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Posted in News Roundup at 9:11 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
All decisions about the development and behavior of Windows are made by Microsoft. If the company decides that you will receive updates at some point, you will receive them when they decide to stop supporting a particular version of Windows, support will be terminated, despite the fact that the system is still used by many. For example, they stopped supporting Windows 7. In Linux, everything is different. There is no single company that would make such decisions. All decisions are made by the community. A clear example is the cessation of CentOS support for Red Hat. The community immediately created an alternative – Rocky Linux, which will be binary compatible with CentOS and will continue to evolve instead.
**gappletviewer** , **gc-analyze** , **gcj** , **gcj-dbtool** , **gcjh** , **gij** , **gjar** , **gjarsigner** , **gjavah** , **gjdoc** , **gkeytool** , **gnative2ascii** , **gorbd** , **grepjar** , **grmic** , **grmid** , **grmiregistry** , **gserialver** , **gtnameserv** , **jcf-dump** , **jv- convert** , **rebuild-gcj-db** and **gcc-objc** from the **d** software series of Slackware.
Recently I’ve been having a back forth with someone who can’t accept a nuanced opinion on open source so I thought I’d just make a video on the topic in case anyone else is confused where I stand.
Today, we’re going to take a look at PopOS 21.04. Or 21.06? It should release in June, so 21.04 doesn’t really make sense, right? Anyway, the guys at system76 have been working at their distro for a while now, but this release is the first time that I felt they departed from baseline Ubuntu enough to warrant a dedicated video. So we’re gonna take a look at the new stuff, but also at stuff that already existed previously, as it’s the first time I’m really using PopOS at all, and the first contact I’ll get with their GNOME redesign called Cosmic.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ve got Distro News from the team at Rocky Linux with their announcement of the 8.4 stable release and also from the Debian team with Debian 10.10. In App News, Canonical has announced a new LTS Support service for the application Blender. Plus we’ll check out the latest release of KMyMoney. NVIDIA announced availability of the 470 Drivers with DLSS Support in Proton and we’ll talk about what that means. Later in the show, we’re bringing back the Lightning Round of topics that we tested out in a previous episode and so much more including something that may hurt your wallets with the Steam Summer Sale. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
Microsoft and systemd developers are proposing a global counter for block device changes for the Linux kernel to better track changes and having a unique system-wide number for disk and other block device changes rather than on a per-disk basis.
This monotonically increasing number is system-wide and would be used so systemd and other user-space software could better correlate events for devices that end up re-using the same device, such as /dev/sda and especially /dev/loop0 and other devices often end up getting re-used when one device is detached and another added. Particularly around loop devices isn’t a better means of finding out if it’s the same loop device as before since not having a serial number or other means of uniquely identifying it.
The hid-input kernel driver with Linux 5.14 is set to see support for “Programmable Buttons” as outlined by the USB HID specification.
Programmable Buttons are as one would think, per the USB specification: “the user defines the function of these buttons to control software applications or GUI objects.” With Linux 5.14 the kernel driver will now finally support the Programmable Buttons and in turn map them to the KEY_MACRO[#] event key codes. The KEY_MACRO event codes in turn are already supported/used by various user-space software.
Back in April was the last time we saw much XeHP specificc ode land in the open-source Mesa driver code while this week there was a fresh batch of code merged.
Merged this week into Mesa Git ahead of next quarter’s 21.2 release was XeHP handling for scratch buffers and register spilling. Changes with GFX12.5 rework how scratch handling is done and thus a number of patches were needed to get this ready for XeHP. In turn this functionality is now wired up for both Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan.
We rely on protocols to speak to each other, the natural way would be language with spoken words using vocal chords, we could imagine other way like emitting sound in Morse. With computers we need to define how to send a message from A to B and there are many many possibilities for such a simple task.
Regex, or Regular Expressions, is a sequence of characters, used to search and locate specific sequences of characters that match a pattern.
In SQL if you were looking for email addresses from the same company Regex lets you define a pattern using comparators and Metacharacters, in this case using ~* and % to help define the pattern: [...]
As we all know, Secure Shell, shortly SSH, is the cryptographic network protocol that allows you to securely communicate/access a remote system over unsecured network, for example Internet.
Whenever you send a data over an unsecured network using SSH, the data will be automatically encrypted in the source system, and decrypted in the destination side.
SSH provides four authentication methods namely password-based authentication, key-based authentication, Host-based authentication, and Keyboard authentication.
We have heard of many linux distributions in recent times used for different purposes. We choose a linux distribution such as debian , manjaro or ubuntu as per our requirements. So we care about the brand recognition of these distros sometimes. now forget about the brand value and go towards the simplicity. Here we will find a distribution that fulfills all our needs, and that is ‘MX linux’. Here I will go through all steps to install MX Linux in detail.
We found MX linux as middle weight linux operating system based on Debian stable and using core antiX components. Additionally ,we also get complementary softwares created and packaged by the MX community. Now, MX linux is an operating system that is designed to combine elegant and efficient desktop system with high stability. Also MX linux is the most downloadable Linux Distribution at Distrowatch. This is because it gives simplicity and less dreary feel to the novice linux users. Basically, MX Linux consists of a core pulled from AntiX system and other stuff from MEPI’s.
This is good news that Python comes pre-installed in Ubuntu 19.04. But question is still remain How will you check Latest python version on your Ubuntu operating system?
Most of tools and utility having special switch for checking version, same python have.
You can use the cp command to copy a file in Linux as well as a folder of any kind to the same working directory of any other destination directory. The use of absolute and relative path is also necessary as per requirement. In the subsequent content of this article, we will scrutinize the cp Command according to the following state of the home directory with the help of numerous examples. Following color coding is used to describe better command to copy a file on Linux.
While working with configuration files in Linux, sometimes you need to append text such as configuration parameters to an existing file. To append simply means to add text to the end or bottom of a file.
In this short article, you will learn different ways to append text to the end of a file in Linux.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Mega Cloud Drive Sync on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, MEGA is one of the few cloud storage service providers with native Linux clients like Dropbox. MEGA Cloud Drive permits its users to sync their files and folders in between their MEGA Cloud Drive and local system. All of the modifications made into files on MEGA Cloud Drive will be reflected on your local computer automatically, and vice versa.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Shutter Screenshot Tool on a Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Are you an Ubuntu user? Do you need to edit your bootloader to change something, delete something, or something else? Don’t know how to do it? If so, this guide is for you. Follow along as we show you how to edit the Ubuntu bootloader.
This is part of a series of posts on ideas for an ansible-like provisioning system, implemented in Transilience.
I thought a lot of what I managed to do so far with Transilience would be impossible, but then here I am. How about Ansible conditionals? Those must be impossible, right?
Achievement unlocked! I know how to work with staging environments in Netlify now.
Specifically, I have just completed the setup and testing of such environment for this Jekyll-based blog.
It’s been a while since I documented a Unix Tutorial Project, too. I’ve been coming back to this idea for a few months now, first not being sure how to use different branches in GitHub, then not quite understanding how to work with different branches in the Sublime Text 4 and lately trying to figure out how to make sure I don’t accidentally publish a whole second website that would compete with the original website – duplicated content is not good for Google rankings.
