Enlarge / An image from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, where in 1874, the newest thing was not software or genetic compositions, but shutter fastenings from H.L. Norton. (credit: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled to consider two bills Thursday that would effectively nullify the Supreme Court's rulings against patents on broad software processes and human genes. Open source and Internet freedom advocates are mobilizing and pushing back.

The Patent Eligibility Restoration Act (or PERA, S. 2140), sponsored by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and Chris Coons (D-Del.), would amend US Code such that "all judicial exceptions to patent eligibility are eliminated." That would include the 2014 ruling in which the Supreme Court held, with Justice Clarence Thomas writing, that simply performing an existing process on a computer does not make it a new, patentable invention. "The relevant question is whether the claims here do more than simply instruct the practitioner to implement the abstract idea of intermediated settlement on a generic computer," Thomas wrote. "They do not."

That case also drew on Bilski v. Kappos, a case in which a patent was proposed based solely on the concept of hedging against price fluctuations in commodity markets.

Enlarge / Illustration of a person who refuses to check their iPhone's messages until RCS is enabled on their MVNO carrier, out of respect for their Android-toting friends and family. (credit: Getty Images)

The future of inter-OS mobile messaging is here, it's just unevenly distributed.

With iOS 18, Apple has made it possible for non-Apple phones to message with iPhones through Rich Communication Services (RCS). This grants upgrades from standard SMS text messages, like read receipts, easier and higher-quality media sending, typing indicators, and emoji/response compatibility. More than that, it allows for messaging while on Wi-Fi without cellular services and makes group messages far less painful to navigate and leave. Notably, RCS messages between iPhones and non-iPhones will not be encrypted, like Apple's private iMessage service available exclusively between Apple devices.

iOS 18 makes these RCS upgrades possible, but certainly not guaranteed, at least as of today. Lots of people have already been enjoying cross-platform RCS messaging when texting with iOS 18 beta users. And iPhones on the big carriers' plans can now trade RCS with Android users. But some iPhone users, particularly on mobile virtual network operators (MVNOs)—typically pre-paid services that do not own network hardware but resell major carrier access—do not have an RCS option available to them yet.

Enlarge / Sorry about all the black space in the lower-right corner. Nerdfetch does not make good use of the space it's given—unlike the Asahi install on this MacBook. (credit: Kevin Purdy)

Almost nobody truly needed Neofetch, but the people who did use it? They really liked it.

Neofetch, run from a terminal, displayed key system information alongside an ASCII-art image of the operating system or distribution running on that system. You knew most of this data, but if you're taking a screenshot of your system, it looked cool and conveyed a lot of data in a small space. "The overall purpose of Neofetch is to be used in screen-shots of your system," wrote Neofetch's creator, Dylan Araps, on its Github repository. "Neofetch shows the information other people want to see."

Neofetch did that, providing cool screenshots and proof-of-life images across nearly 150 OS versions until late April. The last update to the tool was made three years before that, and Araps' Github profile now contains a rather succinct coda: "Have taken up farming." Araps joins "going to a commune in Vermont" and "I now make furniture out of wood" in the pantheon of programmers who do not just leave the field, but flee into another realm entirely.

Enlarge (credit: Unity)

Unity, maker of a popular cross-platform engine and toolkit, will not pursue a broadly unpopular Runtime Fee that would have charged developers based on game installs rather than per-seat licenses. The move comes exactly one year after the fee's initial announcement.

In a blog post attributed to President and CEO Matt Bromberg, the CEO writes that the company cannot continue "democratizing game development" without "a partnership built on trust." Bromberg states that customers understand the necessity of price increases, but not in "a novel and controversial new form." So game developers will not be charged per installation, but they will be sorted into Personal, Pro, and Enterprise tiers by level of revenue or funding.

"Canceling the Runtime Fee for games and instituting these pricing changes will allow us to continue investing to improve game development for everyone while also being better partners," Bromberg writes.

