Don't trust a "legislative" solution to a technical problem. DNT is a polite suggestion, nothing more; implementation is on-your-honor (or dishonor, in this case). Is anyone *that* surprised about stories like this?
Now begin (or should) the technical countermeasures. Suggestions to MS for IE 10.01: If *.yahoo.com in domain:
* Expiry for all cookies and cache resources from this domain set to 7 days or the end of a session (browser exited), whichever comes first. "Cache resources" includes without limitation caches maintaned by plugins (e.g. Flash persistent storage).
* Cookie and cookie-equivalent data retrieval sandboxed by clickstream. E.g. hit yahoo.com - sets cookie. Click to yahoo.com/link - cookie readable (same clickstream scope). User opens a new window and manually browses to yahoo.com - cookies set in first window's session unreadable (out of scope) to 2nd window's session. This behavior may have to extend to cache objects (see "evercookie" and friends)
This is interesting. What I am curious about is whether the US/EU systems are designed to be directly compatible or if this multi-system compatibility will come (as it does now for cell networks and local-area wireless networking) from receiver designers smooshing multiple separate radios (and possibly antennas) into the same die/package.
Interestingly, the '826 pinch-to-zoom patent could be more correctly called "double pinch to zoom": it covers a more narrow implementation in which the system recognizes a user doing a pinch-to-(activity) gesture followed by a 2nd pinch-to-(activity) within a preset time, maintaining the activity state in between. A naked pinch-to... activity (or any number of them) isn't covered if the system doesn't explicitly connect the repeated pinches together. This is probably why Apple hasn't asserted it. (And between you and me, an oddly-specific qualifier in an independent claim is almost always is a smoking gun pointing to prior art on the claim sans-qualifier.)
On the resonance front, AFAICT the main way the modern crop of wireless charging systems differ from Tesla's is that (now in a cheap-as-free microcontroller world) they include some form of 2-way communication/collusion between the charger and gadget, allowing it to actively home in on the resonant frequency for the specific device.
How does this compare to existing ad-hoc WiFi mesh protocols such as B.A.T.M.A.N. / Open-Mesh, or some of the others listed at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry?
I know you are joking, but it's an interesting point. Right now there is a sort of "no harm done" attitude to false claims. The harm, for the purposes of court judgments against claimers, must be quantified and proven in dollars. But an individual victim cannot really quantify or prove the financial harm of, say, their viral cat video being pulled off Youtube for a couple weeks.
I may be taking a big toke off the same pipe, but what if Google (or individual false-claim victims) could claim that a false DMCA notice caused them real, measurable monetary harm by poisoning their search rankings?
Depending on Android version / distributor (this may be more of a thing enabled in unofficial builds, e.g. cyanogenmod), you may have the option to revoke individual permissions on a per-permission and per-app basis. Revoke its 'Internet' permission and you're good to go. Worked for Angry Birds last time I checked (with auto-updates disabled since then), however, it's possible they've added a workaround for this (e.g. force crash if certain permissions revoked).
I know reading the friendly article (and especially PDFs linked from it) is not a certainty around these parts, but this one's pretty interesting. The article itself kind of entirely misses the point (whether the iDevice is a "computer" was pretty much completely irrelevant*), but the opinion itself taught me a lot. In particular, there are such things as "contributory infringement" and "inducement" in patent law. I did not know of such a thing until now.
All of the independent claims of the patent explicitly require a music source whose files have at least two types of metadata and a sorting feature (probably because "DAC-in-a-box" on its own is as old as the hills and not patentable). Assume for the purposes of discussion that the patent is valid (it's not**) and that an average mp3 file + iDevice (or most any mp3 player software) meets the metadata + sort criteria (doubly so if "file name" counts as one of the metadata).
