In the Linux Release Roundup series, we summarize the new application and distribution versions release in the last few days. This keeps you informed with the latest developments in the Linux world.
Chromebooks are incredible tools for school and home use, and although they're often thought of as simple machines, they can do a variety of tasks beyond surfing the web. When Google launched Linux support for Chrome OS in 2018, it unlocked access to thousands of desktop applications. While modern Chromebooks have had access to Linux apps for years, capable Skylake-powered systems like the Samsung Chromebook Pro got left in the dust. It seems the wait may finally be over thanks to recent updates — but it may be too late to matter.
Google broke its silence via the Chromium bug tracker last Friday, confirming that the work to run Linux apps on Skylake Chromebooks is complete. This should finally close the curtains on this issue, with support arriving in subsequent updates without flipping on the "Enable VMs on Experimental kernels" Chrome flag. It's unclear how much longer users with a Skylake device will have to wait, but it could appear in the next major Chrome OS update (M92).
Announced today, this 15.6-inch high-performance laptop from European hardware company TUXEDO offers a 3K display (2560Ãâ1440) display, an optomechanical (sic) keyboard for responsive gameplay and comfortable typing, plus your choice of Intel or AMD processor.
The base configuration costs €1,799. This gets you an Intel Core i7-11800H CPU, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 graphics, a 250 GB SSD, and 8 GB of RAM.
Prefer AMD? if so, can swap out the Intel chip for an AMD Ryzen 7 5800H or an AMD Ryzen 9 5900HX CPU.
The Open-source software model has existed for years now, and we have seen communities develop uncountable software. One example is Linux which is either directly or indirectly used in almost every device on the planet. All of this is great, but have you ever wondered if open-source exists in countries like North Korea? If yes, then what kind of process do the North Koreans follow?
Mike Izbicki, one of the contributors, shares his experience teaching open-source software in North Korea. He taught a class of master’s students about how to contribute to open-source software.
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“The patches submitted for this class were the first-ever open-source contributions to come from North Korea; unfortunately, they were also the last,” Mike added. This is because former US President Donald Trump banned Americans from traveling to North Korea in 2017. North Korea does have a closed-source Linux distribution called the RedStar OS, and its wallpapers were recently extracted from the ISO.
It is also very unfortunate to see a country unable to contribute to open-source due to laws restriction. If it was not due to the restrictions, we might’ve got some bright minds with their valuable contributions to open-source communities. What are your thoughts on this? Let us know in the comments section below.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Rocky Linux 8.4 and some of the applications pre-installed.
Our long-awaited look at RebeccaBlackOS and how it drove us over the edge, and your feedback about Arch, Firefox, and loud dogs. Then a shocking revelation about who Félim trusts, and where we think Linux will be in 10 years.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we have an interview with Dr. Gerald Pfeifer, the CTO of SUSE and the OpenSUSE Chairman to discuss openSUSE Leap 15.3 & SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3. Then we take a look at Nvidia’s recent news that will benefit Linux users. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
I got a lot of the same sort of questions in my comments so I thought it just made sense to go and answer those questions in one easy to find place, obviously can't answer everything today but these are a lot of the questions I very frequently see.
Based on the just released Linux kernel 5.13, the GNU Linux-libre 5.13 kernel is here to add new blob names to the AMDGPU, i915 CSR, MHI busm r8152, and x86 touchscreen drivers, as well as to Qualcomm ARM64 DTS files.
However, it looks like most of the changes in the GNU Linux-libre 5.13 kernel are around the moved and removed drivers from the upstream release. But it also makes some needed adjustments to the cleaning up logic for the btusb module.
Previously available in May as a release candidate for public testing, the final version of Linux 5.13 has been released. Announced by Linus Torvolds on Monday, the newest version is said to be one of the bigger releases in the version 5 range, with over 16 thousand commits made by over 2 thousand developers.
For Mac users, the key addition to the kernel is support for a number of ARM-based chips, which crucially includes the M1. The new kernel is therefore able to be run natively on Apple Silicon hardware, including the M1 Mac mini and the 24-inch iMac.
