Some knowledge of basic Linux commands is required in order to create and manipulate files and directories.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, PwnKit: PolicyKit Vulnerability Discovered, KDE Plasma 5.24 LTS Beta, Sway 1.7, Nvidia Might Abandon $40 Billion ARM Bid, Rancher Desktop 1.0, Wine 7.1, Vulkan 1.3, DeskMini UM700 PC with Manjaro Linux, Steam Deck Launching February 25th, Valve: Dynamic Cloud Sync For Steam Deck & PC, and Gamebuntu: Improve Gaming on Ubuntu. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Valve engineers have been beavering away to try and improve the Steam Deck's battery life ahead of its impending launch on February 25. In order to achieve this, its Linux devs have been making changes to the open-source Radeon Vulkan (RADV) driver, which the Steam Deck uses to control variable rate shading.
Currently under review, the driver changes could help the Steam Deck battery last longer than first anticipated, and even give the much-anticipated, handheld gaming device a handy performance boost in supported games.
Variable Rate Shading (VRS) is a wonderful thing when implemented properly. It gives developers intricate control over how intensely the shading is implemented for each portion of the screen, or frame region. That means it doesn't need to put so many GPU resources into rendering parts of the scene that don't change, or that the user isn't really paying attention to.
It's easy to break down when you look at something like a racing game. Game devs will have it so the car and the road ahead use a higher shading rate than that of the road behind, or anything off at the edge of the screen. Basically, for anything you're not going to be staring intently at, the devs will try to save processing power by making it less of a priority for the graphics card's precious resources.
The upshot of this is that you could get higher frame rates because the GPU isn't being so hammered by a particular game, or if the frame rates are locked you could get lower power use, and therefore longer battery life in a handheld like the Steam Deck.
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology corporation headquartered in Armonk, New York. They sell computer hardware, middleware and software employing over 370,000 people.
IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019. But you can trace IBM’s history of open source far further back. They were one of the earliest champions of open source, backing influential communities like Linux, Apache, and Eclipse, advocating open licenses, open governance, and open standards.
IBM also collaborates with Linux organisations. For example, IBM works with Ubuntu in areas like containers, virtualization, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, big data analytics and DevOps to provide reference architectures, support solutions and cloud offerings, both for enterprise data centres and cloud service providers.
Puppet is a software configuration management tool which includes its own declarative language to describe system configuration. It is a model-driven solution that requires limited programming knowledge to use.
Puppet is available for Linux, Mac, BSD, Solaris, and Windows operating systems. It is written in “Ruby” language and released under Apache License.
Vivaldi is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It had grown from the downfall of Opera with many disgruntled when it changed from the Presto layout engine to a Chromium-based browser. This platform angered traditional Opera users. Since then, Vivaldi has become one of the most popular alternative Internet Browsers amongst the big three Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
Vivaldi promotes itself as a leading browser with faster navigation, clever bookmarking, more intelligent browsing, extensive tab management, and a more visual approach.
Opera is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Opera Software and operates as a Chromium-based browser. Opera offers a clean, modern web browser that is an alternative to the other major players in the Browser race.
Its famous Opera Turbo mode and its renowned battery saving mode are the best amongst all known web browsers by quite a margin, along with a built-in VPN and much more.
Almalinux, as many know, is a downstream version of RHEL, which often means it is incredibly stable but usually has very outdated packages in terms of features and not security updates. Currently, Almalinux features kernel 4.18, but for some users, they may require a more recent kernel for purposes of better hardware compatibility, amongst many other things.
ELREPO has both Linux Kernel Mainline LTS versions. The mainline version is the most recent stable release of the Linux Kernel, and the current LTS Kernel they are supporting is 5.4.
Fedora Linux users may notice, compared to some other distributions, that the DNF download speed can be slow, this can be frustrating when you need to download and install a large number of packages which can occur regularly given how Fedora pushes new packages updates given the type of distribution it is.
Most users do not realize that a few minor tweaks to some configuration files can increase your download speed immensely. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to configure and increase your DNF update/upgrade package manager speed on Fedora Linux 35 Workstation or Server.
HAProxy a load balancer. A load balancer handles more web traffic to avoid downtime. It receives traffic from the Internet or your internal network load balancing an internal service and then forwards traffic to the web.
