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Lodsys is the troll that went after iOS developers for in-app purchases, even though Apple had already licensed the rights to that patent on behalf of their developers. It's not exactly surprising to see that they'd try the same thing with Oracle, nor is it surprising to see that Oracle is following Apple's lead in trying to intervene on behalf of the smaller guys. After all, taking on the big companies is hard, but if you can target their customers or users, you can oftentimes win. Lodsys seems to have made a business of doing so.

I'm sorry friend but you are dead wrong and in fact I'd argue that many of the open source projects would probably be EASIER to plant bugs in than Windows, why? Because there are a ton of projects that are made up of a handful of guys that are always understaffed. Don't think those guys would welcome a highly skilled volunteer from XYZ Corp? And just because the code is open don't mean any people with the skills to spot a highly obfuscated bug actually look at the code, look at how an infected Quake 3 was in the repos for over a year and a half.

So I'm sorry friend but all it takes is money and desire and the three letter agencies have both in abundance so it really wouldn't be hard. Look at how many packages are used in damned near every distro, now tell me have YOU looked at the code for all those common packages? How well do you know the teams that made them? Its not magic folks, you find a weak spot and exploit it and with so many FOSS projects understaffed that is a nice target for exploitation, pure and simple.

Lest you forget, and I'm sure you have all forgotten, one of the universally-despised Righthaven's early major defeats in court occurred when a judge decided that a non-profit could use a news article IN ITS ENTIRETY as fair use http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/03/copyright-troll-righthaven-achieves-spectacular-fair-use-loss/ . Can this woman lose a similar defense over a single image (not that the photographer has yet sued)? Perhaps she can, if only through her own incompetence. Odds have shifted in her favor, and in the favor of 1000s other organizations you may consider undeserving. Yes, that's the taste of victory turning to ash in your mouth. Remember to vote Pirate Party!

If you file for patents on decade old techniques and then use those patents to sue for millions, you are a "troll"; regardless what else you do. How the Aussie government "invented WiFi" and sued its way to $430 million

The testing 'bits' are starting to fit/glow:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/01/did-a-us-government-lab-help-israel-develop-stuxnet/
The details seem to be built on the evidence found in the code, interviews over 18 months with current and former officials.
The need for testing the results on P-1 centrifuges puts the code creation in the hands of a few world powers.

Don't forget that Microsoft is also blocking installation of any other browsers except Internet Explorer on Windows 8 ARM hardware.

This is all a bit rich, reading the resolution, considering that is is coming from the country which unilaterally seizes domains at will.

Don't forget as well that this is coming from the same government that proposed a kill switch for the Internet. Sounds more like "nobody should control the Internet, unless it is us" (well, this arguably applies to the US part of the Internet).

The resolution also says: "Whereas the world deserves the access to knowledge, ... and the informed discussion that is the bedrock of democratic self-government that the Internet provides;"
I thought that WikiLeaks and cablegate were exactly the kind of things which promote a healthy discussion in a democracy, but I doubt that that's what they had in mind when they drafted this resolution, free access to knowledge and all.

This all seems more like a bit of patriotic posturing. Blah blah land of the free blah blah cannot trust anybody else to be as free as we are blah blah. Seriously, it does not matter one bit what will be proposed at this conference; how exactly are you going to *force* the US to relinquish control? Not going to happen.

I'd blame the drama over this just on the article, but the summary's definitely got some FUD to it as well. For x86 systems, all you need to do is turn off the feature. And that's if you insist on running unsigned software - it's not like there isn't an open and inexpensive process to get signed.

linky

Boston pays 170k for illegal arrest

There are numerous others. Now these aren't direct actions against the officers, but you can bet that in Boston they got some refresher training with it costing the city over $170k.

Boy, how soon do people forget.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/04/backdoor-in-mission-critical-hardware-threatens-power-traffic-control-systems/

Made in Canada :p.

Security vulnerabilities are everywhere. You cannot *whitelist* by country. I'll bet you 20 bucks that even if you only used US parts manufactured and designed in the US, you will *still* find backdoors like the one described here which a sufficiently dedicated attacker with a password sniffer will be able to break right open. Your only protection is rigorous security testing and multi-layered defense.

