When Google announced that they were bringing their Flutter UI Toolkit to Linux, there were a lot of mixed reactions. Some thought this would revolutionize desktop Linux, others thought it would increase reliance on Google.
But with the amount of fragmentation between different Linux projects (especially when it comes to the UI), do we really want or need another UI Toolkit?
Josh and Kurt talk about dark patterns. A dark pattern is when a service tries to confuse a user into doing something they don’t want to, like unknowingly purchasing a monthly subscription to something you don’t need or want. The US Federal Trade Commission is starting to discuss dark patterns in webs sites and apps.
We start you off with the headlines that matter this week, then share our thoughts on Audacity's new owners proposing user tracking.
Back in November the Arch team added a bunch of accessibility features into the Arch ISO to make it so it would be even remotely possible for someone who needs a screen reader to actually install Arch Linux with the vanilla ISO.
Linux 5.10 as the latest Long Term Support release when announced was only going to be maintained until the end of 2022 but following enough companies stepping up to help with testing, Linux 5.10 LTS will now be maintained until the end of year 2026.
Linux 5.10 LTS was originally just going to be maintained until the end of next year while prior kernels like Linux 5.4 LTS are being maintained until 2024 or even Linux 4.19 LTS and 4.14 LTS going into 2024. Linux 5.10 LTS was short to begin with due to the limited number of developers/organizations helping to test new point release candidates and/or committing resources to using this kernel LTS series. But now there are enough participants committing to it that Greg Kroah-Hartman confirmed he along with Sasha Levin will maintain the kernel through December 2026.
Oracle engineers have continued working on the "Maple Tree" data structure for the Linux kernel as an RCU-safe, range-based B-tree designed to make efficient use of modern processor caches.
Sent out last year was the RFC patch series of Maple Tree for the Linux kernel to introduce this new data structure and make initial use of it. Sent out last week was the latest 94 patches in a post-RFC state for introducing this data structure.
In addition to work like Linux 5.13 addressing some network overhead caused by Retpolines, this next kernel's return trampoline implementation itself is seeing a simplification.
Merged as part of x86/core last week for the Linux 5.13 kernel were enabling PPIN support for Xeon Sapphire Rapids, KProbes improvements, and other minor changes plus simplifying the Retpolines implementation used by some CPUs as part of the Spectre V2 mitigations. The x86/core pull request for Linux 5.13 also re-sorts and better documents Intel's increasingly long list of different CPU cores/models.
The Linux 5.13 kernel has initial support for dealing with SPI one-time programmable (OTP) flash memory regions.
Linux 5.13 adds the new MTD OTP functions for accessing SPI one-time programmable data. The OTP are memory regions intended to be programmed once and can be used for permanent secure identification, immutable properties, and similar purposes.
In addition to adding the core infrastructure support for OTP to the MTD SPI-NOR code in Linux 5.13, the functionality is wired up for Winbond and similar flash memory chips. The MTD subsystem has already supported OTP areas but not for SPI-NOR flash memory.
It’s time to get busy again and test the next major Linux kernel branch, Linux 5.13, which had a fairly big merge window, according to Linus Torvalds. However, it looks like things have proceeded fairly smoothly and the first Release Candidate is now ready for public testing.
Once again, the biggest changes in Linux kernel 5.13 appear to be made around the AMD GPU open-source graphics driver for AMD Radeon GPUs, which received a “huge dump” of descriptor header files, but there’s a lot more to look for in the upcoming Linux kernel release compared to Linux kernel 5.12.
For your information, merge window for the Linux Kernel 5.13 is closed and the first RC version is now available for the download. Yes, you can download the first Linux Kernel 5.13 release candidate.
Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 5.13-rc1 as a Mother's Day kernel test release that also marks the closure of the merge window for the cycle.
Torvalds wrote in the announcement about the size of this merge window, "This was - as expected - a fairly big merge window, but things seem to have proceeded fairly smoothly. Famous last words. There's a lot in there, although the diffstat looks pretty skewed - once again due to some amdgpu header files...The shortlog would be even bigger than usual, with 1800+ developers and 14k+ non-merge commits (over 15k commits counting merges)."
The first 5.13 kernel prepatch is out for testing, and the merge window is closed for this development cycle. "This was - as expected - a fairly big merge window, but things seem to have proceeded fairly smoothly. Famous last words." In the end, 14,231 non-merge changesets were pulled into the mainline during the merge window — more than were seen during the entire 5.12 cycle.
So two weeks are over, and the merge window is closed.
This was - as expected - a fairly big merge window, but things seem to have proceeded fairly smoothly. Famous last words.
There's a lot in there, although the diffstat looks pretty skewed - once again due to some amdgpu header files. Those things are huge, and autogenerated from hardware descriptions, and the end result is that they often end up overshadowing all the other changes if you only look at the diffs. In fact, over a third of the diff for 5.13-rc1 is just from those kinds of header files.
So ignore that part if you want to look at what changed. That will still show driver changes at 60% of the diff, which is all normal. It's all over the place, although gpu and networking stands out (yes, the gpu updates are noticeable even when ignoring the amd header files).
Outside of drivers, it's a bit of everything: arch updates (arm, x86 and powerpc dominate), documentation (devicetree bindings dominate - I'm not sure it should count as documentation, but there's also a fair amount of translation work), tooling, and obviously all the expected core kernel stuff: filesystems, process handling, VM and core networking.
The shortlog would be even bigger than usual, with 1800+ developers and 14k+ non-merge commits (over 15k commits counting merges). So appended is my usual rc1 "merge shortlog". And as always, this credits the people I merge from - if you want to see details about authorship and exact commits, you will need to go to the git tree itself.
The merge log is obviously woefully inadequate, with the diffstat summary kind of showing why:
12015 files changed, 631309 insertions(+), 246239 deletions(-)
it really is a fair amount of stuff, all over the place.
Go test, Linus
This week Linus Torvalds continued a long email interview with Jeremy Andrews, founding partner/CEO of Tag1 (a global technology consulting firm and the second all-time leading contributor to Drupal). In the first part Torvalds had discussed everything from Apple's ARM64 chips and Rust drivers, to his own Fedora-based home work environment — and reflections on the early days of Linux.
Following the two week merge window, feature development on the Linux 5.13 kernel is slated to end today with the release of Linux 5.13-rc1. Here is a look at some of the most interesting new features and improvements for this kernel that in turn should debut as stable around the end of June.
Arguably most notable with Linux 5.13 is the introduction of basic Apple M1 SoC/platform support. But there are also many other exciting updates coming with Linux 5.13 like preliminary Intel Alder Lake S graphics support, AMDGPU FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync HDMI support, AMD Aldebaran accelerator support, a generic USB display driver for interesting innovative use-cases, Amazon Luna Game Controller support, a new Intel cooling driver to help with overheating issues, the Landlock security module was finally mainlined, Clang CFI is now available, and other security improvements as well as plenty of other new hardware support.
KeePass password manager released version 2.48 a few days ago. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 18.04 via PPA.
It has hit me several times, and searching the internet gives lots of suggestions: How to pass and argument containing quotes to another program from a bash program.
This is another post about EVM/IMA which has it’s main purpose providing useful web search results for problems. However if reading it on a planet feed inspires someone to play with EVM/IMA then that’s good too, it’s interesting technology.
First of all, what is that actually? PCI passthrough describes the process of passing PCI (e) components directly to a virtual machine. This makes it part of the VM and also directly recognizes it as hardware. In the standard, the function is not configured in the Debian substructure of Proxmox. Proxmox also reports this when we want to give a VM a PCI device.
