InfluxDB which is available in both community and enterprise edition is an open-source time-series database (TSDB) program. Meant to provide fast processing and high availability of data and for processing data in time series. Therefore, it joins the database management systems such as Prometheus, Graphite, and RRDtool.
There are tons of monitoring tools that are used for keeping an eye on systems performance and sending notifications in case something goes wrong. However, the installation and configuration steps involved are often tedious.
Netdata is an open-source real-time monitoring & troubleshooting tool that only requires a few steps to get installed. The Git repository comes with an automated script that handles the bulk of the installation and configuration process and takes away the cumbersome configuration associated with other monitoring tools.
Netdata has become hugely popular since its initial release in October 2013. It collects real-time metrics such as CPU and RAM usage, bandwidth statistics, and disk utilization and displays them on easy-to-interpret charts/graphs.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FreeIPA on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, FreeIPA is an open-source identity management system for Linux/Unix environments that provides centralized account management and authentication, like Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP.
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 FreeIPA 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.
Kali Linux is one of the favorite Linux distros of security testers and in case you are also using it, and want to know how to install Zoom Video conferencing client on Kali’s latest version then here is the tutorial on the same.
Zoom is a popular online meeting software that provides both video and voice conferencing solutions to individuals and enterprises. Although it is a premium service, there are free plans as well, of course with some limitations. So, that individuals and enterprises with often requirements of video conferencing can easily use the Zoom service without paying.
Nmap stands for Network Mapper, it is a free and open-source network discovery and reconnaissance tool used for host discovery and collecting detailed information about a host. Written in C, C++ and Python and Initially released in September 1997, nmap has become an integral tool for cybersecurity and digital forensic professionals who rely on it to reveal detailed information about target hosts and unearth potential vulnerabilities. Nmap reveals information such as Active hosts on a network, open ports, OS and service detection, and performing stealth scans to mention just a few.
In this guide, we highlight some of the handy Nmap commands that you can use to retrieve as much information as you can from host systems.
In this article, I will show you how to take a screenshot in Arch Linux. By default Arch installation (GUI) comes with a screenshot utility. But there are other efficient and simple third-party utilities to take a screenshot on Arch Linux and other Linux distributions.
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In this article, we learned how to make use of different tools to take screenshots in Arch Linux. Please let us know if you are using any other screenshot tools which make your life easier.
I hope you are acquainted with the basic Kubernetes terms like node, service, cluster because I am not going to explain those things here.
This is a step-by-step tutorial to show you how to deploy a production-ready Kubernetes cluster.
Production ready? Yes, the examples use a sample domain so if you own a domain, you may configure it on public facing infrastructure. You may also use it for local testing. It's really up to you.
I have used CentOS Linux in the examples but you should be able to use any other Linux distributions. Except for the installation commands, rest of the steps should be applicable to all.
Want to run Windows apps on a Linux computer? WINE may be able to help. Want to run x86 bit applications on a PC with an ARM-based processor, or vice versa? Then an emulator like QEMU might be may be able to help.
And if you want to do both of those things at once? Then there’s Hangover.
This open source application combines WINE and QEMU in a way that makes it possible to run some x86_64 Windows applications on a computer that’s running a different operating systems (such as Linux or macOS) and which has a non-x86 processor (such as a chip that uses ARM or POWER architecture).
The theme was simply disc and/or room. They also included a tutorial on creating a simple disc room using Game Maker Studio. The files for the tutorial have also been made available. For open source developers and fans, I actually recreated the Disc Room Game Jam tutorial in Godot Engine available here with only a few differences and the source code is under the MIT license.
With 166 entries, it can be difficult to determine what to try from the game jam. Here are some of the gems I've found in the entries. I've only tried those playable on either the Web and / or Linux and have not made it through all the entries.
Build up and maintain an amusement park in the classic RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 in the free and open source modern game engine OpenRCT2.
One of my favourites to follow along, because games are constantly lost to time and plenty deserve to be made to run fully and upgraded for modern platforms. Thankfully, plenty of people feel the same and projects like OpenRCT2 are a fantastic example of that bringing the classic RollerCoaster Tycoon 2 to Linux along with modern enhancements.
I have to say, it's certainly eye-catching and makes me thoroughly curious to give it a go myself. Seems the first season was quite popular, since Bound By Ash was successfully crowdfunded on Kickstarter with $26,907 back in September 2019 from over 700 backers. If you want more behind the scenes info, the developer even wrote a Meatpunks Manifesto.
Gamescope from Valve developer Pierre-Loup A. Griffais is described as a micro-compositor that can spoof a virtual screen with a desired resolution and refresh rate and control/resize the output as needed. It can fulfil the same role as a desktop compositor, but it can also run on top of your regular desktop like any other application.
One use-case for gamescope is dealing with compatibility problems. This includes games that have trouble getting into fullscreen, or do not support your native screen resolution, or multi monitor setups. In my case I could not get Dirt Rally to go into fullscreen on Wayland, but it worked perfectly though gamescope.
Become one with death in the Stellaris: Necroids Species Pack, the latest smaller expansion to the grand space strategy game from Paradox Interactive and Paradox Development Studios.
"The Necrophage Origin offers players a powerful primary species which consumes others within its grasp, blurring the line between cult and empire with three unique civics. New cosmetic changes will reincarnate playthroughs of Stellaris for long time players, while also bringing new life to killer empires."
The dark work-horror comedy Yuppie Psycho from 2019 got a nice surprise upgrade for everyone with Yuppie Psycho: Executive Edition available now as a free upgrade. It's a popular game, with it being rated "Overwhelmingly Positive" by over a thousand users on Steam.
You play as Brian Pasternack in a dystopian 90s society, starting a new job at one of the biggest companies in the world, Sintracorp and of course you're totally unqualified. It doesn't take long to find out what you're really there for, which is to hunt a "witch" whose powers made the success of the corporation possible in the first place.
As promised by the team at Crowbar Collective around the 1.0 release, a Definitive Edition of Black Mesa is coming and there's now a Beta. This seriously impressive Valve-approved Half-Life re-imagining sure is something else, and it sounds like this huge update is going to make it even more exciting to go through it again.
The biggest part of the 1.5 update for Black Mesa appears to be going over all of the Earth levels, to bring them up to the detail level they pushed with the later Xen sections. Crowbar said they "implemented brand new art for all the outdoor environments, and refined the art previously seen in the Summer Beta".
I found out about Krita after doing some research online about the different free art tools available online. There were lots of options, but the name Krita came up quite often and seemed to get good reviews, so I thought it was worth trying!
I love that Krita really feels like it was built with art & artists in mind. One of my favourite features is having the reference images pinned around my work without having them cluttering up my layers. I also love that the programme seems quite streamlined so it starts up pretty quickly and never gets too slow even though my laptop doesnÃât have a dedicated graphics card.
My love affair with this handy spacebar file previewer is well known. I’ve used it for as long as I can remember (and before that the terrific Gloobus Preview). I planned to include Sushi on my list of things to do after installing Ubuntu 20.10, as I had done for previous release lists.
Alas. couldn’t.
For those not familiar with it GNOME Sushi is like macOS Quicklook for Linux; you select a file or folder in Nautilus and hit the spacebar to see an instantaneous file preview. Depending on the file type you can sometimes interact with it too, e.g., scroll pages.
It’s a fuss-free way to rifle through similarly-named documents, mislabelled audio files, and obliquely-assigned videos. Sushi lets you preview the contents of a file without launching a full-blown app.
There are a lot of Linux distributions. I can’t even think of coming up with an exact number because you would find loads of Linux distros that differ from one another in one way or the other.
Some of them just turn out to be a clone of one another while some of them tend to be unique. So, it’s kind of a mess – but that is the beauty of Linux.
Fret not, even though there are thousands of distributions around, in this article, I have compiled a list of the best Linux distros available right now. Of course, the list can be subjective. But, here, we try to categorize the distros – so there’s something for everyone.
Government agencies are navigating their ways through uncharted territories and relying on technology to see them through this challenging period. On November 10th, we will hear from IT leaders from federal, state, and local agencies as well as Red Hatters and our industry partners about how enterprise open source technologies are helping government adapt and transform.
Some state and local governments are using tools and development practices they weren’t using before to develop more efficient and effective ways to deliver better citizen services during this time of need. Federal agencies are turning to emerging technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to make better data-driven decisions. And hybrid cloud, containers and DevOps are being used by some agencies to create and deliver applications faster and more securely.
We understand that digital transformation isn’t just about technologyââ¬Å —ââ¬Å it’s also about the process and people. How will your team get trained? How do you implement new business models to execute more rapid development cycles? And how will modernization help employers meet the needs of their employees?
