07.25.21
Posted in Deception, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Security at 4:46 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum b80cf93af3d251781533a79c2ecfb628
Summary: The corporate media wants us to think (or feel) like Microsoft is some kind of security guru; the reality, however, is the exact opposite because at Microsoft sometimes if not always/by default insecurity is the actual objective (back doors)
THE media doesn’t seem to mind facts and truths. It’s all about agenda, irrespective of hard evidence such as NSA leaks [1], empirical evidence [2], warnings from the inside [3], and desperate diversionary tactics [4].
“That’s like George Bush lecturing us on peace.”As just mentioned in our latest Daily Links, a bunch of new puff pieces [5-7] tell us that “Linux” is in trouble, based on Microsoft. The so-called ‘experts’ (from Microsoft) now have the audacity to lecture us on security. That’s like George Bush lecturing us on peace. Or Bill Gates lecturing us in fidelity in a marriage (being faithful). It’s hard to keep a straight face, so we’ve made a video. █
Related/contextual links in order of appearance in the video:
- Microsoft and the NSA
- Is Microsoft a National Security Threat?
- IRC log
- Microsoft Weaponises (and Further Spreads) Racism to Distract From Its Own Incompetence (and ‘Five Eyes’ Collusion for Back Door Access)
- New crypto malware targeting Windows, Linux systems: Microsoft
- New crypto malware targeting Windows, Linux systems: Microsoft
- “LemonDuck”: New crypto malware targeting Windows, Linux systems
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:58 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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Linux has been around for 30 years, beginning back in 1991. Yes, it’s that old, and it did make history. If you are interested in the history of some of the major Linux distros, here it is in a nutshell – the history of various Linux distros, like Ubuntu, Fedora, REHL, Linux Mint, Slackware, etc. Finally learn more about why they were created and what makes each different.
Note: As there are plenty of distros out there, we are only focusing on a few major distros.
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Google has fixed a bug in Chrome OS version 91.0.4472.165 that surfaced on Monday and prevented some users from being able to login to their systems.
Chrome OS downloads updates automatically but doesn’t apply them until reboot, so only those who restarted their Chromebooks to ingest the force-fed broken update were affected.
Earlier this week, the internet titan on its Google Workplace status page said, “Our engineering team has identified an issue on Chrome OS 91.0.4472.165. The rollout of this version was halted.”
As a workaround for those bitten by the bug, Google advised users: to “powerwash” their Chrome OS devices back to factory settings; to rollback the Chrome OS device to a previous version via USB; or to remove the affected account and add the account back to the device. All three mitigations, however, clear local data on the device.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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The big news you’ve probably heard. Valve have announced their handheld console/PC, The Steam Deck. I take a look and discuss a few things.
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Benchmarks
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This past week were the initial Linux benchmarks of the Ryzen 9 5900HX with the ASUS ROG Strix G15 laptop. Ubuntu was used as the default test platform as usual given its popularity and arguably the most relevant Linux distribution to use given that it’s the most common Linux distribution at the moment for preloads on laptops by multiple vendors. In any case, as usual many users were quick to say “but Arch Linux!” as if it was going to make a dramatic difference in my findings. Well, here are some Ubuntu 21.04 versus Arch Linux benchmarks on that AMD Advantage laptop.
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Instructionals/Technical
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Learn how systemd targets work in Linux.
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AutoKey is a scripting application for Linux. It lets you automate repetitive and trivial operations on your computer so you can perform them quickly and efficiently.
Some of the tasks where AutoKey serves well include text expansion, correcting typos, launching programs, and inserting boilerplate texts. Besides, you can also use it to run custom scripts to automate complex system actions on your machine.
That said, though, AutoKey can be intimidating to its first-time users. To this end, here’s a guide to help you install, set up, and use AutoKey on Linux.
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Running a playbook in a chroot or container is not supported by Ansible, but I have invented a good workaround to do it anyway.
The first step is to install Mitogen for Ansible (ansible-mitogen in Debian) and then configure ansible.cfg to use it…
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When trying out a new Linux distribution, one of the first things you need to familiarize yourself with is the system’s package manager. Arch Linux and other Arch-based distros, like Manjaro, use pacman to install or update packages, remove software, and keep the system up to date. Pacman isn’t related to the classic video game, rather just an acronym of package manager.
In this guide, you’ll learn how to use pacman on Arch Linux, Manjaro, and other distros based on Arch. It works the same across any of them. Read on to master pacman with commands to install packages, remove packages, update the system, etc.
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Tar command in Linux is used to archive files and folder into a single archived compressed file. Linux admins use tar command to perform day to day backup and restoration tasks. In other words, we can say that tar command is a command line utility which is used to archive important files and folders of a Linux system and later we can extract files and folders from that archive for restoration purpose.
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If you have a development background, then you must be aware of many development tools. When you individually develop a project through any programming language, you’re either comfortable with a command-line interface (terminal) or GUI tools.
But what if you’re working with the team members, it is hard to send chunks of programs to all team members individually. There is also a size limit of files on different platforms that don’t allow the user to send more than the described size.
It is hard to collaborate when the project is too large and needs modification all the time. For this, you need a distributed version control system that helps you collaborate with team members worldwide. It is good to use a distributed version control system for small and large software projects. Each of the team members will get full access to the complete repository on the local system, and they can work offline.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install RabbitMQ on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, RabbitMQ is open-source message-broker software built around Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) protocol. RabbitMQ can be easily deployed in a distributed and federated configurations to meet high-scale, high-availability requirements.
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 RabbitMQ on AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for Rocky Linux.
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Observer is a cyberpunk horror game developed by Bloober Team and published by Aspyr. It was released on Windows, PS4, and Xbox in 2017, and later on, it came to Linux. In this guide, we’ll show you how to play it on Linux.
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Orwell is a simulation video game by Osmotic Studios. In the game, the player assumes the role of an operative and monitors security cameras for national security threats. Here’s how to play it on Linux.
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reveal.js is an open-source HTML presentation framework. It’s a tool that enables anyone with a web browser to create fully-featured and beautiful presentations for free.
Presentations made with reveal.js are built on open web technologies. That means anything you can do on the web, you can do in your presentation. Change styles with CSS, include an external web page using an <iframe> or add your own custom behavior using our JavaScript API.
So in these times of pandemic, this tool can be quite useful for many students and teachers.
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Linux is widely known among enthusiasts for the productivity and the control it offers to its users. However, one of the things that often goes unnoticed is its flexibility in terms of customizations.
Speaking of customizations, the wallpaper is a simple yet fundamental aspect of the Linux desktop that can make or break its aesthetics. Finding the perfect wallpaper manually can be tough. So why not let a simple script take the pain away? Let’s find out more about this script in detail.
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Sed is a built-in Linux tool for text manipulation. The term sed stands for “stream editor”. Despite the name, sed isn’t a text editor by itself. Rather, it takes text as input, performs various text modifications according to instructions, and prints the output.
This guide will demonstrate how to use sed to delete a line from a text.
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The Open System Interconnection (OSI) model conceptually illustrates seven abstraction layers of communication framework that devices use for interoperability over the network. In the 1980s, the model was a globally accepted standard framework for network communication.
The model defines a set of rules and regulations required to render interoperability between different software and devices.
It was introduced by the Internet Organisation of Standards in 1984 when computer networking was only becoming a new concept. Even though the internet these days is based on a simpler networking model, TCP/IP. The OSI 7-layer model is still used to visualize the basic essential networking architecture and troubleshoot problems.
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A pod can also have one or more containers, one of which is the application container, and the others are the init container, which halts after it completes a job or the application container is ready to perform its function, and the sidecar container, which is affixed to the primary application container. A container or pod will not always leave due to an application failure. In scenarios like this, you will need to restart your Kubernetes Pod explicitly. In this guide, you will explore how to force pods in a deployment to restart using several ways.
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When sticking to Wine recommendations of maintaining separate prefixes per-application, a lot of system files get duplicated for each game/application and in turn leading to significant bloat. With the current state of Wine it can mean hundreds of megabytes per prefix in duplicated files. But proposed reflink patches for Wine are aiming to cut down on this severe bloat.
Developer Alex Xu sent out a set of patches today that would implement Reflink support within Wine. Alex explained, ” With a MinGW build of Wine without Mono or Gecko, new 32-bit prefixes are over 150 MB, and new 64-bit prefixes are over 300 MB. The vast majority of these files are byte-for-byte identical to Wine’s central DLL copies…When reflink is supported by the underlying filesystem, new Wine prefix sizes with Mono and Gecko disabled are reduced to less than 1 MB. The resulting Wine prefix is byte-for-byte identical to one created without reflink, but occupies less space on disk. ”
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Games
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Control Ultimate Edition is an adventurous game packed with actions and thrillers. The developers of the game “Remedy Entertainment” successfully marked the title of the game in gaming publications and were nominated for numerous video game awards. Control Ultimate Edition is available on the platform across Ps4/5, Xbox Series X/One, Epic Games Stores, Pc, and Steam.
