Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

The warning about the bug in OpenSSL coincided with the release of version 1.0.1g of the open-source program, which is the default cryptographic library used in the Apache and nginx Web server applications, as well as a wide variety of operating systems and e-mail and instant-messaging clients. The bug, which has resided in production versions of OpenSSL for more than two years, could make it possible for people to recover the private encryption key at the heart of the digital certificates used to authenticate Internet servers and to encrypt data traveling between them and end users. Attacks leave no traces in server logs, so there's no way of knowing if the bug has been actively exploited.

Nothing sucks more than a great new technology with old-world thinking attached to it. Such has been the case with ebooks, unfortunately, with antiquated views on DRM, pricing, and storefront protectionism resulting in pissed off customers and libraries hollering from the nearest rooftop. What we're left with is a platform that could do much to spread knowledge and the practice of reading among entire populations being stifled by those that still think the world should operate based on analog philosophies.

Assuming the research results are representative of what's happening -- and there's no reason to suppose they aren't -- the obvious conclusion to draw from them for PC users is not just to stop using pirated software (a good idea), but to stop using Windows-based programs too, and to switch to open source applications running on an open source operating system like GNU/Linux. After all, free software is even cheaper than pirated software, and yet rarely has any of the problems identified in the new report.

Among the worst of the worst patent trolls out there, Macrosolve had quite a reputation -- described as "worse than Lodsys" it took a sue tons of companies first, demand settlements later approach, based on an obviously ridiculous patent (7,822,816) for a "system and method for data management" that the company insisted, hilariously, covered any mobile app that used online forms where users could submit data. Yes, forms. For a patent filed in 2003 and granted in 2010. In a bit of a "cute" move, the company tried to pretend it wasn't a troll by doing a deal with... Donald Trump, which apparently suckered some in the press to claim that it wasn't a troll.

We've been talking a lot about the power and importance of open access for academic (and especially government funded) research. More and more universities have agreed, with some even having general open access policies for their academics, requiring them to release research under open access policies. This makes sense, because one of the key aspects of education and knowledge is the ability to share it freely and to build on the work of others. Without open access, this is made much more difficult. So it's immensely troubling to discover that one of the biggest science publishers out there, Nature Publishing Group, has started telling academics that they need to get a "waiver" from their university's open access policies.

Four years ago, the Supreme Court had a chance to establish once and for all whether or not software was patentable. The Bilski case got all sorts of attention as various parties lined up to explain why software patents were either evil, innovation-killing monsters or the sole cause of innovation since the cotton gin and everything in between (only slight exaggeration). Rather than actually answer the question everyone was asking, the Supreme Court decided to rule especially narrowly...

What kinds of software—if any—deserve a patent?

It's a basic question, and one that many thought would be resolved by now, especially since the issue came up in the US Supreme Court's 2010 Bilski decision. But Bilski left the legal landscape more confusing and fractured. This was illustrated in dramatic fashion last year, when the nation's top patent court, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, practically split apart at the seams trying to decide if four patents on financial software held up. The Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank case resulted in ten judges writing seven different opinions and resolving nothing.

That was followed by Justice Stephen Breyer's question, which suggested the Alice patent is describing a method of settling accounts that is in fact ancient.

"I mean, imagine King Tut sitting in front of the pyramid where all his gold is stored, and he has the habit of giving chits away," said Breyer. "He hires a man with an abacus, and when the abacus keeping track sees that he's given away more gold than he has in storage, he says, stop.... How is that [the Alice patent] less abstract than King Tut, if we had the same thing with a grain elevator, if we had the same thing with a reservoir of water, if we had the same thing with my checkbook?"

Fixing and upgrading iOS devices can be a rewarding business opportunity, so long as you don't mind having to fight Apple every step of the way. So says the founder of iFixit, who spoke at the MacWorld Expo in San Francisco on Thursday. The repair outfit's CEO Kyle Wiens said there is little or no official public information for servicing the handheld gizmos:

"On March 27, 2014, Lenovo voluntarily recalled certain lithium-ion batteries. These batteries were manufactured for use with ThinkPad notebook computers that shipped worldwide between October 2010 and April 2011," the company said. "Lenovo is offering replacement batteries free of charge regardless of warranty status."

