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Comment Re:Computer trespass and identity fraud (Score 3, Interesting) 67

The obvious answer is to simply disconnect regions that impose internet-breaking restrictions. If a region believes the rest of the world is responsible for parenting their dumb children, and in particular they're willing to sue when someone else fails to live down to the standards they think their little sheltered idiots need to engage the world and that they're too incompetent to provision themselves, then merely politely tell them their entire region is insufficiently sophisticated to interact and pull their plug.

We really need a FOSS maintained "Gilead regions" IP block list, v4 and v6, for independent operators and national ISPs and DNS providers engaged to banlist those regions from interacting with the an internet that doesn't work for them. They have every right to decide for themselves, but not for anyone else.

Comment FreeBSD is what all servers should run (Score 1) 107

FreeBSD powers my personal infrastructure and has for decades. It is easy to use, not bloated (too badly, though you now have to take steps to keep that damn Wayland out of a server, WTF, but you can with /etc/make.conf). Having eventually made the shift to Poudriere, the package and code management is very good. Fixes for maintained packages are an overnight thing, but some of the major upstream dependencies have the same level of responsiveness as in Linux - better than any commercial software, but not as good as pure FreeBSD.

Moving from SVN to git kinda sucked, but now it works well enough and gets the job done and keeps the Linux heads happy.

Submission + - Musk compromises government systems (reuters.com) 5

evil_aaronm writes: Elon Musk and a crew of loyalists infiltrated the Office of Personnel Management and locked out legitimate employees, compromising system security, and employee data.

Comment Re:The human brain does the same thing... (Score 1) 182

Yes!

We must build an absolute monopoly on inventions which is permanent and heritable even if by so doing retard the progress of science and the useful arts. Without legislative protection, innovation would be like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Society must give a permanent exclusive right to the profits arising from them, lest they be denied by their nature the status of property.

Comment Don't expect teenage dating apps to be more (Score 5, Insightful) 54

Email is, by far, the best communications modality yet devised. I have never heard a remotely coherent argument against it but am inundated with endless marketing invective and paid articles decrying it and extolling the virtues of yet another short lived, idiotic alternative, inevitably proprietary and VC funded still in the burning OPM stage.

It is a transparently disingenuous hype machine desperately intent to lock up commercial ownership of private communications.

Don't breathe that crappy free air, try our UltraChat brand premium air! All the hip kids have switched, they all hate free air and get so much more done on UltraChat! If you were actually cool you'd already be breathing UltraChat Air, boomer. And your first 10,000 breaths are free*!!!

* $8/month after the first 10k up to 5 Gbreaths, contact your corporate sales executive to continue breathing after 5G.

Don't wait for your contact to "expire"

No seriously, you'll die. Pay up.

What makes a good text coms system:
Global interoperability
portability
adherence to open standards
Reliability
store & forward
Local storage and background sync
fast, indexed search
save draft and resume later
structured formatting
Organizational mechanisms like folders
centralized directory

What has all that and more? email. always has, always will. Chat is for children trying to hook up and well-suited to that level of complexity, but nothing more. I don't get how any company or team can be so flabbergastingly idiotic as to willingly cede control of their core intelligence to strategically misaligned scammers trying to lock it up for profit.

If you want a chat interface with the features of an email backend, try delta-chat. I'm not entirely happy with their PGP protocol, but there is some slow progress: https://support.delta.chat/t/a...

Comment Re:These tactics are well-known in the industry (Score 3, Insightful) 92

"Eventually" is better than "never," but unfortunately (like in the OP Humira story) we can quantify the damage by taking a look at all the extra profits that that extra exclusivity generates. Those profits come directly from consumers' wallets in the meantime, meaning it's not really an abstract patent or government problem.

What does $114 billion in average Americans' blood, sweat and tears look like? That's the true cost even delaying generics by just a few years.

Comment Re:These tactics are well-known in the industry (Score 2) 92

Unless and until the DOJ treats this as an anti-competitive practice, nothing will improve.

The USPTO is overworked and the brands exploit that to wear down examiners with repeated office actions until they succeed, but even hiring more examiners wouldn't solve the immense funding imbalance. Brands will always be able to overwhelm the USPTO.

The closest I can think of is a punitive rule against litigating expired patents, but that may also kill the good faith innovation alongside the bad faith "innovation" of creating derivative/related products.

Comment These tactics are well-known in the industry (Score 5, Interesting) 92

Even going back to the early 2000s, I worked on patent litigation for an oral anti-heartburn medication (you can guess which one). This was a common tactic even then.

Step 1: Brand company blitzes the patent office with related applications to a blockbuster drug, creating a portfolio of later-expiring patents to cover obvious and unavoidable variations (dosage, delivery method, etc) on a drug. This is called "evergreening" the patent.
Step 2: Generic companies attempt to create products nearly identical to an expiring patent.
Step 3: Brand company sues generic companies, arguing infringement. Generic companies counterclaim arguing noninfringement and invalidity of the patents.
Step 4: Brand and generic companies test each other for a couple years in litigation while the FDA review and related testing occurs on generic product.
Step 5: As generic product is nearing approval and release, brand company offers generic a deal to settle the litigation: Stay off the market for X years, and we will give you (a) an upfront payment, (b) status as an "authorized" generic, or both. The "authorized" generic simply meant that instead of paying market prices for the drug, a consumer would pay the brand's artificial floor even though the brand has no claim to the generic, expired-patent drug.
Step 6: Brand repeats process for every new generic entrant.

It was and still is amazing to me that the DOJ does not prosecute what is clearly this anti-competitive, monopolistic practice.

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