06.20.21
Posted in News Roundup at 8:27 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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It can be intimidating to switch over to a new operating system, especially if you’ve been using Windows or macOS for years. The language in new systems can be totally different from what you’re used to, and Linux may seem particularly complicated to newcomers.
Luckily, Linux has evolved massively over the past few years, and it’s now easier than ever to install and use this open-source operating system. In some cases, you won’t even need to use the terminal window to do it!
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It’s a common myth that Linux doesn’t support computer hardware like printers, speakers, scanners, keyboards, and other appliances. However, you’ll find that this isn’t the case, as it supports a vast range of hardware.
You can simply search your device’s name alongside ‘Linux’ as a keyword to find answers should you have any trouble getting hardware working. Linux forums on Reddit and Stack Overflow could also provide you with the guidance you need. But in most cases, your hardware will work just fine.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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My main file manager is LF and most of the file managers I look at are of the same style but today is different, today we’re looking at XPLR which is a single pane file manager with extra sub windows that can be 100% customized in Lua.
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**gcc-go** and **gcc-java** from the **d** software series of Slackware.
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Emacs has a really neat mode built into it called prettify-symbols-mode. You add a block of code into your Emacs config listing words and corresponding symbols. Anytime you type one of the words, Emacs replaces with the symbol or emoji that you specify.
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Kernel Space
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Back in April the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system was updated for Linux 5.12 compatibility while now with Linux 5.13 being right around the corner, Edward Shishkin has updated the experimental Reiser5 file-system code for v5.12 compatibility.
Reiser5 continues to be developed by Shishkin as a next-generation successor to Reiser4 with various new features around its logical volume, multi-device, selective file migration, and other features.
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So we've had a very calm last week, and in fact if it hadn't been for
the networking side, it would have been positively tiny.
Just over half the commits are from the networking tree, and honestly,
though networking changes dominate, it's not like there's a ton of
networking changes - it's all pretty small.
The two largest commits are a revert and a code movement patch for a
build issue.
So there's not a huge number of patches in here, and most of the
patches are pretty small too. A fair number of one-liners and
"few-liners".
Which is just how I like it.
Let's hope the trend continues for next week, and I'll be a happy camper.
Go test,
Linus
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Linus Torvalds is celebrating Father’s Day by releasing Linux 5.13-rc7. Kernel maintainers and testers managed to keep him happy the father of Linux happy this week by keeping to a small change set for this late-stage release candidate.
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The 5.13-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “So there’s not a huge number of patches in here, and most of the patches are pretty small too. A fair number of one-liners and ‘few-liners’. Which is just how I like it.”
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Published all the way back in September 2019 was a Linux driver for supporting the Pass-Through DMA controller for EPYC processors. The PTDMA hardware allows for high bandwidth memory-to-memory and I/O copy operations. Now mid-way through 2021 that AMD PTDMA Linux driver remains in the works and is up to its tenth driver revision while waiting to see if it’s now ready for mainline or further changes are still deemed necessary.
This AMD PTDMA controller and driver is optimized for use with AMD Non-Transparent Bridge (NTB) devices and not general purpose DMA. NTB is used for in connecting multiple separate memory systems to the same PCI Express fabric. The PTDMA driver supports the 0×1498 (PCI device ID) controller found within EPYC processors since 7002 “Rome”.
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Applications
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Although Linux distros aren’t exactly considered the most user-friendly operating systems available, many of the different distributions do include some very helpful utilities – as long as you know where to look. Not only can some of these utilities be used for managing and maintaining your Linux data, but some of them are specifically meant for data recovery or backup.
It’s important to note that all Linux distros are not equal. As such, some of these tools might not be included with your Linux installation by default. Many of them are featured in some of the most popular distros, however, including ALT Linux, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, and more.
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QOwnNotes is a open source (GPL) plain-text file notepad with markdown support and todo list manager for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, that (optionally) works together with the notes application of ownCloud (or Nextcloud). So you are able to write down your thoughts with QOwnNotes and edit or search for them later from your mobile device (like with CloudNotes) or the ownCloud web-service. The notes are stored as plain text files and you can sync them with your ownCloud sync client. Of course other software, like Dropbox, Syncthing, Seafile or BitTorrent Sync can be used too.
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Instructionals/Technical
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The Raspberry Pi 4 is seriously impressive, with some considerable hardware improvements over the Pi 3. As a result, many are picking it up to use as a Linux computer. One of the best operating systems to run on the Pi 4 is Rasberry Pi OS. Here’s how to get it set up.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Froxlor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Froxlor is an open-source lightweight server management control panel to effectively manage web hosting, domain names, FTP accounts, email accounts, support tickets, and customers that are associated with them and are licensed under GPL.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Froxlor server management panel on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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This simple tutorial shows how to enable & configure the multi-touch gestures in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 21.10 using touchegg.
For those running Ubuntu on laptop or PC with external touchpad, multi-finger gestures enable users with more actions to control your system.
Since Ubuntu does not offer a utility to configure multi-touch functions, touchegg is a free open-source tool to enable this feature for you. And it supports for both global gestures or gestures for Firefox, Chromium, Google Chrome only.
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In this tutorial we’ll learn how to get Public IP address from Terminal or Command Line.
This will be useful to find public IP address of a cloud instance like EC2 instance, Lightsail instance, or DigitalOcean Droplets.
We can also use this method to find Public IP of a VPS or any bare metal server that have Public IP Address.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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One of the other issues I see with the store and stores in general is that putting content on there means there’s yet another place where an author needs to manage comments. And that can be quite a deal breaker.
I spend some time on getting OPDS 1 implemented into KNewStuff, because it’s a really simple way of representing available content, and I am thinking that for comments I am going to let people link in an rss/atom feed with comments. All the major content management systems have the ability to generate feeds for the comments of a single article, so authors can just link the comment feed for a blogpost, and then on our end we should direct the user to go to the blog if they want to comment.
I think it would be pretty valuable if people could disable comments and instead point at the feed where they keep their comments. There’s some side effects there we need to keep track of, like making sure it’s clear these comments are on that blog and not on the store, as well as some vetting of the comment feed in general, but at the least it’d be in a place where the author can actually control.
This kinda ends up making commenting on the store somewhat pointless at first glance. We could try to see if some of the distributed/federated stuff is useful for assisting people to comment on the author’s comment-feed, but that’s also something that needs investigation.
Conclusion
I’ve been thinking about this all a lot of the past few years. On Saturday there was an Akademy talk by leinir about distributed app stores, and there’s going to be a birds-of-a-feather about that on Friday morning. I might not be available then, so I just wanted to get my thoughts about reviews and comments out there.
In general, I think my adjustments tend to come from a place where I have experience sitting in the author chair, as well as consuming a whole lot of indie stuff, and when looking at those, the approach of the big stores seems really weird.
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Another week has just passed and I have new things to share. This week was more maintenance work and getting ready before we try to build digiKam with Qt6.
In the last week, I ported a lot of code to Qt 5.15, however we need to maintain compatibility with at least Qt 5.12 LTS. I wrote several pre-processor checks and macros to maintain the required compatibilty.
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The Akademy conference weekend (schedule) is almost over already. I was unavoidably detained for saturday and haven’t been able to reserve much time for it this weekend or the rest of the week. On sunday morning I hopped off my bicycle 15 minutes before the start of the KDE e.V. board report, so I’ll let you know that I was wearing bike shorts while looking .. um .. boardly up top. Thanks Tomaz for noticing my long flowing blonde hair. Beside the KDE e.V. AGM and KDE e.V. board office hour I only have one thing going on, my only thing that isn’t administrative in nature: Qt6 on the BSDs; giving it some love and bringing the packaging up-to-date on FreeBSD (catching up with OpenBSD). That’s thursday at 1600 UTC (1800 CEST, so I’m skipping dinner for it). Join us for some ports hacking.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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Today is Fete de la Musique in the French-speaking world.
It feels like the perfect time to release the video of former GNOME employee Magdalen Berns singing Zombie. I recorded this at the Google Mentor Summit in 2014. Magdalen is no longer with us, she died of cancer in 2019.
If Magdalen was alive today, would she recognize the GNOME organization? People are gradually coming to realize that the recent attacks on Dr Richard Stallman crossed far too many red lines. Working for a non-profit organization is a privilege and when certain GNOME employees attacked a volunteer, Dr Stallman, they undermined the principle of volunteering everywhere.
We already see people who signed the petition in the heat of the moment are asking to remove their names. The choice of the song’s title is subject to debate. Are zombies the people trying to stamp out independent thought from leaders like Dr Stallman? Or are they the volunteers silenced by mindless groupthink?
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Reviews
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TrueNAS Core, formerly called FreeNAS, is a FreeBSD-based operating system which provides Network-Attached Storage (NAS) services. TrueNAS Core is the community branch of the TrueNAS project, sponsored by iXsystems. It also has a commercial branch called TrueNAS Enterprise. TrueNAS provides a minimal operating system base with a friendly, web-based front end for administration. Using TrueNAS we can set up ZFS storage pools, filesystem snapshots, network shares, user accounts, and background services through the web-based administration portal.
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On the whole, I like TrueNAS Core. It’s easy to set up, the web-based interface is easy to navigate. The system does a good job of displaying an overview of information and options in a friendly interface. There are a lot of options which might be overwhelming at first, but they’re generally organized in a way that allows us to find specific tools fairly quickly.
I was frustrated with the networking issues which prevented me from using plugins, but the tools which were available, such as those for setting up pools, automating filesystem snapshots, and working with services were all top notch. I’d definitely look at using TrueNAS in an organization that had a lot of data to manage and wanted to organize and share it quickly and with minimal fuss.
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Debian Family
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Windows 11 may be the name of the upcoming version of Microsoft’s desktop operating system, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the number ten. For instance, one of the most popular Linux distributions, Debian, currently sits at version 10 (Code-named “Buster”).
Actually, taking the number ten even further, Debian 10.10 is now available for download. Yes, this is the tenth point release of the tenth version of the wildly popular operating system. Those that believe in numerology may see significance in this versioning. Current Debian users should update their packages immediately, as 10.10 is chock full of important bug fixes and security updates.
“The Debian project is pleased to announce the tenth update of its stable distribution Debian 10 (codename buster). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available,” says the development team.
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Debian 10.10 is out as the latest routine point release, before the upcoming release of the Debian 11 “Bullseye”.
The Debian Project has announced the 10th update of its stable distribution. Like all other point releases that Debian project develops, Debian 10.10 has arrived for keep correcting errors from the Buster, that was released almost two years ago. In the next few weeks we should get a release date for Debian 11 “Bullseye”.
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Over the past days, I have received tons of positive feedback on my previous blog post about forming the Debian BBB Packaging Team [1]. Feedback arrived via mail, IRC, [matrix] and Mastodon. Awesome. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, folks…
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Some problems are just too big and complex for any one person who handles them alone, for these challenges we need to collaborate, but what that means?
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Health/Nutrition
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The expanding global pharmaceutical and medical device markets, the ever-increasing expense of FDA approvals, and the convenience of working with local regulatory agencies often combine to induce drug and device makers to choose first-launch markets outside of the United States. Ordinarily, there is little concern for U.S. patent risk when the development work is conducted entirely outside of the United States. Despite Merck’s apparent framework for applying the patent safe harbor where some aspect of the foreign regulatory work touches the United States, the early cases discussed above have not been expressly overruled and require caution. In varying degrees, each of the early cases demanded some evidentiary linkage between the overseas activity and the pursuit of FDA approval. Amgen and Elan appear to reflect both settled law and the safest course of action—the parallel quest for FDA and overseas approvals.
