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Android

Submission + - Dispute Damages Would Exceed Android Revenues (computerworld.com)

Submitted by
CWmike
CWmike writes: "A new document in a year-old patent lawsuit filed by Oracle against Google over Android intellectual property suggests Oracle could be seeking huge damages from Google. The damages owed to Oracle, if granted by federal Judge William Alsup for the U.S. District Court for Northern California, would 'far exceed any money Google has ever earned with Android' and could lead to a rewrite of Android's Dalvik virtual machine, considered integral to Android and used by Android device manufacturers and potentially thousands of Android app developers, wrote one blogger, Florian Mueller, who writes about intellectual property issues involving the software industry."
Government

Submission + - Internet Access is a Human Right, UN Report Says (discovermagazine.com)

Submitted by purkinje
purkinje writes: Disconnecting people from the internet is a violation of human rights and is against international law, says a UN report released yesterday. The report comes just after several governments in the Middle East restricted internet access during unrest there, and a year after France and the UK passed three-strikes laws to disconnect users illegally sharing files. People have a right to both dimensions of internet access, the report says: unfettered access to content and the technology and infrastructure needed to get online in the first place.

Submission + - Most Websites Exclude 'Home' from Navi (promediacorp.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Mechanical Turks were asked to visit the Alexa top 500 and report back whether there was a home button in the site's navigation. Study found that 63% of sites do not contain a link to the homepage in the nav bar.
DRM

Submission + - DRM is counterproductive (techrepublic.com)

Submitted by dwreid
dwreid writes: It's interesting to see a mainstream technical site such as TechRepublic call out that DRM provides no benefit but does increase costs and punish legitimate customers.
Businesses

Submission + - Does Reputation Matter? (thenation.com)

Submitted by
SilasMortimer
SilasMortimer writes: "In a recent article at "The Nation", a member of a group protesting the Win America Campaign is quoted in response to why they focus their protests on Apple, one of many companies supporting the campaign:

“Most of the other companies aren’t really gonna give a damn if we go after them. They’re not concerned for their reputation. [With Apple] there’s a little more leverage,” [says] US Uncut spokesperson Joanne Gifford.

Putting aside the politics of the contents, is there any worth in this kind of tactic or is it simple naivete?"

Submission + - Supreme Court Removes "Willful Ignorance" Defense (scotusblog.com)

Submitted by Windrip
Windrip writes: The Supremes provide yet another way for patent holders to crush their opponents.
Consider the affirmation of the Federal Court ruling in Global Tech Appliances, Inc. v. SEB S.A.. This decision has ramifications far beyond the infringement:

The plaintiff SEB (the respondent in this case) holds a patent on a design for a deep-fat fryer; the defendant Global Tech (here, the petitioner) reverse-engineered SEBâ(TM)s fryer and marketed a competing fryer.

You really want to rethink your "I don't read patents to avoid damages" strategy: The U.S. Supreme Court has now flat-lined that advice

But the remainder of the opinion is quite interesting. Adopting a suggestion from the oral argument, the Court (with only Justice Kennedy dissenting) held that the judgment of the Federal Circuit nevertheless could be affirmed on the basis of Global Techâ(TM)s willful blindness.
... What is novel about this (and what will make this one of the most commonly cited decisions of the Term) is the Court's explanation for the first time that criminal statutes which require proof of knowing or willful conduct are satisfied by proof of willful blindness.
Cloud

Submission + - Lessons from the Amazon Cloud Outage (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Back in April, major startups were hit by Amazon’s cloud storm: Dropbox, Foursquare, Quora, HootSuite and many more. All of them went down and stayed down, some for days.
Amazon pioneered the cheap, scalable and convenient hosting of Web-based services, unleashing a flood of new companies whose entire business model is based around the Amazon cloud.

The storm, however, showed the world that the cloud — while great — does not absolve companies from taking fundamental precautions to safeguard their systems online.

Cloud computing is in its ascendency. Apple announced its iCloud initiative this week, joining in a fierce competition for users with Microsoft and Google as well as conventional Web hosting providers such as Rackspace.

Your disaster recovery, backup and policy review plans need to be audited and tested. The next major cloud outage will almost certainly not be like the one experienced before. While enjoying the many benefits of cloud computing, it would do well to go back to some old-school IT policies and procedures that you probably threw out as “useless.”

With great advances in cloud computing come great responsibilities of redundancy and diversity. Those who fail to heed this essential truth are dancing with a disaster of their own making.

Submission + - The War On Photography: Legal Analysis (ssrn.com)

Submitted by YIAAL
YIAAL writes: We've seen increasing numbers of stories about photographers facing arrest or assault by police and security officers simply for taking pictures — often pictures of law enforcement misconduct. Although photographers have a legal right to take pictures in pretty much any public place, this article by Morgan Manning concludes that the legal remedies for violations of that right are inadequate and often entirely unworkable. Is law-enforcement education the solution, or do we need new civil rights laws — maybe with attorney fees and heavy damages — to protect photographers from being hassled?

Comment Re:Finding of fact? (Score 2) 298

by SilasMortimer (#36277422) Attached to: FDA Sued To Stop Antibiotic Abuse On Factory Farms

People can be amazingly adept at "contesting" science they don't like. See: creationism, vaccines causing autism, climate change denial, or (a few decades ago) cigarettes being harmless.

(Emphasis mine.)

I can never understand when people say that. Sure, when people were looking to sue the tobacco companies, it made sensible strategy to claim that they never knew smoking was bad for them, but it's hard to understand why people believed that outside of the case. I mean, my mother was born in the 1930s and was told they were bad for her.

Submission + - Ditching the cell phone for VOIP

Submitted by claar
claar writes: I'm almost always near a Wi-Fi connection, so I'm about to cancel my phone service, grab a mobile hotspot with a low data cap for those rare occasions when I'm not near Wi-Fi, and use one of the various apps for calling POTS lines. I figure my wife and I will end up paying $40 to $60/month — a far cry from our current charges.

Has anyone else done this? What apps and mobile hotspots have worked well for you? I just don't understand why I don't hear about more people doing this — enlighten me?
Movies

Submission + - Vincentennial: The Celebration of a Horror Icon (vincentennial.com)

Submitted by
SilasMortimer
SilasMortimer writes: "May 27th will be the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vincent Price. There is an ongoing celebration in his hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, appropriately called the Vincentennial, held by Cinema St. Louis. Whether you're a horror nerd or a general movie nerd, this is a good time to pull out a copy of "The Abominable Dr. Phibes" or some other favorite and enjoy a night of Mr. Price's delightful, over-the-top villainy. What is your particular favorite?"

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