The Web is rotting away, old links become broken links within months or years, so I’ve decided to encode a 3-minute segment of the whole as Ogg.
Partial trascript (Jeff Waugh): “What happened was, we’ve had some very… some of the very early initial meetings (when, you know, there were about 10 people) and Mark [Shuttleworth] showed this picture… and it was of a girl called Sabrina, or that’s the name that he gave her. And it was a very [?] tone, Vaseline on the lens kind of shot, and it was a… a very beautiful shot, but it was with a girl with her face turned away but her breasts perfectly visible. And he saying to everyone, ‘this is what I want the desktop to look like.’”
2 years after Linux Foundation forced him into public apology and therapists.
Based on some meticulous research online (hours-long), Torvalds has hardly appeared “in public” since then.
Summary: Media shaming campaigns may have taken their toll on the founder of Linux, who is now bossed by someone who rejects Linux and is married to a Microsoft booster. Like Richard Stallman under FSF guidance (and conditions for return, mostly for fear of further media assaults and attack dogs), he has become a more publicity-shy and private person. The Linux Foundation has in effect reduced the founder of what it’s called after (Linux) into a weekly release manager and mascot, whose brand it is gradually diluting/cheapening.

Everyone knows that Linux powers millions of servers and desktops worldwide. But are there any other applications of this open-source OS?
If you use Linux on your desktop, you might have wondered if the operating system you’re messing around with has any practical uses. Fortunately, there are plenty of real-world applications of Linux today. Here are some of them.
Welcome to this week’s Linux weekly roundup. We had another full week in the world of Linux releases with Fedora 36, Bluestar Linux 5.17.7, ALT Linux 10.0, and LXLE Focal beta.
I hope you have a wonderful week and enjoy every moment!

The best Chromebooks you can get today have come a long way from the early days. No longer is Chrome OS just a fancy browser running on a laptop. It has grown to incorporate Android and Linux and the platform is now a lot more capable than you might have thought.
The second of those is particularly important. I’m not about to preach about how everyone should immediately switch to Linux. Or that 2022 is the year of the Linux desktop. Or anything like that. However, it is in the limelight right now with the immensely popular Steam Deck on the shelves.
Why am I talking about learning Linux? Well for one, it’s never too late or a bad idea to learn something new. Linux isn’t just some other desktop operating system you don’t currently care about. It has plenty of applications out in the big wide world. All those cloud servers? Running Linux. On a smaller scale, the Raspberry Pi is a tiny, extremely flexible Linux computer you can use to do many wonderful things. A Chromebook is a great place to play around with Linux in relative safety.
VMS Software Inc. has announced the release of OpenVMS 9.2, the first production-supported release for commercial off-the-shelf x86 hardware.
The expectation is that customers will deploy the new OS [PDF] into VMs. Most recent hypervisors are supported, including VMware (Workstation 15+, Fusion 11+ and ESXi 6.7+), KVM (tested on CentOS 7.9, openSUSE Leap 15.3, and Ubuntu 18.04), and Oracle VirtualBox 6.1.
Electron is a framework for developing cross-platform applications using web technology and languages such as Javascript, HTML and CSS. Many people have a negative opinion of Electron apps, but I have found a few Electron apps that are truly excellent. Today, I share with you 7 Electron apps that I use occasionally (or every day, in one case).
In this tutorial, we are going to install the code-server IDE platform on Ubuntu 20.04 OS.
Code-Server IDE is a development platform running remotely on a server that can be accessed via a web browser. The main purpose of this code IDE platform is to be accessible from everywhere for better collaboration between developers. It is an open-source project integrated with Git support that allows developers to run Visual Studio Code.
Installing the code-server IDE platform on Ubuntu 20.04 is a very easy and straightforward process that can take up to 20 minutes. Let’s get started!
Varnish is a free, and open-source web application accelerator used for caching website content in memory. It is designed for HTTP to speed up caching of heavy dynamic websites. It is capable of speeding up your website page loading time by a factor of 10x to 300x. This will helps you with your Search Engine Results Page and also improve the user experience on your website.
In this post, we will show you how to install Varnish 7 on AlmaLinux.