We do RPM things. Some of those RPM things need the /proc file system. Not forever, but for a short while. So we mount /proc, do something, and unmount. Which works fine.
Until we tried to do it in a container.
The sudo command in Linux allows users to run certain commands as another user, preferably as root. Having sudo access allows regular users to perform tasks that otherwise require elevated permissions.
However, sudo requires users to enter their passwords for every new session. This can prove cumbersome for regular tasks like system maintenance. Luckily, you can easily use the sudo command without passwords.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gradle on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Gradle is a free and open-source tool that is useful to build, automate, and deliver software. It is mainly useful for Java, C++, and other Swift projects. Gradle combines the best features of Ant as well as Maven. Also, Gradle uses Groovy, a dynamic, and object-oriented programming language for the Java platform. It helps to define the project and build the scripts.
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 Gradle on an AlmaLinux 8.
In this video, we are looking at how to install Gimp 3 Beta on Deepin 20.2.
Today we are looking at how to install Funkin' with Hex, Dalia, and Ena! 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.
This all started with a Mele PCG09 before testing Linux on this I took a quick look under Windows and the device-manager there showed an exclamation mark next to a Realtek 8723BS bluetooth device, so BT did not work. Under Linux I quickly found out why, the device actually uses a Broadcom Wifi/BT chipset attached over SDIO/an UART for the Wifi resp. BT parts. The UART connected BT part was described in the ACPI tables with a HID (Hardware-ID) of "OBDA8723", not good.
Now I could have easily fixed this with an extra initrd with DSDT-overrride but that did not feel right. There was an option in the BIOS which actually controls what HID gets advertised for the Wifi/BT named "WIFI" which was set to "RTL8723" which obviously is wrong, but that option was grayed out. So instead of going for the DSDT-override I really want to be able to change that BIOS option and set it to the right value. Some duckduckgo-ing found this blogpost on changing locked BIOS settings.
All logs report PASSED for each test done and uploaded as prompted at instruction page.
This post explores some of the darker corners of command-line parsing that some may be unaware of.
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No, I’m not questioning your debating skills, I’m referring to parsing command-lines!
Parsing command-line option is something most programmers need to deal with at some point. Every language of note provides some sort of facility for handling command-line options. All a programmer needs to do is skim read the docs or grab the sample code, tweak to taste, et voila!
But is it that simple? Do you really understand what is going on? I would suggest that most programmers really don’t think that much about it. Handling the parsing of command-line options is just something you bolt on to your codebase. And then you move onto the more interesting stuff. Yes, it really does tend to be that easy and everything just works… most of the time.
Most? I hit an interesting issue recently which expanded in scope somewhat. It might raise an eyebrow for some or be a minor bomb-shell for others.
If you are reading this page then you are like all of us a Linux fan, also you are using the command line every day and absolutely love Linux. But even in love and marriage there are things that make you just a little bit annoyed. Here in this article we are going to show you some of the most stupid Linux commands that a person can find.
Wine lets GNU/Linux users run a lot of Windows software at near-native speeds, but there's still a very long way to go until you can open any random piece of Windows software in Wine and expect it to "just work". Wine 6.8 is another development release with small steps towards full Windows compatibility.
Wine 6.8 has 18 commits to the wined3d DirectX to OpenGL translation layer, support for the map object in JavaScript applications implemented by Jacek Caban, 35 commits to the widely used ntdll library, a new implementation for msv1_0 written by Hans Leidekker and 35 code commits to the user32 library mostly contributed by Rémi Bernon.
For today's Sunday Section we're going over a few missed bits and pieces for Linux, open source and gaming topics while also asking you that all important question.
Firstly, Steam has a fresh Steam Client Beta up! Well, there's actually been a few recently but one in particular released on April 26 caught my eye. Valve has upgraded the video decoder on all platforms, with Linux now using VA-API 0.2 for optional hardware decode functionality. So those of you with an AMD GPU should see a nicer experience for Remote Play.
Antonio Ceballos from the GNU Chess engine team is "glad" to announce a new GNU Chess release with "Bug fixes mainly in the input processing". That's the entirety of the changelog since version 6.2.7 was released almost one year ago. The GNU Chess engine has been around since 1984. It has grown smart during it's years, and you may find that you will have a very hard time beating it.
[...]
There may not be much else to change to a chess engine that's been around for 37 years. GNU Chess was originally written by Stuart Cracraft in collaboration with Richard Stallman in 1984. Though.. the modern version isn't related to that version. GNU Chess was re-written by John Stanback before the 2.x series and it was again changed to use a completely new chess engine, based on the Cobalt chess engine written by Chua Kong-Sian, when GNU Chess 5 was released. And that wasn't the end of it, the current GNU Chess 6.x series using a completely different chess engine based on Fabien Letouzey's Fruit engine (Fruit 2.1 to be specific). The first version using the Fruit-based engine, GNU Chess 6.0, was released on April 26th, 2011. That's nearly a decade ago, so there may not be any need to do more with GNU Chess 6.x beyond "Bug fixes mainly in the input processing" at point.
While the changes don’t drastically alter the KDE Connect Android app’s capabilities — earlier incarnations were perfectly functional — the redo does help bring the app a bit closer to modern design sensibilities used on the Android platform.
About 30 participants joined the first Kdenlive video café last Tuesday, the 4th of May 2021! We had a nice meeting of about 2,5 hours with inspiring discussions. We got a great feedback and we are already having plans to reintroduce community meetings more frequently… Several people asked for a recording of the meeting e.g. because the were not able to join (the whole time), but we feared that this might have destroyed the informal atmosphere where people dared to speak freely.
[...]
Jean-Baptiste is currently working on a refactoring of the jobmanager to fix some major performance issues. A few days ago version 7 of Kdenlives media backend MLT has been release and we already made some steps to support the new version. MLT7 supports time remapping and we want to add this high requested feature soon. Two other features we are going to work on are multiple timelines and advanced trimming tools. During the past releases we had good experience with 1-2 big new features per release and beside that work on polishing and bug fixing.
If you watched enough of the Muppet Show long ago, like I did, then “the continuing stooory, of a cat .. who has gone to the dogs” should trigger Pigs in Space memories. Like a good(?) soap opera, Wayland on FreeBSD just keeps giving material for a new episode, so let’s take a look at recent changes.
KDE Gear 21.04 was released some weeks ago.
If you use some distribution like e.g. the rolling release Arch Linux (or Arch derivates like Manjaro), you might already have updated to Kate from that release.
As show in the 21.04 pre-release post, Kate 21.04 really has some nifty new features and improvements on all fronts over 20.12.
The major changes are new versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, multiple NVIDIA drivers to choose from, and a lot more. For those unaware, OpenIndiana is a distribution of illumos, which in turn is the continuation of the last open source Solaris version before Oracle did what it does best and messed everything up.
But in the 1990s, as Linux was first emerging as a potential operating system with mainstream appeal, the options weren’t necessarily so easy to grasp, which meant that you had to put it on a disk drive before you could actually use it. But doing so in a way that wasn’t destructive went over the heads of new users.
And given that Windows already gave users enough heartache, if Linux was going to win over a large audience, it was going to have to be presented in a way that a regular person could try without the risk of breaking anything.
There was just one problem: The technology wasn’t yet ready. The original alpha of Yggdrasil Linux/GNU/X, considered the first Live CD built expressly for Linux, released well before the term “Live CD” was even in use, required 8 megabytes of RAM, at a time when that much RAM was not necessarily common in mainstream computers. (The final release, still downloadable today, lowered the number to 4MB of RAM.)
