Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

The antivirus software company Doctor Web has issued an alert about a new form of crypto-ransomware that targets users of Linux-based operating systems. Designated as "Linux.Encoder.1" by the company, the malware largely targets Web servers, encrypting their contents and demanding a ransom of one Bitcoin (currently about $500).

CRISPR-Cas can be thought of as the first really powerful and general-purpose genome editor -- a GNU Emacs for DNA. It is widely expected that it will have a massive impact on molecular biology, both for pure research and in industrial applications. Given those very high stakes, it will not come as a surprise to learn that there is already a fierce tussle over who owns a key patent in this field:

EVERYBODY PANIC! The technology industry is running out of a fundamental finite resource. But the problem this time isn’t scarce chips or broken servers, and it certainly isn’t venture capital?—it’s words. Certain corners of the software world are starting to run short on unclaimed terminology, and as such it may soon no longer be possible to talk about tech coherently. That’s too bad, because it’s hard enough already!

t's been nearly ten years since we first wrote about the East Texas district court, based in Marshall, Texas, (and Tyler, Texas) and the fact that patent trolls have been flooding that court with cases. The trolls claimed they liked East Texas because the judges worked quickly and because they "understood" patent issues. The reality, of course, is that East Texas became notorious for a few judges who were insanely pro-patent troll, and ran their cases in a manner that helped out trolls immensely. It's become a cottage industry...

In new guidelines published today, the Librarian of Congress said that gamers deserve the right to continued access to "local play" on games that they paid for, even if the centralized authentication servers required for that play have been taken down. So if Blizzard, for instance, decides to take down the authentication servers required to verify a new copy of StarCraft II online, players will now be legally allowed to craft a workaround that allows the game to work on their PCs...

The Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge have asked a federal appeals court to make big changes to the rules governing venue in patent cases. The two public interest groups are seeking to file an amicus brief (PDF) which attacks the Eastern District of Texas as being one of the "most notorious situations of forum shopping in recent history."

When the business software company Pegasystems got sued in 2013 by a mysterious shell company called "YYZ LLC," Pegasystems' head of IP licensing, Ayaz Hameed, got ready to tell his boss that they had been hit by a patent troll.

Hameed looked at the two patents in the complaint (PDF), numbered 7,062,749 and 7,603,674, and read their examination histories. The patent focused on creating "monitoring messages" and storing them into a central database using what's called a "message broker."

Down on the farm, there's a controversy brewing, because farm equipment manufacturer John Deere doesn't want farmers tinkering with the software on the farmers' own tractors. Spark contributor Sean Prpick talks to Saskatchewan farmer Chris Herrnbock, who wants to see a more flexible and farmer-friendly policy rather than a copyright crackdown.

The issue of Digital Rights Management has been around for a while in everything from music files, books, video games, even coffee makers and farm equipment. In a future of 'smart' objects with embedded software, do copyright restrictions mean you won't be able to fix your smart fridge or hack your smart toaster? University of Ottawa law professor Jeremy de Beer weighs in.

We first wrote about Nina Paley in 2009, upon hearing about the ridiculous copyright mess she found herself in concerning her wonderful movie Sita Sings the Blues. While she eventually was able to sort out that mess and release the film, she also discovered that the more she shared the film, the more money she made, and she began to question copyright entirely. She originally released the film under a ShareAlike license, promising to go after people who didn't uphold the ShareAlike parts, but then moved to a full public domain dedication and has become quite vocal in recent years about not supporting any kind of copyright and even raising some important concerns about many forms of Creative Commons licenses.

Back in March, we noted that Wikimedia was suing the NSA over its mass surveillance program under Section 702 of the FISA Amendments Act. This is the part of the law that the NSA uses to justify its "upstream" collection -- which lets the NSA partner with backbone providers like AT&T and tap their fiber lines at entry/exit points from the country and sniff through all the traffic. The problem in many lawsuits concerning NSA surveillance is that it's been difficult for the plaintiff to satisfy the requirements necessary to get "standing." That is, can the plaintiff prove that he/she/it had rights violated by the program.

The results from a Pennsylvania company's TrueAllele DNA testing software have been used in roughly 200 criminal cases, from California to Florida, helping put murderers and rapists in prison. Criminal defense lawyers, however, want to know whether it's junk science. Defense attorneys have routinely asked, and have been denied, access to examine the software's 170,000 lines of source code in a bid to challenge the authenticity of its conclusions.

A handful of app distributors are putting hundreds of millions of Android users at risk by bundling powerful root exploits with their wares, computer scientists have found. The researchers presented a paper on Thursday that shows how the exploits—which legitimate developers openly use to give Android phones added functionality—can be easily reverse-engineered and surreptitiously incorporated into malicious apps that bypass crucial Android security measures.

Apple lost a patent case on Monday, when a federal jury in Wisconsin found that the smartphone giant infringed a patent that originated at the University of Wisconsin, and is now held by the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF).

For years, privacy advocates have pushed developers of websites, virtual private network apps, and other cryptographic software to adopt the Diffie-Hellman cryptographic key exchange as a defense against surveillance from the US National Security Agency and other state-sponsored spies. Now, researchers are renewing their warning that a serious flaw in the way the key exchange is implemented is allowing the NSA to break and eavesdrop on trillions of encrypted connections.

We've been putting that entire ecosystem through its paces for a few days now, and while some of those pieces work better than others, all have some trouble living up to the promise of a seamless, hassle-free, PC-on-a-TV-console experience. It's early, and Valve's attack on the living room is far from a vaporware failure, but it's not a shock-and-awe knockout blitz either.

A jury has found Apple's A7 and A8 chips violate a patent belonging to the licensing arm of the University of Wisconsin, and the world's richest smartphone maker is now on the hook for up to $862 million in damages.

Core Wireless Licensing S.A.R.L. is one of the patent trolls attacking the high-tech sector. Core Wireless is incorporated in Luxemburg, and is a subsidiary of an even larger troll, Canada-based Conversant. It owns a number of patents that were originally filed by Nokia. It has been asserting some of these patents in the Eastern District of Texas. In one case, a jury recently found that Apple did not infringe five of Core Wireless’s patents. In another case, it is asserting eighteen patents against LG. One of its arguments in the LG case came to our attention as an example of what patent trolls think they can get away with.

There's a new round of Stagefright vulnerabilities that allows attackers to execute malicious code on more than one billion phones running ancient as well as much more recent versions of Google's Android operating system.

The debate over whether vehicle owners have a right to tinker with the software on their vehicles—just like they have the right to change their own oil—comes amid a growing and global in-vehicle software scandal at Volkswagen. And it comes as the US Copyright Office is considering a proposal from the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others that would authorize such tinkering without chilling researchers' speech.