EARLIER today AstraZeneca Kat wrote again about the "first European Qualifying Examination (EQE) online." This time the focus was on the EPO's utterly poor response, which proves that António Campinos hired (or kept) truly incompetent managers, some of them being residues of the Benoît Battistelli nepotism scandals. An onslaught of negative comments can already be found in this thread (15 of them when I recorded this video, plus 115 comments here). The experiences and the responses are consistently bad. A few hours ago there was a follow-up saying: "Last week, the EPO held its first European Qualifying Examination (EQE) online. GuestKat Rose Hughes echoed some of the experiences of this year’s candidates about a rather complicated start of the examination."
"They turn the user's own equipment into a remotely controlled 'zombie', so from a technical point of view it's an act of technical sabotage."Anyway, as noted in the video above (it only highlights 3 comments, out of more than a hundred in total!) those exams are likely illegal for many different reasons and on many different levels. They require things that violate human rights inside one's home; they basically ban computers you control instead one ones that control the you, the user. They turn the user's own equipment into a remotely controlled 'zombie', so from a technical point of view it's an act of technical sabotage.
The video would likely have been a lot longer had my browser not failed to work (as happened to some people taking this exam). I mention the prospects of cheating, power outages, Internet outages and there are many more issues like poorer households where it's hard to isolate oneself from other tenants.
The reputation of the EQE is now truly appalling. Had the EPO canceled EQE for several consecutive years, bearing the pandemic in mind, the integrity of these exams would at least not be harmed this much. Suffice to say, the conceited statement from the EPO, which shocked some people who took the exam (the patronising tone is infuriating), would be better avoided altogether, or at least reworded profoundly. JUVE copy-pasted that nonsense and omitted all the mildly negative bits; JUVE has, in the sense, enhanced the EPO propaganda. We did a video about that a few days ago.
"For big proponents of the UPC, such as AstraZeneca and its lawyers, this might be enough of a reason to suppress critical comments about EPO management. When it comes to highlighting technical issues, all seems safe. But not challenging the EPO for corruption."What we're witnessing here is the collapse of the EPO on many levels, across not just patent examination and administration but also examination as in EQE. No wonder the UPC collapses time after time. The judges (or Justices) in Germany know a thing or two about disarray in EPOnia and it impacts their judgement. They don't even plan to deal with the pair of complaints for at least a couple of years; in other words, they're OK with the UPC never happening. Ever.
For big proponents of the UPC, such as AstraZeneca and its lawyers, this might be enough of a reason to suppress critical comments about EPO management. When it comes to highlighting technical issues, all seems safe. But not challenging the EPO for corruption. The hands freeze when it comes to typing anything at all regarding the latter, almost as if there's a blood clot in the hand. ⬆