In this month’s customer success stories, see how Omnitracs, LLC and SaoBacDau Telecom also tapped into Red Hat’s consulting or training offerings to transform their IT teams. Our third success highlight, AvivaSA Emeklilik ve Hayat A.à ž. (AvivaSA), relied on Red Hat solutions in 2017 when Turkey’s government began requiring private-sector employers to automatically enroll employees into a pension plan. It counted on Red Hat once again recently to continue its IT modernization efforts. Read on for more.
Red Hat, Inc., the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced that it has joined the Open Manufacturing Platform (OMP) initiative. With this participation, Red Hat will help drive innovation in production and throughout the value chain via open standards for interoperability, platform diagnostic solutions and data silo resolution. The aim is to achieve consistent standardization as the basis for Industry 4.0 and digitization in production.
The Linux Mint team announces that they are now including Chromium in the Mint repo. And also a new IPTV Player in user demands.
We’re now only one and a half months (mid-December) away from the release of the first point version 20.1 of the Linux Mint 20 series, which recently received the codename “Ulyssa.”
Until you wait for Linux Mint 20.1 “Ulyssa,” its founder Clement Lefebvre has shared interesting updates on the latest monthly newsletter, which you can try right now.
After the release of Ubuntu 20.10 “Groovy Gorilla” last month, other Linux distributions built on top of Ubuntu also started announcing their own updated versions based on Ubuntu 20.10 like Pop!_OS 20.10.
Along the same line, here comes yet another Ubuntu Groovy Gorilla-based distro, Voyager 20.10 GE, featuring Linux Kernel 5.8 and GNOME 3.38 desktop environment. Let’s see what Voyager 20.10 has to offer...
Canonical did not do anything really surprising or new with Ubuntu 20.10. There are some new features and some improvements. I like the ability to set up ZFS volumes with a click and the support for Raspberry Pi 4 computers will be welcome to many. The permissions on Snap packages will be useful for people who want to sandbox applications and I think having a relatively friendly interface for that is a good move.
I like that we can run GNOME in either a X.Org session or with Wayland. At this point the two technologies appear to be about even. Ubuntu is sticking with X.Org for the default which probably still makes sense given the few corner cases where Wayland can still struggle.
There were a lot of little problems with this release. Putting aside performance in VirtualBox, which was poor, I ran into a number of issues. Things like the Software utility consuming all of my CPU endlessly when it could not find a package match, the same utility not returning any results sometimes even when I was typing names of programs I knew were available and found later using the same search. The constant warnings on my workstation about the network connection not being established while I was downloading files was alternatively comical and annoying. Having the system not boot once during my trial was unpleasant and not confidence inspiring.
The odd thing I found was the unevenness of the experience. The installation is polished and smooth. The GNOME desktop, while very heavy on resources, is well put together and fairly consistent. On the other hand getting spammed with network errors while the network was functioning and regularly seeing sluggish animations that were more distracting than helpful was unpleasant. I started using the command line and APT just to avoid using the desktop and the Software utilities more than absolutely necessary and that is not a good sign when the user is trying to work around your interface.
There are some good ideas happening in Ubuntu 20.10, but the distribution does not feel polished or smooth once it is installed. There are some good tools and good concepts on display, but a lot of little problems, distractions, and glitches too. I'd recommend passing on this release and hoping things get ironed out in time for Ubuntu 21.04.
Kubernetes provides many critical attributes that can contribute to a robust robotics platform: isolated workloads, automated deployments, self-configuring work processes, and an infrastructure that is both declarative and immutable. However, robots designed with ROS 2 face challenges in setting up individual components on Kubernetes so that all parts smoothly work together. In this blog series, we construct a prototype ROS 2 system distributed across multiple computers using Kubernetes. Our goal is not only to provide you with a working configuration, but also to help you understand why it succeeds and overcome future design challenges.
Getting into Kubernetes can be a pretty steep learning curve, so our prototype will use MicroK8s to make it easy. MicroK8s is a lightweight pure-upstream Kubernetes distribution and offers low-touch, self-healing, highly-available clusters. Its low resource footprint makes it ideal for running on robot computers. Even with very little Kubernetes experience you’ll quickly have a complete cluster up and running.
This article will introduce some of the core concepts for our prototype design. Follow-on articles instantiate a ROS 2 talker/listener prototype on a single computer, then extend the prototype with alternative options and distributing compute across multiple computers.
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Within a single pod, containers can reach each other on the localhost address (127.0.0.1), and the host machine’s loopback interface is attached to each container. However, since all pods use the same actual interface, they must coordinate port usage so that no two pods communicate using the same port at the same time.
Should multiple containers within a single pod listen on the same port (for example, identical containers all hosting a web server on port 80), a Kubernetes service can be defined to expose the application and route incoming to containers. However, Kubernetes services typically perform port or address translation which, as we discussed earlier, interferes with ROS 2 communications. Kubernetes services cannot be used for ROS 2 network traffic.
Additionally, ROS 2 does not provide a method for managing ports used by RTPS. For example, a container can not change the standard RTPS discovery port of 7400, nor can a ROS 2 listener select a port other than its default. As a result, port usage can not be coordinated across multiple ROS 2 containers running in the same pod, and these containers generally will not be able to communicate.
In recent years, various platforms have emerged to support agile digital factory DevOps, but most industrial edge platforms have been held back by limitations to application scaling and management – and this is where Kubernetes at the edge comes in.
Kubernetes is a container orchestration system. Containers make it possible to manage applications independently from their underlying technologies, and since factories are often highly heterogeneous environments, this independence is invaluable. Kubernetes simplifies matters even further by enabling an automated approach to scaling and managing large numbers of containerised applications across distributed infrastructure.
Kubernetes is already well-established in the cloud arena, and the PAC RADAR report anticipates that it will soon gain traction at the industrial edge as organisations increasingly look to leverage cloud agility within their IoT environments. As the report explains: “Thanks to the latest innovations in the cloud world, we can predict quite easily what the next wave of ‘cloud-native’ innovations will bring to the industrial edge (and the data center). Kubernetes will be the next big thing at the edge, as it already is in the cloud.”
In this respect, Canonical is ahead of the curve. MicroK8s is a fully containerised, lightweight, fast, and secure Kubernetes distribution optimised for edge and IoT production environments. As the report notes, MicroK8s has already reached 3,750 stars on GitHub – clearly demonstrating both its popularity and the developer appetite for Kubernetes at the edge. Additionally, MicroK8s offers a zero-ops experience, eliminating the main drawback to Kubernetes-based solutions identified in the report: complexity.
Another advantage of Kubernetes is that it is multi-cloud, meaning it can integrate with cloud infrastructure across providers to enable further scalability beyond the edge. According to the report, this is another area in which Canonical excels thanks to Charmed Kubernetes: a composable Kubernetes distribution that can run on bare metal, VMware, Openstack and all major public clouds.
Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard computer with Broadcom BCM2711C0 1.8 GHz processor has just launched, and we already published a teardown of the Raspberry Pi 400 hardware to check out the cooling solution and overall hardware design.
In this review, we’ll mostly focus on Raspberry Pi 400 and Raspberry Pi 4 differences, since both devices mostly rely on the same chips. After checking the different features, we’ll run Thomas Kaiser’s “SBC Bench” script to test thermal cooling and benchmark both RPi hardware platforms.
RPi Trading has launched a $70 to $100 “Raspberry Pi 400” all-in-one keyboard PC with a RPi 4-like mainboard (minus a USB 2.0 and MIPI DSI/CSI) and improved thermals that enable a faster 1.8GHz SoC.
Last year the Raspberry Pi 4 SBC shipped in an optional, $120 Raspberry Pi 4 Desktop Kit configuration that supplies a 4GB Pi 4 in a case, power supply, and mouse/keyboard combo. Now, the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Raspberry Pi Trading have delivered an equivalent product for $100 that skips the case and packs an RPi 4 like mainboard into the keyboard.
Raspberry Pi needs no introduction. What started as a low-spec computer for DIY enthusiasts, it can now be used as full-featured desktop.
With the Raspberry Pi 400 release, they are making it more friendly for home computer usage. The Raspberry Pi 400 is basically a computer in the form of a keyboard.
If you remember, Commodore 64 was also a computer in the form of a keyboard back in 1982. Even though it isn’t unique, for a successful product like Raspberry Pi, it is a sweet deal.
The folks at the Raspberry Pi Foundation have done it again, they've managed to launch a product I really don't need but absolutely want with the Raspberry Pi 400. It's a complete unit, built into an official Raspberry Pi keyboard and it looks seriously slick.
What they haven't done it just attach an RPi to a keyboard, they've fully integrated it. It runs faster and cooler than the comparable 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 and it's actually an entirely new board layout.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is today announcing a new and unexpected single board computer: the Raspberry Pi 400. It's more of a single-keyboard computer that offers slightly higher performance than the Raspberry Pi 4.
