12.12.21

The EPO’s Staff Does Need to Go on Strike in Order to Highlight Abuse/Misuse of Granting Authority and Mishandling of Patent Examiners

Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 6:51 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 600ddae90b6814d6078b98ec29373613

Summary: Susanne Sivborg has made the false assumption that regulations for strikes are needed; However, Sivborg was no fan of Team Battistelli and she only abstained when she voted on the illegal “Strike Regulations” 8.5 years ago

THE REGIME at EPOnia is desperate to hide the degree of abuse and corruption. It’s therefore making it very hard for staff to unionise or to exercise rights of unions (no, the yellow union tactics haven’t worked); failing that, it resorts to outright illegal measures.

“There’s no need to regulate them and it’s a misguided assumption which ought to be rejected.”Speaking for myself, as a person who on numerous occasions over the years confronted employers (at great personal risk), I totally understand why EPO staff wants to strike and needs to occasionally go on strike. The worst situation is, managers of companies start to feel invincible and wrongly assume that staff will follow instructions uncritically, unquestionably, irrespective of morality, ethics etc.

The bosses of the EPO ought not be a bunch of politicians and crooked/failed diplomats. Scientists ought to be in charge of an inherently technical institution.

It’s a bit sad if national delegates, including some who themselves used to be patent examiners (not only Susanne Sivborg but also Bruno Cinquantini), fail to grasp the importance of protest rights, which can escalate/turn into strikes. There’s no need to regulate them and it’s a misguided assumption which ought to be rejected. I myself went on a half-day strike last month and also confronted bosses on a number of issues in recent years, even weeks ago. Workers who just blindly “follow orders” aren’t good workers; they’re just convenient (to those in power). In the realm of science, opinionated and outspoken critics are necessary for true scientific debates, challenging injustices, false orthodoxies, and constantly challenging decisions that are indefensible. That’s why ILO-AT will continue to receive many appeals, which it’s unable to fulfill within a reasonable amount of time. The EPO is already collapsing across a number of dimensions (like scabs), but publishers are bribed by EPO management to pretend everything is OK.

On a technical note, now that there’s a very high-profile security bug we should mention that the EPO’s Web site, which is already poorly maintained, is at risk; you can in theory make the site go crazy (internal server errors) by crafting particular requests (not that we would do it). We’ll spare the technical, pertinent details to avoid potential sabotage (I’ve not tried this personally), but let’s just say that the EPO’s brain drain affects not only patent examination. We have been saying for many years already that their IT department lacks talent and it’s getting worse over time. This is how institutions perish. They lose the very people who make up those institutions. It typically starts with bad leadership, which repels, expels, or unwittingly drives out the most talented workers. █

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[Meme] Strikes Should Not be Regulated by the People Those Strikes Are Against

Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:45 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The Swedish statement on Benoît Battistelli‘s “Strike Regulations” is a tad baffling; EPO staff should not have to ask Battistelli and his friend António Campinos for a permission to strike

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The EPO’s Overseer/Overseen Collusion — Part XXXIII: Swedish Scepticism

Posted in Europe, Patents at 6:31 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Series parts:

Head of the Swedish EPO delegation, Susanne Ås Sivborg. [PDF]

Summary: Benoît Battistelli‘s unlawful “Strike Regulations” did not receive Sweden’s blessing

Like the Belgians, the Swedish delegation also abstained from voting in favour of Battistelli’s “Strike Regulations” in June 2013.

At the time in question, the Swedish delegation was headed by Susanne Ås Sivborg, Director General of the Swedish Patent and Registration Office (PRV).

Sivborg graduated from the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) with a degree in civil engineering in 1983.

“In 2009/2010 Sivborg was candidate for the position of President of the European Patent Office…”Between September 1985 and March 1991 she worked as an examiner at the EPO in Munich. She then returned to Sweden where she worked in the private sector with various companies such as AstraZeneca and Electrolux before taking over as head of the PRV in September 2008.

In 2009/2010 Sivborg was candidate for the position of President of the European Patent Office, but she was outmanoeuvred by the alpha-male Battistelli and his Danish accomplice Jesper Kongstad.

During her time on the EPO’s Administrative Council, Sivborg crossed swords with Team Battistelli on a number of occasions and she deplored the deterioration of the social climate at the institution where she had started her career.

“During her time on the EPO’s Administrative Council, Sivborg crossed swords with Team Battistelli on a number of occasions and she deplored the deterioration of the social climate at the institution where she had started her career.”Nevertheless, for the most part Sivborg stopped well short of any outspoken condemnation of Battistelli’s maladministration.

As can be seen from the minutes of the 136^th meeting [PDF] of the EPO’s Administrative Council, Sivborg’s criticism of the proposed “Strike Regulations” was very muted indeed.

The Swedish position is minuted under point no. 114 as follows:

“The Swedish delegation referred to its comments on CA/56/13. It was the Council’s duty and responsibility to ensure a balance between management and staff and an efficient and good functioning of the Organisation. The Council also had to ensure that the Organisation fulfilled international conventions, such as the Human Rights Convention. It, too, had been astonished to find that the Office had no legal framework in relation to strikes yet. The Office’s proposal included several good and necessary amendments to the Service Regulations. There were some problems with the detailed wording.”

The impression given here is that the only problems that the Swedish delegation saw with the proposal were some minor issues related to the “detailed wording”.

“…at least Susanne Sivborg had the good grace not to cast a vote in favour of such a manifestly flawed proposal.”That falls well short of what one could reasonably expect from the representative of a country like Sweden, which is highly-developed and has a strong democratic tradition.

But at least Susanne Sivborg had the good grace not to cast a vote in favour of such a manifestly flawed proposal.

In the next part we shall turn our attention to the delegation representing Sweden’s Scandinavian neighbour, Norway. █

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EPO Management Now Exploits Autistic People as “White-washing Communication Exercise for an Organization Which Has Breached Fundamental Rights”

Posted in Site News at 6:02 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 49ffae346384c0dc5ff427fdd28ccdf0

Summary: We’ve reached out to ask people who had experience with doctors that label people autistic; here’s what we learned and here’s what an EPO publication says

THIS post concerns a very sensitive subject, so I’ve decided to do this in the form of a video (harder to take out of context) and quote somebody from IRC. It’s a subject which affects him personally.

“Diagnosing a mental patient is such a, well, almost pseudo-science that the doctors frequently don’t agree with each other,” said the person. “But it seems to be trendy to sort of “identify” as autistic now. Even if that’s not the case. Seems like they don’t want to be labeled mentally ill now because that implies disability, and it very well can be one.”

To avoid taking this out of context, please see prior articles we wrote about this, including guest posts by people with autism, e.g.: (there’s lots more)

“Unfortunately,” the person told us, “in today’s employment marketplace, there’s usually more candidates than openings, and if you can turn yourself into a diversity quota filler instead of a potential problem, that’s a nice rebranding. People with autism disorder (which a psychiatrist said he suspected of me at one point), I think, just need to be approached differently. What you get are people who are incredibly good at like one thing or two at the expense of all else. [Richard] Stallman might be a good example of that. He’s brilliant on the subject of computers and the software that runs them, but the guy is a slob that presents in a socially unacceptable manner that I can see would be off-putting to many people.

“Humorously, you see this going on with a lot of psychiatrists too. When I was in an inpatient psychiatric facility for a couple of weeks decades ago, mom came in and pointed to a man shuffling around in a cheap, dated, worn-out suit who didn’t seem to be all there. She said, “Look at that poor man. I wonder if he’ll ever be okay.” I said, “That’s one of the doctors.”. They diagnosed me (that time) with a borderline personality type and implied that being “homosexual” was a mental illness. Like, I remember them specifically asking if I was attracted to men. And I didn’t like how the question sounded, so I said “No, eww.” because I realized there’d probably be some punishment if I said yes. In my patient file, they noted “Patient agrees that he is a normal heterosexual male.”.

He is openly gay, but “homosexual” was seen by the doctors as an abnormality. This is in the United States. “For context, too,” he added, “this happened in 2001 even though the DSM delisted homosexuality as a mental illness in the US in 1977, if I recall correctly. Psychiatry isn’t just borderline pseudo-science, it’s also heavily politicized. Not just in the US. It gets used to discredit people. The whole reason why many people with mental illness are resentful of the whole practice is because it gets used as a weapon against them. No other field of medicine, except maybe the Coronavirus vaccine, operates this way. When they’re taking you in there and holding you down and saying the state commands you to take something you don’t want? Bitter spouses who are suing for child custody? “He’s mentally ill. I have all his files.” Having a bad day? Your psychiatrist might have to report it to the government and then you lose your Second Amendment rights. Antipsychotic drugs are also getting a relabeling as “mood stabilizers”. Honestly, people like me need them. It’s hardly perfect, but it’s what we have. So you guys get to spend a little time in our world. But I see them whacking up kids on major antipsychotics because they had mild seasonal depression or something. It’s like “going after a fly with a nuclear warhead” type stuff. It’s sick. They did this with Ritalin when I was a child. To me, even. Ritalin is like, the opposite of an antipsychotic. So when it caused me to behave even more strangely, they punished me more. It goes back and forth every time you see a doctor throughout your life, almost, unless you tell them what the last one said. Starting from scratch, you’ll be diagnosed with a new thing about every 10 years. They’ve hit me with ADHD, borderline personality type, major depression, social anxiety disorder, bipolar II, and bipolar I. In that order. And the drugs for each one of those can seriously mess you up if they diagnose you incorrectly.”

“They prescribed all kinds of shit,” he told, “including off-label Neurontin (Gabapentin) which there was later a major lawsuit over that the drug company was openly bribing corrupt psychiatrists to do. Big lawsuit, big settlement. I tried all sorts of ways to protest my stay there, including not eating, not taking my meds. Finally I pretended to take them and spit them out when I got back into my room, and they agreed that I was “compliant” and let me go. The court ordered me to continue taking the Neurontin, so I filled it and dumped it in the trash.”

Here is what the new publication (from the video above) says:

06.12.2021
su21013mp – 0.2.1/4.4

Patent Examination: A job for autistic people?

Building a more diverse and inclusive workplace has become a higher priority among large companies willing to reshape their workforce. For the EPO, D&I has also become a convenient white-washing communication exercise for an organization which has breached fundamental rights. Last week, in a newsletter¹ sent to DG1 staff, management tackled the topic of neurodiversity and autism. This paper provides some comments.

DG1 D&I newsletter
In a mass-email sent to the DG1 sectors ICT and M&M, the Chief Operating Officer invited staff to take knowledge of the DG1 D&I Newsletter Issue of November 2021. This latest issue tackles the topic of neurodiversity. Neurodiversity refers to variation in the human brain regarding sociability, learning, attention, mood and other mental functions in a non-pathological sense. The word neurodiversity is attributed to Judy Singer, a social scientist who has described herself as “likely somewhere on the autistic spectrum”².

On page 3 of the newsletter, the reader can find this:

This passage suggests that the integration of autistic people into the workforce is perceived as essentially beneficial for productivity purposes without taking into account whether it is beneficial for the person itself and how the person feels about it in the long-term.

Which requirements for autistic people?
An estimated 60–80% of autistic people have motor signs that include poor muscle tone and poor motor planning³. It is questionable whether an autistic person benefits from a purely static computer work often causing Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI).

Autistic people can be characterised as having persistent deficits in social communication and interaction across multiple contexts⁴. It is questionable whether an autistic individual benefits from HR policies which aim at putting staff out of their comfort zone, constant changes in procedures and daily IT outage.

________
¹ DG1 D&I Newsletter Issue November 2021
² Neurodiversity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurodiversity
³ Autism – Other symptoms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism
⁴ Autism – Diagnosis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism

Autistic people have social impairments which make it difficult for them to have a relationship and build a family⁵. It is questionable whether an autistic person benefits from a lonely work which strongly reduces social contacts especially at a time when mandatory teleworking is the rule. Back in 2016, the press was already comparing teleworking with a hamster wheel⁶.

Conclusion
Consulting companies⁶ advise that the first step to build an inclusive workplace is to “Educate your leaders”. A DG1 newsletter fully taking into consideration the long-term requirements of autistic people would be a first step in the right direction.

SUEPO Munich

________
⁵ Autism – Social development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autism
⁶ “Daheim im Hamsterrad” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ), https://www.faz.net/aktuell/karriere-hochschule/buero-co/home-office-daheim-im-hamsterrad-14406049.html (01-09-2016)
⁷ “6 Steps for Building an Inclusive Workplace”, from the Society for Human Resource Management
(SHRM) (19-03-2018) https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-magazine/0418/pages/6-steps-for-building-an-inclusive-workplace.aspx

Regarding the part which says “[a]n estimated 60–80% of autistic people have motor signs that include poor muscle tone and poor motor planning,” we’ve been told: “I agree with the last part, but not the part about poor muscle tone. Most autistic people are not violent or threatening, but there’s a sense of contemptuous disgust towards them, and so I’d say that if RMS [Richard Stallman] is autistic, then [Matthew Garret] is openly attacking a mentally disturbed person who can’t really help his behaviors. That is deplorable. RMS says some of the things he does because it just comes out unfiltered without any sense of concern about what a “reasonable” person reading it would think.

“HR policy of taking disciplinary action against people who troll employees with mental health issues would be helpful in combating that. Usually, the employers just don’t care that it happens because if there’s a hostile work environment, the victim is more likely to leave than sue, and if they sue, then they have a mountain to climb even if there are laws. Microsoft has a hostile work environment, has for decades, and imports more problems (Like the ones at Bungie and Bethesda and GitHub.). Abuse as motivation for the victim to work harder seems to be a goal sometimes too.”

We don’t know if the EPO actually bothered consulting people who are themselves affected. Instead, in the words of the union, “D&I has also become a convenient white-washing communication exercise for an organization which has breached fundamental rights.” Months ago they leveraged pinkwashing several times. Just shortly after the ILO-AT’s ruling on the "Strike Regulations", which will be the subject of the next 3 posts. █

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Links 12/12/2021: KDE Frameworks 5.89 and OpenRazer 3.2 Released

Posted in News Roundup at 5:35 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux
- Distributions
- Devices/Embedded
Free Software/Open Source
Leftovers

GNU/Linux
- Audiocasts/Shows
  - GNU World Order 438
    
    The **strace** and **subversion** commands from Slackware software series **d**.
  - Xournal++ Your Best Friend For Tablet Notetaking – Invidious
    
    A while back someone asked me about a tablet writing app but I had never actually used one so I did a bit of research and discovered Xournal++
- Kernel Space
  - Richard Hughes: Can you help with bulk storage firmware updates?
    
    Does anyone have any examples of peripheral devices that can have their firmware upgraded by dropping a new firmware file onto a mounted volume? e.g. insert device, new disk appears, firmware file is copied over, then the firmware update completes?
  - Speculative NUMA Fault Support Proposed For Improving Tiered Memory Linux Performance – Phoronix
    
    This year there has been a lot of Linux kernel work around improving the handling of tiered memory servers, namely those with traditional system RAM augmented by Intel Optane DC persistent memory. There has been work to demote pages during reclamation to the slower persistent memory, improving NUMA balancing around such systems to optimize memory placement, transparent page placement and related work around tiered memory Linux servers.
    
    The latest work comes by way of Alibaba and they are proposing speculative NUMA fault support for tiered memory systems. The proposed patches for speculative NUMA fault support will handle promotion of slow/hot memory to fast memory for enhancing system performance.
  - As We Prepare For 2022, Linux Still Doesn’t Have Standardized Per-Client GPU Stats Reporting – Phoronix
    
    One of the Intel patch series we have been waiting to see mainlined since all the way back in 2018 is around per-client GPU metrics reporting for being able to show various GPU engine activity on a per-process basis. Every once in a while the patches have been revived but have yet to reach mainline. They recently were revved once again, leaving us hope that in 2022 we might finally see this standardized per-client/process GPU statistics reporting land in the mainline kernel.
    
    While it started out as an Intel driver effort and fitting the needs of their “intel_gpu_top” utility for exposing to users various per-process GPU metrics, it was later expanded to become a DRM driver standard so it could be supported by other Direct Rendering Manager drivers like AMDGPU. In turn this would ease the burden on user-space software wanting to make use of this information like GNOME/KDE System Monitor or other software that may want insights into per-process GPU usage whether it be for 3D, media engines, etc.
- Instructionals/Technical
  - How to Install phpBB on Ubuntu 20.04
    
    phpBB is an Internet forum package in the PHP scripting language. The name “phpBB” is an abbreviation of PHP Bulletin Board. Available under the GNU General Public License, phpBB is free and open-source.
    
    Features of phpBB include support for multiple database engines (PostgreSQL, SQLite, MySQL, Oracle Database, Microsoft SQL Server), flat message structure (as opposed to threaded), hierarchical subforums, topic split/merge/lock, user groups, multiple attachments per post, full-text search, plugins and various notification options (e-mail, Jabber instant messaging, ATOM feeds).
    
    It is easy to install phpBB on most web servers such as Apache and Nginx and also easy to administer and use.
    
    In this tutorial, we learn how to install phpBB with Apache on Ubuntu 20.04.
  - How to install and Set up Gitlab CE Server on Ubuntu 20.04 – Citizix
    
    GitLab allows you to host an on-premise Git repository that can be accessed from either your local LAN or (if you have an available public IP address) from outside your company. GitLab is an open-source repository manager based on Rails developed by GitLab Inc. It is a web-based git repository manager that allows your team to collaborate on coding, testing, and deploying applications. GitLab provides several features, including wikis, issue tracking, code reviews, and activity feeds.
    
    In this guide, we will install the GitLab CE on the Ubuntu 20.04. We will install the GitLab CE using the ‘omnibus’ package provided by GitLab.
  - How to install Gitlab CE Server on OpenSUSE Leap 15.3
    
    GitLab allows you to host an on-premise Git repository that can be accessed from either your local LAN or (if you have an available public IP address) from outside your company. GitLab is an open-source repository manager based on Rails developed by GitLab Inc. It is a web-based git repository manager that allows your team to collaborate on coding, testing, and deploying applications. GitLab provides several features, including wikis, issue tracking, code reviews, and activity feeds.
    
    In this guide, we will install the GitLab CE on the OpenSUSE Leap 15.3. We will install the GitLab CE using the ‘omnibus’ package provided by GitLab.
  - How to Install and set up PHP and Nginx (LEMP) on Debian 11
    
    In this guide we are going to install and set up PHP and Nginx in Debian 11. We will also set up a virtual host to serve a simple php info page.
    
    PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared towards web development. It is one of the popular programming languages for the web. Popular tools such as WordPress are coded using php. Big companies like Facebook also uses php heavily.
    
    Nginx is a web server that can also be used as a reverse proxy, load balancer, mail proxy and HTTP cache. It started out as a web server designed for maximum performance and stability. Nginx has grown in popularity since its release due to its light-weight resource utilization and its ability to scale easily on minimal hardware. Nginx excels at serving static content quickly and is designed to pass dynamic requests off to other software that is better suited for those purposes.
  - How to install and configure NextCloud on Debian 11 and LEMP
    
    In this guide, we are going to set up NextCloud on a Debian 11 server hosted with Nginx, Mariadb and PHP (LEMP stack). We will be using Mariadb 10 and PHP 7.4 for this guide.
    
    Nextcloud is an Open Source suite of client-server software for creating and using file hosting services. It is a a free self-hosted cloud storage solution similar to Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. With Nextcloud, you don’t have to worry about the pricey alternatives and since you will host your own files, you don’t have to worry about privacy or someone collecting your data.
    
    NextCloud can be installed on a private home server or a virtual private server in the cloud. Files can then be uploaded and then synced to a local desktop, laptop or even a smartphone. This way you have full control of your data.
  - How to Download, Install, and Use Google Fonts on Ubuntu
    
    Ubuntu is one of the best open-source operating systems in the market today. It offers a veritable software ecosystem that provides a variety of premium services, each of which you would normally expect only within Windows or macOS.
    
