Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

The US International Trade Commission today ordered an import ban on Motorola Mobility Android products, agreeing with Microsoft that the devices infringe a Microsoft patent on “generating meeting requests” from a mobile device.

The import ban stems from a December ruling that the Motorola Atrix, Droid, and Xoom (among 18 total devices) infringed the patent, which Microsoft says is related to Exchange ActiveSync technology. Today, the ITC said in a “final determination of violation” that “the appropriate form of relief in this investigation is a limited exclusion order prohibiting the unlicensed entry for consumption of mobile devices, associated software and components thereof covered by claims 1, 2, 5, or 6 of the United States Patent No. 6,370,566 and that are manufactured abroad by or on behalf of, or imported by or on behalf of, Motorola.”

Chinese retailers have started selling a miniature Linux computer that is housed in a 3.5-inch plastic case slightly larger than a USB thumb drive. Individual units are available online for $74.

Skype has issued a hotfix release for its popular closed source VoIP, video and text chat software for Linux, nearly one year after the last update arrived. The new version of Skype for Linux, labelled 2.2.0.99, is a minor update that includes an upgraded version of the libpng PNG reference library, which closes a security hole.

The latest in the recording industry's ten-year grudge match with Michael Robertson. MP3tunes, a music locker service that has spent years locked in litigation with major record labels, announced last week that it was closing up shop. The startup scored a partial victory in court last year, helping to establish the legality of cloud music services in the process. But founder Michael Robertson says that "four and a half years of legal torment" forced his company to file for bankruptcy on April 27. The filing is only the latest development in a decade-long grudge match between the recording industry and Robertson. Robertson has a knack for starting businesses that threaten to disrupt the business models of music industry incumbents, and they have responded with waves of tough litigation, using every available tactic to drive him out of business. The closure of MP3tunes is another notch in the labels' belt, but it's unlikely to be the last we hear from Robertson.

The Portuguese Open Source Business Association (ESOP) has published a white paper PDF which aims to explain the problems laptop manufacturers are facing when trying to introduce systems preloaded with Linux to the market. The report, which is titled "Laptop retail oligopoly: the unnoticed digital divide", analyses the current laptop market with the help of game theory and concludes that it is "bound to a configuration which is not efficient" and does not benefit consumers. In another publication PDF from January, the organisation had detailed the sales failure experienced by an open source software bundle, which included Linux, that was pre-installed on laptops locally built and marketed in Portugal. The failure of Portuguese retailers to supply these laptops led to the second study analysing that behaviour by the market.

Hendrik Knoche is a computer scientist, specializing in human-computer interaction, and he’s been working with farmers in rural India to create smart phone apps so they can crowdsource agricultural information. The challenge is that many farmers in rural areas are illiterate, so how do you create an app that’s easy and accessible to use?

(Segment Runs 8:33)

(Full programme Duration: 54:31 — 50.0MB)

Includes links

The copyright phase of the Oracle v. Google trial is winding down. While the world waits for a jury verdict on the facts, the judge overseeing the case is wrestling with the complexities of the law. Oracle has argued that the "structure, sequence and organization" of the Java API is eligible for copyright protection, while Google disagrees.

Microsoft has drastically overhauled the network running its Skype voice-over-IP service, replacing peer-to-peer client machines with thousands of Linux boxes that have been hardened against the most common types of hack attacks, a security researcher said.

A popular Firefox add-on appears to have started leaking private information about every website that users visit to a third-party server, including sensitive data which could identify individuals or reduce their security.

Thanks to Monday’s joint announcement of Microsoft’s $300 million investment in a new Barnes & Noble’s digital and college textbook subsidiary, we will never know who actually won the patent showdown between the software and bookselling giants. An administrative law judge at the U.S. International Trade Commission last week put off an initial determination in Microsoft’s patent infringement case against B&N, which was tried in February. Now that the two are partners in the e-book business, the patent litigation will end without a ruling on the merits from the ITC or from the U.S. district judge overseeing Microsoft’s parallel infringement suit in Seattle federal court.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t talk about which side won the case.

Microsoft's $300 million partnership with Barnes & Noble wasn't about e-books. It was about Android and Linux and preserving Microsoft's ability to be a patent bully.

Microsoft is set to invest $300 million in Barnes and Noble's Nook business, Microsoft announced Monday. With that investment, Microsoft will have a 17.6 percent stake in a newly formed subsidiary that will handle B&N's digital and college bookstore businesses, and the partnership will result in a Nook application for Windows 8.

The opening statements having been made, and it is worth a look at some of the slides presented by each of the parties regarding the use of the Java API specification (i.e., the narrative telling you what needs to be in an API implementation) and the claims of each party. There is a clear disconnect between what Oracle claims and the practices that Sun and now Oracle follow when it comes to the Java API specifications, and it shows up graphically when one looks at the following slides and then looks at the actual Java API specification license. Let's start by looking at the Oracle slides.

Nearly two years ago, Oracle went to court and accused Google's Android team of infringing patents and copyrights related to the Java programming language. After about 900 motions and filings, and legal fees that are undoubtedly mind-boggling, the trial will finally get started this week. Android has faced many legal challenges, but this is easily one of the most significant, and one of the only ones targeting Google itself rather than the company's hardware partners.

The patents cover TiVo's "multimedia time warping system," TiVo's "time shifting multimedia content streams," and its method and apparatus for allowing rewind, pause, and fast forward capabilities in streaming video.

Nathan Myhrvold, the Microsoft veteran who founded the patent-trolling giant Intellectual Ventures, loves to complain about the "culture of intentionally infringing patents" in the software industry. "You have a set of people who are used to getting something for free," he told Business Week in 2006. Myhrvold is right that patent infringement is rampant among software firms. But in demanding that this infringement stop, Myhrvold isn't just declaring war on what he regards as Silicon Valley's patent-hostile culture. He's declaring war on the laws of mathematics. The legal research required for all software-producing firms to stop infringing patents would cost more than the entire revenue of the software industry. Even if firms were willing to pay the bill, there simply aren't enough patent lawyers to do the work. Firms infringe software patents because they don't have any other choice.

PENNY-PINCHING landlords had better watch out. Their tenants could soon be armed with thermal flashlights that capture a colourful - and possibly incriminating - portrait of a room's temperature. The device comes from the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, a non-profit group based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that develops open-source tools to allow ordinary people to investigate environmental issues. A PLOTS team is working with a school-run project in Harlem, New York, to help tackle landlords who offer poorly heated apartments.

Over the last few years, wide swathes of the game industry, and the downloadable app industry in general, have been revolutionized by a single idea: letting people play for free while charging some of those players for in-game items. Now, it seems, a shell company is claiming that it has sole ownership of that idea, and is going to court to stop a wide range of game companies from using it.

Gametek LLC has filed a lawsuit against 21 of the biggest companies in social gaming, including Facebook, Zynga (Farmville et al), Electronic Arts (The Sims Social), Wooga (Diamond Dash) and 6Waves (Ravenwood Fair), as well as separate suits against iOS game developers such as Backflip (Ragdoll Blaster) and Gameview (Tap Fish).

Microsoft has confirmed that Wednesday's Windows Azure outage that left some customers in the dark for more than 12 hours was the result of a software bug triggered by the February 29 leap-year date that prevented systems from calculating the correct time.

(Yes, I know this is Off Topic -- but how could I resist?)

After throwing Apple into the fire for allowing social networking app Path to access a user's contacts without an explicit warning, further probes revealed that iOS apps could upload pictures from a user's gallery and send them to an unknown server as long as the user allowed the app to see pictures with location data on them. Today, an investigation by the New York Times revealed that Android's permissions system is allowing the same thing, although perhaps in a more nefarious way.