The Raspberry Pi 400 is quite a nifty little device: it's a Raspberry Pi entirely within the keyboard. Thanks to the small form factor of the Raspberry Pi SBC, the keyboard isn't overly large either but roughly the size of a standard keyboard. The Raspberry Pi is cooled by a large aluminum block to act as a heatsink within the keyboard.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation might have struck gold with this one! The brand new Pi 400 is quite possibly the coolest and cutest little Linux PC of 2020.
In the video below you can learn how to use Ubuntu Desktop on the Raspberry Pi 4 and take a closer look at the new features in Ubuntu 20.10. Running Ubuntu on your Raspberry Pi is easy. Just pick the OS image you want, flash it onto a microSD card, load it onto your Pi and away you go. Ubuntu for Pi supports the Raspberry Pi 2, 3 and 4 mini PC systems.
“A tiny machine with a giant impact. The Ubuntu community and Canonical are proud to enable desktop, server and production internet of things on the Raspberry Pi. In support of inventors, educators, entrepreneurs and eccentrics everywhere, we join the Raspberry Pi Foundation in striving to deliver the most open platform at the lowest price, powered by our communities.”
The Raspberry Foundation released a brand new version of the Raspberry PI PC (personal computer), and it is directly built into a small-sized keyboard. The Raspberry Pi 4 model was released in June 2019, and the 8GiB version recently. Let us see Raspberry Pi 400 technical specification and other details. The post Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC: Complete specs and pricing appeared first on nixCraft.
With a keyboard integrated into its chassis, the new Raspberry Pi 400 looks almost like an 80s micro. This really is a micro computer, a fully functional desktop PC small enough to put in your bag or tuck neatly into a desk drawer when you’re not working. And it costs less than €£70 for the base system or around €£95 for a kit that includes everything but a monitor.
We were impressed by last year’s Raspberry Pi 4, which is still available. The company has recently consolidated the success of the most powerful Pi to date with its Compute Module 4 for server clusters and embedded systems, and now it’s bringing out this dedicated desktop PC, powered by a variant of the Pi 4.
Raspberry Pi has dished up a new treat for its legion of fans, as well as anyone who’s looking for a capable, affordable Linux PC.
The Raspberry Pi 400, newly announced today, is a full-fledged Pi-powered computer built inside a compact plastic keyboard. At its heart sits a faster, cooler version of the Raspberry Pi 4 that was launched last year. This is topped with enough ports, slots, and expansions to sate tech tinkerers appetites.
But why an integrated keyboard? Who’s this device aimed at? And how much does it cost? For all those details keep reading.
The Software Freedom Conservancy, an organisation that helps promote, develop, improve and defend free and open source software, has asked Microsoft to resign from the Recording Industry Association of America after the RIAA forced the takedown of youtube-dl, a popular command-line script that can be used to download videos from YouTube and many other videos from the Internet, from GitHub, a code repository owned by Microsoft.
There's a new alpha release available for download. If you build Tor from source, you can download the source code for Tor 0.4.5.1-alpha from the download page on the website. Packages should be available over the coming weeks, with a new alpha Tor Browser release some time this month, assuming we get #40172 figured out.
Remember, this is an alpha release: you should only run this if you'd like to find and report more bugs than usual. We'll be trying to put out putting out stable backport releases in the next week or so.
Following the development version released last month, Collabora Online Development Edition 6.4, the new Collabora Online 6.4 is ready for mass adoption by enterprises and every one else who wants to deploy a premium office suite on their workstations.
Those who were able to try the free Collabora Online Development Edition 6.4 release are probably already familiar with the new features and enhancements in Collabora Online 6.4. These include a new look and feel with the NotebookBar now enabled by default for Writer, Impress, and Calc.
Love LibreOffice? Want to help make it even better? Now’s your chance! The software is developed by a passionate community, spread across the globe, with many volunteers working in their spare time. And you can join them: not only is it a great way to build your skills for a possible future career, but also an opportunity to meet new people, have fun… And get some cool merchandise throughout November! So how does this work
Considering the complexities of managing personal finances and business transactions, you will find a lot of online services or software tools that aim to simplify things. Some tools simply let you add expenses and income to keep track of your savings while others offer different features.
I have already covered several open source account software in the past. Here, I will be focusing on one of the options — GnuCash, which is a popular free accounting software with plenty of features for every user.
It's challenging to understand your Python project as it gets larger and more complex. Even when you write the entire project, it's impossible to know how it works fully. Debugging and profiling your code is essential to better understanding it.
VizTracer is a tool to help you understand Python code by tracing and visualizing its execution. Without making any changes to your source code, VizTracer can log function entries/exits, function arguments/returns, and any arbitrary variables, then display the data using an intuitive front-end Google Trace-Viewer.
I was sent this lovely anecdote of Sean Connery today by a successful Hollywood screen writer. They said I could publish but did not want to be named.
On Tuesday, MEPs adopted proposals on how the EU can best regulate Artificial Intelligence (AI) in order to boost innovation, ethical standards and trust in technology.
The European Parliament is among the first institutions to put forward recommendations on what AI rules should include with regards to ethics, liability and intellectual property rights. These recommendations will pave the way for the EU to become a global leader in the development of AI. The Commission legislative proposal is expected early next year.
On 20 October 2020, the European Parliament adopted – with a large margin – a resolution with recommendations to the Commission on a civil liability regime for artificial intelligence (AI). The text of this resolution is available here; on other issues of AI that are part of a larger regulatory package, see the Parliament’s press release here. The draft regulation (DR) proposed in the resolution is noteworthy from a choice-of-law perspective because it introduces new, specific conflicts rules for artificial intelligence (AI) (on the general issues of AI and PIL, see the conference report by Stefan Arnold here). With regard to substantive law, the draft regulation distinguishes between legally defined high-risk AI systems (Art. 4 DR) and other AI systems involving a lower risk (Art. 8 DR). For high-risk AI systems, the draft regulation would introduce an independent set of substantive rules providing for strict liability of the system’s operator (Art. 4 DR). Further provisions deal with the amount of compensation (Art. 5 DR), the extent of compensation (Art. 6 DR) and the limitation period (Art. 7 DR).
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The unilateral conflicts rule found in Art. 2(1) DR would prevail over the Rome II Regulation on the law applicable to non-contractual relations pursuant to Art. 27 Rome II, which states that the Rome II Regulation shall not prejudice the application of provisions of EU law which, in relation to particular matters, lay down conflict-of-law rules relating to non-contractual obligations. Insofar, it must be noted that Art. 2(1) DR deviates considerably from the choice-of-law framework of Rome II. While Art. 2(1) DR reflects the lex loci damni approach enshrined as the general conflicts rule in the Rome II Regulation (Art. 4 Rome II), one must not overlook the fact that product liability is subject to a special conflicts rule, i.e. Art. 5 Rome II, which is considerably friendlier to the victim of a tort than the general conflicts rule. Recital 20 Rome II states that “[t]he conflict-of-law rule in matters of product liability should meet the objectives of fairly spreading the risks inherent in a modern high-technology society, protecting consumers’ health, stimulating innovation, securing undistorted competition and facilitating trade”. In order to achieve these purposes, the Rome II Regulation opts for a cascade of connections, starting with the law of the country in which the person sustaining the damage has his or her habitual residence when the damage occurred, provided that the product was marketed in that country (Art. 5(1)(a) Rome II). If that connection fails because the product was not marketed there, the law of the country in which the product was acquired governs, again provided that the product was marketed in this state (Art. 5(1)(b) Rome II). Finally, if that fails as well, the Regulation returns to the lex loci damni under Art. 5(1)(c) Rome II, if the product was marketed there. This cascade of connections is evidently influenced by the desire to protect the mobile consumer from being confronted with a law that may be purely accidental from his point of view because it has neither a relationship with the legal environment that he is accustomed to (his habitual residence) nor to the place where he decided to expose himself to the danger possibly emanating from the product (place of acquisition). The rule reflects the presumption that most consumers will be affected by a defective product in the country where they are habitually resident. Insofar, Art. 2(1) DR is, in comparison with the Rome II Regulation, friendlier to the operator of a high-risk AI system than to the consumer.
In England and elsewhere November is also a time of lockdown presently. My morning weekday newspaper USA TODAY provides plenty of updates from across my country and across the planet in the matter with one report after another. The fatigue is quite real.
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I will suggest writing in CommonMark and keeping your formatting to a minimum in your original manuscript. Why? You could then most easily go from then after some editing of the text and format it for Kindle Direct Publishing, LeanPub, Smashwords, or another outlet. With some careful tinkering with the CommonMark and some nice use of LuaLaTeX you can even make a ready copy to make a print version for the various marketplaces.
Covid-19 exposed how important teachers are to students and families—it's a shame that school leaders still won't listen to them.
