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● 08.16.21


● Links 17/8/2021: Go 1.17, Git 2.33, Tesseract 5.0


Posted in News Roundup at 10:08 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux


Desktop/Laptop


↺ The Best 13-Inch Laptops of 2021


Furthermore, the ThinkPad X1 Nano is Ubuntu Linux certified so you can run many different Linux operating systems (OSes) on the X1 including Ubuntu, Pop!_OS, Debian and a host of other Windows alternatives.


Server


↺ Transform Your Phone into A Portable Mini Workstation to Manage Your Servers!


​This guide will make your remote work life a lot easier by transforming your phone into a portable workstation. It helps me a lot in my day-to-day remote work activities, and so I really wanted to share how I did it with you!


But before I start with the technical details, please allow me to share a few thoughts about the transformational shifts in remote work in these changing times.


Audiocasts/Shows


↺ PhotoGIMP: Make GIMP A Little More Photoshop – Invidious


I personally like the GIMP layout but I can totally get why some people don’t and luckily for you there’s a way you can make it look a little more like Photoshop and that’s with PhotoGIMP, this isn’t a fork so no missing features and it’s dead simple to install.


↺ Destination Linux 239: Exclusive PineNote Interview Plus Open Source in Education


This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we have an exclusive product interview with Pine64 about the new PineNote E-Ink Tablet! We also have an interview with Bill Shouten who is here to discuss open-source in education. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.


↺ PineNote e-reader, Firefox has lost 50M users, and Apple looks at your pictures – Linux news August – Invidious


We have a ton of stuff to cover, including the newly announced PineNote e-ink tablet, a lot more coverage of Steam Deck Prototypes, or Apple announcing they’ll look into the pictures their customers upload to the cloud.


↺ pearOS monterey Quick overview #Shorts – Invidious


Pear os monterey is a Linux distribution based on Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS and K.D.E. Plasma 5.


Kernel Space


↺ Asahi Linux progress report for August


For those waiting to run Linux on Apple M1 hardware, the the August Asahi Linux progress report is out.


Applications


↺ Tesseract 5.0 OCR Engine Bringing Faster Performance With “Fast Floats”


Tesseract as the leading open-source optical character recognition (OCR) engine that employs neural networks for converting images/scans of text into actual recognized text is nearing its 5.0 release.


The Tesseract 5.0 Alpha has been available since the end of last year while marked this weekend was the first beta of Tesseract 5.0. Earlier Tesseract 5.0 Alpha releases have brought improved performance, support for Apple Silicon, build system improvements, an overhaul to its public API, and a lot of code improvements.


Instructionals/Technical


↺ How to install OnlyOffice 6.3 on your Linux PC


OnlyOffice 6.3 is out, and with it comes new exciting features. These features include new light/dark themes, password-protected documents, support for fractional scaling, and much more. Here’s how to get it working on your Linux system.


↺ Usermod Command in Linux – ByteXD


The usermod command allows us to modify an existing user account.


↺ How to install Funkin’ The Gacha Mod on a Chromebook


Today we are looking at how to install Funkin’ The Gacha Mod on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.


↺ Retroarch for Android: The Complete Guide – Make Tech Easier


For years, Retroarch has been the indomitable platform of choice for discerning emulation connoisseurs on PC. If you’ve downloaded Retroarch and don’t know your core from your content or just want to know which cores are best for running your favorite console games, read this Retroarch for Android guide for the instructions.


↺ A beginner’s guide to Kubernetes


This guide will introduce you to how Kubernetes works and how to get started with Kubernetes.


↺ How to send Processes to the Background on Linux – VITUX


While using any operating system, there can be multiple processes running on it. These processes are mainly categorized as the background processes and the foreground processes. As the name says, a background process is one that runs silently in the background without requiring any human intervention. On the other hand, a foreground process is the one that we can actually see and interact with continuously. We can even send a process to the background or bring a process to the foreground as per our needs and to know how this can be done, you will have to go through this article.


↺ How To Install Grav CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot


In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Grav CMS on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Grav is a modern, crazy fast, ridiculously easy, and amazingly powerful flat-file CMS. Grav uses a flat-file database for both its back-end and front-end. The main focus is on speed and simplicity instead of on integrated built-in features, which would increase the complexity of the application.


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 the step-by-step installation of the Grav Content Management System on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.


↺ Markdown vs reStructuredText for teaching materials – Nudged Elastic Band is my band name


Back in summer 2017. I wrote an article explaining why we used Sphinx and reStructuredText for producing teaching materials and not a wiki. In addition to recommending Sphinx as the solution to use, it was a general praise for generating static HTML files from Markdown or reStructuredText.


This summer I made the conversion of teaching materials from reStructuredText to Markdown. Unfortunately, the automated conversion using Pandoc didn’t quite produce the result I wanted so I ended up cooking my own Python script that converted the specific dialect of reStructuredText that was used for writing the contents of lab.miletic.net and fixing a myriad of inconsistencies in writing style that accumulated over the years.


↺ How to undo Proton UI in Firefox 91 and onwards


Firefox 91 has been released. Do you know what this means? It means you can no longer disable the Proton interface through about:config anymore. Why does this matter, you ask? Because Proton sucks. For those confused about the vehemence of my message so early on in the review, let’s recap. A while back, Mozilla announced it would change – yet again – the Firefox UI. This time around, it’s called Proton.


I showed you what this thing looks like – and it doesn’t look good. But then, back in Firefox 89, Proton became official, you could simply toggle it off and move on with your dear life, enjoying productivity and efficiency. Now, though, this is no longer an option. So if you don’t want to put up with useless, low-contrast hipsterology, I will show you the set of changes you can use to minimize or remove the useless aspects of Proton, and go back to sane browsing. After me.


↺ How to Install RockyLinux 8.4


For the past few months, we’ve heard the news about the end of the CentOS Linux distribution project. The CentOS 8 will be the last version of the CentOS Linux project, which only gets support until the end of this year 2021. And by this time, we have a few Linux distro as an alternative of CentOS Linux 8 Stable, and among them is “Rocky Linux”.


Rocky Linux is an open-source Linux distribution created by the Rocky Linux project, led by Gregory Kurtzer, founder of the CentOS project. It’s a fork of CentOS and designed to be 100% binary compatible with RHEL. Rocky Linux provides an enterprise-grade operating system and production-ready Linux distribution.


In this guide, we will show you step-by-step how to install a 64-bit version of Rocky Linux 8.4 as a stand-alone server. Additionally, we will verify the installation by accessing the Rocky Linux server through SSH from another machine.


↺ How to Set Up a Network Shared Folder on Ubuntu With Samba


f you have ever wanted to easily share files on your home network across multiple operating systems, then look no further than Samba.


This guide will show you how to set up a network shared folder on Ubuntu Linux using Samba. With the Samba server, you can easily share files on your network, regardless of whether you are using Windows, macOS, or Linux.


↺ [Howto] Installing Cilium with Minikube on Fedora – /home/liquidat


I just started with Isovalent – and since I am very much a beginner regarding everything related to Kubernetes I decided to get some hands-on experience with the technology I am going to work with for the foreseeable future.


Isovalent’s offering is an Enterprise version of Cilium which basically manages and secures connections between containers and adds observability to it. It all runs on eBPF and thus is pretty performant. eBPF can run sandboxed programs in Linux kernel space without the need to recompile the kernel; A tiny bit like a “Kernel VM”. I always wanted to get my hands dirty with eBPF anyway, and Cilium is a very good way to approach it. But where to start? The answer is: with a small Kubernetes setup based on Minikube, a tiny Kubernetes distribution for testing and fooling around which leaves your main system almost unchanged.


