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Will Google Stop Using Java?
Google is so hacked off with Oracle’s java antics it is seriously considering taking it out of Android and replacing it with Apple’s open sauce Swift software.
While we would have thought that there would be little choice between Oracle and Apple as evil software outfits, the fact that Apple uncharacteristically made Swift open source might make life a bit brighter for Google. At the moment Oracle is suing Google for silly money for its Java use in Android.
Swift was created as a replacement for Objective C, and is pretty easy-to-write. It was introduced at WWDC 2014, and has major support from IBM as well as a variety of major apps like Lyft, Pixelmator and Vimeo that have all rebuilt iOS apps with Swift.
But since Apple open sourced Swift, Google, Facebook and Uber have al said that they are interested in it. Taking Java out of Android is a big job. Google would also have to make its entire standard library Swift-ready, and support the language in APIs and SDKs. Some low-level Android APIs are C++, which Swift cannot bridge to. Higher level Java APIs would also have to be re-written.
Of course if it did all this, Apple might realize that its biggest rival was using its own software to club it to death. It might not be be so nice about allowing Swift out to play and eventually Google have to fork Swift and dump the Apple version. This would probably result in an anst-ridden moan album about how life is so unfair which makes a fortune while scoring passive agressive revenge on the dumpee.
Courtesy-Fud
Can Oracle Make Money Off Android?
Database outfit Oracle’s moves to try and copyright APIs appear to be part of an attempt for Oracle to make money on Android.
Oracle has asked a U.S. judge for permission to update its copyright lawsuit against Google to include the Android which it claims contains its Java APIs.
Oracle sued Google five years ago and is seeking roughly $1 billion in copyright claims if it manages to convince a court that its APIs are in Android it could up the damages by several billions.
Oracle wrote in a letter to Judge William Alsup on Wednesday that the record of the first trial does not reflect any of these developments in the market, including Google’s dramatically enhanced market position in search engine advertising and the overall financial results from its continuing and expanded infringement.
Last month, the US Supreme Court upheld an appeals court’s ruling that allows Oracle to seek licensing fees for the use of some of the Java language. Google had said it should use Java APIs without paying a fee.
Jawbone Sues Fitbit
June 23, 2015 by admin
Filed under Consumer Electronics
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Jawbone has filed another lawsuit against Fitbit in less than two weeks, alleging its activity tracking products infringe several of Jawbone’s patents.
The new suit, filed Wednesday in San Francisco by Jawbone parent company AliphCom, seeks unspecified damages and an injunction to block the sale of Fitbit devices such as the Flex, Charge and Surge bands.
Late last month, Jawbone filed another lawsuit, accusing Fitbit of poaching its employees and stealing trade secrets. Fitbit has said it has no knowledge of any such information in its possession.
In its latest complaint, Jawbone says it will also ask the U.S. International Trade Commission to investigate Fitbit, which could potentially lead to an import ban on Fitbit products.
Jawbone says it has hundreds of patents granted or pending, and claims that Fitbit infringes several of them. One patent describes a “general health and wellness management method and apparatus for a wellness application using data from a data-capable band.”
Another patent covers a “system for detecting, monitoring, and reporting an individual’s physiological or contextual status.”
Fitbit didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on the latest suit.
The timing is bad for Fitbit, which is preparing to go public on the U.S. stock markets. It also faces intense competition from a number of rivals, which also include Garmin and Apple with its Apple Watch.
Both Jawbone and Fitbit make wearable bands and associated software that tracks people’s movement, exercise, sleep and heart rate.
Uber Suffers A Data Breach
The names and license plate numbers of about 50,000 Uber drivers were exposed in a security breach last year, the company revealed on Friday.
Uber found out about a possible breach of its systems in September, and a subsequent investigation revealed an unauthorized third party had accessed one of its databases four months earlier, the company said.