Although Merck does not condition safe harbor protection on an active IND or IDE submission, the assumption underlying the decision is that the work must target actual drug development in the direction of FDA approval. See Merck, 545 U.S. at 207 (requiring “reasonable basis for believing that a patented compound may work, . . . to produce a particular physiological effect, and . . . if successful, would be appropriate to include in a submission to the FDA”). Drug makers with an established track record of developing drugs for both the U.S. and overseas markets, whether alone or through licensees, are likely best positioned to demonstrate that an overseas first launch does not preclude clinical and other experimental work that produces information appropriate for eventual FDA submission.
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Priti Krishtel’s first case as a legal aid lawyer in India was as tragic as they come. One day in 2004, she recalls a couple walking into her office in Bengaluru with their three children. Unable to afford life-saving medicine to keep their HIV infections in check, the parents were dying of AIDS. With no other options, they wanted Krishtel to draw up guardianship transfer papers: The rambunctious siblings were to be sent to an orphanage before their parents died.
Even though drugs that could save the parents’ lives were available, the cost at the time was out of reach for the couple, who were living in poverty. Krishtel and the collective of lawyers she was working with at the time went on to handle many similar cases. By 2007, she came up with a strategy to slash the cost of HIV drugs in India: On behalf of patients’ rights groups, lawyers with the nonprofit Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK) she had cofounded would challenge specific patent applications on brand-name drugs, opening opportunities for generic manufacturers. Through a combination of patent expirations and legal challenges, price competition in India drove down the cost of the most common HIV therapy by more than 80% between 2003 and 2008.
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One patent application Krishtel and I-MAK challenged was held by Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories on a formulation of its HIV drug Aluvia that does not require refrigeration – crucial in hot climates like India. At the Indian patent office in Delhi, she argued that the technique used to make the drug heat stable was not new, Abbott had merely applied the technology to its own drug. Under Indian patent law, a drug cannot be re-patented unless it is also more effective than the existing patented form.
The office refused to grant a patent. Then Krishtel and her team scored two more victories. Patents on another adult HIV drug and on a liquid formulation for children were also refused, which enabled broad access to the drugs for millions of low-income Indians – and people around the world in subsequent years because they were supplied by Indian generic manufacturers at a fraction of the brand-name cost.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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Linux turns 30 this summer and, as part of the celebrations, the Linux Foundation asked the open source community “How has Linux Impacted your Life?” Authors of 30 personal stories have each been able to name a penguin. This led us to ask, Why is the Linux mascot a penguin?
Back in April the Linux Foundation asked for submissions to what is now a slide show of stories about how Linux changed their lives. The responses came from all over the globe and 30 of them were selected to create a slideshow that you can view on the Linux Foundation blog. To thank the 30 respondents for their contributions, each of them was invited to name a penguin adopted from SANCCOB, the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, a charity which rescues and rehabilitates seabirds that are injured or abandoned and then releases them back into the wild. This is why each of the slides features a penguin!
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But why was Torvalds so keen on penguins. He himself joked that he had contracted “penguinitis”, a disease that “makes you stay awake at nights just thinking about penguins and feeling great love towards them” after being bitten by a “ferocious” Fairy Penguin on his first trip to Austrailia in the early 1990s to talk to the Australian Unix Users Group.
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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There’s a host of issues with how Apple and Google abuse their mobile app distribution monopolies. The 30% “tax”–which actually peaks at 35.25% (plus Search Ads and developer fees)–gets most of the attention, but what those two companies are doing with respect to governmental contact-tracing apps is exacting an infinitely higher price in the form of human lives. Apple and Google are obstructing governmental efforts to combat COVID and have contributed to the rise of the Delta variant in the UK. That deadly and hypercontagious strain is now spreading to mainland Europe.
The Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, scientifically known as B.1.617.2, “has shown to be more contagious and more lethal both in South Asia and in the UK,” University of Chicago infectious disease expert Dr. Anu Hazra told CBS. In fact, studies have shown it to be about twice as infectious as the original Alpha variant, or “wild type.” Other viruses mutated into irrelevance: as they got more contagious, they also got less pernicious. SARS-CoV-2 might still do us that favor, but so far it hasn’t. It gets worse and worse.
Those who have been vaccinated only once enjoy very limited protection against severe symptoms if they contract the Delta variant. In a few months from now, colder temperatures will exacerbate the situation. The threat of a major pan-European Delta wave–which has already occurred in India and in the UK–is real.
Apple and Google would not have to “do” anything. They’d just have to be more reasonable and allow governments to do their job. I know it sounds absurd that companies should allow governments something–not the other way round–but unfortunately it’s an accurate portrayal of the situation: in April, Apple and Google rejected an update to the official contact-tracing app for England & Wales that would have made the app more effective.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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1 score and a little over 2 years ago, IRC was created by the great and honorable Jarkko Oikarinen. It’s had its ups and downs, from the era of net splits to the era of cancel culture. However, we’re proud to announce that we’ve completely obliterated the swamp removing the shackles on progress, and now we’re sailing blue seas. YaRR!
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The app is in beta, but everything works. If you find any bugs, please let us know in #freenode-bnc!
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Now that IRC is up to speed with modern messaging clients, we’re now aiming to take things further yet. IRC is a much more robust and useable messaging platform than anything else out there. We’re just getting started.
Special thanks goes out to tjr and his team, as well as the entire freenode staff as we worked through the transition from legacy to present. An additional special thanks goes out to prawnsalad, who’s previous contributions to the FOSS and IRC community, including the Kiwi IRC suite of FOSS, made all of this possible.
The power of the people cannot be stopped. freenode is here to stay, no matter what gets thrown at it. It’s now, as well, a recognized digital autonomous zone which gives it the unique ability to provide what freenode does best: freedom.
freenode is IRC. freenode is FOSS. freenode is freedom. Ask not what you can do for freenode, but what freenode will do for you. IRC is back!
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Monopolies
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Patents
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To disclose, or not to disclose? That is the question. [Ed: This firm is embroiled in a corruption scandal and lawsuits; it doesn't seem to know that the Boards of Appeal of the EPO are besieged and compromised; it probably does not care either (patent maximalsits thrive in mischief and entryism)]
With apologies to Shakespeare, here we discuss the difficult question of what information to include in your patent application, focussing on a decision concerning biological deposits – specifically a hybridoma. In this particular case the hybridoma did not serve as a claim limitation, thus the claimed invention (an antibody) was found to lack novelty.
Disclosure of your invention, particularly when it is complex and perhaps not fully understood/characterised can be difficult to appropriately balance when preparing your patent application. You don’t necessarily want to give away all your knowhow but nor do you want to fall into the insufficiency trap. For biotechnological inventions, such as a particular microbial strain or an antibody, where the invention may not have been completely structurally or genetically characterised, it may be possible to submit a biological deposit to allow patent disclosure requirements to be met. The deposit is usually taken as disclosing the invention in sufficient detail to allow the skilled person to make and use it.
However, a recently published European Patent Office (EPO) Board of Appeal decision, T 32/17, found a claim to a monoclonal antibody defined in part by a deposit invalid. In particular, the claim was to an antibody defined by two features – the ability to recognise a specific vitamin (i.e. a functional feature) and that the antibody in question was produced by one of a specific list of deposited hybridomas (i.e. a product by process feature).
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According to the legislation, going forward exemption certificates for royalties will be issued even if it is unclear whether a tax liability exists. This new interpretation of the law should in particular be relevant to the so-called IP registration cases. According to a new interpretation of the German WHT laws, starting this year the German tax authorities hold nonresident licensees and licensors liable to withhold and remit taxes in Germany on extraterritorial royalty payments as long as the licensed intellectual property (IP) rights are registered with the German trademark and patent office. The new law will provide more legal certainty for these taxpayers.
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With the development of techniques such as CRISPR and increasing knowledge in the ‘omics’, science can now provide what only a few years ago looked like science fiction: personalised medicine (sometimes referred to as ‘precision medicine’ or ‘personalised healthcare’). Personalised medicine is an evolving field where a therapeutic treatment is tailored to an individual with a particular disease and is capable not only of avoiding or minimising harmful side effects caused by mass medicines and treatments (as well as ensuring a more successful outcome), but also helping reduce costs compared with a trial-and-error approach to disease treatment.
This chapter aims to discuss the current status of personalised medicine in Brazil from both a regulatory and an IP standpoint, as well as to underline the main challenges in this area.
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CVC Opposes Broad’s Motion to Exclude Evidence and Broad Files Reply [Ed: More bickering over who 'invented' nature and life; this is beyond insane, the realm of the deranged and the lobbyists trying to privatise everything]
Late last month, Junior Party University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (hereinafter, “CVC”) and Senior Party The Broad Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University (hereinafter, “Broad”) each filed Motions to Exclude Evidence in Interference No. 106,115. Now CVC has filed its Opposition to Broad’s motion to exclude and Broad has filed its responsive Reply.
Broad’s motion to exclude was specifically directed to testimony from Dr. Phillip Zamore regarding “how a person having ordinary skill in the art (“POSA”) allegedly would have understood (1) the March 2011 Deltcheva et al. reference’s disclosures regarding tracrRNA, (2) the RNAi, pre-mRNA, and DNA systems he alleges are relevant to Deltcheva et al.’s disclosures, and (3) Dr. Zhang’s October 24, 2011 email regarding the role of tracrRNA in the CRISPR-Cas9 cutting complex.” According to Broad, what Dr. Zamore’s declaration did not attest to was “(1) whether a 2012 POSA would have had a reasonable expectation of success of using CRISPR-Cas9 in eukaryotic cells; (2) the state of the art after the Jinek 2012 paper; or (3) relevant prokaryotic-based systems, such as Group II introns,” all of which were issues upon which CVC Priority Motion relied. But these issues were attested to not by Dr. Zamore in support of CVC’s priority claims but by another witness, who did not opine on them. Thus, CVC’s proffer of Dr. Zamore’s testimony on these matters was an attempt, in Broad’s view, to “untimely seek[] to obtain expert testimony on these topics via improper re-direct testimony by Dr. Zamore” (i.e., during Broad’s cross-examination of CVC’s witness). And Broad asserted that its cross-examination of Dr. Zamore was properly limited to “the actual opinions expressed in Dr. Zamore’s declaration and his qualifications,” and thus did not “open the door” to the testimony CVC elicited on redirect examination.
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European Patent Office Decision T0032/17 has some interesting points to note on the disclosure of technical features conferred by hybridoma deposit information and the burden of proof in relation to product-by-process claims in opposition proceedings.
The claim defined the monoclonal antibody by a functional feature (the antigens the antibody is able to recognise) and a process feature (the antibody being “produced from a hybridoma (…)”). The question arose as to whether the process feature conferred any additional technical features on the claimed antibody. The Opposition Division held that, as a consequence of the process feature, the claimed antibodies were characterised by a unique amino acid sequence because “deposit numbers allow to identify specific hybridomas” and “each antibody produced by a different hybridoma will have a different sequence (heavy and light chains) which renders the antibody unique.”.
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This afternoon, President Biden signed S. 475, the “Juneteenth National Independence Day Act,” into law. The Act designates Juneteenth National Independence Day as a Federal holiday.
In a memorandum issued by the U.S. Office of Personal Management shortly after the signing, the OPM noted that when a Federal holiday falls on a non-work day for a full-time Federal employee, an alternative or “in-lieu-of” holiday within the employee’s tour of duty is designated based on the rules in 5 U.S.C. § 6103(b) and Executive Order 11582. Because June 19th falls on a Saturday this year, the “in-lieu-of” holiday for Federal employees with a Monday-through-Friday work schedule will be Friday, June 18.
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Rather, Judge Stark found that Cirba Inc. (“INC”) did not actually have rights to enforce the patent and thus dismissed the case for lack of Article III standing.
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Basically, the theme of INC’s case was about competition against the much larger VMWare, but IP is only a patent holder. Thus, all is not lost for Cirba, but juries are quite unpredictable.
