This week has been really interesting, but a bit slow on the news and releases. The biggest stories are the launch of the KDE Plasma 5.21 desktop environment, the return of siduction Linux, a new major NetworkManager release, the default OS for the PinePhone Linux phone, and the release of the Kodi 19 home theater software.
I top that with a hands-on article of the Ubuntu Unity 20.10 operating system on the Raspberry Pi 4 computer. You can enjoy these and many other Linux news, as well as the latest distro and software releases in the 9to5Linux weekly roundup for February 21st, 2021, below!
In 2021, there are more reasons why people love Linux than ever before. In this series, I'll share 21 different reasons to use Linux. This article discusses the benefit of choice Linux brings.
Choice is one of the most misunderstood features of Linux. It starts with how many Linuxes there are to choose from. Distrowatch.org reports hundreds of available and active Linux distributions. Many of these distributions, of course, are hobby projects or extremely specific to some obscure requirement. Because it's open source, in fact, anyone can "re-spin" or "remix" an existing distribution of Linux, give it a new name, maybe a new default wallpaper, and call it their own. And while that may seem trivial, I see it as an indication of something very special.
There was a great deal of celebration at NASA and around the world when the Perseverance rover safely landed on the surface of Mars. That historic moment, however, carries a few firsts for a lot of things, and not just for space science alone. While the rolling rover is already important in itself, its companion helicopter drone is just as significant as it is the first time NASA used the open source Linux operating system on Mars, opening up the possibilities for tech demos like it in the future.
Ingenuity, Perseverance’s flying companion, marks a couple of first things for NASA and Mars missions. It is the first aircraft to fly on Mars, for one, contending with different levels of gravity and atmospheric conditions from those of earth. It is also the first of its kind to be built from off-the-shelf parts, both hardware and software.
The Ingenuity helicopter drone runs on a box powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 801, an older chipset that is apparently space-worthy and newer than the boards NASA has inside its rovers. Other parts that make up the drone were also sourced from easily accessible consumer hardware.
Perseverance, sometime it will be the year of the desktop on Earth
When NASA's Perseverance rover landed on Mars this week, it also brought the Linux operating system to the Red Planet.
NASA software engineer Tim Canham said the helicopter-like drone on board the Perseverance rover uses a Linux-powered software framework the space agency open-sourced a few years ago.
"This the first time we'll be flying Linux on Mars. We're actually running on a Linux operating system," Canham said.
Hello and welcome to Episode 395 of Linux in the Ham Shack. In this short topics episode, we talk with Eric Guth, 4Z1UG, about the upcoming QSO Today expo. We then move on to several stories including potential FCC fee amnesty from the ARRL, Flameshot, OwnCloud, AMD and the new Linux kernel, DUDE-Star and much more. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful week.
Which messaging services we use, Debian, web apps and Firefox in your Feedback, and running proper distros on Chromebooks.
We are happy to announce that Bootlin (formerly Free Electrons) has been acquired by two of its employees, Thomas Petazzoni and Alexandre Belloni.
Bootlin was founded in 2004 by Michael Opdenacker, with the goal of promoting the use of Linux and Free Software in embedded systems worldwide.
Thomas Petazzoni joined Bootlin in 2008, as the first employee. Thomas expanded the company offering by starting an engineering services activity, contributed to the growth of the company and took a CTO position. Thomas has a strong technical, open-source and embedded Linux background: he is the co-maintainer of the Buildroot project, has contributed to the Linux kernel, spoke at multiple international conferences and is the member of several embedded Linux conferences program committees. As Bootlin CTO, Thomas has been in charge of the complete engineering services activity: communication, sales, customer interaction, project management, scheduling and review.
Greg Kroah-Hartman sent in the staging/IIO updates for the Linux 5.12 kernel and this time around are lighter than normal but still with a few interesting items worth mentioning.
Greg noted in the pull request, "Nothing really huge in here, the number of staging tree patches has gone down for a bit, maybe there's only so much churn to happen in here at the moment." At least a few items still worth mentioning for staging/IIO in Linux 5.12.
Confronted with the need of plotting high-speed (or high number of data) signals, typically for embedded systems applications and real-time, research engineers at the Saarland University, Germany have developed their own software called ESPlot.
ESPlot communicates with microcontroller boards over a custom serial protocol. In applications where the microcontroller is executing a real-time process, signals can be streamed to a computer in a synchronous way and data can be sent to the real-time process in an asynchronous way.
