Also see: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6090

9. Intellectual Property

      Concerns about intellectual property have slowed the adoption of ECC
      because a number of optimizations and specialized algorithms have
      been patented in recent years.

      All of the normative references for ECDH (as defined in Section 4)
      were published during or before 1989, and those for KT-I were
      published during or before May 1994. All of the normative text for
      these algorithms is based solely on their respective references.

Good point; There are implementation techniques and specific curves which are patented and it is possible to make an implementation that is not patented. For example: http://dnscurve.org/crypto.html

IEEE Std 1363a defines a method to to Elliptic Curve Crypto that is not patent encumbered.

Please re-read my posting. IEEE is very clear about patent disclosure for essential patents. IEEE does not state what FRAND actually means. Samsung is free to charge $0.00 for red hat to release ptpd, and is free to charge much more than that per device to apple for other patents which are less interesting! And in both of those cases, FRAND is satisfied.

Ah, jeez. If you think this is the first time someone noticed that different computers give different results,

Well, apparently the people who wrote the software that this whole article was about did not know that their software was broken because of this. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/MWR-D-12-00352.1

All patents related to IEEE standards are listed on the IEEE website:

http://standards.ieee.org/about/sasb/patcom/patents.html

Any companies that have essential patents for an IEEE standard are required to disclose them and give letters of assurances that they will license them to users under FRAND conditions. Samsung did do this.

In my opinion, the terms that Samsung offered were not "Reasonable" and were completely out of line compared to all other license fees associated with IEEE standards. Typically these fees are "one time fees per company, often less than $1000.00 USD". I feel that this causes a "chilling effect" with all existing IEEE standards until IEEE defines what exactly "Reasonable" means. (disclaimer: I am technical editor for two IEEE standards)

Of course that in itself can be a huge problem for GPL and any open source implementations - for instance see the patents that Samsung has on Precision Time Protocol ( http://standards.ieee.org/about/sasb/patcom/loa-1588-samsung-12apr2007.pdf ) which were blocking RedHat from releasing ptpd: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=556611 - It looks like in this ptpd case, Samsung was reasonable and allows people to do time stamping of packets for free as in GPL.

Regardless of my opinions, ITC said the fees to Apple were reasonable. I guess here the government steps in and says that the fees still stand but the ruling can't block the shipment of devices.

The difference here is that Samsung did agree to license essential patents for an IEEE standard under FRAND with the IEEE and then refused to do so.

Thank you for bringing attention to this! I did not know about what they are doing.

The reality is that the original code was not portable between supercomputers and already comes up with incorrect answers but yet people didn't realize it until now! Do you realize that this means that all the weather forecasts from the first supercomputer implementation of this program are now known to be wrong too? What is the cost of having answers that have unknown accuracy?

You don't have to use Boost - but you HAVE TO manage your intervals and accuracy and rounding errors! If you don't then you can not know what the accuracy is of your answers! Note this has relevance beyond supercomputing too - Digital Signal Processing of Audio also is adversely affected by people programming floating point filters incorrectly, causing noise artifacts and inharmonic distortion due to improper noise shaping and bad coefficient rounding and fading.

Jeff

In the cast of the boost-interval library, the link I posted has a very clear warning about that; so I don't understand why that quote is relevant here. This warning shows that "floating point is hard" and that is MORE reason to be careful with your intervals!

Warning! Guaranteed interval arithmetic for native floating-point format is not supported on every combination of processor, operating system, and compiler. This is a list of systems known to work correctly when using interval and interval with basic arithmetic operators.

x86-like hardware is supported by the library with GCC, Visual C++ 7.1, Intel compiler ( 8 on Windows), CodeWarrior ( 9), as long as the traditional x87 floating-point unit is used for floating-point computations (no -mfpmath=sse2 support).
Sparc hardware is supported with GCC and Sun compiler.
PowerPC hardware is supported with GCC and CodeWarrior, when floating-point computations are not done with the Altivec unit.
Alpha hardware is supported with GCC, except maybe for the square root. The options -mfp-rounding-mode=d -mieee have to be used.
The previous list is not exhaustive. And even if a system does not provide guaranteed computations for hardware floating-point types, the interval library is still usable with user-defined types and for doing box arithmetic.

Good points - in fact in this case one can say that ALL of the calculations done by the different computer architectures are in fact wrong. to varying degrees When doing floating point math without rounding analysis being done then all bets are off. Measurements always have accuracies, and floating point math also adds it's own inaccuracies.

The Boost library can help: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_54_0/libs/numeric/interval/doc/interval.htm

Of course all this extra interval management costs in terms of development and performance. But what is the cost of having supercomputers coming up with answers with unknown accuracy?

Please see http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1280095 for more information on interesting developments with regards to automotive usages of Audio Video Bridging in Infotainment and control - http://avb.statusbar.com/faq.html - typically using Linux.

Pardon my ignorance but.... Isn't there a law against Snowden exercising his free speech rights to disclose what he learned about the NSA?

:-(

Yes, you are right.

Until RFC3514 is updated for IPv6, we can't expect IPv6 to gain full acceptance simply because of the lack of the E bit.

What is the problem here? Why couldn't the web browser just make sure that the cookies are passed via RFC3514 ( http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3514.txt ) compliant packets (with the E bit field set to FALSE) if the advertiser is trustable?