While a landmark of sorts today, Yggdrasil quickly faded from view, and that meant that others would be left to try again.
The passage of time was a useful thing, however. In 2000, the Pentium III was common, and the Pentium 4 had just been released. The CD-ROM drive, long having gotten past the caddy, had reached speeds of as high as 52X, whirring along at more than 6,000 revolutions per minute, to draw read speeds above 6 megabytes per second. (By comparison, the average SATA SSD maxes out at 600 megabytes per second; a modern high-end hard drive can hit maybe a third of that speed.) And DVD-ROMs, which started at 1.25 megabytes per second in speed (nearly 10 times that of a 1X CD-ROMs) were becoming mainstream by this point, and could hold significantly more data, to boot.
But then, there was the portability factor—how were we going to get these live CDs out to lots of people? If you ever went to a Barnes & Noble and picked up a Linux magazine off the rack, you know the answer already—the live CD distros that were often distributed with magazines! But that didn’t necessarily make itself clear at first.
One of the most recent additions to the DistroWatch database is JingOS, an Ubuntu-based Linux distribution for tablet computers. The project aims to run both GNU/Linux and Android applications via a graphical user interface which is designed to work in a familiar way on touch screens. While early versions of JingOS were developed for ARM-based devices, JingOS 0.8 is the project's first version to run on x86 processors.
The JingOS project requires that people register their e-mail address to obtain the project's free download. A download link is then sent to our e-mail address. When I downloaded an earlier version of JingOS (version 0.6) the download link was for the distribution's ISO file directly. When I downloaded version 0.8 I was given a link to the project's torrent file. At first my torrent download only had two seeders with an average download speed of 20kB/s. This eventually rose to eight seeders at 400kB/s, which is unusually slow compared to most free mirrors available these days. The ISO file's total size is 2.4GB so the download took over two hours.
Booting from the distribution's install media causes the system to start with a self-check of the media. This check can be skipped by pressing Ctrl+C. The screen then goes entirely black for a while. After a few minutes I started testing keyboard input without any response. The only thing I could do was to switch between terminals using the Ctrl+Alt+Function keys.
I found the first terminal remained blank, the second terminal showed a colourful background and a clock displaying UTC time. Terminals three through six all displayed a console login prompt. The login prompts identify the distribution as KDE neon's Unstable Edition.
SystemRescueCD is an Arch Linux-based system on a bootable CD-ROM or USB drive, designed for repairing a system and data after a crash.
The primary purpose of SystemRescue (also known as SystemRescueCd) is to repair unbootable or otherwise damaged computer systems after a system crash. It aims to provide an easy way to carry out admin tasks on your computer, such as creating and editing the hard disk partitions.
The most recent version for this operating system SystemRescueCd 8.03 is out now.
Today we’re releasing Freespire 7.5. While incremental, it does incorporate some important OS fixes to version 7.0 which we will detail. Freespire, for those not in the know, is the open source equivalent of Linspire and Xandros, but with strictly libre / open source components. There are no proprietary code or codecs included with Freespire; the team tries to adhere as closely as possible the definition of free software.
Welcome to this week's Linux Weekly Roundup. We hope that you are doing well.
This week we had only a few new Linux distro releases, but good ones! Manjaro 21.0.4, Bluestar Linux 5.12.1, Freespire 7.5.
More than three months in the works, Armbian 21.05 is here as a worthy upgrade to version 21.02 with support for the Linux 5.11 kernel series, support for the Orange Pi R1 Plus open-source single-board computer, improved NVIDIA Jetson Nano support, as well as improved support for the Desktop images.
Yes, that’s right, Armbian can also run on desktop computers powered by ARM processors, such as PINE64’s Pinebook Pro laptop, not only embedded devices or Linux phones. The Armbian team did a great job improving desktop support by adding additional desktop configurations for use with their new framework and implemented a Jira-based checklist for testing the Desktop images.
In April I was assigned 16 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 2.5 hours from earlier months. I worked 14 hours and will carry over the remainder.
I spent a long time trying to verify that the futex issue in was now properly fixed in Linux 4.9, and reviewing the merge of these changes with the real-time (PREEMPT_RT) kernel patchset. Unfortunately this work is not complete and I did not make another upload this month.
The problem reported was for XenialPup. Also getting it with Racy. XenialPup is x86_64, Racy is i686, so that is not a cause. Not getting the corruption with the newer pups and EasyOS. Note, the tray that you see on the desktop is created by JWM, the window manager. The desktop icons and wallpaper are created by ROX-Filer, what is called the "pinboard". So ROX-Filer is not just a file manager, it is also responsible for part of what you see on the desktop.
When a pup or Easy desktop is launched in a container, JWM is started first, then ROX-Filer. Rox creates the desktop icons OK, but sometimes scrambles the wallpaper, even overwriting the desktop icons, with multiple reproductions of the icons. There is a file, /root/Choices/ROX-Filer/PuppyPin, which may be located elsewhere in some pups, that defines the desktop icons and the wallpaper. It is an XML file, with tag for the wallpaper. If that tag is removed from PuppyPin, all is well, the desktop is fine in the container, desktop icons display, with a blank white background.
The first service pack for the current stable branch has been released, v21.03.1. Services packs bring improvements from the edge channel of postmarketOS to the stable release after they have been thoroughly tested.
I use spellcheck in Neovim all the time. It’s my only editor and I use it for everything, even when I input text on the web via my web browser qutebrowser. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any natural keys to bind the spellcheck commands to.
Plain60-B is a rather simple and affordable PCB that’s designed to support as little layouts as possible without limiting usability for most users. It doesn’t even feature LEDs or underglow.
It supports both the VIA and the QMK firmware. And as a creature of habit, I went with QMK as always. If you want to read about my layout, check out my post about my custom keyboard layout. The post is about two years old, so I might do an update on that soon.
So, what could be the solution? This reminds one of a similar situation in computer software when hardware prices dropped like a stone in water but software costs rose like a helium balloon and became the dominant part of the cost for anyone wishing to use a computer. This was made possible by converting software into a product which offers only the right to use, as opposed to the prevailing practice of allowing the users to do whatever they want with it, as was done in the Unix world before software became proprietary. Thus was born Free Software, launched by a prominent hacker of the time at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Richard M. Stallman under the project he called GNU’s Not Unix (with the recursive acronym GNU). This is software that gives users the freedom to use, share, study and modify. With those rights, the software became freely downloadable at zero cost, enabling anyone to use even an old computer, and thus making it accessible to virtually anyone. Today the software has grown to be the dominant one among all computing devices.
Can this be a model for medicine too? Yes, indeed. It can. In fact, there are medical systems other than modern medicine that practised this kind of openness. All traditional medical systems were open, as the concept of the ownership of knowledge, such as copyright and patent laws came only very recently. In fact, the first copyright law was enacted only in 1710 by Queen Anne of England and was known as the Statute of Anne. It was actually meant to prevent publishers from controlling the printing and sales of books to benefit only themselves. The statute sought to benefit the authors in order to encourage them to write more for the good of society. That it eventually got to be controlled by publishers is another story altogether.
