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It’s already December, and before you know it that dreaded post-Christmas credit card statement will arrive in your mailbox, reminding you of just how truly pricey this season can be. Or maybe that’s just me. Anyway, that's why today's Appalooza is all about those applications gratis. This week, we’ll check out Snapseed’s latest Android photo app, a fantastic point-and-click adventure game, and an app that lets you search the entirety of your social network rolodex.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office has issued a first Office action declaring all twenty claims of one of Apple's key multitouch patents invalid. The decision that was filed Monday isn't final, but Apple will have its work cut out for it in order to overturn the initial ruling before it's set in stone.

Free Software Foundation President Richard Stallman today called Ubuntu Linux "spyware" because the operating system sends data to Ubuntu maker Canonical when a user searches the desktop.

But his complaint is already falling on deaf ears—Canonical said today that it plans to increase use of the feature Stallman objects to in order to deliver expanded Internet search results in the next version of Ubuntu.

It doesn't take a patent specialist to figure out that this is basically patenting a spreadsheet for weighting countries on a few different factors. It seems to be the exact kind of thing that was disallowed by the Supreme Court under Gottschalk v. Benson. And yet, the USPTO waved it right on through.

Amazon unwittingly mounts a perfect demonstration why you should not trust Kindle as a place to purchase books.

The rumor mill kicked into high gear last week when several sites, corroborated by evidence from unnamed PC OEMs, claimed some of Intel's future desktop CPUs would forgo processor sockets in favor of being soldered directly to motherboards. This move would theoretically render end users and system builders unable to swap out processors on their own.

Apple and HTC chose what to redact (see Declaration of Robert Becher), and it's a lot. But we learn enough, despite their efforts, to know that it's a cross-license and a settlement of all the 52 litigations and various administrative actions then pending around the world. The "Payments" section is redacted, of course, but the plural means both paid something, as in crossing out a lot of the others' need to pay, and only HTC is listed as paying any royalties going forward. The other thing we learn is that Apple did not license its design patents, which isn't what Samsung was probably hoping it had done. But the rest of Apple's patents are licensed, which ought to matter in the Apple v. Samsung injunction analysis. There are some HTC utility patents excluded as well (see p. 4 and Ex. G of the agreement, p. 141 of the PDF), if I've read it right, the ones on loan from Google, I believe, and Apple reserves to itself all other IP it owns, like trade dress rights. All the litigation is dismissed mostly without prejudice, because one or the other might violate the agreement, but otherwise they agree to drop their disputes and basically leave each other alone.

In advance of today's Apple v. Samsung hearing, Samsung filed a key document it fought hard to acquire—Apple's recent patent settlement with HTC.

The 143-page settlement [PDF] is heavily redacted, and no financial terms are revealed. Still, certain parts of the document are revelatory. The document outlines an arbitration process that Apple can initiate if it believes HTC has created a "Cloned Product" that apes Apple's too closely. It gives specific examples of similarities that would be acceptable and others that would be verboten. "Pinch to zoom" is OK; "slide to unlock" is OK, but only if it looks different.

The discussion on those is very interesting, both in the book and in the podcast. I won't spoil it all for you yet, but I will say that, yes, he's talking about going back to what copyright law was in 1790 -- meaning that it only lasts for two 14 year terms, and that it should cover only "maps, charts and books" since that's what the founders intended. Also, infringement only happened if you copied the entire thing. Copying a section was fine. Interestingly, Bell's next book (also published by Mercatus) will apparently be published under those exact terms. As for why other things shouldn't be covered, well, he notes that the founders didn't appear to think such expressive works like music, painting and sculpture required copyright, and it's not clear why that should have changed.

The judge in the Apple v. Samsung case, the Hon. Lucy Koh, has just ruled that the HTC-Apple license agreement that was signed on November 11 will be made public, the only exception being the pricing and royalty terms, which will be sealed. Samsung's lawyers have already gotten to see them, but we won't. But we will get to see the list of patents covered by the agreement.

Continuing our series of posts concerning the Republican Study Committee report on the problems of the copyright system and how to fix them (which it quickly retracted under industry pressure), today we're going to explore the second "myth" that author Derek Khanna helped debunk: that "copyright is free market capitalism at work." We've already covered the first myth, about the purpose of copyright, as well as responded to various responses to the report by copyright maximalists.