↺ How to Create Locally Trusted SSL Certificates with mkcert on Ubuntu 20.04


Mkcert is a free, simple, and very useful tool that allows you to create a locally trusted certificate without buying it from the real CA. Developers usually work on the local system and it is always impossible to use the trusted certificate from CA on localhost. Mkcert allows you to manage your own certificates without any hassle. In this post, we will show you how to create a trusted SSL certificate for local development using Mkcert on Ubuntu 20.04.


Games


↺ Release candidate: Godot 3.3.3 RC 2


While we’re busy working on both the upcoming Godot 4.0 and 3.4 releases (with a dev snapshot for 3.4 beta 3 available now), we still cherry-pick important bug fixes to the 3.3 branch regularly for maintenance releases (see our release policy).


Godot 3.3.2 was released in May, and a number of useful fixes have been queued in the 3.3 branch since then, so now’s a good time to push them in production.


As there is no new feature and only bug fixes, this RC 2 should be as stable as 3.3.2-stable and can be used in production if you need one of the fixes it includes.


A notable change in 3.3.2 RC 2 is that the Android builds now target API level 30 as required by Google Play, and have partial support for Android scoped storage. The minimum API level has also been increased from 18 to 19.


Desktop Environments/WMs


↺ A journey comes to an end


As this year’s Google Summer of Code comes to a close, so does this series of blogposts. Since this is my last post related to GSoC I have decided to summarize my contributions to Xfce and give you a glimpse of what I’ll be working on in the foreseeable future. If you have read my previous posts, you can skip right to the end since you have already read most of the stuff that I’m going to write.


[...]


Google Summer of Code might be ending, but my job isn’t done. I will continue working on adding a decent recursive-search. A lot of progress has been made on that front, but the performance isn’t quite there yet. Besides that, I want to give Thunar users an option to easily create Shared Thumbnail Repositories which is something that I will probably do through a new plugin.


Distributions


IBM/Red Hat/Fedora


↺ 9 digital transformation truths that the pandemic rewrote | The Enterprisers Project


In the seeming blink of an eye, the pandemic changed everything: how we worked, shopped, went to school, entertained ourselves, got medical or mental health care, engaged with government agencies, and connected with friends and family. “The world shut down and everything was forced to adapt,” says MJ Johnson, managing director in the product and experience lab at business and technology consultancy West Monroe. “Every part of society was affected.”


The pandemic has also rocked many of the core tenets of digital transformation. “With a forced change of this magnitude, we witnessed the impossible become possible,” Johnson says. “Projects that would have taken years took just weeks, business models that were dependent on being ‘in-person’ successfully pivoted to being delivered digitally, and customers ultimately adapted and found businesses that pivoted gracefully throughout the pandemic. Our assumptions and beliefs have completely changed.”


“The result was accelerated, barrier-breaking service delivery.”


↺ Building an adaptable 5G Core on an open source container platform


5G aims to enable the delivery of highly immersive experiences for people and ultra reliable, low latency communication between devices. At the heart of each 5G network lies the 5G Core (5GC), with service providers needing to make several key decisions when building the 5G Core.


Their platform should be able to support a wide range of use cases without adding operational complexities and cost. The proposed architecture conceives 5G Core as a set of disaggregated, cloud native applications that communicate internally and externally over well defined standard interfaces.


Each 5GC component is implemented as a container-based application and is referred to as cloud-native network function (CNF). This requires the container platform to support functionalities and operational features like automated deployment, intelligent workload placement, dynamic scaling, hitless upgrades, and self healing.


This post covers how to architect an open 5G Core solution with cloud-native technologies, focusing on an on-premise, stand-alone deployment approach.


Debian Family


↺ Debian 11 “Bullseye” Now Available


Debian is often called the “Mother of distributions,” because it is used by so many Linux variants as a base. Ubuntu is based on Debian, which is in turn used by so many developers to create other distributions, which helps to verify Debian as the mother of so many distributions. Although you might think, given Debian 10 was released in 2019, that Debian 11 would come with a massive amount of new features, don’t get too excited. Although there are a good amount of new features, the bulk of Debian 11 is updates to already-included packages.