Clearly, these companies are selling only the DAC-in-a-box, *not* including any kind of "computer", user interfaces, mp3 files, metadata or sort capabilities (although the end user can trivially add one and thus infringe the patent). Thus, most of the opinion - including a treasure trove of references to deciding cases - centers on whether the companies were liable for end-user infringements by encouraging and/or inducing them. The gist I got from the opinion is that merely knowing that a user *could* infringe is not enough - the manufacturer must either know of the patent (or believe beyond reasonable doubt that such a patent must exist), be shown to believe that it is valid, AND knowingly encourage an end user to commit actual infringement, or else be shown to have purposely avoided awareness of the existence of the patent ("willfull blindness"). Showing that you believed the patent invalid - in particular, obtaining and relying on an expert legal opinion of invalidity - is a strong defense against such "indirect infringement" claims. In other words, the burden is on the plaintiff to show indirect infringement, and the bar is pretty high.
* There is nothing about a "computer" in the independent claims (although one is briefly mentioned in a dependent claim) - only a list of features which could be performed by a computer (or iDevice). In fact, a footnote in the case notes mentions: "This Court declined to construct the term 'computer' and in this case the analysis need not turn on that definition." . For reasons I don't entirely understand, the check for direct infringement centered on the "interface" part of the claims, which the court constructed to mean a DAC (more or less).
** All of the claims were invalidated upon re-examination, several times (e.g. through several Bose objections to the reexamination results, including to the "Final Decision").
Except they don't do this because it's not useful information for a provider. An individual's usage habits are uniquely worthless.
To the utility's own operations, probably pretty useless. But the data that can be extracted - depending on the update rate the utility can pull, right down to what TV show you are watching - would have high commercial value on the open market (think well-known consumer data-aggregators (Experian), advertisers, etc.). How long will the utility leave that money on the table?
Does anyone else find it ironic that the actual infringer's sites [ http://chicksandpolitics.com/ , http://atty4kids.org/ ] have an anti-right-click script that produces a smarmy message about respecting copyrights?
Mod parent up. The ruling further hammers the point by comparing the Atari vs. Nintendo ruling to the SEGA vs. Accolade ruling. A reverse-engineered implementation of a console "unlock" protocol was deemed infringing in the former case (despite not even being written in the same language) and noninfringing in the latter (despite being a direct copy). The judge points out the difference is in whether or not the API that was copied was the only compatible way to do it. In the case of the 10NES lockout, many alternative bitstreams could have been used to unlock the console, while in the SEGA case, the way the defendant did it was deemed the only sensible implementation*.
*IIRC, gurus in the SEGA case with intimate knowledge of the hardware were able to come up with a couple hacks that proved there was at least one alternate sequence that could theoretically work, but the judge did not find this to be something the defendant could have reasonably known, as the copying of the "magic" sequence predated the existence of the lockout mechanism, and was done in anticipation of such a mechanism being deployed in the future.
Everything old is new again:-) Admittedly, the mechanism is somewhat more advanced going by TFA (the MS version uses doppler shift rather than triangulation per se, so it can use a single mic) :
From TFA: "In the case of SoundWave, your computerâ(TM)s built-in speaker is used to emit ultrasonic (18-22KHz) sound waves, which change frequency depending on where your hand (or body) is in relation to the computer. This change in frequency is measured by your computerâ(TM)s built-in microphone, and then some fairly complex software works out your motion/gesture."
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove "There are two ultrasonic speakers (transmitters) in the glove and three ultrasonic microphones (receivers) around the TV monitor. The ultrasonic speakers take turns transmitting a short burst (a few pulses) of 40 kHz sound and the system measures the time it takes for the sound to reach the microphones. A triangulation calculation is performed to determine the X, Y, Z location of each of the two speakers, which specifies the yaw and roll of the hand."
Ice cube trays are also killer for this. I like that they are ubiquitous and stack well, which comes in handy for complex teardowns or when multiple items / assemblies have to be taken apart concurrently.
Let the arms race begin:-) If the OS shuts down because the adserver is unreachable, 2 weeks until the next tomato firmware comes with "fake adserver mode' that spoofs the server and serves up clear GIFs. (This oldie-but-goodie works great with a binary resource editor and crippleware that displays a watermark...) Cryptographic nuclear option? If history is any guide, there's a hack for that too.
