33981365
submission
capedgirardeau writes:
Via Cory Doctorow at BoingBoing:
Ars Technica's Jon Brodkin has an in-depth look at the "Defensive Patent License," a kind of judo for the patent system created by ... EFF's Jason Schultz (who started EFF's Patent Busting Project) and ... Jen Urban (who co-created the ChillingEffects clearinghouse). As you'd expect from two such killer legal freedom fighters, the DPL is audacious, exciting, and wicked cool. It's a license pool that companies opt into, and members of the pool pledge not to sue one another for infringement. If you're ever being sued for patent infringement, you can get an automatic license to a conflicting patent just by throwing your patents into the pool. The more patent trolls threaten people, the more incentive there is to join the league of Internet patent freedom fighters.
21569478
submission
capedgirardeau writes:
AP: ...with [a] retired Bozeman engineer's 70th birthday approaching, disabled gamers say they fear there will be no one to replace Yankelevitz, who has sustained quadriplegic game controllers for 30 years almost entirely by himself. The retired aerospace engineer hand makes the controllers with custom parts in his Montana workshop, offering them at a price just enough to cover parts.
60854
submission
capedgirardeau writes:
I noticed that SparkFun has a very detailed dissection of the Wii remote with a description of all the ICs on the internal board. They even went so far as to remove the main EEPROM and squeeze out the binary information from the thing, the first step to effective hacking on the Wii-mote. This is for the serious geek who has a little electrical engineering experience or interest.
49646
submission
capedgirardeau writes:
By way of Declan McCullagh's Politech mailing this comes what many have suspected for a long time: The FBI can listen in on you via your turned off cell phone's mic. From his mailing list quoting a news.com.com story:
The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone's microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.
The technique is called a "roving bug," and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.
The U.S. Commerce Department's security office warns that "a cellular telephone can be turned into a microphone and transmitter for the purpose of listening to conversations in the vicinity of the phone." An article in the Financial Times last year said mobile providers can "remotely install a piece of software on to any handset, without the owner's knowledge, which will activate the microphone even when its owner is not making a call."