If you’ve purchased an NVIDIA 2000-series or 3000-series GPU, you’re probably already aware of the big, new feature of these product lines: ray-tracing. What you may not know is that under the umbrella of NVIDIA’s ray-tracing features is another even more game-changing feature: Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS). While it sounds like a mouthful, what it does is remarkably simple and totally awesome for gamers. Read on to learn everything you need to know about DLSS, how the technology has evolved, and how to start using DLSS today!
In the last post I told about Understanding Linux system security for Users After reading this post you have knowledge about Linux file system, and where username and password are stored in Linux? where you can dump this password? when you dump password, it will be in plain text or encrypted format? so for finding the password, walkthrough this post Unshadow the file and dump Linux password
After moving my Ikiwiki blog to my own server and enabling a basic CSP policy, I decided to see if I could tighten up the policy some more and stop relying on style-src ‘unsafe-inline’.
This does require that OpenID logins be disabled, but as a bonus, it also removes the need for jQuery to be present on the server.
Tok has seen a handful of mostly user-experience focused improvements; the most noticeable one being the presence of global menu support. Tok now supports global menu bars; which are typically at least five times faster to access than window-local menus due to Fitts’ Law.
[...]
As per usual, Tok is always striving to be lightweight. Mobile was the area of focus for this changelog’s performance improvements. Opening the group information should now be instantaneous; where it took a few seconds before.
Pushing towards mid-year here with the fourth octant, and me freshly “wed” (there’s a good Dutch word for “not-married partner” which is “nepgenoot”), here’s some KDE-on-FreeBSD news. It includes some desktop@ and x11@ items as well, because the things we do together are tangled up closely.
After 4 days + 1 morning of BoFs, hacking sessions and meetings, talks at Akademy resumed in room 1 on Friday at 17:00 UTC. Kevin Ottens and Christelle Zouein from enioka Haute Couture kicked things off with the talk Community’s Adventures in Analyticsland – Or the State of the Community Through New Analytics. Christelle and Kevin showed us the data analysis tools they have been working on to study information collected from KDE’s development repositories and the surprising facts and trends they discovered.
At the same time, in room 2, Volker Krause talked about Releasing Android Apps – Building, optimizing and deploying release APKs. In this talk, Volker explained that, because KDE developers are producing more and more mobile-friendly applications, there was a need to better understand how to release mobile platforms.
Volker covered the efforts to expand KDE’s tools for building packages (that already help produce packages for Windows, macOS and AppImage) so developers can also use them to create Android packages.
At 19:40, Manav Sethi and Paul Brown came on in room 1 to talk about a new KDE project: Kockatoo a tool to simplify the management of social media posting. After Paul explained the issues derived from managing multiple accounts on a wide variety of platforms, Manav demonstrated how Kockatoo can help. The speakers then explained what was missing from the project and how they thought Kockatoo could help the different KDE projects be more efficient on social media.
This week, we have been focused on making sure that the event editor is finally fully functional – at least, for adding events.
The main obstacles to that were a lack of working recurrence rules and general bugginess, especially around keyboard input of event date/time. Once this week’s merge request is merged, most of that should be fixed!
Recurecurecurecurecurrence
With this week’s merge request, the previously inactive “Repeat” section of the event editor now does what you would expect it to. Now, like in KOrganizer, Kalendar lets you pick how your event is going to repeat, either by selecting a preset (e.g. Daily/Monthly/etc.) or by creating a custom recurrence rule. Custom recurrence rules have special layouts that allow you to create a rule that works exactly the way you want it to!
I realize I don’t blog much these days, but I do try to keep my Twitter filled with screenshots as I work on GNOME.
Recently I spent some time doing another round of performance improvements in GtkSourceView.
Much work this cycle has focused on submitting work to the GPU more efficiently. For example, Matthias Clasen taught the new OpenGL renderer to submit colors along with glyph vertices so that it could have fewer GL uniform updates along with fewer program switches. This has had the effect of letting us batch common GtkTextView usage into a single glDrawArrays() submission. Great stuff!
I’ve been striving to reach 144hz text scrolling ever since a kind GNOME contributor sent me a 144hz monitor to test with. So with the new bits in place, I took another look at what was slowing us down.
“When Red Hat killed off CentOS Linux in a highly controversial December 2020 announcement, Gregory Kurtzer immediately announced his intention to recreate CentOS with a new distribution named after his deceased mentor,” Ars Technica reported in February.
And this week, “The Rocky Enterprise Software Foundation has announced general availability (GA) of Rocky Linux 8.4,” reports ZDNet. “It’s an important milestone because it’s the first Rocky Linux general availability release ever.”
With this autumn’s Fedora 35 release there should be better performance out-of-the-box for those employing LUKS/dm-crypt encryption while using 4K sector size based storage.
As it stands now when installing Fedora Linux to a disk and using LUKS encryption, a 512 sector size is being used regardless of the physical sector size of the underlying disk. But now with the latest cryptsetup release is an option to be able to automatically determine the optimal sector size. Fedora 35 is planning to enable that option.
I’ve been using weechat to connect to IRC since late 2016 and one of its killer feature is relays. They let use other frontends like the Weechat Android app or the amazing Glowing Bear (packaged in Debian Bullseye by yours truly).
Sadly, relays also used to be somewhat of a security risk: anyone with access to a relay could run scripts on the machine running weechat by using commands such as /exec or /script. Not great.
Since I joined the Debian Python Team, I have had a lot of fun working on different QA issues. Although I’m still a Perl illiterate, I’ve for example contributed to a few Lintian tags.
There are multiple ways to make mass QA changes to team-managed packages. Projects like the Debian Janitor are more than fantastic: they make for a robust, thorough and automated way to fix QA issues in the archive and I don’t have enough good words to describe the amazing work of Jelmer Vernooij on the toolsuite the Janitor uses.
But with robustness comes complexity. The Janitor is currently based on 10 different subtools (silver-platter, ognibuild, lintian-brush, …) and if you want to use it to fix a bug, you first need to make sure there’s a Lintian tag that flags the issue you’re working on. Then you need to write a lintian-brush fixer to fix said issue. Sadly, sometimes writing a new Lintian tag to flag a trivial changes is not the appropriate course of action and only creates clutter.
There is a new application available for Sparkers: Lightworks
Mint and Ubuntu are the two most popular Linux Distros among beginners. Some of the reasons they’re popular are their simple and delightful easy-to-use UIs, especially Mint’s UI, which resembles Windows in many ways. In this article, let’s compare Linux Mint Vs Ubuntu, check out the similarities and differences, and determine which one’s better for beginners.
[...]
On an old PC and for beginners, Linux Mint is the clear winner. On more modern hardware, the choice is not quite as clear. Both distros offer different experiences, and at the end of the day, it all boils down to your personal desktop preferences.
Electronic voting systems are on demand, especially in time of COVID-19 pandemics.
The responsibilities of a voting system include allowing voters to mark ballots (if not using pen and paper), counting ballots, reporting election results, and ensuring the integrity of the process.
In addition, it may include ballot design and layout, as well as the functionality of a remote accessibility vote by mail system.
