Welcome to this week's Linux weekly roundup and wow! What a full week in the world of Linux releases with KDE Plasma 5.23 and Linux releases like Ubuntu 21.10, Devuan 4.0.0, KaOS 2021.10, Bluestar Linux 5.14.11, Manjaro 21.1.16, and Sparky Linux 2021.10.
This week was all about Ubuntu 21.10, but we also saw some big announcements starting with the release of the KDE Plasma 5.23 desktop enviornment and the launch of the PinePhone Pro Linux smartphone, and continuing with several great distro releases like the systemd-free Devuan GNU+Linux 4.0 and KaOS 2021.10.
You can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for October 17th, 2021, below. Last but not least, this week I also managed to do some further optimization to the website so that it runs faster, and cleaned up the bottom part of the posts pages to make the comments section more accessible.
In this video, we are looking at KDE Plasma 5.23.
Today we are looking at the newly released KDE Plasma 5.23, we use the KDE Neon user edition to look at it (which is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS). Enjoy!
As computers get easier to use and more people are using computers from a young age you'd think that computer literacy would increase, well in some instances that may not actually be the case.
I often talk about the advantages of free and open source software (FOSS) versus proprietary software (aka "proprietary poo"). But many people have messaged me saying that they could never switch to FOSS because: (1) I have to use proprietary software, or (2) proprietary software is just inherently better than free/cheap software, or (3) there is no FOSS software for the stuff I do.
So here we are, slightly later on a Sunday than usual due to travel, but rc6 is out.
I'd love to say that it's all looking average, but rc6 is actually bigger han rc5 was, and larger than normal for this time in the release cycle.
It's not _enormously_ larger than normal, and it's not the largest rc6 we've had, but it's still slightly worrisome. By rc6 I really do expect things to have started calming down.
I'm hoping it's just one of those random timing effects, with a couple of slightly bigger pulls having come in the last week, and we'll see the next week being extra quiet because rc6 got some of the stuff that would normally have hit rc7. It happens. But let's see how this goes.
The 5.15 cycle over-all remains one of the smaller cycles (at least counting commits), so I wouldn't have expected this to be one that requires an extra rc, but that may be what ends up happening unless the upcoming week is really nice and calm.
That said, nothing in here looks _particularly_ worrisome. It really smells like just random timing effects to me, with networking, GPU drivers, and ntfs3 all having had a somewhat active week. Other than that it all really looks fairly normal.
Full details in the shortlog below.
Please give it a whirl. And let's hope for a nice calm next week and a smaller rc7.
Linus
I'm announcing the release of the 5.14.13 kernel.
All users of the 5.14 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.14.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.14.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
Many programs that write JPEG files don’t do the best job at using the format efficiently.
So, there are many suboptimal JPEGs floating around the internet, and many are up to 20-30% bigger than they need to be, because some programs do all sorts of ridiculous and unnecessary things when they write them, and also fail to use Huffman Coding correctly.
Unfortunately, JPEG is a lossy compressed format (and not even a great one), and so like an MP3 file, if you re-encode it, even back into itself, you suffer further loss in quality.
However, lossless optimization doesn’t do this. You may not get enormous improvements in file size, but it’s more like using a more aggressive dictionary search in a ZIP file.
(As lossy compression schemes broadly have two parts. One that discards data that it considers perceptually irrelevant, and then another part that does lossless compression methods on what’s left.).
I looked around to see if Debian had MozJPEG, but it didn’t. There was a open discussion about it, which is one of the bright sides of Debian. At least you know the discussions leading up to the decisions they make.
Linux terminal is used for performing administrative tasks without having any issues. However, many people don't know that we can play music through the command line. Linux provides different CLI music players by which users can play the audio files from the terminal.
CLI music players are simple to use and consume lesser memory. This article briefs about the 6 best command line Music players for Linux in 2021.
Linux Performance Monitoring tools are the tools that allow you to keep track of your Linux system's resources and storage usage, as well as the state of your network. The tools can be used to troubleshoot and debug Linux System Performance issues.
In this tutorial, we will learn the best tools for Linux performance monitoring and troubleshooting.
Today we are looking at how to install Thinkorswim Desktop 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.
Stellarium is a digital planetarium that is free and open source. Anyone can install it and use it to gaze at stars in the sky in real-time. It also shows detailed information on planets, moons, and even constellations. Here’s how you can use Stellarium to gaze at the stars on your Linux PC.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to install Checkmk monitoring agents on Linux. Monitoring agents enables remote monitoring of system metrics such as system load, memory and disk usage e.t.c.
In our previous tutorial, we learnt how to install Checkmk monitoring tool on Ubuntu 20.04 system.
Dead Space is a survival horror game developed by EA Redwood Shores and published by Electronic Arts. The game was released on PS3, Xbox 360, and Windows. Here’s how to play Dead Space on Linux.
it is actually like this, in virt-manager, that chipset and bios can only be changed during first setup “begin installation”
Due to some unfortunate events I ended up with a broken pam library on a VM I am running. Everything else worked just fine .. except that login of course (so a bit of an issue if you need to do stuff like update letsencrypt certificates quickly cuz you forgot and are on holiday...
Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp. To use terraform, you define the resources you want to create using a declarative configuration language created by Hashicorp known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON.