Enlarge / Hard drives, unfortunately, tend to die not with a spectacular and sparkly bang, but with a head-is-stuck whimper. (credit: Getty Images)

One of the things enterprise storage and destruction company Iron Mountain does is handle the archiving of the media industry's vaults. What it has been seeing lately should be a wake-up call: roughly one-fifth of the hard disk drives dating to the 1990s it was sent are entirely unreadable.

Music industry publication Mix spoke with the people in charge of backing up the entertainment industry. The resulting tale is part explainer on how music is so complicated to archive now, part warning about everyone's data stored on spinning disks.

"In our line of work, if we discover an inherent problem with a format, it makes sense to let everybody know," Robert Koszela, global director for studio growth and strategic initiatives at Iron Mountain, told Mix. "It may sound like a sales pitch, but it's not; it's a call for action."

Enlarge (credit: iFixit)

Not being able to solder puts a hard cap on the kinds of devices you can fix at home. As more modern devices add in circuit boards and discrete electronics (needed or otherwise), soldering is often the only way to save an otherwise functional object from ending up in a junk drawer, or landfill.

That's the kind of roadblock iFixit's FixHub is intended to address. The repair store and repairability advocate now offers battery-powered soldering tools and beginner's kits, intended to make soldering something you can do almost anywhere, quickly, with a few features intended to help out novices and those feeling a bit rusty.

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  iFixit's soldering tools are meant to be used together or separately. The battery pack can control the soldering iron temperature, but so can a browser. [credit: iFixit ]

iFixit, which says it is going "all-in on soldering" in a press release, offers a few interconnected pieces as part of a FixHub system:

Enlarge / It's never explained what this collection of app icons quite represents. A disorganized app you tossed together by sideloading? A face that's frowning because it's rolling down a bar held up by app icons? It's weird, but not quite evocative. (credit: linuxct/hydra)

You might sideload an Android app, or manually install its APK package, if you're using a custom version of Android that doesn't include Google's Play Store. Alternately, the app might be experimental, under development, or perhaps no longer maintained and offered by its developer. Until now, the existence of sideload-ready APKs on the web was something that seemed to be tolerated, if warned against, by Google.

This quiet standstill is being shaken up by a new feature in Google's Play Integrity API. As reported by Android Authority, developer tools to push "remediation" dialogs during sideloading debuted at Google's I/O conference in May, have begun showing up on users' phones. Sideloaders of apps from the British shop Tesco, fandom app BeyBlade X, and ChatGPT have reported "Get this app from Play" prompts, which cannot be worked around. An Android gaming handheld user encountered a similarly worded prompt from Diablo Immortal on their device three months ago.

Google's Play Integrity API is how apps have previously blocked access when loaded onto phones that are in some way modified from a stock OS with all Google Play integrations intact. Recently, a popular two-factor authentication app blocked access on phones with modified firmware, including GrapheneOS, which aims to surpass the security of Android's stock system. Apps can call the Play Integrity API and get back an "integrity verdict," relaying if the phone has a "trustworthy" software environment, has Google Play Protect enabled, and passes other software checks.

Enlarge / "Hmm, no signal here. I'm trying to figure it out, but nothing comes to mind …" (credit: Getty Images)

One issue in getting office buildings networked that you don't typically face at home is concrete—and lots of it. Concrete walls are an average of 8 inches thick inside most commercial real estate.

Keeping a network running through them is not merely a matter of running cord. Not everybody has the knowledge or tools to punch through that kind of wall. Even if they do, you can't just put a hole in something that might be load-bearing or part of a fire control system without imaging, permits, and contractors. The bandwidths that can work through these walls, like 3G, are being phased out, and the bandwidths that provide enough throughput for modern systems, like 5G, can't make it through.

That's what WaveCore, from Airvine Scientific, aims to fix, and I can't help but find it fascinating after originally seeing it on The Register. The company had previously taken on lesser solid obstructions, like plaster and thick glass, with its WaveTunnel. Two WaveCore units on either side of a wall (or on different floors) can push through a stated 12 inches of concrete. In their in-house testing, Airvine reports pushing just under 4Gbps through 12 inches of garage concrete, and it can bend around corners, even 90 degrees. Your particular cement and aggregate combinations may vary, of course.