Friday, April 26, 2013

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Microsoft pays pocket change in Motorola patent dispute

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 06:59 AM PDT

A Seattle judge has ruled in favour of Microsoft in one of two patent trials putting Redmond up against Google and its Motorola Mobility unit, leaving it with a substantially smaller royalties bill to pay.

Motorola wanted Microsoft to cough up cash on patents relating to the Xbox console - as much as $4 billion each year. But district judge James Robart said a more appropriate payment would be $1.8 million, practically nothing considering and much closer to Microsoft's calculation of $1 million a year - or 0.045 percent of Motorola's original claim. The patents are related to wireless and video technology.

Microsoft's deputy general counsel, David Howard, said in a statement that the decision is "good for consumers" because it "ensures patented technology committed to standards remains affordable for everyone".

Later this year, a separate patent case between the two will go to courts - and declare whether or not Motorola failed to licence standard and essential patents to Microsoft on fair terms, Reuters reports. 

Earlier this year, Microsoft also saw off Google in a dispute over the H.264 codec.

Google was believed to have picked up Motorola Mobility in a multi-billion deal largely to bolster its patent portfolio. It, Microsoft, Apple and others have been involved in patent battling since the emergence of the smartphone boom - the winners so far largely being the lawyers and the odd bit of publicity.

US ramps up cyber soldier training

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 05:10 AM PDT

Military academies catering to all three major service branches in the US are stepping up efforts to train a new breed of cyber warriors for the 21st century. The Army, Navy and Air Force academies are piling more tech courses on their students, including elaborate cyber warfare exercises.

Cyber warfare training is nothing new and US academies have been training cadets in the fine art of cyber warfare for more than a decade, but now the programmes are expanding as a result of new vulnerabilities and capabilities demonstrated by potentially hostile nations, reports The Washington Post. 

Director of national intelligence James Clapper recently described cyber warfare as the top threat to national security. He said the threats are more diverse, interconnected and viral than at any point in history.

"Destruction can be invisible, latent, and progressive," he warned.

The US Naval Academy in Annapolis is now requiring freshmen to take a semester to cover the basics of cyber security, but next year it will add a second required cyber course for juniors. The Air Force Academy is rethinking its freshman computing course, half of which now deals with cyber security. It is also looking into adding an additional cyber course.

The Army is also taking cyber warfare seriously. West Point cadets are required to take two cyber courses and attend weekly computer group meetings.

Teams from all three academies take part in regular cyber warfare exercises, the latest of which was held last week. They were not pitted against each other, though. The teams tried to keep computer networks up and running while the NSA tried to take them down, acting like an aggressor team. The Air Force team came out on top. 

Scientists make smart skin sensor breakthrough

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 03:06 AM PDT

A team of US and Chinese scientists has managed to come up with an experimental sensor array that can sense pressure like a human fingertip.   

The breakthrough could speed up the development of artificial skin capable of feeling activity on the surface. Additionally the same technology could be applied to robots, giving them a sense of touch, the BBC reports.

The scientists used bundles of vertical zinc oxide nanowires to build the arrays consisting of about 8,000 transistors. Each transistor can independently produce an electronic signal when placed under mechanical pressure and they can match the human finger in terms of sensitivity. 

Rather than using resistance to detect mechanical pressure, the scientists used piezoelectricity to get an electric response from their array. Therefore they had to use materials that have both piezoelectric and semiconducting properties, including nanowires and certain thin films.

"Any mechanical motion, such as the movement of arms or the fingers of a robot, could be translated to control signals," said Zhong Lin Wang, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology."This could make artificial skin smarter and more like the human skin. It would allow the skin to feel activity on the surface."

Shami Chakrabarti lends support to new health privacy campaign

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 02:10 AM PDT

A new campaign group, medConfidential, held its first conference day in Soho, London, yesterday  - with a view to discussing the way medical records are obtained and stored, lobbying for explicit consent and confidentiality.

MedConfidential has in its ranks campaigners from other prominent organisations like Privacy International, Big Brother Watch, NO2ID, FIPR, TheBigOptOut, and Terri Dowty, former director of ARCH.