Gunfire Reborn is an adventure FPS game with RPG and roguelite elements. The game was published and developed by Douyi Games. Here’s how to play the game on Linux.
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Gunfire Reborn has an excellent rating on ProtonDB, so it should run great on Linux. However, if you’d like to play the game, you’ll have to first install the Steam app for Linux on your computer.
Usually the term "on rails" refers to a highly linear experience over which the player has little control. But sometimes it's meant far more literally than that, as is the case in Pomeshkin Valentin Igorevich's recently released steampunk adventure, Pnevmo-Capsula: Domiki.
Dash to Dock now supports GNOME 40 — officially.
Work to get the popular desktop dock extension jiving with GNOME 40 desktop got underway back in April. Progress was, as we reported, swift and functional, but to try it out users needed to manually install a development version from Github.
Well, no more.
You can now install Dash to Dock on GNOME 40 from the GNOME extensions site using a compatible web browser.
Version 70 of the add-on gains official support for GNOME 40 and its horizontal workspace and application launcher. The dock can be placed on different sides of the screen, and remain accessible once exiting the overview (unlock GNOME Shell’s native dock).
At the beginning of this review I mentioned Auxtral reminded me of Linux Mint Debian Edition. The theme, the Cinnamon desktop, and general look of the project certainly held that first impression. However, the default applications and tools (apart from the Cinnamon desktop and command line utilities) felt quite a bit different. Linux Mint has been around for several years and has earned a reputation for being beginner friendly, polished, and shipping with a lot of top-notch open source applications.
Auxtral appears to have a similar approach - similar base distribution, the same desktop environments, and a similar look. However, Auxtral does have its own personality under the surface. It ships with a quite different collection of applications, sometimes using less popular items (Brave in place of Firefox, SMPlayer instead of VLC, etc.) It has also gone its own way with software updates, preferring classic tools like APT and Synaptic over Mint's update manager.
Auxtral is off to a good start. This was my first time trying the distribution and the experience was mostly positive. The operating system is easy to install, offers multiple desktop environments, and walks a pretty good line between hand holding and staying out of the way. The application menu is uncluttered while including enough programs to be useful. Some of those programs are a bit more obscure or less beginner friendly than what you might find in Linux Mint, but otherwise it's a good collection. Virtually everything worked and worked smoothly. I was unpleasantly surprised by this distribution's memory usage, most projects consume about half as much RAM, but otherwise I liked what Auxtral had to offer. I might not recommended it to complete beginners, especially since the project does not appear to have any documentation or support options of its own, but for someone who doesn't mind a little command line work or who likes the idea of an easy to setup distribution that combines Debian with the Cinnamon (or Xfce desktop) this seems like a good option.

While there is quite an array of Arduino boards to choose from, the Nano is a versatile board suitable for almost all DIY electronic projects. These tiny micro controllers make compact DIY hardware development available to more people than ever before.
In the past we have covered reasons you may not want to choose a genuine Arduino for your projects, but today lets take a look at the positives and negatives of the Arduino Nano.
Adobe is a large multinational computer software company with over 22,000 employees. Its flagship products include Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, XD, Acrobat DC, as well as the ubiquitous the Portable Document Format (PDF). Their products are wrapped up and marketed as the Creative Cloud, a subscription-only way of accessing more than 20 desktop and mobile apps and services for photography, design, video, web, UX, and more.
We are long-standing admirers of Adobe’s products. They develop many high quality proprietary programs. It’s true there are security and privacy concerns in relation to some of their products. And there’s considerable criticism attached to their pricing practices. But the fundamental issue regarding Adobe Creative Cloud is that Linux isn’t a supported platform. And there’s no prospect of support forthcoming.
By now things are going full tilt boogie in downtown Raleigh, as the All Things Open conference is well into its “pre” day.
Keeping with the trend set by other conferences, All Things Open opens a day ahead of time, partially to stage free event’s that aren’t officially a part of the main show, but which offer attendees from out-of-town a reason to fly in a day early to settle in.
This is good for the travelling attendees, because they don’t spend the first day suffering for jet lag or other forms of travel fatigue, and good for the event, because it means that more people are in place to fill seats and attend presentations, beginning with the opening keynote.
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At ATO, the registration desks are open on Sunday from noon until 5:30 Eastern Time, and the pre-conference is a free Inclusion and Diversity Event that started at noon and will run until 5pm, emceed by Rikki Endsley, formally with Red Hat and now a community marketing manager at Amazon Web Services.
The primary change in this release of my Kerberos PAM module is support for calling pam_end with PAM_DATA_SILENT. I had not known that the intent of this flag was to signal that only process resources were being cleaned up and external resources should not be (in part because an older version of the man page doesn't make this clear).
Despite the name, BASIC isn’t exactly a language recommended for beginners these days. Technology has moved on, and now most people would steer you towards Python if you wanted to get your feet wet with software development. But for those who got their first taste of programming by copying lines of BASIC out of a computer magazine, the language still holds a certain nostalgic appeal.
There is a fairly standard image of the university library. At least in affluent Western countries, they are generally open long hours, run by professionals with their own acquisitions budgets, and fairly comprehensive in their coverage of major disciplines. And, until recently, they have been notable for a solemn silence.
