Welcome to this week's exciting Linux roundup.
Kali Linux 2021.2, Pop!_OS 21.04 Beta, and openSUSE 15.3 has been released this week. Cinammon Desktop 5.0 has also been released.
May you have a wonderful week and a fantastic Summer!
In this video, we are looking at the newley released Cinnamon 5.0 which will be in Linux Mint 20.2 on Ubuntu 20.04.
An old Linux distro gets a new trick, and all Linux users get a few excellent quality of life updates.
Plus, the new initiative that has Apple, Google, and Microsoft all working together.
**doxygen** and **gcc** from the Slackware **d** software series.
Josh and Kurt talk about Amazon sidewalk. There is a lot of attention, but how is this any different than the surveillance networks Apple and Google have built?
Hmm. Things haven't really started to calm down very much yet, but rc5 seems to be fairly average in size. I'm hoping things will start shrinking now.
Networking (both drivers and core networking code) is once again responsible for a fairly big chunk of the fixes in rc5, but there's certainly a fair number of fixes elsewhere to - architectures (arm64 has mostly devicetree updates, but we've got fixes to x86, mips, powerpc in there too), other drivers (GPU driver fixes stand out, but there's also sound, HID, scsi, nvme.. you name it).
And we have a scattering of fixes elsewhere too: filesystems (btrfs, ext4, gfs2, ocfs, fanotify), soem core vm fixes, and some selftest and perf tool updates.
Most of the discussion I've seen is already about future things, but please do give this a whirl and make sure that 5.13 is stable and good.
Shortlog appended as usual for people who want to scan the details - you can easily scroll through this to get a feel for the kinds of things that have been going on. Nothing really looks all that hugely exciting (unless one of the issues happened to impact you personally, of course).
Linus
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.13-rc5 ahead of Linux 5.13 potentially releasing later this month but depending upon how the rest of the cycle plays out could end up in early July.
Linux 5.13 has been fairly busy with changes and Torvalds noted in today's announcement that while this -rc5 is "fairly average" in size, the cycle hasn't yet calmed down. He's hoping now that as we move towards 5.13-rc6 that things will settle down.
The 5.13-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "Hmm. Things haven't really started to calm down very much yet, but rc5 seems to be fairly average in size. I'm hoping things will start shrinking now."
The announcement at Computex 2021 of AMD FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) has set tongues wagging among the PC gaming community. Not just because of what it promises to bring to the table, either.
AMD proudly showing off that the technology works on an Nvidia graphics card, admittedly an older one, pricked up more than a few ears. Nvidia has very similar technology already in play on its graphics cards, but you’re unlikely to ever see that made compatible with AMD's Radeon GPUs.
The trouble is that showing off the concept of compatibility is one thing, but executing it is another. AMD doesn’t want to spend time on it, and it’s unlikely Nvidia would give it the time of day. But one killer feature of FSR is that it’s open-source. And that means the community can get involved.
This article will cover a list of useful MP3 file tagging tools available for Linux. Music and other audio files in MP3 format may not always come with well tagged metadata. However, you can manually edit metadata and add your own tags by using MP3 tagging tools. A collection of well tagged MP3 files will enable you to better manage your music / audio library and allow you to sort and filter results using third party applications.
This article will cover a list of children friendly applications and games available for Linux that can be used for learning as well as entertainment purposes. All these applications are open source and some of them support multiple languages making them suitable for learning a variety of topics in different languages.
Celestia
Celestia is a free and open source simulation software that renders a 3D view of space using a database based on known scientific facts. It can show the layout of stars, constellations, distance in light years, and solar system. It can also zoom into the current view and draw appropriate scales to give you some idea about distances between various space bodies. Other main features of Celestia include a built-in catalog of known space entities, official and third party add-ons, real time positions of planets and natural satellites, planetarium view, interactive controls, user made custom galaxies and so on.
Typing on a computer or laptop is not a tough task, and everyone performs it quite easily. But only a few of them possess the skillset touch typing, i.e., typing at speed without looking at the keyboard. Speed has gained so much importance in this tech-savvy world. If you’re involved in a work that demands so much typing, you must be able to type fast that too without minor errors, the only way one can achieve this through continuous practice. To accomplish this, various typing tutor software has been introduced to the world; nowadays, we have multiple websites that give you an interface where you can brush up on your typing skills.
So, in this article today, we’re going to briefly look at some of the best typing tutor apps and web applications that you can use on Linux and its various distros like Ubuntu.
Files with the .tar extension, often called tarballs, are used for storing many files inside a single archive. Usually, but not always, tar files are compressed to save space. For example, gzip compression on a tar archive will change the file’s extension to .tar.gz, or just .tgz.
The tar format has been around since the early ’70s and is a preferred archive format on Linux systems. Files inside a tar archive will have their permissions, ownership, and other file data preserved – a feature that many other archive formats, such as ZIP, don’t offer.
The tar command is used to create tar archives and extract their contents. There are many options when it comes to creating tar files, particularly because there are many types of compression available on Linux. Opening tar files is a simple process, and it only takes a moment to learn how.
In this guide, we’ll go over all the tar commands you’ll need to know in order to create tar archives and extract files from tar archives.
Oauth 2.0 is an authorization framework to delegate specified permissions to APIs without password exchange between the client and the server. Oauth’s main advantage is the possibility to grant third-party applications defined permissions (under a restrictive policy) without sharing passwords. This makes Oauth a great tool to integrate different applications.
For example, a user would want his WordPress website to publish on Linkedin automatically. He wouldn’t mind sharing his own Linkedin credentials with his own website. But if he needs to install a WordPress plugin that will automatically publish on Linkedin, he would need to share with that third-party plugin his Linkedin password, which is inconceivable.
With Oauth, the user can grant the limited plugin access through token authorization instead of credentials. The plugin will act on behalf of the user for the specifically assigned and allowed task.
AWX is an open-source community project sponsored by Red Hat. It serves as the development environment for the Ansible Tower. AWX will have frequent releases and have all new developments.
Ansible AWX provides a web-based user interface to manage Ansible hosts, playbooks, modules, job scheduling, workflow automation, credential sharing, and tooling to enable delegation.
The SCP command in Linux allows you to copy files over ssh connections. This is pretty useful if you want to transport files between computers.
The scp (secure copy) command uses SSH to transfer data from one host to another, and uses the same authentication and security provided by SSH. The command relies on SSH for data transfer, so it requires an ssh key or password to authenticate on the remote systems.
When transferring data with scp, both the files and password are encrypted so that anyone snooping on the traffic doesn’t get anything sensitive. As such, this is one of the most secure ways to transfer data on a network.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Ionic Framework on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Ionic is an open-source framework that can be used for developing hybrid mobile apps using Web technologies like CSS, HTML5, and Sass. The Ionic CLI is the preferred method of installation, as it offers a wide range of dev tools and helps options along the way. It is also the main tool through which to run the app and connect it to other services, such as App flow.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Ionic Framework on a Debian 10 (Buster).