In total, there are 11,294 new packages and 42,821 updated packages. Those are some pretty staggering numbers, which clearly indicate the developers have been working hard to bring this new release to life.


↺ Chrome OS 94 brings Debian Bullseye to Linux on Chromebooks


Did you hear? There’s a new major update of a desktop operating system now available. No, it’s not Windows, macOS, or even Chrome OS. It’s Debian Bullseye, which is version 11 of the popular Linux platform. And Chrome OS 94 brings Debian Bullseye to Linux on Chromebooks.


The upgrade of the Linux container on Chromebooks is still a work in progress as there are some changes the Chromium development team has yet to make. You can read about them in this bug report. But if you have a Chromebook running the Dev Channel of Chrome OS 94 as I do, you can install and use Debian Bullseye on your Chromebook.


On the Stable Channel of Chrome OS, currently, version 92, all new Linux containers on Chromebook use Debian 10, or the Buster version. Previously, Chromebooks used Stretch, which is Debian 9.


↺ Andrew Cater: Happy Birthday, Debian!


28 today. In a video call for Debian day earlier on, I was reminiscing about the earliest distributions: MCC Interim Linux gave instructions to turn it’s final version into Debian. Debian is the second oldest Linux distribution, just behind Slackware.


Debian 1.2 was my first Debian: my latest is, obviously, Debian Bullseye. Debian is like a family – often discordant, sometimes dysfunctional but always full of people that care and are cared for. I wish that some of my friends and colleagues no longer with us could be here to see just how well we’re doing.


↺ Debian 11.0


Today we are looking at Debian 11.0. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.10, Gnome 3.38, and uses about 1GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!


↺ Debian 11.0 Run Through – Invidious


In this video, we are looking at Debian 11.0.


↺ Debian 11 Hits The Mark With New “Bullseye” Release – Invidious


After more than two years of development, Debian 11 (codenamed “Bullseye”) has been released. Debian is a stable GNU/Linux distribution that is supported for up to five years. And Debian’s repository of software now contains an astounding 59,551 packages.


Canonical/Ubuntu Family


↺ Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter Issue 696


Welcome to the Ubuntu Weekly Newsletter, Issue 696 for the week of August 8 – 14, 2021. The full version of this issue is available here.


Devices/Embedded


↺ Yes you can play Doom on this Linux-powered desk phone


As long as there is someone asking whether or not a particular gadget will run Doom, there will be someone else who wants to prove that, yes, it will Doom. This week’s installment: an ordinary-looking office phone!


It’s not truly an ordinary office phone — this is a CaptionCall, an accessible phone that features a large color display that can caption phone conversations in real time.


Open Hardware/Modding


↺ Arduino partners with Altium and the IPC Education Foundation to launch #PCBeTheChange competition | Arduino Blog


We’re excited to announce that Arduino has partnered with Altium and the IPC Education Foundation (IPCEF) to launch a student electronics design challenge to engage, educate, and enhance PCB design capabilities while developing STEM solutions to environmental challenges.


The Innovation for Environmental Change 2021 International Student Design Competition (#PCBeTheChange) encourages student teams to help address common environmental concerns using Altium’s educational tools with Arduino hardware. Teams from high schools and colleges will be using Altium’s Upverter Modular PCB design software and the Portenta H7 to create a prototype design that will improve the environment in each team’s respective local area. The students will be challenged to tackle one or more environmental concerns, such as air pollution, water quality and solar energy capture.


Free, Libre, and Open Source Software


Events


↺ Linux Plumbers Conference: GPU/media/AI buffer management and interop Microconference Accepted into 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference


We are pleased to announce that the GPU/media/AI buffer management and interop Microconference has been accepted into the 2021 Linux Plumbers Conference.


PostgreSQL Database


↺ PostgreSQL: pgAdmin 4 v5.6 Released


The pgAdmin Development Team are pleased to announce pgAdmin 4 version 5.6. This release of pgAdmin 4 includes 14 bug fixes and new features. For more details please see the release notes.


pgAdmin is the leading Open Source graphical management tool for PostgreSQL. For more information, please see the website.