Yet much of this model is relatively new and now coming under pressure. A recently published book, The Library: A Fragile History (Profile), offers some striking insights into the past and future of university libraries. Its authors are Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen, the founding director and deputy director of the Universal Short Title Catalogue, the leading resource for the study of early printed books, at the University of St Andrews, where they are also, respectively, professor of modern history and British Academy postdoctoral fellow.
The PS/2-style port was once about as ubiquitous on PCs as USB connectors are today, and more than a few of us accumulated a fair collection of keyboards and mice that sported the 6-pin mini-DIN plug. They’re not nearly as common today, but when you need one, you need one, so if your stockpile of PS/2 keyboards has dwindled to nothing, you might want to look at rolling your own PS/2 remote keyboard dongle.
The latest video from [TheSignalPath] is a result of his purchase of a home COVID-19 test. He found an electronic version that connects to your cell phone and displays the results on the phone. The device is an antigen test and, internally, works like the home tests that show the results using lines similar to a pregnancy test. So, somehow, the phone version reads the lines and communicates with the phone. But how? That’s the point of the video, which you can see below.
In a traditional test, there’s a control line that has to appear to show that the test was done correctly. Then a line under that indicates detection of the virus. The circuit board inside the electronic test has a plastic unit onboard that contains a similar strip and has optical sensors for both the reference line and the detection line. Since it is essentially an optical device — there are some lenses in the strip assembly that look like they are detecting the dye as it moves through the strip with LEDs onboard to shed light on the situation.
Retrocomputer enthusiasts will quite often be found pondering the great what ifs of their hobby. What if Commodore had had a half-way decent marketing division is a popular one, but the notoriously penny-pinching ways of Sinclair Research are also a plentiful source. What if Sinclair had won the competition for a computer in UK schools, not only the first time around when Acorn’s BBC Micro scooped the prize, but also what if they’d entered the fray once more in 1983 when there was another chance? [10p6] investigates this possibility, and comes up with a Spectrum desktop computer that you can see in the video below the break.
The first two-thirds of the video is devoted to renders which, while pretty to look at, offer nothing of substance. In the later part though we see a build, putting a Spectrum 48k board, Interface 1, and two Microdrives in a slimline case along with a power supply. Meanwhile a ZX rubber keyboard is mounted stand-alone on the end of a cable. It’s a computer that we know would have been an object of desire for many kids back in the day, and we agree with the video that it could have been integrated onto one board without the need for a separate Interface 1. We feel it’s inevitable though that Sinclair’s cost-cutting would have caused something to go astray and there would certainly have been only one Microdrive, even though we like that separate keyboard a lot.
It’s almost hard to remember a time when the obvious answer to most questions about manufacturing wasn’t “Throw it on the CNC.” CNC machines have become so entrenched that the acronym has become a verb; few people would misunderstand a statement like “Let’s just CNC that.”
But before CNC machines became so ubiquitous, there were plenty of clever tricks for cutting material in a controlled fashion, as [Pask] shows us with this tool to machine wood for inlays. The tool is called a parser (or passer) drill, and is designed for use in conjunction with a steel template. [Pask]’s version seems pretty easy to make; a pair of mild steel bars are forged flat into spade shapes before having a cutting surface ground into them. The two halves of the drill are welded together and ground down to fit in the chuck of a hand drill, a modern nod to the fact that few people will want to use the traditional bow and breastplate that drove the original parser drills.
Instead, he said, the company believes focusing on the prevalence of hate speech people actually see on the platform and how it reduces it using various tools is a more important measure. He claimed that for every 10,000 views of a piece of content on Facebook, there were five views of hate speech. “Prevalence tells us what violating content people see because we missed it,” Rosen wrote. “It’s how we most objectively evaluate our progress, as it provides the most complete picture.”
By last year, the issue had become more urgent, according to internal Instagram documents obtained by The New York Times. “If we lose the teen foothold in the U.S. we lose the pipeline,” read a strategy memo, from last October, that laid out a marketing plan for this year.
In the face of that threat, Instagram left little to chance. Starting in 2018, it earmarked almost its entire global annual marketing budget — slated at $390 million this year — to targeting teenagers, largely through digital ads, according to planning documents and people directly involved in the process. Focusing so singularly on a narrow age group is highly unusual, marketers said, though the final spending went beyond teenagers and encompassed their parents and young adults.
When Ethiopian federal forces and the Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) started fighting in November 2020, a second front quickly opened online, where both sides seek to control the narrative.
Social media became a battleground, with the Ethiopian government and its supporters on one side and Tigrayan activists and supporters on the other. Each side tried to present its version of events to English-speaking audiences, according to The Media Manipulation Casebook. Created by the Shorenstein Center's Technology and Social Change project at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Casebook group has been researching Tigray-related information campaigns since the conflict began.
The former state prosecutor said that approximately 25,000 photos were taken of the wreck, on the basis of which a 3D model of the wreck will be put together. The model will enable investigators to see the wreck as a whole and measure the size of the injuries.
"The model will also reveal penetrating injuries," Kurm said. He added that some areas of the wreck have not been photographed, but these are not relevant when it comes to the disaster. According to Kurm, the 3D model will take three to four weeks to complete.
Food Sovereignty is a philosophy of life.