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The new trial order is not a final judgment — the case is still ongoing. That means that there is no right to appeal the case immediately. However, Cirba has petitioned the Federal Circuit for writ of mandamus, arguing that the dismissal on standing was improper. The petition particularly focuses on the Supreme Court’s Lexmark decision and the Federal Circuit’s two subsequent decisions of Lone Star and Schwendimann. In particular, the plaintiff argues that under those decisions, the patent ownership is not a jurisdictional/standing question. “[D]ecisions treating the prerequisites of the Patent Act as jurisdictional were wrong.” Schwendimann. “Whether a party possesses all substantial rights in a patent does not implicate standing or subject-matter jurisdiction.” Lone Star.
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Filing an opposition as a straw man: the pros and cons [Ed: Fake patents should be possible to oppose by anybody; patents are not rights and people aren't magically entitled to monopolies as the burden of proof is on them to justify it]
European patents can be opposed by ‘any person’ within nine months of the publication of the mention of the grant of the European patent in the European Patent Bulletin. The phrase ‘any person’ includes anyone other than the patent proprietor themselves (G 3/93, G 3/97). Even a person listed as an inventor on a particular patent can oppose that patent (T 3/06).
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However, the EPO reaffirmed the principle of ‘any person’ oppositions, stating in the decision, among other things, that any person who starts opposition proceedings provides three main contributions to society at large:
(1) Undeserved monopolies may be revoked or limited to their due scope;
(2) industrial development is fostered in that the direction of innovation is not led astray by wrongfully granted monopolies; and
(3) legal certainty is enhanced.
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Some counsel say selective FTO is key in a crowded field, while others say ignorance is bliss
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Some counsel say selective FTO is key in a crowded field, while others say ignorance is bliss
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Patenting plant inventions via the EPO after G 3/19 [Ed: Besieged EPO courts want you to think patenting life and nature is OK, even though the European Patent Convention (EPC) says otherwise]
Over the past decade, the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the EPO has changed its case law several times on the patentability of plants (and animals) produced by essentially biological processes according to Article 53(b) of the European Patent Convention (EPC). Rather than achieving the envisioned legal certainty, the decisions have created a gap in patent protection for biotechnological inventions owing to the different interpretations of the phrase ‘essentially biological process’ and the EPO’s more recent practice of forcing applicants to expressly disclaim plants obtained by such processes from claims directed at plants obtained by technical processes. While allowing the patentability of plants in principle, Article 53(b) was originally introduced to exclude plant varieties and essentially biological processes of plant breeding from patentability to avoid an overlap with the available national, regional and international protection of plant varieties. In this way, plant breeders would have the freedom to breed and cross in the traditional biological ways without needing to worry about patent protection.
However, looking at the wording of Article 53(b), for example, it is only plant varieties as such that are excluded. As soon as a plant with a trait or mutation is claimed, it is from that point not limited to a single plant variety and the invention becomes patentable. Similarly, a claim to a new and inventive allele, haplotype, mutated protein or DNA sequence remains patentable and will include in its scope plants incorporating material of this kind, even if produced by essentially biological processes. Therefore, despite Article 53(b)’s exclusion from patentability, plant breeders still face potential infringement of existing patent rights, as is the case with any innovative area of research and development. Plant breeders should, at least to a certain extent, be required to accept this if they want to participate in a new innovative area of research and development.
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Boston area drug formulation development firm Integral BioSystems LLC has developed the platform technology NanoM™ for the formulation of new chemical entities as well as already-approved drugs in a 505(b)2 environment. The patented technology is a novel, differentiated and improved delivery approach for administering sustained-release medications, both small molecules and biologics to ocular and other tissue types, both as therapies adjunct to surgical interventions as well as stand-alone sustained release drug therapies in ophthalmology. The technology is also applicable to otology, intranasal, buccal, sublingual, urology and other accessible tissue spaces.
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The European Patent Office (EPO) today honored two U.S. researchers with the European Inventor Award 2021. Indian-American chemist Sumita Mitra won the innovation prize in the “Non-EPO countries” category for her invention that successfully integrated nanotechnology into dental materials. Serbian-American biomedical engineer and university professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic won the Award’s Popular Prize, having received the most votes from the public in an online poll. Vunjak-Novakovic, who had been nominated in the “Lifetime achievement” category, opened new horizons in regenerative medicine by developing a way of growing new tissue ex vivo (outside the body) using the patient’s own cells.
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Innovative Foundry Technologies LLC (IFT) has resolved its patent dispute with Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC). In addition, IFT has acquired new patents, one of which it asserted in a new infringement lawsuit filed in Germany. Specifically, on May 25, 2021, IFT filed two new infringement lawsuits in the Dusseldorf, Germany Patent Court, alleging that Micron Technologies, Inc., Micron Semiconductor (Deutschland) GmbH, and Mouser Electronics, Inc. infringe one of IFT’s patents, German Patent De 10 2008 030 854 B4, “MOS transistors having depressed drain and source regions and conforming metal silicide regions, and methods of fabricating the transistors.”
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Late last month, Junior Party University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (hereinafter, “CVC”) and Senior Party The Broad Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University (hereinafter, “Broad”) each filed Motions to Exclude Evidence in Interference No. 106,115. Now Broad has filed its Opposition to CVC’s motion and CVC has filed its responsive Reply.
CVC’s motion was directed to testimonial declarations of several Broad witnesses, including Benjamin Davies, Mark Kay, Alan Lambowith, Paul Simons, Erez Lieberman Aidan, Greg Hannon, Mark Isalan, Caixao Gao, Adam Bogdanove, Thierry VandenDriessche, Bryan Cullen, Paula Cannon, and Ronald Breaker, as well as documentary evidence. CVC’s basis for its motion was that this witness testimony had not been subject to cross-examination, based on the Federal Rules of Evidence, Standing Order (SO) ¶ 157.3, 37 C.F.R. § 42.51(c), and precedent including Rose v. Frazer, Praxair Distrib., Inc. v. INO Therapeutics LLC, and Mexichem Amanco Holdings S.A. de C.V. v. Honeywell Int’l, Inc. CVC also asserted that certain testimony, particularly that of Dr. Breaker, was hearsay. CVC raised similar hearsay objections to Broad’s proffer of two books about CRISPR, by Walter Isaacson (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race) and Kenneth (sic) Davies (Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing).
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Software Patents
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Inventive step and person skilled in the art
An essential requirement for patentability is an inventive step, which aims to ensure that a novel technical solution is patented only when it differs enough from the prior art (ie, previously known products and methods). The inventive step, according to European practice, is assessed by determining the difference between the invention in question and the prior art and evaluating the significance of the difference. In general, the difference is significant enough if it is not obvious to a person skilled in the art. In addition to the inventive step, the description of an invention provided in the patent application must provide enough details that would enable the skilled person to implement the invention on the basis of the application.
Therefore, the person skilled in the art is a key player when assessing both the inventive step and the sufficiency of the provided description for the invention. According to European practice, the ‘skilled person’ is, in simple terms, a fictional character who knows everything about the relevant area of technology but is not adept at applying their knowledge to find new ways of solving tasks. However, the person skilled in the art is capable of routine types of work and can carry out experiments.
What is changing in AI patenting practice?
In European patenting practice, European Patent Office (EPO) decisions play a significant role and set directions. Decision T 0161/18 by the Boards of Appeal (BoA) of the EPO stated that the skilled person would be unable to train a neural network that was needed for the solution described in a patent application since the content of the application was insufficient. The BoA considered that the skilled person would need more information than was disclosed in the application to train the neural network. The decision was unfavourable for the applicant as the application had been filed back in 2005 and the missing information could no longer be added.
The EPO’s longstanding practice for inventions has been to assess the inventive step of a presented solution by referring to what is “obvious to the person skilled in the art”. If the presented solution is obvious to the skilled person, this means, in practice, that the office considers that the skilled person would have the knowledge and skills to end up with a solution by following the invention described in the application. The EPO examination guidelines provide general guidance on the level of knowledge and skills of the skilled person but no detailed definition of the different fields of technology exists.
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In March of this year, the Enlarged Board of Appeal reaffirmed the European Patent Office (EPO)’s approach to the patentability of computer-implemented simulations.1 While the EPO continues to follow a “technological contribution” approach to patentability, Canada has recently rejected a similar “problem-solution” approach in favour of an approach based on purposive construction of the claims. This article looks at both approaches and how they apply to computer-implemented inventions.
European Patent Office Approach
The EPO has a two-hurdle approach to patentability. Under Article 52(1) of the European Patent Convention, “patents shall be granted for any inventions, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are susceptible of industrial application.” The first hurdle is patent eligibility, which is assessed without reference to the prior art. Article 52(2) EPC lists items that are not considered eligible inventions which includes, amongst other abstract ideas, programs for computers. However, for computer-implemented inventions this first hurdle has become relatively easy to clear, and can be satisfied by including the use of a computer in the claimed subject-matter. This was deemed the “any hardware” approach (T 0253/03) as a single technological feature is
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In this article for The Patent Lawyer, Andrew White and Conor McGuinness develop key insights into patenting video games with exploration of unsuccessful and successful case examples.
US video game publisher Electronic Arts has recently announced its agreement to purchase UK-based video game publisher Codemasters for approximately $1.2 billion. This follows the recent acquisition of, for an undisclosed amount, Scottish video game developer Ruffian Games by another large US publisher, Rockstar Games. UK-based companies are therefore clearly playing a leading role in video game development and publication.
The UK consumer market is of similar scale; its gaming market is currently the sixth biggest globally with UK consumers spending an estimated £5.35 billion on game hardware and software.
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【Volume 50】Great news to software developers! The new Taiwan Patent Examination Guidelines for Computer Software-Related Inventions (“New Guidelines”) will take effect on 1 July 2021. The New Guidelines issued by the Taiwan intellectual Property Office (TIPO) involve significant changes to the eligibility, clarity, novelty and non-obviousness of computer software-related inventions. References were made to the computer software examination guidelines of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), and multiple judgment examples made in Japan are also incorporated. The New Guidelines will provide both the applicant and examiner with a much clearer guidance to the requirements for computer software patents.
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Trademarks
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UKIPO warns that post-Brexit filing deadline looms – The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has posted a reminder that 30 September 2021 is the deadline for customers filing a UK right and claiming an earlier filing date for EU trademarks and design applications. Following the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, customers with EU trademarks and design applications that were pending on 1 January 2021 could file for a UK right and claim the earlier filing date, but time is now running out to do so. The office is therefore encouraging rights holders to file such applications as soon as possible, noting: “An early application will help with early examination and allow time for refiling if necessary, as the deadline approaches”. (TL)
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Counsel say vendors, direct contact with infringers and searching the inside of apps can help them with clearance and enforcement
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The Federal Circuit has affirmed the TTAB’s decision refusing to register FocusVision’s eponymous mark FOCUSVISION after being opposed by IBI based upon its FOCUS marks. The appeal focused in part on the similarity of goods, trade channels, and sales.
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IBI’s lowest cost service is $30,000 for its “WebFocus” tool. A full “Focus” is significantly more expensive. FocusVision argued that the high price, major commitment associated with the purchase, and sophistication of the buyers all suggested against confusion. On appeal, the Federal Circuit noted that “even sophisticated purchasers may be confused by marks that are sufficiently similar.” Slip Op. (finding substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that this factor is “neutral” in the DuPont analysis).
Finally, although there was no proof of any actual confusion, the court also found this “neutral” because the products had only been overlapping on the market for four years. “Here, the relevant period during which actual confusion could have occurred was relatively short—from June 2014 to January 2018.”