The Ubuntu Mainline Kernel Archive provides the new kernel packages via DEB files.
The mainline build kernels do not include any Ubuntu-provided drivers or patches. They are not supported and are not appropriate for production use. And it’s “incorrectly” built with updated libc6 library required. So it WILL NOT install on Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 20.04 and earlier.
For those prefer using a graphical tool, see this tool to install the latest Kernel.
The first KernelCI test development and coverage hackfest took place from 27th May to 4th June 2021. For a total of seven days, developers from the KernelCI team, Google, and Collabora worked to improve many different aspects of KernelCI testing capabilities. The hackfest was a community event promoted by the KernelCI team. It aimed at bringing developers and companies together to improve testing for areas of the Linux kernel they care about. Through this effort, the KernelCI team also expects to increase awareness for continuous kernel testing and validation – more hackfests will happen in the future, so stay tuned if you want to join.
The KernelCI continuous-integration project held its first hackfest recently. Developers from the KernelCI team, Google, and Collabora worked to improve many different aspects of KernelCI testing capabilities. There are plans for more hackfests.
Today it's part 3 of my Outreachy Saga it’s been 5 weeks of my Outreachy internship, and everything is not sailing smoothly how I would like! Why?? Because I had a little problem with my setup and I was stuck for 2 days without working until be able to correctly do my setup, how I said in my introduction post, one thing that I'm learning at my internship is "learning", because not everything goes as I would like, sometimes it is necessary to stop, breathe, redo everything and, after redoing everything, it is so rewarding when things start to flow.
Today my week’s blog will be focusing on the Linux Kernel Community at which I’m interning and the project on which I’m working. So, let’s get started!
If you've used Ubuntu for a while now, you must be aware of the power of the command-line interface. It offers more control over the operating system and its working, eats up less memory than a GUI, and is suitable for automating your tasks. On Ubuntu, the default command-line interface that picks up your commands for execution is the Terminal app.
But what if you are bored with the default terminal? Don't panic. As an Ubuntu user, your options are not limited, thanks to an active open-source culture. There are a variety of credible Terminal alternatives for Ubuntu all over the internet. Let's look at them one by one.
Today we are looking at how to install Alora RSPS on a Chromebook. It only works on Linux Applications in a Chromebook, sadly not in Play Store Applications, Google Chrome, or the rest of Chrome OS. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Wire Desktop on Deepin 20.2.
Installing the entire Ubuntu on to a USB Flash drive is simple and straight forward. You can use ubuntu installed USB as a portable computer and bootable device.
This tutorial we learn how to install the entire Ubuntu on a USB Flash Drive.
Battlefield V is the 16th entry in the first-person shooter developed by DICE and published by Electronic Arts. In the game, players compete against each other in historical battles, with 64 players at a time. In this guide, we’ll show you how to make it work on Linux.
Baldur’s Gate 3 is an up-comping RPG developed and published by Larian Studios. The game is in active development, and is on Steam as “early access.” Early access means even though the game is being worked on, users can play it as is. Here’s how to get it working on Linux.
LibreOffice is a powerful and free office suite, a successor to OpenOffice(.org), used by millions of people around the world. Its clean interface and feature-rich tools help you unleash your creativity and enhance your productivity. LibreOffice includes several applications that make it the most versatile Free and Open Source office suite on the market: Writer (word processing), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentations), Draw (vector graphics and flowcharts), Base (databases), and Math (formula editing).
LibreOffice is compatible with a wide range of document formats such as Microsoft€® Word (.doc, .docx), Excel (.xls, .xlsx), PowerPoint (.ppt, .pptx) and Publisher. But LibreOffice goes much further with its native support for a modern and open standard, the Open Document Format (ODF). With LibreOffice, you have maximum control over your data and content – and you can export your work in many different formats including PDF.
Now, you'll see the following warning: "Warning: apt-key is deprecated. Manage keyring files in trusted.gpg.d instead." What do you do?
To install certain applications from non-standard repositories, those keys must be added. How do you add them? Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy as it once was. You'll still be issuing a command that pipes the downloaded file into another command, with the help of sudo.
The confusing part is that you'll no longer use apt, in any way, to add the key. You'll be adding the key to your keyring. Let's stick with our Opera example, although installing Opera via their .deb package automatically installs and configures their repository for you.
Foreman is an open-source lifecycle management suite – this means that it covers all tasks that are pending, from creation to configuration and monitoring of a system. It is doesn’t matter whether it is physical or virtual systems or Docker containers, Foreman works the same for all of them. Hence, with the help of this provisioning, configuration, orchestration, and monitoring platform physical systems can therefore simply boot from the network and be installed automatically and standardized. Numerous hypervisor and cloud platforms can be addressed through plugins, for example, VMware, oVirt, Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, XEN, OpenStack, OpenNebula…
Puppet is used by default for configuration management – however, Chef, Salt, or Ansible can also be used via plugins. Corresponding configuration rules can be created via the Foreman web frontend and the consistency of the system landscape can be displayed.
When you are working, sometimes your programs suddenly freeze. Other times, the programs are still running but with a high processor or memory consumption. There is a way to fix this in Linux using the ps (Process Status) command. Here we show you how to use the ps command in Linux to list the currently running processes and their PIDs. You can then find and kill the processes consuming your resources.
GlassFish is an open-source implementation of the Java platform. It supports several technologies including, EJB, JPA, JSF, JMS, RMI, JSP, servlets and allows developers to create portable and scalable applications.
GlassFish cluster is a collection of GlassFish Server instances that share the same applications, resources, and configuration information. It allows you to monitor all instances in a cluster from a single host. It is designed for failover, scalability, and load balancing.
In this guide, we will explain how to deploy a GlassFish cluster with automatic load balancing on the RoseHosting Platform.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Google Cloud SDK on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Google Cloud SDK contains tools and libraries that enable you to easily create and manage resources on the Google Cloud Platform. It supports Linux, Mac & Windows as well.
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 installation of the Monit monitoring system on a CentOS 8.
Image Builder is a tool that allows you to create custom OS images (based on the upstream project Weldr), and it’s included in the base repos so you can build images right from the start.
You can use the command line or a Cockpit plugin, and it’s a fairly simple and straightforward process which allows you to create images for most of the major platforms – Libvirt/KVM (RHV or general Linux virtualisation), VMware, Openstack, AWS and Azure. You can also deploy these images from Satellite.
One of the first things I needed to do in Toolbox was to create a custom image based on Red Hat Universal Base Image (UBI) that resembles the UX the users get with fedora-toolbox image, so I needed to learn how to create custom images for toolbox. It is surprisingly easy to do that!
The first thing I needed to do was to take a look to the Toolbox documentation. In the toolbox repository README.md file there is an explaination of what do you need to create your custom images.
ifconfig (interface configuration) is a network management tool. It is used to configure and view the status of the network interfaces in Linux operating systems. With ifconfig, you can assign IP addresses, enable or disable interfaces, manage ARP cache, routes, and more.
In this article, we’ll explore how to use the ifconfig command.
We have, in our earlier tutorial discussed the Dockerfile i.e. what are Dockerfiles & how to create one. We also mentioned three different examples, one each for CentOS, Fedora & Ubuntu to create docker images with Webserver (apache).
We will now use one of those Dockerfiles (CentOS one) to create a Docker image & will then upload the created image to Docker Hub. To simply explain Docker Hub, it's a public registry that has over 15000 images that can be directly used or can be used to create a custom Docker image. Docker Hub is directly maintained by Docker.
Prepare for a quest that spans more than 1200 years and 7 astounding worlds. The epic sequel to The Journeyman Project, The Journeyman Project 2: Buried in Time is now fully supported by ScummVM.
After a number of years in development by clone2727, and a few more years maturing on a shelf, the game is finally ready for public testing.
