Granulate, a provider of autonomous real-time computing workload optimization and cost reduction solutions, today announced it is joining the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), part of the nonprofit Linux Foundation. The announcement comes as part of Granulate's deepening connection to the cloud computing community and the Kubernetes and open-source ecosystems.
Dual-stack networking has arrived in Kubernetes. IPv4/IPv6 dual-stack support is key to the future of Kubernetes, whether powering new 5G and edge workloads or scaling beyond today’s cluster limits to meet your future needs. Let’s dive into the cross-organizational collaboration that brought us this long-awaited goal and examine how the feature evolved over time.
OverOps, the leading solution for root cause analysis at runtime, today debuted its support for Apache Spark, the popular open-source analytics engine for large-scale data processing. This support allows developers to identify and resolve critical exceptions on Spark jobs in minutes, eliminating the need for laborious and time-consuming detective work in searching logs to figure out why their Apache Spark job broke. With no code changes required, OverOps captures a full stack trace of when, where, and why exceptions occurred along with the associated variable state.
The Tegra DRM driver changes were sent out on Friday of the new material destined for Linux 5.16. Notable this time around is NVIDIA's NVDEC driver being included.
After going through rounds of public code review, the Tegra DRM driver updates for Linux 5.16 include the introduction of the NVDEC driver for accelerated video decoding. This open-source video decode engine work is for the Tegra X1 (Tegra210) and newer, including the Tegra X2 and Xavier SoCs at this time.
Sent in this morning were an urgent set of x86 updates for the Linux 5.15-rc5 kernel due out later today.
With this x86/urgent pull request is "Yet another attempt at fixing the never-ending saga of botched x86 timers, this time because some incredibly smart hardware decides to turn off the HPET timer in a low power state - who cares if the OS is relying on it..."
Vivaldi is a freeware, cross-platform web browser developed by Vivaldi Technologies. It had grown from the downfall of Opera with many disgruntled when it changed from the Presto layout engine to a Chromium-based browser. This platform angered traditional Opera users. Since then, Vivaldi has become one of the most popular alternative Internet Browsers amongst the big three Chrome, Firefox, and Edge.
Vivaldi promotes itself as a leading browser with faster navigation, clever bookmarking, more intelligent browsing, extensive tab management, and a more visual approach.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Vivaldi Browser on Fedora.
Rust is an open-source systems programming language that focuses on speed, memory safety, and parallelism. Developers use Rust to create a wide range of new software applications, such as game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components, and simulation engines for virtual reality. Rust is syntactically similar to C++ but can guarantee memory safety by using a borrow checker for validating references.
For users, especially developers wanting to try out Rust Programming language, you will know how to install Rust Programming Language on Fedora.
Learn the steps to install and use Etherpad on Ubuntu 20.04 focal fossa /18.04 Bionic Beaver LTS/ Debian Linux distros for a free and open-source collaborative text editor.
EtherPad is a real-time collaborative web-based text editor in which several people can conveniently work together online on a document. It is an open-source web application, hence doesn’t need to pay anything. The application is scalable to thousands of simultaneous real-time users. It provides full data export capabilities, and runs on your server, under your control.
You can think about having your own Google Docs-like service but with plugins, support to extend the application capabilities. You can simply invite new users with the integrated share function or send them the link to the document via email.
Skype is a proprietary telecommunications application software that is owned and developed by Microsoft. Skype is one of the most known and recognized software for video, audio, and text communication app available across multiple platforms. For the most part, free to download and use, Skype is an excellent tool for keeping in touch with friends or working remotely with colleagues.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Skype with Nginx on Fedora.
Valve’s latest Steam Deck is a promising piece of hardware and is showcasing some great potential for the future of the company’s hardware offerings. A lot has already been talked about at length when it comes to Steam Deck, but it’s understandable that fans may still have some lingering questions before they decide to plop upwards of $399 for the hardware.