The battery problems affect the Edge 11, 13 and 14 series, the T410, T420, T510 and W510 series, and the X100e, X120e, X200, X201 and X201s lines. Batteries that came with the laptops, and those bought as spares, have been recalled, and the problems affect 3-cell, 4-cell, 6-cell or 9-cell parts.

Now a German court has weighed in on the subject, with interesting results. The case concerned the use of a photo from Flickr, released under a CC-BY-NC license. The photo appeared on the Web site of Deutschlandradio, part of the German public broadcaster -- a non-commercial organization, that is. Alongside the photo, Deutschlandradio's Web site included the name of the artist, the license, and a link to its terms. Despite this, the photographer demanded 310 Euros plus costs on the grounds that Deutschlandradio had used the photo for commercial purposes.

Michael Robertson, an entrepreneur who has been waging legal feuds against the music industry for more than a decade now, has been ordered to pay $41 million to a record label that sued him. The record label EMI sued MP3tunes back in 2007, and the case finally went to a jury last week in New York federal court. The jury found MP3tunes, and Robertson personally, liable for copyright violations.

We first wrote about Brazil's 'Marco Civil' back in October 2011, when we described it as a kind of "anti-ACTA". That's because it was designed to protect online rights, not diminish them, and was the product of a democratic and transparent process, not of secret corporate lobbying...

... Precisely because it was not yet another corporate wishlist, but sought to enshrine fundamental user rights, it was fiercely attacked by an array of industries. In November 2012, it looked like Marco Civil had been killed off by the lobbyists, but in 2013 it showed signs of life again. Now comes the good news that it has finally passed a key vote in Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies; significantly, digital activism once more played a crucial role:

Earlier this month, the U.S. government surprised the Internet community by announcing that it plans to back away from its longstanding oversight of the Internet domain name system. The move comes more than 15 years after it first announced plans to transfer management of the so-called IANA function, which includes the power to add new domain name extensions (such as dot-xxx) and to alter administrative control over an existing domain name extension (for example, approving the transfer of the dot-ca domain in 2000 from the University of British Columbia to the Canadian Internet Registration Authority).

In evaluating the Chromebox, we wanted to answer three different questions: where does a cheap Chromebox make sense? What kind of performance and power consumption do you get for $179? And can you get around Chrome OS to install and run other software on the Chromebox, circumventing Google's limitations?

For many years, we've written about the Business Software Alliance's (BSA) ridiculous snitch program. This is where the organization (which represents a bunch of software companies, but more or less takes its orders from Microsoft, Adobe, Apple and Autodesk) promises to give people large cash rewards for snitching on friends and colleagues who happen to be using unlicensed software. The BSA insists that this is one of their best tools -- which they then use to raid small companies for questionable "audits" that often completely destroy those businesses.

If the Federal Communications Commission lets Internet service providers charge Web companies like Netflix for faster delivery of content to consumers, AT&T will lower its customers' Internet bills. That's what AT&T said Friday in a filing in the FCC's "Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet" proceeding.

Keurig's next generation of coffee machines will have a way to prevent any coffee not licensed by Keurig from brewing in the machine as early as this fall. Locking down a thing like coffee seems both trifling and difficult to accomplish—no one has yet described how Keurig can differentiate its own pods enough so that its machines would honor those pods and only those pods...

To suss out the issue of coffee DRM, it makes sense to look at a relatively close analog product with its own rights management and interoperability issues—printer toner cartridges. Each printer company jealously guards its model of cartridges, doing everything it can to make them proprietary and unrefillable, because, of course, the real money in printing is in selling the ink at a very large profit.

Earlier this week, Ars reported on attacks exploiting an extremely critical vulnerability in the PHP scripting language almost two years after the bug came to light. By going 22 months without installing crucial patches, the responsible administrators were menacing the entire Internet.........Now comes word of a new mass compromise that preys on even more neglected Web severs, some running versions of the Linux operating system kernel first released in 2007...

Sandra Aistars of the Copyright Alliance issued a statement during the recent DMCA-related hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee. As was noted earlier, a bunch of effort was made to turn the "notice and takedown" system into a "notice and stay down" system, and weirdly, the word "free" was thrown about as if it was synonymous with "infringement."