Summary: At midnight we shall start looking at the Swiss role (or roll) enabling Benoît Battistelli‘s illegal attacks on fundamental rights of EPO staff, including Swiss patent examiners
More background: 50 Years of Women’s Suffrage in Switzerland | Women’s suffrage in Switzerland | Women’s suffrage in Switzerland: 100 years of struggle
Hello! Welcome to this week’s Linux Roundup.
We had another wonderful week in the world of Linux releases with the releases of MX Linux 21 RC1, Feren OS 2021.10, Debian 11.1, and Manjaro 21.1.5.
A new Linux-based alternative to Windows 11 has shown up online right at the time of the release of Microsoft’s desktop OS. Dubbed as Windowsfx 11, it is an alternate version of Windows that brings several Windows 11 design elements to your PC.
Now, I know that there are a few apps that can add the Windows 11 Start Menu to older versions of Windows, Windowsfx 11 not only adds the Start Menu but also the new Taskbar with centered icons, the translucent theme of Windows 11, dark mode, and various other features to your older PC. It even adds a Cortana-like virtual assistant called Helloa. You can check out the demo video below to get an idea about how it will look like on your system.
Last week, Valve released a teardown video showcasing the Steam Deck internals. This is almost becoming a trend, as Sony did something quite similar before they released the PS5 to the public.
The main difference with Sony here is that Valve starts by saying that “this is your device, you are free to do whatever you want with it, including opening it.” while they do not recommend you do for numerous reasons. Still, that feels so unusual to hear that it’s a breath of fresh air. And some journalists wonder why people like Valve…
In today’s episode we provide a way to enable your “switch screens” key on your Ubuntu MATE laptop.
For awhile, I’ve talked about potentially making a deployment script for my Xmonad/Emacs desktop. The project got put on hold several times, but now it’s time to get this thing released. I’ve spent a few days this week working out some of the bugs, and I think it’s time to go public with the script….but this thing is still very much BETA software. Not recommended for installation on production machines.
So things continue to look quite normal, and it looks like the rough
patch (hah!) we had early in the release is all behind us.
Knock wood.
The commit stats look normal for an rc5, and the diffstat is fairly
regular too. We had more arch updates than perhaps is common, with
almost as many lines of diffs in architecture code as there is in
drivers. Admittedly some of that "architecture" code ends up being
devicetree updates, so some of it could be attributed to driver code,
but that's not how our source tree is laid out..
Outside of arch code (x86, powerpc, arm, arm64) and drivers (mainly
gpu, networking and usb), we have a smattering of other changes: 9p
and ksmbd, core networking, and some perf tooling updates. And misc
smaller random stuff.
Shortlog appended for more of a flavor for the details. Please do give
this a whirl,
Linus
Phoronix Test Suite 10.6.1 was released today with various improvements for our cross-platform, open-source, fully-automated benchmarking software.
Among the changes that built up for Phoronix Test Suite 10.6 include the following highlights:
Linux is open-source software based on the Linux kernel. Other systems, namely Microsoft and Apple, come in one complete version. In contrast, Linux can adapt to satisfy the needs of the user through the addition of various free apps.
Distributions, also known as distros, are free operating systems originating from the Linux kernel that you can install on your PC or mobile device. A distro often incorporates a package management system, which facilitates speedy installation, configuration, and necessary upgrades. This does away with the process of having to find software online and manually install it on your Microsoft or Apple device.
A Linux distro contains the Linux kernel and a variety of software, including GNU tools, a window system and manager, and a desktop environment. These elements combine to produce a software package that is adaptable and allows users to install the specific apps and operating systems that they need.
Sometimes finding the perfect linux distro that meets your needs it’s not that easy as you have to test it before you install it, downloading and testing the distro takes a lot of time especially when Linux is your main OS and you are trying to switch to something that works.
Setting up Appwrite on any Operating System, or Kernel is pretty easy. Here we are going to go through an easy and simple method to setup Appwrite on a Linux Kernel.
Well I use Ubuntu Operating System, so let’s get started with setting up Appwrite on Ubuntu.
Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 4 with the Vantage FX Broker on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
There are so many way to try out Linux, Live booting, virtual machines, dual booting and they have their merits and demirits but which one is the best option to actually go with.
“The Network File System (NFS) was developed to allow machines to mount a disk partition on a remote machine as if it were a local disk. It allows for fast, seamless sharing of files across a network.” (src)
NFS does not ask for passwords, instead on the server in /etc/exports is defined what client (identified by ip-address) may access what folder.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install FireBird on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Firebird is a relational database offering many ANSI SQL standard features that run on Linux, Windows, and a variety of Unix platforms. Firebird supports application programs and triggers, as well as many ANSI SQL standard features. Its multi-generational design enables simultaneous OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) and OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) activities.
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 FireBird database 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.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Audacity on Linux Mint 20. For those of you who didn’t know, Audacity, free and open-source audio editing, and recording software. Audacity can be used across varying platforms such as Linux, macOS, and Windows.
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 Audacity open-source audio editing on a Linux Mint 20 (Ulyana).
Postfix is a popular Mail transfer agent(MTA) which is a part of SMTP whose full form is Simple Mail transfer protocol and Postfix function is to transfer/send mails from one server to another. Postfix is known because of its determination of routes and sending emails; it is completely free and installable on all major Unix operating systems. Around 25% of all the public servers use or run postfix on the internet.
As it is installable on all major Unix operating systems, in this article we will provide a step-by-step guide about how to install and configure Postfix on Ubuntu 20.04.
PostgreSQL, or Postgres, is a free, powerful, and open-source relational database management system developed at the University of California.
In this tutorial post, We are going to show you the steps to install PostgreSQL on Ubuntu Linux along with the pgAdmin4 web-based management tool.
This simple tutorial shows how to install the latest version of Kodi media center in Ubuntu 18.04, Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, and their based systems, e.g., Linux Mint 20, Elementary OS 6 and Zorin OS 16.
Kodi, formerly XBMC, is now at version 19.2 “Matrix”. It fixed some possible crashes caused by missing timer type, missing channel icons, accessing invalid PVR channel, or switching monitors, toggling on/off HDR from Windows 10 display settings.
The big one in the release it that Kodi 19.x now is available on the Xbox, along with swap chain and HEVC DXVA2 decoder performance improvements, and 4k resolution and HDR video playback fixes. For more, see the release note.
So I decided to switch the nameservers on my fossjon.com domain over to Cloudflares service for 2 different reasons. One is that they offer more advance https reverse proxying tech and also a better dns management interface as well! I still have the domain registered with Google Domains as they offer pretty good mx email forwarding via gmail.
An experimental branch of the open implementation of WinAPI – Wine 6.19 has been released . Since the release of version 6.18 , 22 bug reports have been closed and 520 changes have been made.
Recently we wrote about the stealth assassination game HITMAN landing on GOG.com. Not specifically Linux news but interesting industry news to keep an eye on, due to the massive backlash it had and now GOG has removed it for sale. Quick note: while the game does have a Linux build ported by Feral Interactive on Steam, like the rest of Feral titles it didn’t make it to GOG.
As a reminder on the issue – HITMAN is a single-player game, however it does lock quite a lot of features to do with progression behind needing an online connection. With GOG being famous for its anti-DRM stance, bringing that over did not sit well with customers and the backlash spawned well over 2,000 posts on the GOG forum.
After repeated delays it seems Mouse Hat Games have finally settled on an actual release date for Logic World. What was once called TUNG – The Ultimate Nerd Game, shall hit Early Access on October 22.
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From what we’ve been told the Linux support is working very nicely.
Mabox Linux 21.10 refreshed iso images are ready for download. Built on the Manjaro stable branch as of 10 October 2021, it provides a bunch of improvements and fixes.
Today we are looking at Feren OS 2021.10. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.11, based on Ubuntu 20.04, KDE 5.22.5, and uses about 1GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at Feren OS 2021.10.
Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 11 October at 1300UTC in #fedora-neuro on IRC (Libera.chat). The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend.
The Debian Project announced the general availability of the Debian 11.1 “Bullseye” and Debian 10.11 “Buster” as bugfix releases.
Debian doesn’t follow a fixed release schedule, and that makes it somewhat hard to know exactly when a new release will be available. Now the Debian project has announced the availability of two new versions of its operating system simultaneously.
Debian is one of the oldest GNU/Linux distributions that is still in active development. It is the basis for other Linux distributions such as Ubuntu, Kali Linux, or MX Linux.
The Debian Release Team released the first point release for the mid-August this Saturday, Debian 11 Bullseye released in.
As usual with such point releases, the update mainly fixes security problems that have accumulated since the last update, along with a few adjustments for serious problems in applications. These adjustments are only made in the point releases if no regressions are to be feared. A total of 74 bugs were fixed and 24 security problems were fixed. The details can be found in the announcement of the publication .
New month, new service pack! As always, new features and fixes have been backported from postmarketOS edge to the stable version after tough testing by our tough community members on edge.
Submitted by A release of the project Brython 3.10 (Browser Python) with a web browser-side implementation of the Python 3 programming language, allowing you to use Python instead of JavaScript to develop scripts for the Web. The project code is written in Python and is distributed under the BSD license.
While developing MiTubo I’ve recently felt the need of parsing HTML pages: the first problem I wanted to solve was implementing proper RSS feed detection when the user entered a website URL into MiTubo’s search box, so that MiTubo would parse the site’s HTML, look for <link rel=”alternate”…> URLs in the HEAD section, and let the user subscribe to any video feeds found there.
A quick search in the internet did not provide a clear answer: I found a Qt HTML parser in (stalled) development, and a few other C++ or C parsers (among the latters, lexbor is the most inspiring), but all of them seem to take the approach of parsing the HTML file into a DOM tree, while I was hoping to find a lightweight SAX-like parser. Pretty much like Python’s html.parser.
Anyway, I don’t remember how it happened, but at a certain point I found myself looking at html.parser source code, and I was surprised to see how compact it was (apart, of course, for the long list of character references for the HTML entities!). Upon a closer look, it also appeared that the code was not making much use of Python’s dynamic typing, so, I thought, maybe I could give it a try to rewrite that into a Qt class. And a few hours later QHtmlParser was born.
Elixir releases are self-contained directories containing your applications together with all dependencies and the Erlang virtual machine. Although convenient, there are unfortunately not platform-independent. Here’s how to build your application release for any Elixir version and operating system with ASDF and Docker.
Releases are almost as good as a single executable. Almost, because there are platform dependent. Personally, I love minimalism and skipping layers whenever I can. I run Fedora for my desktop so I can actually match my environment with a Fedora server and achieve one of the most effortless deployments there can be (like with Go).
I can move the releases’ files to the server with scp and restart a small systemd service. That’s how simple Elixir deployment can be if you remove anything extra.
However, keeping the same environment is not always possible. And Elixir release won’t just depend on your OS flavor. Instead, an Elixir release depends on your processor architecture and C library version (glibc package). This is because there are still system dependencies in place even though Erlang bytecode is platform-independent.
Those of us tasked with developing firmware for embedded systems have a quite a few hurdles to jump through compared to those writing for the desktop or mobile platforms. Solved problems such as code reuse or portability are simply harder. It was with considerable interest that we learnt of another approach to hardware abstraction, called Luos, which describes itself as micro-services for embedded systems.
This open source project enables deployment of distributed architectures composed of collaborating micro-services. By containerizing applications and hardware drivers, interfaces to the various components are hidden behind a consistent API. It doesn’t even matter where a resource is located, multiple services may be running on the same microcontroller, or separate ones, yet they can communicate in the same way.
Big changes are afoot in the way patent drugs are priced in Canada. At present, Canada’s Patented Medicine Prices Review Board (PMPRB), a federal agency, is responsible for setting maximum prices for patented drugs (i.e., pharmaceuticals, biologics and vaccines). The agency has been criticized for failing to rein in prices, which are higher than in some peer countries. This criticism is unfair: the tools the PMPRB was given to regulate drug prices when it was established in 1987 have become less effective over time.
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To address this problem, the federal government has authorized the PMPRB to introduce new pricing regulations, now scheduled to come into force in January. We think this is the wrong strategy. Instead of relying on price regulation, Canada should engage in negotiations about drug pricing with manufacturers and our trading partners with the aim of bringing about a fairer international sharing of the burden of paying for global R&D costs.
Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp and Pfizer’s Wyeth LLC subsidiary have resolved a patent dispute over their competing vaccines for preventing diseases including pneumonia and meningitis, according to a Delaware court filing.
The parties asked U.S. District Judge Richard Andrews on Tuesday to dismiss the claims with prejudice. Pfizer spokesperson Pam Eisele said in an email on Wednesday that the companies had resolved their worldwide dispute over the vaccine patents. Details of the settlement weren’t immediately available.
