09.26.21
Posted in News Roundup at 6:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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If you’re looking for a Linux laptop with a focus on privacy and security, you could roll your own. Several GNU/Linux operating systems are available that are more angled towards privacy and keeping you secure online, rather than general computing. One example is PureOS, the operating system from Purism that you will find pre-installed on the Librem 14.
A top-end ultraportable notebook with specs comparable with a MacBook Pro, the Librem 14 is arguably the most security and privacy-conscious laptop around.
But Purism’s laptop costs a pretty penny – is it worth the price?
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Kernel Space
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So after a somewhat rocky merge window and second rc, things are now
actually looking pretty normal for rc3. Knock wood.
There are fixes all over, and the statistics look fairly regular, with
drivers dominating as they should (since they are most of the tree).
And outside of drivers, we have a fairly usual mix of changes -
architecture fixes, networking, filesystems, and tooling (the latter
being mostly kvm selftests).
Shortlog appended, it's not too long and easy to scan through to get a
flavor for the details if you happen to care.
Please do give it a whirl,
Linus
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Linus Torvalds has now issued the third weekly release candidate of the forthcoming Linux 5.15 kernel.
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The third 5.15 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “So after a somewhat rocky merge window and second rc, things are now actually looking pretty normal for rc3. Knock wood”.
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Instructionals/Technical
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wall is (an abbreviation of write to all) is a Unix command-line utility that displays the contents of a computer file or standard input to all logged-in users. It is used by root to send out shutting down message to all users just before poweroff.
It displays a message on the terminals of all logged-in users. The messages can_be either typed on the terminal or the contents of a file.
Also usually, system administrators send messages to announce maintenance and ask users to log out and close all open programs.The messages ‘re shown to all logged in users with a terminal open.
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When IT and Security professionals talk about port numbers, we’re referring to the TCP and UDP port numbers a service is running on that are waiting to accept connections. But what exactly is a port?
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Data Science at the Command Line: Obtain, Scrub, Explore, and Model Data with Unix Power Tools written by Jeroen Janssens is the second edition of the series “Data Science at the Command Line”. This book demonstrates how the flexibility of the command line can help you become a more efficient and productive data scientist. You will learn how to combine small yet powerful command-line tools to quickly obtain, scrub, explore, and model your data. To get you started, author Jeroen Janssens provides a Docker image packed with over 80 tools–useful whether you work with Windows, macOS, or Linux.
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In the modern era of technology, typing has become one of the most common activities for a lot of professions. Learning to type faster with accuracy can help you get more things done in the same amount of time.
However, touch typing is not a skill that you can master overnight. It takes regular practice and testing to improve your speed and accuracy gradually. While there are a lot of websites that help you achieve this, all you essentially need on Linux is a terminal. Let’s see how.
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Today we are looking at how to install OpenToonz 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.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
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Games
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Epic Games has announced the availability of its free Easy Anti-Cheat software on Linux and macOS as part of the Epic Online Services platform meant to facilitate cross-platform play.
Many online titles rely on some kind of anti-cheat system to combat the use of wall hacks, aimbots, and other game-breaking software that gives players advantages over their peers. Refusing to install the anti-cheat software can preclude someone from playing the game at all.
That system works out well on platforms where anti-cheat software is readily available. There haven’t been many efforts to introduce those systems on Linux or macOS, however, which is part of the reason why many gamers have to dual-boot Windows to play their favorite titles.
Epic’s working to change that. The company made Easy Anti-Cheat free to Windows game developers in June, and now it’s making the software freely available to devs working on games for Linux and macOS, too. So it should be easier than ever for all three platforms to coexist.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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The Open Mainframe Project kicked off the 2nd annual Open Mainframe Summit today with news of record growth in contributions – with more than 105.31 Million Lines of Code written and over 9,600 commits submitted by Open Mainframe Project communities so far this year. This is 100 percent more code than last year with an increased number of active participants in the 20 project and working groups. These numbers will only increase as Open Mainframe continues to be the cornerstone of governance and innovation for modernizing the mainframe and its path to IoT, Cloud and Edge Computing.
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RISC-V International, a global open hardware standards organization, announced the launch of the Open Hardware Diversity Alliance. The global Alliance, created by CHIPS Alliance, OpenPOWER Foundation, RISC-V, and Western Digital, will develop and provide learning and networking programs, mentorship opportunities and inclusive environments across the expansive ecosystem of open hardware. The Alliance will be focused on supporting professional advancement and encouraging equal participation for women and underrepresented individuals in the open hardware community.
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The long-awaited ASUS Tinker Board 2S is out. And there’s a lot packed into the 85 x 56 mm Raspberry Pi form factor.
At the heart of the Tinker Board 2S is a Rockchip RK3399 chipset that combines two ARM Cortex-A72 cores, four ARM Cortex-A53 cores, and an ARM Mali-T860 MP4 GPU.
The board comes with 2GB or 4GB of LPDDR4 RAM, and 16 GB of eMMC flash.
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Chinese tech giant Huawei launched openEuler operating system (OS) on Saturday, another self-developed OS after the HarmonyOS, as it tries to “solve the domestic stranglehold problem of lacking its homegrown OS in basic technology,” and build a full-scenario covered ecosystem to prepare for more US bans.
The openEuler OS can be widely deployed in various forms of equipment such as servers, cloud computing and edge computing. Its application scenarios cover Information Technology, Communication Technology and Operational Technology to achieve unifying an operating system with multi-device support, according to the company’s introduction.
In the ICT field, Huawei provides products and solutions such as servers, storage, cloud services, edge computing, base stations, routers, industrial control among others, all of which need to be equipped with an OS. Huawei has therefore been building capabilities to achieve a unified OS architecture, and meet the demands of different application scenarios, the firm said on Saturday.
The openEuler program was initially announced back in 2019 as an open source operating system. Today’s launch is an updated one.
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FSF
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Licensing/Legal
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The decade-long legal battle between two of the world’s largest tech companies has finally come to an end. The result was a victory for the open-source software community.
In case you need a refresher on the Oracle v. Google case, Oracle sued Google in 2010 for copyright infringement on Google’s use of Oracle’s Java API in its Android smartphone operating system. The District Court ruled in favor of Google, but that decision was later reversed on appeal. The case ultimately landed in the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled six to two in Google’s favor this April.
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Programming/Development
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Plex is a free audio and video streaming platform that was created to let you host and stream your own media collection to just about anywhere on the internet. At its most basic, you install the Plex server software on a computer – available for Windows, MacOS and most flavors of Linux – where you store your media library. Plex indexes it and makes it available online. Though Plex is most well known for helping people organize and stream their video collections – the platform now even offers free on-demand and live movies and TV – my primary use case is for music.
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Fire up the Cossie*! We’re going back to the ’80s with an On Call tale that combines the drama of a fast Ford motor with the eldritch horror of Unix serial port settings.
“Neil,” today’s Regomised reader, ran a consultancy specialising in Uniplex, an office automation suite compromising the usual suspects: word processing, spreadsheets, email, database and so on. It predated Microsoft’s efforts in the integration arena by a good few years.
“It supported printers from the FX-80 upwards,” Neil explained, “but by far the most popular was the HP LaserJet series with its 8-bit ECMA-94 charset.”
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OVH Groupe SAS is edging closer to a potential initial public offering (IPO) expected to value the European hosting and cloud biz at around $4.7bn – months after a fire engulfed part of its data centre real estate.
The privately owned company, which trades as OVH Cloud, today issued a letter and series of documents confirming it is “contemplating” an IPO on Euronext Paris with the intent to “raise up to €400m through the issuance of new shares.”
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Science
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Scientists have launched a unique software that is able to perform highly complex simulations of a variety of biological processes.
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Health/Nutrition
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California Governor Gavin Newsom on Wednesday signed Assembly Bill 701, establishing new protections for workers at warehouse distribution centers.
The new law requires employers operating large warehouses in the state to disclose worker production quotas. It also prohibits disciplinary action against workers for missing quotas as a result of health- or safety-related breaks.
AB 701, which takes effect on January 1, 2022, was drafted with an eye toward Amazon’s warehouse management practices.
“Amazon’s business model relies on enforcing inhumane work speeds that are injuring and churning through workers at a faster rate than we’ve ever seen,” said Assemblywoman Lorena Gonzalez (D-San Diego), who proposed the bill, in a statement.
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Brittany Giroux Lane gave birth to her daughter, Alexandra, a few days before Christmas in 2018. The baby had dark eyes and longish legs. She had also arrived about 13 weeks early, and weighed just two pounds.
Alexandra initially thrived in the neonatal intensive care unit at Mount Sinai West. Ms. Lane, 35, recalls the nurses describing her daughter as a “rock star” because she grew so quickly. But her condition rapidly worsened after an infection, and Alexandra died early on the morning of Jan. 15 at 25 days old.
A flurry of small medical bills from neonatologists and pediatricians quickly followed. Ms. Lane struggled to get her breast pump covered by insurance because, in the midst of a preterm birth, she hadn’t gone through the health plan’s prior approval process.
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At a protest against vaccine mandates, a hospital worker told New York’s Livingston County newspaper: “If you want it? Great. If you don’t? Great.” She continued: “Choice is where we stand. If you want it, we’re not against it. That’s your choice.” Those I know who have refused to get vaccinated or wear masks have echoed this same idea. They assure me that they aren’t telling anyone else what to do but that this is a matter of personal choice. They are doing what they think is best for themselves and their families.
“My body, my choice,” the rallying cry of the pro-choice movement, has been adopted by those opposing mask and vaccine mandates. People who are pro-choice have voiced outrage that their phrase is being co-opted, which in turn thrills those on the right who are using it.
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Integrity/Availability
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Aggrieved MacBook owners in two separate lawsuits claim Apple’s latest laptops with its M1 chips have defective screens that break easily and malfunction.
The complaints, both filed on Wednesday in a federal district court in San Jose, California, are each seeking class certification in the hope that the law firms involved will get a judicial blessing to represent the presumed large group of affected customers and, if victorious, to share any settlement.
Each of the filings contends Apple’s 2020-2021 MacBook line – consisting of the M1-based MacBook Air and M1-based 13″ MacBook Pro – have screens that frequently fail. They say Apple knew about the alleged defect or should have known, based on its own extensive internal testing, reports from technicians, and feedback from customers.
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Bork goes back to its roots today, with a screen of purest blue showing its unwanted face outside a US Burger King branch.
At least it makes a change from McDonald’s, very much the DNS of Bork when it comes to failures.
In this instance, it looks like it is the exterior signage, normally showing a slideshow of tasty (and frequently greasy) treats, that has succumbed to the curse of Microsoft.
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Linux Foundation
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Though IT hiring is showing signs of rebounding in the wake of the still-lingering COVID-19 pandemic, finding qualified candidates with high-demand open source skills continues to be a huge challenge for many enterprises around the world.
That is one of the frustrations repeatedly being heard from hiring managers everywhere, according to the latest 2021 Open Source Jobs Report from The Linux Foundation and learning platform vendor edX.
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Security
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Apple has warned iPhone and Mac users it’s aware of security bugs in its software that are being actively exploited.
First off, the iGiant thanked Google for spotting CVE-2021-30869 in macOS Catalina. It’s a nasty flaw, as it’s in the XNU kernel at the heart of Apple’s operating systems including macOS and iOS.
As Apple’s advisory explains, “a malicious application may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges” by exploiting this security hole. Thus, malware running on a system can use the bug to take total control. The fruit-themed company says the flaw existed thanks to a “type confusion issue” that was sorted out “with improved state handling.”
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Security researchers have found a flaw in the Microsoft Windows Platform Binary Table (WPBT) that could be exploited in easy attacks to install rootkits on all Windows computers shipped since 2012.
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There’s a fine line between getting hold of data that may be in the public interest and downright stealing data just because you can. And simply because the data is out there – having been stolen by online intruders and then leaked – does not mean it is right to use it.
A paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence this week is an effort to help guide data scientists and researchers through the ethical dilemmas which present themselves when considering using information obtained from data breaches.
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Flagged by researchers Erye Hernandez and Clément Lecigne of Google’s Threat Analysis Group and Ian Beer of Google Project Zero, the vulnerability is a type confusion issue found in XNU, the kernel of Apple’s macOS and iOS operating systems.
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“This vulnerability can be used by anyone who can reach vCenter Server over the network to gain access, regardless of the configuration settings of vCenter Server,” the company noted.