Nevertheless, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) attempted to influence COP 26 by releasing its report ahead of schedule. Because of the consensus-based process of the IPCC — and the direct influence that oil-rich governments exert during the process — the UN body is notoriously conservative in its projections and policy solutions (often referred to as “the lowest common denominator” in climate science).
The hamstrung IPCC, however, did its best to convey urgency by warning of climate catastrophe unless global emissions are cut in half by 2030 and/or net zero emissions are achieved by 2050.
Part of that story is true: There are more than 10 million unfilled jobs in the United States, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The percentage of people quitting their jobs — a measure of confidence in being able to find work — hit a record high in August.
But for whatever reason, workers overall are not managing to extract much more money from their employers.
Target markets for the hiring include the Republic of Ireland, which unlike Northern Ireland remains part of the European Union, as well as Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Poland, and the Netherlands. A spokesperson for Facebook confirmed to Bloomberg the U.K. wasn’t being included.
Numerous members of Al Qaeda and Islamic States have broken out of Afghan prisons amid fighting that toppled the Kabul government last month, the Interfax quoted Anatoly Sidorov, head of the Collective Security Treaty Organisation joint staff, as saying.
Chinese social media outlet Sina Weibo blocked the accounts of Malaysian rapper Namewee (é»âæËŽå¿â) and Taiwan-based Australian singer Kimberley Chen (éâ¢Â³Ã¨Å ³èªž) after they released a duet satirizing the country’s communist regime, reports said Saturday (Oct. 16).
The activists waved the Tibetan flag and Hong Kong’s revolution flag atop the historic monument, chanting “Boycott Beijing 2022” and “Free Tibet”, "just 48 hours before the Olympic Torch will be handed to Beijing in the very same place", according to a statement from the New York-based organisation Students for a Free Tibet.
In pursuit of Xi Jinping’s theory, “to govern the nation, govern the borders; to govern the borders, strengthen the development of border regions”, China has given a concrete shape to the new Great Helmsman’s slogan by building some 600 “model” villages, many in sacred areas on the Tibetan side of the Indian border.
Whether it is with the hydropower plants or the new villages, the hallowedness and pristine purity of these areas are being lost forever.
China, referred to in the report as a “manipulative adversary”, has allegedly been targeting “the bright impressionable minds, the tech savvy youth, the opinion makers and the intelligentsia present in India” through investments by Chinese companies including Alibaba and Tencent in Indian multinationals such as BYJU’s, the Educational technology company based in Bangalore. The appearance of Bollywood megastars Shah Rukh Khan and Kabir Khan at the Beijing International Film Festival in 2019 is interpreted by the report as a covert intelligence mission by the Chinese to “make inroads into Bollywood for its influence operations through the mechanism of co-productions.” The selection of Sha Rukh Khan’s film Zero to close the festival is referred to as a “calculated step” by the Chinese Communist Party.
The biggest movie in the world right now is not the latest Bond film No Time To Die or even Marvel's Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
It's a Chinese propaganda film about the 1950s Korean War, centred on a story of Chinese soldiers defeating American troops despite great odds.
Researchers at the Center for Social Media and Politics at New York University found a significant rise in election fraud YouTube videos shared on Twitter immediately after the Nov. 3 election. In November, those videos consistently accounted for about one-third of all election-related video shares on Twitter. The top YouTube channels about election fraud that were shared on Twitter that month came from sources that had promoted election misinformation in the past, such as Project Veritas, Right Side Broadcasting Network and One America News Network.
Shutdowns have become more sophisticated in recent years. Authorities have learned to take out specific platforms, such as WhatsApp or Twitter, to discourage political mobilisation. They may also ask internet services providers to throttle, or deliberately slow down, network traffic or hit only mobile internet connections. Shutdowns may affect individual cities or entire countries; they may last a few hours or drag on for months. In Ethiopia’s Tigray region, where the army and rebel forces have clashed for nearly a year, residents have been cut off for over 300 days.
He directed his video at another [Internet] user, whom he called ”my brother”. This person recorded himself on camera on the TikTok network. The video was published by journalists from CNews on Friday October 15. In this sequence, which lasts less than a minute, the orator did not hesitate to threaten Marine Le Pen and Eric Zemmour with beheading. [...]
As a history teacher, Mr. Paty was responsible for teaching civics. To illustrate the right to blasphemy, free speech and freedom of conscience, he showed caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad, setting in motion a swirl of lies and rumor that ended in his beheading.
The police investigation revealed that the girl who told her father, Brahim Chnina, a false version of what had taken place in the class and prompted the online frenzy that led to the killing had not been in the class at all.
The girl told the police that Mr. Paty had questioned all students on their religious allegiance, let Muslims know that they could leave because “they would be shocked” and then ordered her out of the class for causing a ruckus while images of a naked Prophet were shown. But the story, it emerged in March, was made up; she was never there.
The judicial investigation is continuing, and no trial is expected for at least a year.
Instead of overt brutality, the campaign is being waged quietly with a vague legal tool: a law regulating the activities of so-called foreign agents.
It was first used against a media outlet in 2017, when several U.S.-government funded outlets, such as the Voice of America, were declared foreign agents. But, last year, the state began to deploy it against independent Russian journalists.
