• The Patent Microcosm, Patent Trolls and Their Pressure Groups Incite a USPTO Director Against the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and Section 101/Alice
• Microsoft’s Lobbying for FRAND Pays Off as Microsoft-Connected Patent Troll Conversant (Formerly MOSAID) Goes After Android OEMs in Europe
• To Understand Why People Say That Lawyers are Liars Look No Further Than Misleading Promotion of Software Patents
• When News About the EPO is Dominated by Sponsored ‘Reports’ and Press Releases Because Publishers Are Afraid of (or Bribed by) the EPO
• The Boards of Appeal at the European Patent Organisation (EPO) Complain That They Are Understaffed, Not Just Lacking the Independence They Depend on
• Guest Post: Responding to Your Recent Posting “The European Patent Office Will Never Hold Its Destroyers Accountable”
• The EPO in 2018: Partnering With Saudi Arabia and Cambodia (With Zero European Patents)
• For Samsung and Apple the Biggest Threat Has Become Patent Trolls and Aggressors in China and the Eastern District of Texas, Not Each Other
• The EPO Continues to Lie About Patent Quality Whilst Openly Promoting Software Patents, Even Outside Europe
• SCOTUS on WesternGeco v Ion Geophysical Almost Done; Will Oil States Decision Affirm the PTAB’s Quality Assurance (IPRs) Soon?
• Links 18/4/2018: New Fedora 27 ISOs, Nextcloud Wins German Government Contract

• ZTE Potentially Losing Access to Android Could Cripple Its Phones

• ZTE's potential catastrophic Android problem (The 3:59, Ep. 388)

• How the US's export ban could truly sink ZTE

• Thousands of Android apps may be improperly tracking kids' data

• EU antitrust chief says investigation of Google's Android, AdSense is advancing

• Vulnerabilities Abound in Popular Android Apps: Report

Managing an open source project is challenging work, and the challenges grow as a project grows. Eventually, a project may need to meet different requirements and span multiple repositories. These problems aren't technical, but they are important to solve to scale a technical project. Business process management methodologies such as agile and kanban bring a method to the madness. Developers and managers can make realistic decisions for estimating deadlines and team bandwidth with an organized development focus.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was approved by the EU Parliament on April 14, 2016, and will be enforced beginning May 25, 2018. The GDPR replaces the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC which was designed "to harmonize data privacy laws across Europe, to protect and empower all EU citizens data privacy and to reshape the way organizations across the region approach data privacy."

The aim of the GDPR is to protect the personal data of individuals in the EU in an increasingly data-driven world.

• Trisquel 9.0 development plans

  Just as we release Trisquel 8.0, the development of the next version begins! Following the naming suggestions thread I've picked Etiona, which sounds good and has the fewest search results.

  We currently do our development in a rented dedicated server in France, and although it is functional it has many performance and setup issues. It has 32 gigs of RAM, which may sound like plenty but stays below the sweet spot where you can create big enough ramdisks to compile large packages without having to ever write to disk during the build process, greatly improving performance. It also has only 8 cores and rather slow disks. The good news is that the FSF has generously decided to host a much larger dedicated build server for us, which will allow us to scale up operations. The new machine will have fast replicated disks, lots of RAM and two 12 core CPUs.

  Along with renewing the hardware, we need to revamp the software build infrastructure. Currently the development server runs a GitLab instance, Jenkins and pbuilder-based build jails. This combination was a big improvement from the custom made scripts of early releases, but it has some downsides that have been removed by sbuild. Sbuild is lighter and faster and has better crash recovery and reporting.

• Trisquel 8.0 LTS Flidas

  Trisquel 8.0, codename "Flidas" is finally here! This release will be supported with security updates until April 2021. The first thing to acknowledge is that this arrival has been severely delayed, to the point where the next upstream release (Ubuntu 18.04 LTS) will soon be published. The good news is that the development of Trisquel 9.0 will start right away, and it should come out closer to the usual release schedule of "6 months after upstream release".