    To this effect, Ubuntu provides you with a default cache of fonts used extensively for various typographic purposes. Nevertheless, users can avail some of the highest quality Google Fonts on Ubuntu for different text processing purposes. Here’s how.
  - How to Check and Repair EXT4 Filesystem in Linux
    
    The fsck (stands for File System Consistency Check) is used to check and repair one or more Linux filesystems.
    
    This check will run automatically at boot time when a filesystem inconsistencies detected. Also, can be run manually as needed.
    
    You can use the fsck command to repair corrupted file systems when the system fails to boot, or a partition can’t be mounted, or if it’s become read-only.
    
    In this article, we’ll see how to use the ‘fsck’ or ‘e2fsck’ command in Linux to repair a corrupted file system.
- Games
  - OpenRazer 3.2 Released For Supporting More Razer Peripherals On Linux – Phoronix
    
    OpenRazer as the open-source, community-maintained collection of Razer peripheral support for Linux is out with a new release.
    
    OpenRazer is the independently-maintained software for supporting Razer lighting, mouse configurations, and other features on Linux that is normally provided by Razer’s own (proprietary) software on Windows. OpenRazer is developed via reverse-engineering and over time has developed fairly robust Razer device support for Linux for not only their keyboards and mice but also headsets, base stations, Thunderbolt Dock, and other devices.
- Desktop Environments/WMs
  - K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
    - Long KFluff – compiling C++/Qt with g++/clang++, QMake, CMake, Kate, KDevelop, QtCreator – rabbiticTranslator
      
      I’ve been learning how to code recently, but it takes a lot of my time to achieve even the basics since I have no IT background, which makes me unproductive for other stuff. And I was having some family health issues to take care of. I’ve decided to do what I like best instead; documenting, translating, subtitling.
      
      Let me casually introduce you to compilation of C++ and Qt software. I’m sure you’ll learn at least something. You will need some basic C++ knowledge, though. I plan on making a learning trajectory for those interested in learning Qt/KF, but that day is not today.
      
      To start off, we can make a simple C++ program just so we have something to compile.
      
      This guide requires you to have installed your distro’s build tools, the Qt libraries, git, Make, CMake, QMake, KDevelop and QtCreator (which usually comes with the package qt5-tools), g++, clang++, ninja and qt5-doc-html. Needless to say, no automagic is possible without all the tools being installed on your system!
    - [KDE/Kate Developer Christoph Cullmann] Keyboard Fun
      
      I think the final “product” looks nice. The RGB back-lighting still works, thought the new keycaps are not shine-through.
      
      In addition I have now a full shine-through ABS keycaps set as backup parts for more keyboard modding. And some more or less useless Varmilo baseboard. But who knows, if I spill too much coffee or whatever in my board, I can still re-build the Varmilo board to have something that works (and pings).
      
      Naturally that was not the way I meant to use the new keyboard, but good enough And I must confess, a bit modding around on the keyboards was fun!
      
      For any people interested in keyboards: I think both boards mentioned above are ok. Perhaps I just was unlucky with my Varmilo board and other builds of it don’t ping at all, like the most reviews tell.
    - I Broke The Plasma Panels… AGAIN! – Kockatoo Tube
    - KDE Frameworks 5.89 Further Improves the Plasma Wayland Session, Fixes Many Bugs
      
      KDE Frameworks 5.89 is here to further improve the Plasma Wayland session by making the Morphing Popups effect work correctly so that panel tooltips have a smooth animation when they appear and disappear, fixing Plasma OSD (On-Screen Display) to respect KWin’s maximized window placement policy, and improves support for QtWidgets apps like Dolphin, Gwenview, or Okular so that the menu won’t appear as a standalone window when clicking on the hamburger menu button while their windows are unfocused.
    - KDE Ships Frameworks 5.89.0
      
      KDE today announces the release of KDE Frameworks 5.89.0.
      
      KDE Frameworks are 83 addon libraries to Qt which provide a wide variety of commonly needed functionality in mature, peer reviewed and well tested libraries with friendly licensing terms. For an introduction see the KDE Frameworks release announcement.
      
      This release is part of a series of planned monthly releases making improvements available to developers in a quick and predictable manner.
- Devices/Embedded
  - Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
- Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
  - Programming/Development
    - Adam Young: Nested Selection Criteria in jq
      
      I’m working with API data from a netbox instance. I want to select a device-typ URL based on the manufacturer. However, the value “manufacturer” in the result is a dictionary. I want to select where that manufacturer has the name “Ampere” or some other manufacturer.
    - How to cross-compile 850+ packages using Yocto/OpenEmbedded
      
      Over the years I have received a few enquiries about how to get going with Yocto/OpenEmbedded — I will call it OE from now on — and in reply I have mentioned that it has a very steep learning curve. Start reading the documentation and your eyes will glaze over very quickly!
      However, you can follow some simple steps and compile 850+ packages without trauma. It should just work. Knowledge of how OE works can be learnt gradually, later on.
      One thing to understand is that OE mostly targets embedded systems, and is not really intended to build packages for a desktop PC. However, it is a testimony to the flexibility of OE that it can be made to do this — my “dunfell” project tarball has many tweaks to achieve this.
      Another very important point is that it is a cross-compile environment. This is great, you can be running on a x86_64 Linux host system and compile for a aarch64 target, for example. I am currently supporting x86_64 (nocona) and aarch64 targets. However, cross-compiling is sometimes like trying to sweep dung uphill. Build recipes may have to do all kind of tricky things to perform a successful compile of a package. OE is incredibly sophisticated and despite the cross-compile hurdle can successfully compile large packages, such as Libreoffice.
    - Python
      - Magnetometer COMPASS with Raspberry PI Pico: GY-271 HMC5883L wiring and use with MicroPython – peppe8o
        
        Many projects (like robotic ones) need to get info about spacial position and direction. In this sense one of most useful device for projects involving Raspberry PI Pico is an HMC5883L magnetometer compass
        
        In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to wire, calibrate (X / Y axes) and use an HMC5883L device, also known as a magnetometer, with Raspberry PI Pico using MicroPython.
      - Create a Python virtual environment in the Linux terminal
        
        The Python package ecosystem offers and abundance of readily available building blocks for your Python applications. Great for your productivity as a Python developer. However, it can quickly become a dependency nightmare. Especially when Python applications depend on different versions of the same Python package. You can sidestep this problem with the help of a Python virtual environment. This article explains how you create and manage a Python virtual environment in the Linux terminal.
      - Exerising Python 3.10 on Fedora 25 via sorting Pandas DataFrame
        
        The text file alpha-wide.txt contains only capital letters of the Latin alphabet (ABC… Z). Identify the character that most often occurs in the file immediately after the letter X. In the answer first write down this character, and then immediately (without a separator) how many times it occurred after letters X. If there are several such characters, you need to display the one that appears earlier in the alphabet.

Leftovers
- Science
  - Book Review: We the Robots? [Ed: The "Hey Hi" hype leveraged by litigation fanatics, hoping to leverage change (or computerisation) for more lawsuits]
    
    As Chesterman mentions in the introduction to the book, “the field of AI and law is fertile,” and there are already books, dedicated journals and thousands of articles that discuss recent developments in AI, its actual or potential impact on the legal profession, and normative questions raised by AI. The majority of them concentrate on the activities of legal practitioners, their potential clients, or the machines themselves. This book, by contrast, Chesterman explains, focuses on those who seek to regulate the activities of AI, and the difficulties that AI systems pose for government and governance. Regulation here refers to two aspects; first. the exercise of control through rules and standards, including self-regulation; and second, that such control is exercised by one or more public bodies.
    This book focuses on the challenges raised by ‘narrow’ AI, meaning systems that can apply cognitive functions to specific tasks typically undertaken by a human. In doing so it asks how should we understand the challenges to regulation posed by AI? What regulatory tools exist to deal with those challenges and what are their limitations? And what more is needed – rules, institutions, actors – to reap the benefits offered by AI, while minimising avoidable harm? As such, the book is presented in three main parts: challenges, tools and possibilities.
    
    Part one addresses the challenges of speed, autonomy, and opacity, with the aim of highlighting the gaps in existing regulatory models with a view to seeing whether the tools at our disposal can fulfil them.
    
    Chapter one, Speed, examines three areas. First, considering the globalisation of information, which seeks to demonstrate the difficulty of containing problematic activity in an interconnected world where speed has conquered distance. Second, considering high frequency trading – where algorithms buy and sell stocks – which highlights the danger that speed of decision making can have on frustrating human attempts to limit or regulate it. Third, the chapter considers the challenges posed by the accelerated flow of information and AI on competition law. For example, tacit collusion by algorithms which conflicts with the regulatory framework.
  - Patent Docs: Ticked Tabby Cats and Their Genetic Bases Elucidated
    
    The domestic cat has been the subject of much study, recently involving its genetic structure, genomic DNA sequence, and comparisons with other felines. The first such study was published in 2014, when an international effort led by Stephen J. O’Brien at the Oceanographic Center, Nova Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida reported the complete genomic sequencing of the domestic cat, Felix catus. The report, entitled “Annotated features of domestic cat – Felis catus genome,” was published in GigaScience 2014, 3:13 (August 5, 2014) (see “Domestic Cat Genome Sequenced”). The study reported sequencing of a female Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon, a mixed-breed cat from Russian named Boris, and Sylvester, a wildcat ancestor of domestic cats. The report showed that domestic cats have retained “a highly conserved ancestral mammal genome organization” in comparison with ancestral cats (see Driscoll et al., 2007, “The near eastern origin of cat domestication,” Science 317: 519–23). Both species, F. catus and Felix silvestris, have 38 chromosomes, 18 pairs of autosomes, and two pairs of dimorphic gender-determining chromosomes. Details of the domestic cat genome structure included the presence of 217 loci of endogenous retrovirus-like elements (amounting to 55.7% of the entire genome, comprised of long interspersed elements (LINEs), short interspersed elements (SINEs), satellite DNA, retroviral long terminal repeats (LTRs) and “others”); 21,865 protein coding genes (open reading frames or ORFs), detected by comparison with eight mammalian genomes (from human, chimpanzee, macaque, dog, cow, horse, rat, and mouse); and a wealth of genetic variability in single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), insertion/deletion events (indels); novel families of complex tandem repeat elements; and short terminal repeat (STR) loci.
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
  - How does pregnancy factor into COVID-19 innovation?
    
    Pregnant people are at increased risk of severe illness from COVID-19, but they have been largely excluded from clinical trials, the process of testing vaccines’ and treatments’ safety and efficacy. They’re consequently left in a bind: there’s not great evidence about the safety and efficacy of products they can take to be safe from COVID-19. This lack of information might be part of the explanation for low vaccine uptake among pregnant people, particularly women of color. And while this lack of data isn’t particularly novel with respect to drug development, generally—we’re historically bad at generating robust safety data for pregnant people—failing to do so for COVID-19 seems to have outsized public health consequences. What’s behind this ongoing exclusion? And how should policymakers consider including pregnant people in COVID-19 clinical trials and beyond?
- Integrity/Availability
  - Proprietary
    - Adios, trusty Z10
      
      Well, damn. After six years of reliable service, I’ve just been informed that my Blackberry Z10 smartphone is going to be “decommissioned” — i.e., remotely bricked — on January 4th.
    - Security
      - The Log4j mess
        
        For those who have not yet seen it, this advisory from Apache describes a nasty vulnerability in the widely used Log4j package.
      - Critical RCE 0day in Apache Log4j library exploited in the wild (CVE-2021-44228)
        
        A critical zero-day vulnerability in Apache Log4j (CVE-2021-44228), a widely used Java logging library, is being leveraged by attackers in the wild – for now, fortunately, primarily to deliver coin miners.
        
        Reported to the Apache Software Foundation by Chen Zhaojun of Alibaba Cloud Security Team, the bug has now apparently been fixed in Log4j v2.15.0, just as a PoC has popped up on GitHub and there are reports that attackers are already attempting to compromise vulnerable applications/servers.
      - Josh Bressers: log4j is hard to find and harder to fix
        
        If you pay attention to tech news, you know what’s going on with log4j right now. It’s being called Log4Shell which is a great name. I’ll spare you repeating the details of the issue, there are many many stories about it at this point.
        
        What I’ve not seen is a good explanation about why knowing if you are using log4j is hard, and fixing it will be even harder than finding it.
        
        Hunting for log4j
        
        If you have a java project, the very first thing you probably did was check to see if you are pulling in log4j as a dependency. The weird thing about Java projects is even if you aren’t using log4j, it could be in you project.
- Defence/Aggression
  - Mississippi Killer Confessed to Another Murder Before His Execution
    
    David Neal Cox admitted to the 2007 killing of his sister-in-law, Felecia Cox, a cold case in which he had long been the prime suspect, prosecutors said.
  - Myanmar’s Military Accused of Massacring and Burning 11 Villagers
    
    Outrage spread on social media in Myanmar on Wednesday over images and accounts of the alleged killing and burning of 11 villagers captured by government troops in the country’s northwest.
    
    Photos and a video of charred corpses in Done Taw village in Sagaing region circulated widely Tuesday. They were said to be have been taken shortly after the men were killed and their bodies set on fire.
- Civil Rights/Policing
  - Google Engineers Put “Don’t Be Evil” to the Legal Test
    
    In a new lawsuit, three fired software engineers claim Google’s “don’t be evil” clause of its code of conduct amounts to a contractual obligation.
- Digital Restrictions (DRM)
  - Netflix Sued Over Dubbed Version of Korean Hit ‘#Saraitda’
    
    Netflix Inc. was accused in a lawsuit of unlawfully releasing a dubbed version of a hit South Korean film, wiping out the potential theatrical audience for producers who claim to have the rights to an English-language version of the movie.
    
    Hollywood Innovations Group LLC said it obtained in 2019 the rights to all but the Korean-language version of “#Saraitda,” a blockbuster hit in Korea about a young man’s struggle for survival during a global pandemic — which was written before the Covid-19 outbreak.
- Monopolies
  - India’s advertising watchdog chief talks influencers, IP and more [Ed: To the chagrin of litigation profiteers]
    
    ASCI secretary-general Manisha Kapoor says self-regulation has paved the way for fast and efficient dispute resolution, and reduced the burden on courts
  - FOSS Patents: Apple gets injunction stayed as predicted AND deals major blow to Epic-Spotify-Tinder Coalition for App Fairness: U.S. appeals court denies motion to file amicus brief
    
    By that wordplay I don’t mean the order by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit granting Apple’s motion to stay the consolation-prize injunction under California Unfair Competition Law (UCL) that the district court had granted Epic Games. Anything else would have been a major surprise. I explained on a few occasions that Apple handily met the criteria for a stay. In fact, I got a 3 out of 3 for my predictions in this context: I said the district court would clarify the narrow scope of the UCL injunction (as it did, though people are free to still pretend to be obtuse), and would uphold its own injunction, but the appeals court would stay it. Actually, it’s even 4 out of 4 as you’ll see further below in the context of an amicus brief Apple successfully opposed.
    
    The order granting Apple a stay (that will practically be in effect for a couple of years) is terse and doesn’t take a position on whether Apple’s conduct raises competition concerns or not. However, a binary outcome is now most likely as the federal appeals court for the West Coast cites California’s Chavez case law, according to which the failure of a theory under federal antitrust law (Sherman Act) spells doom for a California UCL claim on the same basis. I continue to wish Epic luck with their own appeal (of the rejection of nine of Epic’s ten counts), though the hurdle is high and Epic has made some mistakes that it’s too late to fix now. My guess is that the appeals court will not overturn the district court’s finding that Apple is not a monopolist, and Epic’s failure to prove something that is so obvious to me–that so-called Progressive Web Apps are not a viable alternative to native apps–is not the only issue but that one alone is probably sufficient all by itself to make Epic lose again.
  - KOL365 | Guest Lecture on IP for Walter Block’s Law and Economics Class
    
    My friend Walter Block, economics professor at Loyola-New Orleans, asked me to give a guest lecture today (Dec. 8, 2021) for his Law and Economics course, on the topics of intellectual property
  - Patents
    - Draft Standard-Patent Guidance Is U.S. Bid in Global Debate [Ed: Biden is a patent maximalist and his biggest political sponsor (Michael Bloomberg) owns this publisher, which has patent maximalism offshoots cheering for this agenda; bought politicians syndrome]
      
      The Biden administration’s proposed policy changes on patents essential to industry standards are part of a broader international rethinking.
      
      In a draft and request for comments, the administration is taking another look at how to value patents on industry standards for technology needed for things to work together. The issues have become increasingly important with the rise of 5G and the Internet of Things.
      
      The U.K. said Tuesday it was seeking comments on a standard-essential patent framework. The European Union is also preparing a regulation with a new licensing framework.
      
      “The bottom line is that the system that currently exists doesn’t work efficiently,” said Maurits Dolmans, an attorney at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP in London.
      
      “Manufacturers complain of being held up,” Dolmans continued, “while SEP owners complain they are not being paid enough. Litigation is often complex and can span three continents. That is why the U.S., the U.K., and the EU are looking at this again, to see whether they can find a more efficient solution.”
    - Global Cannabis Applications Corp. Patent Now Worldwide [Ed: Drug pushers and drug lords bad, patent litigation people good?]
      
      TheNewswire – December 10, 2021 – Global Cannabis Applications Corp. (“GCAC” or the “Company”) (CSE:APP), (CNSX:APP.CN), (FSE:2FA), (OTC:FUAPF), a leading medical cannabis chain-of-custody compliance and data platform, obtained official Acknowledgement Receipt from the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in filing US Utility Patent Applications.
      
      GCAC filed the “System of Processing and Tracking Cannabis Products and Associated Method Using Block Chain,” Serial Number 63/126,555, filed the original application on December 17, 2020. Due to delays caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, the Patent was officially published on December 2, 2021. A second application filed November 24, 2021, for “Tracking System for Cultivated Products and Associated Methods,” Serial Number 17/457,385 was acknowledged simultaneously.
    - Drug-access backers may push know-how sharing in WHO deal [Ed: Not enough. Cancel these patents. But since WHO is controlled by patent profiteers like Bill Gates that will never happen, not from WHO anyway]
      
      Advocates say the new pandemic preparedness treaty will be a good opportunity to promote a refocus of the debate away from forced licensing
    - Pharma turns to trade secrets and open source for software
      
      Counsel at Bayer, Regeneron and two other companies explain what the rise of software in their firms means for IP protection and finding outside counsel
    - $2,000 Awarded for Longhorn HD ’924 prior art
      
      Unified is pleased to announce PATROLL crowdsourcing contest winner, Preeti Dua, who received a cash prize of $2,000 for her prior art submission for U.S. Patent 8,725,924. The patent is owned by Longhorn HD, LLC, an NPE. The ’924 patent generally relates to an information backup system with a storing mechanism, a power supply, and a host microcontroller. It has been asserted against Kyocera, TCT Mobile International, OnePlus Technology, and Samsung.
    - Solution To Patent Eligibility Quagmire Lies In Constitution [Ed: Politicians bribed by patent litigation firms are pretending that fake patents are somehow protected by the Constitution and we should reopen the doors to abstract patents (so that those who bribe these politicians can make more money through lawsuits]
      
      A lack of clarity on patent eligibility in court decisions and the examination process has undermined the credibility of the patent system.
      
      The urgency for reform is recognized. A draft bill for eligibility reform was released by Sens. Chris Coons, D-Del., and Tom Tillis, R-N.C., and Reps. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., and Steve Stivers, R-Ohio, on May 22, 2019. However, consensus on that bill appears elusive.
    - Chemical Patents – How to Get the Protection You Want in Europe Part 3: Amendments at the EPO [Ed: Conflating monopolies with “protection”, and in this case suggesting pursuing a monopoly from the EPO that’s granting loads of legally-invalid patents]
      
      As those familiar with the patent process will know, the requirements set by the European Patent Convention (EPC) are considered stricter than for many other jurisdictions – and this is particularly true when it comes to assessing basis for amendments. At the European Patent Office (EPO), the notoriously strict approach to added subject-matter has the potential to cause issues for proprietors during examination and also when defending their case during opposition proceedings.
      
      So how can proprietors get the patent monopoly they want in Europe? Our attorneys at Gill Jennings & Every LLP have extensive experience of handling applications in the chemical field during examination, as well as in opposition and appeal proceedings before the EPO. Across a three-part series, we look at how our experience can help in the preparation of your patent applications and how to avoid the pitfalls of the EPC. For Parts 1 and 2 (focused on clarity, and inventive step) see here and here. In this final instalment, we will look specifically at how to prepare and prosecute European patent applications to provide the flexibility necessary to navigate the EPO’s strict approach to added subject-matter.
    - This week in IP: US and UK launch SEP reviews, YouTube publishes first transparency report, and more
      
      The UKIPO opened a highly anticipated call for views on the future of the UK’s rules on standard-essential patent licensing this week.
      
      Stakeholders will have until March 1 to submit evidence on 27 questions, which largely focus on potential market power issues in the SEP licensing market.
      
      In its announcement of the review on Tuesday, December 7, the UKIPO acknowledged concerns over the level of transparency in SEP licensing, which it said had made it difficult to establish a common understanding of what was fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND).
      
      Several of the questions examined specific abuses of market power in SEP licensing, as had been alleged by some patent implementers.
      
      For example, the UKIPO is seeking evidence of circumstances where implementers are required to buy licences to a broader range of patents not essential to the relevant standard.
      
      The call for views also includes other contentious topics in the field, such as the benefits and drawbacks of national courts setting global FRAND rates, and the role of patent pools in FRAND licensing.
      
      UKIPO CEO Tim Moss said: “We want to ensure the UK’s framework remains robust and continues to be regarded as one of the best in the world, while keeping pace with global developments and challenges around SEPs and FRAND licensing.”
      
      “It will help us better understand how our IP framework supports the SEP ecosystem, while ensuring a fair balance is achieved between all entities involved, and the maximum benefit to UK innovation,” Moss added.
      
      It comes the same week as the US Department of Justice announced its own review of SEP policy, also focusing on the intersection of IP and competition law.
    - Standard Essential Patents and Innovation: Call for views [Ed: UK-IPO looking to reinforce very bad stuff]
      
      The government seeks views as to whether the Standard Essential Patents (SEPs) ecosystem (i.e. the enabling participants, commercial relationships, infrastructure, and legal and regulatory environment) surrounding SEPs is functioning efficiently and effectively and striking the right balance for all entities involved. The purpose is to help assess whether government intervention is required.
      
      Our aim is to produce the optimal IP framework for the UK that will promote innovation and creativity both now and, in the future, while supporting the government’s ambitions set out in the Innovation Strategy and Diversification Strategy.
    - Agencies Revise Position on Standards-Essential Patents [Ed: Such patents ought not exist in the first place because they curtail competition and innovation; those buzzwords and acronyms manipulate the debate, e.g. “FRAND” (5 lies)]
      
      On December 6, 2021, the U.S. Department of Justice, along with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Institutes of Standards and Technology, issued a draft policy statement on standards-essential patents (“SEPs”) and welcomed public comments by interested parties. The guidance modifies a 2019 policy statement issued under the Trump Administration, which we previously covered.
    - Venue over Foreign Defendant; and Seeking Rehearing before Mandamus [Ed: Only the US has this insane situation of "forum shopping" which is a loophole for patent trolls and law firms looking to get a judge who's in their pocket or part of their nefarious agenda]
      
      This mandamus petition has been denied, although the Federal Circuit has suggested that Judge Albright reconsider his denial of venue transfer.
      
      AudioEye sued accessiBe for patent infringement (US10423709, et al.) as well as claims under the Lanham Act (false advertisement & product disparagement) and under New York State Law (product disparagement, tortious interference, etc). But, instead of suing in New York, AudioEye sued in W.D. Tex. The focus here is on screen-reader used to help individuals with disabilities better access the internet. The software particularly helps to fix non-compliant websites to make them more accessible.
      
      Suing a Non-Resident for Patent Infringement: In TC Heartland, the Supreme Court severely limited the scope of “proper venue” in patent cases. Generally, the patentee can only sue a defendant in either (1) its state of incorporation or (2) some venue where it has a regular-and-established place of business. These limitations stem back more than 100 years, and the “limitation” offered in TC Heartland might be more properly seen as a rejection of venue-expansion by the Federal Circuit. One gap in the Supreme Court’s analysis in TC Heartland is how to treat foreign companies. The answer though is pretty clear under Brunette Machine Works, Ltd. v. Kockum Industries, Inc., 406 U.S. 706 (1972). In Brunette, the Supreme Court held that the more-expansive rules of the general law (Section 1391) apply when the defendant is not a US entity.
    - Rounding Errors in Patent Law
      
      This case helps show that patent law has arrived at Nerdsville. Actually, I’ve been here for a while and so welcome to all you newcomers. In my view, the case also suggests that our claim construction doctrine has gone too far attempting to discern meaning where none exists. Rather, I would suggest that the issues here are really about infringement rather than claim construction.
      
      The claims require “0.001%” of a formulation be the inactive ingredient PVP K25. The allegedly infringing formulation is slightly different — lets say 0.0008% — but it is within standard rounding error if 0.001% is seen as having one significant digit (0.0005 to 0.0014). Mylan argued that 0.001% should be given a narrower range — “the precise number, with only minor variation.” Mylan’s outcome would result in a range of something like 0.00095 to 0.00104.
    - Inequitable Conduct by Senior Party Broad Alleged in Interference No. 106,115 (and PTAB May Finally Hear Evidence About It) [Ed: The latest in the saga about inane patents or monopolies on life itself, with PTAB getting involved]
      
      An enduring and persistent (albeit until now unresolved) issue in the patent interferences involving the Broad Institute, Harvard University, and MIT (collectively, “Broad”) as Senior Party and the University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, “CVC”) as Junior Party has been the question of whether Broad had committed inequitable conduct in prosecuting its patents- and applications-in-interference. CVC raised the issue in its proposed motions in Interference No. 105,048 (see “CRISPR Interference Motions Set” and “PTAB Redeclares CRISPR Interference and Grants Leave for Some (But Not All) of Parties’ Proposed Motions”) and in this ’115 Interference (see “CRISPR Interference Parties Propose Motions”). In both interferences, the Board denied CVC authorization to file its motions grounded in inequitable conduct as being premature but granted leave for CVC to file a motion for authorization to file their inequitable conduct motion at the end of the priority phase.
    - Federal Circuit Draws a Hard Line Against “Obvious to Try” Analysis
      
      This is an interesting pro-pharma obviousness decision coming out of the PTAB regarding obviousness of particular drug dosages. Here, the particular drug was known to work well, but there were concerns about drug safety. And, there were a couple of particular tests that clearly would have been obvious to try. In fact, the patentee was legally required by the FDA to conduct the tests in order to ensure drug safety. Still, the outcome of the tests were not predictable. Nobody knew whether the particular dosage being was going to turn out to be “safe.” (Here “safe” is interpreted as having “an acceptable risk-benefit profile.”) The patentee ran the tests, found the dosage to be safe, and then patented a method of administering that safe-dosage to patients. Teva challenged the patent, but the PTAB and the Federal Circuit both sided with the patentee. They held that the unpredictable outcome of the test meant that the outcome was not obvious since there was no “reasonable expectation of success.”
      
      I expect that the Supreme Court would reject the hard line drawn in this case in the same way that it rejected the TSM requirement in KSR v. Teleflex. I.e., obviousness is a flexible, open analysis asking “is there an invention here?” Former Kennedy clerk J.C. Rozendaal handled the appeal for Teva, and so I won’t be surprised to see a petition for writ of certiorari in 2022.
    - Day in the life of a patent litigator: Andy Schwentker [Ed: Do a post about day in the life of his many victims, who are being blackmailed by patents while not able to afford legal aid]
      
      Schwentker, a principal at Fish & Richardson, tells Managing IP about his day to day, including the biggest challenges of his job and his favourite venues
    - Patent case: Nichtigkeitsstreitwert III, Germany – Kluwer Patent Blog
      
      The Federal Court of Justice has dealt with the important question of how the amount in dispute in patent nullity proceedings is to be determined with regard to a standard-essential patent. In principle, the amount in dispute is to be determined in the same way as for a “normal” patent. The Federal Court of Justice held that the mere fact that a standard-essential patent is involved does not justify a deviation upward from the usual practice of determining the amount in dispute.
    - IP Edge affiliate Karamelion patent invalidated
      
      On December 9, 2021, the USPTO issued a notice of intent to issue a reexamination certificate, canceling all claims of U.S. Patent 6,275,166, owned by Karamelion LLC, an NPE and affiliate of IP Edge. The ‘166 patent relates to relaying communications to appliances from a central computer and has been asserted in over 40 district court litigations. The reexamination certificate took less than a year to issue.
    - The Rise of Electric Vehicles: Understanding the EV Industry Growth through Patent Trends – CHIP LAW GROUP [Ed: This cites greenwashing PR ('study') from the EPO as it the EPO and patent data (or monopolies easily granted) count for much]
      
      Across Europe, more patents are being filed related to battery technology. The European Patent Office (EPO) reported a 14.8% increase in the number of patents filed related to electricity storage from 2005 to 2018. This is significant compared with other technology areas that only averaged a 3.5% increase.
    - Sunday Surprises [Ed: “15th Annual Forum on Pharma & Biotech Patent Litigation in Europe” because patents and lawsuits are -- to some very sick profession -- a lot more important than helping ill people and curing them indefinitely]
    - Time to talk about ownership of AI-generated intellectual property assets [Ed: These are not property and not assets; greedy and overzealous law firms are lying and some people even pay them to be lied to]
      
      Systems for protecting intellectual property (IP) have been in place since the Middle Ages, encouraging skilled, innovative technicians by granting monopolies within particular industries. For hundreds of years, intellectual property policy has been driven by the imperative of rewarding the human creativity or ingenuity that brings new creative works and useful inventions to society, in exchange for disclosure of those works and inventions to further foster progress – the so-called “bargain.”
    - India grants patent to Macsen Labs’ Methylene Blue Synthesis Process
      
      The Indian patent office has granted a patent to Achal Agrawal, CEO of Macsen Labs, Udaipur. The patent relating to the field of chemistry is titled Novel Improved Method for Synthesis of Diaminophenothiazine Compounds. The patent concerns a novel process for synthesising the compound Methylthioninium Chloride or Methylene Blue.
    - Three USF faculty members selected as new National Academy of Inventors Fellows [Ed: Sumita B. Mitra, propped up by the scam/sham award of the EPO]
      
      Mitra is the first inventor to incorporate nanoparticle into dental materials to produce stronger, more durable and more aesthetically pleasing fillings in products used by more than a billion people worldwide. She is the recipient of 100 US patents and their corresponding global equivalents and has more than 100 publications in the areas of polymer science, nanocomposites and dental materials. She is an internationally recognized lecturer on these topics and has given numerous presentations and courses in various universities and colleges in 45 countries. Additionally, she has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, was named the winner of the highly-prestigious European Patent Office Inventor Award 2021 in Non-EPO countries, and recognized with the EPO Inventors Award, American Chemical Society Heroes of Chemistry Award, Peyton-Skinner Award for Innovation in Dental Materials, and the Hollenback Memorial Prize from the Academy of Operative Dentistry.
    - The Computer-Aided Surgery Innovation Landscape: 2021 Update [Ed: Conflating patents with innovation; many are bogus software patents; it's noted that some are calling software "Hey Hi" to convince the EPO to grant patents it's not supposed to.]
      
      In November 2020 we looked at looked at global patent filing statistics for the preceding twenty years in the computer-aided surgery sector in order to identify the key trends in the field. At the time we set out that the computer-aided surgery sector was at a pivotal stage in its maturity, with those innovating companies developing and effectively protecting the next dominant technologies likely to establish themselves in the market during the widespread adoption of robot assisted surgery in hospitals around the world.
      
      [...]
      
      he EPO recognise that the control of surgical equipment can involve a technical effect. The below graph shows that while small, innovation in the field of surgical robotics using artificial intelligence has been growing rapidly over the last few years.
    - Hetronic Products Injunction’s Global Scope Reduced by Court
      
      An Oklahoma federal court narrowed the scope of its injunction barring radio remote control maker Hetronic International Inc.’s European partners from selling trademark-infringing products, limiting its coverage to countries where Hetronic markets or sells products.
    - AI inventors: can AI own intellectual property rights? [Ed: Those are neither property nor a right; this whole insane debate shows what a farce the system became, like a diploma mills for patents]
    - Austria brings the Preparatory Phase of the Unified Patent Court one step closer [Ed: Bird and Bird says “Austria brings the Preparatory Phase of the Unified Patent Court one step closer”; This firm said the same thing about UPC 7 years ago]
      
      On December 2, 2021, the second chamber of the Austrian Parliament unanimously approved the draft legislation enabling Austria to ratify the Protocol on the Provisional Application of the Unified Patent Court. After the publication of the law in the Federal Gazette, Austria is expected to deposit its instrument of ratification to the Council of the European Union.
    - Innovation At Risk If AI Can’t Be An Inventor, Fed. Circ. Told [Ed: Complete baloney; what's at risk here is the credibility of the system and legitimacy of patents as a concept]
      
      An artificial intelligence researcher wants the Federal Circuit to reverse a federal judge’s finding that AI can’t be listed as an inventor on a patent application, saying the decision hurts innovation.
      
      AI researcher Stephen Thaler on Wednesday filed a corrected opening brief in his challenge to U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema’s September decision that shut down his suit against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
    - What Evidence can the PTAB Use to Decide an IPR? [Ed: Dennis Crouch, funded by a litigation company that lobbies for software patents, on PTAB and how to obstruct its review of fake patents]
      
      Inter partes review (IPR) is an incredibly powerful process for cancelling patent rights. We have a set of expert judges who are not afraid of digging into the details of a complex obviousness analysis. Still, IPR petitions are strictly limited to petitions based upon obviousness and anticipation theories and “only on the basis of prior art consisting of patents or printed publications.” 35 U.S.C. 311(b).
      
      Successful IPR petitions always focus on prior art as the central basis for cancelling the patent claims. And yet, the petitioner usually also presents additional evidence to contextualize the prior art — most typically this comes in the form of expert testimony.
    - The stranger’s guide to PTAB director reviews by in-house [Ed: PTAB culls faka patents, unlike those firms, which just pursue more and more patent lawsuits for personal gain]
      
      Six months after US v Arthrex, counsel at Thermo Fisher, Sanofi and two other companies set out how they plan to use the USPTO’s director review process
    - Why some patent owners may pursue a wait-and-see strategy for the UPC [Ed: Perpetuating fallacies as they've been doing for nearly a decade]
      
      UPC will offer both opportunities and risks, and many will want to watch its early goings-on from the sideline
    - Major US, UK SEP moves; ZTE’s big monetisation play; Germany last hope for covid IP waiver; China patent challenge survival rates up; JUUL ITC success; plus much more [Ed: IAM does not disclose that it is being bribed to promote the UPC while stating "another key milestone for establishment last week" (but it's still illegal; this is fake news and window dressing)]
      
      Three-quarters of IP market leaders in latest IAM Panel Report say they’re taking a cautious approach to the UPC, which passed another key milestone for establishment last week
    - Recent Trends For § 112 Challenges In PGRs
      
      In recent years, the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has invalidated or affirmed the invalidity of various biopharma patents under 35 U.S.C. § 112, which requires that a patent specification contain a written description of the invention and enable any person skilled in the art to make or use the invention. The court system, however, is not the only venue for such invalidity challenges. Post Grant Review (PGR) provides an alternative opportunity to challenge newly issued first-inventor-to-file patents on any and all grounds of invalidity, including § 112 grounds, before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). But, these challenges come with a significant estoppel risk. That is, an unsuccessful PGR petitioner will be estopped from raising arguments that “reasonably could have been raised” in the PGR process during subsequent district court proceedings. When weighing this heightened estoppel risk, one factor to consider is how § 112 challenges have historically fared at the PTAB.
      
      In a prior survey of PGRs for bio, pharma, and chemical patents prior to April 30, 2020, a total of 28 cases, revealed an institution rate of roughly 64%. It further concluded that there was a 78% success rate of finding challenged claims unpatentable in the instituted PGRs that had reached a final written decision.
      
      [...]
      
      A comparison between our results and the prior survey suggests that there has been a significant decrease in institution rates, but it should be noted that the numbers of PGRs in these analyses are small. Even if institution rates have markedly declined, it should not discourage patent challengers from bringing PGRs based on § 112 grounds because no estoppel attaches in cases that are not instituted. And, when a PGR is instituted, the success rate for finding claims unpatentable has remained high.
    - Protecting AI: The current IP landscape [Ed: Intoxicated on patent litigation, the fanatics and profiteers want to give patents to bots (computer programs) now and this contributes to the whole system looking like a laughing stock, aloof and detached from its original goals]
      
      The beginning of a series of articles on artificial intelligence (AI), which starts with an overview of the stance taken by the UKIPO and EPO when examining AI inventions
    - Webinar: Learn From The Expert: Patent Enforcement In Europe [Ed: No, patents are not rights and boasting about being aggressive is bad for the image of this profession]
      
      Be there when lawyers from 15 leading law firms pool their experience to help a fictitious client enforce its patent rights in Europe.
    - Whither goest the patent troll?
      
      Following from this, he points to studies suggesting that an estimated 30% to 40% of issued patents are invalid or low quality.
      
      For Lederer, alleged costs are a key metric associated with patent trolling. They amount to $29 billion dollars yearly in direct litigation expenditures (though the hyperlink reference is to a 2014 article), together with foregone expenditures in R&D (for which no monetary amount is provided).
      
      That said, the author acknowledges that these costs declined from 2013-2017, only to once again rise. What accounts for this? This is where the article gets interesting. The key variable, he claims, were changes in post-grant review procedures, first facilitating those seeking to reduce patent trolling, but thereafter leading to increased patent trolling activity.
    - Bayer v Teva: Drug formulation patent found “the result of standard and routine considerations” ([2021] EWHC 2690 (Pat)) – The IPKat
      
      The recent decision of the English High Court in Bayer v Teva [2021] EWHC 2690 (Pat) is another example in which the UK courts have found a pharmaceutical invention to be the obvious outcome of routine drug development. In the Supreme Court decision Actavis v ICOS the court found a drug dose selection obvious in view of what was considered to be the obvious route that the skilled person would take through the drug development decision tree. The High Court in Bayer v Teva followed a similar reasoning to find the clinical formulation of Bayer’s cancer drug, sorafenib, obvious in view of the preliminary phase I clinical trial results for the drug.
      
      In Bayer v Teva, the patent in question EP (UK) 2305255 was directed to the salt form of sorafenib and its use in the treatment of cancer. The particular claim in contention related to sorafenib tosylate salt. Sorafenib tosylate (NEXAVAR) is approved in the US and EU for the treatment of various types of cancer. The SPCs for the basic patent covering sorafenib expired earlier this year. Teva brought revocation proceedings against Bayer’s sorafenib formulation patent (which had an expiry date of Dec 2022) across Europe, including the UK and Germany.
    - Unified Patents Inc.’s Real Party-in-Interest and Discretionary Decisions
      
      For the past nine years, across more than 250 inter partes, post-grant reviews, and other forms of administrative challenge, Unified Patents, LLC has won every real party-in-interest (RPI) challenge, both at institution, final written decision, and on appeal. It has also won all Fintiv related discretionary arguments and all Arthrex remands, as detailed below.
      
      Unified’s status as the sole RPI was challenged in its first IPR where the Board held that Unified was the sole RPI. Unified Patents Inc. v. Clouding IP, LLC, IPR2013-00586, Paper 9 (Mar. 21, 2014) (members were not found to be RPIs, where there was no evidence of funding or control of the particular IPR; challenged claims were later cancelled in a Final Written Decision issued April 26, 2015). As catalogued below, Unified overcame every such challenge in the proceeding years. As a result, many times Unified’s RPI status was no longer being challenged.
      
      In 2018, the Federal Circuit had their first and (possibly only) opportunity to review the Board’s developing RPI jurisprudence in a case involving a different membership organization. That opinion endorsed the Board’s longstanding RPI test set forth in the Trial Practice Guide, but outlined facts particular to that situation (including a potential time-bar) and characteristics of that different membership organization that merited further scrutiny on remand. See Applications in Internet Time, LLC v. RPX Corp., 897 F.3d 1336 (July 9, 2018) (“AIT”). It remanded for further fact finding but was troubled with the presence of a time bar, lengthy communications with the barred party (who had unsuccessfully challenged the patent previously), and with the RPX business model of acting as a third-party middleman for settlement negotiations.
      
      [...]
      
      Indeed, in every post-grant challenge that has raised arguments related to these discretionary denials, the Board has ignored or declined patent owner arguments that General Plastic or Fintiv applies. See, e.g., Unified Patents, LLC v. Oceana Innovations LLC, IPR2020-01463, Paper 11 (Feb. 23, 2021) (“We agree with Petitioner that the General Plastic factors weigh against denying an inter partes review under the circumstances here”).
      
      Lastly, Unified has not lost a Director review request under Arthrex. See Smith & Nephew Inc. v. Arthrex Inc., No. 19-1452 (U.S. June 21, 2021) (remanding then-pending appeals to allow for requests for Director review); see, e.g., Fall Line Patents, LLC v. Unified Patents, LLC, IPR20 (Fed. Cir. 2020) (remanding), request for review denied, Paper 49 (Nov. 6, 2021).
      
      As catalogued below, Unified has been distinguished from AIT in every decision following that decision and the remand. The PTAB has thoroughly reviewed this issue in numerous cases when confirming that Unified was the sole RPI.
    - Arigna Technology patent challenged
      
      On December 9, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 7,049,850, owned by Arigna Technology Limited, an Atlantic IP Services Limited subsidiary. Formerly owned by Mitsubishi Electric Corp., the ‘850 patent is generally related to a high voltage integrated circuit. The patent has been asserted against BMW, Honda, Nissan, GM, Volkswagen, Daimler, and Mercedes-Benz.
    - Rapid Grant at the EPO [Ed: Helping to rewrite history about the EPO, burying very major blunders]
      
      Obtaining a granted patent anywhere in the world can be a lengthy process, and the European Patent Office (EPO) is no exception, sometimes taking several years to grant meaningful, wieldable protection. There are numerous essential substantive and administrative hurdles to navigate between filing the initial request for the grant of a patent and receiving the notice of the EPO’s intention to grant.
      
      However, options are available to applicants which can enable them to speed up this process, should they wish. Whilst none of these options improve the eventual chances of obtaining a granted patent, they do allow the applicant to accelerate the process, either by skipping certain steps, completing certain steps more rapidly, or a combination of these two strategies. This article aims to outline the options available to applicants, and to evaluate their relative merits.
    - Changed, changed utterly – or not? Germany’s new coalition states its intentions regarding digitalisation and innovation [Ed: They always misuse or weaponise words like “innovation” to promote the robber barons and monopolies]
      
      With yesterday’s official signing of the new Coalition Agreement and today’s parliamentary voting on her successor, Germany’s so-called ‘Ampel’ (traffic light) coalition struck a blow to to Angela Merkel’s chances of becoming Germany’s longest serving Chancellor, should she still be in office on 19 December to overtake Helmut Kohl. With Olaf Scholz, the Social Democrat leader and current Vice-Chancellor and Finance Minister, at the helm, the alliance of the Greens, yellow Social Democrats, and red FDP, represents something of a changing of the guard after sixteen years of Merkel’s CDU/CSU-dominated leadership.
      
      [...]
      
      The Ampel parties want to promote science communication and societal exchange at all levels, including anchoring it to funding approval and supporting science journalism and continued education for decision-makers (whose fruition may come as welcome news to digital policy, data protection, and AI reform advocates at the EU level). They also want to integrate perspectives from civil society more strongly into research and to strengthen Open Access and Open Science.
    - Opposition Practice at the EPO – Advice for Opponents [Ed: Patents have no "owners"; it's the wrong term, but the patent 'sector' hopes that repetition will reinforce this misconception; the more conventional term for patent assignee is "holder" (and that's temporary; it's not eternal like "property")]
      
      The EPO (European Patent Office) opposition process offers third parties the opportunity to attack the validity of a European patent after grant. The opposition process is a centralised system, offering a valuable tool for opponents to limit, or even revoke competitor patents across all European designated states. For tips and advice on navigating this process from the point of view of the patent proprietor, see our previous article here. But from the point of view of the opponent, how can you maximise your chances of success? Whilst the exact strategy will always depend on the facts of each case, Rebecca Matheson and Ash Earl investigate key tips for opponents during these contentious proceedings.
    - Iran RIPI among 25 leading patent holders in oil, gas nanotech
      
      Iran’s Research Institute of Petroleum Industry (RIPI) is the only Iranian company, which has been listed among 25 leading firms active in oil and gas nanotechnology inventions, Trend reports citing IRNA.
      
      [..].
      
      It is worth mentioning that nanotechnology patents of the 25 oil companies have been registered by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the European Patent Office (EPO).
    - Monday Miscellany [Ed: "IPR in Times of Crisis: Lessons Learned from the COVID -19 Pandemic" sounds like a sick idea; they look for ways to profit from a pandemic instead of actually tacking it; "IPR" stands for three lies in a row, or 3 misnomers.]
    - EPO stays proceedings in light of questions referred to the Enlarged Board of Appeal in G 2/21 [Ed: This merits a mention of how it’s basically against the law, in violation of several European constitutions, and made possible only because of EPO corruption, including court-rigging]
      
      The EPO has now issued a notice that in light of this pending referral before the Enlarged Board of Appeal, all examination and opposition proceedings before the EPO in which the decision depends entirely on the outcome of the referral will be stayed until the Enlarged Board of Appeal has issued its decision. The notice clarifies that only cases where the assessment of inventive step is exclusively based on evidence which was not publicly available before the filing date of the patent application (so called “post-published evidence”) will be stayed.
      
      It is not yet clear how strictly and at what point during proceedings the above criteria for staying a particular case will be applied. In particular, for complex opposition proceedings it appears that it may be difficult for the Opposition Division to reach the conclusion that the assessment of inventive step is based “exclusively” on post-published evidence, or that the decision depends “entirely” on the outcome of the referral, without hearing the arguments of all parties during oral proceedings.
    - UK IPO launches call for views on Standard Essential Patents, innovation and competition [Ed: UK-IPO will just do what litigation firms say, not what’s actually good for the British people or for people in general]
      
      As published today on gov.uk, the UK’s Intellectual Property Office (IPO) has launched a call for views on Standard Essential Patents (SEPs), intended to inform the position on whether the present framework requires change in order to best support innovation.
      
      This is a highly topical issue, with methods or devices which utilise technology that is essential to implementing a standard often being protected by patents, running the risk that a third-party manufacturer would be unable to create standard compliant products. Prominent examples include the wireless technologies used in smartphones and connected cars. As such, access to SEPs is to be granted on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms (FRAND), with previous IPKat coverage of both topics available here and here, respectively.
      
      Moreover, interoperability and ability to communicate between products from different manufacturers is vital in order to provide consumer functionality, a concern which is of increasing importance in an age of the Internet of Things (IoT) and AI and often also reliant on these standards.
    - Biofrontera : obtains notice of allowance for US patent on PDT-lamp and treatment method – Form 6-K
      
      Biofrontera AG (NASDAQ: BFRA; Frankfurt Stock Exchange: B8F), an international biopharmaceutical company, announces that its wholly owned subsidiary Biofrontera Pharma GmbH has received a notice of allowance from the United States Patent and Trademark office (USPTO) with respect to the patent application “Illumination device for photodynamic therapy, method for treating a skin disease and method for operating an illumination device” (US 17/215,785), which protects a number of innovations in the recently FDA-approved RhodoLED XL lamp.
    - Peter Meier-Beck: “From a German perspective, anti-suit injunctions should not exist” [Ed: It's a miracle! Actual reporting from JUVE for a change, not just SPAM and fake (false) news (noise); but JUVE asks a loaded question about UPC: "Can the UPC be a success without the UK?" The UPC isn't even legally possible, but the German government does not care about legality.]
      
      Peter Meier-Beck: By and large, no. I have never considered patent and antitrust law to be antagonists. Rather, patent law has always played a role in controlling competiton. However, the senate had to decide on two FRAND cases that were on the borderline of antitrust and patent law. These changed my view on the antitrust aspects of such cases.
      
      [...]
      
      Can the UPC be a success without the UK?
      
      I do think so, although it is a considerable loss for the Unified Patent Court that it will have to take place without its British colleagues. They are all very smart and pleasant partners with whom one can have good discussions and find common solutions, despite differences between the legal systems.
    - [Older] Get a Patent Quickly with the Green Channel. [Ed: The overzealous patent litigation cabal is greenwashing patents or monopolies, making an injustice seem "moral" and honourable]
      
      I recently had the pleasure of assisting the Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys with the IP auditing of finalists for the Earthshot Prize organised by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s Royal Foundation. The prize has characterised 5 environmental challenges to be solved, and awards £1million to a winner in each of the 5 categories for their innovative solutions.
    - Who’s ahead in the WiFi 6 patent race [Ed: Wi-Fi has become a trashy patent thicket with rapid evergreening of patents so as to ensure the protocols never become commons and the patent cartel always gets paid for every device sold (no matter how we use them; double- and triple-dipping patent licences)]
      
      Connected venues and cities, connected cars, connected factory and connected home are just some of the scenarios that will be made possible by the technical benefits of next-generation WiFi 6 technology. Yet the licensing of WiFi 6 SEPs is gradually becoming an issue, particularly where licensing needs to be negotiated among SEP owners and standard implementers for an array of different applications and use cases. IPlytics’ research provides an illuminating snapshot of the WiFi 6 patent landscape as it currently stands.
    - China Issues Draft Administrative Measures Allowing Foreign Patent Agencies to Open Representative Offices
      
      On October 26, 2021, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) issued the Administrative Measures for the Establishment of Permanent Representative Offices in China by Foreign Patent Agencies (Draft for Comment) (外国专利代理机构在华设立常驻代表机构管理办法（征求意见稿)). The draft Measures will allow foreign patent agencies to open up representative offices in China (as distinct from foreign law firms, which are already allowed to open up representative offices). However, unlike trademark agencies opened by many foreign firms, patent representative offices will not be allowed to prosecute Chinese patent applications.
    - As Vehicles Become Computerized, NPE Patent Owners Are Targeting Automakers [Ed: Many cars run Linux nowadays; Microsoft’s patent trolls (proxy/proxies) attack them with patents, but the media isn’t telling you that]
      
      Automakers, high-tech software companies, and electronics companies are increasingly facing similar challenges as vehicles become computers on wheels. For example, the global chip shortage is delaying the production of phones, laptops, and vehicles alike. Unsurprisingly, these similarities are also extending to how the automotive sector is being targeted by non-producing entities (NPEs) for patent infringement law suits.
      
      Software and electronics companies were historically some of the largest targets for patent infringement law suits, including those brought by NPEs. Typically, companies engage in patent infringement suits, or patent wars, to capture market share by excluding rivals from the market. However, for developing markets, such as the electric and autonomous vehicle (E/AV) market, the high cost of patent litigation makes patent wars counterproductive. This is why some leading E/AV makers are attempting to lure competitors to the market by intentionally not enforcing their patents, anticipating that this will spur market growth and consequently increase demand for their products. It is possible that these companies expected to revert to patent wars within the decade since they continue to build their patent portfolios and the E/AV market is rapidly developing, which creates the high stakes that justify patent litigation.
    - Albright Names NPE Lawyer As New Magistrate Judge For Waco [Ed: Some American (US) patent courts have been hijacked by patent trolls and their facilitators instead of proper judges; will Congress act before it's too late and parasites govern the whole system?]
      
      With the transformation of his Waco courtroom into the venue for more than 25% of all patent cases in the United States, Judge Albright can’t keep up with all the business he’s “drummed up” for his courtroom. He’s made heavy use of technical advisors—one of whom made more than $700,000 in the first half of 2021 alone—as well as deferring almost all non-patent cases to his magistrates for all pre-trial proceedings.
      
      But even with a magistrate and technical advisors, it seems like Judge Albright needs more help managing the patent docket he created in Waco. Earlier this year, the Judicial Conference authorized a second magistrate judge for the Waco court. And Judge Albright has arrived at his selection for that role, naming litigator Derek Gilliland to the position.
      
      Gilliland is a Texas lawyer, most recently operating out of Tyler in the Eastern District of Texas. But Gilliland hasn’t been a stranger to Waco. Most recently, he was plaintiff’s counsel in multiple NPE lawsuits in front of Judge Albright. Two of them stand out as particularly noteworthy.
    - Biden Administration publishes draft policy statement on standard-essential patents that strikes reasonable balance between patentees’ and implementers’ interests and bears resemblance to Huawei v. ZTE [Ed: A President that cares about actual people would dismantle SEP completely; taxing the public for oligarchy's financial gain (with no actual effort from them) isn't the way to build a just economy]
      
      Yesterday three U.S. government agencies–the Antitrust Division (ATR) of the United States Department of Justice (DOJ), the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)–invited stakeholders to submit comments by early January on a new draft policy statement on standard-essential patents (SEPs).
      
      I applaud the Biden Administration for taking–at least this stage–a very centrist position. Rather than go from one extreme (the Trump Administration’s take on SEPs) to another, the three agencies have put forward a statement that reflects a good-faith effort to strike a very reasonable balance. The draft statement warns against the risks to innovation and standards from both the overleveraging of SEPs by their owners and what others simply call hold-out tactics by unwiling licensees. As a litigation watcher, I’m well aware of the existence of either problem.
      
      My favorite part is in footnote 8, which says that “[p]roviding additional information with the licensing offer . . . may be particularly helpful to small entities that do not have the expertise or resources to fully address SEP issues and may lack access to information from which to draw assurance that proposed terms are F/RAND.”
    - “Upheaval” in European Patent Law [Ed: Typical misinformation from Team UPC this past week; there are many barriers to UPC, the least of which is Brexit, so they lie to readers; as if Austria is somehow, magically, the real barrier (it never was)]
      
      Yesterday, December 2, 2021, the Austrian Federal Council unanimously approved the ratification of the “Protocol” on the preliminary Application of the UPC (Agreement on a Unified Patent Court), following the corresponding decision of the Austrian Parliament of November 19, 2021.
      
      So far, the instrument of ratification has not yet been deposited, but this should be now only a “formality”. With the deposit of the instrument, the required number of ratifications for the “Protocol” would be reached, so that the necessary preparations for the start of the EPC (Unified Patent Court) could be made. It is planned that Germany will officially deposit its ratification of the UPC in the near future, with the consequence that the court could start after the expiration of another three months (Article 89 UPC). Hence, Germany can – and intends to – “trigger” a proper start of the UPCA in close coordination with the other Member States.
    - Fresenius Is Sued Over Patents on Ready-to-Use Calcium Infusions [Ed: Patent litigation at the expense of public health or access to remedies]
      
      Fresenius Kabi was sued by two Pharmasphere units that want the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to withdraw approval of Fresenius’s calcium gluconate in sodium chloride injection solution in Freeflex bags because it allegedly infringes two patents.
    - Genetic Technologies Announces New Partnership and geneType COVID-19 Risk Test Patent Allowance from the USPTO [Ed: The ascent of COVID profiteers with their patent monopolies; they disregard public health and look to profit from ongoing agony using monopoly]
      
      Genetic Technologies Limited (ASX: GTG; NASDAQ: GENE, “Company”, “GENE”), a global leader in genomics-based tests in health, wellness and serious disease confirms that the Company’s US patent application for its novel geneType COVID-19 Risk Test has been accepted:
    - Agrifood Brief, powered by European Snacks Association: Green Rush [Ed: Some greenwashing by a Bill Gates propaganda arm (yes, he bribes them); they’re also whitewashing corrupt EUIPO]
      
      The tendency of companies and startups from all around the world to protect the names of their green-related products and services was highlighted by a recent study carried out by the EU’s patent office (EUIPO).
    - Access to medicines critical in European Parliament vote on EU IP action plan
      
      The European Parliament Own Initiative Report on an intellectual property action plan is an important step to support the EU’s recovery and resilience following the pandemic and on equitable access to medicine.
      
      [...]
      
      “The European Parliament has clearly voted for a strong and fair IP system by underlining the importance of timely generic and biosimilar medicine competition. The misuse of divisional patents, the need to enlarge the scope of bolar to include API and all regulatory and administrative steps, and the long overdue ban anti-competitive patent linkage are well known problems that the Commission should address in the IP Action Plan. The Parliament has voted; the Commission must act.”, said Adrian van den Hoven, Director General at Medicines for Europe.
    - ABP Burger hires litigator as managing partner in Munich [Ed: Fantastic new example of JUVE having been turned into a SPAM site of patent litigation companies instead of a news site (which is what it used to be); companies hiring one low-level person isn’t noteworthy news but PR/ad]
      
      ABP Burger has recruited Eike Schaper (49) as its new head of litigation, and as managing partner. Schaper has worked in the market-leading team of IP boutique Rospatt Osten Pross in Düsseldorf since 2007.
      
      A mixed IP boutique, ABP Burger is one of the strongest litigation outfits in Austria for hard and soft IP. With the addition of Eike Schaper, the firm is now strengthening its presence in Munich. ABP Burger’s only patent attorney, as well as four other lawyers, are also active in this location.
    - CVR Medical Corp. Announces Additional Patent Grants [Ed: CVR Medical must not be aware of the sharp decline in validity of European Patents; they’re not much to boast about]
      
      CVR Medical is pleased to report that the European Patent Office (the “EPO”) has issued a Notice of the Intention to Grant application no. 16812333.9 for Non-Invasive Method for Measuring Sound Frequencies Created by Vortices in a Carotid Artery, Visualization of Stenosis, and Ablation Means. This application, exclusively licensed to CVR Medical, is directed towards a method for measuring sound from vortices in the carotid artery and is integral to CVR Medical’s Carotid Stenotic Scan (CSS) diagnostic tool. The company has paid the grant fees in certain key European markets and anticipates receiving the EPO’s Decision to Grant in due course.
    - China-set FRAND rate will imbalance market, fear patent owners [Ed: IAM, MIP and others moan about SEP (FRAND is a misnomer) only when China gets something]
      
      SEP owners say they won’t get a fair hearing in China, and that clashes over jurisdiction may be inevitable
    - Software Patents
      - Computer implemented inventions in CNIPA and the EPO – recent developments of examination practice [Ed: The criminals who have taken over the EPO in nefarious means like bribery are now shilling software patents and look who else likes this horrible agenda]
        
        Back in February of 2020, in recognising the rapid growth of the patent filing trend of computer implemented inventions (CIIs) and the expanding role of these new technologies in the Chinese economy, particularly in the fields of AI, Internet+, big data and block chain, the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) introduced a whole new section 6 in Part II, Chapter 9 of the Patent Examination Guidelines (2020 Amendment) to provide, for the first time, specific guidance on the examination of patent applications related to these information technologies.
        
