Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

RSA has issued a statement denying allegations stemming from Friday's bombshell report that the encryption software provider received $10 million from the National Security Agency (NSA) in exchange for making a weak algorithm the preferred one in its BSAFE toolkit.

Last year, the USPTO released a widely cited report entitled “Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy: Industries in Focus.” This report emphasized the importance of IP to the U.S. economy, claiming “the entire U.S. economy relies on some form of IP,” and estimating that “IP-intensive industries” accounted for 40 million American jobs and 35% of the U.S. GDP in 2010.

While many pro-IP groups hailed the report as demonstrating the importance of IP to the American economy, the report was widely panned by critics who pointed out that the definition of “IP-intensive industries” was so broad as to be meaningless. Indeed, according to the report, the number one IP-intensive industry by employment in the United States was… grocery stores.

Last month, troll-fighting online retailer Newegg suffered a stunning setback when it lost in court to TQP Development, a patent-holding company that claims to own the rights to basic Web encryption.

This week the company has said it's "back on track" after getting a total win against a patent troll called Technology Properties Ltd., or TPL, at the International Trade Commission (ITC). Newegg was part of a coalition of tech companies that refused to settle, including Canon, HP, Seiko Epson, Kingston, and a Taiwanese company called HiTi Digital. The original complaint was filed against 21 companies, most of which have settled, just recently including Acer.

The reason I'm bringing up this bit of Christmas music copyright fighting is just to note that the song was written in 1934, at which time the maximum copyright that Coots and Gillespie could have hoped for was 56 years (28 years upon registration, with another 28 years if they renewed). That means that for the two of them, the incentive of having that copyright (which they then assigned away to Leo Feist, Inc.) last until 1990, was clearly all the incentive they needed to write and release that song. Under the basic terms of the deal that the public granted to the copyright holder, in 1990, that song belonged in the public domain.

The prototype Steam Machines Valve recently sent out to 300 lucky beta testers are just prototypes that Valve says aren't indicative of the final form SteamOS-powered devices may take. They have even less in common with the third-party designs already leaking out or the roll-your-own SteamOS machines hobbyists are building.

That doesn't mean there's nothing to be learned from seeing just how Valve builds its first piece of PC gaming hardware, though. iFixit has cracked open a prototype box sent to staffer Christopher Patton.

An international standards group is seeking to replace the various power cords for portable computers with a single charger that could theoretically power any laptop.

It’s a Christmas miracle! That is, if by miracle, you mean yet another example of the limits of "ownership" in the digital world.

Last Saturday evening, Bill Jackson, a Wisconsin father, sat down to watch a nice Disney film with his two kids, aged two and eight. As they were settling in for a cozy night of “Prep & Landing 2: Naughty vs. Nice,” the elder son discovered that the film that the family had paid $3 for was no longer available.

My colleague Lee Hutchinson had a hell of a time getting Windows onto our SteamOS box. Through a series of mishaps and misfortunes, he somehow managed to destroy a Western Digital Black2 Dual Drive hybrid thing, create multiple UEFI partitions with multiple boot loaders, make SteamOS think it was Ubuntu, and thoroughly confuse both himself and the poor PC we were using.

Fedora 20 was released today, with support for ARM as a primary architecture. While x86 will still be the default for most Fedora users, classifying ARM as a primary architecture means that "it receives the same amount of attention that the x86 and x86-64 releases get," Fedora Project release notes say.

A security researcher with George Washington University, DiMino noticed several IP addresses attempting to hijack the Linux server by exploiting a now-patched PHP flaw that gave attackers the ability to remotely execute commands on vulnerable machines. DiMino was curious to know what the people behind the attacks intended to do with his machine, so he set up a "honeypot" box that, for research purposes, ran an older version of the Web development language.

As it announced earlier this week, Valve shipped its 300 Steam Machine prototypes to its randomly selected beta testers late today. That announcement was accompanied by the first public release of SteamOS, the currently-in-beta Linux-based operating system that will power Valve's new gaming-PCs-turned-consoles.

Valve had previously recommended that users who aren't "intrepid Linux hackers" should wait a few more months before trying out SteamOS, but that's not going to stop Ars from barreling head first into the midst of things! We downloaded the OS as quickly as we could after it went live and spent some time getting it whipped into shape on fresh hardware. Contrary to Valve's warning, the install wasn't complex or scary at all—though if you've never installed Linux before, it might take you a bit out of your comfort zone.

On Thursday, a Korean court ruled that Apple did not violate three Samsung patents related to messaging services.

The Seoul Central District Court rejected Samsung’s request that Apple should pay 100 million won ($95,000) in damages, as well as a ban on sales of older iPhones and iPads. According to the AFP, the court noted that two of three patents in dispute are invalid because they can be easily developed using technologies that already exist.

PC gamers who are champing at the bit to build their very own "Steam Machines" won't have to wait long to start tinkering, as Valve has revealed that its recently announced SteamOS will be available this Friday.

The announcement comes alongside word from Valve that its prototype Steam Machines, along with the companion Steam Controller, will be shipped out to 300 randomly selected US beta testers on Friday.

The Princess Bride remains quite the iconic book and movie for tons of people who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s (and, hopefully, other ages as well... but I can only speak from experience). A huge number of lines have lived on from that movie and become mainstays in popular culture. And like all sorts of great culture, it has inspired plenty of additional creativity around the original as well.

When Nokia completes the sale of its telephone business to Microsoft, a transfer of its substantial patent portfolio will be conspicuously absent from the deal. Microsoft got licenses to those patents but won't buy the patents themselves. That situation immediately led to speculation that Nokia was interested in doing standalone patent-licensing when it would be mostly immune to counterattack.

Earlier today, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the appeal on the Alice vs. CLS Bank case which is yet another case that looks at the patentability of software. The ruling in the Federal Circuit appeals court (CAFC) was one of the biggest judicial messes you'll ever see. The ruling was 135 pages of different judges all disagreeing with each other. In all of that there is only one single paragraph that the court agreed on -- one which rejected the patent as not being patentable subject matter. But as for why they did that? No one could agree.

US law on software patents is as chaotic as it's ever been. In May, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which takes all patent appeal cases, agreed to have an important case about software patents, Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank, heard "en banc" by the full court (10 judges at the time).

That produced one of the most splintered rulings ever to come out of the court. The ten judges hearing the case issued seven different opinions. None of those opinions gained a six-judge majority, so the ruling produced no binding precedent. It also showed how the Federal Circuit was all over the map when it came to software patents.

Hashtags like #techdirt are not only an indispensable part of Twitter, but are also increasingly to be found elsewhere as a handy way of flagging up key topics in a compact and recognizable way. Given the monopoly-mad world we inhabit, it's something of a miracle that they weren't patented. Business Insider points out that Chris Messina, the former Google employee who came up with the idea in the first place, has explained precisely why he didn't try to patent them. The first reason is practical:

The most dramatic outcome of the Oracle v. Google trial in spring 2012 wasn't anything the jury said; it was US District Judge William Alsup's finding that programming APIs can't be copyrighted. That sweeping ruling made the trial a total win for Google, and Alsup's opinion (PDF) is strongly supported by app developers who don't want to face legal threats for using simple "declaring code."

Not everyone sees it that way, however. Today it appears that Google's victory may be in danger. Oracle has appealed the case, and initial reports from both Bloomberg and Reuters on the oral arguments held this morning suggest the three-judge panel may be leaning against Google's position.