While we all impatiently wait for official support for Steam via Borealis, let’s talk about how you can start playing Windows games today with Steam Play (Proton) using Crostini (Linux on Chrome OS). The experience isn’t the best, but it’s frankly better than nothing. This article will assume that you have Linux installed on your Chrome OS device and don’t mind getting your hands dirty on the terminal just a bit.
In my 10 year anniversary blog post I mentioned how I wanted to fully redesign the icon chooser dialog which hasn’t changed since its inception and my childhood. Well, guess what I just did between sessions at this year’s Akademy.
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With eight more years of Qt and C++ experience than last time I tried, it took me just a couple of hours over the course of two Akademy evenings to wire up the existing dialog logic to the newly generated UI file. Thanks to a test application in the kiconthemes repository I was also able to test some of the more specialized view modes the dialog offers, such as picking a symbolic toolbar icon, or restricting access to the file dialog for choosing an image from a custom path. Finally, I managed to pull off what I didn’t achieve last time: displaying the icon names in multiple lines.
There are plenty of things to love about the Linux Operating system, and although it does not come off as an anyone-can-use-it option like Windows or macOS, it’s feature-rich.
Unfortunately, since most Linux distributions do not offer the familiar interface available on macOS and Windows systems, and they have a usage learning curve, it discourages many uses from switching to Linux.
Garuda Linux seeks to solve this challenge and make Linux more accessible to the layman.
It’s time for another of our periodic dispatches from the YaST trenches. But instead of the usual collection of topics, this time we want to focus on a single feature that is finally landing in openSUSE Tumbleweed after a couple of months of development. The fun thing is that, despite all the hard work, it is a pretty unnoticeable feature for most end users.
SUSE Linux Enterprise 15 SP3, SUSE Enterprise Linux's first new release, will allow DevOps teams to use OpenSUSE Leap for non-mission-critical workloads.
PipeWire 0.3.31 is out today as the newest version of this audio and video streams server for the Linux desktop that is becoming a viable replacement to the likes of JACK and PulseAudio.
With today's PipeWire 0.3.31 release there are new PulseAudio modules ported over, the JACK support has seen "massive stability improvements", various crashes and lockups have been resolved, a Bluetooth hardware database is now used for disabling non-working features on select devices, scheduling quantum and rate can be changed dynamically, and many other changes throughout the code-base. PipeWire 0.3.1 also now properly checks metadata permissions, there is an infinite loop fix within its audio converter code, and improved latency reporting.
In the previous post, we learned what HDR is: a larger luminance range that requires more bits per component, new transfer functions to encode that luminance, and potentially some metadata. We can examine the work required to use it in a “standard” Linux desktop. By “standard”, I of course meant my desktop environment, which is GNOME on Fedora.
To do this, we’ll consider a single use-case and examine each portion of the stack, starting at the top and working our way down. The use-case is watching an HDR movie in GNOME’s video application, Totem. In this scenario, the application isn’t likely to tone-map its content as it has been created with HDR metadata the display itself can use to tone-map when necessary, but I will note where this could happen.
Long time has passed since my last publication in this blog. Recently I've moved from my usual work with Fleet Commander to working in Toolbox, a containerized command line environment tool.
I had the opportunity to move to the Toolbox team, and work in something different to what I've been working until now. I will continue working in Fleet Commander, but now my main efforts will be working in Toolbox.
Toolbox is a containerized command line environment tool. It allows users to create a command line inside a container so any changes done inside are done in a controlled environment.
This is very useful in the case of Fedora Silverblue, as Silverblue has a read only filesystem and all the applications are running as flatpak applications, and you do not have the option to install new RPM packages. With Toolbox, you can create a containerized shell in which you can install whatever you need and use it from there.
