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Submission Summary: 0 pending, 49 declined, 23 accepted (72 total, 31.94% accepted)

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Privacy

Submission + - Are you ready for road tolls anywhere? (and-still-i-persist.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "Here in Denver, we have E-470, a toll section of the 470 beltway that uses the usual transponder attached to your windshield. Fair enough, and I make use of it, particularly in driving to the airport. But they've just implemented new technology on E-470 that allows anyone to drive through the automated toll gates. If you don't have a transponder, it takes a photo of your license plate and sends a monthly bill to your house. As a result, the company that runs E-470 plans to close all human-staffed toll booths by mid-summer. And as an article in this morning's Rocky Mountain News notes, "Such a system could be deployed on other roads, including some that motorists now use free. The result: a new source of money for highways and bridges badly in need of repair." You can bet that legislators, mayors, and city councilpersons everywhere will see this as an even-better source of income than red-light cameras. You've been warned.""
Earth

Submission + - Did the Zipingpu Dam trigger the Sichuan 'quake? (and-still-i-persist.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "An article in the Telegraph (UK) raises an interesting question: was the massive (7.9) Sichuan earthquake that wracked China last year and left millions homeless caused by ground stresses following the completion of the Zipingpu dam? As the article reports (emphasis added), 'The 511ft-high Zipingpu dam holds 315 million tonnes of water and lies just 550 yards from the fault line, and three miles from the epicentre, of the Sichuan earthquake. Now scientists in China and the United States believe the weight of water, and the effect of it penetrating into the rock, could have affected the pressure on the fault line underneath, possibly unleashing a chain of ruptures that led to the quake.' Oops."
Patents

Submission + - The post-Bilski era gets underway (bfwa.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "A set of pharmaceutical process patents for "evaluating and improving the safety of immunization schedules" (Classen v. Biogen et al.; see US Patents 6,420,139; 6,638,379; 5,728,385; 5,723,283) were held to be invalid due to unpatentability. The decision was appealed to the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, but was upheld with a terse citation to In re Bilksi. Here's the entire text of the appeals decision:

In light of our decision in In re Bilski, 545 F.3d 943 (Fed. Cir. 2008) (en banc), we affirm the district court's grant of summary judgment that these claims are invalid under 35 U.S.C. 101. Dr. Classen's claims are neither "tied to a particular machine or apparatus" nor do they "transform[] a particular article into a different state or thing." Bilski, 545 F.3d at 954. Therefore we affirm.

It will be interesting to see what happens when these same standards are applied to software-related patents."

The Courts

Submission + - Entrapment by emoticon? (bfwa.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "The lawyers for a Nebraska man accused of soliciting what he thought was a 15-year-old girl (actually a police officer) for sex over the internet have offered a novel defense: the (fake) girl's use of emoticons (including an 'angry face' and a 'kiss') induced the defendant into changing his mind and agreeing to meet with the (fake) girl for sex, where he was arrested. The prosecutors argue that emoticons are merely another form of punctuation, like an exclamation point. Thoughts?"
The Courts

Submission + - Is custom software "goods" or "service (bfwa.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "Let's say that your firm is doing custom IT systems development for a client. There are disputes over what you are delivering, and you end up in litigation. Will your work product be treated as services for the client or as goods sold to the client (and thus subject to the Uniform Commercial Code)? The answer could have serious implications as far as the burden of proof and your liability. Susan Nassar of the Texas law firm Elrod PLLC has published a brief legal note on this issue (PDF, 743KB) that should be read by any firm doing custom IT systems development (and passed along to your in-house or outside counsel).

Said firms should note in particular that in Texas and certain other states, a "goods/UCC" interpretation could end up subjecting your work product to the "perfect tender" rule, which says that the client can reject your delivery and ask for its money back "if the goods or the tender of delivery fail in any respect to conform to the contract" (emphasis in article). Something to keep in mind when you're negotiating that next custom development contract.

(Full disclosure: a few years back, I did work for Elrod on an IT systems failure litigation, but I had nothing to do with this legal note.)"
The Courts

Submission + - Court ruling: calculating a hash value == search (bfwa.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "Orin Kerr over at The Volokh Conspiracy (a great legal blog, BTW) reports on a U.S. District Court ruling issued just last week that finds that doing hash calculations on a hard drive is a form of search and thus subject to 4th Amendment limitations. In this particular case, the U.S. District Court suppressed evidence of child pornography on a hard drive because proper warrants were not obtained before imaging the hard drive and calculating MD5 hash values for the individual files on the drive, some of which ended up matching known MD5 hash values for known child pornography image and video files. More details at Kerr's posting."
Transportation

Submission + - Car navigation system -- from the 1920s (brucefwebster.com) 1

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "Strange Maps — one of my daily browsing stops — has a wonderful photo of a 1920's-era, pre-satellite "GPS" that fits on your wrist, no less! In essence, when you started a trip from City A to City B, you picked out the appropriate scroll — a strip map showing your route — and put it into the wristwatch-like holder. You then, well, scrolled the scroll as you drove along to see what was coming up and how far you had to go. So...who wants to build an electronic version of this that really uses GPS technology?"
Privacy

