RED filed a lawsuit yesterday suing (PDF) Nikon for infringing on its video compression patents. PetaPixel reports: The lawsuit was filed in a southern California federal court today and asserts that the Japanese camera manufacturer and its United States subsidiaries have illegally infringed on seven patents that deal specifically with "a video camera that can be configured to highly compress video data in a visually lossless manner."

In the filing, RED notes a type of compression that it says it has patented and is in use by Nikon in the Z9: "The camera can be configured to transform blue and red image data in a manner that enhances the compressibility of the data. The data can then be compressed and stored in this form. This allows a user to reconstruct the red and blue data to obtain the original raw data for a modified version of the original raw data that is visually lossless when demosaiced. Additionally, the data can be processed so the green image elements are demosaiced first, and then the red and blue elements are reconstructed based on values of the demosaiced green image elements."

This compression comes thanks to a partnership with intoPIX's TicoRAW which was announced last December. [...] The TicoRAW feature has been in the news for months, but RED was likely waiting for it to be implemented into a competitor's camera before filing a lawsuit. RED's lawsuit says Nikon's infringement on its patent was "willful" and claims Nikon would have known about RED's patents. [...] RED then cites multiple lawsuits it has filed against Kinefinity, Sony, and Nokia over the years. RED is seeking damages or royalties for the infringement as well as an injunction to ban Nikon from further infringing.

Meta Platforms built its industry-leading virtual reality headset by infringing Immersion's patents, the smaller company alleged in a lawsuit. From a report: The Meta Quest 2, which dominates the market, infringes six patents covering haptic technology, Immersion said in a complaint filed Thursday in federal court in Waco, Texas. In video game systems and controllers, haptics allow users to experience vibrations that mimic real-life forces -- such as blocking a punch in a virtual boxing game. Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has committed to spending $10 billion a year to bring to life his vision of a virtual reality-enabled metaverse. Sales of Meta Quest 2 hit 8.7 million units in 2021, twice as much as in the prior year, and the company owns 80% of the market.

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Remember that patent lawsuit filed against GNOME's Shotwell in 2019? An enterprising open source lawyer has challenged it within the patent office and gotten the whole thing canceled!
OpenSource.org argues that decision by the U.S. patent office "may well give patent trolls cause to steer clear of open source projects — even more than the fierce resistance the community impressively funded and mounted in the GNOME case." Of the many methods developed over the past 20 years to eliminate patent threats against FOSS, none is as powerful as challenging the nefarious patents directly. That's what McCoy Smith, founder of OSI sponsor LexPan Law, did.... Smith pointed out in a re-examination request to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office that the patent was not for any new invention.

They agreed. As a result, all of these "claims" in the Rothschild '086 Patent — the part of a patent describing what the patent rights cover — have consequently been canceled. The Rothschild '086 patent can no longer be used against any victim, including open source projects.

Of course, that's little comfort to the 20+ victims attacked after GNOME with the now-proven-worthless Rothschild '086 patent, or the 50+ companies targeted with related patents that haven't yet been re-examined.... Still, it's good to know there are open source champions of all sizes defending the development of open software.

After Dell's new Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) leaked out last week, several tech sites led many to believe that the company was taking a path to "lock out users upgrades." However, according to PCWorld citing both the person who designed and patented the CAMM standard, as well as the product manager of the first Dell Precision laptop to feature it, "the intent of the new memory module standard is to head-off looming bandwidth ceilings in the current SO-DIMM designs." They claim that CAMM could increase performance, improve reliability, aid user upgrades, and eventually lower costs too. From the report: Most of the internet hot takes last week, however, reacted to CAMM being proprietary, which is typically viewed as a method to lock people into buying upgrades only from one company. Dell officials, however, insist that's not the case at all. "One of the tenants of the PC industry is standards," said Dell's Tom Schnell, the Senior Distinguished Engineer who designed much of it. "We believe in that; we put standards into our products. We're not keeping it to ourselves, we hope it becomes the next industry standard."

