TechEye |  |
- Jury tells Apple to get a life
- Acer boss retires again
- Paypal exec leaves after offensive tweeting
- Yahoo backs down on "do not track"
- U2 takes out LA airport
| Jury tells Apple to get a life Posted: 05 May 2014 02:28 AM PDT Executives at the fruity cargo cult Apple were given a swift kick in their reality distortion field by the jury in the Samsung patent case at the end of last week. Apple had believed that it could go before a jury in its hometown and demand $2 billion from Samsung because it honestly believed that it invented everything in the Samsung phone. Samsung admitted it had violated a few patents, but that was because Apple would not sell them at a reasonable price, and besides the IPhone had a few of its patents which Jobs' Mob had not paid for. The jury seemed to see common sense in the case and ordered Samsung to pay $119.6 million for infringing some of its patents, while Apple owes Samsung $158,400 for infringing one of the Korean company's patents. The jury found all of Samsung's accused gadgets infringed Apple's '647 "quick links" patent but that none infringed the '959 "universal search" patent or the '414 "background sync" patent. Results were mixed for the '721 "slide to unlock" patent, with some Samsung devices, such as the Galaxy Nexus, found to infringe, and others found not to. Judge Lucy Koh, in a pretrial judgement, had already ruled that Samsung infringed the '172 "automatic word correction" patent, and the jury simply calculated damages. The jury awarded Apple only $119.6 million for Samsung's infringement, much less than the $2.2 billion it had wanted. Meanwhile, the jury also decided that Apple infringed Samsung's '449 patent for photo and video organisation in folders and awarded the Korean company $158,400. Samsung had accused Apple of infringing two patents and asked for damages of about $6.2 million. The jury will return today to reconsider one of the damages figures. It awarded Apple no damages for one version of the Galaxy S2, but Apple believes it should be awarded some money for Samsung's infringement of the '172 patent. Apple was doing its best to put some spin on the verdict, claiming that the ruling reinforces that Samsung wilfully stole our ideas and copied our products. "We are fighting to defend the hard work that goes into beloved products like the iPhone, which our employees devote their lives to designing and delivering for our customers." However, quite clearly the jury also thought that Apple was being unreasonable in the way it handled the whole thing. The damages amount owed to Apple fall far below the company's request, and Samsung was not found to infringe all of Apple's patents. In addition, Apple was found to infringe one of Samsung's patents, something that did not occur in the previous trial. Observers say that Apple's claims that Samsung blatantly copied the iPhone never rang true, particularly as most of the claims were about Android software which is made by Google. Apple has worked on the premise that suing Google would not work since Google doesn't make its own phones or tablets so it went after the companies that sell physical devices using Android. The jury was made up of tech novices including a cop and a retired teacher. Only one member, a former IBM software executive, had experience in technology, while another works in renewable energy. There were seven patents at issue in the latest case -- five held by Apple and two by Samsung. Apple accused Samsung of infringing US patents Nos. 5,946,647; 6,847,959; 7,761,414; 8,046,721; and 8,074,172. All relate to software features, such as quick links for '647, universal search for '959, background syncing for '414, slide-to-unlock for '721, and automatic word correction for '172. Overall, Apple argued that the patents enable ease of use and make a user interface more engaging. Samsung accused Apple of infringing US patents Nos. 6,226,449 and 5,579,239. The '449 patent, which Samsung purchased from Hitachi, involves camera and folder organization functionality. The '239 patent, which Samsung also acquired, covers video transmission functionality and could have implications for Apple's use of FaceTime. |
| Posted: 05 May 2014 02:25 AM PDT The troubled PC maker Acer is losing its CEO and Chairman next month. Stan Shih has said he will retire next month to make way for “fresh blood” to sort out the company’s woes. Shih is 69 and is overdue for his gold watch and this is the second time he has retired. He quit once before when it was still known as Mutitech. He returned in November last year as president and chairman, replacing CEO JT Wang and president Jim Wong after the biz reported a net third-quarter loss of £260 million. So far the old blood has not been much chop and Acer has been losing ground on its rivals. He thinks that fresh blood will turn the Taiwanese firm’s fortunes around and succeed in a cloud computing area. To be fair to the old blood, all PC makers experienced year-on-year declines in the first quarter of 2014, Acer was leap-frogged by closest rival Asus, bumping it down into fifth spot globally with a market share of 6.5 percent. However Acer also had problems of its own when Taiwanese coppers raided the outfits HQ last month and arrested ten current and former employees on suspicion of "violating the Securities and Exchange Act" and "conducting insider trading". It appears that some fund managers dumped their shares in Acer just before Wang and Wong’s sudden exits from the company. So far there is no news on who is providing the new blood and we have to admit that this is the first time we have heard of an IT outfit turning to blood sacrifice since the Aztechs. |