Kenilworth, N.J.-based Merck had requested a declaratory judgment from the court in January that its Vaxneuvance vaccine for diseases caused by pneumococcus bacteria, which the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved in July, didn’t infringe three patents related to Wyeth’s Prevnar vaccines. Merck’s complaint said it and New York-based Wyeth had been embroiled in patent proceedings related to the vaccines for over four years in several countries including Australia, Canada, Japan, and the UK.
It’s been five months since the Bolivian government called on Canada to allow COVID-19 vaccines to flow from a manufacturer in St. Catharines, Ont., to the Global South.
Now, the country, where fewer than thirty per cent of people are fully vaccinated, is repeating its request for Canada to override the patent waiver and issue a compulsory license to allow manufacturing to begin.
“It is time to make decisions in the name of humanity,” said Benjamin Blanco, Minister of Foreign Trade and Integration, Ministry of Foreign Relations for Bolivia in an interview with Global News.
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In March 2020, the Government of Canada amended the Patent Act and the Drugs Act in direct response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The changes would allow the government to use and authorize the use of patented inventions on a time-limited basis to address drug shortages.
At the time, Srinivas Murthy, a Faculty of Medicine member at the University of British Columbia, thought it would be a sign of things to come, but noted that we’ve trended the wrong way.
“I don’t think we’ve even moved the needle in wanting to waive patents,” he said.
According to both Murthy and Gold, some of the arguments to uphold patents, mainly around innovation, lack empirical evidence. But, to Gold, part of the reason why Canada could be hesitant around touching the intellectual property (IP) of big pharma is the desire to have them invest and build in the north. The desire to drive investment coupled with buying vaccines from the companies in question is another reason Gold thinks Canada is mum on the TRIPS waiver.
“Any time that the government worries about exporting or decreasing IP, they’re going to get attacked by certain sectors, including the pharmaceutical sector,” he said.
Researchers at ESET found multiple samples of the malware uploaded to the VirusTotal scanning service throughout last year, the first one appearing in May 2020.
Executive Summary: The Productivity Commission is to be congratulated for producing a comprehensive discussion paper on the complex and tangled topic of the right to repair. Taking an interdisciplinary, holistic approach to the issue, the Productivity Commission shows a strong understanding that the topic of the right to repair is a multifaceted policy issue. Its draft report covers the fields of consumer law, competition policy, intellectual property, product stewardship, and environmental law. The Productivity Commission displays a great comparative awareness of developments in other jurisdictions in respect of the right to repair. The policy body is also sensitive to the international dimensions of the right to repair – particularly in light of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The Productivity Commission puts forward a compelling package of recommendations, which will be useful in achieving law reform in respect of the right to repair in Australia.
As with other aspects of trade mark law, the UK and EU have adopted asymmetrical arrangements about exhaustion post-Brexit. The arrangements result in uneven outcomes on enforcement against parallel imports for UK and EU right-holders. It remains to be seen how the principle of exhaustion of UK rights will develop in the hands of the UK government and the courts.
Currently, thanks to section 12 of the Trade Marks Act 1994, holders of UK rights will find their rights are exhausted once their goods have been placed on the market in the UK or anywhere in the EEA. When a right is exhausted, it is no longer enforceable. The reverse does not apply for holders of EU rights, whose rights will allow them to enforce against goods placed on the market in the UK which make their way into the EU.
The direct consequence is that UK right-holders cannot enforce against parallel imports coming to the UK from the EEA. In contrast, EU right-holders would be able to enforce their rights against parallel imports moving from the UK into the EU. This has the effect of placing UK and EU businesses on an uneven footing, particularly in industries where licensing plays a big role. Under the post-Brexit lopsided exhaustion regime, licensors would struggle to enforce territorial exclusivity of licensed rights for their UK licensees.
Everything we covered on WTR over the past seven days – and all you need to know from the world of trademarks to set yourself up for the start of another busy week.
Courtney Cox, a professor at Fordham University Law School, has a very interesting trade secret law article forthcoming in George Washington Law Review called “Legitimizing Lies.” The article can be downloaded on SSRN.
Cox argues, in short, that trade secret law could generate an unexpected incentive for trade secret holders to “lie.” The reason is that federal and state trade secret statutes require anyone who wishes to own a trade secret to take “reasonable” measures to keep that information secret, and in some instances deception—including deception effectuated by lies—may be the most reasonable way to keep something secret. For example, companies sometimes use “deception technology” in their cybersecurity systems “to trick hackers into thinking they are getting close to critical data.” (25). Cox highlights increasing use of a cybersecurity device, affectionately called the “honeypot,” which operates as a decoy computer system that can lure away would-be hackers. (24).
Cox suggests that, to the extent deception-based information security becomes the most effective option for protecting secrets in a certain industry or context, then trade secret law may require taking that deceptive act. This is because the trade secret statutes, at the federal and state level, include taking “reasonable” measures to preserve secrecy as a necessary element of a plaintiff’s trade secret case. Thus, the law encourages, or at least gives its blessing, to “lying.”
This is a follow-up to my previous post on the Epic Games v. Apple Unfair Competition Law (not antitrust) injunction. In the meantime, iMore quoted me on an announcement of an in-app purchasing (IAP) alternative by a company named Paddle that believes its drop-in replacement for Apple’s IAP API will be allowed soon as a result of the Epic injunction.
Now that Apple has filed a motion to stay the injunction (PDF), I’d like to share a few observations and perspectives.
That whole motion-to-stay process could be avoided if both parties acted more constructively. To the extent that any correspondence between them has come to light, neither of the parties is being constructive, and they could not complain should Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers–who has already put so much effort into her handling of this huge and complex case–scold them at next month’s motion hearing.
It is utterly disappointing to see Apple break a promise. It adds to this picture of Apple stopping at nothing to defend its App Store monopoly. Last year, at the preliminary-injunction stage, Apple wrote that it “wants Epic on iOS” provided that it complies with the rules. The Apple apologists out there, of whom there are quite a few, may argue that some of Epic’s public statements since the grant of the injunction justify Apple’s current stance. They may say that Apple has a reasonable apprehension of Epic being hell-bent to break the rules again, just like in August 2020. But Epic CEO Tim Sweeney’s statements are neither what I believe to be the true motivation for Apple to keep the door closed nor are they sufficient justification for walking back on last year’s promise.
On September 28, 2021, Judge Edward M. Chen of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted a motion by Fortress Investment and certain entities funded by Fortress to dismiss with prejudice an antitrust complaint that Intel was still pursuing and from which Apple withdrew in June as this blog was (to the best of my knowledge) first to report.
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This may serve to dissuade Fortress from asserting certain combinations of patents in court, in which case Intel would have actually accomplished something of tangible value despite the dismissal. Moreover, Intel may gain mileage out of this case at the policy level, especially now that the Biden Administration appears to be more sympathetic to makers of innovative products.
The key takeaways are that patent aggregation is not without antitrust risks. But if you, as an alleged infringer of aggregated patents, want to bring an antitrust complaint over patent aggregation in the Northern District of California, you can give it a try, but you must plead specific patent markets consisting of substitutes (not complements), and you better do so only when any potentially abusive behavior has actually occurred.
Sumio Iijima firmly believes that “new materials only have value when they are used.” While carbon nanotechnologies have entered the market, their full potential has not yet been reached. As the European Patent Office explains, current products incorporate bulk nanotubes, which are masses of unorganized nanotubes that are used as composite fibers to bolster mechanical, thermal and electrical properties. These products include smartphone touch pads and a material called Vantablack, known as the blackest substance on Earth, which is used in telescopes and cameras to absorb excess light.
Ahhh, the German injunction gap. A topic of interest in the UK courts at the moment (see the various applications to expedite trials because of it here). But turns out the German patent litigators are also talking about it. From September 15 to September 17 2021, the annual meeting of the German Association for Intellectual Property (GRUR) took place in Bonn. Part of the program was an analysis of Germany’s bifurcated patent procedure and ways to better synchronize nullity and infringement proceedings. Katfriend Anselm Gripp provides the following write-up of the session.
The International Trade Commission can more readily provide injunctive relief against an adjudged infringer than a district court, under appropriate conditions (i.e., with regard to an infringing product or a product made by infringing a claimed method). In September, the Federal Circuit affirmed an exclusion order by the Commission in Jennewein Biotechnologie GmbH v. International Trade Commission (Glycosyn LLC joined as an Intervenor based on its patent being the basis for the exclusion order), based on importation of a product made by a patented method, which relied in part on an application of the doctrine of equivalents in establishing infringement (something that has become more common of late; see, e.g., Ajinomoto Co. v. International Trade Commission).
In addition, Todos and joint venture partner NLC Pharma announced recently that they are seeing positive advancements of the Tollovir treatment program for hospitalized coronavirus (COVID-19) patients who are currently enrolled in a Phase 2 clinical trial in Israel. Tollovir, which is based on the same compounds as Tollovid, has been demonstrated to reduce lung inflammation.
The Federal Circuit has been tearing through mandamus petitions on the issue of inconvenient venue under Section 1404(a). The issue comes up in cases where venue is proper and the court has personal jurisdiction over the defendant, but for whatever reason the particular venue chosen by the plaintiff is inconvenient. Thus, the statute provides a district court with discretion to move venue “[f]or the convenience of parties and witnesses, in the interest of justice.” 28 U.S.C. § 1404. Section 1404 appeals are traditionally quite rare. The issue comes up at the very beginning of the case, but there is no immediate right appeal the grant or denial of the transfer motion. By the time the district court reaches final judgment any harm due to litigating in an inconvenient forum is typically water-under-the-bridge leaving no cognizable harm for the appeal. The shortcut then is to petition for mandamus as soon as the district court grants or denies a motion to transfer.
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The chart above comes from a simple Westlaw case search of appellate decisions referencing both Section 1404(a) and mandamus. What you’ll notice is a relatively large number of decisions from the Federal Circuit, the vast majority of these out of the Fifth Circuit region.
US Courts typically enforce choice-of-forum provisions found within contracts between two business entities. Here, Kannuu and Samsung entered into a non-disclosure agreement as part of a potential deal, and the contract included a choice-of-forum provision that directed “any legal action” stemming from the agreement to courts located in New York City “and no other jurisdiction.” The potential deal fell apart and Kannuu eventually sued Samsung for patent infringement. Samsung responded with an inter partes review (IPR) petition. Kannuu then asked the USPTO to drop the petition based upon the forum-selection-clause and, failing that, also petitioned the district court for an order that Samsung drop the IPR. The district court denied Kannuu’s motion for preliminary injunction and then appealed.
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The district court case is only at the preliminary injunction stage, and the appellate panel found no abuse of discretion in the district court’s finding that the IPR proceedings are not covered by the agreement since the agreement focuses on confidentiality rather than intellectual property rights.
CosmoKey asserted U.S. Patent No. 9,246,903 against Duo in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, alleging infringement. The District Court found the patent’s claims to be ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101 because they were directed to an abstract idea and lacked an inventive concept. On review, the Federal Circuit reversed, and provided a small glimmer of clarity illuminating the ever-elusive contours of the “inventive concept.”
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According to the ’903 patent, this “provides an authentication method that is easy to handle and can be carried out with mobile devices of low complexity [and] it is a particular advantage of the invention that the mobile device does not have to have any specific hardware for capturing or outputting information.”
I wanted to let you know that Managing IP has undergone some changes following feedback to better suit subscriber needs. The team and I believe these changes will allow us to provide a better service to you.
After more than 30 years, we have ceased to offer our printed magazine (which most recently was published every quarter). For the time being, a PDF version will still be available, but it will no longer be printed and distributed as before.
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We are also very conscious of global sustainability efforts. Though it is only a small act, not printing and distributing thousands of copies globally every quarter will help us to reduce our carbon footprint without compromising the very standards we promote on the website each and every day. This is something we take very seriously.
Kathi Vidal at Winston & Strawn has been floated – she would make a great pick for head of the USPTO, but her nomination isn’t guaranteed
HMD Global Oy, the licensee of the Nokia smartphone brand has been granted a patent for the Nokia T20 tablet design by the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). The patent application was submitted on April 16, 2021, but was only granted on October 8, 2021.
Pools streamline a messy process, but in-house sources in the auto and tech industries say some implementers may never be convinced of their value
Whether the UK Supreme Court hears the DABUS appeal or not, AI inventorship is a debate only policymakers can solve
Patent legislation across Asian jurisdictions is constantly catching up with the pandemic’s demands, with stronger protection, foreign filing and higher compensation being common themes. However, the gaps persist, and businesses need to fathom the domestic barriers to stay ahead.
On Sept. 2, 2021, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia addressed what it called a “core issue”—whether an artificial intelligence (AI) machine can be an “inventor” under the Patent Act. It ruled that the “clear answer” is no.
A lot of PSPDFkit’s growth to date, in fact, has been by word of mouth, a strategy that has gotten it very far up to now. Its customers include Dropbox, DocuSign, SAP, IBM, Volkswagen, Fabasoft, Wolters Kluwer Deutschland, and the European Patent Office, among a number of others that it works with under NDA.