The category that the Census calls “health care and social assistance” is the largest sector of employment in the country, accounting for about one in seven jobs nationwide. It encompasses hospitals, clinics, labs, long-term care facilities, home care, and social work agencies. This sector makes up an enormous proportion of low-wage employment growth in the United States over the past several decades: in the bottom quintile of the wage structure, according to sociologist Rachel Dwyer, a majority of new jobs since the 1980s have been care jobs of some kind. This labor market draws heavily on the most economically marginal sections of the working class. For example, the Bronx commits one-quarter of its entire workforce to healthcare and social assistance, making that dispossessed borough the leader among the most populous counties in the United States on this measure.
While often overlooked, this work has drawn public attention since we deemed it “essential” with the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic in the spring. The structural conditions shaping care work, however, remain highly exploitative—and are profoundly linked to the high degree of COVID-19’s spread within both long-term care facilities and the communities that supply their labor force. In nursing homes, Medicaid—the poor relation of the healthcare system—supplies the majority of all revenue, while labor accounts for the large majority of costs. This prompts nursing home operators to seek to suppress wages and staffing levels, leading to high turnover and producing negligent care and dangerous working conditions.
As the U.S. coronavirus caseload surpassed nine million on Friday, Stanford University economists published a study that connected 18 of President Donald Trump’s reelection rallies from June 20 to September 30 with more than 30,000 Covid-19 infections and over 700 deaths — tallies that don’t include the month of October, when cases nationwide surged.
Our very democracy has been on the edge of catastrophe, not only because of a president who lies as a way of life, but because of many who have come to accept his lies as “truth,” or who have lost any concern with truth in the name of apotheosis and hubristic party line politics. How does the language of treason function within this context, especially in terms of derelict “leadership,” disrespect for the Constitution, and the failure to be concerned for hundreds of thousands of Americans who have died from COVID-19? In this interview, Eduardo Mendieta, who is professor of philosophy at Penn State University, and editor, co-editor and author of many books, including The Adventures of Transcendental Philosophy and The Philosophical Animal: On Zoopoetics and Interspecies Cosmopolitanism, boldly and insightfully delineates what is at stake when morality, hope and truth are seriously under attack.
It’s been 217 days since Congress instructed the IRS to send $1,200 stimulus checks to every citizen below a certain income threshold. And yet, it’s likely as many as 12 million people — including those who most need a financial boost — never got the cash.
The Green Party is calling for secondary schools, colleges and universities to be added to the list of closures from Thursday after a month-long lockdown in England was announced by the Government.€
It's going to take more than a change of personnel in Washington to address our decaying climate, public health, and democracy. But it's not too late.
Assuredly, Japan’s government has made an informal decision to dump Fukushima Daiichi’s radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. A formal announcement could come as early as this year. Currently, 1.2 million tonnes of radioactive water is stored.
The problem: TEPCO is running out of storage space.
The American people have it in their power to stop this cancellation of our health, well-being, and basic constitutional rights. On Tuesday, they can cancel Trump.
Those casualties would not have occurred if the campaign events had not taken place, according to a team of Stanford researchers. Media coverage of the rallies made clear there was little effort to follow guidelines about social distancing, and mask use was optional for attendees, who typically numbered in the thousands. (Indeed, face coverings were disparaged by the president on several occasions.)
Furthermore, the extra illnesses and deaths almost certainly reached beyond the ardent Trump supporters who attended the rallies, rippling outward to ensnare others in their towns and cities, the study authors said.
The net today carries the sad news that Dan Kohn has passed away. Among other things, Dan played a huge role in the establishment of the Linux Foundation and a number of its initiatives, including the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and LF Public Health. He will be missed.
Kubernetes, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation and the cloud native computing community will forever be associated with Dan Kohn, who passed away Sunday of complications from colon cancer in New York City. He leaves behind a beautiful family who we will always remember often accompanying Dan on his many travels.
Cyber criminals have used the Windows REvil ransomware to attack the Las Vegas-based Gaming Partners International Corporation, a manufacturer and supplier of casinos table game equipment.
Ransomware attacks have grown massively in number over the last 12 months and these days most attacks on Windows systems are invariably through the use of this genre of malware.
NAT Slipstreaming exploits the user's browser in conjunction with the Application Level Gateway (ALG) connection tracking mechanism built into NATs, routers, and firewalls by chaining internal IP extraction via timing attack or WebRTC, automated remote MTU and IP fragmentation discovery, TCP packet size massaging, TURN authentication misuse, precise packet boundary control, and protocol confusion through browser abuse.
This attack takes advantage of arbitrary control of the data portion of some TCP and UDP packets without including HTTP or other headers; the attack performs this new packet injection technique across all major modern (and older) browsers, and is a modernized version to my original NAT Pinning technique from 2010 (presented at DEFCON 18 + Black Hat 2010). Additionally, new techniques for local IP address discovery are included.
This attack requires the NAT/firewall to support ALG (Application Level Gateways), which are mandatory for protocols that can use multiple ports (control channel + data channel) such as SIP and H323 (VoIP protocols), FTP, IRC DCC, etc.
This story was originally published by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news organization based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at revealnews.org and subscribe to the Reveal podcast, produced with PRX, at revealnews.org/podcast.
France has recently increased its efforts, with clear calls for regulation of social media and introducing a national bill specifically to fight radical Islam. Officials have closed a mosque and proposed to ban a number of Muslim groups considered extreme by authorities. This is all to defend, French ministers say, France's secular state, away from any religious interference.
"Very clearly France is under attack," French President Emmanuel Macron said after the most recent attack, but he was clear in his calls to unite France rather than embrace the "spirit of division." With tensions rising, it not just French ministers that are warning about an escalation in violence. In 2015 including the attack on Charlie Hebdo's offices and the November 2015 Paris attacks, there were 36 terror attacks in France, killing 161 people.
In the event that President Donald Trump loses in the upcoming election but refuses to give up power, some American unions are contemplating a general strike — meaning a major strike in which a significant percentage of workers from every sector of the economy withhold their labor.
Many analysts, psychologists, the president's advisers and even the president himself have suggested that he will not accept the results if he loses, which could trigger a larger political crisis or unrest for those who want to force him out. Back in 2016, Trump infamously refused to accept the legitimacy of the election results if he did not win.
Burkina Faso is set to hold presidential and parliamentary elections later this month, but the presence of extremist groups has disrupted voter registration in some parts of the country and could prevent people from casting ballots on the day. A controversial new law passed by parliament in August – stating that votes will be counted irrespective of people’s ability to access polling stations on 22 November – is also triggering fears of widespread disenfranchisement in already marginalised areas. “If one half [of the country] votes and another half doesn’t, it is not normal,” said Saïdou Wily, a government official in Barsalogho, a conflict-hit town in northern Burkina Faso. Analysts say a low turnout in rural areas could further undermine the state’s ability to govern the West African country, entrenching the power and legitimacy of jihadist groups linked to the so-called Islamic State and al-Qaeda. The proliferation of self-defence militias – including volunteer groups who are fighting extremists with support from the government – could also raise the prospects of political violence, according to analysts and opposition candidates. A recent report from the Clingendael Institute, a think tank in The Hague, stated that politicians may be tempted to use these groups to secure electoral gains, particularly as the polls are expected to be tightly contested.
The letter was actually part of a satirical article on the previously little known (and very specific) humor site, Scoopertino, which peddles Onion-style and tongue-in-cheek "Unreal Apple News."
But when British marketing exec John Willshire took the letter seriously and posted it on Twitter and his blog, it started rocketing around Twitter and beyond.
A fake letter from Sean Connery to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs is making the rounds on social media following the actor’s death on Saturday. Just to reiterate: it’s fake, the product of humor site Scoopertino, which posts satirical articles about Apple and goings-on at its Cupertino (get it that’s the name) headquarters.
Another powerful storm is testing Southeast Asian disaster responders after Typhoon Goni crashed into the Philippines on 1 November, before veering towards flood-hit central Vietnam. Goni, known as Rolly in the Philippines, made landfall on Sunday on Catanduanes Island in the country’s east, bringing violent winds and extensive flooding. The Red Cross says there’s “massive devastation” in some areas, including 90 percent of the homes in villages in one part of Catanduanes. Philippine authorities are still assessing the total damage, but the government said 11 people had died as of 2 November, with numbers still rising. The evacuation of at least 450,000 people and early response planning helped avoid a worse outcome, but aid groups warn that the combined hit from a barrage of recent storms and the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic will test communities for months to come. The Philippines has been locked in disaster response mode for weeks after previous storms caused extensive flooding in parts of Luzon, the country’s main island. Typhoon Molave, known as Quinta in the Philippines, killed at least 23 people in October; Typhoon Saudel, known as Pepito, struck days earlier.
The storm, known locally as Rolly, left at least 10 people dead and nearly 400,000 displaced.
Huntsville, Alabama is teeming with engineers and STEM talent. Some are leaving the defense economy for the clean energy one.
The senator slammed the Trump administration for giving more than $425 billion in contracts to companies that have shipped jobs overseas.