| Paypal exec leaves after offensive tweeting Posted: 05 May 2014 02:24 AM PDT PayPal's director of global strategy, Rakesh "Rocky" Agrawal, has left the company following a string of expletive-filled tweets, some of which were directed at fellow executives. Agrawal has only been at the company since March and apparently posted the insulting tweets and pictures on Friday night while at a jazz festival in New Orleans. Justice was swift and the next day PayPal announced Agrawal was "no longer with the company". It said that the company has a "zero tolerance policy," but it is not immediately clear whether the executive had been fired or quit. Agrawal said he had already resigned and given the company his two week notice before going onto Twitter. He later apologised for the inappropriate tweets and said they were intended to be direct messages, blaming the blunder on a new phone. In the tweets, Agrawal said that PayPal's vice president of global communications, Christina Smedley, was "useless middle manager". The tweets have since been deleted and he appears to have been tired and emotional at the time. However they were saved by Business Insider which thought it was an important record of events. Agrawal is yet another high profile manager who has fallen foul of the tendency to tweet without engaging a brain. Email delivery service SendGrid fired its company evangelist last year after she tweeted a photo of a developer that resulted in him getting fired. In December, IAC's senior director of corporate communications was fired after an offensive tweet about a visit to South Africa. |
| Yahoo backs down on "do not track" Posted: 05 May 2014 02:22 AM PDT Yahoo has dumped support for Do Not Track, claiming that there was a lack of a single standard across the tech industry. Do Not Track (DNT) is part of HTTP and is a privacy setting that tells advertisers whether or not web users are happy to be tracked across websites. It is turned off in most browsers, with people needing to opt in to receive any protection. However there's nothing forcing advertisers to honour it and most ignore it. After all they are evolved from door to door salespeople who never take no for an answer. Yahoo was the first major tech company to implement Do Not Track but it had yet to see a single standard emerge that is effective, easy to use and has been adopted by the wider tech industry. Yahoo claims that the "the best web is a personalised one" and that dropping DNT will give users a more "personalised experience". Jim Killock, executive director of the Open Rights Group, told PC Pro that companies such as Yahoo had "sabotaged the DNT standard". He said that the companies need to respect users' privacy and re-establish trust that has been undermined by pervasive, permission less data collection through cookie-based tracking. It's still possible to opt out of tracking on Yahoo in the Privacy Policy section of its site. If you have a Yahoo account, you can sign in to enable this setting across every computer with one or alternatively you can opt out on a device-by-device basis. |
| Posted: 05 May 2014 02:21 AM PDT A cold war U2 spy-plane managed to take out the computer systems of the world's worst airport. The U2 flew over Los Angeles airport and blew out the computers that run the California air traffic control centre. Officials used that as the excuse of the day to ground flights and make customers lives a misery. In this case LA's illness was extended to several airports in the Southwestern United States and ground planes bound for the region from other parts of the country. The Bob Hope Airport (no really) in Burbank, California, John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, California, and McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas were among other facilities affected by the order to keep planes grounded. Flights in other parts of the country that were bound for the wide swath of airspace in the Southwestern United States managed by the FAA's Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Centre Thousands of arriving and departing passengers at Los Angeles International Airport had their journeys slowed, although how any of them could tell the difference because regular passengers are used to being treated like crap at LA. NBC, citing unnamed sources, reported a U2, a Cold War-era spy plane still in use by the US military, passed through air space monitored by the Los Angeles Air Route Traffic Control Centre and appears to have overloaded a computer system at the centre. The computers apparently had a problem working out that the U2 was flying at 60,000 feet and other airplanes passing through the region's air space were miles below. Officially, no one is saying anything about the problem. The only thing LA Airport is admitting is that there was a software issue that was corrected. This is a little strange given that the U2 has been in service for decades and we would have thought that the Air Traffic Control software would be able to cope with it. Of course, it is LA Airport so anything out of the ordinary results in delays, shutdowns and longer queues in poorly air-conditioned rooms in immigration. |
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