A grim phrase burst into the political conversation this past week: “slow-moving coup.” And it didn’t come from journalists — it was delivered by a late-night comedian.
The “coup” label drove an eight-minute monologue by HBO’s Bill Maher, laying out in detail efforts by Donald Trump’s allies to oust the GOP old guard and lower election guard-rails through a hundred small actions, from Capitol Hill to towns and counties beyond the Beltway.
Maher’s routine exploded on social media because it was a compelling story that gathered scattered pieces of reporting from around the country together into a cohesive narrative. That’s something the mainstream press has not been able to do.
Given India’s immense scale and complexity, and with its deep pool of highly skilled workers, its governments have increasingly turned to high-tech solutions for all sorts of problems. Generally these have eased burdens on both rulers and the governed, despite some expected glitches. Administrative infrastructure such as Aadhaar has propelled such conveniences as digital payments, internet shopping and online schooling. Yet precisely because of India’s size and poverty, tens of millions still are left out—because they are poor, illiterate, disabled, lack electricity, do not possess a smartphone or cannot connect to a mobile or Wi-Fi network.
On October 14th, Apple fired a leader of the #AppleToo movement for allegedly failing to comply with an internal investigation. The employee, Janneke Parrish, has been working behind the scenes for months to organize fellow employees who’ve faced harassment and discrimination.
Now, Apple appears to be cracking down on those efforts — under the guise of trying to stop internal information from leaking to the press. In September, Apple fired Ashley Gjøvik for allegedly violating her confidentiality agreement. Then, it placed software engineer Cher Scarlett on medical leave.
Ms. Parrish, 30, said she believed Apple was retaliating against her for helping to organize the activist group. In recent months, Apple employees have uncharacteristically spoken out and said the company’s culture of secrecy — meant to prevent product leaks — pervaded other aspects of the company and discouraged workers from coming forward about issues like sexual harassment and wage disparities.
During a live broadcast on the official Facebook page of Dar Al-Ifta – the institution tasked with issuing religious fatwas [Islamic edicts] – Ahmed Mamdouh, head of the Islamic Sharia law research department argued in late August that hymen repair was "permissible and necessary,” for example, where a girl has been raped or deceived [by a man] and wished to repent and turn a new page."
A class-action lawsuit has been filed against Canon for disabling the scan and fax features of select all-in-one printers when the ink has run low or is out. The lawsuit filed in New York on October 12 alleges that Canon has misled customers by not informing them that this will happen.
A proposed class action alleges Canon U.S.A. has falsely advertised its All-in-One printers in that the products, touted as able to print, copy, scan and, in some cases, fax documents, are unable to scan or fax when their ink cartridges are low or empty.
The 26-page lawsuit contends that Canon has intentionally failed to inform consumers that ink is needed to use all functions of the “3-in-1” or “4-in-1” printers. As a result, buyers must bear the “unexpected and unnecessary” burden of buying costly ink or otherwise lose the ability to scan or fax from their printers, the case claims.
The claim says that it is a “design issue” by Canon and not a precautionary step. People purchase Canon products because of their excellent reputation and quality and Canon should have either designed the printer to not disable the other functions when the ink was out (the “design issue”) or made it clear that this would be the case.
David Leacraft filed a class-action complaint in federal court on Tuesday.
The European Union’s top antitrust official warned that enforcers must move faster to tackle big tech’s bad behavior, hinting at how they may try to fix future problems.
“We must intervene promptly” Olivier Guersent, director general of the European Commission’s competition unit, said at an online conference. If you are too slow, “you impose a very high fine but the damage is done and there’s nothing you can do to repair the harm” when tech giants take over a market.
On October 13, 2021, the Federal Circuit (2-1 majority) ruled in favor of Unified Patents, rejecting Mobility Workx's arguments that the PTAB has a financial interest in instituting IPRs. All of Mobility Workx's constitutional arguments were found to be "without merit."
In line with other Arthrex cases, the PTAB's finding the patent is unpatentable has been remanded back to the Acting Director for the limited purpose of determining whether review is warranted. The arguments, which appear copied verbatim from another appeal, were not raised below.
Counsel from Asia and elsewhere discuss the reasons behind blockchain’s slow implementation in IP, but highlight use cases from China and promising trends
The patentee primarily these cases on claim construction on two simple terms — based largely on statements made during prosecution to skirt the prior art.
“Location” – some of the asserted claims take various actions related to the “location of [a] mobile wireless device.” During prosecution the patentee had argued that its location ability was not limited to “a position in a grid pattern” and did not require a grid pattern overlay. Rather its location sense was more “adaptable” and “refined.” The courts found this clear prosecution history disclaimer and so the location term is properly construed to require “not merely a position in a grid pattern.” This construction excused Nokia from infringement, since the accused Nokia system is arranged in a grid of 50-meter-by-50-meter bins.
“A Computer” – the claims all required “a computer” or “first computer.” The problem was that the accused devices performed the various functions across a set of computers. The district court construed “first computer” and “computer” to mean a single computer that can perform each and every function. That construction was affirmed on appeal after the Federal Circuit reviewed the claims and specification for supporting evidence.
[...]
