TQP has been arguing for years that using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) combined with the RC4 encryption cipher infringes its patent. The company’s former owner, renowned “patent troll” Erich Spangenberg, acknowledged during a trial last year that he has made more than $45 million in settlements on the TQP patent. TQP is one of dozens of patent groups that he owns.
via Intuit beats Web encryption patent that defeated Newegg at trial | Ars Technica.
“Of course, least positively of all, another angle for many publishers is in-app purchasing – why provide a feature as a hidden cheat when you can get people to pay money to unlock it?” Seavor has also noticed this trend. “Bigger publishers have now realised you can actually sell these things to players as DLC. Want that special gun? Think you can unlock it with a cheat code? Nope! You’ve got to give us some money first!”
It turns out that when you shrink a Vacuum transistor to absolutely tiny dimensions, you can recover some of the benefits of a vacuum tube and dodge the negatives that characterized their usage. According to a report in IEEE Spectrum, vacuum transistors can draw electrons across the gate without needing a physical connection between them. Make the vacuum area small enough, and reduce the voltage sufficiently, and the field emission effect allows the transistor to fire electrons across the gap without containing enough energy to energize the helium inside the nominal “vacuum” transistor. According to researchers, they’ve managed to build a successful transistor operating at 460GHz — well into the so-called “Terahertz Gap,” which sits between microwaves and infrared energy. The “gap” refers to the fact that we have a limited number of devices that can generate this frequency and only a handful of experimental applications for this energy band.
via How Vacuum Tubes, New Technology Might Save Moore’s Law – HotHardware.
Normally, Fang explains, stiffness and strength declines with the density of any material; that’s why when bone density decreases, fractures become more likely. But using the right mathematically determined structures to distribute and direct the loads — the way the arrangement of vertical, horizontal, and diagonal beams do in a structure like the Eiffel Tower — the lighter structure can maintain its strength.
via New ultrastiff, ultralight material developed | MIT News Office.
In any case, it would be mistaken to read the case as grounds for invalidating all software patents.
But it most certainly does provide a basis for invalidating some bad software patents. This is progress. As lower courts apply the Supreme Court decision, we may see more progress.
The evidence suggests that in the software industry, the patent system does more to hinder innovation than to reward it. Inventors spend more money defending themselves against patent lawsuits than they earn from patent royalties. More and more entrepreneurs are losing sleep about the risk that patent litigation will drive them into bankruptcies. And companies that traditionally haven’t had to worry about the patent system, like restaurants, grocery stores, and casinos, are facing demands from trolls over dubious patents, most of which involve software.
via The Supreme Court doesn’t understand software, and that’s a problem – Vox.
He led off by agreeing with the several executive speakers that true competition is the way of the future, and the best way to serve consumers. “But we haven’t given competition the chance it needs,” he continued, before referring to how poorly U.S. broadband compares on the global stage. “We have fallen so far short that we should be ashamed of ourselves. We should be leading, and we’re not. We need to get serious about broadband, we need to get serious about competition, we need to get serious about our country.”
When you click on it, the app asks for administrator privileges of the device. Once opened the sole user interface FireEye observed for the app contains pops up saying “Program Error” and “It’s Deleted!” when translated to English from Korean.
via Malware Posing as Official Google Play App Found in….Official Google Play Store.
These exploits usually require the user to approve of something first.
The app captures text messages, security certificates and banking details which it then sends to a Gmail address included in the malware – an email address which Google has now terminated
The implications are enormous since if a Canadian court has the power to limit access to information for the globe, presumably other courts would as well. While the court does not grapple with this possibility, what happens if a Russian court orders Google to remove gay and lesbian sites from its database? Or if Iran orders it remove Israeli sites from the database? The possibilities are endless since local rules of freedom of expression often differ from country to country. Yet the B.C. court adopts the view that it can issue an order with global effect.
You may not be able to keep pace with every new DNS exploitation but you can be proactive by using firewalls, network IDS, or name resolvers to report certain indicators of suspicious DNS activity.