Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

The Federal Communications Commission is considering new restrictions that would make it harder for users to modify Wi-Fi routers, sparking controversy and an apparent misunderstanding over the FCC’s intentions.

It's easy to laugh-and-point at Samsung over its latest smart-thing disaster: after all, it should have already learned its lesson from the Smart TV debacle, right? Except, of course, that wherever you see “Smart Home”, “Internet of Things”, “cloud” and “connected” in the same press release, there's a security debacle coming. It might be Nest, WeMo, security systems, or home gateways – but it's all the same. Why? Let me introduce someone...

Kids don't want to code. They want to solve problems us oldies can't perceive. “Grandpa is getting pretty old. Out there all alone on that farm, he has no one to look in on him, just to see if he’s ok. He’ll use the landline, but he’s beyond of the range of mobile, and he’s never been really great with computers. No Skype or emails. Grandpa does have internet. So I built this for him.”

Last month, the axe seemingly came down on Adobe Flash: three undiscovered vulnerabilities in Flash were leaked and exploited. In response, Mozilla’s Firefox blocked Flash by default until Adobe issued a patch. You should know by now that installing Flash equals a security risk. But are you aware of how badly your PC can slow down as well? Try 80 percent.

In March or April of 2016, yet another jury will be summoned to federal court in San Jose to weigh in on the long-running dispute between the world's two biggest smartphone companies.

It's that time of the month again: the Electronic Frontier Foundation has selected a winner for its "Stupid Patent of the Month" contest.

Patent-holding company Rothschild Connected Devices Innovations (RCDI) owns US Patent No. 8,788,090, which was granted in 2014 and describes a system where a "remote server" "transmits" a "product preference" via a "communication module." Using those broad claims, RCDI has sued more than 20 companies for making things that connect to the Internet. The company sued ADT (PDF) over its Pulse product that allows for things like adjusting a thermostat.

Imagine if the inventor of the Segway claimed to own “any thing that moves in response to human commands.” Or if the inventor of the telegraph applied for a patent covering any use of electric current for communication. Absurdly overbroad claims like these would not be allowed, right? Unfortunately, the Patent Office does not do a good job of policing overly broad claims. August's Stupid Patent of the Month, U.S. Patent No. 8,788,090, is a stark example of how these claims promote patent trolling.

The buffer overflow has long been a feature of the computer security landscape. In fact the first self-propagating Internet worm—1988's Morris Worm—used a buffer overflow in the Unix finger daemon to spread from machine to machine. Twenty-seven years later, buffer overflows remain a source of problems...

German news outlet c't Magazin is reporting that Xerox printers are going further than the normal restrictions we've become accustomed to. For years, printer companies have made sure users' printers won't run without every single slot being filled with approved cartridges. This includes such stupidity as disabling every function (including non-ink-related functions like scanning) in all-in-one printers until the printer is fed. Xerox is going further. Not only do you need to refill the ink, but you have to fill it with local ink.

Last week, I came across two separate speeches that were given recently about the future of the internet -- both with very different takes and points, but both that really struck a chord with me. And the two seem to fit together nicely, so I'm combining both of them into one post. The first speech is Jennifer Granick's recent keynote at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas. You can see the video here or read a modified version of the speech entitled, "The End of the Internet Dream."

Recent changes to patent law have made it easier to beat patent trolls, but it hasn't made the patent hotspot of East Texas any quieter. In fact, it's been in the news more. Massive numbers of patent troll suits continue to be filed there, and the judge who hears most of them has erected barriers to defendants seeking to have their cases disposed of early.

Back in 2011, This American Life toured an office building in Marshall, Texas, and found eerie hallways of empty offices that serve as the ‘headquarters’ of patent trolls. Trolls love the Eastern District for its plaintiff-friendly rules, so they set up paper corporations in the district as an excuse to file suit there. Meanwhile, defendants find themselves dragged to a distant, inconvenient, and expensive forum that often has little or no connection to the dispute.

IBM is expanding support for Linux on mainframes with a few new initiatives announced today, including plans for an Ubuntu distribution.

The announcement also includes a new Linux mainframe server called LinuxONE and mainframe code contributions to a new "Open Mainframe Project" formed by the Linux Foundation. IBM and Canonical are teaming up to create an Ubuntu distribution for LinuxONE and existing z Systems mainframe hardware.

One of the most underrated features of the latest generation of consoles is the abiltiy to "suspend" the console rather than turning it off completely. Both the Xbox One (since launch) and PS4 (since March) let users put the system into a low-power "rest" mode that provides for a much quicker startup when getting back into the suspended game, saving up to 30 seconds (or more) each time you start up.

Lawrence Lessig, the Harvard professor and cofounder of Creative Commons, announced Tuesday that he is exploring a run for the US presidency as a Democrat. He's crowdsourcing the campaign, too.

The ongoing legal saga known as the Oracle-Google copyright battle took a huge leap Wednesday when Oracle claimed the last six Android operating systems are "infringing Oracle's copyrights in the Java platform."

Oracle's chief security officer is tired of customers performing their own security tests on Oracle software, and she's not going to take it anymore.

Patents are supposed to spread knowledge, by obliging holders to lay out their innovation for all to see; they often fail, because patent-lawyers are masters of obfuscation. Instead, the system has created a parasitic ecology of trolls and defensive patent-holders, who aim to block innovation, or at least to stand in its way unless they can grab a share of the spoils. An early study found that newcomers to the semiconductor business had to buy licences from incumbents for as much as $200m. Patents should spur bursts of innovation; instead, they are used to lock in incumbents’ advantages.

Windows 10 uses the Internet a lot to support many of its features. The operating system also sports numerous knobs to twiddle that are supposed to disable most of these features, and the potentially privacy-compromising connections that go with them.

Unfortunately for privacy advocates, these controls don't appear to be sufficient to completely prevent the operating system from going online and communicating with Microsoft's servers.

During the two-week trial that concluded this week, Finjan accused Blue Coat products such as WebPulse and ProxyAG of infringing six patents related to "cybersecurity," such as this patent on protecting a computer from "hostile downloadables." The San Jose jury agreed with Finjan that all patents were valid, and found five of the six to be infringed. The verdict came in Tuesday and was announced by Finjan yesterday.