● 08.18.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 18/08/2023: Russia Chooses Linux for Domestic Smartphones, WordPress at 20 Years

Posted in News Roundup at 8:54 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Applications

• Introducing FreeTube, a desktop open-source YouTube player crafted with privacy as its cornerstone. Built using Electron, this app can help you to browse YouTube while staying on a Linux desktop.

• If you listen to Spotify using a free plan and find yourself regularly annoyed, irritated, or otherwise incensed by repetitive and banal audio ads, listen up.

• Google Calendar is a time-management and scheduling calendar service developed by Google. We recommend open source alternatives.

• Kanban is a visual project management framework that helps teams manage their work by visualizing it on a board. Kanban boards typically use columns to represent different stages of a process, and cards to represent individual tasks.

• Pgpool-II is a tool to add useful features to PostgreSQL, including: [...]

• In this series we explore how you can migrate from Google without missing out on anything. We recommend open source solutions.

• Google Fonts is a computer font and web font service. It offers font families and an interactive web directory for browsing the library. The library of 1561 open source font families also offers APIs for use via CSS and Android.

• We explore the best free and open source alternatives to Google Fonts.

Instructionals/Technical

• In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Oracle VirtualBox on Fedora Linux. VirtualBox is a very easy-to-use solution for all of your virtualization needs on Fedora, allowing you run different Linux distros, Windows, MacOS, and BSD as guest operating systems.

• Ubuntu, with its plethora of versions and derivatives, continues to evolve every year. Knowing your exact version helps in troubleshooting, system optimization, and understanding compatibility. With the 2023 edition, we present five distinct ways to pinpoint your Ubuntu version, catering to both newbies and seasoned users alike.

• Today I’m setting up snmpd on a new [to me] host. It’s a Dell R730. Previously, my documentation for this was a bit jumbled. It was written in 2015 and contains a few updates and corrections. It was hard to follow, even for me. This new post is an update of that one.

• When managing an Ubuntu system, understanding the distinction between ‘update’ and ‘upgrade’ is vital. While both play crucial roles in system maintenance, their functionalities differ significantly.

• Google Drive is one of the most popular cloud-based services for storing and sharing data online. It comes with a basic free plan of 15

• In our modern digital realm, securing your digital assets with a confidential code, commonly referred to as a ‘password‘, has become an essential practice.

• If you’re a developer of any sort, you’ve probably heard of Pastebin.com, the most widely used web application for pasting and sharing text snippets. Pastebin.com is great, but it’s not the only pastebin tool out there.

• Deleting files and directories is an essential skill you must have as a Linux user. While it’s not hard, you can get more out of the needed Linux commands once you learn how to use them properly. In this tutorial, we’ll show you the different ways you can delete files and directories in Linux.

• Maintaining an up-to-date system is fundamental for both performance and security. With Ubuntu 22.04, users are given the convenience to automate this process. Whether you prefer your system to handle updates seamlessly in the background or you’d rather take a manual approach, this guide has you covered.

• Keeping your Ubuntu system up-to-date is crucial for many reasons: enhanced system performance, improved security measures, access to the latest features, and more. A well-maintained system ensures optimal performance and minimizes vulnerabilities.

• Managing user accounts is an essential administrative task for Linux system administrators. Occasionally, there’s a need to remove user accounts to maintain the system’s security and hygiene. This guide will walk you through the process of deleting a user account safely in Linux.

WINE or Emulation

• For when you really, really need to run a Windows program, but you really, really can’t stand Windows.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

• KDE relies heavily on web services, and many of them need to be kept responsive even under strenuous load. I’ve recently had the opportunity to spend some time on load testing one of our websites and would like to share how that worked out.

• To properly test things I wanted to have multiple computers make concurrent requests to the service and ensure that the service still performs within acceptable limits. To that end I needed a bunch of servers, software that can pressure the web service, and software that can make sure the service works.

• The server bit is the easiest task there… any cloud provider will do.

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• GNOME 45 beta is here about five weeks after the alpha release and further improves the GNOME Control Center (Settings) app, which appears to be the star of the upcoming major release. Various memory leak and accessibility label fixes are present in the beta version of GNOME Control Center, along with ports of multiple settings rows to the new AdwSwitchRow widget.