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Copyrights
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Back in 2019, The IPKat reported on a referral from Belgium – Mircom, C-597/19 – asking the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to clarify the treatment of (i) seeding under the InfoSoc Directive and (ii) ‘trolls’ under the Enforcement Directive, as well as the interplay between copyright enforcement and data protection law (GDPR).
Earlier this week, the Court issued its ruling, substantially endorsing the earlier Opinion of Advocate General (AG) Szpunar.
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With regard to 1., the Court noted that the retrieval of personal information of a subject who has damaged one’s own property may qualify as a legitimate interest. Turning to 2., identification of the owner of the connection is often only possible on the basis of the IP address and information provided by the ISP. Finally, in relation to 3., the mechanisms allowing the different rights and interests to be balanced are contained in the GDPR itself. The Court referred extensively to its La Quadrature du Net ruling and the need to comply with the provisions that embody users’ fundamental right to respect for private life and protection of personal data.
Ultimately, the CJEU ruled that Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, read in conjunction with Article 15(1) of Directive 2002/58, does not preclude either the upstream or downstream data processing requests, insofar they are justified, proportionate and not abusive and have their legal basis in a national legislative measure, within the meaning of Article 15(1) of Directive 2002/58, which limits the scope of the rules laid down in Articles 5 and 6 of that directive.
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Turning to the Enforcement Directive, the judgment – again correctly – does not premise the availability of protection upon the actual use of one’s own rights. This is also consistent with the principle, which however the Court did not expressly refer to, of copyright’s economic rights as being preventive in nature. All this said, the Court also reinstated the requirement of compliance with the overarching principles and limits found in Article 3 of the Enforcement Directive. In practice, this means that trolls of various types, including copyright ones, might be unable to invoke successfully protection under the Directive and its national transpositions.
Finally, the ruling offers some concrete guidance on how to balance copyright/IPR enforcement and data protection rules. This may be also useful when applying the provisions of the DSM Directive, including Article 17(9). Article 28 expressly requires any processing of personal data to be carried out in compliance with Directive 2002/58 and the GDPR.
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 6:17 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Previously in the series:
- Virtual Injustice — Part 1: António’s Increasingly Wonky Legal Fudge Factory
- Virtual Injustice — Part 2: The ViCo Oral Proceedings of 28 May 2021
- Virtual Injustice — Part 3: All the President’s Men…
- Virtual Injustice — Part 4: Mihály Ficsor, the EPO’s Hungarian “Fixer”
- Virtual Injustice — Part 5: Benoît’s “Friends” in Budapest
- Virtual Injustice — Part 6: Best Buddies With António
- Virtual Injustice — Part 7: Musical Chairs and Revolving Doors
- Virtual Injustice — Part 8: A Well-Connected ‘IP’ Maximalist
- Virtual Injustice — Part 9: Heli, the EPO’s Nordic Ice-Queen
- Virtual Injustice — Part 10: Vapid and Superficial Coverage in the ‘IP’ Blogosphere
- Virtual Injustice — Part 11: Perceptive Comments and Caustic Criticism
- Virtual Injustice — Part 12: Carl Josefsson – Down But Not Out!
The main concern of António‘s Oompa Loompas in Haar seems to be churning out high quality legal fudge in a “timely” manner.
Summary: “It would be nice to think that the events of 28 May have given the Enlarged Board pause for thought.”
AS we have seen, the referral procedure G 1/21 got off to an inauspicious start when the President of the Boards of Appeal, Carl Josefsson, decided to disregard a fundamental principle of judicial conduct by insisting that he chair the panel entrusted with adjudicating the case.
It was a matter of public record that Josefsson had previously played a leading role in the process which led to the adoption of the disputed Article 15a of the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal (RPBA). This was the provision which purported to empower the Boards to decide appeal cases by means of ViCo hearings conducted without the consent of the parties.
“It remains to be seen whether the Enlarged Board will continue in rubber-stamping mode or whether it has learned any lessons from the events of 28 May and its previous misguided prioritisation of “speed” over “diligence”.”However, despite his obvious conflict of interest in the matter, for some inexplicable reason Josefsson acted as if this was nobody’s business but his own.
Following a wave of critical and outraged public reaction to such a clear-cut case of judicial misconduct, Josefsson’s peers responded by removing him from the procedure on 17 May in a secretive session from which the parties were excluded.
But although Josefsson was removed from the adjudicating panel, the Enlarged Board failed to distance itself from his previous actions and to take appropriate measures to restore public confidence in the integrity of the procedure.
On the contrary, despite sidelining Josefsson, the Enlarged Board stuck to the “roadmap” which the former Chairman had imposed upon it and acted in a manner which strongly suggested that it had no qualms about sacrificing “diligence” for the sake of “speed” – or “timeliness” as the EPO‘s management likes to call it.
There is an old adage according to which “Justice delayed is justice denied”.
However, as case no. G 1/21 shows, “justice” rendered in an overly precipitous manner can be just as problematic.
But although the Enlarged Board refused to contemplate a postponement of the hearing scheduled by Josefsson, the plan to rubber-stamp mandatory ViCo hearings before the Boards of Appeal did not turn out to be quite the “slam dunk” that the overlord of Haar and his "handlers" on Team Campinos had hoped for.
On the contrary, during the ViCo hearing held on 28 May, the appellant won a small but significant intermediate legal victory when it successfully demonstrated that the Enlarged Board had failed to respect its own procedural rules.
“Right now it’s far too early to make any reliable predictions as to what the outcome of the hearing on 2 July is likely to be.”This resulted in an adjournment of the case to allow the appellant more time to formulate its response to the comments from the President of the Office.
The proceedings are now scheduled to resume on 2 July. [PDF]
It remains to be seen whether the Enlarged Board will continue in rubber-stamping mode or whether it has learned any lessons from the events of 28 May and its previous misguided prioritisation of “speed” over “diligence”.
Right now it’s far too early to make any reliable predictions as to what the outcome of the hearing on 2 July is likely to be.
In his commentary on the hearing of 28 May, a former EPO Director Daniel Thomas speculated that “[h]aving shown that he masters the procedure before the EBA better than the EBA itself as well as the President’s representative [Mihály Ficsor], the representative of the opponent [appellant] might well surprise us once again”.
On the other hand, as things stand, it also remains a distinct possibility that the procedure could still end up as just another pro forma rubber-stamping exercise.
“On the other hand, as things stand, it also remains a distinct possibility that the procedure could still end up as just another pro forma rubber stamping exercise.”It would be nice to think that the events of 28 May have given the Enlarged Board pause for thought.
However – looking at their track record to date – there is no tangible indication that António’s Oompa Loompas in Haar are concerned about anything other than churning out high quality legal fudge in a “timely” manner.
The dogs are barking and the caravan moves on… but where exactly is it heading?
For the moment the dogs are barking and the EPO caravan moves on…
The only question is: where exactly is it heading?
We will return to that question in the concluding part of the series, but before doing so we will make a brief detour to look at how mandatory ViCo hearings gradually became the “New Normal” at the EPO. █
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Posted in News Roundup at 10:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Server
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Apache versus Nginx is a well-deserved topic. If you are confused about which server is the better solution for you, let’s find out the answer in this article.
Apache and Nginx are the most popular web servers that power the internet today. Together, they are responsible for serving over 50% of traffic on the internet. But Apache has seen a decline in recent years, in favor of Nginx. At a high level, both platforms do the same core thing: host and serve web content. Both of them have unique capabilities catering to particular computing requirements, therefore making one more suitable than the other in various scenarios.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The newest Intel Tiger Lake-powered InfinityBook from Linux laptop company @TUXEDO Computers rocks a 16:10 (YES!), 3K display. Let’s unbox it and talk about it.
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On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got a lot of Distro News this week with an update to the Beta for elementary OS 6.0, we’ll also check out the latest releases of Regolith Linux, Redcore Linux and Alpine Linux. We’ve also got some cool hardware news to talk about with an update from Pine64 and the IndieGoGo for the JingPad A1 has launched. Plus I’ve got a new mechanical keyboard to show you that I guarantee you will make you think “BUT WHY?” We’ve also got a new Desktop Environment to talk about this week called CuteFishDE. Later in the show, we’ve also some App News to check out. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
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Kernel Space
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Earlier this month Linux 5.13 disabled Intel’s ENQCMD functionality for upcoming Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” processors as the kernel software code around it was deemed “broken beyond repair”. More of the recent Intel-submitted patches around reworking kernel code in preparation for upcoming CPU features has been found to be rather hairy after already being mainlined and thus another batch of urgent x86 fixes were sent in this morning.
Over the past year has been a lot of low-level x86 (x86_64) kernel code changes around Intel’s Linux 5.13 disabled Intel’s ENQCMD functionality for upcoming Xeon “Sapphire Rapids” processors as the kernel software code around it was deemed “broken beyond repair”. This stems from changes contributed by Intel over the past year around XSAVES supervisor states and preparing the kernel for Control-Flow Enforcement Technology (CET), Intel Processor Trace (PT), ENQCMD with Sapphire Rapids, and other features needing supervisor extended states (xstate) handling.
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Graphics Stack
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While vendors are increasingly just focused on Vulkan (and Direct3D under Windows), there still is plenty of OpenGL software out there especially in the workstation space where software vendors are slow to adapt. Well known RadeonSI OpenGL developer Marek Olšák of AMD landed another performance optimization this week that should benefit the likes of SPECviewperf.
This year we have seen Marek and AMD’s other open-source driver developers working on workstation optimizations with optimizing their Gallium3D driver against SPECviewperf and making other improvements in this year.
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Joshua Ashton who is known for his work on DXVK (formerly D9VK) and related Steam Play / Proton graphics related efforts has submitted a proposal for a Wayland Surface-Suspension protocol.
The proposed “surface-suspension” protocol is about being able to know if/when a surface has been fully occluded/hidden. This is important with some Wayland compositors suspending the client’s windows’ buffers under such conditions.
With games/applications potentially hanging if the buffers are suspended when hidden from view, the Wayland Surface Suspension protocol can be quite practical. The proposal would allow for providing events when a surface buffer is suspended and then restored. In turn the windowing system integration and graphics APIs can handle these surface suspension events to take proper action. Knowing this information could also allow for possible efficiency gains around memory management and the like when being able to reliably know if a surface’s buffer is suspended.
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Applications
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Instructionals/Technical
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Whenever you add a new repository on Ubuntu, the system adds a record to the sources.list file.
What other information related to repositories does this file contain? And is it important for the operating system to store this data? You’ll find out in this post.
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The second field is reserved for the repository URL. This URL points to the server that stores all the package files along with the database.
The third field denotes the release code name for the version of your Ubuntu installation. You might find xenial, bionic, and focal in the case of Ubuntu, and buster or sid if you’re using Debian.
The fourth entry contains information about the type of repository. On Ubuntu, the fourth field would contain any of these four repository components: main, restricted, universal, and multiverse.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install NetworkManager on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, NetworkManager is the default tool for configuring and managing the network services on AlmaLinux 8 or CentOS 8, there are situations where it may be necessary to permanently disable NetworkManager, and use alternative methods to configure and manage the network. Remember good practice always demands that NetworkManager service is up and running for automatic detection of networks and managing interface settings.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step turn-off of the NetworkManager on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cloudron on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Cloudron is a complete solution for running apps on your server and keeping them up-to-date and secure. Cloudron comes with the App store from where you can install various applications with just one click without the need of going through Database setup and other processes, for example, WordPress, Joomla, and more.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Cloudron on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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If you’re writing a lot of Common Lisp and you want to follow the convention of using all uppercase to refer to symbols in docstrings, comments etc., you really need something better than the shift key. Similarly if you’re writing C and you have VARIOUS_LONG_ENUMS.