Linux offers a huge array of open source music players. And many of them are high quality. I’ve reviewed the vast majority for LinuxLinks, but I’m endeavoring to explore every free music player in case there’s an undiscovered gem.
MPD is a powerful server-side application for playing music. In a home environment, you can connect an MPD server to a Hi-Fi system, and control the server using a notebook or smartphone. You can, of course, play audio files on remote clients. MPD can be started system-wide or on a per-user basis.
When an operating system such as Linux is running, there are many events happening and processes that run in the background to enable efficient and reliable use of system resources. These events may happen in system software for example the init or systemd process or user applications such as Apache, MySQL, FTP, and many more.
In order to understand the state of the system and different applications and how they are working, System Administrators have to keep reviewing log files on a daily basis in production environments.
You can imagine having to review logfiles from several system areas and applications, that is where logging systems come in handy. They help to monitor, review, analyze and even generate reports from different logfiles as configured by a System Administrator.
One of our readers wrote to me, “I have installed CentOS on my System, and I’m facing difficulty to minimize and maximize Windows because the Default button to Maximize and Minimize is not available on the top right of the screen just a single Close button is available.
It’s very annoying to switch to different applications every time I need to press Super Button to choose the application or right-click on top of the applications and do minimize.”
I presume you are a tad bit familiar with Docker and know basics like running docker containers etc.
In previous articles we have discussed updating docker container and writing docker files.
In this tutorial , you will learn how to install and use wget command tool. GNU Wget is a command-line utility for downloading files from the web. it provides a number of options allowing you to download multiple files.
Google Cloud SDK (Software Development Kit) provides a set of tools that are used to manage resources hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). The SDK provides gcloud, gsutil, nd bq commands with the ability to access the Google Cloud via the terminal.
The Cloud SDK team provides official PPA for the Debian packages to install on Ubuntu systems. Also the Cloud SDK is available in form of Snap package, which allow you to quickly install Google Cloud SDK on Ubuntu system.
VMware Workstation Player is an ideal utility for running a single virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player free version is available for non-commercial, personal and home use.
This article tutorials show you how to install VMware Workstation Player on Deepin 20.
Suppose you have written a bash shell script and you want to protect the content of the shell script while sharing it with others. For example, for whatever reason you don't want the shell script to be viewed for inspection and modified for re-distribution by others. Better yet, you want to set the expiration date on the script, so that the script may not be used beyond the set expiration date.
Python virtual environment is used to create an isolated environment for Python project which contains interpreter, libraries, and scripts. You can create any number of virtual environments for your projects with each having its own dependencies.
By using virtual environments you avoid installing packages globally which could break other projects.
Putting it in simple words, a virtual environment helps to properly install the specific versions of the packages required by a python project.
If you are in the IT industry, chances are high that you must have heard of Docker, unless you live inside a cave or a remote region completely shut out from the rest of the world. Docker is an opensource containerization technology that has revolutionized how developers develop and deploy applications. It allows development teams to build, manage and deploy applications inside containers. A Container is a standalone prebuilt software package that packs with its own libraries and dependencies. Containers run in complete isolation of the host operating system and from each other as well.
Docker offers immense benefits. Before containerization, developers used to encounter issues when writing and deploying code on various Linux flavors. An application would work perfectly well on one system only to fail on another system. Docker standardizes code deployment and ensures that the applications can run seamlessly across various computing environments without running into dependency issues or errors. Additionally, containers contribute to vast economies of scale. Docker is resource-friendly, lightweight, and quite efficient.
Usually, the ls command is used in Linux to display files and folders. It is an inbuilt command in GNU/Linux. However, it has its shortcomings, for example, there is no option to view directories recursively.
Today we want to introduce you to a new command called ‘tree’ which is used for recursive file listing, and how we can call it with a limit on the depth of file structure to be displayed.
In a previous article, I covered how to create a small app with Knative, which is an open source project that adds components to Kubernetes for deploying, running, and managing serverless, cloud-native applications. In this article, I'll explain Knative eventing, a way to create, send, and verify events in your cloud-native environment.
Events can be generated from many sources in your environment, and they can be confusing to manage or define. Since Knative follows the CloudEvents specification, it allows you to have one common abstraction point for your environment, where the events are defined to one specification.
This article explains how to install Knative eventing version 0.20.0 and create, trigger, and verify events. Because there are many steps involved, I suggest you look at my GitHub repo to walk through this article with the files.
Introducing new layouts and improving on existing ones, Xfce Panel Profiles 1.0.13 makes it easier than ever to manage and experiment with new panel configurations.
