Business leaders think that Zuckerberg is some kind of genius tech visionary because of the success of Facebook. That's why he gets invited to have dinner with the President, and to talk at the World Economic Forum...
There is another hypothesis: he got lucky, he happened to be in the right place, at the right time, doing the right things.
They already are getting paid since every mobile device contains licensed chipsets.
Well, that is the big question, isn't it? If all of the chipsets come with applicable and transferrable patent licenses, then why does the case exist?
If the situation is as simple as you suggest, then the court case would be a slam dunk for anyone using such a chipset. The fact that it hasn't been suggests that the chipset may not include a transferable license for all FRAND patent licenses, or the chipset violates other licenses that are non-FRAND. The real question is, why is the chipset manufacturer forcing their customer to defend their product, instead of defending the case themselves under some patent indemnification clause?
We have to wait for the court to decide on the case. Until then, we have no way of knowing what the terms of the patents license from the chipset manufacturer to their clients actually are. I would guess that the patent license states that the chipset manufacturer isn't liable for patent issues arising for the use of their chipset in a fully assembled product, as they have no way to control what the final assembled product actually is and does, and hence no way to control what patents may or may not be violated by the final product. At best, they would indemnify the operation of the baseband processor, but everything that runs off the main CPU is likely not covered.
They already do require individual license. There is no global license for the GSM "patent pool" - if you want to make a GSM phone, you have to go to each patent holder and license their patents individually. The argument is about this:
FRAND patents are limited to small fixed royalties
Well, who said that FRAND patents would be limited to small fixed royalties? In fact, the patent holder is free to license their patents in any way they wish. That just means that they can't charge one person more than another for a patent license (which is impossible to judge, since the deals involve cross-licensing, and patents don't have a $ value attached to them), and that they are "fair", which can only be decided by a court of law.
You seem to believe standards work by several companies contributing patents to a pool and then those companies are the only ones who get to build to the standard. That is *not* how they work
In fact, that *is* how some standards work. You seem to believe that it is illegal to create a patent pool unless the patents are offered to competitors on FRAND terms. Unfortunately, there is no such law. It is legal for companies to create a private patent pool. Qualcomm do not have to license their CDMA patent pool to you, so that you can create competing CDMA chipsets. The only reason that the GSM patents are considered FRAND is because that is how the GSM Alliance chose to operate (probably due to its E.U. origins as a government-mandated open standards protocol). They could just have easily have created a set of non-FRAND patents, and it would have been completely legal.
Motorola (and others) approached Apple and said that they wouldn't accept cash from them anyway as payment for the FRAND technology
Not true. In fact, Nokia explicitly asked the court to declare a cash value on the patents that they hold. This is the essence of the argument (and something that is missed every single time this appears on Slashdot) - the dispute is not about whether or not the FRAND patents should be licensed, the dispute is over how you define "fair" in the context of patents. Every company making GSM phones has to negotiate a patent license from every other company that has patents in the GSM patent pool. Lawyers negotiate and patent cross-license deals (including both FRAND and non-FRAND patents!) are done, some cash changes hands, and the deal is done. What Apple did was (apparently) refuse to license their patents, presumably because they want to use them to prevent other manufacturers from making similar smart phones. That means that the whole patent payment must be made in cash. At this point there is a difficult problem - what, exactly, is a "fair" cash value for a large essential patent pool? 1% of profits? 5% of profits? 5% of revenue? 50% of revenue? Only a court can decide.
Engadget actually got some lawyers to do a readable version of the situation back in 2009. It's a shame that so many people still argue the same points without actually reading or understanding the basic facts of these patent licensing cases. 'So it's got to be cash, and even if Apple's willing to pay a straight cash royalty for Nokia's patents, negotiating that price is anything but easy -- FRAND is basically what wireless industry licensing executives have to believe so they can sleep at night. In reality FRAND is nebulous and undefined, with almost no specific rules for determining what a "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" license actually is.' - http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/29/nokia-vs-apple-the-in-depth-analysis/
Your arguments are against the patent system itself.
True the patent pool protects everyone but what about those that came into the market after the original standards were agreed upon? Should they have to invent a time machine to get themselves into the pool?
