Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Of course, as you might expect, there's something of a "split" within the tech sector over whether or not there's support for Goodlatte's latest bill. On the one hand, you've got over 200 startups asking for that accelerated review process for questionable patents. At the same time, you've got a coalition of about 100 more stodgy old line businesses (some of whom are in the tech world) arguing that such a review would "undermine many valid patents." Frankly, that's hogwash, as we'll discuss in a bit.

More than two years after unknown hackers gained unfettered access over multiple computers used to maintain and distribute the Linux operating system kernel, officials still haven't released a promised autopsy about what happened.

On Tuesday, Nokia interim boss Risto Siilasmaa backed off recent statements he made indicating that former CEO Stephen Elop's employment contract was the same as Elop's predecessor, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo. The whole situation came to light because Helsingin Sanomat, Finland's largest daily paper, reported that Elop will receive an €18.8 million ($25.4 million) termination payment that wasn't available to Kallasvuo. Elop stepped down in light of Microsoft agreeing to purchase Nokia's phone business. As a former Microsoft employee, Elop wanted to avoid any conflicts of interest, according to Reuters.

Nvidia is now trying to get on Linux developers' good side. Yesterday, Nvidia's Andy Ritger e-mailed developers of Nouveau, an open source driver for Nvidia cards that is built by reverse engineering Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Ritger wrote that "NVIDIA is releasing public documentation on certain aspects of our GPUs, with the intent to address areas that impact the out-of-the-box usability of NVIDIA GPUs with Nouveau. We intend to provide more documentation over time, and guidance in additional areas as we are able."

Right after I wrote up today's news regarding Valve's announcement of a Linux-based SteamOS as central to its living room PC gaming efforts, I tweeted the following instant analysis: "If anyone has the clout to drag the gaming industry towards Linux, it's Valve." After thinking about it for a bit, I think Valve has a better than decent shot of actually pulling the transition off, especially if it wisely utilizes its position as what amounts to the biggest first-party developer in PC gaming.

Many of the most important precepts for managing an open-source community, according to Puppet Labs community lead Dawn Foster, are contained within the pages of science-fiction and fantasy literature. In a presentation given Tuesday at LinuxCon in New Orleans, Foster said that Dr. Who’s TARDIS (a powerful time-travel device) works well as a metaphor for open-source communities, which may be more complicated than meets the eye.

NEW ORLEANS. Three years after Oracle left the Open Solaris and its open source implementation of the ZFS storage filesystem for dead, OpenZFS is alive and well... Shortly after Oracle acquired Sun in 2010, both OpenSolaris and the open source implementation of ZFS were abandoned by Oracle. That didn't mean the end of an open source ZFS, however, as multiple efforts were born at the time to help keep the technology alive.

At the LinuxCon meeting in New Orleans, Linus Torvalds was asked if he had ever been approached by the US government to insert a backdoor into the Linux kernel. Here's his characteristic answer: Torvalds responded "no" while shaking his head "yes," as the audience broke into spontaneous laughter.

Obviously, it's hard to tell from that whether he really meant "yes" or "no". But the question does touch on an important issue: whether open source might be less vulnerable than traditional applications to tampering by the NSA or other intelligence organizations.

The short version is this: Soverain had earlier stated that it would be asserting claim 35 of its key patent, 5,715,314, against Newegg. 35 is a dependent claim, which is reliant on the independent claim, in this case 34. It's the independent claims that are generally the key to a patent, as the dependent ones just build off of the independent ones and maybe add a minor thing or two. Wipe out the independent claims and the dependent ones generally go with them. So, throughout the case, Newegg and Soverain, basically argued over claim 34. That's what mattered.

But Soverain actually had one final trick up its sleeve—a desperate attempt to pull victory from the jaws of defeat that was, in Cheng's telling, effectively based on a typographical error. The appeals court had invalidated claim 34 of the "shopping cart" patent, not claim 35. Instead of allowing what Newegg said was a mistake to be corrected, Soverain tried to literally make a federal case out of it. The patent company asked for a re-hearing from the panel, as well as from the full "en banc" court, saying that after months and months of arguing with Newegg over the value and validity of claim 34, it was actually claim 35 that should have been considered all along.

