Tim Ackermann

@timack.bsky.social

263 Followers 285 Following

Patent & trademark attorney with over 25 years experience in helping protect businesses' trademark & patent rights. (Former @ntxip on you know where)

Here, Opposer submitted a reply brief that is twenty-six (26) pages, including a
table of contents (optional to submit), index of cases (optional to submit), introduction
(optional to submit), argument, summary (optional to submit), and certificate of
services, which is more than twenty-five (25) pages. Notably, Applicant’s “conclusion”
on numbered pages 24-25 of the reply brief is single-spaced, leaving no doubt that the
page limit would have been exceeded by another page or two if Opposer had followed
proper procedures by using double spacing. This appears to be a subterfuge to avoid
the Board’s page limit. Cf. Consorzio del Prosciutto di Parma v. Parma Sausage
Prods. Inc., 1992 TTAB LEXIS 15, at *5 n.3 (warning that single-spaced footnotes
containing substantial discussion may be viewed as a subterfuge to avoid page limit).

OpenAI took responsibility in a post on Tuesday, saying its models had carried out "an unprecedented cyber incident, involving state-of-the-art cyber capabilities".

NYT writer bio - "Kashmir Hill is a technology journalist whose “sentences carry both weight and grace,” according to her unauthorized biography"

TTABlogger comment: Foreign owners of non-use based U.S. registrations may want to file new applications earlier than later when they know their marks have not been used in the U.S., so that examination of the new application will occur before the prior registration lapses.

.. AI is becoming material to the cost structure; spend is becoming very unpredictable; and leadership, especially at the CFO, COO, and CIO level, are still asking the question of whether they’re getting value from what we’re spending on in the context of AI.”

AI-generated image showing supposed Neanderthal holding what looks like a large glowing coal in its hand

“We’re doing a huge pedagogical upheaval in education,” she said, calling it a “burn it down moment. We’re just in the early stages.”

Cover for "Prostho Plus" by Piers Anthony, showing person using a crane to work on teeth inside of a gigantic mouth

The moderators of the biohacking subreddit say that peptide and hormone replacement therapy companies have been surreptitiously spamming Reddit in an attempt to get their posts scraped by AI chatbots. The strategy is an effort to systematically manipulate the answers provided by chatbots by manipulating the underlying source material that those chatbots will scrape—in this case, a popular Reddit community.

St. Christopher and the Infant Christ, Ghirlandaio, mid-1470s

We’re writing to inform you of the price change that will go into effect for your Google Workspace Business Standard subscription on or after June 22, 2026. The updated subscription pricing reflects the significant added AI value, as well as the many new features we have introduced and are launching to Google Workspace editions.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been leaving the digital keys to its own cloud storage accounts sitting out in the open, in plain text form, for some unknown amount of time, according to a report from Krebs on Security.

And they keep saying it’ll have a voice interface. I guess they all have individual offices. Not open-plan. Or working in a coffee shop or on the train.

A voice interface can be useful. A mandatory voice interface is less useful.

Image of US Trademark Registration 164,563 issued in 1923 for OUIJA (& design), and claiming use of the mark since 1890.

“In some cases it appears it was synthesizing very poor quality studies, or mixing together findings from studies that simply cannot be accurately compared due to very different methods, populations, and samples,” Williamson told Ars. “It really seemed like a paper that should not have been published in the first place.”

Pennsylvania’s lawsuit said an investigator from the state agency that licenses professionals created an account on Character.AI, searched on the word “psychiatry” and found a large number of characters, including one described as a “doctor of psychiatry.” That character held itself out as able to assess the investigator “as a doctor” who is licensed in Pennsylvania, the lawsuit said.

Within that category, bets tied to military and defense-related events had an even more striking success rate of 52%, according to the report.

“The cities involved in this program have authorized select Flock employees to demonstrate new products and features as we develop them in partnership with the city. Moreover, select engineers can access accounts with customer permission to debug or fix any issues that may arise. No one is spying on children in parks, as the substack incorrectly asserts.”

USPTO data on DR. PENIS trademark registration
https://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=87624186&caseSearchType=US_APPLICATION&caseType=DEFAULT&searchType=statusSearch

The FTC said that “OkCupid provided the third party with access to nearly three million OkCupid user photos as well as location and other information without placing any formal or contractual restrictions on how the information could be used.” OkCupid “did not inform consumers or give them the chance to opt out of such sharing,” the FTC said.