• The Settings app in GNOME 45 beta has a reorganized Privacy panel that contains all the sub-panels under a single category, makes the new About panel more compact, adds a description to the Date & Time panel to explain the new “Clock & Calendar” options, and adds a banner to indicate when the system is offline in the Online Accounts panel so you won’t create any new accounts until it’s reconnected to the Internet.

Distributions and Operating Systems

BSD

• At Akademy 2023 Tarcisio Fischer gave a talk about a visualization tool, which was applied to Bloomberg’s BDE (Basic Development Environment) set of libraries. It’s a bit Boost-ish, in the sense that it adds a whole bunch of stuff to make C++ nicer, and communicates closely with the standards committee. It is an opinionated library, with strongly articulated views on coding style and documentation. Nominally, it is a portable library (e.g. to Solaris, AIX, and this upstart experimental thingy called Linux). So after hearing Tarcisio’s talk and attending a BoF about the library, I decided to package it for FreeBSD.

• “Make C++ nicer” is a recurring theme. Qt does it, and has been doing it since the earliest days of (non-)standardization of C++, which is why we have QList and QString and QDate. Boost does it. BDE does it. Heck, my work-work has a “toolkit” library that is our expression of “things that we need to make C++ nicer”.

• [...]

• Mostly the trick is to pretend that FreeBSD is Linux – which, from the point of view of “this is POSIX, plus some modernity and you can count on a recent Clang” is true. I spotted some use of /proc which is clearly non-portable (unless you mount the Linux-compatibility /proc filesystem, but it shouldn’t be necessary) and which will need to be repaired later.

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• This week’s openSUSE Tumbleweed snapshots were steady and there were no large updates.

• While updating openSUSE rolling release once a week could result in a larger update, daily updates throughout this week would have meant smaller updates each day.

• The latest snapshot is 20230816. This snapshot fixes compiler-warnings with the ncurses 6.4.20230812 update. This package had some patches added and improved manpages for wgetnstr() and wget_wnstr(). There was also an update for a tool to read manpages with the man 2.11.2 update. This manual tool package introduces security enhancements by replacing $ characters in page names with ? when constructing less prompts, along with other improvements like handling database entries for links better and reorganizing databases for reproducibility. The visual file manager mc 4.8.30 update now supports using Perl Compatible Regular Expressions 2 library as a search engine, and it improves the extfs helpers and patchfs. The yast2-installation 4.6.7 update had a change that addresses a specific issue requiring the presence of the awk utility for use in startup scripts.

Devuan Family

• Devuan GNU+Linux releases version 5 codenamed “Daedalus” on Tuesday, 15 August 2023. It is based on Debian 12 “Bookworm” and coincidentally released close to Debian’s thirtieth birthday. We strongly recommend to download via torrent instead of regular links –if you can– because Devuan torrent shows all choices in one place to you and you can just pick which one you wish. Congratulations to Devuan Community and happy downloading!

Devices/Embedded

• The company provides a Debian 11 image with Linux version 5.10.160 and an unnamed “embedded GUI”, as well as an “Ubuntu 20.04 cross-compiler environment” which usually means a virtual machine image with the toolchain and code samples to get started. Boardcon only lists the software details and supported drivers, but none of that is available publicly. They share the datasheets for the main chips and the CM3568 system-on-module soldered on the board.

• But what are analog HD (AHD) cameras used for? And in which case they should be used over digital cameras? All vendors seem to recommend IP cameras over analog cameras with much better quality, less wiring, improved security, less subject to interference, and better analytics, but Belgium-based vendor Black Box says analog cameras may perform better in low light conditions and typically costs less than digital camera, although it’s not always the case depending on cabling requirements.

• We’ve recently written about the Quansheng UV-K5 multiband radio which supports experimental firmware to work in a wider 18 MHz – 1300 MHz frequency range than with the stock firmware so it can be used for amateur radio, air traffic control, Citizens Band (CB) radio, and other fun stuff. But flashing the firmware requires downloading the manufacturer’s Windows-only programming software and customizations are provided through multiple firmware files. But it has now become much easier to flash the firmware for Quansheng devices thanks to the work of whosmatt who developed the UVMOD web interface using WebSerial to flash the firmware and even customize it from Windows or Linux.

