This week has been great on distro releases, we got the final release of Linux Mint 20.2 “Uma” and Solus 4.3, as well as a new release of the educational oriented Escuelas Linux. In addition, we got a new release of the Nextcloud Hub, KDE Plasma 5.22 desktop, KDE Frameworks software suite, and Tor Browser.
We had another wonderful week in the world of Linux releases with ArcoLinux 21.07.3, Linux Mint 20.2, Endless OS 3.9.5, Bluestar Linux 5.12.15, Solus 4.3, and Robolinux 12.07.
CBL-Mariner is security-focused, makes use of RPMs with DNF / Tiny DNF for package management, various installation types, and more. But again it's not aiming to be a general purpose Linux distribution but one that various Microsoft engineering teams can use for their different varying use-cases.
KDE is my desktop environment of choice. KDE5 is rock-solid, configurable in any way possible and works great. It treats you like a responsible adult instead of a child like GNOME does these days, and after XFCE switched to GTK3, the RAM usage is on-par, more often than not a bare KDE install (Debian or Arch) uses around 300MB ram. This is with Baloo (search indexer) and Akonadi (PIM database backend) disabled. Great default behaviour, low resource usage and enourmous configurability, so why is this post then titled 'IceWM'? At home I'm using a small ARM device (Raspberry Pi 4 with an SSD) as my main computer, and there resources are limited. KDE runs fine, but you notice that it is a bit slower than on my work computer. IceWM on the other hand, uses less than 30 MB of RAM and even less CPU. The program that gives you a desktop background, icewmbg, uses double the RAM of IceWM itself! IceWM, next to Awesome, is one of my favorite window managers, very configurable and provides all I need. This PC doesn't have multiple screens, which would be a bit more of a hassle than with KDE. After switching, the machine feels a lot faster. It's the small details in which I notice it, like text input, a few seconds of lag here and there. This post shows my IceWM config including some options explained, my IceWM theme and a few tips and tricks to configure the rest of the desktop.
Open Source's best hope for alternatives to Microsoft and Google gets a significant update this week, and we cover a plethora of new goodies coming to a Linux near you soon.
Plus, our take on the Audacity fork drama and the milestone reached this week that none of us have been looking forward to.
Josh and Kurt talk about the events happening to the Audacity audio editor. What happens if a popular open source application is acquired by an unknown entity? Can this happen to other open source projects? What can we do about it?
Two weeks have passed since the release the Linux 5.13 kernel series and now the merge window for Linux kernel 5.14 is closed as Linus Torvalds just announced today the availability for public testing of the first Release Candidate (RC) milestone.
While most GNU/Linux distributions are still struggling to upgrade their kernels to Linux 5.13, which already got its first point release and it’s marked as “stable” on the kernel.org website, the kernel developers are busy again with the next major release, Linux kernel 5.14.
The first Release Candidate (RC) is now ready for public testing, as announced by Linus Torvalds, who says that it includes about 13k commits from approximately 1650 developers. Once again, there are big changes for AMD GPU hardware, and all IDE support is now based on libata.
Linus Torvalds has loosed the first release candidate for version 5.14 of the Linux kernel,
Torvalds’ remarks about the new release open with his hopes that this release cycle is smooth, along with observations that the size of a release does not correlate with whether the process is calm.
He then encouraged developers to “ignore - once again - another set of big AMD GPU hardware description header files” present in this cut of the kernel.
“We seem to have those fairly regularly,” he wrote, “and they are always these huge generated headers that end up dwarfing everything else. Almost exactly half of the whole 5.14-rc1 patch is comprised of those GPU headers, and it skews the statistics a lot.”
You all know the drill by now. It's been the usual two weeks of merge window, and not it's closed, and 5.14-rc1 is out there.
As usual, it's much too big to post the shortlog, with about 13k commits (an another ~800 merge commits) by about 1650 developers, and a diffstat summary of
11859 files changed, 817707 insertions(+), 285485 deletions(-)
Appended is my mergelog which gives you an overview of what I've pulled during the merge window, and who I pulled from. And as usual, I want to stress how this is obviously just a very high-level summary, and tiny part of the actual developer community - if you want the full details of all those changes, you'll have to go to the -git tree.
On the whole, I don't think there are any huge surprises in here, and size-wise this seems to be a pretty regular release too. Let's hope that that translates to a nice and calm release cycle, but you never know. Last release was big, but it was all fairly calm despite that, so size isn't always the determining factor here..
If somebody wants to look at the actual diff for the release, I'd encourage you to ignore - once again - another set of big AMD GPU hardware description header files. We seem to have those fairly regularly, and they are always these huge generated headers that end up dwarfing everything else. Almost exactly half of the whole 5.14-rc1 patch is comprised of those GPU headers, and it skews the statistics a lot.
Now, even if you ignore that AMD header drop, drivers account for over two thirds of the changes when you look at the diff, and that's perfectly normal. What's slightly less usual is how there's a lot of line _removals_ in there, with the old IDE layer finally having met its long-overdue demise, and all our IDE support is now based on libata.
Of course, the fact that we removed all that legacy IDE code doesn't mean that we had a reduction in lines over-all: a few tens of thousands of lines of legacy code is nowhere near enough to balance out the usual kernel growth. But it's still a nice thing to see the cleanup.
So drivers dominate: even when ignoring the AMD header addition there's a fair amount of gpu updates, but there's networking drivers, rdma, sound, scsi, staging, media...
Outside of drivers, there's all the usual suspects: architecture updates (arm, arm64, x86, powerpc, s390, with a smattering of other architecture updates too) and various core kernel updates: networking, filesystems, VM, scheduling etc. And the usual documentation and tooling (perf and self-tests) updates.
Please do test, and we can get the whole calming-down period rolling and hopefully get a timely final 5.14 release.
Linus
Following the two-week long merge window, the first release candidate to Linux 5.14 is now available with all the shiny new features to be found in this next kernel release.
Linus Torvalds commented in the 5.14-rc1 announcement, "On the whole, I don't think there are any huge surprises in here, and size-wise this seems to be a pretty regular release too. Let's hope that that translates to a nice and calm release cycle, but you never know. Last release was big, but it was all fairly calm despite that, so size isn't always the determining factor here.."
Linus has released 5.14-rc1 and closed the merge window for this development cycle...
While there are the likes of OOMD / systemd-oomd gaining acceptance as a daemon for Linux systems to deal with killing off processes and other behavior under system memory (RAM) pressure, there still is an issue of the time it takes until the memory is reclaimed by those dying processes. Google engineers at the end of June proposed "process_reap" as a new system call to help in that memory recovery.
The proposed process_reap system call is designed to reclaim memory of a dying process from the context of the caller. Using process_reap should allow the memory to be freed faster with the CPU affinity and priority of the caller. Process_reap can only be used on processes that are dying via SIGKILL such as when triggered via out-of-memory / memory pressure daemons.
This is a series that offers a gentle introduction to Linux for newcomers.