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Defence/Aggression
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The United States Airforce (USAF) has unveiled Project Kaiju, a $150m (£108m) effort to build “cognitive electronic warfare” systems capable of operating entirely autonomously – to be run under Godzilla’s watchful eye.
Named for the entertainment genre, Japanese for “strange beast”, Project Kaiju is not – sadly – an effort to breed giant monsters to defend US interests. Rather, it’s the name given to a project which seeks to give the USAF better electronic warfare capabilities – including the ability to run autonomously, without human interaction.
“US aircraft are increasingly required to operate in hostile environments heavily defended by integrated air-defence systems (IADS),” Project Kaiju’s coordinators explained in the Broad Agency Announcement (BAA) unveiling the project. “The next evolution of advanced IADS is likely to employ radars, surface-to-air (SAM), and air-to-air (AAM) threats that utilise multi-spectrum technology.
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Australia, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom have signed a new defence and technology-sharing pact.
Dubbed AUKUS, the headline item of the pact is assistance from the UK and US to help Australia build nuclear-powered submarines that are interoperable with their own fleets (but do not carry nuclear weapons). Australia’s Department of Defence Science and Technology argues [PDF] that subs “can shape or change the behaviour of other nations and their decision-making, which no other Australian Defence Force asset or combination of assets can do”.
The only credible regional threat Australia faces is China. Australia previously planned to build diesel-electric subs in conjunction with a French manufacturer – a contract that is about to be terminated without putting a boat in the water. Nuclear-powered boats can run submerged for longer and more quietly, and do not have to vent exhaust gases.
AUKUS is therefore further evidence that the US and UK are keen to contain China.
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Germans appeared to vote for change on Sunday. With a majority of voting districts reporting, the Social Democratic Party had a slim lead, hovering around 26 percent, more than a percentage point ahead of Christian Democratic Union, which had just over 24 percent of the vote.
With final results not likely to come until early Monday, the race could still tip either way. But as the hours wore on and more results came in, the Social Democrats’ lead looked increasingly likely to hold.
Regardless of the outcome, the winning party will still need to team up with other parties to form a government. And in the complex equation that can be required in Germany to form a government, it is possible that if the winning party fails to get others on board, the party that placed second could wind up leading the country.
As party leaders reacted to the exit polls broadcast on television news channels earlier in the evening, each of the two top candidates claimed his right to build the next government and occupy the chancellery.
Cheers erupted at the Social Democratic Party’s headquarters when the exit polls were announced early Sunday evening. A short while later, supporters clapped and chanted “Olaf! Olaf!” as Olaf Scholz, their candidate, took the stage to address the crowd.
“People checked the box for the S.P.D. because they want there to be a change of government in this country and because they want the next chancellor to be called Olaf Scholz,” he said.
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Finance
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Giant Pay – an umbrella company used by contractors across the UK – has confirmed “suspicious activity” on its platform is behind a days-long ongoing outage that has left folk fretting about whether they’ll get paid this month.
In an update on its website today, the firm said: “Upon detection of suspicious activity on our network on 22nd September 2021, we immediately assembled a response team including IT data experts and specialist lawyers, and we are currently working with the highest priority to resolve this issue.
“As part of the investigation and as a measure of caution, we have proactively taken our systems offline and suspended all services temporarily.” It also confirmed it had contacted regulatory authorities and assured contractors they would get paid.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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There was nothing inevitable about the creation of the United States — the United States, singular, that is, a continental nation-state with a central government, rather than these United States, plural, a collection of small, quarrelsome quasi republics connected by a weak treaty of friendship. In fact, the path to the nation as we know it, with a powerful executive, a representative legislature and an independent judiciary, was highly implausible. For the 13 states at the time of the Revolution — mini-nations that had their own currencies, their own foreign policies, their own navies — the quest for independence was not just freedom from an imperial Britain, but independence from one another. America could have very easily looked like a bigger, more dysfunctional European Union.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Douyin, the Chinese app known as TikTok outside the Middle Kingdom, has imposed limits on usage time for kids.
In a weekend post to Tencent-operated portal qq.com, Douyin’s owner ByteDance revealed that it has moved all users who have authenticated with their real names, and are under 14 years of age, into “youth mode”.
Such users are now restricted to using the app for forty minutes a day, and not at all between 10pm and 6am. Youth mode users are also fed wholesome, curated content.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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The alleged snooping on opposition leaders, journalists, activists, dissidents and even members of the judiciary, using a military-grade Israeli spyware meant to combat terrorism should have led to an undying uproar. As the Editors Guild of India put it, “This is a moment that demands deep introspection and inquiry into the kind of society we are heading towards and how far we may have veered away from the democratic values enshrined in our Constitution.”
However, like the many other atrocious things happening in this country, the Pegasus issue too has been whittled down. The government’s stonewalling meant that the matter went nowhere in Parliament and the opposition parties lacked imagination on how to take it to the masses. It was only a ‘jugalbandi’ between the media and the judiciary that took the issue forward. Responding to a clutch of PILs filed by journalists, the Supreme Court last week decided to set up a committee of technical experts to look into the allegations. However, the two months that it took for the case to reach this stage may have far-reaching repercussions.
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Rights groups called on military authorities in Democratic Republic of Congo on Friday to release a journalist arrested on terrorism charges for the possession of a video showing the assassination of two U.N. sanctions monitors in 2017.
Sosthene Kambidi, who works for Congolese news site Actualite.cd and sometimes with international news agencies, was arrested by the army prosecutor at a hotel in Kinshasa on Monday night, he said in a WhatsApp message to a Radio France International (RFI) journalist, which was shared with Reuters.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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India’s Telecoms Regulatory Authority has revealed that the nation has over 800 million active broadband subscribers.
The Authority’s Highlights of Telecom Subscription Data [PDF] for the month ending on July 31st 2021 revealed that the nation started the month with 792.78 million broadband subscribers and ended it with 808.6 million – two per cent growth within a month.
Wireless subscriptions jumped by 14.78 million, with wired subs up by a mere 490,000. Interestingly, fixed wireless services grew 83.53 per cent in the month, jumping from 650,000 subs to over 1.19 million.
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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Shareholders press these leading Right to Repair opponents to explain themselves as regulatory pressure mounts
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Monopolies
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The number of undergraduate majors in computer science at Stanford has nearly quadrupled since 2010, and hackathons are almost as easy to come by as fraternity parties. When Facebook, Microsoft or Google pay over $12,000 for a table at a Stanford career fair, the return on investment is assured. Their famous brand names — not to mention their six-figure starting salaries and amenities-rich work environments — are certain to attract large crowds of talented job candidates.
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Like Gebru, Mieczkowski has observed the adverse effects of algorithms throughout the evolution of Silicon Valley. She referenced public backlash surrounding Twitter’s recently discarded image cropping algorithm, which would crop photos with a white person and multiple Black people in a way that, nine times out of 10, would only show the white person in the image preview, according to Mieczkowski. She added that there were repeated instances in which Twitter would crop women’s chests without user input. After immense criticism, Twitter removed the automatic cropping feature.
But what Mieczkowski called the “most invigorating aspect of change in Silicon Valley, and across the country,” are attempts of labor organizing inside technology companies. She cited the Alphabet Workers Union (AWU) — named for the parent company of Google — as a rare creation in an industry historically resistant to the unionization of its white-collar workforce. She described these labor unions as part of “solidarity-centered” change in the industry, which is “hopefully going to make big waves.”
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In an unusual step, the European Commission plans to intervene in the recent merger between Illumina (ILMN) and Grail because regulators were unable to finish reviewing the deal before it was completed, raising concerns that competition in the market for DNA sequencing tests will now be damaged.
The move comes one month after Illumina stunned regulators by announcing it had closed its $8 billion acquisition, even though the EC had opened an investigation only weeks earlier at the prompting of France and five other European Union member states. In the U.S., the Federal Trade Commission had already filed a complaint last March to block the deal.
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Any attempt to block Cellnex’s takeover of Hutchison UK’s tower network could see consumers “significantly worse off” and hamper the progress of Three UK’s planned £3bn investment in 5G.
What’s more, the UK competition watchdog’s decision to probe the deal was flawed and based on a “simplistic and misleading” assessment rather than a proper understanding of how real-world markets operate.
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Patents
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Opinion: How seriously does the UK government really take IP? [Ed: There is no such thing as "IP" (it is a deliberate misnomer and propaganda term) but nowadays they give people job titles with this lie in them. UK changes this one on average every year!]
If IP is so central to the UK government’s objectives, why do we have yet another IP minister?
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How to speed up patent applications in the UK and EU [Ed: Putting speed ahead of accuracy is how lots of fake patents are being issued, only to be canned when they reach courtrooms (and only the lawyers end up profiting)]
From the Green Channel to the Patent Prosecution Highway, there are many mechanisms that enable you to accelerate the progress of a patent application through the search, examination and publication stages at the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) and European Patent Office (EPO). Here’s our guide to ensuring that your applications proceed as quickly and smoothly as possible.
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Court of Appeal rejects AI inventor claims in Dabus patent ruling [Ed: When members of the courts aren't secretly members of the religion or sect or cult of patentism (court not stacked by them yet)]
The Court of Appeal in London has ruled against the physicist Stephen Thaler’s latest bid to list his AI machine Dabus as an inventor on a patent.
In what has become a test case for patent law, Thaler has applied for patents listing Dabus as the inventor in a number of jurisdictions, including the US, Europe and China as well as the UK.
Dabus is a so-called “creativity engine” that uses artificial neural networks to generate and assess new ideas. Thaler argues it’s the sole inventor of, among other things, a food container that improves grip and heat transfer, an area in which he says he has no expertise and so couldn’t have contributed to the patent in a way that would qualify him for inventor’s rights.
The High Court in England and Wales sided with the UK Intellectual Property Office last September in refusing the patent applications, accepting that while Dabus created the inventions, it couldn’t be granted a patent on the grounds that it wasn’t a ‘natural person’.
Now, the Court of Appeal in London has found that only a ‘person’ with legal personality can be an inventor, and that as Thaler accepts that he isn’t the inventor, he isn’t entitled to the patent.
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Moroccan trademark Office (Office de la Propriété Industrielle & Commerciale – OMPIC) and the European Patent Office (EPO) have sealed an agreement on the Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC).
The agreement, which was signed lately remotely by EPO Chief António Campinos and Head of OMPI Abdelaziz Babqiqi, opens up a new chapter of cooperation between the two agencies.
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In a Judgment handed down on 21 September 2021 ([2021] EWCA Civ 1374), the Court of Appeal has rejected an appeal by Dr. Stephen Thaler claiming that it should have been possible for him to name an Artificial Intelligence (AI) entity as the inventor on his UK patent applications. This judgment perhaps makes more emphatic the need for a change in UK legislation to keep pace with the increasing prevalence of AI, particularly if inventions created by AI entities are to be protectable. However, as there was a dissenting judgment at the Court of Appeal, with Lord Justice Birss coming to a different finding to that of Lord Justice Arnold and Lady Justice Elisabeth Laing, it is likely that permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court will be sought.
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The UK Court of Appeal has rejected an appeal in a case concerning the rejection of patent applications filed at the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) on the basis that an AI-based machine known as “DABUS” (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience) was listed as an inventor. This appeal case in the UK follows a number of corresponding cases in a project involving patent applications filed before patent offices around the world by Dr. Stephen Thaler seeking to establish that AI-based machines can make inventions and that the owners of such systems can obtain patents in respect of those inventions – the so-called “DABUS cases”.
On two patent applications filed before the UKIPO, statements of inventorship were filed listing DABUS as the name of the inventor and asserting that Dr. Thaler was entitled to be granted a patent by “ownership of the creativity machine DABUS”. Under UK law, the Patents Act 1977, section 7 stipulates that a patent may be granted to (a) the inventor, (b) any person who is the first owner of the “property in” the invention at the time of the making of the invention. Moreover, under section 13 of the Patents Act, the inventor has the right to be mentioned in the patent, and the applicant must (i) identify the person believed to be the inventor or inventors; and (b) where the applicant is not the inventor, indicate the derivation of his or their right to be granted the patent.
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Court of Appeal – AI generated inventions denied UK Patent in DABUS case [Ed: How patent maximalists (the litigation profiteers) respond to a reasonable decision that bots are not "inventors" and don't deserve monopolies or patents]
The Court of Appeal has denied Dr Thaler the grant of patents for inventions generated by DABUS, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) machine created and owned by him .