The point is that, before all that happened, all knowledge was free (well, almost1), and everyone could learn whatever they wanted. Thus, medicines were often prescribed not by just a name, but by giving the recipe to prepare them. This continues to be the custom in systems like Ayurveda, Siddha and Unani systems of medicine developed in India and the Arab world and the Traditional Chinese Medicines (TCM2). But these medical systems may not be acceptable to many who are looking for scientific validation. This, unfortunately, is a drawback of these systems that were created millennia before modern science was born. But it could be easily recified if some researchers in the medical field are open-minded enough to do experiments to validate their medicines and treatment protocols, which have many pieces of anecdotal evidence of success. Alternatively, the government of India could direct its own Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences (CCRAS) to validate Ayurvedic, Siddha or Unani treatment protocols using modern scientific methods.
We had five presentations done, all prerecorded and made available before the event. At the Sunday afternoon we gathered to discuss the presentations and everything around those topics.
The Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences (ISCAS) in cooperation with the Chinese openEuler Linux distribution have been working on their own project akin to Google Summer of Code and Outreachy for paying university-aged students to become involved in open-source software development.
"Summer 2021" as the initiative is simply called or "Summer 2021 of Open Source Promotion Plan" is providing university-aged students around the world funding by the Institute of Software Chinese Academy of Sciences to work on community open-source projects.
It's just like Google Summer of Code but with offering different funding levels based upon the complexity of the project -- funding options are 12000 RMB, 9000 RMB, or 6000 RMB. That's roughly $932 to $1,865 USD for students to devote their summer to working on open-source. There are not any gender/nationality restrictions with this initative but students must be at least eighteen years old.
There’s only one specific requirement to be able to apply: be at least 18 years old at the time of registration. Selected students will be paid according to the complexity of the project with 12000 RMB ($1,867), 9000 RMB ($1,400), or 6000 RMB ($933) “bonuses” to be distributed at the end of the project.
Other stakeholders include the communities and mentors. A community provides a list and description of the project, and arranges for a mentor to communicate the program with the applicant and select one of the applicants to undertake the project during an up to three-month development period.
In recent months, blind people and disability advocates have been speaking out on social media and suing companies that use AccessiBe. Blind people say AccessiBe, which is supposed to automatically make websites more compatible with the screen readers blind people rely on to access the internet, has prevented them from all sorts of normal activities online, like paying rent, teaching a class or buying Christmas gifts.
AccessiBe is the largest automated accessibility company on the market, according to Lucy Greco, who is blind and the head of web accessibility at the University of California, Berkeley.
The situation has gotten so bad that in the past two months more than 400 blind people, accessibility advocates and software developers signed an open letter calling on companies that use automated services, like AccessiBe and other companies with similar products, to stop.
Announced at the tail-end of 2020, the construction of Finland’s first-ever quantum computer is now fully underway. The project is a public-private collaboration, with € 20.7 million in funding from The Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment having been granted to the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland and their co-innovation partner IQM.
The mammoth project, currently underway at the Micronova research facility jointly owned by VTT and Aalto University, aims to put Finland at the forefront of an emerging technology that has powerful implications for AI, defence technology, transport infrastructure, and more. While the project has been billed as a Finnish success story, one aspect that can be easily overlooked is the diverse and international team behind it.
For many of us during this pandemic, our own values, needs, and safety became glaringly apparent. Our entire human connections transformed to the point that some relationships ended while others emerged as responses to our needs. In essence, Covid-19 brings us face to face with our personal AS political lives and Fernandez interrogates the idea of the personal is political in Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place. At once a witty, interrogative, and nostalgic memoir, the reader finds an astute and humane documentation of atrocious sites of injustice in impeccable journalistic fashion. Fernandez makes no secret of her disdain of the nation she spent her childhood in, but she also offers bold and righteously damning critiques of many nation-states, always championing the masses and the collective lamentation of freedoms denied all over the world. Her self-awareness about her privileges as a white woman who holds powerful documents that allow her to pursue her needs by leaving and arriving whenever and wherever she wants to grounds the reader in being less critical of her and more empathetic to oneself and by default, others. Fernandez shares that she always felt the need to leave; the desire for movement and a fast-paced life. While globe hopping, Fernandez takes the reader through Lebanon, Morocco, Minnesota/the United States, Palestine, and El Salvador. The checkpoint at her very front door in a small, coastal town meant to control the spread of Covid-19, checkpoints in Gaza, checkpoints at airports, and checkpoints of whiteness intertwine and meld to remind the reader that freedom for some means disaster for many.
The confinement of people she loves in places throughout the world who experience a lack of agency due to political oppression is a palpable concern in her story. Gaza and Lebanon, but also the United States, her place of birth and childhood, that is the most problematic for her and the one place to which she avoids returning. Fernandez learns of George Floyd’s lynching through the television of a Zipolite family giving her shelter during the aftermath of an earthquake and for readers around the world, we are immediately reminded that justice and peace are eternally elusive for the masses of people without racial, gender, sexual, economic, and other privileges. She never shies away from turning these critiques upon herself; and yet, the reader empathizes with her because in our own ways, we avoid the discomfort of lacking agency to do more for each other. As she says, a sentiment the reader can understand deeply because of quarantine, “there was no longer a surplus of people to throw me into ethical dilemmas” about personal choices of say, yoga clothed or nude, but the political became even more tantamount as Black and brown bodies piled higher and higher because of structural inequities throughout the world.
Multiple sources have confirmed that the ransomware attack was caused by a cyber-criminal gang called DarkSide, who infiltrated Colonial's network on Thursday and took almost 100GB of data hostage.
After seizing the data, the [crackers] locked the data on some computers and servers, demanding a ransom on Friday. If it is not paid, they are threatening to leak it onto the [Internet].
Colonial said it is working with law enforcement, cyber-security experts and the Department of Energy to restore service.
On Sunday evening it said that although its four mainlines remain offline, some smaller lateral lines between terminals and delivery points are now operational.
In an apparent industry first, the global insurance company AXA said Thursday it will stop writing cyber-insurance policies in France that reimburse customers for extortion payments made to ransomware criminals.
AXA, among Europe’s top five insurers, said it was suspending the option in response to concerns aired by French justice and cybersecurity officials during a Senate roundtable in Paris last month about the devastating global epidemic of ransomware.
The company is believed to have been hit by the DarkSide ransomware, a recent addition to the swarms of ransomware that attack Microsoft's Windows operating system.
Colonial is the biggest American refined products pipeline system and can carry more than three million barrels of petrol, diesel and jet fuel between the US Gulf Coast and the New York Harbour area, according to Wikipedia.
In these reports we try to the most important things that we have been up to over the past month. As a quick recap, whilst anyone may inspect the source code of free software for malicious flaws, almost all software is distributed to end users as pre-compiled binaries. If you are interested in contributing to the project, please visit our Contribute page on our website.
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Closer to home, Jeremiah Orians wrote to our mailing list reporting that it is now possible to bootstrap the GCC compiler without using the pre-generated Bison grammar files, part of a broader attempt to provide a “reproducible, automatic [and] complete end-to-end bootstrap from a minimal number of binary seeds to a supported fully functioning operating system” […]. In addition, Richard Clobus started a thread on potential problems the -Wl,--build-id=sha1 linker flag which can later be used when analysing core dumps and tracebacks.
For most internet users, there’s not much of a perceivable difference between the domain name they want to visit and the server that the domain queries.
That’s because the Domain Name System (DNS) protocol does a good job of seamlessly routing users to different IP addresses that are all associated with a single domain name. The bad news is that this level of seamlessness makes it easier for threat actors and criminals to steal sensitive information and compromise computer hardware and networks with malware.