Despite his attempts to portray himself as a leader who protects the interests of so-called forgotten Americans, President Trump is no working-class hero.
Against our better judgment, we believe a re-purposed office broom closet were can “meditate” represents corporate America’s commitment to our “wellness” rather than a means of discouraging the realization that we are merely biding our times as obsolete automatons until AI makes us altogether redundant.€ There’s a reason that tech and banking bros often cite ‘Zen’ as their guiding principle since the word (in English, at least) redefines a moral vacuum as a sea of white stones in a private temple garden somewhere in wine country.
The same goes for “connectivity” – as if being stalked, monitored, wiretapped and harvested for residual data by powerful microwaves puts us in the same league as Bill Gates.€ Misidentification with the ruling class becomes “aspiration”, yet another misnomer re-labeled as a scented candle.€ The language of power, collated from our involuntarily surrendered medical records, and carefully implanted inner thoughts, is then focus-group-tested on lobotomized lab marmosets and Joe Biden supporters.€ Eventually, all this manipulated data is willfully disseminated in the media and echoed on social media platforms until we are all mindlessly disconnected from reality and plugged into a labyrinthine, neuron-imitating grid on a Pentagon computer screen connected to Amazon’s cloud server.€ This digitized dragnet that installs in humans what Marx termed “false consciousness” has become the final frontier of capitalism.
With just a few days until what is widely regarded as the most important national election in recent U.S. history, voters remain divided and polarized over what should be essentially the future of the country. Issues over racism, immigration, guns, women’s rights, police brutality and climate change are what essentially divide Republican voters from Democrats. The former, galvanized by the extreme and divisive rhetoric of a racist and reactionary president, wish to preserve the values of “traditional America” (white supremacy and patriarchy, militarism, rugged individualism and religiosity), while Democrats worry that another four years of Donald Trump in office will spell the end of democracy.
People spreading disinformation may be trying to sway the election one way or the other or simply undermine confidence in the election and American democracy in general.
In 2016, the total vote out of Harris County, Texas, home to Houston, was 1.3 million. In Dallas County, it was 770,000. In Travis County, home of the city of Austin, over 477,000. Four years later, 485,000 people had voted in the county by October 28th, six days before Election Day, more than the total vote in 2016. In every other major metropolitan area in Texas, including the counties in the west of the state that almost catapulted Beto O’Rourke into the Senate in 2018, nearly as many people had voted by Wednesday evening as had voted in total in 2016, and more than had voted in the mid-terms in 2018. By Friday morning, the last day of early voting in the Lone Star state, the entire state had exceeded its 2016 vote totals. By Saturday morning, it was at 107 percent of its 2016 vote total, with virtually every large metro area exceeding the totals from four years ago.
Under Trump, our notion of shared truth has been shattered. In its place, monsters have swarmed.
Twenty years after the Supreme Court decision known as Bush v. Gore effectively decided a presidential election, it’s back on the country’s mind. President Donald Trump, who is lagging in polls amid a surge in COVID-19 cases and refuses to commit to leaving office quietly should his bid for reelection fail, has said he believes the Supreme Court will intervene in the upcoming election to hand him a second term. He cited that role to justify rushing the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett, who was sworn in as a justice on Monday and could potentially break a 4-4 tie. Lawyers representing the president’s campaign and the Republican Party have taken to citing Bush v. Gore frequently in preelection court filings. And the case’s echoes are only underscored by the presence of three current justices — Chief Justice John Roberts, Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh — each of whom worked for the Republicans in the 2000 ballot recount battles in Florida that culminated in the historic Supreme Court decision.
Democrats got agitated this week when Kavanaugh, appointed by Trump in 2018, included a nearly page-long disquisition on Bush v. Gore in an opinion explaining his vote not to reinstate a six-day buffer after Election Day for mail-in ballots, which are expected to lean heavily Democratic, to arrive at election offices in Wisconsin. Then, only two days later, Democrats were cheered by the news that the court had let stand, at least for now, post-Election Day buffer periods in two other key swing states, Pennsylvania and North Carolina. The notion of a conservative court handing the presidency to Trump seemed that much more distant a prospect.
The Swedish research group created a database of 1,955 political parties from 169 countries, going back to 1970, and invited 665 academics and country experts to score them across a number of values. The V-Dem Institute then created two indices, based on the experts’ responses. The first index, populism, measures the extent to which a political party says it is against elites and favours majority rule over consensus. The second, illiberalism, evaluates parties based on several criteria, including how likely they are to launch personal attacks against their opponents, to what extent they support free speech and fair elections, how likely they are to violate the rights of minorities and whether or not they encourage violence against their political rivals.
How well did this approach work? Hard to say definitively, since neither group was archived by Google Groups.
But judging from a search of mentions on rec.scuba, it seems like alt.binaries.images.underwater once again became a place recommended by enthusiasts to find and post underwater photography, like its creator originally hoped.
There’s virtually no mention of alt.binaries.images.underwater.non-violent.moderated again, leading me to believe that it quietly died as people shifted to other unmoderated Usenet groups, as well as web-based forums, P2P file sharing, and later, communities like Reddit.
The bill is loosely based on the Public Order Act 1986, which outlaws threatening, abusive or insulting words and behaviour but includes a “dwelling defence” that states the threatening language cannot be prosecuted if it is spoken in [...]
She was shuttled to another country where she spent five long months in hiding. Carr has never before told her story, but agreed to meet for an interview as part of a W5 investigation into the shady underbelly of an industry that forced her to give up her business and almost cost her, her life: The tow truck industry.
Secularism as principle and practice in India is in "danger", but "forces of hatred" cannot alter the country's secular character, senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor told PTI in an interview on his new book 'The Battle of Belonging'.
In the book, Tharoor makes a stinging critique of the Hindutva doctrine, asserting that it is a political doctrine, not a religious one.
Here are some excerpts from the interview: [...]
I have published an article entitled "The Trade Secrecy Standard for Patent Prior Art," co-authored with Sharon K. Sandeen.
The article, which is forthcoming in American University Law Review, argues that patent prior art cases can be explained using concepts of publicness and secrecy that match those used in trade secret law. In other words, what counts as prior art against a patent pursuant to 35 U.S.C. ۤ 102 (2011) is informed by the definition of a trade secret pursuant to 18 U.S.C. ۤ 1839 (3) (2016).
The paper can be downloaded here. I've posted an excerpt below, applying the trade secrecy standard for patent prior art to the Supreme Court's interpretation of a "public use" in Egbert v. Lippman.
This shows advances in Apple's in-house development and could be the building blocks for a more comprehensive attack on Google's dominance, alongside what's currently going on in the halls of power.
On 2nd October, 2020, India and South Africa issued a joint statement before the WTO TRIPS Council, with a request to waive “the implementation, application and enforcement of Sections 1, 4, 5, and 7 of Part II of the TRIPS Agreement in relation to prevention, containment or treatment of COVID-19.” This waiver, annexed with a draft decision for the WTO General Council, was requested to ensure that IPRs do not encumber the access to affordable medicines or R&D, manufacturing and supply of medical products essential to combat COVID-19.
The TRIPS Council met on 15th and 16th October, 2020 with an agenda to discuss the joint proposal, among other issues. Apart from the original proposers, the joint statement was co-sponsored by Kenya and Eswatini and was supported by a number of developing and least developed countries (LDC) in the meeting. The proposal received staunch opposition from a bloc of developed countries including European Union, United States of America, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, Canada, Japan and the United Kingdom, joined by Brazil (et tu Brazil? This also makes me wonder if BRICS is still a challenge to western economic supremacy, when their own members are sabotaging proposals of other members). Till the official report on the meetings is made available from the WTO, readers can refer to this informal update by Thiru Balasubramanium of Knowledge Ecology International.
Un-BRICS-ing apart, this joint statement is another addition to the long list of initiatives proposed by the global south. One major example includes the Call for technology pooling initiative by Costa Rica. Other examples have been listed by TWN and South Center. Nonetheless, there are still apprehensions that despite the pandemic, the practice of “business as usual” will likely prevail (see Page 16 specifically).
In this two part post I shall first assess the reasons and the key aspects of the proposal in the first part; and, in the second part I shall focus on the submissions made by India and South Africa followed by a discussion on the challenges which the proposal must overcome and the scenario if the proposal is rejected.
[...]