While coding in any programming language, we use many variables of different types. One well-known and most used variable type is the “string”. The string is a group of characters and special symbols including space in programming. While working in Linux provides us the opportunity to utilize string variables in our code. Today, we will demonstrate some of the examples to check whether a string variable is empty or not using some of the most well-known Bash options.
So, let’s get started now. Let’s start with the Bash file creation, as all of our work will be done within the Bash file. So, use the “touch” instruction of Ubuntu to create a Bash file named “empty” with the “sh” extension. The GNU Nano editor can be utilized to open this newly created Bash file.
The media players are used to play the videos of different formats and the MPV media player is one of the command line media players which is free to download as well as supports many formats of video, audio, and subtitles type.
Since MPV is a command-line-based media player, it does not contain the GUI but a small menu bar that contains all the options to control the media file.
The MPV media player can be installed on different operating systems like Windows, macOS, and the Linux distributions, but in this write-up, we specifically discussed the installation methods of the MPV media player on the Ubuntu 22.04 and Linux Mint 20.
Something I caught while running TLGS’s crawler. Due to how drogon works. It needs to always successfully open a new socket on TCP connection. Otherwise the entire process is killed. But Gemini does not support multiple requests on the same connection. So it’s easy to endup with a lot of open sockets (though most are waiting to be closed). My hack to solve this conflict is to periodically walk `/proc/self/` and check how many sockets are open. And rest if there’re too many.
A TeamViewer is the application by which we can access the other computer remotely and can perform various tasks on it. We can also share the files among both machines as well as the screen of the device.
The TeamViewer can be installed on different operating systems including Windows, but in this write-up, we will focus on the installation of the TeamViewer on Ubuntu 22.04.
After installing Houdini you may come across this error. This error appears in the Terminal, if you open it from the application launcher you maybe be getting this error but it does not show in any way.
The Google Play Store is packed with interesting games, but most of them pale in comparison with the best PlayStation 2 titles, such as Silent Hill 2, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, the Ratchet and Clank series, Final Fantasy X, Kingdom Hearts 1 & 2, Wild Arms, or Persona 4, just to give some examples.
These and many other games are still fun to play, even though it’s been more than two decades since Sony released the PlayStation 2 console to great success. You can play them even if you don’t own the console or any of its successors’ thanks to PlayStation 2 emulators for Android.
Roblox is a unique gaming platform with a library that has millions of games created by a community of millions of developers, allowing endless hours of gameplay. If you are a fan of anime and looking for games that resemble them then we have mentioned some of the top anime games in this article.
Desktop Environments/WMs
K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt
KlipperScreen: All You Need to Know [Ed: Not about KDE per se. This could be a trademark problem because of KDE. Klipper started in the 1990s.]
KlipperScreen is a program that runs on Klipper firmware and provides a GUI to control your printer. Read on to learn more about it!
Thanks to forum member rufwoof, who got me thinking about this. File ‘easy.sfs’ has the entire EasyOS filesystem — we don’t split up into smaller SFS files as is done in Puppy. Except, still have the separate ‘devx’ SFS.
To keep the download file small, easy.sfs is xz-compressed. This is the smallest file-size; however, decompression when in use is also slower than other compression methods. With a fast CPU, you probably won’t notice it, but with a somewhat older CPU there may be noticeable sluggishness, perhaps in app startup.
Red Hat has expanded its Red Hat Cloud Services that support the OpenShift application platform, adding new components to help with the development of hybrid applications such as a Service Registry, plus middleware to make it easier to link to cloud database services.
IBM shareholders at the IT giant’s annual meeting last month endorsed a proposal to have the company produce a public report on the potential risks arising from its use of concealment clauses that constrain disclosure of workplace misconduct.
Debian gangsters promise to continue their vendetta despite missing WIPO’s deadline.
We have all seen those horrendously long discussion threads that take place in Debian from time to time. We wonder if the Debian trademark team, Brian Gupta and Taowa Munene-Tardif (Rosetwig) have involved the lawyer in one of those endless threads. The lawyer’s phone may well be chiming with the sound of a cash register each time a new Debian email comes in.
Nonetheless, apart from the budget blowout, the other problem with these endless email discussions from indecisive volunteers is that it is impossible to meet deadlines.
To connect Raspberry Pi remotely means that we can access the Raspberry Pi using some other computer and can perform different tasks on the Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi can be connected to the display screen by using the mini HDMI port but it can also connect to the desktop remotely by using different approaches which are being discussed in this article.