The latest news on DNS vulnerabilities shines the spotlight on nine newly discovered vulnerabilities that put more than 100 million IoT devices in jeopardy. These DNS vulnerabilities, dubbed “NAME:WRECK DNS,” threaten IoT users with Denial of Service (DoS) and Remote Code Execution attacks that let cybercriminals assume control over targeted IoT systems. Once attackers take these devices offline, there’s nothing left to stop them from targeting and assaulting other IoT attack surfaces.
Universities around the globe have been profoundly affected by stay-at-home orders, which have required them to close their doors and shift to online teaching and learning. In an effort to avoid delaying or postponing examinations amid the Covid-19 outbreak, many higher-education institutions have turned to online proctoring tools, raising complex questions about how they can ensure the integrity of online assessments while at the same time respect ethical and legal constraints, especially regarding students’ fundamental rights to privacy, data protection and non-discrimination. In particular, universities are increasingly relying on AI-based facial recognition technologies (FRT) that can be used to authenticate remote users that connect from offsite the campus as well as to identify cheating and other dubious behavior throughout the online exam process.
"Schools should be safe havens for children, not zones of war."
The 2021 Global Report on Food Crises found that 155 million people in 55 countries faced acute hunger in 2020, an increase of 20 million people suffering from severe food insecurity compared with the previous year.
Ansaar and an affiliated organization "spread a Salafist world view and finance terror around the world under the guise of humanitarian aid," Seehofer said.
Children from Germany would be sent to institutions set up by Ansaar International abroad "in order to internalize Salafist extremist content there and carry it back to Germany," he added.
Sources in the KRG interviewed for this article said that they regard the operations as part of a Turkish effort to turn the autonomous Kurdish area in northern Iraq into a Turkish satrapy. The PKK threat, according to this view, is a useful pretext for this purpose.
A bombing near a school in Kabul on Saturday killed at least 50 people, many of them young students.
At least 100 people were wounded in the attack, according to Interior Ministry spokesman Tariq Arian, the Associated Press reports. He told the AP that casualties could continue to rise.
No group has claimed responsibility for the attack.
Another U.S. energy company told the AP that it was forced to "temporarily halt" all operations on a pipeline that delivers about 45 percent of all fuel consumed by Eastern Seaboard states.
The last reported shut of the pipeline was in October 2020 during Hurricane Delta. The Colonial shut its main distillate fuel line down on October 11 after the hurricane disrupted electric power and halted transport between Houston and Greensboro, North Carolina.
Brazil’s Federal Police agency subpoenaed Sônia Guajajara, the executive coordinator for the Articulation Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB) on April 26 to respond to charges of slander as well as the dissemination of fake news. These accusations are the result of her appearance in a 2020 eight-part web documentary series called Maracá. In it, Guajajara, along with dozens of other natives, activists, artists, and academics denounced numerous health protocol violations committed against indigenous communities by drawing links between Brazil’s 521 years of genocidal history to the current COVID-19 pandemic.
“I was intimidated by the federal police, as a representative of @apiboficial to testify in an inquiry about the Maracá web series,” Guajajara shared on Twitter on April 30, about the police action. “The persecution from this government is unacceptable and absurd! They won’t silence us!” she added. Guajajara was a Socialism and Liberty Party candidate during the 2018 Presidential elections and has been a fierce critic of Bolsonaro and his administration’s indigenous and environmental policies, and its handling of the pandemic.
One day after Brazil's far-right president Jair Bolsonaro asked world leaders for financial support to save the Amazon rainforest, the federal government slashed the Environment Ministry's budget by $45 million.
If it is spontaneous, the research around the ethology for canines could get really interesting. Scientific evidence has previously suggested that dogs don't recognize themselves in the mirror. The so-called mirror test is used to determine whether an animal has the ability of visual self-recognition, and is considered a marker of intelligence in animals. Elephants, chimpanzees, and dolphins are among the animals who have passed the test, but dogs typically don't.
Nasdaq’s pricing system relies for price quotations on 32-bit integers. Nobody conceived that a share price might exceed $429,496.7295, as Berkshire Hathaway’s has. (Nasdaq marks prices to hundredths of a cent.) This assumption seemed reasonable: only in recent years has Berkshire Hathaway flown so close to the value. The share price of NVR Inc, a construction-and-mortgage company that comes second to Berkshire Hathaway among public companies for sticker shock, is not far above $5,000. But now it is causing trouble. Although orders for Berkshire Hathaway shares were largely unaffected—it is listed on the New York Stock Exchange, which says it can handle high numbers just fine—Nasdaq and some smaller exchanges were unable to include the company in some stock-price feeds or to accept certain share orders. Nasdaq’s engineers are rushing to update their systems to accommodate higher prices.
Told in chronological order, we see a sea of mourners – from Tajikistan to Riga, Latvia to Azerbaijan to the Altai Region in Mongolia to Tallinn, Estonia to Vladivostok in the Far East to Vilnius, Lithuania to Kyrgyzstan to Lvov, Ukraine and beyond – pour out to pay their last respects to the man who led the USSR for almost three decades. Across the sprawling country, masses of workers flood the snowy streets, assemble at factories, oil rigs and other worksites, in remote villages and city squares, marching, parading, wearing winter coats with red/black armbands of mourning and holding aloft red flags emblazoned with hammers and sickles, placing gigantic wreaths at the base of colossal statues and portraits of Stalin. Often, the aggrieved listen to what are presumably amplified elegies, delivered by speakers, heard over loudspeakers or radios. In the process we see that the vast Soviet Union was a multi-ethnic society, composed mainly of Caucasians and Asian peoples of various religious origins, including the Russian Orthodox Church and Islam.
Much of State Funeral’s action takes place in Moscow, where dignitaries from around the pro-socialist world and representatives from international Communist Parties join with ordinary proletarians and soldiers to witness the embalmed Marshall Stalin, clad in a military uniform, lying in state inside an open casket within the capacious Hall of the Columns in Moscow’s House of Unions. There, throngs of lamenters file past the coffin at a brisk pace as a live orchestra plays somber music, notably the third movement of Chopin’s “Piano Sonata No.€ 2,” the famed “Funeral March” (“Marche Funèbre”).
Fahmy bemoaned survey results showing Americans' negative impressions of Islam and Muslims, but her skewed, superficial sophistries simply reinforce the reasoning behind those impressions. Middle East studies academics like her do a disservice to Muslims concerned about bigotry by refusing to truthfully critique difficult issues within Islam. These range from what the late Harvard scholar Samuel P. Huntington called "Islam's bloody borders" to the unwillingness of Muslim immigrants in the West to assimilate to their host cultures. True friendship and understanding can develop only with frank, truthful discussions of these and other problems – virtues sorely lacking in Fahmy's warped presentation.
On April 19, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law the controversial HB1, which criminalizes the actions of protesters. Under the law, “rioting,” defined vaguely, can incur stronger penalties. The law also creates several new crimes such as mob intimidation, cyberintimidation by publication, and “aggravated rioting.” To try to undermine the #DefundthePolice movement, it allows local police to penalize municipalities that reduce funding for law enforcements. It denies bail to those arrested until their first court appearance, guaranteeing an overnight stay. It issues a third-degree felony to anyone found damaging a monument or memorial. Perhaps most egregiously, it protects drivers who plow into crowds of protesters. In a country where Black protestors are five times more likely to be arrested at demonstrations nationwide, the law feels like salt on an open wound.
A resolution adopted by the European Parliament has called for the abolition of Pakistan’s controversial “blasphemy” law.
Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) cite “an alarming increase in accusations of ‘blasphemy’”, adding that Pakistan’s judicial system does not deal properly with accusations due to judges’ fear of exonerating those falsely accused.
10. Calls on the Member States to facilitate the issuance of emergency visas and to offer international protection for Shagufta Kausar, Shafqat Emmanuel, their lawyer Saiful Malook and others that stand accused for peacefully exercising their rights, including human rights defenders, should they need to leave Pakistan;
11. Is extremely concerned at the increasing online and offline attacks on journalists, academics and civil society organisations, particularly those against women and minorities; urges the Government of Pakistan to take immediate steps to ensure the safety of journalists, human rights defenders and faith-based organisations and to carry out prompt and effective investigations in order to uphold the rule of law and bring the perpetrators to justice;
Care isn't a burden for women and families to shoulder alone. It's the foundation of our economy, and it deserves to be treated as such.
A Birmingham shop whose owner says he was 'intimidated' by three men and told not to sell alcohol as it violated Sharia law should not be granted an alcohol licence, a councillor has argued.
Google suffered backlash after firing five activist workers in the space of a month towards the end of 2019. Laurence Berland, Paul Duke, Rebecca Rivers, and Sophie Waldman became known as the “Thanksgiving Four” after the company sacked them around the holiday season, alleging they had leaked company information in violation of its policies, an allegation all of them deny.
The four were subsequently joined by Kathryn Spiers, who had created an internal pop-up notification for employees telling them they had a right to “participate in protected concerted activities” before being fired in December 2019.
The competition watchdog, the ACCC, has sought leave to appear at the hearing of Epic Games appeal to the Full Federal Court against an earlier Court decision to stay Epic’s proceedings against Apple.
Is it a trade mark infringement to, e.g., advertise, offer, stock and ship goods carrying a sign identical or similar to a registered sign? The answer is not a difficult one to provide: Articles 10 TMD and 9 EUTMR clearly indicate that these activities amount to prima facie infringement.
Things, however, get more complicated when the same question is asked with reference to an online marketplace, e.g., Amazon. Can such a platform be regarded as playing an active role and be directly liable for trade mark infringement if what is being promoted, sold, stocked and shipped through it is a counterfeit item?
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Considering the discussion above, the new CJEU Louboutin referral is one to watch attentively. The resulting judgment may help shed further light on the (thorny) question of how far the degree of sophistication of the services provided to sellers by an online marketplace can go without amounting to own infringing activities of the platform.
Even if no specific question is asked on this point, it would be also a welcome clarification on the side of the CJEU to address whether a platform that does directly undertake trade mark-restricted acts may remain nonetheless eligible for the hosting safe harbour. This is particularly important, also considering the ongoing discussion around the proposed DSA, which has been also presented as a 'crystallization' of CJEU case law: on the one hand, the Proposal refers the safe harbour protection to “any type of liability” (recital 17); on the other hand, it excludes the applicability thereof to “any service that is not an intermediary service” (Article 1(4)). How to reconcile these two? Can a platform perform restricted acts itself and be still regarded as an intermediary (a host service)?
The German government yesterday rejected the US-backed proposal to waive all intellectual property rights to COVID vaccines.
A government spokesperson said in a statement to multiple media outlets that the limiting factors in the production of vaccines were the production capacities and high-quality standards, not patents.
She added that the US suggestion to waive patent protection for COVID vaccines had significant implications for vaccine production as a whole.
“The protection of intellectual property is a source of innovation and must remain so in the future."
Other European government heads, however, expressed support for the proposal to waive IP rights for COVID vaccines. French president Emmanuel Macron said he completely favoured opening up IP.
European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen said the EU was “ready to discuss any proposals that address the crisis in an effective and pragmatic manner”.
The waiver was proposed in October at the World Trade Organization (WTO) by India and South Africa. The US announced its support of the waiver on Wednesday, May 5.
“This is a global health crisis, and the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic call for extraordinary measures,” said Katherine Tai, the US trade representative, in a statement.
WTO’s TRIPS Council will continue to debate the proposal in the coming weeks.
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EPO announces European Inventor Award finalists
Fifteen inventors and inventor teams have been shortlisted for the European Inventor Award 2021, the EPO revealed on Tuesday, May 4.
The finalists fall into five categories – industry, research, non-EPO countries, SMEs, and lifetime achievement – and specialise in a wide range of technologies including diagnostics and wildlife protection.
The winners will be announced at a digital ceremony on June 17.
“This year’s finalists are shining examples of the ingenuity and creativity that support technological progress and pave the way for job creation and economic growth,” said EPO president António Campinos.
“Each of the exceptional finalists is a trailblazer in their respective field and has made a tangible contribution to overcoming some of society’s most pressing challenges,” he added.
Now in their 15th year, the awards recognise inventors who have made an exceptional contribution to technology, society, and economic growth.
An independent jury picked the 15 finalists from a pool of nearly 400 inventors and inventor teams.
The jury, chaired by diagnostics researcher Helen Lee (who won the “popular prize” award in 2016), consists of experts in intellectual property, business, science, politics, media and research.
The 2021 finalists come from Austria, China, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Serbia, Spain, Switzerland, Sweden, the UK, and the US.
They have all used European patents to protect their inventions, which include improved nasal drug delivery, and the world’s first system to verify a fingerprint pattern and detect live blood flow.
A quick look at the essentials of patent prosecution in Switzerland, including key disclosure requirements for patent applications, expedited procedures, oppositions, timeframes and costs.
Swedish telecoms gear maker Ericsson and Korean tech giant Samsung has inked multi-year global patent licenses that includes patents related to all cellular technologies, including fifth-generation or 5G technology.
With this agreement, the two companies have ended a patent licensing dispute that hit Ericsson's first-quarter revenue.
Additionally, the agreement ends complaints filed by both companies before the United States International Trade Commission (USITC) as well as the ongoing lawsuits in several countries, the telecom gear maker said in an official statement.
Start-ups should consider protecting their technical innovation by filing a patent application. Some reasons for doing so are explained in our earlier article here: https://appleyardleesgreenshoots.com/intellectual-property-for-start-ups-in-a-post-covid-world/.
Once your application for a UK patent is granted, the resulting granted patent gives you the right to prevent others from making, disposing of (e.g. selling or supplying), offering to dispose of, using, importing, or keeping your invention in the UK, where your invention is defined by the claims of your granted patent. It is important to note that it is possible to enforce your patent rights against the others only after the patent has granted. However, the journey to the grant of a patent may take several years, usually around four and a half years in the UK. What do you do if, before you have obtained a granted patent, a third party starts selling a product that looks like your invention? Is there anything you can do to stop the third party? Does your patent application provide you with any rights before the patent is granted? This article answers these questions.
The district court first sided with the patent challenger and awarded sua sponte summary judgment of obviousness based upon a bed-in-a-box reference. That decision was vacated by the Federal Circuit in a 2018 non-precedential decision since Zinus lacked notice and an opportunity to present evidence prior to the summary judgment determination. On remand, the district court reversed itself — awarding summary judgment the other way — that the bed-in-a-box reference did not invalidate. The court entered final judgment, awarding $1.1 million in damages and issued a permanent injunction.
One problem: The president of Zinus (Colin Lawrie) had given false testimony regarding the prior art (Lawrie was testifying both as a fact witness and a testifying technical expert). In particular, Lawrie testified that he had never “seen a bed that was shipped disassembled in one box.” Later, Lawrie testified again and explained that his original testimony was “incorrect” but that at the time he was not intending to answer falsely. In particular, it turned out that a Zinnus-related company had purchased/sold hundreds of beds in boxes that had not been found by Cap’s prior art searchers. Lowrie’s later explanation was that he was focusing on the novel features of his company’s patent — a bed shipped disassembled with all of the components in the headboard. The district court found Lourie’s explanation “wholly implausible.”
European Union leaders on Saturday cranked up their criticism of the U.S. call to waive covid-19 vaccine patents, arguing the move would yield no short-term or intermediate improvement in vaccine supplies and could even have a negative effect.
On the second day of an EU summit in Portugal, the European leaders instead urged Washington to lift export restrictions if it wants to have a global impact on the pandemic.
Global climate targets can only be reached with a major acceleration in clean-energy innovation, as many of the technologies required to bring down CO2 emissions are currently only at the prototype or demonstration phase. This is the conclusion of a joint report released Tuesday from the European Patent Office (EPO) and the International Energy Agency (IEA).
The European Patent Office (EPO) announces that German chemists Christoph Gürtler and Walter Leitner have been nominated as finalists in the "Industry" category of the European Inventor Award 2021 for their roles in developing a new technique to utilise waste carbon dioxide (CO2) as raw material in the production of foams and polymers. Their method, a product of their respective industrial and academic backgrounds, uses chemical catalysts to drive reactions between CO2 and a crude oil derivative, producing polymers, e.g. polyurethane plastics, in a sustainable and commercially viable way.
Yesterday, United States Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced "the Biden-Harris Administration's support for waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines" (see "Biden Administration Supports Waiver of IP Protection for COVID-19 Vaccines"). The waiver was proposed last fall by India and South Africa, which asked the Council for Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) of the World Trade Organization (WTO) to recommend "a waiver from 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" to the General Council of the WTO. In March, the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO), a group of fifteen industry and trade organizations (including BIO), and a group of intellectual property organizations (including the IPO), sent letters to the Biden Administration, members of Congress, and officials at the Patent and Copyright Offices asking the recipients to oppose the waiver proposal.
Sharon Prost took the helm of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit seven years ago in stormy seas.
Some members of the court were openly battling with the Supreme Court about patent eligibility and other intellectual property issues, leading to increasing scrutiny from the justices. The Federal Circuit’s own attempt to forge a consensus on eligibility led to a nightmare of six concurring, dissenting and reflecting opinions from the denial of en banc review in a 2013 case. Over the next 12 months, then-Chief Judge Randall Rader would publicly criticize “patent trolls” in the New York Times, compare U.S. Patent and Trademark Office administrative judges to a “death squad” for patent rights, and then leave the court suddenly under an ethical cloud.
A California federal judge rightly found that a former Raytheon engineer's litigation history with the defense contractor and Intel justifies labeling him a "vexatious litigant" and making him pay a $25,000 security bond to sue them again, the Federal Circuit said Friday.
In a pair of nonprecedential opinions, the Federal Circuit affirmed the dismissal of Nagui Mankaruse's patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation suits against Raytheon and Intel. The cases had been dismissed when Mankaruse did not post the bonds, which sought to deter suits that are "frivolous," "duplicative" or of a "harassing nature."
Nagui Mankaruse is a former Raytheon engineer and also a patentee. U.S. Patent No. 6,411,512. While an employee, he sued Raytheon for employment discrimination and was later fired. (“Laid off due to a workforce reduction”). He later sued Raytheon in California state for various claims, including trade-secret misappropriation, breach of contract, discrimination, etc. California Code allows for a litigant to be defined as a “vexatious litigant” and Mankaruse was so-named. In one case he posted a $10,000 bond as required by the court (and lost the money after losing the case).
In the present case before the Federal Circuit. Nagui Mankaruse filed a pro se lawsuit against Raytheon alleging patent infringement and trade-secret misappropriation. Raytheon asked the US District Court (C.D.Cal.) to deem Mankaruse a “vexatious litigant” under Federal Law and require a bond before he proceeds with the case. The district court agreed and ordered Mankaruse to pay $25k bond and also seek pre-filing approval from the court of any future lawsuit. He did not pay the money and the case was dismissed. On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed.
The EPO today joins the regional representations of the European Parliament and European Commission in Munich in celebrating Europe Day. The three institutions have partnered this year to jointly produce a commemorative video which casts a spotlight on the work of each and how it contributes to keeping the European spirit alive. The video also explores examples of successful Bavarian inventors and the importance of co-operation in addressing pressing global issues.
Traditionally, institutions open their doors to the public and organise commemorative activities and events. While the pandemic has impacted these gatherings, digital celebrations continue.
R2/19 is a recently published decision from the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the European Patent Office (EPO). Although it breaks little new ground, it has highlighted yet again the importance of patent proprietors being properly prepared when defending a patent during post-grant proceedings.
In this article, we look at specific lessons that can be learnt by patent proprietors from this decision.
A revolution in the field of medical imaging. Matthias Fink and Michael Tander, two French physicists, are selected from the finalists for the European Inventor Prize, further proof that French excels in this field.
The European Patent Office (EPO) announces that German scientist, professor and entrepreneur Karl Leo has been nominated as a finalist in the "Lifetime achievement" category of the European Inventor Award 2021. Leo's pioneering work with organic semiconductors led to the development of highly-efficient organic light-emitting diode (OLED) display technology. The full impact of Leo's innovations can be seen across the electronics industry, with OLEDs providing enhanced image brightness, colour resolution and power efficiency in the latest models of smartphones and other electronic devices we use every day.
The European Patent Office (EPO) announces that Serbian-American scientist Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic has been nominated as a finalist of the European Inventor Award 2021 for her innovative contribution to biomedical engineering. She has dedicated her decades-long career to developing an ex vivo tissue engineering technique which offers a safer, more precise way of cultivating skeletal, heart, lung, and vascular tissue for either transplantation, disease modelling, or drug testing.
The European Patent Office (EPO) today announces that Northeastern University microbiologists Kim Lewis and Slava S. Epstein have been nominated as finalists in the "Non-EPO countries" category of the European Inventor Award 2021. They have developed a device that enables scientists to separate and incubate single strains of bacteria in their natural environment. Their invention, the iChip – a thumb-sized plastic chip with miniscule holes – allows a greater number and variety of microorganisms to be grown in laboratories, solving a longstanding problem in microbiology.
The European Patent Office (EPO) announced that Indian-American chemist Sumita Mitra has been nominated as a finalist in the “Non-EPO countries” category of the European Inventor Award 2021. She was the first to apply nanotechnology to the production of dental materials, leading to the creation of a new composite to repair teeth, which has many advantages over conventional materials.
National and intergovernmental patent offices (eg, the EPO) also offer resources for SMEs.
A brand making vegan leather from pineapples has been nominated for a prestigious award.
Pi̱atex, created by Spanish entrepreneur Carmen Hijosa, is a finalist for the European Investor Award 2021 Рorganized by the European Patent Office (EPO).
he European Patent Office (EPO) has announced six U.S.-based finalists for the European Inventor Award 2021, including microbiologists at Boston's Northeastern University, Kim Lewis and Slava S. Epstein, who developed a device to separate and incubate single strains of bacteria in nature; Indian-American chemist Sumita Mitra, the first person to apply nanotechnology to the production of dental materials; and Chinese-American Bo Pi and Yi He, who have developed the world's first fingerprint sensor able to check both a fingerprint's pattern and the presence of live blood flow.