Unfortunately, that is the way that patents work. "What if you became an X developer after X has already been invented?" is a common problem; if someone has a patent, and you create a product that requires that patent, then you must license it. It doesn't matter that you entered the field after the patent was created - it doesn't matter if you weren't born when the patent was created - you will still be at the mercy of the patent holder until the patent expires. Pertinent example: "What if you create a graphics library and GIFs have already been invented?"
They charged Qualcomm licensing fees to make the 3G chips then charges Apple who uses the chips another fee.
Separate charges for manufacture and integration are also allowed by the patents system.
That's like Micron trying to get you or Dell to pay SDRAM licensing to them after you bought DDR modules from Kingston.
Or like Apple suing Samsung and HTC over an operating system that they bought from Google? There is no law that prohibits a patent holder from suing anyone in the distribution chain who they claim violates their patent.
Trouble is, the majority of mainstream religions tend to keep nutjobs under control.
Only since we (the people) effectively took their power away from them. How many millions of people do you think were killed in wars started or promoted by the Church, before we began to question their power in the Enlightenment?
Sounds like a "liberal conservative. As that article points out, in the U.S. the term is considered an oxymoron (perhaps "economic conservative and social moderate" Americans are more likely to self-identify as Libertarian or Democrat).
Republicans... conservatives donate a higher percentage of their income to charities than liberals
"According to Google’s figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do."
"I'm not taking a stand on what the right answer is to any of these comparisons. The lesson here is, don't just believe the headline for any study. Learn to ask the right questions. "link
I don't think Jesus would care one way or another about the NRA.
"Put your sword back in its place," Jesus said to him, "for all who draw the sword will die by the sword."
While certain Christian idiots have done things like bomb abortion clinics (thereby killing both doctors and those seeking abortions), I ask if you've ever seen one try to poison a school full of children for being taught evolution? I thought not.
There is no Central Authority in Islam. No Pope. There is, therefore no central and universally accepted authority on what constitutes Islam or its teachings.
The Pope is not a universally accepted authority on Christianity. The Pope leads the Catholic church, which has about 1 billion members, and there are 2 billion Christians.
Anyone can appoint themselves an Imam, and begin preaching virtually anything they want. There is really no one to hold them in check.
It is the same with Christianity. Anyone can create their own Church, and set themselves up as a preacher, and there is nothing to hold them in check.
5 of those 6 apps listed give you a warning and/or choice before they touch your contacts.
They only tested 12 popular iPhone apps. Out of the 12 apps tested, 6 uploaded your contact details to a remote server, 1 without any warning. There are 585 thousand apps in the App Store. If you just extrapolate that data, then you can estimate that 48750 apps are grabbing users contacts without consent, and 292500 apps are grabbing contacts with a warning.
That would just be a very rough estimate, but the problem is obviously not limited to the popular apps that one security researcher happened to analyse, and which happened to transmit the contacts in plaintext across the network. (As he points out, if the app encrypts the contacts data, he wouldn't see it)
So Android prompts for permissions at install time, and iOS prompts for permissions at runtime. That is not a major difference: it is exactly the same system of explicitly asking the user for permissions, it just happens at a different time. The majority of users are just going to click "ok" anyway. To claim that the iPhone is somehow protected while Android is vulnerable is really stretching.
On the one hand you've got iPhone Apps sending contact details - previously without user permission - now with user permission. Although in either case not with malicious intent.
And how would you know that it is without malicious intent? There are many, possibly hundreds, of iPhone apps that grab the contacts, how do you know what happens to those contact details once they are uploaded?
On the other hand you've got Android apps sending premium rate phone numbers without the users permission.
That is not what the article is about.
Or were you just trying to ignore the type of malicious app mentioned in the summary, because it's bad news for Android?
I was responding to the article, not the summary. The summary has nothing to do with the article. The article is claiming that users contact details can be grabbed by Android apps. The same is true of iphone apps.
And how is that solution different from Android? Android already requires users to authorize apps to read contact details, the problem is that most people don't care. These Android apps are being called malware because they upload the contacts list without permission, which is exactly the same as many ios apps do.
"Google has removed at least 15 Android apps from its official Play market after receiving outside reports they were malicious trojans that siphoned names, telephone numbers of email addresses of every person in the phone's contact list.
..In the background and without warning, they also obtained the phone number and a unique identifier of the infected device and sent the information in clear text to a remote server under the control of the software developers. "
Which is exactly what some iOS apps are also doing. This is not an Android specific problem.