Director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, lent her support to the campaign and expressed her shock on the policy of GP data extraction from a "human rights perspective" - which threatens to remove ownership of personal data from the patient.

The campaign group says it is independent and non-partisan, that works with patients, medics, service users and care professionals to "defend and enhance confidentiality across the health and social care arena".

At an event in Soho, London yesterday, some concerned campaigners raised cases where the lack of confidentiality and culture of note-taking on patient records has actively contributed to misjudgments in care.

One woman said she knew of a parent who went to three separate GPs, convinced something was wrong with her child. Referring to the notes on the first record, the others agreed - but when the parent sought a specialist it turned out her child had a rare bone condition.

Another said she knew of instances where women are committing suicide as a result of post natal depression, because they feel shamed and unable to seek assistance in case notes were made on their records.

Although explicit consent should be sought by way of a GSM1 form before procedures are performed - for example, taking blood pressure - this is often not the case. Results are then uploaded onto medical IT systems without the explicit consent of the patient, attendees said. Another attendee agreed that if patients wish to opt out, in many cases they are coercively pressured into agreeing to have their records managed and stored as data - or be refused treatment.

Campaigner Terri Dowty told TechEye: ""This campaign is vital because the public has got to know that we're all going to lose the medical confidentiality that we take for granted.

"Nobody has even been told what's going on, let alone asked if they want to share the private matters they discuss with their doctors," Dowty said. "And it will stay that way unless we can make enough noise to alert them."

MedConfidential was founded this year "in direct response to the imminent and serious threat posed by radical changes in the way the NHS Commissioning Board collects and passes on patient health information from NHS health record systems in England," the group's website reads. 

CISPA is a dead duck

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 02:07 AM PDT

A US cyber security bill which gave all sorts of power for private companies to share data with the government seems set to die in the senate.

The US Senate will  almost certainly kill a controversial cybersecurity bill, recently passed by the House, according to a US Senate Committee member.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation warned that CISPA's privacy protections were "insufficient" and the Senate will not take up the law. The White House has also said the President won't sign the House bill.

It is not surprising as the law was truly daft. Not only was it unlikely to stop cyber threats it did all sorts of strange things.

Firstly it let the government spy on internet connections without a warrant, and prevented those spied on ever finding out about it. It also protected corporates from legal action if they had done anything stupid with your data. It had a provision which meant that corporates could attack another company or hacker in self defence.

Staff and senators are understood to be "drafting separate bills" that will maintain the cybersecurity information sharing while preserving civil liberties and privacy rights.

According to ZDNet, Rockefeller's comments were significant as he takes up the lead on the Commerce Committee, which will be the first branch of the Senate that will debate its own cybersecurity legislation.

Michelle Richardson, legislative council with the American Civil Liberties Union, said it was fairly clear that CISPA is "dead for now," and said the Senate will "probably pick up where it left off last year".

Civil liberties groups dubbed CISPA a "privacy killer" and "dangerously vague," and warned that it may be in breach of the Fourth Amendment. 

Amazon’s growth slows

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 02:03 AM PDT

Amazon's revenues slowed in the first quarter as the world's largest Internet retail struggled overseas.

The company reported that margins jumped on lower shipping expenses and the expansion of more profitable new businesses.

It would appear that things are looking up in the US but on the international markets Amazon is not doing so well.

Europe's economies, which have been raped by austerity demands, are harming corporate sales in the region. EBay, Amazon's main rival, also reported disappointing results last week and noted European weakness.

Amazon's revenue rose 22 percent to $16.07 billion, with most of the cash coming from growing sales of digital content, cloud-computing services and gains in its main retail business.  However this was a decline from 36 percent growth in the first quarter of last year.

International revenue rose 16 percent in the most-recent quarter, down from a 31 percent growth rate last year.

Amazon CFO Tom Szkutak said Amazon was suffering in the same way that others were.

Amazon has also struggled to grow in China but Szkutak believes that the company is still in "investment mode" in that country so that is nothing to worry about for now.