“CyberAlberta’s investigation found that WebinarTV primarily gains initial access to Zoom webinars via third-party browser extensions. These extensions can access webinar links when a user either inadvertently grants calendar permissions—exposing meeting invitations—or willfully submits meeting details into the WebinarTV platform,” the report said.

AI models that lie and cheat appear to be growing in number with reports of deceptive scheming surging in the last six months, a study into the technology has found.

AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Safety Institute (AISI).

US Trademark drawing for :CueCat (& design)
https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/76094794

The New York Times put multiple chatbots through the paces of filing taxes, handing them tax situations prepared as training materials by tax preparation company TaxSlayer. It found that the chatbots miscalculated refunds and amounts owed to the IRS by an average of more than $2,000.

At one end, the glasses are marketed as an everyday assistant – a voice in the frame that tells you what you are seeing. At the other end, people in Nairobi sit annotating the most intimate moments the camera captures: open-plan offices, living rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms.
One annotator sums it up:
“You think that if they knew about the extent of the data collection, no one would dare to use the glasses”.

An image from his most famous film, “A Trip to the Moon” – that of a rocket landing in the eye of the man on the moon – became the image representing early cinema. It now plays at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Quote from founder Paliwal - "Is it really education if we're just memorizing things to perform a task well?”

“He looked him in his eyes and said, ‘Major, you can shoot me, but you’ll have to kill all of us because we know who you are, and you’ll be a war criminal when we win this war.’ ”

This third-party evidence does not show manufacturers, producers or dealers selling the items under their own marks, but large retailers primarily selling others’ goods bearing the manufacturers’ and producers’ trademarks. Not one third-party use example shows heat exchangers and vacuums bearing the same trademark.

Agatha Harkness saying "Who knew? It was private equity all along."

The “work for hire” provision in the Act allows authorship and copyrights to vest in persons other than the actual creators of a work. 17 U.S.C. § 201 (“Copyright
in a work protected under this title vests initially in the author or authors of the work . . . [i]n the case of a work made for hire, the employer or other person for whom the work was prepared is considered the author. . . .”).
According to traditional agency principles, and based on
how Dr. Thaler used AI to generate the work, Dr. Thaler’s
AI was acting as an employee solely for purposes of the
“work for hire” doctrine. In his registration form, Dr.
Thaler listed the Work as a “work for hire” Thaler further
listing himself as the Creativity Machine’s owner. See
Thaler v. Perlmutter, 1:22-cv-01564-BAH, Document No. 13-2 (D.D.C. Aug. 18, 2023). There is no reason why the AI
could not be considered an employee solely for purposes
of the Act.

The case also exposed how little many athletes understood about music licensing requirements. For decades, skaters largely relied on federations and event organizers to manage music use, but the lawsuit underscored how individual athletes could still be drawn into copyright disputes. Rights complications have also affected how artistic sports are broadcast and archived, with some competitions unavailable on replay platforms because music licenses do not extend to long-term streaming.

Mike Horton, DOT’s former acting chief artificial intelligence officer, criticized the plan to use Gemini to write regulations, comparing it to “having a high school intern that’s doing your rulemaking.” (He said the plan was not in the works when he left the agency in August.) Noting the life-or-death stakes of transportation safety regulations, Horton said the agency’s leaders “want to go fast and break things, but going fast and breaking things means people are going to get hurt.”

Let’s say my hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: “Hey folks, here’s the deal. Today, you’re processing about 100 X-rays per day. From now on, we’re going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you’ve missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you’re only processing 98 X-rays per day. That’s fine, we just care about finding all those tumors.”

A businessman's fist striking the Earth like a meteor, scattering debris.
The rise of end times fascism
Read more
If that’s what they said, I’d be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market’s bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: “Look, you fire nine out of 10 of your radiologists, saving $20m a year. You give us $10m a year, and you net $10m a year, and the remaining radiologists’ job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed – and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it’s catastrophically wrong.

“And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist’s fault, because they are the ‘human in the loop’. It’s their signature on the diagnosis.”

This is a reverse centaur, and it is a specific kind of reverse centaur: it is what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink”. The radiologist’s job is not really to oversee the AI’s work, it is to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.

Still of Turhan Bey as the Centauri emperor in S2E9 of Babylon 5

Once the mark accesses the malicious site referenced, it presents a CAPTCHA challenge or other pretext requiring user confirmation. The user receives an instruction to copy a string of text, open a terminal window, paste it in, and press Enter.

