Microsoft marketing at the EPO's expense
Summary: The EPO lies about financial deficits while spending nearly $100,000,000 on more than a decade of problematic "awards" that occasionally glorify massive frauds
Summary: “European Inventor Award” is little but a graft opportunity and a way to bribe nations (money in exchange for special favours); it’s also a way to reward questionable people, dismantle the notion of patent neutrality, and pass bribes to a lot of European publishers that might otherwise expose EPO corruption
Months ago we covered what the EPO‘s Frenchmen Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos had done in Monaco to buy its vote in the Administrative Council.
So the EPO’s PR event again took place in France/Monaco. What’s wrong’s with it? See what we wrote when they chose Monaco and notice this new puff piece (warning: epo.org link) saying: “With a message from His Serene Highness Albert II, Sovereign Prince of Monaco, a tie for first place in the Young Inventors prize and the revelation of Katalin Karikó as the Lifetime achievement laureate, the 2022 edition offered several surprises for viewers.”
How does the graft allocation stack up? Something like this:
2015: France
2016: Portugal (connected to Campinos)
2017: Italy (Battistelli is an Italian name)
2018: France
2019: Austria
2020: (COVID-19)
2021: (COVID-19)
2022: Monaco France
Each such ceremony, rewarding or glorifying the occasional crooks, frauds and sexual predators by bribing a lot of media (it costs almost $10,000,000 for just a couple of hours of this ‘festival’), involves the passage of a lot of money to host countries or, as in 2018, the hall managed by Battistelli himself (overt corruption). Sometimes the EPO uses these people posthumously for PR; it helps them portray a corrupt, greedy, unhinged institution as some sort of ally of science. █
Montana state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. It borders by Idaho to the west, North Dakota and South Dakota to the east, Wyoming to the south, and the Canadian provinces of Alberta, British Columbia, and Saskatchewan to the north. Montana is the only US state that shares a land border with three Canadian provinces.
In this backyard boomer vlog, I ramble on about how Linux has become a “normie” operating system. If you have used Linux for a few years (or more), then you have undoubtedly noticed that Linux has gotten so good that it’s really…just another operating system.
What source code repository is ethical well it depends on how you define ethics and if you go by what the FSF and GNU have to say well basically nothing is except what they offer themselves.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Manjaro 21.3.0 Xfce Edition and some of the applications pre-installed.
After 30 years of working on Linux, Linus Torvalds is still enthusiastic about the open-source operating system he created and its future prospects for innovation.
Today, the Linux operating system is at the foundation of cloud, edge, embedded and internet of things (IoT) technologies that enable the operations of billions of devices. Linux is developed by an open community of contributors with new versions of the core, known as the Linux kernel, released every six to ten weeks. Each of those new major kernel updates are released by none other than Torvalds himself.
At the Open Source Summit event today, Torvalds discussed the state of Linux, in a fireside chat with his longtime friend Dirk Hohndel, who currently is the chief open-source officer at the Cardano Foundation. The conversation ranged from the state of open-source security, to new technology and the impact of the pandemic on Linux development.
I’ve relied on various authenticator apps for some time. For those that don’t know, an authenticator app is used to generate random codes used for two-factor authentication. How they work is simple: You install the app, add an account and the authenticator will generate a time-based six-digit code to use for 2FA for the site or service in question.
In my opinion, using an authenticator app for 2FA is much more secure than having that code sent to you via SMS. Unfortunately, not every site and service works with authenticator apps, but those services that do make up for the random oversight.
Although 2FA isn’t perfect, it’s far better to use it than not. By adding an extra layer of security, you make it that much more challenging for bad actors to gain access to your accounts and data. For that reason alone, I highly recommend adding 2FA security to all of your accounts that make it available.
With all of that said, you’ll find authenticator apps for nearly every platform. For your mobile needs, there’s Authy and Google Authenticator. But what about the desktop? What apps are available for those platforms?
If your operating system of choice is Linux, there’s one option that’s quite good. That app is called Authenticator, and it’s a GTK app that supports over 200 providers. In fact, any siteor service that supports tokens should work with it. You can search the 2FA Directory and any site that comes up as supporting tokens will work with Authenticator.
Would like to display digital clock and date in your desktop? Desktop Clock is a new extension to do the job in GNOME 42.
It’s an extension that so far works on Ubuntu 22.04, Fedora 36, Arch and Manjaro Linux. With it, you have the date and time display on desktop with customisable appearance.
BetterCAP is a flexible and powerful tool for MITM or Man in the Middle attacks on wireless networks. BetterCAP is built into popular hacking Linux distros such as Kali and Parrot and Aline Linux and is also available on other platforms. The tool has become quite popular, pushing its predecessor EtterCAP to near irrelevance.
The Grub Customizer is a handy GUI tool that lets you configure various aspects of the Grub bootloader.
You can use it to change the order of the boot and make Windows boot by default.
Have you ever wondered how many days it’s been since you started your diet, begun your daily jogs, or were first working with Linux? If you can remember the start date, a simple Linux script can count the days for you. All you need is the date command and a calculation that turns your dates into seconds, subtracts the start date from the end date and then divides the result by the appropriate number to turn the seconds into the corresponding number of days.
Most computer operating systems suffer from some version of “DLL hell” — a decidedly Windows term, but the concept applies across the board. Consider doing embedded development which usually takes a few specialized tools. You write your embedded system code, ship it off, and forget about it for a few years. Then, the end-user wants a change. Too bad the compiler you used requires some library that has changed so it no longer works. Oh, and the device programmer needs an older version of the USB library. The Python build tools use Python 2 but your system has moved on. If the tools you need aren’t on the computer anymore, you may have trouble finding the install media and getting it to work. Worse still if you don’t even have the right kind of computer for it anymore.
Emacs is often thought of as a programmer’s text editor. It has an extensible programming support as well as the ability to automatically evaluate expressions within files. But one thing that Emacs also does well is allowing users to compose beautiful documents with LaTeX through Org Mode.
Audacity is a powerful free audio manipulation program available for modern operating systems. Unlike other free audio processing programs, Audacity stands out as one of the most feature-complete open source project out of all of them. In that, it can manage, edit, and mix multiple audio tracks in a single timeline.
Furthermore, being open source means that Audacity is constantly up-to-date with the latest audio standards, ensuring the ability to adapt any project that you do in Audacity for future audio formats and specifications. Lastly, Audacity is also available on all major operating systems. This ultimately means that even if you change your operating system today, you will most likely still be able to use Audacity.
Some scripts and programs can take options from the command line. These can be very specific for the operation of a program or script.
There are two ways to handle options: placement or parameters.
In this short tutorial , you will learn how to find your sound card information in a simple way in case your Ubuntu distribution cannot automatically detect it.
GIFs are undoubtedly one of the most popular media formats shared on the internet. From tutorials to memes and beyond, people create and share GIFs for everything. But most of the time, these GIFs aren’t originally recorded as files with the “.gif” extension. Usually, a video is trimmed and a specific portion of the media is converted to a GIF.
Raspberry Pi OS is the main operating system for the Raspberry Pi, but it’s not your only option. If you’re looking for a more traditional Linux experience, it’s time to look elsewhere.