  But this is not to say that we shouldn't be excited about Trisquel 8.0, quite the contrary! It comes with many improvements over Trisquel 7.0, and its core components (kernel, graphics drivers, web browser and e-mail client) are fully up to date and will receive continuous upgrades during Flidas' lifetime.
  Trisquel 8.0 has benefited from extensive testing, as many people have been using the development versions as their main operating system for some time. On top of that, the Free Software Foundation has been using it to run the Libreplanet conference since last year, and it has been powering all of its new server infrastructure as well!

• How to install RabbitVCS on Fedora systems

• When Vert.x Meets Reactive eXtensions (Part 5 of Introduction to Vert.x)

• Package management in Ubuntu : Learn dpkg command with examples

• How To Upgrade To Ubuntu 18.04 LTS [Desktop And Server]

• How to Manage Docker Containers with Rancher on Ubuntu

• How to Install Microsoft Quantum Development Kit in Linux

• How to Configure Network Bonding or Teaming in Ubuntu

• Create Dynamic Wallpaper with a Bash Script

• Rust loves GNOME Hackfest: Day 1

  This is a report of the first day of the Rust loves GNOME Hackfest that we are having in Madrid at the moment. During the first day we had a round of introductions and starting outlining the state of the art.

• Madrid GNOME+Rust Hackfest, part 1

  I'm in Madrid since Monday, at the third GNOME+Rust hackfest! The OpenShine folks are kindly letting us use their offices, on the seventh floor of a building by the Cuatro Caminos roundabout.

  I am very, very thankful that this time everyone seems to be working on developing gnome-class. It's a difficult project for me, and more brainpower is definitely welcome — all the indirection, type conversion, GObject obscurity, and procedural macro shenanigans definitely take a toll on oneself.

• Five days left

  I use to joke that the last week before foss-north is the worst – everything is done, all that is left is the stress.

• KubeCon + CloudnativeCon Europe 2018

  The Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s flagship conference will be taking place in Copenhagen from May 2-4. It will cover Kubernetes, Prometheus OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, and other key technologies in cloud native computing.

• A Taxonomy of Tech Debt

  Hi there. I’m Bill “LtRandolph” Clark, and I’m the engineering manager for the Champions team on LoL. I’ve worked on several different teams on League over the past years, but one focus has been consistent: I’m obsessed with tech debt. I want to find it, I want to understand it, and where possible, I want to fix it.

  When engineers talk about any existing piece of technology - for example League of Legends patch 8.4 - we often talk about tech debt. I define tech debt as code or data that future developers will pay a cost for. Countless blog posts, articles, and definitions have been written about this scourge of software development. This post will focus on types of tech debt I’ve seen during my time working at Riot, and a model for discussing it that we’re starting to use internally. If you only take away one lesson from this article, I hope you remember the “contagion” metric discussed below.

• 6 Python datetime libraries

  Once upon a time, one of us (Lacey) had spent more than an hour staring at the table in the Python docs that describes date and time formatting strings. I was having a hard time understanding one specific piece of the puzzle as I was trying to write the code to translate a datetime string from an API into a Python datetime object, so I asked for help.

• Getting started with Anaconda Python for data science

• How to install the Moodle learning management system

• Anatomy of a JavaScript Error

• Is DevOps compatible with part-time community teams?

• Chrome 66 Released With Security Improvements & New JavaScript APIs

  Google has rolled out Chrome 66 to its stable channel for Linux desktop users as well as other supported desktop/mobile operating systems.

• Google Launches Chrome 66 for Android, Windows, Linux, Mac, and iOS

• Chrome 66 rolling out on Mac, Windows, Linux w/ media autoplay restrictions, password export

• Google Launches Chrome 66 With Media Autoplay Advancements And Security Features

• 7 Axioms for Calm Technology

  By 2020, 50 billion devices will be online. That projection was made by researchers at Cisco, and it was a key point in Amber Case’s Embedded Linux Conference keynote address, titled “Calm Technology: Design for the Next 50 Years” which is nowavailable for replay.

• Announcing the Xen Project 4.11 RC and Test Day Schedules

  On Tuesday, we created Xen 4.11 RC1 and will release a new release candidate every FRIDAY, until we declare a release candidate as the final candidate and cut the Xen 4.11 release. We will also hold a Test Day every TUESDAY for the release candidate that was released the week prior to the Test Day starting from RC1. Note that RC’s are announced on the following mailing lists: xen-announce, xen-devel and xen-users. This means we will have Test Days on April 24th, May 1st, 8th, 15th and 22nd. Your testing is still valuable on other days, so please feel free to send Test Reports as outlined below at any time.