The traditional way is a caps lock key. But that means giving up a whole keyboard key, all of the time, just for block capitalisation, which one hardly uses outside of programming. So a better alternative is to come up with some Emacs thing to get block capitalisation, as Emacs key binding is much more flexible than system keyboard layouts, and can let us get block capitalisation without giving up a whole key.
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The second orchestration and automation framework we’ll consider is SaltStack, which has commercial backing by the SaltStack company. SaltStack uses a declarative language similar to Ansible and is also written in Python. In this chapter, we will use the open source SaltStack framework, but an enterprise version of SaltStack is available as well, which adds more features on top of the open source one.
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A service is a program that runs automatically when the computer starts and waits in the background to do its job. A service usually does not have a graphical user interface and works without user interaction. The best-known services are certain web, mail, or database servers, for example, apache, MySQL, and many others. But also the hardware detection or the automatic integration (mounting) of USB sticks, for example, is done by services.
In principle, there are two types of services: internal, for tasks that are relevant or hardware-related when the system is started, and other is services that are subsequently installed by the user, which usually include all server services. In technical terms or computer jargon, services are also traditionally referred to as daemons. The letter ‘d’ therefore often used as the last letter in the program to denote some services, such as when the server component sshd of SSH or mysqld of MySQL.
Whereas Systemd is a system and session manager (init system) that is responsible for managing all services running on the system over the entire operating time of the computer, from the start-up process to shutdown. Processes are always started in parallel (as far as possible) to keep the boot process as short as possible. Now, when we create a configuration file that ends with .service and holds code about a process controlled and supervised by Systemd; is know as a Systemd Service Unit file. Units are created for services, timers, mount points, sockets, swap space, and devices, for example.
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This is an edited copy of an email I sent to provide guidance to users of apt-key as to how to handle things in a post apt-key world.
The manual page already provides all you need to know for replacing apt-key add usage…
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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First thing in the morning, Aleix Pol, president of KDE, introduced the event at and explained how Akademy 2021 was still “special” because we could still not meet in person.
Aleix then introduced the first keynote speaker of the event: Patricia Aas, co-founder of TurtleSec and a C++ developer and trainer. In her talk, Patricia explored bugs, types of bugs, how to deal with the secondary problems bugs create.
Then Aleix was back with his own talk, in which he told us about KDE’s “All about the apps” goal. The goal encourages community members to develop, improve and help distribute KDE apps. Thism it turns out, is especially important for new KDE environments, such as Plasma Mobile! He explained how the goal is going and encouraged people to join the effort.
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I was able to see a few more presentations than anticipated. The most inspiring was the one given by Patricia Aas I Can’t Work Like This. Based on a fictive story (with a lot of real background) she explained the Cynefin framework No, this is not a new UI or Qt based framework. The idea of the Cynefin framework is that it offers decision-makers a “sense of place” from which to view their perceptions. Unfortunately, I missed Nicolas Fella’s What’s cooking for KDE Frameworks 6. Coincidentally, I was preparing dinner at the time. This also cost me the first minutes of Dan Vratil’s C++ Coroutines and Qt. I compensated that by watching Dave Edmundson’s talk about Wayland for Qt application developers. Until yesterday, I thought Qt will abstract everything away from the application and we don’t have to do anything within KMyMoney, but now I know better. Thanks Dave. Guess I have to start playing with Wayland then in the near future just to avoid surprises in the future.
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The virtual KDE Akademy 2021 conference kicked off on Friday and runs through the 25th. This annual summertime event of the KDE desktop community is attended by hundreds but again carried out online due to the pandemic.
For those wishing to enjoy the recordings from this KDE developer conference, there is a YouTube playlist for all Akademy 2021 content.
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This week’s MR involved a big refactor of the linkage between the front-end of the reminder and attendee addition UI and the back-end stuff going on.
All this stuff now happens with models, and changes in each of the fields gets added to the models. This means that anything that you see in the UI should directly reflect whatever is present in the actual event — you won’t see a reminder and attendee that isn’t actually in the event. The benefits of having a single source of truth!
The UI for each attendee’s details has also changed, and it now allows you to select the attendee’s status (i.e. have they RSVPed?) and it also lets you request an RSVP from the attendee.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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On 7th June, I started working on the first task of my project (Redesigning Health’s MainView). The objective was to create a popup window that contains an AdwViewSwitcherTitle in the header bar which lets the user switch between tabs (Add Activity Data and Add Weight Data). We might add another tab (Water Intake Data).
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The Linux distribution NixOS stands out from the crowd with a mathematically “functional” package manager and a declarative system configuration. The system is based on the package manager Nix, from which it also inherits its name and its main advantages and peculiarities. Nix basically does not overwrite anything and regards every adjustment and update as a new, separate package. This means that the status quo is not endangered by failed updates and updates can be withdrawn at will.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Welcome to the 2021 Opensource.com summer reading list. This year’s list contains eight wonderful book recommendations from members of the Opensource.com community. From classics like Frank Herbert’s Dune and a new translation of Beowulf to non-fiction books about the history of tech industry culture, this list has books for readers with different tastes and interests.
Each recommendation provides valuable insight into why the person who recommended the book thinks it is worth reading. As always, the book selections and reviews shared by my peers are insightful and inspiring. I always learn so much from what they share, and I always enjoy seeing what new and interesting books I will invariably add to my “to read” list. I hope that you will also find something to add to your “to read” pile.
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Debian Family
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The Debian Project has announced the availability of Debian 10.10. As with other Debian point releases, Debian 10.10 does not constitute a major release to Debian, rather, it rolls up all the latest packages into a brand new ISO that can be used to install Debian without then having to apply post-install updates.
Anyone who is currently using Debian and has kept their system up-to-date will be on Debian 10.10 already. If you were thinking about installing Debian 10 with pre-existing installation media; you can do that and apply available updates later. Just because Debian 10.10 has been released, it doesn’t mean you have to create new installation media.
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After moving my server to Hetzner, I built up a large collection of self-hosted services I use on a daily basis: from fun things like an RSS reader and an IRC bouncer, to critical services like my email. I ran them all with docker-compose from a Debian VPS.
For the last couple months, however, I’ve been meaning to move away from Debian and towards something more minimal and clean. Over this last weekend, I decided to move to Alpine Linux.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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Ubuntu 20.10 release will reach end of life next month on July 22nd, 2021. Ubuntu 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) was released almost 9 months ago, on October 22, 2020. Canonical says that Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 20.10.
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The Royole RoKit is a flexible display development kit with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 board running Android 10 operating system. The kit includes a 7.8-inch “fully flexible” display and corresponding touchscreen module.
The mainboard is also equipped with on-board wireless connectivity, a gyroscope, a speaker, and more, and the kit ships with modular extension boards, data and power cables all packed into a suitcase.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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There’s a strict eligibility criteria for inclusion in this series. See the Eligibility Criteria section below.
Pure Writer is a plain text editor. The editor is designed to be minimalistic and tries to help the writer focus on writing content.
The app has a protective mechanism to ensure you never lose your content. It’s autosave functionality ensures content is saved every couple of seconds.
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Programming/Development
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Yew is a really nice framework for writing single-page-applications in Rust, that is then compiled to wasm for running in the browser. For me it has helped make web development much more accessible to me, but getting started with it isn’t always straight forward.
This is the bare-minimum to get a “hello world” in your browser – from there you can build on that foundation to make many more interesting and rich applications.
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The Best Cloud Computing Programming Languages To Learn [Ed: Programming for clowns, as the buzzwords du jour certainly determine what sort of coding environment is most suitable or 'trendy'?]
Learning cloud programming is the need of the hour in this era of technology. Cloud computing programming languages are taking the business by storm, and knowing modern cloud coding can assist you to keep ahead.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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Bash is a kind of program called a shell. Shells are usually text-based, and allow us to interact with our computers by exposing a set of builtin functions for things like directory and file navigation, and run commands. The first Unix shell was called the Thompson shell and was written in 1971. Shells have come a long way since then, but more modern shells, including Bash, still use a bunch of the same ideas and concepts as this original shell that was written almost 50 years ago.
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Estonia had already announced a similar decision earlier. The dives will focus on the newly discovered hole in the hull of the vessel, according to officials.
“When and how did this rupture occur? Was it before or after sinking?” director of SHK Jonas Backstrand said at the authority’s press conference on Friday.
The decision was prompted by a documentary series of the ferry wreck which aired in fall 2020 and revealed a large previously unnoticed hole in the hull of the vessel. The video was filmed with the help of a diving robot in 2019.
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Education
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More than half of disadvantaged young people are “not confident” they will be able to appeal unfair grades this summer following the exams marking fiasco of last year.
A total of 52 per cent of disadvantaged pupils are worried about the appeals process, while 38 per cent are not confident they will receive grades reflective of their ability, a new survey of over 1,500 high-achieving disadvantaged young people by the Social Mobility Foundation has found.
The findings come as the Department for Education and Education Policy Institute published research suggesting a lack of in-person teaching following the pandemic has led to a widening of the disadvantage gap.
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Health/Nutrition
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“If this right-wing hit job proceeds, it will be in spite of the Vatican warning against the inevitable divisions,” said the petition by Faithful America, which describes itself as the largest online community of Christians putting faith into action for social justice. “It would also be just for show: Washington’s Archbishop Wilton Cardinal Gregory has made it clear he will not deny Biden Communion, proving the vote’s only point is to send a partisan signal.”
The Christian organization said the conservative bishops were pushing the effort forward and “prioritizing cheap political points over spiritual grace.”
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As the highly transmissible Covid-19 Delta variant has spread to 74 countries in just six months since its discovery, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky is warning Americans that the strain will become the “predominant variant in the months ahead” in the United States.
The Delta variant is believed to be 43 to 90 percent more transmissible than the previous Covid-19 strains and is now the dominant strain both in India and in the United Kingdom.
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Decrying “medical apartheid” and the “failure” of G7 nations “to take on the Big Pharma monopoly rules that are preventing global mass vaccination,” Progressive International on Friday kicked off a four-day virtual summit to promote “vaccine internationalism.”
“Vaccine internationalism is how we end the pandemic.” —Progressive Internationalism
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The software was developed by a joint team of the Foundation for Innovations in Health, Kolkata Science for Equity, Empowerment and Development (SEED) division of the Department of Science & Technology, IIT Guwahati, Dr Kevin Dhaliwal from the University of Edinburgh and Dr Sayantan Bandopadhyay, who was formerly associated with the WHO SEARO.
The software was made available in primary care e-Health facilities through the support of the SEED Project. Healthcare workers trained under the National Skills Qualifications Framework (NSQF) or certified by the National Skill Development Corporation (NSDC) would be able to record all important parameters in a tablet for the running of the software.
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As I spend more time in the classroom, I’ve grown accustomed to not eating in school, but I still come home very hungry and with the occasional headache. While this year’s COVID-19 eating policies hindered many students’ health and studies, school districts now have the opportunity to redesign their policies with student wellness in mind. As districts plan for next school year, it is important to take into account students’ perspectives, needs and suggestions, as well as general safety precautions to help kids succeed.
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Manufacturers of prescription drugs and medical devices are on pins and needles as they await news of who will lead the Food and Drug Administration, and HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said the decision will come once a busy President Joe Biden finds time to make that crucial decision.
“This is one of those positions where obviously the president is very interested because FDA is just not another agency, it’s a critical agency. They’ve done some tremendous things during Covid. So I think what you’re going to do is find that as soon as the president has a chance to think a little bit closer, we’ll be able to work with him to see if we can get a nominee,” Becerra said yesterday in an interview with Bloomberg Law.