Working with PDF files regularly in Ubuntu Linux? QPDF Tools is a nifty tool to manage your PDF documents.
It’s a free and open-source software, easy to use Qt based user interface for Ghostscript and Stapler, with ability to compress, split, merge and rotate your pdf documents.
The main window is simple and works with 4 buttons. Click the action you want to do for the PDF documents. Then select the PDF along with a few options and click the button to go.
I have been using a PKM called Zim Wiki for a long time now. The thing that I have struggled with Zim Wiki is when I have to work on different devices and I don't have my copy of Zim Wiki.
To be honest Zim Wiki is not all fancy with cloud-sync and multi-device support but following the Unix Philosophy of doing just one thing and doing it well, helps me to organize and retrieve information that is valuable to me.
There was a time when I use to back up my copy of Zim on dropbox. Now, in order to maintain a single source of truth, I use to sync the copy of my Zim notes to dropbox every minute using a cronjob.
While working on Linux Servers where we do not have any GUI of Linux and have access to the terminal from where we have to manage the whole server, it becomes difficult to diagnose internet connectivity problems. Therefore, this post contains several methods and provides a detailed guide on how to check the internet connectivity in Linux Terminal.
Vim is known as a potent editor full of features in a Linux terminal. Many Linux administrators prefer to edit the configuration files in an editor which provides some helpful features to get things done easily instead of just writing some text in any text editor.
When Linux server administrators spend a lot of time over the terminal or in the vim text editor managing and doing administrative tasks, they get fed up with watching the same terminal screen and fonts. For resolving this purpose, we can change some preference settings to customize the terminal settings. This post is all about how to change terminal settings and customize fonts according to our desire.
In this post, we will go through a couple of easy and quick methods to increase the font size and later learn the steps for customizing the font of the terminal lastingly.
A symbolic link, also known as symlink, is a file that points to another file. The file points to can be in the same or different directory. It is similar to the shortcuts in Windows OS. In today’s post, we will be describing how to remove a symbolic link in Linux. Note that removing a symbolic link does not affect the file it points to.
Before removing a file, you can verify whether it is a symbolic link using the ls -l command. It will also show you the file or directory that it points to.
The “diff” command in Linux is used to compare two files to look up their differences. However, many people confuse this command with the “cmp” command. It is different from the “cmp” command because it also presents you with all the changes that can be made to both the files for making them identical. This article will show you a few examples of using the “diff” command in Linux.
The rm command in Linux OS is used to remove files and directories from the command line. However, the removed files and directories do not get moved to the Trash. Instead, the rm command removes the files and directories permanently. Hence, you should be careful while using these commands as you will not be able to recover the removed files and directories unless you have a backup.
In this post, we will show you the practical examples of the rm command in Linux. We will also show you the syntax of the rm command and the command line options used with it.
The mv command is one of the basic Linux commands that is used to move files and directories from one location to another. It is also used to rename files and directories. The mv command is by default available on all Linux distributions.
In this post, we will show you the practical examples of the mv command in Linux. We will also show the command line options used with it.
Bash is a well-known shell and command language used for performing tasks efficiently. While working in Bash scripting and explicitly playing with the floating numbers, it is often needed to round off the floating numbers. In this post, we will learn a few commands and techniques of Bash scripting to round off the number to 2 decimal places.
While displaying the numbers or variables that include float numbers in them, different commands can print the text or variables like echo, print, and printf. Although we can show the variables and numbers directly from such commands, however, the only command that has some extra features and capabilities is the printf command that concerns our goal.
Java and the Lucene search library [6] form the basis for the search engine framework Apache Solr [1]. In the previous three articles, we set up Apache Solr on the soon-to-be-released Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye,” which initiated a single data core, uploaded example data, and demonstrated how to query output data in different ways and post-process it [2,3]. In part 3 [4], you have learned how to connect the relational database management system PostgreSQL [5] to Apache Solr and initiated a search in it.
The more documents you have to manage, the longer the answer time on a single-core setup. A multi-core Solr cluster helps to substantially reduce this answer time and increase the effectiveness of the setup. This article demonstrates how to do that and which traps to avoid.
Every time you run a command on a Linux terminal, you are basically commanding the shell to run an executable program bearing the given name. Executable programs, including simple programs such as ls, mkdir, touch, and find, reside on special directories on the filesystem.
While using your computer, you may encounter various issues not properly booting the operating system is one of them. There are various solutions to solve booting problems, some can get easily be repaired, and for some, you need to reinstall the entire operating system.
Ubuntu may also greet you will similar problems, and “initramfs” is one of them. It is a booting problem of Ubuntu and occurs because of bad blocks or bad sectors in the memory which do not allow operating system boot.
Your system contains many important files, so an error like this can definitely be a bit panicky. No need to worry; this write-up focuses on how to solve the “initramfs” issue and boot Ubuntu normally.
The cat command is a very handy tool when viewing short text files. However, when you have large files, it only gives you the last section of the file that constitutes the last few lines of the file. This compels you to scroll all the way up to start reading the file from the very beginning. A better approach is to make use of the Linux more command. The command displays one section of the file at a time and allows you to comfortably scroll all the way to the end of the file.
In this guide, we look at the Linux more command and demonstrate how you can make the most out of it.
The “ss” is a built-in Linux command used to display detailed information about the network sockets. You can use different options with this command to display the kind of information that you want. We will briefly talk about some examples of using the “ss” command in Linux in today’s guide.
Tar is a widely used utility to collect files and creating archives out of them. It was designed to create archives to store data on tapes, thus called “Tape ARchive.” The utility was first included in UNIX version 7 in 1979 and now available on multiple platforms.
Tar is a prominent Linux utility and comes with various functions such as creating archives, extracting them, extracting them to a specific directory, adding more files to the existing archive, etc. But can I view the content of the Tar file specifically while using the terminal? The answer is Yes! This multi-feature utility also allows viewing the content of the archived files, especially when working on the server and no graphical tool is available. Viewing the tar file content can also be quite handy when the file is quite large, and you only want to find a specific and extract it.
We have already discussed many features of the Tar utility. This guide focuses on a lesser-known feature of Tar utility and displays or listing the content of the tar file.
Did you know our brain interprets images much more swiftly compared to text? Well, Digital media is one of the key elements of computer systems now. Being a Linux user, I try to perform most of the operations through the terminal using commands. The majority of the tasks in the terminal are text-based; I can read, edit text files, but I had no idea how to display images in the terminal. Is it even possible to view images while using the terminal? Well, luckily, the answer is yes! Images can appear in the terminal using commands.