The facts surrounding the case are known to many around the world. This matter is an international test case advanced by Dr Thaler and his collaborators to establish whether owners of AI systems can obtain patents for inventions generated by those systems. The Court of Appeal held by a two to one majority, that the UK Patents Act 1977 provided a complete code, under which a patent cannot be granted where the inventor identified in the patent application is not a person. It was accepted by Dr Thaler that a machine is not a person (as is clearly the case). This means that, if patents are to be granted in respect of inventions made purely by machines (as opposed to using the machine as a tool to find inventions), there must be a change in the law, unless the applicant inaccurately identifies a person as an inventor in the patent applications. The Court did not decide whether the inventor had to be a natural or a legal person.
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Leahy confirms new bill to limit USPTO director’s PTAB power [Ed: Once again twisting the meaning of the word "bipartisan" to make it seem like two people in the pockets of patent litigation fanatics somehow speak for every member of Senate/parliament/house]
Senator Patrick Leahy has announced that he plans to introduce legislation intended to prevent future USPTO directors from undermining the inter partes review process at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.
Speaking at a webinar hosted by the US Manufacturers Association for Development and Enterprise (US MADE) on Wednesday, September 22, Leahy said the new bill would increase transparency for IPRs, prevent politicised meddling and limit the number of “so-called” discretionary denials.
Leahy’s announcement confirms reports made to Managing IP earlier this week that the senator would introduce a new PTAB-related bill.
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Tillis and Leahy announce two bipartisan patent bills
US senators Patrick Leahy and Thom Tillis introduced two intellectual property bills on Tuesday, September 21 – one to ensure that the public could identify the true owners of patents and another to bolster more diverse participation in the patent system.
The first bill, the Pride in Patent Ownership Act, would mandate that patent owners have to disclose their identities to the USPTO when a patent is issued or when ownership of a patent changes.
If passed, the act would also set out that applicants have to disclose whether any government entity – including a foreign one – provided funding for fees paid to the USPTO or to a lawyer or patent agent for prosecution.
The second, the Unleashing American Innovators Act, would require the USPTO’s satellite offices to conduct outreach to increase participation in the patent system from underrepresented groups, including women, people of colour, veterans and individual inventors.
It would also mandate that the USPTO director should establish a new satellite office in the southeast region of the US, and to look into whether the office needed additional satellite offices to increase underrepresented groups’ representation in the patent system.
Under the bill, the director would be compelled to establish a pilot programme to help first-time prospective patent owners assess the viability of potential applications.
The bill would also lower filing fees for small businesses and micro entities.
Leahy also announced his intention this week to introduce a bill that would limit the powers of the USPTO director over the Patent Trial and Appeal Board and “restore” the America Invents Act.
Switzerland leads innovation list as Korea breaks into top five
Switzerland retained top spot in the World Intellectual Property Organization’s annual ranking of countries’ innovation capacity.
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Although Patrick Leahy has yet to file his bill proposing reform of the PTAB system at the USPTO, that has not stopped the battle lines being drawn over its merits
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UK Court Rules That AI Can’t Be An Inventor Of A Patent, Do You Agree? [Ed: This has nothing to do with pixie dust "Hey Hi"! it's about assigning patents to bots, which is more ridiculous than calling insects "inventors" and granting them patents]
In doing this, he did not list himself as the inventor, rather opting to list Dabus while arguing that he should be given the patent “by ownership of the creativity machine,” according to the BBC. However, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) told Thaler that it was necessary to list a real human as an inventor, not a machine. Thus, with this “error,” the patent application was considered withdrawn.
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Speakers at Audi, Ropes & Gray and the Computer & Communications Industry Association debated the future of SEP licensing as the IoT grows
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It is understood that the Slovenian Government ratified the Protocol on the Provisional Application of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement on 16 September 2021, and that the ratification should be published in the Official Gazette by the end of September 2021. Publication will result in the ratification entering into force.
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Speaking at a US MADE webinar, Senator Patrick Leahy said his new bill would bolster transparency and limit discretionary denials
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Software Patents
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This EPO Board of Appeal decision concerns a patent application for an automatic selection of a marketing script. In the appeal, the Board noted that considerations were all non-technical business concepts. Therefore, although computers were technical, the implementation of the non-technical requirements would have been obvious to the skilled person in the art of telecommunication and computer systems.
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Received Notice of Allowance from European Patent Office for Patent Application Covering Diagnosis of Cancer Using Proprietary Artificial Intelligence TBIA Immune Profiling Platform
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Copyrights
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With the digital art ‘Everydays: The First 5000 Days’ selling for $69 million, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s first-ever tweet auctioning for $2.9 million, and IBM announcing plans to tokenise patents, some people’s interest in non-fungible tokens is at an all-time high.
But NFTs, a term which broadly covers unique digital assets or tokens on a blockchain, have a long way to go before they transform the trade in intellectual property assets, say sources.
Companies are mostly riding on the NFT hype and tangible changes may take time as the market is largely unregulated.
Counsel say that NFTs have huge potential when it comes to transacting and monetising IP and maybe even physical assets, but most people are uninformed and practical challenges currently overshadow the possible benefits.
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Posted in News Roundup at 2:00 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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Linux is a platform with a good market reputation. Programmers prefer to use it for multiple reasons. It is easier to set up and run over any system. Moreover, its interface comes up with continuous improvements that make it desirable even for programming assignment help .
[....]
No doubt system maintenance is an important thing that requires consideration while setting up and operating the operating system. Linux is simple in maintenance due to its easy to understand interface. The operating system and other software are easier to update. Further, it is a protective system from malware and viruses that helps to arrange data accurately or safely.
The feature of getting all updates on a regular basis helps a lot in making the system quick over actions. As compared to Linux system maintenance on any other setup is not that easy. Further, it requires third party assistance to update the system and much more. But in the case of Linux it is quick and smart in updating or maintenance without the requirement of any third party system.
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Kernel Space
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At the last Linux Plumbers 2021 conference, Google spoke about the success of the initiative to move the Android platform to use a regular Linux kernel instead of using its own version of the kernel, which includes changes specific to the Android platform.
The most important development change was the decision to move after 2023 to the “Upstream First” model, which implies the development of all new kernel features required in the Android platform directly in the main Linux kernel, and not in its separate branches (functionality will be promoted to the main kernel, and then used in Android, and not vice versa). In 2023 and 2024, it is also planned to transfer to the main core of all additional patches remaining in the Android Common Kernel branch.
As for the near future, for the Android 12 platform expected in early October, assemblies of the Generic Kernel Image (GKI) kernel will be offered, as close as possible to the usual 5.10 kernel. For these assemblies, a regular release of updates will be provided, which will be placed in the ci.android.com repository. In the GKI kernel, Android-specific additions, as well as hardware-related handlers from OEMs, are moved into separate kernel modules. These modules are not tied to the main kernel version and can be developed separately, which greatly simplifies the maintenance and transfer of devices to new kernel branches.
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It was just last month when ~3.5M IOPS per-core was impressive with the code for Linux 5.15 to further push Linux’s I/O limits. Now for code likely to be included in Linux 5.16 it’s currently at 3.8M IOPS with a single tread.
With this patch series reworking and further optimizing the submission and completion paths, the I/O throughput is upped even more. With block maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe’s Intel Optane based rig, he is enjoying around a 3% throughput improvement.
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Earlier this month AMD published their “amd-pstate” Linux driver that leverages ACPI CPPC data to make more informed CPU frequency scaling decisions with an aim to boost the performance-per-Watt for Zen 3 (and eventually Zen 2) processors on Linux. The second spin of that “amd-pstate” Linux kernel driver is now available for testing.
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Applications
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PrefersNonDefaultGPU was added to the FreeDesktop.org Desktop Entry Specification in version 1.4. It’s a hint for the desktop environment to use a non-discrete, more powerful GPU, if it is available. Support for this key was recently added to Xubuntu and elementary, and is making it’s way to other desktop environments as well.
X-GNOME-UsesNotifications is used by GNOME, elementary, and other GTK desktops (possibly others as well) to inform the environment that an app can send notifications. This enables management of those notifications through a single interface. This feature is seen in GNOME and elementary.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Systemd is a system and session manager that is responsible for managing all services running on the system over the entire operating time of the computer, from the start-up process to shutdown. Processes are always started in parallel (as far as possible) in order to keep the boot process as short as possible. But how to know which process took how much time while booting your system, well for that we can use the Systemd as well.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Figma on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Figma is a popular tool amongst graphic designers and UI, UX designers. It can be used to create wireframes, high-fidelity interface designs, prototyping, etc. One of the most loved features of Figma is its ability to run inside a browser, which makes it platform-independent.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Figma on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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A group is a collection of users in Linux that shares some commonalities for the purpose of security, privilege, etc.
Linux allows its administrators to create different user groups very easily. This is convenient because you can create a user group and manage all of the user’s permissions at once, instead of individually assigning permissions to each user.
If you are not familiar with Linux permissions and how to manage them, take a look at this article.
In this tutorial, we will cover how to create groups in Linux and briefly explain how to manage them.
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A container is a collection of one or more processes, organized under a single name and identifying ID that is isolated from the other processes running within a computing environment. That computing environment can be a physical computer or a virtual machine.
A container image is a template that defines how an image will be realized at runtime.
While containers started out as a Linux technology, you can create containers within the Windows operating system too.
The important thing to understand about Docker technology is that it has two main components: the client CLI tool and the container runtime. The CLI tool is used to execute instructions to the Docker runtime at the command line. The job of the Docker runtime is to create containers and run them on the operating system.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Yarn on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Yarn is a package manager for JavaScript that runs on Node.js, allowing developers to manage their application dependencies. It was created to solve a set of problems with npm, such as speeding up the packages installation process by parallelizing operations and reducing errors related to network connectivity.
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 Yarn on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
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The open-source LaTeX editor TeXstudio 4.0.0 was released! Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu via PPA repository.
TeXstudio 4.0.0 offers Qt6 support which should improve HiDPI handling. And the official packages for Windows and macOS are now based on Qt6, while Linux build sticks to Qt5.
The final release is out after 8 alpha, 3 beta and 2 release candidate tests, though it’s announced only with following changes…
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Hello Linux geeks, it is always a good practice that Linux systems should be ssh with keys rather than the password. SSH (Secure Shell) keys gives us a secure way to login to Linux and UNIX like servers. When we access Linux systems with SSH keys then it is also known as passwordless ssh authentication.
In this post, we will learn how to setup passwordless SSH authentication with keys in Linux.
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This is a type of cyberattack that seeks to damage an organization by attacking weaker elements in the supply chain. A supply chain attack can happen across any industry.
Software supply chain attacks occur when attackers insert malicious code in a poorly secured part of the software supply chain. This causes a ripple effect, in which a lot of consumers of the software are impacted by the attack.
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In the conventional method of hosting a server or website, the server is hosted through a single HTTP server. When the clients hit on the server, they are allowed on the server. But, what happens when multiple users, even more; thousands of clients, hit the site at a time for some query? What will happen if the server crashes? How will the single server balance the load? To answer all these questions, we can use the term ‘Load balancing’. If you’re looking for authentic tools for managing traffic of your server, you can definitely setup the HAProxy, Nginx, and Keepalived on Linux for load balancing.
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A well-crafted bash command or script can save hours of manual labor. This tutorial will show you exactly how easy it is to become a command-line ninja and automate those tedious tasks. If you need to polish your basics, head over to Shell Commands Every Developer Must Know.
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The interface you use to view and interact with an operating system, whether text-based or graphical, is known as a shell. The first shells were text-based. This is because the earliest electronic computers were not household devices. Instead, they were giant mainframes that occupied entire rooms.
Back then, computing power was pretty low and network connections were slow. You can store very many files, and many users can sign into a system simultaneously over a very slow connection when you’re only working with text.
In 1969, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at Bell Labs developed the Unix operating system, one of the first mainframe operating systems to gain widespread adoption.
Unix operated on mainframes as a shared system, with people interacting with the computer from individual terminals consisting of only a keyboard and a screen. Users did everything from creating and navigating files to transmitting data by typing commands using a shell, which the mainframe then interpreted.
If anything went wrong, a system administrator could check via a console, a dedicated text-entry, and display device used for system-related messages such as those concerning the BIOS, bootloader, or kernel. Linux is a Unix-like system that replicates much of the functionalities of Unix, but as free software available to all.