Spotify is an application that is used to stream millions of music tracks from all around the world on mobile phones, tablets, and desktops. The users of Spotify not only listen to their favorite music but also can make the albums of favorites to store their favorite collection. These albums can be shared with their friends as well as they can also access the albums or songs collections of their favorite people.
Raspberry Pi is a highly effective device that can be used for various purposes. The major advantage of this device is that it can be an ideal option to play large varieties of games, including Final Fantasy, Dragon Ball Z, Minecraft and so on. However, playing these games on Raspberry Pi will require an emulator and device performance that can handle these emulators providing you with a smooth and fast gaming environment.
The RetroPie is an operating system that enables your Raspberry Pi to be a retro-gaming machine so you can play retro games on the Raspberry Pi including the arcade and classic PC games.
For beginner and advanced level projects the Arduino provides a platform for the user that gives the assistance regarding programing the microcontroller as well as also helps in creating the hardware for the projects
This platform provides a variety of the microcontroller boards also known as Arduino boards having different specifications. So before using any Arduino board one must know the specification of the boards and most importantly the pins of the boards and their usability. So, we have explained the pinouts of the Arduino Uno board l and the use of each pin in detail.
Motorized wheelchairs can be very expensive, and for those who are unable to afford them, getting around the house can become a challenge. This is what inspired Wesley Gardner from element14 Presents to design a series of wheelchair modifications that can improve a person’s mobility.
Gardner began by coming up with a few parts in CAD for the battery mount, an electronics enclosure, and a whole host of clamps for attaching steel tubing to the chair. Next, he added a pair of crossmembers below the wheelchair to secure the 12V lead-acid battery in place. Three more tubes were attached vertically to the back as a way to hold the stepper motors against the wheels which rotate them via friction.
I had seen the Edge Impulse development platform for machine learning on edge devices being used by several boards, but I hadn’t had an opportunity to try it out so far. So when Seeed Studio asked me whether I’d be interested to test the nRF52840-powered XIAO BLE Sense board, I thought it might be a good idea to review it with Edge Impulse as I had seen a motion/gesture recognition demo on the board.
It was quite a challenge as it took me four months to complete the review from the time Seeed Studio first contacted me, mostly due to poor communications from DHL causing the first boards to go to customs’ heaven, then wasting time with some of the worse instructions I had seen in a long time (now fixed), and other reviews getting in the way. But I finally managed to get it working (sort of), so let’s have a look.

In 2020, Apple began the Apple silicon transition, using self-designed, 64-bit ARM-based Apple M1 processors on new Mac computers. Maybe it’s the perfect time to move away from the proprietary world of Apple, and embrace the open source Linux scene.
FileMaker is a cross-platform relational database application from Claris International, a subsidiary of Apple.
A relational database matches data using common characteristics found within the data set. The resulting groups of data are organized and are much easier for people to understand.
I’d say that the traditional five senses are more like classes of things than distinct things. Simplifying and lumping together is one of those tools a lot of people use to grok a really complicated universe. I wouldn’t call the five senses a myth, but I’d say that confusing it with reality is confusing the map with the territory.
Just as costs for some components have started to come down, TSMC and Samsung, the two largest contract chip manufacturers in the world, are reportedly planning to increase prices of production, which may affect Nvidia, AMD, Apple, and others that rely on the foundries.
Reports emerged earlier this week stating that Taiwan-based TSMC is planning price hikes in the single-digit percentages for legacy and advanced chip manufacturing technologies next year. Citing industry sources, Nikkei reported that the price hike will be around five to eight percent.
Germany’s government is looking to attract chipmakers to the country by offering €14 billion ($14.7 billion) in financial support, apparently spurred on by global semiconductor supply chain problems.
The move follows the European Chips Act from the European Commission and Intel’s decision earlier this year to build a new fabrication plant in Germany.
According to the FBI, the three top variants of ransomware that were deployed against critical infrastructure companies last year were Conti, LockBit and REvil/Sodinokibi.
Shipments from nearly all of the major tablet manufacturers are declining as consumers and educators find other things to do with their money.