Sure, windfall now, but next month when IPv6 day comes and all the IPv6 sites stay lit, they'll be worth a rapidly diminishing amount.

ArsTechnica has a nice piece about IPv6 and why it's not going to be such a disaster thing after all, add to that the IPv6-capable home routers that are actually being made (at last!) and the ISPs who are rolling out IPv6 networking to their customers... and it's all looking rosy.

The good thing about World IPv6 day this time is that it won't be turned off after a day.

It's about time that IPv6 became widely available. This should start w/ ISPs, who can provide DS or DS-lite to customers still needing IPv4 access. Other than that, since they'll ultimately have to convert anyway, they should get the ball rolling.

Other customers should do it whenever they plan equipment upgrades, so that this conversion accompanies such changes.

Sure, windfall now, but next month when IPv6 day comes and all the IPv6 sites stay lit, they'll be worth a rapidly diminishing amount.

ArsTechnica has a nice piece about IPv6 and why it's not going to be such a disaster thing after all, add to that the IPv6-capable home routers that are actually being made (at last!) and the ISPs who are rolling out IPv6 networking to their customers... and it's all looking rosy.

Reality is often weirder than anything we can dream up.

Welcome to the crazy house

Not according to the foreman - even the jurors leaning towards Googles side in the deliberations thought that it was bad practice to rely on a blog posting.

Some interesting info here:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/oracle-v-google-jury-foreman-reveals-oracle-wasnt-even-close/

Nope, this is not about rangeCheck, it is about the earlier jury ruling that Google had violated copyright laws by duplicating the Java API. The judge still has to rule on whether or not API's are protected by copyright.


http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/jury-rules-google-violated-copyright-law-google-moves-for-mistrial/

"In what could be a major blow to Android, Google's mobile operating system, a San Francisco jury issued a verdict today that the company broke copyright laws when it used Java APIs to design the system. The ruling is a partial victory for Oracle, which accused Google of violating copyright law."

'Google spokesman Jim Prosser responded to the verdict quickly, saying via e-mail: "We appreciate the jury's efforts, and know that fair use and infringement are two sides of the same coin. The core issue is whether the APIs here are copyrightable, and that's for the court to decide. We expect to prevail on this issue and Oracle's other claims."'

If you have no religious objections, take a look at Apple's Mac Mini Server package. It's reasonably priced (for some value of reasonable), and supplies all the components you need, apart from that big external RAID you'll want for shares and back-ups. But, before you jump, check out this review.

Why is it that there is no malware for IOS? There are millions of these devices out there, so there certainly is an incentive for malware writers.

I believe that it has something to do with the fact that only Apple approved and checked software can be installed thereon. This closed system may not appeal to many here on /., but it is certainly as close as we have gotten to a malware proof computing experience we are likely to get anytime soon. Mac users will be able to enjoy this form of security with OS X 10.8 this summer.

Because there's accountability in the App Store. You see, to get an app in there, you have to pay $99 a year. Which means you need a valid billing account Sure malware can use a fake credit card, but when Apple gets a chargeback, they'll cancel the account and remove the app.

Next, if there's really a bad app in there, boom, Apple removes all the developer's apps and closes their account. And with a valid billing address means Apple can hunt you down. Hell, if you want to accept money for apps Apple makes you jump through hoops.

It's just like the Flashback trojan - making money is easy, but getting paid is actually quite hard.

The other reason is iOS makes it quite hard - to send a text message requires user intervention - an app can't send a text message on its own unless it uses its own service. Ditto phone calls - you can call up the dialer, but it'll ask if you really wanted to dial that number.

The only real way to get malware onto iOS without exposing a real identity is via jailbreaks and surreptitious installation that way. To which iOS isn't immune.

An interesting Android hack popped up recently - due to the way smartphone data plans work, an Android app with "Internet Access" can hijack any TCP connection on the phone.

A lot of the commenters here have forgotten their history with this case. This is one case where, in fact, the punishment fits quite nicely.

This is a punishment for illegally sharing music pretty much in name only. The actual trial could be described as a textbook case of "how to alienate a jury."

