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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Doesn't play here .. | 336 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
MS Commitment to Compliance news pick
Authored by: naka on Thursday, March 21 2013 @ 05:53 AM EDT
Just wanted to comment on this:
[PJ: When you think of Microsoft, that's the first thing you think of, isn't it?
The highest legal and ethical business standards?]

Well, I can certainly believe that they were high when they thought up their
standards. Also when writing that blog post.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

UK Government Mandates OSS
Authored by: ukjaybrat on Thursday, March 21 2013 @ 08:37 AM EDT
smartcompany

osswatch

computerweekly

---
IANAL

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Doesn't play here ..
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 21 2013 @ 09:02 AM EDT
"Vp8 IPR (video) RTCWEB II WG meeting - THURSDAY, March 14, 2013." link

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Dizzying but Invisible Depth - You Just Went to the Google Homepage
Authored by: lnuss on Thursday, March 21 2013 @ 09:13 AM EDT
Wow! This is a superb article, and should be required reading for judges,
lawyers, PTO folks, etc. etc.

Though I knew most of what he writes (up to a point), I don't normally think of
it in this fashion -- it really points up the complexity and interaction of the
various technologies involved.

Thanks for putting this in newspicks -- it triggered some additional
thoughts/awareness.

---
Larry N.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Schmidt Explains Why He Went to N. Korea
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 21 2013 @ 04:44 PM EDT
[T]he Google executive explained he went to Pyongyang on a mission to spread the good news about the power of the Internet.
...
There’s no proof yet, but many people in South Korea and elsewhere believe yesterday’s attacks against broadcasters and banks, which crippled 32,000 servers in the South, have North Korean fingerprints.
Bloomberg

Looks like the N Koreans are already perfectly aware of the power of the internet. There's also this bizarre twist:
It is important to note that this attack worked only on computers with disabled DEP ( data execution prevention ).

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

"Google is no good at being evil"
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 21 2013 @ 05:07 PM EDT
I have to disagree. Google was very good at being evil when they helped to
destroy USENET. They linked Google Groups to it, without ever doing anything
about the massive spam influx coming from Google Groups into USENET. And they
couldn't care less.

Today USENET is just a big garbage bin, not the least thanks to Google.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Google is no good at being evil
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 21 2013 @ 07:30 PM EDT
For God's sake everyone. It's just another RSS reader. There are lots of them
around. Just install one on your PC or tablet and read the news.

I can't believe all the people who blow hot air about cookies and privacy but
demand to give all their reading history to Google in an easy to analyse form.
Take control of your life and just install a reader like everyone else does.

I use Lifrea on Ubuntu (12.04). It works very nice and integrates well with
Unity (which is also very nice). If you are using a legacy OS like Mac OS/X or
MS Windows, I'm sure there are equivalents available for them as well.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Vp8 IPR (video) RTCWEB II WG meeting
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 21 2013 @ 09:41 PM EDT
I can't play this ... link

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The United States V Auernheimer...
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 22 2013 @ 06:26 AM EDT

On Monday, Andrew Auernheimer was sentenced to serve 41 months in prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Auernheimer’s case has received a lot of press attention, and I think that attention is merited: I think the case against Auernheimer is deeply flawed, and that the principles the case raises are critically important for civil liberties online. For that reason, I have agreed to represent Auernheimer pro bono in his appeal before the Third Circuit. (I will be joined by the trial counsel Tor Ekeland and his colleagues Nace Naumoski and Mark Jaffe, together with Marcia Hofmann and Hanni Fakhoury of EFF.) In this post, I want to explain some of the issues in play in this case that I think make it so important.

While CFAA is part of the problem, a larger part is the incentives to prosecutors to abuse the law. Carmen Ortiz comes to mind.

While Prosecutors hold office by election, this sort of thing is inevitable.

Wayne
http://madhatter.ca

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Windows RT
Authored by: jrl on Friday, March 22 2013 @ 10:08 AM EDT
I was very interested to see this quote:
"Windows RT will also be a strong platform for tablets"

Strong compared to Windows 8? Strongly smelling?

For my purposes, it is a very strong contender for
the bottom of the list of things I might want on my
tablet.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

They've got PONIES!!!
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 22 2013 @ 07:52 PM EDT
Canonical and Chinese Ubuntu

See also ExtremeTech and Kylin homepage (Chinese)

This story has a few points for nitpickers to knock.
1. Whatever happened to Red Flag Linux? My utterly non-scientific observations in China last year indicated over 90% of desktop machines in homes, retail, and including the China Rail booking system, run Windows XP. A few knowledgeable users had updated to Win7.

2. The "English" name of kylin takes the Cantonese pronunciation of the Chinese characters 麒麟 (sorry geeklog will turn those to html entities). Pinyin is qílín, the first character pronounced chee with rising tone is a mythical auspicious beast, the second character pronounced lin also with rising tone is a female unicorn. The Chinese government has recently tightened its enforcement of the use of mandarin pronunciation in schools and public offices throughout China.