Distribution data collated by tech analyst Canalys shows 38.59 million units were sent into retail and business channels in calendar Q1, down 3 percent year-on-year, albeit against a tough comparison period when sales in the same period of 2021 went through the roof.
Supply chain issues and other disruptions in China caused by strict COVID-19 lockdown measures have seen 23 percent of European businesses operating in the Middle Kingdom consider moving elsewhere, according to a recent report.
The report, from the European Chamber of Commerce in China and released on Thursday, said the number of European businesses considering leaving nearly doubled since the onset of 2022, a mere five months ago.
Infineon joined the ranks of chipmakers that are benefiting from the industry-wide global semiconductor shortages, more than doubling profits in a sector where lead times are severely protracted.
Formerly Siemens Semiconductor, the German-based company reported revenue of €3.298 billion ($3.48 billion), up 22 percent year-on-year for Q2 of fiscal 2022 ended March 31 [PDF]. Profit bounced 131 percent to €469 million ($494 million).
Google Docs, the search giant’s web-based word processing app, has been resuscitated after it was found choking on a series of conjunctions and other parts of speech.
Attention, Mac users who access Outlook with Safari: something’s broken, and it’s causing an empty TokenFactoryIFrame file to be downloaded every few seconds for as long as you remain there.
Microsoft hasn’t said what’s causing the problem, though it did acknowledge the ongoing blunder in this support message-board thread on Microsoft Answers. We understand this flood of downloads affects Safari on desktop Macs; it may also affect browsers on iOS using Safari’s WebKit engine, such as Microsoft Edge on iPads.
Case in point: the SolarWinds attack in 2020, when Kremlin-backed miscreants slipped malware into SolarWinds’ Orion software, which was then pushed to some 18,000 SolarWinds’ customers. This allowed the criminals to infiltrate nearly 100 US government and private-sector networks.
“When you get a White House podium statement that X did Y, like we did with with everything from Sony Pictures to NotPetya, that’s 100 percent” confidence in the attribution, Joyce said.
In 2014, the FBI attributed the Sony Pictures cyberattack to North Korea, and US law enforcement blamed the 2017 NotPetya attacks on the Russian military.
Colonial Pipeline is facing an almost $1 million fine for control room management failures after the US Department of Transportation alleged they contributed to the nation’s fuel disruption in the wake of the 2021 ransomware attack.
A years-long campaign by miscreants to insert malicious JavaScript into vulnerable WordPress sites, so that visitors are redirected to scam websites, has been documented by reverse-engineers.
Kaspersky claims that in 88 percent of organizations that have had to deal with a ransomware incident, business leaders said they would choose to pay the money if faced with another attack. In contrast, among those that have not so far suffered a ransomware attack, only 67 percent would be willing to pay, and they would be less inclined to do so immediately.
Intel has disclosed high-severity bugs in its firmware that’s used in datacenter servers, workstations, mobile devices, storage products, and other gear. These flaws can be exploited to escalate privileges, leak information, or stop things from working.
Pangolin8RAT is modular malware that emerged in 2019 and is regularly updated. It is believed to be the successor of the PlugX and ShadowPad malware families, and has been used to target industries beyond gambling – transportation, telecom and governments have all been attacked.
[...]
TeamT5 also found threat actors collect and store victim credentials, software source code and business info for future use.
Security researchers have devised a tool that detects flaws in the way apps like Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat process JavaScript, and it’s proven so effective they’ve found 134 bugs – 59 of them considered worthy of a fix by vendors, 33 assigned a CVE number, and 17 producing bug bounty payments totaling $22,000.
Efforts by Salesforce-owned cloud platform Heroku to manage a recent security incident are turning into a bit of a disaster, according to some users.
Heroku has run security incident notifications for 18 days and appears to have upset several of its customers due to a perceived lack of openness and communication.
The backdoor Windows malware, dubbed DCRat or DarkCrystal RAT, was released in 2018, then redesigned and relaunched the following year. An individual who goes by the handles boldenis44, crystalcoder, and Кодер (Coder) developed the RAT, we’re told, and works to improve it on a daily basis.
Opposition is building to India’s recently introduced rules on reporting computer security breaches, which have come under fire for being impractical, ineffective, and impinging on privacy.
The rules were introduced without fanfare in late April by CERT-In, the nation’s government-run computer emergency response team that has responsibility for incident management and wider infosec guidance.