Voting system should facilitate auditing the results of an election. The responsibilities of a voting system do not include the responsibilities of a voter registration system. If the ballots are pre-printed, the voting system need not be capable of printing ballots.
Chatwoot is an open source customer relationship platform built with Ruby and Vue.js. It was written from scratch to allow customer-relations teams to build end-to-end platforms for ticket management and support.
This article looks at Chatwoot’s architecture, installation, and key features.
Mozilla Corp. today announced the launch of Rally, a new platform that allows users to submit their own browsing data to research projects, using a privacy-centric and opt-in approach.
Data is a valuable thing — so valuable that so-called “free services” spend lots of time tracking and collecting vital information on their users to sell to other parties. These parties can be marketers, banks, insurance companies, governments, researchers and others.
Services also use this information to target advertisements, personalize experiences on their sites, sell products and similar. At the same time, users don’t get a lot of say in what information is collected and what’s done with it, and they often don’t get the choice to opt in or out.
Tangible difference, according to Sheikh, include getting environments running more quickly, with “less latency in terms of agility,” and the ability for deployment anywhere being attractive factors for the data scientist.
“Our previous database solution was complex … we leveraged multiple pieces of software from multiple vendors,” he said. “We looked for an alternative that was simpler and better … 2ndQuadrant Postgres was the one that provided the most comprehensive solution we were looking for.”
For enterprise organizations switching to an open source database, understanding the benefits and weaknesses of that database is key. In this blog, we compare PostgreSQL vs. MongoDB — two of the most popular open source databases in use today.
The supervisor asked how much it would cost to expand the concept immediately to 2,000 schools. Grupp offered to research a smaller-scale application of 100 to 200 schools. After three weeks, Grupp and two partners had set up and configured a pool of BigBlueButton servers. The onboarding of the first schools followed quickly.
These schools almost immediately expressed their satisfaction with the implementation, and the minister of education gave the green light to significantly increase overall capacity.
In many ways, the open-source learning management system has many immense benefits to the users. Because any developer can contribute to the source code, the software is always up to date with the ever-changing world of eLearning. There is also no initial need for licensing costs, except for implementation and customization costs.
Apple today released a white paper arguing against proposed legislation that would mandate the ability to sideload apps (and thereby alternative app stores) on iOS/iPadOS:1 “Building a Trusted Ecosystem for Millions of Apps”.2 I think it’s good, fair, and cogent. I highly encourage you to read it — it’s not long — then come back for my annotations below.
I believe modern writers should begin thinking about their processes, or workflows.
In a highly distracted world, it is imperative to take ownership over the chain of tasks we perform every day as writers. Traditionally, writers would put their writing to the hours where the distraction is less, and the focus high. Unfortunately advice from Hemingway, Atwood, et al., isn’t really applicable to us any more. The world we live in is far more connected, and thus have far more pitfalls for writers. Part of that is being disciplined enough to not let social media or cute videos of puppies and kittens distract us at the times we are writing.
But disconnecting from the internet isn’t really an option if part of your writing requires quick fact-checks, spellings of uncommon and technical words, etc., – this is very true for me when I am writing. The other issue is the distractions that are within the writing app itself; as a life long MS Word user, I found it getting prettier, but slower and more distracting. I spoke about this at length as being among the primary reasons for transitioning into Vim in the first place, so I am not going to speak extensively on this. The point being that writing in the modern world, on modern devices can be far from ideal.
Google Coral is a family of development boards, modules, M.2/mPCIe cards, and USB sticks with support with local AI, aka on-device or offline AI, based on Google Edge TPU. The company has just published some updates with one important firmware update, a manufacturing demo for worker safety & visual inspection, and the ability to use the Coral USB accelerator in Chrome.
Building Fibonacci sequence is supposed to be performed by C++ code below as a procedure invoked from Python via Python API.
I am aware of the notorious effect that people “get” monads and then post their own idiosyncratic takes on them. In my defense, this isn’t something I write just after my “ah ha!” moment, I’ve understood them in Haskell’s context for many years now, and actually… this isn’t even about that “ah ha!” moment at all. This is only about what they are. Even if you completely understand everything I write in this post, the real “ah ha!” where you realize just how useful the libraries built up around the monad interface are, the first time you search for a type on Hoogle where you’re like this should exist and it turns out it does in fact exist already, that’s still in your future. In fact I’m quite deliberately not trying to convey that feeling in the interests of getting at simply what the monad interface is. Which isn’t, strictly speaking, a pre-requisite to that experience, but it does help.
As the telephone network predates the Internet in Finland by over 100 years, the systems in it can be very old and obscure. Before the Internet gained popularity, these systems were used to provide similar services we use on the internet today. Would it not be interesting to explore a bit and see what has survived to this day? As there are no Shodan-like search engines for the telephone network, I needed to do the exploration myself. This post describes my exploration efforts.
To explore, I used wardialing. Wardialing is a technique to call a list of telephone numbers automatically using a computer. Hackers of old used wardialing to explore the telephone network much like port-scanning is used today to explore the Internet.
Notice the pathway of my career. I went from untyped languages like assembler and C, to statically typed languages like C++ and Java, to dynamically typed languages like Python and Ruby, and now to Clojure.
The type system in Clojure is as dynamic as Python or Ruby, but there is a library in Clojure called clojure/spec that provides all the strong typing anyone would ever need. However, instead of that typing being controlled by the compiler, it is controlled by me. I can enforce simple types, or very complex data relationships. You might think of it as a kind of pre-condition/post-condition language. Eifel programmers would feel very much at home with it. It’s an almost perfect way to engage in Design by Contract.
So what do I conclude from this? Not much other than that static typing is not for me. I prefer the flexibility of dynamic typing, and the ability to enforce types if, and when, I need such enforcement.
Long-time readers of this site may recall my three-level backup system. Daily, my wife’s computer and mine are backed up to each other over the local network, via a cron script I wrote. Also daily, each computer is backed up to its own USB hard drive, via Back In Time. And weekly, more or less, I use scdbackup to back up to DVD-R media (which can be safely stored off-site).
Sorry for this bit of administrivia — apparently, Feedburner, which I have been using for years to serve email subscriptions, is ceasing the email service in a couple of weeks. My first instinct was to just trash the service altogether, but I was pleasantly surprised to see I had a not-small number of email subscribers. So, instead of just trashing the feature I’m attempting to do a graceful migration.
In a document as filled with misrepresentations and rhetorical sleights of hand as the 2021 shareholder letter, we are going to need to pick and choose our quibbles; the analysis that follows, accordingly, is thus limited to the second and third sections of the text, for it is here that the author rises far up above the pablum typical of the genre.
[...]
That Bezos sees himself and his colleagues as a new form of aristocracy is evident in his curious employment of the first-person plural pronoun, as in the above excerpt, in which he claims that “people work for us” because “we create value for them” and that “we need a better vision for how to create value for employees – a vision for their success.”
