Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Security researchers have uncovered a network of infected Linux computers that's flooding gaming and education sites with as much as 150 gigabits per second of malicious traffic—enough in some cases to take the targets completely offline.

One of the most maligned patent trolls, MPHJ Technology Investments, will have to face claims in state court that it violated Vermont's consumer protection laws.

MPHJ and its owner, Texas attorney Mac Rust, gained national attention after sending tens of thousands of letters out to small and medium-sized businesses stating that any business using scan-to-e-mail technology owed MPHJ around $1,000 per worker for patent infringement.

The privacy implications of Windows 10 and its data collection have been a talking point since the operating system was released. And today, Microsoft published a response of sorts.

A shell company with a patent linked to Intellectual Ventures, the world's biggest patent-holding company, has quietly filed a new lawsuit in the Eastern District of Texas against a vast range of computer peripheral makers and sellers.

Despite an FCC guidance to router manufacturers that seems to ban open source firmware such as DD-WRT and OpenWRT, FCC spokesperson Charles Meisch told Ars that there is in fact no such ban. But there are restrictions that in some cases could cause a manufacturer to decide to prevent the installation of third-party firmware. In fact, disabling the installation of third-party firmware by the user may be the easiest and most straightforward way for hardware makers to comply with the FCC's guidance.

Holy copyright law, Batman!" So goes a line in the first paragraph of a federal appeals court ruling announcing that the iconic Batmobile is a character protected by copyright.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with DC Comics in its copyright infringement suit against Mark Towle, the operator of Gotham Garage, the maker of Batmobile modification kits. "As Batman so sagely told Robin, 'In our well-ordered society, protection of private property is essential,'" the three-judge court unanimously concluded Wednesday in its 28-page opinion.

The Environmental Protection Agency should have listened to Ron Weasley’s dad. In the Harry Potter books and films, Arthur Weasley is a bureaucrat in the British magical world’s chief regulatory agency, the Ministry of Magic, where his job is to protect people from dangerous devices. He is known for his unusual fascination with nonmagical technologies, and toward the end of the second book, he delivers a deep lesson in living safely with technology. “What have I always told you? Never trust anything that can think for itself if you can’t see where it keeps its brain.”

The Jeb Bush campaign this week unveiled a major part of the candidate's technology platform, and it likely includes taking a hatchet to net neutrality rules. The new policy outline on Bush's website spends some time butchering the very definition of net neutrality as well, parroting several long-standing incumbent ISP narratives that net neutrality is somehow about content companies not paying their fair share, or that modernization of existing rules is somehow "antiquated." Indeed, Bush's definition of net neutrality is rather unique:

Antivirus applications and other security software are supposed to make users more secure, but a growing body of research shows that in some cases, they can open people to hacks they otherwise wouldn't be vulnerable to.

More than two years after a documentary filmmaker challenged the copyright to the simple lyrics of the song "Happy Birthday," a federal judge ruled Tuesday that the copyright is invalid.

The result could undo Warner/Chappell's lucrative licensing business around the song, once estimated to be $2 million per year. The company is likely to appeal the ruling to the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit.

Strangely, however, the EPA is standing alongside automakers, including VW. They all oppose proposed regulations that would allow the public to circumvent copyright protections measures attached to vehicle software. Also known as "technological protection measures" (TPMs), automakers employ this copyright ruse toward the goal of making it a Digital Millennium Copyright Act violation to examine or tinker with the code in vehicle software. And, for the moment, it's all legal, and the EPA wants to keep it that way.

A few months after Valve officially launched Steam for Linux in 2013, Gabe Newell gave his LinuxCon keynote crowd a bit of music for their ears. "It feels a little bit funny coming here and telling you guys that Linux and open source are the future of gaming," the Valve head-man said. "It's sort of like going to Rome and teaching Catholicism to the pope."

In dissent, US Circuit Judge Sharon Prost paints a sharply different picture from the majority. “This is not a close case,” she writes, noting that Apple’s patents cover a spelling correction feature it doesn’t use, and two others cover “minor features” out of “many thousands.”

The patent fight between Apple and Samsung has been going on for many years now with Samsung being told to pay a lot of money to Apple. But on one point Apple has been unsuccessful: getting an injunction barring Samsung from offering products for sale that include the "infringing" inventions -- such as the concept of "slide to unlock." I still have trouble understanding how "slide to unlock" could possibly be patentable, but there it is: US Patent 8,046,721 on "unlocking a device by performing gestures on an unlock image."

Members of Google's Project Zero vulnerability research team have challenged a key talking point surrounding the security of Google's Android mobile operating system. To wit, a key exploit mitigation known as address space layout randomization does much less than the company's overworked public relations people say in blocking attacks targeting critical weaknesses in Android's stagefright media library.

Some potentially good news this morning -- which may be undermined by the fine print. After many years of back and forth, the 9th Circuit appeals court has ruled that Universal Music may have violated the DMCA in not taking fair use into account before issuing a DMCA takedown request on a now famous YouTube video of Stephanie Lenz's infant dancing to less than 30 seconds of a Prince song playing in the background. Because of this, there can now be a trial over whether or not Universal actually had a good faith belief that the video was not fair use.

The long-running copyright case began when Lenz uploaded a video of her son Holden dancing to Prince's "Let's Go Crazy." At that time, Universal had an employee scouring YouTube each day in order to issue takedowns on videos that used Prince music. EFF, looking for a test case over bad DMCA takedowns, found a sympathetic client in Lenz, a mom seeking to simply share a video of her son with his grandmother.

The Indian Patent Office's recent guidelines declaring that software and business methods are patentable in India has set off alarm bells across the software product industry. The patent office for the first time made a clear interpretation of the Patents (Amendment) Act, 2002 to mean that if a software has novelty, is inventive or tangible, and has proper technical effect or industrial application, it can be patented. The guidelines serve as a reference for officers in granting patents.

At a time when software patents seem to be on the retreat in the US, India has perversely decided to move in the other direction, as reported here by The Economic Times:

Attack code that allows hackers to take control of vulnerable Android phones finally went public on Wednesday, as developers at Google, carriers, and handset manufacturers still scrambled to distribute patches to hundreds of millions of end users.

The critical flaws, which reside in an Android media library known as libstagefright, give attackers a variety of ways to surreptitiously execute malicious code on unsuspecting owners' devices. The vulnerabilities were privately reported in April and May and were publicly disclosed only in late July. Google has spent the past four months preparing fixes and distributing them to partners, but those efforts have faced a series of setbacks and limitations.