LWN.net – Patent clouds for the Opus codec

Oct 122022
 

The Opus codec is an audio codec that
was designed from the beginning to avoid existing patents in the field and
be royalty-free for all users. It was standardized by the IETF in 2012 as
RFC 6716.
Now a company called Vectis (“a premier
full-suite IP licensing and consultancy boutique“) is collecting
patents that are claimed to read on Opus as a way of demanding
royalties on its use. “The planned Opus program will focus on hardware devices and will not be
directed towards open-source software, applications, services, or
content“. (Thanks to Paul Wise).

External feed Read More at the Source: https://lwn.net/Articles/910848/

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Ballot Access News – U.S. Supreme Court Erases Third Circuit Decision on “Materiality” in Determining Whether a Ballot is Valid

Oct 122022
 

Federal voting rights laws have long held that voters cannot be disenfranchised for making a mistake that is not “material”. In other words, if the error made by the voter is merely technical and does not truly pertain to that voter’s ability to cast a vote, the error should not be used to discard the ballot.
On May 27, 2022, the Third Circuit had used that provision of federal law to allow some ballots to be counted in a Pennsylvania local race held in 2021. Even though certain mail-in ballots did not have the “date” blank filled in by the voter, the Court ruled that the ballots should count. All the arriving ballots had been date-stamped by…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://ballot-access.org/2022/10/11/u-s-supreme-court-erases-third-circuit-decisions-on-materiality-in-determining-whether-a-ballot-is-valid/

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Techdirt. – French Parliament Wants To Make People Pay A License Fee To Use Public Domain Works

Oct 122022
 

The public domain is the natural state of creative material. It’s where creations end up once copyright’s monopoly has expired. Crucially, it is the quid pro quo for that monopoly. The deal is that the creator of a work is granted a government-enforced intellectual monopoly for a limited period, after which the work enters the public domain for anyone to use for any purpose, including commercial ones. That’s the bargain, but it seems that the copyright maximalists in the French Parliament want to renege on it. Here’s an amendment to a finance bill that was proposed by 75 politicians in the National Assembly a few days ago (translation by DeepL):

The aim of this amendment is to increase aid to artistic creation by setting…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.techdirt.com/2022/10/12/french-parliament-wants-to-make-people-pay-a-license-fee-to-use-public-domain-works/

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Ars Technica – Webb captures truly strange set of rings built by massive stars

Oct 122022
 

Enlarge (credit: Image courtesy of University of Sydney)
Today, Nature Astronomy released a paper that shows off the sorts of science the Webb Telescope was designed to produce. Early on, the new telescope was pointed at a system of two massive stars that orbit each other closely. Ground-based observations had detected a ring or two produced by the interactions of these giants; the Webb was able to determine that there are at least 17 concentric rings of material that have been put in place over the previous 130 years.
And just to show off, astronomers were able to obtain a spectrum of the material that forms the rings.
It’s difficult to express just how bizarre…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://arstechnica.com/?p=1889489

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Planet PostgreSQL – Paul Ramsey: Be Ready! Public schema changes in Postgres 15

Oct 122022
 

The end is nigh! PostgreSQL has
substantially tightened
restrictions on the use of the “public” schema.
Here, a standard login user (not superuser) tries to make a table, as one does:
user=> CREATE TABLE mydata (id integer); ERROR: permission denied for schema public
LINE 1: CREATE TABLE mydata (id integer);

NoooO! Why can I not write a table into public?
For developers and experimenters, one of the long-time joys of PostgreSQL has
been the free-and-easy security policy that PostgreSQL has shipped with for the “public” schema.

“public” is in the default search_path, so you can always find things in it;
and,
any user can create new objects in “public”; so,
“just throw it in public!” has been an easy collaboration trick.

However, for anyone using a database for more…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://postgr.es/p/5qV

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Articles and Investigations – ProPublica – Mandatory Reporting Was Supposed to Stop Severe Child Abuse. It Punishes Poor Families Instead.

Oct 122022
 

by Mike Hixenbaugh and Suzy Khimm, NBC News, and Agnel Philip, ProPublica, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling, special to ProPublica and NBC News ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. More than a decade before the Penn State University child sex abuse scandal broke, an assistant football coach told his supervisors that he had seen Jerry Sandusky molesting a young boy in the shower. When this was revealed during Sandusky’s criminal trial in 2012, it prompted public outcry: Why hadn’t anyone reported the abuse sooner? In response, Pennsylvania lawmakers enacted sweeping reforms to prevent anything like it from ever happening…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/mandatory-reporting-strains-systems-punishes-poor-families

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Motherboard – ‘We Don’t Have Much Time Left’: Co-Author of UN Climate Report Detained at Climate Protest

Oct 122022
 

On Tuesday morning, an IPCC report author and climate scientist was taken into police custody while protesting  alongside activists blocking traffic in Bern, Switzerland.  The scientist, Julia Steinberger, is a professor of ecological economics at the University of Lausanne and contributed to the 6th Assessment Report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, specifically its third chapter on emissions mitigation pathways that are still possible this century.  The protest was organized by Renovate Switzerland group, and advocated for improved energy efficiency in buildings. Activists glued themselves to the road as part of a blockade; it was the fifth action by the group in the last week, according to local news reports. In a video of…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4ax783/we-dont-have-much-time-left-co-author-of-un-climate-report-detained-at-climate-protest

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INDY Week – Op-Ed: We Need to Ensure We’re Doing Everything Possible to Stop Mass Displacement

Oct 122022
 

Future generations will one day learn about the large-scale removal and replacement of one people with another on a scale not seen since urban renewal. Will we be able to tell them we did everything possible to stop it?

External feed Read More at the Source: https://indyweek.com/news/Letters-to-the-Editor/oped-mass-displacement-durham/

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Phoronix – Zink Lands Async Pipeline Precompiles For Better Performance, Less Game Stuttering

Oct 122022
 

Mesa’s Zink driver implementing the OpenGL API atop Vulkan continues advancing at a rapid pace and today the latest major addition landed: async pipeline precompiles…

External feed Read More at the Source: https://www.phoronix.com/news/Zink-Async-Pipeline-Pre

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Boing Boing – Do “The Lurch” to this rare vintage TV clip of “Monster Mash” as sung by Boris Karloff and Ted Cassidy!

Oct 122022
 

On the October 30, 1965 episode of the musical variety show Shindig!, the special guests were Boris Karloff and Ted Cassidy (aka “Lurch” from the Addams Family)! Previously thought lost to the ages, here is an actual clip from that episode featuring a rendition of “Monster Marsh” with Karloff impersonating original “Monster Mash” singer Bobby Pickett who, of course, was impersonating Karloff in the song. — Read the rest

External feed Read More at the Source: https://boingboing.net/2022/10/11/do-the-lurch-to-this-rare-vintage-tv-clip-of-monster-mash-as-sung-by-boris-karloff-and-ted-cassidy.html

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