Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Your main workstation has a lot of power, so free it up to do better things.

When you work with 3D or video rendering, you quickly realize—excuse the tacky, car-salesman tone of this cliché—that time is actually money. Under a tight deadline with very demanding tasks, you need more than just a faster machine. You need a lot more power, and one of the main ways of getting it is to divide your task among networked machines.

Want to know why there are bad patents? Because there's no such thing as a true "final rejection" of a patent (i.e., you can always keep refiling and try, try, trying again and again until it's approved) and because the former head of the Patent Office, David Kappos, saw it as his main challenge to get rid of the giant backlog in getting patents approved. And thus, soon after Kappos took over the USPTO, we noted that patent approval rates started shooting upwards. Over the previous six years or so, the approval rate had been in a gradual decline, with it really starting to drop off around 2004, just as the Supreme Court started hitting back on a bunch of bad patent rulings, and making it clearer that, no, not "everything under the sun" should be patentable. However, Kappos never appeared to view patent quality as important, merely patent quantity and ending the backlog -- and thus, the patent office started to take an approve anything mentality.

We sort of expected this to happen after the appeals court for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) held its oral arguments back in December, but CAFC has now spit at basic common sense and has declared that you can copyright an API. As we noted, back when Judge William Alsup (who learned to code Java to better understand the issues in the case) ruled that APIs were not subject to copyright protection, his ruling was somewhat unique in that it was clearly directed as much at an appeals court panel who would be hearing the appeal as it was at the parties. Alsup rightly suspected that the judges on the appeal wouldn't actually understand the issues as well as he did, and tried to break it down clearly for them. Unfortunately, the three judge CAFC panel did not pay attention.

Every week brings us new reports about the destructive effect of software patents in the US, and of a patent office there that is only too willing to grant them and other undeserving patents: an excellent if depressing article by Timothy Lee points out that the "allowance rate" - the percentage of patents that are eventually granted by the USPTO - is now a staggering 92%.

There are very good grounds for fearing that the imminent new Unitary Patent system will bring exactly the same problems to Europe, and yet there has been almost no discussion about it, certainly not here in the UK. Similarly, British citizens have not been asked whether they want this new system foisted on to them. You might say that's an unreasonable thing to expect, since patents by their very nature are complex, specialised subjects. That may be true, but the fact that Denmark will be holding a national referendum on the subject in a few weeks' time, shows that it can be done.

That something does what it's supposed to is usually the baseline for evaluating public policy. It's certainly what I expected to find as I researched my (shameless self-promotion alert) just-published book, Copyfight: The global politics of digital copyright reform. I'm an economist and political scientist by training, and also spent six years as an economist with the Parliamentary Information and Research Service, the Canadian equivalent of the Congressional Research Service. Coming cold to the wonderful, wooly world of copyright, I expected that such a long-lived institution would be grounded at least partly in empirical evidence that it, you know, actually promotes the creation and dissemination of music, books and so on.

Thought the peanut butter sandwich patent was a joke? That one doesn't even register a chuckle compared to a patent recently granted to Amazon.com. The e-commerce giant now can claim a legal monopoly on the process of photographing people and things against a white backdrop.

The patent, issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office, is making some folks in the photography community do a double-take. Amazon’s patent, called Studio Arrangement, details a specific arrangement of elements in a photography studio that the company believes helps foster the production of the most aesthetically pleasing images.

Each day, the open internet/net neutrality battle gets a bit more interesting. We just covered Tim Lee's excellent look at how Comcast and other big telcos were effectively using interconnection disputes to get the same result as violating net neutrality, without technically violating the basic concept of what most people believe is net neutrality. And he's back with an even more important explanation of how Comcast's ultimate goal is to effectively make the internet more like the old phone system, post AT&T breakup, in which everyone had to pay to access the end points of the network. Ironically, they're trying to recreate the internet in the form of the old telephone network, while at the same time doing everything to resist being classified as a telephone network by the FCC.

We've talked in the past about just how badly certain industries would love to expand the restrictions created by DRM onto physical goods. And that's because, unlike what copyright system defenders like to claim, DRM allows companies to put restrictions on content that go way beyond what kind of restrictions can be placed on physical goods. For example: the right to resell something. In the copyright space, we've long had the first sale doctrine, which makes it possible for you to resell a physical book you own, without having to first get permission from the copyright holder. Of course, first sale has long been under attack, especially by academic publishers who absolutely hate the idea of a resale market. That's because they are monopoly providers -- professors assign the textbooks, and students need to buy them, leading to ridiculously inflated prices.

