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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.
Education

Submission + - Gamma-Ray Photon Observations Indicate Space-Time is Smooth (space.com)

Submitted by eldavojohn
eldavojohn writes: Seven billion light years away seven billion years ago, a gamma-ray burst occurred. The observation of four Fermi-detected gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) has led physicists to speculate that space-time is indeed smooth (a prepublication PDF can be found here). Three such photons were observed to arrive very close together and the observers believe that these are from the same burst which means that there was nothing diffracting their paths from the gamma-ray burst to Earth. This observation doesn't prove that space-time is infinitesimally smooth like Einstein predicted but does give a nod that it is for a range of parameters. Before we can totally discount the theory that space-time is comprised of Planck-scale pixels, we must now establish that the proposed pixels don't disrupt the photons in ways independent of their wavelengths. For example, this observation did not disprove the possibility that the pixels exert a subtler "quadratic" influence over the photons nor could it determine the presence of birefringence — an effect that depends on the polarization of the light particles.
Crime

Submission + - The Case Against DNA

Submitted by
Hugh Pickens writes
Hugh Pickens writes writes: "Thanks to fast-paced television crime shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, we have come to regard DNA evidence as uncontestable. But BBC reports that David Butler has every right to be cynical about the use of DNA evidence by the police. Butler spent eight months in prison, on remand, facing murder charges after his DNA was allegedly found on the victim. ""I think in the current climate [DNA] has made police lazy," says Butler. "It doesn't matter how many times someone like me writes to them, imploring they look at the evidence... they put every hope they had in the DNA result."" The police had accused Butler of murdering a woman, Anne Marie Foy, in 2005 — his DNA sample was on record after he had willingly given it to them as part of an investigation into a burglary at his mother's home some years earlier. But Butler has a rare skin condition, which means he sheds flakes of skin, leaving behind much larger traces of DNA than the average person and Butler worked as a taxi driver, and so it was possible for his DNA to be transferred from his taxi via money or another person, onto the murder victim. The case eventually went to trial and Butler was acquitted after CCTV evidence allegedly placing Butler in the area where the murder took place was disproved. Professor Allan Jamieson, head of the Glasgow-based Forensic Institute, has become a familiar thorn in the side of prosecutors seeking to rely on DNA evidence and has appeared as an expert witness for the defense in several important DNA-centered trials, most notably that of Sean Hoey, who was cleared of carrying out the 1998 Omagh bombing which killed 29 people. Jamieson’s main concern about the growing use of DNA in court cases is that a number of important factors -human error, contamination, simple accident — can suggest guilt where there is none. “Does anyone realize how easy it is to leave a couple of cells of your DNA somewhere?” says Jamieson. “You could shake my hand and I could put that hand down hundreds of miles away and leave your cells behind. In many cases, the question is not ‘Is it my DNA?’, but ‘How did it get there?’”"
United Kingdom

Submission + - BBC Keeps Android Flash Alive In The UK (techweekeurope.co.uk)

Submitted by
judgecorp
judgecorp writes: "Although Adobe wants to can mobile Flash, the Android Flash app has returned to the Google Play store in the UK after disappearing earlier this month. It has come back because of pressure from large organisations, in particular the BBC, whose popular iPlayer video on demand service uses Flash. The Android app is back, apparently or as long as it takes the BBC to move to HTML5"
Facebook

Submission + - Europeans Can Ask to Be Forgotten (frontwave.eu)

Submitted by Full_Privacy
Full_Privacy writes: "A 'right to be forgotten' will help people better manage data-protection risks online. When they no longer want their data to be processed and there are no legitimate grounds for retaining it, the data will be deleted." Anyone in the EU will be able to ask any service provider or company for complete details of the data they hold about them, and request the complete erasure of the information, except the one that companies need to keep required by law.

Facebook has already received hundreds of requests from users that want to erase all data in the service
Science

Submission + - DNA analysis shows ancient humans interbred with Denisovans (nature.com)

Submitted by ananyo
ananyo writes: Tens of thousands of years ago modern humans crossed paths with the group of hominins known as the Neandertals. Researchers now think they also met another, less-known group called the Denisovans. The only trace that we have found, however, is a single finger bone and two teeth, but those fragments have been enough to cradle wisps of Denisovan DNA across thousands of years inside a Siberian cave. Now a team of scientists has been able to reconstruct their entire genome from these meager fragments. The analysis supports the idea that Neandertals and Denisovans were more closely related to one another than either was to modern humans and also suggests new ways that early humans may have spread across the globe.
Beer

Submission + - Drinking Too Much? Blame Your Glass (sciencemag.org)

Submitted by sciencehabit
sciencehabit writes: Before you down that pint, check the shape of your glass—you might be drinking more beer than you realize. According to a new study of British beer drinkers, an optical illusion caused by the shape of a curved glass can dramatically increase the speed at which we swill. The researchers recruited 160 Brits, and asked them to watch a nature documentary while they drank beer from straight or curved glasses. The group drinking a full glass of lager out of curved flute glasses drank significantly faster than the other group--possibly because the curved glasses impaired their ability to pace themselves while drinking.
Encryption

Submission + - Is your iOS application data protected? (github.com) 1

Submitted by
pteufl
pteufl writes: "A recent slashdot article discusses the security of the iOS encryption systems. While the first system encrypts the whole file system and is used for fast remote wiping, the second system (Data protection) allows the encryption of application files with keys that are derived from the user's passcode and an AES key that is stored on a chip. This system makes brute-force attacks on a good passcode infeasible.

The decision whether this data protection classes are used for application files is made by the application developer. Unfortunately, the user (or administrator) is not able to see which protection classes an installed application uses.

This leads to the following scenario: An iOS-device protected with a secure passcode receives sensitive PDFs via the standard mail app (which uses adequate protection classes). The user opens these files in an external application (e.g. a PDF reader), which stores the files without data protection. In this case, an attacker does not need to carry out the infeasible brute-force attack on the passcode to access the data within the mail application. He only needs to apply a jailbreak to gain access to the file system and thus, to the unprotected files of the PDF reader application.

In order to allow the user/administrator to find out which protection classes are used by application files, we have created a simple java tool that extracts the protection classes from an existing iTunes backup. This information plays an important role in deciding whether an application should be used within a deployment scenario where security is considered to be important."

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