↺ PostgreSQL: PGO, the Crunchy Postgres Operator v5 Released: Fully Declarative Postgres


Crunchy Data is pleased to announce the release of PGO v5, the Postgres Operator from Crunchy Data, which automates and simplifies deploying and managing open source Postgres clusters on Kubernetes and other Kubernetes-enabled Platforms.


↺ PostgreSQL: pglogical 2.4.0 Now Available


EDB announces the release of pglogical 2.4.0, the next generation in logical replication for PostgreSQL. Implemented entirely as a PostgreSQL extension, pglogical is a logical replication system that serves as a highly efficient method of replicating data as an alternative to physical replication.


↺ Alter Table PostgreSQL


PostgreSQL allows you to modify database objects such as tables, databases, schemas, group, users, and more. In this tutorial, we will focus on how you can ALTER the structure of a table.


↺ Add Column PostgreSQL


After creating databases and populating them with information, you will rarely need to alter the database structure. The recurrent thing you will do is to add or retrieve records stored in the database. However, there are rare instances where you may need to add a new column and populate it with data.


In this guide, we will look at how to alter a PostgreSQL table and add a column.


Programming/Development


↺ Go 1.17 is released


Today the Go team is thrilled to release Go 1.17, which you can get by visiting the download page.


This release brings additional improvements to the compiler, namely a new way of passing function arguments and results. This change has shown about a 5% performance improvement in Go programs and reduction in binary sizes of around 2% for amd64 platforms. Support for more platforms will come in future releases.


Go 1.17 also adds support for the 64-bit ARM architecture on Windows, letting gophers run Go natively on more devices.


We’ve also introduced pruned module graphs in this release. Modules that specify go 1.17 or higher in their go.mod file will have their module graphs include only the immediate dependencies of other Go 1.17 modules, not their full transitive dependencies. This should help avoid the need to download or read go.mod files for otherwise irrelevant dependencies—saving time in everyday development.


↺ Go 1.17 is released


The Go blog has announced the release of version 1.17 of the Go programming language. The new version has some fairly small changes to the language, support for the Arm 64-bit architecture on Windows, along with other features, bug fixes, and more…


↺ Git v2.33.0


↺ Git 2.33 Released With New “merge-ort” Merging For 500~9000x Speed-Up


Git 2.33 is out this evening as the latest stable update to this immensely successful open-source distributed revision control system.


Git 2.33 brings the latest patches around geometric repacking, “merge-ort” as a new merge strategy for handling Git merges across branches, and a number of bitmap-related optimizations. There is also the usual assortment of fixes and smaller items.


↺ Maximiliano Sandoval: Introducing Lorem


Lorem is a new design app powered by gtk4-rs and libadwaita. It generates tasteful placeholder text for your projects. It use the classic Lorem Ipsum text as the base.


↺ ATOI Function in C


The C programming language contains a collection of useful functions that we can use to perform actions in our program. One such function is the atoi function. The atoi function is part of the C standard library. Its primary use is to parse a string and convert its contents to the corresponding numerical value of int type.


This tutorial will discuss how to use the atoi function to convert strings to integer values in C.


↺ LLVM Clang 14 Begins Landing Intel AVX-512 FP16 Support – Phoronix


Last month Intel began posting the developer documentation around AVX-512 FP16 support coming with Sapphire Rapids and initially accompanied by GCC compiler patches along with LLVM/Clang. While that GNU Compiler Collection support around AVX-512 FP16 has yet to be merged, the LLVM Clang support for this next iteration of AVX-512 has begun landing.


Next-generation Intel Xeon Scalable “Sapphire Rapids” will support AVX-512 FP16 with full-speed handling of denormal FP16 values – not to be confused with AVX-512 BF16 (BFloat16) found on Cooper Lake. AVX-512 FP16 should help with deep learning models and other cases where FP32 isn’t necessary.