There are various GUI-based applications in Linux distributions to view images, but many Linux users prefer to work with the terminal. This guide is going to mention few techniques to display images in the terminal. These methods would be quite helpful for those who are searching for CLI (Command Line Interface) based applications to view images.
Vim – short for Vi Improved – is a powerful open-source command-line text editor clone of the good old vi editor. It is highly configurable with an extensive manual and ships with a wealth of features, including syntax highlighting and color codes, comprehensive plugin support, and search and replace, to mention a few.
Searching text or a string by manually scrolling up and down can be a daunting and time-consuming undertaking. Thankfully, the vim editor has a faster and convenient way of doing this.
The latest updates to Valve's Proton Experimental build for Steam Play should be offering lower input latency.
Longtime Valve developer focused on the company's Linux efforts tweeted out today about lower input latency. He explained, "Latest Proton Experimental contains input latency improvements, especially for VSynced games, or GPU-bound games running below 60FPS. The changes affect how the frames are timed at a pretty low level, so it'll need lots of testing to make sure there aren't subtle regressions."
DLSS, a technology I do not want to understand because then it will no longer feel like magic, has until now been available only to folks playing Windows games. Thanks to some work from Valve and Nvidia, though, that’s about to change.
As The Verge report, Nvidia announced last week that it is working with Valve to bring the same performance boosts seen on RTX cards in Windows to Linux users as well.
An official list of games that will support the feature hasn’t been released, but you can get a rough look things by comparing Nvidia’s list of DLSS-supported titles to those compatible with Proton, a tool released by Valve earlier this year that lets Linux users run Windows games on their computer through a “compatibility layer”.
Today we are looking at how to install Friday Night Funkin' Minus 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.
Hey everyone .I am Sachin Jindal and I am delighted to share I will participating in GSoC 2021 with KDE and more specifically Krita . Krita is a professional FREE and open source painting program . It is made by artists that want to see affordable art tools for everyone.
I am thankful to the KDE community for giving me an opportunity to be a part of this program. I will be working under the guidance of Wolthera , Agata Cacko and Halla Rempt this summer working on the Project - Reference Image Improvement.
I am grateful for starting the opensource journey with Krita . And the journey has been truly awesome with a pinch of silly questions by me xD. Initially it was all a bit over-whelming but i recieved excellent help from Halla & Dmitry always. The proposal was shaped by heavy corrections from my mentors Wolthera and Agata Cacko.
The Krita community has always been very helpful and friendly.I had the guidance and support from many remarkable people throughout the contributions . I am thankful to all of them for their guidance which has made a lot of things easier for me.
Personally, I now feel much more confident to work on big codebases .I have also learnt how a good software is developed with an open perspective towards everything . All in one contributing to Krita has been truly fun and full of learning for me.
Hello dear reader, I hope you are safe and sound. I am Anjani Kumar, an Information Technology student from India. This year in Google Summer of Code, my proposal to Port digiKam to Qt6 on Linux has been selected by KDE Community.
Today is the last day of community bonding period and from tomorrow the real work starts. Thanks to mentors Gilles Caulier, Maik Qualmann and Thanh Trung Dinh for helping me prepare for the work this summer.
Hello everyone, I hope that you are safe and healthy. It was the 17th May 2021, the results were to be notified at 11:30 PM IST. My friend Anjani from the same college as mine, who is also a contributor to the KDE Community called me up 1 hour before the results. We both were very anxious. I checked my email at 11:26 PM, there was a mail that my project was accepted in Google Summer of Code. I called up Anjani since the results were to be notified at 11:30 PM IST and he hung up my call in panic. He called back, we were excited that both of our projects got accepted in KDE, one of the largest free software community that we are part of.
Hi, I’m Manuel Genovés, a Spanish physicist, somewhat artist and programmer by accident. Some of you may know me for Apostrophe, a nice little app I maintain for quite some time now. This year I decided to further step up my involvement with the GNOME project so I signed up for the GSoC program.
With this new release, the version "i" can be installed on disk : wiki which explains how to install on disk
I had mostly positive experiences while running openSUSE 15.3. The distribution does a lot of things well. The installer is both fairly straight forward to use and yet, under the surface, offers a lot of advanced options. This started me off with a good first impression, as did the initial welcome screen.
I deeply appreciate that openSUSE is one of the only Linux distributions to entirely embrace advanced filesystems. Its administrative tools automatically take snapshots of changes and we can rollback to previous snapshots from the boot menu. Apart from FreeBSD, I don't know of any other commonly used open source operating system which makes proper use of advanced filesystems such as Btrfs and ZFS.
Speaking of the administration tools, YaST is quite powerful. We can manipulate most aspects of the underlying operating system through YaST and, while some modules are overly complex (for less experienced users), more advanced users will find a lot of useful tools in the YaST panel.
There are some weak points in openSUSE's armour. The web-based application store, promoted by the welcome window, is really rough and overly complicated. It shows far too many package options for simple searches and depends on the user clicking on the proper link to download for the right edition of openSUSE. It will even show packages and download links for packages which haven't been built for openSUSE 15.3 yet.
The distribution offers a short support cycle. openSUSE Leap claims to be a long-term support (LTS) release, but only gets 18 months of updates. This is roughly the same as Fedora and much less than Ubuntu's community editions (which receive 36 months of support) or Ubuntu, Debian, and FreeBSD - each of which offer 60 months of support. Despite its rapid upgrade pace, the provided packages are mostly over a year old. This means openSUSE gives us the upgrade pace of Fedora along with the software age of more conservative distributions.
Not having multimedia codecs available out of the box is rare these days. This, combined with the complex command line steps outlined in the documentation and the failure of applications like Parole to find missing codecs after offering to install them (even after community repositories have been enabled), means new users have an overly complicated and confusing path ahead of them, compared against the experience offered by other distributions, if they want to watch videos.
One thing which I kept coming back to while using openSUSE is that it feels like a distribution for administrators and developers, not for regular home users. Some really complex tasks, like setting up Btrfs, working with complex firewalls, setting up network shares, comparing snapshots, and so on are quite easy (thanks to YaST). However, some basic actions such as playing video files, downloading desktop applications, or reading manual pages are unusually complex on openSUSE. It is a distribution which makes complex tasks easy and simple tasks harder than most other mainstream distributions.
The user interface is fairly polished and the newly upgraded Xfce desktop works well. The system is responsive and worked well with my test environments. I think this fairly smooth experience will entice people, particularly more experienced users, to run openSUSE. openSUSE is a little on the heavy side in terms of memory usage, but the array of convenient features that accompany it more than makes up for the difference in my opinion.
