Motorola wins sales ban on Xbox and Windows 7, but can't enforce it
Motorola Mobility has won an injunction preventing the sale of the Xbox 360 and Windows 7 from a German court.
Motorola can't enforce the injunction right away, however. Microsoft will appeal the ruling, and a US judge recently ruled that any injunction in Germany can't take effect until the related US court case is settled.
The ruling in Germany covers the Xbox 360, Windows 7, Internet Explorer, and Windows Media Player, resulting from Microsoft's alleged infringement of two standards-essential patents related to the H.264 video codec, the BBC reports today.
Microsoft told the BBC that the German ruling "is one step in a long process.... Motorola is prohibited from acting on today's decision, and our business in Germany will continue as usual while we appeal this decision and pursue the fundamental issue of Motorola's broken promise."
The "broken promise" Microsoft is referring to is Motorola's pledge to license standards-essential patents under so-called "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND)" terms. In response to the German ruling, Motorola said "We remain open to resolving this matter. Fair compensation is all that we have been seeking for our intellectual property."
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Amazon’s HPC cloud: supercomputing for the 99%
The Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud is becoming increasingly popular for high-performance computing. It's now capable of running many of the applications that previously required building out a large HPC cluster or renting time from a supercomputing center. But as you might expect, Amazon EC2 can’t do everything a traditional supercomputer can.
Scientific applications that require super-fast interconnects are still the reserve of the IBM Blue Genes and Cray supercomputers of the world. However, Amazon’s adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections in its high-end cluster compute instances have expanded the usefulness of EC2.
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Steganography: how al-Qaeda hid secret documents in a porn video
When a suspected al-Qaeda member was arrested in May of 2011 in Berlin, he was found with a memory card with a password-protected folder—and the files within it were hidden. But, as the German magazine Zeit reports, computer forensics experts from the German Federal Criminal Police (BKA) eventually uncovered its contents—what appeared to be a pornographic video called "KickAss."
Within that video, they discovered 141 separate text files, containing what officials claim are documents detailing al-Qaeda operations and plans for future operations—among them, three entitled "Future Works," "Lessons Learned," and "Report on Operations."
So just how does one store a terrorist’s home study library in a pirated porn video file? In this case the files had been hidden (unencrypted) within the video file through a well-known approach for concealing messages in plain sight: steganography.
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Xamarin releases XobotOS, the .NET-powered version of Android
A company has substantially ported Google's Java-based Android software to use C# and the .NET framework, a move that could be the first step towards creating an Android-like operating system that avoids legal entanglements with Oracle.
Android's primary application environment is based on the Java technology first developed by Sun, now owned by Oracle. Google's decision to use Java in Android has resulted in a decidedly inconvenient—and potentially expensive—copyright and patent lawsuit with Oracle. Java wasn't, however, the company's only option: it briefly considered, and then ignored, Microsoft's .NET runtime and C# programming language. Like Java, .NET and C# offer a convenient, modern, object-oriented language and API. Unlike Java, much of C# and .NET are covered by ISO standards, with legally binding commitments from Microsoft to not sue implementers of the specifications for patent infringement.
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One third of Firefox users vulnerable to known flaws; IE and Chrome continue to gain share
Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Google's Chrome both gained market share during April, with Mozilla Firefox and Apple's Safari losing out. The Firefox numbers are bad news for another reason, too: Firefox users are leaving themselves open to exploitation with about a third appearing to use obsolete, unpatched versions of the browser with known security flaws.
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French group sues because Google Suggest thinks Jon Hamm is Jewish
A French court is set to hear arguments on Wednesday from an anti-racism group fighting against Google Suggest search results. SOS Racisme and others have brought a lawsuit against Google over its feature that lets search terms for various celebrities, including Rupert Murdoch and Jon Hamm, be associated with the word "jew" through Google Suggest.
Over the weekend, an attorney with SOS Racisme, Patrick Klugman, told the Agence France Presse that Google Suggest has facilitated the "creation of what is probably the largest Jewish file in history."
"A great many number of users of France’s and the world’s number one search engine are confronted daily with the non-solicited and almost systematic association of the term ‘Jew’ with famous people in the world of politics, media, and business," the organizations allege.
In September 2011, the French group famously pressured Apple to remove the "Jew or not Jew" app from the iTunes store.
