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Submission + - Google bids $900M on Nortel’s patents (venturebeat.com)

Submitted by suraj.sun
suraj.sun writes: In lieu of waiting for actual patent reform, Google announced today that it has bid $900 million on Nortel’s patent portfolio to protect against wanton patent litigation. If Google wins the auction, it will have access to some 6,000 patents related to wired, wireless, and other communications technologies. The company will likely utilize some of those patents to fend off litigation against Android — like Oracle’s complaint from last summer.

Nortel, once a telecom equipment giant, filed for bankruptcy in January 2009 and is currently in the process of selling off its individual units piecemeal.

Comment Actually (Score 3, Informative) 163

by micksam7 (#34527930) Attached to: Hosting Giants Teaming Against Small Businesses

Softlayer and ThePlanet merged a few months ago. And UK2/"Hosting Services"/100TB simply resells Softlayer's services.

100TB has a bandwidth pool deal with Softlayer, then oversells like mad. SimpleCDN used 100TB [I -believe-] to get excellent bandwidth deals.

Seems like 100TB [and perhaps Softlayer] weren't happy with this.

Submission + - SimpleCDN Hosting Fails Due to ISP Dispute (simplecdn.com) 1

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: We host some of our content with SimpleCDN. Yesterday we noticed some of the content not loading and we logged into SimpleCDN to find out why. The following letter was posted:

Dear SimpleCDN Customer,

I am writing this letter to update you on a situation that has been developing for the past 72 hours between SimpleCDN and our technology and infrastructure providers, SoftLayer and Hosting Services, Inc.

Two days ago these organizations decided to immediately terminate our contract and suspend service on much of our infrastructure in Dallas, Seattle and Washington, D.C. This infrastructure constitutes the majority of our delivery network for our value services, including on-demand and live streaming services.

Absolutely no valid reason or warning was or has been given for this termination, and our best guess currently is that these organizations could not provide the services that we contracted and paid for, so instead they decided that terminating services would be the best solution for them.

We have already started to take legal action against these organizations, however thus far we have not gotten either party to reconsider their position. As it stands now, certain SimpleCDN services will begin to fail within the next few days as additional services are terminated.

We believe the actions of Hosting Services, Inc. and SoftLayer constitute a deliberate attempt to cripple SimpleCDN’s current service offering.

SoftLayer and Hosting Services / UK2 Group also resell "CDN" services at a much higher price point, and it is clear these actions constitute a conspiracy to remove us, and many other corporations affected by their reckless actions, from the marketplace.

I invite you to contact these organizations directly to voice your frustration and opinions on this matter, while we’ll continue to ensure access is available to key services for backing up your data currently contained on the CDN for as long as possible.

I understand how difficult this is for you, and for the past two days we have been scrambling to make alternative arrangements, but not enough time has been given to secure additional delivery resources.

Our support team will be available 24/7 at support.simplecdn.com to answer any of your questions, and assist you with alternative services in any way possible.

You may contact me directly at: frank.wilson@simplecdn.com or via our corporate number at 800-269-3033 ext 704.

Sincerely,

Frank Wilson
Chief Engineer, SimpleCDN

Comment Re:Yea sure (Score 1) 214

by micksam7 (#32455120) Attached to: Google Relents, Will Hand Over European Wi-Fi Data

Likely a configuration issue, keeping raw data around for debug info then forgetting to turn it off before deploying it. Google has been wanting to capture network SSIDs and GPS coordinates [war drivers have been doing this for years], likely for cell/laptop location data, but accidentally grabbed all raw packets instead.

Comment Re:Great (Score 4, Interesting) 214

by micksam7 (#32455092) Attached to: Google Relents, Will Hand Over European Wi-Fi Data

They opened the can of worms by announcing that they had collected it. If they stayed silent, and shredded the data quietly, they'd probably wouldn't be in this mess and no one would have known they ever did it. Google instead has been trying to make this situation 'right' by being transparent about it, and no one gives a crap about it. The governments certainly are going to grab that data, use it as evidence to prosecute Google, and keep it around for ~other reasons~ for years upon years.
Image

Air Canada Ordered To Provide Nut-Free Zone 643

Posted by samzenpus from the no-nuts dept.
JamJam writes "Air Canada has been told to create a special 'buffer zone' on flights for people who are allergic to nuts. The Canadian Transportation Agency has ruled that passengers who have nut allergies should be considered disabled and accommodated by the airline. Air Canada has a month to come up with an appropriate section of seats where passengers with nut allergies would be seated. The ruling involved a complaint from Sophia Huyer, who has a severe nut allergy and travels frequently. Ms. Huyer once spent 40 minutes in the washroom during a flight while snacks were being served."

Comment Re:Compression? (Score 1) 175

by micksam7 (#30592128) Attached to: OnLive One Step Closer

Near the end of the video during the Q&A, they answered a bit about it. They actually created their own compression, then had encoding custom chips made for it.

Basically, video encoding hardware geared exactly to their new compression.
Robotics

The Best Robots of 2009 51

Posted by samzenpus from the best-of-show dept.
kkleiner writes "Singularity Hub has just unveiled its second annual roundup of the best robots of the year. In 2009 robots continued their advance towards world domination with several impressive breakouts in areas such as walking, automation, and agility, while still lacking in adaptability and reasoning ability. It will be several years until robots can gain the artificial intelligence that will truly make them remarkable, but in the meantime they are still pretty awesome."

Comment History (Score 2, Insightful) 211

by micksam7 (#30038568) Attached to: How Do You Evaluate a Data Center?

Look at a datacenter's history [recent and past], outages, maintenance issues, customer support, management and etc, in conjunction with their listed redundancies and capacities.

Just because they have two electrics going to each server, doesn't mean a random maintenance tech will flip the wrong switch. :)

Submission + - Trojan Kill Switches & the Israeli Attack on S (nytimes.com) 1

Submitted by Nrbelex
Nrbelex writes: The New York Times reports in this week's Science section that hardware and software trojan kill switches are an increasing concern, and may have already been used. 'A 2007 Israeli Air Force attack on a suspected partly constructed Syrian nuclear reactor led to speculation about why the Syrian air defense system did not respond to the Israeli aircraft. Accounts of the event initially indicated that sophisticated jamming technology was used to blind the radars. Last December, however, a report in an American technical publication, IEEE Spectrum, cited a European industry source in raising the possibility that the Israelis might have used a built-in kill switch to shut down the radars. Separately, an American semiconductor industry executive said in an interview that he had direct knowledge of the operation and that the technology for disabling the radars was supplied by Americans to the Israeli electronic intelligence agency, Unit 8200.'

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