To assist such countries Article 31bis was introduced in TRIPS. This provision acts as the legal basis for members to grant special compulsory licenses exclusively for the production and export of affordable generic medicines to other members which cannot domestically produce the needed medicines in sufficient quantities. (see page 172 here) However, as suggested by the joint statement, Article 31bis is not exactly ‘user friendly’ and has been subjected to excessive criticism for its complex and cumbersome requirements, due to which it has been used only once- to export Anti Retroviral Vaccines from Canada to Rwanda. (See also “Why the High Income Countries that opted-out from the Art. 31bis WTO TRIPS system must urgently reconsider their decision in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic”)
Any device/ medicine which is patent protected could also be protected under other IPRs. Out of these protections, the protection granted to trade secrets warrants special attention as it protects undisclosed information. (see Article 39.2 of TRIPS). It is noteworthy that , even if a compulsory license is issued against use of a patented product, the undisclosed information on the product will still be protected. Prof. David Levine explains the significance of this“For vaccines and other biologic medicines, cell lines, genomic information, and other biological material can also be held as trade secrets. Data about the effectiveness of medicines and vaccines are trade secrets. Even so-called negative information — information about what does not work — can be a trade secret. All of this information is essential to the rapid development of, and access to, safe and effective COVID-19 diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines worldwide.”
Apart from patents and trade secrets, there is also the issue of technology transfer and know how. Abandoning patents and disclosing trade secrets will not do any good unless effective transfer of technology and sharing of know-how takes place. The most vulnerable in this regard are developing countries and LDCs which lack the necessary expertise to overcome a pandemic of this massive scale without expert assistance. While Article 66.2 of the TRIPS does talk about transfer of technology from the developed countries to LDCs (which is neither justiciable nor mandatory) it is silent on such transfer to developing countries. (refer here for a detailed discussion on Article 66.2)
The relationship between business activity and human rights in the context of intellectual property (IP) is unique in several respects. First, it is an example of how national efforts to control the human rights impact of business activities can be frustrated by international agreements. Thus, the obligation under the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (Guiding Principles) for states to maintain sufficient national policy space to address human rights impacts is particularly important in this area. Corporations also have a responsibility not to push for changes in domestic and international law that would enable them to maximize profits at the expense of human rights.
Second, the case of human rights and IP provides an example of corporations taking advantage of legal rules that allow them to extract profits at the expense of human rights. These legal rules are directed toward a legitimate purpose — namely, fostering innovation — but they can also be abused in ways that harm human rights. Thus, the relationship between IP and human rights demonstrates that corporations may have a responsibility not to take maximal advantage of opportunities to make a profit where doing so would violate human rights. It also indicates that human rights law may constrain states in the choices they make about how to incentivize innovation.
The People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.) witnesses today an explosion of law and legal practice. In the last six years China has enacted laws and promulgated regulations ranging from administrative law to criminal procedure to joint venture regulation to tax law. Intellectual and industrial property law numbers among the fastest growing fields. Since 1979 China has revitalized its trademark system, built a patent system from scratch, promulgated a Patent Law, and drafted a copyright law. Chinese copyright, trademark, nd patent law has grown equally quickly in importance to the Western practitioner. Today a Western lawyer concerned with Chinese legal and business relations must understand its copyright, trademark, and patent laws. Such understanding may prove crucial to handling technology transfer, joint ventures, tax regulation, and the rapidly expanding Chinese foreign trade. This Article describes for the benefit of the American practitioner, the Chinese system of copyright, trademark, and patent law.
It comes as something of a surprise when one of the EPO’s Technical Boards of Appeal finds that “the terminology “closest prior art” is somewhat misleading”, as stated by Board 3.4.01 in T 694/15 & T 405/14. In fact, almost no discussion at the EPO about inventive step is complete without mentioning the “Problem-Solution approach” and the “closest prior art”. Indeed, in combination, the White Book and the Guidelines for Examination refer to the “closest prior art” no fewer than 196 times. In this article we investigate whether the view of Board 3.4.01 in T 694/15 and T 405/14 is widely held, and consider its consequences.
[...]
At first sight it might appear that a corollary of moving away from the idea of a “closest” document is that the choice of starting point requires no justification. In an extreme case it might be possible to establish a lack of inventive step starting from a document in a remote technical field (perhaps even one that a real inventor would never have considered) as long as the skilled person merely has to take a straightforward, obvious step from that starting point to arrive at the claimed invention. Whilst the language “closest prior art” suggests it is important to work out which document is the closest, in practice this may end up being irrelevant — an opponent/examiner just needs to find a document from which the claim is obvious. Is this truly allowable or does it amount to a use of hindsight, by choosing an unrealistic starting point that happens to work to show a lack of an inventive step?
Board 3.4.01 appears alive to the hindsight issue. Indeed, that the generally accepted considerations for choosing the starting point (such as whether the documents share a common or similar purpose with the claimed invention) introduces a lack of objectivity is a reason that the Board gives for moving away from the idea of a “closest prior art”. Board 3.4.01 proposes instead that the question to be answered when selecting a starting point is whether that starting point “allows… a realistic objection of lack of inventive step to be raised”, in other words “on the basis of an evaluation of the likelihood of the existence of an obvious path to the claimed subject-matter”. Despite this requirement for a “realistic objection” or likelihood of an obvious path, the Board expressly mentions that it can still be possible to show a lack of inventive step from starting points that are “not even limited to items of prior art dealing with the same or similar problem so long as hindsight is avoided”. One way to rationalise these seemingly contradictory statements by this Board is that there may be cases where it would be realistic for the skilled person to start from a document in an unrelated field. But how is “realism” measured?
One possible answer is that it is the perspective of the skilled person that provides the metric by which “realism” is assessed. Many cases, including one very early Problem-Solution approach case, T 24/81, support the view that the skilled person plays a role in choosing the starting point. Board 3.4.01 in a previous case, T 2057/12, appears to agree with this solution and added that “arguments or evidence should be provided as to why the skilled person in a specific technical field would have indeed envisaged selecting a document in a remote field of technology as closest prior art”.
Merck Sharpe & Dohme Limited (MSD) has successfully revoked Wyeth LLC’s pneumococcal vaccine patent at the UK High Court (see below for a link to the full decision). The patent (EP(UK)2676679) covered Wyeth’s Prevnar 13€® product which vaccinates against pneumococcal bacteria. The patent was found to be invalid for lack of inventive step because a number of steps were thought to be within the common general knowledge of the skilled team. Following a counterclaim for infringement, MSD’s V114 product was considered to be non-infringing due a narrow claim construction.
Section 271(e)(1) of the Hatch Waxman Act allows competitors to begin the lengthy regulatory approval process while a patent is still in force. This facilitates the possibility of market entry immediately upon patent expiration. This Safe Harbor provision provides a defense to a charge of infringement if the otherwise-infringing activity is "reasonably related" to regulatory approval.
[...]
Over time, courts have held that the Safe Harbor provision applies to both drugs and devices. Courts have also expanded the scope of ۤ 271(e)(1) to protect certain activities from infringement liability, ie, the use of the patented technology to include performing preclinical research on a drug even if that information is never submitted to the FDA as part of an approval application, testing batches after submission of a Biologics License Application ("BLA"), analyzing the effect of the scheduling of immunization, and testing the purity of commercial batches even after FDA approval.
On October 16, 2020, in Edwards Lifesciences v. Meril Life Sciences, the US District Court for the Northern District of California granted a motion for summary judgment of no infringement, finding that the Safe Harbor provision of €§ 271(e)(1) protects defendants’ use of a patented method of manufacture.
Navigating the contours of the Safe Harbor provision in view of this and other recent Federal Circuit decisions will be a complicated and uncertain process. Understanding the outer limits of the Safe Harbor provision is important, as infringing acts not protected by this defense to infringement liability can result in significant damage awards exceeding tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. In two recent decisions, the question of why the patented invention was made or used was key, exemplifying the fact-intensive approach courts take in determining the applicability of ۤ 271(e)(1).
This week marks five years since the entry into force of a validation agreement between the European Patent Organisation and the State Agency on Intellectual Property of the Republic of Moldova (AGEPI). Under the agreement companies and inventors from Europe and around the world are able to easily broaden the scope of their European patent protection to the Republic of Moldova.
Meeting virtually earlier this month, European Patent Office President António Campinos and AGEPI Director General Viorel Iustin discussed the latest developments in bilateral co-operation, and in particular the validation of European patents. The validation system brings advantages for patent applicants, while increasing the attractiveness of the Moldovan economy and fostering foreign investment. The agreement also allows AGEPI to concentrate its resources on supporting local innovators, in particular universities and SMEs, in order to foster the national innovation ecosystem.
On Friday (October 30), the Munich I Regional Court (Landgericht München I) ordered its third standard-essential patent (SEP) injunction in the same calendar month, and the second against car maker Daimler over the course of eight days. Each of these decisions was based on the same clearly erroneous application of the Court of Justice of the EU's Huawei v. ZTE guidance, and each came with a determination of a negligible security amount that is an insult to human intelligence and calls into question whether the rest of the world should take any Munich patent decision seriously anymore or just attribute it to some judges' burning desire to attract patent infringement complaints to their venue, no matter the damage to device makers and to innovation itself.
But the tide may turn. At least there is hope based on certain dicta of an order by the Munich appeals court.