Indefiniteness: Some of the claims were also invalidated as indefinite, even after a certificate of correction. In particular, the those claims required a “means for … suggesting corrective actions . . based upon . . . location” but the specification did not disclose how that might take place. On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed. “Although Traxcell demonstrated that the structure makes corrections based on other performance data, it hasn’t shown that any corrections are made using location.”
The Federal Circuit uses a simple if-then shortcut for its indefiniteness analysis of claims that include means-plus-function language. If the specification lacks sufficient structure to support the claimed means; Then the claim is invalid as indefinite. This approach is probably too rule based. Rather, each time the Federal Circuit should use its lack-of-structure analysis to ask does the claim at issue “particularly point[] out and distinctly claim[] the subject matter which the inventor or a joint inventor regards as the invention.” 35 U.S.C. 112(b).
In February 2021, US Inventor and others collectively sued the USPTO asking the court to order the USPTO to issue rulemaking regarding discretionary considerations at the institution stage of AIA Trials. That case is now on appeal.
The lengthy string of challenges to the constitutionality of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board appears set to continue after a dissent by a Federal Circuit judge on Wednesday identified another potential flaw in the board that seems likely to spur more litigation, attorneys say.
A 2-1 majority of a panel of the appeals court rejected arguments by Mobility Workx LLC that the PTAB has a financial interest in the outcome of cases that makes it biased against patent owners. However, U.S. Circuit Judge Pauline Newman's dissent raised a separate issue to suggest the way the board institutes reviews does not comport...
From the inspirational intergalactic films to science fiction we have always wanted, computers and robots to be able to talk to us, understand us, helps us in ways a human brain cannot process and materialize. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a computer source code which behaves like a cluster of neurons communicating electromagnetically and basing their actions on self-learning algorithms. One can brainstorm on the fiction of Avengers where, Jarvis and Friday, the AI systems that Tony Stark a.k.a Iron Man uses, are undoubtedly his intellectual property. So given the situation where the former develops some benefiting and novel invention would the legal system consider the AI as inventor or its human developer? And who would be the patentee?
Counsel say the Federal Circuit’s decision could encourage design patent applicants to strive for broader claim language, among other things
The Taiwan Patent Examination Guideline was revised and announced on July 14, 2021, and the major revisions include Part II Chapter 6 Amendments, Part V Invalidations, as well as clarification of disclosure requirements. From now on, patentees shall be careful that the invalidation procedures are different from the past, and that there are now more limitations to the amendment of claims. We set out the revised regulations below and offer our strategies.
Building a useful patent portfolio requires the company to define quantity and quality targets, for the short, medium, and long terms. It would be no exaggeration to see the past year as a golden age of Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) for Israeli startups and tech companies. The prominent offerings over the past year include Kaltura, monday.com, WalkMe, Global-e, Playtika, SimilarWeb, SentinelOne, Taboola, ironSource, and Payoneer. Together they have raised more than $2 billion and are traded with combined market caps of more than $50 billion.
The Federal Circuit accepted patent owner Mobility Workx LLC’s argument that its case should be sent back to the patent office for director review in light of a recent U.S. Supreme Court case finding administrative patent judges were unconstitutionally appointed.
In a precedential opinion, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit remanded Unified Patents LLC’s challenge to Mobility’s wireless patent under United States v. Arthrex, which gave the patent office director the power to overturn decisions the Patent Trial and Appeal Board makes in the inter partes review process.
Two judges of the three-member appellate panel rejected Mobility’s broader arguments that the board is structured in a way that creates due process concerns for patent owners.
That task is complicated, however. Developing case law around the licensing of patents ‘essential’ to standardised technology, the fallout from Brexit, and possible reforms to IP law, including in the context of artificial intelligence (AI), will all play into due diligence exercises.
Legal and industry sources agree Justice Meade has taken a radical step, but are split on whether it gets the balance right
The European Patent Office (EPO) has confirmed its intention to grant Hexicon a European patent for the company's floating wind power platform with tilted towers. EPO has also examined a third-party submission, similar to the objection filed against the patent already granted in Sweden, and did not find it relevant, in accordance with Hexicon's previous assessment.
The review provides data relating to the patenting activity in the leading patent offices, including USPTO (US), EPO (States to the European Patent Convention), CNIPA (CN), KIPO (KR), JPO (JP), CIPO (CA), IP Australia (AU), DPMA (DE), TIPO (TW), DKPTO (DK).
US district court patent litigation levels are about the same now as they were in 2017, while PTAB filings have dropped, and ex parte re-examinations are trending upwards
The Senate IP subcommittee will hold a hearing on Tuesday, October 19, to discuss the Pride in Patent Ownership Act, which – if passed – would compel patent owners to disclose their identity to the USPTO when a patent was issued or when patent ownership changed.
Senators Patrick Leahy and Thom Tillis introduced the act on September 21, along with the Unleashing American Innovators Act, which would require the USPTO’s satellite offices to conduct outreach to increase participation in the patent system from underrepresented groups.
The hearing will start at 2.30pm EST on October 19 in the Dirksen Senate Office Building, room 226, with Leahy presiding. It will be available to watch online via the Senate Judiciary Committee website.
Former USPTO director David Kappos will serve as a witness at the hearing, as will Allon Stabinsky, deputy general counsel at Intel, Abigail Rives, IP counsel at Engine, and Robin Feldman, a professor at the Hastings College of the Law, University of California.