Linux Mint is a popular Linux distribution tailored for beginners while providing a similar experience to former Windows users. In fact, it does a few things better than Ubuntu, which makes it a suitable choice for every type of user.
It is completely community-powered, on top of Ubuntu as its base.
On the other hand, Fedora is a cutting-edge distribution that focuses on incorporating exciting changes that eventually makes it way to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).
Trying out different operating systems on the PinePhone is as simple as flashing a bootable disk image to a microSD card, inserting it in the phone, and powering it on and the instructions for installing an OS to built-in storage are almost as simple.
Not sure which operating system you want to install though? That’s where a tool like Megi’s multi-distro demo image can come in handy. Instead of flashing a single operating system to a microSD card, this image lets you flash a whole bunch and then choose which one you want to run when you boot your phone.
The latest version was released a few days ago, and it contains 15 different operating systems including Arch, Fedora, Mobian, Sailfish, Ubuntu Touch and several different versions of postmareketOS and Manjaro with different user interfaces.
Initially planned to take place in Dublin, Ireland, the unique edition this year of the Embedded Linux Conference will take place in Seattle, US and virtually from September 27 to September 30, 2021. See also the conference website. Bootlin CEO Thomas Petazzoni is again a member of the program committee for this edition of ELC.
Web browsers are usually quite identical to their counterparts in terms of appearance and functionality. However, Tor Browser is one such browser that stands apart from your regular day-to-day web browser. While it is usually linked to the deep or dark web, there is more to it than what meets the eye.
[...]
Tor stands for The Onion Router. But what does a vegetable have to do with a networking system? Similar to how an onion comprises multiple layers, the Tor network employs a nested web of private computers, called nodes, that route and encrypt your internet traffic.
These nodes can be an entry node, relay node, or exit node. The entry node is the first node through which your device connects to the Tor network. Apart from this node, none of the other nodes know your real IP address. Your connection is then passed to a series of relay nodes and finally to the exit node.
This exit node is the node that ends up connecting to the website you wanted to visit in the first place. This way, even if you were the one who wanted to visit a website, the website server will receive the request from the exit node's IP instead of yours. This is how Onion Routing helps you stay anonymous on the internet.
[...]
Installing Tor Browser on Linux is a straightforward process and similar to installing any other software. Head over to the official downloads page of the Tor Browser website and click on the Download for Linux button to get the latest release.
At the beginning of May, we started a new Month of LibreOffice, celebrating community contributions all across the project. We do these every six months – so how many people got sticker packs this time? Check it out…
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And we have an extra bonus: 10 contributors have also been selected at random to get an extra piece of merchandise – a LibreOffice hoodie, T-shirt, rucksack or snazzy glass mug. Here are the winners – we’ll get in touch personally with the details:
Michael Warner Jorge Gustavo Rocha Roland Kurmann Astur Alessandro Volturno Harshita Nag Ãâ°rico Nogueira Chris Shaw Wanderer María del Mar
Version 2.32 of the Git distributed revision control system is now available with a variety of improvements from performance optimizations to usability enhancements and a whole lot of bug fixes.
More details on all of the improvements and fixes to find with the new Git 2.32 release can be found via the release announcement. Those wanting to build Git 2.32 from source this weekend can fetch it from git.git that continues to reside on the master branch.
The latest feature release Git v2.32.0 is now available at the usual places. It is comprised of 617 non-merge commits since v2.31.0, contributed by 100 people, 35 of which are new faces [*].
Sublist3r is a tool to search and list subdomains easily. Sublist3r uses search engines and databases like Google, Bing, Yahoo, Ask, Baidu, Virustotal, Netcraft. ThreatCrowd, DNSdumpster, and ReverseDNS. Brute force ability was added with the integration of subbrute to Sublist3r.
[...]
Sublist3r is a great option for searching subdomains. The program is accessible to all user levels, easy to run and implement its options. The brute force integration added interesting features comparable to DNS Brute and similar Nmap NSE scripts.
In KDE we have this awesome meta-build system, called “kdesrc-build“. It allows developers to compile tens and hundreds of KDE (and also external!) projects with only a few command line interactions. Since a few years, specifically after the migration from SVN to Git, it is the de-facto standard way for many contributors to update and build libraries, on top of which they develop their applications. This post is about how efficiently integrating it with a QtCreator workflow. (footnote: this does not mean that you should use QtCreator, especially if you are happy with Kdevelop or other IDEs; this post just explains how the interaction works nicely if you do use QtCreator)
Before looking at QtCreator, let’s look a little bit deeper into kdesrc-build. I will not explain how to set it up, how to use it in detail, or how to configure it to use a self-built Qt . I simply assume that you are already configured kdesrc-build and that it works on your system.
Bash is one of the most popular shells available on Linux. It’s simple, fast, and lightweight. Besides interpreting and executing commands, bash can work with scripts to automate a particular set of tasks. This guide elaborates on some of the common practices in bash programming.
On behalf of the Dancer Core Team, I'd like to announce the availability of Dancer2 0.301004. This is a maintenance release with two bug fixes only: one corrects an omission from the tutorial, and the other adds a missing dependency to Dancer2's cpanfile.
The failure to regulate emotions, namely emotional dysregulation (ED), is a relevant construct in adolescent psychiatry, in terms of prognostic and developmental implications. We developed and validated a novel self-report questionnaire for the assessment of ED, the RIPoSt-Y, both in clinical and non-clinical samples.
For over forty years, coalitions of academics, governments, corporations, and world governance bodies have colluded to build a global ed-tech schooling system meant to shackle children to the transhumanist Fourth Industrial Revolution.
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While Project BEST was building the international internet infrastructure for virtual learning platforms like K12 Inc. and BIA, multinational technology corporations, such as Microsoft, Apple, and IBM, were jockeying for positions in the global market to facilitate the hardware and software needed to operate the online courseware for the national education systems participating in UNESCO Study 11. At the same time, the globalist academic establishment was promoting school integration of courseware from these very same Big Tech corporations by advertising their “computer-assisted learning” products in the pages of scholarly journals alongside ads for other ed-tech developers contracting with Project BEST, such as Scott, Foresman and Company and the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT). Simultaneously, these same academic journals printed articles publicizing the ed-tech research of the OECD and UNESCO Study 11, which was advocating the use of commercial ed-tech products manufactured by the exact same Big Tech companies, including Microsoft, Apple, and IBM.
A Biologics License Application, or BLA, is FDA’s standard “full approval” mechanism for biological products, including therapeutics and vaccines. A company seeking a BLA for its product must demonstrate that the product is “safe, pure, and potent,” which generally means completing robust, well-controlled clinical trials. A company receiving a BLA for their product can introduce the product into interstate commerce and market it for its approved uses. A BLA also has no defined end date—assuming no significant problems emerge, the product can stay on the market indefinitely.