Many operating systems are available for the Raspberry Pi, among them Ubuntu. Desktop, Server, and Core versions of Ubuntu can be run on the Raspberry Pi.
Keep reading to find out how to install your preferred Ubuntu version on a Raspberry Pi 4.
Cockpit is a very powerful tool that allows you to manage several aspects, such as Podman containers, users, storage, networking, services, SELinux, software updates and with the help of additional plugins, much more.
Cockpit is found on most RHEL-based Linux operating systems and can be installed on Ubuntu-based systems from the standard repositories with a command like sudo apt-get install cockpit -y.
Cockpit is traditionally managed by a web-based interface, but for those who prefer a desktop client, there is an application. Cockpit Client provides a very simple-to-use GUI to make it even easier to manage your servers. All connections are made via SSH using the SHH configuration for the local user and all servers must have Cockpit installed. The bonus is that the Cockpit web server doesn’t need to be enabled, and no extra ports are exposed.
In these wild times, collaboration has become an absolute necessity. Thankfully, there are so many ways to collaborate: Every platform offers the means to work together, whether it’s a desktop, server, mobile or container deployment, you name it and you can collaborate with it. Some of those collaborative tools offer a ton of features, but sometimes you want something simple — just the ability to collaborate on, say, notes.
For such a need, you should turn to a very easy-to-use Etherpad, which is a real-time collaboration platform that can be deployed on just about any operating system
The rm (remove) command is one of the essential Linux utilities that every basic to pro user should know, their working and usage.
Not much familiar with Linux Nano file Editor, then here are some keyboard shortcuts you can use with it to work around easily such as Undo and Redo options in Nano editor.
Nano is easy to use and simple text-based file editor. It allows you to edit files in a terminal or console, even without a graphical environment. Although the Nano has a smaller range of functions than VIM or Emacs, it is much easier and more intuitive to use. Nano is therefore particularly suitable for smaller, fast edits or for writing short scripts.
The editor supports syntax highlighting for different programming languages, undo/redo functionality, mouse support (if a graphics server is running), automatic indentation, saving files with MS-DOS or Mac line endings, and much more.
fd is an alternative and faster command line utility for the find command. It does the job of finding files and directories based on their names, sizes, types, and other attributes. The fd command has been designed with simplicity and performance in mind and supports features like colors, and a lot more.
It’s available for MacOS, Linux and Windows on the official website and via Homebrew, APT and Chocolatey package managers.
One of the core utilities in Linux is the find command line utility. find is a utility first originally written for Unix systems by Bell Labs Computing Sciences Research Center in version 1 of Unix in 1970.
A good 20+ years before Linus Torvalds created the first version of the Linux kernel. So in terms of computing application software find is one of the most oldest, still in use and still maintained software programs.
If you see an apt-key deprecated warning when you run apt update on Ubuntu and want to fix it, you’re in the right place
TeamViewer is an application that lets you access other computers remotely so you can modify, maintain, or manage them wherever you are, as though you were actually there.
Better yet, the app works with all major platforms: Windows, macOS, and Linux (also in limited forms on iOS and Android too). You can use TeamViewer to transfer files to/from a remote computer and host; chat in real time with its users; sync clipboard contents, and more.
TeamViewer is also simple to use: you install the app on both computers, then connect using the unique ID and password the app generates. While this tool’s core feature set is skewed more towards IT professionals, support agents, and developers it is free to use for personal use (and ideal for helping a frustrated relative).
In Python, a dictionary is an apparently random set of data values that may be used to store data values in the manner of a map. Unlike other data types, which can only store a single value as an element, dictionaries retain Key:value pairs instead of single values. The dictionary includes a key-value pair in order to make it more search engine optimized.
As you may already know, when an user enter a command with sudo privileges, the sudo password will be remembered for a brief period of time.
By default, the password is remembered for 15 minutes. During this time, the users don’t have to enter the password for the subsequent commands that run shortly after the first sudo command, even if they require sudo privileges.
What if you want to force the users to enter sudo password all the time? That’s what we are going to learn now. This brief guide explains how to force sudo password authentication in Linux.
The new KDE Plasma release eases pain for Linux desktop users, but is it enough to make Linux a mainstream desktop OS?
Only a week after introducing KDE Plasma 5.25, the KDE developers have released version 5.25.1. This release fixes a number of bugs, including improved support for multiple monitors.
RISC OS, the operating system of the original Arm computer, the Acorn Archimedes, is still very much alive – and doing relatively well for its age.
In June 1987, Acorn launched the Archimedes A305 and A310, starting at £800 ($982) and running a new operating system called Arthur. At the time, it was a radical and very fast computer. In his review [PDF] for Personal Computer World, Dick Pountain memorably said: “It loads huge programs with a faint burping noise, in the time it takes to blink an eye.”
Arthur was loosely related to Acorn’s earlier MOS, the BBC Micro operating system but looked very different thanks to a prototype graphical desktop, implemented in BBC BASIC, that could charitably be called “technicolor.”
Renamed RISC OS, version 2 followed in 1989 – the same year that Sun started selling its new SPARCstation 1 (a snip at £7,500c $9,200) and DEC launched the MIPS R2000-chipset-based DECstation 3100 (for £8,800/c $10,800).
RISC OS has had a rather convoluted history, partly due to Acorn spinning out Arm, eventually pulling out of the computer market, rebranding as Element 14 and being acquired by Broadcom, where Arm co-designer Sophie Wilson still works today. And partly due to drama over the ownership of the OS post-Acorn at one point.
Now that Shift has been released, we are still busy working on the Debian version of Shift due later this year, but what else beyond that is happening ? Well, We have also started working on a “GameR” Edition of MakuluLinux, this build is specifically tailored to hardcore gamers using platforms like : Steam, Lutris, Gamehub, Itch, Geforce-Now, Epic Games, Wine etc etc… These platforms are often quite difficult to setup and often have conflicting dependencies issues. One way that users work around the issues is by using Snapd or flathub installs to bypass Dependencies issues, however these installs also come at a price as both flathub and snapD don’t quite give you the same speed boost as the native app client packages. This is where “MakuluLinux-GameR” is focused, We are actively working to provide these platforms in their native forms running at the max possible speed without Dependencies issues. At The same time, it being a Makulu release, you can also Expect it to be very slick, pretty and beautiful … Here is a Sneak Preview Screenshot of the Desktop of a very early build of MakuluLinux-GameR
Manjaro “Ruah” has been released and includes the latest Calamares installer, GNOME 42, and much more.
Manjaro is an Arch-based, rolling-release Linux distribution aimed at users who want the power and flexibility of Arch, without complications. The latest release, version 21.3.0, includes plenty of newness, in the form of the Calamares installer (which now supports LUKS partitions), GNOME 42 (which includes Libadwaita), KDE Plasma 5.24 (which includes the new Overview), XFCE 4.16 (which now supports fractional scaling), and Linux kernel 5.15 LTS.
