups on campus following the committee’s rejection of numerous annual grants this past cycle. He writes, “I have worked with a great committee who have made all of the funding that student organizations receive possible”

• Alaska Airlines canceled about two dozen flights in its namesake state on April 13 because of an ash cloud from a volcano in Russia, the Seattle-based airline said.

• LTV’s program “4. studio” with the help of observant residents has investigated evidence of curious excavations on the edge of the forest between Rīga and Babīte.

Science

• Everything you need to know about JUICE.

• “The 2019 image was just the beginning.”

Education

• Some Stanford janitors say that an “abrupt” change in subcontractor this week at the Redwood City campus leaves them at risk of losing job benefits after years of employment. Stanford is switching from the subcontractor UG2 to Service by Medallion.

• Following his remarks, the Faculty Senate heard the Committee of 12’s Honor Code recommendations. Doerr School Dean Majumdar also spoke on the sustainability school’s plans for the future.

Hardware

• So, it looks like need to either comment-out the “VertRefresh” or increase its range. I decided on the latter, have changed it to:

• Which should cater for a monitor that cannot run at 60Hz and wants 90Hz. Though, my understanding is that 90Hz monitors are capable of dropping down to 60Hz.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• A Hong Kong student accused of incitement to expose others to the risk of infection over Instagram posts related to Covid-19 has been cleared of the charge. Nischal Gurung, who had posted an Instagram story reading “stay positive” in February 2022, was found not guilty on Thursday, local media reported.

• The government has defended strict staffing requirements for aged care facilities as a necessary change as more centres close their doors over recruitment and cost pressures. But the federal opposition has warned of a looming collapse in the aged care sector after providers in Sydney and Perth unexpectedly announced the closure of several facilities.

• Law enforcement officials in the Lithuanian counties of Kaunas and Marijampolė have detained nine people suspected of distributing e-cigarette liquid mixed with psychotropic substances to minors.

• A microbiologist explains ‘antibiotic tolerance’.

• We could finally have a biological signature.

• Timing is key.

• Here’s what we know about OMAD.

• Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the governor of Arkansas, imposed a minimum age limit for social media use in legislation signed on Wednesday (Apr. 12).

Security

• Thieves cut through the wall of a coffee shop to get to an Apple store, bypassing the alarms in the process.

• I wrote about this kind of thing in 2000, in Secrets and Lies (page 318): [...]

• Hikvision patches CVE-2023-28808, a critical authentication bypass vulnerability that exposes video data stored on its Hybrid SAN and cluster storage products.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The European Data Protection Board today announced that it has set up a task force to investigate ChatGPT, a day after Italy rescinded a ban on the generative artificial intelligence service following privacy concerns.

• The Tor Project, the organization behind the anonymous network and browser, is helping launch a privacy-focused browser that’s made to connect to a VPN instead of a decentralized onion network. It’s called the Mullvad browser, named after the Mullvad VPN company it’s partnered with on the project, and it’s available for Windows, Mac, or Linux.

• The Mullvad browser’s main goal is to make it harder for advertisers and other companies to track you across the internet. It does this by working to reduce your browser’s “fingerprint,” a term that describes all the metadata that sites can collect to uniquely identify your device. Your fingerprint can be made up of simple things, like what browser and operating system you’re using, to more invasive info, like what fonts and extensions you have installed, and what input / output devices your browser has access to.

Defence/Aggression

• Sometimes, says former defence minister Brendan Nelson, ministers must make decisions that run contrary to the advice they receive from their departments.

• Imran Khan would like to become prime minister of Pakistan again one year after being forced to step down. In an interview, he discusses the battle for power that is currently thrusting the country deeper into chaos.

• NATO member Norway has declared 15 officials of the Russian Embassy in Oslo to be “unwanted,” saying they were intelligence operatives acting under diplomatic cover.

• Ukraine’s defense and foreign ministers have stressed the need for NATO engagement — including membership for Kyiv — to safeguard security in their country and the entire Black Sea region, as Russian forces continued their assault on the city of Bakhmut and elsewhere in eastern Ukraine.

• Police in Russia’s Republic of Bashkortostan are investigating the deaths of 18 dogs, including several puppies, which were found on April 12 in a forest near the city of Sterlitamak.