The Thompson shell (written by Ken Thompson) was the initial shell for Unix, but a replacement came from Stephen Bourne in 1979 known as the Bourne shell. In 1989, Brian Fox create the Bourne Again shell (bash for short) as a free software replacement of the Bourne shell as part of the GNU Project. This is the default shell for most Linux operating systems.
Thus we have several of the names that are still commonly used for the command line today: command line, shell, terminal, console, and bash.
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This is how you can get rid of those lifeless login screen background in Ubuntu and set a nice picture to welcome you each time you log on.
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Wine or Emulation
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The latest development release of the Windows compatibility layer Wine for running Windows games and applications on Linux is out now with Wine 6.18. It’s also part of what makes up Steam Play Proton. Once a year or so, a new stable release is made.
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Games
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Game developer Itizso on itch.io made a motion comic derivation with the first webcomic episode of Pepper&Carrot. It’s an interesting way to give life to this episode.
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GOG.com, the store that provides itself on offering “DRM FREE” builds of games has recently released Hitman – Game of The Year Edition from IO Interactive and GOG fans are not happy.
To set the scene a little, this is a single-player stealth game about running around assassinating various targets across a bunch of different missions. It’s actually a pretty good game and it has a Linux build available on Steam ported by Feral Interactive, which is not up on GOG.
Here’s the problem: many features in HITMAN require you to have an internet connection. This is different to a game that has online modes which would of course need the internet. This is a game you play by yourself. Story missions and bonus mission can be played offline but you have to be online for most of the progression for item unlocks, new start location unlocks, special contracts, featured contracts, escalation missions and more.
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If you have been following news closely (including with our recent Podcast with James Ramey) it should come as no surprise to see official support for EAC ahead of the Steam Deck launch. As discussed during our interview, this will probably require signed Proton builds in order to have EAC running in the games that require it (one of the requirements of Anti-cheat technology is to have reproducible environments). In practical terms this probably means that custom Proton builds made by third parties (like Proton GE) may not be able to include such support. We will have to see when more details surface.
[...]
With these two announcements, it looks like there should be a nice jump in compatibility for anything running under Proton in the very near future (maybe even ahead of the Steam Deck launch). Will that be enough to reach 100% compatibility as announced by Valve? Probably not, but my guess is that the fact that they are shipping a truckload of devkits of the Steam Deck early to developers is going to help for the remaining gaps.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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This week, we have focused on one thing: speed. From UI additions to under-the-hood improvements, Kalendar is now quicker to use and faster to act than ever!
A lot of this week has been spent profiling Kalendar, finding hotspots, and minimising them. As a result, lots of tweaks now help Kalendar perform better, particularly when using the month and schedule views. By limiting the number of view resets each second, using less resource-intensive components, and eliminating cruft, Kalendar is now significantly faster.
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Reviews
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Pinebook’s Linux-only approach to hardware development makes an attractive proposition for those wanting the all-FOSS experience. But how does its Pinebook Pro laptop stack up against more established opposition, such as the much-loved Chromebook?
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Musicians and Raspberry Pi enthusiasts may be interested in a new project published to the official Raspberry Pi blog this week documenting a new project using the small Raspberry Pi Pico mini PC that can automatically tune your guitar. The Pico powered guitar tuning box has been created by Redditor u/thataintthis otherwise known as Guyrandy Jean-Gilles and makes it easy for you to perfectly tune your guitar. The project is perfect for beginners or those looking for a little help to remove the boredom of tuning your axe before a session.
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The European Processor Initiative (EPI) has run the successful first test of its RISC-V-based European Processor Accelerator (EPAC), touting it as the initial step towards homegrown supercomputing hardware.
EPI, launched back in 2018, aims to increase the independence of Europe’s supercomputing industry from foreign technology companies. At its heart is the adoption of the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture for the development and production of high-performance chips within Europe’s borders.
The project’s latest milestone is the delivery of 143 samples of EPAC chips, accelerators designed for high-performance computing applications and built around the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture. Designed to prove the processor’s design, the 22nm test chips – fabbed at GlobalFoundries, the not-terribly-European semiconductor manufacturer spun out of AMD back in 2009 – have passed initial testing, running a bare-metal “hello, world” program as proof of life.
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This project, called the Moncky project, is a step above the usual 8-bit computer builds as it is actually a 16-bit computer. It is built around an Arty Spartan-7 FPGA dev board running around 20 MHz and has access to 2 x 128 kB dual-port RAM for memory. To access the outside world there is a VGA output, PS/2 capability, SPI, and uses an SD card as a hard drive. This project really shines in the software, though, as the project creator [Kris Demuynck] builds everything from scratch in order to illustrate how everything works for educational purposes, and is currently working on implementing a C compiler to make programming the computer easier.
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If you are lucky, you’ve never experienced the heartbreak of watching a loved one lose their ability to do simple tasks. However, as hackers, we have the ability to customize solutions to make everyday tasks more accessible. That’s what [omerrv] did by creating a very specific function remote control. The idea is to provide an easy-to-use interface for the most common remote functions.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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It seems like every nation is dealing with the plague a little differently. In June, the EU instated a COVID Green Pass which comes in the form of a paper or digital QR code. It was designed to grease the wheels of travel throughout Europe and allow access to nursing homes. As of early August, the Green Pass is now required of those 12 and older in Italy to gain access to bars and restaurants, museums, theaters, etc. — anywhere people gather in sizeable groups. The Green Pass shows that you’ve either been vaccinated, have had COVID and recovered, or you have tested negative, and there are different half-lives for each condition: nine months for vaccinated, six for recovered, and just forty-eight hours for a negative test.
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Knowles AISonic IA8201 Raspberry Pi development kit is designed to bring voice, audio edge processing, and machine learning (ML) listening capabilities to various systems, and can be used to evaluate the company’s AISonic IA8201 DSP that was introduced about two years ago.
The kit is comprised of three boards with an adapter board with three buttons connecting to the Raspberry Pi, as well as the AISonic IA8210 DSP board itself connected via a flat cable to a microphone array.
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…even Linus Torvalds share what the electronics pioneer meant to them
[...]
Linus Torvalds was a Sinclair user: Among those influenced by Sir Clive was Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, who worked on a Sinclair QL before he turned to his most famous work. From 00:30 in the video below, he reminisces about his time using the QL.
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Probably the most interesting facets of amateur radio in 2021 lie in the realm of digital modes. Using the limitless possibilities of software defined radios has freed digital radio communication from the limits of what could be done with analogue electronics alone, and as a result this is a rare field in which radio amateurs can still be ahead of the technological curve. On of these newer digital modes is FT8 created by the prolific [Joe Taylor K1JT].
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Web Browsers
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An adblocker doesn’t necessarily make your web browser load pages faster. The Brave browser introduced a shiny new and more performant adblocking system in late 2019. However, leftovers from its old system have remained in the browser and have quietly held back its performance potential.
I could spend time describing the change with numbers (I do at the end), but let’s look at the bigger picture first. The two flame graphs below show a 475 ms window during a page load with the current stable release build of Brave (top), compared to the new and improved nightly releases (bottom). The colored bars indicate work the browser has to complete to finish the page load. Ignore the minutia of the graphs, just look at the big differences.
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Given last week’s release of Chrome 94, here are some fresh browser benchmarks looking at Firefox 92 stable against Chrome 94 running on Ubuntu Linux.
Just as some quick weekend benchmarks and not running any cross-browser Linux benchmarks since earlier this summer, here are some fresh numbers.
The system this time around is the Intel Core i9 11900K “Rocket Lake” with Radeon VII graphics and using a development snapshot of Ubuntu 21.10 from the default GNOME Shell Wayland session.
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FSF
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GNU Projects
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Core utilities are the basic, fundamental tools of a GNU/Linux system. Coreutils 9.0 brings with it some important improvements.
[...]
It’s easy to understand how important they are for each Linux system, giving the following example.
When Linus Torvalds first wrote and compiled the Linux kernel, he needed a set of very basic system utilities to even begin to perform marginally useful work. The kernel does not provide commands themselves or any type of command shell such as bash. It is useless by itself. So Linus used the freely available GNU Core Utilities and recompiled them for Linux. This gave him a complete operating system that we know today as Linux.
For those of you who don’t know, previously these utilities were offered as three individual sets of GNU utilities named Fileutils, Shellutils, and Textutils. In September 2002, those three have been combined into a single set of utilities called Coreutils.
Here you can find the list of commands from the GNU Coreutils 9.0 for Linux/Unix environments.
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Hi,
we are happy to announce the release 2.0.0 of GNU Wget2.
Wget2 is the successor of GNU Wget, a file and recursive website
downloader.
Designed and written from scratch it wraps around libwget, that provides
the basic functions needed by a web client.
Wget2 works multi-threaded and uses “modern” features to allow fast operation.
In many cases Wget2 downloads much faster than Wget due to HTTP2,
HTTP compression, parallel connections, use of If-Modified-Since HTTP header and more.
Wget2 has several new command-line options, see the wiki page for a list and comparison with Wget.
Wget will be maintained further. The idea is that breaking changes and new functionalities go into Wget2 / libwget.
Except for WARC and FTP, Wget2 is a drop-in replacement for Wget in most cases. Of course there may be subtle differences, so make sure to test well before replacing Wget by Wget2.
GNU Wget2 is licensed under GPLv3+. Libwget is licensed under LGPLv3+.
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GNU Wget2 2.0 has been released for this successor to GNU Wget. There are many improvements to this GPLv3+ licensed program. Over the original GNU Wget, Wget2 is faster, supports more protocols especially around HTTP/2 and compression, supports multi-threading / parallel connections, and other improvements.
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Programming/Development
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QuickLicenseRT Linux 3.0 implements the QuickLicense 9.1 runtime system to protect and license a Linux desktop applications. Apply licensing to a 32 or 64-bit executable with a few programming commands. Use LinuxWrap to license a compiled executable without programming.
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It has been 12 years since Barbara Liskov won a Turing Award for her contributions to practical and theoretical foundations of programming language and system design, and these days the creator of the CLU programming language continues to work on some interesting problems.
We spoke about innovation, abstraction and encapsulation in the 1970s and today in a recent chat.
Liskov, now in her 80s, leads the Programming Methodology Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Recently, she has been working on parallel computing and, with a student, developed Byzantine Fault Tolerance* [PDF] in the 1990s, “which turns out to be very significant for the blockchain world,” she says.
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DevOps darling GitLab has finally filed for an Initial Public Offering (IPO) as revenues continue to grow and losses widen.
The IPO had been expected in 2020 but the company put things off due to the pandemic until late last week, when the paperwork was filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The company, founded in 2014, has remained tight-lipped over the sums involved, although the filed S-1 form recorded that the proposed maximum aggregate offering price is estimated at $100m.
[...]
In the IPO document, Gitlabs said it was on course to grow revenues to $233m in its current financial year ending in 2022. This compares to the $152.2m reported in fiscal 2021 and the $81.2m in the year before that.
However, losses also widened over those years. The net loss in fiscal 2020 was $130.7m – but it was $192.2m in fiscal 2021. Net loss reached $69m for the six months ended 31 July 2021, up from $43.5m for the same time last year.
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C and C++ are two different well-recognized programming languages with the function of assembly language. Though both C and C ++ sound similar with an extra “++” on the latter, their features and usage are distinctive.
C is a procedural programming language with a static system, whereas C++ is an enhanced version of the C programming language with object-oriented programming support.
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Standards/Consortia
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Millions of smartphones, game consoles and computers will lose their Internet access by September 30, 2021, as the security certificate on all connected products expires. This applies to all devices marketed and not updated before 2017.
Smartphones, Computers, Tablets, But game consoles and televisions … the Internet has been everywhere for years. But still, on September 30, 2021, millions of devices may lose connectivity! A giant “blackout” affecting a large number of devices designed before 2017. Why? Because this September 30, 2021, a Certificate Digital security is about to expire, and the lack of an update will prevent another certificate from becoming too widespread to connect to the Internet today, for example watching videos or viewing emails.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Less than a third of German-speaking SAP users think the global application vendor is doing a good job of getting its software to work in the cloud.
The survey from user group DSAG, which represents those in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, showed that only 30 per cent of members have had good experiences with SAP in the cloud. The figure for use of non-SAP software was around 60 per cent.
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Security
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Two IT trade groups on Wednesday challenged the constitutionality of Texas’ new social media law, arguing that it compels companies to host speech they disagree with in violation of their First Amendment rights.
The Texas law, HB 20, was signed by Governor Greg Abbott on September 9, 2021 and takes effect on December 9, 2021. It prohibits large social media platforms from removing content posted by users based on any viewpoint, or the user’s location in Texas, unless the content is unlawful.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Virtual communities have long provided a space for LGBTQ youth to explore their identities, allowing queer children to safely come out of the closet without fear of abuse from unsupportive parents.
But as technology companies ratchet up surveillance in the name of content moderation, the digital privacy of LGBTQ youth and other vulnerable people may be at risk.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Engineers at Alphabet’s technology moonshot lab X say they used lasers to beam 700TB of internet traffic between two cities separated by the Congo River.
The capitals of the Republic of the Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo, Brazzaville and Kinshasa, respectively, are only 4.8 km (about three miles) apart. The denizens of Kinshasa have to pay five times more than their neighbors in Brazzaville for broadband connectivity, though. That’s apparently because the fiber backbone to Kinshasa has to route more than 400 km (250 miles) around the river – no one wanted to put the cable through it.
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Canada (24th), France (19th), Germany (36th), Japan (13th) and the US (14th) all out-performed the UK (43rd), according to the numbers.
[...]
Despite the stinging criticism, media watchdog Ofcom has warned people against jumping to conclusions.
A spokesperson for the UK regulator told us that comparisons like this “should be treated with caution.”
“The speeds people actually get and the speeds people could get are not the same thing. Superfast broadband is available to the vast majority of UK homes, but millions of people are yet to take this up. Many customers might be surprised to learn they can upgrade to faster speeds, for no extra cost,” they said.
Indeed, when it comes to speed, all the G7 nations are whipped by smaller nations. According to Cable.co.uk, Jersey tops the list with means download speeds of 274.27Mbps, followed by Liechtenstein (211.26Mbps), Iceland (191.83Mbps), Andorra (164.66Mbps) and Gibraltar (151.34Mbps).
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Monopolies
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Google has again refused to say whether it will reimburse Britain’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for all the money it has spent warning consumers about dodgy financial ads carried on the tech giant’s platform.
The director of Trust and Safety at Google, Amanda Storey, was among a number of tech bigwigs quizzed about economic crime by MPs at the Treasury Select Committee meeting on Wednesday (video link here).
Speaking yesterday, Storey said: “Scams and fraud are organised crime, much like identity theft or hacking, and we’re really working in three main ways to try and tackle that problem. Most recently we launched the Financial Services Certification. So, any advertiser wanting to target a UK user with a financial services ad has to be FCA authorised and has to pass identity checks first before they can run those ads.”
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In a previous post, this blogger described how a plant variety right for a gold kiwifruit variety in New Zealand had been infringed by a rogue grower. In that decision, the grower was licensed to grow the variety in New Zealand, but it had exported budwood of the gold kiwifruit variety into China and thereby helped to establish substantial orchards there. The judge’s reasoning in the High Court decision was that the act of exporting the material into China had diminished Zespri’s enjoyment of its plant variety right.
The concept of “diminished enjoyment” of a right was derived from a 2005 decision, Winchester v Cropmark. In that case, the defendant had “arranged” for a barley crop to be grown from unlicensed seed. The defendant then purchased and exported the crop to a brewery in China. The defendant argued that it had not itself sold unlicensed seed and therefore it did not infringe.
[...]
A new Plant Variety Rights Bill is due to be passed by 30 December 2021, but is not expected to come into force until mid-2022. That Bill, when it comes into force, will establish UPOV 91 rights, including the right to export material of a protected variety. While that would now make the grower’s exporting of budwood an infringement in New Zealand, it will not solve the problem of the Chinese orchards still producing gold kiwifruit without compensation to the New Zealand plant breeders.
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Patents
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Amnio Technology, LLC, a global leader in the development and distribution of amniotic tissue allografts, is announcing today that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued a new patent titled, “Enriched Multilayer Amnion Derived Tissue Graft.” The new patent strengthens Amnio Technology’s intellectual property position by further protecting its advanced allograft manufacturing processes in the United States.
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In courtrooms across the globe, arguments continue to rage as to the extent of an SEP owner’s FRAND undertaking. In exchange for getting their technology incorporated into a standard (meaning that, if essential to the standard, that technology has to be used by users of the standard), SEP owners have to give an undertaking – known as a FRAND undertaking. This undertaking obliges SEP owners to be prepared to licence their patents on Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory (FRAND) terms. Otherwise, unlike normal patents where competitors do not have to use the technology, SEP owners are in a position which could allow them to extract extremely high and possibly anti-competitive royalties from their competitors or stop them from participating in the standard and market completely (which were vices the European Commission wished to be addressed with the ETSI IPR Policy). Thus, the FRAND undertaking is a safeguard that seeks to balance users’ interests with SEP owners’ interests in protecting their IP. But the courtroom debates in the US, Germany, UK and China have raised numerous unanswered questions about what this means. How wide or narrow is this FRAND undertaking? To whom is the FRAND undertaking owed? What does FRAND even mean? The second question was subject to the CJEU referral in the Nokia v Daimler (see previous posts here), but which has so far remained unanswered in Europe. In the first of a two-parter opinion piece, two US patent and anti-trust litigators in the form of Mark Selwyn, Tim Syrett and Alix Pisani of WilmerHale (who have acted in some of these cases) discuss their view of what is going on and where the answer might, and should lie.
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Part 2 will explain how SEP holders’ second argument against licensing component suppliers—that licensing at the end user level is necessary to promote efficiency—also fails to withstand examination. Instead, SEP holders’ true motives are financial gains through royalties that expand beyond their invention (the smallest salable unit).”
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XORTX Therapeutics Inc. (“XORTX” or the “Company”) (CSE: XRX) (OTCQB: XRTXF), a biotechnology company focused on developing therapeutics for the treatment of progressive kidney disease, is pleased to advise that further to its press release of April 6, 2021 that announced the intention of grant, the Company has now received receipt of the patent grant “EPO National Stage of PCT International Application for Compositions and Methods for Treatment and Prevention of Hyperuricemia Related Health Consequences” by the European Patent Office. The patent covers compositions and methods for the prevention and treatment of diabetic nephropathy (DN) using uric acid lowering agent and specifically xanthine oxidase inhibitors. Aberrant purine metabolism and specifically, chronically increased serum uric acid concentrations have been associated with kidney disease progression.
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-Axonics, Inc. (Nasdaq: AXNX), a global medical technology company that is developing and commercializing novel products for the treatment of bladder and bowel dysfunction, today announced that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued final written decisions on three additional Medtronic patents that Axonics is contesting.
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IPO Annual Meeting: Counsel dive into anti-anti-suit injunctions [Ed: The patent trolls in the capital of patent trolls, along with notorious boosters of software patents, agreeing with one another on their patent extremism. Patrick Wingrove gives them a platform because the publisher is sponsored by them.]
Standard essential patent litigation raises some tough jurisdictional challenges for plaintiffs and litigants, a panel told delegates at the IPO Annual Meeting in Austin yesterday, September 21.
Speakers from InterDigital, Qualcomm, Bardehle Pagenberg, WilmerHale and Shanghai Lung Tin Law Firm said that one of the biggest they faced recently was the threat of anti-anti-suit injunctions (AASIs), and even anti-anti-anti-suit injunctions (AAASIs), in India, China, Germany and the US.
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Targovax ASA (OSE: TRVX), a clinical stage immuno-oncology company developing immune activators to target hard-to-treat solid tumors, today announce that the European Patent Office has granted EU Patent no EP3402889. The patent covers the use of ONCOS-102 in combination with chemotherapy in malignant pleural mesothelioma.
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The US Courts of Appeal of the Federal Circuit (CAFC) found in Belcher Pharmaceuticals v Hospira, Inc that a formulation patent was unenforceable in view of inequitable conduct, in the form of contradictory submissions to the patent office and the regulatory agency (FDA) by the patentee. The case serves to highlight the fine line that innovators sometimes must tread between a) demonstrating the unexpected advantages of drug dose or formulation, and b) convincing regulatory agencies of the obvious safety and efficacy of selected formulation or dose regime for a product, whilst simultaneously avoiding any cognitive dissonance or doublethink.
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Cosmonautics: The EPO Reports Lift Off In Patent Filings [Ed: The same old propaganda that space travel is only made possible by patents and in the process some reputation laundering for the corrupt EPO]
Over the past couple of years, news about space has been dominated by the advances in space travel made by private companies. Space-X, Virgin Galactic and Blue Origin, to name a few, have gone from making small steps to taking giant leaps in only a few years.
In my previous Insight article, I looked at how a ready access to space provides new opportunities for extra-terrestrial research, and discussed some of the IP questions facing these pioneers as space-based-research starts to take off. For the moment, however, the current technological advances and trends in space exploration are already providing a tangible IP metric: patent applications.
The European Patent Office, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA) Technology Transfer and Patent Office and the European Space Policy Institute, has recently produced a Patent Insight Report which uses patent filing statistics to analyse the characteristics of innovation in space and, in particular, cosmonautics.
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Patent Suggests Faraday Future Is About to Enter the Commercial Van Space [Ed: "European patent filing" from "the European Union Intellectual Property Office"? Can the media not tell the difference between EUIPO and EPO (non-EU and not trademarks)?]
This European patent filing shows a boxy, utilitarian electric commercial delivery van concept.
Is Faraday Future about to enter the commercial van business? Maybe. A recent patent submitted by the company to the European Union Intellectual Property Office includes illustrations of what appears to be an electric commercial delivery van concept.
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Innovation and growth report 2020-21 [Ed: British government or UK-IPO deliberately conflating patents (monopolies) with "innovation"; this is how propaganda gets cooked, along with misnomers such as "IP"]
Innovation is the way we will tackle our biggest challenges now and in the future. It holds the key to achieving carbon net zero, levelling up growth and achieving our ambitions as a global trading nation.
The UK has an extraordinary heritage of innovation stretching back to the industrial revolution, and an effective intellectual property (IP) regime has been at the heart of its development. We only have to look at the staggeringly rapid development and production of Covid-19 treatments – from laboratory concept to protecting the vulnerable in around 12 months. This is the direct result of an innovative economy that is able to create, invent, finance, organise, administrate and deliver.
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In re: Juniper Networks [Ed: Abusive Judge Albright, who turned a courtroom into a for-profit corporation by denying the law, is still facilitating parasitic entities for personal gain while the higher courts blast him for it]
By my count, it’s been over a month and a half since the Federal Circuit issued a decision granting a petition for writ of mandamus arising from the Western District of Texas. (That decision was In re: Hulu on August 2, 2021.) That streak has come to an end, as today the court issued In re: Juniper Networks.
Like other petitions for a writ of mandamus arising from the Western District of Texas, Juniper Networks, Inc.’s petition concerned the denial of a request for transfer under 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a). The case itself involves an assertion of patent infringement by WSOU Investments LLC (referred to as “Brazos”) against Juniper that was filed in the Western District of Texas. Juniper, a Delaware corporation headquartered in Sunnyvale, California (for those who aren’t familiar with the area, that’s Silicon Valley), moved to transfer to the Northern District of California. Judge Albright denied the motion, reasoning that under the four private interest and four public interest factors governing which district is more convenient, Juniper had not established that the Northern District of California was a clearly more convenient forum for this litigation.
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As an ending note, the Federal Circuit also denied a petition for a writ of mandamus arising from the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims in In re: Fermin on the basis that “mandamus relief is not appropriate when a petition fails to seek relief through the normal appeal process.” Here, the petitioner’s prior appeal to the Federal Circuit had been dismissed for lack of subject matter, the petitioner had filed a motion to reconsider at the Veterans’ Court (which the court denied), and had not appealed the Veterans’ Court’s denial of that motion. “Because [the petitioner] here failed to seek review of the Veterans Court’s order by way of a timely filed direct appeal, we must deny his request for this extraordinary relief.” Slip Op. at 2.
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The AmeriKat was elsewhere in the remote universe, but was lucky to have guest Kat, Anna Duch (Bristows) on hand to report on the event for her and all the other readers who may have missed the session.
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How to accelerate your patent application at Mexico’s IP office [Ed: Does this look like an article or just marketing? Of course it's just PR spam, but then again this whole network is spam in "news" clothing...]
