Musings about office technology from an intellectual property lawyer
And now a moment for a smile. It turns out that there are at least two places where you can go and be warned to be careful if you see a coyote carrying a box marked “ACME”. These places include Juneau International Airport and Redwood City, California.
The map at right shows, in real time, our progress in letting twelve thousand people learn that they have an opportunity to attend four free-of-charge webinars about PCT forms. As you can see, some 1600 emails have been sent (light green shading) to people in Asia and Africa and eastern and central Europe. Just now, emails are being sent (dark green shading) to people in west Africa and parts of Greenland. Some 11000 emails are waiting to be sent to people in North and South America. Why did these emails not get sent all at once? Continue reading “Telling twelve thousand people about four free webinars”
Yesterday, for the first time in the seven-year history of our OPLF shopping cart, somebody used our shopping cart for “card testing”. A fraudster in a foreign country had purchased a bundle of stolen credit card numbers, and wanted to determine which of the cards was still valid. Such a person will engage in “card testing”. The person tries to make purchases with the credit card numbers, using an online commerce site. Yesterday, the person chose our OPLF shopping cart. By the time that we had shut out the “card testing”, the fraudster had tested about 198 credit card numbers, and had found two of the cards to be valid. (This means the card holder had not yet canceled the stolen card number.)
The service providers Woo and Stripe performed admirably in this incident.
How did we learn that the “card testing” was happening? What did we do in response? What permanent harm, if any, flowed from this incident? What protective step might we have taken earlier? Continue reading “What is “card testing”? What should you do about it?”
Hello loyal readers. A couple of days ago, this blog got hacked. Instead of the usual “Ant-Like Persistence” page, it was a mostly blank page asking the visitor to type in a password.
Several nice people dropped emails to me to let me know they had noticed the problem.
I will describe what had gone wrong and what I did to fix the hack. Continue reading “Dealing with a hack”
I am hoping to collect some fairly comprehensive information about where the charging ports are on EVs and PHEVs that are used in the US.
At this article you can see information about charging port locations on European vehicles. My hope is to do the same for America vehicles.
Are you in the US? Do you have an EV or a PHEV? If so, I would be very grateful if you could share the location of your charging port. To respond, click here.
The questionnaire also asks if you have an EV charger at home, and whether you have any adapters for charging at other kinds of charging stations.
Thank you for helping.
The US State Department says that an “expedited” passport renewal by mail has a processing time of 7-9 weeks. I recently had the good fortune to get a renewal done by mail in less than a month. My renewal papers got delivered to the State Department on August 16, 2023, and I had my new passport in hand on September 15, 2023. Here are things that probably helped. Continue reading “Getting a US passport renewed promptly”
Every time one inserts a connector into any communications channel, there will inevitably be some nonzero amount of signal loss. Green optical fiber connectors use a clever bit of geometry to reduce greatly the signal loss that would otherwise be incurred.
One of the most familiar and beloved wildflowers in the Rocky Mountains is the so-called “one-sided penstemon”. True to its name, the plant has its flowers all on one side of the stem. Continue reading “Why penstemon is one-sided?”
For their entire careers, US patent and trademark practitioners have lived and breathed a world of “reel and frame numbers” that are somehow intimately connected with the recordation of patent and trademark assignments. What exactly are reel and frame numbers, and how is it that reel and frame numbers relate closely with bitcoin and blockchain and shared ledgers? Continue reading “What reel and frame numbers have to do with bitcoin and blockchain and shared ledgers”
What is the device shown in the photograph at right? My quick answer, and you might say the same thing, is that it is “an EV charger”. But my quick answer is wrong. The device shown at right is a mere “EVSE”, not an “EV charger”. This fact, it turns out, explains why a Hyundai Kona charges at a mere 26 miles per hour, when plugged into this 48-amp device, instead of as much as 42 or 43 miles per hour the way some other EV might do. See a blog article about this.