The desktop environment with its bundle of programs sharing a common graphical user interface (GUI) remains a firm favorite with users. That’s unsurprising as a good desktop environment makes computing fun and simple. The graphical desktop environment has become so ingrained in almost everyone’s computer activities that it might seem the shell would fade away. Yet there’s still an important role to play for the shell and accompanying terminal-based software.
What’s a shell? What’s a terminal? The shell is a program that takes commands from the keyboard and gives them to the operating system to perform. On Ubuntu, the default shell is bash (which stands for Bourne Again SHell). The terminal is really a program called a terminal emulator. This is software that lets you interact with the shell.
It's HOT! I suppose I can't complain too much about living in paradise, but when my wife and I moved to Hawaii last fall, I didn't really think too much about the weather. Don't get me wrong, the weather is lovely pretty much all the time, and we keep our windows open 24/7, but that means it is pretty warm in the house right now in the middle of summer.
So, where does all this humble bragging intersect with open source? Well, we're planning to get a whole-house fan—one of those big ones that suck all the air out of your house and force it into the attic, pushing all the hot air out of the attic in the process. I am sure this will make the house way cooler, but the geek in me wants to know just how much cooler.
GitLab is a web-based tool which provides a Git repository manager and DevOps lifecycle tool. It is a feature rich tool that offers issue tracking, continuous integration, deployment pipeline.
GitLab comes with two distributions: the Enterprise Edition and the Community Edition. GitLab community edition is opensource. Enterprise edition comes with additional features.
In this tutorial we learn how to install GitLab Community Edition on Ubuntu 20.04.
Mounting disk in Linux is actually a process to access a partitioned and formatted hard disk in the system. Whatever data is stored in a hard disk can only be accessed or used after mounting that hard disk in Linux Operating System. As we know when a pen drive is inserted in the USB slot of Windows system, the pen drive will automatically be available for access in the windows home folder. This is only due to “plug and play” options installed in Windows operating system. But, in Linux, inserting or connecting a hard disk in the system, is not enough to access that disk. Before accessing it, the hard disk has to partitioned, formatted followed by mounting it in the system. However, the hard disk can be mounted with any of the single or multiple folder of Linux system. There is no restriction of mounting location of that hard disk. The following diagram is explained the basic difference between inserting a hard disk in Linux and Windows operating system.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Synfig Studio on Linux Lite 5.4.
Today we are looking at how to install Friday Night Funkin': Mic'd Up on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
SFTP (Secure File Transfer Protocol) is a secure version of FTP protocol that uses Secure Shell (SSH) to transfer files. It is similar to SCP, but it has access to various SSH operations like changing file permission and ownership, downloading credential files, etc. which we don’t want to allow over SFTP protocol. By default, SFTP uses the standard SFTP so we need to configure the chroot jail environment for all the SFTP users. In simple terms, we can say it’s a jail environment that prevents users from changing directories.
Find a file in windows is very easy just go in search bar and search file by name. it is only possible, if your computer has graphical interface in Linux.
Searching files in Windows are easy, Just go to the search box and type your query (name of the file), and hit enter, you will get the result of all files with the name. it happens only in the graphical user interface.
The GUI (Graphical User Interface) is not available in the Linux operating system every time, but the command line interface is available always.
To find a file by name, size, type, etc in the graphical interface is quite easy, And it is not really so easy in CLI (Command Line Interface).
In this article, I am going to cover “How to find a file in Linux by using CLI mode.
Converseen is a free and open source software for batch image conversion. With this tool, you can convert multiple images to another format, resize, change their aspect ratio, rotate or flip them all at once.
This is a handy tool for someone like me who has to deal with multiple screenshots of different size but has to resize them all before uploading to the website.
Batch conversion tools help a lot in such cases. This could be done in the Linux command line with the wonderful ImageMagick but a GUI tool is a lot easier to use here. Actually, Converseen uses ImageMagick underneath the Qt-based GUI.
Last week, numerous Chromebook users reported a CPU-crippling bug had arrived in the latest incremental update to version 91 of Chrome OS. Shortly thereafter, Google pumped the brakes on the update and paused the server which essentially reverted the most current version of Chrome OS to the previous 91.0.4472.114 that rolled out in mid-June. For users on the newer version that weren’t experiencing massive CPU usage, there was really nothing to do. The update should be working properly and reverting isn’t a necessity. For those who did roll back or perhaps never updated in the first place, an unforeseen side effect of the pause appeared in the form of a broken Linux container.
This tutorial explains how to create a multiboot USB in Linux in which you just need to copy any ISO you want to boot. After reading this tutorial you’ll know how to create within a minute a multiboot USB containing multiple operating systems such as different Linux distributions or Microsoft Windows.
‘du’ stands for the disc usage in a system. It is used to identify the usage of space by the files present in the system that causes the disc storage space to run out of the provided space. The du command uses different options and flags to get used to the command and to know about the disk space left in your system.
If you want to have the summary of the usage of the disk storage of the current directory that is in use on your system, then you will use this keyword as a command on the terminal.
This brief tutorial explains how to convert xcf files to jpg or any other image type using Gimp. First, click on the File menu located on Gimp’s top left corner, as shown in the image below.
In Linux, we constantly work with text files such as configuration files, source codes, web pages, and many others. Hence, it is essential to have a quick view of the contents of a text file in the command line before editing the file.
This quick guide aims to show you various approaches you can use to list the contents of a text file in the terminal.
Siege is an open-source regression test and benchmark utility used to stress test a website URL with several simulated users accessing a website. Developers can check the performance of their code using Siege. It works by hitting a web server simultaneously with many concurrent users. These users put the webserver under stress for a configurable period or until a manual interrupts the user running the Siege program.
SSH is a cryptographic network protocol that lets you control and modifies a remote computer over the internet. This protocol ensures security even through a vulnerable network. Most of the Linux distros use OpenSSH, an open-source project implementing the SSH protocol.
In this guide, we’ll demonstrate how to verify if SSH is running on Linux.
Everybody checks their computer’s hardware details from time to time. These details include information about RAM, processor, motherboard, GPU, and much more. Through this information, we can gauge how strong a computer is, what kind of drivers it needs, and its configuration. Hardware details are essential knowledge for a computer user; therefore, we will be discussing the best 5 GUI tools you can use to view them.
Checking for updates and installing them as soon as they are available is highly recommended as it makes your system more secure, stable, and less vulnerable to security threats.
When developers find any bugs in the system, they try to fix them as early as possible. Then, they give out the new fixed system as a security update. Security updates also have unique features.
This precise and to-the-point article will learn how to check for system security updates by two different methods: A) Manual B) Automatic.
Let’s first learn to install security updates manually.
To get started with the Firewall configuration in any Operating system, we first need to understand what a Firewall is and what it does. So let’s learn about Firewall first.
What is a firewall?
A firewall, in simple words, is a system used for network security by monitoring, controlling, and filtering the network traffic(incoming or outgoing). We can set some security rules if we want to allow or block some specific traffic. So, for the security of the system, a well-configured firewall is essential.
Administrators on Linux have to be very careful when it comes to user management for security reasons. They have to assign different levels of Sudo privileges to other users. Sometimes, they may even have to create users without a home directory. Those users can have a home directory later in CentOS 8.