What this suggests is Bezos does not consider the hundreds of thousands of hourly employees and contractors who pick and pack and deliver the goods to play any significant role in the creation of “real value.” It is rather the prerogative of “we” the “inventors” up in the C-suite or over in the R&D lab. Mere “employees” are hardly different from the customers, clients, and third-party sellers; the only significant distinction is that rather than providing goods and services for a fee, we provide you with a living in exchange for your labor.
The second thing I take away from this is that network cables can fail in place even after they’ve been plugged in and working for months. This network cable wasn’t necessarily completely undisturbed in our machine room, but at most it would have gotten brushed and moved around in the rack cable runs as we added and removed other network cables. But the cable still failed over time, either entirely on its own or with quite mild mechanical stress. It’s possible that the cable was always flawed to some degree, but if so the flaws got worse, causing the cable to decay from a reliable 1G link down to 100M.
For years Jamaicans have been getting up and standing up for their right to smoke ganja. But it was only six years ago that the island decriminalised the possession of small amounts of cannabis for recreational use and made growing five plants at home perfectly legal. Since 2015 it has also allowed medical, therapeutic, sacramental and scientific use. The law stipulates that any cannabis-related business must be half-owned by Jamaicans.
When Reuters asked about that warning, Microsoft announced the breach publicly.
After commenting on a broader phishing campaign that it said had compromised a small number of entities, Microsoft said it had also found the breach of its own agent, who it said had limited powers.
The agent could see billing contact information and what services the customers pay for, among other things.
After malware was found to have wiped all data from some users’ devices, storage solutions major Western Digital (WD) is advising customers who use its My Book Live and My Book Live Duo products to disconnect them from the Internet.
In a statement on its community forum, WD said, some My Book Live devices had been compromised by malicious software, which led to a factory reset that erased the data, The Straits Times reported.
As some of you may have heard, yesterday Microsoft announced the upcoming release of Windows 11. As an early build had leaked last week and Microsoft had dropped a number of hints this did not shock anybody in particular. What was rather shocking was how little Microsoft seems to give a shit about the normal everyday average computer user.
Some users on WD’s forum report that their devices appear to have been factory reset, while others report seeing a page requesting a password they don’t know.
In most cases, those who have been affected say that all of the data on the device appears to be gone, with their file structure either remaining intact, but with empty folders, or no folders at all except the ones that come by default on the device.
Western Digital’s popular My Book Live hard drives are being deleted remotely by an unknown attacker, according to the company. And there’s not much anyone can do at this point but unplug their drives from the internet.
“We have determined that some My Book Live devices have been compromised by a threat actor,” Western Digital’s Jolin Tan told Gizmodo early Friday by email. “In some cases, this compromise has led to a factory reset that appears to erase all data on the device.”
Crime has been moving online, like everything else, for the past 25 years, and for the past decade or so it’s accounted for more than half of all property crimes in developed countries. Criminologists have tried to apply their traditional tools and methods to measure and understand it, yet even when these research teams include technologists, it always seems that there’s something missing. The people who phish your bank credentials are just not the same people who used to burgle your house. They have different backgrounds, different skills and different organisation.
We’re still waiting for explicit confirmation from Microsoft on the CPU requirement, but a rep confirms that TPM 2.0 will be mandatory, and that the original information on that page was wrong. “The referenced docs page was a mistake that has since been corrected,” an MS rep tells The Verge.
In a screenshot of the enabled feature, Twitter’s sign-in page on the web shows “Sign up”, “Log in” and a third option, “Continue with Google”.
Presumably, this button will allow you to attach your Google Account to an existing Twitter account, create a new Twitter account with your Google Account details or login to your Twitter account if you’ve already associated it with your Google Account.
According to tot the report, there are ups and downs to signing in through a service like Sign In with Google.
As a proof-of-concept, I’ve built a vaccination paywall to provide an example of how this can be done. In this example, the contents of the book The Great Gatsby are protected by a vaccination paywall. In order to read it, you simply have to get your digital vaccination record from Digital COVID-19 Vaccine Record portal, press the Scan Digital COVID-19 Vaccination Record button and scan it in.
When I check my web analytics the response is often frustration, or even mild anxiety. I’m in a perpetual cycle of thinking it’s not enough! This obsession isn’t healthy, so what’s the point?
And then, all three affidavits describe, the FBI obtained a warrant for Lesperance’s iCloud account, something that has happened with few other January 6 defendants pre-arrest. The geolocation associated with the iCloud account corroborated what Verizon already had; Lesperance was inside the Capitol the day of the [insurrection].
But it also provided a bunch of photos from the day, presumably at least some of the photos that Lesperance had deleted, “out of fear of negative repercussions.”
Germans take data protection seriously. And with good reason: Their experience under two dictatorships in the 20th-century have made people extremely aware of the dangers.
This becomes even more apparent whenever the state wants to collect more private information. For example, a weekslong controversial debate was recently mounted about what data should be available in the federal government’s coronavirus contact-tracing app. In the end, a compromise was agreed: Data could be collected if stored anonymously and decentrally.
President Biden’s plan to evacuate tens of thousands of Afghans who assisted U.S. military efforts in the country has left lawmakers and advocates with a number of unanswered questions as time dwindles amid the U.S. withdrawal.
The White House confirmed Thursday it would evacuate former interpreters, drivers and others along with their families to third countries to shield them from danger in Afghanistan while completing what can be a years-long process of reviewing applications for so-called Special Immigration Visas (SIVs).
But even those who have pushed the administration to execute that massive-scale evacuation say officials have been short on details about when, where and how it will take place.
Since the end of April, more than 50 Danes have reported cases of stones being thrown at their cars on the stretch of road leading from Ystad, the Swedish port Danes need to use to travel to Bornholm, to Malmö, their point of entry to Sweden.
Kenyan authorities say at least 350 young people who joined the Somali Islamist militant group al-Shabab have surrendered this year and will be reintegrated into society.
Security agencies in Kenya’s coast region say fewer youth are crossing to Somalia to fight for the group in a sign that counterterrorism measures are working.
Kenyan counterterrorism officials are in the county of Mombasa this week to help sensitize the community against violent extremism and to assist former al-Shabab fighters.
One Spanish and two Ethiopian employees of the medical charity Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) have been “brutally murdered” in Ethiopia’s war-torn northern Tigray region, the organisation said Friday.
A man armed with a long knife killed three people and injured five others, some seriously, in Germany’s southern city of Wuerzburg on Friday before being shot by police and arrested, authorities said.
Herrmann said that he is not excluding any possibility: “In any case, there is circumstantial evidence that this could have been an Islamist attack.”
Herrmann cited a witness who alleged that the attacker had shouted the common Islamic phrase “Allahu Akbar,” [...]
A reporter for ARD public television said he had been told by police that there were no indications of a terrorist motive behind the attack.
Motive remains unclear on Friday night but the suspect attacked people in the city centre with a knife at around 5pm according to reports
Police searched a homeless shelter, where he was registered to be living, and found his phone and leaflets with hateful messaging, police said.
A witness reported that the suspect shouted “Allah Akbar” during the attack, said Mr Herrmann.
The EPA said on Friday that the environmental justice initiatives will use allocated dollars from the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed by Democrats in Congress earlier this year, for underserved communities through a range of local programs.
