Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

In 2014, Nvidia filed its first-ever patent lawsuit. The target was Korean smartphone giant Samsung. Predictably, Samsung struck back—but a jury's verdict that came out on Friday shows neither side is getting traction.

PayPal has stopped accepting payments for Canadian outfit UnoTelly—a provider of VPN and SmartDNS services—because these might be used to facilitate copyright infringement.

UnoTelly said in an update on its website that Paypal had "severed payment processing agreement unilaterally and without prior warning." It added: "Paypal indicated that UnoTelly is not allowed to provide services that enable open and unrestricted Internet access."

An East Texas jury has ruled that Apple must pay patent-holding company VirnetX $625.6 million for infringing four patents. It's a massive verdict for VirnetX, a company that has no products and makes its money solely through patent litigation. The verdict shows the jury found Apple infringed on every patent claim that was at issue.

Back when you were a kid, you may (depending on your age) have checked books out of your library using a circulation card. The cards, like the one pictured to the right, would allow the librarian to keep track of the books, who had them, and when they were expected back at the library. This month’s Stupid Patent is awarded to Xerox, who on January 19, 2016 was awarded a patent on essentially the library circulation card, but done electronically.

A trial has just kicked off in the patent hotspot of East Texas, and it's a big one. VirnetX, a patent-holding company that says it owns wide-ranging rights to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), is facing off against Apple. VirnetX says that Apple's VPN technology, as well as its FaceTime video-messaging, both infringe the company's patents. A jury trial began today, and VirnetX seeks $532 million in damages.

As a security conscious user who follows the best practices—using unique passwords, two-factor authentication, only using a secure computer, and being able to spot phishing attacks from a mile away—I thought my accounts and details would be pretty safe. I was wrong.

That's because when someone went after me, all those precautions were for nothing. That’s because most systems come with a backdoor called customer support. In this post I’m going to focus on the most grievous offender: Amazon.com.

A shell company that sued dozens of computer peripheral makers has quickly dropped Newegg house brand Rosewill from its list of defendants. The motion to dismiss, filed yesterday, comes just days after Newegg's lawyers filed notices of their appearance in the case.

If you own a system with an Intel 6th generation Core processor—more memorably known as Skylake—and run Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, you'll have to think about upgrading to Windows 10 within the next 18 months. Microsoft announced today that after July 17, 2017, only the "most critical" security fixes will be released for those platforms and those fixes will only be made available if they don't "risk the reliability or compatibility" of Windows 7 and 8.1 on other (non-Skylake) systems.

Microsoft’s patent claims against Corel are unsurprising in light of how much money is potentially at stake. If Corel is found to infringe even one of Microsoft’s design patents through even the smallest part of Corel Home Office, current Federal Circuit law entitles Microsoft to all of Corel’s profits for the entire product. Not the profits that can be attributed to the design. Not the value that the design adds to a product. All of the profit from Corel Home Office.

Cisco has finally quashed a long-running lawsuit brought by an Israeli patent-holding company called Commil USA. The case took a surprising number of detours, including a trip to the Supreme Court last year that looks almost unnecessary in hindsight.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Stupid Patent of the Month" for December isn't owned by a sketchy shell company, but rather the Microsoft Corporation. The selection, published yesterday, is the first time the EFF has picked a design patent as the SPOTM. The blog post seeks to highlight some of the problems with those lesser-known cousins to standard "utility" patents, especially the damages that can result.

Ian Murdock, founder of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution project, has died at the age of 42. His death, announced in a blog post by Docker CEO Ben Golub, came after an apparent encounter with police and a statement posted on Murdock's Twitter feed that he was going to commit suicide, though no cause of his death has been given.

Mint's LTS strategy was a risky move, as it bucked several trends by opting to pass on whatever butterflies Ubuntu was chasing. Sticking with a stable base and steadfastly refusing to inflate its version numbers may well have left some users at a loss. Jests aside, turning its back on the latest and greatest GTK and kernel updates that come from tracking Ubuntu's every move is not without some costs, but overall the strategy seems to have been a huge success.

64-bit Firefox for Windows is mostly identical to 32-bit Firefox for Windows, except that very few plug-ins will work with 64-bit Firefox. This is by design: Mozilla is in the process of dropping Firefox's support for NPAPI plug-ins. NPAPI support is being dropped due to (ostensible) stability and security concerns. Amusingly (or ironically), though, 64-bit Firefox does still support one plug-in: Flash. Sites that use other NPAPI plug-ins, such as Silverlight or Java, are being told by Mozilla to "accelerate their transition to Web technologies."

The world of connected devices is upon us and things have never been better. Criminals can access your email account by breaking into your fridge. Your child's toys and your television record your conversations and send them to manufacturers' servers, where criminals are (again) able to access them. Your home thermostat goes HAL 9000 and attempts to set your house on fire. And, now, your lightbulbs won't do the one thing you expect them to do: produce light.

On December 9, Microsoft released a Linux certification: Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA) Linux on Azure. You know what's even more amazing? Microsoft created this certifcation with the help of the The Linux Foundation. Maybe dogs and cats can live together!

This important step in broadening the technology integration between Microsoft and the open-source community is another sign that this is not your or Bill Gates' Microsoft. Why would Microsoft do this? Well, it's not because Microsoft has become Google+ buddies with Linus Torvalds.

But according to Roberts, caps only make sense because broadband is just like gasoline and electricity.

"Just as with every other thing in your life — if you drive a hundred thousand miles or a thousand miles you buy more gasoline," the CEO claimed. "If you turn on the air conditioning at 60 versus 72, you consume more electricity," he said. "The same is true for [data] usage, so I think the same for a wireless device — the more bits you use, the more you pay."

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts defended his company's much-criticized data caps yesterday, saying that consumers should pay for Internet access based on how much data they use, just like they do with gas or electricity.

"Just as with every other thing in your life, if you drive 100,000 miles or 1,000 miles you buy more gasoline. If you turn on the air conditioning to 60 vs. 72 you consume more electricity," Roberts said. "The same is true for [broadband] usage." Cellular data is already billed this way, "the more bits you use, the more you pay," he said. So why not cable Internet, too?

With less than a week to go before a trial, a class-action lawsuit over the copyright status of "Happy Birthday" has been resolved. Details of the settlement, including what kind of uses will be allowed going forward, are not clear.

Techdirt has written a few times about the pharmaceutical industry's use of "evergreening", whereby small, sometimes trivial, changes are made to drugs in order to extend their effective patent life. It turns out the technique is applied to one of the most widely-used drugs of all, insulin: