Month: February 2022

Pine64 is a company which develops hardware aimed at open source software enthusiasts and then encourages independent developers to create the software that will run on it. So far that approach has generated results with a series of affordable laptops, smartphones, and a tablet.

The company’s most recent product is a $399 E Ink tablet called the PineNote. It recently went on sale for $399, but Pine64 cautions that it’s currently only appropriate for developers and early adopters because software is still very much a work in progress. But that work is progressing.

Pine64 community manager Lukasz Erecinski highlights some recent progress in the company’s latest monthly update blog post. At this point all of the tablet’s hardware works with open source Linux software including the E Ink display, capacitive touch panel, Wacom digitizer, WiFi, Bluetooth, and audio.

Meanwhile, developers of several GNU/Linux distributions and user interfaces have begun porting their software to run on this E Ink tablet with a grayscale display, a slow screen refresh rate, and a Rockchip RK3566 processor. Some things aren’t working yet – including hardware-accelerated graphics, which means the user interface is sluggish. But things have come a long way since Pine64 began shipping the first units to developers a few months ago.

Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.

Pine64 February 2022 Update [Pine64]

Software development for the upcoming PineNote E Ink tablet continues. Most hardware is now supported in Linux, a grayscale Plasma Mobile theme is in the works, and there’s initial support for postmarketOS with the Phosh and SXMO user interfaces.

Sony Just Reinvented Wireless Earbuds [Gizmodo]

Sony’s LinkBuds true wireless earbuds are the opposite of noise-cancelling: they’re designed to be wearable all day, allowing you to hear people and sounds around you without removing them. You can also control them by tapping nearby without touching.

Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra review shows Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 GPU is faster than Exynos 2200 [TechPowerUp]

Samsung’s Exynos 2200 processor with AMD RDNA 2 graphics appears to offer only a modest GPU performance boost over the previous-gen chip… and the same phone with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip trounces them both according to a recent review. The video review (which you can watch below) is in Turkish, which is why I’m linking to TechPowerUp’s summary.

Intel to Acquire Tower Semiconductor [Intel]

Intel is acquiring Tower Semicondicutor for $5.4 billion to help shore up its foundry services (Intel manufactures chips for other companies). Tower specializes in things like RF, power, industrial sensors, and silicon-germanium. The move follows Intel’s recent $1 billion investment in third-party chip development including major contributions to organizations working on RISC-V architecture, also seen as an effort to shore up demand for Intel’s foundry services. 

Shield TV gets 9.0.1 update to fix Android 11 issues including Plex servers, storage permissions [9to5Google]

NVIDIA begins rolling out software version 9.0.1 for the Shield TV, bringing fixes for Plex media servers and other apps that use external storage which had been broken by the update to Android 11.

Keep up on the latest headlines by following Liliputing on Twitter and Facebook and follow @LinuxSmartphone on Twitter and Facebook for the latest news on open source mobile phones.

The post Lilbits: PineNote, Sony LinkBuds, and Intel’s foundry business appeared first on Liliputing.

Pine64 is a company which develops hardware aimed at open source software enthusiasts and then encourages independent developers to create the software that will run on it. So far that approach has generated results with a series of affordable laptops, smartphones, and a tablet.

The company’s most recent product is a $399 E Ink tablet called the PineNote. It recently went on sale for $399, but Pine64 cautions that it’s currently only appropriate for developers and early adopters because software is still very much a work in progress. But that work is progressing.

Pine64 community manager Lukasz Erecinski highlights some recent progress in the company’s latest monthly update blog post. At this point all of the tablet’s hardware works with open source Linux software including the E Ink display, capacitive touch panel, Wacom digitizer, WiFi, Bluetooth, and audio.

Meanwhile, developers of several GNU/Linux distributions and user interfaces have begun porting their software to run on this E Ink tablet with a grayscale display, a slow screen refresh rate, and a Rockchip RK3566 processor. Some things aren’t working yet – including hardware-accelerated graphics, which means the user interface is sluggish. But things have come a long way since Pine64 began shipping the first units to developers a few months ago.

Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.

Pine64 February 2022 Update [Pine64]

Software development for the upcoming PineNote E Ink tablet continues. Most hardware is now supported in Linux, a grayscale Plasma Mobile theme is in the works, and there’s initial support for postmarketOS with the Phosh and SXMO user interfaces.