So, first, Tenenbaum hired a lawyer who acted very eccentric: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/07/tenenbaum-trial-opens-following-last-minute-dismissal-of-fair-use-defense/

Then, Tenenbaum - after eight months of legal proceedings - admitted that he had been lying under oath the entire time. When counsel asked him why he had basically played the entire court system (and, for that matter, his own lawyer) for chumps for the last eight months, he replied with the equivalent of a shrug and "it seemed like the best response to give": http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/07/tenenbaum-takes-the-stand-i-used-p2p-and-lied-about-it/

At this point, he had acted enough like a sociopath that the $675,000 judgement against him was self-inflicted. Then, having done all this, his legal team put out an appeal to the Internet to pay his fine for him. I'm not kidding - the appeal was removed after the backlash included Ray Beckerman himself: http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2009/08/please-do-not-contribute-any-funds-to.html

And now, he's trying to weasel out of the consequences of his actions. I'm sorry, but I think the punishment fits here. This isn't some poor fool who got caught sharing a few songs and got extorted by the RIAA for it. This is somebody who perjured himself for eight months, alienated what would have otherwise probably have been a sympathetic jury, and tried to get everybody else to pay his fine when the jury - understandably upset when it learned it had been lied to and the entire system played for chumps - handed down its sentence.

The Supreme Court was right to not spare this man any of its time.

A lot of the commenters here have forgotten their history with this case. This is one case where, in fact, the punishment fits quite nicely.

This is a punishment for illegally sharing music pretty much in name only. The actual trial could be described as a textbook case of "how to alienate a jury."

So, first, Tenenbaum hired a lawyer who acted very eccentric: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/07/tenenbaum-trial-opens-following-last-minute-dismissal-of-fair-use-defense/

Then, Tenenbaum - after eight months of legal proceedings - admitted that he had been lying under oath the entire time. When counsel asked him why he had basically played the entire court system (and, for that matter, his own lawyer) for chumps for the last eight months, he replied with the equivalent of a shrug and "it seemed like the best response to give": http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/07/tenenbaum-takes-the-stand-i-used-p2p-and-lied-about-it/

At this point, he had acted enough like a sociopath that the $675,000 judgement against him was self-inflicted. Then, having done all this, his legal team put out an appeal to the Internet to pay his fine for him. I'm not kidding - the appeal was removed after the backlash included Ray Beckerman himself: http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2009/08/please-do-not-contribute-any-funds-to.html

And now, he's trying to weasel out of the consequences of his actions. I'm sorry, but I think the punishment fits here. This isn't some poor fool who got caught sharing a few songs and got extorted by the RIAA for it. This is somebody who perjured himself for eight months, alienated what would have otherwise probably have been a sympathetic jury, and tried to get everybody else to pay his fine when the jury - understandably upset when it learned it had been lied to and the entire system played for chumps - handed down its sentence.

The Supreme Court was right to not spare this man any of its time.

There's even more than that. This is a case where the "victim" acted like a sociopath for a good chunk of the trial.

It's one case where I have absolutely no sympathy for the man. For eight months of the trial, he lied under oath about whether he had done it. Then, when he was caught out, the reason he gave was that it seemed to be the best response to give.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/07/tenenbaum-takes-the-stand-i-used-p2p-and-lied-about-it/

Then, he tried to take up a collection to pay the damages, which only got retracted after an uproar in which Ray Beckerman himself took a stand against it.

Link: http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.ca/2009/08/please-do-not-contribute-any-funds-to.html

So, you've got somebody who perjures himself for eight months, plays the entire court system for chumps, and tried to get the internet to pay his damages for him. I'm no fan of the RIAA - frankly, I'll be in line to dance on their graves when they die - but in this case, the punishment fits.

None of the systems I manage nor any of my systems at home exhibit the behavior you describe. Perhaps you are embellishing just a bit?

Yes, I embellished a bit, but not much.

Apparently, some people had it worse than I had.

In my case, I can't ever say that my copy was ever found not to be genuine, or at least it never told me that's what it found, but it just seemed that every time I received a critical update, Microsoft seemed to have forgotten that my copy had previously passed the WGA validation test successfully.

And yes as someone else said already, there are ways to get around WGA, but as a paying customer, I wasn't about to get around WGA. The people that get around WGA are the ones that are using pirated copy of the software. And I wasn't about to replace a perfectly valid purchased copy of a software with an illegal copy of the same.

Citation needed.