Schnell said that Dell isn't making the modules and has worked with memory companies as well as Intel on this. In the future, a person with a CAMM-equipped laptop will be able to buy RAM from any third party and install it in the laptop. Yes, initially, Dell will likely be the only place to get CAMM upgrades, but that should change as the standard scales up and is adopted by other PC makers. The new memory modules are also built using commodity DRAMs just like conventional SO-DIMMs.

In fact, Dell points out, it's not even "proprietary" on its own laptops. The first Precision workstations that come with CAMM will also eventually be offered with conventional SO-DIMMs using an interposer. Mano Gialusis, product manager for Precision workstations, said the interposer option goes into the same CAMM mount, too. With CAMM now a reality, Dell's next step is to get it in front of JEDEC, the memory standards organization, to make it available to others, he said. Why not create a standard from scratch? Schnell said its far easier to get a standard minted once it's proven to work rather than trying to simply create something anew every time. The report goes on to say that Dell does hold patents on the CAMM design "and there will be royalties," but "no standard can go forward through JEDEC unless the licensing is not anti-competitive, is reasonably priced, and cannot discriminate against a company."

A writer for The Drive reports that "Recently, I noticed a part that I made for my Honda Accord was removed from Printables, the newly rebranded 3D printing repository offered by Prusa.

"There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for it, but I didn't think anything else about it...until reports of a mass deletion started popping up on Reddit." All models referencing the word "Honda" posted prior to March 30, 2022, were seemingly removed from Printables without warning. These included speaker brackets, key housings, hood latches, shifter bushings, washer fluid caps, roof latch handles, and my trunk lid handle — a part not offered on 10th generation Accords sold in the U.S. at all. In fact, many of the removed parts had no Honda branding but were just compatible with Honda vehicles. As it turns out, Prusa says it was issued a takedown notice from Honda and removed all 3D models that referenced the brand.

"I can confirm to you that we have received a letter from a lawyer representing Honda, informing us that we were required to remove any model which used 'Honda' in the listing, the model itself, or one of several trademarks/logos also associated with Honda," a Prusa spokesperson told The Drive in an email. "This will also be related to the naming of the files it self (sic), as for Honda this would be considered as a violation of their trademark/patents." A Prusa employee responded to a post on the company's forums, noting that Honda sent a "huge legal document" that covered every model that the company wished to have deleted. The document reportedly included items that did not have Honda logos, but also specific items with certain shapes and dimensions — like a washer fluid reservoir cap, for example.

A response from another employee was posted suggesting other sites that host 3D models were also sent a similar takedown notice.

Back in 1987 Alexander Trevor worked with the GIF format's creator, Steve Wilhite, at CompuServe. 35 years later Fast Company tech editor Harry McCracken (also Slashdot reader harrymcc) located Trevor for the inside story: Wilhite did not come up with the GIF format in order to launch a billion memes. It was 1987, and he was a software engineer at CompuServe, the most important online service until an upstart called America Online took off in the 1990s. And he developed the format in response to a request from CompuServe executive Alexander "Sandy" Trevor. (Trevor's most legendary contribution to CompuServe was not instigating GIF: He also invented the service's CB Simulator — the first consumer chat rooms and one of the earliest manifestation of social networking, period. That one he coded himself as a weekend project in 1980.)

GIF came to be because online services such as CompuServe were getting more graphical, but the computer makers of the time — such as Apple, Commodore, and IBM — all had their own proprietary image types. "We didn't want to have to put up images in 79 different formats," explains Trevor. CompuServe needed one universal graphics format.

Even though the World Wide Web and digital cameras were still in the future, work was already underway on the image format that came to be known as JPEG. But it wasn't optimized for CompuServe's needs: For example, stock charts and weather graphics didn't render crisply. So Trevor asked Wilhite to create an image file type that looked good and downloaded quickly at a time when a 2,400 bits-per-second dial-up modem was considered torrid. Reading a technical journal, Wilhite came across a discussion of an efficient compression technique known as LZW for its creators — Abraham Limpel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It turned out to be an ideal foundation for what CompuServe was trying to build, and allowed GIF to pack a lot of image information into as few bytes as possible. (Much later, computing giant Unisys, which gained a patent for LZW, threatened companies that used it with lawsuits, leading to a licensing agreement with CompuServe and the creation of the patent-free PNG image format.)