The files accessed held the names and license plate numbers of about 50,000 current and former drivers, which Uber described as a “small percentage” of the total. About 21,000 of the affected drivers are in California. The company has several hundred thousand drivers altogether.
It’s in the process of notifying the affected drivers and advised them to monitor their credit reports for fraudulent transactions and accounts. It said it hadn’t received any reports yet of actual misuse of the data.
Uber will provide a year of free identity protection service to the affected drivers, it said, which has become fairly standard for such breaches.
The company said it had filed a “John Doe” lawsuit Friday to help it confirm the identity of the party responsible for the breach.
Google Goes To The Supreme Court
Google has asked the U.S. Supreme Court to rule on contentious litigation against Oracle arguing that the high court must act to protect innovation in high tech.
Google’s request seeks to overturn an appeals court ruling that found Oracle could copyright APIs of its Java programming language, which Google used to design its Android smartphone operating system.
Oracle sued Google in 2010, claiming that Google had improperly incorporated parts of Java into Android. Oracle wants $1 billion on its copyright claims. Oracle claimed Google’s Android trampled on its rights to the structure of 37 Java APIs. A San Francisco federal judge had decided that Oracle could not claim copyright protection on parts of Java, but earlier this year the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington disagreed.
In its filing this week, Google said the company would never been able to innovate had the Federal Circuit’s reasoning been in place when the company was formed.
“Early computer companies could have blocked vast amounts of technological development by claiming 95-year copyright monopolies over the basic building blocks of computer design and programming,” Google wrote.
Samsung Makes Changes In Mobile
May 22, 2014 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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Samsung Electronics Co Ltd, the world’s biggest mobile phone manufacturer, has replaced the head of its mobile design team amid criticism of the latest Galaxy S smartphone.
Chang Dong-hoon offered to resign last week and will be replaced by Lee Min-hyouk, vice president for mobile design, a Samsung spokeswoman said on Thursday.
“The realignment will enable Chang to focus more on his role as head of the Design Strategy Team, the company’s corporate design center which is responsible for long-term design strategy across all of Samsung’s businesses, including Mobile Communications,” Samsung said in a statement.
Lee, 42, became Samsung’s youngest senior executive in 2010 for his role in designing the Galaxy series, a roaring success which unseated Apple Inc’s iPhone as king of the global smartphone market.
Samsung now sells two times more smartphones than Apple, largely thanks to the success of Galaxy range.
But the South Korean firm has also been battling patent litigation the world over, with Apple claiming Samsung copied the look and feel of the U.S. firm’s mobile products.
The Galaxy S5, which debuted globally last month, has received a lukewarm response from consumers due to its lack of eye-popping hardware innovations, while its plastic case design has been panned by some critics for looking cheap and made out of a conveyor belt. The Wall Street Journal said the gold-colored back cover on the S5 looked like a band-aid.
Chang, a former professor who studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, will continue to lead Samsung’s design center which overseas its overall design strategy.
Lee, who acquired the moniker of “Midas” for his golden touch with the Galaxy series, started out designing cars for Samsung’s failed auto joint venture with Renault in the 1990s.
SOA’s New API Goes To The Cloud
SOA Software has launched an application programming interface (API) gateway today that allows businesses to expose their API’s with a built-in cloud based developer community, helping to grow their services and make it quicker for them to get up and running.
The firm’s CTO Alistair Farquharson said the API Gateway is unique due to it being a new concept in API and SOA management, aiming to “deliver new advantages in the application-level security space”.
“The new API Gateway provides monitory, security, and more uniquely, a developer community as well, so kind of a turnkey approach to an API gateway where a customer can buy that product, get it up and running, expose their API and expose the developer community to the outside world,” Farquharson said.
“[It will] support and manage the porting of mobile applications or web apps or B2B partnerships.”
Farquharson explained that there are three main components within the Gateway, which SOA Software has termed a “unified services gateway”, including a runtime component, a policy manager, and a developer community.