The benefits of using a load balancer once deployed on multiple servers. The load balancer can relay traffic to grow your capacity to serve numerous clients without directly connecting to each server. HAProxy receives and forward traffic and then balances the load across your servers. This technique hedges against any of your servers failing since the load balancer can detect if a server becomes unresponsive and automatically stops sending traffic. HAProxy is used to balance the traffic to any number of web applications using a single configuration.
A runlevel is a mode of operation in the computer operating systems that implements Unix System V-style initialization. Conventionally, seven runlevels exist, numbered from zero to six. S is sometimes used as a synonym for one of the levels. Only one runlevel is executed on startup; run levels are not executed one after another (i.e. only runlevel 2, 3, or 4 is executed, not more of them sequentially or in any other order).
runlevel defines the state of the machine after boot. Different runlevels are typically assigned (not necessarily in any particular order) to the single-user mode, multi-user mode without network services started, multi-user mode with network services started, system shutdown, and system reboot system states.
The exact setup of these configurations varies between operating systems and Linux distributions. For example, runlevel 4 might be a multi-user GUI no-server configuration on one distribution, and nothing on another. Runlevels commonly follow the general patterns described in this article; however, some distributions employ certain specific configurations.
mdBook allows you to create book from markdown files. It’s pretty much alike Gitbook but implemented in Rust. However, unlike Gitbook that supports using calibre for generating PDF, for a long time, mdBook doesn’t support generating PDF files natively, and supporting that is also not in their roadmap. Existing plugins (backends) such as mdbook-latex that utilize Tectonic as well as pandoc solutions will generate a PDF page that doesn’t unify with the existing mdBook generated HTML version. Considering these facts, I created a mdBook backend named mdbook-pdf for generating PDF based on headless chrome and Chrome DevTools Protocol Page.printToPDF.
mdbook-pdf depends on Google Chrome / Microsoft Edge / Chromium. The generated page are pretty much alike the one you manually print to PDF in your browser by opening print.html or executing google-chrome-stable --headless --print-to-pdf=output.pdf file:///path/to/print.html, but with customization of PDF paper orientation, scale of the webpage rendering, paper width and height, page margins, generated PDF page ranges, whether to display header and footer as well as customize their formats, and more, as well as automation. It supports all the platform where Google Chrome / Microsoft Edge / Chromium would work. You can check samples of the generated PDF files in the Artifacts here (The Rust book collections generated in x86_64 Windows, macOS as well as Linux).
Wordle seems to be popping up everywhere across social media feeds. Wordle is a quick word game that you can play once daily, and you can easily share results with friends over social media.
The aim of Wordle is to guess a secret word. To make a guess, enter a word, and Wordle displays the results of your guess in a grid of color-coded emoticons. Green indicates that a letter is in the correct location. Yellow indicates that the secret word contains the letter, but it is in the wrong location. And grey means that the letter isn't in the word at all.
My new employer is Develer. Some of you might know it because they organize the annual QtDay. They also sponsor other conferences such as the italian Pycon and they are in general friendly to open source.
Hello! I’m Ivan Molodetskikh, a computer science student from Moscow, Russia.
I’ve been involved in GNOME starting from my GSoC 2018 project to port librsvg filters to Rust. Throughout the last year in GNOME I’ve been doing some work to reduce input latency in Mutter, the GNOME’s compositor (by implementing the presentation-time Wayland protocol and adding dynamic render time computation). I’ve also created two small apps, Video Trimmer and Identity.
As part of this year’s Google Summer of Code, I’m implementing a new screenshot UI in GNOME Shell.
Developed during Google Summer of Code last year was an updated screenshot and screen recorder user interface. That improved screenshot/screencasting UI was merged this week for GNOME 42.
GNOME to this point allowed screen recording but via key combinations and not exposed via the GNOME Screenshot user interface. The keyboard-only screen recording initiation isn't very user friendly and lacked various features found in alternatives. This new implementation for GNOME 42 provides screenshots and screen recording from a single user-interface that is part of GNOME Shell.
While continuing the monthly release cycle, Nitrux 2.0 is here as a major update to the systemd-free distribution that tweaks its KDE Plasma-based NX Desktop graphical environment to make it look more modern and usable.
Probably the biggest change in this release is the implementation of the latest and greatest Linux 5.16 kernel series as default (XanMod) kernel. This brings top-notch hardware support, along with some goodies added by the Nitrux team, such as additional firmware for AMD GPUs and the latest Mesa 21.3.5 graphics stack.
Today, we are releasing the first Core Update of the year for testing. It comes with an improved Quality of Service based on CAKE and various bug fixes and a lot of package updates.
CAKE is short for Common Applications Kept Enhanced and is the successor of CoDeL. It is an advanced queue management algorithm which aims to keep your internet connection snappy and fast.
CAKE comes with a couple of benefits over its predecessor of which requiring less CPU resources, more accurate bandwidth shaping due to working with bytes instead of packets the most important ones. In our experiments in the lab we have found no notable differences for fast lines, but there is a notable improvement of VoIP call quality on slower or saturated lines.
The video below the break makes for a handy primer on PCB coil construction, reminding the viewer that the turns need all to lie in the same direction as well as the importance of insulation between windings. There’s a discussion of the properties of a PCB coil in relation to the switching frequency, and once the transformer has been assembled, we see it hooked up to a power supply board for a test. What happens next may be familiar to seasoned transformer-winders; nothing works, and the transformer gets hot. In making the PCB he’s left some copper on each board which amounts to a shorted turn — cutting these allows the transformer to work perfectly.
Wappsto:bit GO is an ESP32 board compatible with BBC Micro:bit accessories thanks to a compatible edge connector, but adding WiFi to Bluetooth LE, and offering some extras compared to Elecrow Mbits ESP32-based BBC Micro:bit clone.
The new board is notably equipped with a wider range of sensors including a light sensor, a magnetometer, and sound sensor beside the temperature sensor and accelerometer present in the original board, and it also exposes GPIO through a more traditional 2.54-pitch header to facilitate the integration of a wider variety of add-on boards.
If you don’t own a cat, hearing the sound of one meowing from somewhere in the house probably comes as quite a shock. The Cat Prank box built by [Reuben] promises to deliver such hilarity with aplomb.
The idea is simple: hide the Cat Prank box in a cupboard or other space in a friend’s house, and it will meow from its secret location. When found, either the light sensor or motion sensor will trigger the yowling of an angry feline, with hopefully startling effects.
When Pine64 announced the PinePhone in 2019, no one could have foreseen the tremendous impact it would have on mobile Linux, desktop Linux, and privacy as a whole.
As one of the few phones designed specifically to run desktop Linux, it had all the features of a low-end Android phone, combined with the versatility of a laptop. Unfortunately, desktop Linux is just that; it is made for desktops, not phones.
Fortunately, thanks to the incredible power of the GNOME, KDE, Pine64, and general Linux communities, whole new desktop environments, applications, and distributions were born. Some of the more recognizable of these include Plasma Mobile, Phosh, Megapixels, and Mobian.
With all the key pieces in place, all Pine64 needed to was to sell PinePhones, and sell PinePhones they did. Every community edition (each preloaded with a different distro) pre-ordering round received thousands of orders, one of which was mine.
Since I received my unit in December 2020, the PinePhone has been a key part in my daily life, with me using it as my daily driver for the whole of 2021. Here are my experiences with it.
The phone will alert you that there's an update. Go to Settings => Sailfish OS Updates. As always, backup first. Then, download the update. I get a message that I need to "remove or revert the following packages". Time to look around for help, like the Suomenlinna release notes Long story short (read this part of the release notes), I decide to remove the packages the updater complains about and a few more.
One of the tough choices that you’ll have to make after installing an operating system is which web browser to use. Only a few elegant ones with highly useful features stand out in the never-ending ocean of browsers article. If you choose to go with Linux as your primary operating system, in this article, let’s look at some of the best browsers for Linux.
Before we begin, the browsers mentioned in this list are not in the best to worst order or vice versa. All of them are excellent browsers, and you may want to try a couple of them before settling with one.
Although it is true that it is not in its best days, Firefox is one of the most important web browsers in the computing sector. This ranks third in the ranking of the most used browsers, behind Chrome and Edge, and thanks to it we can browse with greater privacy and using open source software. As with any program, it is important to have this software always up to date, in order to navigate safely and with the latest technology. But what about the ESR version of Firefox , which is often quite a bit behind the latest stable version?