GIF officially debuted on June 15, 1987. "It met my requirements, and it was extremely useful for CompuServe," says Trevor....

GIF was also versatile, offering the ability to store the multiple pictures that made it handy for creating mini-movies as well as static images. And it spread beyond CompuServe, showing up in Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, and then in Netscape Navigator. The latter browser gave GIFs the ability to run in an infinite loop, a crucial feature that only added to their hypnotic quality. Seeing cartoon hamsters dance for a split second is no big whoop, but watching them shake their booties endlessly was just one of many cultural moments that GIFs have given us.

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.

For the last two years, Unified Patents, an international organization of over 200 businesses, has been winning the battle against patent trolls "to keep them from stealing from the companies and organizations that actually use patents' intellectual property (IP)," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan Nichols. "This is their story to date." From the report: Unified Patents brings the fight to the trolls. It deters patent trolls from attacking its members by making it too expensive for the troll to win. The group does this by examining troll patents and their activities in various technology sectors (Zones). The United Patents Open Source Software Zone (OSS Zone) is the newest of these Zones. [...] Even before OSS Zone was formally launched, Unified Patents along with the Open Invention Network (OIN), the world's largest patent non-aggression group, launched legal cases against poor quality PAE-owned (Patent Assertion Entities) patents. The Linux Foundation and Microsoft have also joined the OSS Zone to battle these bad patents. [...]

Together, United Patents uses open-source software evidence as proof to establish that the trolls often don't have a case. This is done using Inter Partes Review (IPR), a 2012 legal tool for showing that a bad patent never should have been granted in the first place. [Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin] notes, "The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)'s discretionary rulings on IPRs have changed the landscape around NPEs. These cases take a long time to be resolved. Typically, it takes from 12 to 24 months. That also makes them expensive for both the OSS Zone and the trolls. Keith Bergelt, the OIN's CEO, said "In other technology areas when patents go through the IPR process or are reexamined, there is a settlement around 20% of the time. In the OSS Zone, there are few settlements. This makes it more costly and difficult to administer, but also is difficult on the PAEs. When the success rate against their patents is over 95%, certain PAEs that would otherwise hope to settle have essentially given up on defending their patents." Still, with such a high success rate, it's worth the expense.

To date, Unified has overseen and managed 43 challenges. Of these, 12 patents were found invalid, another 23 cases have been instituted, and six are still in process. This has led to multiple settlements for Unified Patents members. These, in turn directly pass through to OIN's 3,600+ community members. For example, an Accelerated Memory Tech patent 6,513,062, was used by the troll IP Investments Group to claim that the open-source Redis, which manages cache resources on the cloud, violated the patent. Redis, not having any money, IP Investments Group instead went after Hulu, Citrix Systems, Barracuda Networks, Kemp Technologies, and F5 Networks for their use of Redis software. IP Investments Group gave up rather than fighting it out. Everyone who uses Redis wins. It's one small victory, but that's how the patent troll wars are won. And, with the United Patents' high-success rate in knocking out bad patents, slowly but surely the patent trolls are being driven back from not only open-source software but all software.

There's won't be a big revival for BlackBerry phones anytime soon. OnwardMobility, the Austin-based startup that announced its plans to release a 5G BlackBerry device with a physical keyboard back in 2020, is shutting down. From a report: The company posted a notice of its closure on its website, making it clear that it won't be proceeding with the development of the smartphone. This comes a month after it responded to people asking about the status of the project with a blog post entitled "contrary to popular belief, we are not dead." While OnwardMobility didn't expound on the reason behind its closure, Android Police reported a few days ago that its license to use the BlackBerry name had been canceled. Apparently, BlackBerry wants to distance itself from its past as a smartphone manufacturer after it sold off its remaining mobile patents for $600 million in the beginning of February. OnwardMobility reportedly decided not to push through with the development of a new smartphone without the BlackBerry name, especially since it won't be easy entering the market with an ongoing global component shortage.

