Russia Says Its Businesses Can Steal Patents From Anyone In ‘Unfriendly’ Countries

Russia has effectively legalized patent theft from anyone affiliated with countries “unfriendly” to it, declaring that unauthorized use will not be compensated. The Washington Post reports: The decree, issued this week, illustrates the economic war waged around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as the West levies sanctions and pulls away from Russia’s huge oil and gas industry. Russian officials have also raised the possibility of lifting restrictions on some trademarks, according to state media, which could allow continued use of brands such as McDonald’s that are withdrawing from Russia in droves. The effect of losing patent protections will vary by company, experts say, depending on whether they have a valuable patent in Russia. The U.S. government has long warned of intellectual property rights violations in the country; last year Russia was among nine nations on a “priority watch list” for alleged failures to protect intellectual property. Now Russian entities could not be sued for damages if they use certain patents without permission.

The patent decree and any further lifting of intellectual property protections could affect Western investment in Russia well beyond any de-escalation of the war in Ukraine, said Josh Gerben, an intellectual property lawyer in Washington. Firms that already saw risks in Russian business would have more reason to worry. “It’s just another example of how [Putin] has forever changed the relationship that Russia will have with the world,” Gerben said. Russia’s decree removes protections for patent holders who are registered in hostile countries, do business in them or hold their nationality.

The Kremlin has not issued any decree lifting protections on trademarks. But Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development said last week that authorities are considering “removing restrictions on the use of intellectual property contained in certain goods whose supply to Russia is restricted,” according to Russian state news outlet Tass, and that potential measures could affect inventions, computer programs and trademarks. The ministry said the measures would “mitigate the impact on the market of supply chain breaks, as well as shortages of goods and services that have arisen due to the new sanctions of western countries,” Tass stated. Gerben said a similar decree on trademarks would pave the way for Russian companies to exploit American brand names that have halted their business in Russia. He gave a hypothetical involving McDonald’s, one of the latest global giants to suspend operations in Russia under public pressure.

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Google’s Messages App Can Now Handle iMessage Reactions

Google is updating the default “Messages” app to include a number of new features, such as the ability to handle iMessage “Tapbacks.” TechCrunch reports: Other coming updates include nudges to remind you to reply to messages you missed, separate tabs for business and personal messages, reminders about birthdays you may want to celebrate, support for sharper videos via a Google Photos integration and an expanded set of emoji mashups, among other things. After the update, reactions from iPhone users will be sent as an emoji on text messages on Android. As on iMessage, the emoji reaction — like love, laughter, confusion or excitement — will appear on the right side of the message. (On Android, it’s the bottom right.) This feature is first rolling out to Android devices set to English, but additional languages will follow. […] Android’s interpretation of which emoji to use varies slightly from iPhone, however. For instance, the “heart” reaction on Android becomes the “face with the heart eyes” emoji. And the iMessage’s exclamation mark reaction becomes the “face with the open mouth” emoji.

Google is also integrating Google Photos into the Message app to improve the video sharing experience. While the modern RCS standard allows people with Android devices to share high-quality videos with each other, those same videos appear blurry when shared with those on iPhone, as iMessage doesn’t support RCS. By sending the link to the video through Google Photos, iPhone users will be able to watch the video in the same high resolution. This feature will later include support for photos, too. This addition aims to push Apple to adopt the industry standard by shaming the company over video quality.

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Google Dupes Diners, Sidelines Restaurants For Delivery Profits

Google has been making unauthorized pages for restaurants and using them to take a cut of fees from delivery orders through sites like Postmates, DoorDash and Grubhub, according to a lawsuit Tuesday in San Francisco federal court. Reuters reports: The proposed class action (PDF) filed by Left Field Holdings, a Florida franchisee of Lime Fresh Mexican restaurants, said Google has been creating illegitimate digital “storefronts” for restaurants and deceiving users into thinking that the restaurants approved them. The lawsuit says Google takes a cut from the delivery sites for orders made through the storefronts, and in some cases delivery sites pay Google to divert users to them.

Left Field said restaurants are charged up to 30% of each order in fees by delivery sites, and therefore see “little (if any)” profits from them. Google never received permission to sell the restaurants’ food, designed the storefronts to look like they were restaurant-appproved, and placed a large “Order Online” button under restaurant search results to lure users to its storefronts, according to Left Field. […] The lawsuit accuses Google of deceiving customers and violating federal trademark law starting in 2019. It asks for an undisclosed amount of money damages on behalf of Left Field and similarly affected restaurant owners and a ban on Google’s alleged misuse of their trade names. In response to the lawsuit, a Google spokesperson said that the “Order Online” feature is meant to “connect customers with restaurants they want to order food from,” and that it lets restaurants “indicate whether they support online orders or prefer a specific provider, including their own ordering website.”