Europe 1, a French television channel, reports that there has been legal precedent in France over similar cases. In 2010, a Frenchman filed a suit because his name was systematiclaly associated with "satanist," "rapist," and "convicted." He won €1 in damages and €5,000 ($6,600) to recover his legal fees. The following year a Lyon company was able to win €50,000 ($66,000) for having its search results associated with a slang term for "cheater."
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New Firefox design will offer uniform look across desktop and mobile
Mozilla recently combined its desktop and mobile design teams with the aim of unifying the Firefox user experience across form factors. A presentation slide deck published by Mozilla’s Madhava Enros offers some insight into the design process and shows how the effort to boost Firefox’s visual cohesion aligns with Mozilla’s Kilimanjaro initiative.
Mozilla is aiming for a "soft, friendly, and human" design that will "feel like Firefox" across all supported platforms and form factors. The challenge will be blending the browser’s distinctive visual style with the conventions of the underlying platforms. The slide presentation includes mockups that show how the new design language will translate to various environments, including Android, Metro, B2G, and the conventional desktop.
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Not just the pirates: Brazilian rights holders indicted for ripping off artists
Fifteen officials of ECAD, the Brazilian organization in charge of collecting copyright licensing fees for music, face indictment after a Senate investigation there. The organization is the Brazilian counterpart to American collecting societies such as ASCAP and BMI. The Senate committee also recommended new legislation to overhaul the copyright licensing system in Brazil.
In the political arena, copyright debates are often portrayed as morality plays with industry incumbents as the good guys and file-sharing firms like Megaupload and the Pirate Bay wearing the black hats. Yet the controversy in Brazil is a useful reminder that the picture isn't always so black and white. Incumbents in Brazil and elsewhere have also skirted the law, taking money that rightfully belongs to artists or consumers.
Inside the black box
ECAD's senior leadership stands accused of embezzlement, fraud, and price-fixing. The Brazilian Senate panel described ECAD's collection system as a "black box" and noted that only 76 percent of the fees collected by the organization were passed on to artists.
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Nintendo's odd attempt to bridge the digital/retail sales divide
When Nintendo announced last week that it would soon start offering the majority of its retail 3DS and Wii U games as digital downloads, it represented a major change in policy for the company. But buried in the announcement was what could possibly be an even more significant change in Nintendo's relationship with brick and mortar retailers.
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Samsung, Apple continue smartphone market share tug-of-war
As Nokia continues to give up market share, Samsung and Apple are persisting in their tug-of-war to lay claim as the world's top smartphone vendor. And while Nokia's smartphone shipments have nosedived year-over-year for the first quarter, lagging overall sales have made Samsung the number one mobile vendor worldwide.
The overall mobile phone market declined slightly for the first quarter, with shipments down 1.5 percent according to market research firm IDC. Nokia, which had been the number one mobile phone vendor since IDC began tracking the market in 2004, has continued its slide in market share. With overall shipments down 23.8 percent year-over-year, it has now dropped to number two—still holding a respectable 20.8 percent market share.
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How a fake Justin Bieber "sextorted" hundreds of girls through Facebook
Police in Biloxi, Mississippi received a disturbing report in the summer of 2011: someone using the e-mail address dalton.powers1@yahoo.com had been contacting young girls in the area through Facebook. "Dalton" said he was new to Biloxi and was looking for friends. When girls aged 9-16 responded, he struck up conversations. These led quickly to a question game in which he asked the girls about their bra sizes, sexual experiences, and bodily imperfections.
When girls responded, Dalton then demanded that they go further and send him topless images. If they did not, he would take the information provided by the girls themselves and send it to their parents, friends, and school officials. Numerous girls complied, though some could only bring themselves to pose in their underwear. Nearly every shot came from the cameras on the cell phones each girl owned.
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New York City imposes new social media rules for teachers
On Monday, the New York City Department of Education published its first set of guidelines for the use of social media, underscoring the importance for teachers and staff to keep a clear distinction between the use of their personal and professional accounts.
"In an increasingly digital world, we seek to provide our students with the opportunities that multi-media learning can provide—which is why we should allow and encourage the appropriate and accepted use of these powerful resources," schools Chancellor Dennis Walcott said in an e-mail to principals, according to the Journal.
Mainly, teachers are expected to use common sense: inappropriate offline behavior would also be inappropriate online. However, teachers are being told that their interactions with students on professional social networking services will be monitored and that there is "no expectation of privacy," and that administrators and officials should have access to the professional accounts.