• Xen 4.11 Hypervisor Reaches The Release Candidate Stage

  The first release candidate of the upcoming Xen 4.11 virtualization hypervisor release is now available.

  The Xen Project has put out Xen 4.11 as their first of several release candidates while also announcing weekly "test days" through the remainder of April and the month of May.

• Cloud Foundry Foundation looks east as Alibaba joins as a gold member

• Cloud Foundry 2018 North American Summit Begins in Boston, Announces New Certified Platforms, Global Adoption

• Cloud Foundry Adoption Accelerates Globally in Every Vertical, as Developers Embrace Cross-Platform Flexibility and Speed of App Deployment, According to New Global Survey

• Wayland's Weston Begins Switching To Head-Based Output API

  Following last week's release of Wayland 1.15 / Weston 4.0, the development gates are once again open for new feature activity to land for Wayland and the reference Weston compositor. Weston has alrea

• mesa 17.3.9

• Mesa 17.3.9 Released To End Out The Series

  For those still using the Mesa 3D release that debuted in Q4'2017, the Mesa 17.3.9 point release is now available while it's the last planned update for the series.

  Mesa 17.3.9 has about two dozen fixes affecting the Intel drivers, RADV / RadeonSI, GLSL / SPIR-V / NIR, and other minor fixes/improvements. The list of Mesa 17.3.9 fixes can be found via this morning's release announcement.

With the recent release of DragonFlyBSD 5.2 one of the prominent changes is HAMMER2 now being considered stable for most use-cases. I've been running some benchmarks of this file-system compared to alternatives on other operating systems and have some FreeBSD / Linux reference points to share.

Complementing my earlier HAMMER vs. HAMMER2 benchmarks, I ran a set of I/O tests on TrueOS and FreeBSD 11.1 as well as Ubuntu and Clear Linux. All tests were done using the same Intel Xeon E3-1280 v5 Skylake system with 256GB Toshiba RD400 NVMe SSD, same default CPU clock frequencies, etc.

• Open-source library for improving security of AI systems

  Attacks against neural networks have recently been flagged as one of the biggest dangers in our modern world where AI systems are increasingly getting embedded in many technologies we use and depend on daily.

  Adversaries can sometimes tamper with them even if they don’t know much about them, and “breaking” the system could result in very dangerous consequences.

  [...]

  The library is written in Python, as it is the most commonly used programming language for developing, testing and deploying Deep Neural Networks.

• IBM launches open-source library for securing AI systems

  On Tuesday at the RSA conference in San Francisco, IBM announced the launch of the Adversarial Robustness Toolbox to support developers and users of AI that may become the victims of attacks against AI systems including Deep Neural Networks (DNNs).

  According to the tech giant, threat actors may be able to exploit weaknesses in AI systems through very subtle means. Simple, small, and often undetectable alterations in content including images, video, and audio recordings can be crafted to confuse AI systems, even without a deep knowledge of the AI or DNN a cyberattack is targeting.

• IBM releases new toolbox to protect AI from adversarial attacks

  IBM is releasing an open-source software library to combat against adversarial attacks in deep neural networks (DNNs). DNNs are machine learning models that are capable of recognizing patterns.

• Build a serverless framework at home: Go on, bit of open sourcey hijinx won't hurt

  First unveiled at SpringOne Platform in December, riff is still an early project. It emerged from the Spring Cloud Data Flow, a data integration project to run Java code as microservices created under Pivotal's open source Java-focused Spring framework.

  "Riff is the next step in that evolution," says Jürgen Leschner, a riff organiser who works at Pivotal. Instead of running microservices that persist in containers, serverless models hide the containers from the developers and operations teams entirely. Instead, when a developer calls a software function, the container orchestration system (in riff's case, Kubernetes) spins one up and then kills it off silently.

  [...]

  The benefits of open source serverless

  What do these open source serverless options bring to the party? Unless you're using them to slurp services on the AWS platform and minimise container fees by weeding out idle compute power, why bother?

