● 08.26.23

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 26/08/2023: Libinput 1.24.0 and Canonical’s Snap Woes

Posted in News Roundup at 8:22 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

GNU/Linux

Server

• CrowdSupply recently featured the ZimaBlade which is a single-board x86  device geared for personal servers, media streaming, retro gaming and many other applications. This card sized platform offers PCIe support, dual SATA connectors, Gigabit ethernet and support for the Open-Source CasaOS. The product page indicates that the ZimaBlade will be available in two configurations.

• Mirantis launched an open source k0smotron control plane project for Kubernetes that makes it simpler to centrally manage multiple clusters.

• This morning I pondered how much will noise reduce when I power off that server? From the comfort of my living room, directly above the rack in the basement, I powered it off. At first, I was disappointed. I could still hear that repetitive whine.

Audiocasts/Shows

• Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams is off at Chaos Communications Camp, and Assistant Editor Tom Nardi is off on vacation, so there’s no real podcast this week.

Graphics Stack

Applications

• To provide an insight into the quality of software that is available, we have compiled a list of 5 high quality open source partition tools that offer an excellent way to create, destroy, resize, move, check and copy partitions.

• Our recommendations are captured in this legendary LinuxLinks-style ratings chart. All software featured is free and open source.

• In 2020, Apple began the Apple silicon transition, using self-designed, 64-bit ARM-based Apple M1 processors on new Mac computers. Maybe it’s the perfect time to move away from the proprietary world of Apple, and embrace the open source Linux scene.

• We recommend the best free and open source alternatives.

• EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: I am still looking for a super awesome team lead for a super amazing project involving KDE and Snaps. Time is running out and well the KDE world will be a better a better place if this project goes through! I would like to clarify, this is a paid position! A current KDE developer would be ideal as it is a small team so your time will be split managing and coding alike. If you or anyone you know might be interested please contact me ASAP!

• Lots of news on the snap front 23.04.3 is now complete with new snaps! I know, just in time for 23.08.0. I have fixed some major issues in this release, 23.08 should go much quicker. Even quicker if my per repo snapcraft files gets approved!

• A file explorer to share files over a network based on Flask server framework.

• Pydio Cells is a fully-featured, robust, and user-friendly web-based file sharing and synchronization platform designed to cater to the needs of businesses. The platform offers an extensive range of features and functionalities that make it an ideal alternative to popular cloud-based file sharing services like Dropbox and Box.

• The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 248. This version includes the following changes:

• [...]

• Duplicate file removal is the process of identifying and removing duplicate files from your computer. Duplicate files are identical files that occupy unnecessary disk space and can slow down your computer.

• Web data extraction (also known as web data mining or web scraping) is an incredibly useful tool for extracting valuable information from arbitrary web pages.

• Swiss File Knife is a highly useful, free and open-source tool that can be used for a variety of purposes. Not only is it easy to use, but it is also portable, allowing users to take it with them wherever they go on a USB stick. The program combines many

Instructionals/Technical

• Opera is a free web browser based on Chromium. Opera browser comes with a lot of useful features that can make your browsing experience better.

• This guide walks you through installing fonts on Linux, using the command line, or utilizing the dedicated GNOME and KDE’s GUI apps.

• In our digital age, data integrity and security are paramount. Pop!_OS, revered for its user-centric design, offers tools like TimeShift that empower users to safeguard their data.

• Learn how to troubleshoot Apache 2 when it’s not executing PHP files with this easy-to-follow, step-by-step tutorial.

• For those who want to install the latest Linux Kernel (6.4.x so far), there’s a new apt repository made for Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 22.04, and Debian 12 Bookworm.

• Figma is a popular cloud-based design and collaboration tool used for creating user interfaces (UIs), user experience (UX) designs, web designs, app designs, and more. It’s popular among designers, product managers, and developers for its collaborative features, real-time editing capabilities, and ease of use.

• Managing and administering Linux servers from the command line is difficult for beginner Linux users. In this case, you can use Webmin to manage your Linux server from the web-based interface. In this article, I will show you how to install Webmin on Debian 12.

• Pop!_OS, with its developer-friendly interface, harmoniously marries the robust capabilities of Docker, offering an efficient environment to run containers. Whether you’re a seasoned developer or someone venturing into the containerized world, understanding the nuances of running Docker containers on Pop!_OS can redefine your developmental workflow.