Version 2.8 for the Raspberry Pi4 was released on June 5: https://bkhome.org/news/202106/easyos-dunfell-series-version-28-for-the-raspberry-pi4.html Version bump to 2.8.3, download from here: http://distro.ibiblio.org/easyos/aarch64/releases/dunfell/rpi4/2.8.3/ Feedback welcome on the forum: https://forum.puppylinux.com/viewforum.php?f=63
When Ubuntu 21.10 ‘Impish Indri’ arrives this October it’ll do so with a new look in tow.
After many fine years of service Ubuntu’s iconic mix of dark header bars and light widgets is being retired.
Shocked? Well, the writing has been on the wall for a while.
Ubuntu’s community-based design team has decided that Ubuntu 21.10 will only come with a fully-light and fully-dark version of the default Yaru theme only.
At present, Ubuntu ships with three versions of the Yaru GTK theme: Yaru (dark headerbar and light widgets; default); Yaru Light (light headerbar and light widgets); and Yaru Dark (dark headerbar and dark widgets). Users can switch between these from the Appearance pane in the Settings app.
Managed IT services are widely used by the most sophisticated organisations across the globe. Recent reports show that over 90% of the Fortune 500 have multiple outsourcing contracts to managed service providers, with a value of over $190 billion. This includes managed IT services such cloud services, infrastructure, networks, security, backup, applications and much more. How can organisations at any scale adopt the same strategy and benefit from managed IT services?
What does “IT” look like in a Fortune 500?
At a scale of a Fortune 500 organisation, things look different than the usual. Running a business with hundreds of thousands of employees in different regions across the world, with millions of daily activities to serve thousands of customers and generate billions of dollars in revenues can easily become complicated. It requires well structured operations to run a business at that enormous scale, where any activity that does not add value should be minimised, automated or even eliminated when possible.
These companies have always created better alternatives to enhance the way they do everyday business. Normally, an IT department at that scale would serve hundreds of thousands of daily users, with each user group having their own set of required applications and services that help them do their jobs. A minor issue causing a few seconds of delay in a widely used service within the company would cost over a 100K seconds of waste, or almost 3 working days of a full time equivalent! The mass makes minimal things count, and a few minutes everyday throughout the year is a significant amount of lost potential worth acting upon.
Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 689 for the week of June 20 – 26, 2021. The full version of this issue is available...
Neousys’ has had three series of its embedded PCs certified for Baidu’s PaddlePaddle deep learning AI software – the Nuvis-7306RT series, the Nuvo-8000 series and the Nuvo GC series.
Neousys Technology has announced that three of its embedded computer series have been certified by Baidu as compatible with Baidu’s PaddleX development tool. PaddleX is a tool designed to accelerate data processing for Baidu’s PaddlePaddle deep learning AI framework. The certified embedded computers from Neousys include Nuvis-7306RT – a vision computer with vision-specific I/Os and real-time controller, Nuvo-8000 series – rugged expansion box PCs, and Nuvo GC series – edge AI GPU computers.
As most homeowners with a basement will tell you, keeping track of the sump pump is an important part of maintenance, as neglecting it can lead to the basement turning into a swimming pool. This is the exact predicament that a recent element14 Build Inside the Box winner, Mike Moore, ran into with his house because freezing pipes and an unreliable pump often became problematic. He went with multiple approaches to solve this, including water level detection, temperature monitoring, and even checking if the pump has ceased working.
The first component used was a TCST1103 photo interrupter, and its job is to send a signal if a bobbing piece of plastic gets between its emitter and receiver, which would indicate the water level has risen too high. For more granular and continuous measurements, Moore also implemented a VL53L0X time-of-flight sensor that sends a laser beam towards the water and waits for a reflection. Because water can distort this reading, a couple of readings get taken and then averaged together. Temperatures are read by a simple MCP9701 IC that was placed inside of a plastic tube and stuck to the side of the pit. Finally, detecting if the pump is running is handled by an MCP604 IC.
Every online business dreams of building a world-class eCommerce website that attracts visitors, engages, and converts them into customers. Such a website should be mobile-friendly, esthetically appealing, and functionally convenient. Among eCommerce platforms, Magento is a leading CRM built on open-source technology.
