Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Gates has been prolific in filing patent applications over the past few years, mostly through a partnership with friends at Intellectual Ventures (IV). That's one of the world's largest patent holding companies, typically described as a patent troll because of its practice of acquiring patents and using them to file lawsuits (notably against Motorola), despite not using the patents to make technology of its own.

You may remember a rather wonderful court case from 2012 that pitted copyright lawyers against patent lawyers over the issue of whether submitting journal articles as part of the patenting process was fair use. Well, we now have the judge's decision

When Mark Shuttleworth founded Canonical in 2004, he made a promise to his staff: "You can count on me for two years." The idea was "to get the team to relax" and focus on the newly created Ubuntu operating system. Shuttleworth wanted to eliminate the pressure of becoming a blockbuster business overnight.

He issued no ultimatums. And although Shuttleworth wanted Canonical to be self-sustaining, he didn't threaten to abandon Ubuntu if it lost money. "When we started, I told the team two years," he recently told Ars. "I didn't say, 'till it's profitable.' I said, 'You can count on me for two years. What I want to really see is evidence of a clear path to success and really interesting disruption.'"

It's not difficult to make an educated guess as to what happened. The Feds went to Lavabit demanding access to Ed Snowden's email. Lavabit refused. The feds went to (secret) court and the (secret) court said (in secret) that Lavabit had to turn over the information. And Lavabit's response is noble: it is shutting down and fighting in court, rather than becoming a pawn in this and compromising the trust and reputation its built up over the years. Lavabit also includes a link on their site for a legal defense fund.

Not all the attention may have been positive. Less than a month after Snowden was revealed to have used the service, it has been shut down. The owner of Lavabit, Ladar Levison, has left a cryptic and chilling message stating that he had to walk away from the ten years of work he put into Lavabit, lest he "become complicit in crimes against the American public." Until real reform happens, Levison says he "would _strongly_ recommend against anyone trusting their private data to a company with physical ties to the United States."

Signaling criminals' growing interest in attacking non-Windows computers, researchers have discovered banking fraud malware that targets people using the open-source Linux operating system.

You don’t have to look too hard at the slate of new smartphones to see Android’s “bigger is better” ethos. While iPhones have remained resolutely conservatively sized, Android manufacturers continue to push the limits with phones like the 5.5-inch LG Optimus G Pro or the 6.3-inch Samsung Galaxy Mega.....it’s actually impossible to get any of the latest models and also get a phone that’s smaller than 4.7 inches. They just don’t exist anymore.

Linux users who want to run Windows applications without switching operating systems have been able to do so for years with Wine, software that lets apps designed for Windows run on Unix-like systems. There has been no robust equivalent allowing Mac applications to run on Linux, perhaps no surprise given that Windows is far and away the world's most widely used desktop operating system. A developer from Prague named Luboš Doležel is trying to change that with "Darling," an emulation layer for OS X.

Attackers exploited a recently patched vulnerability in the Firefox browser to uncloak users of the Tor anonymity service, and the attack code is now publicly circulating online. While the exploit was most likely designed to identify people alleged to have frequented a child porn forum recently targeted by the FBI, anonymity advocates say the code could be used against almost any Tor user.

The threat poses as an update for the official Android app available to customers of NH Nonghyup Bank, one of South Korea's biggest financial institutions, according to a blog post published Friday by researchers from antivirus provider Trend Micro. By exploiting the so-called master-key vulnerability in the mobile OS, this malware bears the same cryptographic signature found in the legitimate release, even though the update contains malicious code that uploads user credentials to a remote server.

The CableCard—that small slab that lets a TiVo tune into cable by authenticating its connection—would lose a regulatory safeguard under a bill nearing introduction in Congress. The "‘Consumer Video Device Cost Savings Act" proposes to squelch the authority of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to make cable operators use CableCards in their own boxes—a rule enacted in 2007 that discourages second-class treatment of third-party devices like TiVo DVRs.

Just over a year ago, Google released its first Nexus tablet. The 2012 Nexus 7 wasn't perfect by a long shot, but it was the kick in the pants that the Android tablet ecosystem needed at the time. Up until that point, the best Android tablets (and we use that term loosely) were trying to pretend like they weren't even Android tablets. Among the Galaxy Tabs and Motorola Xooms of the world, no one tablet really did well enough to merit the attention of developers or users. The Nexus 7 also redefined what people could expect to get for $200—an entirely usable (if not cutting-edge) general-purpose tablet without performance-sucking third-party skins or OEM-exclusive app stores.

Sunday night, Samsung lawyers filed an order just out from the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that renders invalid one of Apple's key patents, No. 7,844,915, the so-called "pinch to zoom" patent. It's definitely a setback for Apple, which presented "pinch to zoom" at last year's trial as one of the innovations that was ripped off by a wide array of Samsung phones.

The upcoming version of Google's Android operating system offers several enhancements designed to strengthen handset security, particularly in businesses and other large organizations. Ars will be giving the just-unveiled version 4.3 a thorough review in the coming days. In the meantime, here's a quick rundown of the security improvements. The most significant change is the addition of a security extension known as SELinux—short for Security-Enhanced Linux—to reinforce Android's current hack-mitigation model.

OpenOffice 4.0 was released yesterday by the Apache Software Foundation, bringing with it a new sidebar designed to make better use of widescreen monitors and improved compatibility with Microsoft Office documents.

Researchers have spotted the first in-the-wild apps to exploit a critical Android vulnerability allowing attackers to inject malicious code into legitimate programs without invalidating their digital signature.

There are a lot of people complaining about lousy software patents these days. I say, stop complaining, and start killing them. It took me about fifteen minutes to stop a crappy Microsoft patent from being approved. Got fifteen minutes? You can do it too.

The inventor of the Web, Tim Berners-Lee, had never testified in court before last year. In February 2012, he left Cambridge to fly down to Tyler, an east Texas city of about 100,000, to testify at a patent trial. It was the culmination of a bold campaign by a man named Michael Doyle to levy a vast patent tax on the modern web.

While it's disappointing that Canonical chose a relatively weak hashing scheme to protect its forum users' passwords, company officials deserve credit for immediately reporting the breach and exhorting users to change passwords. By contrast, recent responses to password breaches hitting Reputation.com and LivingSocial.com either made no suggestion to change passwords or played down that advice.

In 2005, Nicholas Negroponte, who previous founded MIT's Media Lab, founded One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which works with the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) to deliver low-cost laptops to children in developing nations. But this week, OLPC announced something a little bit different.