• In a world where cross-platform connectivity is key, the ability to connect to a remote Windows system from a Linux command line can be a game-changer. Thanks to powerful tools like xfreerdp, this process has become seamless and efficient.

Desktop Environments/WMs

GNOME Desktop/GTK

• Update on what happened across the GNOME project in the week from August 18 to August 25.

• In this blog, I’ll be sharing my experience attending GUADEC 2023 in person held in Riga, Latvia from 26th July 2023 to 31st July 2023.

• Last month, when I woke up on this date, I was still unsure whether I’d be able to attend GUADEC in person because of the visa process, I was supposed to have my visa received on July 24th, but I wanted to attend GUADEC because it would be my first conference I’d ever attended. So I decided to go to my courier’s office to pick up my visa, which was already at a local courier depot. When I opened it, I was overjoyed to see that my visa had been approved. Following this, I began contacting Melissa; she was so supportive that I received my flight tickets and accommodation details the same day, even though she was traveling herself. I flew from Pune to Delhi at midnight, then from Delhi to Helsinki and then from Helsinki to Riga. To be honest, I was also looking forward to the travel experience as well because it was my first international journey. I had a great time taking pictures on the way and arrived in Riga on the evening of July 25th. Melissa if you’re reading this thank you again

• In this article I’ll present how I used to organize myself, mainly using my smartphone for that, and why and how I started changing this.

• On January 1st 2023 at 00:30, my Android smartphone died, and it made me realize how dependent on that device I was. I used it for many aspects of my life: to stay organized, to be informed, to be entertained, or to move around.

• Luckily, at that time I was working for Purism and I had a Librem 5, that was the perfect opportunity to try it out in real conditions, as the device I depend on. I started by listing all I used my previous smartphone for, and tried to fulfill the same needs with the Librem 5. It didn’t go well. The device has some great upsides and interesting features, for sure, but the Linux smartphone ecosystem was very far from something I can depend on, especially given how much I was asking from my smartphone.

• I ordered a new smartphone in mid-February 2023, and being back on Android after 1½ months not using it helped me discover things I wasn’t expecting.

• You are missing out on lots of built-in search features in the GNOME desktop environment. Learn something new.

Distributions and Operating Systems

SUSE/OpenSUSE

• Dear Tumbleweed users and hackers,

• As announced on various channels, OBS services have been moved to a new location on new hardware. So the last check-in we could do was on Wednesday, building, and QA done before the move yesterday and then publishing it. As we managed to get the timing pretty right (which was more based on luck than anything else; timings for build and QA are only very rough estimates) we managed to publish 6 snapshots since the last review. At the moment, we do not yet have a new snapshot building, as the service migration seems to have left a few services in limbo – e.g. openQA is, up to the moment of this writing, not able to sync snapshots from OBS. So we rather slow down than risk sending out untested stuff.

• The six snapshots (0817, 0818, 0819, 0821, 0822, and 0823) delivered during the last week brought you these changes: [...]

Fedora Family / IBM

• As part of our efforts to make Fedora Workstation more attractive for developers, particularly those building applications that would be deployed on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, we had made it easy to create gratis, self-supported Red Hat Enterprise Linux virtual machines inside GNOME Boxes. You had to join the Red Hat Developer Program by creating an account on developers.redhat.com and with that you not only had gratis, self-supported access to RHEL, but also a series of other products like Red Hat JBoss Middleware, Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform and so on.

• The Workstation team is working on the final integration of Anaconda WebUI Installer for Fedora Linux Workstation. As a result, the Fedora Workstation Working Group and QA teams have organized a test week from Monday, Aug 28, 2023 to Monday, Sept 04, 2023. The wiki page in this article contains links to the test images you’ll need to participate. Please continue reading for details.

• At the Fedora Linux 38 release party, the Docs team suggested that we take advantage of a virtual meetup to bring teamwork into documentation writing. Documentation writing shouldn’t be a solitary pursuit.

• An interactive session at Flock 2023 helped exchange ideas on a collaborative way to run meetings and invite more contributions for documentation.

• After months of waiting for ideas to be finalized, the Docs team is pleased to announce the workshop will begin September 2023.

• If you fancy coming along, just let us know your preferred timeslot in the When-is-good scheduler by September 15 2023.

• This is a weekly report from the CPE (Community Platform Engineering) Team. If you have any questions or feedback, please respond to this report or contact us on #redhat-cpe channel on libera.chat.