Luckily, recent developments on the matter have cleared the air surrounding the hardware and software with Valve seemingly giving out hardware units to developers for testing purposes. Furthermore, Valve’s recent interviews and press releases have revealed more about the Steam Deck, so here are 10 more new things you need to know before buying the console.
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As mentioned earlier, the Steam Deck will use Proton API to run Steam games that aren’t native to Linux.
If you're at all interested in gaming on PCs, you’ve probably come across Steam, Valve’s platform for distributing, updating and running games. Steam makes it possible to purchase a game, install it over the internet and then run it from the Steam interface. Ah, but that brings us back to the age-old Linux gaming conundrum of support, as not every PC game is designed to run on anything other than Microsoft Windows.
That said, there are plenty of Steam games that will run on Linux, and quite often, a Windows Steam game can be convinced to run on Linux even though some ‘fettling’ by the user may be required. This approach is officially supported by Steam using a system called Proton. Getting all of these things running, and then possibly optimising the results, is what we’ll be looking at in this tutorial.
After a long bumpy road with many revisions, it appears that the futex2 work sponsored by Valve is finally heading into the upstream Linux Kernel. Initially much larger, the work was slimmed down to get the main needed parts done and enabled before the rest can make it in.
So what is it? As developer André Almeida previously described it: "The use case of this syscall is to allow low level locking libraries to wait for multiple locks at the same time. This is specially useful for emulating Windows' WaitForMultipleObjects. A futex_waitv()-based solution has been used for some time at Proton's Wine (a compatibility layer to run Windows games on Linux). Compared to a solution that uses eventfd(), futex was able to reduce CPU utilization for games, and even increase frames per second for some games. This happens because eventfd doesn't scale very well for a huge number of read, write and poll calls compared to futex. Native game engines will benefit of this as well, given that this wait pattern is common for games.".
Good news! We have spent time this week preparing Kalendar for KDE Review — the two-week process that new KDE applications are subjected to before initial release. Don’t worry, we’re going to go over what that means in a second. We will also go through some of the refactoring, tweaking, and boatload bug-fixing that has been happening in anticipation for KDE Review. Oh… and our new logo!
That doesn’t mean we’ve stopped working on new features, however. Far from it! We have some new cool stuff to show off, including timezone management and expanded tag filtering capabilities.
In August I was assigned 12.75 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative and carried over 18 hours from earlier months. I worked 2 hours and will carry over the remainder.
I started work on an update to the linux package, but did not make an upload yet.
So, Remmina is now compiled in OpenEmbedded, for x86_64 and aarch64, and is now available via the package manager. It does have some dependencies, so make sure that you install those also.
Note, I have not tested any of these VNC and RDP apps, have just compiled them and made them available for people to play with. The recipes were pre-existing in OpenEmbedded, except for gtk-vnc for which I created a recipe. I did modify some pre-existing recipes to remove not-needed dependencies, such as 'pam' and 'avahi'.
When we need an extra computer to perform a specific job for us, it's sometimes too expensive or wasteful to buy a whole new PC or laptop to do the job. Sometimes you just need a small but capable device that can do the job for you, and this is where the Raspberry Pi comes into play.
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The Raspberry Pi may have a funny name, but once you get through all the bakery-related puns, you'll find a powerful kit that can do a lot for what you pay for. The Raspberry Pi Foundation invented it as a way to help teach people about coding and the basics of Computer Science.
The device comes with its own unique brand of the Debian operating system called "Raspberry Pi OS." The choice to make the OS Linux-based helps keep the cost down and allows users to have a lot more control over their system, making it a great tool for learning.
Does that mean the Raspberry Pi is for kids? Hardly. Despite the fact that the device itself is the size of a credit card, it can do a surprising amount. It has most of the ports you would expect from a PC, such as USB, Ethernet, and HDMI. As such, when you set it up, it really feels like you're using a desktop PC that shrunk in the wash.
Today, General Motors announced Ultifi, its end-to-end software platform designed to unlock new vehicle experiences and connect customers’ digital lives. Ultifi will help enable the frequent and seamless delivery of software-defined features, apps and services to customers over the air. It offers the potential for more cloud-based services, faster software development and new opportunities to increase customer loyalty.