Starting this month, New York City will begin training sessions with teachers and will highlight "best practices."
Social media practices across educational institutions have been a mixed bag. The Associated Press reported last month that "at least 40 school districts nationwide have approved social media policies." They added that "Schools in New York City and Florida have disciplined teachers for Facebook activity, and Missouri legislators recently acquiesced to teachers' objections to a strict statewide policy."
Just this week, a school district in Delaware proposed new social media rules that would require teachers to unfriend students. Meanwhile, the Portland, Maine school district is now banning all social networking, chat sites, forums, and other sites from state-provided laptops.
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Blizzard to take up to 15 percent of Diablo III real-money auction house sales
Since its initial announcement last summer, Blizzard's decision to let Diablo III players buy and sell in-game items for real money through a centrally controlled, in-game auction house has drawn controversy. Today's announcement of the specific fees and conditions for those auctions seems unlikely to calm those angry that Blizzard is trying to "cash in" on the game's second-hand digital goods market.
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Massive offshore wind turbines to float in waters over a thousand feet deep
The US and UK last week announced plans to develop enormous floating offshore wind turbines that can be deployed in much deeper waters and further out to sea.
By being freed of the towers that would usually tether offshore wind turbines to the seabed, floating turbines are not restricted to the usual 60-meter (200-foot) depth limit, and instead can be located in waters several hundred meters deep. Not only does this increase the areas of sea and ocean that can be harvested for wind, it grants access to faster and more reliable winds. And because wind turbines can be located further from the coast, they can be positioned beyond the sight of inland communities that may be less than impressed by the insertion of a wind farm into their scenic coastal view.
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Skype replaces P2P supernodes with Linux boxes hosted by Microsoft (updated)
Microsoft has drastically overhauled the network running its Skype voice-over-IP service, replacing peer-to-peer client machines with thousands of Linux boxes that have been hardened against the most common types of hack attacks, a security researcher said.
The change, which Immunity Security's Kostya Kortchinsky said occurred about two months ago, represents a major departure from the design that has powered Skype for the past decade. Since its introduction in 2003, the network has consisted of "supernodes" made up of regular users who had sufficient bandwidth, processing power, and other system requirements to qualify. These supernodes then transferred data with other supernodes in a peer-to-peer fashion. At any given time, there were typically a little more than 48,000 clients that operated this way.
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2007 raids on console mod-chippers result in indictments nearly 5 years later
In a press release that went largely unnoticed last month (hat tip: GamePolitics), the Department of Justice announced indictments against ten individuals that were the subject of a nationwide raid targeting alleged video game console mod chip suppliers and sellers conducted nearly five years ago.
The ten individuals, who hail from Florida, New York, Texas, Ohio, Illinois, and Massachusetts, were the focus of "Operation Tangled Web," an industry-aided effort undertaken by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the summer of 2007. They've been charged with violating the Digital Millenium Copyright Act by trafficking in mod chips for the PlayStation 2, Nintendo Wii, Xbox, and Xbox 360, devices prosecutors say are "primarily designed to circumvent technological measures designed to effectively control access to a work copyrighted under Title 17 of the United States Code, for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain."
But defenders note that console mod chips have extensive legal uses as well, including the ability to let users run homebrew code, legal backups, and imported games on their hardware. For this reason, last year the Electronic Frontier Foundation formally requested (PDF) that the US Copyright Office exempt mod chips from DMCA enforcement, much as it has excepted "jailbroken" smartphones since 2010. A final ruling on that request is expected later this year.
In 2009, following an ICE investigation, Anaheim resident Matthew Lloyd Crippen became the first person to face DMCA charges for installing mod chips on the Xbox 360. Those charges were later dropped, thanks to issues surrounding the prosecution use of evidence.
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Feature: Bandwidth explosion: As Internet use soars, can bottlenecks be averted?
As the head of a bandwidth assessment group at the IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and past chairman of the IEEE's task force on 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit per second Ethernet, John D'Ambrosia is among the people who will help guide the world toward 400 Gigabit and even Terabit per second speeds. But will our capacity to deliver bandwidth keep up with the human race's ability to consume it?
"That's the question that keeps me up at night," said D'Ambrosia, who is also chairman of the Ethernet Alliance industry group and an engineering executive at Dell. "When we were doing the 100 Gigabit project, people were saying as soon as you get 100 Gigabit done, you need to start working on the next speed. We're past that knee of the curve and we're getting into real exponential growth."