        With the 2020 Amendment, CNIPA opened up a new horizon for the examination practice of CII applications. To begin with, the 2020 Amendment explicitly states that any patent claims related to abstract algorithms or business rules, insofar as they contain technical features, shall not be excluded from patent protection under Chinese Patent Law Article 25(2).
        
        Further, claims directed to abstract algorithms or business rules may be regarded as a “technical solution” under Chinese Patent Law Article 2(2), hence eligible for patent protection, provided that the relevant technical means solves a technical problem by utilising the law of the nature.
      - $6,000 for Cine Graphic Solutions prior art
        
        On December 8, 2021, Unified Patents added three separate PATROLL contests with an opportunity to collect up to $6,000 in cash for prior art on at least claim 1 of three patents – U.S. Patent 7,388,587; U.S. Patent 7,629,977 and U.S. Patent 8,035,644 – all owned by Cine Graphic Solutions, an NPE and a subsidiary of Strategic Intellectual Solutions, LLC. Each patent generally relates to providing animation in electronic communications, such as emails and websites. The patents have been asserted against Motorola, Samsung, and Fujifilm.
      - First Patent Pool for 3GPP Infrastructure Launched to Help Accelerate 5G [Ed: Well, it looks like Unified Patent is ‘colluding’ with patent troll MPEG-LA and its software patents]
        
        Alium, a joint patent pool venture between MPEG LA and Unified Patents, is supporting the development of Open RAN by providing a solution to the uncertainty and risk posed by the more than 100,000 essential patents already self-declared.
      - Mirror Imaging patent challenged
        
        On December 9, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 9,928,275, owned by Mirror Imaging, LLC, an NPE. The ‘275 patent is generally related to financial document retrieval and storage systems and has been asserted against Bank of America, Wells Fargo, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Capital One, PNC Bank, BancorpSouth Bank, and others.
      - Unified Loses Challenge To Video Patent But Avoids Naming Members [Ed: Does the patent maximalist Matthew Bultman cherry-pick such outcomes?]
        
        Unified Patents LLC lost its challenge to a patent essential to a video coding standard, although a patent review board said it didn’t have to decide whether Unified members should have been named as interested parties.
        
        The Patent Trial and Appeal Board said Unified hadn’t shown the disputed claim in U.S. Patent No. 8,867,854 is invalid. The patent, covering a video compression technique, is owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute and other Korean research groups.
  - Trademarks
    - China TM data shows low preference for settlement and appeal
      
      Managing IP digs into the low appeal and settlement rates in trademark litigations and administrative actions in China
    - The TTABlog^®: Precedential No. 33: “LOCH MOOSE MONSTER” Fends Off Monster Energy’s Lack-of-Bona-Fide-Intent Summary Judgment Motion
      
      Tom & Martha LLC’s application to register the mark LOCH MOOSE MONSTER for gift shop goods and services survived a feeble summary judgment attack by frequent TTAB plaintiff Monster Energy, who claimed that the applicant lacked a bona fide intent to use the mark in commerce. Although the evidence did not show that applicant “took concrete steps to launch all the goods and services in its application,” it did show applicant’s “capacity to market” them. The existence of a genuine issue of material fact as to applicant’s bona fide intent precluded summary judgment. Monster Energy Company v. Tom & Martha LLC, Opposition No. 91250710 (December 8, 2021) [precedential].
      
      [...]
      
      Applicant argued, and Mr. Byrne confirmed in a declaration, that applicant is a small business that has developed a number of marks intended for use on a wide range of consumer goods; its brand development strategy is to identify a brand, file an intent to use application for the intended goods, and then start the process of bringing the goods to market. Moreover, applicant produced photographs showing use of its LOCH MOOSE MONSTER mark on hooded sweatshirts, t-shirts, canvas tote bags, hats, and mugs.
    - TTABlog Test: Are Glass Ornaments Related to Dried Flower Arrangements Under Section 2(d)?
      
      The USPTO refused registration of the proposed mark EVERLASTING ROSE for “Ornaments of glass; Ornaments of glass, namely, glass roses,” finding confusion likely with the identical mark registered for “Dried flower arrangements; Dried flowers; Flowers, dried, for decoration.” Applicant submitted three third-party registrations for EVERLASTING-formative marks (for baskets for flower arrangements, live plants, and jewelry) in arguing that “EVERLASTING” is a weak formative, and it pointed to registrant’s arguments regarding the weakness of “EVERLASTING” when the registrant overcame a refusal of its underlying application. How do you think this came out? In re 1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc., Serial No. 88690528 (December 6, 2021) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Cindy B. Greenbaum).
      
      Absent proof of use, third-party registrations do not impact the commercial strength of the cited mark. However, coupled with a dictionary definition of “everlasting,” this evidence led the Board to conclude that “everlasting” is suggestive of dried flowers, “as consumers would expect the dried flowers to last longer than live flowers, but they would not expect them to last literally forever.” In any event, none of the three third-party marks is as close to registrant’s mark as is applicant’s mark. [How could they be? - ed.].
    - [Guest post] Milan loses derby against Inter… in Court
      
      Katfriend Federica Combariati (TM IP Counsel at Assa Abloy) discusses a recent decision relating to AC Milan’s attempt to extend its international trade mark registration for its club logo to the territory of the European Union.
      
      The General Court rejected an appeal brought by AC Milan (nicknamed also Rossoneri) and considered that the brand characterizing Rossoneri’s emblem could not be registered as an EU trade mark (EUTM) since it would give rise to a likelihood of confusion with the earlier German trade mark ‘Milan’ held by the company InterES.
      
      [...]
      
      InterES Handels-und Dienstleistungs Gesellschaft GmbH & Co KG, a German company very active in the office supply industry, began its battle for protecting its brand back in 2017, when AC Milan filed an international registration designating the European Union before the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO). Registration was sought for the following figurative sign concerning, inter alia, goods in Class 16 (stationery and office supplies) of the Nice Classification…
    - Protecting Your Online Brand on Amazon [Ed: Amazon as a force of centralisation has become a menace to many]
      
      In today’s ever-expanding ecommerce environment, online brand protection and enforcement has become a necessary undertaking of paramount importance for brand owners in efforts to combat the illicit trade of counterfeit and infringing products. With around 2 million active sellers on Amazon, and approximately 200 million active Amazon Prime subscribers, it’s easy to understand why brand owners choose to offer their products on Amazon.
      
      Amazon has established itself as the gold standard of the modern consumer experience, offering essentially unparalleled fast and efficient customer service. However, brand owners selling their products on Amazon have struggled to control the consumer experience, risking reputation and goodwill established in their brands that may have taken significant amounts of time and money to develop.
    - TTABlog Test: Is “GOAT GREATEST OF ALL TIME” Merely Descriptive of Vodka?
      
      AAN Holding, LLC. applied to register the mark GOAT GREATEST OF ALL TIME for vodka, but the USPTO refused registration on the ground of Section 2(e)(1) mere descriptiveness. Applicant pointed to five Principal Register registrations for marks that include a variation of GOAT GREATEST OF ALL TIME without disclaimer or Section 2(f) claim, arguing that these registrations “show an Office practice of allowing GOAT GREATEST OF ALL TIME and other common phrases and expressions to register.” How do you think this came out? In re AAN Holdings, LLC, Serial No. 88130411 (December 6, 20201) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Marc A. Bergsman).
    - WYHA? TTAB Finds “5 DAY FASTING DIET” Merely Descriptive of Nutritionally Balanced Prepared Meals
      
      The Board affirmed a Section 2(e)(1) refusal of 5 DAY FASTING DIET, finding the proposed mark to be merely descriptive of nutritionally balanced prepared meals for medical use sold only after consultation with a doctor. Applicant L-Nutra feebly argued, inter alia, that the word “fast” could not immediately describe its goods because the word has 37 different dictionary meanings. Not so fast, said the Board. In re L-Nutra, Inc., Serial No. 88757432 (December 3, 2021) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Christopher Larkin).
      
      L-Nutra insisted that a consumer could not, just by looking at the mark, understand that the goods require a medical consultation. The Board pointed out, however, that “these arguments reflect an all-too-common and fundamental misunderstanding of the test for mere descriptiveness, but they are particularly troubling here because Applicant’s counsel is not writing them on a clean slate.” The Board had rejected the same arguments in two other appeals filed by L-Nutra: for the proposed marks 1 DAY FASTING DIET and FASTING BAR. As the Board pointed out in both prior decisions, “the fact that the word ‘fast’ ‘may have other meanings in different contexts is not controlling.’”
    - Precedential No. 32: Color “Cream” for Guitar Pickups Lacks Acquired Distinctiveness, Says TTAB
      
      A single color mark on a product design is registrable only upon a showing of acquired distinctiveness. Wal-Mart (citing Qualitex). Applicant Dimarzio, Inc. failed to prove that its claimed color “cream” for electronic guitar pickups met that test, and so the Board affirmed a refusal to register under Sections 1, 2, and 45 of the Lanham Act. Among other problems with Dimarzio’s evidence, the Board found that its use of the proposed mark was not substantially exclusive, as required under Section 2(f). In re Dimarzio, Inc., Serial No. 87213400 (December 3, 2021) [precedential] (Opinion by Judge Mark Lebow).
      
      Pagination problem: Dimarzio led off with a sour note when the Board refused to consider its appeal brief because the brief exceeded the 25-page limit of Rule 2.142(b)(2). Examining Attorney Tasneem Hussein blew the whistle, pointing out that the brief was 16-pages long but not single-spaced, as required by Rule 2.126(a)(1). The Board sustained her objection, agreeing that the brief would have exceeded 25 pages if double-spaced (at 250 words per page). The Board, however, did consider Dimarzio’s reply brief.

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Links 12/12/2021: GNU Releases and Haiku Activity Report

Posted in News Roundup at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux
- Distributions
- Devices/Embedded
Free Software/Open Source
Leftovers

GNU/Linux
- Audiocasts/Shows
  - The Spirit Of Audacity Lives On In Audacium And Tenacity – Invidious
    
    Several months ago, the very popular free and open source audio editor Audacity was purchased by a company and begin making some very questionable decisions, such as adding telemetry and adding age restrictions to the software.
- Kernel Space
  - More Apple M1 Bring-Up For Linux Continues: SPI, SimpleDRM, PMU – Phoronix
    
    One year after Apple introduced the M1 SoC and the effort began to bring-up this Apple Silicon under Linux, the effort remains ongoing and more code is inching closer to the mainline kernel.
    
    Recently work got underway on the new M1 Pro / M1 Max for Linux that fortunately isn’t too invasive for changes over the original M1. With the Linux 5.16 kernel there is the M1 PCIe driver, Apple CD321X USB, and then ahead for Linux 5.17 already queued up is an Apple PMGR driver, PCIe clock gating, and DT updates.
  - Linux Prepares For More Code Sharing Between AMD SEV + Intel TDX – Phoronix
    
    Coming with future Intel CPUs is Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) to further enhance the security of virtual machines (VMs) and it’s sounded a lot like AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) in many regards and in fact now for the Linux kernel Intel is looking at leveraging some of that SEV code to allow for more code sharing between these CPU features to improve virtualization security.
- Instructionals/Technical
  - How to install and configure wine on Ubuntu 21.10/21.04 – NextGenTips
    
    Wine is a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on several POSIX-compliant operating systems i.e Linux, macOS, and BSD. Instead of simulating internal Windows logic like a virtual machine or emulator, Wine translates Windows API calls into POSIX calls instantly eliminating the performance and memory penalties of other methods and allowing you to integrate Windows applications in your desktop.
    
    In this tutorial, I will take you through the installation steps of Wine in Ubuntu 21.10/21.04.
  - How to reduce Google Chrome’s CPU usage
    
    Google Chrome is the best performing browser available today, but all that speed comes at a price. To work fast, it needs to use more CPU than other browsers – and more CPU means more battery consumption .
    
    This is just one of the reasons for not using Chrome on a MacBook, for example. Its heavy dependence on the CPU means that it can affect the performance of other applications and cause your fan to make a lot of noise in an attempt to expel the extra heat. But if you like working with the Google browser , there are some tips that can help you reduce excessive CPU usage and other problems that can drain your computer’s power.
  - How to Setup and Configure UFW Firewall on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable
    
    One of the keystones of any operating system is a properly configured firewall for complete system security. Debian uses IP tables; however, most users will opt to use software that works as a front end for it with UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall).
    
    Some of the great benefits of UFW are its simplicity, user-friendly and easy-to-use command line, making it great for beginners in Linux to the most advanced power users.
    
    In the following tutorial, you will learn to install and set up UFW Firewall on Debian 11 Bullseye.
    
    Prerequisites
  - How to Install Metasploit Framework on Debian 11 Bullseye – LinuxCapable
    
    The Metasploit Framework is an open-source project that provides public resources for vulnerability research and code development. It allows security professionals to detect intrusions into their network and identify threats and vulnerabilities in various areas such as software, systems, or networks. Metasploit comes jam-packed with existing exploits but gives the framework to create your own custom exploits.
  - How To Install OpenOffice on Debian 11
    
    In this tutorial, we will show you how to install OpenOffice on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache OpenOffice is a free and open-source office productivity software suite similar to LibreOffice and Microsoft Office suite. It was initially developed for Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Solaris and later distributed for other operating systems. The OpenOffice suite included multiple applications to perform various functions such as OpenOffice Writer package for a word processor, Calc package for spreadsheet tasks, Impress is used for presentation application, Draw is for drawing application and many more.
    
    This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the OpenOffice on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
  - Maybe fix for samba
  - How To Add Search To A Jekyll Site
    
    When I flipped from WordPress to Jekyll, one thing I really missed was the ability to search my posts on-site. I’ve now added a proper search tool and this post will show you can do it too.
  - Why it’s good to explicitly document the purposes of things, illustrated
    
    Today we decommissioned some internal DNS zones for things that we aren’t using or aren’t doing any more. Among them were three internal iSCSI zones, which makes sense since we haven’t used iSCSI since we moved away from our OmniOS fileservers to our Linux fileservers. But when my co-worker doing the work told me about this, I was surprised that there were three iSCSI networks, since our Solaris and OmniOS fileservers only used two iSCSI networks.
  - Ship System Logs to ELK Stack using Elastic Agents – kifarunix.com
    
    This tutorial will take you through how to ship system logs to ELK stack using Elastic Agents. You might be so used to using Elastic beats such as Filebeat, metricsbeat, Winlogbeat etc. to ship log from your end points to ELK for visualization. However, Elastic has announced the general availability Elastic Agents. Elastic Agent is a single, unified agent that you deploy to hosts or containers to collect data and send it to the Elastic Stack. Behind the scenes, Elastic Agent runs the Beats shippers or Elastic Endpoint required for your configuration.
  - Detect Changes to Critical Files in Linux using Auditbeat and ELK – kifarunix.com
    
    In this tutorial, you will learn how to detect changes to critical files in Linux using Auditbeat and ELK. Auditbeat is one of the elastic beats that according to Elastic page, collects Linux audit framework data and monitor the integrity of the files. It ships these events in real time to the rest of the Elastic Stack for further analysis. It enables you to find out who was the actor? What action did they perform and when?.
  - How to get character encoding of a file in Linux – kifarunix.com
    
    Are you trying to get character encoding of a file in Linux? Well, follow through this guide to learn some simple ways that you can use to find or get character encoding of file in Linux.
  - How To Install Microsoft Edge on AlmaLinux 8 [Ed: Utterly dumb and irresponsible tips; they urge people to put a password stealer on GNU/Linux boxes; also, if you are installing Microsoft proprietary software on GNU/Linux you typically add spyware of Microsoft to your system with root-level access, pinging Microsoft every time updates are polled for and giving the NSA’a darling power to do anything to your machine (you practically give them root)]
  - How to Install MySQL 8.0 on AlmaLinux 8 – LinuxCapable
    
    MySQL is a relational database management system based on SQL (Structured Query Language). It is one of the most widely used database software for several well-known applications that utilize it. MySQL is used for data warehousing, e-commerce, and logging applications, but its most used feature is a web database storage and management.
    
    AlmaLinux comes with MySQL in its AppStream. However, as many know, it is not the latest release. In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install MySQL 8.0 using the AppStream or the latest Community version RPM from MySQL repositories on AlmaLinux 8.
- Games
  - “In the Name of Hades! I Accept This Message” – Boiling Steam
    
    Picture back to the time you were 19. Or 18. Or some other age in your teenage/young adult life where you tried to escape from home. You’re tired of your parents’ rules, you’re tired of them and your siblings, and you wanted to get away from the drama.
    
    If you actually did that, there’s a probable chance that you suffered the painful consequences. You didn’t take the time to first sit down and calculate the expense as to what it’s like living in the real world. As a result, you found out that the world is a cold place, you were treated far worse than you were at home, and with the little money left in your pocket, you discover you can’t afford your own place. Then you learn that maybe home isn’t so bad after all.
    
    In Hades, it takes that metaphor to a whole new level. You’re in control of a young prince and God named Zagreus, who lives in what is called the Underworld. Even though he may be a God, he’s not immortal. Like you, the reader, may have wanted to do at some point in your life, Zagreus wants to leave home and reach the surface in the hopes of finding more purpose in life and wanting to have nothing to do with the family. But he’s going to have to fight through hell and back in order to do that, making his way across the various chambers his father has laid down while slaying the enemies that are contained in each. And let me tell you, it’s not going to be easy.
    
    [...]
    
    I mean, Hades was one of the games showcased on the Steam Deck. What more do I have to say here? It works great out-of-the-box on Proton and Proton GE. There’s no video playback, no anti-cheat (it’s a single-player game), so no issues there. Gamepads work as expected. The game is rated Platinum over on ProtonDB.
- Desktop Environments/WMs
  - K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
    - TLP has unintended side effects on Mobile devices
      
      We often get a complaint that Plasma Mobile is laggy. Today I wanted to debug it, one of the best way to debug this is to check if something is making use of system resources when it should not.
- Distributions
  - Upgrade Kali Linux 2021.3 to 2021.4 – kifarunix.com
    
    Learn how to upgrade Kali Linux 2021.3 to 2021.4. Kali Linux 2021.4 has just been released.
  - BSD
    - BSDCan – The BSD Conference
      
      BSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa, Canada, quickly established itself as the technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects. The organizers have found a fantastic formula that appeals to a wide range of people from extreme novices to advanced developers.
    - What are the VPN available on OpenBSD
      
      I wanted to write this text for some time, a list of VPN with encryption that can be used on OpenBSD. I really don’t plan to write about all of them but I thought it was important to show the choices available when you want to create a VPN between two peers/sites.
  - Slackware Family
    - Chromium 96 update (also for ungoogled variant)
      
      I have uploaded a set of new packages, both for Chromium 96.0.4664.93 and its “un-googled” variant.
      
      I am lagging a bit behind on the source release which happened last monday, but my mind is occupied with all the stuff that is needed to get ready for out-of-the-box SecureBoot support.
  - IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
    - Fedora 35 – What’s new from the developer’s perspective | FOSS Linux
      
      The official stable release for Fedora 35 was made available for download on Nov 2, 2021, after being pushed back to resolve some outstanding blocking bugs. However, the wait was worth it! The release cycle includes Fedora Server, spins, IoT, and Fedora labs with curated software packages to suit niche requirements. In addition, it features GNOME 41, updated developer tools, new programming languages, power management profiles, improved software management of other third-party apps.
      
      This article is a software developer’s insight into new features, development tools, Fedora Labs, and improvements in Fedora Linux 35.
  - Canonical/Ubuntu Family
    - Ubuntu Web: A Chrome OS Alternative That Respects Your Privacy
      
      Ubuntu Web is a free, privacy-focused alternative to Chrome OS. You can use this community-developed Ubuntu Remix to create a Chrome OS-like web experience on any computer.
      