The agency was key in authorizing the Covid-19 vaccines and is now being tasked with permanent approval of them. The FDA also will need to consider how it can update the regulatory structure for other drugs and medical devices in light of some of the challenges through the pandemic. Many of the key HHS nominees tasked with responding to the pandemic have been confirmed or are on the path to being so.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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The United States government has already stepped up its response back home. The Biden administration sent a letter to corporations and business leaders with recommendations for how they can better protect themselves from attacks, and a plea that they do so. The DOJ formed a task force dedicated to ransomware, which has already managed to recover part of the ransom Colonial Pipeline paid to its attackers. And FBI director Christopher Wray even compared the ransomware attack epidemic to 9/11.
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But the scale, speed and ease at which that contest can now play out has been transformed. Robert Hanssen, one of the KGB’s most productive agents ever, supplied thousands of pages of classified material to his handlers. But he did so over a period of 20 years, from 1979 to 2001. Vasili Mitrokhin, a disillusioned KGB archivist, pilfered an astonishing 25,000 pages of material between 1972 to 1984, hiding reams of documents under the floor of his dacha, but it took him another eight years to get those secrets to Britain’s MI6.
By contrast, the Chinese [crackers] who penetrated America’s Office of Personnel Management in 2014 gained access to the records of 21.5m people at a stroke—a haul which, if printed out, would have filled a fleet of lorries. Some see the capacity to steal secrets in such remarkable quantity as qualitatively different from older forms of espionage: not just spying but warfare, or some hybrid of spying and warfare, or something entirely new.
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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The Linux Foundation — a trade organization founded in the year 2000 with the purpose of supporting, standardizing, and growing the Linux operating system — is rapidly putting their weight behind their new business venture: their COVID Vaccine Passport system. And sacrificing other portions of their business to do so.
The commitment level to their Vaccine Passport business is so high, that they are requiring 100% of all attendees at future events to not only be vaccinated against COVID-19… but also specifically use the Linux Foundation Vaccine Passport system.
With the rapid series of events, here is a chronological listing of some of what has transpired over just the last two weeks.
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Security
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If admins don’t update IBM AIX and Db2, attackers could paralyze the systems via DoS attacks. Security updates are available for download.
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The White House has issued a communique to business leaders [PDF] urging them to take the threat of ransomware a bit more seriously.
The memo, from deputy national security advisor for Cyber and Emerging Technology Anne Neuberger, said the private sector has a “critical responsibility” to protect their businesses against ransomware.
“All organizations must recognize that no company is safe from being targeted by ransomware, regardless of size or location,” she said.
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Thanks to increased demand for internet-connected cars, autos are driving the manufacturing edge with robotics-driven automation during assembly.
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I’m one of the Google Summer of Code (GSoC 2021) interns contributing to the GNOME Foundation. And I’m contributing to the libsecret project.
[...]
In simple terms, my goal is to extend current libsecret file database encryption-decryption functionality to work with a TPM. So, the TPM will handle key generation, wrapping-unwrapping of keys and key storage processes. This is very exciting work! Honestly, this was not the case in my early stage of contributing to libsecret. I knew nothing about libsecret, computer security, cryptography or TPMs. Thanks to both my mentors and upstream TSS developers, I’m confidently finding my way around the project. So, thank you Daiki Ueno for guiding me through every step of the way from my initial contribution to making my final project proposal for GSoC. And thank you Anderson Sasaki for helping me out with my questions every single day. Also, I would very much like to thank, upstream TSS developers Peter Huewe, Philip Tricca and Andreas Fuchs for helping me out with all things related to TPMs.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The report is authored by Irene Khan, Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, Clement Nyaletsossi Voule, Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association and Joseph Cannataci, Special Rapporteur on the right to privacy.
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The identity verification service ID.me is intended to help reduce unemployment fraud, and uses biometric data and official documents to verify people. But according to Motherboard, some who have applied for unemployment have reported that ID.me has failed to identify them correctly, and that they have had difficulty reaching someone at ID.me to remedy the problem.
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On Twitter, there are dozens of complaints about ID.me per day, and local news articles all over the country have detailed the problem over the course of months. In California, 1.4 million unemployment beneficiary accounts were abruptly suspended on New Year’s Eve and the beneficiaries were required to re-verify their identity using ID.me, a process which many found difficult and resulted in them waiting for weeks to reactivate their accounts while they struggled to make ends meet.
In Colorado, benefit recipients who had no problem establishing their identity before ID.me took over were suddenly rejected and went months without receiving the payments they were eligible for.
The story is similar in Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Arizona, and many other states.
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Defence/Aggression
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“The walking stick… is also a weapon and it meets a felt need of barbarian man on that ground.’ —Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class
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Neither general could explain why it took hours to send National Guard troops to clear the Capitol. Their absurd stonewalling about the need for a “concept of operation” plan was belied in previous testimony by then-D.C. National Guard Commander William Walker. Walker said Piatt and Flynn justified their rejection of his initial request for permission to deploy National Guard troops, at 1:49 p.m., on the grounds that having soldiers deployed to the Capitol would be “bad optics.”
Walker further testified in March that he had 155 guardsmen fully equipped and ready to deploy, and that their timely dispatch to the Capitol could have “secured the perimeter” and “made a difference.”
No one at Tuesday’s hearing mentioned the fact that Charles Flynn is the younger brother of retired General Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser. Days before the January 6 coup attempt, Flynn publicly urged Trump to declare martial law and hold new elections at gunpoint in swing states that had given Biden his margin of victory.
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The election, in other words, was not competitive—even by the standards of Iran, where unelected clerics hold the real power. Of the nearly 600 candidates who registered to run, all but seven were disqualified by the Guardian Council, including a former president, a current vice-president and Iran’s longest-serving speaker of parliament. (Three of the seven dropped out later.) The council, a group of clerics and lawyers who vet candidates, essentially cleared the field for Mr Raisi, a hardline cleric and judiciary chief with close ties to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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Amnesty said Raisi was a member of the “Death Commission” that forcibly disappeared and extrajudicially executed in secret thousands of opposition prisoners in 1988 while serving as Tehran’s deputy prosecutor.
Asked in 2018 and again last year about the executions, Raisi denied playing a role, even as he lauded an order he said was handed down by the Islamic republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, to proceed with the purge.
Amnesty said the “fate of the victims and the whereabouts of their bodies are, to this day, systematically concealed by the Iranian authorities, amounting to ongoing crimes against humanity”.
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Political analysts had predicted that Raisi’s win could complicate efforts by President Biden to renegotiate a nuclear deal, with Ali Vaez, Iran project director with the International Crisis Group, saying this week, “Raisi’s abhorrent human rights record, I think, will increase the price of diplomatic engagement for the Biden administration.”
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Progressive Iran-watchers on Saturday reacted to the election of Ebrahim Raisi, the country’s conservative judiciary chief, with concern and appeals to the Biden administration to choose conciliation over confrontation with the Islamic Republic, beginning with a U.S. return to the Iran nuclear deal and the easing of crippling economic sanctions.
“The ascension of Raisi to the presidency will be widely viewed as a victory for hardliners in Iran and the U.S. who seek confrontation over conciliation between the U.S. and Iran.”—NIAC
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It’s been years since Newsweek has been a regular news source for large numbers of readers but it still occasionally produces good investigative reporting. In a long feature story titled “Inside the Military’sSecret Undercover Army” published in the magazine last month, William Arkin, author of a number of books on U.S. national security, revealed that the Pentagon and, even more alarmingly, private contractors working with it, have deployed thousands covert operatives at home and abroad. These covert programs are believed to have 60,000 operators, twice as many as the CIA.
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Environment
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The past few years have seen young people around the globe emerging as leaders in the fight for transformative change—on issues ranging from climate change to gun violence to gender equality.
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“The typical data center uses about 3-5 million gallons of water per day — the same amount of water as a city of 30,000-50,000 people,” said Venkatesh Uddameri, professor and director of the Water Resources Center at Texas Tech University.
Although these data centers have become much more energy and water efficient over the last decade, and don’t use as much water as other industries such as agriculture, this level of water use can still create potential competition with local communities over the water supply in areas where water is scarce, he added.
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Finance
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Twitter India accepted before the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Information Technology that it differentiates between tweets- promoting the healthy ones and suppressing the harmful- and gives priority to its own laid down policies over the law of the land in cases of conflict, leading the panel to conclude that this is a gross violation of the IT Act, 2000.
The Shashi Tharoor-led parliamentary panel grilled Twitter India representatives at a sitting on Friday for over 90 minutes on issues ranging from failure to appoint a full time compliance officer and its claims of being an intermediary despite “manipulating content” on its site, which would put it in the category of a publisher, according to sources.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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The Modi government on Friday sought public comments on the draft Cinematograph (Amendment) Bill 2021, which proposes to arm the Central government with the power to order recertification of an already certified film following the receipt of viewer complaints – a move that would lead to an additional layer of direct government censorship going beyond that envisaged by the existing process run by the Central Board for Film Certification (CBFC).
While the ministry says that the original Cinematograph Act empowered the Central Government, “if the situation so warranted … to reverse the decision” of the CBFC in certifying a particular film, the Supreme Court’s view that the government has no right to demand censorship once the Board has certified a film has left the Centre powerless.
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The [Internet] in general and social media platforms in particular have proven to be effective places to spread misinformation about important matters such as Covid-19 and vaccines, disinformation (intentional falsehoods) about politics and elections, plus all manner of character assassinations and conspiracy theories.
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The Oversight Board pointed out in its recommendation that while Facebook has said it will make exceptions for satire, it doesn’t specify how or what qualifies as satire in its guidelines. Facebook said in its post that in addition to making its guidelines around satire clearer, it would “initiate a review of identical content with parallel context,” and may take further action.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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A new FAIR study finds that TV news coverage of the southern US border largely ignores the experiences and voices of those most impacted by the immigration system.
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Being Black in America, one often encounters a paradox: that in a so-called “free” country, one is not Black with impunity; that the “freedom” we lionize in this country began and holds itself together on top of your subjugation.
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The decline of democracy in Hong Kong, with Beijing continuing to tighten its grip, has accelerated. While the Chinese government pledged a hands off posture towards Hong Kong for 50 years when the UK relinquished its control, that pledge seems to have been worth less than the paper on which it was written. A couple years ago, Hong Kong implemented a new “national security” law that has almost nothing to do with national security beyond allowing for the prosecution of anyone who doesn’t think the CCP are perfect in every way. The end result of that has been the arrest of media members accused of participating in “unauthorized protests”, arrests of protesters themselves, and the ousting and later arrest of pro-democracy lawmakers for the crime of being pro-democracy.
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Back in the mid-nineteen-fifties, the prolific, progressive political economist, Harvard’s John Kenneth Galbraith, developed his “theory of countervailing powers.” He asserted as big business got bigger, its overreach would be constrained by strong labor unions, regulators, and antitrust enforcement. Inside the realm of large companies, big retail chains could check the power of large manufacturers.
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British judges would be told that they are no longer “bound” by European human rights rulings under major reforms being considered by a government review.
The Telegraph understands that the first review of the Human Rights Act in 20 years is weighing up proposals to curb the influence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in the UK.
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Monopolies
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Protection of plant varieties under plant breeders’ rights [Ed: Clear and overt misuse of words like "rights" in relation to #monopolies on plants, seeds, and animals (life) as if they are inventions]
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USPTO Webinar on China IP [Ed: Inappropriate term, "IP". What USPTO deals with is limited to patents and trademarks, nothing called "IP". Can we stop this propaganda drive? It's not property.]
The program will provide timely, up-to-date information on the latest IP legislative and case law developments in China during 2020 and the first half of 2021, during which China passed and implemented a myriad of IP-related measures.
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This guest post is brought to you by Sandra Torrillas Rodríguez. Sandra is an IP lawyer and PhD student at University Carlos III Madrid under the supervision of Sara Martín Salamanca, and visiting PhD student at Brunel University London, under the supervision of this Kat. Sandra’s main areas of research include the audio-visual market, the new ways of exploiting works in the digital sphere and the study of the making available right and the distribution right.