Today Lenovo's public relations agency sent out a press release (which others have already quoted) according to which the Munich Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht München) has granted the computer maker's motion to stay the enforcement of the H.264 video codec SEP injunction Nokia had obtained on October 1 and which the Finnish company (whose products were way too bad to stay competitive in the consumer electronics market) had recklessly started to enforce a couple of weeks ago.
What is known about the Munich appeals court's decision is that the panel (Presiding Judge: Konrad Retzer) concluded unusually quickly that the lower court's ruling most likely cannot stand. Unlike in the United States, where the enforcement of an injunction may be stayed if the defendant establishes irreparable harm and generates significant doubt about whether the court below got it right, the standard in Germany is pretty one-dimensional: short of the possibility of a company going bankrupt, only the likelihood of success on the merits determines whether a motion for an enforcement stay is granted.
As reported previously on this blog, the German ratification process for the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPC) has been started anew after the Federal Constitutional Court (BVerfG) had declared the previous ratification act void because it had not been approved by parliament with the required 2/3 majority. Now there is yet another development. The liberal party which is currently in opposition has filed on 27 October 2020 a parliamentary question (Kleine Anfrage) on the UPC.
[...]
According to the Rules of Procedure of the Federal Diet the government has to answer these questions within two weeks. Since the ratification of the UPC Agreement requires a 2/3 majority, the votes of the liberal party will be crucial for obtaining parliamentary approval of the agreement (see here). Therefore, it will be interesting to see the government’s answers and their impact on the liberals’ voting behavior.
Merck Sharp & Dohme Limited (MSD) sought to invalidate Wyeth LLC’s (Wyeth) patent, EP (UK) 2 676 679 (the ‘Patent’), with Wyeth maintaining that the Patent was valid and counterclaiming for infringement on a quia timet basis in relation to MSD’s V114 product. Interestingly Wyeth confirmed from an early stage that they would not seek an injunction on any infringement finding, rather an order for compensation. Meade J. was asked to assess the validity and infringement of the Patent in a proposed unconditionally amended form. The Patent covers Wyeth’s peneumococcal bacteria vaccination product, Prenvar 13€® and claimed a formulation which inhibited silicone-induced aggregation of a polysaccharide-protein conjugate in siliconised containers for a vaccine with polysaccharides of 13 specified serotypes. The claimed formulation involved the use of an aluminium salt adjuvant, a buffer and a surfactant.
With the issues in the case having been narrowed since its inception Meade J. was left to decide on MSD’s invalidity arguments which included anticipation, obviousness and insufficiency primarily as a squeeze against obviousness. There was also an issue of claim construction for claim 1 in relation to infringement, as well as a claim for infringement by equivalents.
[...]
This decision reaffirms the importance in English Patents Court proceedings of the role of experts and the characterisation of the CGK. It also contains a clear statement of the difference between CGK on the one hand and information that would be found by routine means as the skilled person set about a problem, on the other. Both may be taken into account by the Court in its assessment of inventive step and therefore putting such materials in evidence, and more importantly, adducing credible evidence as to the status of such materials, will often be of central importance in English proceedings.
In many jurisdictions, the scope of protection afforded by a patent is defined by the claims as read either literally or under doctrine of equivalents. Infringement based on the doctrine of equivalents may be based in part on statutory law, the interpretation of which is generally established via case law (e.g. Court decisions). The purpose of the doctrine of equivalents is to promote fair patent coverage so that trivial departures (e.g., variants or deviations) from the claim language cannot be used to avoid infringement.
This is the seventh post in our series examining the law governing the doctrine of equivalents in several European countries. Our first post examined the law governing the doctrine of equivalents in Spain, our second post examined the law in the Netherlands, our third post examined the law in Germany, our fourth post examined the law in Denmark, our fifth post examined the law in the United Kingdom, and out sixth post examined the law in France.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, law firms are permitting their lawyers to work remotely even when a return to the office is possible and practicable. One of the main professional responsibility concerns about these arrangements is the risk of falling afoul of the rules governing the unauthorized practice of law (“UPL”). That this problem even exists is a throwback to the historic premise that the regulation of who may practice law is based on the lawyer's physical location, embodied in the states' systems of lawyer regulation. ABA Model Rule 5.5, adopted with variations and a patchwork of exceptions in almost every state1, restricts lawyers from engaging in the practice of law when they are physically located in a state where they are not licensed or admitted. The potential for engaging in UPL, already a problem in the pre-pandemic era, is exacerbated by the new remote practice culture. Even before the pandemic, this byzantine, state-by-state system of regulation sometimes posed potentially serious restrictions on the freedom of clients to choose lawyers to act for them on a nationwide basis.2
Facing up to the challenges that social distancing and travel bring, the EPO, like many organisations and businesses in 2020, has introduced video conferencing as an important means to facilitate communication. In this article, we have drawn from our extensive experience of oral proceedings before the EPO by video conference (ViCo) to aid participants of such proceedings in what they might expect and how best to prepare, including a “Client Check-List for ViCo”.
Based on our experience, and having also spent time speaking to EPO Examiners since issue of their internal guidance, we have assembled a ‘toolbox’ of strategies for amending a description in advance of the official release of the new Guidelines. Based on the extensive EPO Opposition and Appeal experience of CMS patent attorneys as well as important input regarding national considerations from CMS patent litigators from the UK, France and Germany, we understand that there can be high risks associated with adopting a one-size-fits-all approach to amending a description. We are able to assess the pros and cons of various approaches to ensure that the best one is adopted for each individual case.
This article discusses the expected changes and identifies the possible issues, particularly from a life sciences and chemistry perspective, that might arise and which will need careful consideration with your EP counsel.
Introduction
Since the introduction of the EPC in 1973, approaches for amending the description have developed over time and the often complex considerations for a strategy for amending the description can come as a surprise to Applicants from different jurisdictions which do not have this requirement, such as the US.
Perhaps due to the variety of different approaches taken, the EPO appears to consider that harmonisation is required. Revisions to the EPO Guidelines are expected in March 2021 but, importantly, EPO Examiners have already been given internal guidance, and this now is evident in Examination Reports issued by the EPO. However, until the revision of the EPO Guidelines is published, Applicants have little guidance as to the EPO’s expectations for the many different types of scenario that might arise. Further, even when the Guidelines are published, it seems likely that there will still be uncertainty as to the best practice for meeting the EPO’s requirements whilst also minimising any risks for the Applicant.
In a statement, the company said the US patent concerns the formulation of a solventless extract. It has been issued patents as well in Canada, Israel, Australia, New Zealand, Colombia, South Africa, and across the EU.
Moderna, a biotech advancing one of the leading COVID-19 vaccine candidates, has faced questions for several months over its patents and intellectual property. Responding to investor questions, the company now says it won't enforce its vaccine patents against other companies during the pandemic.
In a Wall Street Journal interview, company President Stephen Hoge said Moderna is “quite studiously not asserting infringement.” Without naming names, the biotech says other COVID-19 vaccines in development might be using Moderna-patented technology.
“We’re not interested in using that IP to decrease the number of vaccines available in a pandemic,” Hoge told the WSJ. Further, the company is open to licensing its technology after the pandemic. Moderna made the pledge in response to investor questions around its patents, Hoge told the newspaper.
This Article reassesses the first two eBay factors for final injunctions—irreparable injury and the inadequacy of legal remedies—in light of traditional equitable principles. Tracking most closely with tradition would require the Federal Circuit to recognize that: (1) an injury it seeks to redress with a final injunction is future infringement itself, not just follow-on harms caused by future infringement; (2) it can presume future infringement from past infringement; (3) it can presume that legal remedies are inadequate to remedy future infringement; and (4) it need not require a plaintiff to show that alternative equitable remedies, like ongoing royalties, would inadequately redress future infringement. Moreover, the Federal Circuit can recognize, without relying on presumptions, that the burden on the first two eBay factors is not onerous. A patentee can satisfy them by showing that a defendant is likely to infringe again and that any legal damages awarded at trial did not fully compensate the patentee for the life of the patent.
We’re pleased to bring to you a guest post by Dr. Enrico Bonadio (City, University of London – Fellow of the Innovators Network Foundation during 2019-2020), Dr. Luke McDonagh (London School of Economics – Fellow of the Innovators Network Foundation during 2019-2020) and Dr. Plamen Dinev (Goldsmiths, University of London), commenting on the recent Chinese decisions granting anti-suit injunctions in two SEP cases, one of which was discussed on the blog earlier this month here.