This post contains a detailed explanation of how to create a user with or without a home directory. Later, we will also learn how to create a home directory for a user which already exists. So let’s begin.
To run the commands mentioned in this article, you will have to have Sudo privileges or log in as a root user.
PATH is an environmental variable present in almost all major operating systems that define a set of directories where executable programs are located. Programs and scripts located in the directories specified in $PATH can be executed directly without specifying their path.
Executable programs like ls, find, and the file is located at different directories in an Operating system. When a person inputs a command, the system looks for an executable program (with the same name) in the directories specified in $PATH.
In this post, you will learn in detail how to add directories to $PATH in CentOS 8.
The Solus team pulled off another great release with Solus 4.3 with the latest desktop versions. We wrap up the release.
Organizational psychologist Carol Dweck made a name for herself measuring the impact of mindset on human performance. More than a decade ago, she synthesized her research on the subject in her book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In that book, Dweck distinguished people with “fixed mindsets”, who believe that basic qualities like intelligence or talent are static, from those with “growth mindsets,” who believe that they can develop talents and capabilities over time through effort. Those who fall in the latter group, Dweck found, thrive on challenge; as a result, they are better at problem solving and adapting to change.
It’s no surprise, then, that her study of personality has grown in popularity among business leaders in recent years of continual and often dramatic shifts. Indeed, some companies like Microsoft, have institutionalized her work and built entire business strategies around it.
Sources fear Big Blue lacks knowledge to keep systems running smoothly
Teradata is outsourcing field-based support on both sides of the pond to IBM, much to the alarm of some customers who fear a loss of knowledge in keeping its trusted on-prem systems up and running.
The global data warehouse stalwart made its name with tightly integrated software and hardware systems sold as analytics "appliances", but in the last two years has shifted focus to its cloud platform following fierce competition from so-called cloud-native rivals including Snowflake, AWS, Microsoft, and Google.
siduction is a Debian-based distribution first released in 2011. What makes it unique is that it is one of the few Debian-based distros based off the Unstable branch (commonly known as Debian Sid, hence the name siduction). Although Debian is well known to be a very stable distro, some people look for more recent and up to date software that a rolling release distro would provide. Some common rolling release distros that are more well known are the Tumbleweed branch of openSUSE, Arch Linux, and Gentoo, and the never ending list of distros based off these. The reason siduction is such a powerful distro is that it is maintained by its community, therefore it is curated slightly more than Debian Sid. In my use case, Debian stable provides xorg-server version 1.20.4 but I require at least version 1.20.6 to properly use the NVIDIA card in my laptop with the new(ish) prime render offloading. xorg-server currently is at version 1.20.11 at the time of writing this, and siduction provides the most current version.
Installing
The siduction live USB boots to the desktop environment you chose on the download page - KDE Plasma, Cinnamon, LXDE, LXQt, Xfce, Xorg, and a no X version are available. For this review I used the KDE Plasma desktop environment because it is a very popular choice. I was actually quite disappointed there is no GNOME desktop version available for installation from siduction, although you could choose the Xorg version and install GNOME manually - but this would be not very beginner friendly. GNOME is easily one of the most popular desktop environments, far more popular than LXDE, Cinnamon, and LXQt, however I understand that these desktop environments have their own use cases such as low RAM usage, Qt environment, or GTK in the case of Xfce. I'm still shocked there is no GNOME version available from the downloads page.
PiSugar battery for the Raspberry Pi Zero was introduced around two years ago, followed the next year with a 5,000mAh PiSugar 2 battery for Raspberry Pi 3/4 which is currently sold for $49.99.
But the company has now designed lower-cost versions of the batteries with PiSugar S for Raspberry Pi Zero board, and PiSugar S Pro for Raspberry Pi 3/4 single board computers.
Right to Repair: The FTC is encouraged to “limit powerful equipment manufacturers from restricting people’s ability to use independent repair shops or do DIY repairs.” This is particularly focused on farmers, but will likely extend to other areas.
It's not that easy! My reliance on web services is hurting here, I found a website providing weather forecast working in w3m.
I easily focus on a task because switching to something else is painful (screen redrawing takes some times, HDD is noisy), I found a blog from a reader linking to other blogs, I enjoyed reading them all while I'm pretty sure I would usually just make a bookmark in firefox and switch to a 10-tabs opening to see what's new on some websites.
The beauty of the LoRa protocol is its range. Practical range for LoRa devices is usually listed at somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 km, with achievable range put somewhere between 15 and 20 km. However, there are a number of factors that can increase or decrease that distance. Things that will play heavily into the performance you get with your LoRaWAN or LoRa peer-to-peer project include things like transmission power mode, network and node-gateway positioning, antenna performance, and probably the most important factor of all - the surrounding environment, or the presence of physical obstructions. LoRaWAN is designed primarily for use outdoors, or in extremely large structures. In an urban setting, you might be lucky to get any more than 2-3 km. In a rural setting, however, range increases dramatically. LoRa’s range is heavily dependent on line-of-sight, so the more wide open your spaces, the better. Here at SFE HQ, we have a great line-of-sight out to the foothills, and we’ve gotten results a bit over 19 km. Of course, we’re using a fairly impressive antenna.
In string coding, string reversal is a crucial topic. There are also several methods for reversing a string, each of which has a different logic. This article will show you how to properly reverse a string to use several distinct approaches and reasoning with and without requiring any preset functions. Whenever the reversal of a string technique is applied in a particular unique input string, the text that a consumer would supply in a specific order will be completely reversed. In the instance beneath, different alternatives of reversing a string with C have been employed.
When implementing this guide, we have been working on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux system configured on Virtual Box. While working on a Linux system, we used to do most of our installations and queries on the terminal shell. Hence, open the terminal shell by a shortcut “Ctrl+Alt+T” or search it via an application search bar under the Activity area of the Ubuntu desktop. It is necessary to update your system first via the apt update query. It will ask you for the current user password to run the update. Hence, add a password and press Enter button.
Strings are just a one-dimensional collection of characters with the null character ‘0’ at the end. On the other hand, a null-terminated string includes the characters that make up the string, succeeded by a zero. In this article, you will learn about how to deal with strings in Ubuntu 20.02 Linux system. Make sure you have GCC compiler installed in the system. Now open the terminal via Ctrl+Alt+T to get started.
The full path of a file or folder from the root directory is specified by absolute path. In Python, the Current Working Directory is set to the directory location from where the python script executes. Many modules exist in python to get the Current Working Directory. How to get the Current Working Directory in Python is explained in this article.
To understand the working of the Arrow operator, we need to understand what pointer is first. In C++, pointer exists as a mutable, which always refers to the location of some other mutable of almost any data kind, such as an int, char, or float, since we’ve already taught. A pointer to structures could be used likewise, with a pointer mutable pointing to the location of such a structure mutable. Throughout C/C++, the Arrow operator may be used to access items in Unions plus Structures. It can be used in conjunction with such a pointer variable that points to a structure and union. A negative sign precedes the greater than mark to construct the arrow operator. Throughout C or C++, the -> operator assigns the content of the mutable name to the structural or union mutable pointer name.