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Patents
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Judge Albright is not “So Unreasonable or Egregious” [Ed: Who is destroying patent systems? These sorts of judges from Texas, who turned courts into corporations]
Here is another mandamus writ coming out of Judge Albright’s Waco Texas courthouse. A basic repeated complaint against Judge Albright is that he appears to work quickly regarding issues that move the case toward trial, but acts more slowly to decide motions to dismiss transfer. I personally don’t put much weight in this complaint because truthfully he’s deciding all of the issues more quickly than most other judges.
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On 22 April 2021 the Intellectual Property Enterprise Court (IPEC) gave a judgement in Claydon Yield-O-Meter v Mzuri, a UK case on patent invalidity because of prior disclosure. As is known, in order for an invention to be considered new under Section 2(2) of the UK’s Patents Act 1977, it must not form part of ‘the state of the art’, i.e. all matter which is available to the public anywhere in the world in any manner, before the priority date.
It should be reminded that even if there is no one to observe the disclosure, just a possibility of prior public use being observed can rob an invention of its novelty. This principle was previously affirmed in Lux Traffic Controls Ltd v Pike Signals Ltd (1993). In that case, the invention related to a traffic signal light system. Before the filing date, field trials had been carried out by the applicant. The defendant argued that the invention had been made available to the public because a prototype had been used in public and it did not matter whether anyone observed the particular feature claimed by the patentee. It was held that the relevant claim of the patent was invalid for lack of novelty. Indeed, the court noted, a prototype was made available to a contractor and – if a skilled man had examined it – he/she would have seen how it worked. Whether such person examined it did not matter. To back up this argument the court pointed out that a book on the library shelf may be deemed a prior disclosure even if no one has actually ever opened and read it.
[...]
Claydon Yield-O-Meter Limited (‘Claydon’) was the claimant. Mzuri Limited (‘Mzuri’) and Christopher Martin Lole (sole director of Mzuri) were the defendants. The two companies are both manufacturers and sellers of agricultural equipment. Mr Jeffrey Claydon, CEO of Claydon, to whom the patents were granted, appeared as a third party to the dispute. Claydon filed a case against Mzuri claiming infringement of both its UK and European patents. The patents protected a seed drill, which is attached to tractors for precisely sowing seeds. The inventor, Mr Claydon, tested the invention prototype in his farm for ten hours over two days, before filing for the patents. There was a six-feet tall hedge surrounding the farm and the hedge had several gaps from where anyone could peep into the field. Mzuri contended that Claydon’s prototype could have been seen by anyone from the footpath to which the public had access, providing enough information to enable an understanding of the invention.
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Delayed Europe patent court launch prolongs frustration [Ed: This entire article is a Big Lie, and a lie that the corrupt EPO bribed the FT for. Corrupt media lying the people under the guise of “news”. They quote almost nobody except Team EPC.]
In November, the EU revealed a new intellectual property policy with the goal of helping companies — especially small and medium-sized enterprises — make the most of their innovations.
The EU says its plan will improve SMEs’ ability to protect their
IP, help companies share IP to broaden the adoption of technological innovations, fight counterfeiting and strengthen enforcement of IP rights.
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On May 11, Icelandic-based drug developer Alvotech filed a lawsuit against AbbVie seeking to undo what it alleges is a “minefield” of “invalid” patents surrounding what is arguably the pharma giant’s most prized possession: Humira.
Just 2 weeks prior, AbbVie had filed a lawsuit of its own against Alvotech — currently seeking FDA approval for its Humira (adalimumab) biosimilar AVT02 — accusing Alvotech of patent infringement related to that biosimilar application.
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In the first instance, Geofabrics alleged that Fiberweb’s Hydrotex 2.0, a track bed liner used by UK railway infrastructure provider Network Rail in the laying of railway tracks across the UK, infringed EP 238.
In March 2020, the first instance court under presiding deputy judge David Stone concurred with the allegation of infringement. The court also found the patent valid, dismissing Fiberweb’s counterclaim for invaldity based on lack of novelty, obviousness and insufficiency.
[...]
Now the second instance Court of Appeal has upheld the first instance decision, that the Hydrotex product infringes EP 238. The court dismissed claims of patent invalidity for novelty on the basis of Hoare, the first prior art.
The court upheld the decision that Hoare did not provide enough information for a skilled person to perform the invention, as well as corroborating the High Court’s rejection of the attack of obviousness.
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Despite all previous decisions, and the patent already surviving a 2014 opposition suit filed by Swiss company Intersurgical at the EPO, the German Federal Patent Court found the patent null and void (6 Ni 62/19).
It is not yet clear whether Fisher & Paykel will appeal the ruling. Since many of the previous rulings are in their favour, this seems to be the next logical step.
Ultimately, the question is whether Fisher & Paykel will receive damages for the time that Flexicare products were distributed on the German market, or Flexicare for the time it was not allowed to distribute in Germany due to the patent dispute.
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Austrian steelmaker Voestalpine has announced that it has developed an industrial-scale process for carbon-neutral steel production without the use of fossil carbon and that it has obtained a patent for the process from the European Patent Office. The patent is valid in all major European steel manufacturing countries and covers the production of sponge iron (direct reduced iron or hot briquetted iron) using green hydrogen and biogas in the direct reduction process.
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Scandinavian ChemoTech AB announces today that the Company has received approval from the European Patent Office. The final injunction for this patent application was announced in a press release on the 3d of February 2021. The examiner announces that the approval will be published 7th of July 2021.
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Lawyers predict how office life is about to change [Ed: Hopefully this pandemic can make more of these patent lawyers redundant; they were already waste of space and budget, wasting company resources by spreading their ruinous religious to inflame wars, litigation]
Lawyers say they are happy to keep flexible working – but question how effective it will be in a post-COVID world
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China produces more Crispr-Cas publications than EU and US combined [Ed: It is absolute insanity to conflate patents with publication and pretend that anything not patented simply does not exist (irrespective of how insipid those patents may be)]
Dutch companies are watching with suspicion how the genetic engineering technique Crispr-Cas9 is being used internationally, while in the Netherlands (and Europe) legislation inhibits the use of the technique. Is this causing the Netherlands to lag behind with agricultural innovations?
Yes and no, that is how you could summarize the answer of LNV Minister Carola Schouten. She took up her pen to answer questions from VVD Members of Parliament Peter Valstar and Thom van Campen.
[...]
Schouten refers to figures from Espacenet, a patent database managed by the European Patent Office. It contains patent documents published worldwide. In China, the number of Crispr-Cas9 publications increased from 200 in 2016 to 850 in 2020. In comparison, the number in the US is 150 and 500 (in 2020), while in Europe ‘only’ 140 applications were made in 2020, compared to 47 in 2016.
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Enlivex Therapeutics Ltd., (Nasdaq: ENLV, the “Company”), a clinical-stage macrophage reprogramming immunotherapy company targeting diseased macrophages in patients with sepsis, COVID-19 and solid tumors, today announced that the European Patent Office has issued European patent No. 3,258,943 covering AllocetraTM, the Company’s immunotherapy product candidate. The new patent’s title is “COMBINATION IMMUNE THERAPY AND CYTOKINE CONTROL THERAPY FOR CANCER TREATMENT”, and is expected to provide added intellectual property protection for therapeutic compositions of AllocetraTMand CAR-T immunotherapies for inhibition or reduction ofcytokine storms associated with CAR-T therapies for cancer.
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Validity challenges at the China National IP Administration are an increasingly important part of the Chinese patent landscape, but they can be confusing affairs. With regulations and guidelines, the process that PRID follows is intended to be efficient and many Chinese practitioners will advise that invalidations can be accomplished in six to nine months. However, Unified Patents has filed 18 such challenges since 2020 in China but, based on its experiences, the reality can be very different to expectations.
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Intel and Apple demonstrate what perseverance can mean in litigation. They’ve been trying since 2019 to strike back against Fortress Investment’s patent assertion business (which is just one of various fields in which Fortress invests) with an antitrust action in the Northern District of California. Had they not done this, the dispute would have been a one-way street, with Apple and Intel always being on the receiving end of litigation campaign after litigation campaign. Sometimes a good offense is the best defense. So Intel, which was joined by Apple early on, alleged that Fortress and the multitude of patent assertion entities it has funded engaged in anticompetitive conduct.
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In 2019, on the occasion of its 10th anniversary of its Patent Local Rules, the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court) commissioned an evaluation by the Max Planck Institute. The results became known last year. For the most part, they were pretty positive, but in my view, the respondents underrated the legal and technical competence of the Munich judges as compared to other German patent infringement courts, and I said so at the time.
Many respondents to the survey criticized inconsistencies between the lower court’s decisions and those handed down by the Oberlandesgericht München (Munich Higher Regional Court), the regional appeals court–comparable to a U.S. appeals court for a particular circuit, though regional and higher regional courts in Germany are run by the states, not the federal government.
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Germany is the world’s most popular patent litigation venue, and last week’s legislative decision does nothing to dissuade patent holders from enforcing their intellectual property rights in the largest EU member state. If anything, there may be a further shift from Dusseldorf, where I’ve only attended one patent trial so far (Huawei v. ZTE in 2013) and covered another (in 2020) from a distance. What happens there is usually uninspiring. The judges presiding over the two patent appeals divisions of the Dusseldorf Higher Regional Court made statements last year that suggest they may interpret the new injunction statute in a divergent way from the case law of the Federal Court of Justice, against the clear legislative intent. I don’t think the risk there is high, but who would want to be the first patent holder to be denied an injunction after prevailing on the technical merits of a non-standard-essential patent? Or worse still, who would want this to happen as counsel?
In a way, others are beating Dusseldorf at its own game. What made Dusseldorf popular was not the quality of its judges but their plaintiff-friendly inclinations. I remember a conversation with a patent litigator who, back in 2007, described the tilted playing field he found there when trying to defend clients against infringement complaints. Judge Dr. Thomas Kuehnen (“Kühnen” in German) was the one who set the bar so high for staying infringement cases over invalidity contentions that he largely vitiated the invalidity defense. The rest of the country followed. But by now, other venues are more en vogue than the state capital of North Rhine-Westphalia. Some of the best Dusseldorf-based patent litigators attend more hearings and trials in Munich and/or Mannheim now than in their hometown. Second- and third-tier litigators still get a fair amount of Dusseldorf business from cases pitting small and medium-sized enterprises against each other, but the exciting cases are filed in Mannheim and Munich.
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A Stanford University bioengineering professor’s company on Friday sued a former researcher and his current employer, the University of Oxford’s Ludwig Institute for Cancer Research, for allegedly trying to steal its patent rights to breakthrough DNA sequencing technology.
Chunxiao Song and the Ludwig Institute are trying to misappropriate inventions that were co-created by Stephen Quake and belong to his Bluestar Genomics, according to the complaint filed in San Francisco federal court.
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In March 2021 the EPO published its revised Guidelines for Examination (hereafter, the “Guidelines”). One area of note that received extensive amendments was Part F Chapter V – Unity. In this article we take some time to examine what has changed, and how this might affect applicants.
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The interplay between EPO and national proceedings may take various forms. The Technical Board of Appeal revoking a European Patent during European-wide litigation is one of the more dramatic examples. The EPO’s stay of the grant of an application following an entitlement claim (an ‘entitlement torpedo’) another one. And then there is the central limitation procedure…
According to Article 105a EPC the patentee can request the EPO to limit a European Patent by an amendment of the claims. Article 68 EPC determines that a European Patent shall be deemed not to have had “from the outset” the rights conferred by the patent to the extent it has been limited in the limitation proceedings. These three words, “from the outset”, are words that matter in national proceedings. The long lasting proceedings between High Point and KPN before the Dutch courts show why.
[...]