Ultifi’s functionality builds upon the Vehicle Intelligence Platform (VIP), GM’s advanced electrical architecture. VIP-enabled vehicles today provide over-the-air capability, plenty of data bandwidth, robust cybersecurity and lightning fast processing power. On top of this foundation, GM engineers will separate key software into a new centralized layer that acts as a powerful hub for vehicle systems. The Ultifi platform will then enable accelerated development and deployment of software and applications over the air to millions of customers, without affecting basic hardware controls.
Offerings enhanced through partnerships with leading global RISC-V technology providers
In the community effort to help a struggling family build a home, everyone selflessly pitches in, drawing on their own experiences as homeowners, focused on ensuring that this family’s house goes up as quickly and as cost-effectively as possible. Each individual is working with an eye to the future, making sure the place will last so that this family can build a better life for themselves.
As a rule, open source software is a type of uncommercialized program that is shared as public domain software. Moreover, it was born to promote industry exchanges and technical exchanges. The sole spirit of open source lies in cooperation and openness. Thanks to open communication and close cooperation, it also offers more chances for future development.
Red Hat's Platform Tools team is making it very easy to run the very bleeding edge, development version of the LLVM toolchain and Clang compiler on the current versions of Fedora.
A Copr repository is now being maintained that builds nightly snapshot packages for the latest versions of Fedora Linux (currently F34 / F35 / Rawhide) for all of the major CPU architectures. This in turn makes it very easy to test out the freshest LLVM compiler support not only for the Clang C/C++ compiler itself but related sub-projects like LLD.
Proteins are the molecular machines of all living cells and have been exploited for use in many applications, including therapeutics and industrial catalysts. To overcome the limitations of naturally occurring proteins, protein engineering is used to improve protein characteristics such as stability and functionality. In a new study, researchers demonstrate a machine learning algorithm that accelerates the protein engineering process. The study is reported in the journal Nature Communications.
Machine learning algorithms assist in protein engineering by reducing the experimental burden of methods such as directed evolution, which involves multiple rounds of mutagenesis and high-throughput screening. They work by simulating and predicting the fitness of all possible sequences of the target protein after being trained on protein sequence databases.
Although many machine learning algorithms exist, few of them incorporate the evolutionary history of the target protein. This is where ECNet (evolutionary context-integrated neural network), a deep-learning algorithm, comes in.
In geographic atrophy, a late form of age-related macular degeneration (AMD), reading ability is closely related to the altered retinal structure. Reading speed makes everyday functional impairment measurable, which the most common functional test in ophthalmology -- the best-corrected visual acuity assessment - cannot reflect. Retinal imaging can be used to assess loss of reading ability even when central visual acuity is still good.
During the coronavirus pandemic, many people have grown accustomed to wearing face masks to protect themselves and others, but that doesn't mean the masks are always comfortable -- especially during exercise. Now, researchers reporting in ACS Nano have developed a dynamic respirator that modulates its pore size in response to changing conditions, such as exercise or air pollution levels, allowing the wearer to breathe easier when the highest levels of filtration are not required.
Many of you will be well aware of The Terminator and I, Robot. Both films begin with the fantasy of living alongside machines or robots harmoniously, with artificial intelligence adding value to our lives. But cracks begin to show and the human race is left fighting for survival against our own creation.
Today, some would say we’re creeping towards a similar outcome, claiming “the end is nigh” after recent news that Tesla is planning to make the ‘Tesla bot’.
But with the proper governance and a clear understanding of where we see technology within our lives, we can properly utilise tech for good, and not see it as a step towards judgement day.
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While technology remains the faithful co-pilot to our human endeavours, we must ensure that it is far more than just a two-person job when looking to effectively implement and run.
Technology has enabled us to capture data and understand large groups, giving us a good understanding of different cultures and societies. This information can be key towards eradicating bias in future developments, and help build a society free from stereotypes, creating the kind of legacy humans can be proud of.