How do I protect my patent internationally?
Since the rights granted by a U.S. patent extend only throughout the territory of the United States and have no effect in a foreign country, an inventor who wishes patent protection in other countries must apply for a patent in each of the other countries or in regional patent offices. Almost every country has its own patent law, and a person desiring a patent in a particular country must make an application for patent in that country, in accordance with the requirements of that country.
I didn't say that it was possible for anyone, or even easy, but most good C programmers should be able to do kernel development. In difficulty terms it's on a similar level to embedded systems programming, or old games console development where you had access to the low-level system. This is the stuff that teenagers used to do for fun back in the 80s.
I've seen a lot of promising college-aged open source devs that seem to have an overwhelming reverence and awe towards the kernel, thinking it far too complicated for them to work on with their own programming abilities. In reality, most of them could pick up the kernel and figure it out quite quickly, but they'll never convince themselves of that.
I agree with this. I have also heard younger developers say that they can only do Java or PHP, and think that C is too complicated, etc., and so they never try. But if they really did apply themselves, and put in the time and effort, how far did you think they could go? They might never be Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds, but if they really went for it, they could get pretty close.
Contributing to and old and large code is much more difficult than contributing to a small one. Getting your head around a large code base is no small task and documentation is often lacking. Even if the code is well commented it could be very difficult to understand the overall design of the software and how things interact with each other.
That is true, however, you don't need to understand all the millions of lines of code of the kernel in order to do development, just as you don't need to understand the complete implementation of the C library, or the Java runtime, in order to do desktop application development.
And hey with a scalpel I'm qualified to be your heart surgeon...right?
The two are not the same. Heart surgery is a specialism that requires probably a 5 year degree, following by a decade or so of further training under most medical regimes. Software development is a bit more open. The kernel isn't magic, it's just software; if you are a good C programmer you should be able to figure it out enough to complete the task at hand
you expect Joe average to pull off a major rewrite?
Who said anything about a major rewrite? The vast majority of security fixes are very small, and generally target a few lines of code where some trivial mistake was made. The only reason a major rewrite would be required is if the protocols or implementation are completely broken and insecure. And if that is the case, you're better just disabling the broken functionality.
And do you have ANY idea how much it would cost to hire a qualified kernel developer to do your own custom rewrite?
RedHat, Canonical, etc. all ship custom kernels. Kernel development can be hard, but it's certainly not impossible for a good programmer who has never worked on the kernel to do development there. There are probably at least a few thousand programmers in the world who already have kernel experience. Hiring good C programmers isn't cheap, but it may well be cheaper than rewriting your custom SCADA implementation to run on a more modern OS.
Don't like how your case is going here? Sue in France!
Which is absolutely fine, as any rulings of the French trade courts will only apply in France, not the United States. Contrary to what Microsoft claim, they doesn't need to license any E.U. patents for territories outside of the E.U. - the jurisdiction of E.U. patents ends at the E.U. borders.
Would you be happy if the E.U. courts began to make judgements against Microsoft etc., and expressly said that the jurisdiction of those judgements wasn't just within the E.U., but also covered the U.S.? It is a blatant attempt to extend the jurisdictional territory of national patents onto other nations, which is certainly not allowed under the existing patent treaties. What if Chinese courts decide that they have the jurisdiction to rule on U.S. patent cases?
After all, companies and individuals are routinely held to account for operating within the unspoken rules of business in China which is all about bribes and corruption
Obama is from mixed race parents, but is referred to as black because he looks black.
Actually, mixed race people are referred to as "black" in the United States due to the concept of hypodescent that was prevalent in the southern states. In other countries, Obama would be more correctly classified as "mixed race".
Slashdot Mirror
Business leaders think that Zuckerberg is some kind of genius tech visionary because of the success of Facebook. That's why he gets invited to have dinner with the President, and to talk at the World Economic Forum...
There is another hypothesis: he got lucky, he happened to be in the right place, at the right time, doing the right things.
Time will tell...
They already are getting paid since every mobile device contains licensed chipsets.
Well, that is the big question, isn't it? If all of the chipsets come with applicable and transferrable patent licenses, then why does the case exist?
