eBay 1, patent trolls nil

Posted on by

From Good Morning Silicon Valley…

EBay started off the week on a high note this morning when the U.S. Supreme Court sided with it in its long-running patent scuffle with MercExchange …. Saying a permanent injunction against the use of infringing technology need not be automatically issued once it is determined that a patent has been infringed, the high court unanimously set aside a ruling that would have barred eBay from using patented technology owned by MercExchange and ordered a lower court to reconsider the matter. The ruling is a victory not just for eBay, but for any tech company accosted by a patent troll hoping that the threat of a court injunction will win it an easy settlement…

Diebold: that security hole is a feature, not a bug

Posted on by

From GMSV…

Are electronic voting machines ever held to any baseline computer security standards? It certainly doesn’t seem so. To wit, the discovery of a security hole in Diebold Election Systems’ touch-screen voting machines that experts are calling the “worst ever” in a voting system. Discovered by Harri Hursti, a Finnish computer expert who was working at the request of Black Box Voting, the vulnerable technology is intended as a means of quickly upgrading the machines’ boot loader, operating system and application program. But it can be easily exploited to load almost any software without a password or proof of authenticity, potentially without leaving any signs the machines have been tampered with. “It’s worse than a hole,” Michael Shamos, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University, told the Associated Press. “It’s a deliberate feature that was added by Diebold that we all believe is unwise.” Avi Rubin, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who first cast doubt on the reliability of Diebold’s systems in a 2003 report, agreed. The machines are “much, much easier to attack than anything we’ve previously said,” he told the Baltimore Sun. “On a scale of one to 10, if the problems we found before were a six, this is a 10. It’s a totally different ballgame.”

Er, it was Diebold machines that decided the outcome of the last Presidential election, wasn’t it?

The invisible war

Posted on by

Interesting Washington Post piece which helps to explain why Bush’s poll ratings aren’t even lower.

After three years, there are at least 550,000 veterans of the Iraq war. The Washington Post interviewed 100 of them — many of whom were still in the service, others who weren’t — to hear about what their war was like and how the transition home has been.

Their answers were as varied as their experiences. But a constant theme through the interviews was that the American public is largely unaffected by the war, and, despite round-the-clock television and Internet exposure, doesn’t understand what it’s like…

Who says the BBC doesn’t get it?

Posted on by

The BBC has staked a claim to a virtual tropical island where it can stage online music festivals and throw exclusive celebrity parties.

The rented island exists in online game Second Life and will hold its first event this weekend with bands including Muse, Razorlight and Gnarls Barkley….

[Source]

Tabloid idiocy

Posted on by

The thing I detest most about the British tabloid press is its sanctimonious stupidity. It is written by people who couldn’t run a bath, have no experience of any organisational life and to whom the notion of systemic failure is entirely alien, yet who never fail to search for ‘the guilty men’ whenever there is a complex organisational failure. The publication of the two reports into the 7/7 London bombings has called forth another orgy of this retrospective sanctimoniousness. Why didn’t the security services detect the plot? Why was Siddique Khan not monitored more closely? Etc., etc… Henry Porter has an intelligent take on this:

The press is having it both ways: it must be illogical in one set of circumstances to condemn the credulity of intelligence officers while in another to attack them for not acting on every piece of information received, however peripheral it seems. Having sat through the inquiry into David Kelly’s death and read Lord’s Hutton’s report with disbelief, I am disposed to a sceptical line on government reports.

But the two accounts of the 7 July bombings and the intelligence failure do not have the glare of whitewash, nor the slightest glimmer of it. They seem to provide an accurate picture of what happened and the difficulties faced by the security services and Special Branch. What Siddique Khan and his three companions planned was essentially unknowable. …

Quote of the day

Posted on by

The late JK Galbraith once remarked that left-wing governments’ penchant for intervening meant that they needed to be better at management than right-wing ones. The truth is that practically the only areas the government has got half right – the economy and the railways – are the ones it has removed itself from. Everywhere else, ignoring Galbraith and its own heritage, Labour has marched management backwards.

Simon Caulkin, writing on the irony of how “an administration that sets such store by efficiency and private-sector methods should end up resembling Fawlty Towers”.

The Devil’s new tune

Posted on by

This morning’s Observer column…

The devil, famously, has the best tunes – ‘Honky Tonk Women’, ‘I Can’t Get No Satisfaction’, etc. But what do you do when he suddenly starts singing ‘Lead Kindly Light’? This is the kind of puzzle set last week when Warner Brothers announced plans to make over 200 films available for downloading. That’s not the funny bit, though: the real scream is that they propose to use BitTorrent to do it…

Airbus turbulence

Posted on by

I bought The Times as well as the Guardian and the Financial Times this morning (mainly because it was giving away a DVD of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis). There was a feature on the forthcoming Airbus 380 with lots of cod statistics (like: it holds enough fuel to fill 21 road tankers, and its interior volume would enable it to hold 44 million ping-pong balls, yawn), but also an interesting note from the paper’s Transport Correspondent, Ben Webster.

Airbus is struggling to persuade international regulators that the double-decker will not cause dangerous turbulence for planes following in its wake.

In a preliminary ruling, the International Civil Aviation Organisation has said that there must be an 11-mile gap between an A380 and any aircraft landing behind it. That is double the distance for a Boeing 747 and at a stroke would destroy the business case for the A380.

Airbus says that the A380 will solve capacity problems at many of the world’s leading airports, especially Heathrow, by delivering up to 600 passengers for each landing slot. But if the ICAO ruling stands, the A380 will actually reduce the capacity of any airport it uses…

Wrong Guy

Posted on by

Guy Kewney, a computer expert, was waiting outside a BBC Television Centre studio to discuss the high court ruling on the Beatles’ Apple Corps v Apple Computer on Monday morning. As he watched the news in reception, he was amazed to see “Guy Kewney” pop up on screen. Unlike the white, bearded technology columnist for IT Week, this “Guy Kewney” was black, and appeared stumped when asked about the US computer giant and its tussle with the Beatles over the Apple trademark.

“Were you surprised by this verdict?” he was asked. “I’m very surprised at the verdict,” he gamely replied. “Because I was not expecting that when I came.”

A BBC insider said the wrong Guy was a minicab driver, waiting to pick up the real Guy. When the producer went to collect the computer expert from a different waiting area, he called out “Guy Kewney” and the driver said “hello”. He was then whisked upstairs to meet the BBC’s Karen Bowerman, who asked the first question on live TV.

[Source]