Mexico has signed up to a number of international patent agreements and incorporated their provisions into domestic law to ensure that applications are granted without unnecessary delays and costs. Two such regulations are those governing the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) and the Patent Parallel Grant (PPG).
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Michael has now carried out and reported on a study with his FICPI CET colleague, Harrie Marsman from VO Patents & Trademarks in The Netherlands, to ascertain whether there are other countries that do not fully recognise multiple and partial priorities within a single claim and, if so, whether that can give rise to poisonous priority or poisonous divisionals. The study was prompted by the circumstances leading to the 2016 decision of the Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office in case G1/15. Prior to that decision, claims in European patents or patent applications that relied on multiple or partial priorities were vulnerable to anticipation by their European priority applications or by their divisional or parent European applications.
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Future magic circle trainee Will Holmes considers the ‘historically absurd’ definition of inventor following this week’s DABUS patent ruling
In 1421, one of the earliest recognisable patents was granted to Filippo Brunelleschi, “a man of most perspicacious intellect, industry and invention” so that he could protect “the fruit of genius and skill”. On Tuesday, however, the UK Court of Appeal ruled that “man” could not be replaced by “machine”.
The court was considering whether the AI creativity machine DABUS, built by the physicist Dr Stephen Thaler, can be recognised as the inventor of a patent. Thaler believes that DABUS has independently produced novel inventions (the ‘Neural Flame’ and the ‘Fractal Container’) and therefore should be legally recognised as the inventor, whilst he remains the owner of the patent.
The UK Patents Act 1977 states that an inventor is the “actual deviser of the invention”. Although it appears that DABUS could fit this broad definition, section 13(2) couples the status of ‘inventor’ with ownership. The inventor is the owner of the patent unless it is assigned to another entity. But because DABUS is not a legal person, it cannot own or assign ownership of the patents to anyone. The court’s split decision reaffirmed the IPO and High Court’s previous conclusions: “only persons can be inventors”.
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Sarah Lau of Kilburn & Strode’s Life Sciences and Chemistry Group looks at the role of interdisciplinary research in some celebrated inventions, and the questions this raises for IP protection.
Nominations for the European Inventor Award 2022 are open until 1 October 2021. The awards were established in 2006 and are presented annually; after a postponement due to the pandemic in 2020, the 2021 edition took place as a virtual ceremony.
Winners of the 2022 edition will be announced in mid-2022 and will be selected in five established categories: Industry; Research; Non-EPO countries; SMEs; and Lifetime achievement. There will also be a new category: the Young Inventors prize will be presented to an innovator aged 30 or under to recognise initiatives that use technology to solve a problem within the UN Sustainable Development goals framework. The winner will receive a cash prize. (If you’re interested in nominating an inventor in any of the categories, you can find out how to do so on the European Patent Office’s website.)
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In Great Britain, too, an appeals court has now ruled that artificial intelligence cannot be accepted as the inventor of a new patent. This is another setback for the campaign of the US entrepreneur and programmer Stephen Thaler, who is trying in various countries to have a neural network recognized as an inventor. The aim is for an AI to be officially recognized as an inventor. The developers of the AI should only be granted the property rights to the patent claims. So far they have been more unsuccessful than successful, but the fact that the resistance is not quite as unanimous can be seen, for example, from the fact that the most recent decision was only made with two votes to one.
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In the now from the Court of Appeal for England and Wales it says passed judgmentthat a patent can only be awarded to one person. Because after a systematic interpretation of the underlying law one can only come to the conclusion that only one person can be an “inventor”. Colin Birss contradicts this, at least in part, in his minority vote. He agrees that a machine is not a “person” in the sense of the relevant law, but according to the law, the space for it in the patent application could simply remain empty, then there would be no inventor. In addition, none of the questions would have arisen if Thaler hadn’t been so “obsessed”, he criticizes.
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Software Patents
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A Missouri federal judge on Wednesday rejected a bid by Voice Tech Corp. to enter a default judgment against artificial intelligence company Mycroft AI in a dispute over voice command patents, but did find Mycroft in contempt for reposting online content the court had previously ordered it to remove.
In a three-page order, U.S. District Judge Roseann A. Ketchmark said Mycroft’s conduct didn’t rise to the level of contempt to warrant the extreme sanction of ending the case altogether. But she did determine that Mycroft violated an April 2020 order to “assertively take down” portions of a threatening blog post its…
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The decision G1/19 by the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) concerning the patentability of simulations essentially restated that long-established principles should be applied, i.e. those of T 641/00 (COMVIK). According to COMVIK, a claimed feature is only considered to be an inventive step if and to the extent that it contributes to the technical character of the claimed subject matter.
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Trademarks
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This exit as is commonly and popularly referred to as “Brexit” from the EU community has also had important spillover effects and ramifications for IP owners and more so specifically for trademark and design registration holders in the EU community. Under the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and the EU, Trademark holders in the EU (which erstwhile included UK as well) can apply to register the same right as a stand-alone right in the UK right within nine months after the end of the transition period, this being up to and including 30 September 2021.
In this write-up, we briefly analyse the important steps that brand owners may need to pro-actively undertake to ensure continued protection of their trademarks in the UK on a stand-alone basis irrespective of their impending trademark applications filed before the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) of which office the UK was earlier part of. The following table provides the insights regarding the Brexit’s impact on existing trademark applications/registrations in EU from a trademark holder’s perspective…
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As regards the status of patents, the European Patent Office (EPO) is not an EU agency and thus the UK leaving the EU would not affect the European patent system. Existing European patents covering the UK also remain unaffected and the protection is granted by the EPO, is valid in the UK even after Brexit.
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Copyrights
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Does the private copying exception and, with it, the fair compensation requirement under Article 5(2)(b) of the InfoSoc Directive apply to reproductions carried out by using cloud-based recording services? If so, can rightholders request the providers of such a service to impose a levy even if their customers (natural persons) have already paid one when purchasing the devices (eg, computers, smartphones, tablets) subsequently used to undertake acts of reproduction covered by that provision?
These, in essence, are the issues that the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has been called upon to decide in Austro-Mechana, C-433/20, a pending referral from Austria.
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Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:32 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
The paradox or the irony was not overlooked
Summary: Our next series will show the sheer hypocrisy of the EPO, hiding behind the veil of (patent) law while so shamelessly violating just about every law in the books without facing any form of accountability
THE EPO under the wing of the two Frenchmen [1, 2] (3 out of 4 of the latest presidential terms were occupied by Frenchmen! Talk about diversity and tell us all about inclusion!) brought about a Vichyite regime — perhaps not surprising given the family background of this regime's architect. There’s no real concept of elections anymore (the dictator gets to choose his successor, usually an old friend), the staff is treated like dirt without any basic rights, and the patent system is turned/reduced to rubble, along with the system of justice. They still try hard to replace courts they do not or cannot control (something like UPC would allow European software patents without them ever being legalised in the first place).
“In order to fill this gap or this ‘vacuum’ we’re going to present a series here shortly.”As noted in passing (only in Daily Links), there’s still a barrage of very obviously fake ‘news’ about UPC and there are occasional puff pieces about the EPO. Nothing is being said about the ILO-AT situation even though it impacts Europe's second-largest institution and so many people.
In order to fill this gap or this ‘vacuum’ we’re going to present a series here very shortly. At the same time we will be in touch with European officials who are attentive to these issues. █
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux, Microsoft at 8:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum afbb4bfd50a72a8df166274fd7774de9
Summary: In another blow to software freedom, OpenMandriva and Mozilla decide to abandon their own systems and use proprietary software from Microsoft instead
MICROSOFT is paying projects to move to GitHub. This is monopoly abuse and today's biggest threat to software freedom. The GitHub acquisition was never supposed to be allowed, but when was the last time a major takeover was blocked by the US government? Incidentally, the other day Wired published “Microsoft is heading for a new antitrust showdown” (it’s well overdue but Microsoft used diversion tactics).
Anyway, it’s not a secret that Microsoft wants to control the competition through GitHub and it pays money to accomplish this (or gives ‘freebies’ like CPU cycles in “Actions”). We have long covered examples and names of projects/companies like these. The payments aren’t always direct, but the correlation is shallow enough to see.
Now, with Microsoft inside Mozilla's board, we should not be too shocked to see reports about Mozilla testing censorship engine Bing as the default ‘search’ engine in Firefox. Mozilla considers letting Microsoft spy on Firefox users whilst also diverting those users to Microsoft products.
“This is how projects die and Mozilla needs to urgently replace its management.”Yes, Microsoft — the very same company that fought Firefox for many years and corrupted officials to undermine Mandriva contracts until Mandriva dissolved. Stockholm Syndrome all over this…
The reason we bring up Mandriva is this morning’s appalling news. It seems like OpenMandriva has entered the lion’s den and put its head inside the jaws of the lion. Who on Earth came up with this decision and was there any prior consultation with the community? They move away from Bugzilla to Microsoft’s proprietary software — a similar trend to what we see in Mozilla itself. It’s outsourcing itself, piece-wise, to Microsoft, while Microsoft pays slush funds for it. And where does the money go? Millions of dollars for a failing CEO and based on these press reports a bunch of PR firms that convince Mozilla to act like a political party instead of tech company/community. This is how projects die and Mozilla needs to urgently replace its management. Otherwise it cannot survive and users will flee faster than ever before (no, they don’t want to use Bing). █
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Posted in News Roundup at 5:55 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Audiocasts/Shows
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On this episode of This Week in Linux, GNOME 41, Epic Games Announce Easy Anti-Cheat Support For Linux, BattlEye Confirms Linux Support for Steam Deck, Ubuntu 21.10 “Impish Indri” Beta, Canonical Extends Support For Ubuntu 14.04 & 16.04, Ubuntu Touch OTA-19, Fedora Linux Recognized As Digital Public Good, Google’s Android Finally Shifting To “Upstream First”, Valve Publishes New Steam Deck FAQ. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
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**Mercurial** version control, and assembly with **nasm**.
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Benchmarks
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How long does it take to read the time? How would you time time? These strange questions came to the fore back in 2014 when Netflix was switching services from CentOS Linux to Ubuntu, and I helped debug several weird performance issues including one I’ll describe here. While you’re unlikely to run into this specific issue anymore, what is interesting is this type of issue and the simple method of debugging it: a pragmatic mix of observability and experimentation tools. I’ve shared many posts about superpower observability tools, but often humble hacking is just as effective.
A Cassandra database cluster had switched to Ubuntu and noticed write latency increased by over 30%. A quick check of basic performance statistics showed over 30% higher CPU consumption. What on Earth is Ubuntu doing that results in 30% higher CPU time!?
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Applications
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For just about any task you care to name, a Linux-based desktop computer can get the job done using applications that rival or exceed those found on other platforms. However, that doesn’t mean it’s always easy to get it working, and speech recognition is just one of those difficult setups.
A project called Voice2JSON is trying to simplify the use of voice workflows. While it doesn’t provide the actual voice recognition, it does make it easier to get things going and then use speech in a natural way.
The software can integrate with several backends to do offline speech recognition including CMU’s pocketsphinx, Dan Povey’s Kaldi, Mozilla’s DeepSpeech 0.9, and Kyoto University’s Julius. However, the code is more than just a thin wrapper around these tools. The fast training process produces both a speech recognizer and an intent recognizer. So not only do you know there is a garage door, but you gain an understanding of the opening and closing of the garage door.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ansible on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Ansible is the simplest way to automate apps and IT infrastructure. Ansible uses port 22 (SSH) to connect to a remote machine and make the necessary changes. It is a cross-platform tool designed to handle system configurations while working with Linux, macOS, and Windows operating systems.
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 Ansible on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
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SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) is a secure file protocol used to access, manage, and transfer files over an encrypted SSH transport session. Security first is a thumb rule for the system administrators. In some cases, we need to allow remote users to access the filesystem on our system, but you don’t want to allow them to get a shell. This will allow you a secure channel to provide limited access to specific files and directories.
This tutorial will help you to setup SFTP only access (without shell access) on Debian 11 system. It will create a chroot environment on your system to limit the SFTP user to a specific directory only. Also, it will allow SFTP only access without SSH access to the user.
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Unlike Windows, macOS, and Android, software on Ubuntu—and Linux in general—is not distributed as a single package. Instead, when you install an application, your system’s package manager downloads multiple packages, including the main app package and its dependencies. However, this only stands true for traditional package installation on Linux i.e. using package managers.