• As you might have experienced… using a recent system to connect to a legacy one could be complicated as some insecure protocols have been disabled, with a message like:

• Unable to negotiate with 192.168.2.82 port 22: no matching host key type found. Their offer: ssh-rsa,ssh-dss Create an entry like this in your .ssh/config file, so that insecure methods can be used to connect to a specific host:

• Host 192.168.2.82 HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa KexAlgorithms=+diffie-hellman-group1-sha1 PubkeyAcceptedKeyTypes=+ssh-rsa User root or alternatively on the command line: [...]

Debian Family

• In 2023 the traditional Debian Day is being celebrated in a special way, after all on August 16th Debian turned 30 years old!

• To celebrate this special milestone in the Debian’s life, the Debian Brasil community organized a week with talks online from August 14th to 18th. The event was named Debian 30 years.

Canonical/Ubuntu Family

• Ubuntu was planning to ship the CUPS printing stack as a Snap in 23.10 — but after several months of testing, its changed its mind. Accordingly, a DEB-based printing stack will feature in Ubuntu 23.10 “Mantic Minotaur” and in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Switching to the CUPS Snap will now aim to take place during the Ubuntu 24.10 development cycle.

• I’ve worked from home since November 2011, when I started working for Canonical. I’ve had enough though, and have chosen to go back to working in an office on a regular basis.

• No, I don’t have investments in city-centre office spaces, and I’m not a Zoom paid shill. I just think it’s better for me, and here’s why.

• Commuter hell Before 2011, all my roles were all on-site, commuting between six and sixty miles a day, each way.

• Practical guide on some of the finest themes that you can use on Linux Mint using a list of a handful of popular themes and how to install them on Linux Mint.

Devices/Embedded

• An Internet of Things OS is any Operating System specifically designed to work within the constraints that are particular to IoT devices which are typically limited in memory size, processing power, capacity, and built to enable swift data transfer over the Internet.

• There are several (mostly Linux-based) Operating Systems that you can use for IoT but they wouldn’t allow you to get the best out of your setup and that’s the reason why IoT-focused distros exist.

• Here are the list of top Operating Systems you can use for your Internet of Things projects.

• The summit will bring together industry leaders in the semiconductor and microelectronics space to discuss opportunities for standards-driven innovation, incubating and accelerating ideas across industry, academia, and government, providing training and education, and enabling a standards-capable workforce. The summit signifies a strong commitment to excellence and collaboration in the semiconductor and microelectronics industry and a community-driven approach to exploring its future.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

Programming/Development

• Histograms are a powerful tool for visualizing the distribution of numerical data. They allow us to quickly understand the frequency distribution of values within a dataset.

• In my post about Akademy 2023 I had mentioned the efforts to retire KDE’s Jenkins installation (“Binary Factory”) in favor of Gitlab on invent.kde.org. One remaining issue has meanwhile been resolved, the migration of the Craft cache jobs. And for migrating the packaging jobs there’s an easy way how you can help.

Python

• Modular Mojo is a new programming language designed for AI developers that is said to combine the usability of Python with the performance of C with over 36,000 times the performance of Python on a matrix multiplication workload. Modular Mojo programming language was not in the initial plan of the company but came about when the company’s founders – who focused on building a platform to unify the world’s ML/AI infrastructure – realized that programming across the entire stack was too complicated and also ended up writing a lot of MLIR (Multi-Level Intermediate Representation) by hand. The “over 36,000 times speedup” claim comes with the matmul.py script performing a 128×128 matrix multiplication in Python with a throughput of 0.00215 GFLOP/s and another script doing 512×512 vectorized + parallelized matrix multiplication in Mojo at 79.636 GFLOP/s.

Standards/Consortia

• The story of the PDF, the portable document format that’s become one of the internet’s defining information formats. It’ll be with us after we’re long gone.

Leftovers

• According to the academic paper search engine Oa.mg

• MAG: 2913484807 Aizu Project’s Ayanami Rei Ruben Schade Computer science 2016

• Correct me if I’m wrong, but that means someone in 2016 cited the below post of mine, for… computer science? Classifying Evangelion in this way might be a bit meta even for me, but maybe there’s some profound relationship between the two I’m missing.

• Was it about the software required to interface a plugsuit with a human operator? Some other NERV research project?

• As it’s weekend, it is time for something more light hearted. This is how my son and I packed his Lego when going to the summer house. A yellow head staring you down from inside the yellow car!