Patents are granted for inventions that are novel and involve an inventive step. Any information or material that is publicly available or published before the filing of a patent application is known as “prior art” and this forms the basis on which novelty and inventive step is determined. For a prior patent application to be considered prior art for a subsequent patent application, the prior patent application should have been published before the filing of the subsequent patent application. A prior patent application that was filed before the filing of a subsequent patent application but published only after the filing of the subsequent patent application, is not prior art in many jurisdictions. The jurisdictions that do consider such patent applications as prior art often refer to them as ‘secret prior art’.
Swedish telecom giant Ericsson Inc has sued Apple Inc in federal court in Texas seeking a declaration that the rates it offered Apple to license its 5G wireless patents are fair and reasonable.
Ericsson accused Apple of using improper tactics to lower the royalty rates it has to pay and refusing to license the patents under anything other than its proposed terms in the lawsuit filed Monday in Marshall, Texas.
The lawsuit comes as the companies, which settled a previous licensing dispute in 2015 amid a California court battle, are deadlocked in negotiations over a new license, according to Ericsson.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on Monday affirmed Apple Inc’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board win invalidating parts of a fingerprint-authentication patent owned by Korean patent owner Firstface Co Ltd, but also upheld two other Firstface patents that Apple had challenged.
U.S. Circuit Judge Raymond Chen wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel rejecting Apple’s claims that the two valid patents were obvious based on earlier disclosures, but agreeing with Apple that a third patent was obvious.
Firstface sued Apple and Samsung in 2018 in San Francisco federal court for infringing the three patents with “home buttons” or “home keys” that wake devices and use fingerprints to authenticate users simultaneously, in cases that were stayed for the PTAB proceedings.
If the complicated birth of United States patent law can be told through the story of a single figure, that person is Oliver Evans. Evans’s patenting activities spanned the Founding. He received patents from four states in the 1780s, and then, in 1791, the third U.S. patent to be granted. This grant became the most contested patent of the early Republic. Amid bitter politicking, Evans received the first Congressional patent extension and brought four of the U.S. Supreme Court’s first six patent cases. He also pioneered large-scale patent enforcement, asserting and litigating his rights across multiple states, as well as issuing the first demand letter to a sitting U.S. President. In the process, Evans became the nation’s leading polemicist for the rights of patentees.
The story of Oliver Evans thus embodies the framing of American patent law — the construction of both the law’s institutional framework and the political and rhetorical claims that surrounded it. By appearing at all the major waypoints of Founding-era and early-nineteenth-century patent history, Evans provides a crucial test case for several important historical questions, including the degree of continuity between the first federal patents and their state predecessors, the contested role played by natural-rights conceptions of the patent, and the enforceability of inventors’ rights in the early Republic.
What is the price of an ordinary human life? Although the answers may be imprecise and deeply rooted in philosophical quandaries, for those suffering from a rare genetic degenerative disorder, Novartis answers the question, valuing life at 2.1 million dollars (Rs. 16 crore). This was the price that a family from Kannur, Kerala raised within 7 days through crowd funding to give the youngest son Mohammed, a fighting chance. Onasemnogene abeparvovec, commercially available under the name Zolgensma, is the gene therapy medication prescribed for those suffering from Spinal Muscular Atrophy. Novartis obtained the patent for this “miracle drug” from its $8.7 billion acquisition of AveXis.
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Other than Article 31, Article 7 speaks on how a balance is to be sought, between the individual benefits of the inventor and the needs of the users of that technological knowledge, the same idea being iterated under Section 83 of the Indian Patents Act. Article 8(1) empowers countries to take measures necessary to safeguard public health, corresponding to their respective socio-economic and technological needs. These articles identify the true goal of innovation and the public interest that is to be addressed by these scientific advancements. Article 30 also explicitly provides for implementing exceptions to patent rights, to the extent that it does not conflict with ordinary use of the patent or cause unreasonable prejudice to the legitimate interests of the patent holder and instead strike a balance, between these exclusive rights and public interest. In the midst of the present COVID-19 pandemic, the Supreme Court in a suo moto writ petition addressed the utility of the compulsory licensing regime with respect to essential drugs and how the Government is empowered by the same to expeditiously address national emergencies., (For instance, in case of urgent demand for the drug and at the same time, a consensus cannot be reached regarding the royalties to be paid, the High Court is empowered to determine the royalty amount.).
Jeffrey Wilder, the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division Economics Director of Enforcement, gave a speech yesterday before the IAM and GCR Connect SEP Summit in Washington. Here is a link to the text, which I perceive as a welcome return to sanity. The key paragraph that summarizes the Antitrust Division’s approach under the Biden Administration is as follows…
Characterising it as a “welcome return to sanity”, Comparative Patent Remedies summarised the recent speech of Jeffrey Wilder, the U.S. Department of Justice Antitrust Division Economics Director of Enforcement, as to his department’s proposed approach to SEPs.
The University of Stirling has joined the Pan-European Seal Programme, a prestigious EU training scheme, becoming the first in Scotland to partner with Europe’s leading Intellectual Property (IP) organisations: the EU Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO).
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The Pan-European Seal Programme is jointly organised by Europe’s IP Offices, EPO and EUIPO, and offers paid, trainee roles in Alicante or Munich.
On October 5, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 10,292,022. The patent is owned by Ascension Intellectual Properties LLC, an NPE. The ’022 [patent] relates generally to media echoing and social networking methods and devices, for use with mobile systems and is currently being asserted against Amp Me, Inc.
Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on U.S. Patent 7,184,707, formerly owned by Toshiba but now assigned to 2BCom, LLC, an NPE. The ‘707 patent is generally related to a communication device and a method for controlling a communication device that can load or unload service information at appropriate timings by flexibly designating discriminating conditions of connection or disconnection of a link. The ‘707 patent has been asserted in district court against BMW, FCA, and Kia.
In this article for The Patent Lawyer, Mathys & Squire partner Dani Kramer and associate Dylan Morgan review the response of patent offices to blockchain filings with a particular focus on the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), the European Patent Office (EPO), and the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).
In the last decade or so, blockchain has become an area of increasing interest both commercially and from a patenting perspective. While blockchain has not yet become a part of daily life for most people, the technology can be applied to many fields and offers the potential to improve various existing technologies. Unsurprisingly, many companies are keen to protect their blockchain developments via patents.
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As will be apparent from the Examiner’s comments in the UK examination report cited above, the EPO is generally more amenable to blockchain inventions than the UKIPO.
Indeed, for EP3312756B1 (the EP filing in the above-mentioned Trustonic patent family) the Examiner’s objections were almost entirely related to novelty and inventive step, with the patentability per se of the subject matter attracting very little attention.
This trend is played out across European patent filings. Novelty and inventive step tend to be the determining factors, with patentable subject matter tending to be of subsidiary relevance. This is partially due to the way in which the EPO approaches inventive step – and as with all applications, non-technical aspects are of limited relevance during the determination of an inventive step – but, as a general rule, the EPO seems willing to consider blockchain technologies as being technical and to more readily grant blockchain patents.
Another application that illustrates this difference in approach between the EPO and the UKIPO is EP3577593B1, which was filed by PHM Associates in 2018 claiming priority to a GB application filed in 2017. On the face of it, this is a fairly innocuous European application. Following entry into Europe via a Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) application, the Examiner raised various novelty and inventive step objections. Once these were overcome, a patent was granted by the EPO.
Conversely, the corresponding UK application GB2566741A has thus far received a total of four examination reports from two different examiners, with each of these examination reports objecting to the claims as relating to unpatentable subject matter.
Turning then to an application that has fallen foul of EPO subject matter objections, EP3376456A4 is an application filed by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp in 2016 that relates to the determination of whether a party is qualified to add blocks to a blockchain. This application has been refused by the EPO Examining Division and is currently under appeal.
…software, or computer-implemented inventions?
On October 5, 2021, the Central Reexamination Unit of the USPTO issued a final office action rejecting all claims of U.S. Patent 7,664,924, owned and asserted by Eighth Street Solutions, LLC, an NPE and Endpoint IP entity. The ’924 patent is related to securing a computer system by selectively controlling write access to a data storage medium. The ’924 patent has been asserted against Sophos, Trend Micro, McAfee and Avast.
Patentee wins this one–with the Federal Circuit reversing the district court and finding the claims on patent-eligibility under Alice step-two. This is another case that serves as a data-point, but I struggle to differentiate it from similar cases finding claims ineligible.
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On appeal, the Federal Circuit has reversed — holding that the patent “discloses a technical solution to a security problem in networks and computers.” That statement suggests reversal on Alice Step 1; but the court actually leapt to Step 2 without a clear holding on Step 1. Here, the court found that the claimed steps were (1) developed by the inventors; (2) not admitted prior art; and (3) yield advantages over the described prior art. The court noted the difficulty with this case — the purpose of the invention was to “reduce significantly” “the complexity of the authentication function.” But, simplification can quickly suggest abstraction.
UKIPO names new chair
The UKIPO has appointed Harry Rich as its new chair for a three-year term, it announced on Monday, October 4.
Rich currently serves as registrar of consultant lobbyists, as well as chair of the Valuation Tribunal Service, non-executive director of the Press Recognition Panel, and governor of the Glasgow School of Art. His term began on Friday, October 1.
The office also named Harriet Kelsall and Hilary Newiss as non-executive directors, also for three-year terms.
Former IP lawyer Newiss is a trustee of the Natural History Museum and has served on several boards, including that of the Francis Crick Institute and the Human Genetics Commission.
Kelsall was chair of the National Association of Jewellers and is a non-executive director of the National Hallmarking Council.
“To perform at our best, we need to draw on breadth and wealth of professional experience and expertise,” said Tim Moss, UKIPO CEO. “I am delighted to welcome Harry, Harriet and Hilary to an already experienced and committed team of non-executive directors.”
Commenting on his appointment as UKIPO chair, Rich said he was “passionate about the ways that design, innovation, creativity and business drive wellbeing and prosperity”.
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The US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued two separate decisions this week setting out that Judge Alan Albright’s refusals to transfer Google’s and Juniper Networks’ patent infringement cases were clear abuses of discretion.
The appellate court let Google and Juniper Networks transfer from the District Court for the Western District of Texas to the District Court for the Northern District of California on Wednesday, October 6 and Monday, October 4 respectively.
The Federal Circuit found in both cases that there were problems with Albright’s analysis of the public and private interest factors that traditionally governed rulings on motions to transfer.
Earlier Thursday, EA Sports’ top executive said the company is reconsidering its naming-rights agreement with FIFA and could rebrand its top-selling soccer series. A couple of new trademark applications in Europe could point to a name the publisher has in mind.
In Australia, the term “ugg boots” refers to a general style of sheepskin shoe with the fleece turned in for warmth. It is a generic term, and not a trademark – in Australia. And, there are dozens of companies that make and sell ugg boots in that country, including Australian Leather Pty. Ltd.. The original name “ugh” came from 1970s surfer Shane Stedman who has been quoted as saying “We called them Ughs because they were ugly.”
UGG is a registered trademark in the USA, now owned by Deckers Outdoor Corp. Back in 2016, Deckers learned that Australian Leather had imported 12 pairs boots labelled “ugg boots” into the USA and sued for trademark infringement. The defendant argued that it should be able to import its boots to the US since the term is generic in Australia, but the district court sided with the plaintiff in rejecting that defense. On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed in a R.36 Judgment without any opinion (the original complaint included some design patents as well).
This is an important design patent decision that substantially narrows the scope of prior art available for anticipation rejections in design patent cases. The result is that it should become easier to obtain design patent protection. The decision is only about 600 words long — fewer than may writeup about the case.
My children have a variety of paper stumps that they use for smoothing and blending their pencil drawings. The first image below shows a typical paper stump that artists have been using for many decades. The second image shows the design for Surgisil’s article of manufacture that it is attempting to patent (design patent). I also recall being fascinated by double-sharpened pencils that you can see in the third image.
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Surgisil is in some tension with precedent holding that the claim scope should be limited only to ornamental features. See, e.g., In re Zahn, 617 F.2d 261 (CCPA 1980) (“[35 U.S.C] 171 refers, not to the design of an article, but to the design for an article.”); OddzOn Prods., Inc. v. Just Toys, Inc., 122 F.3d 1396 (Fed. Cir. 1997) (design patent scope is limited to the ornamental features). The appellate panel here did not address that argument presented by the USPTO on appeal.
Generally, the USPTO will see this case as a major change to anticipation analysis. In the end, it will make it even easier to obtain design patents — and seemingly permits someone to obtain a design patent by grabbing a design that is known in the art and applying it to a new article of manufacture.
