Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Apple announced iOS 9 on Monday, and while watching the keynote, I had just a little bit of déjà vu. Most of iOS 9's new features seem to be squarely aimed at Apple's biggest rival in mobile: Android. Specifically, they were about catching up to Android.

RayNiro, one of the lawyers who pioneered the wave of contingent-fee patent litigation, says he's ready to exit the business. “The stand-alone patent case is dead on arrival, and I don't think we're unique,” Niro told Crain's Chicago Business.

Patent litigation dropped by roughly 20 percent in 2014, and patent lawsuits by "non-practicing entities," also known as patent trolls, dropped by nearly 25 percent. Those trolls filed about 3,700 lawsuits in 2013, and 2,800 in 2014, according to data from RPX's annual report (PDF).

There are certain general rules about who not to attack that you should generally stick to: You should never get involved in a land war in Asia. You should never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. And perhaps now we can add: never sue the EFF for defamation for calling your patent stupid. But that appears to be exactly what Scott A. Horstemeyer is doing.

The filing of a defamation suit against the EFF—a group that has fought numerous legal cases to defend online speech—is a stunning turn of events, with a cast of characters that you can't make up. The plaintiff, Scott Horstemeyer, is a patent lawyer who also has a side business of "inventing"—that is, not just prosecuting patents for clients but also convincing the US Patent and Trademark Office to grant him his own patents, many of which include broad claims to Internet and mobile technology.

The Justice Department is weighing in on the hot-button intellectual property dispute between Google and Oracle, telling the Supreme Court that APIs are protected by copyright.

The Obama administration's position means it is siding with Oracle and a federal appeals court that said application programming interfaces are subject to copyright protections. The high court in January asked for the government's views on the closely watched case.

The dispute centers on Google copying names, declarations, and header lines of the Java APIs in Android.

The Supreme Court issued a ruling today in Commil USA v. Cisco Systems, one of two patent cases it heard this term. On one key issue, the opinion favors Commil, a "patent troll" that won a $64 million jury verdict against Cisco. But other findings mean that the non-practicing entity won't be getting a payday any time soon—and a final section of the opinion is wholly dedicated to reminding judges to sanction misbehaving patent plaintiffs, something that didn't even come up in this case.

A worm that targets cable and DSL modems, home routers, and other embedded computers is turning those devices into a proxy network for launching armies of fraudulent Instagram, Twitter, and Vine accounts as well as fake accounts on other social networks. The new worm can also hijack routers' DNS service to route requests to a malicious server, steal unencrypted social media cookies such as those used by Instagram, and then use those cookies to add "follows" to fraudulent accounts. This allows the worm to spread itself to embedded systems on the local network that use Linux-based operating systems.

Microsoft executives telephoned Conservative MPs threatening to shut down a facility in their local area because of planned IT reforms, David Cameron’s former strategy chief has claimed. Steve Hilton, who worked for Cameron in opposition and for two years in Downing Street, made the allegation as he argued the dominance of corporate lobbying in the UK was leading to bad policy-making...

... Another former Downing Street aide, Rohan Silva, appears to have given a similar account of lobbying by Microsoft in relation to open source software, in comments reported by Computer Weekly. Silva told a conference: “A day or two before we were going to give a speech, a couple of backbench MPs called the office – they said Microsoft had called them saying if we went ahead with the speech on open standards, open architecture and open source, they would cut spending or maybe close research and development centres in the constituencies of the MPs they had called.

In the first comprehensive study of the effectiveness of the Android feature, Cambridge University researchers found that they were able to recover data on a wide range of devices that had run factory reset. The function, which is built into Google's Android mobile operating system, is considered a crucial means for wiping confidential data off of devices before they're sold, recycled, or otherwise retired. The study found that data could be recovered even when users turned on full-disk encryption.

The first smartphone I ever purchased died last week. It was an Android running CyanogenMod and lived through 19 months of aimless browsing, displaying stupid WhatsApp jokes, short and long late night conversations and more.

In 2011 and 2012, the NSA and the communications intelligence agencies of its "Five Eyes" allies developed and tested a set of add-ons to their shared Internet surveillance capability that could identify and target communications between mobile devices and popular mobile app stores—including those of Google and Samsung. According to an NSA document published by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the targeting capability could have been used to launch "man-in-the-middle" attacks on mobile app downloads, allowing the NSA and other agencies to install code on targeted devices and gather intelligence on their users.

The 2012 document shows that the surveillance agencies exploited the weaknesses in certain mobile apps in pursuit of their national security interests, but it appears they didn't alert the companies or the public to these weaknesses. That potentially put millions of users in danger of their data being accessed by other governments' agencies, hackers or criminals.

I have converted many users, including my wife, to Linux in the past 10 years and and I am still going strong. If you do it right, Linux will do a better job for your users than Mac OS X or Windows … if you do it right.

Although only a handful of Nexus devices are confirmed to run Ubuntu Touch, many others have had the mobile operating system ported to them. If you’re wondering whether or not your hardware is suitable, the first thing to do is to take a look at the list of working ports, which you’ll find on the Ubuntu Wiki. Note that unlike the Nexus versions, the ports on this list are not hosted by Ubuntu.

The CHIP is in the vein of small, Linux-based, inexpensive computers, like the Raspberry Pi and the Beagle Board. Crucially, though, it has built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, so you won’t have to sacrifice a USB port. The computer runs a 1Ghz R8 ARM processor and hums along with 512MB of RAM, and 4GB of flash storage. It also has a full-sized USB port, and a composite video out, so it can work with older televisions.

The ACLU has a "new" app available that allows users to record interactions with the police and automatically upload them to the ACLU's servers to preserve the footage in case the phone is seized… or smashed on the ground...

... If your local ACLU chapter hasn't put together an app to automatically archive recordings of law enforcement interactions, there's another app on the way that will give anyone the ability to capture footage and ensure that, not only will it survive attempts to destroy evidence, but that it will possibly be seen by others as the event unfolds...

Every one of us has already had this fight at some point: Apple or Android? The two dominant players in the mobile space carry with them very loyal fanbases who, for some reason, like to spar off with one another over whose tech-daddy could beat up the other. The companies compete with the same level of petty at times, which doesn't help.

We talk a lot about how fair use is under attack these days, and I've discussed in the past my concerns about freedom of expression when we always have a company (or a few companies) standing in the middle of our decisions on whether or not we can speak. NiemanLabs has a great example of where this becomes problematic in a story about how SoundCloud will not even consider fair use in making decisions about whether or not to take down content, and how that's harming journalism:

Imagine you're on your way to deliver a case of beer to a party. Before you get there, your boss sends you a text: They want 2 cases now. You read the text while driving (don't do that), so you deliver an extra case when you arrive. Having successfully completed that task, you leave for your next delivery.

Congratulations! You might get sued by the owner of April's stupid patent of the month.

If you choose to laugh at Microsoft over its mobile presence, feel free, but please know that Microsoft is laughing too; all the way to the bank. What you may not know is, Microsoft makes money from Android handset sales thanks to its patent portfolio. In fact, it also collects money from Chromebooks too. In other words, Microsoft is profiting from Linux, since both operating systems are based on the kernel. Today, Microsoft increases its number of patent licensing agreements, by making a deal with Qisda Corp.