Hardware

• Khadas Mind Premium is an ultra-thin mini PC powered by an Intel Core i7-1360P Raptor Lake processor and supports various docks through the Khadas Link connector. We reviewed the mini PC with the Mind Dock in Windows 11 a few weeks ago, and we’ve now had time to install Ubuntu 22.04 to check out the mini PC with Linux. Installing Ubuntu 22.04 on Khadad Mind Premium We decided to install Ubuntu 22.04 alongside Windows 11, so we shrank the Windows partition by about half before inserting a Ubuntu 22.04.3 USB drive to install the Linux distribution.

• If you were around when the Altair 8800 was king, you might remember the name Cromemco. They were an early vendor of add-ons for the Altair, along with companies like Godbout and Morrow. The company was mostly famous for a very crude digital camera for the Altair and a similarly-crude graphics interface card. They graduated into building S-100 bus computers. Like many similar companies, they could taste the upcoming home PC market, and they wanted a piece of it. Their answer? The $1,800 C-10 Cromemco Personal Computer, and you can see [Vintage Geek’s] thoughts on the odd machine in the video below.

• Retired hardware engineer [Plasmode] recently took on the challenge of building a debugger for the 6502 designed to sit atop the microprocessor while seated in a solder less breadboard. The result is the Diagnostic Overlay for W65C02 Breadboard, consisting of 128 kB SRAM and a 1250-gate CPLD. Except being 0.8 in wide, the overlay debugger is otherwise the same size as the 6502’s 40-pin DIP package, so it doesn’t overhang other portions of your circuit.

Health/Nutrition/Agriculture

• I have an annoying propensity to keep repeating how, in narratives of antivax conspiracy theories, everything old is new again. I was reminded of this again when I encountered a particularly stupid invocation of the old antivax claim that vaccines cause sudden infant death syndrome invoked by tech bro turned antivaxxer Steve Kirsch, as epitomized by two posts on his Substack….

Security

• Microsoft warns that Chinese spies are hacking into Taiwanese organizations with minimal use of malware and by abusing legitimate software.

• The US Federal Government’s recent Request for Information (RFI) on Open Source Software Security (announced by the US White House) is a noteworthy development for open source software (OSS). This RFI originated from the Open-Source Software Security Initiative (OS3I) interagency working group created to improve OSS security. This blog post aims to provide a brief overview of the RFI.

• So, what’s the best way to secure Kubernetes systems? Alex Jones, engineering director Kubernetes at Canonical, suggests a need to look beyond containers with a holistic approach to security that spans all layers of the system. We talked to him to discover more.

• Fast forward 30 years later and what was once started as a hobby is now one of the most powerful operating systems, powering billions of devices worldwide. This operating system, named Linux, now makes up almost 3.08% of all the operating systems used worldwide.

• However, with great power comes even greater responsibilities. And Linux is no exception to this rule. As the backbone to a multitude of servers, workstations, kiosks, and other front-line devices throughout the globe, it is imperative for organizations to keep their Linux environments secure and up and running at all times.

Integrity/Availability/Authenticity

• XKCD has multiple comics about how hacking isn’t quite the way they make it out to be in movies: [...]

Privacy/Surveillance

• To summarize, I have other beef with the IDOI. I’ve complained to them about three other problems, one of which I’ve blogged about before.

• Here are the summaries and the current state of the complaint.

• GEICO: During my April-October policy, they emailed me a “survey link” to update my annual mileage, under threat to increase it to 12,000, the “State average”, and bill me for it if I didn’t reply. I replied and said something like 5,000-6,999, which is true. GEICO raised my bill by about 10% and set my mileage at 12,000 anyway. I only caught it because I checked my policy (how many people do?) and found this. When I called to complain, GEICO acted like it was a mistake and refunded the difference.

• “Applicant’s warning of a prima facie violation of Japanese law’s privacy protections fails to constitute a harm severe enough” to justify pseudonymity.

Defence/Aggression

• When police teams acting on a tip-off attempted to raid an apartment in Kağıthane, the incident turned violent.

• Move will reduce attacks that have killed thousands of civilians, Myanmar’s shadow government says.

• The officers who took power in Niger last month said Thursday they would authorise the armies of neighbouring Burkina Faso and Mali intervene in the country “in the event of aggression”.

• Anti-junta community schools function under threat of airstrikes and ground offensives.

Torture

• In dismissing a confession in the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole, Col. Lanny J. Acosta Jr. has shaken a foundation of U.S. government cases at the post-9/11 court.