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The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected arguments from non-practising entity Mobility Workx on Wednesday, October 13, ruling that the structure of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board was constitutional.
In Mobility Workx v Unified Patents, the appellate court dismissed the argument that administrative patent judges (APJs) had an interest in instituting proceedings to fund the USPTO and ensure job stability.
The court pointed out that the chief APJ, deputy chief APJ, and vice chief APJs were not responsible for the USPTO’s finances. It added that Congress set the USPTO’s budget, which meant that any agency interest in fee generation was too tenuous to be a due process violation.
The Federal Circuit also disagreed with the NPE’s assertion that APJs had an interest in instituting proceedings to earn better performance reviews and bonuses.
It did, however, remand the decision to the PTAB to allow Mobility to request director rehearing of the final written decision, which it was entitled to under US v Arthrex.
The appellate court declined to review the merits of the PTAB decision until Drew Hirshfeld, who was performing the functions and duties of the USPTO director, determined whether a rehearing was warranted.
Mobility sued T-Mobile and Verizon for patent infringement in 2017 in the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. One of the disputes settled and the other was stayed pending this appeal. Unified Patents – of which both telecoms companies were members – filed an inter partes review in June 2018.
In 2019, the PTAB found that some of Mobility’s claims were unpatentable because they were obvious. Mobility then appealed to the Federal Circuit.
US Copyright Office to study ancillary copyright for publishers
The US Copyright Office announced on Tuesday, October 12, that it would conduct a study of ancillary copyright protection for publishers, or the rights of publishers to prohibit third-party online services from reproducing press publications.
The office said in a notice published on the Federal Register that it would investigate the issue at the request of Congress, noting that there were concerns that online news aggregators – which included search engines and social media platforms – allowed readers to get news without visiting publishers’ websites.
The copyright office also acknowledged arguments that news aggregators drove readers to new websites and got them to click on more articles than they would normally.
Comments are due by November 26. The office wants to know how effective current protections are for press publishers, whether more protections are desirable and how new protections would interact with existing rights and international treaty obligations.
The office will hold a virtual roundtable to discuss this issue on December 9.
We are very grateful for the many responses we have already had to our annual benchmarking survey focusing on the efficiency, quality and value provided by the IP5 patent offices - the China National IP Administration, the European Patent Office, the Korean IP Office, the Japan Patent Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office.
Like my previous two posts (also published today) on IP Bridge v. Ford and Thales v. Avanci & Nokia, this one stems from my research into high-profile Munich patent cases.
Six days ago, Sharp announced a global cross-license agreement with Chinese smartphone maker OPPO. In connection with the Chinese part of the dispute, the Supreme People's Court of the People's Republic of China had made an interesting jurisdictional decision. Sharp was suing OPPO over alleged infringements in Germany, and it appears that OPPO defended impressively well.
The Munich I Regional Court has confirmed to me that Sharp's complaint over EP2854324 on a "communication system and mobile station apparatus (case no. 21 O 3514/20) was dismissed: the patent was not found to be infringed by OPPO.
Just like my previous post (on a newly-discovered IP Bridge v. Ford Motor Company case pending in Munich), this post relates to automotive standard-essential patent (SEP) licensing issues.
The Nokia v. Daimler dispute lasted almost two years, and only toward the very end did French industrial giant Thales intervene. Thales makes network access devices (NADs), which other companies then incorporate into their telematics control units (TCUs). Thales is a tier 2 supplier by automotive supply-chain terminology, and its customers are tier 1 (i.e., direct) suppliers.
A couple of weeks ago, OffshoreAlert listed a U.S. discovery request that Thales made from InterDigital in order to use the information so obtained in an antitrust litigation in Munich against the Avanci patent pool and Nokia. InterDigital is an Avanci licensor (as are Nokia and roughly three dozen other companies).
The Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Arthrex, Inc., 141 S. Ct. 1970 (2021), at the end of its last term resulted in many cases with pending certiorari petitions that were based on Appointment Clause challenges to be remanded to the Federal Circuit, and many (if not most) of those were remanded back to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. The decision handed down by the Federal Circuit on Tuesday in Snyders Heart Valve LLC v. St. Jude Medical, LLC is an exception, the Court considering the appeal on the merits and reversing the Board's determination that St. Jude had shown by a preponderance of the evidence that challenged claims 1–3, 8, 9, 22, 23, 31–35, 37–39, and 45 of U.S. Patent No. 6,821,297 were invalid as being either anticipated by U.S. Patent No. 5,855,601 to Bessler or obvious over the '601 patent "in combination with other prior art references."
This is the second appeal of several IPRs between the parties; in an earlier case, St. Jude Medical, LLC v. Snyders Heart Valve LLC (Fed. Cir. 2020), the Board found Snyders' U.S. Patent No. 6,540,782, directed to an artificial heart valve and systems for introducing the valve, to be neither anticipated over U.S. Patent No. 5,957,949 nor rendered obvious over a combination of the '949 patent with U.S. Patent No. 4,339,831 to Johnson and U.S. Patent No. 5,413,599 to Imachi. The Federal Circuit affirmed this decision. In the same appeal, the Federal Circuit reversed the Board's finding that certain of the challenged claims of the '782 patent were anticipated by the Bessler '601 patent based on erroneous claim construction.