Looking at the various email threads, it reads to me like Google decided a Java-compatible platform was their best option, and licensing one from Sun (they already had one, called Java) was the easiest path to getting the job done. Another email in the exhibit mentions the possibility of clean-rooming their own Java-compatible platform, but basically saying it would be a giant PITA and not cost-effective vs. just licensing Sun's existing one. I don't see the Java license discussions as construing "proof of knowledge of infringement" (etc.), or belief that it was the only legal path forward, only that at least one guy believed it was the easiest path forward.
This sounds very similar to Digital Solid State Propulsion, a states-side company that has been testing electrically-fired chemical microthrusters for at least the last several years. The DSSP thrusters (at least the ones I've seen so far) ranged from about the size of a.22 shell casing to an "AA" battery, and produce a controlled jet of ionized gas when electricity is applied (a gelled fuel inside is slowly consumed in the process). They're intended for propulsion and micropositioning (e.g. long-term station-keeping) on small satellites... although there are probably other sizes for other applications.
I'm far more interested in why G+ has been unblocked, while FB/Twitter/etc. are still firewalled. Did the Chinese gov't realize every post having a real / potentially verified name attached is more convenient than the site being inaccessible?
The difference being that on a reality show, even if you're not crazy about any of the contestants, voting for one and having them win is mostly harmless...
...is a Mechanical Turk / crowdsourcing engine for distributedly nuking crap patents with prior art. Occasionally, specific bad tech patents reach notoriety on/. and elsewhere and the comment threads fill up with posts from geeks who have potentially credible examples of prior art. Some 80% of those don't really understand how to read a patent (not really their fault; they don't exactly teach this in school), but overall there's a good chance the discussion turned up something that would narrow the patent in question. However, that leaves many, many other bad patents lurking below the notoriety threshold.
How many here would sign up to a service where you could subscribe to feeds for your fields / areas of expertise (e.g. "video compression algorithms" or "input devices", etc.), see an individual top-level claim and filing date, and get paid to point out examples of prior art that you are aware of?
Prior Art databases exist, but with some issues. EFF's Patent Busting project is a good start, but there are relatively few patents to bust, and no one with the incentive (other than ideological) to finance a specific action. I bet a lot of companies would be willing to pay a more than fair bounty for information that nukes a specific problematic claim in a competitor's overbroad patent.
Wishlist features: * A quickstart guide for laymen / "non-lawyer professionals" on how to parse patent claim constructions, how to determine if prior work exactly matches ("prior art"), or "teaches" (alone or in combination with some other pieces) or "renders obvious" a claim, even if not an exact match. It can't make participants into patent lawyers overnight, but many do not even know the basics, and those basics would improve the quality of prior art submitted.
* Advice/tools for determining effective priority date. There are plenty of things (provisionals, continuations, filings across various countries, etc.) that will bamboozle many casual patent-busters in deciding if a piece of art is "prior" or not.
* Random / Rainy day browse modes. Claim-a-day sent to your mobile?
(Before anyone thinks this would just create another tool that could be used for evil, remember that the patent office - presumably in any country - is not supposed to be granting patents for things that already exist in the first place... so correcting such a mistake is not really foul play.)
The battery lifetime for any cellphone depends heavily on the network provider's coverage as well. Unfortunately no amount of efficiency hacks can correct for this. Things like radio scheme (CDMA/GSM), 2G/3G/etc., and especially the distance to the tower matter. Virtually all are smart enough to dynamically adjust their transmit strength to not-much-more than necessary, but if the coverage is poor (active tower is far away), the phone must spend a LOT of energy keeping in contact with it. For any phone spending most of its time in standby (smart and dumb alike), the cellular radio will dominate power consumption. (With the cell radio out of the picture, my middle-road Android phone will go 2 weeks of light usage when in airplane mode.)
I have a feeling most of the 1-2 week battery life claims (for any phone) come from city dwellers - they'll be in for a shock when they visit the boonies!
This case sounds more like they are claiming copyright on a particular dish itself based on the inclusion of a couple key ingredients, regardless of the actual recipe steps, text or ingredient proportions.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't trust a "legislative" solution to a technical problem. DNT is a polite suggestion, nothing more; implementation is on-your-honor (or dishonor, in this case). Is anyone *that* surprised about stories like this?