If the situation is as simple as you suggest, then the court case would be a slam dunk for anyone using such a chipset. The fact that it hasn't been suggests that the chipset may not include a transferable license for all FRAND patent licenses, or the chipset violates other licenses that are non-FRAND. The real question is, why is the chipset manufacturer forcing their customer to defend their product, instead of defending the case themselves under some patent indemnification clause?
We have to wait for the court to decide on the case. Until then, we have no way of knowing what the terms of the patents license from the chipset manufacturer to their clients actually are. I would guess that the patent license states that the chipset manufacturer isn't liable for patent issues arising for the use of their chipset in a fully assembled product, as they have no way to control what the final assembled product actually is and does, and hence no way to control what patents may or may not be violated by the final product. At best, they would indemnify the operation of the baseband processor, but everything that runs off the main CPU is likely not covered.
Apple offered [wsj.com] settlement deals to both Samsung *and* Motorala before enteringlitigation.
Yes, and I'm sure Samsung and Motorola in turn offered settlement deals to Apple before entering litigation.
That is how the legal world works:
"Why don't you give me $20 per device?"
"No. Why don't *you* give *me* $20 per device?"
"See you in court"
The important detail is the terms of the deal that was offered, not the fact that a deal was offered in itself.
FRAND patents are limited to small fixed royalties
Well, who said that FRAND patents would be limited to small fixed royalties? In fact, the patent holder is free to license their patents in any way they wish. That just means that they can't charge one person more than another for a patent license (which is impossible to judge, since the deals involve cross-licensing, and patents don't have a $ value attached to them), and that they are "fair", which can only be decided by a court of law.
You seem to believe standards work by several companies contributing patents to a pool and then those companies are the only ones who get to build to the standard. That is *not* how they work
In fact, that *is* how some standards work. You seem to believe that it is illegal to create a patent pool unless the patents are offered to competitors on FRAND terms. Unfortunately, there is no such law. It is legal for companies to create a private patent pool. Qualcomm do not have to license their CDMA patent pool to you, so that you can create competing CDMA chipsets. The only reason that the GSM patents are considered FRAND is because that is how the GSM Alliance chose to operate (probably due to its E.U. origins as a government-mandated open standards protocol). They could just have easily have created a set of non-FRAND patents, and it would have been completely legal.
Motorola (and others) approached Apple and said that they wouldn't accept cash from them anyway as payment for the FRAND technology
Not true. In fact, Nokia explicitly asked the court to declare a cash value on the patents that they hold. This is the essence of the argument (and something that is missed every single time this appears on Slashdot) - the dispute is not about whether or not the FRAND patents should be licensed, the dispute is over how you define "fair" in the context of patents. Every company making GSM phones has to negotiate a patent license from every other company that has patents in the GSM patent pool. Lawyers negotiate and patent cross-license deals (including both FRAND and non-FRAND patents!) are done, some cash changes hands, and the deal is done. What Apple did was (apparently) refuse to license their patents, presumably because they want to use them to prevent other manufacturers from making similar smart phones. That means that the whole patent payment must be made in cash. At this point there is a difficult problem - what, exactly, is a "fair" cash value for a large essential patent pool? 1% of profits? 5% of profits? 5% of revenue? 50% of revenue? Only a court can decide.
Engadget actually got some lawyers to do a readable version of the situation back in 2009. It's a shame that so many people still argue the same points without actually reading or understanding the basic facts of these patent licensing cases. 'So it's got to be cash, and even if Apple's willing to pay a straight cash royalty for Nokia's patents, negotiating that price is anything but easy -- FRAND is basically what wireless industry licensing executives have to believe so they can sleep at night. In reality FRAND is nebulous and undefined, with almost no specific rules for determining what a "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" license actually is.' - http://www.engadget.com/2009/10/29/nokia-vs-apple-the-in-depth-analysis/
True the patent pool protects everyone but what about those that came into the market after the original standards were agreed upon? Should they have to invent a time machine to get themselves into the pool?
Unfortunately, that is the way that patents work. "What if you became an X developer after X has already been invented?" is a common problem; if someone has a patent, and you create a product that requires that patent, then you must license it. It doesn't matter that you entered the field after the patent was created - it doesn't matter if you weren't born when the patent was created - you will still be at the mercy of the patent holder until the patent expires. Pertinent example: "What if you create a graphics library and GIFs have already been invented?"