It provides brands and online merchants with rich tools to manage their shopping carts, product listing, and design. If you don’t know how to use these tools, ask a Magento eCommerce development company to help you with it.
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Currently, Magento has two platforms – Open Source and Commerce.
Given the growth and scale of the Kubernetes project, the existing reporting mechanisms were proving to be inadequate and challenging. Kubernetes is a large open source project. With over 100000 commits just to the main k/kubernetes repository, hundreds of other code repositories in the project, and thousands of contributors, there's a lot going on. In fact, there are 37 contributor groups at the time of writing. We also value all forms of contribution and not just code changes.
With that context in mind, the challenge of reporting on all this activity was a call to action for exploring better options. Therefore inspired by the Apache Software Foundation’s open guide to PMC Reporting and the CNCF project Annual Reporting, the Kubernetes project is proud to announce the Kubernetes Community Group Annual Reports for Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and Working Groups (WGs). In its flagship edition, the 2020 Summary report focuses on bettering the Kubernetes ecosystem by assessing and promoting the healthiness of the groups within the upstream community.
Earlier this year Google announced the Lyra voice codec that could work with AV1 video for video chats over 56kbps modems. Google is today shipping its newest Lyra version.
Lyra is a very low bit-rate codec for speech compression designed for WebRTC usage and other online chat purposes. Lyra can operate at 3kbps thanks to its machine learning and other design features. Following the February announcement, in April was the initial open-source code for Lyra. That initial v0.0.1 release has now been succeeded by version 0.0.2.
Compiling the Linux kernel with LLVM's Clang code compiler continues to be more featureful with plumbing now being added to handle profile-guided optimizations (PGO) to help in achieving greater performance for optimizing kernel builds for targeted workloads.
Earlier this month I wrote about Clang PGO likely coming for Linux 5.14 and indeed the pull request was sent in on Monday. While GCC PGO for the Linux kernel was previously shot down, it looks like this new infrastructure will make it in for this new cycle.
The GNU C Library (Glibc) has landed its _Fork function implementation as an async-signal-safe fork replacement that is also expected to be made part of the next POSIX standards revision.
Going back to 2007 has been Glibc Bug 4737 of the fork function not being signal safe with glibc, unlike some BSDs and other platforms. Various developers have commented on it over the years due to deadlocks occurring in their programs such as if using fork() within a signal handler and other conditions met.
Few months ago I posted a library for sensible int scale for Gonum Plot. There is a similar package I’ve developed to handle timescales.
The integer one, being based on a recursive function, works with any number scale. Differently, this one will only work well with a timescale between 2 days and a couple of years. Extending it is not hard since it’s enough to add additional case statements in the switch, but I’ve not found use-cases for different timeframes so far. If you add additional options, please commit them back!
A new version of the GStreamer Rust bindings, 0.17.0, was released.
As usual this release follows the latest gtk-rs release.
This is the first version that includes optional support for new GStreamer 1.20 APIs. As GStreamer 1.20 was not released yet, these new APIs might still change. The minimum supported version of the bindings is still GStreamer 1.8 and the targetted GStreamer API version can be selected by applications via feature flags.
Apart from this, the new version features a lot of API cleanup, especially of the subclassing APIs, and the addition of a few missing bindings. As usual, the focus of this release was to make usage of GStreamer from Rust as convenient and complete as possible.
Intel is going to be disabling Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) by default for various Skylake through Coffee Lake processors with forthcoming microcode updates. Yes, this does mean performance implications for workloads benefiting from TSX. This change has seemingly not been talked about much at all publicly and I just happened to become aware of it when looking through new kernel patches.
Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) have been around since Haswell for hardware transactional memory support and going off Intel's own past numbers can be around 40% faster in specific workloads or as much 4~5 times faster in database transaction benchmarks. TSX issues have been found in the past such as a possible side channel timing attack that could lead to KASLR being defeated and CVE-2019-11135 (TSX Async Abort) for an MDS-style flaw. Now in 2021 Intel is disabling TSX by default across multiple families of Intel CPUs from Skylake through Coffee Lake.