• TBS has designed two small DVB-S2X/S2/S tuner cards with the TBS7230 M.2 module and TBS7901 mini PCIe module designed to easily add DTB support to a desktop PC or even a single board computer with the right interfaces. Both models are based on a Lattice Semi LFE3-17EA-6FTN256C FPGA and Montage LZ M88RS6060 single-chip DVB-S2X/S2/S receiver with a tuner, a demodulator, and an LNB controller, but as I understand it, the mPCIe module relies on a USB PCIe (see comments section) interface, while the M.2 module features a PCIe interface and you can even install more than one in a PC through a PCIe card for NVMe drives.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

• Vladimir Zykov, the head of a Russian organization for professional social media users, has published new photos and information about the technical features of the R-FON, a new domestic smartphone that uses a Linux-based operating system.

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Content Management Systems (CMS)

• Earlier this year, WordPressers around the globe united to celebrate 20 years of community and innovation. There were parties, blogs, videos, and social media posts aplenty. And, of course, the trending hashtag, “#WP20”.

• Throughout April and May, community members reflected on their journeys – what brought them to WordPress and its personal meaning. The stories, tweets, and videos were inspiring, nostalgic, and even humorous at times. There was swag, and the cakes were epic.

Programming/Development

• Welcome to the 43th post in the $R^4 series.

Python

• Python is a high-level, general-purpose, structured, powerful, open source programming language that is used for a wide variety of programming tasks. It features a fully dynamic type system and automatic memory management, similar to that of Scheme, Ruby, Perl, and Tcl, avoiding many of the complexities and overheads of compiled languages. The language was created by Guido van Rossum in 1991, and continues to grow in popularity.

• Python is a very useful and popular computer language. One of the benefits of using an interpreted language such as Python is exploratory programming with its interactive shell. You can try out code without having to write a script. But there are limitations with the Python shell.

• Flask is a popular web framework for building web applications in Python. It is considered a microframework because it provides only the bare essentials for web development, focusing on simplicity and extensibility.

Leftovers

Hardware

• RTL-SDR has just launched the RTL-SDR Blog V4 dongle for software-defined radio (SDR) enthusiasts based on the Rafael R828D tuner chip with three switchable inputs instead of the R860 chip used in RTL-DSR Blog V3 dongle. The new model still features the Realtek RTL2832U demodulator found in all previous versions of the SDR USB dongles but adds basic input filtering, integrates an improved LDO for the power circuity leading to fewer heat emissions, and improves HF reception thanks to a built-in upconverter. The main RTL-SDR Blog V4 dongle improvements include: Improved HF Reception thanks to a built-in upconverter instead of using a direct sampling circuit. Some positive consequences are that there’s no more Nyquist folding of signals around 14.4 MHz, improved sensitivity, and adjustable gain on HF. Improved filtering thanks to the three inputs of the R828D tuner chip found in the V4 dongle. T

• However, Apple could well become the top-selling brand for the first time, Counterpoint said, adding that it was “cautious on 1Q 2024 and see elevated risk of a delayed recovery into 2024″.

• Asia was predicted to be one of the main obstacles to growth, with the economic situation in China and also the broader region adding to the factors holding back the market.

• {loadposition sam08}Jeff Fieldhack, Counterpoint’s research director for North America, said: “There’s been a decoupling between what’s happening in the economy and consumers buying phones. So far this year, it’s been record low upgrades across all carriers.

Proprietary/Artificial Intelligence (AI)

• Microsoft recently faced ridicule and criticism after publishing an article that recommended tourists visit the Ottawa Food Bank on an empty stomach. The article, titled “Headed to Ottawa? Here’s what you shouldn’t miss!” listed 15 must-see attractions in the capital. However, the article was filled with errors and strange recommendations, leading to its removal by Microsoft.

• An allegedly AI-generated travel guide posted by MSN.com’s Microsoft Travel section has come under fire for listing a food bank among Ottawa’s “cannot miss” attractions.

• The article dedicated to the Canadian city was published late last week and has since been removed, though an archived version of the piece remains available online.