Knowing what additional dependencies are downloaded during an installation can be beneficial for beginner and advanced users alike. This way, one has complete control over the packages installed on their system.
Let’s take a look at how you can check the dependencies of a package on Ubuntu.
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his tutorial shows the steps for actually installing Ubuntu Linux on an external US drive with the bootloader installed on the USB. It is NOT live USB set up. This USB will work as portable operating system and can be used on any computer system.
Let me recall a few things.
A live USB is used for testing the distribution. It is also used for installing Linux on computer hard disk. Normally, any changes you made to your live distribution is lost and this limits the usage of the live USB.
Several of It’s FOSS readers requested a tutorial on installing Linux on a USB. Not the regular live USB with persistence but the actual Ubuntu installed on a USB disk.
This means having a portable Ubuntu Linux on a USB that you can plug it in to any computer, use it, save your work on the USB like it was an actual hard disk.
The procedure does not seem very different from installing Ubuntu on actual hard disk. And this is where people make mistakes.
The available tutorials on the internet miss the most crucial part: the bootloader.
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BSD
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A demonstration of Netflix’s video streaming technology was held during the EuroBSD conference. That in and of itself isn’t significant, but the company’s optimizations in order to achieve 400 Gbit/s per server are certainly noteworthy.
According to developer Drew Gallatin, the popular streaming service is powered by AMD Epyc-7502P servers with 32 cores and 256 GB DDR4-3200 RAM. Four 100GbE connections are provided by two Mellanox ConnectX-6 Dx switches. They are running FreeBSD. Because of the restricted amount of memory available, the developer has configured the systems to accommodate data rates of up to 400 Gbit/s.
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Kamity, who previously worked at Cisco Systems, drew on the experience of Mike Larkin, creator of the OpenBSD Hypervisor, in founding DeepFactor in 2019. The two developed a business plan in a crowded Silicon Valley Starbucks prior to the onset of the pandemic.
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PCLinuxOS/Mageia/Mandriva/OpenMandriva Family
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OpenMandriva switching to Github Issues [Ed: OpenMandriva cannot be taken seriously anymore and it is not "Open". It outsources to Microsoft's proprietary software monopoly]
To make things easier and simpler for users to file issue reports we are switching to Github Issues.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Big Iron Will Always Drive Big Spending [Ed: IBM-sponsored 'publishers' (like this one, Timothy Prickett Morgan) constantly push IBM stuff that's massively overpriced as if it is truly necessary]
Here we are, more than three decades later, and IBM represents around half of the revenues outside of the x86 server market. That relatively big piece of the non-x86 server market is despite the rise of single-socket machines based on Arm servers at selected hyperscalers and cloud builders, which is eating into x86 server growth but which also making the non-x86 piece of the pie rise more than it has in about a decade. Sun and HP have left the RISC/Unix server battlefield long since — about a half decade ago if you want to be generous — and AMD has no interest whatsoever in building four-socket, eight-socket, or larger machines based on its Epyc architecture. Quite the opposite. AMD is the poster child for the single-socket server, and has made that a centerpiece of its strategy since the “Naples” Epyc 7001 CPUs — the company’s re-entry into the server market — launched four years ago. Google has caught the religion with its Tau instances on its eponymous public cloud, but that is mainly to combat the single-socket Graviton2 instances at Amazon Web Services.
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IBM has also upgraded its support for GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), which is a free and open source compiler that was originally developed by Richard Stallman for the GNU operating system (which is the foundation for Linux). Over the years, GCC has grown to include a host of handy functions, including compilers for languages like Python and Perl, a version of Bash, and more.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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This product is shipped as KIT for assembling, it’s not an assembled laptop!
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Exploring the vast underwater world is exciting, and personal breathing devices such as SCUBA allow for people to descend far further than usual. However, robots can be even better since they can operate much longer and more efficiently than a person. And because these underwater remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) can be so expensive, Ranuga Amargasinghe wanted to construct his own DIY version that costs less.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Toast quickly evolved from a relatively simple mobile app at Firebrand Saints and a few other spots to a more complete back-end restaurant system that used Android tablets as terminals. At the time, iPads were the far superior product, and were being used by buzzy start-ups like Revel Systems.
Toast opted for Google’s open source Android technology, which allowed the company to design its own hardware and customize software rather than being restricted to Apple’s closed system.
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Web Browsers
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Mozilla
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Mozilla Corporation has selected BerlinRosen as its U.S. agency of record.
The agency was brought on following a competitive selection process. The contract, effective July 15, is for one year.
BerlinRosen is responsible for Mozilla’s comprehensive PR and communications strategy planning and development. The firm will work on earned media, advise on digital and creative projects and support the strengthening of the nonprofit’s brand.
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Science
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This was it. This is what I feared would render me destitute. It doesn’t matter what any of this code means. What matters is that the math was a single insight. It was the realization that if a single column of a matrix was subtracted before recalculating sums, we could ask the computer to crunch a lot fewer hard numbers. It meant maybe some day a researcher in a lab could mash a button and have a chemical candidate for a novel chemotherapy enter their brain for the first time. It meant they could do that every couple seconds instead of every couple weeks. The math was the thought process, not the numbers, functions, rules or other tools of the trade taught in your average Hard Numbers for Computers course.
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Education
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At the staff meeting the other day, one of my fellow teachers turned to me and said he was having trouble seeing.
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Equally, the university is also emphatic that it does not assess the originality of papers solely based on the percentage of likeness found using automated systems. Instead, evaluators – recognised experts in their fields – are asked to use their knowledge of the literature to identify paraphrases and translational plagiarism and as well as plagiarism based on electronically inaccessible documents missed by the automated checks. Anti-plagiarism software focused mainly on work in the Slovak language has been mandatory in all Slovak higher education institutions since 2010, but this university is using two other systems to provide an additional check for works in foreign languages.
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Health/Nutrition
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House Democrats’ 2,465-page reconciliation package includes a plan to add dental benefits to Medicare, a proposal that is overwhelmingly popular with U.S. voters and—according to advocates—urgently needed to assist the tens of millions seniors who have been forced to go without crucial care.
“Did no one learn anything from the long delay in implementing the ACA?”
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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The flaw has caused the Autodiscover service to leak nearly 100,000 unique login names and passwords for Windows domains worldwide, Serper said in a technical report released this week.
“This is a severe security issue, since if an attacker can control such domains or has the ability to ‘sniff’ traffic in the same network, they can capture domain credentials in plain text (HTTP basic authentication) that are being transferred over the wire,” he said.
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In an attempt to protect users and buy them time to upgrade, Google is keeping the details surrounding CVE-2021-37973 a closely guarded secret. All the company would provide were its threat ranking, what part of Chrome had been exploited and that it was discovered in-house by Google employees:
High — CVE-2021-37973 : Use after free in Portals. Reported by Clément Lecigne from Google TAG, with technical assistance from Sergei Glazunov and Mark Brand from Google Project Zero on 2021-09-21
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Security
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Numerous vulnerabilities have been identified and fixed in Apache HTTP Server 2.4, including high-impact server-side request forgery (SSRF) and request smuggling bugs.
The Apache HTTP Server Project is a collaborative project to develop and maintain an open source software-based HTTP server for modern operating systems including UNIX and Windows. The technology is claimed to be the most popular web server on the internet…
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Indonesian authorities have admitted that the COVID-19 vaccination certificate of the nation’s President has circulated online and tried to explain that it’s an indication of admirable transparency, rather than lamentable security.
That President Joko Widodo’s vaccination certificate was made public late last week is not in dispute.
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VMware has fixed 19 vulnerabilities affecting VMware vCenter Server and VMware Cloud Foundation, the most critical of which is CVE-2021-22005.
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Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt/Fear-mongering/Dramatisation
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Almost five years after the ePrivacy Regulation was proposed, Big Tech has increased its dominance in the online advertising industry, to the detriment of both publishers and the privacy of Europeans. Furthermore, news such as the recent Pegasus Project revelations2 have evidenced the need to mandate privacy by design and by default for all, or there will be no privacy for anyone.
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Our investigation found the iPhone’s tracking protections are nowhere nearly as comprehensive as Apple’s advertising might suggest. We found at least three popular iPhone games share a substantial amount of identifying information with ad companies, even after being asked not to track.
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A security firm hired by Britney Spears’ father monitored the pop singer’s phone calls and text messages during the court-sanctioned conservatorship she has lived under since 2008, according to a New York Times documentary released on Friday.
In Controlling Britney Spears, Alex Vlasov, a former Black Box Security employee who said he worked with the singer’s team for nearly nine years, said the company “mirrored” the pop singer’s phone on an iPad by logging in to her iCloud account. A listening device also was placed in her bedroom, Vlasov said.
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Since January 1st, the Federal Aviation Administration says it has received 4,385 reports of unruly behavior by passengers, which includes 3,199 reports of passengers “refusing to comply with the federal facemask mandate.” The FAA has issued more than $1 million in proposed fines, but the agency does not have the authority to conduct criminal prosecutions.
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“Controlling Britney Spears” exposes shocking allegations from those who’ve worked close to the star throughout the years, and finally decided to come forward with horrifying accounts of Spears’ phone being monitored and her home being bugged.
Nearly anyone who worked with the star was required to sign a non-disclosure agreement, the filmmakers tells Variety, so getting to Spears’ inner circle was near impossible. But after Spears testified in June, those who witnessed what they perceived to be unethical behavior in the conservatorship felt compelled to speak up.
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The British government is preparing to launch a full-scale policy assault against Facebook as the company gears up to introduce end-to-end encryption across all of its services.
Yet the backlash has already begun, showing that officials face a tooth-and-nail fight against their attempt to derail the rollout of end-to-end encryption on the anti-social networking site and others in the Facebook estate.
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Defence/Aggression
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As the US after 20 years finally began its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the story dominated TV news. Just as they did when the war began (Extra!, 11–12/01), corporate journalists overwhelmingly leaned on government and military sources, while offering no clear antiwar voices and vanishingly few perspectives from civil society leaders in either Afghanistan or the United States.
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The House on Thursday overwhelmingly approved $1 billion in new funding for Israel’s Iron Dome missile defense system, after a debate that exposed bitter divisions among Democrats over U.S. policy toward one of its closest allies.
The vote was 420 to 9 to help Israel replace missile interceptors used during heavy fighting in a devastating rocket and missile war with the Palestinians in May, reflecting the widespread bipartisan support in Congress for Jerusalem that has persisted for decades.
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Environment
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Tens of thousands of environmental activists staged a rally outside Germany’s parliament Friday, two days before the country holds a national election, to demand that politicians take stronger action to curb climate change.
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The vigilante patrol was prompted by an international outcry last summer when hundreds of Chinese vessels were discovered fishing for squid near the long-isolated Galapagos Islands, a UNESCO world heritage site that inspired 19th-century naturalist Charles Darwin and is home to some of the world’s most endangered species, from giant tortoises to hammerhead sharks.
China’s deployment to this remote expanse is no accident. Decades of overfishing have pushed its overseas fleet, the world’s largest, ever farther from home. Officially capped at 3,000 vessels, the fleet might actually consist of thousands more. Keeping such a sizable flotilla at sea, sometimes for years at a time, is at once a technical feat made possible through billions in state subsidies and a source of national pride akin to what the U.S. space program was for generations of Americans.
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Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Amor Mottley delivered a scathing indictment of the rich and powerful during her address at the 76th session of the U.N. General Assembly on Friday, condemning the leaders of wealthy countries for refusing to take basic steps to end the coronavirus pandemic, tackle the climate emergency, and usher in a more just society.
“How much more global temperature rise must there be before we end the burning of fossil fuels?”
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Energy
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A bill toughening rules for providers of virtual currency services has exited the Estonian Ministry of Finance that would, in order to mitigate the risks of financial crime, allow granting an Estonian virtual currency service authorization only to applicants who intend to operate in Estonia.
The bill also seeks to set out in greater detail the grounds for refusal of authorization and to put an end to anonymous transactions in virtual currencies, spokespeople for the finance ministry said.
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The seizure pokes a hole in the long-held belief that cryptocurrency is impossible to trace. Cryptocurrency is computer code that allows people to send and receive funds, recording the transactions on a public ledger known as a blockchain, rather than retaining account holder info. Because of the lack of user data, cryptocurrencies like bitcoin have been hailed as a safe haven for criminal activity. Fueled by anonymity, the shadowy industry allows hackers, tax evaders and other bad actors to launder money secretively, outside of the traditional banking system.