[...]
India’s Internet Freedom Foundation has offered an extensive criticism of the regulations, arguing that they were formulated and announced without consultation, lack a data breach reporting mechanism that would benefit end-users, and include data localization requirements that could prevent some cross-border data flows.
The foundation also points out that the privacy implications of the rules – especially five-year retention of personal information – is a very significant requirement at a time when India’s Draft Data Protection Bill has proven so controversial it has failed to reach a vote in Parliament, and debate about digital privacy in India is ongoing and fierce.
F5 Networks and Cisco this week issued warnings about serious, and in some cases critical, security vulnerabilities in their products.
F5 officials said Thursday its most serious issue, a critical flaw in its iControl REST framework with a severity score of 9.8 out of 10, could be exploited to bypass the authentication software, used by its BIG-IP portfolio, and hijack equipment. Specifically, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2022-1388, can be abused by miscreants to, among other things, run malicious commands on BIG-IP devices via their management ports unimpeded.
David Harville, eBay’s former director of global resiliency, pleaded guilty this week to five felony counts of participating in a plan to harass and intimidate journalists who were critical of the online auction business.
Harville is the last of seven former eBay employees/contractors charged by the US Justice Department to have admitted participating in a 2019 cyberstalking campaign to silence Ina and David Steiner, who publish the web newsletter and website EcommerceBytes.
Europe’s data protection regime has reduced the number of apps available in Google Play by “a third,” increased costs, and reduced developer revenues, according to a study published Monday.
In one way, I have treated it as such – I’ve not disclosed anything here or on the gemini mailing list that I would want unknown to certain family members, or an employer, or other IRL people. In another way, however, I’ve not been behaving as if this gemsite is in my real name. Until now, this gemsite has not mentioned my full name or really any other real-life information.
Big names in Bitcoin have defended cryptocurrency mining, issuing a jointly signed letter hitting back at US lawmakers who last month urged a government watchdog to probe the practice.
Twitter founder and Bitcoin champion Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Bitcoin-collecting MicroStrategy Michael Saylor, and others on Monday signed the letter [PDF] that is a point-by-point rebuttal to a memo [PDF] sent last month to America’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by Representative Jared Huffman (D-CA) and a couple dozen other Democrats.
Taiwanese hardware giant ASUSTeK says demand for GPU used to mine cryptocurrency is “disappearing” – and so is about ten percent of demand for personal computers.
Speaking on the company’s Q1 earnings call, co-CEO S.Y. Hsu said the fall in demand for GPUs was caused by the crypto industry responding to critics of its energy consumption. They’re moving away from proof of work to proof of space – verifiable creation of data occupying space in a storage medium – as the means of mining tokens.
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has scrambled to alleviate fears that customers storing cryptocurrencies at the digital cash exchange will lose everything if the biz goes under.
This concern stemmed from Coinbase’s quarterly 10-Q report [PDF] filed this month to the SEC. It disclosed that customers who kept their cryptocurrencies at the exchange could see their assets seized in the event the business went bankrupt, thus:
The US Treasury has sanctioned cryptocurrency mixer Blender for its role in helping North Korea’s Lazarus Group launder stolen digital assets.
As a result, among other limitations, anyone in the United States or a US person can no longer do any business with Blender without special permission from the government.
This marks the Feds’ first-ever sanctions against a crypto mixer, which cybercriminals can use to cover their tracks. As the name might suggest, cryptocurrency mixing, or tumbling, can obscure the source of some digital money. The laundered coins cannot be traced back to, say, a wallet robbed of its contents, allowing crooks to spend their ill-gotten gains without being linked to their crimes.
Such services have legitimate privacy uses, though Uncle Sam isn’t happy that it can be used to make life easy for criminals, and so it’s cracking down on the practice.
SoftBank lost a lot of money over the past 12 months.
The Japanese giant’s founder and CEO Masayoshi Son today told analysts on a conference call marking the end of its fiscal 2022 year that the SoftBank group as a whole lost $13.15 billion. Its two Vision Funds, which account for 50 percent of SoftBank’s net asset value, alone lost $27.4 billion between them. If your technology stock or cryptocurrency portfolio has taken a dive lately in these bumpy economic times, perhaps you can manage a wry grin here.
