CLS Bank v. Alice Corp: Court Finds Many Software Patents Ineligible

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In a much awaited en banc decision, the Federal Circuit has affirmed the patent ineligibility of Alice Corp’s claims to a computerized method, a computer-readable medium containing computer instructions, and a computer system that implements those instructions.

via CLS Bank v. Alice Corp: Court Finds Many Software Patents Ineligible – Patent Law Blog (Patently-O).

Also from: Federal Circuit, en banc, rules in CLS Bank ~pj Updated

The Federal Circuit. OMG. We’ve worked hard for so many years to get to this point, I almost can’t believe it. And I suppose it’s possible it could be appealed, but this is proof of what I’ve always told you, that education is never a waste. Judge Rader is very upset, I gather. He has written a dissent. But he didn’t prevail. And I’m sure he gave it his best effort. OMG. This is a new day.

Original opinion here. (pdf)

Space Station Leaking Vital Coolant, NASA Says

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The space station uses chilled liquid ammonia to cool down the power systems on its eight giant solararray panels. A minor leak of this ammonia was first noticed in 2007, and NASA has been studying the issue ever since. In November 2012 two astronauts took a spacewalk to fix the problem, rewiring some coolant lines and installing a spare radiator due to fears the original radiator was damaged by a micrometeorite impact.

via Space Station Leaking Vital Coolant, NASA Says | Weather Underground.

Update: Astronauts Complete Spacewalk to Repair Ammonia Leak

A little more than 2 1/2 hours into the spacewalk, Cassidy and Marshburn removed the 260-pound pump controller box from the P6 truss and replaced it with a spare that had been stowed nearby on the port-side truss, or backbone of the station. Mission Control ran the new pump while the spacewalkers watched for any ammonia snowflakes, but so far there have been no new signs of a leak. Long-term monitoring of the pump will be required to determine whether the pump replacement has fixed the leak.

Realtime GPU Audio

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While these techniques are widely used and understood, they work primarily with a model of the abstract sound produced by an instrument or object, not a model of the instrument or object itself. A more recent approach is physical modeling- based audio synthesis, where the audio waveforms are generated using detailed numerical simulation of physical objects or instruments.

via Realtime GPU Audio – ACM Queue.

There are various approaches to physical modeling sound synthesis. One such approach, studied extensively by Stefan Bilbao,1 uses the finite difference approximation to simulate the vibrations of plates and membranes. The finite difference simulation produces realistic and dynamic sounds (examples can be found at http://unixlab.sfsu.edu/~whsu/FDGPU). Realtime finite difference-based simulations of large models are typically too computationally-intensive to run on CPUs. In our work, we have implemented finite difference simulations in realtime on GPUs.

Department Of Labor Attack Points To Industry Weaknesses

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“This is basically the same pattern that a lot of advanced malware is taking today,” says Srinivas Kumar, CTO of TaaSERA. By taking a multi-stage approach and going after server-side vulnerabilities at legitimate sites, the attackers can be assured that unsuspecting visitors to the site are more likely to trust links redirecting to malware-laden sites, he says.

via Department Of Labor Attack Points To Industry Weaknesses — Dark-Reading

Apparently the Department of Labor’s site was hosting links to malware.  Usually users get hacked by sites hosting compromised  advertisements.

NASA’s system for avoiding collisions with space junk

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Potential collisions are flagged for monitoring if there’s simply a high probability of conjunction. Typically, the probability goes down after a couple of additional days of tracking, but in rare cases this doesn’t happen (and, in a few, the probability went up with further monitoring). When the probability doesn’t go down, the software can calculate a maneuver that will reduce the probability of collision to an acceptable level. The solution will take into account other potential hazards as well as mission requirements—some Earth-monitoring satellites can’t orbit above a certain altitude and still perform their jobs.

via Saving Fermi: NASA’s system for avoiding collisions with space junk | Ars Technica.

bcache

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Bcache is a Linux kernel block layer cache. It allows one or more fast disk drives such as flash-based solid state drives (SSDs) to act as a cache for one or more slower hard disk drives.

Hard drives are cheap and big, SSDs are fast but small and expensive. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could transparently get the advantages of both? With Bcache, you can have your cake and eat it too.

via bcache.

Passive OS Fingerprinting

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Active measures, like those employed by Nmap, are unfortunately not available when doing passive analysis of live traffic or when analyzing previously captured network traffic. Passive analysis requires much more subtle variations in the network traffic to be observed, in order to identify a computer’s OS. A simple but effective passive method is to inspect the initial Time To Live (TTL) in the IP header and the TCP window size (the size of the receive window) of the first packet in a TCP session, i.e. the SYN or SYN+ACK packet.

via Passive OS Fingerprinting – NETRESEC Blog.

Why weren’t the Prenda porn trolls stopped years ago?

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Of course, lawyers and litigants use the court system every day as a way to make money; entire business models like patent trolling remain legal, and the lawyers involved aren’t so much as sanctioned. But with Prenda, the difference in Wright’s mind was apparently the target—not companies but individuals, many without much money or court experience. Prenda’s plan, Wright said, was nothing less than a scheme “to plunder the citizenry.”

via Why weren’t the Prenda porn trolls stopped years ago? | Ars Technica.

As for the porn trolling business model, well, it’s not dead yet. But at least it can’t be done this way.

This case has been terribly confusing for me to follow.  The following comment from the comment section sums up the issue with Prenda nicely.

One issue is that lawyers aren’t supposed to misrepresent who their clients are. In this case the lawyers *are* the clients, via numerous shell corporations and offshore trusts designed to obscure that fact. The Prenda attorneys allegedly bought the IP of little-known porn movies for very little money and then set up various bogus organizations to obscure the fact that the attorneys were also the plaintiffs who would benefit from favorable judgments. IANAL but apparently that behavior is frowned upon by law-talking guys.

Last mention of it here was last March.  A lot of work from sites like DieTrollDie and FightCopyrightTrolls went into helping the victims of this extortion.  Here’s a snippet from the latter:

We have been waiting for this moment for a long time. Congratulations to everyone involved, especially Morgan and Nick.

CSS Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design

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There is a continuing need to show the power of CSS. The Zen Garden aims to excite, inspire, and encourage participation. To begin, view some of the existing designs in the list. Clicking on any one will load the style sheet into this very page. The HTML remains the same, the only thing that has changed is the external CSS file. Yes, really.

via CSS Zen Garden: The Beauty in CSS Design.

From: 10 Years

Wow. It’s finally happened. The CSS Zen Garden is 10 years old today.

BT Retail Tests Controversial Carrier Grade NAT IP Address Sharing

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The technique has been criticised because it imposes certain limits on users by virtue of the fact that their broadband connection no longer has the use of a fixed unique IP address, but is rather sharing an address with other users – in BT’s trial, up to nine other users. This means, for instance, that users can’t serve content to the wider Internet from servers on their home network; and BT admits that it can also affect activities such as online gaming and dynamic DNS services.

via BT Retail Tests Controversial Carrier Grade NAT IP Address Sharing.