As part of the ongoing debate on value-sharing for creators and users of online content, press publishers were granted a neighbouring right under EU copyright. This entailed an opportunity to obtain remuneration through licences for the use of online journalistic content by online aggregation services.
However, the right’s lack of efficiency became visible when press publishers in France, the first country to implement the right, attempted to enforce remuneration for Google’s use of snippets. Google demanded zero-remuneration licences or would abstain from using snippets from news webpages, which has proven to lead to decline in webpage traffic. Accordingly, the press publishers were still not seeing the promised remuneration. Since the strong market position of Google appeared to enable the ultimatum, the publishers claimed the behaviour infringed competition law, constituting an abuse of dominance.
This article argues that EU competition law cannot be relied on to ensure remuneration under the press publishers’ right. This argument is, firstly, based on an analysis concluding that practices similar to that of Google – forcing zero remuneration licences – do not constitute an abuse of dominance under Article 102 of the Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union. Secondly, the argument is founded on the conclusion that competition law, de lege ferenda, should not be applied for such purposes, as the goal of competition law does not warrant securing remuneration. Moreover, it is suggested that the fairness standard, which some argue is becoming a benchmark in EU competition law, is not a steering principle in itself, but rather that fairness is the result of correct competition law enforcement.
In July this year, the Federal Court of Australia handed down a decision in Stephen L. Thaler [2021] APO 5, which allowed listing AI system DABUS as an inventor in a patent application. It is interesting to explore what implications this decision could have in the field of copyright.
About the DABUS decision
The DABUS case refers to an international patent application where AI DABUS was listed as an inventor. Initially, it was rejected by a number of IP offices around the world (including the US, UK, EPO, German and Australian patent offices). The Federal Court of Australia heard the appeal in the case and found that under the Australian Patent Act the AI could be listed as an inventor. According to the court, Dr Thaler, who is the developer, owner and controller of DABUS, would be the owner of the patent. The court found that this is compatible with the goal of the Patent Act to promote innovation and that nothing in the Patent Act explicitly or impliedly prohibits listing AI as an inventor. The decision has been appealed to the Full Federal Court and the outcome is pending.
Posthumous releases and realisation of unfinished works come with controversial stories. While some artists like Cristo or choreographer Mark Morris accept or arrange for their works to be released or continued after their death, others keep silent on the future of their works, by default leaving it to the hands of third parties to decide their fate after they are gone. In Amy Winehouse’s case, after the release of album ‘Lioness: Hidden Treasures’, compiled of B-sides and demos, Universal Music CEO announced that he had destroyed all of her demo recordings, in an attempt to prevent anyone else from releasing them posthumously. When such extremes as destruction of art, or the unwilling release of it, could be the future of someone’s legacy, it is no wonder that Anderson .Paak felt it was imperative to make his will for his legacy ink-on-skin-clear. But would that be enough? What (other) means do artists have to make sure their intentions are respected?
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Whatever model is followed, the dilemma between economic loss and following the artist’s intent still remains, since usually the ones inheriting are the ones that would be gaining from posthumous releases, and would most likely refrain from enforcing the deceased artist’s rights for the sake of personal gain. As a result, a lack of express will in countries following the Succession Model would leave little to prevent these parties from using the works of an author, in such a way that could injure the artist’s legacy, for example by releasing work that is beneath the artist’s calibre, bearing their name, or that goes to a different ideological direction.
Video download link | md5sum 77c00b3410a1213422c0a19c852d5887
Summary: Team Battistelli and Team UPC have long infested the IPO (or UKIPO or UK-IPO as we’ve long called it); it’s time to tell the story of what has gone on there since I was in my early 20s, observing this institution’s bizarre stance on software patents (sometimes contradicting the position of British courts, which Team UPC wished to replace/infiltrate)
THE eighth part of the series has just been published. I’ve had a lot to say about my experiences with the UK-IPO, so the video above is a bit longer than usual (70 minutes). In hindsight — as the text is almost always composed after making the videos — it should be noted that the "quality" propaganda of Joff Wild's IAM can be found here. As we note in Daily Links: “IAM (bribed by the EPO) comes up with loaded headlines and lies… with question marks at the end; Joff Wild profits from spreading lies for tyrants.”
“…Team Battistelli and Team UPC may be running out of mouthpieces.”But wait, there’s some bad news (and also good news, for a change). Check what Managing ‘IP’ published on October 8th, 2021. As it turns out, UK-IPO has in effect just put more questionable people in charge of the patent office, this time as chair. To quote: “Rich currently serves as registrar of consultant lobbyists, as well as chair of the Valuation Tribunal Service, non-executive director of the Press Recognition Panel, and governor of the Glasgow School of Art. His term began on Friday, October 1.”
“The UPC lies may carry on, but they will have fewer carriers.”Yes, “lobbyists”… and now in the UK-IPO (since 10 days ago).
So what’s the good news? As a side note, and totally unrelated to the video above, Team Battistelli and Team UPC may be running out of mouthpieces. People can see that as per this public statement, days ago Managing ‘IP’ finally threw in the towel. It is dying and finally it is ending its printed publication (amid many departures of staff; we’ve named some recently, especially because they constantly lied about the EPC and UPC); this probably means too many cancellations and lack of income. So no more publications and the Web site too, over time, will lack the capital needed to carry on at any meaningful capacity levels (it always happens in that order). Like IAM going paywall-only a few years ago, in effect making itself irrelevant (and invisible to almost everybody). IAM is mentioned a few times in the video above. The UPC is also mentioned. Earlier today we did a sort of meme about it. The UPC lies may carry on, but they will have fewer carriers.
Another bonus: Readers might wish to see all those new comments on the subject of PEB and CIPA, a booster of the UPC and Battistelli, which in turn took over IP Kat (after Merpel had been chased out). Shades of EQE. With PEB, CIPA runs a soft of pyramid scheme of “qualifications” or a sort of multi-level diploma mill, just like EPO with EQE (the legal chief of today's EPO is enabling this corruption). Notice the pricing and the nature of the scandals, including proctoring. █
Series parts:
The delegates from the UKIPO certainly didn’t make life better for EPO staff.
Summary: Enablers of Benoît Battistelli and current enablers of António Campinos are explained based on their track record in the UK, Ireland, and Europe
As we have already seen, the delegations from the EPO’s main host states, Germany and the Netherlands, voted in favour of the controversial “Strike Regulations” in June 2013.
In this part we will take a look at the UK delegation which at the time in question was headed by UKIPO Director John Alty accompanied by his deputy, Sean Dennehey.
The UK delegation: John Alty and his deputy Sean Dennehey.
It’s worth recalling that the UK Patent and Trademark Office – as the UKIPO was previously known – was one of the first of Margaret Thatcher’s Next Steps agencies.
“As high-level mandarins in the post-Thatcherite UK civil service, Alty and Dennehey are likely to have been in sympathy with Battistelli’s plans to crush the EPO’s staff union.”Back in the day, proposals to fully privatise the Patent Office were discussed but ultimately rejected. The end result was an “executive agency” housed within the department of Trade and Industry, but with some degree of financial independence and a daunting array of “performance goals”.
Thus, the UKIPO was set up, complete with its own citizen charter, a well-paid chief executive officer, and most importantly, a license to operate outside of British civil service and other administrative rules.
As high-level mandarins in the post-Thatcherite UK civil service, Alty and Dennehey are likely to have been in sympathy with Battistelli’s plans to crush the EPO’s staff union.
After all, long before Battistelli, Thatcher’s policy advisors were referring to trade unions as “a politicised mafia” and were scheming to “erode trade union membership”. The Thatcherite era in the UK saw the introduction of some of the most constrictive trade union laws in the world.
It is known that the UK delegates met with UK staff at the EPO on the margins of the quarterly Administrative Council meetings and were fully briefed about the excesses of the Battistelli régime. But rumour has it that Battistelli managed to “soften up” the UK delegates with the promise of some kind of “bilateral cooperation activities”.
“For some time afterwards, Dennehey continued as Deputy Chief Executive of the UKIPO and in March 2018 he accompanied his new boss Tim Moss on a visit to Team Battistelli in Munich…”Alty left the UKIPO in July 2016 to become Director General of Trade Policy at the UK Department for International Trade (DIT) where he is now Interim Permanent Secretary.
Dennehey succeeded Alty as head of the UKIPO on an ad interim basis between July 2016 and May 2017 before the current incumbent Tim Moss took over.
For some time afterwards, Dennehey continued as Deputy Chief Executive of the UKIPO and in March 2018 he accompanied his new boss Tim Moss on a visit to Team Battistelli in Munich “to discuss recent developments in patents and co-operation between the two offices”. (warning: epo.org link)
Requena, Lutz, UKIPO CEO Tim Moss, Battistelli and UKIPO Deputy CEO Sean Dennehey in Munich (March 2018)
Dennehey seems to be rather publicity shy and it’s almost impossible to find a photo of him on the UKIPO website.
“Whatever about his “services to intellectual property”, it’s clear that Dennehey didn’t earn any awards for trying to protect the fundamental rights of EPO staff.”But luckily the website of the National Copyright Administration of the People’s Republic of China (NCAC) provides some nice photos of him on a junket to the opening ceremony of the 6th China International Copyright Expo held in Guangzhou in December 2016.
Like Battistelli and Lutz, Dennehey seems to have been more at home rubbing shoulders with Chinese mandarins and their Communist overlords than complying with his duty of care towards EPO staff and his obligation to respect and uphold the rule of law in an international organisation like the EPO.
Dennehey retired from the UKIPO at the end of March 2018.
Earlier that year in January it was announced [PDF] that he had made it to the New Year’s Honours list where he had been awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) for “services to intellectual property”.
Sean Dennehey – awarded a CBE for “services to intellectual property” in January 2018.
Whatever about his “services to intellectual property”, it’s clear that Dennehey didn’t earn any awards for trying to protect the fundamental rights of EPO staff.
“Some time later in March 2018, Barrett was elected to the Board of the Administrative Council, the exclusive “inner circle” which carries out the preparatory work for Council meetings. Presumably this little sinecure was intended as recognition of his earlier support for “le système Battistelli”.”Before wrapping up, it’s worth mentioning the delegation representing the Republic of Ireland which joined the EPO somewhat later than the UK in 1992.
The Irish delegation generally tends to align itself with the UK delegation and this occasion was no exception.
Like his British counterparts, the head of the Irish delegation, Gerard Barrett acted in a typically pusillanimous manner by giving his assent to Battistelli’s “Strike Regulations”.
Following the lead of his British counterparts, the head of the Irish delegation, Gerard Barret, voted in favour of Battistelli’s “Strike Regulations”.
Some time later in March 2018, Barrett was elected to the Board of the Administrative Council, the exclusive “inner circle” which carries out the preparatory work for Council meetings. Presumably this little sinecure was intended as recognition of his earlier support for “le système Battistelli”.
In the next part, we will turn our attention to the delegation representing another founding state which has traditionally played quite a significant role in EPO affairs, the Swiss Confederation. █
Granulate, a provider of autonomous real-time computing workload optimization and cost reduction solutions, today announced it is joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. The announcement comes as part of Granulate’s deepening connection to the cloud computing community and the Kubernetes and open-source ecosystems.
Dual-stack networking has arrived in Kubernetes. IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack support is key to the future of Kubernetes, whether powering new 5G and edge workloads or scaling beyond today’s cluster limits to meet your future needs. Let’s dive into the cross-organizational collaboration that brought us this long-awaited goal and examine how the feature evolved over time.
OverOps, the leading solution for root cause analysis at runtime, today debuted its support for Apache Spark, the popular open-source analytics engine for large-scale data processing. This support allows developers to identify and resolve critical exceptions on Spark jobs in minutes, eliminating the need for laborious and time-consuming detective work in searching logs to figure out why their Apache Spark job broke. With no code changes required, OverOps captures a full stack trace of when, where, and why exceptions occurred along with the associated variable state.
The Tegra DRM driver changes were sent out on Friday of the new material destined for Linux 5.16. Notable this time around is NVIDIA’s NVDEC driver being included.
After going through rounds of public code review, the Tegra DRM driver updates for Linux 5.16 include the introduction of the NVDEC driver for accelerated video decoding. This open-source video decode engine work is for the Tegra X1 (Tegra210) and newer, including the Tegra X2 and Xavier SoCs at this time.
Sent in this morning were an urgent set of x86 updates for the Linux 5.15-rc5 kernel due out later today.
With this x86/urgent pull request is “Yet another attempt at fixing the never-ending saga of botched x86 timers, this time because some incredibly smart hardware decides to turn off the HPET timer in a low power state – who cares if the OS is relying on it…”
Vivaldi is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It had grown from the downfall of Opera with many disgruntled when it changed from the Presto layout engine to a Chromium-based browser. This platform angered traditional Opera users. Since then, Vivaldi has become one of the most popular alternative Internet Browsers amongst the big three Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
Vivaldi promotes itself as a leading browser with faster navigation, clever bookmarking, more intelligent browsing, extensive tab management, and a more visual approach.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Vivaldi Browser on Fedora.