(Montel) Amazon plans to invest in a Spanish solar plant (152 MW) and a wind farm in Finland (52 MW), it said on Wednesday.
But Amazon has a long way to go before it reaches its goal of net-zero emissions. The company had a carbon footprint of about 51.2 million metric tons in 2019, according to its sustainability report — roughly equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions of the entire country of Singapore.
The other option, developing their own projects, also presents problems. One is investors. Since torching shareholder value the last time around, miners have been on a tight leash. Bosses “know the way to be sacked is to have one of these mega-projects”, says one big investor. Much of the cash flowing in thanks to surging commodity prices is going back to shareholders in record dividends and buy-backs. One mining executive fears that the fat returns have changed the make-up of his shareholders, attracting yield-hungry investors averse to growth projects.
Second, many energy-transition metals are simply too small a market for the big miners to bother with. Take lithium, which is used in batteries. In 2004 Rio Tinto discovered a large deposit in Jadar in Serbia. When the project comes online in a few years it may add 2-3% to Rio’s revenue, reckons Liam Fitzpatrick of Deutsche Bank. That is not enough to move the needle at a firm with a market value of $140bn. The market for cobalt is even smaller.
↺ Poor People’s Campaign Marches on Washington to ‘Blunt the Political Effects of Wealth Inequality’
Amidst compromise negotiations over President Biden’s infrastructure proposal, hundreds of low-wage workers, faith leaders, and advocates from Kentucky and West Virginia joined the Poor People’s Campaign for a Moral March on Manchin and McConnell.
New reporting out Saturday on the creation of a political action committee by a group of moderate House Democrats is being criticized by progressives as an effort to “protect corporate interests” and put a cap on the so-called Squad.
The new political action committee (PAC) is called Team Blue, as NBC News reported. Its May filing with the Federal Election Committee was noted last month by Politico Influence.
Eyeing what they see as a fast-approaching “deadline for our democracy,” progressive groups are mobilizing for a nationwide campaign to pressure lawmakers to pass the For the People Act.
“We need wide-scale public pressure,” say the groups behind the Deadline for Democracy campaign. “Not in September. Not in early 2022. Right now—in the weeks leading up to the final showdown in July.”
Mara Gay diagnoses the problem with New York City democracy: it’s “a one-party affair” (June 16). But she doesn’t offer the solutions: (1) extend ranked-choice voting to the general election and (2) proportionally represent all parties on city council through ranked-choice voting from multi-member districts.
City council was elected by proportional representation five times from 1937 to 1945 using ranked-choice voting from multi-seat borough-wide districts. It created a multi-party democracy with four or five parties represented after each election, including Fusion, American Labor, Communist, and nonpartisan independents.
Google will now be telling its users when search results are rapidly changing around a breaking story, with some searches bringing up a warning that “it looks like these results are changing quickly,” and a subheading that will explain “if this topic is new, it can sometimes take time for results to be added by reliable sources.”
According to The Verge, in a blog post, the company suggested that users might want to check back later when it’s found more results.
On August 10, 2020, Jimmy Lai was arrested under the “collusion with foreign powers” charge along with six associates at Next Media. In the same year, various arrests which included journalists and pro-democratic figures were made as a result of enforcing the above-mentioned rule.
On June 23, at 11:59pm, Apple Daily ceased service in both print and online due to their assets being frozen under the order of the 5th term Chief Executive of Hong Kong Carrie Lam. Later this week she suggested, it is up to the journalists themselves to sort out how to avoid breaking the national security law whereas the law will not be affecting the “normal journalistic work”. However, it is still unclear as she did not explain what “normal” was.
Hong Kong’s pro-democracy Apple Daily tabloid said it was a “victim of tyranny” in a defiant final edition on Thursday after it was forced to close under a new national security law, ending a 26-year run of taking on China’s authoritarian leaders.
The official inspection of BAJ’s activities has been criticized by rights groups as further harassment of the media. The order comes amid a wider crackdown on media since mass protests over the contested August 2020 presidential elections. Longtime leader Alexander Lukashenko claimed victory, and some opposition members were jailed or forced to flee.
During this time, the BAJ documented 480 detentions of journalists in 2020 and, since the start of this year, over 130 arrests or attacks on media. At least 25 journalists are currently detained, it says.
This week, Senate Republicans in lockstep blocked key reforms of the For the People Act that would address gerrymandering and big money in politics, plus enhance ethics for federal office holders. The Act would also strengthen voting rights—on which a big battle is now underway across the country.
An indigenous group in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan on Thursday said it had found the unmarked graves of an estimated 751 people at a now-defunct Catholic residential school, just weeks after a similar, smaller discovery rocked the country.
The latest discovery, the biggest to date, is a grim reminder of the years of abuse and discrimination indigenous communities have suffered in Canada even as they continue to fight for justice and better living conditions.
Indeed, it is pure folly to believe that we can rely on the mechanisms of the criminal legal system to eradicate police violence. The irrationality of this country’s addiction to incarceration as the go-to solution does not suddenly become rational just because the defendant in this case happens to be a police officer. A lengthy sentence may provide some measure of closure for Floyd’s family and the community, which is important, but it almost certainly won’t lessen the number of police killings that will likely occur as we head into the summer months.
One need look no further than the prosecutors in the Chauvin case to see that his experience with the criminal legal system won’t change the behavior of the police as a whole. The government attorneys who made the case against Chauvin went out of their way to make clear that this case was about an instance of grave misconduct by one bad apple and decidedly not about policing in Minneapolis more generally, let alone the culture of policing nationwide.
The “good Samaritan” credited by police with saving lives by intervening with an active shooter in Olde Town Arvada this week was shot and killed by an Arvada police officer, a source familiar with the investigation confirmed Thursday.
“He did not hesitate; he didn’t stand there and think about it. He totally heard the gunfire, went to the door, saw the shooter and immediately ran in that direction,” Troyanos said. “I just want to make sure his family knows how heroic he was.”
Article 211 – The Universal Declaration on the Tibetan Buddhist Genocide concludes that the genocidal pattern carried out in Tibet against Buddhists was also repeated against other groups, such as the Falun Gong Community, the Uyghur Islamic People and the Catholic Christians, although for different reasons: in the case of the Tibetan Genocide the reason was communist anti-religiosity whose materialistic atheism is contrary to Buddhist Spirituality; in the case of the Falun Gong Genocide the reason was the lack of democracy of the communist dictatorship that was outnumbered by Falun Gong practitioners; in the case of the Uyghur Genocide the reason was a monocultural and anti-Islamic ethnic policy; and in the case of the Catholic Genocide the reason was the opposition to interference in Chinese society by Western leaders of the Vatican.
Activists from Tibet, Taiwan, Tibet, East Turkestan, China, Hong Kong, and Southern Mongolia protested outside Mars’ corporate headquarters and the Chinese Consulate in New York City and called for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics. The NYC Global Day of Action protests were organized by RTYC NYNJ, Dokham Chushi Gangdruk, and Students for a Free Tibet.
On June 23, 2021, Tibetans and human rights activists demonstrated their discontent with Beijing 2022 and called for its boycott in NYC, first, in front of Mars Incorporated Headquarters, which is an Olympic sponsor, and later at the Chinese consulate as a part of Global Day of Action.