Here.. 89% definitively illegal, 11% probably illegal, 0.3% confirmed legal. And since you want to play the wikipedia game, anything you say to make this article invalid is [citation needed], no arguments of your own only reliable third party sources.

Samsung announced it had completed development of its first 4Gb DDR4 DRAM module in January of 2011, and started shipping 2Gb DDR4 samples in December of 2010; Hynix demoed its own DDR4 technology in February of 2011.

Add this to the borked-beta weekend and I think they have more polishing to do.

IDC suggests it's 68%.

Also less powerful than Amazon's cloud hosting or Lolita City which survived Anonymous' best efforts (sadly).

But then the movie industry is rather thuggish too.

The movie business has—yet again—run up record numbers at the box office. In 2010, theaters around the world reported a combined total revenue of $31.8 billion, up 8 percent from 2009. While the industry certainly has its share of piracy problems, they aren't affecting box office receipts.

http://www.the-numbers.com/market/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/piracy-once-again-fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office/

as casual piracy really is hurting the industry.

Really?

The movie business has—yet again—run up record numbers at the box office. In 2010, theaters around the world reported a combined total revenue of $31.8 billion, up 8 percent from 2009. While the industry certainly has its share of piracy problems, they aren't affecting box office receipts.

http://www.the-numbers.com/market/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/02/piracy-once-again-fails-to-get-in-way-of-record-box-office/

...that seizing domains does absolutely no good, and that in at least a one case, it does significant harm to people who haven't violated the law.

It's a flawed, ineffective, and destructive policy that can only cause harm and can never have any significant benefit. It needs to be stopped immediately.

It's funny how the DSL providers will swear up and down for years that they can't get DSL or fiber into your area. Then one day, they hear that the city itself is planning to roll out city-wide broadband, so the DSL company is "suddenly" able to serve your area, and sues the city for unfair competition.

http://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2008/09/telco-to-town-were-suing-you-because-we-care/

Take a company, any company at all, and give them the choice between money and truth, they will ALWAYS pick money.

You seem very sure of this. I am unsure. Since time is not a constant then almost anything is possible with regards to causality. Relative causality? http://arstechnica.com/science/2012/04/decision-to-entangle-effects-results-of-measurements-taken-beforehand/ I would bet hard money you could run an experiment similar to this but instead send the information forward in time, faster than light. If you transported one of a pair of more stable molecules that were entangled then constantly manipulated there states wouldn't that information travel faster than light even though the particles themselves cannot travel from place to place faster than light? Also, if you took a stable wormhole and transported one end at the speed of light for an extended period of time. Then sent something through one side of the wormhole to another you could theoretically instantly skip the time betwen, allowing for either faster than light travel, or travel back in time.

It was in Nevada (and not near any military installation), and I'm pretty sure it was just Joe Contract Trucker.

That wasn't the first time It happened, just the first time I figured out what it was. My Garmin literally had me in North Dakota one minute, then Texas the next. It was useless. The phone simply couldn't get a fix. The Cell towers told it one thing, but the GPS signal said something totally different.

Its becoming a big problem. These units are not hard to find, and the problem is becoming fairly serious as even a cursory Google search will find:
http://arstechnica.com/business/2012/02/uk-research-measures-growing-gps-jamming-threat/
http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/onepercent/2012/02/gps-jamming-a-clear-and-presen.html
http://www.jammerall.com/categories/GPS-Jammers/

Google commissioned the paper, presumably to help ward off calls for government regulation of its search results.

As noted previously, Google has come under TONS of scrutiny from different governments and several U.S. government agencies. They have used their monopoly to illegally promote their own other services, all hidden behind the old "but it is just our algorithms at works!".

As Google is maintaining strict editorial process of the search queries, I think it would be good to hold them to responsibilities for them too. Google has shown that they can remove content from their service. Just like newspapers aren't allowed to show illegal things, Google should not be either. If Google has a problem with this, they need to stop manually deciding what's good for people and use an algorithm that is actually fair and isn't biased.