Rust is an open-source systems programming language that focuses on speed, memory safety, and parallelism. Developers use Rust to create a wide range of new software applications, such as game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components, and simulation engines for virtual reality. Rust is syntactically similar to C++ but can guarantee memory safety by using a borrow checker for validating references.
For users, especially developers wanting to try out Rust Programming language, you will know how to install Rust Programming Language on Fedora.
Learn the steps to install and use Etherpad on Ubuntu 20.04 focal fossa /18.04 Bionic Beaver LTS/ Debian Linux distros for a free and open-source collaborative text editor.
EtherPad is a real-time collaborative web-based text editor in which several people can conveniently work together online on a document. It is an open-source web application, hence doesn’t need to pay anything. The application is scalable to thousands of simultaneous real-time users. It provides full data export capabilities, and runs on your server, under your control.
You can think about having your own Google Docs-like service but with plugins, support to extend the application capabilities. You can simply invite new users with the integrated share function or send them the link to the document via email.
Skype is a proprietary telecommunications application software that is owned and developed by Microsoft. Skype is one of the most known and recognized software for video, audio, and text communication app available across multiple platforms. For the most part, free to download and use, Skype is an excellent tool for keeping in touch with friends or working remotely with colleagues.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Skype with Nginx on Fedora.
Valve’s latest Steam Deck is a promising piece of hardware and is showcasing some great potential for the future of the company’s hardware offerings. A lot has already been talked about at length when it comes to Steam Deck, but it’s understandable that fans may still have some lingering questions before they decide to plop upwards of $399 for the hardware.
Luckily, recent developments on the matter have cleared the air surrounding the hardware and software with Valve seemingly giving out hardware units to developers for testing purposes. Furthermore, Valve’s recent interviews and press releases have revealed more about the Steam Deck, so here are 10 more new things you need to know before buying the console.
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As mentioned earlier, the Steam Deck will use Proton API to run Steam games that aren’t native to Linux.
If you’re at all interested in gaming on PCs, you’ve probably come across Steam, Valve’s platform for distributing, updating and running games. Steam makes it possible to purchase a game, install it over the internet and then run it from the Steam interface. Ah, but that brings us back to the age-old Linux gaming conundrum of support, as not every PC game is designed to run on anything other than Microsoft Windows.
That said, there are plenty of Steam games that will run on Linux, and quite often, a Windows Steam game can be convinced to run on Linux even though some ‘fettling’ by the user may be required. This approach is officially supported by Steam using a system called Proton. Getting all of these things running, and then possibly optimising the results, is what we’ll be looking at in this tutorial.
After a long bumpy road with many revisions, it appears that the futex2 work sponsored by Valve is finally heading into the upstream Linux Kernel. Initially much larger, the work was slimmed down to get the main needed parts done and enabled before the rest can make it in.
So what is it? As developer André Almeida previously described it: “The use case of this syscall is to allow low level locking libraries to wait for multiple locks at the same time. This is specially useful for emulating Windows’ WaitForMultipleObjects. A futex_waitv()-based solution has been used for some time at Proton’s Wine (a compatibility layer to run Windows games on Linux). Compared to a solution that uses eventfd(), futex was able to reduce CPU utilization for games, and even increase frames per second for some games. This happens because eventfd doesn’t scale very well for a huge number of read, write and poll calls compared to futex. Native game engines will benefit of this as well, given that this wait pattern is common for games.”.
Good news! We have spent time this week preparing Kalendar for KDE Review — the two-week process that new KDE applications are subjected to before initial release. Don’t worry, we’re going to go over what that means in a second. We will also go through some of the refactoring, tweaking, and boatload bug-fixing that has been happening in anticipation for KDE Review. Oh… and our new logo!
That doesn’t mean we’ve stopped working on new features, however. Far from it! We have some new cool stuff to show off, including timezone management and expanded tag filtering capabilities.
In August I was assigned 12.75 hours of work by Freexian’s Debian LTS initiative and carried over 18 hours from earlier months. I worked 2 hours and will carry over the remainder.
I started work on an update to the linux package, but did not make an upload yet.
So, Remmina is now compiled in OpenEmbedded, for x86_64 and aarch64, and is now available via the package manager. It does have some dependencies, so make sure that you install those also.
Note, I have not tested any of these VNC and RDP apps, have just compiled them and made them available for people to play with. The recipes were pre-existing in OpenEmbedded, except for gtk-vnc for which I created a recipe. I did modify some pre-existing recipes to remove not-needed dependencies, such as ‘pam’ and ‘avahi’.
When we need an extra computer to perform a specific job for us, it’s sometimes too expensive or wasteful to buy a whole new PC or laptop to do the job. Sometimes you just need a small but capable device that can do the job for you, and this is where the Raspberry Pi comes into play.
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The Raspberry Pi may have a funny name, but once you get through all the bakery-related puns, you’ll find a powerful kit that can do a lot for what you pay for. The Raspberry Pi Foundation invented it as a way to help teach people about coding and the basics of Computer Science.
The device comes with its own unique brand of the Debian operating system called “Raspberry Pi OS.” The choice to make the OS Linux-based helps keep the cost down and allows users to have a lot more control over their system, making it a great tool for learning.
Does that mean the Raspberry Pi is for kids? Hardly. Despite the fact that the device itself is the size of a credit card, it can do a surprising amount. It has most of the ports you would expect from a PC, such as USB, Ethernet, and HDMI. As such, when you set it up, it really feels like you’re using a desktop PC that shrunk in the wash.
Today, General Motors announced Ultifi, its end-to-end software platform designed to unlock new vehicle experiences and connect customers’ digital lives. Ultifi will help enable the frequent and seamless delivery of software-defined features, apps and services to customers over the air. It offers the potential for more cloud-based services, faster software development and new opportunities to increase customer loyalty.
Ultifi’s functionality builds upon the Vehicle Intelligence Platform (VIP), GM’s advanced electrical architecture. VIP-enabled vehicles today provide over-the-air capability, plenty of data bandwidth, robust cybersecurity and lightning fast processing power. On top of this foundation, GM engineers will separate key software into a new centralized layer that acts as a powerful hub for vehicle systems. The Ultifi platform will then enable accelerated development and deployment of software and applications over the air to millions of customers, without affecting basic hardware controls.
Offerings enhanced through partnerships with leading global RISC-V technology providers
In the community effort to help a struggling family build a home, everyone selflessly pitches in, drawing on their own experiences as homeowners, focused on ensuring that this family’s house goes up as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. Each individual is working with an eye to the future, making sure the place will last so that this family can build a better life for themselves.
As a rule, open source software is a type of uncommercialized program that is shared as public domain software. Moreover, it was born to promote industry exchanges and technical exchanges. The sole spirit of open source lies in cooperation and openness. Thanks to open communication and close cooperation, it also offers more chances for future development.
Red Hat’s Platform Tools team is making it very easy to run the very bleeding edge, development version of the LLVM toolchain and Clang compiler on the current versions of Fedora.
A Copr repository is now being maintained that builds nightly snapshot packages for the latest versions of Fedora Linux (currently F34 / F35 / Rawhide) for all of the major CPU architectures. This in turn makes it very easy to test out the freshest LLVM compiler support not only for the Clang C/C++ compiler itself but related sub-projects like LLD.
Proteins are the molecular machines of all living cells and have been exploited for use in many applications, including therapeutics and industrial catalysts. To overcome the limitations of naturally occurring proteins, protein engineering is used to improve protein characteristics such as stability and functionality. In a new study, researchers demonstrate a machine learning algorithm that accelerates the protein engineering process. The study is reported in the journal Nature Communications.
Machine learning algorithms assist in protein engineering by reducing the experimental burden of methods such as directed evolution, which involves multiple rounds of mutagenesis and high-throughput screening. They work by simulating and predicting the fitness of all possible sequences of the target protein after being trained on protein sequence databases.
Although many machine learning algorithms exist, few of them incorporate the evolutionary history of the target protein. This is where ECNet (evolutionary context-integrated neural network), a deep-learning algorithm, comes in.
In geographic atrophy, a late form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), reading ability is closely related to the altered retinal structure. Reading speed makes everyday functional impairment measurable, which the most common functional test in ophthalmology — the best-corrected visual acuity assessment – cannot reflect. Retinal imaging can be used to assess loss of reading ability even when central visual acuity is still good.
During the coronavirus pandemic, many people have grown accustomed to wearing face masks to protect themselves and others, but that doesn’t mean the masks are always comfortable — especially during exercise. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have developed a dynamic respirator that modulates its pore size in response to changing conditions, such as exercise or air pollution levels, allowing the wearer to breathe easier when the highest levels of filtration are not required.
Many of you will be well aware of The Terminator and I, Robot. Both films begin with the fantasy of living alongside machines or robots harmoniously, with artificial intelligence adding value to our lives. But cracks begin to show and the human race is left fighting for survival against our own creation.
Today, some would say we’re creeping towards a similar outcome, claiming “the end is nigh” after recent news that Tesla is planning to make the ‘Tesla bot’.
But with the proper governance and a clear understanding of where we see technology within our lives, we can properly utilise tech for good, and not see it as a step towards judgement day.
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While technology remains the faithful co-pilot to our human endeavours, we must ensure that it is far more than just a two-person job when looking to effectively implement and run.
Technology has enabled us to capture data and understand large groups, giving us a good understanding of different cultures and societies. This information can be key towards eradicating bias in future developments, and help build a society free from stereotypes, creating the kind of legacy humans can be proud of.
Ultimately, there are some key considerations for bias-free technology:
Firstly, tech should be built ethically and with safety at the forefront, by testing correctly on a group representative of the community we are using technology as a positive enabler for change for.
15-year-old Richard Hovsepyan from Cambridgeshire nabbed the top spot with a 30 second clip of music inspired by Toby Fox’s Undertale, a delightfully retro-styled RPG.
The audio is heady stuff, taking this hack back to teenage years spent mashing the keys of various 8-bit home computers while increasingly urgent music served to highlight a distinct lack of progress via the medium of the noise and tone channels.
Marvell has produced samples of a server microprocessor with up to 24 Arm-compatible cores that could be used for applications involving artificial intelligence as well as network management, a spokesperson told The Register.
These chips are part of the Octeon family, and Marvell refers to them as data processing units. They are designed to run high-throughput code in cloud and data center environments, the company said.
“We are sampling Octeon silicon to our customers and they’re working to bring their products to market next year,” a spokeswoman said this week.
Data processing unit, aka DPU, is an irritating label because all computer processors are data-processing units. The industry has taken to use the term for specialized accelerators to which CPU cores can offload routine but intensive work, such as network packet processing, data encryption and compression, and AI inference and training. You might also know them as SmartNICs.
“Most challenging, but most rewarding” for Aimee Reitzen, who helped launch a foundation to bring awareness to her son’s genetic disorder.
During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, midwives have reported increased demand for community birth services. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand childbearing persons’ decision-making during the pandemic and to illuminate their experiences giving birth in community settings.
A crew of innovator chefs and entrepreneurs have turned Washington into a hub of plant-forward dining. But they have all kinds of competing ideas about what meat-free fare should be.
Screening for perinatal depression is a clinical approach to identifying women in need of mental health diagnoses, referral, and treatment. Many states mandate screening for perinatal depression, but it remains unclear whether screening leads to increased access to treatment and better health outcomes. The aim of this qualitative study was to identify how women from diverse backgrounds perceive the quality of perinatal depression screening and whether the perceived quality affected their decisions about mental health care. During 2019 a sample of twenty-nine participants who had been screened for perinatal depression completed semistructured in-depth interviews in which they were asked for their impressions of the screening process. Common themes were that the screening was ineffective because providers didn’t explain the purpose or uses of the screening tool, didn’t tell patients anything about the results, and failed to provide any follow-up relating to patient depression scores. The results suggest the need for health care facilities to engage patients in a dialogue about screening results and for health care delivery systems to refine the screening process. These findings offer a foundation to design more comprehensive, patient-centered screening protocols that might result in improved mental health outcomes.
The goal of a new Broadband Forum project, Open Broadband – WWC Reference Implementation for 5G-RG (OB-5WWC) is for vendors and operators to bring products to market in a shorter timeframe and enjoy reduced development times and cycles. The Open Source project will bring the full benefits of the 5G ecosystem to fixed-line services and offer a full end-to-end solution to operators.
We covered Littles earlier this week, noting that after he ran for the board on a platform of making it more responsive to developers’ needs – rather than Microsoft’s. He later quit because, according to a post, “I didn’t have the energy to put into an organization that doesn’t share my views and stance on what I think the community needs, Sustainable Open Source Software.”
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The first comment on the apology described it as “a total non-apology” – a sentiment repeated in other comments. The conversation also features some discussion of how to withdraw projects from the foundation.