We also remember the Tibetans who bravely protested that same year until China imposed martial law in Tibet’s capital of Lhasa on March 8, 1989. Since invading Tibet more than 70 years ago, the Chinese government has systematically worked to eliminate Tibetans’ unique religion, language and way of life, and today, the survival of Tibetan culture is in peril.
We are deeply concerned at attempts of the Chinese authorities to systematically suppress the memory of the events at Tiananmen Square and to rewrite history in their favor, as they likewise continuously intend to distort the history of Tibet.
Facebook Inc. must face lawsuits filed by three women claiming they were forced into prostitution as teenagers by abusers who used the social-media site to ensnare girls.
Justice James Blacklock of the Texas Supreme Court said in a ruling Friday the women can sue Facebook under a state law that allows legal action against those who benefit from sex trafficking. But he said they can’t pursue claims under federal law that Facebook failed to warn minors and take measures to block sex trafficking activity on its site.
First – Microsoft Teams, the video-calling app which saw a boom during 2020′s pandemic, will be integrated into Windows 11 by default.
The Third Country Report identifies countries outside of the EU in which the state of intellectual property protection and enforcement gives rise to the greatest concern, and provides an update of the existing Commission’s list of priority countries.
China remains the top priority country, as was the case in previous editions. Other priority countries include India, Turkey, Argentina, Indonesia, Nigeria, and Saudi Arabia.
The report aims to improve intellectual property rights protection and enforcement worldwide, as well as inform rights holders, including SMEs, of the potential risks when conducting business in certain countries. To access the report, click here.
The consultation seeks the views of all those affected by design protection in Europe on selected issues, such as whether rules on spare parts protection should be changed, as well as potential policy options in view of the review of the Community Design Regulation (6/2002/EC) and the Design Directive (98/71/EC). It is a public consultation directed at industry, businesses and designers who own or create designs (including individual designers), trade bodies and associations who represent design and creative industries, Member States and national IP offices, the legal profession, the judiciary, consumers and consumer organisations, and civil rights associations.
This book review is brought to you by Donal O’Connell, the Managing Director of Chawton Innovation Services, a company focused on IP Education, IP Consultancy and IP Solutions & Tools. He is formerly a VP of R&D and a Director of IP at Nokia and is a Visiting Researcher of IP at Imperial College Business School in London and teach there about ‘IP management’. His first book “Inside the Patent Factory” was published by Wiley & Sons in 2008, and second book “Harvesting External Innovation” was published by Gower Publishing in 2011. He also has over 200 short papers on various aspects of IP published. Since 2013, Donal has been included into the IAM 300 (the world’s leading IP Strategists) an annual listing of those individuals identified as offering operating companies and other IP owners world-class advice on maximising the value of their intellectual property.
In a message distributed to Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO) members, Dr. Michelle McMurry-Heath, BIO President and CEO, released a declaration signed by the corporate and organizational leaders of 209 global biotechnology companies and 41 biotech associations, in which the signatories acknowledged their “social responsibility to work with other stakeholders — healthcare providers, governments, multilateral organizations, and non-governmental donor organizations — to ensure that COVID vaccines and treatments get to the patients in the world who most need them.”
Intellectual Property legislation and oversight in the Senate goes through the Intellectual Property Subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee. On June 22, the Subcommittee heard testimony on the topic of ongoing problems with “low quality patents.”
One of the UK’s leading patent attorney firms is facing a claim brought by their client, chemical company, BASF. BASAF is suing Carpmaels for a reported €1.05 billion, because of a missed EPO appeal deadline. Whilst the court proceedings are ongoing, some interesting background to the case can be found in arguments made by Carpmaels in the request for re-establishment of the appeal deadline. The EPO was characteristically unsympathetic in its decision on the request for re-establishment. The Board of Appeal decision cataloguing the actions leading up to the missed deadline makes for some tough reading for any patent attorney wishing to sleep soundly at night.
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The request for re-establishment was submitted by the Carpmaels patent attorney responsible for the case. The patent attorney had been a partner at Carpmaels for over quarter of a century, during which it was submitted, he “had never missed a due date for filing a Notice of Appeal or any other critical deadline before the EPO”. Shortly before the incident with the appeal deadline, the patent attorney had retired. To manage the hand-over of work, the attorney continued to take some responsibility for a certain number of cases as a consultant and only visited the office occasionally.
[...]
BASF have now filed a case against Carpmaels in the UK. BASF have reportedly alleged that because of the missed deadline for filing the appeal, they lost a patent worth €1.05 billion ($1.2 billion). BASF particularly argued that the patent, which would have expired in 2034, would have allowed them to become a market leader in filter products.
Carpmaels’ admit to missing the appeal deadline. Their argument in defence to BASF’s claims is that the patent was clearly invalid anyway, and that the decision of the opposition division to revoke the patent would have been upheld by the Board of Appeal. Carpmaels have therefore placed themselves in the rather unusual position of arguing against the validity of a patent they once defended. The merits of the argument will be difficult for the court to assess, given that the opponents in the appeal case did not file replies to the statement of grounds of appeal, and no preliminary view was given by the Board on the merits of the case. The Court may however take note of the divisional patent (EP2042227) in the same family, which was also revoked at opposition. BASF withdrew their appeal of this decision. There also appears to be a pending divisional application (EP2933009), however the register shows no activity since 2017.
On May 18, 2021, the United States House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Reform held a hearing in which it reviewed the pricing and business practices of AbbVie, Inc., with a special focus on Humira and Imbruvica. Present at the hearing were Tahir Amin, Co-Founder and Co-Executive Director of Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge; Craig Garthwaite, Professor at Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University; Richard Gonzalez, Chairman of the Board and CEO at AbbVie, Inc; and Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School.
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Mr. Amin called on Congress to take action and change the requirements for what can be patented, as well as change the financial incentives and “culture” at the United States Patent and Trade Office.
In an Inter Partes Review (IPR), the PTAB generally focuses on whether or not the claims have been proven unpatentable. If the patentee, the PTAB has a general approach of issuing a declaratory order that the claims “have not been shown, by a preponderance of the evidence, to be unpatentable.” The evidentiary-and-burden caveats from the PTAB leave substantial wiggle room about whether the claims are valid or invalid in any more abstract sense. We would be better off if the PTAB was able to make a positive statement — concluding that the claims are patentable.
The AIA calls for the Board to “issue a final written decision with respect to the patentability of any patent claim challenged by the petitioner.” 35 U.S.C. § 318(a). This portion of the statute suggests to me that the Board’s declaration should be a more direct decision about patentability. That interpretation is bolstered by § 318(b) which suggest that every challenged claim will have either been “determined to be unpatentable” or “determined to be patentable.”
Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on U.S. Patent 6,917,304. This patent is owed by MagnaCross, LLC, an IP Edge entity and well-known NPE. The ’304 patent generally relates to wireless data transmission through wireless access points or routers and has been asserted in over 100 litigations against many networking companies, including T-Mobile, Sprint, Acer, Logitech, and ZTE. Prior art search service provider, Parola Analytics, found the art shown below.
