Showing headlines posted by BernardSwiss

Missed this when it first came out, but Bloomberg ran a fantastic report at the beginning of February, highlighting how piracy and fraud were key components to helping America catapult into the industrial revolution. In fact, there are reasonable arguments to be made that if the US was not a "pirate" nation, it would not have had the kind of success that it has had as the industrial world leader. We've discussed some of this in the past, and have highlighted how Eric Schiff's research showed how other countries (the Netherlands and Switzerland) industrialized by explicitly rejecting patents. The US didn't go that far, but it did involve quite frequent copying of the efforts of others and then improving on them, without fear of repercussions.

The X window system has served numerous Linux- and Unix-based operating systems well over its nearly three decades of life. But Canonical is ready to move on from X, saying a new display server is necessary to power the Unity user interface in Ubuntu as the OS expands from desktops to tablets and phones.

The DRM Chair has only a limited number of use before it self-destructs. The number of use was set to 8, so everyone could sit down and enjoy a single time the chair. A small sensor detects when someone sits and decrements a counter. Every time someone sits up, the chair knocks a number of time to signal how many uses are left. When reaching zero, the self-destruct system is turned on and the structural joints of the chair are melted.

The legality of unlocking one's cell phone to run on any network has flipped back and forth in the past several years. It was deemed illegal under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act—then it was made legal by the Library of Congress in an exception to the DMCA passed in 2006. The Library chose not to renew the exemption in 2012, however, and it expired in January of this year. That inspired a petition to the White House, which a few weeks ago passed the 100,000 signature mark. The White House then promised to respond.

Plenty of industry heavyweights were active at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) last week, but there was a very noticeable, major absence: Google. The company's invisibility in Barcelona was a microcosm for perhaps the biggest trend coming out of the conference: co-option

This morning, Representatives Peter DeFazio (D-OR) and Jason Chaffetz (R-UT) introduced the SHIELD Act, which would create a "loser pays" system for some types of patent litigants. The bill is meant to stymie companies that do nothing more than file patent lawsuits.

The latest example comes from an argument between Torvalds and other Linux developers over whether the Linux kernel should include code that makes it easier to boot Linux on Windows PCs. This goes back to Microsoft requiring that PCs designed to run Windows 8 use UEFI firmware with the Secure Boot feature enabled. This has complicated the process of booting Linux on PCs that shipped with Windows 8, but it hasn't prevented people from doing so. There are workarounds, but some people are looking for a solution in the Linux kernel itself.

On Friday, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced that it had reached a settlement (PDF) with HTC over notable security holes on its millions of tablets and Android handsets. HTC has now agreed to provide a patch within 30 days and be subject to a security review for the next 20 years.

This case comes to the Supreme Court from the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the nation's top patent court. Over the past several years, the Supreme Court has often stepped in to limit the power of patents, keeping the Federal Circuit in check. That doesn't appear likely to happen in this situation, however.

This week on Spark - My Cyborg My Self. As implanted medical devices become more commonplace, they're bringing up lots of issues, especially around security. We ask: who will control the devices in our bodies? Also, should we just accept long, limiting cellphone contracts as just a part of life? Or is there another, very Canadian answer to the problem?

The Python programming language has been around for more than two decades, but today it is fighting for its name in Europe. The Python Software Foundation's chairman yesterday said the Python trademark is "at risk in Europe" because a cloud server and storage company that also uses the name Python is trying to get ownership of the mark. In a blog post, Foundation Chairman Van Lindberg (who is also an IP and open source lawyer) asked community members for help, both financially and by supplying material that might help the Foundation bolster its claim to the trademark.

A McAfee administrator accidentally revoked the digital key used to certify desktop applications that run on Apple's OS X platform, creating headaches for customers who want to install or upgrade Mac antivirus products.

A certificate revocation list [CRL] hosted by Apple Worldwide developer servers lists the reason for the cancellation as a "key compromise," but McAfee officials said they never lost control of the sensitive certificate which is used to prove applications are legitimate releases. The revocation date shows as February 6, meaning that for seven days now, customers have had no means to validate McAfee applications they want to install on Macs.

Innovatio deliberately avoided targeting the actual manufacturers of Wi-Fi equipment, preferring to sue end-users. But in October, Cisco, Netgear, and Motorola teamed up to file an 81-page lawsuit [PDF] seeking to shut down Innovatio's patent-trolling project once and for all. Not only were the patents invalid, but the suit alleged Innovatio's whole campaign was a violation of the RICO anti-racketeering law. That law is more commonly used against crime families than patent holders.

Years before the JSTOR scraping project that led to Aaron Swartz's indictment on federal hacking charges—and perhaps to his suicide—the open-data activist scraped documents from PACER, the federal judiciary's paywalled website for public access to court records. (The acronym PACER stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, which may sound like it's straight out of 1988 because it is.) Swartz got 2.7 million documents before the courts detected his downloads and blocked access. The case was referred to the FBI, which investigated Swartz's actions but declined to prosecute him.

Cleaning up the code has been a major focus. "The resulting code base is rather different from the original one, as several million lines of code have been added and removed, by adding new features, solving bugs and regressions, adopting state of the art C++ constructs, replacing tools, getting rid of deprecated methods and obsoleted libraries, and translating twenty-five thousand lines of comments from German to English," the Document Foundation said in its LibreOffice 4.0 announcement. "All of this makes the code easier to understand and more rewarding to be involved with for the stream of new members of our community."

A dizzying story that involves falsified medical research, plagiarism, and legal threats came to light via a DMCA takedown notice today. Retraction Watch, a site that followed (among many other issues) the implosion of a Duke cancer researcher's career, found all of its articles on the topic pulled by WordPress, its host. The reason? A small site based in India apparently copied all of the posts, claimed them as their own, then filed a DMCA takedown notice to get the originals pulled from their source. As of now, the originals are still missing as their actual owners seek to have them restored.

Patent trolls have gone after some pretty ridiculous things recently. Online shopping carts, scanners, Windows Phone tiles, and yes, rejecting a call and sending it to voicemail. On Tuesday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation announced that it’s now gearing up to tackle the latest completely absurd troll, who claims to have invented podcasting.

For anyone still using a Thunderbolt, it's nice that the phone is being updated at all rather than being fated to run Gingerbread forever, as has been the case for so many other phones. But the Thunderbolt's update still sums up pretty much everything that's wrong with the Android ecosystem's ever-worsening software fragmentation problems:

Software developers are racing to patch a recently discovered vulnerability that allows attackers to recover the plaintext of authentication cookies and other encrypted data as they travel over the Internet and other unsecured networks.

The discovery is significant because in many cases it makes it possible for attackers to completely subvert the protection provided by the secure sockets layer and transport layer protocols. Together, SSL, TLS, and a close TLS relative known as Datagram Transport Layer Security are the sole cryptographic means for websites to prove their authenticity and to encrypt data as it travels between end users and Web servers. The so-called "Lucky Thirteen" attacks devised by computer scientists to exploit the weaknesses work against virtually all open-source TLS implementations, and possibly implementations supported by Apple, Microsoft, and Cisco Systems as well.

Like Acer's C7, HP's Chromebook is a lightly modified version of one of its low-end Windows laptops, the HP Pavilion Sleekbook 14-b010us. That laptop includes a Windows license and several upgraded components, but the body and build quality of both should be more or less identical. Despite this similarity, don't expect to be able to buy the Chromebook version and put your own Windows license on it—while a version of Ubuntu has been made that is compatible with Chromebooks' locked-down bootloaders, installing alternate operating systems on the computers is a non-trivial undertaking.