• German prosecutors announced Thursday that a Syrian national accused of crimes against humanity and war crimes through torture and enslavement between 2012 and 2015 has been arrested. The investigating judge presiding over the matter ordered the man detained pending trial.

• The Saudi defendant, accused of orchestrating the attack on the U.S.S. Cole in 2000, was waterboarded and subjected to other forms of torture by the C.I.A. in 2002 in a secret prison network.

• “Lately, even journalists have shown decreased interest in human rights-related issues,” says Ümit Efe, an executive of the Human Rights Foundation of Turkey.

• Prosecutors say some of the officers nicknamed themselves the “Goon Squad” because of their willingness to use excessive force and cover up attacks including the assault that ended with a deputy shooting one victim in the mouth.

• A deportation order was made for Elyas Torabibaeskendari from Iran, one of those detained following the 21st Pride March in İstanbul. Elyas’s family says that Elyas may face anything, starting with torture, if sent back to Iran.

• A U.N. mission in Afghanistan reported summary killings, arbitrary detentions and torture of hundreds of onetime soldiers, police officers and others in the old government.

• A U.N. independent investigator on human rights says Eritrean refugees and asylum-seekers report that during compulsory national service they experienced torture, inhumane or degrading treatment, sexual and gender-based violence, forced labor and abusive conditions. Mohamed Babiker says Eritrea has a policy of indefinite national service and has ignored numerous calls from human rights bodies to ensure legal limits for the duration of such service and to protect the human rights of all participants. Eritrea maintains its national service is “unfairly judged.” But Babiker says in a report circulated Monday that he continues to receive “numerous and credible reports of grave human rights violation in the context of forced national/military service.”

• In spite of undergoing several name changes and employing shrewd repackaging strategies under the pretext of human rights advocacy, the notorious School of the Americas remains actively committed to training foreign fighters, steadfastly advancing the cause of the American empire.

• Five former officials at a Siberian penitentiary have been handed prison terms in a high-profile case involving the torture and rape of an inmate from the Republic of Tyva.

• A well-known Uzbek investigative journalist and blogger, Abdulqodir Mominov, says he was tortured by three law enforcement officials while in pretrial detention.

• They beat 31 political prisoners and locked them in narrow, dark cells.

• At the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, the aging men known by their serial numbers arrived at the meeting shackled. For the first time since it had opened in 2002, a U.S. president was allowing them to meet with a U.N. independent investigator. They told the investigator, Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, about the scant contacts with their families, the psychological and physical scars of the torture and abuse they experienced, and their hopes of leaving. They also told her she had come too late. In an interview with The Associated Press, Ní Aoláin agreed, because a total of 780 Muslim men were detained there following the 9/11 terrorist attack and today there are just 30.

• The UN Committee against Torture issued findings on New Zealand, Romania, Spain and Switzerland on Friday in its latest session.

Environment

Energy/Transportation

• So, let’s get the range question out of the way. My last car was a fairly lean diesel (a BMW E61 with the 2.0L diesel) and my personal record was 1350km on one tank of diesel, but I could do 1000km easily. The MG claims to do 380km. On a nice spring day on the smaller roads (so doing ~70-80kph) I can do 400km without too much effort. On a day with heavy rain trying to do 100kph, I’m happy if I can do 300km. It will be interesting to see how this car fares in winter conditions (cold + thick slush covering the road).

• Given that the charging speed is a variable thing, it took a couple of weeks getting used to it, but now I do longer trips quite comfortably.

• I consume ~16-17kWh/100km. If I want to do highway speeds (in Sweden that means 100 – 135kph) I need to calculate ~25kWh/100km. The battery pack carries 61kWh of charge. You do the math.

Finance

• As of midnight on Friday, the bargaining team of the University of Michigan’s Graduate Employees’ Organization has officially ratified the University’s final contract offer, ending more than nine months of negotiations, including a five-month-long strike.

• A couple, moved by the plight of the debt-ridden villagers, have offered them interest-free loans… with a catch.

• The United Auto Workers said Friday that its members have authorized a strike if the union can’t reach new contracts with the Detroit Three automakers: General Motors, Ford and Stellantis.

• Things are going in a bad direction economically due to the “Economic Miracle of Biden”, as told by “KrugmanBot3000” (with a Volvo) in the NY Times.

• I too am sick, of being told of this “Miracle” that is unfolding, as people lose jobs, get their hours cut, and have to wonder how long they can even afford to take care of their pet cat or fill up the tank of their car.

• It makes me depressed to read it even though I know it’s propaganda that would make Goebbels or Stalin blush.

