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Microsoft Bows to Eolas, Revamps IE
Tenacious Dee writes "The patent quarrel between Microsoft and Eolas takes a strange turn with an announcement from Redmond that the Internet Explorer browser will be modified to change the way ActiveX controls are handled. A Microsoft white paper details the behavior change."
You can see the Patent Here.
Essentially, it's a total bullshit patent attempting to own the concept of having an interactive server/client style application embedded in a webpage.
No, it's not like Flashblock. The article indicates that flash movies will play as they normally do. Only that if you want to click the "Stop" button, you will actually have to click it twice - once to activate the control and a second time to click the button. Dumbdumbdumbdumbdumb.
Furthermore, the webdev can bypass this stupidity using some simple javascript to write out the tags.
Note also that Firefox and other browsers will need to implement a similar change.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Will eolas go for other browsers?
Probably Not! (Here's why).
The general trick if you are going for maximum profit is to first sue a small company, and get a successful precident. It costs you less to fight the action against a smaller company, and improves your chances of getting the really big money later by giving you some already recorded findings that the court will generally accept and not let your opponent delay over. Taking on Opera (for example), first, and Microsoft second or later makes more sense if it's all about the cash.
For a publicly traded company, this is even more plausable. Winning a small decision that seems to forshadow a bigger win can really drive up the price of stock without costing much at all to implement.
The chief reason people are concerned that this lawsuit might be the first of a series is probably SCO's lawsuits. After all, SCO avoided going after smaller fry first and went for IBM. However: 1. That doesn't seem to be working too well, and other companies are at least as likely on observing it to avoid the strategy as imitate it. 2. There's no indicators that Eolas has been secretly coached in this strategy, backed by (say) the veiled resources of the powerful Lynx Megacorporation in an attempt to regain browser dominance for Eolas's hidden puppeteer.
Check out my website: Playfully Clever
What makes you think security benefit was one of the goals? Its about changing the current implementation so that it no longer violates a patent.
I knew someone would turn this into a flamefest about ActiveX.
Allow me to make a technical point on slashdot -- ActiveX is nothing more than an interface standard. It's neither "secure" or "insecure" by itself. As it is used in IE it's no less secure than any other browser plugin mechanism, including those found in Firefox or Safari.
The technology you dislike is not ActiveX -- it's called Internet Component Download. And while it still exists, it's pretty limited in XPSP2, and there's been some rumblings that it will be removed alltogether in Vista.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
You're totally misunderstanding the proposal. It isn't that the ActiveX will cease automatically running. It is that after they are running, the user will need to "activate them" with a mouse click before working with them. If you want to stop a movie playing, you'd have to click once to activate it and again to stop it.
It wasn't easy - it's been in the courts for many years. Microsoft was offered a good deal early on but decided that they could get away with just using the patent without paying at all. They counted on their legal machine being able to crush tiny Eolas regardless of the merits of the case. Eolas is just one guy, Mike Doyle. He invented this technology legitimately, albeit about a month or two before other people. Nevertheless, if you read the patent carefully the details aren't really obvious. The patent and the legal issues around it are more complex than reports have indicated, and the alleged prior art differs in significant ways from the patent. Also, this isn't the only or most important thing Mike was the first to do - in the '80s he was the first person to create a networked hypertext system with the links stored in the content pages themselves rather than in a seperate central database. This was a much more fundamental technological and conceptual advance than the derivative implentation of hypertext by Tim Berners-Lee, HTML. So I look at this as a rare case of a lone innovator actually getting a shot at the big bucks that corporations take as their due. Software patents are the problem, not Eolas, and as long as the system is as it is, the best than one can hope is that actual inventors will see some royalties.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
You are totally off base. see my earlier post: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=170066&cid =14174958
The patent is very, very specific and Mike Doyle actually built the software covered by the patent before filing the patent. His employer, a university, holds the patent for his invention. He then founded Eolas and licensed the patent back from his employer. Also, this is not the only big thing Mike Doyle invented, just the only one he tried to get paid for. Your idea of ending patents for inventors who don't have the ability to manufacture their inventions themselves is something the big companies would push hard for if there were any chance of it happening.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry