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Turkey Revenge
The turkeys are pissed this Thanksgiving they are seeking revenge.
Germs Infest 60% of Americas Phones
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Smartphone Sanitizing: A Practical Guide
Securely erase personal data from your old smartphone before recycling. Protect your identity from hackers—easy steps to follow.
Why Soft Skills Matter in Today’s Job Market
Boost your career with essential soft skills like communication, teamwork, and emotional intelligence. Learn why they’re crucial for workplace success.
Patent Trolls Going After Users
Patent trolls have changed their tactics by going after users according to TechEye. Patent trolls have realized that taking on big companies with large legal teams is a risky prospect so they have started looking for softer targets. Ars Technica is reporting the case of Steven Vicinanza and BlueWave, who received a letter ordering him to pay $1,000 per employee for a license for some “distributed computer architecture” patents.
The blog says the troll in question, “Project Paperless LLC.” claims to have a patent covering the ability to scan documents to e-mail and was demanding money with legal menaces. If BlueWave paid, the troll would have collected $130,000. BlueWave was not the only company the troll went after. Lots of other small and medium companies were being hit.
Steven Hill, a partner at Hill, Kertscher & Wharton, an Atlanta law firm represented Project Paperless. The attorney told Mr. Vicinanza that if you hook up a scanner and e-mail a PDF document the company’s patent covers that process. In other words, any company that used office equipment would have to pay up.
In this case, Mr. Vicinanza decided to fight and beat the troll in court. Despite the victory, TechEye says Project Paperless patents claims are continuing to appear. The troll claims were passed to a network of shell companies. Ars found that the patent threats are going out under at least ten differently named LLCs.
These outfits are sending out hundreds of copies of the same demand letter to small businesses from New Hampshire to Minnesota. The article says the troll’s royalty demands range from $900 to $1,200 per employee.
Ars Technica reports that Project Paperless has four patents and one patent application it asserts, all linked to an inventor named Laurence C. Klein. “It was a lot of what I’d call gobbledygook,” said BlueWave’s Vicinanza. “Just jargon and terms strung together—it’s really literally nonsensical.”
Ars provides links to the asserted patents, numbers 6,185,590, 6,771,381, 7,477,410 and 7,986,426. AdzPro also notes it has an additional patent application filed in July 2011 that hasn’t yet resulted in a patent. Ars states that the patents may have been useless from a technologist’s perspective, but fighting them off in court would be no small matter. The problem is that it often costs more in legal costs for small businesses to fight the trolls than it does to pay up and make them go away.
Mr. Vicinanza spent $5,000 on a prior art search and sent the results to the Project Paperless lawyers. He filed a third-party complaint against four of the companies that actually made the scanners, Xerox (XRX) Canon (CAJ), HP (HPQ), and Brother (6448). That could have compelled the manufacturers to get involved in the case.
In the end, Hill dropped its lawsuit against BlueWave and went away and the case never came to court. However, Ars points out a detailed website called “Stop Project Paperless,” with information about the patents and links to the Hill, Kertscher, and Wharton law firm.
TechEye concludes that if a firm wants to make a lot of money from a dubious patent, it is better to sue users than the companies which make products that use it. If Apple wanted to kill off Samsung’s business all it would have to do is sue every Android user. Most of them would never go to court and pay whatever Apple demands. That particular scenario is unlikely, but it does show where the antics of patent trolls are headed.
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The politicians tried to work on the problem with the SHIELD Act which I covered here, but that apparently went nowhere. After all, they are too busy driving us all off the fiscal cliff.
Maybe it was top troll Apple that stopped the law from getting a full House vote, Apple is now the biggest patent troll of them all.
So more proof that Patent Trolls Cost the US $29 Billion which I covered earlier.
Related articles
- Patents still pending on paper, words, breathing (howtospotapsychopath.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Open Source Wireless for Detroit
Detroit is the proving grounds for a new open source wireless network technology called Commotion. According to FierceWireless, Commotion is a new wireless mesh-networking platform being deployed across Detroit by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute (OTI).
The OTI has completed the first phase of construction of the wireless testbed in Detroit’s Cass Corridor, where Commotion connects low-income apartment buildings, community centers, churches, and businesses. FierceWireless says the prototype open-source network allows neighbors to communicate with one another and can potentially distribute Internet access to local residents, the group says. “The Detroit wireless network … will put control of the Internet into the hands of its users,” said OTI Director Sascha Meinrath. “The partners OTI works with in Detroit are not only self-provisioning connectivity for local residents, they’re proofing out technologies that support free, safe, ubiquitous communications around the globe.”
Stacey Higginbotham at GigaOM reports the new stack has technologies such as Serval, which would enable the handsets to recognize the Commotion network, Tor, a program that can hide where a user is coming from and OpenBTS, an open source base station that runs software that can interface between VoIP networks and GSM radios.
The OTI release on the news notes that more than half of Detroit residents do not have Internet service at home due to the cost of service and a lack of investment in infrastructure by Internet service corporations.
GigaOM also notes that the public release of Commotion follows a funding round for a company called Open Garden, which is pursuing a similar mesh network creation software. Meanwhile, Range Networks has been formed to support the OpenBTS standard and deliver a “network in a box” that runs the OpenBTS software and allows users to make voice calls anywhere in the world.