The EU is taking China to the World Trade Organization for alleged patent infringements that are costing companies billions of euros, as part of what officials in Brussels claim is a "power grab" by Beijing [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] to set smartphone technology licensing rates. Financial Times reports: Businesses, including Sweden's Ericsson, Finland's Nokia and Sharp of Japan, have lost money after China's supreme court banned them from protecting their patents by securing licensing deals in foreign courts, the European Commission said. Chinese courts set licence fees at around half the market rate previously agreed between western technology providers and manufacturers such as Oppo, Xiaomi, ZTE and Huawei, it added.

The lower licensing fees set by Beijing deprive smartphone makers and other mobile telecommunications businesses of a crucial source of revenue to reinvest in research and development. "It is part of a global power grab by the Chinese government by legal means," said a European Commission official. "It is a means to push Europe out." Smartphone makers have agreed global standards for telecommunications networks. In return, technology manufacturers must license their patents to others. If they cannot agree on a price, they go to court to set it. Chinese courts generally set prices at half the level of those in the west, meaning their companies pay less for the technology from overseas providers. In August 2020, China's Supreme People's Court decided that Chinese courts can impose "anti-suit injunctions," which forbid a company taking a case to a court outside the country. Those that do are liable for a â147,000 daily fine and the judgments of courts elsewhere are ignored.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: The delayed 5G BlackBerry phone is dead, OnwardMobility has confirmed on its website. "It is with great sadness that we announce that OnwardMobility will be shutting down, and we will no longer be proceeding with the development of an ultra-secure smartphone with a physical keyboard," OnwardMobility said in a message posted Friday, as spotted earlier by CrackBerry. "Please know that this was not a decision that we made lightly or in haste. We share your disappointment in this news and assure you this is not the outcome we worked and hoped for." Android Police and CrackBerry originally reported the phone had been cancelled on Feb. 11, saying OnwardMobility, a Texas-based startup seeking to revitalize the iconic brand through an Android-based, next-gen Wi-Fi device, lost the license from BlackBerry Ltd. to use the BlackBerry brand name. OnwardMobility did not expand on why it is shutting down and cancelling production of the phone. The news comes after BlackBerry ended service for its legacy devices in early January. "Before OnwardMobility picked up the license, Chinese manufacturer TCL was the most recent maker of BlackBerry-branded phones," adds CNET.

Most recently, the company sold its prized patent portfolio to "Catapult IP Innovations Inc." for $600 million.

Microsoft last month received a US patent covering modifications to a data-encoding technique called rANS, one of several variants in the Asymmetric Numeral System (ANS) family that support data compression schemes used by leading technology companies and open source projects. The Register reports: The creator of ANS, Jaroslaw Duda, assistant professor at Institute of Computer Science at Jagiellonian University in Poland, has been trying for years to keep ANS patent-free and available for public use. Back in 2018, Duda's lobbying helped convince Google to abandon its ANS-related patent claim in the US and Europe. And he raised the alarm last year when he learned Microsoft had applied for an rANS (range asymmetric number system) patent.

Now that Microsoft's patent application has been granted, he fears the utility of ANS will be diminished, as software developers try to steer clear of a potential infringement claim. "I don't know what to do with it -- [Microsoft's patent] looks like just the description of the standard algorithm," he told The Register in an email. The algorithm is used in JPEG XL and CRAM, as well as open source projects run by Facebook (Meta), Nvidia, and others. "This rANS variant is [for example] used in JPEG XL, which is practically finished (frozen bitstream) and [is] gaining support," Duda told The Register last year. "It provides ~3x better compression than JPEG at similar computational cost, compatibility with JPEG, progressive decoding, missing features like HDR, alpha, lossless, animations. "There is a large team, mostly from Google, behind it. After nearly 30 years, it should finally replace the 1992 JPEG for photos and images, starting with Chrome, Android."