By contrast, an Emergency Use Authorization, or EUA, is just that—an authorization to distribute an otherwise unapproved product (or an approved product for an unapproved use) during an emergency formally declared by the Secretary of Health & Human Services. Both the substantive and procedural rules surrounding an EUA differ from those surrounding a BLA (or the BLA counterpart for small-molecule drugs, a New Drug Application or NDA). Substantively, the standard for granting an EUA is whether, “based on the totality of scientific evidence available,” “it is reasonable to believe that the product may be effective” and that the “known and potential benefits… outweigh the known and potential risks.” Procedurally, an EUA lasts only as long as the underlying emergency. Further, the FDA may “revise or revoke” an EUA if the substantive evidence for granting it no longer exists.
In the context of prescription drugs intended to treat COVID-19, the EUAs granted by the FDA typically did not require the completion of robust, well-controlled clinical trials. Further, several of these EUAs have been revised or revoked subsequently (such as hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma). But for COVID-19 vaccines, the FDA has applied a higher standard.
Specifically, the FDA has published multiple guidance documents that describe both what the agency is specifically looking for in vaccines authorized under an EUA and how that differs from the requirements for submitting a full BLA. A June 2020 guidance for COVID-19 vaccines laid out requirements for companies to conduct full-scale clinical trials before submitting EUA paperwork. Each vaccine manufacturer enrolled tens of thousands of participants in randomized clinical trials, similar if not virtually identical to what would have been done for outright license approval. As the agency later explained in more detailed EUA guidance, because these vaccines are “intended to be administered to millions of individuals, including healthy people, to prevent disease,” the FDA planned to apply different standards to the authorization of vaccines than to the authorization of treatments for patients who were already ill with COVID-19.
Who is in charge? This question, the nation's population, has begun asking itself for a few weeks and months. The ruling Rajapaksa brothers lent a strong and focussed leadership to the people, polity and the armed forces at the height of the nation's own ''war on terror'', dividing the responsibilities and resultant accolades between them. War-time President Mahinda Rajapaksa is the Prime Minister now. Then Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaksa is the all-powerful President today. They have a solid parliamentary backing, which only they had earlier, post-war (2010-15) – and not certainly their rivals who replaced them in between, 2015-19.
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The Sri Lankan Tamil polity is as divided as the community. The reverse is truer, again. The problem has all along been that of the community cherishing and relishing a multiplicity of leaders than their total numbers could afford and justify.
After years of debate and prosecutorial overreach, the Supreme Court has now narrowed the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA). In Van Buren v. U.S., the Court ruled that obtaining information by "exced[ing] authorized access" is limited to information on the computer that one is not authorized to access at all, rather than to information simply gathered for an improper purpose.
To explain, consider the facts of Van Buren. Van Buren had rightful access to a database of DMV license plate information. He accessed that database using valid credentials, but looked up information for an improper purpose. He was convicted under the CFAA for exceeding his authorized access. I have blogged about this issue before. The broad reading that sent him to jail is a really scary interpretation of the statute, one in which many ordinary people could go to jail for innocuous use of the internet.
The Court narrowed the meaning, and held that the language of the statute: "to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter.” cannot be read to cover the purpose of gathering the information. Instead, "entitled so to obtain" must mean entitled to obtain in the manner prior referenced, which means obtained by access to a computer with authorization. Based on this reading, Van Buren cannot be guilty because he accessed records that he was already entitled to access. But he might have been guilty if he looked at personnel files on the same computer.
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As a final note, the Court's appeal to the civil provisions is unavailing – standard hacking, captcha breaking, password guessing and any number of other things that might give unauthorized access to information are illegal yet cause no damage or loss as the Court describes those provisions. Further, the Court ignores the ridiculous, “we spent money finding the leak and that’s loss” that lower courts have upheld. That type of loss would apply to a broader definition of "exceeds authorized access" as well.
There is a well-worn legal maxim that "hard cases make bad law." In deciding Van Buren v. United States today, the Supreme Court was faced with the opposite problem: bad laws[i] make hard cases. Specifically, in a 6-3 decision, the Court found that the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act ("CFAA") does not extend to an individual's accessing information over the internet for an improper purpose, so long as the individual would be entitled to access for a proper purpose. There's no question that interpreting the opaquely-worded CFAA forced the Court to choose between two bad options, with a parade of horribles on both sides; it chose the option that clearly decriminalizes everyday behavior (but also would allow abusive use of access that individuals have solely for work purposes).
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Seeing an opportunity for help with his financial woes, Van Buren told Albo -- falsely -- that he had substantial medical debts. He then asked Albo for a loan. But instead of appreciating Van Buren's position, Albo went to the county sheriff's department with recordings of the request and told them Sergeant Van Buren was shaking him down. The FBI got involved and decided to run a sting operation. First, it had Albo ask Van Buren for help running drugs, but the police sergeant refused. Then, it had Albo ask for information about a female friend that Albo had allegedly met at a strip club (specifically, information regarding whether she was an undercover police officer). Albo offered money in exchange for Van Buren accessing Georgia and national criminal databases to run the woman's license plates. Van Buren accepted the money and ran the plates, then texted Albo when he had done so. The FBI and Georgia Bureau of Investigation then swept in and arrested Van Buren, who admitted to all of the facts and agreed what he had done was wrong.
The local U.S. Attorney charged Van Buren with honest services fraud and unauthorized access to the government databases in violation of the CFAA. He was convicted on both counts, but the Court of Appeals reversed the honest services fraud verdict on the basis of improper jury instructions. Van Buren then took the CFAA conviction to the Supreme Court.[ii] Specifically, the Supreme Court considered whether a person who is authorized to access information on a computer for certain purposes violates the CFAA if he accesses that information for an improper purpose.
The six-Justice majority, in an opinion written by Justice Barrett, decided that the CFAA would not extend so far. The majority started with the text of the CFAA, and believed that the act was structured so that the two options for the offense (access with authorization or access exceeding the scope of authorization) would be parallel in a binary "gates-up-or-down inquiry." That is, because the only question for the first part was whether the accesser had authorization or not, the second part should be limited to the question of whether the accesser had authorization to access that information in any circumstance or not. In that sense, Justice Barrett used a physical analogy for the scope of authorization, describing the prohibition as relating to "particular areas of the computer – such as files, folders, or databases – to which their computer access does not extend." In doing so, she rejected the government's assertion that the majority's interpretation would read the word "so" (in the phrase "entitled so to obtain or alter") from the statutory definition of "exceeds authorized access." She indicated that the word "so" could be understood to distinguish the situation where an individual is not entitled to see the same information in non-computer-based means (such as, hypothetically, if a person were entitled to see a personnel file in hard copy by not electronically).