Ultimately, there are some key considerations for bias-free technology:
Firstly, tech should be built ethically and with safety at the forefront, by testing correctly on a group representative of the community we are using technology as a positive enabler for change for.
15-year-old Richard Hovsepyan from Cambridgeshire nabbed the top spot with a 30 second clip of music inspired by Toby Fox's Undertale, a delightfully retro-styled RPG.
The audio is heady stuff, taking this hack back to teenage years spent mashing the keys of various 8-bit home computers while increasingly urgent music served to highlight a distinct lack of progress via the medium of the noise and tone channels.
Marvell has produced samples of a server microprocessor with up to 24 Arm-compatible cores that could be used for applications involving artificial intelligence as well as network management, a spokesperson told The Register.
These chips are part of the Octeon family, and Marvell refers to them as data processing units. They are designed to run high-throughput code in cloud and data center environments, the company said.
"We are sampling Octeon silicon to our customers and they're working to bring their products to market next year," a spokeswoman said this week.
Data processing unit, aka DPU, is an irritating label because all computer processors are data-processing units. The industry has taken to use the term for specialized accelerators to which CPU cores can offload routine but intensive work, such as network packet processing, data encryption and compression, and AI inference and training. You might also know them as SmartNICs.
"Most challenging, but most rewarding" for Aimee Reitzen, who helped launch a foundation to bring awareness to her son's genetic disorder.
During the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, midwives have reported increased demand for community birth services. The purpose of this qualitative study was to understand childbearing persons’ decision-making during the pandemic and to illuminate their experiences giving birth in community settings.
A crew of innovator chefs and entrepreneurs have turned Washington into a hub of plant-forward dining. But they have all kinds of competing ideas about what meat-free fare should be.
Screening for perinatal depression is a clinical approach to identifying women in need of mental health diagnoses, referral, and treatment. Many states mandate screening for perinatal depression, but it remains unclear whether screening leads to increased access to treatment and better health outcomes. The aim of this qualitative study was to identify how women from diverse backgrounds perceive the quality of perinatal depression screening and whether the perceived quality affected their decisions about mental health care. During 2019 a sample of twenty-nine participants who had been screened for perinatal depression completed semistructured in-depth interviews in which they were asked for their impressions of the screening process. Common themes were that the screening was ineffective because providers didn’t explain the purpose or uses of the screening tool, didn’t tell patients anything about the results, and failed to provide any follow-up relating to patient depression scores. The results suggest the need for health care facilities to engage patients in a dialogue about screening results and for health care delivery systems to refine the screening process. These findings offer a foundation to design more comprehensive, patient-centered screening protocols that might result in improved mental health outcomes.
The goal of a new Broadband Forum project, Open Broadband – WWC Reference Implementation for 5G-RG (OB-5WWC) is for vendors and operators to bring products to market in a shorter timeframe and enjoy reduced development times and cycles. The Open Source project will bring the full benefits of the 5G ecosystem to fixed-line services and offer a full end-to-end solution to operators.
We covered Littles earlier this week, noting that after he ran for the board on a platform of making it more responsive to developers' needs – rather than Microsoft's. He later quit because, according to a post, "I didn't have the energy to put into an organization that doesn't share my views and stance on what I think the community needs, Sustainable Open Source Software."
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The first comment on the apology described it as "a total non-apology" – a sentiment repeated in other comments. The conversation also features some discussion of how to withdraw projects from the foundation.
The Register suspects the foundation may soon need some new volunteers. Brave new volunteers
Littles was elected and took on the role of chair for the Technical Steering Group, hoping to be able to achieve some progress towards Open Source sustainability. However, when he realized that his efforts were futile he resigned from the .NET Foundation board ahead of the 2021 elections which took place in August. He hadn't intended to draw attention to this, but changed his mind when the announcement of the election results reported on his resignation.
Apache Software has quickly issued a fix for a zero-day security bug in the Apache HTTP Server, which was first reported to the project last week. The vulnerability is under active exploitation in the wild, it said, and could allow attackers to access sensitive information.