Every several weeks, Firefox releases a new version of its browser, with changes, fixes, and new features. All users who have this browser installed will update automatically in order to always be up to date. Everyone except those using Firefox ESR .
Several articles here have delved into the history of John Bernard, the pseudonym used by a fake billionaire technology investor who tricked dozens of startups into giving him tens of millions of dollars. Bernard’s latest victim — a Norwegian company hoping to build a fleet of environmentally friendly shipping vessels — is now embroiled in a lawsuit over a deal gone bad, in which Bernard falsely claimed to have secured $100 million from six other wealthy investors, including the founder of Uber and the artist Abel Makkonen Tesfaye, better known as The Weeknd.
Over in the Swedish city of Södertälje, about 30 km southwest of Stockholm, a pilot program is being explored which will enlist crows to clean up discarded cigarette butts. Butts account for over 60% of litter in Sweden, and the per-butt cleanup cost falls between 0.8 and 2 Swedish kronor each. The company behind the project, Corvid Cleaning, estimates the cost will be around 0.2 kronor. If the birds picked up all the butts, that would be a substantial savings, but in reality, the current manual cleaning will still be needed. Total savings to the city will depend on the ratio of bird-collected vs. people-collected butts. Of course, if people would throw their butts in ashcans or carry pocket ashtrays like those popular in Japan, this would be a non-starter.
This year, CMU invested in a new recruitment and enrollment management system that allows us to more proactively communicate with and respond to the needs of future students. Late last week, while testing this new platform, messages about the Centralis Scholar Award were inadvertently posted in the student portal. Nearly 60 prospective students who were logged into the portal during that time saw a message indicating they had been selected to receive the prestigious scholarship when most had not, in fact, been chosen.
Understandably, many of these students were extremely excited, and they began sharing the good news with their families and friends. When they later learned that they had seen the message in error, many experienced tremendous disappointment, frustration and sadness.
Earlier Wednesday, the university said that the messages about the Centralis Scholar Award were sent out inadvertently by school staff members when new messaging technology was being tested.
Looking to get into fault injection for your reverse engineering projects, but don’t have the cash to lay out for the necessary hardware? Fear not, for the tools to glitch a chip may be as close as the nearest barbecue grill.
If you don’t know what chip glitching is, perhaps a primer is in order. Glitching, more formally known as electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI), or simply fault injection, is a technique that uses a pulse of electromagnetic energy to induce a fault in a running microcontroller or microprocessor. If the pulse occurs at just the right time, it may force the processor to skip an instruction, leaving the system in a potentially exploitable state.
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To be sure, a tool as simple as this won’t do the trick in every situation, but it’s a cheap way to start exploring the potential of fault injection.
Seems like all the cool kids are rewriting legacy C programs in Rust these days, so we suppose it was only a matter of time before somebody decided to combine the memory-safe language with some of the most historically significant software ever written by way of a new Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) emulator. Written by [Felipe], the Apache/MIT licensed emulator can run either ROM files made from the computer’s original rope core memory, or your own code written in AGC4 assembly language.
Over on Retro Recipe’s YouTube channel, [Perifractic] has been busy restoring an old promotional video of how Commodore computers were made back in 1984 (video below the break). He cleaned up the old VHS-quality version that’s been around for years, translated the German to English, and trimmed some bits here and there. The result is a fascinating look into the MOS factory, Commodore’s German factory, and a few other facilities around the globe. The film shows the chip design engineers in action, wafer manufacturing, chip dicing, and some serious micro-probing of bare die. We also see PCB production, and final assembly, test and burn-in of Commodore PET and C64s in Germany.
Check out the video description, where [Perifractic] goes over the processes he used to clean up video and audio using machine learning. If restoration interests you, check out the piece we wrote about these techniques to restore old photographs last year. Are there any similar factory tour films, restored or not, lurking around the web? Let us know in the comments below.
The two EU secret service situation centres could soon be merged into a single institution. Their surveillance capacities are currently being expanded. Operational competences are also under discussion.
The vast destruction wrought by the atomic bombing of Japan in August 1945 should have been enough to convince national governments that the game of war was over.