Now begin (or should) the technical countermeasures. Suggestions to MS for IE 10.01: If *.yahoo.com in domain:
* Expiry for all cookies and cache resources from this domain set to 7 days or the end of a session (browser exited), whichever comes first. "Cache resources" includes without limitation caches maintaned by plugins (e.g. Flash persistent storage).
* Cookie and cookie-equivalent data retrieval sandboxed by clickstream. E.g. hit yahoo.com - sets cookie. Click to yahoo.com/link - cookie readable (same clickstream scope). User opens a new window and manually browses to yahoo.com - cookies set in first window's session unreadable (out of scope) to 2nd window's session. This behavior may have to extend to cache objects (see "evercookie" and friends)
This is interesting. What I am curious about is whether the US/EU systems are designed to be directly compatible or if this multi-system compatibility will come (as it does now for cell networks and local-area wireless networking) from receiver designers smooshing multiple separate radios (and possibly antennas) into the same die/package.
Interestingly, the '826 pinch-to-zoom patent could be more correctly called "double pinch to zoom": it covers a more narrow implementation in which the system recognizes a user doing a pinch-to-(activity) gesture followed by a 2nd pinch-to-(activity) within a preset time, maintaining the activity state in between. A naked pinch-to... activity (or any number of them) isn't covered if the system doesn't explicitly connect the repeated pinches together. This is probably why Apple hasn't asserted it. (And between you and me, an oddly-specific qualifier in an independent claim is almost always is a smoking gun pointing to prior art on the claim sans-qualifier.)
On the resonance front, AFAICT the main way the modern crop of wireless charging systems differ from Tesla's is that (now in a cheap-as-free microcontroller world) they include some form of 2-way communication/collusion between the charger and gadget, allowing it to actively home in on the resonant frequency for the specific device.
How long until they notice Gnome 3?
How does this compare to existing ad-hoc WiFi mesh protocols such as B.A.T.M.A.N. / Open-Mesh, or some of the others listed at the bottom of the Wikipedia entry?
I know you are joking, but it's an interesting point. Right now there is a sort of "no harm done" attitude to false claims. The harm, for the purposes of court judgments against claimers, must be quantified and proven in dollars. But an individual victim cannot really quantify or prove the financial harm of, say, their viral cat video being pulled off Youtube for a couple weeks.
I may be taking a big toke off the same pipe, but what if Google (or individual false-claim victims) could claim that a false DMCA notice caused them real, measurable monetary harm by poisoning their search rankings?
Depending on Android version / distributor (this may be more of a thing enabled in unofficial builds, e.g. cyanogenmod), you may have the option to revoke individual permissions on a per-permission and per-app basis. Revoke its 'Internet' permission and you're good to go. Worked for Angry Birds last time I checked (with auto-updates disabled since then), however, it's possible they've added a workaround for this (e.g. force crash if certain permissions revoked).
I know reading the friendly article (and especially PDFs linked from it) is not a certainty around these parts, but this one's pretty interesting. The article itself kind of entirely misses the point (whether the iDevice is a "computer" was pretty much completely irrelevant*), but the opinion itself taught me a lot. In particular, there are such things as "contributory infringement" and "inducement" in patent law. I did not know of such a thing until now.
All of the independent claims of the patent explicitly require a music source whose files have at least two types of metadata and a sorting feature (probably because "DAC-in-a-box" on its own is as old as the hills and not patentable). Assume for the purposes of discussion that the patent is valid (it's not**) and that an average mp3 file + iDevice (or most any mp3 player software) meets the metadata + sort criteria (doubly so if "file name" counts as one of the metadata).
Clearly, these companies are selling only the DAC-in-a-box, *not* including any kind of "computer", user interfaces, mp3 files, metadata or sort capabilities (although the end user can trivially add one and thus infringe the patent). Thus, most of the opinion - including a treasure trove of references to deciding cases - centers on whether the companies were liable for end-user infringements by encouraging and/or inducing them. The gist I got from the opinion is that merely knowing that a user *could* infringe is not enough - the manufacturer must either know of the patent (or believe beyond reasonable doubt that such a patent must exist), be shown to believe that it is valid, AND knowingly encourage an end user to commit actual infringement, or else be shown to have purposely avoided awareness of the existence of the patent ("willfull blindness"). Showing that you believed the patent invalid - in particular, obtaining and relying on an expert legal opinion of invalidity - is a strong defense against such "indirect infringement" claims. In other words, the burden is on the plaintiff to show indirect infringement, and the bar is pretty high.