The telecommunications standards arm of the U.N. has quietly endorsed the standardization of technologies that could give governments and companies the ability to sift through all of an Internet user’s traffic – including emails, banking transactions, and voice calls – without adequate privacy safeguards. The move suggests that some governments hope for a world where even encrypted communications may not be safe from prying eyes. At the core of this development is the adoption of a proposed international standard that outlines requirements for a technology known as "Deep Packet Inspection" (DPI). As we’ve noted several times before, depending on how it is used, DPI has the potential to be extremely privacy-invasive, to defy user expectations, and to facilitate wiretapping.

In our recent ZaReason UltraLap 430 review, Ars alum Ryan Paul lamented that even though putting Linux on laptops is easier today than ever, it's still not perfect. Some things (particularly components like trackpads and Wi-Fi chips) take some fiddling to get working. Major OEMs aren't yet putting forth the same concerted effort to build and support laptops with Linux as they are their more high-margin servers.

However, Dell is changing that. Earlier this year, they announced a pilot program, "Project Sputnik," intended to produce a bona fide, developer-focused Linux laptop using their popular XPS-13 Ultrabook as base hardware. The program turned out to be a rousing success, and this morning Dell officially unveiled the results of that pilot project: the Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition.

We're still waiting on Intel's next-generation Haswell CPUs to launch, but details and rumors are already swirling about processors that are even further down the company's roadmap. The latest scuttlebutt is that Broadwell, the follow-up to Haswell due in 2014, will forego standard socketed desktop processors. If the rumors are true—and both ZDNet and SemiAccurate report that they've received confirmation from PC OEMs—Broadwell desktop CPUs will need to be soldered directly to motherboards, and won't be easily swappable or upgradeable by users and system builders.

The idea appears to be to cut off one of Samsung's post-trial arguments. Samsung argued that notwithstanding the jury verdict, Apple's design patents are invalid for a number of reasons; in particular, it argues that the D'677 patent is invalid for so-called "double patenting." In other words, the D'087 and the D'677 patents are too similar to be granted separate patents.

Today's move suggests Apple feels at least a bit threatened by that argument. It's not hard to understand why; the patent drawings do look very similar.

Samsung is already embroiled in a worldwide patent fight with Apple, but the company will now face a patent attack from another direction. Swedish telecom giant Ericsson sued Samsung today, saying the Korean company wouldn't renew a patent cross-licensing agreement after two years of negotiation.

Samsung refused a deal on terms that the rest of the industry has accepted, Ericsson representatives said today. The specific terms offered weren't disclosed, but documents show they were "Fair, Reasonable, and Non-Discriminatory," or FRAND. Just what constitutes a FRAND rate is very much in dispute right now, however, with multiple US federal courts and the US International Trade Commission considering the issue.

The stable, supported, mainstream version of Firefox on Windows is a 32-bit application. Even if you use 64-bit Windows, if you use Firefox, you're using a 32-bit browser. The exception is if you're using the Nightly build of Firefox. This represents the latest, cutting-edge version of the browser, and it's available in two versions: a 32-bit one, and a 64-bit one. However, this won't last much longer. Mozilla announced last week it was no longer going to produce 64-bit Nightly builds of Firefox for Windows; nor will it run automated tests of 64-bit Firefox. The browser's future on Windows is resolutely 32-bit. Linux and Mac OS X, in contrast, both have official 64-bit versions.

The people who built the Raspberry Pi say there's a question they're asked almost every single day—does it run Minecraft?

But the more important step in the de facto legalization of software patents came in 1982, when Congress created a new court called the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. It was given authority to hear all appeals in patent cases. While the new court was still theoretically under the authority of the Supreme Court, the fact that it heard so many patent cases gave it an outsized influence on patent law. And because the majority of its cases were patent cases, its judges spent a lot of time rubbing elbows with patent attorneys. As a result, it quickly shifted the law in the direction patent attorneys prefer: toward an ever stronger and more expansive patent system.

Just days after Apple announced it had settled all its patent disputes with HTC, lawyers that had opposed Apple in a much bigger dispute—Apple v. Samsung—said that they wanted to see the settlement. Their argument was that if Apple had licensed to HTC patents it said it originally wouldn't license at all, then that should be considered in post-trial motions to determine whether Apple will be allowed to kick some Samsung phones off the market.