The GNOME edition of Manjaro 21.30 includes both GTK 4 and Libadwaita, which offers improved performance, a modern UI style, and plenty of new user interface elements. The Plasma edition makes it possible to more easily move panels around and stick them to any edge you like. The XFCE edition received quite a number of updates, especially in the area of compositing and GLX.
In a world of disruptions, the new SUSE Linux Enterprise (SLE) brings innovation without disruption. Our new Linux helps our customers and partners stay ahead of cyberattacks with advanced supply chain security and confidential computing.
But what is a secure system worth if you can’t keep it that way? Today, we’re excited to launch SUSE Manager 4.3 to keep your systems secure — no matter which Linux distro you are running or where it is located.
It is my great pleasure to introduce Opensource.com’s 2022 summer reading list. This year’s list contains seven wonderful reading recommendations from members of the Opensource.com community. You will find a nice mix of books covering everything from a fun cozy mystery to non-fiction works that explore thought-provoking topics. I hope you find something on this list that interests you.
Red Hat Developer Subscription for Individuals provides access to the most popular database and/or web servers, such as PostgreSQL, MariaDB, httpd and Nginx via Application Streams. While this is a great way for Linux developers to get started implementing applications quickly, Application Streams follow their own lifecycles, which can pose a challenge for RHEL developers and administrators trying to keep their system in a supported state.
Red Hat Insights to the rescue! We’ve recently added a new set of Advisor recommendations which alerts users for an approaching retirement date of Application Streams.
Not that long ago, databases were viewed as the definition of a monolith — never intended to be broken down into microservices and containerized. A lot has changed in a short period of time and while containerizing a database may not be as straightforward as containerizing an application, the benefits greatly outweigh the challenges. Databases need the agility, portability and scalability that containerization can offer and organizations are moving to take advantage of these benefits.
Fedora Hatches are still happening all around the world! Along with Nest With Fedora this year, Fedora is hosting local in-person hatch events. This is a great opportunity to connect with your fellow Fedorans and receive some amazing Fedora swag.
Thanks to our Ambassadors, Fedora is hosting eight Hatch events this year! You can expect a social event and possibly a workshop depending on which Hatch event you attend.
Personally, I’ve been doing things with Debian and free software for almost thirty years. I was really shocked when I heard that Debian funds were being used to try and shut down independent, volunteer-run web sites publishing news about Debian itself.
I had a closer look at the situation myself and realized that nobody has registered a Debian trademark in Switzerland. Therefore, the Software Freedom Institute submitted an application for the mark.
The application was submitted on 14 May 2022 and granted on 8 June 2022.
Software Freedom Institute SA immediately published a statement authorizing legitimate use of the trademark in domain names.
It appears really bizarre that some rogue members of Debian have collaborated for months with an expensive lawyer and yet none of them bothered to ensure they were holding a registration in Switzerland before filing their attacks at WIPO. The Swiss Institute for Intellectual Property charges a fee of just CHF 550 to register a trademark. That is less than what Debian pays for two hours with their lawyer. Einstein himself used to work there but you don’t need to be Einstein to realize who got better value for their money in this case.
As planned, we held our second local Debian meeting of the year last Sunday. We met at the lovely Eastern Bloc (an artists’ hacklab) to work on Debian (and other stuff!), chat and socialise.
[...]
We are planning to have our next meeting at the end of August. If you are interested, the best way to stay in touch is either to subscribe to our mailing list or to join our IRC channel (#debian-quebec on OFTC). Events are also posted on Quebec’s Agenda du libre.
This is a tutorial to install Unity Desktop Environment on Ubuntu 22.04. This turns back Ubuntu to the previous default experience between the years 2011-2017. Let’s turn back Unity!
Memfault, the provider of the first cloud-based connected device observability platform, today announced its over-the-air (OTA) update capabilities are now available on Embedded Linux. Device developers building on Linux now have access to the Memfault platform for OTA management and hosting features such as cohorts, staged rollouts, full vs. delta releases, and a scalable global CDN. Memfault also added support for forced (non-interactive) updates, a critical feature for delivering security updates to embedded IoT devices.
A leading DMS company would like to build AOI systems with machine vision inspection technology to improve product quality and customer satisfaction. This DMS company has been using Windows OS-based industrial control PCs to run long-term machine automation. When importing product inspections, a Linux-based system with NVIDIA® GPU runs inspection models for image analysis.
SolidRun announced today a partnership with Renesas Electronics at Embedded World. According to SolidRun, the RZ/G2LC is the first System on Module (SOM) based on the 64-bit RZ/G2LC System on Chip from Renesas. The company is expecting to target applications such as IoT solutions, video surveillance, HMI applications and industrial automation solutions.
The compact SOM module integrates up to two Cortex-A55 processors with a frequency up to 1.20GHz and a Cortex-M33 for secured IoT applications. The device also features an Arm Mali-G31 GPU for image processing and AI inference with support for OpenGL/CL 2.0.
Pen plotting projects are everywhere nowadays, with the vast majority using a couple of stepper motors for moving the writing utensil and a servo to raise or lower it. But they are quite slow due to the lack of rigid assembly and because the servo motor takes around a second to move the pen. This problem is what drove YouTuber IV Projects to create a very novel design that swaps out the servo for another stepper motor and drastically increases drawing speed.
Just like most other pen plotters, the X-axis is driven by a NEMA17 stepper motor with a timing belt attached to the central pen carriage. However, the Y-axis takes a different approach by relying on a pair of rollers that are covered in 120-grit sanding bands, which help to grab the paper securely and move it whenever the stepper motor rotates the drive wheel. This helps to minimize slipping compared to rubber rollers and is much faster than a belt-driven design.
Think Silicon®, a leader in ultra-low power graphics IP, will showcase the industry’s first RISC-V-based GPU – the NEOX™ G-Series & A-Series – at Embedded World 2022. The company will also introduce the NEMA®|pico-VG, the latest in the NEMA®|GPU-Series for MCU-driven SoCs – which supports rich vector graphics and improves system efficiency by offloading CPU utilization up to 95%.
Nominations are now open for the OpenUK Awards 2022.
We’ve run our annual awards ceremony to recognise great Open tech contributions for the last two years with great success and this year nominations are open for you to join or point is to the best people, organisations and projects that need rewarded.
Two years ago it we had dinner sent to your door during Covid. Last year we dined at the centre of the world at COP26. This year we’re Lording it up with a ceremony and dinner in the House of Lords on 30 November.
The Southern California Linux Expo – SCALE 19x – returns to its regularly scheduled annual program this year from July 28-31 at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel.
As this continent’s largest community-run Linux/FOSS expo, SCALE 19x continues a nearly two-decade tradition of bringing the latest Free/Open Source Software developments, DevOps, Security and related trends to the general public during the course of the four-day event. Whether you are interested in low level system tuning, how to scale and secure your applications, or how to use OSS at home – SCALE is for you.
Private advertising technology proposals could greatly improve privacy for web users. Web advertising has a reputation for poor privacy practices. Firefox, other browsers, and the web community are collaborating on finding ways to support advertising while maintaining strong, technical privacy protections for users.
This series of posts aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation regarding the future of advertising on the web by providing technical analyses on proposals that have been put forward by various players in the ecosystem to address the questions of what might replace third-party cookies. In this installment, we look at Apple’s Private Click Measurement (PCM).