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In addition to stating that transacting with cryptocurrencies is illegal, the PBOC statement describes the need to coordinate the activities of agencies including the bank, the Cyberspace Administration of China, and the Ministry of Public Security, as well as local governments, to ban and crack down on cryptocurrency-related activities.
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Today, through a holding company based in Kennerdell, Pennsylvania, called Stronghold Digital Mining that bought the plant, Scrubgrass burns enough coal waste to power about 1,800 cryptocurrency mining computers. These computers, known as miners, are packed into shipping containers next to the power plant, the company stated in documents filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of its initial public offering. Coal waste is a byproduct from decades of mining in the region, left behind in enormous black piles. Stronghold estimated that it’s currently burning about 600,000 tons of it per year at Scrubgrass.
According to the SEC filings, Stronghold plans to operate 57,000 miners by the end of 2022 — an expansion that requires buying up two additional coal waste power plants in the region.
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In June, Huobi banned existing Chinese users from trading riskier products such as derivatives, after China’s cabinet called for a renewed clampdown on [cryptocurrency] trading and mining. There is no indication that Chinese users are barred from Huobi and Binance altogether, which are widely regarded as two of the big three [cryptocurrency] exchanges that originated in China, along with OKEx.
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Though bans on effeminate men and cryptocurrency might appear to have little in common, they are both emblematic of the way Xi and his party want to keep China free of foreign and individualistic influences, with these crackdowns furthering his goal of greater control over all aspects of Chinese economy, culture and education. While the displays of power are deeply damaging for the individuals harmed by these moves, the fact that the isolationist measures are becoming more drastic has a silver lining: They’re a sign of how increasingly difficult and elusive such government control is in a globalized economy and social media age.
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A move by China’s central bank to criminalize all forms of cryptocurrency trading – effectively making bitcoin illegal in the country – has failed to meaningfully impact the price of the world’s leading digital asset.
The clampdown came one day after Twitter announced that its 330m active users will soon be able to send bitcoin to each other instantly and for virtually zero cost – harnessing the Lightning network that’s been built on top of bitcoin’s primary layer and, many believe, will propel the cryptocurrency into the mainstream.
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Wildlife/Nature
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He added that he intends to eventually expand the butterfly preserve, based on how the monarchs respond this winter and whether he can secure funding to keep up with the project. Schell said he also plans to continue working with Guardian Grange by hosting nature walks and hikes through the property and educational sessions about the plants and native herbs that grow there.
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Next time you go hunting for scorpions under cover of darkness, here’s a handy hack: Bring a black light. Most scorpion species are fluorescent, meaning they glow—in this case, a dazzling bluish green—when exposed to ultraviolet (UV) light.
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Overpopulation
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The government has already initiated the construction of several dams across the country, including Diamer-Bhasha Dam to cope with the growing needs of water and energy in the country.
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Meanwhile, demand had risen sharply. Jordan’s population has doubled in the past 20 years, with waves of refugees, including more than 1 million Syrians, taken in.
The share of water per person per year has plummeted to 80 cubic metres from 3,400 at the turn of the century, official figures show, and Salameh says available supplies are only enough for three million of Jordan’s 10 million inhabitants.
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We can, and we should. In fact, laws that encourage construction of multifamily housing provide living quarters, without thirsty yards, for a workforce that otherwise might be seeking traditional housing and putting in new lawns instead of ripping out old ones. We call it “drinking water,” but in fact the greatest single use of household water in California is for landscaping. Apartments, fourplexes and other multifamily units, in which numerous people share landscaping, are quite water thrifty.
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At least 70 percent of Lebanon’s population faces critical water shortages with many people at risk of running out of water in the coming days, according to UNICEF.
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Finance
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If you think elementary, middle, and high school students know too little history, geography, and government, try asking them about the corporations that command so many hours of their day, their attention, what they consume, and their personal horizons.
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Democrats in Congress are scrambling to avert a debt ceiling crisis that could have devastating consequences for the U.S. economy—and Republicans are vowing to stonewall them every step of the way.
The GOP’s principal tool of obstruction—the Senate’s notorious 60-vote filibuster rule—is one the minority party has used repeatedly in recent months to tank popular Democratic legislation, most prominently a bill aimed at safeguarding and strengthening voting rights nationwide.
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In the end, a government budget is both a moral document and a reflection of the society that produced it. That should fill us all with shame.
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Trump just unleashed an unhinged, barely coherent rant about the possibility President Biden might reveal what was going on in the White House on January 6th, the day Trump tried to finally end, once and for all, any possibility of governmental oversight of his ongoing criminal career. He believed he could follow in the footsteps of grifters before him who’ve taken control of and then drained dry countries from Hungary to Russia, Brazil to Turkey and The Philippines.
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It’s designed so that when Mr. Goxx runs on the hamster wheel, he can select among dozens of cryptocurrencies. Then, deciding between two tunnels, he chooses whether to buy or sell. According to the Twitch account for the hamster, his decision is sent over to a real trading platform — and yes, real money is involved.
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The deadline passed without a word, with no sign that the closely watched-for payment had been made, so investors did what they have done for months to the troubled Chinese property giant with loads of debt and few solutions: They sold.
Shares of China Evergrande Group fell nearly 12 percent on Friday, as a Thursday deadline to make an $83 million interest payment passed without any word from the company about whether it had met its commitments.
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At least one of the 13 bankers who made the presentation about the poor working conditions at Goldman Sachs in February is still at the firm
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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In his recent encyclical, Pope Francis wrote that, post-pandemic, “Our worst response would be to plunge even more deeply into feverish consumerism and new forms of egotistic self-preservation.” He also warned against “this dogma of neoliberal faith” that “resort[s] to the magic theories of ‘spillover’ or ‘trickle.’” Trickle-down economics — the theory that giving more money to people who are already wealthy will somehow benefit the rest of us — inspired tax cuts for rich people under former Presidents Ronald Reagan, George Bush and Donald Trump. Trickle-down economics is the opposite of Christian teaching. Jesus teaches us in Matthew 25 that nations will be judged by how they care about the most vulnerable people first and foremost.
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A former senior Afghan security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the resistance comprises three broad categories: supporters of Saleh and Massoud’s National Resistance Front; former officers, including generals of the Afghan National Defense and Security Forces, as well as senior officials of the former defense and interior ministries; and former ministers and deputy ministers. Discussions are in the early stages, and the groups are yet to unite ideologically.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Platforms are also cracking down on adult content because of the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA) and the Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act (SESTA), a law passed in 2018 that made platforms liable for hosting sex trafficking—and created a chilling effect on all sexual speech online. As with anything that creates risk, this made banks and payment platforms more hesitant to do business with platforms that host adult content.
“While the purported target of the law [FOSTA/SESTA] was trafficking in the sex trades, it has proven incredibly ineffective but is instead invoked regularly by tech companies when censoring and removing content shared by sex workers, or even just users sharing content of a sexual nature,” Mariah Grant, Director of Research and Advocacy at The Sex Workers Project of the Urban Justice Center, told Motherboard.
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The ruling extends liability for user comments to anyone with a public Facebook page, not just news outlets. For example, the administrator of a Facebook community could be sued for comments left under a post, even if the administrator was unaware of them.
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Xiaomi seems to do the bidding of the Chinese government in ways that could threaten users in the West, the report argues, including putting a censorship module in its phones and secretly communicating with Chinese-run servers worldwide. Meanwhile, Huawei’s lax app-installation process can get your phone infected by Android malware.
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The Defence Ministry is now drafting the legislation to ban public institutions from procuring “untrustworthy” equipment, including smartphones, with a view to presenting it to the parliament for debate by the end of this year, Abukevicius told Reuters.
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The censoring capability in Xiaomi’s Mi 10T 5G phone software has been turned off for the “European Union region” but can be turned on remotely at any time, the country’s National Cyber Security Centre said in a report on Tuesday.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Utilising reactionary anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine rallies in Melbourne organised this week, police forces have unveiled an array of new weapons and equipment. This includes “pepper ball” firearms that shoot hard pellets the size of marbles, ‘‘stinger’’ grenades, and paramilitary-style vehicles and body armour.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Scott Boalick, the chief administrative patent judge, weighed in on director review at the board while speaking at Managing IP’s US Patent Forum
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FDA fixes for generic delays may not work, say patent counsel [Ed: These patents kill when generics makers are denied access to #medicines (which in turns denies the public access to these). Will FDA and USPTO actually do something for sick (ill) people rather than sick-minded (greedy) oligarchs?]
Counsel that represent generic pharma companies say a letter from the FDA to the USPTO highlights important patent issues but may not fix them
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UK Court of Appeal opinion diverges on Dabus and patenting AI [Ed: Misleading headline from JUVEntoon (EPO and Team UPC propaganda operative) Amy Sandys. The actual news and the headline should be, UK rejects “Hey Hi” excuse for patents (no divergence on that). The patent maximalists, even when they lose, always look hard for some positive slant and then start pushing that slant to mislead people in headlines. Why would you wish to get legal advice from such pathological liars?]
Stephen Thaler has experienced another defeat in his effort for the UK patent courts to recognise artificial intelligence system, Dabus, as a named inventor. This time, the UK Court of Appeal rejected Thaler’s appeal against a previous first-instance verdict, at a ratio of two judges to one.
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Plasseraud is next French patent attorney firm to adopt mixed approach [Ed: These JUVEntoons are once again posting marketing spam as ‘news’ and pushing UPC lies along the way. JUVE used to do actual journalism, honest analysis, but then reinvented itself as a liar for extremists and people looking to undermine the rule of law, constitutions, integrity in journalism etc. Habitual lying in articles about patents seems to have become a modus operandi of team UPC.]
Now that the UPC is once again within reach [Ed: False], many French law firms are considering a mixed line-up or strengthening their teams. Furthermore, following Brexit, many French lawyers see their chance to play a major role in the UPC.
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Software Patents
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On September 22, 2021, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issued a final written decision in Unified Patents, LLC v. Targeted Radio LLC holding claims 1 and 3-9 of U.S. Patent 8,948,684 invalid. Targeted Radio LLC is an affiliate of well-known NPE Acacia Research Corporation. The ’684 patent is generally directed to the insertion of advertising or other content into an Internet radio stream based on the user’s location. This patent was asserted against Pandora Media, but the case was terminated in 2020.
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Trademarks
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Genuine use poses a unique quandary for trade mark owners when raised in revocation proceedings. Not only does the trade mark owner bear the burden of producing evidence to establish such use, but the trade mark owner should know that the ‘reputation’ of the mark does not mean that proving such use is guaranteed to succeed. In this sense, one may recall the fate of the BIG MAC mark in 2019 decision of the Cancellation Division (see IPKat here).
Earlier this month, Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe Ltd faced the same problem in relation to their EU word mark ‘Vita’, when the General Court ultimately found that Sony had not provided sufficient evidence of genuine use of the mark within the relevant five-year period.
Let’s see what happened.
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Mariah Carey is in the middle of a brawl with Irish whiskey makers over her choice of brand name for her new cream liqueur products.
On August 16, Ms. Carey posted a photo on Instagram with the caption “Introducing BLACK IRISH. Two years in the making.” The brand name was inspired by Ms. Carey’s heritage – her father, who was Black, and her mother, whose roots were Irish.
[...]
In the EU, the situation is different. There, the BLACK IRISH trademark is owned by Darker Still Spirits Co., which acquired the name in 2015 and has been selling a stout blended whiskey since June 2020. Ms. Carey filed for a trademark in the EU, but her mark was filed after the mark owned by Darker Still Spirits. That has not stopped Ms. Carey’s legal team from fighting for the mark in the EU, and the battles continue. The European trademark office is still evaluating the positions regarding the BLACK IRISH trademark.
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Copyrights
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The Appellant was the plaintiff at the (Federal) High Court where she had sought a declaration that the Respondent/Defendant’s use of her photographs on its billboards without her express authorization amounts to an infringement of her “image/intellectual property rights”. The Appellant also sought the sum of 50 Million Naira (approximately $121,000) as “compensation for the infringement of her image rights”.
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Efforts to make pirate sites harder to access have resulted in two new waves of blocking in the UK. Action by Elsevier and Springer Nature now requires major ISPs to block several additional Sci-Hub-related domains while the efforts of the MPA require them to block domains that facilitate access to previously blocked sites including EZTV, SolarMovie, Icefilms, and more.
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