According to a security advisory issued on Monday, the issue (CVE-2021-41773) could allow path traversal and subsequent file disclosure. Path traversal issues allow unauthorized people to access files on a web server, by tricking either the web server or the web application running on it into returning files that exist outside of the web root folder.
Users of the open source Apache HTTP Server who have updated to recently released version 2.4.49 are being urged to update to 2.4.50 immediately to apply fixes for a newly disclosed zero-day that is already being actively exploited by malicious actors.
First reported a week ago on 29 September, the expedited fix reflects the widespread usage of the Apache Software Foundation’s free, cross-platform web server software, which dates back to the mid-1990s and was a driving force in the rapid development of the world wide web at the time. It still serves around a quarter of active websites globally.
The Apache Software Foundation has released version 2.4.50 of the HTTP Web Server to address two vulnerabilities, one of which is an actively exploited path traversal and file disclosure flaw.
The Apache HTTP Server is an open-source, cross-platform web server that is extremely popular for being versatile, robust, and free. As such, any vulnerability in the product has widespread consequences.
A few days after releasing a fix for a vulnerability in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.49 that is under active attack, the Apache Software Foundation released another version of the server because the fix for the flaw was incomplete and still allowed remote code execution in some cases. "It was found that the fix for CVE-2021-41773 in Apache HTTP Server 2.4.50 was insufficient. An attacker could use a path traversal attack to map URLs to files outside the directories configured by Alias-like directives. If files outside of these directories are not protected by the usual default configuration "require all denied", these requests can succeed. If CGI scripts are also enabled for these aliased pathes, this could allow for remote code execution," the ASF said in an advisory Thursday.
The expiration of Let’s Encrypt's root certificate last week threw up a number of problems, though not perhaps in the areas predicted ahead of the event.
A legacy certificate used by the certificate authority – the IdentTrust DST Root CA X3 – expired on September 30.
Wireshark is a network packet analyzer. A network packet analyzer will try to capture network packets and tries to display that packet data as detailed as possible. You could think of a network packet analyzer as a measuring device used to examine what's going on inside a network cable, just like a voltmeter is used by an electrician to examine what's going on inside an electric cable (but at a higher level, of course). In the past, such tools were either very expensive, proprietary, or both. However, with the advent of Wireshark, all that has changed. Wireshark is perhaps one of the best open source packet analyzers available today.
With Google sponsorship, the Linux Foundation has launched the Secure Open Source Rewards pilot program to incentivize improvements that proactively harden critical open source projects and their supporting infrastructure against application and supply chain attacks. Rewards range from $505 to $10,000 or more.
In view of the ubiquity of cyberattacks that exploit vulnerabilities that target people, organizations, and governments around the world, in August 2021 Google announced that it was going to invest $10 billion over the next five years to strengthen cybersecurity, including enhancing open-source security. This included a pledge of $100 million to support third-party foundations, like OpenSSF, that manage open source security priorities and help fix vulnerabilities.
The maintainers of Apache Ranger have criticized a report that benchmarks the open source data governance platform against proprietary rival Immuta in terms of implementing access control policies.
The report, which is sponsored by Immuta and produced by tech analyst firm GigaOm, “paints an incorrect picture on the complexities of using Apache Ranger”, wrote Madhan Neethiraj, a project management committee (PMC) member for Apache Ranger, in a blog post.
A hospital that continued to admit patients during a ransomware attack has been sued over claims that a baby died after doctors and nurses failed to spot there was a problem due to networks being shut down.
Nicko Silar died after six months in intensive care after being born at Springhill Memorial Hospital with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, documents filed in the Alabama Circuit Court state [PDF]. The suit alleges that, because the hospital had shut down key networks, staff were reduced to using paper records, internal staff messaging services were down, and fetal monitoring devices were severely affected.
Nicko's mother, Teiranni Kidd, was never told that the hospital was having computer problems, the suit claims, and would not have used the facility if she had known.