Supplementary Protection Certificate (SPCs) for medicinal products are intellectual property rights intended to compensate patent holders for the loss in effective patent term that results from the time taken to receive marketing authorisations for such products. An SPC takes effect at the expiry of the normal term of the patent on which it is based, and expires at whichever is the earlier of (i) 15 years from the first marketing authorisation in the EU/EEA, and (ii) 5 years from the expiry of the basic patent.
After inter partes review (“IPR”), the Board found Mobility’s patent claims invalid. Mobility appealed the decision to the Federal Circuit, arguing that the structure and funding of AIA review proceedings violates due process. Particularly, Mobility argued that the Board and the individual administrative patent judges (“APJs”) have impermissible financial incentives to institute IPRs.
The Federal Circuit rejected Mobility’s due process challenges. First, the Court distinguished the Board from the mayor’s court found impermissible in Tumey v. Ohio, 273 U.S. 510 (1927) where the mayor presiding over the proceedings received compensation if the defendant was convicted and used the fees to finance the town. The Federal Circuit explained that Congress, not the APJs, is responsible for setting the USPTO’s budget, and thus held that the fee-funded structure of IPRs does not violate due process. Second, the Federal Circuit held that individual APJs did not have an impermissible incentive to institute IPRs based on the APJ bonus structure because any interest in instituting IPRs for a bonus was too remote to violate due process.
In a prior appeal in this case, the the Federal Circuit affirmed the lower court’s holding that Heat On-The-Fly’s U.S. Patent No. 8,171,993 was unenforceable due to inequitable conduct. By the critical date (1-year-before-filing), the patentee had done about $2 million in jobs using the invention, but did not disclose those sales/uses to the USPTO during prosecution.
On remand, the district court awarded attorney fees to the defendants — finding the large number of undisclosed sales sufficient to constitute “affirmative egregious conduct” and then pursued aggressive litigation despite knowing that the patent was invalid.
The patent act provides a district court with discretion to award “reasonable attorney fees to the prevailing party” in “exceptional cases.” Once you have a prevailing party, the district court needs to determine whether the case is “exceptional.” If so, the district court will then determine whether to award attorney fees, and the amount to award. These determinations are within the district court’s equitable discretion based upon a broad “totality of the circumstances” test. On appeal, the district court’s factual and equitable determinations are given deference and only overturned based upon an abuse of discretion. Octane Fitness, LLC v. ICON Health & Fitness, Inc., 572 U.S. 545 (2014); Highmark Inc. v. Allcare Health Mgmt. Sys., Inc., 572 U.S. 559 (2014).
Charging high prices on life-saving drugs, as Merck Sharp & Dohme has done, may weaken faith in the patent system as a whole
India’s commerce ministry last month announced an 80% fee cut for educational institutions in India and abroad applying for patents in India in a bid to drive up research, encourage more industry-university collaborations and make it globally competitive in the development of research into patented innovations.
On May 20th, Senior Party ToolGen filed its Substantive Motion No. 1 for benefit of priority to U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/837,481, filed June 20, 2013 ("P3" or "ToolGen 5 P3"), or alternatively, International Application No. PCT/KR2013/009488, filed October 23, 2013 ("PCT"). Junior Party the Broad Institute, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (collectively, "Broad") filed its Opposition to this motion, and on September 24th ToolGen filed its Reply.
As set forth in ToolGen's motion, the Board had granted ToolGen the benefit of its U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/717,324, filed October 23, 2012 ("P1"), resulting in ToolGen having an earlier priority date than Broad. ToolGen submitted this motion to be accorded benefit of priority to two later-filed, related applications: U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/837,481, filed June 20, 2013 ("P3" or "ToolGen 5 P3"), or alternatively, International Application No. PCT/KR2013/009488, filed October 23, 2013 ("PCT"). In its motion, ToolGen explains that it is submitting this motion contingent on the Board granting CVC's Substantive Motion No. 2, which attacks ToolGen's entitlement to priority to the P1 priority document in Interference No. 106,127.
In August, the Federal Circuit sided with Apple and affirmed the district court determination that USR’s asserted claims were all directed to abstract ideas — and thus ineligible under 35 U.S.C. €§ 101. When I first wrote about the original decision, I noted the high correlation between the two steps of Alice: “if a claim fails step one, it usually fails step two as well.” However, this particular decision stood-out because of the extent that the step-one analysis “borrow heavily from typical step two analysis.” Crouch, When Two become One, Patently-O (Aug 29, 2021).
USR has now petitioned for en banc rehearing, and focused-in on the panel’s overlapping analysis regarding step one and step two.
MPEG-LA has hit back at recent IAM analysis which found that Access Advance’s HEVC patent pool provides the most compelling offering to prospective licensees.
The office could maximise the benefits of a TTAB ruling that lowered the fraud bar to reckless disregard if it applied the same standards to non-lawyers
Pirate sites such as ExtraTorrent, KickassTorrents, and isoHunt disappeared from the web more than half a decade ago. Intriguingly, that hasn't stopped some anti-piracy groups from going after them, as they're still asking Google to remove 'infringing' URLs of these sites.