Is a Russian invasion of Ukraine imminent? At the heart of this avoidable catastrophe is Moscow's concern over the ever-increasing U.S. military threat on its doorstep. Since the Soviet Union fell, the United States, through its€ NATO€ allies, has pushed troops and arms closer to Russia, despite the "not one inch eastward" promise made by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Now, close to 100,000 Russian troops are massed on the Ukrainian border. The Ukrainian military is on high alert. Adding fuel to the fire, President Biden ordered 8,500 U.S. troops on high alert and is pouring weapons into Ukraine.
With war always a popular gambit to rescue a president’s plunging poll numbers, the proposed war in Ukraine serves multiple purposes for Biden’s dreary administration: as a desperate gamble to save his own political butt, to divert attention from the struggle over its unraveling Covid-19 strategy, and destabilizing its arch-enemy Russia is always a worthy past time. Yet the drama to escalate military action in Ukraine with "heightened preparedness" of a token 8,500 American troops lacks the persuasive spectacle of a first-rate global crisis as once reliable U.S. allies are not on board even before the first shot is fired.€ €
Anti-war advocates accused the Biden administration of continued warmongering late Friday into Saturday after President Joe Biden confirmed he plans to send U.S. troops to Eastern Europe.
"I'll be moving troops to Eastern Europe€ in the NATO countries in the near term," Biden told reporters at Joint Base Andrews late Friday. "Not too many."
The litigation was spurred in part by a whistle-blower lawsuit that alleged that 3M sold defective earplugs to the military in violation of the False Claims Act. In 2018, 3M agreed to pay $9.1 million in a settlement with the Department of Justice in response to the lawsuit. The settlement did not determine liability.
As an American born into a conservative Christian family, I grew up surrounded by chauvinist messaging that I was living in “the greatest country in the world”. This message was reinforced in the popular media I was allowed to consume, and also at home, at church and in my Christian school, where pupils’ inculcation in Christian nationalism extended to the recitation of not just one, but three pledges every morning: to the American flag, the Christian flag and the Bible.
Standing with hundreds of physicians and medical experts who have called on Spotify to develop a policy on misinformation to counter the Covid-19 falsehoods podcast host Joe Rogan has aired on his wildly popular show, singer and songwriter Joni Mitchell announced late Friday that she would remove her music from the streaming platform.
"I've decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives," Mitchell wrote in a brief message on her official website, asking her fans to read an open letter to Spotify signed by more than 270 people in the medical community earlier this month.
"Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives," the Canadian singer said in a post on her official website.
The move comes just several days after Young first demanded Spotify pull his catalog over claims that the company was actively promoting the spread of misinformation about vaccines and the Covid-19 pandemic — particularly via the massively popular podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience. Spotify, who boasts the largest worldwide market share for paid music streaming platforms, bought the rights to Rogan’s podcast last year in a reported $100 million deal.
Spotify took Young’s music down on Wednesday, two days after he posted an open letter calling for its removal as a protest against “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Spotify’s most popular podcast, which has been criticized for spreading misinformation about the coronavirus and vaccines.
He did so after a group of hundreds of scientists, professors and public health experts had asked Spotify to take down an episode of Rogan’s show from Dec. 31 that had featured Dr. Robert Malone, an infectious-disease expert. The scientists wrote in a public letter that the program promoted “several falsehoods about Covid-19 vaccines.”
In a note on her official website titled “I Stand With Neil Young!,” Mitchell wrote: “I’ve decided to remove all my music from Spotify. Irresponsible people are spreading lies that are costing people their lives. I stand in solidarity with Neil Young and the global scientific and medical communities on this issue.”
On Wednesday, Young pulled his music from Spotify in protest of COVID misinformation being spread on Joe Rogan’s podcast. Both Young and Mitchell have referred to an open letter sent to Spotify from 270 professionals in the medical and scientific community, calling on the audio giant to implement a policy and better address misinformation on the platform. The letter was spurred by a December Joe Rogan Experience podcast episode where Rogan interviewed a known vaccine skeptic who compared current pandemic policies to Nazi Germany and baselessly claimed that people were being “hypnotized” to believe facts about COVID-19.
Is a Russian invasion of Ukraine imminent? At the heart of this avoidable catastrophe is Moscow's concern over the ever-increasing U.S. military threat on its doorstep. Since the Soviet Union fell, the United States, through its€ NATO€ allies, has pushed troops and arms closer to Russia, despite the "not one inch eastward" promise made by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990. Now, close to 100,000 Russian troops are massed on the Ukrainian border. The Ukrainian military is on high alert. Adding fuel to the fire, President Biden ordered 8,500 U.S. troops on high alert and is pouring weapons into Ukraine.