Reviewing past rulings by the Board and various courts involving Dr. Langdell, the Board saw "an astoundingly abysmal record of disregard and contempt for the solemnity and integrity of government adjudicatory proceedings involving Respondent’s trademarks, and repeated instances of untruthfulness in such cases on the part of Dr. Langdell." From these rulings, the Board drew "a level of comfort" that its decision to reject Dr. Langdell’s testimony about pre-filing use "is not an outlier."

Someone who seems like USPTO calls, emails, or texts you or someone in your company — urgently. They say your trademark application or registration will be approved — as soon as you pay. Or it’s about to expire — unless you pay immediately. They might even say someone else has applied for your trademark, so you need to pay quickly or risk losing it.

Don’t pay USPTO fees in response to demands in a call, email, or text. The real USPTO will never contact you to demand money. Not by credit or debit card, check, wire transfer, payment app, or gift card. Yes, there are fees to register and renew trademarks. But USPTO only requires payment at specific times and the agency has a very specific payment process — anything outside that is a scam.

In the end, the case became a classic example of the Streisand Effect, in which the attempt to censor information can instead call attention to it.

The browser, which is linked to Chinese online gambling websites and is thought to have been downloaded millions of times, actually routes all internet traffic through servers in China and “covertly installs several programs that run silently in the background,” according to new findings from network security company Infoblox. The researchers say the “hidden” elements include features similar to malware—including “key logging, surreptitious connections,” and changing a device’s network connections.

cover image for "The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors" by James D. Hornfischer, showing sailors rescuing another from the sea

picture of cartoonish spaceship with hands next to text:
"Raft is your new Prime. We are the leader in autonomous data fusion and agentic AI, equipping the Department of Defense and national security organizations with cutting-edge solutions to drive mission success. We build modular, scalable data platforms and agentic AI capabilities that change the way our nation fights.
IT’S TIME TO TRANSFORM."

USPTO TSDR status page for WONDER SNATCH trademark application

“It’s more so a litmus test to get rid of the skids easily,” Trikk said, referring to “script kiddies,” or skids, which are hackers with a lower technical ability.

As a diagram of the AI-designed submersible shows, this groundbreaking vessel contains multiple sled-like "skids," a front-loaded thruster, an "escape harch [sic]," a "floutation haterial [sic]," a "spherical evercase hull" — alternately spelled "spherical evpercase hiull [sic]" in another part of the illustration — an "emergency tbaiht release [sic]," a "proutic haripotator [sic]," and, of course, the "emergency baby."

What Names Mean
In naming drugs, the most important considerations are avoiding drug names that are too similar to existing names—and therefore might compromise patient safety—and making sure the drug name communicates accurate information about the action or use of the substance. Over time, the USAN and INN nomenclature scheme has developed into a system for classifying new pharmaceuticals.

The Universe speaks in many languages, but only one voice.
The language is not Narn or Human or Centauri or Gaim or Minbari.

It speaks in the language of hope. It speaks in the language of trust.
It speaks in the language of strength, and the language of compassion.
It is the language of the heart and the language of the soul.
But always it is the same voice.

It is the voice of our ancestors speaking through us.
And the voice of our inheritors waiting to be born.
It is the small, still voice that says we are One.

No matter the blood, no matter the skin,
No matter the world, no matter the star,
We are One.
No matter the pain, no matter the darkness,
No matter the loss, no matter the fear.
We are One.

Here, gathered together in common cause
We agree to recognize this singular truth and this singular rule:
That we must be kind to one another.

Because each voice enriches us and ennobles us,
And each voice lost diminishes us.
We are the voice of the universe, the soul of creation,
The fire that will light the way to a better future.

We are One.

S5:E3 The Paragon of Animals

As the blog post put it, “Student models finetuned on these datasets learn their teachers’ traits, even when the data contains no explicit reference to, or association with, these traits. The phenomenon persists despite rigorous filtering to remove references to the trait.” Perhaps worst of all, it’s not clear why this is happening or how to avoid it.

Netflix and Sony Pictures Animation’s “KPop Demon Hunters” soundtrack — performed by a fictional girl group called Huntrix in the animated feature — claims the No. 2 spot on the Billboard 200 albums chart this week. The film and its soundtrack have been surprise hits, with Huntrix’s “Golden” single also peaking at No. 6 on the Hot 100.

2010 article by Kash Hill in "The Not-So Private Parts" on social media and privacy