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Google Buys Patents From IBM
September 22, 2011 by admin
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Google has purchased more than 1,000 patents from IBM, as part of its strategy to strengthen its patent portfolio to counter litigation, according to records of the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Jim Prosser, a Google spokesman, confirmed the transfer, reported by a blog SEO by the Sea, but did not provide details such as the the purchase price Google paid for the patents.
Google also acquired another over 1,000 patents from IBM in July. It transferred recently some patents to smartphone maker HTC to help it pursue patent litigation against Apple.
Google has been interested in buying patents for some time now, which led to its failed bid in June for the patents of Nortel Networks, and its proposed acquisition of Motorola Mobility for about US$12.5 billion.
The tech world has recently seen an explosion in patent litigation, often involving low-quality software patents, which threatens to stifle innovation, Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president and general counsel, said in a blog post in April.
“But as things stand today, one of a company’s best defenses against this kind of litigation is (ironically) to have a formidable patent portfolio, as this helps maintain your freedom to develop new products and services,” he added.
The acquisition of Motorola Mobility’s patents was a key consideration for Google to start talking to the company in early July. But Motorola told Google that it could be a problem for Motorola Mobility to continue as a stand-alone entity if it sold a large portion of its patent portfolio, according to a filing by Motorola to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday.
Nokia Puts Free M$ Apps On Symbian Phones
September 15, 2011 by admin
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Several of Microsoft’s business productivity applications will be available free of charge on Nokia’s latest Symbian Belle smartphones later this year, Nokia stated Thursday.
The move comes at the same time Nokia is developing its first smartphone on the Windows “Mango” Phone platform. That phone is rumored to be scheduled for a November debut.
The free apps will run on Symbian Belle smartphones announced in August; they’re designed to keep customers buying Nokia products while Nokia ramps up to Windows Phone smartphones.
The free apps for Symbian Belle phones will include: Microsoft PowerPoint Broadcast for broadcasting presentations from a desktop to a smartphone;Microsoft OneNote for taking notes with images by syncing with Microsoft SkyDrive;And Microsoft Document Connection, which provides a single view of documents stored on a smartphone including email attachments and documents on Microsoft SharePoint 2010 sites.
Early next year, Nokia said it will provide OneNote synchronization with SharePoint and will add Word, Excel and PowerPoint as native applications for the first time outside the Windows platform.
Some critics of Nokia’s partnership with Microsoft wonder how successful Windows Phone Mango (version 7.5) will be and said the addition of Microsoft apps to Nokia’s older Symbian line is a way for Nokia to hedge its bets if the Microsoft partnership doesn’t pay off quickly.
The free productivity apps could also be a way to introduce a large number of Symbian users to Microsoft software. There are many more Symbian users outside the U.S. than inside and Symbian until this year had been the world’s largest smartphone platform.
Making the free apps available on the Symbian Belle phones doesn’t cost either company much and the Belle phone users “get something to sweeten the deal to stay with symbian,” Gold said.
Apple Blasted For Not Blocking Stolen Certificates
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A security researcher blasted Apple for what he called “foot dragging” over the DigiNotar certificate fiasco, and urged the company to act fast to update Mac OS X to protect users.
“We’re looking at some very serious issues [about trust on the Web] and it doesn’t help matters when Apple is dragging its feet,” said Paul Henry, a security and forensics analyst with Arizona-based Lumension.
Unlike Microsoft, which updated Windows Tuesday to block all SSL (secure socket layer) certificates issued by DigiNotar, Apple has not updated Mac OS X to do the same.
DigiNotar, one of hundreds of firms authorized to issue digital certificates that authenticate a website’s identity, admitted on Aug. 30 that its servers were compromised weeks earlier. A report made public Monday said that hackers had acquired 531 certificates, including many used by the Dutch government, and that DigiNotar was unaware of the intrusion for weeks.
Because almost all the people who were routed to a site secured with one of the stolen certificates were from Iran, many experts suspect that the DigiNotar hack was sponsored or encouraged by the Iranian government, which could use them to spy on its citizens.
Microsoft isn’t the only software maker to block all DigiNotar certificates: Google, Mozilla and Opera have also issued new versions of their browsers — Chrome, Firefox and Opera — to completely, or in Opera’s case, partially prevent users from reaching websites secured with a DigiNotar certificate.
Users of Safari on Mac OS X, however, remain at risk to possible “man-in-the-middle” attacks based on the fraudulently obtained certificates.
Because Safari relies on the underlying operating system to tell it which certificates have been revoked or banned entirely, Apple must update Mac OS X. The Windows edition of Safari, which has a negligible share of the browser market, taps Windows’ certificate list: That version is safe to use once Microsoft’s Tuesday patch is applied.
Get Ready For Email-Malware Spree
A sizeable uptick in malicious email attachments is just subsiding, but if history is any indicator,several smaller spikes are about to follow that use even more deceptive tactics than their predecessors.
The recent surge, fueled in large part by a flood of fake messages from UPS, is similar to one observed at the end of March in that the messages urge recipients to open an attachment that releases the malware on victims’ machines, according to Internet security firm Commtouch.