3. Kylin was developed by academics at the National University of Defense Technology, PRC, and was based on Mach and FreeBSD (MacOS?). Given the current US paranoia about the role of the PLA in cybersecurity, where does this place Canonical now as a valid Linux vendor in the US?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Monsanto’s Death Patents
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, March 22 2013 @ 10:37 PM EDT

Monsanto& #146;s Death Patents

Other variations on this theme include pollen from Monsanto corn (similarly dominant in the U.S. market) pollinating a farmer's crop, or seeds from Monsanto-engineered grains being distributed by animals, winds, or waterways and commingling with non-GMO plantings. In each case, Monsanto could have a cause of action against an unwitting farmer by claiming patent infringement.

Isn't Monsanto polluting someone else's fields in that case? Shouldn't Monsanto be the one being sued?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

News picks
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, March 23 2013 @ 02:40 PM EDT
Prenda allegedly distributes movies, then files lawsuits against those who download them

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Judge says Xbox doesn't infringe Google patent
Authored by: tknarr on Saturday, March 23 2013 @ 06:05 PM EDT

Judge says Xbox doesn't infringe Google patent

I see PJ's comment about the judges trying to avoid the stupidity and the pain that goes with it. IMO that's the problem. What I've found in my career is fairly simple: problems don't get solved until they become a personal problem for whoever has the authority to order them solved. So, the patent system allows for stupidity that'd disrupt things severely for everybody? Stop trying to work around it and rule exactly as the law requires, and block imports of every single product that's entitled to be blocked under the law. Let the pain be felt. I guarantee you, as soon as the politicians are faced with a situation where the patent system is causing enough pain for their constituents, you'll see the politicians dropping the patent lobby like a hot potato. When your average Joe finds out he can't get the latest appealing Samsung or HTC phone because Apple has a patent on a rectangular case with rounded corners, supporting that will overnight become political suicide. And you'll see the situation change.

Think "work to rule".

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

News pick: Reactions on reddit to Nokia's threat re patents on Google's Vp8
Authored by: webster on Saturday, March 23 2013 @ 10:10 PM EDT


Judging by the length of Nokia's patent list, it looks like the Monopoly cared only secondarily about selling their OS on Nokia phones. It looks like some of these patents may be compromised if Symbian can be argued to contain any of their functionality. Google should be able to defend with some open source FUD at least. Look at this:
The current form of Symbian is an open-source platform developed by Symbian Foundation in 2009, as the successor of the original Symbian OS. Symbian was used by many major mobile phone brands, like Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and above all by Nokia. It was the most popular smartphone OS on a worldwide average until the end of 2010, when it was overtaken by Android.
Wikipedia. PJ wrote about this and don't be surprised if she spins a new article before this comment issues. Nokia let the cat out of the bag before Elop and the Monopoly. Have they developed an "Oracular Blind Spot" of open source licenses? Imagine their own experts opining whether Nokia's patents apply to Symbian as well as Android with the same functionality. Can Nokia do ten years of litigation if they are not a Delaware corporation?

When googling for the Symbian license history, the following appears:

Not Found The requested URL /blog/2011/04/04/not-open-source-just- open-for-business/ was not found on this server. Microsoft-IIS/7.5 Server at symbian.nokia.com Port 80
Are they starting to take the evidence down? This is a real struggle of the titans. Nokia is a pawn. Take-backs are not favored in the law.

~webster~

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Janet Reno Recruiting Hackers, some more notes
Authored by: Anonymous on Monday, March 25 2013 @ 09:53 PM EDT
Dear Ms Reno:

If you want to recruit anyone with real integrity and talent, you will need to
have Mr Holder and his team go after some executives with the same zeal his team
has with the "hackers". It might also be worth granting immunity to
and publicly celebrating and/or privately thanking some of those that hack into
notably insecure systems.

If you want to actually secure computers, begin with the idea that the
foundations of computer operating system security are, at the moment,
fundamentally flawed, and, without an upgrade to the basic principles, none of
the currently popular operating systems can possibly be made even reasonably
secure in the sense that the owner is certain that he or she is aware of and in
control of all activities of his or her computer. To even make that possible,
the operating system must fundamentally distrust as many of its components and
programs as possible and yet minimize the inconvenience to the owner. It must
also provide convenient ways of effectively filtering the noise that distrust
will create, and provide convenient and reliable control over every part by the
system owner. Simplification will be an important part of that convenience.

I am afraid this lesson will only be driven home by a major disaster. I hope it
won't be rendered moot by a second "Carrington Event"(huge solar flare
followed by geomagnetic storm) that destroys a big piece of the utility power
grid.

I speak as an embedded systems programmer and electronics engineer, with about
20 years of professional experience. I simply cannot afford to actually look at
and understand the source code for the tools I use daily -- I must ship a
working product.

This is not to say that moving people away from totally insecure proprietary
operating systems such as Windows that don't take security at all seriously
isn't part of the short-term solution.

However, I do not believe that any popular and widely available system is
designed to distrust, audit, and control the software it is running as much as
possible and is prepared to deal well with applications or other components that
get out of bounds, especially working applications designed to send out small
and/or steganographic messages.

Windows is simply too complex, and has a long history of viruses. Other
operating systems take security much more seriously -- Linux is probably too
complex and loads unsecured drivers, Android has better policies on top of
Linux, Chrome is probably secure if you don't mind sending your info to Google,
iOS is proprietary and demands a credit card and the answers to sensitive
personal questions even if you don't intend to spend money.

(Christenson)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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