A UK law firm is bringing legal action on behalf of patients it says had their confidential medical records obtained by Google and DeepMind Technologies in breach of data protection laws.
Mishcon de Reya said today it planned a representative action on behalf of Mr Andrew Prismall and the approximately 1.6 million individuals whose data was used as part of a testing programme for medical software developed by the companies.
essenger apps like Signal and Telegram received a surge in interest after a Facebook Inc. outage left Whatsapp users in the lurch. At least 2.7 billion social network users around the world were plunged into digital darkness on Monday as Facebook’s suite of apps and services, including Whatsapp and Instagram, went down. For six hours, from around 11:40am EDT, millions of communication channels were unusable.
ew Delhi: Over 500 prominent citizens and organisations have written to the Election Commission of India (ECI), expressing their disapproval over the proposal demanding the linkage of voter IDs with Aadhar card, saying it would be exclusionary and a violation of privacy as well as Supreme Court’s ruling.
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The signatories also include prominent individuals, including former civil servants, journalists, lawyers, social activists, researchers, and students.
As per the ECI proposal these “reforms” are sought in order to clean up the voters’ list, prevent voter fraud, as the Aadhar card involves biometric verification which cannot be duplicated. It has also said that any linkage of Voter ID with Aadhar shall be voluntary, and documents such as passports, driving license etc would remain valid for verification.
However, the statement has termed this proposal a “dangerous idea” that “ will almost certainly lead to mass disenfranchisement, could increase voter fraud, given the mass discrepancies in the Aadhaar database, and could violate people’s right to privacy by enabling voter profiling through the linkage of data sets. This proposal would violate the judgment of the Supreme Court of India in Justice K.S. Puttaswamy (retd.) & Anr. v. Union Of India (Aadhaar judgment) which limited the use of Aadhaar authentication solely to welfare programmes and to link with PAN numbers for the purposes of income tax.”
Roughly a month into the grand bitcoin experiment in El Salvador, how it’s going depends on how you look at it.
In the “it’s going gangbusters” camp, we might present as Exhibit A the fast and furious tweets of President Bukele, who said on that social media platform Thursday (Oct. 7), “Since yesterday, Salvadorans are inserting more cash (to buy #bitcoin) than what they are withdrawing from the ATMs. And if we add remittances (almost $2 million per day), the incoming USD QUADRUPLES the outflow. This is very surprising so early in the game.”
Yet Reuters noted this week that “only a fraction” of the businesses in the country have taken bitcoin payments amid the technical glitches that have been a hallmark of the rollout. In anecdotes, consumers told the newswire that the Chivo wallets, in some instances, took consumers’ money to buy bitcoin — but then did not ante up the bitcoin. That comes as Bukele has said that 3 million individuals have downloaded the wallets, which exceeds the initial targets set by the government by 500,000 and represents about half of the nation’s population. But the Salvadoran Foundation for Economic and Social Development reported that 93 percent of companies surveyed across a number of verticals have not been taking bitcoin payments.
Metro Bank has put "less than 90" IT employees at risk of redundancy as it endeavours to "support our new agile way of working" – agile being that nebulous yet overused term that can be heard in certain circles.
Disgruntled techies working at the retail and commercial bank contacted us this week to inform of recent events that will affect people in the Architecture, Engineering and IT change teams.
A spokesperson at Metro Bank – the first new bank on the British high street in 150 years when it opened in 2010 – sent us a statement:
Nicklaus Children's Hospital Foundation, a 501(c)3 organization dedicated to raising essential funds for the patients and families of Nicklaus Children's Hospital, announced today that it has begun accepting cryptocurrency donations.
Nicklaus Children's Hospital Foundation is among the first nonprofits, and believed to be the first healthcare foundation in South Florida, to begin accepting cryptocurrency donations. This addition comes ahead of #BitCoinTuesday on Tuesday, November 30, a major giving day for the digital currency community.