  Efficiency for developers is one driver, says Leschner. "Developers don’t have to worry about building the connectors and boilerplate stuff into their code. They can package a simpler project and the boilerplate is already in the platform."

• Failure to secure open source code spurs DevSecOps boom [Ed: Yet another one of those 'journalists' who help marketing from anti-FOSS entity because it's disguised as 'research']

  A survey of over 2,000 IT pros shows that fear of data breaches is increasing investments in DevSecOps tools, particularly automated security tools and oversight of open source software.

• Security updates for Wednesday

• German government moves to open source private cloud

  The German federal government is moving to an open source, self-hosted cloud platform from Nextcloud for file sync and sharing and collaboration, in order to protect the data of its citizens.

  The Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund), which takes care of IT services for the entire federal government, has been running a pilot of 5000 users with Nextcloud since October 2016 and after a successful tender this will now be rolled out everywhere.

• German government chooses Nextcloud for open-source files

  Nextcloud has revealed its new three-year contract which will consist of supplying the German federal government with its private, on-premises cloud platform.

• Open source's big German win: 300,000 users shift to Nextcloud for file sharing

  The German federal government has chosen local private cloud and open-source file-sync operator Nextcloud as its collaboration and file-sharing platform for 300,000 government users.

  Nextcloud arrived on Germany's tech scene in 2016 after Frank Karlitschek, co-founder of the open source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud program OwnCloud, forked the software to create a more open-source model.

• German Government Chooses Open Source For Its Federal Cloud Solution

  It’s not hidden that apart from costing tons of money, the use of proprietary software also brings along hidden security caveats. These are the two primary reasons why the usage of open source software is being pushed in public agencies all around the world, especially in European countries.

The release of openSUSE Leap 15 is scheduled to be release during the first day of this year’s openSUSE Conference in Prague, Czech Republic on May 25.

The package submission deadline for non-bug fix package updates is April 24 as Leap enters the release candidate phase. The scheduled release for Leap 15 is May 25 at 12:00 UTC.

Leap has been using a rolling development model for building Leap 15 beta versions. Bug fixes and new packages have been released via snapshots to users testing the beta versions. The snapshots for the test version will stop and maintenance and security updates for Leap 15’s release will begin next month. Linux professionals and anyone looking to use Leap 15 are encouraged to test the beta versions as there is still snapshots being released and announced on the openSUSE Factory Mailing List. A list of items to test is available here.

Also: OpenSUSE Leap 15 Planned For Release At The End Of May

• No-Judgment Digital Definitions: App vs Web App

  Just when you think you’ve got a handle on this web stuff, things change. The latest mixup? Apps vs Web Apps. An app should be an app no matter what, but there is a difference between the two. Let’s find out what it is.

• Friend of Add-ons: Viswaprasath Ks

  Please meet our newest Friend of Add-ons, Viswaprasanth Ks! Viswa began contributing to Mozilla in January 2013, when he met regional community members while participating in a Firefox OS hackathon in Bangalore, India. Since then, he has been a member of the Firefox Student Ambassador Board, a Sr. Firefox OS app reviewer, and a Mozilla Rep and Tech Speaker.

  In early 2017, Viswa began developing extensions for Firefox using the WebExtensions API. From the start, Viswa wanted to invite his community to learn this framework and create extensions with him. At community events, he would speak about extension development and help participants build their first extensions. These presentations served as a starting point for creating the Activate campaign “Build Your Own Extension.” Viswa quickly became a leader in developing the campaign and testing iterations with a variety of different audiences. In late 2017, he collaborated with community members Santosh Viswanatham and Trishul Goel to re-launch the campaign with a new event flow and more learning resources for new developers.

• Virtual Reality at the Intersection of Art & Technology

  This is the second video in our four part series around creators, virtual reality, and the open web. As we laid out in the opening post of this series, virtual reality is more than a technology, and it is far more than mere eye-candy. VR is an immensely powerful tool that is honed and developed every day. In the hands of a creator, that tool has the potential to transport audiences into new worlds and provide new perspectives.

• Hello wasm-pack!