The bitwise operators have been used to manipulate data only at the bit level. Bit-level computing would be done when you execute bitwise operations. It comprises two numbers, one of which is 0 and the other one is 1. It’s mainly used to speed up mathematical calculations. Inside the C language, we use several sorts of bitwise operators as below. Let’s discuss each one of them one by one. At the time of implementing this guide article, we have been working on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux system. We have successfully logged in from the system and installed the GCC compiler to compile C language code. Without a compiler, we are unable to execute our C script. After that, we have used the Ctrl+Alt+T key shortcut to open the terminal shell, as we have been doing every implementation and execution on a shell.
I was just going to use a variation on last week's "Nybble Swap" task for this, but then I foolishly thought, "No, I've read Hacker's Delight I should twiddle bits!"
Okay, now that I told you about my first mistake, let me tell you, the bit twiddling was fun once it started working but I do have a little regret that it's straightforward bit-twiddling: I created a bit mask to pick out alternating bits, then just did the shifting and OR-ing you would expect to switch the even/odd bits. I can't help but wonder if there isn't some clever one-liner in Hacker's Delight. I can't claim to have remembered it even once though: I skimmed the book. But I didn't use arrays and array indexing tricks, like I did on the nybble-swap, so I did learn something and that something is this: Once you start using bigint, you have to start thinking in a paranoid way like you do in python, "This assignment will just create a pointer, I need to make a copy." Since I'm the type who hits :w reflexively when at a lull in VIM, this isn't too outrageous for my sensibilities ... until I had to make a copy of the number 2 in a my declaration. That seemed a little much.
The full form of YAML is Yet Another Mark-up Language. This file format is very popular now to store serialized data that is human-readable. It is mainly used for configuration files, but it can be used for other purposes also. Different types of scalar data such as number, string, etc., and compound data such as list, the dictionary can be the content of this file. The extension of this fie is ‘.yaml’. Multiple modules exist in Python to read the YAML file. The use of the PyYAML module to read the YAML file in Python has shown in this tutorial.
The file that contains the binary data is called a binary file. Any formatted or unformatted binary data is stored in a binary file, and this file is not human-readable and is used by the computer directly. When a binary file is required to read or transfer from one location to another location, the file’s content is converted or encoded into a human-readable format. The extension of the binary file is .bin. The content of the binary file can be read by using a built-in function or module. Different ways to read binary files in Python have been shown in this tutorial.
Take input from the user is an important part of any programming language. The output of the many programs depends on the standard input. The way of taking input from the user is different for different programming languages. Many ways exist in python to read from the standard input. The input() function is the most common way is to read from the standard input, which is a built-in function. The sys.stdin is another way is to read from the standard input the calls input() function internally. Python has another module named fileinput for reading the standard input. The input() function of this module can be used to read standard input or read content from one or more files. Different ways to read from the standard input in Python have been explained in this tutorial.
The file or folder name can be used with the full path or just mentioning the file or folder name only to use it in the script. The full path of a file or folder from the root directory is specified by absolute path. When the file name is used without the pathname in the script, then the Current Working Directory is assumed as the file’s pathname and is called the relative path. In Python, the Current Working Directory is set to the directory location from where the python script executes. Many modules exist in python to get the Current Working Directory. The ways to retrieve the Current Working Directory by using different modules in Python have shown in this tutorial.
Sorting is a technique to rearrange the elements or data either in ascending order or descending order. In Python programming, we can do sorting very easily with the help of the methods sort () and sorted ().
The sorted () and sort () methods arrange the elements either in ascending or descending order. Even both perform the same operations, but still, they are different.
For these tutorials, users must have some basic ideas about the list, tuples, and sets. We will be using some basic operations of these data structures to show a clear picture of sort () and sorted () built-in methods. And for this, I am using Python3, so if you are using Python2, then there might be some output difference.
In this notebook, I will go over different ways of removing items from Python list.
Our pragmatic reason is that we are almost always pasting from our own instructions, which we obviously trust. In addition, we do this sort of pasting quite a bit. Since our own source text is trusted, an extra step to accept them is both annoying and almost certainly ineffective at avoiding mistakes. Since we know the source is trusted, we're extremely unlikely to pause, look at what we're about to hit Return on, and realize we've pasted the wrong thing, especially since we do this all the time.
Or, actually, .bash_aliases - but that's not as fun to say
On this page I've gathered some selected bits and pieces from my .bash_aliases file. Apart from the selection of hacks and scripts available on this site, these are the homemade contraptions I use most frequently when farting around with my computer.
There are people who willfully twist the truth, cherry-pick, distort, lie, out of malice. And there are people who do all those same actions but out of some psychological hangup; they believe in the greater “truth” of their position and they can’t help themselves from sorting their inputs accordingly. And then there are those who are just genuinely and temporarily misinformed.
“Never” attribute to malice has led us to being poorly equipped to handle climate change denial, the GOP’s election lies, flat-eartherism and many other things. I would say that there is a non-zero amount of people who know full well that what they are saying is factually incorrect and they do it anyway; to push the Overton window, to push their “side’s” position, to gain social status or wealth, to “own the libs”, or a number of other explanations.
Regulations in these areas are usually triggered by the need to implement an incomplete reform of the telecom sector, in which the government maintains its ownership to the incumbent provider. In other cases, these policies and regulations are set in an attempt to ensure the privacy and security of users in general, and in time of political disturbances.
However, the report found that each policy had a direct impact on at least one of the critical properties of the Internet, thereby hindering its resilience and accessibility. Here’s how: [...]
In the late 1970s, men and women attended college in almost equal numbers. Today, women account for 57 percent of enrollment and an even greater share of degrees, especially at the level of master’s and above. The explanations for this growing gender imbalance vary from the academic to the social to the economic. Girls, on average, do better in primary and secondary school. Boys are less likely to seek help when they struggle. And they face more pressure to join the work force.
On Sunday, CNN’s Jake Tapper showed Biden’s chief medical adviser a video clip from CPAC where the crowd loudly cheered while a conservative author boasted about the government having trouble reaching a higher percentile of U.S. citizens vaccinated.
“They were hoping, the government was hoping that they could sort of sucker 90 percent of the population into getting vaccinated. And it isn’t happening,” the panelist said to cheers. Currently, only 48 percent of Americans are fully vaccinated.
Sophos, a key player in next-generation cybersecurity, has announced that it has acquired Capsule8, a pioneer in runtime visibility, detection and response for Linux production servers and containers covering on-premise and cloud workloads.
Founded in 2016, Capsule8 is privately held and headquartered in New York.
As per the deal, Sophos will be integrating Capsule8 technology into its recently launched Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem (ACE), providing powerful and lightweight Linux server and cloud container security within this open platform.