Kubuntu computer users benefit from its full featured file manager and desktop. Here's my personal collection of tips & tricks on Kubuntu you might find them useful -- as I use and teach it daily for years. You will be able to do everything easily and easier, like bulk conversion as well as managing files more efficiently plus some others. Now let's go and enjoy!
Following the recent major rewrite to KDE's KWin compositor code there are more exciting improvements likely to come for KWin in improving its Wayland compositor support.
KDE developer Xaver Hugl has work-in-progress code striving for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR, a.k.a. Adaptive-Sync / FreeSync) support for the KWin Wayland compositor. Additionally, the tentative patches also aim to get the compositor-induced latency down to around ~1-2ms when using direct scanout with Vsync but without VRR.
linux.conf.au has been running now for more than two decades, and I’ve been attending since 2008, but 2021 turned out to be a little bit different, thanks to COVID-19. The conference was originally going to be held in Canberra, but that’s been shifted out to 2022, with 2021 being run as an online event from January 23-25. As Angela Ashton mentioned in her post last month, SUSE sponsored the conference again, and William Brown, Lana Brindley and myself presented talks. The videos are now available thanks to the excellent folks at Next Day Video:
VanDyke Software announced the official releases of SecureCRT 9.0 and SecureFX 9.0.
Orange Pi PC is an Allwinner H3 SBC that was launched in 2015 for as little as $15 plus shipping (now $17.42 with 1 GB RAM), and made by a company called Shenzhen Xunlong Software. The next year, the company launched Orange Pi PC Plus with 8GB eMMC flash and WiFI connectivity for $20 (now $25.54).
It appears another company named “Shenzhen LC Technology” has designed a board with similar specifications & layout, so not technically a clone, but close enough. Meet Cherry Pi SBC.
DH electronics DHCOM STM32MP1 is an STMicro STM32MP1 Cortex-A7/M4 system-on-module (SoM) following the company’s SO-DIMM-based DHCOM standard, and capable of running Linux with Etnaviv GPU drivers.
The SoM is compatible with two DHCOM carrier boards from the company, namely DH PDK (Premium Developer Kit) for development, and DH PicoITX2 Pico-ITX board for direct integration into products.
Note some of the interfaces are multiplexed, so click on the image above to enlarge it, and get more details about which interface can not be used at the same time such as MMC/SD and WiFi/Bt.
The company provides a Linux BSP with Debian and Yocto support, and there’s a short Wiki to get started. I found out about the module because it is listed in Linux 5.11 changelog, so that means it should also run mainline Linux together with Etnaviv open-source graphics drivers.
As I’ve been thinking and writing about privacy and decentralization lately, I had a conversation with a colleague this week, and he commented about how loss of privacy is related to loss of agency: that is, loss of our ability to make our own choices, pursue our own interests, and be master of our own attention.
In terms of telecommunications, we have never really been free, though in terms of Internet and its predecessors, there have been times where we had a lot more choice. Many are too young to remember this, and for others, that era is a distant memory.
The irony is that our present moment is one of enormous consolidation of power, and yet also one of a proliferation of technologies that let us wrest back some of that power. In this post, I hope to enlighten or remind us of some of the choices we have lost — and also talk about the ways in which we can choose to regain them, already, right now.
I will talk about the possibilities and then go into more detail about the solutions.
[...]
Back in the late 90s, I worked at a university. I had a 386 on my desk for a workstation – not a powerful computer even then. But I put the boa webserver on it and could just serve pages on the Internet. I didn’t have to get permission. Didn’t have to pay a hosting provider. I could just DO it.
And of course that is because the university had no firewall and no NAT. Every PC at the university was a full participant on the Internet as much as the servers at Microsoft or DEC. All I needed was a DNS entry. I could run my own SMTP server if I wanted, run a web or Gopher server, and that was that.
There are many reasons why this changed. Nowadays most residential ISPs will block SMTP for their customers, and if they didn’t, others would; large email providers have decided not to federate with IPs in residential address spaces. Most people have difficulty even getting a static IP address in the first place. Many are behind firewalls, NATs, or both, meaning that incoming connections of any kind are problematic.
Do you see what that means? It has weakened the whole point of the Internet being a network of peers. While IP still acts that way, as a practical matter, there are clients that are prevented from being servers by administrative policy they have no control over.