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China Led World With 500,000 Electric Car Exports In 2021

China exported nearly 500,000 electric cars in 2021 — more than any other country in the world — thanks to increasing sales in Europe and Southeast Asia by emerging cost-competitive automakers, Nikkei has learned. From the report: According to the General Administration of Customs of China, the number of passenger EVs exported in 2021 increased 2.6 times to 499,573 units. Meanwhile, Germany doubled its exports to about 230,000 units, while the U.S fell 30% to around 110,000 units, and Japan increased 24% to 27,400 units — according to data compiled by the German Association of the Automotive Industry and the Japan External Trade Organization.

China accounts for 60% of global EV production, and is emerging as the world’s factory for EVs having already secured the same position in digital product manufacturing. Exports to the EU grew in the wake of it announcing a policy to ban the sale of new hybrid and gasoline-powered vehicles in 2035. China’s EV exports to Europe rose fivefold to 230,000 units, with the region absorbing half of China’s total EV exports. Belgium imported 87,000 units and the U.K. 50,000 units. Of the almost 500,000 units exported, more than 100,000 appear to have originated from Tesla’s Shanghai plant.

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Concept Touchscreen Uses Temperature To Create Feel of Friction

Researchers at Texas A&M have come up with a novel way for touchscreens to feel more than just perfectly smooth by fooling a user’s sense of touch through temperature changes. Gizmodo reports: In a recently published paper in the Science Robotics journal, they found that by regulating the temperature of the surface of a touchscreen, they can increase or decrease the amount of friction a finger feels like it’s experiencing. The sensation of friction can be increased by as much as 50% by increasing a touchscreen’s surface temperature from 23 degrees Celsius to 42 degrees Celsius, while the actual temperature changes are imperceptible to the user, assuming they’re sticking to taps or quick swipe gestures on the screen.

The current prototypes don’t facilitate temperature adjustments in fine detail, but the eventual goal is to be able to manipulate and quickly change the temperature on any region of a touchscreen so that as a finger is sliding across it the changes in friction that are felt fool the brain into thinking it’s feeling physical buttons like keyboards, playback controls, even joysticks and action buttons for gaming.

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Ukraine Warns Chernobyl Nuclear Plant Is Without Power

On February 24, Russian forces seized control of the Chernobyl nuclear plant and took its staff hostage, causing radiation levels to increase about 20-fold from all the heavy military vehicles stirring contaminated soil in the exclusion zone surrounding the plant. Today, the Ukrainian government warned that the abandoned nuclear power plant, including other nuclear facilities nearby, no longer have electricity after a power line was damaged. Axios reports: A loss of power at the plant could disrupt the cooling of radioactive material stored there, risking radioactive leakage that can be carried by wind to other parts of Europe. […] “About 20,000 spent fuel assemblies are stored in the spent nuclear fuel storage facility-1. They need constant cooling, which is possible only if there is electricity. If it is not there, the pumps will not cool. As a result, the temperature in the holding pools will increase,” the Ukrainian government said. “After that evaporation will occur, that will lead to nuclear discharge. The wind can transfer the radioactive cloud to other regions of Ukraine, Belarus, Russia and Europe. In addition, there is no ventilation inside the facility,” it added.

The International Atomic Energy Agency said Wednesday that Ukraine had informed it of the power outage and called it a violation of a “key safety pillar” but saw “no critical impact on safety” in this case. The agency’s director general said Tuesday that it was no longer receiving data monitoring systems installed at the plant and other facilities and that the handling of nuclear material in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone had been put on hold.
“I’m deeply concerned about the difficult and stressful situation facing staff at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and the potential risks this entails for nuclear safety. I call on the forces in effective control of the site to urgently facilitate the safe rotation of personnel there,” IAEA director general Rafael Mariano Grossi said Tuesday.

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Amazon Nears ‘Tipping Point’ Where Rainforest Could Transform Into Savanna

If deforestation continues, the Amazon rainforest could reach a critical tipping point where most of it transforms into a dry savanna, a new study warns. Live Science reports: The study, published Monday in the journal Nature Climate Change, suggests that more than 75% of the rainforest has steadily lost “resilience” since the 2000s, meaning those portions of the rainforest now can’t recover as easily from disturbances, such as droughts and wildfires. Regions of the rainforest that show the most profound losses in resilience are located near farms, urban areas and areas used for logging, Inside Climate News reported. Climate change, rampant deforestation and burnings conducted for agriculture and ranching have left the Amazon far warmer and drier than in decades past, and since 2000, the region has endured three major droughts, The New York Times reported.

By examining satellite images taken between 1991 and 2016, the researchers determined how long the rainforest took to bounce back after such events, The Guardian reported. The researchers determined that, since the turn of the 21st century, the rainforest has been taking longer and longer to recover biomass, meaning the mass of living trees and other vegetation, after droughts and fires. “That lack of resilience shows that, indeed, there is only so much of a beating that this forest can take,” Paulo Brando, a tropical ecologist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the study, told The New York Times. If the rainforests surpasses this tipping point, the ecosystem could swiftly change into a vast savanna, unleashing tens of billions of tons of carbon dioxide during the transformation, The Guardian reported.

