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Patents

Supreme Court Throws Out Bilski Patent 232

Posted by CmdrTaco from the well-isn't-that-special dept.
ciaran_o_riordan writes "The US Supreme Court has finally decided the Bilski case (PDF). We've known that Bilski's patent would get thrown out; that was clear from the open mockery from the judges during last November's hearing. The big question is, since rejecting a particular patent requires providing a general test and explaining why this patent fails that test, how broad will their test be? Will it try to kill the plague of software patents? And is their test designed well enough to stand up to the army of patent lawyers who'll be making a science (and a career) of minimizing and circumventing it? The judges have created a new test, so this will take some reading before any degree of victory can be declared. The important part is pages 5-16 of the PDF, which is the majority opinion. The End Software Patents campaign is already analyzing the decision, and collecting other analyses. Some background is available at Late-comers guide: What is Bilski anyway?" More analysis of the decision is available at Patently-O.
Medicine

What US Health Care Needs 584

Posted by kdawson from the velluvial-matrix dept.
Medical doctor and writer Atul Gawande gave the commencement address recently at Stanford's School of Medicine. In it he lays out very precisely and in a nonpartisan way what is wrong with the institution of medical care in the US — why it is both so expensive and so ineffective at delivering quality care uniformly across the board. "Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has... enumerated and identified... more than 13,600 diagnoses — 13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we've discovered beneficial remedies... But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we're struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver. ... And then there is the frightening federal debt we will face. By 2025, we will owe more money than our economy produces. One side says war spending is the problem, the other says it's the economic bailout plan. But take both away and you've made almost no difference. Our deficit problem — far and away — is the soaring and seemingly unstoppable cost of health care. ... Like politics, all medicine is local. Medicine requires the successful function of systems — of people and of technologies. Among our most profound difficulties is making them work together. If I want to give my patients the best care possible, not only must I do a good job, but a whole collection of diverse components must somehow mesh effectively. ... This will take science. It will take art. It will take innovation. It will take ambition. And it will take humility. But the fantastic thing is: This is what you get to do."
Australia

Operation Titstorm Hits the Streets 458

Posted by timothy from the koala-masks dept.
schliz writes "Hacker group 'Anonymous' is organising international, real-life protests of the Australian mandatory internet filter this coming Saturday. Protests will take place in major Australian cities as well as at Australian embassies around the world. The protests are said to be the second stage of 'Operation Titstorm,' which unleashed a prolonged DDoS attack on Australian government websites last week. Organisers of the so-called Project Freeweb said: 'If passed, this legislation will set a disturbing precedent at an international level. The public, not the Government, should have the right to decide what is deemed appropriate for you or your family to be exposed to.'"
Government

Submission + - U.S. rules may raise cost of buying gadgets online (computerworld.com)

Submitted by ericatcw
ericatcw writes: Buying your next laptop or smartphone online could suddenly get a lot more expensive if a little-known U.S. Department of Transportation proposal to tighten rules around the shipment of small, Lithium-Ion battery-powered devices by air goes through, says an industry group opposing the move. The changes, designed primarily to reduce the risk from Lithium-Ion batteries, would also forbid air travelers from carrying spare alkaline or NiMH batteries in their checked-in luggage, according to the head of the Portable Rechargeable Battery Association. The proposal is under review until March 12. It can be viewed and commented upon by members of the public here.
Idle

Canadian Blood Services Promotes Pseudoscience 219

Posted by samzenpus from the type-A-negative-personality dept.
trianglecat writes "The not-for-profit agency Canadian Blood Services has a section of their website based on the Japanese cultural belief of ketsueki-gata, which claims that a person's blood group determines or predicts their personality type. Disappointing for a self-proclaimed 'science-based' organization. The Ottawa Skeptics, based in the nation's capital, appear to be taking some action."

Comment Re:What's the point? (Score 1) 289

by trevmar (#29093935) Attached to: TomTom Releases iPhone Navigation App

I use mGmaps in my Blackberry. Unlike Google Maps, you can download the maps in advance and work in an offline (airplane) mode. A world map at decent resolution takes about 6 gigs of SD card space. But this will just make sure you know where you are - I use TomTom to get me where I want to go. Two different tasks :)
 
Security

Submission + - SPAM: Linux machines used to attack DMZ

Submitted by viralMeme
viralMeme writes: "Criminal hackers continue to penetrate many more company networks than most administrators care to admit, according to two security experts who offered a list of the most effective exploits used to gain entry"

"Topping the list is an attack dubbed super-flexible pivoting. It abuses Linux machines connected to a network's DMZ, or demilitarized zone, to bypass corporate firewalls and access sensitive resources on an internal network. The technique has already been used to steal vast amounts of data, including "millions of credit cards," said Ed Skoudis, a senior security consultant for InGuardians, a security company that frequently responds to major network breaches"

[spam URL stripped]
Link to Original Source
The Courts

Submission + - The Pirate Bay Aftermath Circus in Swedish Press

Submitted by MaulerOfEmotards
MaulerOfEmotards writes: Reading the Swedish news reports, the turmoil surrounding the aftermath of The Pirate Bay trial continues.