Imagine if you, a person with an Internet connection to your laptop or phone, could just decide to host a website, or a forum on it. For moderate levels of load, they are certainly capable of this. The only thing in the way is the network management policies you can’t control.
Elaborate technologies exist to try to bridge this divide, and some, like Tor or cjdns, can work quite well. More on this below.
If you're looking for performance, complexity, or many possible solutions to solve a problem, C ++ is always a good candidate when it comes to extremes. Of course, functionality usually comes with complexity, but some C++ peculiarities are almost illegible. From my point of view, C++ method pointers may be the most complex expressions I've ever come across, but I'll start with something simpler.
[...]
Methods pointers can get a bit complicated if you're not familiar with them. I did a lot of trial and error, and it took time to find the correct syntax. However, once you understand the general principle, method pointers become less terrifying.
This is the most complex syntax I have found in C++ so far. Do you know something even worse? Post it in the comments!
The Union Education Ministry had earlier asked the UGC to develop an ecosystem for cyber security in the Indian educational institutions’ cyber space. It further asked to give publicity to the MHA cybersecurity Twitter handle @cyberdost, share link of the ‘National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal’ that is cybercrime.gov.in, prepare a handbook on cyber hygiene in vernacular languages for the students across colleges and universities and provide hands-on training to both graduate and post graduate students to deal with any instance of cyber crime.
The curriculum will have to include certain courses on cyber-security to make the students of all the streams aware about the given theme.
The U.S. death toll from the coronavirus topped 500,000 on Sunday,according to an NBC News tally — a milestone that underscores the grave threat the virus still poses nationwide even as more Americans get vaccinated.
The coronavirus has claimed the lives of more than 2,462,000 people worldwide, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University. The death toll in the U.S. is the highest in the world, even though the country has less than 5 percent of the global population.
NBC News' tally showed that roughly 500,001 people had died of Covid-19 as of Sunday afternoon. The number of dead rivals the population of Atlanta or Sacramento, California.
Two variants of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes covid-19 have combined their genomes to form a heavily mutated hybrid version of the virus. The “recombination” event was discovered in a virus sample in California, provoking warnings that we may be poised to enter a new phase of the pandemic.
The hybrid virus is the result of recombination of the highly transmissible B.1.1.7 variant discovered in the UK and the B.1.429 variant that originated in California and which may be responsible for a recent wave of cases in Los Angeles because it carries a mutation making it resistant to some antibodies.
The route out of lockdown, which the prime minister will set out on February 22, is set to be long and winding with several roadblocks, but according to Boris Johnson, there will be no turning back.
Summer holidays and the reopening of pubs are two hot topics surrounded by speculation, while a return to schools for some youngsters is just weeks away.
Hurd and Killam said they had found two versions of the malware: one which was only an Intel x86_64 binary, while the second contained binaries both x86_64 and the M1 ARM64 platform; all files were in the PKG format.
Rwandan musician, genocide survivor, and peace activist Kizito Mihigo was remembered in his homeland and beyond on the first anniversary of his death.€
Dominic Raab and numerous Tory MPs never showed the slightest concern when British bombs and missiles supplied to the United Arab Emirates killed thousands of Yemeni women and children. Those bombs and missiles were dropped and fired from British planes with British trained pilots, maintained by British engineers, and often acting in concert with British special forces secretly deployed in Yemen. The Tories roared all this on as excellent for British exports and the balance of payments. I am quite certain Dominic Raab could not name a single woman or child we have killed in Yemen.
Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Eric Foner has argued that Congress could, with a simple majority, begin a process of invoking Section Three of the 14th Amendment, which allows for the disqualification from public office of supporters of insurrection. “This can be invoked against anyone who has ever taken an oath to support the Constitution, including the president,” Foner has said. “It’s much simpler than impeachment. It is not a judicial proceeding. It’s a political proceeding. It doesn’t involve lawyers or trials. It is simply about qualification for office. You could have one afternoon of debate and a vote.”
What texts might people be turning to? Researchers study literary habits of the far-right by monitoring reading lists traded on social media, texts promoted on podcasts or recited by enthusiasts as audiobooks on YouTube, output from right-fringe publishing houses and, most extreme, the diatribes that serve as manifestos of those who commit atrocities. Together they suggest several strands of hateful writing. Brian Hughes of American University in Washington, DC says that the sheer availability of online extremist ideology is, in part, “responsible for the elevated rates of extremist mobilisation”.
The February 11 agreement for disengagement on the north and south banks of Pangong Tso and the PLA Daily, for the first time, publicly claiming four Chinese casualties from the Galwan clash on February 19 have once again made China-India border standoff a major talking point in China.