At this point, can anything be done to prevent the Amazon rainforest from turning into the Amazon savanna? Experts say there is. “These systems are highly resilient, and the fact that we have reduced resilience doesn’t mean that it has lost all its resilience,” Brando told the Times. “If you leave them alone for a little bit, they come back super strongly.” But it requires key steps to be taken, experts said. “We have to get to zero deforestation, zero forest degradation,” Carlos Nobre, a senior scientist at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Brazil, who was not involved in the study, told the Times. “We still have a chance to save the forest.”

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Internet Backbone Giant Lumen Cuts Service To Russia

Lumen Technologies, an American company that operates one of the largest Internet backbones and carries a significant percentage of the world’s Internet traffic, said today it will stop routing traffic for organizations based in Russia. KrebsOnSecurity reports: Lumen’s decision comes just days after a similar exit by backbone provider Cogent, and amid a news media crackdown in Russia that has already left millions of Russians in the dark about what is really going on with their president’s war in Ukraine. Monroe, La. based Lumen (formerly CenturyLink) initially said it would halt all new business with organizations based in Russia, leaving open the possibility of continuing to serve existing clients there. But on Tuesday the company said it could no longer justify that stance.

“Life has taken a turn in Russia and Lumen is unable to continue to operate in this market,” Lumen said in a published statement. “The business services we provide are extremely small and very limited as is our physical presence. However, we are taking steps to immediately stop business in the region.” “We decided to disconnect the network due to increased security risk inside Russia,” the statement continues. “We have not yet experienced network disruptions but given the increasingly uncertain environment and the heightened risk of state action, we took this move to ensure the security of our and our customers’ networks, as well as the ongoing integrity of the global Internet.” According to Internet infrastructure monitoring firm Kentik, Lumen is the top international transit provider to Russia, with customers including Russian telecom giants Rostelecom and TTK, as well as all three major mobile operators (MTS, Megafon and VEON).

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Better.com Employees Learned of Layoffs When Severance Checks Appeared In Payroll App

The mass layoffs at digital mortgage lender Better.com have reportedly started, according to employees and other sources at the company, and affected workers are finding out by seeing a severance check in their Workday account — the company’s payroll app. TechCrunch’s Mary Ann Azevedo reports: The layoffs were meant to be announced by the company on March 9, but one employee — who wishes to remain anonymous due to fear of repercussions — told TechCrunch that “they accidentally rolled out the severance payslips too early.” Better.com execs reportedly planned the layoffs for March 8 but moved the date to March 9 when news of the initial date leaked. Apparently, when execs realized their mistake, they deleted the checks from some people’s Workday accounts. According to the employee, the severance checks arrived without any additional communication from the company.

The employee told me: “Better Layoffs have started. Severance showing in our Workday app (which is payroll) as of 12 AM respective time zones. No email, no call, nothing. This was handled disgustingly.” The employee — who had an inkling that the cuts were coming — added: “Leadership remained absolutely silent, never acknowledged anything in regards to layoffs. They still haven’t.” An estimated 3,000 of the company’s 8,000 employees in the U.S. and India are being let go.

It is notable that the missive came from [CFO Kevin Ryan] and not CEO Vishal Garg, who suffered severe backlash after laying off 900 employees during a Zoom meeting in early December in what many considered to be a cold and callous manner. The video went viral globally and Garg was vilified not only for the way he notified employees, but for what employees described as verbally abusive behavior. […] Ryan wrote that the company “had to adjust to volatility in the interest rate environment and refinancing market.” He added: “Unfortunately, that means we must take the difficult step of streamlining our operations further and reducing our workforce in both the U.S. and India in a substantial way. This has not been an easy few months, and I want to express my sincere thanks to every member of the Better team for your hard work and focus,” he added. “Our strongest days lie ahead.”

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Half of US Adults Exposed To Harmful Lead Levels As Kids

Over 170 million U.S.-born people who were adults in 2015 were exposed to harmful levels of lead as children, a new study estimates. The Associated Press reports: Researchers used blood-lead level, census and leaded gasoline consumption data to examine how widespread early childhood lead exposure was in the country between 1940 and 2015. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, they estimated that half the U.S. adult population in 2015 had been exposed to lead levels surpassing five micrograms per deciliter — the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention threshold for harmful lead exposure at the time.

The scientists from Florida State University and Duke University also found that 90% of children born in the U.S. between 1950 and 1981 had blood-lead levels higher than the CDC threshold. And the researchers found significant impact on cognitive development: on average, early childhood exposure to lead resulted in a 2.6-point drop in IQ. The researchers only examined lead exposure caused by leaded gasoline, the dominant form of exposure from the 1940s to the late 1980s, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Leaded gasoline for on-road vehicles was phased out starting in the 1970s, then finally banned in 1996.

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