The Supreme Court’s ruling opened up a new chapter in the litigation: in August 2020 High Point filed a new action against KPN with the District Court on the basis of the (limited) B3 version of the patent, claiming a declaration of infringement and damages (no injunction: the patent expired in 2012).
KPN requested High Point’s claims to be declared inadmissible/denied. KPN, in sum, argued that the B3 version did not enter into force for the Netherlands because before EPO’s central limitation on September 7, 2017, the B1 version was annulled by the District Court in 2010. This invalidation has direct effect on condition that the judgment becomes final in due course. This condition had been fulfilled, as the CoA upheld the 2010 District Court decision, while the supreme appeal was dismissed. The 2010 decision should therefore be considered res judicata in these new proceedings between the parties.
The District Court, in a May 12, 2021 decision, dismissed KPN’s request (decision in Dutch available here). The District Court considered that the condition mentioned by KPN is a suspensive condition. As long as the judgment has not yet become final, the patent still exists, but only its legal effects cannot be invoked. The 2010 decision has indeed become final, but considers the B1 version. However, at the time of the central limitation the patent had not yet been (finally) invalidated. Therefore, the doctrine of res judicata does not mean that it is also settled between the parties that the CoA, by upholding the 2010, has also ruled that the B3 version is null and void. The Supreme Court explicitly considered in its 2020 judgment that the Court of Appeal did not express an opinion on the content of that limited patent. The proceedings based on the B3 version will therefore continue.
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The patent in question is dated on the 12th day of August, 1820. The specification annexed, is in these words: ‘This invention or improvement, in the composition, or making, or manufacturing, of ingrained carpets or carpeting, consists in making the warp thereof, that is, the threads that extend lengthways of the same, of cotton, flaxen tow, or hempen yarn or thread, and weaving or combining them therewith, in the manner of weaving carpets or carpeting; the filling, that is, the threads that extend crossways, to consist of woolen or worsted yarn, by the weaving or combination of which materials, in the manner of weaving carpets, or carpeting, of any figures or colours, can be made or manufactured.’ On the 17th day of February last, the complainant, by his counsel, moved this court for a rule that the patentees show cause why process should not issue against them to repeal the above patent. The application was founded, and the rule granted, upon affidavits alleging that the patent in question had been obtained surreptitiously, or upon false suggestion; and this allegation, supported by other evidence, tending to show that the manufacture, for the exclusive working and making of which the respondents had obtained the patent, was not new, or, in other words, that they were not the true inventors of discoverers. The rule was granted, and in compliance with a decision which had been made in another case, after full argument and deliberation, the parties upon the hearing went into the whole merits of the case, and the alleged originality of the manufacture in question was investigated with much labour and assiduity.
[...]
It has been seen, plainly, I think, that the subject of a patent must be both ‘new’ and ‘not known or used, before the application.’ It must also be ‘useful.’ This term has been defined to mean such an invention as is ‘not frivolous, or injurious to the well being, good policy, or sound morals of society’ (Lowell v. Lewis [Case No. 8,568]); such an invention ‘as may be applied to some beneficial use in society in contradistinction to an invention which is injurious to the morals, the health, or the good order of society’ (Bedford v. Hunt [Id. 1,217]). A more enlarged and comprehensive signification may safely and properly be ascribed to the term ‘useful.’ It may well be added, that it must be an art, &c., not mischievous to the state, or generally inconvenient, which brings it within the terms of the British statute. It seems to me to have been used and intended as equivalent to that clause in the sixth section of the statute of James, which defines the nature of the new manufactures which will be exempted from the general prohibition of the act. What, if I may be allowed the phraseology, can be less useful than a patent that interrupts the practice of an art, &c., commonly known? What more pernicious to the state than the monopoly of a machine or manufacture already in use? I should not hesitate to decide, under this expression in the act, if the point were presented, that such an art, &c., or such a machine or manufacture, were not patentable, and that the grant was void. As this case, in my view of it, does not turn on this point, it is not necessary to pursue its investigation further.
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Software Patents
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IP law firms battle flush tech groups to hire top talent [Ed: FT took bribes from the EPO (this is well documented) and now it's just corrupt media for private litigation firms and software patents ("AI"). Avoid FT. It's corrupt.]
Pandemic-induced remote working, as well as the emergence of new fields of innovation such as artificial intelligence, have increased the difficulties in acquiring and developing the most able patent attorneys.
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Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on U.S. Patent 7,349,668. This patent is currently owned by Optinetix, a NPE. The ’668 patent generally relates to a system and method for the distribution of information, typically digital information that is distributed actively, through broadcast media such as television and radio. Prior art search service provider, Parola Analytics, found the art shown below.
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Trademarks
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The latest edition of the EUIPO Guidelines for Examination of European Union trade marks (EUTM) and registered Community designs (RCD) entered into force on 1 March 2021, following approval by the Executive Director of the EUIPO on 8 February 2021 by means of Decision EX-21-1.
The Guidelines are available in both electronic and PDF format on the EUIPO website. The changes introduced in the new edition can be seen and compared to the previous edition by switching on the “Show modifications” option at the top of the electronic version of the Guidelines.
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EUIPO says that the growth of e-commerce has been well documented, but how the rise of different technologies and consumer habits has affected IPR infringement on the internet and, in particular, on social media platforms, is not clear. Therefore, EUIPO decided to conduct a study to better understand the volume and frequency of IPR infringement on social media.
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The CP11 Common Practice on “New types of marks: Examination of formal requirements and grounds for refusal” was adopted by EUIPO’s Management Board by written procedure in October 2020. It delivers a set of general principles and examples on the formal requirements of examination and grounds for refusal and/or invalidity regarding sound, motion, multimedia and hologram marks and the new ways of representing them.
The Common Communication document, which includes the CP11 Common Practice and complementary information, such as the implementation dates and processes for each participating office, was published simultaneously on the websites of the IP offices of the EU on 14 April 2021. The document is also available on the EUIPN website in all EU languages.
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Copyrights
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Several EU member states have failed to implement the EU Copyright Directive on time, so what happens next?
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Kinsella on Liberty Podcast, Episode 344. This is my appearance with Adam Terrell of the Theocracy podcast: 022 Copyrights Are Unlawful with Stephan Kinsella. From his shownotes: Now, some of you know I have a background in media production. And I have gotten royalty checks and benefitted from a copyright “tradition” (I don’t call it law) on multiple occasions, and I have family who have had their entire livelihoods supported by it. So how can I say in the title that “Copyrights Are Unlawful?” Stephan Kinsella is my guest today. I found him through Tom Woods’s podcast years back, and I’ve run in to his talks at Mises University online several times. He’s a patent attorney who has helped me think through these issues practically relating to intellectual property and why it doesn’t exist. I believe there is a Bible verse I can point to as well in Exodus, but we’ll get to that. We get in to some less-than-settled issues as well.
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Depending on how the US Supreme Court rules in Unicolors v H&M, copyright defendants could have a harder time fending off serial filers, say counsel
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After a leaked copy of Windows 11 began circulating this week, thousands downloaded the ISO file to get an early look at the new operating system. Perhaps surprisingly, Microsoft hasn’t yet made much of an effort to contain the leak, but was successful in taking down the ISO from various hosting sites. It also targeted a tech news site, which removed an installation tutorial.
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 4:29 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Summary: The media has been thoroughly corrupted, patent legitimacy has been severely damaged (far too many European Patents aren’t in compliance with the EPC anymore), and Team UPC is trying to undermine the EPC and turn Europe into another Texas
THE EPO is wasting loads of money doing loads of damage to the media. It not only hires aggressive lawyers to threaten publishers and bloggers; it also puts aside a bribery budget for publishers, ensuring its critics defect or stay silent (to be fair, large corporations have long been doing the same thing, but imitating the evils of corporations with submissive corporate media doesn’t make Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos seem any better).
The video starts by mentioning some of the latest buzzwords for European software patents, e.g. Software as a Medical Device (SaMD) and "MedTech". It talks about an article from Konstanze Richter about Team UPC (home of Winfried Tilmann) profiting from fake patents, granted by the EPO.
“Notice how European Patents are actually being used against Europeans by companies that are not European.”That’s just another one of those many examples of EPs falling/dying at the altar (actual courts, ones that EPO does not stack and tinker with). This one says: “Despite all previous decisions, and the patent already surviving a 2014 opposition suit filed by Swiss company Intersurgical at the EPO, the German Federal Patent Court found the patent null and void (6 Ni 62/19).
“It is not yet clear whether Fisher & Paykel will appeal the ruling. Since many of the previous rulings are in their favour, this seems to be the next logical step.
“Ultimately, the question is whether Fisher & Paykel will receive damages for the time that Flexicare products were distributed on the German market, or Flexicare for the time it was not allowed to distribute in Germany due to the patent dispute.”
Notice how European Patents are actually being used against Europeans by companies that are not European.
The video then discusses the following new puff pieces, paid for by the EPO and seeded by the EPO (warning: epo.org link):
Remember that these ‘awards’ for patent holders have turned into reputation laundering and marketing stunts, sometimes at the expense of people's lives (Theranos). It is getting easier to catalogue (in the past few days) which publishers are the latest recipients of EPO bribes. The video says a lot more about those.
To make matters yet worse, the people who push for all those patents are hungry for more. Here’s a new EPLAW letter to the UPC Preparatory Committee [PDF] on the possibility of doing ViCo.
In simple terms, what they’re looking to do is expand the scope of litigation and lower the burden for litigants. Already, and at least twice this past week, we saw media coverage speaking of the “EU patent office” (there is no such thing) because by piggybacking the EU it seems that Team UPC looks to just broaden the scope of litigation. These ambitions of Team UPC are like Texas with its ambitions of attracting patent trolls. One UPC critic recalled FFII’s Andre having a vision of “courts as companies” (treating litigation just like a business). “Actually,” he remembered, “Andre was the one who wrote the line in the EPLA analysis on “courts as companies”.
Watch what EDTX and WDTX (eastern and western districts of Texas) are doing nowadays, ever so shamelessly. More “business” is what they want for their courts, so they invite patent trolls! Same thing Team UPC has been doing! Team UPC works a lot with and for trolls.
Suffice to say, there’s no press coverage about that. None at all. Team UPC dominates all the coverage on these issues, helped by EPO budget.
Instead of journalism what we now have (in Europe and elsewhere too) is appalling puff pieces. Almost no journalism and instead just paid-for (bribes are given) puff pieces seeded/disseminated at the expense of EPO stakeholders and the European public (people who get sued due to European Patents, even if they don’t entertain or engage with such a system). This status quo is untenable. The media, on the EPO’s payroll, is trying to keep us all in the dark. How long for? █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, Site News at 3:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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Summary: We examine more closely some of the latest changes in the site and the capsule (Web and Gemini, respectively); we show that it’s possible to keep abreast of IRC using nothing but a text editor, a Gemini client… or even the command line alone
THE video above shows a very little but useful feature, implemented owing to popular demand. People who don’t lurk in IRC or lose the connection (dropping whilst online in IRC) can catch up almost in real time, both over the Web and over Gemini. By the very nature of IRC, dropping out of a channel means not seeing (no relay/catchup) messages posted while one was offline. There are workarounds (services) that mitigate such issues, but they tend to involve subscription and/or spying.
“By the very nature of IRC, dropping out of a channel means not seeing (no relay/catchup) messages posted while one was offline.”We’ve meanwhile noticed that after several days of downtime Freenode is working to restore its KiwiIRC instance and we’ve added Mibbit (privacy risk) as an alternative to KiwiIRC. We’ve done some more tinkering to further improve the IRC experience in the site and enhance the Gemini side of it. Shown below is the revised page for gemini:// statistics. █
Each month we’ve seen an increase in the amount of traffic we get over gemini://
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