      While still young and under development, Ubuntu Web is giving users a choice with a full suite of privacy-respecting, open-source alternatives that stand up well against Google’s notoriously information-hungry web OS and apps.
      
      If you want a web-based OS that doesn’t feed on your personal information, Ubuntu Web is it. In this article, we’re going to show you where to get it, how to install it, and what you can do with it.
- Devices/Embedded
  - Develop USB Host and Device applications with ESP32-S3-USB-OTG board – CNX Software
    
    ESP32-S series chips like ESP32-S2 and ESP32-S3 come with a USB OTG interface, and Espressif unveiled the ESP32-S3-USB-OTG board last September in a post entitled “ESP-USB: Espressif’s Wireless Communication Solution“, where they mostly focused on USB code samples with documentation in Chinese only and provided few details about the board itself.
    
    But I browsed the company’s official Aliexpress store earlier this week, and I noticed ESP32-S3-USB-OTG board was up for sale for $35 plus shipping, with additional information now available, so let’s have a closer look.
  - A DIY Biometric Device with Some Security Considerations
    
    Biohacking projects are not new to Hackaday and it’s certainly a genre that really piques our interest. Our latest biohacking device comes courtesy of [Manivannan] who brings his flavor of a wearable biosensor with some security elements built-in through AWS.
    
    The hardware is composed of some impressive components we have seen. He has an AD8232 electrocardiogram front end, the MAX30102 integrated pulse oximeter IC for determining blood oxygen and heart rate, and the ever-popular LM35 for measuring body temperature. Either of these chips would be perfect for your next DIY biosensor project though you might try the MAX30205 body temperature sensor given its 0.1-degree Celsius accuracy. However, what really piqued our interest was the use of Microchip’s AVR-IoT WA Development Board. Now we’ve talked about this board before and also mentioned you could probably do all the same things with an ESP-device, but perhaps now we get to see the board a bit more in action.
  - Time to review the phone that I helped make!
    
    This phone is successful at its main goal: being un-addictive.
    
    I’m overall happy with it and hope it’ll last me for a long, long time.
  - Open Hardware/Modding
    - Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 4: how algorithms are implemented
      
      The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses two custom digital chips to generate sounds with a technique called FM synthesis, producing complex, harmonically-rich sounds. Each note was implemented with one of 32 different patterns of modulation and summing, called algorithms. In this blog post, I look inside the sound chip and explain how the algorithms were implemented.
  - Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
- Free, Libre, and Open Source Software
  - Best Free and Open Source Alternatives to Corel WordPerfect Office
    
    Corel Corporation is a Canadian software company specializing in graphics processing. They are best known for developing CorelDRAW, a vector graphics editor. They are also notable for purchasing and developing AfterShot Pro, PaintShop Pro, Painter, Video Studio, MindManager, and WordPerfect.
    
    Corel has dabbled with Linux over the years. For example they produced Corel Linux, a Debian-based distribution which bundled Corel WordPerfect Office for Linux. While Corel effectively abandoned its Linux business in 2001 they are not completely Linux-phobic. For example, AfterShot Pro has an up to date Linux version albeit its proprietary software.
    
    This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives to products offered by Corel.
  - Open source 3D pixel art with Goxel
    
    make it no secret that I love Lego, but I’ve moved far away from my Lego collection, and shipping a closet full of classic Lego sets all the way around the world is currently a problematic proposal. I’ve done a lot of virtualization to solve this problem, from building models in Lego CAD to styling models with a Lego texture in Blender. Recently I discovered Goxel. This shockingly easy 3D modeling application makes no conceit of being Lego-based or even Lego-adjacent. Yet, the sensation of building models with 3D pixels is surprisingly similar to the satisfaction of building with Lego bricks. You can think of Goxel as a pixel paint program, but in 3D.
  - Haiku activity report – November 2021
    
    Kallisti5 fixed some minor problems with the PowerPC port to keep it building and simplify it a bit. Kallisti5 and waddlesplash also continued cleaning up the RISC-V sources and fixing various minor issues there.
  - SaaS/Back End/Databases
    - Have you tried rubbing a database on it?
      
      As a result of too much coffee and twitter before breakfast, I’m organizing a conference on strange and unusual applications of data-centric ideas.
  - Productivity Software/LibreOffice/Calligra
    - [Old] Python Guide – Introduction
      
      LibreOffice allows the users to write macros in several interpreted languages, one of which is Python. PyUNO is the component that gives users access to the application programming interface (API hereinafter by its acronym Application Programming Interface) of LibreOffice with Python.
    - [Old] Python Guide – My First Macro
      
      All Python examples are stored as PC-based personal macros, as opposed to product Python scripts or document-based scripts. Any example in this guide assumes that you save in this place.
  - FSF
    - GNU Projects
      - GNU Serveez 0.3.0 available
        
        release notes: Quite a few years since the last release. Here's to another decade of GNU Serveez updates! README excerpt: GNU Serveez is a server framework. It provides routines and help for implementing IP-based servers (currently TCP, UDP and ICMP). It supports named pipes for all connection-oriented protocols. We think it is worth the effort because many people need server functionality within their applications. However, many people experience problems with select(2) or poll(2) loops, and with non-blocking operations. GNU Serveez demonstrates various aspects of advanced network programming in a portable manner. It is known to compile and run on GNU/Linux systems, as well as on other 32-bit and 64-bit flavours of Unix and on Microsoft Windows (9x/ME/NT/2000/XP). You can use it for implementing your own servers or for understanding how certain network services and operations work. NEWS for 0.3.0 (2021-12-06): - distribution no longer in .xz format The .lz tarball works fine, 'nuff said. - many portability tweaks GNU Serveez now compiles and passes "make check" on a 64-bit system with Guile 2.2.7 installed. There are also changes for Guile 2.0 in the mix. NB: Guile 2.x "auto-compilation" is suppressed during configure and build phases. To manually disable it for testing, use: "make check GUILE_AUTO_COMPILE=0". Contributions for OSX and other BSDs have been installed (but not tested by the maintainers). THANKS to Julian Graham. - miscellaneous bugfixes Some of these relate to 32- vs 64-bit assumptions. Others are to appease the ever more stringent demands of modern C compilers (i.e., GCC). Some are related to the portability tweaks, above. One in particular addresses CVE-2019-16200. THANKS to Austin James Gadient. - shell used for "make check" can be specified You can do "make check CHECKSHELL=/my/spiffy/sh", for example. THANKS to Eric Bavier. - bootstrap/maintenance tools upgraded: Guile-BAUX 20211106.0154.1368008 GNU Texinfo 6.8 GNU Automake 1.16.5 GNU gnulib 2021-12-06 00:16:10 GNU Autoconf 2.71 as before: GNU Libtool 2.4.6
      - GNU Guile-SDL 0.5.3 available
        
        release notes: Tested w/ Guile 2.2.7 and SDL 1.2. README excerpt: Guile-SDL is a set of modules that provide bindings for various Simple DirectMedia Layer (http://www.libsdl.org) libraries. Most of the SDL functions are wrapped, with the exception of a few functions that are too C-centric. The SDL threads, audio and network functions are not included. However, there are (optionally configured) bindings for SDL_mixer and SDL_ttf. Also included is SDL_gfx 2.0.22 (by Andreas Schiffler) source code (LGPL 2.1) and bindings for it. This is alpha code (pre 1.0 release), tested with various, but not all, versions of Guile and SDL. It may have bugs, and the interfaces may change from version to version. NEWS for 0.5.3 (2021-12-11): - distribution now .tar.lz only If you have GNU tar, you can use "tar xf" and it will DTRT. If not, you can use "lzip -dc TARBALL | tar xf -" to unpack it. - configuration changes - Guile "auto-compilation" suppressed During configure script execution, ‘GUILE_AUTO_COMPILE=0’ is in the environment. This disables the on-the-fly compilation of .scm code to .go files. During "make", it's up to you to do the same, should you desire. - new option: ‘--enable-sed-scripts-installation’ The distribution includes sed scripts to help transition client code from pre-0.5.0 interfaces to 0.5.0 (2013-07-19) and later. Since it's been several years since the previous release, it's unlikely that these will still be useful. For new Guile-SDL installations, you don't need, and can safely ignore, them. - new option: ‘--disable-embedded-gfx’ This causes module ‘(sdl gfx)’ to be built to load the installed (system) SDL_gfx dynamically (if possible) instead of embedding it statically, the default. See README. - intermittent crash fixed (but maybe not so smoothly) In recent systems, XCB (an underlying technology of the X Window System) has become particular about threads and their sequence numbers. This was evidenced by a crash in test/cursor.scm, on occasion. Guile-SDL now does a preventative call to ‘XInitThreads’ on load of module ‘(sdl sdl)’, at the earliest possible moment. This solves the crash issue, but at the cost of violating abstraction (not all SDL installations run over X). If you encounter problems building or running Guile-SDL as a result of this, please report it and we'll find Another Way. - Guile "auto-compilation" suppressed for "make check" This works like for the configure script, by setting env var ‘GUILE_AUTO_COMPILE’ to "0". - test/mixer.scm more graceful During "make check", test/mixer.scm tries to output sound (assuming ‘INTERACTIVE=1’ in the environment). If your sound device is busy, it used to fail. Now it simply skips the test (exit 77). - bootstrap/maintenance tools upgraded: Guile-BAUX 20211106.0154.1368008 GNU gnulib 2021-12-06 00:16:10 GNU Autoconf 2.71 GNU Automake 1.16.5 GNU Texinfo 6.8 as before: GNU Libtool 2.4.6
  - Programming/Development
    - Intel Contributes A Number Of Vulkan Filters/Improvements To FFmpeg – Phoronix
      
      Aside from the separate work around experimental Vulkan Video decode support, thanks to Intel recently there have been a number of Vulkan improvements to the FFmpeg code around new accelerated filters.
      
      Last year saw early Vulkan support landing in FFmpeg and that has continued since for this widely-used multimedia library. Thanks to Intel engineers there have been some recent Vulkan additions in FFmpeg Git.
    - “Open Source” is Broken
      
      All software is made on top of the shoulders of giants. Consider something as basic as running an SSH server on the Linux kernel. In the mix you would have at least 10 vendors (assuming a minimal Alpine Linux system in its default configuration), which means that there are at least 10 separate organizations that still have bills to pay with actual money dollars regardless of the number of users of the software they are giving away for free. Alpine Linux is also a great example of this because it is used frequently in Docker contexts to power many, many companies in production. How many of those companies do you think fund the Alpine Linux project? How many of those companies do you think even would even THINK about funding the Alpine Linux project?
      
      I’ve had this kind of conversation with people before and I’ve gotten a surprising amount of resistance to the prospect of actually making sure that the random smattering of volunteers that LITERALLY MAKE THEIR COMPANY RUN are able to make rent. There is this culture of taking from open source without giving anything back. It is like the problems of the people who make the dependencies are irrelevant.
    - Advent of 2021, Day 10 – Working with data frames
      
      On the other hand, dataframe is organised dataset with named columns. It offers much better optimizations and computations and still resembles a typical table (as we know it from database world). Dataframes can be constructed from arrays or from matrices from variety of files, SQL tables, and datasets (RDDs). Dataframe API is available in all flavours: Java, Scala, R and Python and hence it’s popularity.
    - Branchless Git
      
      One Git usage pattern that I think is underused is the “branchless” workflow. The idea here is pretty intuitive if you’ve used trunk-based development: there’s just one “main” branch that everything gets merged into. No feature branches, no release branches, no hotfix branches.
      
      The “branchless” workflow is, in a nutshell: You work in a stack of atomic commits which are all eventually intended to be merged into a single trunk branch. Each commit can become a pull request, and each pull request consists of a single commit.
    - Perl/Raku
      - Raku Advent Calendar: Day 12: A long journey to Ethereum signatures
        
        The Ethereum blockchain is essentially a transaction-based state machine. We begin with a blank state, before any transactions have happened on the network, and move into some final state when transactions are executed. The state of Ethereum relies on past transactions. These transactions are grouped into blocks and each block is chained together with its parent.
        
        Transactions are processing by own Turing complete virtual machine – known as the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). The EVM has its own language: EVM bytecode. Typically programmer writes the program in a higher-level language such as Solidity. Then the program should be compiled down to EVM bytecode and commited to the Ethereum network as the new transaction. The EVM executes the transaction recursively, computing the system state and the machine state.
        
        The EVM is included into the Ethereum node client software that verifies all transactions in each block, keeping the network secure and the data accurate. Many Ethereum clients exist, in a variety of programming languages such as Go, Rust, Java and others. They all follow a formal specification, it dictates how the Ethereum network and blockchain functions.
        
        In this article we will consider Geth as the basic Ethereum node software.
      - A (not so) simple matter of privacy
        
        You may have seen Ovid’s recent post on his discussions with the Perl Steering Committee about moving forward with implementing an initial subset of the Corinna proposal in the Perl core.
        
        One of the issues that came up during those discussions was the best way to provide private methods in Corinna.
    - Rust
      - Rust for Linux Progresses with New Abstractions and Infrastructure [Ed: Linux the kernel -- not just Linux Foundation -- increasingly being controlled by the Microsoft, i.e. the thugs who attack him internationally]
        
        A new patch for Linux advances support for Rust as a second language for kernel development. Besides updating the infrastructure and providing new abstractions around kernel features, the new patch sets the base for more frequent submissions, writes Rust for Linux project lead Miguel Ojeda.
        
        The new patch comes a few months after the initial contribution setting the stage for using Rust for drivers and modules and taking advantage of its superior memory safety model.
        
        With the new submission, Rust for Linux moved to using the latest stable release of the Rust compiler, version 1.57.0. The objective here is not relying eventually on any unstable language features and being able to declare a minimum Rust version required for kernel development. The new infrastructure also includes a number of new diagnostics and clippy lints to ensure stricter checks.

Leftovers
- Comet
  
  Comet. Wallpaper illustation by Margo de Weerdt
- Education
  - Amid Staffing and Mental Health Crises, Teachers Say Test Prep Is Wrong Priority
- Hardware
  - Silent Films Offer Rare Glimpses of Life in 1920s Ireland
    
    Mr. Gault shot on 35-millimeter nitrate film, which was rare for a hobbyist because it was a very professional and higher-resolution medium, Mr. McManus said. The downside is that nitrate is also unstable and flammable, which makes the film hard to preserve.
    
    “First of all, these are amateur films shot 100 years ago that, fortunately, nobody ever threw out,” Mr. Byrne said. “Films like these are disappearing. They’re a huge, single unique copy on a combustible, flammable, deteriorating film base. Fifty years from now, this film would not exist at all.”
  - We All Live In A PVC Submarine | Hackaday
    
    We doubt you could really live in [Pena’s] PVC submarine, but now the song’s stuck in our head anyway. Although the post is in Portuguese, you can get a pretty good idea of how it works, and translation software is better than ever. Transcending the language barrier, there are videos of just about every step of the construction. We didn’t, however, find a video of the vehicle in the water.
    
    The plumber’s delight has modified motors for thrusters, and a camera as well. Epoxy potting keeps things waterproof. We’ve seen candle wax used for the same purpose in other builds.
- Health/Nutrition/Agriculture
  - ‘Shut Down Red Hill’: Solidarity Action Rebukes Navy Over Toxic Water Pollution
    
    Activists with CodePink, in solidarity with Hawaii-based water protectors, on Friday projected images on a submarine tower outside the Navy museum in Washington, D.C., calling for a shutdown of a military fuel storage facility associated with contamination of Oahu drinking water.
    
    Messages displayed on the USS Balao Conning Tower included “Shut down Red Hill tanks,” “Demilitarize Hawaii,” and “Navy is poison.”
  - Pharma-Backed Group Hosted Dem Staffers at Resort Before Build Back Better Vote
  - Völner resigns, Far-right EP group fails to launch, and green light to vaccine mandate
    
    On the morning of December 7, the chief prosecutor’s office had requested the waiver of the immunity of member of parliament Pál Völner, secretary of state in the minister of justice.
    
    Such a high-ranking politician, who incidentally is a key player in the Pegasus surveillance scandal, has never been found in such an unpleasant situation in the government of Viktor Orbán.
  - Two-year follow up shows delaying umbilical cord clamping saves babies’ lives
    
    An Australian-led study finds that aiming to wait just 60 seconds to clamp the umbilical cord of very premature babies at birth continues to have benefits two years on – decreasing the child’s risk of death or major disability.
  - Hesitancy, Apathy and Unused Doses: Zambia’s Vaccination Challenges
    
    Vaccine misinformation spreads on TikTok and WhatsApp, and in evangelical churches where pastors warn that the shot “contains the mark of the beast.”
    
    “No matter how educated people are, if their pastor says don’t trust the vaccine, they don’t trust,” said Dr. Morton Zuze, the clinical care coordinator at Chongwe District Hospital, where seven staff members sat idle in an empty vaccination tent.
    
    As in the United States, there are false rumors in Zambia that the vaccine causes female infertility or erectile dysfunction. Zambians have heard AstraZeneca is not being used in many countries because of reports of blood clots in a very small number of people who received that shot. “It’s a global village and everyone can switch on CNN,” Dr. Zuze added.
  - Policeman martyred, FC officer injured in gun attack on polio team in KP’s Tank district
    
    Tank District Police Officer (DPO) Sajjad Ahmed told Dawn.com that police and FC personnel were guarding the polio teams in the Chadrar area situated on main Wana Road when gunmen opened fire.
  - Pakistani Taliban claim deadly attack on polio vaccination team
    
    The militant group Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) on Saturday claimed responsibility for an attack on a team offering polio vaccinations to children.
    
    Gunmen riding a motorcycle shot at two police officers who were guarding the medical team, killing one and wounding the other, officials said.
- Integrity/Availability
  - Proprietary
    - Security
      - Russell Coker: Some Ideas for Debian Security Improvements
        
        Debian security is pretty good, but there’s always scope for improvement. Here are some ideas that I think could be used to improve things.
      - SUSE Statement on log4j / log4shell / CVE-2021-44228 / Vulnerability
        
        On Friday December 10 morning a new exploit in “log4j” Java logging framework was reported, that can be trivially exploited. This vulnerability is caused by a new feature introduced in log4j 2.x versions where a specific string embedded in messages logged by log4j would be interpreted by log4j to connect to remote sites and even execute code directly.
      - InfoSec Handbook: 2022 and beyond
        
        In 2021, we spent our leisure time for the following improvements and changes on infosec-handbook.eu:
        
        Revising our content: Frequent readers know that we removed most of our content in July. This is an ongoing effort to update our articles accordingly. We think, 3-year old guidance to configure certain software doesn’t help our readers and may not improve their security at all. We republish updated articles as soon as possible.
        
        Optimizing our theme: Thanks to further optimization by Jakub, your web browser loads more and more files only if needed. For instance, instead of putting all CSS in a huge file, we split it in numerous files and tell your web browser when to load the rest. This approach results in less network traffic and even faster loading speed of our website (which is already really fast).
        
        Experimenting with a JavaScript-based search feature: The InfoSec Handbook comes without any search feature at the moment. While you can use the Sitemap, tags, categories, and navigation to access all content, no easier way to search for it exists. Currently, we experiment with a JavaScript-based search feature. It may provide an optional way to search for content in the future. If readers block JavaScript, they can access our website without any limitation.
        
        New virtual server: We migrated our content to a new virtual server that consumes less power.
      - Privacy/Surveillance
        
        Wearables Can Detect the Flu? Well…Maybe… [Ed: Unwittingly promoting mass surveillance agenda in safety/health/fitness clothing]
        
        Surprisingly there are no pre-symptomatic screening methods for the common cold or the flu, allowing these viruses to spread unbeknownst to the infected. However, if we could detect when infected people will get sick even before they were showing symptoms, we could do a lot more to contain the flu or common cold and possibly save lives. Well, that’s what this group of researchers in this highly collaborative study set out to accomplish using data from wearable devices.
        