Cybersecurity truisms have long been described in simple terms of trust: Beware email attachments from unfamiliar sources and don't hand over credentials to a fraudulent website. But increasingly, sophisticated hackers are undermining that basic sense of trust and raising a paranoia-inducing question: what if the legitimate hardware and software that makes up your network has been compromised at the source?
That insidious and increasingly common form of hacking is known as a "supply chain attack," a technique in which an adversary slips malicious code or even a malicious component into a trusted piece of software or hardware. By compromising a single supplier, spies or saboteurs can hijack its distribution systems to turn any application they sell, any software update they push out, even the physical equipment they ship to customers, into Trojan horses. With one well-placed intrusion, they can create a springboard to the networks of a supplier's customers—sometimes numbering hundreds or even thousands of victims.
CloudLinux, the sponsor of the forever-free AlmaLinux OS enterprise Linux distribution, is now automating, simplifying and securing Linux operations with its TuxCare unified enterprise support services.
Every day more and more connected devices are being brought to market and estimates for the total size of the Internet of Things (IoT) market are as high as $1.5 trillion by 2027. Gas pumps, medical devices, and point of sale systems are increasingly connected, making it virtually impossible to avoid interacting with these devices, even for complete Luddites. In the home, devices such as power meters, light switches, and security cameras are commonly internet-enabled allowing for smart home functionality.
The level of complexity in the software for these devices increases with the functionality, and the number of devices with software defects in the field is growing. In many cases, these systems are designed, produced, and shipped without any consideration given to providing software updates beyond the initial program load. That’s a serious problem, and it can extend far beyond causing problems for the owner of the device, or adding warranty or recall expense for the manufacturer.
Internet privacy is incredibly important don't get me wrong, however, that doesn't mean that you should beat people over the head about the issue. If they're willing to work within the system that exists, that's ok, that's something that they chose to do.
Facebook’s growing role in the ever-expanding surveillance and “pre-crime” apparatus of the national security state demands new scrutiny of the company’s origins and its products as they relate to a former, controversial DARPA-run surveillance program that was essentially analogous to what is currently the world’s largest social network.
Thanks to the good offices of my friend Vijay Boyapati, author of the new book-length version of The Bullish Case for Bitcoin, the organizers of bitcoin2021 in Miami, June 4-5 2021, graciously gave me two minutes to make an announcement about the Open Crypto Alliance (@OpenCryptoX) and its work, on Saturday June 5.
A boomer rants from his couch about life without being connected to the Internet. I'm currently without a computer at home and this has me thinking. Is being connected by default a good thing or a bad thing? Is your life better or worse because of this constant Internet connection?
In the summer of 2009, I had an idea. My workdays were spent deploying tons of cloud infrastructure as Rackspace acquired Slicehost and we rushed to keep up with the constant demands for new infrastructure from our customers. Working quickly led to challenges with hardware and networking.
That was a time where the I Can Has Cheeseburger meme was red hot just about everywhere. We needed a way to quickly check the public-facing IP address of lots of backend infrastructure and our customers sometimes needed that information, too.
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Soon the site exceeded 1B requests per day. I went back to the people who helped me at Red Hat and after they looked through everything I sent, their response was similar to the well-known line from Jaws: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat."
I languished on Twitter about how things were getting out of control and someone from Cloudflare reached out to help. We configured Cloudflare to filter traffic in front of the site and this reduced the impact from SYN floods, half-open TLS connections, and other malicious clients that I couldn’t even see when I hosted the site on my own.
Later, Cloudflare launched workers and my contact there said I should consider it since my responses were fairly simple and the workers product would handle it well. The cost for workers looked horrifying at my traffic levels, but the folks at Cloudflare offered to run my workers for free. Their new product was getting bucket loads of traffic and I was able to scale the site even further.
In 2021, the traffic I once received in a month started arriving in 24 hours. The site went from 1B requests per day to 30-35B requests per day over a weekend. Almost all of that traffic came from several network blocks in China. Through all of this, Cloudflare’s workers kept chugging along and my response times barely moved. I was grateful for the help.
Cloudflare was doing a lot for me and I wanted to curb some of the malicious traffic to reduce the load on their products. I tried many times to reach out to the email addresses on the Chinese ASNs and couldn’t make contact with anyone. Some former coworkers told me that my chances of changing that traffic or getting a response to an abuse request was near zero.
Pretty sure Jack is actually a lizard-person in a human flesh suit. Like... who else would come up with this stuff?
United States law offers four types of protection for intellectual property, namely patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets. Only two of these, patents and trade secrets, can grant you the protection of ideas. Besides this superficial similarity, patents and trade secrets are different, both in the kinds of ideas they can protect and in the responsibilities of the owner of the patent or trade secret. If your intended business activities hinge on an idea that gives you or your company an economic advantage, a skilled intellectual property attorney would help you to decide what part of that economic advantage you wish to disclose and patent and what other part you must maintain as a trade secret.
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Not every idea that can be commercially beneficial is eligible for a patent. Patents are meant to cover new, useful, and non-obvious inventions (utility patents) and new and non-obvious designs (design patents)
Every country should have the right to make its own vaccines during a pandemic. That’s the principle underpinning the campaign to temporarily waive intellectual property (IP) protection on coronavirus vaccines. The campaign was initiated by India and South Africa, and is being backed by more than 100 countries, along with international organizations including the World Health Organization and the United Nations AIDS charity, UNAIDS. The goal is to reduce the barriers to countries producing their own vaccines — particularly for the lowest-income nations.
At present, the proposal does not have the support of the pharmaceutical industry, nor that of most high-income nations. Instead, these countries are pledging to share more of their own vaccines with low-income nations and to provide more funding to charitable vaccine-provision schemes such as COVAX. However, in a surprising and welcome move earlier this month, the United States, Russia and China came out in support of an IP waiver on vaccines.
The significance of the US decision in particular cannot be overstated, because the country is the world’s largest market for pharmaceuticals. For decades, US governments have worked with industry, universities and other research-intensive nations in setting — and enforcing — IP rules, most recently through the World Trade Organization (WTO), where the IP waiver proposal is being discussed. Even a few months ago, the mere idea of the United States taking this position would have been unthinkable. Now that it has done so, those countries still holding out — notably Japan, South Korea, the United Kingdom and European Union member states — need to follow suit.
On May 5, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai announced that the Biden administration would support a process to waive patent protections for COVID-19 vaccines, so the entire world could focus on producing these lifesaving medicines. While the process will take months and cannot by itself expand access to vaccines, it was a rare moment of the United States engaging in an intellectual-property dispute on the side of openness rather than pharmaceutical rights holders.