The open-source OpenSSL cryptographic library is being patched for a pair of security flaws, one of which has been in the code for at least four years.

OpenSSL, of course, is the source of the now infamous Heartbleed vulnerability, first disclosed on April 7. While Heartbleed has had a wide-ranging impact that has left hundreds of millions of users vulnerable, the newly patched issues are not quite as dramatic.

For years now, every time the net neutrality debate starts getting really confusing, Tim Lee comes along and puts it all into useful perspective. Six years ago, there was his exceptionally useful position paper on net neutrality for the Cato Institute. A couple years ago, he wrote another great piece for National Affairs magazine that deftly explained why the internet wasn't competitive and why that's a problem. Now working for Vox, he's put together a great piece that explains the technical difference between the interconnection fights and the net neutrality battle -- but also explains how the end result is basically the same.

DRM and the laws that back it up actively undermine our computer security. On this Day Against DRM, the first one since we learned about the US government’s efforts to sabotage the integrity of our cryptography and security technology, it's more important than ever to consider how the unintended consequences of copyright enforcement make us all less safe.

Network operator Level 3, which has asked the FCC to protect it from "arbitrary access charges" that ISPs want in exchange for accepting Internet traffic, today claimed that six consumer broadband providers have allowed a state of "permanent congestion" by refusing to upgrade peering connections for the past year.

Level 3 and Cogent, another network operator, have been involved in disputes with ISPs over whether they should pay for the right to send them traffic. ISPs have demanded payment in exchange for accepting streaming video and other data that is passed from the network providers to ISPs and eventually to consumers.

The Mozilla Foundation today is filing a petition asking the Federal Communications Commission to declare that ISPs are common carriers, but there's a twist.

The FCC doesn't have to reclassify the Internet access ISPs offer consumers as a telecommunications service subject to common carrier regulations under Title II of the Communications Act, Mozilla says. Instead, the FCC should target the service ISPs offer to edge providers like Netflix and Dropbox, who need to send their bits over ISP networks to reach their customers. Classifying the ISP/edge provider relationship as a common carrier service will be a little cleaner since the FCC wouldn't have to undo several decade-old orders that classified broadband as an "information" service rather than telecommunications, Mozilla argues.

The jury foreman in the latest round of the Apple v. Samsung patent showdown said Monday that the "consumer" was clearly the biggest loser following the conclusion of the month-long trial.

For years, the government has upheld the principle of “Net neutrality,” the belief that everyone should have equal access to the web without preferential treatment. But now, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission and a former cable and telecommunications top gun, is circulating potential new rules that reportedly would put a price tag on climbing aboard the Internet.

The second blockbuster Apple v. Samsung patent trial has ended, and it looks like a Pyrrhic victory for Apple.

I spent a lot of the last week shaking my head at the commentary on the Supreme Court and its (lack of) technical expertise. Much of the criticism came in response to the oral arguments in Aereo, and broke down in two areas: it either misunderstood the nature of Supreme Court oral arguments and their transcripts, or mistook familiarity with a handful of Silicon Valley products with actual tech savviness.

So here's the question: why haven't airlines adopted these better methods, instead sticking with what are clearly the worst methods? Everyone seems to agree that speeding up turnaround times could save airlines a tremendous amount of money. Steffen himself has estimated that faster turnaround could save the airline industry over a billion dollars. So you'd think they'd do that. But... they don't...

A few years ago, we wrote about how a guy named Dimitry Shirokov, with help from the law firm of Booth Sweet had taken on the "fathers" of copyright trolling in the US, Dunlap, Grubb & Weaver, who had formed an organization called US Copyright Group, which initiated the first round of mass copyright trolling in the US (before the likes of Prenda and others entered the space). Shirokov had tried to make his lawsuit a class action against the lawyers, claiming fraud and extortion. And while the class action part was unfortunately rejected, the case has ended with a victory for Shirokov, with the judge ordering DGW to pay $39,909.95 ($3,179.52 to Shirokov and the rest in attorneys' fees to Booth Sweet).

Following his weak attempt to diffuse concerns about his bogus "open internet" rules, FCC boss Tom Wheeler has decided to try again, by basically repeating what he said last week with slightly stronger language about how he won't let broadband providers violate net neutrality. Of course, as many people have explained, the problem is that the new rules clearly aren't strong enough, and leave open all sorts of ways to kill off basic neutrality online. Of course, the real problem is that the original 2010 "open internet" rules (which were really crafted by the telcos in the first place) didn't really protect net neutrality in the first place, and the new rules are basically an even weaker version of those rules.