Submission + - Police secretly planting GPS devices on cars (brucefwebster.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "The Washington Post has a long investigative article on how more and more police departments are secretly planting GPS tracking devices on the cars of people they are investigating — usually without a warrant. After-the-fact court challenges on this technique have largely upheld such use of a GPS device, though the Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that a warrant is required."
Censorship

Submission + - "Fairness Doctrine" could impact Web conte (brucefwebster.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "Democrats in Congress, unhappy with Fox News and Rush Limbaugh, have made noises about reinstating the "Fairness Doctrine" to set limits on political speech on broadcast media. FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell has cautioned that such an effort might well have implications for web content as well. Something to keep in mind."
The Courts

Submission + - California Supreme Court bans most non-competes (bfwa.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "The California Supreme Court has issued a decision that bans most non-compete agreements within the state. This is not a new development per se, but it is a rather sweeping affirmation of existing California law and upholds the reversal on appeal of a lower court decision enforcing a particular non-compete agreement. The bottom line: if you're doing business in California, you should be very proactive on intellectual property protection (trade secret, copyright, patent) if you don't want key information — business or technical — walking out the door with your ex-employees."
Robotics

Submission + - First all-drone USAF air wing (brucefwebster.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "Strategy Page reports that the United States Air Force has announced its first air wing that will consist entirely of unmanned craft. The 174th Fighter Wing has flown its last manned combat sorties; its F-16s will be entirely replaced by MQ-9 Reapers. Reasons cited include costs (maintenance and fuel) and the drone's ability to stay in the air up to 14 hours, waiting for a target to show itself."
The Courts

Submission + - Oracle may seek $1 billion in damages from SAP (bfwa.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "Oracle is in the process of suing SAP for theft of confidential information. Specifically, Oracle alleges that a US-based subsidiary of SAP, TomorrowNow, registered itself as an Oracle customer to license and download Oracle documentation, patches, and even source code. The judge in the case ordered mediation back in February, but that appears to have gone nowhere. It doesn't help that SAP has admitted that TomorrowNow conducted "inappropriate downloads" of Oracle software. Now the lawsuit appears to be going forward, and Oracle is now making noises that it may seek as much as $1 billion in damages from SAP. Yep, that's "billion" with a "b".

Intellectual property cases like this are more common than you think, particularly when a given firm — for competitive and trade secret reasons — strictly limits software, patches, and documentation to formally licensed and registered customers. In such cases, a competitor may retain a third-party firm to become a licensed customer, then use that relationship to gain proprietary information. What's curious here is that this was done by an SAP subsidiary. Oracle states that none of the files downloaded by TomorrowNow made their way back to SAP itself, but that's a hard negative to prove. Between this and the lawsuit from Waste Management, times are tough at SAP."
The Courts

Submission + - Patent suit claims "millions of devices" i (bfwa.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "According to this story over at PocketLink, Typhoon Touch Technologies has "'significantly expanded' its patent infringement suit begun in December 2007 against Dell by adding Apple, Fujitsu, Toshiba, Lenovo, Panasonic, HTC, Palm, Samsung, Nokia and LG" — in other words, just about every firm that manufactures a "portable computer with touch screen and computer system employing the same." The patents in question are US Patents 5,379,057 (filed in 1993, issued in 1995) and 5,675,362 (filed in 1994 and issued in 1997). Typhoon's own press release on the expansion can be found on their home page. (Curiously missing from the lawsuit: Motorola.)

Since PDA-like devices date back to the 1980s, and John Sculley announced the Apple Newton — complete with a touch screen — in early 1992, a year before the earlier patent was filed, one wonders whether these patents can hold up under prior art, and it's unclear why the patents were granted in the first place.

On the other hand, there are some curious information gaps on the web. Just last week (see entry for 05:29, 18 June 2008), someone stripped out the "History" section of the Wikipedia article on PDAs, which — before being deleted — documented PDAs going back to 1983. Likewise, a commonly-linked article — "The Evolution of the PDA: 1975-1995" by Evan Koblanz — appears to have been pulled off the web. (Google doesn't have a cached version, nor does the Internet Wayback Machine.) Sounds as though someone may be trying to do historical revision in advance of trial. ..bruce.."
Programming

Submission + - Anatomy of a runaway IT project (brucefwebster.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "While searching through some archived files on CDs, I ran across a memo that I wrote some years back to a senior executive at a large corporation after I conducted (upon request) a quiet review of a major troubled IT project at that corporation. The memo, just a few dozen paragraphs long, summarizes the widespread and pervasive problems with the project, which had been going on for a few years and eventually would fail entirely. I've publicly posted a carefully redacted version of the memo as a reminder of just how and wny a major corporate IT project can get so off-track."
Censorship

Submission + - TSA investigages former air marshal for e-mail (brucefwebster.com)

Submitted by
bfwebster
bfwebster writes: "Jeffrey Denning used to work as a Federal Air Marshal (FAM) for the US Transportation Security Agency (TSA). He quit the TSA last year, then was called up in the US Army Reserve and went over to serve in Iraq. This past March, while still in Iraq, he received (on his private e-mail account) an e-mail addressed to current and former FAMs which suggested they contact CNN, which was preparing a report on problems with the TSA; Denning thinks he may have forwarded that e-mail on to a few more FAMs. When he got home from Iraq earlier this month, he discovered that the TSA had launched an investigation to find out who sent that original e-mail to him. Needless to say, he is not amused."

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