Using a novel polymerization process, MIT chemical engineers have created a new material that they say is stronger than steel and as light as plastic, and can be easily manufactured in large quantities. MIT News: The new material is a two-dimensional polymer that self-assembles into sheets, unlike all other polymers, which form one-dimensional, spaghetti-like chains. Until now, scientists had believed it was impossible to induce polymers to form 2D sheets. Such a material could be used as a lightweight, durable coating for car parts or cell phones, or as a building material for bridges or other structures, says Michael Strano, the Carbon P. Dubbs Professor of Chemical Engineering at MIT and the senior author of the new study. "We don't usually think of plastics as being something that you could use to support a building, but with this material, you can enable new things," he says. "It has very unusual properties and we're very excited about that."

The researchers have filed for two patents on the process they used to generate the material, which they describe in a paper appearing today in Nature. MIT postdoc Yuwen Zeng is the lead author of the study. {olymers, which include all plastics, consist of chains of building blocks called monomers. These chains grow by adding new molecules onto their ends. Once formed, polymers can be shaped into three-dimensional objects, such as water bottles, using injection molding. Polymer scientists have long hypothesized that if polymers could be induced to grow into a two-dimensional sheet, they should form extremely strong, lightweight materials. However, many decades of work in this field led to the conclusion that it was impossible to create such sheets. One reason for this was that if just one monomer rotates up or down, out of the plane of the growing sheet, the material will begin expanding in three dimensions and the sheet-like structure will be lost. However, in the new study, Strano and his colleagues came up with a new polymerization process that allows them to generate a two-dimensional sheet called a polyaramide. For the monomer building blocks, they use a compound called melamine, which contains a ring of carbon and nitrogen atoms. Under the right conditions, these monomers can grow in two dimensions, forming disks. These disks stack on top of each other, held together by hydrogen bonds between the layers, which make the structure very stable and strong.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: BlackBerry is adding another sad chapter to the downfall of its smartphone business. Today the company announced a sale of its prized patent portfolio for $600 million. The buyer is "Catapult IP Innovations Inc.," a new company BlackBerry describes as "a special purpose vehicle formed to acquire the BlackBerry patent assets." BlackBerry says the patents are for "mobile devices, messaging and wireless networking." These are going to be the patents surrounding BlackBerry's phones, QWERTY keyboards, and BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). BlackBerry most recently weaponized these patents against Facebook Messenger in 2018, which covered ideas like muting a message thread and displaying notifications as a numeric icon badge. BlackBerry -- back when it was called RIM -- was a veteran of the original smartphone patent wars, though, and went after companies like Handspring and Good Technology in the early 2000s.

If the name "Catapult IP Innovations" didn't give it away, weaponizing BlackBerry's patents is the most obvious outcome of this deal. According to the press release, Catapult's funding for the $600 million deal is just a $450 million loan, which will immediately be given to BlackBerry in cash. The remaining $150 million is a promissory note with the first payment due in three years. That means Catapult is now a new company with a huge amount of debt, no products, and no cash flow. Assuming the plan isn't to instantly go bankrupt, Catapult needs to start monetizing BlackBerry's patents somehow, which presumably means suing everyone it believes is in violation of its newly acquired assets.

MIT, Brigham, and Women's Hospital researchers are working to eliminate many of the headaches associated with treating diabetes. According to Engadget, "They're developing all-in-one devices that measure glucose, calculate the necessary insulin dose and inject you accordingly." From the report: The first device includes the blood-drawing lancet, glucose test strips and an insulin needle. Users would first take a photo of their meal using a smartphone app to estimate the food volume and carbohydrate levels. After that, they'd start the automated process of collecting blood, calculating glucose (again through the app) and delivering the appropriate amount of insulin. The second gadget would only need one needle jab -- it would build the glucose sensor into the insulin needle and inject the appropriate amount of insulin. You'd have to wait five to ten seconds, but you wouldn't have to stick yourself twice.

The technology is still some ways off. While the first device would use parts that were already FDA-approved, it hasn't been tested in humans. The second, meanwhile, uses a new sensor type that will likely require more work to be testable with humans. Scientists have filed patents for both devices and are hoping to work with companies on further development. There's a strong motivation to bring these devices to market, at least. People with diabetes would only need to use one device at meals, and with the hybrid sensor/needle might suffer less pain. That, in turn, could encourage consistent treatment that improves your overall wellbeing.