#gnu #linux not falling behind. https://www.gadgetheadline.com/play-control-ultimate-edition-on-linux-how-to/
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Smartphones are basically pocket-sized computers running mobile-friendly operating systems. And folks who want to run a free and open source GNU/Linux distribution on their phones get the advantages of a hackable, customizable OS that can run desktop Linux applications as well as mobile apps.
But the selection of mobile-optimized Linux apps is still rather small, which is why some folks have been using tools like Anbox to run Android applications on Linux phones. But now there’s a new work-in-progress alternative to Anbox called WayDroid which offers smoother performance on supported devices.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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I found an interesting Russian site and Telegram channel where newbies QA try to get some experience in QA process for free. Its name is Хомячки (Hamsters). You can ask admins to create a group for testing of anything and if someone want they will test your software (mobile, web, desktop or something) for you.
I asked there if someone want to test LibreOffice and many people said yes. So, today we have the group of Russian newbies QA who are triaging bug reports in our Bugzilla. We have a goal – to have minimal number of unconfirmed bug reports in end of August 2021 as possibly.
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FSF
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GNU Projects
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I am happy to announce that the release 1.0.3 of the GNU Health Personal Health Record (PHR) component, MyGNUHealth.
This release updates the medical genetics domain, with the latest human natural variant dataset based on UniProt Consortium (release 2021_03 of June 02 2021).
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Programming/Development
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The fourteenth release of littler as a CRAN package just landed, following in the now fifteen year history (!!) as a package started by Jeff in 2006, and joined by me a few weeks later.
littler is the first command-line interface for R as it predates Rscript. It allows for piping as well for shebang scripting via #!, uses command-line arguments more consistently and still starts faster. It also always loaded the methods package which Rscript only started to do in recent years.
littler lives on Linux and Unix, has its difficulties on macOS due to yet-another-braindeadedness there (who ever thought case-insensitive filesystems as a default were a good idea?) and simply does not exist on Windows (yet – the build system could be extended – see RInside for an existence proof, and volunteers are welcome!). See the FAQ vignette on how to add it to your PATH.
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Python
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When you’re acquainted with Python, you’re probably aware that the Increment and Decrement expressions (both before and after) aren’t supported. Python was created to be understandable and consistent. In linguistics having ++ and — expressions, a beginner programmer frequently makes the mistake of confusing the distinctions among increment/decrement expressions, post and pre (both in priority and return value). In comparison to many other programming languages, basic increment and decrement expressions are not quite as necessary. In this tutorial, we will learn about the increment by 1 operator in Python code. Make sure you must have a python tool installed and configured on your system. Hence, we have installed the Spyder Python tool on our system.
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While contrasting variables, it’s important to examine both the contents and respective datatypes. Whenever the values of the two inputs differ, the statement is satisfied. Throughout Python, we may use “!=” or “is not” to do not equal operations. Whenever the values of any two Python variables or operands supplied on either side of the not equal operator are not equal, it must return true, else false. Many structured query languages might grumble about matching various types since Python is flexibly yet tightly typed. The not equal operator must return “True” whenever the values provided in two variables are the same; however, they are of various types. Let’s have some examples to see the working of python Not equal operator. First of all, you must ensure that your system has a python tool installed and configured. Launch your installed python tool to start working. At the time of implementing this article, we have been working on the Spyder Python tool.
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Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
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In any programming or scripting language, the loop is a quintessential feature. Loops are generally to perform a repetitive task until a certain condition is met. Bash is a powerful scripting language that supports all the major features of a scripting language (including loops).
This guide demonstrates one-line for loops in Bash.
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C
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Strstr() in the C language is a built-in function. The functionality of strstr can be understandable through the manual present in the Ubuntu terminal if you are working on Ubuntu. Then the terminal will show you the guide of strstr and how it works.
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The C language of programming has a facility to split a string using the function strtok. This is done through a delimiter. It is an easy task that uses a pointer token. A string that is taken as input is divided into small strings called tokens. ‘S’ is the name that indicates that in “strtok”, str stands for the string, and “tok” stands for the token. So this function splits the string into tons of tokens. We have highlighted some examples in this tutorial that will help you out understand this concept.
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C++
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The way to merge two or more strings is called string concatenation. It is a very common task for any programming language. Some programming languages use a specific operator, some programming languages use the built-in function, and some programming languages use both operator and built-in function to combine string values. The string concatenation can be done by using the ‘+’ operator and different types of built-in functions in C++. The uses of the ‘+’ operator and different built-in functions to combine strings in C++ have been explained in this tutorial.
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An array is a group of elements of the same data type. Many functions are performed on arrays either in the main program or outside it, in the functions. In C++, in the case of functions, we need to pass them. This is done via parameters as arguments. These arguments can be of different ways, either sizeable arrays or through the pointer array. In this tutorial, we will cover some major aspects of array transfer using different parameters of the functions.
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The way to cut any portion from a string is called a sub-string. The substr() function exists in C++ to generate a new string by cutting a particular portion from a string. The string.h library file is required to include to use this function. This function has two arguments. The first argument contains the starting position of the new string, and the second argument contains the length of the string. The way to use the substr() function in C++ has been explained in this tutorial.
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Different built-in functions exist in C++ to work with the string data. The find_first_of() function is used to find the location of the first occurrence of the specified character. This function returns the position of the first occurrence of the string that will be given as the argument value of this function. Different uses of this function for searching the string in C++ have been explained in this tutorial.
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Hardware
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Xiaomi entered the competitive Chinese mobile phone market in 2010 with MIUI, an Android-based smartphone software product which it offered for free. By 2017, it had achieved global recognition as a leading smartphone manufacturer and reached US$15 billion in revenue. Today, Xiaomi is the world’s largest Internet-of-Things (IoT) firm and by the end of 2020 had revenues exceeding US$37 billion.
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Health/Nutrition
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The Visa Foundation and Village Capital – the world’s largest organization supporting early-stage startups – announced the 20 startups selected for their Future of Food in Latin America 2021 program .
The call sought entrepreneurs who are building high-growth projects in the agritech and foodtech sectors and received 117 applications from 15 countries in the region such as: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala , Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Saint Lucia and Uruguay.
These are the selected ventures:
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Pseudo-Open Source
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Privatisation/Privateering
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Uri Schor, a resident of Zichron Yaakov, is a family man, software developer, surfer and mountain biker. In recent years he has been devoting a considerable amount of his time to an issue that upsets him: public access to the beach at Kibbutz Ma’agan Michael. Schor is the beach’s freedom fighter. A one-man guerilla unit.
He is incredibly organized. He has every document needed to prove the injustice he says is being committed there. He has a mountain of correspondence with the authorities, government ministries and law enforcement agencies. The paperwork could probably cover Israel’s more than 190 kilometers of shoreline. But while there still is no solution, Schor has endless patience. He smiles and explains why all the agencies involved have failed to protect the beach and allow free access to the public.
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Security
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A Smurf attack is a type of Denial-of-Service Attack (DOS) where an attacker exploits internet control message protocol (ICMP) packets. The attack surfaces when an attacker sends a massive flood of spoofed ICMP echo_request packets to the target victim.
This article will learn about how a Smurf attack is executed and how much damage a Smurf attack can cause to a network. The article will also describe preventive measures against a Smurf attack.
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A data link layer acts as a medium for communication between two directly connected hosts. At the sending front, it transforms the data stream into signals bit by bit and transfers it to the hardware. On the contrary, as a receiver, it receives data in the shape of electrical signals and transforms them into an identifiable frame.
MAC can be classified as a sublayer of the data link layer that is accountable for physical addressing. MAC address is a unique address for a network adapter allocated by the manufactures for transmitting data to the destination host. If a device has several network adapters i.e., Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, etc., there would be different MAC addresses for each standard.
In this article, you’ll learn how this sublayer gets manipulated to execute the MAC flooding attack and how we can prevent the attack from happening.
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Microsoft has warned customers about a new crypto mining malware that can steal credentials, remove security controls, spread via emails and ultimately drop more tools for human-operated activity.
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The BLAKE3 cryotpgraphic hash function that was announced last year and based on its predecessor BLAKE2 has now reached version 1.0 for its official/reference software implementation. BLAKE3 continues to be much faster than BLAKE2 while also being much faster than the likes of SHA-1/SHA–2/SHA-3 and even MD5 while being more secure.
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Privacy/Surveillance
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We have become all too accustomed – even desensitized – to reading stories of data breaches, misuse and evocative privacy debates. Malicious cyberattacks with the goal of harvesting information are now par for the course. According to the HIPAA Journal, 62 healthcare-focused data breaches occurred in April of this year alone, exposing the contents of 2.5 million medical records – a number that is historically high but unfortunately eye level with prior months. Combined with the observable and frightening rise in ransomware attacks targeting the sector, the risk to patient data is at an all-time high and healthcare organizations are chronically ill-prepared to combat it. So, it is easy to appreciate the legitimate paranoia that data custodians have towards data management and, along with the restrictions imposed by legislation, the self-imposed restrictive governance severely limiting access to production data.