After rising to the fore in the US during the most fraught presidential campaign the country has seen for decades, the QAnon phenomenon has emerged in France – prompting President Emmanuel Macron’s government to order a multiagency inquiry on conspiracist movements scheduled to report back at the end of February.
The French state agency responsible for tackling sectarian movements, MIVILUDES, has received some 15 reports over recent weeks raising the alarm about the rise of QAnon in France, Le Figaro reported. The agency described the development of the movement as “highly concerning” in an internal communication seen by the French paper.
The U.S. Capitol Police has suspended six officers with pay for their actions on Jan. 6, when a pro-Trump mob attacked the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the certification of President Biden's Electoral College victory, according to a department statement.
An additional 29 officers remain under investigation as part of the department's ongoing probe into the events that unfolded that day.
Within days of taking office, the Washington Post reported, Biden stopped the Keystone XL pipeline, returned to the Paris climate agreement, closed the Arctic Refuge to oil drilling, made climate action a priority for every federal agency, imposed a moratorium on federal oil and gas leasing and more. He also “initiated a process to invest in minority and low-income communities that historically have borne the brunt of pollution.” Biden overturned 10 Trump rollbacks of environmental policy “and is targeting more than 60 others.” He has promised to review more than 100.
He did this in two executive orders, one on January 20, the other on January 27. Biden’s first executive order singles out the Trump administration by directing federal agencies to address actions “during the last four years that conflict” with Biden’s climate agenda. It orders a review of all regulations and policies adopted by Trump on the climate and the environment.
337,000 pounds of benzene, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, and sulfur dioxide were flared, as well as an indeterminate amount of methane.€
Hoffa emerged from the meeting sporting a shark-like grin. Hoffa and the Teamsters had long pushed for opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling and for the construction of a natural gas pipeline to cut across some of the wildest land in North America from the tundra of Alaska to Chicago. “Kerry says, look, I am against drilling in ANWR, but I am going to put that pipeline in, and we’re going to drill like never before,” Hoffa reported. “They are going to drill all over, according to him. And he says, we’re going to be drilling all over the United States.”
Kerry didn’t stop to comment. He slipped out the door and into a waiting SUV. Don’t worry, the candidate later assured worried greens, it wasn’t Kerry’s gas-guzzling, hydro-carbon belching behemoth. It belonged to his…family. (Apparently, this meant he couldn’t take out a loan on the vehicle for his campaign.) Still, the senator’s not a total hypocrite on this count. After all, Kerry voted against ratification of the Kyoto Protocol on Global Warming.
As of Wednesday, according to the misnamed Electricity Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), the industry-dominated electricity distribution coordinator, 1.4 million people were without power in Houston, the state’s largest city, while one-fourth of residents in Dallas, the second-largest city, were similarly cut off. At least 21 deaths have been attributed to the combination of winter storms and power outages, with causes ranging from road accidents to house fires to people overcome by carbon monoxide.
The cause of the disaster is not any actual shortage in the production of electricity in the United States. On the contrary, the power supply is adequate and prices are comparatively stable. This social tragedy is the product of a series of decisions made by private corporations and public officials, all driven by a common concern: the maximization of capitalist profit.
Ten years ago, a mid-February deep freeze caused a power crisis in Texas. This prompted studies and multiple warnings of what might occur in the event of a similar or more far-reaching occurrence. The current crisis, occurring in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, is not a “natural” disaster, but the result of the deliberate and criminal refusal to heed those warnings.
"The local community living near these protected areas can be the source of the lemurs' conservation problems but is also the solution to those same problems."
Almost 1,000 homeless deaths occurred last year across the UK, a social justice group has said.
The Museum of Homelessness (MoH) said the figure rose by more than a third on the previous year, and called for more to be done to stop such “terrible loss of life”.
The museum’s Dying Homeless Project recorded 976 deaths across the four nations in 2020.
It said it had verified 693 homeless deaths in England and Wales, 176 in Scotland and 107 in Northern Ireland.
Trauma politics really only favor the privileged, and singles out the most “relatable” among them – at least to the consumers most aggressively targeted by the New York times et al. Such media outlets provide something similar to a glam-enhancing filter for its readership, enabling them to echo elite influencers’ power-serving opinions by re-tweeting and sharing them. Thus tribal affiliation with the ruling class is established, and conveyed throughout the social media sphere as a kind of currency. These aspiration-enabling mechanisms help us to internalize the suffering of our oppressors, and ‘relate’ to it. Through this process of false identification with celebrities and their struggles, we direct our outrage at the trespasses against these individuals, while overlooking the collective trauma that inflicts damage far greater than Harvey Weinstein.
