Slashdot Mirror

you cannot volunteer your technology to become part of a standard and then later hold the industry (or competitors in the industry) to ransom by selectively refusing to license that technology on FRAND terms

You're got it backwards. It's Samsung that has "essential" patents and demanding payment but it's Apple that's refusing to pay anything for them. So ironically, thanks to the US's obvious native-company favouritism, a company with essential patents (like Samsung's) can't get money or redress, while a company with trivial, obvious patents (like Apple with rounded corners, hyperlinks, search bars, etc) can sue, and sue, and sue, and sue till the sun dies. Basically, Apple gets to pirate Samsung's essential patents in the US, thanks to govt protectionism.

Apple wants a royalty rate of $24 per unit from Samsung for its alleged use of Apple's design patent, the notorious tablet shape with rounded corners ... when Samsung asked Apple for a much lower amount per unit that everybody else in the market pays for Samsung's standards patents, Apple refused, offered no counter-offer, and sued instead. To date, it's paid nothing at all for those patents or for the other regular patents Samsung is accusing Apple of infringing. In its trial brief, Apple states in one header:
        To The Extent That Samsung Is Entitled To Any Remedy, its FRAND Damages Cannot Exceed $0.0049 Per Unit for Each Infringed Patent
        Less than a penny should be Samsung's lot for patents that are essential to even be in the mobile phone business, but Apple wants Samsung to pay $24 for rounded corners, plus from $2.02 and up to $3.10 per unit for its utility patents.

The Commission also found that Apple had failed to argue other FRAND-based defenses, such as promissory estoppel, laches or fraud. Finally, the Commission determined that even if Apple had offered evidence of the proper interpretation of ETSI’s IPR policy and had shown that the patents at issue were actually necessary to practice the standard, that the FRAND declaration was a legally enforceable obligation, and that Samsung was required to grant irrevocable licenses under FRAND terms to any party, it still would not have found in Apple’s favor, because the parties’ final offers were sufficiently close to each other that Samsung did not violate its obligation to negotiate in good faith.

In an earlier Snowden story, it was revealed that:

"British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) reportedly used spoofed LinkedIn and Slashdot pages to compromise the computers of network engineers working for global roaming exchange providers based in Europe."

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?...

Is it possible that all of us, right now, are logged into a spoofed page that has replaced the real Slashdot for reasons known only to GCHQ and the NSA? 'Beta' is probably the final stage in whatever sinister plot they have planned for us. Incredible, I know, but is it any less likely than the alternative, that a job search site none of us had ever heard of would buy Geeknet for $20 million, and then proceed to trash its properties by a series of bizarre decisions like setting up SlashBI (beware the tumbleweed!) and inflicting Beta on its loyal readers? Just how far does this conspiracy go?

That's why your e-mail should be one of your most closely guarded accounts, together with banking accounts and alike. Did y'all turn on 2 factor auth yet?

Obliquely related, some e-mail providers let you freely use aliases like somemail+slashdot@gmail.com and somemail+dotslash@gmail.com for somemail@gmail.com - sites that ask for e-mail in password reset form will just tell you "No such account" if you have it set to "somemail+thissite@..." but ask for "somemail@...". As a bonus, you'll instantly know there was a leak when a spam letter comes to somemail+hackedsite@gmail.com.

Oh, and another one for name+extra@mail - Gravatar won't leak your e-mail as easily as here.

An article that expresses the same skepticism:

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=5A2C0BF6-9626-6CF9-119A812483E44613

There's also the news that ICANN will help cooperate with global domain seizures (posted as a /. submission, but didn't make the front page), perhaps being preceded by this.

While I'm not sure about handing control of DNS to the UN, leaving such an important and essential resource to a non-democratic organization (and the country that hosts it taking extralegal measures to seize domains) is going to become increasingly untenable, and I wouldn't be surprised if the system fragments -- or is replaced altogether -- this decade.

I'm concerned that vested interests will increasingly attempt to push control of the net's infrastructure (in spite of being counterproductive and harmful), similar to how the world economy was put on the brink in 2008, by those who want more control and power, regardless of harm or cost. That would lead to the net becoming a shadow of what it is -- with self-censorship a norm and not the exception -- and go against the spirit of its foundations being built on common interest and openness. It sounds unlikely now, but considering how far down the domain takedown road we are, not impossible to imagine.

And this is different from hiring an employee to keep your IT support in-house? If anything, an external provider is less likely to be a nutcase or otherwise disgruntled enough to take punitive action against you. What about your cleaning staff? Your office security firm? Your hookers?

Security is important, but there can be a tendency for entrepreneurs and startups to over-vector. Pick a respectable vendor. Trust them, and keep an eye on their work.

Yep, well hitting 50-50 against Windows would be huge, I consider 60-40 also huge. At least here in Norway the boss for Acer's mini-PCs claim they see 90-10 Windows share, but also that in the last four months they've sold 14,000 Linux PCs. (Source). Digging up some numbers on PCs sold in Norway says there are 1.2mio PCs sold/year total for all companies, so 400k/4 months. (Source) So for last few months in 2008 at least 3.5% Linux plus whatever anyone else has sold with Linux. Obviously figures on market share take a lot longer to grow than shares on sale, but things are in motion.

Actually this seems to confirm it

http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=01923563-17A4-0F78-313A27C7A88124BA

Godson's use in PCs has been held back by the fact that it is based on a MIPS core, as opposed to the x86 design used by Intel and AMD. To run Windows it has to use translation software to achieve x86-compatibility, and the Godson loses a lot of its native MIPS power in the process.

The Godson 3 adds new instructions that speed the x86-to-MIPS translation by a factor of 10, Xu said. "Our goal is to eventually reach 80 percent of the native MIPS performance," he said. "Right now we are at 40 percent, so we have a long way to go."

So it's not going to be quick, a 1Ghz Godson running x86 code through software translation will currently perform like a say P3 at 400-800Mhz.

Denmark
http://www.ds.dk/

Poland
http://polishlinux.org/poland/no-consensus-over-ooxml-in-poland-yet/

Germany
http://www.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.heise.de%2Fnewsticker%2FDIN-sagt-Ja-zur-ISO-Stan
dardisierung-von-OOXML--%2Fmeldung%2F105657&langpair=de|en&hl=sv&ie=UTF8

South Korea
http://osrin.net/2008/03/28/south-korea-votes-approve-for-isoiec-dis29500/

Norway
http://www.idg.no/computerworld/article92563.ece

I think the USA and the UK are also voting yes, but I don't have any links for those.