Although it took several years, the federal government solved a similar chronic trespass grazing situation in Arizona when it got Mr. Klump put in jail for contempt and placed a lien on his property.€ But the Department of the Interior (DOI) agencies and the Department of Justice (DOJ) have failed to try these proven solutions with Mr. Bundy.€ This failure contributed to the dangerous Bunkerville standoff that nearly caused a gun battle with militia members.€ This successful standoff by the militia then emboldened them€ to conduct the Malheur Refuge occupation and later the January 6th insurrection in the U.S. Capitol.€ Another potentially dangerous standoff may now be brewing in southern Oregon over Klamath river water.
When will the DOI and DOJ demonstrate to Mr. Bundy and his militia supporters that there is tangible accountability for their lawless actions and threats of violence?€ Will the Biden administration ineptly keep kicking this can down the road, as was done during the eight Obama administration years?
Rumsfeld (“Rummy to his friends”–though he confessed to Nixon that he never drank with reporters or Secret Service agents) wasn’t all that close to George HW Bush, either. Recall that Rumsfeld launched a presidential bid against Poppy in 1988. Unable to raise much cash, Rumsfeld backed out and promptly endorsed Bush’s arch-rival Bob Dole. To read this article, log in or or Subscribe. In order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.
The 83,926-acre blaze was 8 percent contained Sunday. Federal fire officials reported some progress in holding the fire on the south and southwestern flanks.
Ecocide means to destroy the environment, but when considered etymologically, from the Greek and Latin, it signifies to kill one’s home.
Alaska's thawing permafrost is undermining the supports that hold up an elevated section of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, putting in danger the structural integrity of one of the world’s largest oil pipelines.
In a worst-case scenario, a rupture of the pipeline would result in an oil spill in a delicate and remote landscape where it would be extremely difficult to clean up.
Can the world’s largest floating offshore wind farms help the North Sea oil industry to cut carbon emissions? Should they?
The illegal Bull Trout Recovery Plan would€ allow the federal government to remove bull trout from Endangered Species Act protections as long as only 147 individual populations go extinct out of 611 total populations.€ Yes, that’s right.€ Even though bull trout had already lost 60% of their range when listed under the Endangered Species Act 20 years ago, the plan is to allow another 147 populations to go extinct.€ As the National Park Service noted in public comments against the plan,€ “Bull trout are a species that has already lost€ 60% of its historic range. Delisting after losing up to another 10% of that range is not a€ recovery plan.” € Instead, it is an extinction plan.
The Endangered Species Act requires that recovery plans contain “objective and measurable criteria,” which, when met, would lead to a lawful delisting rule.€ This plan violates this legal requirement because there are no objective criteria, such as target population numbers, trends, or distribution. € Instead, the plan is to delist once “threats” are “effectively managed.” € However, it is simply impossible to determine if management has been effective without looking at the actual population numbers, trends, and distribution.€ As stated by the Fish and Wildlife Service project leader from the Columbia River Fisheries€ Program Office: “Without a benchmark of success, there is . . . certainly€ no way to determine whether primary threats have been effectively’€ managed.”
India’s National Family Planning Programme aims to reduce India’s overall fertility rate to 2.1 by 2025.
In the 1970s, actually in the late 1960s also, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) had an error in its construction that led it to overstate the rate of inflation relative to the current measure. In some years, especially in the late 1970s, the error was especially large, peaking at 2.6 percentage points in 1979. Here’s the picture for the official CPI used at the time, compared with the Bureau of Labor Statistics CPI-U-RS, which calculates the inflation rate using the current methodology.
This mattered a lot in the 1970s because, as Smialek and Casselman point out, many wage contracts were directly indexed to the CPI. This means that an overstatement in the measured rate of inflation would show up directly in higher wages. Many rental contracts were also indexed to the CPI. This measurement error undoubtedly contributed to the wage-price spiral of the 1970s. Presumably we don’t have to worry about the same sort of measurement error today, and even if there were such an error, many fewer contracts are now indexed to the CPI. ( I wrote about this issue many years ago.)
Even many proponents of Bitcoin say that, while there’s an argument it’s a good store of value, its utility as a payments mechanism is limited.
“Bitcoin is the worst payment system ever invented. It’s terrible,” said William Quigley, the co-founder of stablecoin Tether and a pioneer of multiple aspects of the cryptocurrency space, in a recent video interview. “Almost any token is better than Bitcoin as a payment system.”
NFTs are getting a lot of press. For sure, NFTs have made a big splash in the art world. I had an interesting conversation with a friend today about financing young athletes through the monetization of their right of publicity since the NCAA (and states) have begun allowing collegiate athletes to profit from their image etc. One interesting issue concerns aspiring professional tennis players. Often those players must make a decision between attempting to finance a shot at a profess
Sweden is a democratic republic that practices an economic system often referred to as “democratic socialism” or “social democracy.”€ Although Karl Marx popularized the word “socialism” in 1848 to describe his proposed utopian economic/political system, outside of the realm of Marxists and rightwing cranks, Marx’s system is usually today referred to as “communism” and “socialist” is the modern tag used to describe countries like Sweden.
As such, it’s describing an economic system made possible by the political system of democracy.€ Swedes have what they have because the majority of their population has repeatedly voted for politicians who promised to put democratic socialism into place.
In recent years, the "vloggers" have been increasingly presenting themselves as China-lovers, spreading Communist Party disinformation.
YouTube labels Chinese state media like broadcaster CGTN as government-funded. But there is little policing when it comes to individuals promoting similar narratives.
Some vloggers are suspected of co-operating with state-owned outlets to spread China's rhetoric to the world. But it's far from clear what really motivates them, or how effective this strategy is.
On June 30, the New York Times published an article, Target Store Closings Show Limits of Pledge to Black Communities, about Target closing 13 stores and divesting in some Black communities. This is after the nation’s #2 discount retailer publicly committed to investing $2 billion in Black communities following Target’s “woke” moment in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and the looting of its South Minneapolis store, which is across the street from where the third precinct police station burned.€
In 2016 I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to learn more about what happened behind the scenes in 2011. I received a response over a year later. The full FOIA response offers an inside look: scrawled notes on the phone with Apple, descriptions of a Special Agent scrolling through my social media, justifications for a search warrant, a detailed closing report. But it is mostly boring minutiae: multiple pages of paperwork for every piece of hardware that was seized, separate lines documenting every time evidence was withdrawn and returned to the locker.
Reading this story again ten years later, I see a lot that has changed in me.
In 2011 I was still under the false belief that all varieties of law enforcement are designed to protect the public from harm. It was a sign of my privilege, and of my naive faith in the system. How many other people have pointed the Secret Service to incriminating evidence on their own laptop, and literally given them passwords in an effort to help? I thought we were all on the same side. In some ways this is a story about how I began to learn that law enforcement is there to protect some specific people (and companies), and not the general public as I imagined.
Saypinar, 26, came to the US from Turkey to avoid the conservative culture in Turkey. Saypinar is a fitness model and social media influencer and she was the first woman in Turkey to receive an IFBB (International Federation of Bodybuilding and Fitness) status.
Saypinar took to Instragram to share her anger after she was banned from boarding the flight.
