Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Encrypted Media Extensions (EME), a mechanism by which HTML5 video providers can discover and enable DRM providers offered by a browser, has taken the next step on its contentious road to standardization. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body that oversees most Web-related specifications, has moved the EME specification to the Proposed Recommendation stage.

After staying quiescent for years, IV opened up a barrage of lawsuits to enforce its patents in 2010. But the companies that decided to stand up to IV rather than buckle under have been faring well, as judges have found the patents that IV has chosen to enforce in court less than impressive.

Ahead of a 2010 decision by federal regulators to legalize mobile phone jailbreaking, Apple had cautioned US Copyright Office officials that doing so would have "potentially catastrophic" (PDF) consequences because hackers wielding jailbroken iPhones might take down the nation's mobile phone networks. Clearly, Apple's scare tactics were designed to protect its own business model—as jailbroken phones can bypass Apple' App Store and get apps elsewhere.

You know, when you email someone and you get back a bounce that says the person is out of the office, and that they won't be reading emails (even though they probably are reading them anyway and probably will respond anyway, because, really, who goes off email these days?). Anyway, the application for this patent was filed in 2010, way, way, way after OOO messages were quite common... ... As the EFF notes, going over the history of this patent demonstrates why the US Patent Office is so bad at this stuff.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is bringing light to what it calls a "stupefyingly mundane" patent on e-mail technology, given not to a patent troll hiding in a small office but to one of the world's largest technology corporations. IBM lawyers wrangled with the US Patent and Trademark Office for years over their bizarre and alarming alternative history, in which IBM invented out-of-office e-mail—in 2010. US Patent No. 9,547,842, "Out-of-office electronic mail messaging system" was filed in 2010 and granted about six weeks ago.

It's not just in Nebraska where this conversation is happening (the Nebraska bill just happens to be the furthest along legislatively). Similar bills are also winding their way through New York, Minnesota, Wyoming, Tennessee, Kansas, Massachusetts, and Illinois state legislatures. And in most of these states, the companies lobbying against these laws are using the same disingenuous arguments Apple has been embracing. Usually it's the trifecta of false claims that the bills will make users less safe, pose a cybersecurity risk, and open the door to cybersecurity theft.

The latest Windows 10 Insider Preview build doesn't add much in the way of features—it's mostly just bug fixes—but one small new feature has been spotted, and it could be contentious.

Even though the idea seems a no-brainer -- you bought it, why shouldn't you be able to repair it? -- progress has been extremely slow, as successive Techdirt articles have chronicled. One of the most important developments is a number of "Right to Repair" bills that are being considered by various state legislatures. These typically require electronics manufacturers to make service manuals available to the public, and to sell repair parts. The hope is that if even one or two of these are passed, manufacturers will find it simpler to comply nationally. However, an article on Motherboard suggests that the "Right to Repair" movement has a rather surprising enemy.

Manufacturers have lobbied hard against right to repair legislation in the past. Last year, a bill headed through the New York statehouse was killed in part due to lobbying from Apple and IBM, among other manufacturers. But nationwide, the legislation appears to have much more momentum this year as more states introduce right to repair bills. Last month, the American Farm Bureau Federation, an influential political organization representing farmers, officially endorsed right to repair legislation.

Google successfully made its case to a jury last year that its use of Java APIs in Android was "fair use." A San Francisco federal jury rejected Oracle's claim that the mobile system infringed Oracle's copyrights. But Oracle isn't backing down. Late Friday, the company appealed the high-profile verdict to a federal appeals court.

A little more than three years after it shut down to avoid complying with federal prosecutors' demands for its encryption key, Lavabit is returning to life. The secure email system, whose most famous user was Edward Snowden, fought the US government in court over demands to produce the key that would unlock access not only Snowden's emails, but those of every user. Not only did it shut down, but it also memorably delivered a 4-point middle finger to the feds in the middle of the legal battle.

If you're one of the 60% of Pebble employees who didn't get a job offer from Fitbit, the company's new owner, you're probably not having a great Christmas season -- but that trepedation is shared by 100% of Pebble customers, who've just learned (via the fine print on an update on the Pebble Kickstarter page) that the company may soon "reduce functionality" on their watches.

the real problem here is that thanks to stupid laws like the DMCA Section 1201 (barring circumvention of technological protection measures) and the CFAA (barring certain forms of "hacking"), users will have trouble fixing or saving their own watches. It's yet another case of not really owning what you thought you bought... thanks to DRM and bad laws.

We've been writing about how patent trolls have been flocking to East Texas for ten years now, and little has changed. In fact, as we noted last year, there's one judge in East Texas, Judge Rodney Gilstrap, who famously handled 20% of all patent cases filed in the country in 2014. One judge. And that's not all the patent cases that come into that court. The towns of Marshall, Texas, and Tyler, Texas, have built a giant industry out of being super friendly to patent trolls. And it's ridiculous. But there's a case that could put an end to it and the Supreme Court has thankfully agreed to hear it.

For the first time in a century, the US Supreme Court has weighed in on how much design patents are worth. The answer: not nearly as much as Apple thinks.

The 8-0 opinion (PDF) is a rebuke to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which held that the relevant "article of manufacture" for calculating damages was—in fact, had to be—the entire smartphone. That meant even though Apple's patents covered only certain design elements, it was entitled to $399 million in lost profits damages.

A five-year-old patent brawl between Netflix and Rovi (now TiVo) has reached a turning point, with the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit upholding a major lower-court victory by Netflix.

Is somebody really claiming to have invented a method for switching from watching one video to watching another? This question comes from a lawyer at the New York Times, as an aside in an interesting article about the paper's response to a defamation threat from a presidential candidate. Apparently, that defamation threat distracted the his legal team from their work on another task: responding to a patent troll. Intrigued, we looked into it. The patent troll is called Bartonfalls, LLC and its patent, U.S. Patent No. 7,917,922, is our latest Stupid Patent of the Month.

It's getting easier than ever for defendants to win fees in patent cases, especially against "non-practicing entities" with no products. But don't tell that to pop stars Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears.

Previously, some experts believed Rowhammer attacks that altered specific pieces of security-sensitive data weren't reliable enough to pose a viable threat because exploits depended on chance hardware faults or advanced memory-management features that could be easily adapted to repel the attacks. Now, an international team of academic researchers is challenging those assumptions by demonstrating a Rowhammer exploit that alters crucial bits of data in a way that completely roots name brand Android devices from LG, Motorola, Samsung, OnePlus, and possibly other manufacturers. An app containing the researchers' rooting exploit requires no user permissions and doesn't rely on any vulnerability in Android to work.

A serious vulnerability that has been present for nine years in virtually all versions of the Linux operating system is under active exploit, according to researchers who are advising users to install a patch as soon as possible.

While CVE-2016-5195, as the bug is cataloged, amounts to a mere privilege-escalation vulnerability rather than a more serious code-execution vulnerability, there are several reasons many researchers are taking it extremely seriously.