On 18 June 2021, the Full Court of the Federal Court confirmed in Ariosa Diagnostics, Inc v Sequenom, Inc [2021] FCAFC 101 that a method of detecting cell-free foetal DNA (cffDNA) in pregnant women, permitting non-invasive prenatal diagnosis, is patent eligible subject matter in Australia. This is a significant decision given that in the US the same subject matter was found to be ineligible for patent protection because it covered a natural phenomenon.
A CRISPR patent held by South Korea-based biotechnology company Toolgen is currently in limbo. The EPO Opposition Division has revoked EP 29 12 175 B1, which covers “Composition for cleaving a target DNA comprising a guide RNA specific for the target DNA and CAS protein-encoding nucleic acid or Cas protein.”
CRISPR (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) is a biomechanical method to selectively cut or modify DNA. Pharmaceutical companies can use CRISPR to combat chronic infectious diseases such as hepatitis C or HIV.
The technology also helps improve crop varieties easily and efficiently. Although the gene-editing technology is not uncontroversial, it promises a global business worth billions.
It is well-established European law that the combination of two specific features each selected from different lists “of some length” may result in a novel invention when combined. This principle, the “two-list principle” as established in T 12/81 is outlined in detail here.
In the recently published decision T 2635/16 from the European Patent Office, the Board considers what constitutes a selection in the lists of the prior art.
In this case, Claim 1 of the patent was directed to a specific salt of a specific compound. During prosecution, the Examiner cited document D1 as novelty destroying to Claim 1. D1 related to compounds of a general formula or salts thereof and disclosed the specific compound in one of its claims, amongst a list of 121 other compounds. Separately, D1 disclosed the specific salt in a list of possible salts, the list of salts referred to the general claimed formula and not the claimed compounds. The Examiner considered that the disclosure of the specific compound in the claims of D1 meant it was a highly preferred embodiment and thus it picking a compound from the claimed list was not a selection per se. Therefore, the Examiner considered that a selection of the specific salt from the list combined with this compound would allow you to arrive at the claimed invention. As a result, the Examiner considered that only a single selection was required from D1, thus held that the claim was not novel.
Today the upper house of the German legislature, named Bundesrat (Federal Council), waved the new patent legislation (which the Bundestag, or Federal Parliament, had voted on two weeks ago) through. This PDF document says that the Federal Council does not attempt to veto the bill. It would have been highly unusual to say the least if the Federal Council had exercised its veto powers in this case. Not only is the hurdle very high but this bill is simply too uncontroversial and, actually, unimportant.
Now the bill is awaiting the Federal President’s signature. Unlike the President of the United States, the German head of state has a purely ministerial function unless a bill raises constitutional issues, which this one obviously doesn’t. There’s no question that this legislative measure will take effect during the summer, which formally requires its publication in the Bundesgesetzblatt (Federal Law Gazette).
As I had explained before, the injunction “reform” is dead on arrival. The legislature made it unmistakably clear that it’s not meant to change a thing. The judiciary has already said so, not “in the name of the people” (which is how German judgments formally begin), but via anonymous quotes by the Juve Patent website, which I picked up and commented on.
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So, let’s imagine that Congress added the eBay language with the four factors to 35 U.S.C. § 283–the U.S. equivalent to Germany’s § 139 PatG. And let’s furthermore imagine that the majority in both Houses of Congress made it totally clear that this is a ringing endorsement of the Supreme Court’s case law in this field.
What would the courts do? The same as before. They’d have no reason to decide differently. Same old same old.
Optinose (NASDAQ:OPTN), a pharmaceutical company focused on patients treated by ear, nose and throat (ENT) and allergy specialists, today announced Dr. Per Djupesland received the European Inventor Award 2021 in the Industry category from the European Patent Office (EPO) for his invention of the technology that serves as a basis for the Optinose Exhalation Delivery System (EDS™).
The Enlarged Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office has issued decision G 4/19 (double patenting) in which it holds that a European patent application can be refused by reason of the prohibition on double patenting.
We reported in March 2020 that questions concerning double patenting were being considered by the Enlarged Board of Appeal in case G4/19. The Enlarged Board of Appeal has now issued its decision, which can be found here. The EPO has also provided a helpful summary of the decision here.
The legal background behind the referral, and the specific questions referred, are discussed in our earlier news item. In brief, an examining division had rejected a European patent application on the basis that it claimed “100% identical” subject matter to its already-granted European priority application. The applicant was apparently pursuing this filing strategy because the European patent application would have an extra year of patent term as compared to its priority application. On appeal, the applicant argued that this additional year of patent term provided the applicant with a “legitimate interest” in being granted multiple patents for the same subject-matter.
The European Patent Office today confirmed in Decision G4/19 of the Enlarged board of Appeal that a European patent application can be refused for ‘double patenting’. Such a refusal can be made even absent the European Patent Convention having an explicit double patenting provision.
The claiming of the same subject matter in two applications having the same filing or priority date to the same Applicant is referred to as double patenting. The European Patent Convention does not contain an explicit prohibition against this practice. However, previous decisions against double patenting have relied upon a reference to general principles of patent law in EPC Contracting States embodied in Article 125 EPC. For example, Section 18(5) of the UK Patents Act provides such an explicit double patenting provision. It was argued that the double patenting provision embodied in Article 125 EPC only prevented double patenting in the case of applications filed on the same day or between a divisional application and its parent.
SCOTUS’s preservation of the PTAB came as a relief to many counsel, but its fix has raised concerns about political lobbying and the procedure for final review
The 5G SEP self-declared landscape has exploded over the past 2 years. The number of self-declared 5G SEP families has grown 275% since 5G Release 15 was frozen mid-2019. Meanwhile, the number of technical contributions to the 5G standard has grown only 40% during the same time frame. Craig Thompson, Unified Consulting’s General Manager, and Matthias Schneider, Audi’s Chief Licensing Officer, interpret the latest 5G SEP self-declaration data and explore the relationship between 5G standard technical contributions and 5G SEP self-declarations.
↺ another shoddy way or made up buzzwords by which to push software patents as it they’re legitimate
Exploring the growth of patents for connected medical devices, and how best to protect them.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to change our lives by creating a connected world with billions of devices with embedded sensors and transmission capability exchanging data with other devices and systems over the Internet. Whilst the IoT is well-established in the consumer market, this concept is also frequently employed in medical devices for use in healthcare systems. This trend, known as the Internet of Medical Things, is leading to a paradigm shift in ways of treating some of the harder to reach and pervasive medical problems. Patient access to treatment is improved, regardless of their location.
Is Instagram Live actually live? This is one of the issues in the case Facebook v Voxer [2021] EWHC 1377 (Pat). Voxer argued that a live broadcast feature offered by Facebook infringes its patent EP 2 393 259. Facebook initiated the present proceeding to revoke the patent. Voxer counter argued that the patent was valid and infringed. The judgment of the pre-trial review had been handed down in March: [2021] EWHC 657 (Pat). The present case has been tried under the Shorter Trials Scheme (a topic for another post, says Merpel….).
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The amendments were allowed. But the patent was invalid for obviousness over Munje and not infringed ([283], [284]).
Comments
There are three comments in this judgment which merit additional attention. First, in [56] Birss LJ held that there was no special legal principles of claim construction if the specification included a lexicon. As relevant as the definitions were, other factors such as the specification as a whole and the common general knowledge were also important.
Although Birss LJ suggests that the glossary may sometimes be determinative, one thinks these occasions may be rare. Two such situations may be that a revolutionary invention requires a new word to be created, or the specification expressly excludes the interpretation of a word by the common general knowledge. But inventions are more often incremental than revolutionary; patent agents tend to cover a scope as wide as possible rather than exclude other possible interpretations of a word. This means that express definitions given in the specification would be seldom determinative.
Secondly, regarding the prohibition of added matter Facebook submitted that the policy behind was to prevent any difference in the monopoly between what the application originally justified and what the patent eventually obtained, then based on this submission appeared to argue that ‘asynchronous message’ was not in claim 1 as filed, which had made this term added matter ([141]). But the Judge declined this argument. He pointed out that differences between the monopoly originally claimed in the filed application and the one in the granted patent were allowed (which happens often during the prosecution). He explained in [134] that one needed to stick to the law explained in Conversant v Huawei [2020] EWCA Civ 1292, [55] – [60] and apply the comparison in Bonzel v Intervention [1991] RPC 553.
Thirdly, Birss LJ noted that the Formstein defence has been recognised both in the German system ([212]) where validity and infringement are decided by separate courts, and in the Dutch Court of Appeal which as the UK Patents Court is not bifurcated ([213]). Birss LJ supported the Formstein defence in the UK, for two reasons ([216]): first, if the claim was valid on its normal construction, it appeared harsh to invalidate it based on equivalents. This would promote certainty. Secondly, since several other contracting states to the European Patent Convention recognised the Formstein defence, the UK as another contracting state to the EPC should adopt the same approach as well. In the UK, the Formstein defence was first discussed by Hacon HHJ in Technetix v Teleste [2019] EWHC 126 (IPEC). A formal decision on this issue by the English court, however, no doubt will require more comprehensive submissions from counsel before a more detailed judgment is reached (and it filters it’s way up on appeal).”
The high court has handed down a judgement in the case Facebook v Voxer. The case concerned European Patent (UK) No. 2 393 259, entitled “Telecommunication and multimedia management method and apparatus” and forms part of an international dispute between the parties relating to the live broadcast features offered by Facebook and Instagram over iOS devices. Voxer alleged that these live broadcast features infringed the patent. The proceedings were started by Facebook as an action for revocation, denying infringement and asserting invalidity of the patent, with Voxer counterclaiming for infringement.
The invention of the patent was intended to enable two modes of conversation. Users can conduct communications in either a near-synchronous or “live” conversation, providing a user experience similar to a standard full duplex phone call, or in a series of back and forth time-delayed transmissions referred to as a “time-shifted mode”. Users engaged in a conversation can transition from the live mode to the time-shifted mode and back again. Two individuals using the system could therefore send recorded voice messages back and forth to each other and review the messages when convenient, or the messages can be sent at a rate where they essentially merge into a live, synchronous voice conversation.
The infringement case was advanced in relation to live broadcast features on the Facebook website and the Facebook and Instagram Apps as they operate on iOS devices but not Android. After consideration of the claims and potential equivalents, the court concluded that the patent was not infringed by any of these live broadcast features. Regardless of this, after considering the available prior art, the court further concluded that the claims were obvious and therefore invalid. The case therefore represents a success for Facebook, although proceedings are ongoing in the US.
What is the appropriate standard for determining whether a patent claim is directed to” a patent-ineligible concept under step 1 of the Court’s two-step framework for determining whether an invention is eligible for patenting under 35 U.S.C. § 101?
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‘796 Patent. Nintendo challenged the claims via IPR, but the PTAB sided with iLife. The IPR challenge focused on obviousness and anticipation.
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Finally though the district court issued a post-verdict judgment as a matter of law — holding the claims ineligible as directed to the abstract idea of “gathering, processing, and transmitting information.” On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed, holding that the claims recite the abstract idea of “a motion sensor system that evaluates movement of a body using static and dynamic acceleration information.” Stripped away from pseudo-technical language, the court found this simply gathering, processing, and transmitting information.”
After decades, the Research and Development of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies have matured to a level where it may be successfully integrated into numerous industrial fields. In fact, the utilization of AI-related technology is not limited to applications and products in the computer software industry, but rather has been successfully adopted in many other fields. The leading domains where AI technology is used include: Recognition, Conversation & Human Interaction, Predictive Analytics & Decisions, Goal-Driven Systems, Autonomous Systems, Patterns & Anomalies and Hyper–Personalization. Also prominent is the growing impact that deep learning and AI technology has on the development of new drugs, personalized and focused treatments, genetic testing, disease detection and diagnostics, medical devices, e-health and many other aspects of life science technology.
The bottom line is that we are at the dawn age of AI technology, which is likely to be widely circulated in many technological domains. There is a common belief among many entrepreneurs, investors and technology opinion leaders, that software (sometimes referred to as “algorithms”) is not patentable, and if patentable, is not enforceable, and in any case has no business value. Accordingly, many consider the pursuance of patent protection for innovative software technologies as a waste of time and money. Contrary to the common myth, in most leading countries including but not limited to the U.S., Europe (EPO), China, Korea and Japan, software-related inventions are patentable and enforceable. Almost any innovative software-related “deep technology” involves a “technical” solution in the field of software, and as such, would be regarded as patentable, provided that it meets other criteria of the respective patent laws. Innovations in many fields, including Automotive, IoT, FinTech, Cybersecurity, Telecommunications, Media, Cloud Computing, and many others can benefit from patent protection.
West helped to design the YZY Runners — a shoe that I would never have imagined possible. Walmart’s version are clearly knock-offs and West has sued.
Our colleagues Helena Gajek and Malgorzata Furmanska won the case before the General Court in Luxembourg related to invalidity proceedings concerning the bad faith application.
The case was related to the trademark ENTEROSGEL, published in October 2006, for medical products. In 2016 the applicant applied for a declaration of invalidity, claiming that the predecessor of the trademark owner, acted in bad faith when filing a trademark application. The application for a declaration of invalidity was directed against all the goods covered by the contested mark.
Counsel say that although the CJEU’s ruling offers little comfort to rights owners, its effects could be limited
Sony believes that cloud gaming is in many ways superior to the way most people play games today. In a recent patent application the company argues that, when people no longer store games on local devices, piracy will become irrelevant. At the same time, this means that ‘expensive’ consoles are no longer needed either.
Do platforms like YouTube and cyberlocker Uploaded directly perform copyright-restricted acts under Article 3 of the InfoSoc Directive? At what conditions is the hosting safe harbour under Article 14(1) of the Ecommerce Directive available? What may be the requirements for injunctions under Article 8(3) of the InfoSoc Directive?
These are some of the questions that the German Federal Court of Justice had referred to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in two separate cases, which were subsequently joined: YouTube, C-682/18 and Cyando, C-683/18.
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