Ten years ago, a small, yet mighty team launched Pocket because we felt that people deserved a better way to consume content on the internet. We wanted it to be easy — “as simple an action as putting it in your pocket” — and empowering, giving people the means to engage with the web on their own terms. We championed the save as a fundamental internet action — akin to browse, search and share — but more than any other, allowing you to create your own corner of the internet.
Good morning, mallocators. Last time we talked about how to split available memory between a block-structured main space and a large object space. Given a fixed heap size, making a new large object allocation will steal available pages from the block-structured space by finding empty blocks and temporarily returning them to the operating system.
Today I’d like to talk more about nothing, or rather, why might you want nothing rather than something. Given an Immix heap, why would you want it organized in such a way that live data is packed into some blocks, leaving other blocks completely free? How bad would it be if instead the live data were spread all over the heap? When might it be a good idea to try to compact the heap? Ideally we’d like to be able to translate the answers to these questions into heuristics that can inform the GC when compaction/evacuation would be a good idea.
The Central Bank of Austria has published a report in the context of a workshop celebrating 20 years of Euro-denominated cash. The report discusses the future of cash, including account- and blockchain-based designs, as well as GNU Taler.
In 2019, we published evidence of a conflict of interest scandal at the FSFE Legal & Licensing Workshop (LLW). We redacted the names.
Following subsequent actions from FSFE, we now publish the full email. Open Invention Network (OIN) was responsible for the scandal.
The KDE Community has used – and gently encouraged – the Fiduciary License Agreement (FLA) which was created by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) some 15 years ago. The FLA is a kind of copyright assignment that preserves the Free Software underpinnings of the software, ensures the contributor can (re)use the work and that the fiduciary can handle licensing questions around the contributed code. A CLA without the corporate-style downsides.
Using the FLA has always been an option in the KDE world. Some people choose to sign it to ensure long-term stability. Others don’t, and that’s fine. Here is a 2009-era post from me about the FLA and the licensing situation closer to when we introduced it. The next time I mentioned the FLA was in 2020, so it just kept plugging along all that time.
In libsoup2 there’s some thread safety support that allows to send messages from a thread different than the one where the session is created. There are other APIs that can be used concurrently too, like accessing some of the session properties, and others that aren’t thread safe at all. It’s not clear what’s thread safe and even sending a message is not fully thread safe either, depending on the session features involved. However, several applications relay on the thread safety support and have always worked surprisingly well.
In libsoup3 we decided to remove the (broken) thread safety support and only allowed to use the API from the same thread where the session was created. This simplified the code and made easier to add the HTTP/2 implementation. Note that HTTP/2 supports multiple request over the same TCP connection, which is a lot more efficient than starting multiple requests from several threads in parallel.
When apps started to be ported to libsoup3, those that relied on the thread safety support ended up being a pain to be ported. Major refactorings where required to either stop using the sync API from secondary threads, or moving all the soup usage to the same secondary thread. We managed to make it work in several modules like gstreamer and gvfs, but others like evolution required a lot more work. The extra work was definitely worth it and resulted in much better and more efficient code. But we also understand that porting an application to a new version of a dependency is not a top priority task for maintainers.
Have now compiled version 3.7 in OE.
Recently I was reading Antirez’s piece TCL the Misunderstood again, which is a nice defense of the utility and value of the TCL language.
TCL is one of those scripting languages which used to be used a hell of a lot in the past, for scripting routers, creating GUIs, and more. These days it quietly lives on, but doesn’t get much love. That said it’s a remarkably simple language to learn, and experiment with.
Using TCL always reminds me of FORTH, in the sense that the syntax consists of “words” with “arguments”, and everything is a string (well, not really, but almost. Some things are lists too of course).
This is the sixth installment in the series of blog posts on how to adjust your QML application to take the maximum advantage of qmlsc. In the first post we’ve set up the environment. You should read that post first in order to understand the others.
As usual, we conducted an annual community survey in 2021. We previously shared some some highlights and charts in a blog post. This year we would also like to make the complete (-ish) dataset available. We have compiled a report which contains data and charts for nearly all questions with minimal analysis. We have elided a few sensitive questions and have combined some answers or elided some answers where there is any chance of respondents being identified or of sensitive data being released.
In recent years, silicon vendors have been building out new types of computing architecture beyond just CPUs and GPUs – welcome to the world of data processing units (DPUs) and infrastructure processing units (IPUs).
The goal with DPUs and IPUs is to let organizations offload certain data and cryptography as well as artificial intelligence/machine language (AI/ML) tasks to dedicated hardware to accelerate operations. To date, there have been few, if any, standards around DPUs and IPUs to enable interoperability or industry standardization for deployment, management and scheduling, but that’s about to change.
Today, the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the Open Programmable Infrastructure Project, which aims to collect open-source efforts around DPUs and IPUs and organize vendors to advance adoption for organizations of all sizes. Founding members of the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) project include Intel, Nvidia, Marvell, F5, Red Hat, Dell and Keysight Technologies.
Project Nephio, an open source initiative of partners across the telecommunications industry working towards true cloud-native automation , today announced rapid community growth and momentum.
The TODO Group, together with Linux Foundation Research, LF Training & Certification, api7.ai, Futurewei, Ovio, Salesforce, VMware, and X-Labs, is conducting a survey as part of a research project on the prevalence and outcomes of open source programs among different organizations across the globe.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (tzdata), Oracle (cups), and SUSE (atheme, golang-github-prometheus-alertmanager, golang-github-prometheus-node_exporter, node_exporter, python36, release-notes-susemanager, release-notes-susemanager-proxy, SUSE Manager 4.1.15 Release Notes, SUSE Manager Client Tools, and SUSE Manager Server 4.2).
Two bills attempting to reduce the power of Internet monopolies are currently being debated in Congress: S. 2992, the American Innovation and Choice Online Act; and S. 2710, the Open App Markets Act. Reducing the power to tech monopolies would do more to “fix” the Internet than any other single action, and I am generally in favor of them both. (The Center for American Progress wrote a good summary and evaluation of them. I have written in support of the bill that would force Google and Apple to give up their monopolies on their phone app stores.)
There is a significant problem, though. Both bills have provisions that could be used to break end-to-end encryption.
Let’s start with S. 2992. Sec. 3(c)(7)(A)(iii) would allow a company to deny access to apps installed by users, where those app makers “have been identified [by the Federal Government] as national security, intelligence, or law enforcement risks.” That language is far too broad. It would allow Apple to deny access to an encryption service provider that provides encrypted cloud backups to the cloud (which Apple does not currently offer). All Apple would need to do is point to any number of FBI materials decrying the security risks with “warrant proof encryption.”
This service is being built on the foundation of Slim.AI’s open-source project, DockerSlim. This popular developer program optimizes and secures your containers by analyzing your code and throwing away unnecessary code, thus “slimming” down your containers’ attack surface. It also can reduce the size of your container by up to 30x.
Software developers must be vigilant in regards to their use of hardware resources. Dedicated hardware is often expensive to buy, run, and maintain—and there’s only so much room in a data center for extra servers.