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Defence/Aggression
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Carine Kanimba’s cell number reportedly on the list of targets tied to NSO Group; Rwanda claims it does not possess the technical capability to use such software
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Environment
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Energy
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The future of Minneapolis’ Lake Street will be powered in part by solar.
As business and building owners rebuild in the wake of last year’s civil unrest after the police killing of George Floyd, dozens are seeking public funding for solar projects, including some designed to incorporate racial equity goals.
Thirty-four property owners have been awarded money for solar installations through the city’s Green Cost Share program. Another dozen program applicants are receiving money for energy efficiency upgrades.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Monopolies
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Patents
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In a recent case, Trimble Inc. v. PerDiemCo LLC, No. 2019-2164 (May 12, 2021), the Federal Circuit found that, sometimes, threatening a patent infringement action, or entering extensive patent license negotiations prior to filing suit, with a company having a presence in a particular state could subject you to jurisdiction in that state, even if you are located elsewhere.
On one hand, this could provide a retailer with the ability to obtain declaratory judgment jurisdiction in a preferred home forum when the retailer is on the receiving end of infringement threats from a patent owner. On the other hand, this means that retailers should be aware of their communications regarding their own patents, and take care not to inadvertently subject themselves to a suit by a target alleging non-infringement in an unwanted jurisdiction.
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Chemours is a 2015 spin-off from Du Pont. Its patents at issues here relate to a polymer having a high melt flow to allow high-speed extrusion to cover electrical wires. U.S. Patent Nos. 7,122,609 and 8,076,431. The claims require a standardized melt flow rate range: 30±3 g/10 min along with other physical properties.
Daikin petitioned for inter partes review, and the PTAB agreed that the claims were invalid as obvious based upon a single prior art reference, U.S. Patent No. 6,541,588 (“Kaulbach”). Judge Dyk’s dissenting opinion in this case explains that “[t]he only material difference between [Chemours] claim 1 and Kaulbach is that Kaulbach discloses (in Sample A11) a melt flow rate of 24 g/10 min, slightly lower than 27 g/10 min, the lower bound of the 30 ± 3 g/10 min rate claimed in claim 1 of the ’609 patent.” Actually, Kaulbach goes even further and expreslly discloses a melt flow rate of “15 g/10 min or greater” and includes the example of 24 g/10 min MFR.
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Market Share vs Sales Numbers: The Board also held that market share evidence (rather than merely sales numbers) is required for a showing of commercial success. The Federal Circuit disagreed. “[M]arket share data, though potentially useful, is not required to show commercial success.”
Blocking Patents: Still on Commercial Success, the Board also rejected the commercial success argument after finding that Chemours patents at issue blocked market competition — so that any commercial success would be due to the patent’s existence rather than the innovation’s marketability. On appeal, the Federal Circuit rejected this conclusion also as contrary to law, finding that the Board totally misapplied the blocking patent doctrine.
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English courts will thrive in life sciences patent litigation alongside the UPC [Ed: Incredibly laughable nonsense from EPO propaganda mill IAM, pretending that UPC is about to happen ("even when the UPC is up and running"). Not gonna happen, but they think if they keep lying it'll sell services.]
The UK will remain a key venue for biopharma patent litigants even when the UPC is up and running, argues IAM life sciences editor Adam Houldsworth. In fact, the English courts may acquire a new strategic significance working in parallel with the new system
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The patent covers the company’s improved breast cancer screening analysis and is effective across 25 European countries
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If you think patents are all about protecting something “technical” or something only a scientist or engineer could appreciate, you are mistaken. Patents can protect how things look as well as how they work. If you want to protect how something works, you need a Utility Patent. If you want to protect how something looks, you need a Design Patent.
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In deciding which type of patent is right for you, be sure to work with a patent attorney who has written, prosecuted, and litigated both types, so you too can independently assess the benefits/downsides of both.
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Biden’s stance on patents – what we know six months in [Ed: In the propaganda mill of nihilistic patent extremists (who would rather see millions die than accept a much-needed patent waiver) Patrick Wingrove uses a veiled attack on Biden's patent stance. How do they sleep at night? On a pillow of cash from patent trolls' loot.]
The US president’s executive order on antitrust law and support for a COVID IP waiver don’t inspire confidence, but a USPTO head nomination will reveal more
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A Texas jury next week is set to consider whether Verizon’s LTE network services infringe a wireless patent developed by a University of Florida professor.
Nearly four years after Mobility Workx LLC filed suit, Verizon Communications Inc. and its affiliates will tell the jury on Monday that its cellular networks do not infringe a 2007 patent registered to UF professor Sumi Helal and an engineer, both of whom run Mobility Workx.
The patent, covering a method of imitating mobile communications in networks, is the sole patent remaining out of the three Mobility Workx accused Verizon of infringing. One was dropped after…
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As part of the EPO’s continuous dialogue with users and user associations across all sectors, the latest in a series of high-level meetings with top applicants, small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and high-growth firms (HGFs) took place online on Wednesday 21 July. To date, ten meetings have taken place with key applicants from Asia, Europe and the US, including four of the top ten applicants at the EPO and three SMEs. Several of the meetings were hosted by EPO President António Campinos and further meetings are planned in the course of the year, including with user associations.
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Finally, applicants expressed an interest in technical follow-up meetings as well as holding high-level meetings on an annual basis. The meetings, which are set to take place frequently with applicants from all sectors, supplement the Office’s comprehensive outreach programme, which includes further regular exchanges with user groups such as epi, Business Europe, SACEPO and AIPPI, among others. The widespread use of online meeting platforms and tools has allowed the EPO to increase its dialogue with its stakeholders, and the Office will explore how to capitalise on the advantages of hybrid meeting environments further as it heads towards a new normal.
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Over the past decade, Congress and the courts have made changes that have improved the patent system and encouraged American leadership in innovation. With our nation in a period of economic recovery, now is not the time to threaten that important progress.
Expansionists who claim that the U.S. needs more and stronger intellectual property are fond of arguing that patents convey constitutionally protected property that must receive treatment equal to that of tangible property. This has become a favorite talking point in their efforts to undo the positive changes made over the last decade by Congress and the Supreme Court. However, patents are not of the same quality and don’t have the same attributes as traditional property.
Adherents of this view equate patents with the deeds that convey ownership of real property. Just as a deed describes the boundaries of a parcel of land and transfers rights to the landowner, they argue that a patent defines the metes and bounds of an invention and grants ownership rights to the inventor or the inventor’s assignee. This “property equivalence” argument has been at the heart of dozens of petitions to the Supreme Court seeking to challenge the inter partes review (IPR) process, which allows the Patent Office to review patents to determine whether they should have been issued. The expansionist view is that patent rights should be held inviolate and that – like landowners – patent holders deserve to enjoy “quiet title” to their inventions.
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To ensure clear boundaries, the written description requirement would need to be strictly enforced by USPTO. To prevent patentees from redrawing the boundaries of their property, patent prosecution would also need to be reformed to limit continuation practice and to bring a reliable, finite end point to the patenting process.
Patent quality would also need to be substantially improved. An effective property regime doesn’t require that every grant of rights be valid, but it does require a vastly lower invalidity rate than that of the current system. This would require increasing fees, devoting substantially more than 19 hours for examination, and applying significantly more stringent standards to ensure the boundary lines are clear.
There would also be a need to create an effective means of identifying ownership interests – similar to the recordation system for real property – that requires assignments and perhaps FRAND licensing obligations (which are like liens) to be recorded and made publicly available. A host of other real property doctrines – from nuisance to adverse possession to trespass by necessity – would also need to be incorporated into this system.
The resulting regime is what treating patents “like real property” would actually look like. I suspect that patent expansionists would find such a regime highly disadvantageous and supremely objectionable, but I’d be happy to be proved wrong. Either way, if they want their arguments to hold any water, those who claim patents should be treated like real property should be championing reforms to make the patent system work a lot more like a property system – and right now, they aren’t.
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As a trainee patent attorney Claire has worked with a range of clients in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical areas, on applications related to a broad range of technologies, including antibodies, industrial biotechnology, gene therapies, RNA therapies, new chemical entities and drug repurposing.
“How much data do I need to file a patent application?” This is a question we get asked by many clients in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical field. In particular, this has been a more pressing concern during the pandemic as many companies had to restrict the number of scientists working in laboratories to allow social distancing. Some projects progressed a little slower than planned, delaying data read- outs.
Supporting an invention with sufficient data is however critical when applying for a patent at the European Patent Office (EPO), specifically in the biotech field and in the pharmaceutical field. This is particularly important when complying with the requirements for inventive step and sufficiency under European practice. An Examiner will assess whether it is plausible that the invention performs as claimed and whether the technical problem that the invention is said to solve, is actually solved. The invention must be rendered plausible at the priority date of the application, and in the life sciences field, data is usually required to demonstrate this.