They charged Qualcomm licensing fees to make the 3G chips then charges Apple who uses the chips another fee.
Separate charges for manufacture and integration are also allowed by the patents system.
That's like Micron trying to get you or Dell to pay SDRAM licensing to them after you bought DDR modules from Kingston.
Or like Apple suing Samsung and HTC over an operating system that they bought from Google? There is no law that prohibits a patent holder from suing anyone in the distribution chain who they claim violates their patent.
Trouble is, the majority of mainstream religions tend to keep nutjobs under control.
Only since we (the people) effectively took their power away from them. How many millions of people do you think were killed in wars started or promoted by the Church, before we began to question their power in the Enlightenment?
Sounds like a "liberal conservative. As that article points out, in the U.S. the term is considered an oxymoron (perhaps "economic conservative and social moderate" Americans are more likely to self-identify as Libertarian or Democrat).
Republicans... conservatives donate a higher percentage of their income to charities than liberals
"According to Google’s figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do."
"I'm not taking a stand on what the right answer is to any of these comparisons. The lesson here is, don't just believe the headline for any study. Learn to ask the right questions. "link
I don't think Jesus would care one way or another about the NRA.
"Put your sword back in its place," Jesus said to him, "for all who draw the sword will die by the sword."
While certain Christian idiots have done things like bomb abortion clinics (thereby killing both doctors and those seeking abortions), I ask if you've ever seen one try to poison a school full of children for being taught evolution? I thought not.
How about a Christian who shot and killed 77 people, mostly children, at a summer school, in what he calls a Knights Templar operation carried out to defend Christians, and who has today in court said that the deliberate killing of children was justified because they were not 'non-political children' ?
There is no Central Authority in Islam. No Pope. There is, therefore no central and universally accepted authority on what constitutes Islam or its teachings.
The Pope is not a universally accepted authority on Christianity. The Pope leads the Catholic church, which has about 1 billion members, and there are 2 billion Christians.
Anyone can appoint themselves an Imam, and begin preaching virtually anything they want. There is really no one to hold them in check.
It is the same with Christianity. Anyone can create their own Church, and set themselves up as a preacher, and there is nothing to hold them in check.
5 of those 6 apps listed give you a warning and/or choice before they touch your contacts.
They only tested 12 popular iPhone apps. Out of the 12 apps tested, 6 uploaded your contact details to a remote server, 1 without any warning. There are 585 thousand apps in the App Store. If you just extrapolate that data, then you can estimate that 48750 apps are grabbing users contacts without consent, and 292500 apps are grabbing contacts with a warning.
That would just be a very rough estimate, but the problem is obviously not limited to the popular apps that one security researcher happened to analyse, and which happened to transmit the contacts in plaintext across the network. (As he points out, if the app encrypts the contacts data, he wouldn't see it)
So Android prompts for permissions at install time, and iOS prompts for permissions at runtime. That is not a major difference: it is exactly the same system of explicitly asking the user for permissions, it just happens at a different time. The majority of users are just going to click "ok" anyway. To claim that the iPhone is somehow protected while Android is vulnerable is really stretching.
On the one hand you've got iPhone Apps sending contact details - previously without user permission - now with user permission. Although in either case not with malicious intent.
And how would you know that it is without malicious intent? There are many, possibly hundreds, of iPhone apps that grab the contacts, how do you know what happens to those contact details once they are uploaded?
On the other hand you've got Android apps sending premium rate phone numbers without the users permission.
That is not what the article is about.
Or were you just trying to ignore the type of malicious app mentioned in the summary, because it's bad news for Android?
I was responding to the article, not the summary. The summary has nothing to do with the article. The article is claiming that users contact details can be grabbed by Android apps. The same is true of iphone apps.
It's in the fucking summary.
The text you quote is in the summary, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the article, which is about apps uploading contacts to remote servers.
It doesn't happen to iPhones.
Yes it does - there are iPhone apps which upload the contacts to a remote server.
And how is that solution different from Android? Android already requires users to authorize apps to read contact details, the problem is that most people don't care. These Android apps are being called malware because they upload the contacts list without permission, which is exactly the same as many ios apps do.
"Google has removed at least 15 Android apps from its official Play market after receiving outside reports they were malicious trojans that siphoned names, telephone numbers of email addresses of every person in the phone's contact list.