More Chinese tech companies including Tencent, JD.com, and China Mobile face delisting by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) thanks to opaque disclosures.
Tencent-affiliated gaming outfits Huya and Douyu, internet datacenter services provider Vnet Group, and online game services provider NetEase were among more than 80 fresh additions to a provisional list of companies on May 4.
On Wednesday, the US Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals decided to undo a preliminary injunction that for the past few months has been blocking Texas’s law prohibiting online content moderation while that legislation is being challenged.
Two judges of a three judge panel – all Republican appointees – granted Texas’s motion to stay the preliminary injunction, granted last December, that suspended HB 20 amid the dispute over its constitutionality.
China’s internet regulator, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), has published guidelines that aim to stop minors from giving tips or other forms of payment to livestreamers, watching after 10pm, or livestreaming themselves.
“Website platforms must not develop functional applications that attract minors to tip or induce minors to give ‘gifts.’ If it is found that the website platform violates the aforementioned requirements, measures such as suspending the tipping function and shutting down the live broadcast business will be implemented,” said the recently published Opinions on Regulating Online Live Rewards and Strengthening the Protection of Minors (in Chinese).
California Attorney General Rob Bonta on Wednesday welcomed the decision by a group of telecom and cable industry associations to abandon their legal challenge of the US state’s net neutrality law SB822.
“My office has fought for years to ensure that internet service providers can’t interfere with or limit what Californians do online,” said Bonta in a statement. “Now the case is finally over.
OAKLAND – California Attorney General Rob Bonta today issued the following statement on a decision by associations representing major internet service providers to dismiss their lawsuit challenging California’s net neutrality law. Senate Bill 822 protects Californians from blocking, throttling, harmful forms of zero-rating, and other anti-competitive practices that harm
The FTC has settled a case in which Frontier Communications was accused of charging high prices for under-delivered internet connectivity.
The US telecommunications giant has promised to be clearer with subscribers on connection speeds, and will cough up more than $8.5 million, or less than a day in annual profit, to end the matter.
Frontier used to primarily pipe broadband over phone lines to people in rural areas, expanded to cities, and today supplies the usual fare to homes and businesses: fiber internet, TV, and phone services.
One thing I found by looking at where my #hashtag crawler went was that some people have a bottomless pit of links.
The first one I saw was someone exposing a repository of the site content. That included a link to the content itself. Not a link to the actual site, but to the copy of it in the repo. That had a repo link, where you could find a site link, and so on. I spotted this when it got to several levels of site/repo/site/repo/site/repo and told the crawler to give up. I’m mildy curious how deep that could go. I suppose it’s limited by the maximum length of a gemini request (assuming that either the server or the client respected that limit).
[...]
to give up on those too.
Having read Sean Connor’s experiences with the crawlers that won’t give up on an infinite redirect loop, I think that some crawlers are probably probing the limits of those two capsules.
I’ve had similar thoughts, I mean, the immediate of ‘social’ media, designed for engagement has a lot of problems.
[...]
I don’t know, I was born in the 80′s so I can’t talk about what happened before, rather than what older friends and parents told us.
That said, the lifestyle is always being broken by innovations, cheapest ways. I think travelling abroad was ‘impossible’ for a middle-class citizen 50 years ago, now it’s kind of common. Talking in English with random people from the world was kind of unthinkable. Now you are doing it.
When things become easier, they are less appreciated, I have seen.
And then they come the greedy technological companies, fighting against the opposite. ‘Everything has to be for profit’, ‘Everything has to be open and free’. I don’t want to take a side, both parts have something I like. And I think being in the middle is kind of healthy.
So as always, we (and several prominent members of the hacking scene) recommend you do not update your console, if you can, and if you’re expecting to Jailbreak it eventually.
Tesla has started legal action against a former employee the company alleges was copying confidential data from its Project Dojo supercomputer onto his own systems outside the company. It further alleges he tried to conceal his actions by submitting a substitute laptop for inspection by the carmaker’s information security team.
Unified Patents’ Portal now includes foreign opposition data with access to the dockets. At the current moment the data covers the United Kingdom, Germany, European Patent Office, and Japan.