        Participants of the study were given an E4 wristband, a research-grade wearable that measures heart rate, skin temperature, electrodermal activity, and movement. They then wore the E4 before and after inoculation of either influenza or rhinovirus. The researchers used 25 binary, random forest classification models to predict whether or not participants were infected based on the physiological data reported by the E4 sensor. Their results are pretty lengthy, so I’ll only highlight a few major discussion points. In one particular analysis, they found that at 36 hours after inoculation their model had an accuracy of 89% with a 100% sensitivity and a 67% specificity. Those aren’t exactly world-shaking numbers, but something the researchers thought was pretty promising nonetheless.
        
        Confidentiality
        
        [Crackers] steal research data from Sweden’s Volvo Cars
        
        The company, owned by China’s Geely, “has become aware that one of its file repositories has been illegally accessed by a third party,” it said.
        
        “Investigations so far confirm that a limited amount of the company’s R&D property has been stolen [sic] during the intrusion,” Volvo added.
- Defence/Aggression
  - 40 Years Later, El Mozote Massacre Victims Vow to ‘Keep Demanding Justice’
    
    As Salvadorans this weekend mark 40 years since nearly 1,000 rural villagers were murdered in El Mozote and nearby hamlets by troops from an elite U.S.-trained army unit, the pursuit of justice by survivors and victims’ families is being threatened by El Salvador’s right-wing president—who critics say is trying to derail the prosecution of the massacres’ perpetrators in a bid to protect the armed forces and solidify his power.
    
    “The people who have been on the side of the victims will continue to be relentless in the pursuit of justice.”
  - Israel’s Hard-Line Position Is Sabotaging US-Iran Negotiations
  - Opinion | Build Back Better or Build More Bombs? The Choice Is Clear
    
    As special interests in Washington, DC pared President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better package from $3.5 trillion to $1.75 trillion over ten years, the $768 billion annual Pentagon budget sailed through the House of Representatives. That’s equivalent to about $8 trillion over ten years, significantly larger than Build Back Better, passed with bipartisan harmony. The National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is now in the Senate, where additional spending amendments are being pushed for this “must pass” legislation. If budgets indicate a society’s values, then it’s clear what’s important to the United States: weapons and war.
  - Opinion | The Fascists Are Rising in the Name of Defending Democracy—They Must Be Called Out and Stopped
    
    Tuesday’s New York Times ran a story that has gotten much attention: “Ahead of Biden’s Democracy Summit, China Says: We’re Also a Democracy.”
  - Opinion | Israel Is Hell-Bent on Sabotaging US Nuclear Negotiations With Iran
    
    After a 5-month hiatus, indirect negotiations between the U.S. and Iran resumed last week in Vienna in an attempt to revise the 2015 Iran nuclear deal (formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA). The outlook isn’t good.
  - Capitol [insurrectionists]‘ social media posts influencing sentencings
    
    For many [insurrectionists] who stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, self-incriminating messages, photos and videos that they broadcast on social media before, during and after the riot are influencing even the sentences in their criminal cases
  - U.S. Prosecutors Indict American Seeking Asylum In Belarus On Charges Related To Capitol [Insurrection]
  - France to open classified Algerian War archives 15 years ahead of schedule
    
    The files cover judicial proceedings by the French police and military forces during the 1954-1962 war of independence.
    
    They are likely to confirm widespread use of torture and extra-judicial killings by French forces.
  - Canadian citizen accused of narrating ISIS propaganda videos pleads guilty
    
    A Canadian citizen accused of being the English-speaking narrator on multiple recruitment videos for the Islamic State (ISIS) pleaded guilty to aiding the terrorist organization on Friday.
    
    Saudi-born Canadian citizen Mohammed Khalifa, 38, pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization, resulting in death, at a hearing in the U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., according to a release from the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
    
    U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III accepted Khalifa’s plea.
  - Kinetic Strikes Via A Consumer Grade Drone | Hackaday
    
    Kinetic projectiles are a seldom-used weapon of war, consisting of heavy metal slugs dropped from a great height by aircraft. On the way down to the ground, they pick up enough speed to kill enemy troops and even penetrate light armor. [i did a thing] tried to replicate this simple technology using a consumer drone.
    
    The kinetic projectiles were made on a lathe, using 1045 steel as a good balance between hardness and machinability. Simple mild steel is far too easy to blunt, while tool steel was beyond the machining capability of the tools on hand. Simple fins were added using materials sourced from the local hardware store.
- Environment
  - This fabric is hailed as ‘eco-friendly.’ The rainforest tells a different story.
    
    Adindo and its competitors have long operated in the region. For years, they cut down large swaths of ancient trees to make way for tree plantations. The wood is transported to mills, where it is dissolved into pulp and spun into a breathable fabric that has become ubiquitous across the U.S.: viscose rayon.
    
    Viscose rayon is used in clothing ranging from couture dresses to t-shirts to sportswear. It has been touted as eco-friendly because it comes from a renewable resource: trees.
    
    But it is also among the products that have driven the destruction of rainforest in Indonesia. The plantations built on the cleared land create a continuous supply of new wood or goods like palm oil, often from a single species of tree.
  - Sunrise Movement Blasts ‘Criminal’ Effort by Corporate Dems to Slash Carbon Capture Threshold
    
    As Senate Democrats continue to negotiate pared-back climate provisions in the Build Back Better reconciliation package in a bid to win the support of right-wing Democratic senators, activists from the youth-led Sunrise Movement on Friday warned against easing the bill’s proposed carbon capture threshold.
    
    “Power plants that disproportionately harm Black, brown, and working-class neighborhoods already get billions in tax credits, with little to show for it.”
  - Massive Devastation After Dozens of Deadly Tornadoes Rip Through Multiple States
    
    Rescue efforts are underway after over 30 tornadoes including a potentially historic quad-state twister ripped across multiple states in the South and Midwest late Friday, causing catastrophic destruction and scores of deaths.
    
    “The devastation is unlike anything I have seen in my life,” said Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear, “and I have trouble putting it into words.”
  - Landfills Belch Climate-Warming Methane. Even the EPA Doesn’t Know How Much.
  - Energy
    - Politicians are sending mixed signals about private car ownership
      
      And yet American politicians are not all as obsessed with cars as they were. Madison, the liberal college city hosting the monster-trucks rally, boasts about how many of its people walk, take public transport or cycle to work. A series of city leaders elected across America have promised to nudge people out of their cars. For many owning a car is no longer the great aspiration it was. In that, America is gently following a pattern established in Europe for decades, and now accelerating. On both continents city leaders want to reduce car ownership, so as to cut congestion and pollution.
      
      National leaders however tend to want to add to it, to help the car industry. The result is clashing policies, where people are encouraged to buy ever more cars, but find that they are increasingly unable to use them as they would like. Car ownership is becoming political.
    - Banksy work to be digitally divided and sold as NFTs
      
      Banksy’s work “Love is in the Air” will be digitally shredded into 10,000 pieces and sold as NFTs at a January auction on platform Particle.
    - What’s the Environmental Impact of NFTs? We Found Out
      
      “NFTs require transactions on a blockchain—to create NFTs, to bid, to pay for the NFT after winning the bid, or to transfer the ownership,” Köhler says. “So you could associate the share of transactions NFTs need to their share of electricity consumption and associate environmental footprint. With an increased interest in NFTs and more people buying and selling NFTs, their associated impact increases.”
      
      The energy used for these transactions is a problem, too, as Köhler says miners are generally incentivized to use cheap electricity to maximize profits (like fossil fuels). There’s also the topic of the technology used: “Production and recycling of the hardware only makes up a small share,” she adds. “That being said, using specialized computers for mining that can become unprofitable within a few years creates large amounts of e-waste.”
    - [Old] NFTs Are Hot. So Is Their Effect on the Earth’s Climate
      
      Two years ago, Joanie Lemercier, a French artist known for his perception-bending light sculptures, took on a new role as a climate activist. He attended protests against coal mining, projecting lasers onto excavators and government offices with dramatic effect, and began a campaign demanding Autodesk stop selling its design software to fossil fuel operations. He also took a closer look at his own energy use, which included a hefty heating bill for his studio in Brussels, electricity for the high-end computers to render his creations, and dozens of flights each year to exhibitions around the world. He tracked it all down to the watt and vowed to reduce his energy use by 10 percent each year, a goal he had successfully met. Then, a few months ago, in the course of a few minutes, his progress was erased.
      
      The culprit was Lemercier’s first blockchain “drop.” The event involved the sale of six so-called nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, which took the form of short videos inspired by the concept of platonic solids. In the clips, dark metallic polyhedrons rotate on loop and glisten—a reference to Lemercier’s installations in the physical world. The works were placed for auction on a website called Nifty Gateway, where they sold out in 10 seconds for thousands of dollars. The sale also consumed 8.7 megawatt-hours of energy, as he later learned from a website called Cryptoart.WTF.
    - NFTs: The hot new fad with a massive environmental cost
      
      And we’ve barely begun to talk about it. But we need to. Because while NFTs might seem like a fad now, allowing them to become established as the standard for ownership of digital artwork and collectibles could create a massive source of energy consumption for years to come.
      
      In February, the French artist Joanie Lemercier was moved to cancel a release of several works after discovering just how substantial the environmental costs were. “My release of 6 CryptoArt works,” Lemercier wrote on his website, “consumed in 10 seconds more electricity than [my] entire studio over the past 2 years.”
  - Wildlife/Nature
    - Volunteers have cleaned from trash the entire shoreline of Helsinki twice
      
      SATAKOLKYT-project began in 2019 and was originally planned to end in December 2021, but received an extension for next year through an additional grant. “We are very happy that we can continue the work for the Baltic Sea and the beach clean-ups”, says project coordinator Karoliina Eronen. “Next year, the project will focus especially on young people,” Eronen continues. The project will continue until the annual Baltic Sea Day in late August 2022.
      
      There have been individuals, school classes, groups of young people and organizations involved in the clean-up. Many companies have also participated as part of the staff wellbeing days. “Especially during the pandemic, the importance of urban nature has grown in the daily lives of many people. The littering of the Baltic Sea worries many people, which has certainly inspired them to take action”, Eronen says. “According to the feedback from the volunteers, collecting rubbish is rewarding, as you can immediately see the work you have done”, Eronen continues.
- Finance
  - Opinion | Tax Justice Is Not a Technical Battle, It Is a Crucial Tool to Advance Human Rights
    
    Much has been said about the ‘post-pandemic world’, the one that would rise from the ashes in the aftermath of the pandemic, hopefully less materialistic, more sustainable, more supportive, and feminist. But a new wave of infections and the emergence of variants seem to be pushing back this ‘post-Covid-19′ once again, and we are entering the third year of the health crisis. As the world commemorates ‘International Human Rights Day’ on 10 December, hypocrisy and cynicism remain the order of the day, particularly on the part of rich countries, which pay lip service to the issue while at the same time contributing to the denial of basic human rights to the majority of the world population.
- AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
  - Apple’s concessions in China reportedly include a secret $275 billion deal and one odd change in Maps
    
    That includes a request Apple reportedly received in 2014 or 2015 about a small group of uninhabited islands that China and Japan apparently have a dispute over in terms of who owns them. Going by either the Senkaku Islands or the Diaoyu Islands, depending on which side of the argument you’re taking, they inspired a request from China to members of the Maps team to make them appear larger, even when viewers are zoomed out on the map. According to The Information, not only did Apple eventually make the change, but even today, for viewers using its map from within China, the islands are still shown at a larger scale than the territories around them.
    
    The report also details disputes over everything from iTunes and iCloud to Apple Pay. The figure that looms over everything is a 1,250-word memorandum of understanding that The Information says Tim Cook signed during a publicized trip to China in 2016. The way it’s laid out, Cook went to China because of repeated regulatory actions affecting Apple’s business. By signing a five-year agreement (with an option to extend to a sixth year) promising investments, business deals, and training in China, worth an estimated $275 billion, the aim was to avoid further disruptions.
- Censorship/Free Speech
  - The Project Censored Newsletter—December 2021 – Censored Notebook, Newsletters
    
    The listing of the Top “Censored” Stories of 2020-2021is also accessible on the Project website.
  - Australia’s planned anti-trolling law may silence political critics
    
    But experts say the legislation is political theatre because it won’t do anything to stop most forms of online bullying. Instead, it could undermine individuals’ privacy and fuel the current trend of government MPs suing their social media critics.
    
    If the proposed Social Media (Anti-Trolling) Bill is passed, it will allow Australians who feel they have been defamed on social media to request court orders forcing providers to disclose the real names, country locations, phone numbers and email addresses of users who have allegedly defamed them. The idea is to unmask trolls who have been hiding behind anonymous user names so that legal action can be launched against them, as long as they are also in Australia.
- Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
  - Watchdog: Federal Anti-Terror Unit Investigated Journalists
    
    A special Customs and Border Protection unit used sensitive government databases intended to track terrorists to investigate as many as 20 U.S.-based journalists, including a Pulitzer Prize-winning Associated Press reporter, according to a federal watchdog.
    
    Yahoo News, which published an extensive report on the investigation, also found that the unit, the Counter Network Division, queried records of congressional staffers and perhaps members of Congress.
    
    Jeffrey Rambo, an agent who acknowledged running checks on journalists in 2017, told federal investigators the practice is routine.
  - Opinion | Journalists’ Nobel Peace Prize Spotlights So-Called Democracies’ Claims on Press Freedom
    
    It has been 75 years since a journalist last won the Nobel Peace Prize. Back in 1936, Carl von Ossietzky couldn’t accept the honour in person because he was imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. The fact that today’s winners, Maria Ressa and Dmitry Muratov, both made it to the Oslo award ceremony might be a sign of progress. But in a year when a record number of journalists have been jailed, dozens killed, and countless more threatened, intimidated or forced to flee their homes, the spotlight their prize shines on the world is grim. It shames so-called liberal democracies, too, including Britain, that claim to stand for press freedom.
  - Nobel Peace Prize Winners Muratov, Ressa Call For Commitment To Independent Journalism
    
    Nobel Peace Prize winners Dmitry Muratov and Maria Ressa have warned that a rise in authoritarian governments requires a continued commitment to independent reporting.
    
    The two journalists received the award for 2021 at Oslo City Hall on December 10, an honor they won for their separate battles to uncover the truth in countries — Muratov in Russia, Ressa in the Philippines — where freedom of expression and the media have faced growing attacks, and even killings, from hostile regimes.
  - Philippine reporter who covered drug war killed by shot to the head
    
    It was partly for Reuters that he had investigated certain aspects of the “war on drugs” launched by President Rodrigo Duterte, especially that fact that mainland China was the one of the major sources of drugs entering the Philippines.
  - Extradiction of Assange Darkens Human Rights Day: Russia Says
    
    On Friday, Russia’s Foreign Affairs Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova harshly criticized the decision of the Court of Appeal of England and Wales to approve the extradition of WikiLeaks Julian Assange to the United States.
  - WikiLeaks founder Assange can be extradited to the US, London court rules
    
    Washington challenged the decision made in January that the 50-year-old Australian would be a suicide risk if he was transferred to the US justice system.
    
    Assange is wanted to face trial for the publication by WikiLeaks in 2010 of classified military documents relating to the US wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.
    
    A two-day hearing was held in October where US lawyers argued that the original judge had not given sufficient weight to other expert testimony about Assange’s mental state.
  - “How can they accept an extradition to the country that plotted to kill Julian, that plotted to kill a publisher because of what he published?”
    
    We will fight. Every generation has an epic fight to fight, and this is ours, because Julian represents the fundamentals of what it means to live in a free society. Of what it means to have press freedom. Of what it means for journalists to do their jobs without being afraid of spending the rest of their life in prison.
    
    The UK imprisons journalists. They are imprisoning Julian on behalf of a foreign power which is taking an abusive, vindictive prosecution against a journalist. And this is what it is about. I urge everyone to come together and fight for Julian. Julian represents all our liberties and all our rights.
  - Britain’s High Court rules on United States extradition appeal: Assange must be handed to his assassins
    
    The US Department of Justice, Pentagon and CIA are determined that Assange rots in jail for revealing their crimes. Assange faces 18 criminal charges for publishing thousands of classified files and diplomatic cables in 2010 exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan that were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people. The charges against Assange carry a sentence of up to 175 years in prison.
  - UK High Court orders Assange extradited: A pseudo-legal travesty
    
    Similar store has been put in the 11th hour turn by the media to formally oppose Assange’s extradition. But the truth is that whatever hand-wringing editorials and opinion columns these organisations can bring themselves to publish, the sentiment in the editorial offices of the Guardian and the New York Times will be one of smirking satisfaction. They spent years paving the way for yesterday’s verdict. They will now hope that Assange, who threatened to upset their cosy relationship with their respective ruling classes, can at last be put out of mind.
- Civil Rights/Policing
  - Biden Opposes Kellogg’s Plan to Hire Scabs as Workers Decide to Remain on Strike
  - A Key Founder of Critical Race Theory Discusses the Right-Wing Panic Over It
  - Biden sharply criticizes Kellogg’s plan to replace striking unionized workers
    
    Earlier this week, workers rejected a five-year contract offer that would have provided 3 percent raises, among other benefits. The union argued that the company’s two-tiered system of wages pays newer workers at the plants less and provides them with fewer benefits as well as little opportunity to move up.
  - Starbucks unionization vote is ‘tip of the iceberg,’ organizers say
    
    After plunging to a historic low in 2009 at the height of the Great Recession, Americans’ support for unions is now around 68 percent, according to Gallup polling, a level not seen since 1965.
    
    Unions aren’t just for blue collar factory workers or public service employees any more. Organizing attempts have succeeded or been attempted at digital and legacy media organizations in recent years.
  - Europe Pushes New Rules Turning Gig Workers Into Employees
    
    The commission proposed rules that, if enacted, would affect up to an estimated 4.1 million people and give the European Union some of the world’s strictest rules for the so-called gig economy. The policy would remake the relationship that ride services, food delivery companies and other platforms have with workers in the 27-nation bloc.
    
    Labor unions and other supporters hailed the proposal, which has strong political support, as a breakthrough in the global effort to change the business practices of companies that they say depend on exploiting workers with low pay and weak labor protections.
  - New Persian-Language Website Exposes ‘All-Out Assault’ On Rights In Iran
    
    Amnesty International has launched a Persian-language website, saying it aims to increase access to information on abuse in Iran amid “an all-out assault on human rights” by the authorities, including arbitrary detention, enforced disappearance, torture, and extrajudicial executions.
    
    The new website, launched on Human Rights Day on December 10, includes, among other things, research and legal analysis of “shocking” human rights violations, as well as recommendations to the international community to tackle “this crisis of impunity,” the London-based human rights watchdog said in a statement.
  - Public Displays of Resignation: Saying ‘I Quit’ Loud and Proud
    
    There once was a time when broadcasting the decision to quit a job might have seemed unwise, or at least uncouth. Career coaches traditionally advised their clients not to disparage former employers online. Though there was always a subset of workers who quit loudly on principle, recruiters often raised their eyebrows at candidates who’d gone public about negative experiences in their previous roles. But after over a year of laboring through a pandemic, protests over racial justice and all the personal and societal tumult that followed those events, some workers are ready to reject stale professional norms and vent.
  - Eighty years after Pearl Harbor, survivors of Japanese internment camps remember ordeal
    
    After Japan’s 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, the US forcibly displaced 120,000 people of Japanese origin into 10 internment camps in the western United States. Eight decades on, our correspondents went to meet survivors, who reflected on their ordeal.
- Internet Policy/Net Neutrality
  - Indigenous Connectivity: New Tribal Grant for Three US Community Networks
    
    The Internet Society supports people like Bumpy who want to build community networks, through partnerships, or through the Internet Society Foundation. This is why we are happy to announce that we’re funding three communities in North America through a one-time tribal grant.
    
    The Yurok, Hoopa Valley, and Bear River Band communities will use the resources to build, expand, and improve connectivity, bringing many new opportunities for those connected and growing the Internet to those who need it the most. Learn more about their projects below.
- Digital Restrictions (DRM)
  - Tired of Netflix
    
    Basically Netflix doesn’t give enough time for series to grow, because of that it becomes impossible to develop a fandom. Without a fandom, there is no sustainable engagement with that property, and the series gets cancelled. I’m breaking this cycle, I will go back to books and other services, I’m tired of this broken relationship with Netflix’s original series.
- Monopolies
  - Patents
    - Arbitration Clause Not Binding on the United States Patent Office
      
      The Federal Circuit’s recent ruling in MaxPower Semiconductor Inc. et al v. Rohm Semiconductor USA, LLC highlights the interplay between the liberal federal policy favoring arbitration agreements and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (“PTAB”) authority as an agency tribunal having a broad role to protect the public interest in ensuring the quality of patents.
      
      Challenging the validity of a patent through the inter partes review (IPR) process at the PTAB is a conventional alternative to litigating invalidity in federal court. MaxPower addressed the question of whether the PTAB will defer to an agreement to arbitrate that did not expressly preclude the parties from proceeding before the PTAB.
    - Judge Leonard P. Stark Will Bring a Wealth of Patent Experience to the Federal Circuit [Ed: This would be a lot better than Biden putting a Microsofter in charge of USPTO]
      
      On Wednesday, November 3, 2021, the White House announced President Biden’s nomination of Judge Leonard P. Stark (U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware) to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. If approved, Judge Stark will succeed Judge Kathleen M. O’Malley, who recently announced that she will retire in March 2022.
    - China’s Supreme People’s Court Rules Unintentional Short Payment of Annuity Fee Causes Termination of Patent Rights [Ed: Patents are not rights; in this article, a lie is being repeated over and over again]
      
      In case no（2021）最高法知行终322号 recently highlighted by China’s Supreme People’s Court on November 2, 2021, the Court ruled that an unintentional short payment of a patent annuity caused termination of the patent. A patentee received a “Patent Termination Notice” issued by the China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) and sued CNIPA at the Beijing Intellectual Property Court, claiming that it had paid the annuity of 600 RMB, and the CNIPA nonetheless terminated its patent right. However, the 600 RMB was insufficient to cover the annuity and late fee due.
    - Design Patent Claims Limited to Recited Article of Manufacture [Ed: Design patents should, in general, be eradicated; wrong law, laughable agenda]
      
      In In re: SurgiSil, L.L.P., No. 2020-1940 (Fed. Cir. Oct. 4, 2021), the Federal Circuit reversed the Board’s decision affirming an examiner’s rejection of Surgisil’s design patent application.
    - Zhejiang, China Fines Hangzhou Patent Firm for Not Withdrawing 164 Abnormal Patent Applications and Suspicion of Filing 1,192 Abnormal Applications in Total
      
      In a decision dated October 21, 2021, the Zhejiang Provincial Market Supervision and Administration Bureau fined a Hangzhou, China patent firm 20,000 RMB for not withdrawing abnormal (irregular) patent applications in decision no. 浙市监处罚〔2021〕3号. The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) has defined abnormal applications in the Measures Regarding the Regulation of Patent Applications (关于规范申请专利行为的办法) and includes filing multiple same patent applications among other actions.
    - Shanghai, China’s Municipal People’s Congress Proposes Fining Irregular Patent Application Applicants Up To 150,000 RMB [Ed: There have been millions of 'fake' patent applications in China, driving up or gaming the numbers]
      
      On September 30, 2021, the Shanghai Municipal People’s Congress issued the draft Several Provisions on the Establishment of a High-level Intellectual Property Protection System in Pudong New Area, Shanghai (上海市浦东新区建立高水平知识产权保护制度若干规定（草案征求意见稿）). Article 6 of the Provisions proposes to increase punishment for irregular (or abnormal) patent applications and malicious trademark applications to up 150,000 RMB ($23,280 USD) and 50,000 RMB respectively. The Provisions also provide for IP protections at exhibitions, specify increased punitive damages for intentional infringement as well as fines for repeated patent infringement.
    - [Old] Can Computer Systems Using Artificial Intelligence Patent their Own Inventions? [Ed: Loaded statement because computers don't invent and this is a stepping stone towards arguing for patents being granted to one's pets etc.]
      
      Increasingly, companies are using artificial intelligence to invent new methods and products. But can a named inventor be a non-human machine under the law? That depends on which country’s laws are being applied.
    - [Old] Dolby hit with South Korean fine for breach of FRAND obligations [Ed: Dolby also runs a sort of patent cartel against GNU/Linux]
      
      South Korea’s Fair Trade Commission has fined Dolby more than $200,000 after finding it abused the advantageous bargaining position its ownership of SEPs reading on AC-3 gave it when dealing with a local set-top box maker
    - European UPC Almost Ready to Launch as Austrian Parliament Approves Ratification [Ed: McDermott Will & Emery's Henrik Holzapfel and Maximilian Kiemle say "European UPC Almost Ready to Launch", but this is a lie because it's illegal; this is just a lobbying strategy by those looking to benefit financially]
      
      Austria became the 13th country to join the protocol on a European Unified Patent Court (UPC) on provisional application (PPA) when the second chamber of the Austrian parliament (Bundesrat) approved the PPA unanimously on December 2, 2021. The Austrian government is expected to formally deposit its ratification shortly.
      As expected, Austria followed Slovenia as the last of the 13 EU Member States that were required to ratify in order for the PPA to take effect. This group mandatorily included Germany, Italy and France (i.e., the three Member States in which the most European patents were in effect in 2012).
    - Lucky 13? Austrian Upper House Brings The Unitary Patent Closer [Ed: J A Kemp LLP (Team UPC) ignores all matters of legality, hoping that if we pretend lobbying bypasses the law itself, then the illegal will magically become possible.]
      
      The EU “unitary patent” took a step closer to being established on 2 December when the upper House of the Austrian parliament (the Federal Council) approved the Protocol for Provisional Application (PPA) of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA). The Unitary Patent (UP) is intended to be a single patent right having effect in the territory of participating EU members, overseen by the Unified Patent Court (UPC). Austria is now in a position to become the 13th state to deposit its instrument of ratification of the PPA, perhaps in early 2022, if not before the end of 2021. As reported here, the Preparatory Committee of the UPC reports that Austria depositing its instrument of ratification of the PPA will allow the phase of provisional application of the UPC agreement officially to start, meaning that the UPC can be set up as an institution before the UPC system itself is fully operational.
    - European UPC Almost Ready to Launch as Austrian Parliament Approves Ratification [Ed: The National Law Review says "European UPC Almost Ready to Launch", but it merely perpetuates a lie for Team UPC because this is illegal; this comes to show the degree to which the press has been corrupted, turned into a lobbying vessel]
      
      Austria became the 13th country to join the protocol on a European Unified Patent Court (UPC) on provisional application (PPA) when the second chamber of the Austrian parliament (Bundesrat) approved the PPA unanimously on December 2, 2021. The Austrian government is expected to formally deposit its ratification shortly.
      
      As expected, Austria followed Slovenia as the last of the 13 EU Member States that were required to ratify in order for the PPA to take effect. This group mandatorily included Germany, Italy and France (i.e., the three Member States in which the most European patents were in effect in 2012).
    - Guide to the Unified Patent Court (UPC) [Ed: D Young & Co LLP releases a “Guide to the Unified Patent Court (UPC)” to perpetuate the illusion — the lie — that it is already here, inevitable etc.]
    - Austrian step brings Unified Patent Court closer [Ed: A barrage of misleading or fake news about the UPC does not turn illegal agenda into a lawful move]
      
      A recent step taken in Austria brings a new Unified Patent Court (UPC) closer to reality and should prompt businesses to consider how best to protect their innovations and enforce their patent rights across Europe in future, an expert has said.
    - Austria’s parliament passes law to ratify UPC Agreement’s PPA [Ed: Austria is not the UK and it is irrelevant to the UPCA; Team UPC is slinging onto straws and lying a lot these days. It's moreover conspiring to do something illegal.]
      
      The draft legislation enabling Austria to ratify the Protocol on the Provisional Application (PPA) of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA) completed its passage through parliament on 2 December, when the Federal Council voted unanimously not to raise any objection to the National Council’s approval on 19 November. The Federal Council’s decision followed the unanimous vote on 30 November of its Committee on Innovation, Technology and the Future not to raise any objection. The final steps to promulgation of the law are authentication by the Federal President, countersignature by the Federal Chancellor, and publication in the Federal Law Gazette.
  - Copyrights
    - Major Manga Publishers Try to Identify Operators of Massive Pirate Sites
      
      Manga publishing giants Shogakukan, Shueisha, Kadokawa and Kodansha have a new batch of pirate sites in their collective crosshairs. In one action they have asked a US court to help them obtain the identities of several ‘pirate’ operators pulling in a few million visits per month. In another, just two domains are pulling in a staggering 290 million visits per month.

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[Meme] [Teaser] On Tolerating ‘Kings’ in Charge of the EPO

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: The status quo at the EPO (akin to monarchy or Mafia with Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos rigging and undermining democratic processes) isn’t being condoned by everyone at the EPO’s Administrative Council

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IRC Proceedings: Saturday, December 11, 2021

Posted in IRC Logs at 2:23 am by Needs Sunlight

Also available via the Gemini protocol at:

Over HTTP:


#techrights log as HTML5	#boycottnovell log as HTML5

#boycottnovell-social log as HTML5	#techbytes log as HTML5

#techrights log as text	#boycottnovell log as text

#boycottnovell-social log as text	#techbytes log as text

Enter the IRC channels now

IPFS Mirrors

CID	Description	Object type
`QmNQpPDwX8RFasgTynBhwMd3qKitHwV3B9LopWZ8rmxHf3`	IRC log for `#boycottnovell` (full IRC log as HTML)
`QmYfiHrN68iyq79DRV6LnmYTKFdLjjSgbAyL2RSAspoy9R`	IRC log for `#boycottnovell` (full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)
`QmWAhJNzknqs1BfuR4nQiQbmbEEeFmtHu3Lig1N3W2XJx7`	IRC log for `#boycottnovell-social` (full IRC log as HTML)
`QmSK22fqYeoeWyJsi3zgVSjToqcXHeg4d3oR6N63VUEa1U`	IRC log for `#boycottnovell-social` (full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)
`QmV1wdpen9To6Xzep2HDcHV4BvLmeJ57QUjktboa37DyWn`	IRC log for `#techbytes` (full IRC log as HTML)
`QmWJDACJ2nBeWqWf55Vtmm4pV9ZNWLMPX2K6q2RuZU5AV6`	IRC log for `#techbytes` (full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)
`QmPQxdYFJx4Nyk3eDLV3utmumcjy5PAwyX5VvJUMGDMSYd`	IRC log for `#techrights` (full IRC log as HTML)
`QmVWkf98uymDQnneYqnwk2hxc8SYQgBtH6qmUoXrkwUMhG`	IRC log for `#techrights` (full IRC log as plain/ASCII text)

IPFS logo

Bulletin for Yesterday

Local copy | CID (IPFS): QmPrW6GPykdMyQtg8txV2DXmRYjghF1TQPv6CJcwVUx6iy

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December 2021
M	T	W	T	F	S	S
« Nov				Jan »
		1	2	3	4	5
6	7	8	9	10	11	12
13	14	15	16	17	18	19
20	21	22	23	24	25	26
27	28	29	30	31

12.12.21

Patent Examination: A job for autistic people?

Contents

Audiocasts/Shows

Kernel Space

Instructionals/Technical

Games

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Programming/Development

Python

Science

Book Review: We the Robots? [Ed: The "Hey Hi" hype leveraged by litigation fanatics, hoping to leverage change (or computerisation) for more lawsuits]

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

Security

Defence/Aggression

Civil Rights/Policing

Digital Restrictions (DRM)

Monopolies

India’s advertising watchdog chief talks influencers, IP and more [Ed: To the chagrin of litigation profiteers]

Patents

Draft Standard-Patent Guidance Is U.S. Bid in Global Debate [Ed: Biden is a patent maximalist and his biggest political sponsor (Michael Bloomberg) owns this publisher, which has patent maximalism offshoots cheering for this agenda; bought politicians syndrome]

Global Cannabis Applications Corp. Patent Now Worldwide [Ed: Drug pushers and drug lords bad, patent litigation people good?]

Drug-access backers may push know-how sharing in WHO deal [Ed: Not enough. Cancel these patents. But since WHO is controlled by patent profiteers like Bill Gates that will never happen, not from WHO anyway]

Chemical Patents – How to Get the Protection You Want in Europe Part 3: Amendments at the EPO [Ed: Conflating monopolies with “protection”, and in this case suggesting pursuing a monopoly from the EPO that’s granting loads of legally-invalid patents]

Standard Essential Patents and Innovation: Call for views [Ed: UK-IPO looking to reinforce very bad stuff]

Agencies Revise Position on Standards-Essential Patents [Ed: Such patents ought not exist in the first place because they curtail competition and innovation; those buzzwords and acronyms manipulate the debate, e.g. “FRAND” (5 lies)]

Venue over Foreign Defendant; and Seeking Rehearing before Mandamus [Ed: Only the US has this insane situation of "forum shopping" which is a loophole for patent trolls and law firms looking to get a judge who's in their pocket or part of their nefarious agenda]

Inequitable Conduct by Senior Party Broad Alleged in Interference No. 106,115 (and PTAB May Finally Hear Evidence About It) [Ed: The latest in the saga about inane patents or monopolies on life itself, with PTAB getting involved]

Day in the life of a patent litigator: Andy Schwentker [Ed: Do a post about day in the life of his many victims, who are being blackmailed by patents while not able to afford legal aid]

The Rise of Electric Vehicles: Understanding the EV Industry Growth through Patent Trends – CHIP LAW GROUP [Ed: This cites greenwashing PR ('study') from the EPO as it the EPO and patent data (or monopolies easily granted) count for much]

Sunday Surprises [Ed: “15th Annual Forum on Pharma & Biotech Patent Litigation in Europe” because patents and lawsuits are -- to some very sick profession -- a lot more important than helping ill people and curing them indefinitely]

Time to talk about ownership of AI-generated intellectual property assets [Ed: These are not property and not assets; greedy and overzealous law firms are lying and some people even pay them to be lied to]

Three USF faculty members selected as new National Academy of Inventors Fellows [Ed: Sumita B. Mitra, propped up by the scam/sham award of the EPO]

The Computer-Aided Surgery Innovation Landscape: 2021 Update [Ed: Conflating patents with innovation; many are bogus software patents; it's noted that some are calling software "Hey Hi" to convince the EPO to grant patents it's not supposed to.]

AI inventors: can AI own intellectual property rights? [Ed: Those are neither property nor a right; this whole insane debate shows what a farce the system became, like a diploma mills for patents]

Austria brings the Preparatory Phase of the Unified Patent Court one step closer [Ed: Bird and Bird says “Austria brings the Preparatory Phase of the Unified Patent Court one step closer”; This firm said the same thing about UPC 7 years ago]

Innovation At Risk If AI Can’t Be An Inventor, Fed. Circ. Told [Ed: Complete baloney; what's at risk here is the credibility of the system and legitimacy of patents as a concept]

What Evidence can the PTAB Use to Decide an IPR? [Ed: Dennis Crouch, funded by a litigation company that lobbies for software patents, on PTAB and how to obstruct its review of fake patents]

The stranger’s guide to PTAB director reviews by in-house [Ed: PTAB culls faka patents, unlike those firms, which just pursue more and more patent lawsuits for personal gain]

Why some patent owners may pursue a wait-and-see strategy for the UPC [Ed: Perpetuating fallacies as they've been doing for nearly a decade]

Protecting AI: The current IP landscape [Ed: Intoxicated on patent litigation, the fanatics and profiteers want to give patents to bots (computer programs) now and this contributes to the whole system looking like a laughing stock, aloof and detached from its original goals]

Webinar: Learn From The Expert: Patent Enforcement In Europe [Ed: No, patents are not rights and boasting about being aggressive is bad for the image of this profession]

Rapid Grant at the EPO [Ed: Helping to rewrite history about the EPO, burying very major blunders]

Changed, changed utterly – or not? Germany’s new coalition states its intentions regarding digitalisation and innovation [Ed: They always misuse or weaponise words like “innovation” to promote the robber barons and monopolies]

Monday Miscellany [Ed: "IPR in Times of Crisis: Lessons Learned from the COVID -19 Pandemic" sounds like a sick idea; they look for ways to profit from a pandemic instead of actually tacking it; "IPR" stands for three lies in a row, or 3 misnomers.]

EPO stays proceedings in light of questions referred to the Enlarged Board of Appeal in G 2/21 [Ed: This merits a mention of how it’s basically against the law, in violation of several European constitutions, and made possible only because of EPO corruption, including court-rigging]

UK IPO launches call for views on Standard Essential Patents, innovation and competition [Ed: UK-IPO will just do what litigation firms say, not what’s actually good for the British people or for people in general]

[Older] Get a Patent Quickly with the Green Channel. [Ed: The overzealous patent litigation cabal is greenwashing patents or monopolies, making an injustice seem "moral" and honourable]

As Vehicles Become Computerized, NPE Patent Owners Are Targeting Automakers [Ed: Many cars run Linux nowadays; Microsoft’s patent trolls (proxy/proxies) attack them with patents, but the media isn’t telling you that]

Albright Names NPE Lawyer As New Magistrate Judge For Waco [Ed: Some American (US) patent courts have been hijacked by patent trolls and their facilitators instead of proper judges; will Congress act before it's too late and parasites govern the whole system?]

“Upheaval” in European Patent Law [Ed: Typical misinformation from Team UPC this past week; there are many barriers to UPC, the least of which is Brexit, so they lie to readers; as if Austria is somehow, magically, the real barrier (it never was)]

Fresenius Is Sued Over Patents on Ready-to-Use Calcium Infusions [Ed: Patent litigation at the expense of public health or access to remedies]

Genetic Technologies Announces New Partnership and geneType COVID-19 Risk Test Patent Allowance from the USPTO [Ed: The ascent of COVID profiteers with their patent monopolies; they disregard public health and look to profit from ongoing agony using monopoly]

Agrifood Brief, powered by European Snacks Association: Green Rush [Ed: Some greenwashing by a Bill Gates propaganda arm (yes, he bribes them); they’re also whitewashing corrupt EUIPO]

ABP Burger hires litigator as managing partner in Munich [Ed: Fantastic new example of JUVE having been turned into a SPAM site of patent litigation companies instead of a news site (which is what it used to be); companies hiring one low-level person isn’t noteworthy news but PR/ad]

CVR Medical Corp. Announces Additional Patent Grants [Ed: CVR Medical must not be aware of the sharp decline in validity of European Patents; they’re not much to boast about]

China-set FRAND rate will imbalance market, fear patent owners [Ed: IAM, MIP and others moan about SEP (FRAND is a misnomer) only when China gets something]

Software Patents

Computer implemented inventions in CNIPA and the EPO – recent developments of examination practice [Ed: The criminals who have taken over the EPO in nefarious means like bribery are now shilling software patents and look who else likes this horrible agenda]

First Patent Pool for 3GPP Infrastructure Launched to Help Accelerate 5G [Ed: Well, it looks like Unified Patent is ‘colluding’ with patent troll MPEG-LA and its software patents]

Unified Loses Challenge To Video Patent But Avoids Naming Members [Ed: Does the patent maximalist Matthew Bultman cherry-pick such outcomes?]

Trademarks

Protecting Your Online Brand on Amazon [Ed: Amazon as a force of centralisation has become a menace to many]

Contents