Leftovers


Integrity/Availability


Proprietary


Security


↺ Security updates for Monday


Security updates have been issued by Arch Linux (c-ares, firefox, fossil, gitlab, jupyterlab, loki, lynx, opera, prosody, and vivaldi), Debian (amd64-microcode, exiv2, ffmpeg, thunderbird, and trafficserver), Fedora (libsndfile, rust-argh, rust-argh_derive, rust-argh_shared, rust-askalono-cli, rust-asyncgit, rust-bugreport, rust-crosstermion, rust-diskonaut, rust-dua-cli, rust-fancy-regex, rust-fedora-update-feedback, rust-filetreelist, rust-git-version, rust-git-version-macro, rust-gitui, rust-heatseeker, rust-jql, rust-pulldown-cmark, rust-sd, rust-shadow-rs, rust-skim, rust-textwrap, rust-tokei, rust-tui, rust-tui-react, rust-unicode-linebreak, rust-unicode-truncate, rust-urlencoding, rust-versions, rust-weezl, and zola), Mageia (dino, firefox, glibc, libvirt, mariadb, qtwebengine5, spice, sylpheed, claws-mail, and webkit2), openSUSE (grafana, kernel, libdnf, and openscad), Oracle (.NET 5.0, .NET Core 3.1, and virt:ol and virt-devel:rhel), Red Hat (compat-exiv2-026, exiv2, firefox, sssd, and thunderbird), SUSE (cpio and kernel), and Ubuntu (mariadb-10.3, mariadb-10.5).


↺ How to Stop WordPress Brute Force Attacks


Do you wish to prevent brute-force attacks on your WordPress site? These attacks can cause your website to slow down, become unreachable, or even install malware by cracking your passwords. We’ll show you how to prevent brute force attacks on your WordPress site in this article.


↺ Linux glibc security fix created a nastier Linux bug


The GNU C Library (glibc) is essential to Linux. So, when something goes wrong with it, it’s a big deal. When a fix was made in early June for a relatively minor problem, CVE-2021-33574, which could result in application crashes, this was a good thing. Unfortunately, it turned out the fix introduced a new and nastier problem, CVE-2021-38604. It’s always something!


Monopolies


↺ Hard label: GSK edict forces generics to ‘reassess position’


The Federal Circuit’s latest decision that Teva induced infringement has stakeholders worried that US skinny label law has been thrown out the window


↺ Career series: Alicia Instone, Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys


↺ The People’s Courts’ Judicial Protection Plan for Intellectual Property Rights (2021-2025) (Mainland China)


Patents


↺ IP and R&D: Should you search before research?


While every organisation and industry sector will have differing IP policies and R&D priorities, they each share the same challenges when it comes to considering and capturing IP. The question is: at what point should they start?


Typically, businesses consider IP after R&D activities have yielded a conceptual technical solution. Likewise, academics, while excellent early searchers of published papers, rarely search patent literature.


However, with much R&D activity focused on crowded technical areas, companies and academics are beginning to recognise the need to incorporate IP strategy into their R&D approach. Managed appropriately, IP can help drive and focus R&D efforts, and mitigate the risk of investing in the development of technical innovations that may unnecessarily overlap with existing prior art.


↺ BEST MODE: Did You, or Are You Just Going To, Test that Invention?


A patent must teach one skilled in the relevant art how to make and use the claimed invention, as required by 35 U.S.C. §112(a). The Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) 608.01(p) explains that unless an invention is disclosed such that one skilled in the art will be able to practice it without undue experimentation, at least one operative example of the invention must be set forth. On July 1, 2021, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will publish a reminder to patent applicants and patent practitioners that to satisfy the enablement and written description requirement, a patent application must properly present examples in a manner that clearly distinguishes between “prophetic” examples, which describe predicted experimental results, and “working” examples, which report actual experimental results. Failure to do so raises an inequitable conduct issue related to the applicant’s duty of disclosure, as discussed in our related posts here and here.


