Posts

Posted on

getting good use of your code-required smoke alarms

click to enlarge

If your home was constructed in the past twenty years, it almost certainly has several code-required smoke alarms.  You can see, at right, an example of this.  The home that I discuss here has half a dozen of these First Alert model 3120B smoke alarms.

The point of this blog article is to help you make some actual meaningful use of your code-required smoke alarms, above and beyond their intended function which is to permit the building inspector to grant a “certificate of occupancy” for the newly constructed home.  Continue reading “getting good use of your code-required smoke alarms”

Posted on

Has your membership in a listserv been disabled due to “excessive bounces”?

(Updated November 25, 2023 to recognize that if your email service provider is bouncing the normal listserv postings, your email service provider may also have bounced the warning message that was sent to you about your email service provider bouncing the normal listserv postings.)

In recent days, dozens of members of our intellectual property listservs have received (or at least have been sent) email warnings that start like this:

Your membership in the mailing list <blah> has been disabled due to excessive bounces.  The last bounce received from you was dated <recent date>. You will not get any more messages from this list until you re-enable your membership. You will receive 2 more reminders like this before your membership in the list is deleted.

If you received such an email warning, this is because (a) you belong to one or more of our listservs, and (b) you selected Microsoft (outlook) to be your email service provider.   But of course another possibility is that you did not receive this warning email message, because your email service provider bounced the warning email message too.  What should you do next? Continue reading “Has your membership in a listserv been disabled due to “excessive bounces”?”

Posted on

Coyote carrying box marked “ACME”

click to enlarge

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.

Posted on

Telling twelve thousand people about four free webinars

click to enlarge

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”

Posted on

What is “card testing”? What should you do about it?

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?”

Posted on

How many Patent Center bugs and missing features can one encounter in a single e-filing task?

Today I had to pay an Issue Fee.  Let’s see how many Patent Center bugs and missing features I encountered in a single e-filing session in Patent Center, trying to pay an Issue Fee. Try to guess how many bugs and missing features were encountered. Continue reading “How many Patent Center bugs and missing features can one encounter in a single e-filing task?”

Posted on

Patent Center is not ready, and PAIR cannot be shut down tonight

click to enlarge

Just now I logged in at Patent Center and tried to view my outgoing correspondence.  I was greeted with a big red error message saying Search Limit Reached.  This is bug number CP178.  I opened EBC ticket number 1-843318724.   EBC agent 50 checked with the Patent Center team and reported back that this is a feature, not a bug.  This feature blocks data mining, he explained.  Continue reading “Patent Center is not ready, and PAIR cannot be shut down tonight”