The REvil ransomware operation is now using a Linux encryptor that targets and encrypts Vmware ESXi virtual machines.
I had been meaning to write on the above topic for almost a couple of months now but just kept procrastinating about it. That push came to a shove when Sucheta Dalal and Debasis Basu shared their understanding, wisdom, and all in the new book called ‘Absolute Power – Inside story of the National Stock Exchange’s amazing success, leading to hubris, regulatory capture and algo scam‘ . Now while I will go into the details of the new book as currently, I have not bought it but even if I had bought it and shared some of the revelations from it, it wouldn’t have done justice to either the book or what is sharing before knowing some of the background before it.
Before I jump ahead, I would suggest people to read my sort of introductory blog post on banking history so they know where I’m coming from. I’m going to deviate a bit from Banking as this is about trade and capital markets, although Banking would come in later on. And I will also be sharing some cultural insights along with history so people are aware of why things happened the way they did.
President Joe Biden must let Julian Assange go free if he wants the United States to become a beacon for a free press once again and put the legacy of Donald Trump behind it, the fiancée of the WikiLeaks founder told Reuters.
After 100 years of classifying patents using the U.S. Patent Classification, or USPC, system, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office replaced that system in late 2020. The change to the Cooperative Patent Classification, or CPC, system gives patent practitioners greater opportunity to potentially direct patent applications to art units by careful drafting in conjunction with an understanding of how the CPC functions.
Each year inventors and patent attorneys file thousands of new patent applications at the USPTO. Each application is reviewed multiple times by various USPTO units to verify compliance with rules and procedures. One of those reviews is a classification...
The US Supreme Court has almost cleaned-up its patent docket for the October 2020 term. I still expect a decision at some point this week (by July 2) in Minerva Surgical, Inc. v. Hologic, Inc. focusing on the ongoing viability of assignor-estoppel. The court has already decided its one other patent-focused case for the term–United States v. Arthrex, 594 U. S. ___ (2021). In Arthrex, the court altered the power of the PTO Director beyond statutory limitations in order to preserve the PTAB’s constitutional authority during IPR proceedings. A number of parallel petitions had raised the same or similar questions to Arthrex. The Court vacated and remanded some cases back to the Federal Circuit “for further consideration in light of United States v. Arthrex, Inc.” For other cases, the court simply denied certiorari. There are also several Arthrex-follow-on petitions pending that have not yet been fully briefed. I expect these will also be denied.
The court also denied certiorari in TCL Communication v. Godo Kaisha IP Bridge 1, No. 20-1545. That case asked a couple of interesting questions regarding proof of literal infringement. The court allowed the patentee to make assumptions about the accused devices based upon admissions that the devices conform to certain industry standards.
Squaring the grace period circle that being a signatory of both the CPTPP and EPC would seemingly require of the UK may prove impossible. That should concern not only UK patent professionals but also EPO member states
The addition of claims in the 1836 Act was designed to provide notice to the world as to the scope of the patent right following an on-point complaint from the U.S. Supreme Court (and others). See Evans v. Eaton, 20 U.S. 356 (1822). Over the years, the Supreme Court focused more on the importance of claims for publicly demarking the property line. See Winans v. Denmead, 56 U.S. 330, 347 (1853) (Campbell, J., dissenting); Merrill v. Yeomans, 94 U.S. 568, 573 (1876) (The patent laws “leave no excuse for ambiguous language or vague descriptions. The public should not be deprived of rights supposed to belong to it, without being clearly told what it is that limits these rights.”). The 1952 Act did not appear to change these general rules but rather attempted to clean-up the requirement slightly by grammatically separating the disclosure requirements 112€¶1 from the claim requirements 112€¶2. In his contemporary commentaries, P.J. Frederico explained that “the clause relating to the claim has been made a separate paragraph to emphasize the distinction between the description and the claim, and the language has been modified.” P.J. Frederico, Commentary on the New Patent Act (1952). In 2011, the statute was renumbered so that Sections 112€¶1 and 112€¶2. are now Sections 112(a) and 112(b).