Sweden's Ericsson has filed another set of patent infringement lawsuits against Apple in the latest salvo between the two companies over royalty payment for use of 5G wireless patents in iPhones. From a report: Both companies have already sued each other in the United States as negotiations failed over the renewal of a seven-year licensing contract for telecoms patents first struck in 2015. Ericsson sued first in October, claiming that Apple was trying to improperly cut down the royalty rates. The iPhone maker then filed a lawsuit in December accusing the Swedish company of using "strong-arm tactics" to renew patents. "Ericsson has refused to negotiate fair terms for renewing our patent licensing agreement, and instead has been suing Apple around the world to extort excessive royalties ... we are asking the court to help determine a fair price," an Apple spokesman said on Tuesday. Patent lawsuits are quite common among technology companies because every dollar saved could amount to significant amounts over the duration of the agreement, with companies such as Ericsson charging $2.50 to $5 for every 5G handset.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: In January of 2020, Sonos filed two lawsuits against Google, claiming that the latter stole its multiroom speaker technology and infringed on 100 patents. In September, Sonos then sued Google alleging that the company's entire line of Chromecast and Nest products violated five of Sonos' wireless audio patents. A judge (preliminarily) ruled in favor of Sonos. Now it's gone from bad to worse for Google, as the preliminary findings have been finalized by the U.S. International Trade Commission. As a result, Google is not allowed to import any products that violate patents owned by Sonos, which Sonos argues includes Google Pixel phones and computers, Chromecasts, and Google Home/Nest speakers.

These products produced by Google are often made outside of the United States and imported, hence why this is a big deal for Google. In the ruling (PDF) (via The New York Times), Google was also served a cease & desist in order to stop violating Sonos' patents. It has been theorized that as a result of the lawsuit, Google had removed Cast volume controls in Android 12, though it was recently added back with the January 2022 security patch. Sonos has previously said that it had proposed a licensing deal to Google for patents the company was making use of, but that neither company was able to reach an agreement. [...] There are still two more lawsuits pending against Google filed by Sonos, meaning that it's unlikely this is the last we've heard of this spat.

Japan will compensate companies to keep secret patents with potential military applications under proposed legislation, the Nikkei reported on Sunday, without citing sources. Reuters: The patents under review in the proposed economic security legislation will include technology that can help develop nuclear weapons, such as uranium enrichment and cutting-edge innovations like quantum technology, the financial daily said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: Dr. Garry Nolan is a Professor of Pathology at Stanford University. His research ranges from cancer to systems immunology. Dr. Nolan has also spent the last ten years working with a number of individuals analyzing materials from alleged Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon. His robust resume -- 300 research articles, 40 US patents, founding of eight biotech companies, and honored as one of Stanford's top 25 inventors -- makes him, easily, one of the most accomplished scientists publicly studying UAPs. Motherboard sat down with Garry to discuss his work. It has been edited for length and clarity. Motherboard's Thobey Campion starts by asking Dr. Nolan how he first became interested in UAPs. I've always been an avid reader of science fiction, so it was natural at some point that when YouTube videos about UFOs began to make the rounds I might watch a few. I noticed that this guy at the time, Steven Greer, had claimed that a little skeleton might be an alien. I remember thinking, 'Oh, I can prove or disprove that.' And so I reached out to him. I eventually showed that it wasn't an alien, it was human. We explain a fair amount about why it looked the way it did. It had a number of mutations in skeletal genes that could potentially explain the biology. The UFO community didn't like me saying that. But you know, the truth is in the science. So, I had no problem just stating the facts. We published a paper and it ended up going worldwide. It was on the front page of just about every major newspaper. What's more appealing or clickbait than 'Stanford professor sequences alien baby'?

