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Intel

Submission + - I, for one, welcome our new patent overlords (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: A significant event took place yesterday: potentially the biggest software patent troll of all has finally woken from its slumbers: Today Intellectual Ventures enforced its rights and filed patent infringement complaints in the US District Court of Delaware against companies in the software security; dynamic random access memory (DRAM) and Flash memory; and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) industries. Intellectual Ventures was founded by Microsoft, Intel and a Seattle based lawfim.
United Kingdom

Submission + - Cloud will create thousands of IT jobs (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: Cloud adoption could help the UK achieve economic benefits of £100.7 billion over the six-year period from 2010 to 2015, according to a study by the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR). Cloud could also create thousands of new jobs, says CEBR. In the UK, 289,000 jobs are expected to be generated cumulatively over the 2010 to 2015 period, contributing to the more than 2.3 million jobs that are expected to be created across France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK. The net annual figure for all five economies is forecast to be 446,000 new jobs.
Privacy

Submission + - Wikileaks Julian Assange arrested in London (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: The UK Metropolitan Police arrested the 39-year old founder of Wikipedia this morning on the basis of a European Arrest Warrant, as he voluntarily turned himself into a police station. He will appear in Westminster Magistrates’ Court later. Assange is accused by the Swedish authorities of sexually assaulting two women. He has said the charges are wrong and are part of a campaign against him as Wikileaks reveals a raft of confidential government communications.
The Military

Sarah Palin 'Target WikiLeaks Like Taliban' 1425

Posted by CmdrTaco from the name-calling dept.
DMandPenfold writes "Sarah Palin, who is widely tipped as a possible Republican candidate for president in 2012, has said WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange should be hunted down in the way armed forces are targeting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda." So that means we should spend billions of dollars and not catch him? Good plan.
Facebook

Submission + - Will Mark Zuckerberg Prove He's Open Source's BFF? (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: Facebook Messages integrates with Microsoft Office, but open source has been overlooked. Glyn Moody calls on the open source community to petition Mark Zuckerberg to encourage Facebook to support open formats. "Put bluntly, Mr Zuckerberg owes open source a big 'thank you' — or, rather, 41 billion of them."
News

Submission + - Modeling software showed BP cement as unstable (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by DMandPenfold
DMandPenfold writes: Advanced modelling software analysed the cementing conditions for BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil well as unstable, days before the blast that killed 11 oil rig workers and let millions of barrels of oil spill into the Gulf of Mexico.

Halliburton, the company that carried out the cement job, used its own modelling software called OptiCem, to support arguments that more stability...
Security

Submission + - Man loses $20 million after taking laptop for repa (techworld.com)

Submitted by ChiefMonkeyGrinder
ChiefMonkeyGrinder writes: A New York couple have been charged with defrauding a wealthy musician to the tune of $20 million (£12.3 million) after he innocently visited their computer servicing company to have a virus removed from his laptop. The couple cooked up a bizarre plot involving Opus Dei — the Catholic organisation central to The Da Vinci Code — in order to extort the musician out of money.
Google

Submission + - UK to Repeat US Mistakes with Patents? (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by Glyn Moody
Glyn Moody writes: Alongside British Prime Minister David Cameron's surprise announcement that he wanted to make UK copyright law "fit for the internet age" was a comment from David Willetts, the UK science and universities minister, who said: "The US rule is that 'anything man has invented under the sun you should be able to patent'. That's something we do wish to investigate." Unfortunately, he seems to be under the impression that Google built its success through being "able to patent some work", when in fact, Google has relatively few patents compared to other companies like Microsoft, say. Is the UK about to suffer problems of overburdened examiners approving too many weak patents that then lead to patent thickets and spiralling levels of litigation, as has happened in the US? What would you say to discourage him from taking this step?
Google

Submission + - Google sues government agency over Microsoft bias (computerworlduk.com)

Submitted by superapecommando
superapecommando writes: Google and a reseller of its products have filed a lawsuit against the US Department of the Interior after the agency solicited bids for cloud-based email and messaging services specifying that bidders must use Microsoft products.

Google and reseller Onix Networking filed the lawsuit against the DOI Friday in the US Court of Federal Claims. The contract, for up to $59.3 million over five years, tells bidders they must deploy Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite-Federal (BPOS) package to deliver the services.

The Microsoft requirement is "unduly restrictive of competition" and violates federal contracting law, Google and Onix said in their complaint. The DOI, despite promising to look at alternatives to the Microsoft package, issued an August 30 request for bids constituting "a sole source procurement that is arbitrary and capricious, an abuse of discretion and otherwise contrary to law," the complaint said.
Security

Submission + - Antivirus guy admits scanning is useless (techworld.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: US antivirus vendor Webroot has bought UK-based Prevx in an acquisition that looks like the latest symptom of the growing dissatisfaction among security companies with the current signature-based scanning model for detecting malware.

On the face of it a 20-person software security company based in Derby is an unlikely bride for an ambitious US outfit looking to grow. But since its founding as long ago as 2001, Prevx has been a pioneer of the application fingerprinting technology that in the cloud services era has suddenly become ultra-fashionable.

Application fingerprinting is a very different approach than signature-based detection, and is based on separating the thousands of known good apps from unknown and suspect ones. Any unknown programs encountered are compared to fingerprints in a cloud database to determine whether they are harmful and if they can't be identified at all they are blocked as a precaution.

Submission + - Traders convicted for outsmarting broker algorithm

Submitted by E5Rebel
E5Rebel writes: Men beat machines. Norwegian traders, Svend Egil Larsen and Peder Veiby, were handed suspended prison sentences and fines for market manipulation after outsmarting the trading system of Timber Hill, which is a unit of US-based Interactive Brokers.The two men managed to work out how the computerised system would react to certain trading patterns. This allowed them to influence the price of low-volume stocks and profit from it.Is this a crime or a something to celebrate?

http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/security/3244186/norwegian-traders-convicted-for-outsmarting-us-stock-broker-algorithm/

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