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Neurim Pharmaceuticals has launched a second round of litigation against two Viatris Inc. subsidiaries to try and pull a generic version of its insomnia medication off the market, despite a ruling from the European Patent Office last year that revoked the company’s parent patent.
The High Court claim, which became newly public on July 15, focuses on a so-called divisional patent of the parent, for a melatonin-based insomnia drug. While the parent patent was revoked by the EPO back in 2019, the descendant patent is still in force, according to the new claim.
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Software Patents
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The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that targeted advertising is still an abstract idea and that a system providing targeted advertising must utilize something more than generic features and routine functions to be eligible for patent protection. Free Stream Media Corp. v. Alphonso Inc., Case No. 19-1506 (Fed. Cir. May 11, 2021) (Reyna, J.)
Free Stream Media, d.b.a. Samba, owns a patent directed to “a system providing a mobile phone user with targeted information (i.e., advertisements) that is deemed relevant to the user based on data gathered from the user’s television.” The system has three main components: (1) a networked device (e.g., a smart TV) that collects primary data, including program information, location, weather information or identification information; (2) a client device (e.g., a mobile device) on which applications run and advertisements may be shown; and (3) a relevancy-matching server that uses the primary data to select advertisement or other targeted data based on a relevancy factor associated with the user. Specifically, the relevancy-matching server “may also be configured to render the targeted data to the user through the networked device and/or the sandboxed application of the client device.”
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Posted in News Roundup at 11:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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Linux laptops are the perfect alternatives to macOS and Windows-powered laptops.
Technically, you can turn any laptop of your choice into a Linux machine by choosing to install any Linux distribution available.
But, here, our focus will be on the laptops that offer Linux out-of-the-box, ensuring the best compatibility and support no matter what kind of budget you have.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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I often get asked which Linux distribution is my favorite. My answer is usually one of two responses: (a) I don’t have a favorite, or (b) it’s the distro that I’m currently running. Well, if it’s the latter then my favorite distro has been Arco Linux for the last two years.
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Downloading packages from the AUR can take quite a while but there might be another way and that’s the Chaotic AUR, this is a seperate repo which precompiles a lot of the popular AUR packages and distributes binaries.
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**GNU COBOL** and **gperf** from the **d** software series of Slackware Linux.
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On this episode of This Week in Linux, we check out some Distro News about Debian 11 Bullseye, CentOS Hyperscale, Nest With Fedora and Kaisen Linux. Then we’ll revisit the Audacity Saga as it continues. Later in the show, we’ll take a look at Adobe’s announcement about joining the Blender Development Fund and Netflix may be getting into Video Game streaming service. Then in App News, we’ve got new releases from Handbrake, WordPress, CudaText, and Nativefier. All that and so much more coming up on episode 161 of This Week in Linux, recorded live on July 24, 2021. Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
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Kernel Space
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Intel Hardware P-State (aka Harware Controlled Performance or “Speed Shift”) (HWP) is a feature found in more modern x86 Intel CPUs (Skylake onwards). It attempts to select the best CPU frequency and voltage to match the optimal power efficiency for the desired CPU performance. HWP is more responsive than the older operating system controlled methods and should therefore be more effective.
To test this theory, I exercised my Lenovo T480 i5-8350U 8 thread CPU laptop with the stress-ng cpu stressor using the “double” precision math stress method, exercising 1 to 8 of the CPU threads over a 60 second test run. The average CPU temperature and average CPU frequency were measured using powerstat and the CPU compute throughput was measured using the stress-ng bogo-ops count.
The HWP mode was set using the x86_energy_perf_policy tool (as found in the Linux source in tools/power/x86/x86_energy_perf_policy). This allows one to select one of 5 policies: “normal”, “performance”, “balance-performance”, “balance-power” and “power” as well as enabling or disabling turbo frequencies. For the tests, turbo mode was also enabled to allow the CPU to run at higher CPU turbo frequencies.
The “performance” policy is the least efficient option as the CPU is clocked at a high frequency even when the system is idle and is not idea for a laptop. The “power” policy will optimize for low power; on my system it set the CPU to a maximum of 400MHz which is not ideal for typical uses.
The more useful “balance-performance” option optimizes for good throughput at the cost of power consumption where as the “balance-power” option optimizes for good power consumption in preference to performance, so I tested these two options.
[...]
Running with HWP balance-power option is a good default choice for maximizing compute while minimizing power consumption for a modern Intel based laptop. If one wants to crank up the performance at the expense of battery life, then the balance-performance option is most useful.
The balance-performance option when a laptop is plugged into the mains (e.g. via a base-station) may seem like a good idea to get peak compute performance. Note that this may not be useful in the long term as the CPU frequency may drop back to reduce thermal overrun. However, for bursty infrequent demanding CPU uses this may be a good choice. I personally refrain from using this as it makes my CPU rather run hot and it’s less efficient so it’s not ideal for reducing my carbon footprint.
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The latest Linux kernel feature proposed by Microsoft that is now working its way to the mainline kernel is IMA-based target measurements for the Device Mapper (DM) subsystem for enhanced security.
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Instructionals/Technical
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Timeshift on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Timeshift is an application that will create a backup and restore point on our Linux Environment similar to the System Restore feature in Windows and the Time Machine tool in Mac OS. Timeshift protects your system by taking incremental snapshots of the file system at regular intervals. These snapshots can be restored at a later date to undo all changes to the system.
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 the step-by-step installation of the Timeshift backup/restore application on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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“Basically, rust-gdb is a wrapper that loads external Python pretty-printing scripts into GDB. This is useful (and somewhat necessary) when debugging more complex Rust programs because it significantly improves the display of Rust data types.” (src)
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In this article you will learn how to extract/untar tar.gz files in Linux systems through the command line using the tar command.
A lot of the downloadable Linux/Unix files found on the internet are compressed using a tar.gz format. Therefore, knowing how to open or untar tar.gz files is a very useful skill.
The name “Tar” stands for “Tape Archiver”, because when tar was invented it was used to place data on storage tapes. A .tar.gz file is nothing, but an archive. The tar program takes one or more files and “wraps” them into a self-contained file.
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PHP 8.0 is a major update of the PHP language released on November 26, 2020, a giant leap forward from the existing PHP 7.4 release. The new PHP contains many new features and optimizations, including named arguments, union types, attributes, constructor property promotion, match expression, null safe operators, JIT and improvements in the type system, error handling, and consistency.
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This quick guide explains some of the steps which may come in handy to recover an Arch Linux Install.
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Games
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Bright Star Studios started selling virtual land in May. When the first pieces of property were put up for sale the interest was so massive that the systems crashed.
“By our calculations, everything would have been sold out in 15 seconds if the servers hadn’t crashed,” said Mark Laursen, founder and manager at Bright Star Studios.
Overall, the earnings are expected to pass 630 million kr before sales end.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
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Last week brought a significant new addition: the schedule view. It, and all of the other features explored in last week’s post, have been added over the course of this week and are now part of the master branch of Kalendar!
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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GUADEC 2021 took place July 21 -25. This year’s conference was to be held online and last five days. The first two days of the conference, July 21 – 22, was dedicated to presentations. The 23 – 24 were Birds of a Feather sessions and workshops, and the last day will be for social activities.
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New Releases
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LibreELEC 10.0 RC1 is released! bringing Kodi (Matrix) v19.1 (+ additional fixes) to LibreELEC users.
Changes from LibreELEC 10.0 BETA 5 are listed here. As discussed in the recent Upcoming Changes blog post it, the 10.0 release is a disruptive and limited hardware release. If you have not read the blog post – please do – because we are not releasing images for all hardware. In summary: this is a stable release for Generic (x86_64 PCs). Stable-Beta for Allwinner and Rockchip. Stable “Alpha” for Raspberry Pi 4 as the code is still very new. RPi 2/3 are still in development targeting an LE10.2 release. RPi 0/1 are discontinued. All others hardware is still in development and not in a state for formal releases.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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From spinning off its infrastructure business to making high-profile acquisitions, the industry giant is on a journey to reinvent itself
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We’re delighted to welcome Giang Dao to Red Hat as a country manager for Vietnam. In the new role, Dao will be responsible for Red Hat’s business operations in one of ASEAN’s fastest-growing markets.
Dao has extensive experience in the enterprise software space, with more than 20 years in IT, and having managed virtually every industry vertical. She joins Red Hat from IBM Vietnam, where she led sales for Vietnam’s North Top Development Accounts. She also held leadership roles at technology businesses in Vietnam, such as T&T Group and CMC Corporation, supporting customers on their digital transformation initiatives.
We caught up with Dao to hear her perspectives on open source and Red Hat, and her insights on leadership.