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According to the court, this internal inconsistency further sealed the deal. Invalidity Affirmed. I would note that the proffered inconsistency appears easily reconcilable in that the “activation criterion” and “user command” can come from two different sources. But, that is a distinction I had to guess at and create in my head ex post — not something offered by the patent documents.
As the post-pandemic world begins to shape up, the patent litigation world has seen billion dollar verdicts to record-breaking amounts of litigation financing. The explosive growth in litigation financing has come from a backlog of capital during the covid pandemic and investors seeking non-cyclical returns. As highlighted from last year’s report on NPE patent financing in the Western District of Texas, this trend can be seen among the top-5 patent venues. From Waco to Silicon Valley to Delaware, the effect of aggregations and financing can be seen.
These venues were chosen, since the Western District of Texas now accounts for 25% of all patent litigation, while the remaining four account for 43% in the first quarter of 2021. Collectively, these 5 venues have seen the most litigation over the last 5 years, with nearly 70%.
One year after its initial launch, the EPO has updated and expanded the information in its "Fighting coronavirus" platform to reflect the rapidly-changing technology landscape in the struggle against the pandemic. The 35 search strategies added to the platform today reflect e.g. new interest in a wider range of existing medicines that could be suitable for re-purposing as COVID-19 therapeutics, and a wider variety of existing disinfectant technologies useful for making public spaces and transport safer. There are now over 300 search strategies in this free resource, an almost threefold increase from the original platform, all compiled by dozens of EPO experts.
On June 28, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on U.S. Patent No. 8,341,157. The patent is owned by R2 Solutions LLC, an Acacia Research Corporation entity. The '157 generally relates to to using query keywords to determine a user's intent for a search entry. It is currently being asserted against Walmart, iHeartRadio, Target, Expedia, Roku, Workday, and Deezer.
Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Preeti Dua, who received a cash prize of $5,000 for her prior art submission for U.S. Patent 7,409,715. The patent is owned by the most prolific NPE assertor in 2020, WSOU Investments, LLC d/b/a/ Brazos Licensing and Development. The ‘715 patent generally relates to an impersonation attack detection system for a wireless node of a wireless communication network. The ‘715 patent is currently being asserted against Arista Networks in the Western District of Texas.
The UAE recently announced it will be joining the Madrid Protocol for trademark registration systems, which is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2021/early 2022. This accession has been discussed for many years, along with various opinions on the pros and cons of entering the system.
The interplay (and clash) between copyright protection and other fundamental rights and freedoms has become increasingly frequent and relevant over the past few years. The IPKat is pleased to host the following guest post by Jakob Plesner Mathiasen (IFPI Denmark and Ples&Lindholm) on a recent and very interesting Danish decision.
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In 1921 Danish philosopher Martinus Thomsen (1890 – 1981) had an epiphany, where Jesus – according to Martinus – appeared and entered Martinus’ body. This led Martinus to become a prophet and write The Third Testament (in continuation of the Old and the New Testament). An enormous work of approximately 10,000 pages.
Martinus died in 1981 and left the copyright in The Third Testament to the Martinus Institute, a self-governing non-profit institution, which was then responsible for publishing the work of Martinus. The Institute subsequently made changes to the work, which sparked fury among some of Martinus’ approximately 40,000 followers.
The followers believe that The Third Testament is a holy scripture, and that not even a comma can be changed. As stated by one of the followers during the trial the consequences would be much more severe than any sanction from the courts: “Anyone who violates a holy scripture will, as the Bible says, be condemned”.
Therefore, the followers published Martinus’ original work without permission. The followers claimed that it was an act of emergency and in accordance with their freedom of religion and speech under Articles 9 and 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights.
The followers argued that the Institute had made undue changes to the original work, that the work had a special sacred status, and that the Institute had refrained from publishing the original work. As a result, the followers found themselves bound to take on this responsibility.
