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Haiku is not only a Japanese short poem with a defined structure—it's also the name of an open-source recreation of BeOS, an alternative operating system originally developed in the mid-1990s. It was the brainchild of Jean-Louis Gassée, a flamboyant, enthusiastic manager and head of Apple France. He climbed his way up the executive ladder to become the head of “advanced product development and worldwide marketing” before being forced out of the company by then-CEO John Sculley in 1990.

The perverse incentives created by locked-down platforms promote insecurity. Windows RT hasn't been jailbroken yet, but the first steps towards opening the platform to enable it to run any program, and not merely the ones that Microsoft authorizes, have been taken. Microsoft's reaction so far has been quietly congratulatory, praising developer clrokr's ingenuity, but suggesting that the operating system flaw he took advantage of may not be a permanent feature.

As disclosed by Marvell Technology Group Ltd. (“Marvell”) in a press release dated December 27, 2012, on December 26, 2012, a jury in Pittsburgh delivered a verdict in a lawsuit brought by Carnegie Mellon University (“CMU”) against Marvell in the United States District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania. The jury found that the two CMU patents at issue were literally and willfully infringed and valid, and awarded damages in the amount of $1.17 billion. As stated in Marvell’s December 27 press release, Marvell believes that the evidence and the law do not support the jury’s findings and the award of damages and will seek to overturn the verdict in post-trial motions before the District Court and, if necessary, to appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C.

Marvell is providing the following FAQs as of January 7, 2013 to provide additional information to Marvell stakeholders and partners regarding the CMU litigation and to elaborate on Marvell’s positions described in the December 27 press release. Marvell has compiled the following from publicly available sources including the proceedings of the litigation. Marvell believes that additional details regarding Marvell’s position regarding the jury verdict and the litigation may further clarify the status of the CMU litigation.

Last week we put together a list of Android tablet apps to help you (or your relatives) outfit the new devices sitting under your trees (or your Festivus poles, if that's more your style.) Ars readers are a helpful bunch, though, and all of you put together a much more extensive list to help jumpstart new tablets. For your benefit, we've rounded up the ones we liked best, sometimes using your own words to argue why you really need to download these apps right now.

Now that the new year is here, you might be feeling a little crazy trying to organize all of those resolutions in your head. I've always found that jotting down those thoughts helps with the process of putting goals into action. Fortunately, there are plenty of apps available in the Google Play Store that offer this sort of thing: a place for Android users to put down their streams of consciousness, store photos that haven't been archived, or leave a mental note.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office is seeking input from the software industry about the performance of the patent system. A pair of February "roundtable" events—one in Silicon Valley and the other in New York City—will give members of the public an opportunity to comment on how to improve the quality of "software-related patents."

A newly published patent application filed by Sony outlines a content protection system that would use small RFID chips embedded on game discs to prevent used games from being played on its systems, all without requiring an online connection. Filed in September and still awaiting approval from the US Patent Office, the patent application for an "electronic content processing system, electronic content processing method, package of electronic content, and use permission apparatus" describes a system "that reliably restricts the use of electronic content dealt in the second-hand markets."

US v. Google is not going to be the tech trial of the decade. Today the government has wrapped up a wide-ranging investigation of the search giant's practices in both its core search business, and its use of standards-based patents. No major charges will be brought.

Google agreed to a series of changes in its business practices in search. For example, the company will stop scraping content from "vertical" websites that focus on shopping or travel for use in its own products. Google also agreed to stop using its standard-essential patents to seek injunctions, which should force a major change in the company's litigation strategy. The commission voted 4-1 to end the patent investigation with a consent decree, and the vote to close the search investigation without action was 5-0.

Current US law extends copyright for 70 years after the date of the author’s death, and corporate “works-for-hire” are copyrighted for 95 years after publication. But prior to the 1976 Copyright Act (which became effective in 1978), the maximum copyright term was 56 years – an initial term of 28 years, renewable for another 28 years. Under those laws, works published in 1956 would enter the public domain on January 1, 2013, where they would be “free as the air to common use.” Under current copyright law, we’ll have to wait until 2052.1 And no published works will enter our public domain until 2019. (The law in the EU is different – thousands of works from authors who died in 1942 are entering their public domain on January 1.) Even more shockingly, the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that Congress can take back works from the public domain. Could Shakespeare, Plato, or Mozart be pulled back into copyright? The Supreme Court gave no reason to think that they could not be.