Ada Mae's beautiful blonde curls are wild on this sunny, mild winter afternoon.
After he announced in December he would not be supporting President Joe Biden's Build Back Better Act, Sen. Joe Manchin's political action committee received the maximum allowable contribution from billionaire Republican donor Ken Langone.
The Hill reported late Friday that the wealthy investor, who supported former President Donald Trump's 2016 campaign, gave $5,000 to Manchin's Country Roads PAC less than two weeks after the right-wing Democratic senator from West Virginia said he would not join his party in supporting the president's agenda.
Thousands of Canadian truckers and their supporters enroute to Ottawa in protest of vaccine mandates are preparing to make a stop in Sudbury on Friday morning.
The trucker convoy, which departed from BC on Jan. 23 and quickly gained momentum across the country, is demanding that federal and provincial governments terminate COVID-19 vaccine mandates and passport systems.
Local support for the movement, dubbed Freedom Convoy 2022, is steadily growing as groups prepare to meet the convoy at the Petro-Pass Truck Stop on Regent Street at 10 a.m. and other locations throughout the city.
Apple just reported record numbers. Its luxury-goods business model and its abuse of market power against suppliers and app developers are wildly profitable. The former is legit; the latter must be stopped, and it is under pressure around the globe. "Pressure" is an understatement. Change is coming, the question is just when and where, with Match Group's Dutch case so far having the greatest potential of all enforcement actions under existing law (as it could have EU-wide ripple effects and easily apply to all--not just dating--apps).
Epic Games faces an uphill battle (here's my take on its opening brief), but it's getting some amazing support:
35 U.S. states led by Utah and Microsoft have officially thrown their weight behind Epic's appeal through amicus curiae briefs filed with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Those filings are not just a "nice to have." This kind of support is mission-critical, as I explained a few days ago. And a few hours before those filings, I was already impressed with the fact that "the Dean of American Antitrust Law" (as the New York Times called him), Professor Herbert Hovenkamp, signed a world-class amicus brief submitted by Professor Michael Carrier.
Executive version: Quite a few scholars have tried to decipher the hymn sheet shown on Elias Haussmann’s famous portrait of Johann Sebastian Bach. This blog tries to decipher the latest changes in the EPO Management just announced by the President.
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Namely, the EPO / EPInc. employs, in addition to a President and four Vice Presidents, inter alia: a Chief of Staff, a Chief Technology Officer, a Chief Financial Officer, a Chief Information Officer, a Chief Sustainability Officer, a Chief People Officer, a Chief Business Analyst, a Chief Economist, and a Chief Corporate Policies Officer. I intend no offence to the numerous other PDs of probably equal rank but with no “Chief” in their titles and instead kindly refer readers to this EPO website for more titles, names and faces. In summary, EP Inc. has a lot of chiefs, each one of them with a couple of underlings (aka “Directors”) and sub-underlings. The principal directors and several selected directors form the EPO Management Advisory Committee (MAC).
A couple of changes have now been announced in this management structure, at least officially “to consider the needs of all our stakeholders, with the primary aim of further deepening collaboration and strengthening our One Office culture”. I will leave it there and focus on the changes in just one sector that I found particularly interesting, i.e. “Corporate Policies”. This is perhaps not a self-explanatory title for an office (assuming that the EPO still is an office, not a corporation). What are corporate policies of the EPO, and should they not be called “Office Policies”?
Anyway, the “PD Corporate Policies” used to include three directorates, (i) Compensation and Benefits, (ii) Employment Law, and (iii) Workforce Planning and Employee Policies. These seem to me to be typical tasks of Human Resource Management, yet I note that the present structure also included a “PD People” with again three directorates two of which have “HR” in their names. Thus, not exactly a simple structure.
In strict adherence to the second law of thermodynamics – entropy always increases -, the planned new structure may be seen to be even more complex than the present one, because the classic HR functions will now be divided between no less than three Principal Directorates, i.e. PD “People”, PD “Corporate Policies” and a new PD “Employment Law and Social Dialogue Advice” that will be under the direct responsibility of the President himself. But there is also another and perhaps even more interesting way of looking at these changes, and that is from the point of view of the PD Corporate Policies.