Unless you can afford complete public disclosure about a graphically sordid sexual encounter, “poor decision making” will factor into your narrative, and your motives for speaking out will be questioned, if not maligned. Just ask former Senator Joe Biden’s accuser, whatever that lowly, “Trump-enabling” intern of no consequence’s name is. What passes as “left” in American political discourse is particularly prone to dismissing “ill-timed” testimonials from sex abuse victims that implicate its preferred political candidates. As the prevailing “feminist” discourse moves away from its broader political aims of wealth re-distribution, over-sharing personal information has become the “movement’s” political and economic underpinning. Individual trauma within this narrow framework supports the idea that predators are independent of predatory systems, and can be politicized with the now academic language of radical movements to advance a centrist agenda.
For years, Russian officials and the Kremlin’s advocates in the media have accused Alexey Navalny and his activists of deliberately recruiting minors for protests against the government. These allegations are mainly a response to the Navalny movement’s reliance on social media for public outreach, as well as the fact that his message apparently resonates better with younger audiences. For all their complaints about how Navalny “politicizes the youth,” Russia’s state authorities have actually engaged students across the country far more aggressively.
"The ideas that fuel anti-Asian prejudice really come from our nation's white supremacist history and can't be separated from that history."
The princess had no access to her passport and was under surveillance, so they had to slip out of Dubai and drive to the coast of Oman. It took hours for them to get out to international waters, riding a dinghy and jet ski. By the evening they reached the yacht which was supposed to carry them to freedom.
In a Whatsapp message to a friend, Latifa declared: "I'm free".
They planned to sail across the Indian Ocean, and then fly to the United States where Latifa could try to claim political asylum.
But eight days later, as the coast of India neared, the escape went horribly wrong.
Armed men boarded the boat. The friends hid in the bathroom until smoke grenades forced them up to the deck.
"Latifa was screaming and kicking. She kept saying 'don't take me back to the UAE. Just shoot me here'," Tiina said. It was the last time she saw her friend.
A little less than four years ago, the Federal Circuit rendered a decision in Amgen Inc. v. Sanofi that brought clarity to how the Court (and U.S. Patent and Trademark Office) should apply the written description requirement in 35 U.S.C. ۤ 112(a) to properly circumscribe the scope of claims to monoclonal antibodies. Earlier this month, on an appeal from remand, the Court took aim at the enablement requirement for antibody claims, with similar, scope-limiting results.
The case arose when Amgen sued Sanofi and Regeneron over sales of Praluent€® (alirocumab), which allegedly competes with Amgen's Repathaâ⢠(evolocumab); Amgen's asserted patents, U.S. Patent Nos. 8,829,165 ("'165 patent") and 8,859,741 ("'741 patent"), claim a genus of antibodies that encompass Praluent€®. As background, blood plasma contains low-density lipoproteins that bind cholesterol and are associated with atherosclerotic plaque formation. Liver cells express receptors for LDL (LDL-R) wherein binding thereto reduces the amount of LDL cholesterol in blood and reduces the risk of plaque formation and cardiovascular disease. PCSK9 (proprotein convertase subtilisin kexin type 9) is a molecule that binds to and causes liver cell LDL-R to be destroyed, thus reducing the capacity and effectiveness of the liver cell's ability to reduce serum LDL-cholesterol. The antibodies at issue in this suit bind to PCSK9 and prevent PCSK9 from binding to LDL-R, preventing their destruction and resulting in lower serum cholesterol.
[...]
While providing yet another fact-bound basis for invalidating (or limiting the scope of) claims to biotechnological inventions, it is unlikely to have been a coincidence that the opinion is authored by Judge Lourie, the architect of the Court's emphasis on structure in applying the written description requirement to biotechnology claims.
GitHub has removed a fan-made project that included reverse-engineered code of the popular GTA 3 and Vice City games. The developer platform responded to a DMCA takedown request from Take-Two Interactive, which also listed dozens of forks. While reverse engineering can in some cases be classified as fair use, it's certainly not always the case.
Spanish football league La Liga has been successful in its application to have Italian ISPs block access to five pirate IPTV providers distributing its games online without permission. It's estimated that the services attracted more than a million visits per month in Italy alone. No court process was necessary.
