49176927
submission
ectoman writes:
This week, a coalition of more than 40 companies sent a letter to Congress asking for legislation that expands the Covered Business Method (CBM) program, a move some feel would stem patent abuse in the United States. Expanding the scope of CBM—a program that grants the Patent and Trademark Office the power to challenge the validity of certain business methods patents—would expedite the patent review process and significantly cut litigation costs, they say. "The vague and sweeping scope of many business method claims covering straight forward, common sense steps has led to an explosion of patent claims against processes used every day in common technologies by thousands of businesses and millions of Americans," says the letter, signed by companies like Amazon, Netflix, Red Hat, Macy's, and Kroger).
24138240
submission
glittermage writes:
The WSJ reports on an ongoing case regarding alleged "Hacker" Daniel David Rigmaiden regarding the governments tools used to track mobile devices with or without a warrant. The Judge may allow Daniel to defend himself against the governments claims by putting the technology into the light. Sounds good to me.
14523218
submission
JoshuaInNippon writes:
Move over Blu-ray. Japanese researchers from Sony and Tohoku University announced the development of a "blue-violet ultrafast pulsed semiconductor laser," which Sony is aiming to use for disk. The new technology, with "a laser wavelength of 405 nanometers in the blue-violet region" and a power out put "more than a hundred times the world'(TM)s highest output value for conventional blue-violet pulse semiconductor lasers," is believe to be capable of holding more than 20 times the information of current Blu-ray technology, while retaining a practical size. Japanese news reports have speculated that one blue-violet disk could be capable of holding more than 50 high-quality movie titles, easily fitting entire seasons of popular TV shows like 24. When the technology may hit markets was not indicated.
1293447
submission
marshotel writes:
European law-enforcement officials uncovered a highly sophisticated credit-card fraud ring that funnels account data to Pakistan from hundreds of grocery-store card machines across Europe, according to U.S. intelligence officials and other people familiar with the case.
Specialists say the theft technology is the most advanced they have seen, and a person close to British law enforcement said it has affected big retailers including a British unit of Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Tesco Ltd.
1230583
submission
ruphus13 writes:
There are still places on the world where having anonymity might mean the difference between life and death. In other walks, covering ones tracks is considered to be of such paramount importance, that we are now witnessing the rise of a Linux distro catered to just those folk. The alpha version of ParanoidLinux is now out. But is this the best way to protect oneself? Couldn't that be easily circumvented? The article states, "Why is it necessary to put the applications and services designed to protect anonymity, to encrypt files, to make the user nameless and faceless, all together, in one distribution? Let's think in a truly paranoid manner. Wouldn't it be far easier for a nefarious government organization to target that distribution's repositories, mirror that singular distribution's disk images with files of its own design, and leave every last one of that distribution's users in the great wide open?" What should the truly paranoid user do?
1230487
submission
MazzThePianoman writes:
Steve Fossett left behind secret vessel project called the Deep Space Challenger. The winged submersible being designed by Hawkes Ocean Technologies was going to be capable of traveling to the very bottom of the ocean floor including the The Mariana Trench. Testing was completed at Department of Defense facilities. Field testing was only four weeks away when Fossett's untimely death then put the project on hold.
1227501
submission
nerdyH writes:
Dell is preparing to ship two enterprise-oriented Windows Vista notebooks with an interesting feature — a built-in TI OMAP (smartphone) processor that can power instantly into Linux. The "Latitude ON" feature is said to offer "multi-day" battery life, while letting users access email, the web, contacts, calendar, and so on, using the notebook's full-size screen and keyboard. I wonder if someday we'll just be able to plug our phones into our laptops, switching to the phone's processor when we need to save battery life? Or, maybe x86 will just get a lot more power-efficient. Speaking at MontaVista's Vision event today, OLPC spokesperson and longtime kernel hacker Deepak Saxena said the project is aiming for 10-20 hours of battery life during active use, on existing hardware (AMD Geode LX800 clocked at 500MHz, with 1GB of Flash and 256MB of RAM). Interesting times.