Total year-over-year unit growth, which measures the number of items Amazon sells, was 30 percent in the first quarter, down from 49 percent in the first quarter of 2012.

Amazon forecast second-quarter revenue of $14.5 billion to $16.2 billion and operating results from break-even to $350 million.

The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street wanted to see second-quarter revenue of $15.94 billion and operating results of $452 million.

The figures do show that, despite weaker growth and a cautious forecast, Amazon is becoming more profitable.

Amazon is currently building distribution warehouses closer to customers, reducing shipping costs. It has also been charging third-party merchants on its marketplace higher fees for shipping and warehouse storage.

Researchers rescue Alexander Bell's voice

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 01:47 AM PDT

Scottish inventor Alexander Bell has earned the distinction, somewhat late in his career, of having his voice preserved in the world's oldest recording.

For years, that record was held by Thomas Edison, who in 1888, when he was not trying to ruin Nikola Tesla for being cleverer than him, recorded his voice on a phonograph.

Bell made a recording in 1885 on a rare experimental phonograph which used a wax and cardboard disk. Edison used embossed foil, while Bell tested a variety of materials, including paper, plaster, metal, wax and cardboard.

Bell's four to 14-inch discs were thought to be "mute artifacts" because they were too fragile to play.

However, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory physicist Carl Haber, National Museum of American History curator Carlene Stephens and Library of Congress digital conversion specialist Peter Alyea used laser technology to salvage the voice of Bell. The audio recovered has Bell say, "In witness whereof -- hear my voice, Alexander Graham Bell".

The Smithsonian owns more than 400 disks and cylinders used by Bell in his attempts to record sound. Bell was a member of the Smithsonian's Board of Regents, and he donated his laboratory materials to the museum in 1922.

According to the IBT, the technique that the researchers used is called optical scanning and it reconstructing the objects into digital maps. The scientists remove evidence of scratches by filling in the blanks on the computer sound track. The finished digital map is then run through a piece of software that recreates the motion of a stylus moving through the grooves of the disc or cylinder, which reproduces the audio content into a standard sound file.

The fact that Bell does not appear to have a Scottish accent might have something to do with his dad Alexander Melville Bell being a famous elocution teacher. Bell Sr would probably have got Bell Jr to stop rolling his Rs.

Here is a tape of him counting:

 

Human computer logs off

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 01:45 AM PDT

Shakuntala Devi, an Indian mathematical wizard known as "the human computer" has died in Bangalore, India. She was 83.

Devi was dubbed the human computer because in 1977 she was able to beat a Univac computer in calculating the extracted the 23rd root of a 201-digit number in 50 seconds. The Univac took 62 seconds.

In 1980, she correctly multiplied two 13-digit numbers in only 28 seconds at the Imperial College in London. This included the time to recite the 26-digit answer and earned her a place in the Guinness Book of World Records.

According to Science, Devi's dad was a trapeze artist and lion tamer in a circus and at age three she discovered that she was a mathematical prodigy with an uncanny ability to memorise numbers when she was playing cards with him. At age five she had become an expert at solving math problems.

She started out demonstrating her math skills at the circus, and later in road shows arranged by her father.

Soon she was making more money for the family than her father and his lions.

She toured Europe in 1950. The BBC thought they had caught her out when she came up with an answer to a problem which was different from what was on their card. It turned out they were wrong. The same problem happened in Rome when university boffins failed to add up their numbers correctly.

According to the New York Times, in 1976 she could give you the cube root of 188,132,517 in the time it took to ask the question. If you gave her any date in the last century, she would tell you what day of the week it fell on.

In a 1990 journal article about Devi, Arthur Jensen, a researcher on human intelligence at the University of California, Berkeley, said that to her the manipulation of numbers was like a native language.

Curiously for the rationalists, she was also a famous astrologer and writer turning out novels and cookbooks. 

Apple still losing market share

Posted: 26 Apr 2013 01:43 AM PDT

Jobs' Mob is continuing to lose ground to arch-rival Samsung at an alarming rate.

For a while now the the Apple frenzied press has been preparing the world by warning Apple will lose some market share as Samsung's latest smartphone comes out before the new iPhone.