The ability to run multiple virtual machines on one piece of hardware makes virtualization a good option. Yet, each virtual machine must include its own guest OS and everything that entails. That eats up system resources. These days, using virtualization is like using stock music when you could be using a full orchestra. When it comes to scalability, consistency and efficiency, there is a better way: You should be considering implementing a container strategy.
Open-source security is currently undergoing a period of accelerated change, thanks in no small part to the efforts of the Linux Foundation’s OpenSSF (Open Source Security Foundation).
Tech companies looking to improve the sustainability of their operations need to rethink their attitude towards growth and collaborate across the sector to be effective in meeting the challenge on the timescale required by the climate crisis.
During London Tech Week’s ClimateTech Summit, representatives from both startups and large corporates discussed the importance of reorientating the sector in a more sustainable direction.
Chairing a session on how firms can accelerate positive growth at scale with climate tech, Accenture’s sustainability for growth lead, Dagamara Puddick, noted: “Only 50% of CEOs have a clear roadmap to reaching the sustainability pledges that they’ve made, and only 5% have made positive progress at all.”
Today, WifiForward, a coalition of companies, organizations, and public sector institutions, presented Public Knowledge Policy Counsel Kathleen Burke with a Wi-Fi At Work Award, designating her a Wi-Fi Policy Champion for her efforts to close the digital divide through innovative connectivity policies.
Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) joins the Open Invention Network (OIN) as its newest community member.
OIN was formed to safeguard open source software (OSS), with the company now the largest patent non-aggression community in history. It announced this week that RBC has joined as a community member.
OIN is an advocate for patent non-aggression, something it describes as ‘defensive strategies that protect us against the aggressive use of patents’. When a company claims a patent and uses its right to an invention as a means to prevent others from entering the market effectively, this is patent aggression; also sometimes known as a ‘patent troll’.
This text is less a Victorian astronomy primer than the foundation for a phenomenological star wisdom.
Mexico is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States, to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean, to the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea, and to the east by the Gulf of Mexico.
RapidDisk is an advanced Linux RAM Disk which consists of a collection of modules and an administration tool. Features include: Dynamically allocate RAM as block device. Use them as stand alone disk drives or even map them as caching nodes to slower local disk drives. Access those drives locally or export those volumes across an NVMe Target network.
GatsbyJS or Gatsby is a free and open-source framework for building blazing fast, modern apps, and websites with React. In this tutorial, you will learn how to install and set up Gatsby.js on the Ubuntu 22.04 machine.
qView is a free, open-source image viewer designed to be minimal and space-efficient with super-fast opening images. The image viewer features no cluttered interface, just your image with a title bar containing features such as animated GIF controls for easy viewing on any device.
For more information about what qView features and looks like before installing it, visit the qView website, which features some great examples of the image viewer in action.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install qView on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS Jammy Jellyfish desktop using the command line terminal with tips about installing the alternative development version and removing the application if required in the future.
PostgreSQL is an open source, SQL-based, relational database manager that emphasizes security and SQL compliance.
According to the PostgreSQL website, it is “The World’s Most Advanced Open Source Relational Database”. Powerful and fast, PostgreSQL is often presented as the logical choice in complex systems or where advanced clustering is required.
An interesting feature of PostgreSQL is the multiversion concurrency control. This method adds an image of the database state to each transaction offering great performance advantages.
In this guide we will learn how to install and configure Pritunl vpn server in Rocky Linux 8. Pritunl is a free and open source enterprise distributed VPN server. It allows you to virtualize your private networks across datacenters and provide simple remote access in minutes. It utilizes a graphical interface that is friendly and easy to use to the user. It is secure and provides a good alternative to the commercial VPN products.

DNS Toys is an open-source tool to help you manage all the little queries you have from your command prompt by taking advantage of the DNS protocol.It helps you find the public IP, weather, world time, timezone, conversion rate, etc., within your terminal instead of browsing.
This seems like the least useful thing to type at a command prompt:
cd .
“Take me to where I already am, please.”
But suppose that your current directory, /whatever/foo, is a symlink, and some other process has deleted and recreated foo.

KDE Plasma 5.25 arrived last week as the latest and greatest version of the beloved desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions used by thousands of users worldwide.Now, KDE Plasma 5.25.1 is here as the first maintenance update to KDE Plasma 5.25, addressing various issues like external screen support on multi-GPU setups, an issue with the screen brightness being stuck at 30 percent on some laptops, as well as a KWin crash that occurred when the screen setup changes.
Today KDE releases a bugfix update to KDE Plasma 5, versioned 5.25.1.
Plasma 5.25 was released in June 2022 with many feature refinements and new modules to complete the desktop experience.
This release adds a week’s worth of new translations and fixes from KDE’s contributors. The bugfixes are typically small but important and include…
With the list of 50+ changes, KDE Plasma 5.25.1 – the first point release becomes more stable, also brings several tweaks.
The Linux Foundation wants to make data processing units (DPUs) easier to deploy, with the launch of the Open Programmable Infrastructure (OPI) project this week.
The program has already garnered support from several leading chipmakers, systems builders, and software vendors – Nvidia, Intel, Marvell, F5, Keysight, Dell Tech, and Red Hat to name a few – and promises to build an open ecosystem of common software frameworks that can run on any DPU or smartNIC.
SmartNICs, DPUs, IPUs – whatever you prefer to call them – have been used in cloud and hyperscale datacenters for years now. The devices typically feature onboard networking in a PCIe card form factor and are designed to offload and accelerate I/O-intensive processes and virtualization functions that would otherwise consume valuable host CPU resources.
As organizations strive for digital transformation, they are in reality seeking to reinvent their business, modernize their processes and push the boundaries of existing IT infrastructure. To address that last point, we frequently see customers exploring alternatives to CPU-centric system architectures, where software running on a central CPU directly controls a set of HW peripherals that offer static functions and/or acceleration capabilities. Supporting this trend is a new class of devices, evolved from SmartNICs but lacking cohesive standards even when it comes to naming – NVIDIA and Marvell call their offerings Data Processing Units (DPU) while Intel refers to their technologies as Intelligent Processing Units (IPUs).
Data Processing and Infrastructure Processing Units – DPU and IPU – are changing the way enterprises deploy and manage compute resources across their networks; OPI will nurture an ecosystem to enable easy adoption of these innovative technologies
Incident response includes monitoring, detecting, and reacting to unplanned events such as security breaches or other service interruptions. The goal is to get back to business, satisfy service level agreements (SLAs), and provide services to employees and customers. Incident response is the planned reaction to a breach or interruption. One goal is to avoid unmanaged incidents.
[...]
The Operations Team is the only team that can touch the production systems.
The OpenTelemetry project addresses the needs of modern, containerized environments running microservices and serverless applications on Kubernetes and cloud systems. This article contains a video showing how to integrate OpenTelemetry into a Java application using the Quarkus framework.
In the classic corporate satire Office Space, “the Bobs” – two management consultants brought in to trim the fat from fictional software company Initech – pepper a beleaguered “engineer liaison” with questions about his (apparently minimal) job duties before getting to the punchline: “What would you say … you do here?”
