Showing headlines posted by djohnston

Two of the country’s top secure email providers, Lavabit and Silent Circle, shuttered their doors shortly after Edward Snowden blew the lid off the NSA's domestic surveillance program. Now encryption services continue to drop like flies.

The latest is CryptoSeal Privacy, a VPN service that provides a secure and private way to use the internet. The company announced it's shutting down its consumer privacy product in order to avoid government attempts to access and monitor users’ encrypted communications.

For the longest time. one of the major barriers to hobbyists and very small companies selling hardware with a USB port is the USB Implementers Forum. Each USB device sold requires a vendor ID (VID) and a product ID (PID) to be certified as USB compliant. Adafruit, Sparkfun, and the other big guys in the hobbyist market have all paid the USB Implementers Forum for a USB VID, but that doesn’t help the guy in his garage hoping to sell a few hundred homebrew USB devices.

Healthcare.gov, the federal government's Obamacare website, has been under heavy criticism from friend and foe alike during its first two weeks of open enrollment. Repeated errors and delays have prevented many users from even establishing an account, and outside web designers have roundly panned the structure and coding of the site as amateurish and sloppy. The latest indication of the haphazard way in which Healthcare.gov was developed is the uncredited use of a copyrighted web script for a data function used by the site, a violation of the licensing agreement for the software.

Tuesday was [Ada Lovelace] day and to recognize it SparkFun posted an article about women in their workforce and the STEM initiative. [Ada Lovelace] is credited with forging a path for women in mathematics and computing. The STEM acronym represents a movement to get more of America’s students into Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics fields in order to keep up with the rest of the developed world.

Yes, it’s true: In a classic example of parody coming to life, a newly published patent filing reveals Google’s ambitions to solve one of the most troublesome challenges known to humanity: Splitting the bill at the end of a meal.

Today we learned just how determined the patent troll Lodsys is to avoid a ruling on the merits of its claims. When software security company Kaspersky Lab refused to surrender, Lodsys settled for nothing (yes, you read that right—absolutely nothing) rather than take its claims to trial.

About 2,000 Chinese employees of an iPhone assembly company fought a pitched battle into the early hours of Monday, forcing the huge electronics plant where they work to be shut down.

Comment: I know this is not an open source story, but many electronic gadgets in use around the world are made at Foxconn's factories.

Being from Canada, interested in technology and the markets, and a privacy advocate, BlackBerry, formerly known as Research In Motion (RIM), has been on my radar for a number of years, so I would like to add my two cents regarding its demise (2, 3, 4, 5).

The carrier wants to charge websites for carrying their packets, but if they win it'd be the end of the Internet as we know it

The United States' National Security Agency intelligence-gathering operation is capable of accessing user data from smart phones from all leading manufacturers. Top secret NSA documents that SPIEGEL has seen explicitly note that the NSA can tap into such information on Apple iPhones, BlackBerry devices and Google's Android mobile operating system.

The National Security Agency has acknowledged in a new classified briefing that it does not need court authorization to listen to domestic phone calls. Rep. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Democrat, disclosed this week that during a secret briefing to members of Congress, he was told that the contents of a phone call could be accessed "simply based on an analyst deciding that."

The European Commission has fined Microsoft €561 million (£484 million/$732 million) for dropping the Browser Choice Screen in a Windows 7 update. This is the first time ever that the Commission has had to fine a company for non-compliance with an anti-trust commitment.

And so this situation is starting to get ridiculous - and consumers are, as usual, caught in the middle of it all. Google has just blocked Windows Phone devices from accessing Google Maps on their phones. In addition, it also seems Windows Phone users are now restricted to the basic HTML version of the mobile GMail website.

The maker of an industrial control system designed to be used with so-called smart grid networks disclosed to customers last week that hackers had breached its network and accessed project files related to a control system used in portions of the electrical grid.

There are plenty of things that you can do when you have plenty of money. Mark Shuttleworth, for example, spent some of his fortune for the privilege of being one of the first space tourists. Another part of his capital is involved in the company named Canonical, which works on the famous Linux distribution, Ubuntu.

So, the shadiness factor of the German EU-wide injunction against the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 seems to continue. Not only has Apple been caught supplying the court with tampered evidence, it now seems the court in Duesseldorf didn't have the authority to ban the Galaxy Tab EU-wide - at least, according to a German court which has just lifted the EU-wide ban on the Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Earlier this week, we were introduced to a new concept in intellectual property law: the European 'Community Design'. The Community Design is a sort of trademark on design, and sits halfway between a trademark and a patent. I decided to investigate what, exactly, the laws and regulations around Community Designs are, and what I found was shocking. Think the USPTO is bad? Wait until you learn about the Community Design.