• The other day, they went so far as to blame people with low interest fixed-rate mortgages for still being able to spend a lot of money while the Fed bangs the poor into bankruptcy due to the wealthy panicking about inflation. This situation with the American media has never been worse.

• What level of Freedom and Capitalism are we in where the media gleefully shouts “HAHAHAHAHA!!! It’s all working as planned. The Central Bank is killing American families with rigged interest rates. They can’t afford to buy a can of beans and they are losing their jobs! This will bring inflation to a very manageable 3% eventually!”

• A troll in IRC told me he believed copyright should be abolished.

• (If it was to be, then Microsoft can commit more code theft using Plagiarism as a Service, AKA CoPilot.)

• Then another sockpuppet in IRC shamed me for reading the Times via Links or the Newswaffle.

• I mentioned that their paywall is pretty much just there so that people on a Mac with Safari, or on an iPhone, can’t do anything about it. It was never going to stop smart people who can just drop to the terminal and type “links nytimes.com”.

• The WEI “attestation” of Chrome is there to stop people from doing this. There will be two or three Web browsers that are “trusted”, and they will be “trusted” to prevent the user from doing anything at all to alter the display of “content”, on the client-side.

• So in layman’s terms, no more “KrugmanBot3000” and “Miracles” because the browser has to attest that you have not done anything clever.

• The only benefit is that these sites tend to be so bogus that nobody should pay for them anyway which is why they’re really dying.

• Let me be frank, that considering that these places only ever post propaganda that benefits the wealthy elite and the American government’s gaslighting, you’d think taxpayers would be on the hook to directly subsidize all of them and not just NPR.

• They could have packed it into the “Inflation Production Act” or something.

• Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell on Friday warned that inflation was still far too high, and suggested the central bank may need to raise interest rates further in coming months.

• Why it matters: Despite recent data that shows inflation receding, the Fed is not declaring victory with signs that price pressures could reemerge.

AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

• The American president instead may go to Vietnam, a most useful ally to counter China in Southeast Asia.

• Poll observers from a regional southern African bloc SADC on Friday said certain aspects of Zimbabwe’s tense presidential and legislative elections did not conform to democratic principles.

Censorship/Free Speech

• Section 230, the court says, immunizes good-faith attempts to block spam—and RNC didn’t introduce enough evidence of bad faith.

• The paper worries that “social media companies are receding from their role as watchdogs against political misinformation.”

Freedom of Information / Freedom of the Press

• A free expression NGO has criticised the Hong Kong authorities after a journalist was faced with HK$500,000 in legal costs despite being cleared of a public disorder charge.

Civil Rights/Policing

• Just fucking weird. Seems illegal. How do we get away with this in a constitutional republic? Rights exist. And et cetera.

• Gaming czar Vassil Bozhkov, 67, was detained upon his return to Bulgaria from self-imposed exile, the Sofia prosecutor’s office said on August 25.

Monopolies

• The Digital Services Act (DSA) now applies to the 19 largest social networks, marketplaces and search engines, including Google, YouTube, Amazon, Facebook, Instagram, X (ex- Twitter) or TikTok.

• The European Union’s (EU) wide-ranging new digital privacy protection law went into effect on Friday (Aug. 25), ushering in a new era for Big Tech in Europe.

Patents

• Friday’s agreement between Chinese telecommunication company Huawei and Swedish electronics manufacturer Ericsson is long-term and covers access to each company’s 3GPP, ITU, IEEE, and IETF standards for 3G, 4G, and 5G cellular technologies.

• Since launching on 1 June 2023, the UPC has had problems showing proceedings on its registry. However, now users and observers can view all 35 infringement proceedings on its case management system.

• There was no error in an inter partes review decision finding obviousness in a communication system patent because the board properly relied on materials in the record in its claim construction and obviousness analysis.

• Mylan had deducted over $100 million in litigation expenses for the periods of 2012-2014 it occurred in defending patent infringement lawsuits brought against the generic manufacturer after it submitted abbreviated new drug applications (ANDAs) with paragraph IV certifications challenging the respective patents.  The IRS disallowed the deductions and issued notices of deficiency to the company — concluding that instead the litigation costs should be capitalized under I.R.C. § 263 (and associated regulations) as costs to acquire intangible assets (the FDA drug approvals).

Share in other sites/networks: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. Permalink  Send this to a friend

----------

➮ Sharing is caring. Content is available under CC-BY-SA.