That ended up bringing me to the attention of some people associated with the CIA and some aeronautics corporations. At the time, they had been investigating a number of cases of pilots who'd gotten close to supposed UAPs and the fields generated by them, as was claimed by the people who showed up at my office unannounced one day. There was enough drama around the Atacama skeleton that I had basically decided to forswear all continued involvement in this area. Then these guys showed up and said, 'We need you to help us with this because we want to do blood analysis and everybody says that you've got the best blood analysis instrumentation on the planet.' Then they started showing the MRIs of some of these pilots and ground personnel and intelligence agents who had been damaged. The MRIs were clear. You didn't even have to be an MD to see that there was a problem. Some of their brains were horribly, horribly damaged. And so that's what kind of got me involved. Dr. Nolan expanded on the MRIs, saying they resemble the white matter disease, or scarring, that occurs with multiple sclerosis, with the symptomology that's basically identical to what's now called Havana syndrome. "That still left individuals who had seen UAPs. They didn't have Havana syndrome. They had a smorgasbord of other symptoms."

When asked if there's anything man-made that might have this impact on the brain, Dr. Nolan said: "The only thing I can imagine is you're standing next to an electric transformer that's emitting so much energy that you're basically getting burned inside your body."

As for the UAP fragments, Dr. Nolan said some of the objects are "nondescript," and just "lumps of metal" with nothing particularly unusual about them "except that everywhere you look in the metal, the composition is different, which is odd." He added: "The common thing about all the materials that I've looked at so far, and there's about a dozen, is that almost none of them are uniform. They're all these hodgepodge mixtures. Each individual case will be composed of a similar set of elements, but they will be inhomogeneous."

Of the 10 or 12 UAP fragments he's looked at, "two seem to be not playing by our rules," he says. "That doesn't mean that they're levitating, on my desk or anything, it just means that they have altered isotope ratios."

You can read the full Q&A here.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Politico: Clearview AI has gotten the green light on a federal patent for its facial recognition technology -- an award that the company says is the first to cover a so-called "search engine for faces" that crawls the internet to find matches. Clearview's software -- which scrapes public images from social media to help law enforcement match images in government databases or surveillance footage -- has long faced fire from privacy advocates who say it uses people's faces without their knowledge or consent. Civil rights groups also argue that facial recognition technology is generally error-prone, misidentifying women and minorities at higher rates than it does white men and sometimes leading to false arrests. (A recent audit of Clearview's tech by the Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology found its results to be highly accurate (PDF), and the company said it knows of no instances to date where the technology has led to a wrongful arrest.) Now, some of those critics fear that codifying Clearview's work with a patent will accelerate the growth of these technologies before legislators or regulators have fully addressed the potential dangers.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office sent Clearview a "notice of allowance" on Wednesday, meaning the patent will be approved once the company pays certain administrative fees. The patent covers Clearview's "methods of providing information about a person based on facial recognition," including its "automated web crawler" that scans social networking sites and the internet and its algorithms that analyze and match facial images obtained online. "There are other facial recognition patents out there -- that are methods of doing it -- but this is the first one around the use of large-scale internet data," Clearview CEO and co-founder Hoan Ton-That told POLITICO in an exclusive interview. The product uses a database of more than 10 billion photos, Ton-That said, and he has emphasized that "as a person of mixed race, having non-biased technology is important to me." Clearview argues that there is a First Amendment right to make use of public material. "All information in our datasets are all publicly available info that people voluntarily posted online -- it's not anything on your private camera roll," Ton-That said. "If it was all private data, that would be a completely different story."

Ton-That said Clearview serves government users only and that "we don't intend to ever make a consumer version of Clearview AI." Yet Clearview says in its patent application that the invention could be useful for other purposes. The company argues that "it may be desirable for an individual to know more about a person that they meet, such as through business, dating, or other relationship." Common ways of learning about new people, like asking them questions or checking out their business cards, may be unreliable because the information they choose to share could be false, the application says. "The part that they're looking to protect is exactly the part that's the most problematic," said Matt Mahmoudi, an Amnesty International researcher who is leading the group's work to ban facial recognition. "They are patenting the very part of it that's in violation of international human rights law."

Mahmoudi of Amnesty International said that language in the patent leaves the door open to a cascade of new uses in the future. "It shows a willingness to go down a slippery slope of basically being available in any context," he said.