Today in Techrights

• The European Patent Office Goes Down a Very Slippery Slope by Promoting and Defending Patents on Life/Nature in Defiance of Parliament and the EPC
• Software Patents Are in a Freefall in Courts Worldwide, But the EPO Keeps Granting and Promoting These
• Team UPC Excited Over Nothing, President Campinos Rarely Even Mentions UPC Anymore
• Battistelli’s Bodyguard Has Been Arrested, But Battistelli Should Join Him
• Links 22/2/2019: GNOME 3.32 Beta 2 Released and Fedora 30 Flicker-Free Boot

Q4OS Linux Revives Your Old Laptop and Give it Windows Looks

Q4OS is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Debian. It imitates the look and feel of Windows. Read the complete review to know more about Q4OS Linux.

Android Leftovers

• Android users can now disable Facebook from secretly collecting their location data

• Rumors: Nokia 3.2 (4.2?) TA-1157 gets WiFi certification, running Android 9 Pie

• Nokia 2.1 with 1 GB RAM gets Android Pie Go

• Xiaomi to start beta testing Android Pie update for Redmi Note 5 Pro, Redmi Note 6 Pro and Redmi Y2

• Samsung Galaxy A7 2018 is getting an Android Pie beta in India

• Samsung’s Galaxy S10 will come with Google’s Digital Wellbeing out of the box

• Nike's $350 self-lacing sneaker is having an Android problem

• Google introduces Android Enterprise Recommended for Managed Service Providers

• One developer is attempting to bring Android to the Nintendo Switch

• How to install Android widgets on a Chromebook

• LG’s latest budget Android phones have Google Assistant buttons and small notches

• 10 Best Video Editors for Android

today's leftovers

• Clear Linux Has A Goal To Get 3x More Upstream Components In Their Distro

  For those concerned that running Clear Linux means less available packages/bundles than the likes of Debian, Arch Linux, and Fedora with their immense collection of packaged software, Clear has a goal this year of increasing their upstream components available on the distribution by three times. Intel Fellow Arjan van de Ven provided an update on their bundling state/changes for the distribution. In this update he shared that the Clear Linux team at Intel established a goal this year to have "three times more upstream components in the distro. That's a steep growth, and we want to do that with some basic direction and without reducing quality/etc. We have some folks figuring out what things are the most desired that we lack, so we can add those with most priority... but this is where again we more than welcome feedback."

• The results from our past three Linux distro polls

  You might think this annual poll would be fairly similar from year to year, from what distros we list to how people answer, but the results are wildly different from year to year. (At the time of the creation of each poll, we pull the top 15 distributions according to DistroWatch over the past 12 months.) Last year, the total votes tallied in at 15,574! And the winner was PCLinuxOS with Ubuntu a close second. Another interesting point is that in 2018, there were 950 votes for "other" and 122 comments compared to this year with only 367 votes for "other" and 69 comments.

• Fedora Strategy FAQ Part 3: What does this mean for Fedora releases?

  Fedora operating system releases are (largely) time-based activity where a new base operating system (kernel, libraries, compilers) is built and tested against our Editions for functionality. This provides a new source for solutions to be built on. The base operating systems may continue to be maintained on the current 13 month life cycle — or services that extend that period may be provided in the future. A solution is never obligated to build against all currently maintained bases.

• How open data and tools can save lives during a disaster

  If you've lived through a major, natural disaster, you know that during the first few days you'll probably have to rely on a mental map, instead of using a smartphone as an extension of your brain. Where's the closest hospital with disaster care? What about shelters? Gas stations? And how many soft story buildings—with their propensity to collapse—will you have to zig-zag around to get there? Trying to answer these questions after moving back to earthquake-prone San Francisco is why I started the Resiliency Maps project. The idea is to store information about assets, resources, and hazards in a given geographical area in a map that you can download and print out. The project contributes to and is powered by OpenStreetMap (OSM), and the project's entire toolkit is open source, ensuring that the maps will be available to anyone who wants to use them.

• Millions of websites threatened by highly critical code-execution bug in Drupal

  Drupal is the third most-widely used CMS behind WordPress and Joomla. With an estimated 3 percent to 4 percent of the world's billion-plus websites, that means Drupal runs tens of millions of sites. Critical flaws in any CMS are popular with hackers, because the vulnerabilities can be unleashed against large numbers of sites with a single, often-easy-to-write script.

• Avoiding the coming IoT dystopia

  Bradley Kuhn works for the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) and part of what that organization does is to think about the problems that software freedom may encounter in the future. SFC worries about what will happen with the four freedoms as things change in the world. One of those changes is already upon us: the Internet of Things (IoT) has become quite popular, but it has many dangers, he said. Copyleft can help; his talk is meant to show how. It is still an open question in his mind whether the IoT is beneficial or not. But the "deep trouble" that we are in from IoT can be mitigated to some extent by copyleft licenses that are "regularly and fairly enforced". Copyleft is not the solution to all of the problems, all of the time—no idea, no matter how great, can be—but it can help with the dangers of IoT. That is what he hoped to convince attendees with his talk. A joke that he had seen at least three times at the conference (and certainly before that as well) is that the "S" in IoT stands for security. As everyone knows by now, the IoT is not about security. He pointed to some recent incidents, including IoT baby monitors that were compromised by attackers in order to verbally threaten the parents. This is "scary stuff", he said.