• “Headed to Ottawa? Here’s what you shouldn’t miss!” included the Ottawa Food Bank, a charitable organization dedicated to feeding families who are financially struggling, in its list of must-visit spots in the city.

• Microsoft pulled an AI-written article encouraging tourists to visit the Ottawa Food Bank, bringing into focus the need for careful consideration and ethical usage of AI in content creation.

• Artificial Intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of content creation, enabling various applications such as essay writing, screenplay drafting, and even blog post creation.

• This technology, often referred to as AI writing, involves utilizing AI tools to generate written content.

• However, recent events that happened in tech giant Microsoft highlighted the importance of human oversight in the utilization of AI-generated content.

Linux Foundation

• The Linux kernel has grown in complexity over the years. Complete understanding of how it works via code inspection has become virtually impossible. Today, tracing is used to follow the kernel as it performs its complex tasks. Tracing is used today for much more than simply debugging. Its framework has become the way for other parts of the Linux kernel to enhance and even make possible new features. Live kernel patching is based on the infrastructure of function tracing, as well as BPF function hooks. It is now even possible to model the behavior and correctness of the system via runtime verification which attaches to trace points. There is still much more that is happening in this space, and this microconference will be the forum to explore current and new ideas.

• Welcome to the August edition of the Linux Foundation Newsletter! We have an important announcement for the 3D graphics and virtual world industry: the launch of the Alliance for OpenUSD (AOUSD). Plus, don’t miss our exclusive training and certification discounts, and stay updated with the latest news from our Linux Foundation projects.

Security

• Threat actors have been observed deploying a proxy application on Windows and macOS systems that were infected with malware.

• Phishing remains a lucrative threat. We get daily emails from well-known brands (like DHL, PayPal, Netflix, Microsoft, Dropbox, Apple, etc). Recently, I received a bunch of phishing emails targeting Zalando customers. Zalando is a German retailer of shoes, fashion across Europe. It was the first time that I saw them used in a phishing campaign.

• The Monti ransomware was found in June 2022 that attracted notice due to its close resemblance to the Conti ransomware, both in name and tactics, drawing attention from cybersecurity experts and organizations.

• Updates are critical to maintaining the security of our computer systems, but they can be disruptive to work or leisure time, can result in changes to interfaces and functions, and only ever seem to increase in number. These have trained people to ignore and dismiss them, regardless of their severity or importance.

• We can’t get rid of the need for updates (at least, not in the way we currently write and deliver consumer software), but we can improve our odds of them being taken seriously.

Privacy/Surveillance

• The pair of Senators who are calling for an investigation of YouTube’s practices have pushed for new children’s privacy protections.

• Researchers are trying to use AI to detect “social norms violations.” Feels a little sketchy right now, but this is the sort of thing that AIs will get better at. (Like all of these systems, anything but a very low false positive rate makes the detection useless in practice.)

• News article.

• In our experience, there’s rarely any question when the cat uses the litter box. At all. In the entire house. For hours. And while it may be instantly obvious to the most casual observer that it’s time to clean the thing out, that doesn’t mean there’s no value in quantifying your feline friend’s noxious vapors. For science.

Defence/Aggression

• Last week, the government reaffirmed that the executive decides when Australia goes to war.

• In the public mind, long-range strike options, such as land-based missiles and the AUKUS submarines, are ‘the deterrent’. If so, the Australian Defence Force is stuck in a holding pattern for many years to come.

• At a Security Council meeting, officials gave harrowing accounts of rights abuses in North Korea. But global divisions were clear: Russia denounced the discussion, and China questioned its validity.

• Satellite photos show a 600-meter airstrip was constructed on Triton Island over the last month.

• An explosive leaked document obtained by The Intercept appears to show direct U.S. involvement in former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan’s ouster in 2022 because of his stance on the war in Ukraine. Khan is currently jailed and facing trial over a slew of corruption charges that his supporters say are intended to keep him from running for office again. The former cricket star was elected in 2018 but lost power in 2022 after a no-confidence vote in Parliament, which he says was engineered by the country’s powerful military with support from the U.S. The diplomatic cable published by The Intercept shows State Department officials pressured their Pakistani counterparts to push Khan out because of his neutrality over the war in Ukraine, promising that “all will be forgiven” if he was to be removed. “This document has been at the center of Pakistan’s political crisis for the past year and a half,” says Murtaza Hussain, senior writer at The Intercept. “Now that we’ve seen this document for the first time, it does seem to validate many of [Khan’s] claims.”