Which is exactly what some iOS apps are also doing. This is not an Android specific problem.
The question is, should apps be allowed to upload your contact data? Both Android and ios apps allow this, and some of the most popular apps do it.
"some of App Store's shiniest celebrities are among those that beam away your contact list in order to make hooking up with other friends who use the app smoother. " http://m.gizmodo.com/5885321/how-iphone-apps-steal-your-contact-data-and-why-you-cant-stop-it
How do I protect my patent internationally?
Since the rights granted by a U.S. patent extend only throughout the territory of the United States and have no effect in a foreign country, an inventor who wishes patent protection in other countries must apply for a patent in each of the other countries or in regional patent offices. Almost every country has its own patent law, and a person desiring a patent in a particular country must make an application for patent in that country, in accordance with the requirements of that country.
I didn't say that it was possible for anyone, or even easy, but most good C programmers should be able to do kernel development. In difficulty terms it's on a similar level to embedded systems programming, or old games console development where you had access to the low-level system. This is the stuff that teenagers used to do for fun back in the 80s.
Here's some old relevant comments:
reverence and awe (Score:5, Interesting)
I've seen a lot of promising college-aged open source devs that seem to have an overwhelming reverence and awe towards the kernel, thinking it far too complicated for them to work on with their own programming abilities. In reality, most of them could pick up the kernel and figure it out quite quickly, but they'll never convince themselves of that.
I agree with this. I have also heard younger developers say that they can only do Java or PHP, and think that C is too complicated, etc., and so they never try. But if they really did apply themselves, and put in the time and effort, how far did you think they could go? They might never be Alan Cox or Linus Torvalds, but if they really went for it, they could get pretty close.
What about the barrier to entry? (Score:5, Insightful)
Contributing to and old and large code is much more difficult than contributing to a small one. Getting your head around a large code base is no small task and documentation is often lacking. Even if the code is well commented it could be very difficult to understand the overall design of the software and how things interact with each other.
That is true, however, you don't need to understand all the millions of lines of code of the kernel in order to do development, just as you don't need to understand the complete implementation of the C library, or the Java runtime, in order to do desktop application development.
And hey with a scalpel I'm qualified to be your heart surgeon...right?
The two are not the same. Heart surgery is a specialism that requires probably a 5 year degree, following by a decade or so of further training under most medical regimes. Software development is a bit more open. The kernel isn't magic, it's just software; if you are a good C programmer you should be able to figure it out enough to complete the task at hand
you expect Joe average to pull off a major rewrite?
Who said anything about a major rewrite? The vast majority of security fixes are very small, and generally target a few lines of code where some trivial mistake was made. The only reason a major rewrite would be required is if the protocols or implementation are completely broken and insecure. And if that is the case, you're better just disabling the broken functionality.
And do you have ANY idea how much it would cost to hire a qualified kernel developer to do your own custom rewrite?
RedHat, Canonical, etc. all ship custom kernels. Kernel development can be hard, but it's certainly not impossible for a good programmer who has never worked on the kernel to do development there. There are probably at least a few thousand programmers in the world who already have kernel experience. Hiring good C programmers isn't cheap, but it may well be cheaper than rewriting your custom SCADA implementation to run on a more modern OS.
Don't like how your case is going here? Sue in France!
Which is absolutely fine, as any rulings of the French trade courts will only apply in France, not the United States. Contrary to what Microsoft claim, they doesn't need to license any E.U. patents for territories outside of the E.U. - the jurisdiction of E.U. patents ends at the E.U. borders.
Would you be happy if the E.U. courts began to make judgements against Microsoft etc., and expressly said that the jurisdiction of those judgements wasn't just within the E.U., but also covered the U.S.? It is a blatant attempt to extend the jurisdictional territory of national patents onto other nations, which is certainly not allowed under the existing patent treaties. What if Chinese courts decide that they have the jurisdiction to rule on U.S. patent cases?
After all, companies and individuals are routinely held to account for operating within the unspoken rules of business in China which is all about bribes and corruption
That is a different thing - bribery of foreign officials is explicitly illegal under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Obama is from mixed race parents, but is referred to as black because he looks black.
Actually, mixed race people are referred to as "black" in the United States due to the concept of hypodescent that was prevalent in the southern states. In other countries, Obama would be more correctly classified as "mixed race".