• Ukraine’s state energy company, Naftohaz, says a Hague-based tribunal has ordered Moscow to pay the company $5 billion for the illegal seizure of its assets in Crimea, which occurred after Russia illegally annexed the peninsula in 2014.

• A day after the United States imposed sanctions on three Hungarian officials, Budapest said it will withdraw its representatives from the Russia-led International Investment Bank (IIB) and exit the institution.

• Lithuania has pledged 10 million euros through the World Bank’s special financing instrument for Ukraine’s reconstruction and resilience-building in Moldova, the Finance Ministry said on Thursday.

• A Moldovan court sentenced fugitive businessman and politician Ilan Shor, who is in living in exile in Israel, to 15 in years in prison.

• The Southeast Asian bloc issued a strongly worded statement but 2 days after the fact.

• Countries must do more to avert the costly consequences of growing global trade fragmentation and help avert a “second Cold War,” the International Monetary Fund’s managing director said on April 13.

• Poland’s once-close relationship with Hungary has “changed a lot” over Budapest’s position on Ukraine, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said on April 13

• An Iranian academic group says more than 400 students have been suspended or expelled in the wake of recent nationwide protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini last September while being held for allegedly violating the strict Islamic dress code for women.

• The New York Times routinely tells bigger lies than the clumsy nonsense it published about weapons in Iraq.

• Reprinted with permission from the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft There is a renewed push from some European allies for NATO to create a “road map” for Ukraine to join the alliance.

• China on Thursday blamed the “negative impact” of US military drills for tensions on the Korean peninsula, after Pyongyang fired a ballistic missile that prompted Japan to briefly issue a seek shelter warning.

• Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda said he did not have any contact with KGB officials after information that there was a KGB case related to him was shared on social media on Thursday.

• Lithuania’s State Border Guard Service (VSAT) has launched a pre-trial investigation after a Belarusian border guard illegally entered Lithuania’s territory for a short period of time on Wednesday.

• “They had a duty to protect her,” says Ta’Neasha Chappell’s sister. “She was not attended to because she was a Black woman and they didn’t feel like she was worth getting any attention.”

• U.S. authorities have arrested a 21-year-old Air National Guardsman in connection with the investigation into the leaking of top-secret defense and intelligence documents that have been circulated online, Attorney General Merrick Garland said on April 13.

• The top diplomats from Russia, China, Iran, and Pakistan attended a conference on April 13 that focused on ensuring regional security in light of the situation in Afghanistan.

• Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic said that “Serbia has not and will not export weapons to Ukraine” nor will it send ammunition to either side of the conflict, which began with Russia’s invasion in February 2022.

• Germany has approved Poland’s request to export five old MiG-29 fighter jets to bolster Ukraine’s air power against the Russian invasion, the German Defense Ministry said on April 13.

• Reprinted from Mint Press News with the author’s permission.

• Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva will meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing on Friday (April 14), as part of an official state visit to China where the two leaders will discuss climate change, the conflict in Ukraine, and a range of other topics.

• Owners and operators of Australia’s critical infrastructure will soon be turning their minds to the annual reporting required under the government’s new risk-management program.

• Originally posted at TomDispatch. In some ways, it’s still hard to take in. In 2001, in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, President George W. Bush and crew invaded Afghanistan, the very country in which the Soviet Union’s military had failed so catastrophically in the previous century.

• Lithuania plans to raise the issue of barring Russians and Belarusians from taking part in the Olympic Games at the EU Education, Youth, Culture and Sport Council, Minister of Education, Science and Sport Jurgita Šiugždinienė has said.

• The video of the execution of a Ukrainian prisoner of war is yet another reason why Russia cannot preside over the United Nations Security Council, Lithuanian political leaders say.

• Russia on April 13 said that there would be no extension of the UN-brokered Black Sea grain deal beyond May 18 unless the West removed a series of obstacles to the export of Russian grain and fertilizer.

• Neighbors Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova signed cooperation agreements in Romania’s capital on April 13 after a trilateral meeting on ways to strengthen security in their Black Sea region to counter threats posed by Russian aggression.

• Rescue workers say they are frantically cremating bodies amid the risky security situation.

• Children in poor families are needed for farm labor as planting season begins.