• The president will host the leaders of the two Asian democracies at Camp David, as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine spurs them to rapidly mend relations.

Russia, Belarus, and War in Ukraine

• Officials on both sides of the conflict balked at the suggestion that Ukraine should cede territory in order to join the alliance.

• The area around Kupiansk, in northeastern Ukraine, is the only part of the front line where Russia is making noticeable gains.

• Russia’s Investigative Committee (IC) is a federal law-enforcement agency tasked with detective work in both military and civilian spheres. Since the earliest phases of the armed conflict in the Donbas in 2014, the IC launched a number of programs for assisting children affected by warfare in eastern Ukraine. As the conflict developed into a full-scale war, the federal bureau started recruiting youths from the region to its cadets corps, sending them to several campuses around Russia. Anna Ryzhkova, a journalist writing for the independent outlet Verstka, has located and interviewed a number of Ukrainian teens who are now enrolled as cadets in these academies. (Their names have been changed to protect their privacy.) What she discovered was a tangle of moral ambiguities and outright violations of the rights of a child. With Verstka’s permission, Meduza has translated this reportage on the life of Ukrainian cadets in Russia’s law-enforcement schools.

• Tatyana Koltunyuk, an immigrant from Ukraine, has a “permanent disability” after being bitten by a shark at Rockaway Beach last week, her family said.

• The jets can be sent once Ukrainian pilots are trained to operate them.

• Baltic states Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania issued a joint statement August 17 reaffirming their joint support for Ukraine, including in the context of the G7 Declaration of Support for Ukraine.

• Russia escalated tensions beyond Ukraine again this week when its navy forcibly inspected and fired warning shots at a civilian cargo ship.

• To achieve individual, business, and national goals of renewal, Ukrainians need their government to be just as nimble and adaptive as the country’s private sector, writes Ukraine’s Business Ombudsman Roman Waschuk.

• Ukraine’s secret weapon in the war against Russia is a vibrant and sophisticated tech ecosystem including around 300,000 IT professionals and hundreds of defense tech startups, writes Mykhailo Fedorov.

• Russia thwarted a Ukrainian marine drone attack on its warships in the Black Sea, its defence ministry said Thursday, the latest in a string of assaults on its fleet in the flashpoint waterway. Attacks from both sides have escalated in the Black Sea since Russia pulled out of a deal that had allowed safe export of Ukrainian grain through the shipping hub.

• France’s former president Nicolas Sarkozy has stirred outrage in Kyiv and Paris by suggesting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could be ended with new referendums in occupied territories.

• A civilian cargo ship sailing from Ukraine reached Istanbul on Thursday in defiance of a Moscow blockade that saw another ship come under attack from Russian military personnel. Earlier in the day, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said his country would need weapons from the West “until we have won” the war against Russia. Read our blog to see how the day’s events unfolded. All times are Paris time (GMT+2).

• On Thursday, the prime ministers of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania said in a statement that they were joining the G7 Declaration of Support for Ukraine.

• Flights from civilian airports in Moscow were temporarily restricted in the early morning on August 18 after authorities announced that a downed Ukrainian drone had struck a building in the Russian capital.

• Hundreds of Ukrainian men have crossed into neighboring Romania illegally since the beginning of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Agerpres news agency reported

• Meanwhile, the Ukrainian casualties in Donetsk amounted to 310 soldiers, in addition to losing a tank, three armored vehicles, nine cars and a D-20 howitzer.

• Europe’s hospitality toward the war’s refugees prevents political divisions and is preparing them to rebuild their country.

• Small villages along a buffer area between Ukrainian and Russian positions on the Zaporizhzhia front have come under increasingly heavy bombardment.

• Tucker Carlson’s exclusive 80 minute interview with RFK Jr.

• A spokesman for the Ukrainian Air Force said the advanced planes wouldn’t arrive by winter, meaning they won’t play a role in the latest counteroffensive push.

• The Alliance should conduct a no-notice exercise in the Suwalki Gap between Poland and Lithuania, deploying maritime, air, and ground assets.