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Huawei, the world’s top smartphone maker in terms of market share (as of 2020 Q2), initiated a non-infringement action against Conversant in the Nanjing Intermediate Court on 25 January 2018 (for an overview of the UK court dispute between the two companies, read more here). In the Nanjing proceedings, Huawei requested a determination of FRAND royalties for a range of SEPs on 2G, 3G and 4G held by Conversant. On 20th April, 2018, Conversant brought a separate action in the Düsseldorf Regional Court, alleging that Huawei had infringed a number of its German patents. Before the German Court had made a decision, on 16th September, 2019, the Nanjing Court responded by imposing ‘relatively low’ royalty rates, which prompted Conversant to take the case to the Chinese Supreme People’s Court (CSPC).
Then, on 27th August, 2020, the Düsseldorf Court found that Huawei had infringed Conversant’s patent EP1797659, which Conversant itself had acquired from Nokia in 2014. Critically, the Düsseldorf Court prohibited Huawei’s operations within the territory of the country, including the sale of UMTS-enabled devices (Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems), and approved the FRAND terms originally requested by Conversant (which are nearly 20 times higher than those initially imposed by the Nanjing Court).
This prompted Huawei to immediately apply for an anti-suit injunction at the CSPC. The Supreme Court approved the request, thus prohibiting Conversant from enforcing the German decision until the CSPC reaches its own verdict in the ongoing Chinese proceedings. As in Xiaomi v. InterDigital, the Court imposed a fine of one million yuan a day for violating the order. Moreover, its justifications are strikingly similar to those provided by the Wuhan Court. The CSPC stated that, inter alia, enforcing the German decision would have a negative impact on the Chinese proceedings; the injunction is necessary to prevent irreparable harm to Huawei; and that the Chinese case was launched prior to the German case.
The CSPC decision is still pending. Interestingly, this may result in another ‘anti-anti-suit’ injunction between a German and a foreign court, which reportedly happened for the first time in a recent dispute between Nokia and Daimler (covered on the blog here).
If we have learned anything from the last six-and-a-half years of patent eligibility jurisprudence, it is that nobody knows what's going on.
Subject matter eligibility is a fundamental requirement for an invention to be patentable. According to 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101, "[w]hoever invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof, may obtain a patent therefor, subject to the conditions and requirements of this title." This definition is quite broad, covering virtually any physical thing (machines, articles of manufacture, and compositions of matter) and any series of steps used to achieve a goal (processes). Indeed, 40 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that Congress had intended the statute to "include anything under the sun that is made by man."
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In practice, the introduction of this test effectively made it more difficult to patent certain types of inventions -- particularly, diagnostic methods, software, and business methods. As a result, there has been consternation over the Court's opinions not only in how they have reduced the ability to protect critical innovations that drive the U.S. economy, but also how vague the Justices left the line between inventions that are eligible for patent and those that are not.
On Tuesday in the District of Maryland, plaintiff Global Interactive Media, Inc. (GIM) filed a complaint for patent infringement against defendants AT&T Services, Inc. and AT&T Communications, LLC (collectively AT&T) for the purportedly infringing the patent method to identify and track broadcasts and to provide program information to consumers.
The patents-in-suit are U.S. Patent Nos. 7,574,721 (the ’721 patent); 8,032,907 (the ’907 patent); and 6,314,577 (the ’577 patent), which “each claim methods and/or systems of tracking broadcasts and providing program information on demand to customers.”
GIM averred that AT&T infringed at least claim 1 of the ’721 patent “by identifying television broadcast providers based in response to a user’s submission of a geographic identifier such as a zip code.” Specifically, claim 1 states: “[a] method for identifying at least one broadcast provider [and broadcast identifier] through a combination of a geographic identification code and a broadcast identifier…digitally storing, in a database, one or more geographic identification codes that are each associated with at least one area or location in which a broadcast is receivable from at least one broadcast provider…”
TikTok and the video sharing app's parent company ByteDance sued rival app Triller on Wednesday in a countersuit over patent infringement claims.
Chinese-owned TikTok filed a complaint in San Francisco federal court that Triller’s lawsuit, filed over the summer, has “cast a cloud” over TikTok and ByteDance, “causing uncertainty” for the company.
The complaint also denies Triller’s allegations that TikTok infringed on Triller’s patent.
“A judicial declaration is necessary to resolve the real, immediate, and justiciable controversy concerning these issues and to determine the respective rights of the parties regarding the ’429 patent,” TikTok’s complaint states.
Triller, a U.S.-based video-sharing app, filed a lawsuit in July alleging that TikTok has been using its technology for years.
Apple's upcoming patent infringement trial may be a little easier for the company after it convinced the Patent Trial and Appeal Board to review one of Seven Network's 16 patents being used against Apple in the lawsuit.
The intellectual property infringement trial set to occur on November 2 has been a year in the making, with mobile technology company Seven Networks insisting Apple has infringed on 16 owned patents covering critical software and hardware features. Depending on the outcome of a PTAB review, the number that could impact Apple may reduce down to 15.
While the PTAB typically errs to deny a petition in instances when a trial is soon to take place, the board advised on Thursday it was going to be looking at one of the patents in question, reports Law360. This is in part due to a parallel lawsuit that has been paused for 30 days because of the prospect of a potential settlement.
Now that the Madrid Protocol has been in force in Canada for close to 18 months, the Canadian Intellectual Property Office (CIPO) has started substantive examination of international applications designating Canada (Protocol Applications). Brand owners may find that this process can present unique challenges in Canada, as Shannon Young and Sanjukta Tole explain.
Appointment of local agent
All Protocol Applications owned by non-Canadian applicants require a registered local agent to be appointed in order to receive all correspondence from CIPO regarding an application. If a WIPO representative was identified in the Protocol Application but does not appear on the list of Canadian trademark agents or is not domiciled in Canada, CIPO will issue a courtesy letter advising that further correspondence regarding the Protocol application will only be sent directly to the applicant or an appointed Canadian agent.
If no local agent is appointed, material notifications (such as office actions, default notices, notices of approval for advertisement and notices of refusal setting out the time an appeal deadline) will not be received by the representative before WIPO.
Appointing a local agent can ensure that all documents issued by CIPO in respect of a Protocol Application will be received and managed, particularly in view of the fact that CIPO engages in substantive examination.
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CIPO’s interest is in preventing confusion among the public rather than protecting pre-existing rights of brand owners. Consequently, some of the usual means of overcoming such objections, such as consents, may not always be available. Pre-filing availability searches for Canada can be a valuable tool in these circumstances to pre-emptively avoid such objections.
In the first of a new series of conversations, I recently caught up with INTA’s CEO, Etienne Sanz de Acedo, to discuss plans for the upcoming virtual meeting and to hear Etienne’s thoughts on the current IP landscape and the Association’s key policy priorities. The background of the current pandemic was never far from our conversation, but Etienne, ever the optimist, was always keen to highlight opportunity and appears to be facing the situation with calm resolve. Consumer trust and behaviour and how these have evolved since the start of the pandemic were a key theme of our conversation. According to Etienne, internet usage is expected to rocket by 160% among new or low frequency users alone, whereas consumers are becoming more frugal in their consumption with a shift in focus towards home and family. The online marketplace will inevitably continue to grow, but consumers will increasingly seek to engage with transparent, fair and ethical suppliers – a major consideration for brand owners and their advisors. It seems that the pandemic is either exacerbating or accelerating trends that were already apparent, including increased consumer fatigue around certain brands and trade marks. Consumers are benefitting from better access to information, which is aiding their desire to interact with brands whose ethos lends itself to a relationship of trust and transparency. It is no longer enough for brands to be seen to talk; they also need to act.
In-house counsel and brand protection specialists are divided on whether customs authorities should switch their attention to smaller packages
It’s not often that flags and copyright take centre stage in public debate, but that is exactly what’s happening in Australia, where the government is negotiating with an Aboriginal man who owns the copyright to his peoples’ flag.
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In 1995, the Australian governor-general proclaimed the flag as the Australian Aboriginal Flag. Although the government reportedly acted in good faith, Thomas was bitterly opposed to the proclamation – and made his grievances known before it was made. He believed it represented the usurpation of something belonging to the Aboriginal peoples, and his anger triggered a copyright dispute with the government. Two years later, in 1997, the Federal Court declared Thomas the owner of the design’s copyright after dismissing two other men’s claims.
A few months after the turn of the new millennium, a new piece of software called LimeWire saw the light. At the time, Napster was still the dominant file-sharing tool and the music industry's greatest threat. However, it didn't take long before LimeWire took over, dwarfing all other P2P applications. Two decades later, we talk to several developers who witnessed it all first hand.
Internet Matters, a not-for-profit organization based in London, has been running a video anti-piracy campaign for just over a week. In common with many of its kind, it focuses on the supposed dangers of piracy, such as exposure to malware. Its viewing figures are both unusual and extraordinary, especially when placed alongside a similar campaign in the US.
Trudeau was right in 2018. Canadians already pay too much for Internet and wireless access and increasing the cost of Internet services will render those services less affordable with reduced choice for millions of Canadian consumers. The right way to make the services pay is through conventional taxation, but this will apparently be left for another day.
