geek stuff

If new tech looks like old tech, old rules apply says supreme court

28 June 2014 by Steve Blum
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Today’s turn-of-the-knob logic might have made VCRs contraband 30 years ago.

Functionality, not technology, should guide how pre-Internet laws are applied in cyberspace. That’s the essential logic behind a U.S. supreme court ruling on Wednesday, that said that the same copyright rules that apply to cable TV systems also apply to Aereo, an online system for accessing broadcast television signals.

Aereo argued that since viewers were individually activating a tiny receiver and antenna, and selecting which channel to watch, it was more like a VCR than a cable TV system, which streams multiple channels continuously.… More

You can't patent just an idea, supreme court rules again

19 June 2014 by Steve Blum
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The Air Force can now defend Earth without fear of trolls.

Doing the job that the patent office should have done in the first place, the U.S. supreme court stepped up to the plate and swatted down a long line of patent trolls. In an unanimous opinion issued today and written by justice Clarence Thomas, the court said that an Australian company, Alice Corporation, can’t take a common, centuries (millennia?) old financial practice – using a middleman to keep both parties honest – and claim a patent on it just because it’s being done on a computer…

There is no dispute that a computer is a tangible system…or that many computer-implemented claims are formally addressed to patent-eligible subject matter.

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Is Google looking at an orbital backbone?

8 June 2014 by Steve Blum
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It was a good look then.

Google is making another sexy move with satellites, or so the rumor goes. It’s supposedly via an investment in WorldVu Satellites, which has picked up the spectrum originally assigned to SkyBridge, one of the failed low earth orbit (LEO) ventures of the 1990s. Iridium and GlobalStar actually launched, primarily as voice telephone services, but both had to go through the wringer of bankruptcy before there was even a hope of sustainability.… More

U.S. supreme court sticks to the strict meaning of patent infringement

There’s good news in the U.S. supreme court’s unanimous decision this week to toss out a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Akamai against a competing content delivery network, Limelight.

The court declined to open a vast new frontier for patent troll claims. Akamai, of course, isn’t a troll – it uses its patented technology to good effect – but it was trying to make the case that a partial (and thus, under law, allowable) duplication of a method it developed was actually an infringement because Limelight told customers how to complete the missing steps themselves.… More

Microsoft Office market grip loosens as the cost of free drops

31 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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How much more popular do the descendants of OpenOffice need to be before they reache a tipping point? That is, the point at which open source productivity apps tip Microsoft Office into a terminal downhill market share slide.

The answer is not much. The Apache Software Foundation says that its child – Apache OpenOffice – has been downloaded more than 100 million times. That doesn’t represent the size of the user base by a long shot – the figure would include downloads of updates and browsing by the curious – but it’s not unreasonable to think it’s somewhere in the tens of millions range, albeit at the lower end.… More

Senators enjoy a clubbing from patent trolls

Patent reform legislation is dead in Washington right now, killed by senate majority leader Harry Reid as a favor to trial lawyers, who have given him as much as $4 million in campaign contributions in the past 5 years, and pharmaceutical companies. The senate has backed off from anti-troll measures passed last year by a wide, bipartisan majority in the house.

The heart of the package was a loser-pay provision, which would have given judges the power to make patent trolls pay defence costs when the verdict goes against them.… More

eBay wants to reassure you that it's your fault

24 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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Meet our new chief security officer.

I’m still waiting for my email from eBay telling me I should change my password. I checked my spam folder – that’s where all the other emails that tell me to click here and enter my password end up. Not a peep from the peeps at eBay, though. Of course, they only got around to flagging that advice on their home page yesterday. In an understated, be-sure-to-floss-daily sort of way…

We take security on eBay very seriously, and we want to ensure that you feel safe and secure buying and selling on eBay.

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Locking down home automation means locking out success

The best thing to do if you’re developing a home automation product is to allow it to be controlled by someone else, Ryo Koyama, CEO of Weaved, told Parks Associates’ San Francisco Connections conference this week. Hardware designers need to harness the brain power of app developers. “Let them define the killer app that sells your product”, he said.

Koyama was speaking on behalf of Qualcomm and its AllJoyn platform, which is an attempt to create a common interoperability protocol for the Internet of Things.… More

Linux marches to the beat of broadband growth

10 May 2014 by Steve Blum
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Most of the world’s personal computers run on Microsoft Windows. Gartner, a tech industry research group, says that the 280 million Windows boxes shipped last year swamped 12.5 million Macs and 2.9 million Chromebooks. But Gartner is also predicting that the Linux-based Chrome operating system will overtake the Mac OS by 2016.

According to a BBC story…

“There’s a couple of reasons – one is the number of vendors who are now pushing a [Chromebook] device,” explained Ranjit Atwal, research director at the firm.

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Expect the unexpected from giants' battle for air supremacy

A year ago, if anyone had said that Google and Facebook would be fighting each other to acquire drone manufacturers and technology, you might have rightly called that person crazy. Loony, even. But that’s what’s going on now.

Google announced this week that it bought Titan Aerospace, a New Mexico-based maker of drones. That follows stories more than a month ago that Facebook was in the process of buying it.

Titan’s drone technology will be used by Google both for imaging purposes and to bolster Project Loon, which is aimed at bringing Internet connectivity to parts of the world that can’t be economically reached by conventional means.… More