Oracle Sues Lodsys!

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The constellations have shifted again. Oracle has just sued Lodsys, seeking to invalidate four of its patents. The complaint actually claims noninfringement and invalidity.

via Groklaw – Oracle Sues Lodsys! ~pj – Updated, Complaint as text.

It seems that Lodsys has been going after Oracle customers, and they in turn have been asking Oracle to indemnify them. Lodsys, methinks, has made a mistake. One doesn’t go after Oracle’s money. No. No. Never a good plan. I suspect Oracle will go for damages, tripled, and all their expenses, legal fees, etc. when this is over. That’s what that long list of prior art is saying to me, that it’s war. Also, note that DLA Piper US is also on the case. That’s another signal that Oracle intends to prevail, all other things being equal. When you have to add “US” to your law firm name, it’s because you are global. Here’s what DLA Piper says about itself:

NASA gets two military spy telescopes for astronomy

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They have 2.4-meter (7.9 feet) mirrors, just like the Hubble. They also have an additional feature that the civilian space telescopes lack: A maneuverable secondary mirror that makes it possible to obtain more focused images. These telescopes will have 100 times the field of view of the Hubble, according to David Spergel, a Princeton astrophysicist and co-chair of the National Academies advisory panel on astronomy and astrophysics.

The surprise announcement Monday is a reminder that NASA isn’t the only space enterprise in the government — and isn’t even the best funded.

via NASA gets two military spy telescopes for astronomy – The Washington Post.

Lua is a proven, robust language

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Lua has been used in many industrial applications (e.g., Adobe’s Photoshop Lightroom), with an emphasis on embedded systems (e.g., the Ginga middleware for digital TV in Brazil) and games (e.g., World of Warcraft). Lua is currently the leading scripting language in games. Lua has a solid reference manual and there are several books about it. Several versions of Lua have been released and used in real applications since its creation in 1993. Lua featured in HOPL III, the Third ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages Conference, in June 2007.

via Lua: about.

Microsoft Certificate Was Used to Sign “Flame” Malware

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Microsoft certification authority signing certificates added to the Untrusted Certificate StoreWhile these security issues are not Flame-specific, and could be used in other forms of unrelated malware, Microsoft was able to identify components of the Flame malware that had been signed with a certificate that ultimately chained up to the Microsoft Root Authority.

via Microsoft Certificate Was Used to Sign “Flame” Malware | SecurityWeek.Com.

Microsoft did not say what algorithm was exploited in order to generate the rogue certificates, though SecurityWeek did reach out to Microsoft for comment and we will update the story if a response is recieved.

ARM expects 20-nanometer processors by late next year

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ARM doesn’t manufacture the chips itself. It licenses its designs to companies such as Qualcomm, Texas Instruments and Nvidia, who in turn outsource manufacture of the chips to foundry companies like Taiwan’s TSMC.

via ARM expects 20-nanometer processors by late next year – processors, Components, Arm Holdings, computex – CIO.

This year’s Computex should be a big event for ARM. Microsoft has developed the first version of its Windows PC OS that runs on ARM-based processors, called Windows RT, and vendors are expected to show the first ARM-based tablets running the new software.

Online Social Networks can be Tipped by as Little as 0.8% of their Population

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The spreading of a trend or behavior in a social network is a very active area of research. One very important model of trend spreading is the “tipping” model. With tipping, an individual in a network adopts a trend if at least half (or some other proportion) of his or her friends have previously done so. An important problem in viral marketing is to find a “seed set” of individuals in the social network. If all members of a “seed set” in a social network initially adopt a certain trend, then a cascade initiates through the tipping model which results in the entire population adopting that trend. So, if a viral marketer wants to provide free samples of a product to certain individuals, a seed set is likely a good place to start.

via Online Social Networks can be Tipped by as Little as 0.8% of their Population | The Central Node.

Our work, “Large Social Networks can be Targeted for Viral Marketing with Small Seed Sets,” will be presented at the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining (ASONAM) as a full paper this August

A Brief History of Money

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Kublai Khan was ahead of his time: He recognized that what matters about money is not what it looks like, or even what it’s backed by, but whether people believe in it enough to use it. Today, that concept is the foundation of all modern monetary systems, which are built on nothing more than governments’ support of and people’s faith in them. Money is, in other words, a complete abstraction—one that we are all intimately familiar with but whose growing complexity defies our comprehension.

via A Brief History of Money – IEEE Spectrum.

There is, to be sure, something a bit eerie about all this, and periods like the recent housing bubble, when banks made an extraordinary number of bad loans, should remind us of the dangers of runaway credit. But it’s a mistake to yearn for a more “solid” foundation for the monetary system. Money is a social creation, just like language. It’s a tool that can be used well or poorly, and it’s preferable that we have more freedom to use that tool than less.

US warns users of new Citadel ransomware hit

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This variation, called Reveton, lures the victim to a drive-by download website, at which time the ransomware is installed on the user’s computer, says the U.S. Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Once installed, the computer freezes and a screen is displayed warning the user they have violated United States Federal Law. The crimeware declares the user’s IP address was identified by the Computer Crime & Intellectual Property Section as visiting child pornography and other illegal content.

via US warns users of new Citadel ransomware hit.

Ocracoke Island Journal: Nookd

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I was shocked. Almost immediately I found it hilarious…then outrageous…then both. It is definitely clever. But it raises many questions. E-books can be manipulated at will by the purveyors of the downloadable software. Here is a classic work of fiction some claim it is the greatest novel every written used for a sophomoric and/or commercial prank. What else might be changed in an e-book? Fears of manipulation for economic, political, religious, or other ideological ends come to mind. It makes one wary of the integrity of any digital version of not only War and Peace…but any e-book.

via Ocracoke Island Journal: Nookd.

The .epub format is just zipped html files.  Ebooks can be manipulated with any text editor or simple script.