It’s a great bit, but in a real-life IT shop the script should be flipped: It’s you who needs to ask the consultants about what they do – and ideally not months (or years) after you’ve engaged with them.
Consultants can deliver significant value to IT leaders and their teams, especially when your strategic ambitions outpace the expertise and resources available in-house. But this usually only occurs when you have a strong shared understanding of their role and how you can best work together.
One of the most rewarding things I’ve done in my professional career is to serve as a mentor for others. Numerous people freely gave their time and expertise to help me get to where I am today, so I’m always happy to return the favor.
The benefits of mentoring are plentiful. According to a SurveyMonkey study, nine out of 10 employees who have a career mentor are happy in their jobs.
At Improving, we have an initiative that is part career coaching, part mentorship. The aim is to help our people reach their career goals, and the approach is customized to each person’s needs.
Use Subscription Manager to sign up your RHEL machines for important software updates and manage them from your central Red Hat account.

GeckoLinux creator unveils a new Linux distribution based on Debian, focusing on simplicity and usability.The creator of GeckoLinux (providing an improved openSUSE experience) remains anonymous.
And, I won’t comment if it is a good or bad thing, but now the developer is back with another similar project based on Debian.

Sipeed has launched the Lichee RV Dock Pro kit for the company’s Lichee RV Allwinner D1 RISC-V module that builds on the earlier Lichee RV Dock carrier board and adds a MIPI/RGB LCD connector, two built-in microphones, as well as an on-board JTAG+UART debugger based on Bouffalo Lab BL702 microcontroller.Lichee RV Dock Pro specifications (preliminary) which changes in bold or strikethrough…
The MIPI interface used to be for the 6-mic array expansion, so it’s not available for that board which features two microphones instead. In the original RV Dock board, MIPI displays required an expansion board, but they can now be connected directly to the board.
EdUBudgie is a Linux distribution for schools, students and teachers that comes with pre-loaded educational software and Ubuntu LTS version.
Canonical’s Ubuntu Core 22, the fully containerized Ubuntu 22.04 LTS variant optimized for IoT and edge devices, is now generally available for download. The release includes a fully pre-emptible kernel to ensure time-bound responses. The Ubuntu 22.04 LTS real-time kernel, now available in beta, delivers high performance, ultra-low latency, and workload predictability for time-sensitive industrial, telco, automotive, and robotics use cases, Canonical said.

Is this a reason to ditch Chromium-based browsers and start using Firefox? Maybe, you decide.Even with all the privacy extensions and fancy protection features, there are still ways to identify you or track you.
Note that it is not the case for all browsers, here, we focus on Chromium-based browsers and Google Chrome as the prime suspect.
While detecting installed extensions in a Chromium browser was already possible, numerous extensions implemented certain protections to prevent it.
The modern Hollywood and adjacent story-writing traditions nowadays seem to gravitate upon the idea of “subverting expectations”. For various reasons, I find that largely irritating. In this short, I explain why, and offer up the two alternatives in the title as writing goals.
Let’s set up the stage here a little. Around the late 2010s to (hopefully) the late 2020s, there is a trend that goes on in the story-writing traditions that currently is the most popular in terms of raw brain-space occupation power. This group of traditions is currently centred upon a fairly large city somewhere in America that most people would clearly identify with “Hollywood”, and despite the best efforts of certain other governments in the world, the best that anyone else can do as of time of writing is to appeal only to local tradition, making the Hollywood tradition generally understood to be a global superstratum in linguistics terms.
Sometimes when people say something that might sound kinda romantic but that’s not why they’re saying it, they’ll say “noromo” (which originated in the X-files fandom; whether it’s related to the sometimes kinda homophobic marker “no homo”, I’m not sure but probably).
In this article, we shall a list of useful Linux security features that every system administrator should know. We also share some useful tools to help a system admin ensure security on their Linux servers.
The list is as follows, and is not organized in any particular order.
Despite 10 years of Access Now campaigning against the legislation, this morning, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that the EU Passenger Name Record (PNR) Directive is compatible with EU law and human rights. In a case brought by Belgian civil society group, Ligue des droits humains, the Court upheld the validity of the law despite acknowledging that “the PNR Directive entails undeniably serious interferences” with the rights to privacy and data protection, and seeks to introduce a “surveillance regime that is continuous, untargeted and systematic.” However, instead of scrapping the entire law, judges decided to limit its key measures.
“Considering the impact that the EU PNR Directive has on fundamental rights — as confirmed by the Court — the law should have been invalidated,” said Estelle Massé, Europe Legislative Manager at Access Now. “All EU states will now have to limit their use of PNR data due to its intrusiveness. They must apply this ruling swiftly, and end their shameful track record of ignoring decisions from the Court — particularly in the area of data retention.”
All eyes will be on Kenya over the coming months as Access Now and civil society from across the globe urge authorities to uphold their commitment to ensuring a fair, open, and accessible internet throughout the presidential elections scheduled for August 9.
“Democracy means information, participation, and communication. Democracy means internet accessibility,” said Felicia Anthonio, #KeepItOn Campaign Manager at Access Now. “Kenya votes on August 9, and Access Now is calling on authorities to stand by their commitment, and #KeepItOn when it counts — always!”
At least three times this year — first in May, then again twice this month — authorities have committed to keeping the country connected during this cornerstone moment in the nation’s democracy. Chief Justice Martha Koome has also highlighted the importance of digitization and access to the internet, and committed the judiciary to ensuring that the law is upheld in internet governance efforts.
First of all, we must admit that DoG doesn’t sound like a super bad idea (and it’s a much better acronym) compared to DoH, and I’m not saying this only because I’m a Puppy Linux developer…
My Internet bill went up by $20 since the 1st year sign-up deal expired so I’ve been considering switching to another tier of internet service.
Currently we have the 500 Mbps plan. Since Sac has fiber, fast internet is pretty damn cheap. All this thinking about internet reminded me I barely ever run into any issues with the 10 Mbps 2.4Ghz wifi band I use. Occasionally if I download a large file I’ll make sure to swap to the 5Ghz band but even then unless it’s above 2 Gb I’d rather just wait a second and do something else while it’s downloading than switch over. Of course my roommate is a self described data whore so he needs something a bit more powerful and whenever I do torrent stuff it is nice to be able to utilize the faster connection.
[...]
When you cut out these harmful digital leaches and only use the web as a way of gathering information and media, you really don’t need much of a connection to it.
So whenever I do eventually go off-grid, a stable phone hot spot or satellite connection will be all I need. Here’s hoping that day eventually comes.
The facts are clear to see, but where are the national broadcasters? Too busy bagging EPO bribes for EIA puff pieces?
If only Ukrainians knew….
Summary: The EPO‘s Belarusian blunder (more below) is still 100% uncovered — as in NOT covered — by the mainstream media (or any site other than Techrights for that matter)
More on the Belarusian blunder:
Video download link | md5sum 20680f311f0d2aa55dd31f9b75fe2cd4
EPO Crisis Explained
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: In the video above I go through the document explaining “internal” EPO scandals (directed towards staff) and there’s still time to contact European politicians and media; there’s no valid excuse for turning a blind eye
EARLIER today we said that EPO staff would protest in front of EPO buildings just 8 days from now.