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Symantec: Flashback botnet could generate up to $10k per day in ad clicks
Antivirus and security firm Symantec says the true motivation behind the massive Flashback malware infection is revenue—ad revenue, that is. In a post to its Security Response blog, Symantec wrote that a Flashback botnet has the potential to generate up to $10,000 per day in ad clicks, primarily impacting Google and bringing in "untold sums of money for the Flashback gang."
As outlined by Symantec, the ad-clicking component of Flashback runs in the browser (Safari, Chrome, and Firefox are all affected) where it redirects search queries to another page, generating an ad click for the attacker. "The ad click component parses out requests resulting from an ad click on Google Search and determines if it is on a whitelist," Symantec wrote. "If not, it forwards the request to the malicious server."
This technique (covered in more detail by the Symantec post) effectively bypasses Google's ability to receive credit for the ad click, instead resulting in the attackers receiving a payout.
Symantec points out that this technique isn't new, and that another botnet—W32.Xpaj.B—was able to generate up to $450 per day through a botnet of 25,000 infected machines. Since Flashback's numbers ballooned up into the hundreds of thousands—and may still be floating in that range—Symantec believes the revenues could easily be in the thousands. It's a good thing that Flashback Java vulnerability has been patched and Mac users can begin receiving updates directly from Oracle, right?
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Carbon storage capacity: there's plenty, but fracking may be wrecking some
Recent changes in the Earth's climate are primarily being driven by the burning of fossil fuels—that is, taking carbon from deep in the Earth, and dumping it into the atmosphere at breakneck speed. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just sort of… put it back?
That’s roughly the idea behind carbon capture and sequestration (CCS). Carbon dioxide is captured from the effluent of a large generator, like a coal power plant, and compressed into a supercritical liquid. That liquid is then transported via pipeline to an injection station where it’s pumped deep underground.
But the technique requires some very specific rock formations if we expect the carbon to stay there. Two new studies have looked at how much CO2 we could hope to store, and how that storage may be affected by another process that's booming: fracking.
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RIM takes the wraps off BlackBerry 10 OS, shows off camera and keyboard
RIM showed off elements of its upcoming BlackBerry 10 operating system at the BlackBerry World 2012 conference Tuesday. The QNX-based BB10 will include some slick new gesture-based navigations, a new keyboard, and some interesting camera functionality. The new software development kit also includes features that should make porting and developing apps easier for developers.
Keyboards have always been central to the BlackBerry brand, though RIM hasn't adapted so well to the move to touch-based interfaces. The new virtual keyboard interface is able to adapt to the typing habits of users, and uses SwiftKey-like technology seen on the QNX-based BlackBerry PlayBook that lets users swipe backward to delete whole words, or swipe forward to fill in partially typed ones. Upward swipes on the keyboard will change its layout to make symbols or numbers accessible.
The use of gestures extends to the multitasking front. In BB10, users can swipe left to right across the whole screen to view other apps that are running in the background, and use the swipe to settle on a background application if desired.
Another intriguing feature is in the camera app, meant to compensate for people who aren't good at timing photos. If users time a photo incorrectly, they are able to page backward in time on the camera to an earlier version of the photo, as if the camera was taking shots continuously before the shutter button was actually pressed.
On the developer side, the BlackBerry native SDK has a C/C++ app framework, and should allow users to port OpenGL-based apps easily, according to RIM. A new set of development tools named Cascades that use C/C++ and the Qt framework will provide developers with standard UI elements, similar to what they've been able to get with Android or iOS, which will help speed along the development process.
BB10 is available for developers as of today, though the first BB10 phone is not set for launch until October.
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Treyarch's futuristic Black Ops sequel leaked for Nov. 13 release
Activision seemed all set to officially reveal the first details about the inevitable sequel to 2010's Call of Duty: Black Ops in a commercial message during tonight's NBA playoffs. An itchy-trigger finger from the publisher's Web department seems to have stolen some of that thunder, though, as the game's UK teaser site has launched to reveal a November 13 launch date for the game.
Though the game's first official trailer is still hidden behind YouTube privacy settings, the teaser site does reveal that the new title will "propel players into a near future, 21st Century Cold War, where technology and weapons have converged to create a new generation of warfare." A Joystiq tipster also apparently did some light flie-system hacking to unearth some screenshots of the game, showing off gun-mounted quad-copter drones and some sort of camouflaged walking tank fighting in front of smoke-blackened, wrecked cityscapes.