Sony Just Reinvented Wireless Earbuds [Gizmodo]

Sony’s LinkBuds true wireless earbuds are the opposite of noise-cancelling: they’re designed to be wearable all day, allowing you to hear people and sounds around you without removing them. You can also control them by tapping nearby without touching.

Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra review shows Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 GPU is faster than Exynos 2200 [TechPowerUp]

Samsung’s Exynos 2200 processor with AMD RDNA 2 graphics appears to offer only a modest GPU performance boost over the previous-gen chip… and the same phone with a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip trounces them both according to a recent review. The video review (which you can watch below) is in Turkish, which is why I’m linking to TechPowerUp’s summary.

Intel to Acquire Tower Semiconductor [Intel]

Intel is acquiring Tower Semicondicutor for $5.4 billion to help shore up its foundry services (Intel manufactures chips for other companies). Tower specializes in things like RF, power, industrial sensors, and silicon-germanium. The move follows Intel’s recent $1 billion investment in third-party chip development including major contributions to organizations working on RISC-V architecture, also seen as an effort to shore up demand for Intel’s foundry services. 

Shield TV gets 9.0.1 update to fix Android 11 issues including Plex servers, storage permissions [9to5Google]

NVIDIA begins rolling out software version 9.0.1 for the Shield TV, bringing fixes for Plex media servers and other apps that use external storage which had been broken by the update to Android 11.

Keep up on the latest headlines by following Liliputing on Twitter and Facebook and follow @LinuxSmartphone on Twitter and Facebook for the latest news on open source mobile phones.

The post Lilbits: PineNote, Sony LinkBuds, and Intel’s foundry business appeared first on Liliputing.

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Der Bundeskanzler sprach am Dienstag in Moskau mehrere Stunden mit seinem Gastgeber. Die Differenzen wurden beim folgenden Pressetermin mehr als deutlich

Über einen ideologischen Begriff, der gerade Konjunktur hat

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In 2020, Amazon teamed up with publisher Penguin Random House and authors including John Grisham, Scott Turow and Lee Child to sue several pirate ‘Kiss Library’ eBook sites operating out of Ukraine.

Curious as to how such a lawsuit might progress, we monitored every filing in the case. Over time it became extremely clear that the plaintiffs were going to have to work extraordinarily hard to get the matter to trial, let alone recover anything from the elusive defendants.

Late December, however, the plaintiffs, which included members of the Authors Guild, prevailed after winning a $7.8m default judgment. But that win, the authors say, only serves to highlight the problems caused by foreign-based pirate sites.

Authors Celebrate Hard Fought Win

In a new opinion piece published at The Hill, Grisham and Turow summarize some of the undoubted difficulties the lawsuit encountered, likening the battle to those faced by scientific publishers in respect of Z-Library and LibGen which “continue to operate openly and brazenly.”

“Every day, countless numbers of books, including ours, are stolen and sold or given away illegally over the internet. As a result, authors and the publishing industry as a whole hemorrhage large amounts of revenue each year,” they write.

“Book authors earn their incomes from legitimate sales of their books, as a percentage of each sale. When sales are replaced by pirated copies, authors earn a lot less. Piracy steals from us, not only the value of our labor, but the years we spent honing our craft and the personal sacrifices we make along the way.”

In respect of the judgment, the authors welcome the maximum $150,000 per work damages awarded by the court but quite rightfully question whether they will ever see a penny of that. What they want now is more action from the likes of Google, who they accuse of facilitating access to infringing works. They also want Congress to step up funding for criminal enforcement in copyright cases.

Congress and Google Must Do More

With around 90% of the search market, Google is regularly criticized by rightsholders for allowing infringing content to appear in its search results. No that the company doesn’t take action, however. It has removed billions of reported infringing links and since 2012 has been downranking pirate sites, something that hit torrent portals particularly hard.

Grisham and Turow don’t directly reference any of these efforts. Instead they cite lobbying efforts by the Authors Guild to seek action from Congress to change copyright law in a way that compels services such as Google to completely delist “notorious foreign-based piracy sites”, rather than simply reducing their visibility.

“Such measures would spare authors and other creators the enormous costs of suing bad guys like Kiss Library overseas,” they write.

What do the Authors Guild Want?

The Authors Guild’s position is largely in line with those of the MPA and RIAA, who believe that the DMCA is no longer fit for purpose. The whack-a-mole game of taking down URLs only for them to reappear under another URL is one aspect they believe can be addressed by narrowing safe harbors for service providers.