Part of the news are occupied with Tomas Norström, the presiding judge of The Pirate Bay trial. Mr. Nordström is suspected of bias after reports of affiliation with copyright protection organisations, for which he has been charged reported to the appeals court, is rapidly gaining a certain notoriety. The circus around him is currently focused on three points. First, his personal affiliation with at least four copyright protection organisations, a state the potential bias of which he himself fails to see and refuse to admit. Secondly, Swedish trials use a system of several lay assessors to supervise the presiding judge, one of which, a member of an artists' interest organisation, which is far fewer than Mr. Norström himself, was by Mr. Norström made to resign from the trial for potential bias, and his failing to see the obvious contradiction in this casts doubts on his suitability and competence. Thirdly, according to professor of judicial sociology Håkan Hydén the judge has inappropriately "duped and influenced the lay assessors" during the trial: "a judge that has decided that 'this is something we can't allow' has little problem finding legal arguments that are difficult for assisting lay assessors to counter".

The apparent grave legal problems if the trial itself is also of medial interest. Professor Hydén continues with enumerating "at least three strange things" with "a strange trial": Firstly that someone can be sentenced for being accessory to a crime for which there is no main culprit: "this assumes someone else having committed the crime, and no such individual exists here ... the system cannot charge the real culprits or it would collapse in its entirety". It is unprecedented in Swedish judicial history to sentence only an accessory. Secondly, that the accessories should pay the fine for a crime committed by the main culprits "which causes the law to contradict itself". And thirdly that accessories cannot be sentenced to harsher than the main culprit, which means that every downloader must be sentenced to a year's confinement. In closing Me. Hydén sums up by saying that to allow this kind of judgement the Swedish Parliament must first pass a bill making this kind of services illegal, which hasn't been done.
Music

Submission + - Freedb.org -- does anyone know what's going on? 1

Submitted by
tednolan
tednolan writes: "The hosts behind the round-robin name freedb.freedb.org provide (provided?) a service to lookup information about music CDs based on a disc ID using a protocol called CDDBP. A number of programs use this information to generate filename and MP3 tag information when ripping CDs. I use cdda2wav (and some custom shell scripts) on FreeBSD.

For the past few days, freedb.freedb.org has stopped resolving disc ID requests. I have verified by searching USENET that this is happening for other people, and is not just an artifact of my configuration or ISP. Noone, however, seems to know what is going on.

The web server at www.freedb.org is still working, but there is no indication of any problem noted on their front page. There is a link for "forums", but if these were ever implemented, they are now gone. Searching slashdot doesn't bring up any recent hits for freedb.

Does anyone know what is going on with this service?"
Intel

Submission + - Theo de Raadt details Intel Core 2 bugs

Submitted by Eukariote
Eukariote writes: Recently, Intel patched bugs in its Core 2 processors . Details were scarce, soothing words that a BIOS update was all that was required were spoken. OpenBSD founder Theo de Raadt has now provided more details and analysis on outstanding, fixed, an non-fixable Core 2 bugs. Some choice quotes: "Some of these bugs (...) will *ASSUREDLY* be exploitable from userland code.", "Some of these are things that cannot be fixed in running code, and some are things that every operating system will do until about mid-2008".
Education

Submission + - No OLPCs for Cuba. Ever.

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: In a move going largely unnoticed by the developers the OLPC project now requires all submissions to the project to be hosted in the RedHat Fedora project.

While not seeming like a big deal, the implications are interesting. First, contributors have to sign the Fedora Project Individual Contributor License Agreement. By being forced to submit contributions to the Fedora repository they automatically fall under the provisions of US export law. So, no OLPC for Cuba, Syria and the likes. Ever.

But at least the OLPC project will build a nice business for RedHat The software borrows from the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, with about 95 per cent of the code overlapping.
Intel

Submission + - Intel releases 2.93GHz quad-core QX6800

Submitted by AnInkle
AnInkle writes: Intel's new QX6800 debuts, and The Tech Report runs the gamut of multi-threaded 64-bit benchmarks, to find out what $1199 can get in a CPU, or if you should get by on the cheap and stick with the $999 QX6700. With popular games, Folding@Home in Linux, real-world scientific applications, and detailed power consumption, the 2.93GHz quad-core QX6800 is compared to over a dozen competitors from both Intel and AMD. The results aren't surprising, but the commentary sure is fun.
Microsoft

Submission + - VBootkit Bypasses Vista's Code Signing Mechanisms

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: At the Black Hat Conference in Amsterdam, security experts from India demonstrated a special boot loader that gets around Vista's code signing mechanisms. Indian security experts Nitin and Vipin Kumar of NV labs have developed a program called the VBootkit that launches from a CD and boots Vista, making "on the fly" changes in memory and in files being read. In a demonstration, the "boot kit" managed to run with kernel privileges and issue system rights to a CMD shell when running on Vista, even without a Microsoft signature. Bruce Schneier reminds us that this is not theoretical; VBootkit is actual code that demonstrates the exploit.

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