• The Russian authorities have opened a criminal investigation into one of the leaders of a prominent independent election monitoring group, his lawyer said Thursday.

• Latvia’s Central Statistical Bureau has released a list of businesses that continue to trade with Russia and Belarus, the Latvian public broadcaster LSM has reported.

• Vilnius University is terminating its contract with Andrey Desnitsky, a Russian professor who said the Baltic states were not occupied by the Soviet Union.

• Kazakh authorities have blocked the website of the Russian TV channel Tsargrad due to extremist propaganda and “inciting discord.”

• The United States has imposed sanctions on four Russians who it says were involved in the 2020 poisoning of Russian opposition leader Aleksei Navalny.

• Kazakhstan says the company sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) this week over its ties with arms deals between North Korea and Russia has been defunct for more than two years.

• “Issues of cooperation in international and regional affairs were discussed, including Iran’s participation as a full member of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization…”

• Which? calls for an independent airline ombudsman over transparency concerns

• According to Fintraffic, the civilian aircraft were allowed to fly over Finnish airspace to avoid bad weather.

• A Moscow court has arrested U.S. citizen Gene Spector on suspicion of espionage, according to Russian state media. Spector, who was born in Russia, was sentenced to 3.5 years in prison last year for allegedly bribing an assistant of former Deputy Prime Minister Arkady Dvorkovich.

• Turkey’s government sent a warning to Moscow requesting that it avoid further escalation after Russian forces fired warning shots to stop a cargo ship in the Black Sea on Sunday, according to the Center for Combating Disinformation under the Turkish presidency’s communications directorate.

• The popular online Tatar language school Ana Tele (The Mother Tongue), which halted operations in June after the international Education First (EF) group left Russia, will resume its courses.

• Luna-25, Russia’s uncrewed spacecraft that’s currently orbiting the Moon, has captured its first image of the lunar surface. Russia’s state space corporation Roscosmos published the image on August 17.

• Russian colleges will start training students to operate drones, state media reported on Thursday, citing remarks made by Education Minister Sergey Kravtsov at the Moscow Urban Forum.

• Russian officials have reportedly opted not to impose new controls on buying and selling foreign currency, as officials try and stabilize the plummeting ruble.

• Tajik authorities have questioned the mother of prominent opposition politician Sharofiddin Gadoev who now lives in the Netherlands, and Gadoev has asserted it was done on Russia’s behalf.

• NATO has not detected any changes to Russia’s nuclear forces and the Western alliance has seen no reason to reconsider its own corresponding setup, NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg said.

• Belarusian authorities have designated two 19th-century poems by a writer who is considered a father of Belarusian literature as extremist.

• Some Belarusian IT companies that have moved to Lithuania are considering exiting the country, a representative of the office of Belarusian opposition leader Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya says.

• Lithuanian border guards and the Armed Forces are planning to hold joint drills on August 27 to prepare for potential threats on the Belarusian border.

• LRT English Newsletter – August 18, 2023

• The number of illegal border crossing attempts on the Belarusian side has risen rapidly, so life in the eastern border of Latvia has become more alarming, local government heads told Latvian Radio on August 17.

Environment

• Torrential rain is expected to hit the Southwestern United States on Friday.

Energy/Transportation

• The constant talk by the federal Opposition about the need to embrace nuclear power as an option for satisfying the country’s energy needs appears to be just another diversionary tactic, which is unlikely to be followed up were the Coalition to gain power sometime in the future.

Wildlife/Nature

• In the wake of the fires that tore across the Hawaiian island of Maui on August 8, a number of images have been circulating on social media. The unrelated videos have been fuelling a conspiracy theory, born in the 2000s, that says wildfires are caused by laser weapons known as “directed energy weapons”.

Finance

• A mass ouster of employees from right-wing media group Project Veritas this week has left the company’s future in question, with a threadbare staff and serious fundraising concerns, say newly laid-off employees.

• Founded in 2010 by James O’Keefe, Project Veritas specializes in undercover and sting-style videos. O’Keefe was removed from his leadership role with Project Veritas in February, after employees signed a joint letter accusing him of being “a power-drunk tyrant” who allegedly wasted company funds on personal expenses and was supposedly “outright cruel” to colleagues. Project Veritas later sued O’Keefe for alleged financial impropriety, and the District Attorney in Westchester, New York has opened an investigation into him, the Nation reported this week.

