Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Sysadmins, rejoice: PowerShell is coming to Linux and Mac. Microsoft announced Thursday that its automation and scripting system is breaking out of the confines of Windows and going open source.

The company is also releasing alpha versions of PowerShell for Linux (specifically Ubuntu, Centos and Redhat) and Mac OS X. A new PowerShell GitHub page gives people the ability to download binaries of the software, as well as access to the app's source code.

The attorneys who moved the song Happy Birthday into the public domain will receive $4.62 million in fees, according to a judge's fee order (PDF) published Tuesday. The amount, which equals one-third of a $14 million settlement fund, was granted over objections by the defendant, Warner/Chappell. After various billing deductions, US District Judge George King found that a "lodestar" payment of about $3.85 million was appropriate. King then added a multiplier. "Given the unusually positive results achieved by the settlement, the highly complex nature of the action, the risk class counsel faced by taking this case on a contingency-fee basis, and the impressive skill and effort of counsel, we conclude that a 1.2 multiplier is warranted," wrote King.

There's been a bunch of coverage of this attack on Microsoft's Secure Boot implementation, a lot of which has been somewhat confused or misleading. Here's my understanding of the situation.

The owner of a patent on podcasting is hoping to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. Personal Audio and its owner, Jim Logan, lost their patent last year after lawyers from the Electronic Frontier Foundation showed the US Patent and Trademark Office that various types of Internet broadcasts pre-date the patent, which claims a 1996 priority date.

Today, the EFF and a coalition of organizations and individuals asked the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to explore fair labeling rules that would require retailers to warn you when the products you buy come locked down by DRM ("Digital Rights Management" or "Digital Restrictions Management").

Microsoft has inadvertently demonstrated the intrinsic security problem of including a universal backdoor in its software after it accidentally leaked its so-called "golden key"—which allows users to unlock any device that's supposedly protected by Secure Boot, such as phones and tablets. The key basically allows anyone to bypass the provisions Microsoft has put in place ostensibly to prevent malicious versions of Windows from being installed, on any device running Windows 8.1 and upwards with Secure Boot enabled.

The vulnerability resides in the design and implementation of RFC 5961, a relatively new Internet standard that's intended to prevent certain classes of hacking attacks. In fact, the protocol is designed in a way that it can easily open Internet users to so-called blind off-path attacks, in which hackers anywhere on the Internet can detect when any two parties are communicating over an active transmission control protocol connection. Attackers can go on to exploit the flaw to shut down the connection, inject malicious code or content into unencrypted data streams, and possibly degrade privacy guarantees provided by the Tor anonymity network.

A startup on a shoestring budget is working to clean up the Android security mess, and has even demonstrated results where other "secure" Android phones have failed, raising questions about Google's willingness to address the widespread vulnerabilities that exist in the world's most popular mobile operating system.

This shouldn't be a surprise. All the way back in 2004, in Adam Jaffe's and Josh Lerner's excellent book about our dysfunctional patent system, Innovation and Its Discontents, one of the key problems they outlined with the system was the fact that there was strong incentives for patent examiners at the US Patent Office to approve shit patents. That's because they were rewarded for how "productive" they were in terms of how many patent applications they completed processing.

A recent extension of UK copyright for industrially manufactured artistic works represents "a direct assault on the 3D printing revolution," says Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge. The UK government last month extended copyright for designs from 25 years to the life of the designer plus 70 years. In practice, this is likely to mean a copyright term of over 100 years for furniture and other designed objects. "This change means that people will be prohibited from using 3D printing and other maker technologies to manufacture such objects, and that for a full century."

BlackBerry has filed a patent lawsuit (PDF) against internet telephony firm Avaya. The dispute marks a turning point for Blackberry, which pushed into the Android market last year but has been struggling. In making its case that Avaya should pay royalties, BlackBerry's focus is squarely on its rear-view mirror. The firm argues that it should be paid for its history of innovation going back nearly 20 years.

So if you're looking for an Ubuntu-like system but don't want to be Canonical's lab rat for the transition to Mir and Unity 8, Mint is for you. Mint 18.x should make for a familiar but stable Linux environment. In some ways, that means Mint has become what Ubuntu once was—a stable, new-user-friendly gateway to Linux. Mint installation is now simpler than upgrading to Windows 10 (though there is one additional headache with 18.0). And once installed, both the Cinnamon and MATE desktops will be familiar to anyone switching from Windows.

Nevada-based VirnetX won a jury trial against Apple earlier this year. An East Texas jury ruled that Apple must pay $625.6 million to VirnetX for infringing four patents. The patents are said to cover Apple's VPN on-demand feature, as well as FaceTime. US District Judge Robert Schroeder, who oversaw the trial, published an order (PDF) on Friday that vacates the verdict and orders a new trial to begin in September.

In a settlement with the Federal Communications Commission, TP-Link agreed to pay a $200,000 fine, comply with the rules going forward, and to let customers install open source firmware on routers... The open source requirement is a unique one, as it isn't directly related to TP-Link's violation. Moreover, FCC rules don't require router makers to allow loading of third-party, open source firmware. In fact, recent changes to FCC rules made it more difficult for router makers to allow open source software.

A well-known American photographer has now sued Getty Images and other related companies—she claims they have been wrongly been selling copyright license for over 18,000 of her photos that she had already donated to the public for free, via the Library of Congress.

Computer security professor Matthew Green and famed hardware hacker Bunnie Huang have teamed up with the EFF to sue the US government, challenging the constitutionality of Section 1201 of the DMCA, also known as the "anti-circumvention" clause. As we've discussed for many years, 1201 makes it against the law to "manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof" that is designed to "circumvent" DRM or other "technological protection measures." There are all sorts of problems with this part of the law, including the fact that it doesn't matter why you have that tool or why you're circumventing the DRM. For example, it would still be considered infringement if you cracked DRM on a public domain work. That's... insane.

Cyanogen Inc. seems to be in trouble. A report from Android Police cites "several sources" that say the three-year-old Android software house will be laying off 20 percent of its workforce. One source said the company would "pivot" to "apps" and away from OS development.

Techdirt has been warning for years that the West's repeated demands for China to "respect" patents could backfire badly. In 2010, Mike pointed out that Chinese companies were starting to amass huge patent portfolios, which were soon used as weapons against foreign firms operating in China, most notably Apple.

With No Man's Sky's highly anticipated release just weeks away, a Dutch company is objecting to the game's alleged use of a patented "superformula" to generate landscapes and terrain.

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