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Canonical/Ubuntu Family
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For all the Ubuntu users who are still ‘grooving’ with Groovy Gorilla (Ubuntu 20.10), the support for the same will be ending July 22. This means that you’ll no longer receive security, app, or bug fixes updates.
Saying goodbyes could be hard, but the good news is Ubuntu 21.04 has been out since April, and it brings new features and improvements. In this article, let’s look at how to update from Ubuntu 20.04/20.10 to 21.04 ‘Hirsute Hippo.’
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This is a follow-up to the End of Life warning sent earlier this month to confirm that as of July 22, 2021, Ubuntu 20.10 is no longer supported. No more package updates will be accepted to 20.10, and it will be archived to old-releases.ubuntu.com in the coming weeks.
The original End of Life warning follows, with upgrade instructions:
Ubuntu announced its 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla) release almost 9 months ago, on October 22, 2020, and its support period is now nearing its end. Ubuntu 20.10 will reach end of life on July 22, 2021.
At that time, Ubuntu Security Notices will no longer include information or updated packages for Ubuntu 20.10.
The supported upgrade path from Ubuntu 20.10 is via Ubuntu 21.04. Instructions and caveats for the upgrade may be found at:
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Zidoo M6 is both a complete mini PC and a single board computer based on Rockchip RK3566 processor with up to 8GB RAM with plenty of peripherals connectivity options including built-in Gigabit Ethernet, WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5, and support for 5G modems.
Several years ago, Zidoo used to serve the TV box market, but they’ve now veered towards higher-end media players, digital signage players, and industrial applications. While we’ve already seen some RK3566 TV boxes on the market, using the AIoT processor does not make much sense in this type of product, and instead, Zidoo M6 targets AI Edge gateways, digital signage, and other AIoT products.
[...]
Zidoo will provide Android 11, Ubuntu 18.04, and Station OS for the board/mini PC, as well as support for Buildroot to built custom Linux images, and Qt and Froglogic for graphical user interface development.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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A screen reader is a vital tool that helps individuals who are blind or low-vision read digital text. Unfortunately, not all file formats receive the same level of support from screen readers. For example, while PDF files have accessibility features that you can use, they are often not the preferred file format for screen reader users. Between line breaks, multiple columns, symbols, and images, screen readers can have trouble reading PDFs in a cohesive way to their users.
This is what the folks at Open @ RIT are trying to change.
Open @ RIT is the open source program office at the Rochester Institute of Technology, offering RIT faculty and staff assistance in opening their research projects and maintaining communities of practice around their work. One such faculty member is Dr. Todd Pagano, Professor of Chemistry and Associate Dean for Teaching and Scholarship Excellence at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf. Dr. Pagano came to Open @ RIT seeking help to increase the accessibility of an open-access journal, the publications of which currently exist as PDFs.
The Open @ RIT team, consisting of UX designer Rahul Jaiswal and full-stack developer Suhas C.V., have used this project as a stepping stone to begin exploring ways to convert PDFs into accessible HTML.
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Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
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A more advanced option is the other longtime go-to in the Linux world: LibreOffice. If you want to use it, you will have to install Linux on your Chromebook first. Then you can install LibreOffice in the default Debian installation using APT.
sudo apt install libreoffice
To launch LibreOffice Writer, just look for it in the app launcher, as you would with any other app. When you launch it, you’ll see the standard OpenOffice Writer interface in all its clunky glory.
You can then compose your document as on any other system. When you save it, don’t forget to save it as a Microsoft Word document (DOCX), not the standard OpenOffice format (ODT).
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Programming/Development
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Programming language is practically the backbone of data science and in the modern advancement of technology, we have a lot of languages available at our expense. But the question is which one among them is the most suitable for a data scientist. Currently, the latest group of programming languages that data scientists use are Python, Julia, and R. All these languages have their unique attributes and they also have areas of expertise. For example, the Python ecosystem is loaded with libraries, tools, and applications that make the work of scientific computing and data analysis fast and convenient, but Julia aims to give scientists and data analysts not only fast and convenient development but also blazing execution speed. On the other hand, R language enhances the speed of statistical computing like no other.
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Python
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This post is an immediate followup for the most recent post at Lxer.com regarding return of one string. Consider the task already been treated with 2D vector and dumping the content of vector to disk file. This approach would allow us to solve the same task via to straight forward returning vector of strings from C++ procedure to Python module.
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Science
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Cephalopods are fascinating creatures, and their primary living representative — the octopus — has recently been the subject of the Academy Award winning documentary “My Octopus Teacher.” They are clearly intelligent (as set forth in Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness), but it is an intelligence so different from human intelligence that it was an inspiration for the alien first-contact film, Arrival.
Outside the coleoid group, the only living relative are animals of the genus Nautilus, the sole surviving externally shelled cephalopod since the Paleozoic (541 to 252 million years ago). That shell is itself iconic, as both objet d’art and a living illustration of the Fibonacci series in the ratios of the whorls from which the shell is made.
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These researchers report that the Nautilus genome comprises 731 megabasepairs, which is the smallest of the cephalopods, being 2.5-7 fold smaller than their extant coleoid relatives. One feature the authors called “strikingly different” in Nautilus DNA is found in transposable elements (TE), known to be “the driving force in shaping genomic architecture and evolution.” TEs comprise 31% of the genome, with retrotransposons, including LINE (long interspersed nuclear element) SINE (short interspersed nuclear element), and LTR (long terminal repeats) elements constituting only a minor portion (6.5%); in contrast, these elements are “a prominent presence” in the coleoid cephalopod genome. Moreover, further analysis indicated that an ancient DNA transposon “burst” occurred once in the Nautilus lineage and that there has been no further expansion of TEs in the Nautilus genome (coleoid cephalopods have had more evolutionarily recent instances of such bursts). Nautilus shares this characteristic with other mollusks, which the authors say suggest slow evolutionary rates in non-coding regions of the Nautilus genome.
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Hardware
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Xiaomi entered the competitive Chinese mobile phone market in 2010 with MIUI, an Android-based smartphone software product which it offered for free. By 2017, it had achieved global recognition as a leading smartphone manufacturer and reached US$15 billion in revenue. Today, Xiaomi is the world’s largest Internet-of-Things (IoT) firm and by the end of 2020 had revenues exceeding US$37 billion.
How did Xiaomi manage to achieve such extraordinary growth? In addition to interviews with senior executives from Xiaomi and its ecosystem partner firms, our in-depth, multi-year study involved extensive analysis of conversations, reports and datasets from 2010–2020 across all departments of the firm.
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Health/Nutrition
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Fifty-six years ago Congress enacted Medicare to provide health insurance for people ages 65 and older and the disabled regardless of income or medical history. Since 1965, Medicare has become living proof that public, universal health insurance is superior to private insurance in every way. Medicare is more efficient than private health insurance and is administered at a cost of 3% to 4%, as opposed to private, for-profit health insurance, which has administrative costs above 15%. In light of the burgeoning, severe losses of jobs/employment/health insurances caused by the ravages of the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s very Important to remember that Medicare is still providing stable coverage for everyone 65 and older. If the new and improved Medicare for All, as outlined below, were in place today, everyone’s health insurance, in spite of the Covid-19 pandemic, would continue uninterrupted because the Medicare for All insurance system is based on residence, not employment.
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Sir Patrick Vallance, the U.K.’s chief scientific adviser, has announced that 40% of people admitted to hospital with Covid in the U.K. have had two doses of a coronavirus vaccine. At first glance, this rings very serious alarm bells, but it shouldn’t. The vaccines are still working very well.
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I’ve written a lot about the violent rhetoric of the antivaccine movement going back to 2015. I’ve also written about their techniques of protest, including bad cosplay and a fetish for V-style Guy Fawkes masks coupled with claims of being the “new civil rights movement” and victims, but up to and including violence. Few people have a lower opinion of antivaxxers than I do, but even I never expected this:
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Just days before the 56th anniversary of Medicare being signed into law, advocates for creating a public, universal health insurance program in the United States to replace the largely private, for-profit system held marches in more than 50 cities across the country on Saturday.
The day of action was organized by a coalition of over 100 groups, from Mainers for Accountable Leadership, the Chicago Teachers Union, and Sunrise Movement Seattle to various arms of Democratic Socialists of America, Physicians for a National Health Program (PNHP), and Our Revolution.
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After 31 October, the entries, including photos and videos, will be published anonymously in the form of a map as well as forwarded to the different municipalities and the Ministry of Mobility. The map will be available from mid-November.
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An international team of researchers has found a wide presence of microplastics such as polyester and polyethylene in the feces of three species of Antarctic penguins, according to a study published in ScienceDirect.