The Register suspects the foundation may soon need some new volunteers. Brave new volunteers
Littles was elected and took on the role of chair for the Technical Steering Group, hoping to be able to achieve some progress towards Open Source sustainability. However, when he realized that his efforts were futile he resigned from the .NET Foundation board ahead of the 2021 elections which took place in August. He hadn’t intended to draw attention to this, but changed his mind when the announcement of the election results reported on his resignation.
Apache Software has quickly issued a fix for a zero-day security bug in the Apache HTTP Server, which was first reported to the project last week. The vulnerability is under active exploitation in the wild, it said, and could allow attackers to access sensitive information.
According to a security advisory issued on Monday, the issue (CVE-2021-41773) could allow path traversal and subsequent file disclosure. Path traversal issues allow unauthorized people to access files on a web server, by tricking either the web server or the web application running on it into returning files that exist outside of the web root folder.
Users of the open source Apache HTTP Server who have updated to recently released version 2.4.49 are being urged to update to 2.4.50 immediately to apply fixes for a newly disclosed zero-day that is already being actively exploited by malicious actors.
First reported a week ago on 29 September, the expedited fix reflects the widespread usage of the Apache Software Foundation’s free, cross-platform web server software, which dates back to the mid-1990s and was a driving force in the rapid development of the world wide web at the time. It still serves around a quarter of active websites globally.
The Apache Software Foundation has released version 2.4.50 of the HTTP Web Server to address two vulnerabilities, one of which is an actively exploited path traversal and file disclosure flaw.
The Apache HTTP Server is an open-source, cross-platform web server that is extremely popular for being versatile, robust, and free. As such, any vulnerability in the product has widespread consequences.
A few days after releasing a fix for a vulnerability in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.49 that is under active attack, the Apache Software Foundation released another version of the server because the fix for the flaw was incomplete and still allowed remote code execution in some cases.
“It was found that the fix for CVE-2021-41773 in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.50 was insufficient. An attacker could use a path traversal attack to map URLs to files outside the directories configured by Alias-like directives. If files outside of these directories are not protected by the usual default configuration “require all denied”, these requests can succeed. If CGI scripts are also enabled for these aliased pathes, this could allow for remote code execution,” the ASF said in an advisory Thursday.
The expiration of Let’s Encrypt’s root certificate last week threw up a number of problems, though not perhaps in the areas predicted ahead of the event.
A legacy certificate used by the certificate authority – the IdentTrust DST Root CA X3 – expired on September 30.
Wireshark is a network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible. You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what’s going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what’s going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course). In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed. Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.
With Google sponsorship, the Linux Foundation has launched the Secure Open Source Rewards pilot program to incentivize improvements that proactively harden critical open source projects and their supporting infrastructure against application and supply chain attacks. Rewards range from $505 to $10,000 or more.
In view of the ubiquity of cyberattacks that exploit vulnerabilities that target people, organizations, and governments around the world, in August 2021 Google announced that it was going to invest $10 billion over the next five years to strengthen cybersecurity, including enhancing open-source security. This included a pledge of $100 million to support third-party foundations, like OpenSSF, that manage open source security priorities and help fix vulnerabilities.
The maintainers of Apache Ranger have criticized a report that benchmarks the open source data governance platform against proprietary rival Immuta in terms of implementing access control policies.
The report, which is sponsored by Immuta and produced by tech analyst firm GigaOm, “paints an incorrect picture on the complexities of using Apache Ranger”, wrote Madhan Neethiraj, a project management committee (PMC) member for Apache Ranger, in a blog post.
A hospital that continued to admit patients during a ransomware attack has been sued over claims that a baby died after doctors and nurses failed to spot there was a problem due to networks being shut down.
Nicko Silar died after six months in intensive care after being born at Springhill Memorial Hospital with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, documents filed in the Alabama Circuit Court state [PDF]. The suit alleges that, because the hospital had shut down key networks, staff were reduced to using paper records, internal staff messaging services were down, and fetal monitoring devices were severely affected.
Nicko’s mother, Teiranni Kidd, was never told that the hospital was having computer problems, the suit claims, and would not have used the facility if she had known.
A UK law firm is bringing legal action on behalf of patients it says had their confidential medical records obtained by Google and DeepMind Technologies in breach of data protection laws.
Mishcon de Reya said today it planned a representative action on behalf of Mr Andrew Prismall and the approximately 1.6 million individuals whose data was used as part of a testing programme for medical software developed by the companies.
essenger apps like Signal and Telegram received a surge in interest after a Facebook Inc. outage left Whatsapp users in the lurch. At least 2.7 billion social network users around the world were plunged into digital darkness on Monday as Facebook’s suite of apps and services, including Whatsapp and Instagram, went down. For six hours, from around 11:40am EDT, millions of communication channels were unusable.
ew Delhi: Over 500 prominent citizens and organisations have written to the Election Commission of India (ECI), expressing their disapproval over the proposal demanding the linkage of voter IDs with Aadhar card, saying it would be exclusionary and a violation of privacy as well as Supreme Court’s ruling.
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The signatories also include prominent individuals, including former civil servants, journalists, lawyers, social activists, researchers, and students.
As per the ECI proposal these “reforms” are sought in order to clean up the voters’ list, prevent voter fraud, as the Aadhar card involves biometric verification which cannot be duplicated. It has also said that any linkage of Voter ID with Aadhar shall be voluntary, and documents such as passports, driving license etc would remain valid for verification.
However, the statement has termed this proposal a “dangerous idea” that “ will almost certainly lead to mass disenfranchisement, could increase voter fraud, given the mass discrepancies in the Aadhaar database, and could violate people’s right to privacy by enabling voter profiling through the linkage of data sets. This proposal would violate the judgment of the Supreme Court of India in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (retd.) & Anr. v. Union Of India (Aadhaar judgment) which limited the use of Aadhaar authentication solely to welfare programmes and to link with PAN numbers for the purposes of income tax.”
Roughly a month into the grand bitcoin experiment in El Salvador, how it’s going depends on how you look at it.
In the “it’s going gangbusters” camp, we might present as Exhibit A the fast and furious tweets of President Bukele, who said on that social media platform Thursday (Oct. 7), “Since yesterday, Salvadorans are inserting more cash (to buy #bitcoin) than what they are withdrawing from the ATMs. And if we add remittances (almost $2 million per day), the incoming USD QUADRUPLES the outflow. This is very surprising so early in the game.”
Yet Reuters noted this week that “only a fraction” of the businesses in the country have taken bitcoin payments amid the technical glitches that have been a hallmark of the rollout. In anecdotes, consumers told the newswire that the Chivo wallets, in some instances, took consumers’ money to buy bitcoin — but then did not ante up the bitcoin. That comes as Bukele has said that 3 million individuals have downloaded the wallets, which exceeds the initial targets set by the government by 500,000 and represents about half of the nation’s population. But the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development reported that 93 percent of companies surveyed across a number of verticals have not been taking bitcoin payments.
Metro Bank has put “less than 90″ IT employees at risk of redundancy as it endeavours to “support our new agile way of working” – agile being that nebulous yet overused term that can be heard in certain circles.
Disgruntled techies working at the retail and commercial bank contacted us this week to inform of recent events that will affect people in the Architecture, Engineering and IT change teams.
A spokesperson at Metro Bank – the first new bank on the British high street in 150 years when it opened in 2010 – sent us a statement:
Nicklaus Children’s Hospital Foundation, a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to raising essential funds for the patients and families of Nicklaus Children’s Hospital, announced today that it has begun accepting cryptocurrency donations.
Nicklaus Children’s Hospital Foundation is among the first nonprofits, and believed to be the first healthcare foundation in South Florida, to begin accepting cryptocurrency donations. This addition comes ahead of #BitCoinTuesday on Tuesday, November 30, a major giving day for the digital currency community.
Donations in the following cryptocurrencies are now accepted by Nicklaus Children’s Hospital Foundation: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Amp (AMP), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), ChainLink (LINK), Dai (DAI), Dogecoin (DOGE), The Graph (GRT), Gemini Dollar (GUSD), Litecoin (LTC), Storj (STORJ), UMA (UMA), Zcash (ZEC), 0x (ZRX) and 1inch (1INCH) and more!
Whistleblower Frances Haugen today urged Congress to regulate Facebook and its algorithms that she said put immense profit before safety and society.
“I am here today because I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy, and much more,” Haugen, a former program manager at Facebook, said [PDF] at a Senate commerce and science subcommittee hearing.
“The company’s leadership knows ways to make Facebook and Instagram safer and won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people. Congressional action is needed. They cannot solve this crisis without your help.”
Yeah, we know: corporation puts profit first, who’d have thought? Bear in mind, though, Facebook is used by 1.9 billion people every day, and made a $29.1bn profit in 2020, up 58 per cent on the year before. That’s some responsibility on its shoulders.
Google’s South Korean operation has decided to comply with the nation’s new law that prohibits it from restricting payments to its own Play Store, either to pay for apps or for in-app purchases.
The law was enacted in September and was the world’s first such legislation. As such it is of considerable interest, as Google and Apple have both spent years saying that allowing third-party payments would compromise user security. Epic Games, which unilaterally enabled its own payment options for its iOS apps, has framed the issue as one of unfair monopolisation by Apple.
At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, former Facebook Inc. product manager Frances Haugen didn’t need to convince lawmakers that the company has a big problem. Republicans and Democrats were, for once, united on her side, at several points even calling her a “hero.” What they needed was direction. Luckily, Haugen gave that to them.
Throughout the hearing she used the term “engagement-based ranking” to synthesize the complexities of Facebook’s problems into a single, neutral term. The lawmakers tried saying it themselves. “We’ve learned … that Facebook conducts what’s called ‘engagement-based ranking,’” Sen. John Thune said.
He was correct. Facebook’s success as a business boils down to algorithms that bump the most titillating content to the top of users’ newsfeeds. These formulas are fundamental to Facebook’s success in engaging users but also contribute to the propagation of conspiracy theories on the site and to drawing teenage girls to eating disorders on Instagram. In one powerful moment, Haugen pointed out that, years from now, women would effectively suffer from brittle bones and infertility because of Facebook’s choices.
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has sided with Hulu that a data processing patent was invalid in light of an earlier textbook, a decision that came after the board’s precedent-setting panel ruled last year that the online streaming company had shown a reasonable likelihood that the prior art qualified as a printed publication.
The final ruling on Hulu’s petition for inter partes review came down on Tuesday. The patent board agreed that all the challenged claims in a Sound View Innovations LLC patent were obvious in light of a textbook titled “Sed & Awk,” authored by Dale Dougherty in 1990….
he covid-19 pandemic affecting the world’s population has demonstrated the importance of advancements in medical technology and securing patent protection in countries of interest. The ongoing debate concerning the waiver of the enforcement of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement in 1994 for all IP related to the prevention, containment and treatment of covid-19 has brought up the age-old question of striking a balance between greater public access with the aim of global vaccinations and the rights of the patentee.
The dispute between Abiomed and Thoratec began in 2015 with the two infringement lawsuits in Düsseldorf. Abiomed and its German subsidiary AIS GmbH accused Thoratec of infringing EP 2047872 B1. It protects a catheter device. They also claimed infringement of the German patent DE 10336902 B3, which protects an intracardiac pumping device.
Counsel see little upside, and even some downsides, to asking for judges’ financial disclosures, despite a Wall Street Journal article that highlighted conflicts
The following have been appointed by the PCT Contracting States as International Searching Authorities (ISAs): the national Offices of Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Chile, Egypt, Finland, India, Israel, Japan, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine and the United States of America, and the following regional Offices, the European Patent Office, the Nordic Patent Institute, and the Visegrad Patent Institute. The availability of a particular ISA to the nationals or residents of a country is determined by the receiving Office where the international application was filed.
Today’s jury verdict in E.D. Tex. favored the accused infringer Sony. The patentee alleged that Sony’s Spider-Man and God of War games infringed its U.S. Patent Nos. 6,362,822 (claim 1) and 7,061,488 (claims 1, 27, and 50. The jury found, however, that neither game infringed.
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Claim 1 of the ”822: A shadow rendering method for use in a computer system, the method comprising the steps of…
Article on Advanced Bionics v Med-El [2021] EWHC 2415 (Pat). Similar to Abbott v Dexcom, the key reason for the present application was to avoid the German injunction gap (an issue explained in detail in Abbott v Dexcom, [33]). Unlike Abbott v Dexcom, Mellor J granted expedition for this case, as IPKat friend friend, Brussels-based trainee patent attorney, Henry Yang explains.