• North Korea says it successfully test-launched a new intercontinental ballistic missile powered by solid propellants. If confirmed, that development could provide the country with a harder-to-detect weapon targeting the continental United States. The report Friday came a day after North Korea’s neighbors detected a launch of a long-range missile from near Pyongyang. The launch extended a run of weapons displays involving more than 100 missiles fired into sea since the start of 2022. In his official media, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un described the Hwasong-18 missile as his most powerful weapon, which he said would enhance his country’s counterattack abilities in the face of external threats from the U.S. and its allies.

• A Massachusetts Air National Guard member has been arrested in connection with the disclosure of highly classified military documents about the Ukraine war and other top national security issues. The breach has raised questions about America’s ability to safeguard its most sensitive secrets. The guardsman is an IT specialist identified as 21-year-old Jack Teixeira. He was taken into custody on Thursday without incident after FBI officers converged on his Massachusetts home. Attorney General Merrick Garland says he is to be charged under a provision of the Espionage Act that makes it a crime to remove or transmit classified national defense information.

Transparency/Investigative Reporting

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• Critical minerals are vital components in today’s rapidly growing clean-energy industry. They’re used in advanced technologies like electric vehicles and batteries, wind turbines, solar panels, fibre-optic cables and semiconductor chips.

• A startup business that places small turbines in irrigation canals to generate electricity has raised $18.4 million to scale up its technology for carbon-free hydropower. Emrgy’s installations are very small in the commercial sense — between 2 and 10 megawatts. But that’s approximately enough to power a neighborhood or a small campus. Energy experts say small amounts can add up, and it’s a system that makes clean electricity without disturbing the environment.

• Stanford hosted the official launch of the Battery Center at SLAC on Thursday. The invite-only event was hosted at the Graduate School of Business (GSB) campus and featured presentations from leadership at SLAC, two Nobel laureates, members of the Department of Energy, researchers at national labs and industry leaders.

• Renewables are having a bumper run, according to JP Morgan’s annual assessment (pdf) of the energy market. More money is being invested into clean tech than fossil fuels—and this was true even before the US Inflation Reduction Act flushed the climate industry with $370 billion.

• This week’s Twitter kerfuffle is all about public funding. Elon Musk decided to label National Public Radio’s account first as “government-influenced media,” which it previously applied to state-operated media outlets that shade into propaganda. Later, the label was changed to “government-funded media.”

• Fossil fuel financing—lending and underwriting for bonds and equities—from the world’s 60 largest banks hit $673 billion in 2022, according to a new annual report from Rainforest Action Network (RAN), a San Francisco-based environmental organizational group.

Wildlife/Nature

• We’d never seen this before.

Finance

• Thousands of Iranian workers have signed a protest letter sent to President Ebrahim Raisi against an increase that would see the minimum wage rise by only about half of the current inflation rate.

• The Bishkek City Court has canceled a lower court decision to reject an appeal filed by RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service, known locally as Radio Azattyk, against the freezing of its bank account last year.

• The Top Talent Pass Scheme, introduced by Hong Kong’s Chief Executive John Lee last October to attract high-earners and foreign graduates from top universities, had received over 20,000 applications as of late March, according to the Secretary for Labour and Welfare Chris Sun.

• The days of banks discounting home loan rates for new customers appear to be dwindling as the big four banks pull the trigger on out-of-cycle hikes.

• The figures suggest an uptick in redundancies that began in mid-2022 has yet to abate.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• A MintPress News investigation has found that dozens of former officials from the State Department, CIA and FBI are working in key positions at TikTok and affecting the content that over one billion users see.

• The policy bottlenecks that many people thought would impede Germany’s Ampelkoalition (‘traffic-light coalition’) have materialised, well into its second year in power.

• Professional women’s tennis tournaments will resume in China in September after a 16-month boycott over concerns for the safety of Chinese player Peng Shuai, the WTA announced on Thursday. The former doubles world number one has not been seen outside China since first making, and then withdrawing, accusations of sexual assault against a high-ranking official.

• NPR is no Xinhua, but Elon Musk is correct that it doesn’t need government subsidies.

• Press Gazette’s monthly ranking of the top 50 news websites in the US, using Similarweb data.

• It comes a week after Fieldsports announced it bought Trout & Salmon from Bauer.