The experts collected excreta samples from three congeneric species, the Adelie penguin (Pygoscelis adeliae), the chinstrap (Pygoscelis antarcticus) and the gentoo (Pygoscelis papua), during seven seasons between 2006 and 2016, to later analyze them and assess the presence of microplastics in the Antarctic Peninsula and the Scotia Sea.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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Last week, Bloomberg News reported that Amazon planned to release an Alexa-enabled tracking device for children. This latest revelation—which isn’t Amazon’s first attempt at targeting children with tracking-like devices—comes as no surprise from a corporation that has made surveillance a critical part of its business model. As Amazon continues its relentless crusade to monopolize markets, crush rivals, and extract as much data as possible from unsuspecting consumers and third-party merchants, Congress and federal law enforcers must step up to restructure the corporation and prevent it from using these harmful practices. A new report by the Open Markets Institute (where I am employed) details how.
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Announced last week, Facebook’s $1 billion will pay the creators of popular posts, from fashionistas to comedians and video gamers, through 2022.
Facebook’s 1 billion plan to pay the creators such as fashionistas, comedians and video gamers
It is the strongest signal yet that the US social media giant now recognises the strategic importance of the “creator economy”.
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Whoever enters your mobile will get much more information about you than registering your home. Both physically (real-time location, travel history, hours of sleep) and socially (who is seen with and for how long, what does he talk about, who are his friends and family) or even mentally (tastes, hobbies, political ideas). Our pocket computers are also an access point to any valuable document (medical, financial or employment data, personal photos and videos, work files). Everything we do today goes through these devices. That is why we are terrified that someone could snoop on them without our consent. “Mobile phones are Stalin’s dream,” says Richard Stallman, father of the software free and living legend for many programmers.
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Defence/Aggression
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Speaking with SaharaReporters on Friday, the Director General, Centre for Justice on Religion and Ethnicity in Nigeria, Kallamu Musa Ali Dikwa, said for three weeks now, the terrorists have been stopping vehicles along Maiduguri- Damaturu Road at Mainok and kidnapping motorists and commuters without any disturbance.
He said, “This has been going on for two to three weeks now, along Maiduguri-Damaturu Road. When ISWAP kidnap passengers in a bus, they keep the Christian passengers captive and release the Muslim passengers, this is not just once, it has been happening. They just stop the car, enter into the bush, release the Muslims and hold the Christians captive.
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Transparency/Investigative Reporting
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The Reindeer Herder’s Association, which operates under Finland’s Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, experimented with spraying reflective paint on reindeer fur and antlers in 2014. The test ultimately failed, but the organization has since found more success with an app that alerts drivers to reindeer crossings.
However, the photo used in the post is not real – it’s an illustration, made using 3D software by visual designer Vasjen Katro. The author of the viral Facebook post, Samit Parab, edited the post on July 15 to credit the artist, but other posts continue to present the photo as reality.
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Environment
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Energy
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A life-cycle study of automobile emissions in four major new-car markets globally by Georg Bieker of nonprofit the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) has demonstrated conclusively that battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are dramatically cleaner than gasoline cars under virtually all circumstances, no matter how dirty the electric grid in which the BEVs operate.
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Wildlife/Nature
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Bunny, TikTok’s beloved “talking” Sheepadoodle, never fails to stun her followers. From asking for play dates with dog friends on her augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) device to posing existential questions, it appears that the more Bunny talks, the more insight we gain into the minds of dogs.
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Overpopulation
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California is a powerhouse of food production, growing some 40 percent of the country’s fruit, vegetables, and nuts. Yet the production depends on a supply of water that’s increasingly fragile and unreliable as the climate warms.
“Drought reveals the lie of a place,” says Mark Arax, the Fresno-based author of The Dreamt Land, a history of California’s water conflicts. “The lie is our ambition. We’ve taken on too much.”
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Finance
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Behind recent praise of undertaxed billionaire Jeff Bezos’ brief trip to near-space lie the neglected realities of institutional and environmental degradation, both of which have been eclipsed by vanity space projects and the ostensible prospect of space tourism.
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Buffalo’s India Walton looks to be on track to become the first socialist mayor of a major American city since Milwaukee’s Frank Zeidler left office in 1960. Her breakthrough win in the city’s June 22 Democratic primary, in which she beat the four-term incumbent mayor, Byron Brown, put the 38-year-old registered nurse and housing activist in the national spotlight. She’ll face strong write-in challenges by Brown and others in the November general election. But if she wins, with a grassroots campaign backed by the Working Families Party, Democratic Socialists of America, and the Erie County Democratic Party, Walton promises to make Buffalo a laboratory of democracy.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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His anger has been fueled by the fact that what was accomplished in Haiti was accomplished by what might be described as a rag-tag group of people with no weapons other than guns, whereas the people the trump demanded support him and keep him in office included the vice president of the United States and members of Congress, who the trump believes, clearly had the power to block the certification of Electoral College votes for Joe Biden as president, thereby permitting the trump to retain lawful possession of the White House and its accompanying perks.
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It was 35 years ago this month that I left my beloved Venice, California, to move to New York City to launch FAIR. Not many progressive nonprofits endure 35 years, but FAIR has survived and thrived.
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Islamic intimidation and lawfare, launched against Westerners for calling out the truths about Islam, is nothing new. Canada and the US had enough advance notice to fight what has now become ingrained in Western culture: Islamic lawfare, punitive action against those who offend Muslims or Islam, and a resulting cancel culture.
The NCCM (formerly CAIR-CAN) is now operating inside the Liberal Government of Canada as a leader on “diversity” issues. The NCCM was a recipient of an undisclosed amount of funding to help implement Canada’s big mistake: anti-Islamophobia motion M-103, which includes monitoring citizens for compliance and training law enforcement to identify online and offline “hate.” The implementation of M-103 was enabled by a taxpayer funded 23-million-dollar package. Another recipient to assist the Liberal Government’s implementation of its M-103 strategy was IRFAN (Islamic Relief Canada), which was outlawed by the previous Conservative government as a terrorist entity.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Face recognition technology may sound futuristic, or perhaps too abstract to seem harmful. But we are already living in a reality in which face recognition and other forms of biometric surveillance pervade our daily lives. These technologies threaten our privacy and free speech rights and, when used by police and immigration enforcement, serve as yet another dangerous system to abuse Black and Brown people on a massive scale. Big Tech companies are profiting off these abuses because they are the ones developing and selling face recognition to government agencies. And it’s our communities—particularly communities of color—that face the harmful consequences.
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That officer did turn out to be corrupt. In 2012, Watts and another officer were arrested and later pleaded guilty to federal theft of public funds charges, accused of extorting residents and drug dealers in the housing project.
Now Shannon is still fighting to be heard, along with dozens of others who say they were framed by Watts and his team in one of Chicago’s biggest police corruption scandals.
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Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
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Digital Restrictions (DRM)
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In a unanimous vote among the five commissioners, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) will move forward with a new policy regarding the right-to-repair. This decision was foreshadowed by a 2019 workshop and 2021 report to Congress.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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Sources told Managing IP this week that a study released by the European Commission has led them to worry that SMEs could be squeezed out of the market by large biotech companies using patents to block research on new plant varieties.
On July 12, the European Commission submitted a letter to the World Trade Organization outlining the results of a study it conducted into the status of new genomic techniques (NGTs). It showed that there have been significant advances in NGTs since the EU developed its directive on genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in 2001.
Sources are hopeful that the results could pave the way for new legislation that would allow for plants obtained through NGTs to be commercialised in Europe. However, the worry for some plant breeders is that this could open new opportunities for patenting that big seed companies could use to exploit small breeders.
[...]
TCL Communication Technology and Ericsson settled their long-standing patent fight on Friday, July 16.
The parties filed a motion to dismiss in the District Court for the Central District of California, where TCL had claimed that Ericsson had not licensed its patents on fair terms. The court dismissed the case on Monday, July 19.
On Thursday, July 15, the companies filed the same type of motion in the District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, where Ericsson had accused TCL of patent infringement. The venue dismissed the dispute the next day.
The news comes about 10 months after both parties had their petitions rejected by different appellate courts.
The US Supreme Court denied cert in October 2020 on TCL’s request to overturn a ruling from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit that Ericsson was entitled to a jury trial.
In September 2020, the Federal Circuit denied Ericsson’s petition for an en banc rehearing. The appellate court had previously determined that TCL was not liable for patent infringement – reversing a decision from the Eastern District of Texas.
The Federal Circuit said the patent being litigated contained ineligible subject matter because it was directed to an abstract idea.
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This is the first part of a trilogy on licensing negotiation groups: automotive industry cartels that would collectively negotiate standard-essential patent (SEP) licenses with major patent holders and pools.
Earlier this month, the European Commission levied a € 875 million fine on Volkswagen (that company has to pay more than half a billion euros alone) and BMW–Daimler got away unscathed only because it had blown the whistle–for restricting competition in emission cleaning for new diesel passenger cars. That decision stands in the tradition of regulatory findings of cartel law violations by car makers and their suppliers. Just a few recent examples from the EU that beg the question of whether such conduct is deeply ingrained in that industry’s DNA…
[...]
I’ve looked at this topic from multiple angles: whether the issues Volkswagen has identified are real; whether the proposed measures are necessary and proportionate; whether licensing negotiation groups would be more or less constructive than individual parties; whether SEP holders would still be reasonably capable of enforcing their rights; and whether the upside would outweigh the downside in competition policy terms.
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News July 2021 fr AFD China [Ed: China also learned to adopt the propaganda term and misnomer "Intellectual Property"]
The winners of the 22nd China Patent Award were announced by the China Intellectual Property Administration….
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Finnish mobile phone manufacturer HMD might no longer be able sell mobile devices in Germany that infringe VoiceAge EVS patent EP 27 07 687, following a Regional Court Mannheim decision (case ID: 7 O 116/19). The court today declared that HMD infringes EP 687. It is currently unclear whether VoiceAge will enforce a sales stop, which would lead to a ban on the sale of the devices. HMD can still appeal the verdict.
EP 687 protects a speech coding technology for mobile devices. VoiceAge EVS had sued for injunctive relief and also demanded damages, information and rendering of accounts.
The ruling is the first in a series of lawsuits filed by the SEP holder against five mobile phone manufacturers. VoiceAge EVS filed five lawsuits against HMD in Mannheim and Munich in 2019. It also took action against Lenovo/Motorola, Apple, Xiaomi and TCL/TCT over the same patents. In today’s decision, the court found that HMD has infringed the patent and held that the defendant’s FRAND defence was unsuccessful.
[...]
Wildanger and Bosch Jehle, on the other hand, have worked together intensively for many years for SEP holders such as VoiceAge EVS. Previously, both law firms led a successful joint campaign for NPE Saint Lawrence.
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The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, exploring the use of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 60(b)(3) under Ninth Circuit law, affirmed a district court’s ruling setting aside a monetary damages judgment and an injunction for fraudulent misrepresentations by a corporate patent owner’s president concerning prior art. Cap Export, LLC, et al. v. Zinus, Inc., et al., Case No. 20-2087 (Fed. Cir. May 5, 2021) (Dyk, J.)
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The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit concluded that the minimum contacts or purposeful availment test for specific personal jurisdiction was satisfied where a patent owner sent multiple infringement notice letters and other communications to a resident of California who then filed for declaratory judgment of non-infringement in federal district court in California. Trimble Inc. v. PerDiemCo LLC, Case No. 19-2164 (Fed. Cir. May 12, 2021) (Dyk, J.)
PerDiem accused Trimble of infringing several of PerDiem’s patents. PerDiem exchanged 22 communications with Trimble in California over a period of three months, some through Trimble’s subsidiary ISE in Iowa and other communications through its chief IP counsel in Colorado. The communications started with a letter (sent to ISE in Iowa) that had attached an unfiled complaint and which PerDiem used to try to launch license negotiations. This unfiled complaint asserted nine of PerDiem’s patents. After ISE brought Trimble, its parent, into the discussion, PerDiem accused Trimble’s products of infringing 11 patents and sought to enter into binding mediation on its infringement allegations. PerDiem also threatened to sue Trimble in the Eastern District of Texas and identified the counsel it planned to use for this purpose. Trimble filed for a declaratory judgment of non-infringement in the Northern District of California. The district court dismissed the complaint, relying on the Federal Circuit’s 1998 decision in Red Wing Shoe v. Hockerson-Halberstadt, concluding that it would be unreasonable to assert personal jurisdiction over PerDiem based on its communications. Trimble appealed.
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o mitigate potential conflicts of interest and to improve the public’s understanding of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) procedures, the agency has recently made various amendments to its rules relating to the conduct of registered patent attorneys and agents. The resulting changes mirror some well-recognized provisions of the American Bar Association’s (ABA) Rules of Professional Conduct. The changes also make the agency’s procedures easier to comprehend, as discussed below.
Contrary to most legal practice, representing inventors to secure a patent does not require a licensed attorney. “Patent agents” can also represent inventors when seeking a patent from the USPTO. A patent agent is typically a college-educated non-lawyer with an engineering or other technical degree who has taken the USPTO’s “patent bar” exam. On this exam, applicants are tested on laws and rules that address patentability issues and inventor obligations. (A patent attorney must also have technical credentials and take the patent bar exam, in addition to having a law degree and passing a state bar examination.).
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Addressing claim construction, enablement, damages and willfulness, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit found that evidence of a defendant’s knowledge of the asserted patent and proof of infringement were, by themselves, legally insufficient to support a finding of willfulness. Bayer Healthcare LLC v. Baxalta Inc., Case No. 19-2418 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 1, 2021) (Stoll, J.)
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In a recent post, we discussed the importance of complying with the US Patent and Trademark Office’s duty of disclosure under Rule 56 of the Rules of Practice. This post focuses on the existence of this duty throughout the entire prosecution of a patent application, in a specialized factual context involving a priority application outside the US.
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If the claimed invention in the US non-provisional application is entitled to the filing date of the PCT application, the effective filing date of the claimed invention in the US application would be the filing date of the PCT application. In that circumstance, the exception under 35 USC 102(b)(1)(A) would apply, and the prior public disclosure would not qualify as prior art. As a result, technically it would not be necessary to cite the prior public disclosure to the USPTO as part of the duty of disclosure under Rule 56. However, there are a number of issues to consider.
Preliminarily, under US practice, it is possible to “bypass” the normal PCT national stage entry by filing either a “bypass” application, which may contain the same disclosure as the PCT application, or may contain different disclosure from the PCT application. This “bypass” practice is unique to US patent practice (that is, it is not available in other jurisdictions around the world). For purposes of the following discussion, it is necessary only to consider whether the US application contains the same disclosure as the PCT application.
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On July 9, 2021, the German Federal Constitutional Court (FCC) published its decision rejecting two applications for a preliminary injunction against the German ratification of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPCA) that had been approved by the German parliament on 18 December 2020.[1] The FCC had originally asked Germany’s Federal President to wait with his signature required for the underlying bill to enter into force. With the two applications dismissed, the President is now free to sign the bill into law, despite the still pending underlying constitutional complaints.
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The United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit recently granted a patentee’s request to dismiss an appeal of an inter partes review brought by an accused infringer, relying on the patentee’s voluntary resolution of litigation on the patent. In ABS Global Inc., v. Cytonome/St, LLC, 984 F.3d 1017 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 6, 2021), the panel set forth a framework for the specific circumstances under which a patentee can obtain such relief, explaining how a patent owner may moot such an appeal by expressly declining to appeal a district court judgement of non-infringement obtained by the petitioner.
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Germany Constitutional Court Removes UPC Hurdle for Approval Act [Ed: UPC has nothing to do with "United" or unity -- a claim that Team UPC operatives like to float around with their media flunkies; it's about attacking the whole of Europe in one fell swoop]
On July 9, 2021, Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court rejected a pair of applications for a preliminary injunction directed against the German Approval Act on the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPC) (decision of June 23, 2021, 2 BvR 2216/20). Thus, German ratification of the Agreement now only requires a presidential signature of the Approval Act and the subsequent deposition of the ratification.
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Co-Diagnostics, Inc. (Nasdaq: CODX), a molecular diagnostics company with a unique, patented platform for the development of molecular diagnostic tests, announced today that it has added to its suite of intellectual property protection after being awarded a patent from the Republic of Korea’s Intellectual Property Office for the Company’s CoPrimer™ technology.
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Today the European Patent Office (EPO) published ”Towards a new normal”, an orientation document to explore how the Office can capitalise on new opportunities in a potentially post-COVID-19 era.
In the midst of a rapidly changing social and economic landscape, as the pandemic continues to impact the way we live and work, the aim is to ensure as far as possible that both users and staff fully benefit from new emerging possibilities. The document therefore proposes how we can build on the new levels of flexibility and new ways of collaborating achieved during the pandemic, at the same time as preserving a strong sense of the EPO community.
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Europe SEP initiative highlights company differences [Ed: Team UPC's propaganda mill is at it again; Charlotte Kilpatrick promotes the cartel in "SEP" clothing. This is what happens when 'journalism' is subsidised for lobbying and mass deception.]
SEP owners and implementers are split on how they want the European Commission to draft a framework for a fairer licensing system
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With spectators barred from the Olympic Games because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic and cases rising in areas around the world, particularly among unvaccinated people, rich governments face growing pressure to take bolder steps to address what critics have called “vaccine apartheid.”
As the Games formally kicked off Friday—following the launch of a new “Stop Playing Games” campaign to demand that wealthy countries invest in a global vaccine manufacturing plan—dozens of members of Congress called for including additional funding in the reconciliation package to produce and distribute Covid-19 vaccines worldwide.
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Lots of petroleum is trapped by deep rock formations that are difficult to drill-out one-by-one. Hydraulic fracturing (fracking) gets access to those stores by using high-pressure injection of a slurry of water, chemical additives and proppant (such as sand or other granular). The high-pressure water causes cracking of the rocks. Proppant residue is left behind and holds the cracks open — allowing the petro to flow out more easily.