Counsel at IBM, Siemens and three other companies say the office should expand its list of majors that automatically qualify applicants to sit the patent bar
The Chinese organizations have been investing in several European markets, and an effective protection by means of the patent system is comprised in the strategy of said organizations. Regarding protection of intellectual assets by means of patents, filing a patent application before the European Patent Office is a common approach to have patents in force in several European countries. The EPO is the regional Patent Office, which covers 38 member states, two extension states and 4 validation states, wherein some of this later group is geographically located outside Europe. After a patent being granted by EPO, it is necessary to validate European patent in the countries where the applicant has interest in protecting its invention.
The CIPA president announced the launch of the Mercer Review at the CIPA East of England regional conference back in 2019, following the debacle of the 2018 FD4/P6 examination (IPKat). The flood of criticism levelled at the Patent Examination Board (PEB) following so-called Gantry-Gate (after the borderline incomprehensible subject-matter of the 2018 FD4/P6 paper). The UK qualifying patent examinations were criticised, as they had been for years, for being out-dated and unfit for the purpose of actually assessing whether a candidate is fit to practise (IPKat).
It is now nearly 2 and a half years since the Mercer Review was announced. The delay in the Review was reportedly due to a change of scope following the move to online exams in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (a move that has been beset with its own issues, IPKat). Meanwhile, a radical shake-up of the European Qualifying Examinations (EQEs) has been announced (IPKat), with the aim of making the EQEs more fit for purpose.
On October 8, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,316,128, owned and asserted by Netcom Global Solutions LLC, a Jeffrey M. Gross entity. The ’128 patent is generally directed to a firewall that can enforce communication management and filtering policies using the identities of the sender and receiver of the communication. It has been asserted against Microsoft and Cisco.
On October 8, 2021, the China National Intellectual Property Administration declared all claims of CN103384333B invalid. The patent is owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI). The CN’333 patent is related to patents that are designated essential to the Access Advance (formerly known as HEVC Advance) patent pool as well as SISVEL’s AV1 and VP9 patent pools. It is also related to U.S. Patent 8,867,854, which Unified challenged in IPR2020-01048.
On October 5, 2021, the Central Reexamination Unit of the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a final office action rejecting all of the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,426,715, owned by Sound View Innovations, LLC. The initial request was filed in an effort to protect Open Source technologies from invalid NPE assertions. The ’715 patent generally relates to shutting down a plurality of software components in an ordered sequence. Sound View had asserted this patent against Walmart, Vudu, and Delta Air Lines.
On October 7, 2021, Unified Patents filed a Japanese opposition against JP6855419, currently assigned to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI). The JP‘419 patent, and its corresponding extended patent family, is one of the largest families known to be owned by KAIST. The JP‘419 patent is related to patents that have been designated essential in both the Access Advance (formerly known as HEVC Advance) and AV1 pools.
No, both Germany and the UK need to ratify and the UK cannot.
Summary: Paid and unpaid puff pieces (P and U) are intended to accomplish nothing but to mislead people; it’s the "Fake it Till You Make it" approach
Summary: This is just the latest example and cautionary tale (the same thing was done to Linux by the same person, who now bosses Linus Torvalds at the Linux Foundation after Microsoft paid for that to happen). Where are the antitrust investigators? Taking instructions from Microsoft's lobbyists?
If your project uses GitHub, then Microsoft is your boss.
(There’s some face-saving PR here from an anti-Torvalds troll)
Update: Microsoft Tim weighs in as well (puff piece). It’s him who helped Microsoft hijack Linux (exporting it to GitHub). One day apart Microsoft Tim distracted from Microsoft’s antitrust violations. He became a shameless shill of Microsoft front groups, which are even hosted by Microsoft (he does not disclose this).
Update #2: There’s more information : “Littles was elected and took on the role of chair for the Technical Steering Group, hoping to be able to achieve some progress towards Open Source sustainability. However, when he realized that his efforts were futile he resigned from the .NET Foundation board ahead of the 2021 elections which took place in August. He hadn’t intended to draw attention to this, but changed his mind when the announcement of the election results reported on his resignation.”
Update #3: The latest Microsoft reputation laundering by Microsoft Tim this week.
Update #4: Simon Sharwood at it again, relaying Microsoft talking points and face-saving statements.
Update #5: Today the hogwash carries on, with Microsoft Tim comparing Microsoft’s vendor lock-in to GNOME Foundation.
Update #6: With the lie at the top about Microsoft “heart” open source, Microsoft’s booster Tom Warren does revisionism and ‘damage control’ for Microsoft, just like those other Microsoft boosters and media operatives, citing the so-called ‘Linux’ Foundation, which Microsoft pays for PR.
Update #7: You can tell this a major PR crisis for Microsoft because the company’s media operatives work overtime doing ‘damage control’, e.g.
Microsoft has enraged the open-source .NET community by removing flagship functionality from open-source .NET to bolster the appeal of Visual Studio, not least against its cross-platform cousin Visual Studio Code.
Update #8: There’s this new explanation of a new controversy: “The elimination of this function generated even more friction with the developer community (including company personnel, according to some media), since Despite being removed from .NET 6, it will be kept in Visual Studio 2022, Microsoft’s development environment whose launch will take place on November 8. Thus, in this way, a function that was initially going to be found in .NET 6, will suddenly become available only in the development environment, paid, of course, from Microsoft, thus moving away from free software.”
Update #9: Today we see a couple of “Open Source” writers commenting on this. In this first one, the summary is wrong. It shows that there’s no community; the ‘community’ is a company called Microsoft. And meanwhile Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols at ZDNet became an apologist for the thugs at Microsoft, pretending there’s some ‘new Microsoft’ because they pay (to control) the Linux Foundation and get to boss Linux Torvalds.
Rewind to four/five years back, I did not use Linux as my daily driver. Yes, in a virtual machine or dual-boot, sure.
I stuck with Windows saying – “Linux isn’t user-friendly, and it’s all about the commands/terminal.”
In my defense, I did not know a lot of things back then. But, when I finally took the leap of faith and started using Linux as a daily driver, I began to explore how things work and was blown away by many things.
Including some of the compelling reasons why Linux is better than Windows.
It took me a couple of days to understand the fundamentals and learn about the software utilities not available for Linux.
But, surprisingly, I did not need to use Windows for most of my tasks, except multiplayer gaming. And, thanks to Valve, that’s about to change with the support for BattleEye, and Easy-Anti Cheat added to Linux.
Fret not; I’m not one of those who recommends ditching other operating systems. You should always use what you are comfortable with.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, Google has released Android 12 and Desktop Linux is working on Apple M1 Mac thanks to Asahi Linux. Mozilla has announced the release of Firefox 93. In the Enterprise Linux world, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.5 Beta is out, CERN Reveals their opinion of CentOS Stream and AlmaLinux Foundation Opens Up Memberships. In Security News, Twitch.tv had a Data Leak and Google announced funding for Open Source Security. Modular smartphone, Fairphone 4 will be available soon as discussed on Hardware Addicts. Sony talks about their efforts for contributions to Open Source and Linux. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
As it turns out, Perl is amazing! Find out why, and how to start using it.
The Asahi Linux project is working on porting the free operating system to the current M1 architecture from Apple. Progress is explained in a monthly status report. The primary focus of the latest development is the inclusion of important components in the Linux kernel. The declared goal of Asahi Linux is to publish all improvements directly in the respective upstream projects.
The have already been merged for the 5.16 kernel PCIe bindings , which also allow other operating systems such as OpenBSD to use the same boot loader. In addition, the required could already be included PCIe and USB-C drivers in the kernel tree. A driver to support the power management is in the verification , as is the CPU frequency scaling phase , on which the final work is being carried out.
Future AMD processors could be coming with USB4 support and DisplayPort tunneling sometime soon. According to Phoronix, AMD Linux driver engineers are working on a new AMDGPU kernel graphics driver featuring initial support for USB4 DisplayPort tunneling technology.
We don’t know exactly what architecture will come with USB4, however, rumors are floating around that AMD’s Ryzen 6000 series APUs codenamed “Yellow Carp” and “Rembrandt” could feature USB4 connectivity. If so, then AMD will likely be targeting laptops for USB4 adoption first before bringing it over to desktop Ryzen-based CPUs and Radeon RDNA-based graphics cards.
Apache, also known as Apache HTTP server, has been one of the most widely used web server applications globally for the past few decades. It is a free and open-source web application software maintained by the Apache Software Foundation. Apache provides some powerful features with dynamically loadable modules, easy integration with other software, and handling of static files, among other popular features.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to Install Apache Web Server on Debian 11 Bullseye.
Discord is a free voice, video, and text chat app used by tens of millions of people ages 13+ to talk and hang out with their communities and friends. Users communicate with voice calls, video calls, text messaging, media, and files in private chats or as part of communities called “servers.” Discord is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux Distros.
If you want to get a wild-card certificate with let’s-encrypt then you’ll have to use the DNS verification method. I made an example Docker file and script that can quickly and automatically spin up a Debian container to run the letsencrypt command line interface. You can then connect to the container via a local HTTP URL (http://127.0.0.1:8080) and interact with the process to set the DNS TXT record and then verify the entry and then download the signed cert chain & key pem files!
I’m currently testing Zidoo M6 with Android 11. The mini PC is mostly designed for industrial and commercial use cases, so it may not need to be certified by Google in order to access Google apps and services like a consumer device.
Foxit PDF Reader is a free multi-platform PDF reader for Linux, macOS, and Windows. The PDF reader is a small, fast, and feature-rich PDF Reader to view, annotate, form-fill, and sign PDF documents. PDF Reader easily integrates with popular ECMs and cloud storage.
At the end of the tutorial, you will know how to install Foxit PDF Reader on Fedora.
Most modern Linux Desktop systems such as Fedora come with an Nvidia driver pre-installed in the Nouveau open-source graphics device driver for Nvidia video cards. For the most part, this is acceptable; however, if you are using your Linux system for graphical design or gaming, you may get better drivers.
Historically, the Nouveau proprietary drivers are slower than Nvidia’s, which lacks the latest graphics card hardware’s latest features, software technology, and support. In most situations, upgrading your Nvidia Drivers using the following guide is more beneficial than not doing it. In some cases, you may see some substantial improvements overall.
The Graphical User Interfaces allow the users to perform their tasks very easily by clicking or by just drag and drop. But the use of commands will remain important in all flavors of Linux.
This article provides an overview of 15 useful basic Linux commands that you should know.
This is especially important if you are a beginner or you want to know the basic Linux commands for an interview. So, keep on reading!
Twenty years ago today, on Tue Oct 9 16:30:12 2001, Ludvig Strigeus pushed the initial revision of the ScummVM code, which was version 0.0.1 of the project. Time flew quickly and, fast-forward to the present day, we are proudly releasing ScummVM 2.5.0 “Twenty years ago today…”
The list of changes is tremendous.
First of all, this is the first release that supports 2.5D games (almost 3D), thanks to the merger with ResidualVM. With this release we announce support for Grim Fandango, The Longest Journey and Myst 3: Exile. This is why we jumped straight to 2.5 in our versioning. Please note that only desktop platforms currently support these games and other platforms may or may not gain the support later depending on their capabilities.
KDE Frameworks packages have been updated to 5.87.0. This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner. It is recommended that you reboot after updating to avoid a possible KIO file protocol error in Dolphin.
From September the 8th to October the 7th, OpenSUSE has helped me host a survey on how developers are using Rust in their environments. As the maintainer of the Rust packages in SUSE and OpenSUSE it was important for me to get a better understanding of how people are using Rust so that we can make decisions that match how the community is working.
First, to every single one of the 1360 people who responded to this survey, thank you! This exceeded my expectations and it means a lot to have had so many people take the time to help with this.
The TeX Live contrib repository has been for many years now a valuable source of packages that cannot enter proper TeX Live due to license restrictions etc. I took over maintenance of it in 2017 from Taco, and since then the repository has been available via my server. Since a few weeks, tlcontrib is now available via the CTAN mirror network, the Comprehensive TeX Archive Network.
[...]
Thanks to the whole CTAN team, and please switch your repositories to the CTAN mirror to get load of my server, thanks a lot!
This month I accepted 224 and rejected 47 packages. This is almost thrice the rejects of last month. Please, be more careful and check your package twice before uploading. The overall number of packages that got accepted was 233.
It all started when Brandon Withrow created a replica of The Simpson’s family TV that plays episodes of the classic cartoon. The idea took the Raspberry Pi community by storm and makers everywhere have started making their own cartoon-themed TV projects. Today the adventure continues as we have this awesome BMO-themed TV project to share created by a maker known on Reddit as Davidforthewynne.
This project features a shell shaped like the Adventure Time character BMO. When the Pi inside boots, you get a glimpse of BMO’s face on the desktop before it begins to play episodes of Adventure Time.
[...]
Inside you’ll find a Raspberry Pi Zero running Raspberry Pi Video Looper to continuously show episodes. It features a power button capable of safely shutting BMO on and off, a 7-inch screen for the face and has a speaker mounted to the back for audio output.