  As Lin Clark emphasizes in her article about Rust and WebAssembly: the goal of WebAssembly is not to replace JavaScript, but to be an awesome tool to use with JavaScript. Lots of amazing work has been done to simplify crossing the language boundary between JavaScript and WebAssembly, and you can read all about that in Alex Crichton’s post on wasm-bindgen. This post focuses on a different type of JavaScript/Rust integration: package ecosystem and developer workflows.

• Eclipse 2018 survey: The IoT landscape, what it empirically looks like

  Every year the Eclipse Foundation along with other sponsors conduct an online survey of the IoT market looking at what technologies are being used and how. The 2018 edition of that survey has just been made available and I thought it would be a great idea to look at some of the overarching trends.

  [...]

  The IoT OS of choice is Linux

  According to the 2018 respondents, the overwhelming choice for their IoT operating system (OS) is Linux with a commanding 71%, the top 3 choices being Raspbian, Ubuntu, or Debian. Interestingly all of these systems are closely related with Raspbian and Ubuntu both being somewhat based on Debian. What may be more interesting is that all 3 of these distributions can run Snaps, the next-generation packaging format designed from the ground up with security, robustness, and upgradeability in mind – all key aspects for anyone looking to create or use IoT devices.

• Official Ubuntu 18.04 T-Shirt Goes on Sale

  The official Ubuntu 18.04 LTS 'Bionic Beaver' t-shirt has been added to Caonical's online shop. The dark grey shirt carries the bionic beaver mascot in orange.

• Linux Shirt Penguin Remix

• Welcome To The (Ubuntu) Bionic Age: Behind communitheme: interviewing Mads

  My name is Mads Rosendahl (MadsRH) and I’m from Denmark. My dayjob has two sides, half the time I work as a teacher at a school of music and the other half I work in PR (no, not pull requests ) where I do things like brochures, ads, website graphics, etc.

  I’m no saint - I use OSX, Windows and Linux.

  I got involved with Ubuntu back when everything was brown - around 7.10. When I read about Ubuntu, Linux and how Mark Shuttleworth fits into the story, a fire was lit inside me and I wanted to give something back to this brilliant project. In the beginning I set out to make peoples desktops brown and pretty by posting wallpaper suggestions to the artwork mailing list.

  Because I can’t write any code, I mostly piggyback on awesome people in the community, like when I worked on the very first slideshow in Ubiquity installer with Dylan McCall.

  I attended UDS in Dallas back in 2009 (an amazing experience!) and have had to take a long break from contributing. This theme work is my first contribution since then.

• Declining Android's Automatic Correction Help

• Before you panic: 6 things to remember about Android security

• Google's Safe Browsing now comes integrated into Android apps

• After being an Apple fanboy for years, I'm now an Android convert

• Android P will finally be able to remember your Bluetooth headphone volume settings

• ZTE exports ban may mean no Google apps, a death sentence for its smartphones

Oracle Enterprise Linux 7 Update 5 is now available for download for the x86_64 (64-bit) hardware architecture and brings with it Oracle's Unbreakable Enterprise Kernel (UEK) Release 4 kernel (kernel-uek-4.1.12-112.16.4.el7uek) and a Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible kernel (kernel-3.10.0-862.el7). Oracle noted that fact that Oracle Enterprise Linux 7.5 remains compatible with apps that have already been certified for the Oracle Linux 7 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.

"Oracle Linux maintains user space compatibility with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which is independent of the kernel version that underlies the operating system. Existing applications in user space will continue to run unmodified on Oracle Linux 7 Update 5 with the UEK Release 4 and no re-certifications are needed for applications already certified with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 or Oracle Linux 7," said Avi Miller, Product Management Director, Oracle Linux.

Also: Oracle Ships GraalVM 1.0 To "Run Programs Faster Anywhere"

Four years after the debut of Trisquel 7.0 and a year and a half since the 8.0 Alpha, Trisquel 8.0.0 is now available for this Linux distribution that's endorsed by the Free Software Foundation.

Along with gNewSense, PureOS, and a few others, Trisquel is among the few Linux distributions approved by the Free Software Foundation for meeting their free software requirements. Trisquel 8.0 continues this trend in being "100%" committed to free software.