Oren’s parent company US Silica competes with PropX for delivering proppant (sand) for fracking. As part of this competition, Oren holds several patents related to storage of proppant and sued PropX for infringement. US Patent Nos. 9,403,626; 9,511,929; and 9,296,518. PropX responded with petitions for IPR. This case involves the ‘626 patent and the PTAB’s ruling cancelling all the challenged claims as obvious. On appeal, the Federal Circuit has rejected the PTAB decision for two reasons: (1) the PTAB decision strayed too far from the grounds of unpatentability found in the petition; and (2) the PTAB improperly disregarded the commercial success of Oren’s container.
The ‘626 patent is directed to a stackable storage container for sand. Each container has a bottom hinged-hatch that allows sand to flow to the next lower container and eventually out through the bottom of the stack.
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The Patent Trial and Appeal Board turned away 104 petitions for discretionary reasons in the first half of 2021, but more than 70% of those were in the first quarter of the year, according to new Unified Patents data.
Between January and March 2021, the PTAB rejected 74 petitions on procedural grounds, compared to 30 in the following three months, Unified Patents said July 6. Despite the dip, the group — which supports the PTAB invalidating weak patents — projected that number will double over the rest of the year, ending around 208 denials.
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Software Patents
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On July 22, 2021, in a challenge that took less than 6 months to complete, the China National Intellectual Property Administration declared claims 1, 2, 5, 7, 9, 14, 16 and 18 of CN103081504 invalid. Owned by IdeaHub, Inc., the CN’504 patent is directed to media content streamed in accordance with the MPEG-DASH standard and to video-on-demand (VOD) systems. It is related to U.S. Patent 8,645,562, which IdeaHub’s licensee, Helios Streaming, LLC, has used to sue Showtime, Vudu, Crackle, and Starz.
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On June 29th Patently Apple posted an IP report titled “Apple won 46 Patents today covering their Ultra-Wideband AirTag System, an iDevice Recycling System, AirPower & more.” The focus of one of Apple’s key granted patents was AirTag and how it could guide a user with an iPhone to find a device using an arrow UI system. Another granted patent on this technology reveals Apple’s use of Ultra-Wideband wireless technology will go far beyond AirTag.
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Copyrights
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Captain Craig Alexander sued Atlanta-based Delta for trade-secrets theft in Georgia state court on Monday. He claims he spent $100,000 of his own money to develop his QrewLive app, which he pitched to the airline as a way to address crew communication snafus after disrupted flights. Delta turned him down but went on to launch its own identical tool, he claims.
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Alexander denies that a billion dollars is a ridiculous claim, asserting that the airline has saved more than this by using the app. Delta says the claim about how its app came to be developed is “not accurate or fair.”
Earlier this year, Delta partnered with Apple and AT&T to equip all 19,000 flights attendants with an iPhone 12.
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“FFC is a carbon copy, knock-off of the role-based text-messaging component of (my) proprietary QrewLive communications platform,” Mr Alexander said in his suit.
The pilot noted in his suit that Mr Bastian and Mr Samant have both bragged to investors that the app has smoothed operations.
In describing the damages he is seeking, Mr Alexander said the value of the technology, “based solely upon operational cost savings to Delta, conservatively exceeds US$1 billion”. He is also seeking punitive damages against Delta.
“To add insult to theft and injury, Captain Craig Alexander must use his stolen QrewLive text-messaging platform every day while he works for Delta,” the suit claimed.
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The pilot could face a challenge pursuing his claims as a Delta employee, as companies typically own the rights to anything produced by their workers. In his suit Alexander stressed that he put his own time and resources into QrewLive and said Delta indicated it would be willing to purchase the app from him on the same terms as from an outside vendor.
The case is Alexander v. Delta Air Lines Inc., 21A03275, Georgia State Court, DeKalb County.
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Congress has established four guidelines to determine whether a work can be granted copyright protection: originality, fixation, idea versus expression and functionality.
In choreography, it’s the fixed “expression” that’s being protected, not the “idea” behind it. This is why New York City Ballet can copyright their choreographed version of “The Nutcracker,” but other artists can create their own versions or expressions of the story as plays, storybooks or choreographed dance.
Artists and scholars still debate what, exactly, it is that a dancer or choreographer is trying to claim as their own. Is it the dance as a work of art, the choreography or the specific performance?
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An official investigation found Tencent’s 2016 acquisition of China Music Corp.’s stakes violated regulations partly because of a lack of reporting to authorities, according to a statement by the anti-trust watchdog on Saturday. The State Administration for Market Regulation required Tencent and its affiliates to waive exclusive music rights within 30 days and handed down a fine of 500,000 yuan ($77,145).
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Several more movie studios have quietly joined a partnership with the Federation Against Copyright Theft that bears all the hallmarks of a pending major anti-piracy scheme. It will be of concern to UK-based pirates that several of the companies are already involved in broad litigation activity in the United States against both downloaders of content and those that provide it.
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Katfriend Dr Sabine Jacques, Associate Professor in IP, IT & Media law at the University of East Anglia and author of The Parody Exception in Copyright Law (OUP 2019), provides the follow review of The Copyright/Trademark Interface: How the Expansion of Trademark Protection is Stifling Cultural Creativity – by Martin Senftleben.
The title of this book clearly sets out its premise: trademark protection has encroached into what used to be solely copyright’s domain, resulting in an undesirable over-protection of works which impoverishes the public domain and restricts others’ creative endeavours. Senftleben has responded laudably to addressing this colossal challenge by writing a scholarly book which is sure to be a ‘go to’ reference for anyone interested in IP overlaps and protection asymmetries.
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Just as it takes a highly skilled watchmaker to make a truly accurate mechanical watch, so it takes a stellar IP scholar to explore and resolve the tensions between copyright and trademark law. Borrowing the eyeglass of a watchmaker, Senftleben explores the internal mechanisms of copyright and trademark to suggest new ways of applying trademark doctrines without impoverishing the public domain, hindering creativity or even diluting the true aims of trademark law. Akin to watchmaker’s deft touch in creating a watch movement, the author’s meticulousness in addressing every possible scenario is commended.
Nevertheless, not all will agree with some of the work’s premises, such as the conception of the author and the role of the public domain in copyright. Others (including the reviewer) would perhaps have liked to have seen more on the impact of the US Court of Appeal case, Rogers v. Grimaldi, which is relied upon heavily in Chapter 9, because it identified a defence based on ‘artistic relevance.’ A court in a later case, Stouffer v. Nat’l Geographic Partners, LLC, No. 18-cv-3127-WJM-SKC, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 140947 (D. Colo. Aug. 20, 2019) – which perhaps came too late for included in this edition of book – highlighted some shortcomings in the Rogers test, and established a different test of ‘genuine artistic motive’. Finally, although the author discusses (US-style) ‘fair use’ and its absence from EU IP law, the reader is left to wonder whether the author is in favour of introducing fair use into EU trademark legislation. Whilst this may be desirable in copyright which requires a dynamic paradigm, might trademark law’s static focus precludes a fair-use-type analysis? However, all this is just nit-picking. Senftleben has written a marvellous, scholarly monograph which will feed into and fuel discussion for years to come. It is not only comprehensive; it is a thoroughly enjoyable read.
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Posted in Site News at 7:19 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 3b228ff45c983c528681a60f3506e3ca
Summary: The (almost) real-time logs for #techrights have been available in http://techrights.org/irc and in gemini://gemini.techrights.org/chat/index.gmi for over a month; today we extend that to cover all channels (aggregated into one)
THE past few months were spent dealing with IRC disruption like we’ve never experienced in over 13 years. We took the opportunity to make several improvements. This morning at around 2 AM we carefully checked the output (txt and html files) for #techpol, whose logging was finally automated yesterday, then tested thoroughly.
“Access and read IRC in (almost) real-time right from the command line.”Later in the moning we improved the tooling with some simple command line programs and pipelines. I’ve decided to (re)check and ensure it’s all consistent with Konversation (KDE) as shown on the screen (GUI), lessening interactions with bloated applications and reducing the need for notifications of any kind. In the process we’ve managed to create a sort of tool everyone can take advantage of. Access and read IRC in (almost) real-time right from the command line.
For all channels in one place (aggregated):
watch -n 5 "wget -qO- http://techrights.org/irc-archives/irc-status.txt | tail -20"
All channels watched
For #techrights alone (different format, different source/node):
watch -n 5 "wget -qO- http://techrights.org/irc | tail -20"
#techrights channel watched
The 2 screenshots show what it looks like on my system. Watch and Wget are quite universal. On some systems they may need adding. To change refresh intervals to something other than 5 seconds alter the number after -n accordingly. The same is true for number of lines shown (tail -20)
From the Web (as shown in the video above, with a screenshot added below) it looks the same as before. We hope more people will take advantage of these interfaces (for which we run jobs/processes 24/7). █
Latest updates from all IRC channels
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