If there’s one thing we can say definitively, it’s ‘rhombus’. This project is algebraic! The best Raspberry Pi projects are ones you can recreate at home and this is one of them. To get a closer look at how it all goes together, check out the original thread shared to Imgur and be sure to follow Davidforthewynne for more cool projects.
We (Koen and Elco) recently converted a Koen’s fridge into a BrewPi fermentation chamber and made a lot of photos of the progress. This guide will show you various options to convert a fridge or freezer into a temperature controlled fermentation chamber for your homebrew.
It is up to you how far you want to go in hacking the fridge electronics, this guide will show you 3 options to mod your fridge: [...]
A lot of phrases surrounding phones don’t make sense anymore. With a modern cellphone, you don’t really “hang up” and there’s certainly no “dial” to be had. However, with [jakeofalltrades’] project, you can read an old-fashioned phone dial using an Arduino.
The idea behind a phone dial is actually pretty simple. When you pull the dial back to the stop using one of the numbered holes and release it, it causes a switch to open and close the same number of times as the hole you selected. That is, if you pull back the 5 hole, you should get 5 switch closures. The duration of each switch event and the time between switch events is a function of the speed the dial moves because of its internal spring. The zero hole actually produces ten pulses.
React Help Desk is an open source live chat application that comes with an administrative control panel that lets you manage multiple chats. The control panel written with React, Node.js, and web sockets.
React Help Desk offers a real-time support system with a simple interface which allows you to communicate with many clients at the same time.
Created by Jason Gallagher, a web developer with 20 years of experience, who created it for his personal use and currently using it at his website.
How many of us who have a few decades of adulthood under our belts would like to talk to our 17 year old selves? “Hey kid, it’s all gonna be OK. Also, Duke Nukem Forever does come out eventually, but it’s not going to be pretty!” Being honest, exposure to the hot takes of one’s naive teenage self would almost certainly be as cringeworthy as the time-worn-but-familiar adult would be to the teenager, but there’s one way in which you can in a sense have a conversation with your teenage self. [Mad Ned] had this opportunity, when he discovered a printed BASIC listing for a game he’d written for the TRS-80 back in 1981. Could he make it run again, and what did it tell him about his teenage years?
All Linux and Mac-based computers pull their time zones from a massively important database — the time zone database. The process of defining time zones is centralized. This is actually quite a big deal in its own right because people tend to grossly underestimate how pivotal Linux is to … the entire [Internet] and technology as we know it. It may constitute a small percentage of desktop users and be an OS largely favored by nerds and computer developers. But in server-land it’s actually the dominant operating system, especially on the public cloud infrastructure that is rapidly usurping the diminishing role that on-premises infrastructure has to play in getting packets of data from hosts to users (in normal language: making the [Internet] work). AWS instances, for instance, default to Amazon’s Linux spin-off. Virtually all the world’s supercomputers used for everything from weather forecasting to simulating physics experiments run on Linux. Android is a fork of Linux. (I don’t play the “will this be Linux’s year on the desktop?” game. People have been wrong too many times and I don’t particularly care either way). If you’ve ever used an Android device, received a weather forecast, or accessed a website (you’ve probably done all those things), then you’ve benefited from the existence of Linux.
The AITI-KACE and GIFEC are sister agencies under the Ministry of Communications and Digitilisation. The two agencies have in the past signed an MoU of collaboration through which some projects were delivered. The two heads agreed to pick the MoU for review. Both were optimistic that the two agencies can work together for a greater good.
Reproductive rights advocates lashed out overnight following a ruling by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals which reinstated a near-total ban on abortion in Texas just days after a separate federal court had placed the state’s law on hold pending final judicial review, most likely by the U.S. Supreme Court.
“[A] violation of half a century of precedent upholding the constitutional right to abortion.”
Democrats in Congress and their supporters inside the beltway have taken single payer off the table.
Doctors spend an average of over 16 minutes in the EHR for each patient visit—a significant portion of their work day, according to a 2020 study of 155,000 US physicians in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
One report revealed that company researchers had themselves determined that Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, has a psychologically damaging effect on teen girls, even as it denied this publicly and plowed ahead with a version of Instagram for under-thirteens. Another found that the company’s 2018 rejigging of its algorithm to promote “meaningful social interactions,” or MSI, had instead incentivized posts and content based in outrage, social division, violence, and bullshit. Others show that Facebook was intentionally targeting kids and finding ways to hook them on the product early, and that it dragged its feet on taking down posts it knew were made by drug cartels and human traffickers.
Deepfake voice technology based on voice cloning, or quasi-perfect reproductions of a person’s voice, can be used both for the good and for the bad. It can be put in the service of voice synthesis that can give a voice back to people who would otherwise lose it due to acute or chronic conditions such as ALS, apraxia, traumatic brain injury, stroke, etc.
It is already being used in the film and TV industry, gaming, call centers, and it is also potentially convenient for encryption and therapy. However, there is no denying that it can pose a significant threat to democratic processes, particularly to those related to the value of privacy. If used inappropriately, deepfake voice technology can perpetrate deceit and harassment.
ESET researchers have discovered a previously unknown malware family that utilizes custom and well-designed modules, targeting operating systems running Linux. Modules used by this malware family, which ESET dubbed FontOnLake, are constantly under development and provide remote access to the operators, collect credentials, and serve as a proxy server. The location of the C & C server and the countries from which the samples were uploaded to VirusTotal might indicate that its targets include Southeast Asia.
The US government’s pivot to a so-called “zero trust” cyber architecture – which assumes all devices in a network to be untrustworthy by default – will require the support of industry partners as well as the Defense Department, Fletcher added.
Well, the Internet Apocalypse came and went! Due to the recent expiration of the Let’s Encrypt intermediate and root certificates, I saw more widespread issues than I was expecting, but on different devices and for different reasons than I thought. Let’s take a look at what happened and why.
To state the obvious, even as Joe Biden will be meeting virtually with Xi Jinping by year’s end, AUKUS (Australia, UK and US alliance) and the QUAD formation are geopolitical earthquakes that greatly increase the dangers of catastrophic great power war.
Afghanistan’s humanitarian situation is spiraling into catastrophe.
Horrifying as these crimes are, they are now being eclipsed by an even more heinous one: a deliberate attempt by the Ethiopian government to starve its own citizens. Since the fighting broke out Tigray has suffered an increasingly restrictive blockade by government forces. Since July it has received only a fraction of the food needed to keep its 6m inhabitants alive, hardly any fuel and no medical supplies at all. More than 5m people do not have enough to eat. Some 400,000 of those are facing what aid agencies call “catastrophic” hunger—the last step on the path to mass starvation. Aid workers compare the crisis to Ethiopia’s famine of the 1980s, when 400,000-700,000 died.
The number of people killed by police officers in the U.S. has been massively underreported in official statistics over the past four decades, with an additional 17,000 deaths over that period, according to our new research.
Our study, which was published on Oct. 2, 2021, in The Lancet, compared statistics from the National Vital Statistics System, a federal database that looks at death certificates, with data from three nongovernmental organizations that more accurately track police violence: Mapping Police Violence, Fatal Encounters, and The Counted.
We found more than 30,000 deaths from police violence between 1980 and 2018. During that time, the National Vital Statistics System underreported fatal police violence by 55.5%.
The FBI and the Justice Department are investigating the task force after security footage emerged of a violent arrest in September.
Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate, a key leader of the international youth climate movement, was in Germany on Saturday where she joined opponents of the country’s largest lignite coal mine to denounce its proposed expansion in the face of the ever-growing threat of fossil fuels and planet-heating emissions.
“With the expansion of this coal mine, it means people’s cultures will be destroyed, people’s traditions, people’s histories of this place,” she said of the mining operation known as Garzweiler and plans to destroy the nearby village of Luetzerath to allow for the owners, German utility giant RWE, to expand its already vast footprint.
Twenty state Attorneys General on Friday filed a joint complaint in an effort to block changes to the U.S. Postal Service enacted last week by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy and which critics warn are an overt effort to cripple the mail service from within by slowing delivery times while also increasing the cost to consumers.
The official complaint filed by the 20 AGs is directed at the Postal Regulatory Commission (PRC), which is charged with providing independent oversight of the USPS, but which the suit alleges betrayed its mandate by allowing the controversial plan put forth by DeJoy to move into implementation on October 1 without proper review.
The Wisconsin Legislature is now openly at war with democracy.
When the great social media blackout of October 4, 2021, struck, I was in the picturesque village of Himarë in southern Albania with my feet propped up on a balcony railing, half-gazing at the Ionian Sea, while impatiently awaiting Al Jazeera’s publication of my latest article on New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
After former President Donald Trump urged supporters Friday to attend a rally on the steps of the Michigan Capitol building in Lansing next week in order to demand an audit of the 2020 election in which Trump was soundly defeated by President Joe Biden, at least one top Democrat in the state warns that the ongoing Republican obsession with what has become known as the “Big Lie” is a threat that cannot be ignored.
“This is the same inflammatory rhetoric that brought men armed with assault rifles to these very steps last year and endangered the lives of our lawmakers and staff.”
One America News, the far-right network whose fortunes and viewership rose amid the triumph and tumult of the Trump administration, has flourished with support from a surprising source: AT&T Inc, the world’s largest communications company.
A Reuters review of court records shows the role AT&T played in creating and funding OAN, a network that continues to spread conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the COVID-19 pandemic.
OAN founder and chief executive Robert Herring Sr has testified that the inspiration to launch OAN in 2013 came from AT&T executives.
“They told us they wanted a conservative network,” Herring said during a 2019 deposition seen by Reuters. “They only had one, which was Fox News, and they had seven others on the other [leftwing] side. When they said that, I jumped to it and built one.”
Nobel Peace Prize winner Maria Ressa used her new prominence to criticize Facebook as a threat to democracy, saying the social media giant fails to protect against the spread of hate and disinformation and is “biased against facts.”
The veteran journalist and head of Philippine news site Rappler told Reuters in an interview after winning the award that Facebook’s algorithms “prioritize the spread of lies laced with anger and hate over facts.”
Her comments add to the pile of recent pressure on Facebook, used by more than 3 billion people, which a former employee turned whistleblower accused of putting profit over the need to curb hate speech and misinformation. Facebook denies any wrongdoing.
This attack on Stock is yet another unsettling example of how independent thinkers are subject to intimidation in today’s climate. The notion that biological males should not be allowed to enter female-only spaces was a widespread view a mere five years ago. Now, thanks to the speed of cultural transformation driven by social media, activist demands harden into orthodoxies virtually overnight. It takes brave professors of Kathleen Stock’s meld to stand up to them, not with force, or retaliatory intimidation, but with argument and deliberation. We owe her a deep gratitude.
Drug dogs are man’s best friend, if that man happens to be The Man. “Probable cause on four legs” is the unofficial nickname of these clever non-pets, which give signals only their handlers can detect which give cops permission to perform searches that otherwise would require a warrant.
“It’s none of your business whether I wear a dupatta or not,” I retorted, and he backed down apologising. However, the incident stuck with me. The idea that a complete stranger could tell me what to wear wasn’t alien to me. I had grown up in Saudi Arabia, where an entire brigade of men called the mutawa, were tasked with going around town to check how many strands of hair were showing from women’s hijabs and admonish them and their next-of-kin males accordingly.
These courageous campaigners received little or no support from young western feminists. Yet when French coastal resorts, including Nice – which had just seen 86 people murdered in an Islamist attack – banned the burkini, the reaction was swift.
Kace’s legal team, however, allege that prison officials also played a role in the attack and in an attempted cover up. CCTV was disabled in the room where Kace was attacked and cell guards were dismissed early from their duties.
This post summarises detailed information about ethernet splitter, its speed, and different FAQ to help you choose the best hardware.
Switches, hubs, and ethernet splitters are just some of the networking equipment that helps to expand a network. Small ethernet splitters are the most basic of these devices. Ethernet splitters are small network devices that split one Ethernet signal into two. They are cost-effective while being easier to use. These are also some of the simplest networking devices, as they don’t need a power source and don’t have any specific buttons or status LEDs on their bodies. There are just three ethernet ports on this small gadget, two on one side and one on the other. A short ethernet cable with an RJ45 connection on one end and two ethernet ports on the other is included with some kinds.
Although splitters have been around for a long time in the networking world, many people still don’t know how to utilize them efficiently. Contrary to popular belief, ethernet splitters should always be purchased in pairs. Directly attaching one end of the splitter to the router and then connecting two devices to the splitter’s two ethernet ports on the other side will not work. There is a correct technique to set up ethernet splitters in a network so that they function properly.
The operators of around two dozen torrent sites and pirate streaming services are at risk of having their identities obtained by the Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment. The global anti-piracy coalition has obtained a pair of DMCA subpoenas that compel CDN company Cloudflare to hand over whatever information it holds on these individuals. Combined traffic to the sites is huge.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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