However, that type of action wouldn’t necessarily help to tackle dedicated ‘pirate’ platforms that often ignore DMCA takedown notices completely. In these cases the Authors Guild says that pressure needs to be applied to search engines including market leader Google.

“The Authors Guild strongly supports the use of website blocking by search engines (also called ‘delinking’ in the search engine context) after a certain number of takedown notices have been issued against a particular site and it is clear that the site is devoted to piracy,” they write (pdf).

The Authors Guild also wants Congress to require online service providers of a certain scale (over $10m in annual revenue, for example) to implement “filtering, fingerprinting, and other prophylactic technical measures”, a request that’s broadly in line with the measures currently under scrutiny in the EU.

Broadly speaking, the Authors Guild believes that existing copyright law is completely inadequate against modern threats but the background to the Kiss Library lawsuit paints a slightly different picture.

Plaintiffs Lawsuit Was Almost Immediately Effective

In their opinion piece Grisham and Turow note that the “most important thing is that the Kiss Library network of dozens of sites is now down” but that has long been the case. In July 2020, around the time that the original complaint was filed, all of the domains in the ‘Kiss’ operation were taken down, presumably in response to the legal action.

Just a day after the complaint was filed, a Washington court issued a temporary restraining order designed to cripple Kiss Library. Without the defendants being heard, domain registries and registrars, including Tucows Domains Inc., Whois Privacy Corp., and NameCheap, Inc., were ordered to take action against all of the defendants’ domains under their control, rendering them “inactive and non-transferable” pending further instruction from the Court.

A similar order was granted requiring email services, social media services, search engines and other online providers to disable service to all of the defendants’ websites. In August 2020, the injunctions, which also covered banks, payment processors, credit card companies, advertisers and search engines, were made permanent.

The plaintiffs were also granted permission to take down any ‘mirror’ sites that may have surfaced to take up where Kiss Library left off.

While there can be little doubt that the proposals to tighten the DMCA to bring greater liability for service providers would be welcomed by most copyright holders, the Kiss Library lawsuit actually shows what can be achieved when action is taken under existing law.

The final money judgment is of course noteworthy, but the crucial matter of infringing content being made available illegally was dealt with in short order and more importantly at the actual source.

And, with no illegal ‘Kiss’ sites remaining online, there was nothing further for Google to index.

From: TF, for the latest news on copyright battles, piracy and more.

Last fall Valve released a short video showing how to disassemble the Steam Deck handheld gaming PC, but strongly advised folks not to actually do it since opening the case weakens its protection against drops and other damage.

But if you’ve got a broken part, then opening the case to see if you can replace it might be less of a risk than doing nothing. So it’s good to know that not only can you open up the Steam Deck, but Valve will also offer replacement parts for some components.

That means if, for example, the thumb sticks start to exhibit problems, you should be able to remove the eight Phillips head screws holding the case together, remove the back cover, and then remove the thumb sticks, each of which are on their own board – making it easy to replace one or both.

The folks at repair shop and parts supplier iFixit have published a teardown guide that shows how to get the thumb sticks out… as well as everything else including the Steam Deck’s SSD, shoulder buttons, touchpads, mainboard, and other parts. Valve says iFixit will also be one of the authorized sellers of Steam Deck replacement parts.

But that doesn’t mean they’re giving Valve top marks for Steam Deck repairability. While it’s nice that the case is easy to open and some parts are modular and easy to replace, one of the things you’re most likely to want to replace is apparently a pain to remove.

The battery is sealed in place with a lot of adhesive. Removing it requires application of heat, and iFixit advises against using isopropyl alcohol, since there are holes in the frame beneath the battery that could allow liquid to leak into the display.

And that’s a shame, because odds are that heavy users of the Steam Deck could see the battery degrade relatively quickly. While you might get around 3-5 hours of game play on a charge for some games, others may require more horsepower and kill a battery dead in just about 90 minutes of game play. And that means you could end up charging a Steam Deck pretty frequently, which will shorten the longevity of the battery.

The Steam Deck will begin shipping to customers later this month, starting with folks who reserved one last year. The handheld gaming PC sells for $399 and up and you can still reserve one, but if you request one now, you won’t actually get it until the second quarter of 2022 or later.

The post Valve will offer Steam Deck replacement parts for DIY repairs appeared first on Liliputing.