* There is nothing about a "computer" in the independent claims (although one is briefly mentioned in a dependent claim) - only a list of features which could be performed by a computer (or iDevice). In fact, a footnote in the case notes mentions: "This Court declined to construct the term 'computer' and in this case the analysis need not turn on that definition." . For reasons I don't entirely understand, the check for direct infringement centered on the "interface" part of the claims, which the court constructed to mean a DAC (more or less).
** All of the claims were invalidated upon re-examination, several times (e.g. through several Bose objections to the reexamination results, including to the "Final Decision").
Except they don't do this because it's not useful information for a provider. An individual's usage habits are uniquely worthless.
To the utility's own operations, probably pretty useless. But the data that can be extracted - depending on the update rate the utility can pull, right down to what TV show you are watching - would have high commercial value on the open market (think well-known consumer data-aggregators (Experian), advertisers, etc.). How long will the utility leave that money on the table?
Does anyone else find it ironic that the actual infringer's sites [ http://chicksandpolitics.com/ , http://atty4kids.org/ ] have an anti-right-click script that produces a smarmy message about respecting copyrights?
Mod parent up.
The ruling further hammers the point by comparing the Atari vs. Nintendo ruling to the SEGA vs. Accolade ruling. A reverse-engineered implementation of a console "unlock" protocol was deemed infringing in the former case (despite not even being written in the same language) and noninfringing in the latter (despite being a direct copy). The judge points out the difference is in whether or not the API that was copied was the only compatible way to do it. In the case of the 10NES lockout, many alternative bitstreams could have been used to unlock the console, while in the SEGA case, the way the defendant did it was deemed the only sensible implementation*.
*IIRC, gurus in the SEGA case with intimate knowledge of the hardware were able to come up with a couple hacks that proved there was at least one alternate sequence that could theoretically work, but the judge did not find this to be something the defendant could have reasonably known, as the copying of the "magic" sequence predated the existence of the lockout mechanism, and was done in anticipation of such a mechanism being deployed in the future.
Everything old is new again :-) Admittedly, the mechanism is somewhat more advanced going by TFA (the MS version uses doppler shift rather than triangulation per se, so it can use a single mic) :
From TFA:
"In the case of SoundWave, your computerâ(TM)s built-in speaker is used to emit ultrasonic (18-22KHz) sound waves, which change frequency depending on where your hand (or body) is in relation to the computer. This change in frequency is measured by your computerâ(TM)s built-in microphone, and then some fairly complex software works out your motion/gesture."
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Power_Glove
"There are two ultrasonic speakers (transmitters) in the glove and three ultrasonic microphones (receivers) around the TV monitor. The ultrasonic speakers take turns transmitting a short burst (a few pulses) of 40 kHz sound and the system measures the time it takes for the sound to reach the microphones. A triangulation calculation is performed to determine the X, Y, Z location of each of the two speakers, which specifies the yaw and roll of the hand."
Ice cube trays are also killer for this. I like that they are ubiquitous and stack well, which comes in handy for complex teardowns or when multiple items / assemblies have to be taken apart concurrently.
Let the arms race begin :-) If the OS shuts down because the adserver is unreachable, 2 weeks until the next tomato firmware comes with "fake adserver mode' that spoofs the server and serves up clear GIFs. (This oldie-but-goodie works great with a binary resource editor and crippleware that displays a watermark...) Cryptographic nuclear option? If history is any guide, there's a hack for that too.
Looking at the various email threads, it reads to me like Google decided a Java-compatible platform was their best option, and licensing one from Sun (they already had one, called Java) was the easiest path to getting the job done. Another email in the exhibit mentions the possibility of clean-rooming their own Java-compatible platform, but basically saying it would be a giant PITA and not cost-effective vs. just licensing Sun's existing one. I don't see the Java license discussions as construing "proof of knowledge of infringement" (etc.), or belief that it was the only legal path forward, only that at least one guy believed it was the easiest path forward.