On May 9, 2022, Unified Patents added two separate PATROLL contests with an opportunity to collect up to $4,000 in cash for prior art on at least claim 10 of U.S. Patent 9,269,208 and at least claim 1 of U.S. Patent 9,665,705. The patents are owned by CPC Patent Technologies Pty., Ltd., an NPE and Charter Pacific Corp. entity. The ’208 and ‘705 patents generally relate to systems using wireless transmission of security code information. They have both been asserted against Apple.
On May 9, 2022, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on at least claim 13 of U.S. Patent 8,620,039, owned by CPC Patent Technologies Pty., Ltd., an NPE and Charter Pacific Corp. entity. The ’039 patent is generally related to a biometric security card device. It has been asserted against Apple.
In what may be one of the biggest wastes of time in the history of trademark jurisprudence, the Board reversed the USPTO’s requirements that LEGO disclaim the word KID, in both Latin and non-Latin characters, in the two marks shown below, for various goods and services primarily aimed at children. The Board found the two marks to be unitary, and therefore disclaimer of KID was not required. Now, does anyone think that Lego, by avoiding these disclaimers, will be able to stop others from using the word KID in connection with child-related goods and services? What’s the point? In re Lego Juris A/S, Serial Nos. 88698784 and 88698804 (May 9, 2022) [not precedential (Opinion by Judge Cynthia C. Lynch).
Posted in Europe, Patents at 2:13 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Sheesh!
Summary: Unitary Patent and Unified Patent Court (UPC)? Impossible. But Team UPC counts on an endless torrent of fake news managing to convince you (and more importantly politicians) otherwise.
Video download link | md5sum 6b334ef318c0bd9f414896b358c65e3e Even Former EPO Chiefs Reject the UPC Lies
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Daniel X. Thomas and other people who are “too old to punish” (consequences to their career profoundly minimised owing to seniority) are among those who push back against the Unitary Patent or Unified Patent Court (UPC); any sane person — not a career-climbing litigation zealot — can identify the pertinent facts and realise that what’s going on here is an injustice of unprecedented proportions in the patent discipline
THE video above deals with 13 annotated screenshots from today (gathered over the past week) and 17 new comments against the UPC. If one puts aside fake news and shameless self-promotion, it seems abundantly clear that UPC is neither legal nor desirable. Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos as EPO presidents have acted like agents of Team UPC, striving to lower patent quality in anticipation of kangaroo courts with docile judges across the EU.
“There’s that old cliché about UPC always coming “next year” (and next year they’ll say “next year” again).”The perils of Team UPC have lasted over a decade. They’ve groomed Campinos (he attended and spoke in a UPC lobbying event in his very first week as EPO President). But he’s letting out the expletives. His approval rates among staff are near 0% (3% two years ago; the only way has been down since then).
As shown above, even former executives of the EPO, who worked and still work with Battistelli, agree that the UPC is a terrible conspiracy (of law firms and their largest clients; they conspire against the European public). The pushback is very apparent and rumours we’ve seen suggest a legal action is inevitable if not imminent. There’s that old cliché about UPC always coming “next year” (and next year they'll say "next year" again). █
Posted in Europe, Patents at 1:25 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Corporations that send patent applications to the EPO are large multinationals (only 20% of applicants are not)
Summary: The European examiners who deal with patents prefer a system that works for science, for Europe, not for foreign megacorporations that amass millions of low-quality patents and weaponise these to discourage competition
As an associate of ours put it, “quantity over quality has been a problem, pushed by management, so it is important to distinguish this downturn from an actually desirable re-calibration.”
Posted in Europe, Patents at 1:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 954eaf1895d37a3d1cd81c91ad93af26 More Research, Less Rubber-stamping
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Seeing that the EPO’s management routinely violates the law and even the very legal basis of the EPO’s existence (it is a monopoly in Europe; no body has the authority to compete against it), the EPO’s examiners have embarked on a ‘Work-to-Rule’ campaign — working in compliance with the rules as defined 49 years ago and revised over the decades — and the European Patent Convention (EPC) takes priority over unlawful demands from middle and upper management; this is proving highly effective so far and it will carry on until demands are met, i.e. until the law is obeyed and staff is treated with respect/dignity
THE EPO‘s staff union in Munich (known as SUEPO Munich) is pleased with the outcome of the industrial action, which started earlier this year. António Campinos is already losing his temper. It seems to be working.
