41605545
submission
Dupple writes:
According to the Dow Jones News Wires,., LG has filed an injunction in its home territory of South Korea, seeking to ban the sale of the Galaxy Note 10.1, alleging the panels inside the tablet infringe LG patents.
The injunction follows a lawsuit filed by Samsung . on 7 December, which alleged that LG infringed seven of Samsung's liquid crystal display patents. LG, which filed the injunction with the Seoul District Court on Wednesday, is aiming to block the sales of the Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet computer.
41597823
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Dupple writes:
Craig Mundie, who famously thought tablets computing a fad, is set to leave Microsoft in 2014.
Microsoft said Chief Research and Strategy Officer Craig Mundie, 63, plans to retire in 2014 after two decades at the software company and has shifted to a new role as a senior adviser to CEO Steve Ballmer.
Eric Rudder, chief technical strategy officer, is taking over some of Mundie’s duties overseeing research, privacy and security, as well as technology policy, Ballmer said in an email to staff Dec. 14 that Microsoft made public Monday.
Mundie’s job switch marks the second change to the senior leadership team within the past two months. On Nov. 12, the company announced that Windows chief Steven Sinofsky was leaving.
41568909
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Dupple writes:
US chipmaker Marvell Technology faces having to pay one of the biggest ever. patent damage awards.
A jury in Pittsburgh found the firm guilty of infringing two hard disk innovations owned by local university Carnegie Mellon.
Despite Marvel claiming that the CMU patents weren't valid because they hadn't invented anything new, citing that a Seagate patent. 14 months earlier described everything the CMU patents claimed, the jury found that Marvell's chips infringed claim 4 of Patent No. 6,201,839 and claim 2 of Patent No. 6,438,180. "method and apparatus for correlation-sensitive adaptive sequence detection" and "soft and hard sequence detection in ISI memory channels."
It said Marvell should pay $1.17bn (£723m) in compensation — however that sum could be multiplied up to three times by the judge because the jury had also said the act had been "wilful".
Marvell's shares fell more than 10%.
The maximum penalty would be close to the $3.96bn value of the company, based on its market capitalisation.
Marvell makes a range of chips which includes processors which power devices including Blackberry smartphones, Sony Google TV internet video boxes and LED lighting controllers, as well as hard disks.
41563861
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Dupple writes:
Samsung Electronics has sought a ban on the import and sales of some Ericsson products in the US which it claims infringe its patents.
In a complaint filed with the US International Trade Commission (ITC), Samsung has accused Ericsson of breaching seven of its patents.
The move counters Ericsson's complaint to the ITC, made in November, seeking a sales ban on some Samsung products.
Ericsson has also claimed that Samsung infringed some of its patents.
The Swedish firm had a licensing deal with Samsung under which the South Korean manufacturer was allowed to use various technologies patented by Ericsson in its products.
41462803
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Dupple writes:
On Friday, the High Court of London issued a ruling that said that one of Motorola’s patents covering technology to synchronize messages across several devices should be invalidated. Originally, the patent covered the synching of messages across multiple pagers, but recently Motorola has used the patent in lawsuits against Apple and Microsoft for using similar message-syncing services in iCloud and on the Xbox, respectively.
The presiding Judge Richard Arnold declared Motorola's patent invalid and said it should be revoked because the patent (which has a priority date from 1995, but was issued in 2002) contained technology that “was obvious to experts. in the field at the time.”
41403155
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Dupple writes:
The European Commission charged Samsung Electronics on Friday with abusing its dominant position in seeking to bar rival Apple from using a patent deemed essential to mobile phone use.
The Commission sent a "statement of objections" to the South Korean group, with its preliminary view that Samsung was not acting fairly.
"Intellectual property rights are an important cornerstone of the single market. However, such rights should not be misused when they are essential to implement industry standards, which bring huge benefits to businesses and consumers alike," Competition Commissioner Joaquin Almunia said in statement.
41244599
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Dupple writes:
Microsofts user data shows that users are getting used to dealing with Windows 8 user interface from this article on MIT technology review.
Despite some of the more scathing reviews of Windows 8, ordinary users are getting along with it just fine, according to Julie Larson-Green, the Microsoft executive who leads Windows product development. Data collected automatically from some Windows users, she says, show they are adjusting to some of the new operating system’s controversial features without problems
“So far we’re seeing very encouraging things,” Larson-Green says of the large volume of data that Microsoft receives every day from people using Windows 8 who have chosen to join the company’s “customer experience improvement program.” All users are invited to enroll in that program when they first log into the new operating system. If they do so, anonymized information about how they are using the operating system is sent to Microsoft. Referring to complaints from some quarters, Larson-Green says: “Even with the rumblings, we feel confident that it’s a moment in time more than an actual problem.”
41144603
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Dupple writes:
The Australian reports that South Korean government says that there was a link between working at a Samsung factory and a cancer case of one of it's workers.
A SOUTH Korean government agency says that working at a Samsung Electronics factory caused the breast cancer of a worker who died earlier this year, only the second time it has recognised a link between cancer and Samsung's chip plants.