Donations in the following cryptocurrencies are now accepted by Nicklaus Children's Hospital Foundation: Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), Amp (AMP), Basic Attention Token (BAT), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), ChainLink (LINK), Dai (DAI), Dogecoin (DOGE), The Graph (GRT), Gemini Dollar (GUSD), Litecoin (LTC), Storj (STORJ), UMA (UMA), Zcash (ZEC), 0x (ZRX) and 1inch (1INCH) and more!
Whistleblower Frances Haugen today urged Congress to regulate Facebook and its algorithms that she said put immense profit before safety and society.
“I am here today because I believe that Facebook’s products harm children, stoke division, weaken our democracy, and much more,” Haugen, a former program manager at Facebook, said [PDF] at a Senate commerce and science subcommittee hearing.
“The company’s leadership knows ways to make Facebook and Instagram safer and won’t make the necessary changes because they have put their astronomical profits before people. Congressional action is needed. They cannot solve this crisis without your help.”
Yeah, we know: corporation puts profit first, who'd have thought? Bear in mind, though, Facebook is used by 1.9 billion people every day, and made a $29.1bn profit in 2020, up 58 per cent on the year before. That's some responsibility on its shoulders.
Google's South Korean operation has decided to comply with the nation's new law that prohibits it from restricting payments to its own Play Store, either to pay for apps or for in-app purchases.
The law was enacted in September and was the world's first such legislation. As such it is of considerable interest, as Google and Apple have both spent years saying that allowing third-party payments would compromise user security. Epic Games, which unilaterally enabled its own payment options for its iOS apps, has framed the issue as one of unfair monopolisation by Apple.
At a congressional hearing on Tuesday, former Facebook Inc. product manager Frances Haugen didn’t need to convince lawmakers that the company has a big problem. Republicans and Democrats were, for once, united on her side, at several points even calling her a “hero.” What they needed was direction. Luckily, Haugen gave that to them.
Throughout the hearing she used the term “engagement-based ranking” to synthesize the complexities of Facebook’s problems into a single, neutral term. The lawmakers tried saying it themselves. “We’ve learned … that Facebook conducts what’s called ‘engagement-based ranking,’” Sen. John Thune said.
He was correct. Facebook’s success as a business boils down to algorithms that bump the most titillating content to the top of users’ newsfeeds. These formulas are fundamental to Facebook’s success in engaging users but also contribute to the propagation of conspiracy theories on the site and to drawing teenage girls to eating disorders on Instagram. In one powerful moment, Haugen pointed out that, years from now, women would effectively suffer from brittle bones and infertility because of Facebook’s choices.
The Patent Trial and Appeal Board has sided with Hulu that a data processing patent was invalid in light of an earlier textbook, a decision that came after the board's precedent-setting panel ruled last year that the online streaming company had shown a reasonable likelihood that the prior art qualified as a printed publication.
The final ruling on Hulu's petition for inter partes review came down on Tuesday. The patent board agreed that all the challenged claims in a Sound View Innovations LLC patent were obvious in light of a textbook titled "Sed & Awk," authored by Dale Dougherty in 1990....
he covid-19 pandemic affecting the world’s population has demonstrated the importance of advancements in medical technology and securing patent protection in countries of interest. The ongoing debate concerning the waiver of the enforcement of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement in 1994 for all IP related to the prevention, containment and treatment of covid-19 has brought up the age-old question of striking a balance between greater public access with the aim of global vaccinations and the rights of the patentee.
The dispute between Abiomed and Thoratec began in 2015 with the two infringement lawsuits in Düsseldorf. Abiomed and its German subsidiary AIS GmbH accused Thoratec of infringing EP 2047872 B1. It protects a catheter device. They also claimed infringement of the German patent DE 10336902 B3, which protects an intracardiac pumping device.