“The ‘Work-to-Rule Actions’ are proving successful,” SUEPO Munich says (see video above or text below), “and the Focus on search actions is effective. The actions are drawing the attention of the Administrative Council and external stakeholders thereby persuading management to take staff’s concerns seriously. Actions continue.”
“In a nutshell, the industrial action is working because there’s a lot less focus on granting European Patents (especially bogus and harmful ones like software patents).”Excellent! These ‘Work-to-Rule Actions’ aren’t some kind of “activism” but an attempt to compel the management to obey the law! This is essential. The European public interest is with the examiners.
In a nutshell, the industrial action is working because there’s a lot less focus on granting European Patents (especially bogus and harmful ones like software patents). The staff wants to fix the patent quality problem and there’s an upcoming meeting (Wednesday the 18th of May) on the matter. It will take place about a fortnight after the staff survey’s deadline was reached. The EPO’s staff is organised, unionised, and eager to stop the financialization of the EPO.
Here’s the letter to staff:
Ortssektion München . Local Section Munich . Section locale de Munich
12.05.2022
su22002mp – 0.2.1/0.3.2
SUEPO Work-to-Rule Actions are successful and continue
Where do we stand?
Early this year, SUEPO called for actions supported by the Central Staff Committee (CSC). The main reason for discontent with the EPO present administration led by Mr. Campinos during the last four years follows his flawed Financial Study of 2019 made by Oliver Wyman & Mercer and the consequent reforms.
The new salary adjustment procedure causes a disastrous immediate and long-term loss of purchasing power and denies the massive efforts made by EPO staff during the last two pandemic years.
In view of the above issues, SUEPO proposed on the 22 February 2022 an ‘Action Plan’ which was largely approved by staff.
Action Plan
The ‘Work-to-Rule Actions’ are proving successful and the Focus on search actions is effective. The actions are drawing the attention of the Administrative Council and external stakeholders thereby persuading management to take staff’s concerns seriously.
The following is the aggregated data:
January – February Examiner Products (S,E,O) is +1% above 2021 Search Actions are +11% above 2021 and +8% above plan Grants are -21% below 2021 and -8% below plan
January – March. Examiner Products (S,E,O) is -2% below 2021 Search Actions are +9% above 2021 and +5% above plan Grants are -24% below 2021 and -12% below plan
January – April. Examiner Products (S,E,O) is -4% below 2021 Search Actions are +7% above 2021 and +6% above plan Grants are -24% below 2021 and -10% below plan
Source: DG1 Holistic Dashboard
Industrial Actions
The focus on the Search Actions has caused a steep decrease in Grants followed by an even steeper decline since the successful strike day on the 22 March 2022. A significant decrease in Grants can be clearly seen in the DG1 Management Dashboard. Staff has understood that even a reward of a double step this year won’t make up for the loss of purchasing power due to the lack of a salary adjustment.
The inflation in the Netherlands of 11.2% and in Germany of 7.8% over the last 12 months accounts for far more than a double step reward (on average 1 step equals 2%). Less than 60% of eligible staff (actually less than 50% of all staff) may receive a single step let alone a double step this year. This is the worst year in the career of EPO staff which comes at the time when staff worked diligently through the worst pandemic of the century and the worst inflation since the EPO inception.
Ignoring the facts
Mr. Campinos ignores every invitation from the social partner to discuss staff’s problems. SUEPO invited Mr. Campinos on the 1st, on 5th and on 6th of April. All these dates were ignored and only on the 12th of April did Mr. Campinos react, by sending a letter just before the Administrative Council meeting for his communication exercise. Management representatives have anyway no mandate to meaningfully talk to SUEPO about the issues in the call for strike and merely repeat the Office’s statements.
Former presidents talked to SUEPO and unsurprisingly found common ground on difficult issues such as on the salary adjustment procedure. The salary adjustment procedure was a co-supported measure by management and staff for more than 30 years. This all changed when Mr. Battistelli entered our office and even worsened now with Mr. Campinos. Under their management not once could a solution be found.
Nevertheless, we continue to invite Mr. Campinos in person to the negotiation table since only through dialogue can we achieve a positive outcome for staff.
SUEPO Munich
Notice how quiet not only the Office but also the media has been. The media isn’t doing its job.
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