The earlier wave used a wide range of package-delivery services as senders, including FedEx and DHL, but the latest outbreak employs a wider variety of messages such as, “Dear client, recipient’s address is wrong”, “Dear User, Delivery Confirmation: FAILED”, and “Dear Client, We are not able to delivery [sic] the postal package”, according to the Commtouch blog.
All the messages then instruct the recipient to open the attachment that contains the malware, claiming it is an invoice or a form that needs to be filled out. “This time we see differences in the style of the emails – there is far more variation in the automatically-generated subjects, body and attachment names. Last time all the attachments were “UPS.exe” – this time there are many variations,” says Avi Turiel, director of product marketing at Commtouch in an email.
The attackers will evaluate the success of the attack by finding out how many recipients activated the malware, “Based on the infections vs. malware sent out they will probably try and figure out what they could improve in the next attack,” he says.
HP Exec Claims Evidence Was Falsified
HP has been accused of producing “false and fabricated” evidence against a former sales executive who the firm claims stole confidential information.
Adrian Jones, who was a sales executive at HP, left the firm to join Oracle in February 2011. HP claims that Jones nabbed a load of confidential information between 10 and 11 February using a removable hard drive. Jones told the court that the hard drive was used by HP for backup and was never in his possession, saying that HP and its outside counsel have confirmed these facts.
Jones’ current employer Oracle said that the accusations leveled at its employee are simply not true, with Deborah Hellinger, a spokeswoman for Oracle telling Bloomberg, “The central allegation in HP’s employment lawsuit against Adrian Jones has turned out to be complete fiction…. If they did it knowingly then HP and their lawyers should be sanctioned. If they did it mistakenly then they simply owe Mr Jones an apology.”
HP is said to have probed Jones’ relationship with a female subordinate, for whom Jones allegedly arranged a 94 per cent pay rise and expensed travel that had no business purpose.
Jones’ case mirrors that of former HP CEO Mark Hurd who left the company after similar expense discrepances were brought to light. Hurd, a close friend of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, then joined Oracle as co-president within weeks of leaving his post at HP.
HP and Oracle have been going at it hammer and tongs in a largely public row over Oracle’s decision to dump support for Intel’s Itanium architecture. The two companies are in various other legal battles as well, with HP claiming that Oracle had gone from being a partner to a “bitter antagonist”. We assume the next lawsuit will claim that Oracle stole HP’s lunch money and beat it up behind the bike shed, or perhaps the other way around.
Flaw in Intel’s 320 Series SSD Confirmed
July 22, 2011 by admin
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There had been talk on the Internet in reference to the nasty bug discovered and reported on Intel’s support forums regarding the data loss on its recently released 320-series SSDs and today, Intel has finally and officially confirmed it.
The users have mentioned that under power failures, the drive reverts back to 8MB capacity and thus looses all the data stored on the drive. According to preliminary reports the drive tries to reconnect with the SATA port rather than to go for a proper shutdown.
Is Intel Facing The Heat?
Analysts at Goldman Sachs are saying that chip maker Intel may be in a pickle as microprocessor shipments slow and it faces stiff competition. That said, analysts have advised stockholders to sell Intel as they downgraded the stock.
James Covello and Simon Schafer of GS said that there will be a surplus in chips due to plant expansion. Meanwhile the rest of the gang on Wall Street is forecasting a six percent year-over-year rise in Intel’s sales, amid expanding gross margins, Goldman says otherwise and that sales will be flat due to excess capacity.
Furthermore, Intel is expected to face problems dealing with better chips from their main rival AMD: while tablets are cannibalising notebooks with ARM kicking its tail in the mobile space.
New Atom Architecture In The Making
Word on the street is that Intel is in the process of developing an entirely new Atom architecture based on its 3D transistor technology they announced last week. This new architecture should enable more power efficiency on the chip.
The new processor is being called Silvermont and the Atom will encompass a system-on-chip design, similar to Intel’s Z760 Atom or ARM’s processors. Silvermont is being designed on Intel’s 22nm process and harness the power of Intel’s 3D transistor technology that has yet to be tested.
Tablet Users Are Dropping Laptops
According to Neilsen people who have owned laptops and now use tablets as a PC device are ditching them like hotcakes. Under the study conducted around 77 percent of tablet owners are now using their device in the same capacity as they used their laptop computers. This strange because there are many applications or functions that a tablet is not able to process or handle.
One third of the tablet owners also admitted that they find themselves using their desktops even less since they acquired a tablet PC. Furthermore, thirty percent of those surveyed who own both a laptop and desktop who owned a laptop find themselves using their tablet more. A small percentage (2) of those Neilsen interviewed said they had stopped using their laptop computer altogether.
Oak Trail Tablets Coming Next Month
April 5, 2011 by admin
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Word on the street is that Intel will keep their word and debut Oak Trail based tablets as promised next month. Apparently, the tablets will be introduced during the week of Computex, that opens May 31. An Intel representative was speaking with PC Advisor and basically confirmed that the first batch of tablets should be available in May. No pertinent information in reference to design and launch schedules were revealed. Nevertheless, many PC manufacturers such as Fujitsu, Lenovo and Samsung were said to be the first to show tablets that are based on Oak Trail and Windows 7.