The European Union on Friday submitted a plan to the World Trade Organization that it believes will more effectively broaden supply of COVID-19 vaccines than the intellectual property (IP) rights waiver backed by the United States.
India, South Africa and dozens of developing countries are demanding the waiver to address what they say is a "staggering inequity" in access to vaccines and other COVID-19 treatments.
The lobbying group that represents several top pharmaceutical companies last month quietly launched a campaign against President Joe Biden's decision to support waiving intellectual property protections for Covid-19 vaccines. PhRMA is a political advocacy group that represents more than 30 pharmaceutical firms, including Covid vaccine makers Pfizer and Johnson & Johnson.
Late last month it started running a digital ad campaign on Facebook and Google targeting Biden's decision, a CNBC search of the companies' ad archives revealed.
Progress is being made towards a deal on an intellectual property waiver for COVID-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization (WTO), U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said on Saturday.
Tai pointed to a revised proposal from the original proponents of the waiver, led by India and South Africa, as well as principles the European Union has come up with to guide how they would like to negotiate the issues.
In a surprise shift in May, the United States moved to supporting a patent waiver, piling pressure on opponents like the European Union and Switzerland, where many drugmakers are based.
"We're actually really encouraged to see more WTO members come forth with proposals on what they can support at the WTO with respect to intellectual property rules at the WTO and how they apply to the COVID vaccines," Tai told reporters ahead of a meeting of trade ministers in the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum.
A deal on an intellectual property waiver for COVID-19 vaccines at the World Trade Organization (WTO) was no closer to acceptance on Monday despite Washington's backing, due to expected scepticism about a new draft, sources close to the talks told Reuters.
Negotiations reopened at the WTO on Monday, focused on a highly anticipated revised draft submitted by India, South Africa and dozens of other developing countries last week.
A surprise U.S. shift earlier this month to support a patent waiver heaped pressure on remaining opponents like the European Union and Switzerland that are home to numerous drugmakers. But Monday's discussions - the 11th session since the initial waiver proposal in October - failed to achieve a breakthrough.
Last month, Senior Party The Broad Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University (hereinafter, "Broad") filed its reply to an opposition to Broad's motion to correct inventorship filed by Junior Party University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (hereinafter, "CVC"), which was filed as a contingent motion in response to CVC's Substantive Motion No. 3 under 37 C.F.R. ۤ 41.121(a)(1) asking for judgment of unpatentability for all claims in interference under 35 U.S.C. ۤ 102(f) or (if post-AIA) 35 U.S.C. ۤ 115(a) for "failure to name all inventors of the alleged invention" in Interference No. 106,115.
CVC's opposition asserted that Broad has not established that it is entitled to this relief, as required under 37 C.F.R. ۤ 41.121(b). CVC also argued that Broad did not provide consent for one of the individuals -- Shauiliang Lin -- to be added as an inventor. CVC further alleged that the motion is barred by laches and submitted in bad faith. And finally, CVC asserted that as a matter of jurisdiction the Director -- not the Board -- has sole authority to change inventorship and that there is no evidence that the Director has delegated this authority to the Board.
Almost precisely two years ago, I made an announcement that led to my Brussels conference on component-level standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing in 2019. It was wildly successful and the first event with that particular focus.
Today I am also announcing something new that I plan to offer soon, and just like last time, I'm talking about it here early so I can get some feedback and input at the conceptual stage, such as via this blog's contact form. That also helped a lot last time. What I have in mind now has even greater potential, though.
In-house counsel at five drugs firms reveal the prosecution and enforcement hurdles surrounding oncology and gene therapy treatments
GuestKat Rose Hughes has been untiring in documenting how using video conferencing (ViCo) in oral proceedings of the EPO’s Board of Appeal has been unfolding [see the bottom of this post for the full list of The IPKat’s posts on the topic]. Last week, Rose reported that the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) has decided to reschedule oral proceedings in G1/21, where the issue of ViCo is to be decided, following a request from one of the parties, who claimed not having been given sufficient time to consider the EPO’s President submissions on the referral.
A patent is an intellectual property right that provides the owner of an invention with the exclusive right to benefit from the commercial use of the product, such as producing, selling and exporting for a set period time. Patents encourage pharmaceutical companies to invent and develop new drugs, therefore patent protection also serves the improvement of research and development, and thus human health.
Pharmaceutical companies must adhere to a number of rules and legislation that regulate the clinical research, production, distribution processes, drug safety, quality, efficiency, pricing, marketing and promotion of their products. Research and development costs for pharmaceuticals are high, as are the risks of failing to successfully obtain authorization to market a product. Patent protection gives originator pharmaceutical companies an exclusive right to manufacture, sell, and benefit from a drug, and prevents third parties from encroaching on their inventions.
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Granting a drug patent provides the patent owner with the exclusive right to prevent third parties from using, offering for sale, selling, or importing a product in a given country for a 20-year term as of the date of filing the patent application in the relevant country. Patent protection is an important element for originator pharmaceutical companies as it strengthens market-based incentives for pharma stakeholders in the private-sector to endeavour and invest resources in research & development, and the manufacture and marketing of new pharmaceuticals. These incentives are considered especially valuable for the development of pharmaceuticals because of the requirement for large financial and technical resources, particularly when combined with the high risk of failure even at a late stage in product development, as well as the reputational issues and legal responsibilities related to product liability.
This article has aimed to highlight the key points of pharmaceutical patents without including all aspects. You can find more detailed information by following our article series.
In July 2018 India’s first ever SEP decision was issued by the High Court of Delhi in two joined (identical) disputes, Koninklijke Philips v. Rajesh Bansal and Koninklijke Philips v. Bhagirathi Electronics.
In both cases, the defendants were importers and assemblers of DVD players in India. The plaintiff, Philips, filed patent infringement cases against both of them, claiming that they had imported DVD player components that were manufactured using its patented technology and had then assembled them in India without obtaining licenses. The patent in question covers the ‘Channel (De)coding technology’ responsible for video playback function in the DVD player. The implementers argued that they had not infringed Philips’ patent as they acquired the components from authorized licensees of Philips.
The Delhi High Court ruled in favour of Philips. It held that the plaintiff’s patent was essential for the DVD standard, accepting the company’s US and European patents’ essentiality certificates. As for the infringement, the court held that the defendants failed to prove that the components were imported from Philips’ authorized licensees. Furthermore, the court held that the defendants’ failure to obtain a licence from Philips to use its SEP prima facie led to the finding of infringement, as the defendants’ products complied with the standard. Regarding the applicable licence fee, the defendants were unable to prove that the fee charged by Philips was not on FRAND terms. Therefore, the court fixed the royalty charges as proposed by Philips.
This decision, though path-breaking, was a relatively straightforward one, focusing entirely on domestic issues. The situation is far more complex in the recent InterDigital v. Xiaomi case.