The Korea Workers' Compensation and Welfare Service, which is part of the labour ministry, ruled earlier this month that there was a "considerable causal relationship" between the woman's cancer and her five years of work at a semiconductor plant near Seoul.
The ruling didn't become public until Friday when the agency announced compensation for the woman's family.
41113575
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Dupple writes:
Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) is sticking with a decision to make it harder to track users’ online behavior, earning plaudits from privacy groups while drawing fire from the advertisers its money-losing Web unit needs most.
After months of criticism that the new tools cut off valuable customer-targeting information, the software maker has no plans to change the automatic setting in its newest Internet Explorer browser that tells websites not to track user behavior, General Counsel Brad Smith said in an interview.
“We crossed the Rubicon and are completely comfortable being on the other side of the river,” he said. “We have no intention of going back and have no intention of engaging in discussion on that possibility.” Smith will provide an update on the company’s position today in a blog posting.
Association of National Advertisers President and CEO Bob Liodice said his group opposes the decision to turn on the signal by default, even after Microsoft made some changes that make the setting clearer to users.
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Dupple writes:
As always with such deals the details regarding the agreement are scarce but MS has got another Android patent deal.
Microsoft and Hoeft & Wessel AG have signed a patent licensing agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft's patent portfolio for Hoeft & Wessel devices running the Android platform.
While the contents of the agreement have not been disclosed, the parties indicate that Microsoft will receive royalties from Hoeft & Wessel.
"This agreement with Hoeft & Wessel is another example of how industry leaders address intellectual property," said Horacio Gutierrez, corporate vice president and deputy general counsel of the Intellectual Property Group at Microsoft. "We are proud of the continued success of our licensing program in resolving IP issues surrounding the Android platform in a variety of industries."
Hoeft & Wessel builds and sells Android-powered handheld devices and terminals for the public transportation, logistics and retail industries across Europe
41042161
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Dupple writes:
There's a two page article over on IT World detailing the new European patent system
Parliament adopted all three proposed regulations needed to form the new patent system on Tuesday: the regulation on a Unitary Patent, the language regime and the formation of a new unified patent court system.
Not all European Union member states want a part in the new system: Italy and Spain refused to participate, although they may join at any time. The new system will cut the cost of obtaining a patent in the participating countries by up to 80 percent, the Parliament said. The patents will be made available in English, French and German and applications will have to be made in one of those three languages.
Not everyone was pleased with the newly adopted regulation though. MEPs opposing the adopted text are concerned the new system is going to be bad for innovation and business, and by voting for the text, the Parliament is giving away powers, they said.
The new regulation "means the European Parliament will abdicate all its political powers to an organization ... that is outside of the E.U.," said Christian Engström, Pirate Party member of parliament, adding that he still wanted a European patent as long as it did not hamper innovation as he believes the proposal in its current form does.
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Dupple writes:
Following on from apple to bring mac manufacturing to the USA.
Foxconn have said that would be bringing over American engineers to train them before to returning them to the plant in the US.
“We are looking at doing more manufacturing in the U.S. because, in general, customers want more to be done there,” Louis Woo, a Foxconn spokesman, said in a phone interview. He declined to comment on individual clients or specific plans.
“Supply chain is one of the big challenges for U.S. expansion,” Woo said. “In addition, any manufacturing we take back to the U.S. needs to leverage high-value engineering talent there in comparison to the low-cost labor of China.”
Foxconn Chairman Terry Gou, who founded the maker of iPhones, iPads, PlayStations and televisions in Taipei 38 years ago, wants to bring U.S. engineers to Asia to train them in manufacturing before deploying them back home, he said at a forum last month..
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Dupple writes:
In an exclusive interview with Brian Williams airing tonight at 10pm/9c on NBC’s “Rock Center,” Apple CEO Tim Cook announced one of the existing Mac lines will be manufactured exclusively in the United States next year. Mac fans will have to wait to see which Mac line it will be because Apple, widely known for its secrecy, left it vague. Cook's announcement may or may not confirm recent rumors in the blogosphere sparked by iMacs inscribed in the back with “Assembled in USA.”
40812191
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Dupple writes:
"If you look at how highly cratered the Moon is — the Earth used to look like that; parts of Mars still do look like that," explained Prof Maria Zuber, Grail's principal investigator from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, US.
"This period of time when all these impacts where occurring — this was the time when the first microbes were developing.
"We had some idea from the chemistry [of ancient rocks] that Earth was a violent place early on, but now we now know it was an extremely difficult place energetically as well, and it shows just how tenacious life had to be to hang on," she told BBC News.
Prof Zuber was speaking in San Francisco at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting, the world's largest annual gathering for Earth and planetary scientists..
40466015
submission
Dupple writes:
Printers manufactured by Samsung have a backdoor administrator account hard coded in their firmware that could enable attackers to change their configuration, read their network information or stored credentials and access sensitive information passed to them by users.
The hardcoded account does not require authentication and can be accessed over the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) interface of the affected printers, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT) said in a security advisory.
SNMP is an Internet protocol commonly used to monitor and read statistics from network-attached devices.
The SNMP account found in Samsung printers has full read and write permissions and remains accessible even if SNMP is disabled using the printer's management utility, US-CERT said.