This sounds very similar to Digital Solid State Propulsion, a states-side company that has been testing electrically-fired chemical microthrusters for at least the last several years. The DSSP thrusters (at least the ones I've seen so far) ranged from about the size of a .22 shell casing to an "AA" battery, and produce a controlled jet of ionized gas when electricity is applied (a gelled fuel inside is slowly consumed in the process). They're intended for propulsion and micropositioning (e.g. long-term station-keeping) on small satellites... although there are probably other sizes for other applications.
I hear this custom Android build is pretty secure, if you can get your hands on it of course.
Or for the /. crowd, Kimberly-Clark.
I'm far more interested in why G+ has been unblocked, while FB/Twitter/etc. are still firewalled. Did the Chinese gov't realize every post having a real / potentially verified name attached is more convenient than the site being inaccessible?
The difference being that on a reality show, even if you're not crazy about any of the contestants, voting for one and having them win is mostly harmless...
...is a Mechanical Turk / crowdsourcing engine for distributedly nuking crap patents with prior art. Occasionally, specific bad tech patents reach notoriety on /. and elsewhere and the comment threads fill up with posts from geeks who have potentially credible examples of prior art. Some 80% of those don't really understand how to read a patent (not really their fault; they don't exactly teach this in school), but overall there's a good chance the discussion turned up something that would narrow the patent in question. However, that leaves many, many other bad patents lurking below the notoriety threshold.
How many here would sign up to a service where you could subscribe to feeds for your fields / areas of expertise (e.g. "video compression algorithms" or "input devices", etc.), see an individual top-level claim and filing date, and get paid to point out examples of prior art that you are aware of?
Prior Art databases exist, but with some issues. EFF's Patent Busting project is a good start, but there are relatively few patents to bust, and no one with the incentive (other than ideological) to finance a specific action. I bet a lot of companies would be willing to pay a more than fair bounty for information that nukes a specific problematic claim in a competitor's overbroad patent.
Wishlist features:
* A quickstart guide for laymen / "non-lawyer professionals" on how to parse patent claim constructions, how to determine if prior work exactly matches ("prior art"), or "teaches" (alone or in combination with some other pieces) or "renders obvious" a claim, even if not an exact match. It can't make participants into patent lawyers overnight, but many do not even know the basics, and those basics would improve the quality of prior art submitted.
* Advice/tools for determining effective priority date. There are plenty of things (provisionals, continuations, filings across various countries, etc.) that will bamboozle many casual patent-busters in deciding if a piece of art is "prior" or not.
* Random / Rainy day browse modes. Claim-a-day sent to your mobile?
(Before anyone thinks this would just create another tool that could be used for evil, remember that the patent office - presumably in any country - is not supposed to be granting patents for things that already exist in the first place... so correcting such a mistake is not really foul play.)
Saw the following from a semi-famous developer in my twitter feed today:
Microsoft Store in Santa Clara apparently not selling Kinect for Windows unless customer can "prove it will be used for commercial purposes"
(later...)
Wow. You actually have to BRING BUSINESS DOCUMENTATION to the MS Santa Clara store to get a Kinect for Windows. Also sign licenses.
The battery lifetime for any cellphone depends heavily on the network provider's coverage as well. Unfortunately no amount of efficiency hacks can correct for this. Things like radio scheme (CDMA/GSM), 2G/3G/etc., and especially the distance to the tower matter. Virtually all are smart enough to dynamically adjust their transmit strength to not-much-more than necessary, but if the coverage is poor (active tower is far away), the phone must spend a LOT of energy keeping in contact with it. For any phone spending most of its time in standby (smart and dumb alike), the cellular radio will dominate power consumption. (With the cell radio out of the picture, my middle-road Android phone will go 2 weeks of light usage when in airplane mode.)
I have a feeling most of the 1-2 week battery life claims (for any phone) come from city dwellers - they'll be in for a shock when they visit the boonies!
This case sounds more like they are claiming copyright on a particular dish itself based on the inclusion of a couple key ingredients, regardless of the actual recipe steps, text or ingredient proportions.