I spoke to him at Google's HQ in Silicon Valley, for the first of a series of interviews I am doing for the BBC with global figures.
President Joe Biden issued a sweeping executive order on Friday that encourages government agencies to begin enacting reforms across the tech spectrum, including re-enacting net neutrality, enforcing broadband competition, enacting “right-to-repair” laws, and more.
According to a fact sheet released by the White House, several aspects of the order will directly affect consumers and how they use technology. Below, we’ve summarized the executive order and listed how its contents may affect consumers’ daily lives.
(The order, when published, will appear on the Federal Register of executive orders.)
The coronavirus pandemic, its fallout and the reopening of economies in its aftermath are key themes of PricewaterhouseCoopers’ annual “Global Entertainment & Media Outlook,” which found a 3.8 percent decline in global industry revenue to $2 trillion in 2020, “the most significant year-on-year drop in the history” of the report.
The study looks ahead at the years 2021–2025, forecasting global industry revenue to bounce back 6.5 percent this year “as more territories emerge from lockdown” and a further 6.7 percent in 2022. “From 2020 to 2025, we project a healthy five-year compound annual growth rate of 5.0 percent, taking revenues to $2.6 trillion,” PwC finds.
US businesses’ growing need for infrastructure modernisation will further exacerbate shortages of workers with IT, data and AI skills, leading them to turn to IT services providers who have large, trained talent bases in India.
This talent shortage in the United States will also allow IT services players to raise billing rates that can offset anticipated cost increases.
Counsel at luxury brands and those in the consumer goods and pharmaceutical industries debate whether openness or silence is the best way to combat counterfeiting
The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that a party did not waive the Patent Trial & Appeal Board’s (Board) constitutionality argument by raising it for the first time in its opening brief because the Court’s decision in Arthrex, Inc. v. Smith & Nephew, Inc. was issued after the party sought rehearing. New Vision Gaming v. SG Gaming, Inc., Case Nos. 20-1399, -1400 (Fed. Cir. May 13, 2021) (Moore, J.) (Newman, J. concurring in part, dissenting in part)
New Vision appealed two covered-business method (CBM) review final written decisions in which the Board found that all claims of the patents, as well as its proposed substitute claims, were directed to patent ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101. In its opening brief before the Federal Circuit, New Vision requested the Court vacate and remand the Board’s decisions in light of Arthrex. SG Gaming argued New Vision had waived its right to a challenge under Arthrex since it raised it for the first time on an appeal. The Court disagreed, finding that New Vision had not waived its ability to challenge the Board’s decision under Arthrex since Arthrex was issued after the Board’s final written decisions and after New Vision sought Board rehearing. The Court vacated the Board’s final written decisions in the CBMs and remanded for further proceedings consistent with Arthrex without reaching the merits or any other issues.
The legal basis for compulsory licensing in Russia flows from Articles 1360 and 1362 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation (Civil Code). Article 1360 of the Civil Code allows the Russian Government to grant permission to the use of a patented invention in the interest of defense and national security. Such permission requires notifying the patentholder and paying him an adequate compensation.
A Chinese tech giant filed more patents in Canada last year than any other company, evidence of what some observers say is a failure by Canada to secure the critical intellectual property rights needed to build next-generation technologies.
Applied Information, Inc., the leading provider of intelligent transportation infrastructure technology, announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has granted the company a patent covering its technology that uses both cellular network and direct radio communication to control traffic signals.
Apple Inc. will ask a London court this month to reject arguments that the iPhone maker is an “unwilling” patent licensee, during a high-stakes trial that could raise the U.K’s growing profile in global patent fights.
Apple already has been found to infringe two Optis Cellular Technology LLC patents essential to 3G and 4G communications standards. The court has been asked to determine a licensing rate that is fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory, or FRAND.
Apple doesn’t want to commit to taking a license before the rate is determined, however. A trial set to begin July 19 focuses on whether that makes Apple an “unwilling licensee,” a label that can open the door to a possible sales ban in the U.K.
The recent expansion of the Patent Office’s power to invalidate issued patents raises a coordination problem when there is also concurrent litigation, particularly where the federal courts have already upheld the patent’s validity. The Federal Circuit has concluded that Patent Office cancellation extinguishes litigation pending at any stage and requires vacating prior decisions in the case. This rule is widely criticized on doctrinal, policy, and separation of powers grounds. Yet, the Federal Circuit has reached (almost) the right outcome, except for the wrong reasons. Both the Federal Circuit and its critics overlook that the Federal Circuit’s rule reflects a straight-forward application of the justiciability limits on the power of the federal courts. Patent cancellation eliminates the exclusive rights that form the basis for the plaintiff’s suit, mooting the infringement case no matter how belated in the litigation. Courts typically vacate prior judgments and decisions when a pending case becomes moot, exactly as the Federal Circuit requires. Properly rooting the effects of Patent Office cancellation in mootness addresses critics’ doctrinal and policy concerns. It also demonstrates that critics’ separation of powers concerns are exactly backwards. The Federal Circuit’s rule is not a threat to the constitutional structure or the role of federal courts but rather a necessary result of Article III’s limits on federal judicial power. Courts and Congress each have potential ways to mitigate policy concerns from allowing Patent Office cancellation to trump litigation, while respecting mootness, but these ways introduce their own problems. Courts may have some discretion to decline to vacate prior judgments but doing so would have limited impact and could be an unwarranted departure from generally applicable procedural rules. Congress could limit the retroactive effect of patent cancellation, but this would be historically novel and raise its own policy concerns.
This article explains that domestic patenting activity may foreshadow a country’s level of regulation of path-breaking technologies. The article considers whether different governments will act with a light or a heavy regulatory hand when encountering a new disruptive technology. The article hypothesizes that part of the answer to this important regulatory, economic, and geopolitical question may lie in an unexpected place: the world’s patent offices. Countries with early and significant patent activity in an emerging technology are more likely to view themselves as having a stake in the technology and therefore will be less inclined to subject the technology to extensive health, safety and environmental regulation that would constrain it. The article introduces the term “patent footprint” to describe a country’s degree of patenting activity in a new technology, and the article posits that a country’s patent footprint may provide an early clue to its willingness or reluctance to strenuously regulate the new technology. Even more so, lack of geographic diversity in patent footprints may help predict whether an emerging technology will face extensive international regulation. Patent footprints provide a useful tool to policymakers, businesses, investors, and NGOs considering the health, safety, and environmental regulation of a disruptive technology. The predictive power of patent footprints adds to the literature on the broader function of patents in society.
The USPTO plans to launch a patent eligibility jurisprudence study, it was revealed yesterday, July 8.
The announcement came in response to a letter sent by a bipartisan group of senators to acting director Drew Hirshfeld in March asking the office to “publish a request for information on the current state of patent eligibility jurisprudence in the US and evaluate the responses”.
A federal register notice (FRN) is now scheduled to be published today, July 9, requesting answers and input from stakeholders to 13 questions and topics to assist in that effort, according to a publicly posted draft of the FRN.
[...]
