46403915
submission
ais523 writes:
The Federal Circuit has divided CLS Bank vs. Alice Corp., a case about various sorts of patents, including software patents. Although the judges disagreed, to a lesser or greater extent, on the individual parts of the ruling, eventually, more than half decided that the patents in question — algorithms for hedging risk — were ineligible patent matter, and that merely adding an "on a computer"-like clause to an abstract algorithm does not make it patentable. Coverage is available at Patently-O and Groklaw, or you can read the opinion itself.
4186327
submission
ais523 writes:
Wikipedia (and other websites run by Wikimedia) have requested to opt-out from Phorm; according to the email they sent (quoted here), they "consider the scanning and profiling of our visitors' behavior by a third party to be an infringement on their privacy."
347169
submission
ais523 writes:
As reported by Tectonic, South Africa's new Mininimum Interoperability Standards for Information Systems in government (MIOS) explain the new rules for which data formats will be used by the government; according to that document, all people working for the South African government must be able to read OpenDocument Format documents by March, and the government aims to use one of its three approved document formats (UTF-8 or ASCII plain text, CSV, or ODF) for all its published documents by the end of 2008. A definition of 'open standard' is also included that appears to rule out OOXML at present (requiring 'multiple implementations', among other things that may also rule it out).
