Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Techdirt recently wrote about the ever-growing flood of patents being granted by the USPTO. As we've emphasized, more patents do not mean more innovation; nor do they necessarily lead to greater overall benefits for business. That's clear in an important new paper from a team including James Bessen, whose work has been mentioned here several times before. It builds on the approach described in the 2008 book "Patent Failure" by James Bessen and Michael Meurer, and seeks to estimate both the private costs and private benefits accruing from patents in the US during the years 1984 to 2009. Here's how the costs are obtained:

With every word he writes, recently installed FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler shows he has little interest or belief in net neutrality as most consumers understand it. In another flimsy attempt at defending his position on “fast lanes” — i.e., allowing Internet service providers to charge more to content companies seeking priority access to end-users — Wheeler contends that consumers should do what Verizon and other telecoms want because well, it could take a while to do it correctly.

The proposal would formalize pay-for-play arrangements in which streaming video companies and other types of Web services pay Internet service providers for a faster path to consumers over the "last mile" of the network...

... What are the consequences of this decision? Let's ask the 2010 version of the FCC, led by previous commissioner Julius Genachowski. Here are some relevant quotes from the Open Internet Order.

Canonical pushed out Ubuntu 14.04 last week. This release is the first Ubuntu Long Term Support release in two years and will be supported for the next five years.

It feels like, for Canonical at least, this Long Term Support release couldn't have come at a worse time. The company is caught in a transitional phase as it moves from a desktop operating system to a platform that spans devices.

FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler confirmed today that proposed rules to replace the net neutrality regulations struck down by a court decision are on track for an FCC vote on May 15. Wheeler didn't detail exactly what those rules would be, but The Wall Street Journal says it has a source who knows. "The Federal Communications Commission plans to propose new open Internet rules on Thursday that would allow content companies to pay Internet service providers for special access to consumers, according to a person familiar with the proposal," the Journal reported.

The case was just weeks away from a jury trial, but US District Judge Anthony Trenga didn't let it get that far. In an opinion published Wednesday, Trenga found that IV's patents were simply abstract ideas: "nothing more than the mere manipulation or reorganization of data," he wrote. "At most, the patents describe a more efficient system or method for performing tasks than could be done without a computer, i.e. monitoring expenditures according to preset limits (the '137 Patent) or determining what would appeal to a particular user from a particular website (the '382 Patent.)"

The decision to fork OpenSSL is bound to be controversial given that OpenSSL powers hundreds of thousands of Web servers. When asked why he wanted to start over instead of helping to make OpenSSL better, de Raadt said the existing code is too much of a mess.

"Our group removed half of the OpenSSL source tree in a week. It was discarded leftovers," de Raadt told Ars in an e-mail. "The Open Source model depends [on] people being able to read the code. It depends on clarity. That is not a clear code base, because their community does not appear to care about clarity. Obviously, when such cruft builds up, there is a cultural gap. I did not make this decision... in our larger development group, it made itself."

Researcher finds secret “knock” opens admin for some Linksys, Netgear routers.

First, DSL router owners got an unwelcome Christmas present. Now, the same gift is back as an Easter egg. The same security researcher who originally discovered a backdoor in 24 models of wireless DSL routers has found that a patch intended to fix that problem doesn’t actually get rid of the backdoor—it just conceals it. And the nature of the “fix” suggests that the backdoor, which is part of the firmware for wireless DSL routers based on technology from the Taiwanese manufacturer Sercomm, was an intentional feature to begin with.

Microsoft MSFT -0.97% has been on a roll lately. Office for iOS (and soon Android), free Windows licenses for small devices, universal Windows and Windows Phone apps, Siri rival Cortana, even a promise to eventually return the start menu before Windows 9. But when it comes to Windows 8, it seems the company has a permanently loaded pistol aimed squarely at its feet.

So it fits that just one week on from the launch of ‘Windows 8.1 Update 1’ (the smart upgrade mouse and keyboard users have long awaited) stupidity would strike once again.

Eli Lilly bet its entire business model on patents years back, rather than on creating useful products that people want to buy. Lately it's been having trouble getting new patents, and is reacting extremely poorly to the fact that its last-gasp efforts to get new patents aren't working. As we've noted, a few years back, Canada rejected some patent applications for some Eli Lilly drug after the Canadian patent board "determined that the drug had failed to deliver the benefits the firm promised when obtaining the patent." In other words, after realizing that the drug is not useful, Canada rejected the patent.

And Eli Lilly flipped out.

It should take a long time to spend $9 billion when your company produces nothing that has ever been brought to market, but that's IV for you.

MITRE gave a presentation on UEFI Secure Boot at SyScan earlier this month. You should read the the presentation and paper, because it's really very good.

It describes a couple of attacks...

The web is a dangerous place these days. Akamai, which many large companies rely on for hosting as a CDN, has admitted that its Heartbleed patch was faulty, meaning that it was possible that the SSL keys "could have been exposed to an adversary exploiting the Heartbleed vulnerability."

While AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have argued -- with incredible message discipline -- that network neutrality is "a solution in search of a problem," that's simply not true. There are many concrete examples of network neutrality violations around the world. These network neutrality violations include ISPs blocking websites and applications, ISPs discriminating in favor of some applications and against others, and ISPs charging arbitrary tolls on technology companies.

On Monday, after seven months of discussion and planning, the first-phase of a two-part audit of TrueCrypt was released.

Over the last year, a rabbi, a state NAACP official, a small town mayor, and other community leaders wrote op-eds and letters to Congress with remarkably similar language on a remarkably obscure topic. Each railed against a long-standing proposal that would give taxpayers the option to use pre-filled tax returns...

Back in December, we noted that the House Judiciary Committee had approved an unfortunately watered-down, anti-patent troll bill. It was better than nothing, but we hoped that the Senate would approve a much stronger version. For a while it seemed like that was likely to happen, but... those who abuse patents are pretty damn powerful. Even those who have been hit by patent trolls in the past, like Apple and Microsoft, have decided to join forces in lobbying against meaningful patent reform. They've been pushing to water down the Senate's bill, taking out nearly everything that would make the bill useful -- and it appears that they're succeeding.

How the heartbleed bug works: http://xkcd.com/1354/

And a little Perspective: http://xkcd.com/1353/

Why can't movie-streaming sites deliver the selection of movies that customers obviously want? This was the question posed by a recent New York Times column, comparing undersupplied services like Netflix with unauthorized platforms like Popcorn Time...

The problem is that, unlike earlier movie-rental options, streaming rights fall fundamentally within a permission culture. Netflix is a great illustration of what's gone wrong here. It's gone from having a nearly unrivaled catalog of films available to rent to being the butt of Onion jokes. What happened: It shifted from a system where nobody had a veto power over its operations, to one where it had to get permission and make deals with Hollywood. Sometimes it's difficult to find the concrete costs of living in a permission culture, but the decline of Netflix's selection is an important cautionary tale.

Earlier this week, we wrote about the MPAA's announced plans to sue Megaupload in a civil lawsuit to pile on to the criminal charges the company is already facing. As we noted, there's no legitimate reason for such a lawsuit, given the criminal lawsuit already underway, other than as a way to try to get a favorable court ruling it can use against others. Having now read the full complaint against Megaupload, it's quite clear that this is exactly what the MPAA is doing. The lawsuit is incredibly dangerous for the internet, even if you think that Megaupload itself was a bad actor. Even the LA Times -- Hollywood's hometown paper -- has called out the lawsuit for how it may have negative consequences felt broadly across the internet.