Developer Treyarch will once again be taking the reins for Black Ops 2, after Sledgehammer Games took the lead in developing last year's Modern Warfare 3. The Treyarch-developed Black Ops immediately became one of the best-selling games of all time when it launched in November 2010, selling 8.4 million copies in the US a single month before going on to sell over 25 million copies worldwide.
Black Ops 2's November 13 launch puts it one week after the launch of Microsoft's Halo 4, and well past a slew of anticipated holiday season releases currently set for September and October.
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Firefox "security" add-on exposes users' Web browsing history
A Firefox add-on that gives users the ability to collect information on the IP address, server hostname and other related data for websites they visit also has the added bonus feature of reporting the same information on every site visited to a third-party server, SophosLabs reports. The ShowIP add-on exposes the full Web-browsing history of its users to the add-on's back-end service—and anyone who can intercept the unencrypted packets.
Sophos' Graham Cluely writes that he was alerted to the problem by a reader, who found a recent update to the ShowIP add-on sends the full URL of sites visited in unencrypted form—including those visited using HTTP Secure and in "private browsing" mode—to a Web server at api.ip2info.org, without alerting the user. The behavior is a potential privacy threat to users of the service, because the data leaked by the add-on could be used by anyone sharing the network they are on to reconstruct their Internet browsing history.
The issue has been reported on the add-on's Google Code project page, but there has been no response.
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Expanding an optical lattice to accelerate particles
Accelerating neutral particles is a challenge. Unlike electrons or ions, researchers can't easily manipulate the velocities of particles like un-ionized atoms or molecules with electric or magnetic fields—the tool of choice in particle accelerators and mass spectrometers. Although accelerating charged particles is easier, it's tough to keep slow-moving ones under control. And that's unfortunate, because streams of relatively slow particles, whether neutral or charged, are extremely useful for studying chemical reactions, fabrication of new materials, and so forth.
In a nice twist on laser trapping and cooling, in which photons are used to slow down and confine particles, C. Maher-Williams, P. Douglas, and P.F. Barker have used laser light to accelerate neutral particles in a highly controlled way. Using two interfering laser beams, the researchers generated an optical lattice to organize particles, and then adjusted the lattice properties to start them moving. Since this acceleration method doesn't rely on the electric charge of the particles involved, it works for neutral atoms and allows for manipulating large molecules.
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Feature: "Free babysitting": how would-be pedophiles use Craigslist—and how they get caught
Craigslist classified ads may have kneecapped the newspaper business, but they are doing wonders for amateur comedians, finders of false teeth, and fashioners of crucifix-shaped guitars played by men dressed as Funky Jesus.
"I am an atheist seeking friends who are pious and who will be wisked away for the rapture that kirk cameron says is coming may 22nd 2011," said one obviously humorous ad last year. "I get to keep all your stuff because you won't need them as you will be in rapturous bliss basking in the love of the great creator. I, however, will need your stuff since I will be trapped here on earth with all the rest of the unclean, deniers, and cravens."
But most unbelievable posts concern sex. A famous find from 2008 instructed any interested woman to arrive at a certain hotel, walk into a certain room (the door would be open), and lie down naked on the bed with posterior in the air. The woman was to pick up the NES controller lying there and start up Super Mario Bros. The man who posted the ad—hiding in the bathroom until this point—said he would only come out when the game had begun.
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Fair use or "first excuse"? Oracle v. Google goes to the jury
The Oracle-Google copyright showdown is now in the hands of a San Francisco jury, following heated closing arguments given today to a packed courtroom. It's the culmination of the most high-profile attack on Google's Android mobile operating system, which Oracle lawyers say illegally ripped off Java.
In closing today, Oracle lawyer Michael Jacobs said that Google knowingly structured its Android APIs in the same way that Java APIs were structured, even though it knew that move was legally dicey; Google's lawyer, meanwhile, emphasized Android's originality and the fact that Sun Microsystems, which invented Java, had only good things to say about Android, even encouraging Google.
In addition to arguing that it didn't infringe Sun's copyrights at all, Google argued any use it did make should be considered "fair use." Jacobs ridiculed the fair use argument, saying it was merely Google's "first excuse."
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