So this is not the same ATMs with a demonstrated hack at the blackhat conference a couple years back? http://arstechnica.com/security/2010/07/researcher-demonstrates-atm-jackpotting-at-black-hat-conference/

Further evidence: ArsTechnica report on this, says Intel's roadmap doesn't include DDR4 until Haswell-EX in 2014.

http://arstechnica.com/business/guides/2012/05/ddr4-memory-is-coming-soonmaybe-too-soon.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

Of course, you wouldn't know science if it smacked you over the head.

I don't know who these scientists were who were trying to convince people about global cooling, because even back in the 70s the consensus was that the planet was going to get warmer.

What error am I supposed to admit? Are you insane? Christ, you deniers are really something...

Are we ignoring the fact that the major players in this very industry were at one time colluding to keep prices artificially high until the DoJ stepped in?

Steam?

AGW proponents don't need to prove deniers are crazy to prove their point

Then why do they expend so much effort trying? For example, in the last link the author states:

Heartland's continued efforts in this area seem to risk turning it into a single-issue think tank. And that may actually make sense; the leaked financial documents indicate that some of its largest donations come from single individuals who are targeting money for climate efforts.

A scientist sacrificed his career to obtain this information fraudulently (as well as forging a memo to sex up the leak when the existing information wasn't good enough). Why wasn't the science good enough for him?

One side sees this primarily as a scientific question to be resolved through inquiry and research... the other views it primarily as a political problem to be resolved through rhetoric and propaganda.

Sure. So which "side" is which? The side that uses terms like "denier" (and equates them to crazy people) strikes me as the "rhetoric and propaganda" side.

So you are banking on iOS?

i even dear to say that Andriod will overcome iOS pretty soon

Not even close.

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/05/oracle-google-judge-asks-for-comment-on-eu-court-ruling.ars

EP 0618540, Microsoft's obscene "MSDOS-compatible filenames" patent on FAT32, was upheld by a German court.

Old Europe hopes to draw the smart people back, away from the US legal EULA mess.
http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2010/12/court-you-do-not-own-that-copy-of-wow-you-bought.ars
"Give me your hardwired, your sophomore,
Your huddled hoaxes yearning to code free,
The gifted gnus of your crumbling bookstores.
Send these, the faithless, gymnast-tost to me,
I lift my laptop beside the golden port!"

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/05/skype-replaces-p2p-supernodes-with-linux-boxes-hosted-by-microsoft.ars

Owners of HTC’s highly-praised HD2 touchscreen smartphone will be unable to upgrade the device to Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7 software when the OS is released towards the end of the year. Despite the HD2 meeting many of the criteria laid down in Microsoft’s ‘Chassis 1’ spec – including a 1GHz Qualcomm processor, high-res capacitive touch display, 5 megapixel camera and 3.5mm headphone jack – the phone will be ruled out for the simple reason that it has five buttons instead of the three mandated for all Windows Phone 7 devices.

Source.

Here are links to some of the sources saying the same thing is going to happen to current Win Phone 7 device owners:

The Verge

Mary Jo Foley

Ars Technica

meanwhile, all google can think of is switching off the lights!

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/03/super-secret-google-builds-servers-in-the-dark.ars

Is BPI part of this group?
"Artists' lawsuit: major record labels are the real pirates" http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2009/12/artists-lawsuit-major-record-labels-are-the-real-pirates.ars

Except that God is said to be eternal and timeless. A recent experiment indicates that decisions on quantum entanglement propagate backwards through time. An omniscient deity not bound by "the arrow of time" could see through an extension of quantum entanglement. Imagine if every particle in the physical universe was entangled with one in "Godspace" (for wont of a better word). He would therefore be able to observe the results of the resolution of quantum states in our universe before the decisions had been made.

Of course, I'm not saying this as a genuine theory, but as a demonstration that the scientific disproof of the supernatural is a fool's errand....

* companies are authorized to share "cyber threat information" with other private companies or the government "notwithstanding any other provision of law." That appears to mean that if a company decides that your private emails, your browsing history, your health care records, or any other information would be helpful in dealing with a "cyber threat," the company can ignore laws that would otherwise limit its disclosure.

CISPA is another way of getting *ANYTHING* labeled a "cyber threat" so an entire can of whoopass can be opened legally. I can conceive how this would be abused by , let's say, limiting what gets blogged when a demonstration is taking place, or being raided.

[*] - http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2012/04/cispa-advances-in-house-as-eff-decries-bills-revisions.ars