All eyes on EPO following re-scheduled VICO hearing
The EPO’s Enlarged Board of Appeal has finally considered the legality of mandatory video conferences for oral proceedings – and practitioners will now keenly await its decision.
The Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBoA) hearing in G1/21 was held on Friday, July 2.
It was initially scheduled to start on May 28 but was delayed that same day after a request from the opponent, who claimed it had not been given enough time to consider submissions by EPO president António Campinos.
During last week’s hearing, it was noted that before oral proceedings by VICO became mandatory, only 300 matters using this method were held. It was added that one party in a dispute was able to stall proceedings for all others simply by declining a VICO hearing.
At the end of last year, sources told Managing IP that some patentees deliberately declined virtual proceedings in order to stall potential invalidation of their patents.
In January this year, the need for both parties to consent to VICO was removed. Since then, 3,000 oral proceedings have taken place by VICO, the EBoA heard.
The G1/21 hearing has been dogged with controversy. The composition of the EBoA panel was changed after the EBoA accepted that there was a justified fear of bias.
Those concerns were raised because Boards of Appeal president Carl Josefsson, who was involved in the drafting of the article that allowed for VICO hearings, was due to sit on the panel hearing the dispute.
Josefsson was replaced by EBoA member Fritz Blumer.
A written decision is expected, but no timeline has been provided yet.
Davis replaces Yokoyama as Microsoft head of IP
Burton Davis will oversee intellectual property at Microsoft, it was announced this week after current IP head Jennifer Yokoyama revealed she was stepping down.
Yokoyama said in a LinkedIn post on Saturday, July 3, that she was moving to a new role in the company’s cloud and artificial intelligence department.
“As we head into the new fiscal year at Microsoft, I’m looking forward to expanding my role as the new corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of cloud and AI as part of a new customer experience and policy team,” she wrote.
The US Patent Office is looking at the impact of patents on areas such as quantum computing, AI and networking
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is looking at the impact of patents on innovation and investment in technology and calling for industry views.
The study particularly wants to find examples of where a patent has been denied in the US but accepted in other jurisdictions, which will be a key area for European electronics companies.
The US Supreme Court’s 2016 decisions in Mayo and Alice and subsequent Federal Circuit decisions applying the Supreme Court’s legal framework have highlighted the impact of patents on areas such as quantum computing, artificial intelligence, precision medicine, diagnostic methods, software and networking
The USPTO will use the responses to prepare a report for US Senators Thom Tillis, Mazie Hirono, Tom Cotton, and Christopher Coons on how current jurisprudence may have affected U.S. investment and innovation...
In-house and private practice counsel set out their arguments for why recent data may or may not indicate a rise in PGRs for biologics
On 25 June 2021 Meade J handed down his decision in the second of a series of trials listed as part of the Optis v Apple UK action ([2021] EWHC 1739 (Pat); a link the judgment is here). This decision concerned the validity and infringement of EP (UK) 2 229 744. This patent had previously been held valid and infringed/essential by Birss J in the context of the Unwired Planet v Huawei dispute (a copy of Birss J’s decision is here). In this case, Apple conceded infringement/essentiality but argued the patent was invalid over two pieces of prior art and also raised a defence of proprietary estoppel. Whilst a number of the patent arguments are interesting – particularly the question of anticipation by equivalence which the judge rejected as a matter of law and fact – this author was especially drawn to the judge’s in-depth analysis and dismissal of Apple’s proprietary estoppel defence. The decision no-doubt brings a sigh of relief to SEP holders as it appears to close the door in the UK on estoppel arguments of this nature, sometimes categorised as a flavour of ‘patent ambush’ argument, at least in the context of the ETSI telecommunication standards.
PLUSS has partnered with pharmaceutical companies across India for transporting their products using Celsure boxes and also exports Celsure boxes and its ‘phase change materials’ to pharma packaging suppliers in Europe and the USA. PLUSS has received a patent for the Celsure box from the United States Patent and Trademark Office and the European Patent Office in Germany and has applied for a patent in India, Singapore and Brazil.
Sources from Nestlé, Novartis and Siemens clash over proposals to introduce full examination to the Swiss patent regime
Two patent owners [sic] told the Federal Circuit on Wednesday that there were "significant questions" about the legality of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's plan for its temporary leader to review patent decisions under the U.S. Supreme Court's Arthrex ruling, since he isn't a presidential appointee.
On May 20th, Junior Party the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Vienna; and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") filed its Substantive Preliminary Motion No. 3 in Interference No. 106,127 (which names ToolGen as Senior Party), asking the Patent Trial and Appeal Board to add claims in ToolGen's U.S. Patent No. 10,851,380* to this interference, pursuant to 37 C.F.R. ۤۤ 41.121(a)(1)(i) and 41.208(a)(2) and Standing Order ۦ 208.3.2.
On June 11th, Junior Party the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Vienna; and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") filed its Responsive Preliminary Motion No. 2 in Interference No. 106,127 to be accorded benefit of priority to U.S. provisional application No. 13/842,859, filed March 15, 2013, pursuant to 37 C.F.R. ۤۤ 41.121(a)(2) and 41.208(a)(3) and Standing Order ۦ 208.4.1. CVC filed this motion contingent on the Board granting Senior Party ToolGen's Substantive Preliminary Motion No. 2 to deny CVC priority benefit to U.S. provisional application No. 16/757,640, filed January 28, 2013 ("P3").
ZTE is currently the only company that is commercially selling a smartphone with ð selfie camera hidden under the display and it's about to release its second generation any moment now. We expect the Samsung Galaxy Fold3 to also adopt the tech, Oppo has also been working on a solution, and now Huawei is on its way to join them after patenting a smartphone with a UPC.
In-house and private practice lawyers say changes to Australia’s patent law, including the removal of a secondary patent system, could unfairly affect SMEs
The Supreme Court has upheld a decision striking out a claim against a pharmaceutical company for causing loss to the NHS by unlawful means. The alleged unlawful means consisted in obtaining and enforcing a patent for a blood pressure drug through fraudulent misrepresentations to the European Patent Office (“EPO”) and the English court (allegations which were denied). This conduct, it was alleged, delayed the entry onto the market of generic versions of the drug, which meant that the NHS had to pay higher prices for the drug: Secretary of State for Health v Servier Laboratories Ltd [2021] UKSC 24.
A use-limited product claim is a claim format often used in Europe as an alternative to method of treatment claims. However, it is a claim format in its own right, and an understanding of its uses and limitations may be useful when drafting patent applications which are destined to be prosecuted before the European Patent Office (EPO).
Use-limited product claims allow a known compound to be protected for a first medical use (where its use as a medicament was previously unknown), or for a further medical use (where the compound was previously known as a medicament). They are essentially a product claim in which the product is limited by its use, and the basic formats for drafting such claims are provided below:
I have been following the patent ownership lawsuit of Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. v. International Trade Commission and 10X Genomics. The case is now pending on a petition for en banc rehearing before the Federal Circuit.