Counsel see little upside, and even some downsides, to asking for judges’ financial disclosures, despite a Wall Street Journal article that highlighted conflicts
The following have been appointed by the PCT Contracting States as International Searching Authorities (ISAs): the national Offices of Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, China, Chile, Egypt, Finland, India, Israel, Japan, the Philippines, the Republic of Korea, the Russian Federation, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine and the United States of America, and the following regional Offices, the European Patent Office, the Nordic Patent Institute, and the Visegrad Patent Institute. The availability of a particular ISA to the nationals or residents of a country is determined by the receiving Office where the international application was filed.
Today’s jury verdict in E.D. Tex. favored the accused infringer Sony. The patentee alleged that Sony’s Spider-Man and God of War games infringed its U.S. Patent Nos. 6,362,822 (claim 1) and 7,061,488 (claims 1, 27, and 50. The jury found, however, that neither game infringed.
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Claim 1 of the ”822: A shadow rendering method for use in a computer system, the method comprising the steps of...
Article on Advanced Bionics v Med-El [2021] EWHC 2415 (Pat). Similar to Abbott v Dexcom, the key reason for the present application was to avoid the German injunction gap (an issue explained in detail in Abbott v Dexcom, [33]). Unlike Abbott v Dexcom, Mellor J granted expedition for this case, as IPKat friend friend, Brussels-based trainee patent attorney, Henry Yang explains.
Counsel at IBM, Siemens and three other companies say the office should expand its list of majors that automatically qualify applicants to sit the patent bar
The Chinese organizations have been investing in several European markets, and an effective protection by means of the patent system is comprised in the strategy of said organizations. Regarding protection of intellectual assets by means of patents, filing a patent application before the European Patent Office is a common approach to have patents in force in several European countries. The EPO is the regional Patent Office, which covers 38 member states, two extension states and 4 validation states, wherein some of this later group is geographically located outside Europe. After a patent being granted by EPO, it is necessary to validate European patent in the countries where the applicant has interest in protecting its invention.
The CIPA president announced the launch of the Mercer Review at the CIPA East of England regional conference back in 2019, following the debacle of the 2018 FD4/P6 examination (IPKat). The flood of criticism levelled at the Patent Examination Board (PEB) following so-called Gantry-Gate (after the borderline incomprehensible subject-matter of the 2018 FD4/P6 paper). The UK qualifying patent examinations were criticised, as they had been for years, for being out-dated and unfit for the purpose of actually assessing whether a candidate is fit to practise (IPKat).
It is now nearly 2 and a half years since the Mercer Review was announced. The delay in the Review was reportedly due to a change of scope following the move to online exams in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic (a move that has been beset with its own issues, IPKat). Meanwhile, a radical shake-up of the European Qualifying Examinations (EQEs) has been announced (IPKat), with the aim of making the EQEs more fit for purpose.
On October 8, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,316,128, owned and asserted by Netcom Global Solutions LLC, a Jeffrey M. Gross entity. The '128 patent is generally directed to a firewall that can enforce communication management and filtering policies using the identities of the sender and receiver of the communication. It has been asserted against Microsoft and Cisco.
On October 8, 2021, the China National Intellectual Property Administration declared all claims of CN103384333B invalid. The patent is owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI). The CN’333 patent is related to patents that are designated essential to the Access Advance (formerly known as HEVC Advance) patent pool as well as SISVEL’s AV1 and VP9 patent pools. It is also related to U.S. Patent 8,867,854, which Unified challenged in IPR2020-01048.
On October 5, 2021, the Central Reexamination Unit of the United States Patent and Trademark Office issued a final office action rejecting all of the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 7,426,715, owned by Sound View Innovations, LLC. The initial request was filed in an effort to protect Open Source technologies from invalid NPE assertions. The ’715 patent generally relates to shutting down a plurality of software components in an ordered sequence. Sound View had asserted this patent against Walmart, Vudu, and Delta Air Lines.
On October 7, 2021, Unified Patents filed a Japanese opposition against JP6855419, currently assigned to the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) and the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI). The JP‘419 patent, and its corresponding extended patent family, is one of the largest families known to be owned by KAIST. The JP‘419 patent is related to patents that have been designated essential in both the Access Advance (formerly known as HEVC Advance) and AV1 pools.