The runtime component handles the message traffic, whereas the policy manager component is capable of managing a range of different policies, such as threat protection, authentication, authorisation, anti-virus, monitorin, auditing, logging, for example.
“The whole objective here is to get a customer up and running with API’s as quickly as possible to meet some kind of a business need that they have, whether that’s mobile an application initiative or a web application, integration or syndication,” Farquharson added.
The third component is the API’s cloud-based “developer community”, which exposes an organisation to the outside world so developers can come take a look at its API, read its documentation, and see what APIs it has to figure out how to interact with them.
It’s this component that sets SOA Software’s Gateway apart form other firms doing similar appliances on the market, claims Farquharson.
“It essentially becomes the developer site for your organisation, with it all running on a single appliance which is rather unique,” he added.
“The interesting thing about the gateway is that it does API’s as well as services [that are] needed for mobile devices so you have old and the new encapsulated in the single appliance, which is very important to our customers.”
The developer community is offered through the API as a service, “like the Salesforce of APIs”, Farquharson said.
“Developers can go there and build their community and it provides them with high level service and availability and saglobla infrastructure and leverage the strength of their community to get themselves going.”
AMD And Oracle Join Forces
AMD is taking part in the OpenJDK project “Sumatra” in collaboration with Oracle.
The project aims to bring heterogeneous computing capabilities to Java for servers and clouds. It will look at how the Java virtual machine, language and APIs, can be spruced up to allow applications to take advantage of GPU acceleration, either in discrete graphics cards or in high-performance graphics processor cores such as those found in AMD APUs.
Manju Hegde, corporate vice president heterogeneous applications and developer solutions at AMD said that the OpenJDK Project represents the next step towards bringing heterogeneous computing to millions of Java developers. AMD has an established track record of collaboration with open-software development communities from OpenCL to the heterogeneous system architecture (HSA) foundation, and with this initiative we will help further the development of graphics acceleration within the Java community, he said.
Oracle Wants More Money From SAP
Oracle is appealing the damages awarded from SAP that it was granted and is pushing for more.
The news has disappointed SAP, according to a German newspaper, and the firm is worried that the appeal will draw out the five year long legal battle even longer.
“We are disappointed that the lawsuit Oracle pulls further out,” said a SAP spokesman to the German newspaper Mannheimer Morgen.
“We had agreed on a sensible arrangement, because we believe that this case has gone on long enough. We remain committed to bring this dispute to an end.”
Neither firm has commented yet, but the appeal follows SAP’s admission of liability in the Tomorrownow affair.
SAP pleaded guilty last year and acknowledged that its Tomorrownow subsidiary had done wrong. Tomorrownow was accused of downloading information belonging to Oracle, including software and customer information related to Peoplesoft users.
Oracle was initially awarded $1.3bn in damages but this was knocked down to $306m by a judge who told it that it had two options, accept that sum or take SAP back to court.
Woman Sues LinkedIn
June 25, 2012 by admin
Filed under Around The Net
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An Illinois woman has filed a $5 million lawsuit against LinkedIn Corp, claiming that the social network violated promises to consumers by not having better security in place when more than 6 million customer passwords were stolen.
The lawsuit, which was introduced in federal court in San Jose, California, on June 15 and seeks class-action status, was filed less than two weeks after the stolen passwords turned up on websites frequented by computer hackers.
The attack on Mountain View, California-based LinkedIn, an employment and professional networking site with more than 160 million members, was the latest massive corporate data breach to have attracted the attention of class-action lawyers.
A federal judicial panel last week consolidated nine proposed class-action lawsuits in Nevada federal court against online shoe retailer Zappos, a unit of Amazon.com, over its January disclosure that hackers had siphoned information affecting 24 million customers.
The LinkedIn lawsuit was filed by Katie Szpyrka, a user of the website from Illinois. In court papers, her Chicago-based law firm, Edelson McGuire, said LinkedIn had “deceived customers” by having a security policy “in clear contradiction of accepted industry standards for database security.”
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