• Chartbeat data for 546 UK and US news sites reveals where publishers get their traffic from.

• Woman complains on social media of being used to score propaganda points without her consent

Misinformation/Disinformation/Propaganda

• The Sun breached accuracy rules in the Editors’ Code of Practice by reporting that a man had “filmed himself raping a dog”, IPSO has ruled.

• Video was likely boosted on social media by pro-China sources, the official says.

Censorship/Free Speech

• A Moscow court has again fined Wikipedia for not removing a Russian-language article about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Thursday’s action is the latest in a series of Russian government moves to silence objective reporting or criticism of the war and restrict the Russian public’s access to information. The court fined Wikimedia Foundation, a nonprofit that runs the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, 2 million rubles ($24,464) for not removing an article titled “Russian occupation of the Zaporizhzhia region.” That refers to one of four Ukrainian areas that Russia annexed last September. Many countries have declared the annexation illegal. Russian President Vladimir Putin has increased his crackdown on content that doesn’t correspond to his government’s views or versions of events.

• A Moscow court on April 13 fined the Wikimedia Foundation, owner of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, 2 million rubles ($24,525) for failing to remove what the court termed “fake information” about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

• Imprisoned Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny’s health has deteriorated dramatically following what a senior aide called the suspicious “treatment” he was given by prison medical personnel for acute stomach pains the politician suffered while in punitive solitary confinement.

• Nguyen Lan Thang was sentenced to six years in jail for spreading anti-state propaganda.

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• Spit hoods will no longer be used by the Australian Federal Police following an internal review into the controversial restraint devices.

Civil Rights/Policing

• They were slammed for their dehumanizing treatment of Indigenous mother Cindy Gladue after her death. Now, they’re judges.

• Skaters and skiers were caught on video using banned words while playing a game during training.

• Lao youths are among those trapped in Kayin state, forced to carry out cyber-scams for criminal groups.

• The Human Predicament and A Human’s Predicament  “…ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” – President John Fitzgerald Kennedy This is easier said than done, especially when we change the words “your country” to “humanity”. As we, “the MAHB”, know,

Internet Policy/Net Neutrality

• I get excited when I find new personal websites. I remember early on when I joined the IndieWeb community I thought the IndieWeb webring was one of the best sites on the web. Until I had seen most of the sites on the webring, every time I clicked I found something new. Interesting blogs to follow, browse, and explore. With every site I saw, I got more excited. There are many people out there maintaining personal websites, from written blogs to photo blogs to single-page profiles.

Monopolies

Patents

• The recent controversy at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit involving Chief Judge Kimberly Moore and Judge Pauline Newman has raised concerns and garnered attention. The Court has now confirmed the rumors about Judge Moore’s actions to remove Judge Newman from an active role on the bench. According to a statement of court and two published orders, it seems that Chief Judge Moore also has the support of her fellow judges in this matter.

• by David Hricik, Mercer Law School

• As has been reported by Dennis on the main page, by Gene Quinn on IP Watchdog (here), and by various media I am seeing, Chief Judge Moore reportedly threatened Judge Newman with a petition to remove Judge Newman as incompetent to carry out her duties unless Judge Newman agreed to take senior status. Gene points out the incongruity of Chief Judge Moore’s reported position that Judge Newman may continue to serve as a judge, though Chief Judge Moore ostensibly believes she is incompetent to do so.

Trademarks

• “This should help solve one of our biggest problems… people saying the word ‘JavaScript’.”

• Trademark applicant Charger Ventures LLC has lost its appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) from the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board’s (TTAB’s) finding that SPARK LIVING is likely to be confused with an earlier-registered mark, SPARK. The precedential decision was authored by Judge Reyna. Both marks cover real estate services, but Charger amended its application to specify residential real estate services, whereas the earlier mark specified services related to commercial real estate property. Charger also disclaimed the term “LIVING” in response to the examiner’s request. However, the examiner ultimately issued a final office action refusing the application on the grounds that “a comparison of the respective marks show[s] that they are comprised either in whole or significant part of the term ‘SPARK,’”…and both marks are for real estate services, with ‘overlapping identifications of leasing and rental management services.’”

Copyrights

• NME Networks’ Holly Bishop on the future of music journalism.

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