↺ FCA upholds reconsideration decision maintaining $100M+ award against Apotex for cefaclor patent infringement


On July 23, 2021, the Federal Court of Appeal (FCA) dismissed Apotex’s appeal of the Federal Court’s (FC) reconsideration decision on the quantum of damages owed by Apotex for its infringement of eight Eli Lilly process patents related to the antibiotic cefaclor: Apotex Inc. v. Eli Lilly and Company, 2021 FCA 149.


↺ Judge Tosses Patent Infringement $308M Jury Verdict Against Apple


↺ Patent Protection and Access to COVID-19 Medical Products in Developing Countries


Several new vaccines that have been developed for COVID-19 are patent protected. The patentees control the production, supply and pricing of these vaccines. Most people in low-income countries have been unable to access the vaccines. India and South Africa supported by a large number of developing countries have submitted a proposal to the TRIPS Council of the WTO requesting a temporary waiver to eliminate patent and other intellectual property barriers for the development, production and supply of all COVID-19 medical products. Nine months have passed since the proposal was first made in October 2020 but still no decision could be taken because of the opposition from developed countries. The disagreements essentially revolve around four issues: whether suspension of patent rights will act as a disincentive for the development of new medical products; whether patented products can be manufactured in the absence of manufacturing capacities; whether voluntary initiatives are better than a patent waiver; and whether a waiver is necessary in view of compulsory licensing and other measures which TRIPS permits. The paper briefly reviews these issues and also provides some suggestions about what developing countries can do to make COVID-19 medical products affordable and accessible.


↺ Intellectual Property 101: What is a Patent?


The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (“PTO”) provides extensive online resources on its website. While much of the content may be directed to patent and trademark practitioners to perform filings and access regulations, some of the more general information is geared to the general public for educational and practical use. Recently, the PTO updated a general information page that includes excellent discussions of the various aspects of Intellectual Property law. This webpage is extensive, but we have reproduced some of the most relevant sections of interest.


Some people confuse patents, copyrights, and trademarks. Although there are similarities among these kinds of intellectual property, they serve distinct purposes.


↺ [GuestPost] Opinion: Patent trolling threatens the market of taxi aggregators in Kazakhstan


Friend of the Kat and Legal Head of Delivery for Gett in Moscow, Konstantin Voropaev has been following some developments out of Kazakhstan relating to an uptick in litigation in the taxi-app space. Over to Konstantin for the story and his take on the developments:


“Some may associate businesses whose primary aim is to assert patents in litigation to obtain license revenue with the Eastern District of Texas or the Unwired Planet decision in the UK, and not think about cases further afield from Marshall, Texas or London. However, many such business have been popping up in Kazakhstan. One such business appears to be that of G-Taxi, whose presence in Kazakhstan has only been made public in connection with litigation. So what is going on? Let’s start at the beginning.


[...]


The term “patent trolling” – which can be used interchangeably with the less vivid “Patent Assertion Entity (PAE) or “Non Practicing Entity (NPE)” – is used worldwide to refer to situations when individuals or legal entities buy and issue patents in their own name, without being involved in the production and use of intellectual property. After that, the business model is that they wait until the point in time when certain technologies develop on the market to the required level of revenue and entrenchment to make licensing demands profitable. That is when these entities start demanding compensation from market players for the use of the technology. A patent or trade mark troll’s strategy consists of finding potential defendants who find it less expensive to negotiate a settlement rather than litigate.


“Patent trolling” has been used actively since the beginning of the 1990s in the territory of the post-Soviet space, especially in Russia, when large corporations were served with several lawsuits from patent holders for already well-known and popular items. For example, in October 1999, a patent was published in Russia for the invention of the “Glass vessel”, the description of which fully corresponds to an ordinary glass bottle. The patentee tried to demand from the companies producing beer and soft drinks, licensing fees in the amount of at least 0.5% of the proceeds. That patent was canceled by the decision of the Chamber for Patent Disputes. The second well-known history of patent trolling in the Russian Federation is associated with a patent for an invention and three patents for useful models with the general name “Vehicle shock absorber”. This entrepreneur tried to get substantial sums in euros from foreign companies – manufacturers of automobile shock absorbers. Among the infringers of the entrepreneur’s patent rights were: the Japanese company Kayaba, the German company ZF Trading and the American company Gates.