Cannabics Pharmaceuticals Inc. (OTCQB: CNBX), a global leader in the development of cancer related cannabinoid-based medicine, announced today that it had received "Notice of Allowance" from the Mexican Patent and Trademark Office (IMPI) in relation to the company's patent titled: 'System and method for high throughput screening of cancer cells'. The decision of the Mexican patent authority follows the European Patent Office (EPO) "Intention to Grant a European Patent" notice to the company from October 2020, concerning the same patent application.
Maintained TG + chemo patent as granted after opposition in European Patent Office
The Brazil Supreme Court yesterday removed the guarantee of a 10-year minimum term for successful pharmaceutical patent applicants.
Ruling nine to two in Direct Action 5,529, the court rendered the sole paragraph of Article 40 of Brazil's Industrial Property Law unconstitutional.
The court will come together again next Wednesday, May 12, to decide whether the ruling should have retroactive effect.
If the justices decide that it does, granted patents for pharmaceutical and biotech inventions would have their term of validity reduced to 20 years counted from the filing date, instead of 10 years counted from the date of grant.
The granting of the notice from Mexico’s patent authority comes after the European Patent Office (EPO) issued an Intention to Grant a European Patent notice to the company in October 2020. The notice that was issued from Europe’s patent office covering the same application that was filed in Mexico.
The plan implemented by the Brazilian Patent and Trademark Office (BPTO) to tackle the patent backlog reduced in 51.2% pending patent applications...
This is the first of a series of articles prepared for the Intelligent Health community, directed at all innovators using artificial intelligence to solve problems in healthcare. Our aim is to address some of the misconceptions we hear frequently around the protection of AI-based HealthTech inventions and to provide some practical guidance on the steps that should be taken to secure protection that supports your commercial aims and the wider adoption of your technology.
During the period of the Intelligent Health UK event, the GJE HealthTech team are offering free 1-2-1 IP consultations to innovators wanting to explore how best to protect their AI-driven HealthTech innovations. You can arrange a session with a patent attorney from the GJE HealthTech team here.
The Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) will offer a one-hour webinar entitled "Patenting Computer Simulations in Europe Following Enlarged Board Case G1/19" on May 12, 2021 from 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm (ET). Mike Jennings of AA Thornton; Tobias Kaufmann of Bardehle Pagenberg; Heli Pihlajamaa, Director Patent Law, European Patent Office (EPO); and James Signor of Leydig, Voit & Mayer, LTD. will address whether, following the Decision G 1/19 on Computer-implemented simulations by the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBOA) of the European Patent Office, something has changed with respect to the assessment of patentability and inventiveness in Europe.
And everybody knows that suspending patent rights is necessary to provide sufficient vaccine to stem the global pandemic caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus known as COVID-19. It is always a sign of intellectual weakness and pack animal thinking to believe something is true because "everybody knows"; recently American pathologists reaped the consequences of their "everybody knows" campaign against "gene patenting" in AMP v. Myriad Genetics (see "Schadenfreude Is Not Always An Unpleasant Feeling"), although evidence of this eventuality was available earlier (see "The ACLU, Working for the Man"). Sadly, the true roots of the issues arising over global vaccination have been known for almost a year (see "Latest COVID Conundrum: Accessibility of Vaccines (When They Are Available)"), and the wrong-headedness of proposals for a "patent waiver" have also been recognized (see "Suspending IP Protection: A Bad Idea (That Won't Achieve Its Desired Goals)"). And yet, of course, the Biden Administration, speaking though the U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai, issued a press release yesterday supporting the waiver (see "Biden Administration Supports Waiver of IP Protection for COVID-19 Vaccines").
There is no silver lining and no Pollyanna or Professor Pangloss available to contend that this is good policy, but it may be informative to consider the possible outcomes that could arise depending on how any such waiver or suspension is effectuated.
Counsel from Red Lobster, Novartis, 3M, and two other companies reveal how they make the most of flat fees and billable hours
Counsel from Coty, Conair and two other companies reveal how the Trademark Modernization Act will shape clearance and enforcement strategies
The trademark landscape may be changing in Taiwan if a number of recent decisions coming from the Taiwan Intellectual Property Office (“TIPO”) are any indication. Traditionally known for shooting down applications that aim to register three-dimension shapes, the TIPO recently handed Cartier a win and agreed to register the 3D design of its Love Bracelet, finding that on the heels of filing an application in December 2017, the Paris-based jewelry company successfully established that the shape of the bracelet has acquired distinctiveness in the minds of consumers, thereby, enabling the bracelet, itself, to act as an indicator of source.
Today, as part of our ongoing efforts to enforce our Terms and protect against abuse, Facebook and Gucci filed a joint lawsuit against the head of an international counterfeiting business.
Facebook, Inc. and Gucci America, Inc. sued an individual in the United States District Court, Northern District of California for breach of Facebook and Instagram’s Terms and infringement of Gucci’s intellectual property rights. Specifically, the defendant used multiple Facebook and Instagram accounts to evade Facebook’s enforcement efforts and continue to promote the sale of counterfeit Gucci products.
Facebook and Instagram’s terms strictly prohibit IP infringement, including the sale or promotion of counterfeit products. Consistent with these terms, Facebook and Instagram have implemented robust IP protection measures including a global notice-and-takedown program, a robust repeat infringement policy and additional measures.
The SpicyIP Blog published a guest post concerning copyright protection of musical fountains under the Chinese legislation. The post analyses the approach taken by at least on court in China (the report does not specify the court) regarding dynamic artworks and then compares it with Indian copyright law.
We’re pleased to bring to you a guest post by Abhijay Srekanth, discussing a Chinese decision on copyrightability of a musical water fountain show and analysing whether the courts’ approach therein is compatible with Indian copyright law. Abhijay is a 4th law student at Jindal Global Law School, Sonipat.
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Beijing Zhongke Shuijing Technology Co. claimed to own a copyright over a fountain show it arranged to the music “Beauty Overthrowing States and Cities” and “Streets Where Wind Lives” at the International Horticultural Exposition Music Fountain. It alleged that Beijing Zhongke Hengye Zhongzi Technology Co. had plagiarised its arrangement and played it at the West Lake Musical Fountain (Hangzhou), thereby violating its copyright. The question that, therefore, emerged was whether a fountain-show was copyrightable.
The appellate court, inter alia, ruled that a musical fountain show would be copyrightable as a ‘fine-artwork’. Under Article 2 of the Implementing Regulation of Copyright Law of the Republic of China (hereinafter, ‘Implementing Regulation’), a ‘work’ is defined as “original intellectual creations in the literary, artistic and scientific domain, insofar as they are capable of being reproduced in a certain tangible form”. A work can be copyrighted if it meets four factors: (i) it is an expression, (ii) it is original, (iii) it is fixed (though this requirement may not apply strictly to all works), and (iv) that it can be replicated in some tangible form. On an evaluation of the water-fountain, the Court noted that the particular patterns of spray accompanying music and light were unique enough to be considered an original expression. In dealing with replication, the Court examined the infrastructure that enabled the fountain and held that the mechanical infrastructure and accompanying software when utilised by the fountain designer would produce the same show, thereby replicating the fountain at every instance resulting in its general protectability as a ‘work’.
The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment, a global anti-piracy coalition that includes the major Hollywood studios, Netflix, Amazon and others, has claimed a major victory. The group reports that it shut down Cuevana, one of the most popular pirate streaming operations in Latin America. Confusingly, however, the most popular Cuevana domain remains online.