• Mass tech layoffs returned to the Bay Area on Thursday following a relatively calm summer, with Intel announcing that an additional 140 employees are to be let go by the end of the month.

• Beginning in October of last year, the tech sector across the Bay Area announced mass layoffs in the tens of thousands. These have included Twitter, Peloton, Lyft, Opendoor, Chime, Stripe, Intel, Microsoft, and numerous others. In January, Salesforce cut 10% of its staff, or around 7,000 jobs, in only their latest round after several other cuts last year. Seattle-based Amazon slashed 18,000 jobs, with many coming in Silicon Valley city Sunnyvale. and Google cut 12,000 employees. Then in February, thousands more lost their jobs because of layoffs at former Silicon Valley stars PayPal, NetApp, Yahoo, and Twilio. In the following months, another round of job cuts at Meta led to another 10,000 people losing their jobs and Salesforce announcing that so many people had been let go that they would be leaving an entire office building. Even usually strong tech sector companies such as Apple, Lyft, Dropbox, Amazon also made cuts.

• However, tech company contraction slowed down in the late Spring and early Summer. While San Francisco’s downtown vacancy crisis worsened, it was generally other sectors pulling out. While generating fewer jobs than previous tech booms, the growing AI market has strengthened the tech sector in recent months, with many AI startups choosing San Francisco and the Bay Area as bases of operation. Despite this, more traditional tech companies have remained in turmoil in California, leading to the return of of layoffs this week.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• Opposition leader Ousmane Sonko, at the centre of a crisis that has rocked Senegal ahead of presidential elections, has been admitted to intensive care after launching a hunger strike, his lawyers said Thursday.

• As state media relies on an old Xi speech, more will be needed for confidence to return to China’s economy.

• During his stopover, Mr Lai gave speeches to the Taiwanese community, among other things.

• Nedim Öztürk was transferred to a high-security prison after his release was postponed.

Censorship/Free Speech

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

• Spotify’s white noise problem is becoming such an issue that the platform has considered banning the content altogether, according to one recent report.

Monopolies

Patents

• Today JUVE announced the shortlist for this year’s JUVE Awards Germany, including the renowned JUVE IP Law Firm of the Year, and the IP In-house Team of the Year.

• Incept LLC v. Palette Life Sciences, Inc., No. 21-2063 (Fed. Cir. Aug. 16, 2023) (Majority by Judges Schall and Taranto; Dissent-in-part by Judge Newman)

• The most interesting line in the case for appellate attorneys (and legal scholars) is probably the court’s law/fact distinction in the context of obviousness analysis.  The majority wrote: “We see no reversible error … whether viewed as a factual one about the level of [commercial] success or a legal one about the weight of any such success in the overall obviousness analysis.”  The law/fact divide is important because of the evidentiary requirements in the first instance and the standard for review on appeal. Here, the court makes clear that the weight given to any objective indicia of non-obviousness is a question of law rather than a question of fact.  The result then is that its analysis can generally be based upon reason rather than evidence, and that issue is one that will be heard de novo on appeal.

• CureVac accuses BioNTech of infringing two patents and three utility models with its mRNA vaccine Comirnaty. CureVac filed lawsuits last summer over the EP 1 857 122 B1 and the utility models DE 20 2015 009 961 U1, DE 20 2015 009 974 U1 and DE 20 2021 003 575 U1.

Trademarks

• The Board upheld a refusal to register CHURCH BOY TO MILLIONAIRE for “Books in the field of faith-based coaching, personal development, motivational and inspirational topics; books in the nature of memoirs; books about personal development; printed matter in the field of personal development, namely, books, booklets, curricula, newsletters, magazines, printed periodicals,” on the ground that the proposed mark is the title of a single creative work and thus fails to function as a trademark for the identified goods. Applicant Douglas Wood contended that the book and its Spanish translation are different works, but he failed to show that the two books have significantly different contents. In re Douglas Wood, Serial No. 88388841 (August 15, 2023) [precedential] (Opinion by Judge Christopher Larkin).

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