Tesla’s next generation of vehicles like the Cybertruck and the Made-in-Texas Model Y will likely be built with a structural battery pack. Together with the company’s 4680 cells and megacasted parts, Tesla’s integrated battery system is expected to improve its vehicles’ mass and range significantly.
During Battery Day, Elon Musk explained that the use of structural batteries on electric cars could be compared to how passenger aircraft eventually used their wings to store fuel. In the case of airplanes, the weight of the fuel actually provided rigidity to the wing, reducing wing flutter, or the vibrations of the wings due to airflow. Musk noted that a structural battery pack could provide a 10% mass reduction and an opportunity for a 12% range increase for its vehicles.
Generics and innovators explain the possible ramifications of the European Commission’s investigation into Teva’s divisional filing practices for Copaxone
Dallas Invents is a weekly look at U.S. patents granted with a connection to the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington metro area. Listings include patents granted to local assignees and/or those with a North Texas inventor. Patent activity can be an indicator of future economic growth, as well as the development of emerging markets and talent attraction. By tracking both inventors and assignees in the region, we aim to provide a broader view of the region’s inventive activity. Listings are organized by Cooperative Patent Classification (CPC).
Japanese firm has said licensing will be is core to its business. The terms of its deal with Samsung could make or break that strategy.
The Federal Circuit recently wrote about the GATT-Bubble in Hyatt v. Hirschfeld decision. “[I]n the nine days leading to June 8, 1995, the PTO reported that it received and processed over 50,000 applications—one-quarter of the entire year’s projected filings.” Pre-GATT applicants had a comparative incentive to keep their patent applications pending longer because patent term was calculated based upon the issue date.* This was especially true in the early days prior to creation and expansion of Patent Term Adjustment. 1995 was 26 years ago — most folks who are patent attorneys today were not yet even in law school at the time. That summer, I was working at a bacon factory in Frontenac Kansas (The $5.15 per hour was substantially above minimum wage of $4.25).
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In addition, a number of unclassified pre-GATT cases have also moved through. An interesting one is a patent issued to Lockheed Martin in 2020 on a “method for opening a combination padlock.” U.S. Pat. No. 10,669,742. Basically, this is a method and apparatus for figuring out the combination on the padlock. The application was filed back in 1990 and kept secret by order of the Department of Defense until 2018.
Last week, the Federal Circuit affirmed imposition of an exclusion order under 19 U.S.C. ۤ 1337 (Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930) by the Federal Trade Commission against 10X Genomyx (an intervenor in this appeal) over importation of patented microfluidic chips, in Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. v. International Trade Commission. (10X Genomyx obtained a similar exclusion order against Bio-Rad in a case appealed last month; see "Bio-Rad Laboratories, Inc. v. Int'l. Trade Comm".)
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The technology at issue was related to microfluidics chips for performing bioanalytic assays using small amounts of sample contained in microdroplets, defined in the opinion as "a contiguous amount of one type of fluid that is encapsulated within a different fluid," wherein "the inner fluid is aqueous or water-based, while the outer fluid is oil" in typical embodiments. Generally, the sample is contained in the aqueous inner fluid. An advantage of this arrangement was that each sample could be subject to chemical reactions in its own droplet (a "mini-test tube" according to the '664 patent) and that a larger number of chemical reactions can be performed in parallel. Such reactions are performed on microchips as claimed in the patents-at-issue (the opinion noting that such microchips were known in the art at the priority dates of these patents).
As set forth in the opinion, the named inventors of the asserted patents previously worked for a company (QuantaLife, Inc.) that was thereafter acquired by Bio-Rad. These inventors had agreed in their employment contracts with QuantaLife to promptly assign to the company their rights to the provisional applications that matured into the three patents-in-suit, which they assigned to Bio-Rad after the acquisition. These inventors later left Bio-Rad and formed 10X Genomics, where they developed the technology asserted by Bio-Rad to infringe the patents-in-suit.
The Patent Box is a quite complicated tax relief in comparison to R&D tax reliefs. It was introduced to encourage companies to commercialise intellectual property. It only applies to products that are either entirely patented or contain a patented item. Companies can reduce their rate of corporation tax to 10% for profits accumulated from the sale of products which qualify. However, for patents to be accepted, they must have been granted by the UK Intellectual Property Office or the European Patent Office. It can be quite a complex process to identify how much of a business’ income is relevant to a patent. To understand what does and doesn’t qualify, it’s important that you work closely with your accountant to establish robust accounting systems so as to prevent submitting incorrect claims.
If PerDiemCo LLC (PerDiemCo | Defendant) could have it their way, sending demand letters to a company in another state would not constitute minimum contacts for purposes of personal jurisdiction. Trimble, Inc. v. PerDiemCo LLC, No. 19-2164, 2021 WL 1898127, at *1, *7 (Fed. Cir. May 12, 2021). PerDiemCo is the assignee of eleven patents[1] at issue, all related to geofencing and electronic logging technology (commonly used in the trucking industry). Trimble, Inc., and ISE (Trimble’s wholly-owned subsidiary) (Trimble | Plaintiff) offer geofencing and logging technologies along with manufacturing and selling positioning devices. Id. at *1. Below is a figure depicting this technology, which shows the geofenced areas (boxed in), the entry and exit points (see figure reference 2204), and location information logs while a contact is within a geofenced area (see figure reference 2202). U.S. Patent No. 10,171,950 fig.22 (filed May 22, 2018) (issued Jan. 1, 2019).
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In response, Trimble and ISE sought a declaratory judgment action of non-infringement in the Northern District of California for all patents asserted by PerDiemCo in January 2019. Id. Trimble and ISE asserted that PerDiemCo was subject to specific personal jurisdiction in the Northern District of California. Id. While the district court (and later the Federal Circuit) held that the minimum contacts standard was satisfied, the district court dismissed the action, and Trimble and ISE appealed. Id. at *3, *7.
PerDiemCo argued that specific personal jurisdiction would be unreasonable, citing the five “fairness” factors outlined in Burger King Corp. v. Rudzewicz, 471 U.S. 462, 477 (1985).[2] In Burger King, the Court had to decide whether exercising personal jurisdiction over two out-of-state Burger King franchisees would be fair. Id. at 466, 476. The Court ultimately concluded, after weighing the fairness factors (see footnote 2), that the exercise of personal jurisdiction, in that case, did not offend due process, as the franchisees had fair notice of the danger of suit in Florida. Id. at 487. The franchisees did not show the Court that it would be fundamentally unfair to exercise jurisdiction. Id.
Sources suggest a pre-launch validity assessment could help de-clutter the register and act as an insurance for hopeful applicants, but others are unconvinced