Given the pandemic and several other factors, it’s difficult to expect it to be the biggest EPO protest ever. Benoît Battistelli had managed to bring the staff closer together (united by scorn for his crimes) and António Campinos was fortunate that just over a year after his term’s commencement there was a pandemic, keeping staff physically apart (for over 2 years already). He would later exploit the pandemic to also wage a war on courts, or on access to justice. Due process is not prioritised by those who break the law; they love kangaroo courts and they’re in no rush to comply with court orders issued by judges not controlled by them.
“If you live in Europe, please consider contacting a local politician (like MEP) and the national press. These scandals merit national and international attention. Failing to even mention them is a form of complicity by selective apathy.”Campinos is already proving he’s no better than Battistelli in the sense that he’s willing to bribe and interfere in voting. He and Battistelli already did this over a decade ago in their 'crusade' for power; it’s a sad tragedy that no national broadcasters have bothered investigating this. If Europe’s second-largest institution has become a den of corruption, we should at least expect the ombudsman to look into it (or Europe’s largest institution, the EU). But it’s simply not happening and the EPO crafted its own fake ombudsman. If you live in Europe, please consider contacting a local politician (like MEP) and the national press. These scandals merit national and international attention. Failing to even mention them is a form of complicity by selective apathy. █
Tiny increase
…and EPO income at all-time high because it grants a ton of fake, bogus, legally-invalid patents while reducing salaries/compensation, shutting down premises, facilities etc.
Summary: Nobody at the EPO is dumb enough to be fooled by the charlatan António Campinos, who refers to himself as “the f***ing president” (no kidding; the Hubris is humongous)
The 2022 demonstration isn’t the first of its kind, but it can help oust the latest corrupt dictator
Summary: EPO staff is sick and tired of abuse and corruption at the employer, which was supposed to serve Europe and to serve science (instead if became like a secretive private bank that violates every law it wants to)
As noted last night, a demonstration had been considered and even a strike. Now it’s confirmed that in 8 days from now staff based in Germany (most people) will physically gather — in spite of the pandemic — in order to be heard and to make it crystal clear that António Campinos needs to go. Notice how he’s being compared to his friend and predecessor (‘fixer’) Benoît Battistelli:
Demonstration on Wednesday 29 June at 12.30 in front of the Isar building
Dear SUEPO Members,
Dear Colleagues,SUEPO Munich invites all staff to demonstrate on Wednesday 29 June 2022 (the first day of the 171th session of the Administrative Council) at 12.30h in front of the Isar building.
Mr Campinos hopes that his “Mobility Package” (CA/32/22 Rev. 1) introducing seconded national experts posts for the delegations will guarantee him a re-election for a second mandate.
Come to the demonstration to show the Administrative Council and the rest of the world that there can be no peace at the Office with a President who protects and pursues the Battistelli attacks on staff rights, who orchestrates a flawed Financial Study, who refuses to invest in younger employees who are the future of the EPO, who pushes for a decentralisation of the EPO to serve his re-election and who is unable to conduct social dialogue. This paper gives further contextualized information about the current situation.
SUEPO Munich
Here’s the full publication as HTML, plain text, and GemText (in that order, depending on the medium accessed):
Ortssektion München . Local Section Munich . Section locale de Munich
21.06.2022
su22003mp – 0.2.1/0.3.2DEMONSTRATION
Wednesday 29 June
SUEPO Munich invites all staff to demonstrate on Wednesday 29 June 2022 (the first day of the 171th session of the Administrative Council) in front of the Isar building starting from 12h30. Mr Campinos hopes that his “Mobility Package” (CA/32/22 Rev. 1) introducing seconded national experts posts for the delegations will guarantee him a re-election for a second mandate. This paper gives further contextualized information about the current situation.
Protecting Mr Battistelli’s inheritance as long as possible and at all costs
Back in 2018, Mr Campinos was mandated by the Administrative Council to restore social dialogue at the EPO. EPO staff hoped the new President elect would put an end to the breaches of fundamental rights. On several occasions1, Mr Campinos declared that he holds a lawyer degree himself and that he does not need the advice of the staff representation.
The Tribunal proved him wrong. In Judgments 4430-4435, the Tribunal confirmed that the EPO breached the fundamental right to strike including 3 years during his mandate Judgment 4482 confirmed that staff representation elections held since 2014 and also by Mr Campinos in June 2020 interfered with the right to freedom of association. Mr Campinos refused that the Organization formulates any apology and even threatened to reduce cash injections into the pension reserve funds if he were to grant moral damages to all staff.2
For the pending complaints in front of the Tribunal against Battistelli’s New Career System and the abolition of the Invalidity Lump Sum, Mr Campinos is still counting on the two law firms Lenz & Staehelin and de Guillenchmidt to whom he awarded3 an unprecedented amount of €5.85m (CA/F 11/21) to represent the EPO.
Mr Campinos continues the attacks against staff representation and trade unions by banning them from freely using mass-emails on EPO lines and disbanded in 2021 any secretarial support4 for staff
_____________
1 e.g. during the GCC meeting of 1 March 2022 (su22001mp)
2 “Extension of strike judgment to all staff: No moral damages. No apology”, SUEPO paper of 23-09-2021 (su21024cp)
3 “An army of litigators instead of social dialogue”, CSC paper of 17-05-2021 (sc21059cp)
4 “Disbanding secretarial support for staff representation”, CSC paper of 09-07-2021 (sc21088cp)
representation. There are also warning signs that staff representation and unions will be hidden further clicks away in the new Intranet.
Since 2012, the EPO is consistently testing the limits of Employment Law and feels only governed by the Tribunal. In this respect, Mr Campinos continues to act along the line of his predecessor.
The flawed Financial Study
In 2019, Mr Campinos orchestrated a flawed Financial Study together with Oliver Wyman & Mercer. Mr Campinos selected a base-2 scenario which foresaw deflation and an overall deficit of €3.8bn by 2038, and added a €2bn arbitrary “buffer” for closing the alleged “gap”5.
In May 2020, SUEPO mandated Ernst & Young to perform an analysis on the Office’s Financial Study. Comparing the key assumptions of the 2019 study with those of other EPO documents, Ernst & Young found that the 2019 study consistently took an overly conservative approach. It was clear that the EPO had no deficit.
The Covid-19 pandemic broke out in March 2020 and the lockdown forced staff to stay at home. The staff representation asked Mr Campinos to consider the Ernst & Young evidence at hand and appealed to his morality so that staff is not subject to a loss of purchasing power during the pandemic.
Mr Campinos ignored all arguments and put in place as of July 2020 his new salary adjustment procedure. Instead of the alleged deflation, inflation now materialized at the historical level of +11.1% in Germany6 since then. Again, it is difficult for a study to be more wrong. At the same time, EPO salaries were adjusted by only +0.5%.
