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Lawyers for Google and Oracle fought over the final details of their upcoming copyright trial today, debating issues of courtroom technology, time limits, and what type of evidence jurors will see.

An ongoing drive-by attack is forcing ransomware onto Android smartphones by exploiting critical vulnerabilities in older versions of Google's mobile operating system still in use by millions of people, according to research scheduled to be published Monday...

Linux 4.5 seems to have got Intel's Skylake platform (ie, 6th-generation Core CPUs) to the point where graphics work pretty reliably, which is great progress (4.4 tended to lose all my windows every so often, especially over suspend/resume). I'm even running Wayland happily. Unfortunately one of the reasons I have a laptop is that I want to be able to do things like use it on battery, and power consumption's an important part of that.

After finally reaching the tipping point with off-the-shelf solutions that can't match increasing speeds available, we recently took the plunge. Building a homebrew router turned out to be a better proposition than we could've ever imagined. With nearly any speed metric we analyzed, our little DIY kit outpaced routers whether they were of the $90- or $250-variety.

Naturally, many readers asked the obvious follow-up—"How exactly can we put that together?"

Earlier this year, after a bit of a roller coaster ride of a legal fight over the copyright status of the song "Happy Birthday," the two key parties finally reached a settlement that declared the song in the public domain. While many news reports had earlier claimed that the judge in the case had done the same, that wasn't really true. The judge simply declared that Warner Chappell did not hold the copyright, leaving it an open question as to whether or not anyone else did -- and some quickly raised their hands to claim the copyright.

A New Jersey man named Michael Garofalo had a patent he claimed covered online contests, and used it to demand money from other small businesses. But when the Electronic Frontier Foundation came to the defense of a photographer targeted by Garofalo last year, Garofalo quickly dropped his case. Last month, he and his lawyers were ordered to pay $29,000 in legal fees. Now Garofalo, who owns the website Garfum.com, is asking for the fee smackdown to be reconsidered. His reasoning: since the US Patent and Trademark Office recently agreed to grant him another patent, nearly identical to the first, his case couldn't possibly be considered "exceptional."

A report last year by the GAO found that most consumers have no real idea what kind of a broadband connection they're buying. The report argued that caps, interconnection squabbles, throttling, and other line limitations make it virtually impossible for many consumers (especially the more Luddite-inclined among us) to understand what they're buying, or compare it with competing services. As a result, the FCC this week proposed a new "nutrition label" for broadband that would include not only connection speed -- but any network management, latency, usage caps, overage fees, or other conditions impacting the line.

The first Windows 10 Insider Preview build that includes support for native Linux bash on Windows is now out. This was some of the biggest news to come out of Build last week, as Microsoft works to make Windows even more attractive to developers.

Microsoft deciding to support Linux software on Windows is a surprising move, and the obvious question is, why? Superficially, the answer is easy—developers like these tools, so supporting them makes developers happy—but the story runs a little deeper than that. Supporting Linux apps in Windows is a significant move for a company that has spent decades promoting its own APIs and application platform, and it's unlikely that the company would make such a move just to provide a few creature comforts to developers. The need goes deeper than that.

In 2014, an East Texas jury ordered Google to pay $85 million to SimpleAir, a "patent troll" company with no business beyond enforcing its patents. It was a massive victory for the company, which claimed that Google's use of push notifications in Android phones infringed its US Patent No. 7,035,914.

Stop us if you’ve heard this before: a young academic with coding savvy has become frustrated with the incarceration of information. Some of the world's best research continues to be trapped behind subscriptions and paywalls. This academic turns activist, and this activist then plots and executes the plan. It's time to free information from its chains—to give it to the masses free of charge. Along the way, this research Robin Hood is accused of being an illicit, criminal hacker.

This month, Intellectual Ventures filed some fresh lawsuits against targets including JCPenney, Sally Beauty, and flower delivery service Florists' Transworld Delivery. We checked out the asserted patents to see if any deserved our Stupid Patent of the Month award. All were worthy candidates, but one in particular stood out.

Okay, all joking aside, what if I told you that a really great firewall router was possible for under $200?! I’m talking about the kind of box that would allow to do stuff you could never do by simply flashing firmware on a cheap plastic piece you were using previously! I, for one, am done supporting cra@ppy hardware vendors just to save a buck or two.

In a second go-round of its copyright lawsuit against Google, Oracle is hoping to land a knockout blow. A damages report filed last week in federal court reveals that the enterprise-software giant will ask for $9.3 billion in damages.

In its lawsuit, Oracle argues that Google infringed copyrights related to Java when it used 37 Java API packages to create its Android mobile operating system. The damages it's seeking aren't just more than the Java API packages are worth—it's far more than Oracle paid for the entirety of Sun Microsystems, which was purchased in 2009 for $5.6 billion.

Last fall, you might recall that the hardware tinkering community (and people who just like to fully use the devices they pay for) was up in arms over an FCC plan to lock down third-party custom firmware. After tinkering enthusiasts claimed the FCC was intentionally planning to prevent them from installing third-party router options like DD-WRT and Open-WRT, we asked the FCC about the new rules and were told that because modified routers had been interfering with terrestrial doppler weather radar (TDWR) at airports, the FCC wanted to ensure that just the radio portion of the router couldn't be modified. The FCC stated at the time that locking down the full, broader use of open source router firmware entirely was absolutely not their intent:

One of the oldest and most profitable patent trolls, Uniloc, has been shot down. Its US Patent No. 5,490,216, which claims to own the concept of "product activation" in software, had all claims ruled invalid by the Patent Trademark and Appeals Board (PTAB).

For the past four days, including during the hour that this post was being prepared on Thursday morning, a major security certification organization has been spreading TeslaCrypt malware—despite repeated warnings from outside researchers.

A church pastor caught up in a patent battle over foam arrows is about to get assistance from the nation's best-known slayer of patent trolls, Newegg top lawyer Lee Cheng.

The war of words aside, for now the issue is left in the hands of Magistrate Sheri Pym in Riverside, California. She already ordered Apple to help unlock the phone last month but did so without giving Apple a chance to challenge it. Tuesday's hearing is about providing Apple that opportunity. Between these two court events, there's been plenty of he-said, she-said arguments from both sides.

After a 13-day trial in 2012, a jury held that Samsung's phones infringed Apple utility and design patents. Apple was originally granted $1.05 billion, but that number was slashed down on appeal. Samsung paid $548 million late last year, but the company didn't give up its right to one last appeal. A Supreme Court win could result in Samsung getting much of that money back.