↺ Texas transfer pleas rise 120% – counsel reveal how to win them


The Federal Circuit has already ruled on more than twice as many transfer petitions for the Western District of Texas in 2021 as it did in 2020


↺ Legal battle brewing over AI’s potential status as a ‘nonhuman inventor’


If humans and only humans can be named inventors on U.S. patent applications, some AI developers are going to be disincentivized from innovating.


Within healthcare and the life sciences, algorithms that could help save or enhance lives may never arise.


So contends one such developer who is suing the Commerce Department’s U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and its Office of the Undersecretary for Intellectual Property.


↺ Impossible inventions


Every now and then, a patent attorney will come across an invention which seems too good to be true, for example, inventions which purport to ‘disprove’ or ‘violate’ various well-established theoretical laws of physics such as Newton’s laws of motion. These ‘impossible inventions’ are most closely associated with individual inventors who may not have the resources to experiment and prototype extensively before filing an associated patent application. In this article, we will visit three ‘impossible invention’ hearings at the UK IPO, before diving into some practical tips for those thinking of filing a patent application.


↺ Entera Bio Reports Second Quarter 2021 Financial Results


↺ Entera Bio Reports Second Quarter 2021 Financial Results and Provides Clinical Updates


Foundational Patent Received in Europe for Platform Technology: The European Patent Office granted a patent titled “Methods and Compositions for Oral Administration of Proteins” to Entera addressing its oral PTH formulations currently in advanced clinical stages for osteoporosis and hypoparathyroidism. This patent, combined with others issued in key markets including the U.S., China, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel, fortify Entera’s leadership position in the oral delivery of proteins.


↺ Artificial Intelligence system as inventor in South African patent application: The case of DABUS


Late last month, South Africa’s Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) became the first Patent Office in the world to award a patent that names an artificial intelligence as the inventor of a product. In the application by Dr Thaler, an artificial intelligence system (AI system), which has been described as a device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience (DABUS), was named as the inventor. The decision is significant considering that the applicant’s previous applications in the UK, EPO and at the USPTO were unsuccessful because DABUS was named as inventor.


In each of these jurisdictions, the question was whether the relevant patent laws may be interpreted as permitting an AI system (i.e. a machine/device) to be named as the inventor in a patent application. This question is also relevant in the case of South Africa.


↺ In a world first, South Africa grants patent to an artificial intelligence system


↺ In a world first, South Africa grants a patent listing AI as the inventor


↺ South Africa


↺ CVC Files Opposition to ToolGen’s Substantive Preliminary Motion No. 2


In June, Senior Party ToolGen filed its Substantive Preliminary Motion No. 2 to deny Junior Party the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Vienna; and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, “CVC”) priority benefit to its U.S. Provisional Application No. 61/757,640, filed January 28, 2013 (“Provisional 3″), pursuant to 37 C.F.R. §§ 41.121(a)(1)(ii) and 41.208(a)(3) and Standing Order ¶ 208.4.1. CVC has filed its Opposition to this Motion.


↺ Mylan Fights For Invalidity Case In Neurim Melatonin Battle


Generic-drug maker Mylan has argued it shouldn’t be blocked from challenging Neurim Pharmaceuticals Ltd.’s melatonin patent just because a London court previously upheld the parent patent for the insomnia medication, as the European Patent Office later invalidated it.


Mylan UK Healthcare Ltd. fought back in its Thursday defense filing with the High Court against Israel-based Neurim’s assertions that it shouldn’t be allowed to contest the validity of the divisional patent — derived from the parent patent — in new litigation brought by the Israeli drug developer.


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