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Am I the only one that sees the irony that the Fed’s are using Detroit as a proving ground for technologies designed to help take down dictatorships? According to the OTI press release, the U.S. Department of State is funding the Detroit Commotion project to test the potential of the technology in third world places like Egypt or Syria or Detroit.
Don’t worry, we are the government and we are here to help.
Do you think Open Source Wireless for Detroit will work?
Related articles
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2013, Cass Corridor, Detroit, Internet service provider, Michigan, New America Foundation, Open Source, OpenBTS, OTI, Wireless
Who supported the ITRs at WCIT-12
Byron Holland, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) speculated what the results of WCIT-12 mean for the Internet in the article, “Observations on WCIT-12.” Mr. Holland says the results of WCIT-12 will lead to a two-tiered Internet.
One tier consisting of the countries that supported the new ITRs and ratified the resulting agreement. He believes that these governments will use the United Nations agreement to limit and watch, if not censor, Internet traffic transiting across its borders.
The CIRA CEO states that governments that did not support the new ITR’s and the resulting treaty will continue to have access to the free and open Internet and all of its benefits. The governments that rejected the WCIT power grab are primarily in the developed world. The rest of the world, primarily those that live in the developing world, will have access to some lesser version of the Internet.
There is a clear correlation between a state’s ranking in the Democracy Index and how their place on the International Telecommunication Regulations (ITR) at the International Telecommunication Union‘s (ITU) World Conference on Information Technology (WCIT-12) according to the article. The following chart compares those countries that supported the ITRs with those that did not or deferred their vote until after consulting with their home country.
The author concludes that some of the larger content producers are simply just not going to bother offering content or services to much of the world. This could very well mean that a content producer will be subject to the ITRs if it is available in those countries. Mr. Holland explains that Internet traffic doesn’t travel point-to-point. The traffic is broken into many packets of information which individually take the most efficient route possible. What if that route transits through a country that has signed on to the new ITRs?
The CIRA CEO urges everyone to think about how the Internet works against the backdrop of the above info-graphic. It is primarily countries in the developing world that supported the new ITRs. This means that it will be the developing world that will not have access to the same information, free and open democracies, like Canada, do.
The article concludes that the result of Dubai is that the free and open Internet – the Internet that has allowed free speech, democracy, and economic development to flourish – will only be available to the citizens of the developed world. The citizens of the developing world – the people who could most benefit from the free and open Internet, from the free flow of information, and from access to global markets for their products and services – will be deprived of these benefits.
Related articles
- Behind closed doors at the UN’s attempted “takeover of the Internet” (arstechnica.com)
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2013, Business, Democracy Index, Information technology, ITU, United Nations, WCIT
Happy New Year
Smart TVs Dumb Security
When a device gets connected to the web without any security it leaves the users vulnerable. This is a trend as the Internet of Things evolves. In this case, Samsung Smart TVs seem to have no security, a dumb TV. Dailywireless.org reports that 40% of Americans have connected their TV to the Internet.
At the same time, The Security Ledger is reporting that a “Security Hole in Samsung Smart TVs Could Allow Remote Spying.” The Malta-based firm ReVuln, says it has uncovered a remotely exploitable security hole in Samsung Smart TVs. If left unpatched, the vulnerability could allow hackers to make off with owners’ social media credentials. Attackers could also spy on those watching the TV using compatible video cameras and microphones.
ReVuln is a security research firm that offers information on security holes it discovers only to subscribers. However, it did confirm the previously unknown (“zero-day”) hole with Security Ledger. The zero-day affects Samsung Electronics Co. (005930) Smart TVs running the latest version of the company’s Linux-based firmware. It could give an attacker the ability to get access to any file on the remote device, As vulnerable are external devices (such as USB drives) connected to the TV.
In an Orwellian twist, the hole could be used to use cameras and microphones attached to the Smart TVs. Granting remote attackers the ability to spy on those viewing a compromised set. Luigi Auriemma of ReVuln told ComputerWorld via email, “If the attacker has full control of the TV … then he can do everything like stealing accounts to the worst scenario of using the integrated webcam and microphone to ‘watch’ the victim.”
Security Ledger says that the Smart TVs offer no native security features, such as a firewall, user authentication, or application whitelisting. More critically: there is no independent software update capability, Which means that, barring a firmware update from Samsung, the exploitable hole can’t be patched without “voiding the device’s warranty and using other exploits,” ReVuln said.
The company posted a video of an attack on a Samsung TV LED 3D Smart TV online. It shows an attacker gaining shell access to the TV. Copying the contents of its hard drive to an external device and mounting them on a local drive. This gave them access to photos, documents, and other content. ReVuln said an attacker would also be able to lift credentials from any social networks or other online services accessed from the device.
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There is no patch for people. Until there is, Smart TV users will have to wait for Samsung to fix this huge security hole or fix it for themselves and risk voiding their warranty. Smart TV with a complete lack of security features, Smart TV Dumb Security.
Related articles
- Samsung Developer Conference Showcases New Smart TV Tools and Policies for Developers (news.samsung.com)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.
Category: Uncategorized |
Tags: 2012, Internet of Things, Linux, Samsung, Security, Smart TV, Vulnerability