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Australia

Submission + - Surveillance oponents send copies of Nineteen Eighty-Four to Attorney General (wordpress.com)

Submitted by
boron boy
boron boy writes: "Given the recent push for increased surveillance, ISP data retention, and the erosion of any “right to remain silent”, I wonder if Nicola Roxon (Attorney General of Australia) has read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Let’s make sure she has, or at least that she re-reads it, given the circumstances. I’ve started a campaign to send copies to her office at parliament house."
Iphone

Submission + - iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S cameras compared – improvements are barely noticeab (bgr.com)

Submitted by redkemper
redkemper writes: The iPhone 5s svelte frame and all of its scratching, light-peaking and poorly delivered iOS 6 Maps app might be the talk of the town, but what about its new and improved 8-megapixel camera? Apple didn’t spend too much time talking about the iSight camera at the iPhone 5s unveil event because it’s mostly the same as the one found in the iPhone 4S. Thankfully, iMore grabbed an iPhone 5 and iPhone 4S and did a fantastic shoot-out between the two device’s rear cameras. Does the iPhone 5s camera actually live up to Apple’s marketing hype of “40% faster photo capture, better low-light performance, and improved noise reduction?” Ehh, it just barely edges out the iPhone 4S’s year-old camera...

Submission + - Toys R Us sued over Tabeo tablet (bbc.com)

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: The Toys R Us chain is being sued in the US over allegations it stole one of its former partners' trade secrets to develop its own tablet computer.

Fuhu — the Los Angeles based creator of the Nabi tablet — claims the toy chain copied the design, user-experience and online services of its device.

Toys R Us used to have exclusive rights to sell Fuhu's machine in the US, but this deal has since lapsed.

Fuhu is part-owned by the Taiwanese computer-maker Acer, the gadget manufacturer Foxconn and the memory chip producer Kingston.
News

Submission + - Myspace Is Back (Again) (bbc.com) 1

Submitted by another random user
another random user writes: MySpace has showcased its new look with a preview video ahead of its forthcoming relaunch.

New owners Specific Media are revamping the social network in collaboration with Justin Timberlake after acquiring it from Newscorp for $35 million two years ago.

The new look centres around a horizontal layout similar to Pinterest, with a navigation panel for controlling audio content. Photo albums can be paired with playlists and integration with rival networks Facebook and Twitter has been incorporated.
Android

Submission + - Research Shows Half of All Androids Contain Known Vulnerabilities (threatpost.com)

Submitted by Trailrunner7
Trailrunner7 writes: About half of all Android phones contain at least one vulnerability that could be used to take control of the device, according to new research. Duo Security, which launched a free vulnerability scanning app for Android this summer, said their preliminary data from users shows a huge number of the devices are vulnerable to at least one of the known Android flaws.

The X-Ray app from Duo scans Android devices for a set of known vulnerabilities in a variety of the Android releases. Many of them are flaws that attackers have used in the last few months. The main issue with Android security and patches is that each carrier is responsible for pushing out new versions of the operating system to its users and they all do it on random timelines. There's no set interval for updates and users don't have to upgrade, so there's a good chance that many users are running older, vulnerable versions of Android at any given time.
Patents

Submission + - Easy Fix For Software Patents Found In US Patent Act (infoworld.com)

Submitted by
WebMink
WebMink writes: "What if there was an easy, inexpensive way to bring software patents under control, that did not involve Congress, which applied retrospectively to all patents and which was already part of the US Patent Act? Stanford law professor Mark Lemley thinks he's found it. He asserts that the current runaway destruction being caused by software patents is just like previous problems with US patent law, and that Congress included language in the Patent Act of 1952 that can be invoked over software patents just like it fixed the earlier problems. All it will take is a future defendant in a patent trial using his read of a crucial section of the Patent Act in their defence to establish case law. Can it really be that easy?"

Comment Re:The specific ruling: (Score 3, Informative) 203

by Walterk (#41332651) Attached to: Dutch Court Rules Hyperlinks Can Constitute Infringement

[..] FileFactory.com, a cloud service to store files and share them with others. However, these files canâ(TM)t be found through search engines, only users with the exact URL have access to the files.

Wrong. As some other posters have already shown, google happily indexes and searches FileFactory.
Apple

Submission + - Bruce Willis 'considering iTunes legal action' against Apple (telegraph.co.uk)

Submitted by oobayly
oobayly writes: It appears that Bruce "Die Hard" Willis isn't too impressed that he can't include his iTunes collection in his estate when he dies.

Bruce Willis, the Hollywood actor, is said to be considering legal action against Apple so he can leave his iTunes music collection to his three daughters.

Such a high profile individual complaining about the ability to own your digital music can only be a good thing, right? I suggest that also assaulting Cupertino in a dirty white vest would do the job.
Google

Submission + - Google Extends Patent Search to Prior Art - I wonder why? (i-programmer.info)

Submitted by mikejuk
mikejuk writes: As well as buying up patents to defend itself against the coming Apple attack on Android, Google is also readying its own technology. It has extended its Patent Search facility to include European patents and has added a Prior Art facility.
The new Prior Art facility seems to be valuable both to inventors and to the legal profession. In order to be granted a patent the inventor has to establish that it is a novel idea — and in the current litigious environment companies and their lawyers might want to show that patents should not have been granted. My guess is that this is one Google facility that won't be closing any time soon as one of its main users is likely to be Google.

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