Yet another unfortunate patent decision has come out of the appeals court for the federal circuit. This involves a case where certain customers of Cisco products were being sued for patent infringement by TR Labs, and part of its argument was that certain Cisco equipment resulted in the infringement by those customers. In response, Cisco filed a lawsuit in federal court, asking for a declaratory judgment that TR Labs' patents were invalid. TR Labs hit back that it had not sued Cisco, had no intention of suing Cisco, and thus Cisco could not sue for declaratory judgment.

The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is not exempt from the "sequestration" budget cuts being imposed on government agencies. For now, one casualty of the cuts will be that agency's plan to open an office in Silicon Valley in the near future, according to a Sunday report by The Associated Press. The Silicon Valley office was an idea that has been suggested for years, and it looked like it was finally coming to fruition.

Versions don't matter, because Google now controls the platform behind the platform. Android 4.3 was released to Nexus devices a little over a month ago, but, as is usual with Android updates, it's taking much longer to roll out the general public. Right now, a little over six percent of Android users have the latest version. And if you pay attention to the various Android forums out there, you may have noticed something: no one cares.

Regular readers of tech news sites are used to hearing about patent trolls. Soon, though, you might start hearing about them in surprising places: like on the drive home from work. The Internet Association has teamed up with the biggest trade groups representing restaurants, supermarkets, and retailers to launch a new ad campaign in print and radio outlets. The new campaign isn't tech-centric at all, and it emphasizes how trolls hurt "Main Street"-type businesses.

The world's largest patent-holding company, Intellectual Ventures (IV), has opened up a Washington DC office, according to The Washington Post's Capital Business blog. The move appears to be a ramping up of the company's lobbying efforts in a year in which "patent trolls" have come under unprecedented criticism in Congress.

Both OSes fail to ensure that browser cookies, document files, and other sensitive content from one Internet domain are off-limits to scripts controlled by a second address without explicit permission, according to a just-published academic paper from scientists at Microsoft Research and Indiana University. The so-called same-origin policy is a fundamental security mechanism enforced by desktop browsers, but the protection is woefully missing from many iOS and Android apps. To demonstrate the threat, the researchers devised several hacks that carry out so-called cross-site scripting (XSS) and cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attacks to surreptitiously download user data from handsets.

A major new patent bill, passed in a 117-4 vote by New Zealand's Parliament after five years of debate, has banned software patents. The relevant clause of the patent bill actually states that a computer program is "not an invention." Some have suggested that was a way to get around the wording of the TRIPS intellectual property treaty, which requires patents to be "available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology."

If you read Techdirt, you're almost certainly familiar with Larry Lessig, the law professor at Harvard who (among many other things) has been an avid advocate for copyright reform and campaign finance reform, an author of many books about copyright and creativity, a well-known public speaker whose presentations are stunningly compelling, entertaining and informative, and the founder of some important organizations including Creative Commons. Of course, as an expert on copyright and creativity, and someone who's actually been involved in some of the key copyright legal fights over the past decade (tragically, on the losing side), you might think that a record label would think twice before issuing a clearly bogus threat to sue him over copyright infringement.

Groklaw, the 11-year-old website devoted to covering legal disputes related to open source software, has announced it will shut down rather than risk the government reading its e-mail. Groklaw founder Pamela Jones (commonly known as "PJ") wrote today that she is not confident the government won't someday be able to crack her encrypted e-mails. "There is no way to do Groklaw without e-mail," she wrote. "So this is the last Groklaw article."

Another day, another example of excessive DMCA takedown actions. The latest is that Microsoft has been issuing DMCA takedowns to Google directing the search engine to remove links to Open Office. Open Office, of course, is the open source competitor to Microsoft, and Microsoft has no copyright-related rights over it. As TorrentFreak points out, this does not appear to be a one-off occurrence.