Over the same period, the EPO saved on liabilities and increased its assets in the treasury fund and the pension reserve fund. Within only 2 years, the new salary adjustment procedure saved on the back of staff €1.33bn of the €2bn planned to be saved over 20 years. At the end of 2021 the actual budget surplus came to €385.7m, 10.6% better than 2020, and significantly above the budget figure of €214.8m7. Again, it is difficult for a study to be more wrong.
In view of the excellent performance of the EPO, staff should be thanked for their efforts instead of having a historical loss of purchasing power.
In June 2022, the Coordinated Organisations (e.g. OECD, ESA, NATO, CoE) agreed to propose an interim adjustment of +7% for their staff retroactively to 1 March 2022. If Mr Campinos had not continued the Battistelli reform of 2014 as the staff representation proposed, EPO staff would also be granted interim adjustments. Now, EPO staff has no protection against high inflation.
SUEPO initiated a petition to remedy the situation. Almost +2.000 staff members signed so far.
The re-election package
Under the alleged buzzwords of “flexibility” and “sustainability”, Mr Campinos is seeking approval of his “Mobility Package”8 in the Administrative Council (AC) meeting of 29/30 June 2022. This reform confirms the double standards policy at the EPO9. In a first aspect, the reform is creating a new lower
_____________
5 CA/18/20, summary
6 Harmonised Index of Consumer Prices (HICP) according to Eurostat in Germany was for July 2020 = 106.4, for April 2022 (when drafting the petition) = 116.9 (+9.1%) and for May 2022 = 118.2 (+11.1%).
7 CA/10/22 page 27/82
8 CA/32/22, “Professional Mobility”
9 “The Mobility Package”, slides in the General Assembly of 18 May 2022 (sc22010mp)
category of staff called the “Young Professionals” with few rights and low salary. In a second aspect, the secondment policy provides a generous package for national experts and for seconded EPO handpicked employees.
Young Professionals: Cheap Disposable Workforce
The EPO intends to hire bachelors for a three-year program. They will be deprived of allowances such as the dependent and travel allowance, have no right to pension transfer and no salary savings plan. They will start virtually off-scale below the EPO salary grid around €2.300 and will only reach the social minimum of G1(4) in their second year. 70% of them will be ejected from the EPO after their 1st year. While Mr Campinos is pretending to build a “caring organization” and calls on “Together, stronger”, he is actually creating a new cheap disposable workforce below all International Standards.Secondment Policy: A generous package
Contrary to the Young Professionals, the secondment policy will be generous. National experts coming to the EPO will benefit from their national salary paid by the EPO and an allowance of +€5.000 per month. The handful of EPO employees (from high management?) seconded to national offices will continue to earn their full EPO salary without performing any work for the EPO.The project is conveniently tabled in the Administration Council meeting during which the re-election of Mr Campinos will be discussed. In his time, Mr Battistelli offered free dental care to Council delegates to have their support. Now, Mr Campinos is offering them generous national experts posts.
The whole project aims at knowledge transfer of EPO core tasks to employees from national patent offices or external professionals. It fosters a decentralisation which is not in the interest of the Office and puts EPO employees at risk in the long term.
Lack of Transparency in the conduct of social dialogue: the GCC meeting of 26 April 2022
The General Consultative Committee (GCC) was invented by Mr Battistelli in his “social democracy” reform of 2014. Since then, it confirmed to be neither an advisory body, nor a consultative body, but rather a promulgation body for rubber-stamping all proposals that come in. On the management’s side, high managers silently attend and vote yes on all the President’s reforms without formulating any reason. On the staff representation side, 99% of the documents either receive a negative opinion or an abstention because legal assessments and benchmarks are missing or the reforms are detrimental to staff without any justification.
During the pandemic, social dialogue took place only virtually and the “quality” of meetings significantly regressed. The trend deteriorated further in the GCC meeting of 26 April 2022 during which the atmosphere was abysmal. Mr Campinos used foul language throughout, using expletives in various languages, and insulted most of the speakers10. The degree of unprofessionalism shown during the meeting strongly reminded of and was even worse than the GCC of 19 November 2014 during which Mr Battistelli had said to a staff representative: “We don’t care about your opinion Mr Rosé” (“On s’en fout de votre opinion Mr Rosé”)11.
Meetings with Mr Campinos in which arguments cannot be exchanged and where questions could not be answered, cannot be considered to have provided a meaningful consultation. Staff deserves transparency in this matter and their representation asked that the available recording is made public.
____
10 “Report on the GCC meeting of 26 April 2022”, CSC paper of 29 April 2022 (sc22050cp)
11 “Flash report on the GCC meeting of 19 November 2014”, CSC paper (sc14287cp)
On 18 May 2022, a General Assembly took place during which some of the events of said meeting were reported to staff. At the end, a poll was organized during which 96% of the participants voted in favour of the request to publish the recording of the 26 April 2022 GCC12.
Mr Campinos rejected this request and alleges that such a recording is only meant for the GCC Secretariat to draft the minutes. However, the draft minutes are clearly redacted so as to hide the controversial conduct of Mr Campinos during the meeting. Mr Campinos has now postponed the approval of the minutes after the AC meeting and his re-election when the delegations look away. According to the Rules of Procedure put in place since 2014 by Mr Battistelli, Mr Campinos in his capacity as Chair of the GCC now has the power to approve the minutes alone although he has a blatant conflict of interest in the matter.
Come to the demonstration…
… on Wednesday 29 June, at 12.30h in front of the Isar building to show the Administrative Council and the rest of the world that there can be no peace at the Office with a President who protects and pursues the Battistelli attacks on staff rights, who orchestrates a flawed Financial Study, who refuses to invest in younger employees who are the future of the EPO, who pushes for a decentralisation of the EPO to serve his re-election and who is unable to conduct social dialogue.
“You will never have such a nice person being the f***ing President for the next fifty f***ing years. So you wake up and make agreements with me, or you never will for your f***ing life.”
Mr Campinos, in the GCC meeting of 26 April 2022
SUEPO Munich
_____________
12 “Open letter to the President: Staff demands publication of the GCC recording of 26 April 2022”, LSCMN letter to the President (sc22009ml)
Every member of staff in the vicinity ought to show up, at the very least as an act of solidarity. It increasingly looks like “scabs” (or ‘examination sweatshops’ for lack of a better analogy) are being attempted by the corrupt, incompetent banksters and military men who took over the Office on behalf of global monopolists and their lawyers (e.g. Team UPC). These people do not care about competition, science, and European business. They want to produce [sic] millions of legally-invalid patents in exchange for billions of euros (denied to the European public and EPO workers; that’s just for gambling and graft; the European population, including the examiners, are the externality here and they’ll pay a stiff price for those millions of monopolies, e.g. in elevated prices of goods including medication and potential litigation, usually frivolous, without merit). On top of all this, it seems clear that the EPO’s management continues to arrogantly break many laws while bribing the officials who are meant to prevent such illegal actions.
Where were you all these years, European publishers, intentionally turning a blind eye to EPO crimes? This leads to cynicism. Will you cover the EPO demonstration? The taxpayers pay national broadcasters to keep informed. That’s clearly not happening.
At what point will the public get a feeling that the point of today’s press is to cover up crime instead of covering crime? █
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Guest Editorial Team
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