No matter how brazenly people abuse the DMCA takedown process, and no matter how ridiculous the notices get, it seems like there's always someone waiting to do something even stupider. This latest incident, submitted by Anonymous American, is a serious contender for the crown dunce cap: a DMCA takedown over a login page. And not just any login page, but the barely-modified default login page of an open source website platform, which the operators of iPhotographyCourse.com claim infringes on... their own barely-modified default login page of a different open source website platform. Yeah.

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

The smartphone market is already dominated by iPhone and Android, with RIM losing prominence, Windows Phone making a charge at third place, and various other operating systems aiming for elusive name recognition. So why should carriers and handset makers warm to Ubuntu, and why should anyone buy an Ubuntu phone?

In short, Shuttleworth believes that Ubuntu will be more user-friendly for people who barely know how to use a smartphone, and he says it will offer a more powerful alternative to Android at the high end for several reasons, including Ubuntu's ability to operate across mobile devices and desktops.

On Friday the ITC filed a redacted version of a remedy suggested by ITC Administrative Law Judge Thomas Pender, in which he recommended a ban be enforced against Samsung products that were found to infringe upon four Apple patents.

Know someone who emerged from this holiday season with a new tablet in hand—and they now want your advice on what to do with it? An Android device is only as good as the apps you install, so we've drawn up a listed of some top Android apps for tablet newbies.

The apps we've chosen below are not necessarily new or edgy, but we've field-tested them all and find them solid choices for a wide variety of users wanting to get started with some basic tablet tasks.

Almost one in 10 desktop Firefox users have enabled 'do not track' on the browser, with a much higher proportion of Firefox for Android users doing the same.

As this paper documents, data caps, especially on wireline networks, are hardly a necessity. Rather, they are motivated by a desire to further increase revenues from existing subscribers and protect legacy services such as cable television from competing Internet services. Although traffic on U.S. broadband networks is increasing at a steady rate, the costs to provide broadband service are also declining, including the cost of Internet connectivity or IP transit as well as equipment and other operational costs. The result is that broadband is an incredibly profitable business, particularly for cable ISPs. Tiered pricing and data caps have also become a cash cow for the two largest mobile providers, Verizon and AT&T, who already were making impressive margins on their mobile data service before abandoning unlimited plans.

Verizon has been trying to justify their blocking of Google Wallet on Verizon phones, insisting the app is blocked because Google Wallet uses the "secure element" on devices to store a user's Google ID. In response to complaints filed with the FCC, Verizon insists the unending blockade has nothing to do with the fact Verizon (in conjunction with AT&T and T-Mobile) is working on their own competing mobile payment platform named Isis.

So maybe you were lucky enough to get an e-reader for the holidays. In fact, maybe you’re reading this article on one right now! Maybe you’re cozying up to your fire and you’re considering what e-book you want to download to get through these dark winter days.

But you’re an Ars reader, and you actually know (and care!) what DRM stands for. After all, we’ve been covering digital rights management for years, ever since it was a contentious issue in the music industry. You may recall that Amazon itself led the charge against Cupertino, challenging iTunes with cheaper downloads and a lack of DRM. But Amazon's lead in the fight against music DRM was a business decision rather than an ideological stance. You may remember our story from late October 2012, detailing how to strip DRM off of Amazon Kindle purchases as a means of backing up your titles and preventing Amazon from deleting your entire library on a whim.

And that leaves this question: where’s the DRM outrage over e-books? Or put another way, why doesn’t Amazon care about eliminating DRM for books, when it did for music?

Edison Junior, the technology and design lab behind the POP portable power station, is returning the full $139,170 in funding it received from Kickstarter backers to develop the device. Unfortunately, Apple has refused to give the project permission to license the Lightning charger in a device that includes multiple charging options.

POP was billed as “the intersection between charging and design” and featured connectors to charge iPads, iPhones, and yes … Android devices. Its four retractable cord reels would have powered anything using micro-USB charging connectors. That’s a problem with Apple. In fact, even combining Apple’s new Lighting connector with the old 30-pin connector in a charging device was verboten; Apple would not approve, forcing the team to abandon the project.

If power Android users can agree on one thing, it’s that Google, carriers, and smartphone manufacturers are maybe not the best at executing on Android OS updates. Things were going great in the early days when there was only the one flagship Android phone, but as more companies and carriers got involved the update situation fell apart. Google tried to intervene with the Android Update Alliance, which resulted in exactly zero improvements to update timeliness.

For those interested in getting the latest and greatest OS update the second it’s announced, these delays are a known negative of the Android platform. The growing history of OS releases shows all carriers and smartphone manufacturers drag their feet in the application of updates—but some carriers, some manufacturers, and some combinations thereof are marginally better than others at getting updates to their phones.