But according to new figures, which were compiled before Samsung released its latest smartphone, Apple is already in trouble.

Research firm IDC said Samsung grabbed more smartphone market share from archrival Apple in the latest quarter, with sales of its phones jumping to account for one third of the global market.

While sales of the iPhone 5 helped Apple's volumes grow 6.6 percent to 37.4 million phones in the quarter from a year earlier, it was not enough to stop its share of the market dropping to 17.3 percent from 23 percent,

Samsung lifted its shipments about 60 percent to 70.7 million, giving it a 32.7 percent of the market, up from 28.8 percent a year earlier.

During the first quarter Samsung shipped more smartphones than the next four vendors combined.

Only Apple lost market share, with LG Electronics, Huawei and ZTE making incremental gains.

All this seems to indicate that Apple is really starting to lose ground in its key mobile sector entirely at the expense of Android. 

Your genetic make up to be stored, without consent, for profit

Posted: 25 Apr 2013 09:10 AM PDT

Dr Helen Wallace, director of GeneWatch UK, warned at a MedConfidential event in London that beyond electronically storing patient records, the next step for the UK is linking these records with DNA and genetic information on an all-in-one database.

It is already public policy, she pointed out, and a Human Genomics Strategy Group (HGSG) urged the need for a national DNA database for personalised medicine last year - which was welcomed by the secretary of state for health, which has asked for the recommendations to be implemented.

Genetic data is massively revealing- and can be used to identify relatives as well as the patient, and can be used to assess the potential for passing recessive genetic disorders on to children.

Anonymisation here, Wallace argued, is impossible. For example, it would be possible to swab DNA from a coffee cup and compare this to your sequence, also linked to your medical record, stored in a research database. The HGSG plan threatens to remove people's right to know exactly who is using their genomic data and why - as required by the Helsinki Declaration - and the building of a biometric database without consent, which will allow for tracking and categorisation of all individuals and those individual's relatives. This data is mostly not relevant to patient care, and could lead to stopping screening criteria in favour of individual feedback of personalised risk predictions, Wallace said. And marketing.

Ultimately, this means the entire population could unwittingly become a profit-making market for genome sequencing with presenting a direct benefit to the people whose DNA is being collected, including babies and children being sequenced without their consent. This will lead to investors cashing in and intermediaries, such as Google, building risk algorithms for profit and personalised marketing - indeed, Google's Sergey Brin is involved in the gene testing company 23andMe.  

Chiefly leading the charge advocacting this are Sir Mark Walport, former head of the Wellcome Trust, professor Sir John Bell of Wellcome/Oxford and HGSG, Sir Richard Sykes, former chair of GlaxoSmithKline, and Sir Paul Nurse, head of the Francis Crick institute and the Royal Society.

Supporters of 'Public Health Genomics', Wallace argued, said that they think data mining and storing genomes is necessary for the public health - but this itself undermines article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the right to privacy. It is also disputed just how effictive genetic variants are as predictors of common diseases.

This all despite there never having been a public consultation on the plan, or an assessment of costs and benefits - while there is significant commercial interest in further opening up healthcare to the markets, or insurers. Others set to profit would be hardware, software, and infrastructure providers such as Microsoft and IBM, genotyping companies like Life Technologies, VC investors, and universities who can gain research and development tax credits and matched infrastructure funding. 

Further implications, according to Wallace, is a shifting away from public health controls on products or health inequalities in favour of personalised marketing. It also threatens a de-skilling in the NHS, opening up the floodgates to commercial control over diagnosis and prognosis. Personalised risk assessments themselves will be used to tout products and other medications.

Just seven percent of people approached to opt in to the UK Biobank agreed, Wallace asks: should the 93 percent be presumed to have given their consent unless they actively refuse? Although the public is largely supportive of research, they want their total consent - and by-stepping this could damage public trust in legitimate medical research.

With the above considered, Wallace says that data sharing plans for electronic medical records are a step towards sharing genomes and genotypes - and ultimately building a DNA database of the whole population "by stealth" in the NHS.
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