Several former Bio-Rad employees left to form 10X Genomics. While at Bio-Rad, the individuals began development of a number of ideas but did not complete conception or reduction-to-practice. Some months later, after leaving and forming 10X, they completed the inventions and filed patent applications. Bio-Rad now argues that it has partial ownership rights to the inventions based upon the inventor’s contributions while employees.
In the appeal, the Federal Circuit sided with 10X, holding that the terms of the employment agreement were limited to Intellectual Property, and pre-conception ideas were not enough.
In Sweden, infringement and invalidity of a patent are officially handled in separate cases and consequently brought in separate proceedings, but it is the same court that will deal with both infringement and invalidity. Validity and infringement can be decided in the same proceedings, but it can also, at the request of any of the parties, be decided separately (section 61, The Swedish Patent Act). Such separate decisions are however not independent of each other, and it is still the same judges that will deal with both issues, taking into account facts from both proceedings.
The pace of innovation is increasing in the scramble to meet the required timescale for the move to EVs. A recent joint study by the European Patent Office and the International Energy Agency found that between 2005 and 2018 patenting activity in batteries and electricity storage technology grew at an average annual rate of 14% worldwide, four times faster than the average for all technologies, and that the rise in innovation was chiefly driven by developments in Li-ion batteries. Although the study found that Asia has a strong lead, concerted efforts are now being made in Europe and the US to catch up.
These decisions clear the path for the ratification procedure in Germany. It is likely that Germany will sign the UPC Agreement within this year. This means the UPC could finally be ready to operate as early as Spring 2022!
A low-key change at the top of the Microsoft IP function is a sign of how things have changed at the company over recent years
A low-key change at the top of the Microsoft IP function is a sign of how things have changed at the company over recent years.
Compared to cellular and WiFi patents, litigation over Bluetooth devices is relatively rare. But that's just one of two aspects that make Texas LFP v. Texas Instruments (a recently-filed patent infringement action in the Eastern District of Texas) stand out.
On LinkedIn, Tangible IP's Louis Carbeonneau--a patent broker--provided some interesting background on the case. His firm had "offered [a portfolio containing the patent-in-suit] to several chip companies, including all the alleged infringers, to no avail." As a result, the patent holder "turned to a well respected patent litigation firm that liked the portfolio and are now suing one of the alleged infringers": TI.
No need to reinvent the wheel for some patent owners and IPR petitioners.
VoIP-Pal sued Apple for infringing its U.S. Patent Nos. 9,537,762; 9,813,330; 9,826,002; and 9,948,549. Apple filed four petitions for for inter partes review, but all four were denied by the PTAB. Judge Koh then dismissed the infringement case in Apple’s favor–finding that all asserted claims were directed to ineligible subject matter. On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed without opinion (R.36). Now, VoIP-Pal has petitioned for writ of certiorari. The case is now part of a trio of eligibility cases pending before the Court. See American Axle & Manufacturing, Inc. v. Neapco Holdings LLC, No. 20-891; iLife Technologies, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc., No. 20-1760.
Today Zighra, the leading solution for continuous behavioral authentication, expanded the company's pioneering technical leadership. The United States Patent and Trademark office issued today: System and method for behavioural biometric authentication using program modelling (U.S. Patent No. 11,057,413), enabling a process to eliminate passwords and continuously authenticate users on multiple applications and cloud services. The company now has 16 issued and pending patents across four patent families.
Sources at Starbucks, Coty and Ziff Davis reveal how using similar criteria to the courts can help them conduct challenging consumer confusion analysis
Over the past few weeks, the song ‘Football’s Coming Home’ has been shouted at various levels of volume and inebriation all over England.
For our readers living under a rock or in the US, the national team managed to end a 55-year wait for a major final: the Three Lions will play Italy in the final of the European Championship 2020 (which was delayed by a year) on Sunday night and attempt to bring the trophy back to the home of football (soccer, for our American readers).
Days after Kanye West and Yeezy LLC filed suit against Walmart and a number of unnamed sellers on the retail giant’s marketplace platform over the sale of copycat footwear, Yeezy has responded to the already-existing trademark scuffle that Walmart waged against it this spring. On the heels of Yeezy filing a trademark application for registration for a stylized sun rays graphic, which the company says that it intends to use on everything from clothing and retail store services, and musical sound recordings and streaming to hotel services and the construction of “non-metal modular homes,” among other things, Walmart initiated an opposition proceeding in an attempt to block the registration of the Yeezy logo on the basis that it is confusingly similar to a trademark that is already using.
SpicyIP featured a post on the copyright ownership in State Board Textbooks. The post looks into how different copyright policies in different states within India impede access to knowledge and calls for consistency among such copyright policies across State Boards.
Although education has the potential to be a significant leveller of inequalities, online education because of the pandemic, has brought into stark relief the digital divide and widening socio-economic inequalities in India. Of late, there have been multiple reported cases of suicides by students (see here and here) on account of lack of access to the means of education. Further, only around a quarter of Indian families have access to the internet, according to estimates. This percentage reduces to 15% in rural homes. As usual, the marginalised, rural, and destitute communities have been hit the hardest.
There should therefore be a renewed emphasis on the need to make education, online or offline, more inclusive. Equitable access to learning materials and textbooks for education, both online and offline, constitutes a basic requirement for the realisation of this goal. However, since a long time access to textbooks in India, has been riddled with distribution problems, and the impact of this differential access has only been exacerbated during the pandemic. In this post, I look at the question of the government’s copyright ownership in State Board textbooks, and its implications on access to knowledge and education.
A preliminary disclaimer: in my view, the Cofemel decision is far from straightforward. The fact is, however, that the CJEU has been pretty clear-cut in stating that under EU law the existence of a “work” – as defined in the Court’s settled case law (see for reference Cofemel, at 29-34) – is the only requirement for copyright protection, works of industrial design included. And this principle, implicitly repeated in Brompton, implies that Member States would not be allowed to make the protection of such works conditional upon fulfilment of further requirements, in spite of Article 17 Design Directive and Article 96 Design Regulation.
Italy is (was?) one of the countries where these further requirements must (had to?) be met. Under Article 2.10 of Italian Copyright Law, in order to be protected, works of industrial design must have inherent “creative character and artistic value”. It is no surprise, then, that Italian scholars have been particularly prolific in speculating on the possible assassination of “artistic value” by the CJEU.
Do YouTube and cyberlocker Uploaded directly perform copyright-restricted acts? And, following from this: what is the relationship between the InfoSoc right of communication to the public and Article 17 of the DSM Directive? At what conditions is the hosting safe harbour available? And what about intermediary injunctions?
A man who operated several pirate sites that allowed people to download movies and TV shows has been sentenced in the United States. Talon White, who previously admitted to copyright infringement and tax evasion offenses, was handed 12 months in prison and ordered to pay $4.3 million in restitution to the MPAA and IRS.
Popular webtoon subscription service Toomics is quite active on the anti-piracy front. Unfortunately, the Korean company is not very accurate as its takedown notices target perfectly legal content on Facebook, Amazon, Pinterest and Netflix. Even more bizarrely, Toomics has repeatedly asked Google to remove 'infringing' URLs on its own website.