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Thus, while some scepticism is always appropriate (see: Es gibt nichts Gutes. Außer man tut es.) and there is always the possibility that these changes are just cosmetic (or even Orwellian) in nature, one might at least cautiously hope that these organizational changes are meant to signalize a bit of a change to the better. Employment law will now be made “Chefsache” and the PD renamed as “Employment Law and Social Dialogue Advice”, which is perhaps no bad approach if the idea is to avoid future negative headlines arising from AT ILO decisions and unpleasant discussions in the Administrative Council (always provided that actions follow the words!). Moreover, an important directorate that will likely play a big role in establishing the EPO’s “New Normal” including more working from home (more on this in a later blog), will be moved to PD People. Let us hope that these changes will help to promote more social peace and more meaningful dialogue with staff at a stage where decisions have not already been made.
On September 2021, the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO), with the support of the European Patent Office (EPO), launched the ARIPO Regional Patent Examination Training (ARPET) programme.
2021 saw changes in Canadian patent legislation, and a variety of court decisions addressing rarely interpreted provisions of the Patent Act, early consideration of recently enacted provisions, and new takes on central tenets of patent law.
In this article, we highlight statutory changes and a selection of the most interesting patent cases reported in the 2021 calendar year.
On January 18, 2022, after recently joining the protocol on a European Unified Patent Court (UPC) on provisional application (PPA) as the decisive 13th EU Member State, Austria deposited its instrument of accession to the PPA. Thus, the countdown to the grand opening of the UPC has now started. (The actual opening may take place in late 2022 or—more likely—in early 2023.)
The President of the European Patent Office has decided that applicants will soon be able to request, at the EPO, a delay in the issuance of a European patent until entry into force of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement, which will make "Unitary" Patents available based on a granted European patent (see also the accompanying EPO notice on the decision).
Europe’s long-awaited Unified Patent Court and the European Union’s Unitary Patent could (and even should) both be available before the end of 2022. Even if there is a short delay, the UPC is almost certain to be open for business in late 2022 or early 2023.
On January 19, 2022, Austria became the 13th Member State to ratify the Protocol on Provisional Application of the Unified Patent Court Agreement. The addition of Austria's ratification establishes the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and triggers the Provisional Application Period (PAP).
On January 18, 2022, after recently joining the protocol on a European Unified Patent Court (UPC) on provisional application (PPA) as the decisive 13th EU Member State, Austria deposited its instrument of accession to the PPA. Thus, the countdown to the grand opening of the UPC has now started. (The actual opening may take place in late 2022 or—more likely—in early 2023.)
The Protocol to the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court on provisional application (PAP-Protocol) provides that it will “enter into force the day after 13 Signatory States of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court including Germany, France and the United Kingdom have…ratified”. Despite the UK’s withdrawal from the UPC project, it has now come into force following Austria’s ratification meaning preparation to implement the UPC can begin.
On December 22, 2021, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) released 9 decisions suspending or revoking the licenses of 9 patent firms for filing irregular (abnormal) patent applications. The CNIPA stated, “acting as an agent for irregular patent applications that are not for the purpose of protecting innovation violates the legislative purpose of the Patent Law, wastes public resources, and seriously interferes with the normal conduct of patent examination.” In the worst case of the 9, one firm was filing almost 8,000 patent applications per person in 2020! Previously, the CNIPA had announced that approximately 15% of all Chinese applications filed so far in 2021 were irregular. Further, 43% of patent firms have submitted irregular applications.
As you might expect, Nike often finds itself involved in intellectual property stories. To be fair, the company has been on both sides of the IP coin. There are plenty of stories of Nike playing IP bully: the whole Satan Shoes dustup with MSCHF, its lawsuit happy practice when it comes to counterfeits, and so on. But the company has also found itself on the receiving end of IP action, sometimes very much deserved, sometimes not so much.
If you repeatedly download and share pirated content you risk losing your Internet access in the United States. Faced with liability lawsuits, ISPs are more inclined to take this drastic action today, which can have grave consequences. For one subscriber, downloading a Skyrim mod appears to have been too much. But is this really what the game's creators want?
