Why patents suck: Rollover image on your website? That will be $80,000 (please)

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Dear website owner, congratulations on your excellent site, which includes features covered by our registered patent, #5,251,294. As the description indicates, many of the components on your pages, particularly your menus, rollover images, and shortcuts, are detailed in our claim. We would be delighted to lease these to you at a reasonable royalty rate of $80,000. Please call our offices at your convenience to arrange a payment schedule

Webvention acquired the property from the great patent gobbler itself, Intellectual Ventures, and has been having a grand old time with it ever since. The firm is suing Abercrombie and Fitch, Bed Bath & Beyond, Dell, Gamestop, E*Trade, Neiman Marcus, Visa and ten other companies for patent infringement on ‘294. And the outfit wants jury trials in Texas. East Texas.

via Rollover image on your website? That will be $80,000 (please).

WikiLeaks funding has been blocked. Claims US / AU government blacklisting is the cause.

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Moneybookers, a British-registered internet payment company that collects WikiLeaks donations, emailed the organisation to say it had closed down its account because it had been put on an official US watchlist and on an Australian government blacklist.The apparent blacklisting came a few days after the Pentagon publicly expressed its anger at WikiLeaks and its founder, Australian citizen Julian Assange, for obtaining thousands of classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan, in one of the US army’s biggest leaks of information.

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Moneybookers moved against WikiLeaks on 13 August, according to the correspondence, less than a week after the Pentagon made public threats of reprisals against the organisation. Moneybookers wrote to Assange: “Following an audit of your account by our security department, we must advise that your account has been closed … to comply with money laundering or other investigations conducted by government authorities.”

via WikiLeaks says funding has been blocked after government blacklisting | Media | The Guardian.

In Ireland, law is not made by big companies

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UPC, one of Ireland’s largest internet service providers, has won a major legal victory against four of the world’s most powerful record companies over the much-contested issue of online music piracy.

The High Court in Dublin ruled today that there was no precedent in Irish law to force ISPs to identify and disconnect people accused of illegally downloading copyrighted files, which means that despite the record companies requests, UPC will not be required to take part in the three strikes programme that had been on the table for some time now.

via Law: Irish ISP wins major legal victory against record labels – No legal precedent in Irish law for disconnection | TechEye.

BLADE – Block All Drive-by Download Exploits

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BLADE is a new Windows immunization system that prevents surreptitious drive-by download exploits from infecting vulnerable Windows hosts. BLADE is implemented as a series of kernel extensions, which interrupt the covert binary installation phase of current malware drive-by exploits.

Ie. it checks if you authorised the download and execution of a file.

via BLADE – Block All Drive-by Download Exploits.

limera1n – IOS 4.1 jailbreak

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This jailbreak has some political ramifications, as the greenpo1son jailbreak was slated for release and Geohot (the author of this jailbreak) jumped the gun and released this without permission from two of the code writers.

There’s no phone unlock yet, but it’s untethered and should work, even though getting your phone into DFU mode is a bit of a trick.

limera1n.

Nano-Gyroscopes Will Let Cell Phones Navigate Indoors, Underground

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Israeli researchers have created the tiniest-ever optical gyroscopes, as small as a grain of sand, but still maintaining the keen accuracy of their counterparts hundreds of times larger. Optical gyroscopes are generally used for navigation in airplanes, ships and satellites, in which they track movement without reference to external navigation points, by measuring the vehicle’s rotation rate and linear acceleration. This is called inertial navigation. It’s extremely accurate but, up until now, only possible in gyroscopes and weighing two to three pounds.

They only need to set their position once, quickly, and then they can remember where they are for quite some time.

via Nano-Gyroscopes Will Let Cell Phones Navigate Indoors, Underground | Popular Science.

Seamlessly joining multiple projectors

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This isn’t so easy to do. There are a few different options:

1) The software route

Open Source VVVV

vvvv is a graphical programming environment for easy prototyping and development. It is designed to facilitate the handling of large media environments with physical interfaces, real-time motion graphics, audio and video that can interact with many users simultaneously.

C-nario

C-nario’s state of the art seamless projection application breaks down the barriers of traditional wall casting and provides endless possibilities for multiple, high definition displays projection on any shape, any size, 360 degrees surface. Now you can enjoy seamless projection with digital signage added values.

Sol7

Sol7 corrects imagery for projecting:
* onto non-planar screen shapes such as curved screen displays
* from unusual angles
* a seamless image from multiple projectors
* any combination of the above to achieve an immersive visual display

Sol7 is a versatile software tool that can be used to:
* align real-time content onto curved and non-planar screens
* align movies onto curved and non-planar screens
* edge blend multiple projectors
* align and edge blend multi-projector displays
* align and edge blend stereoscopic displays
* align and edge blend curved screen displays
* align unique display systems

Dataton Watchout

This doesn’t just meld the displays in all kinds of funny angles, it also supports loads of different feeds: live video, file kinds, different sound files, etc.

Scalable Display

Scalable Display Technologies makes trailblazing software used to calibrate multiple projector digital displays. Our auto-calibration system brings simplicity, reliability and brilliant high-resolution to displays across many industries and applications.

We help partners in a wide variety of markets enable Scalable auto-calibration in their products for cost-effective, eye-catching results.

2. The hardware route

The Axon Media Server

Barco / Folsom BlendPRO

Mersive Sol Harmony

One Shot program – auto aiming for snipers

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Lockheed Martin’s objective is to deliver 15 field-testable and hardened prototype systems by October 2011 that provides the capability to profile downrange crosswind and range to target in near real time, at longer ranges, and improved probability of a first round hit.

The system’s integrated spotter scope ISS should measure crosswinds, maximum effective range of the weapon, temperature, atmospheric pressure, humidity, cant and pointing angles, and GPS coordinates, as well as allow direct day and night observation of targets with continuous updates of the aim point offset corrections, with no alignment verification of the laser/crosswind optics to the spotting scope necessary.

The rifle scope also should communicate the aim point offset and expected crosswind variability to the rifle scope using a wired or wireless data link

via Lockheed Martin to continue One Shot program electro-optics work to help snipers hit targets in crosswinds – Military & Aerospace Electronics.

Toshiba to launch no-glasses 3D TV this year

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oshiba will offer a 12-inch model and a 20-inch model. They’ll cost around ¥120,000 (US$1,430) and ¥240,000 respectively. Toshiba didn’t announce launch or pricing plans for markets outside of Japan.

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Behind this lens screen is a custom-developed LCD (liquid crystal display) panel. Each screen has 8.29 million pixels — four times the number of pixels in a conventional “full HD” television — organized into groups of nine pixels of each color. The nine lenses split light from each bank of pixels and send it to nine points in front of the TV

If the viewer sits in one of these sweet spots they get the 3D illusion.

The nine spots should enable several family members to watch a 3D image at the same time.

The set-up means that despite the large number of pixels in the screen, the resulting picture seen in each of the nine spots is equivalent to a 720p high-definition image, said Toshiba.

via Toshiba to launch no-glasses 3D TV this year in Japan – toshiba, consumer electronics, CEATEC – Good Gear Guide.

Google TV

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Well, this is Google’s take on TV. You buy either a Logitech box or a Sony TV and it’ll let you browse the web, watch youtube, use some apps and do some other stuff on it. You can control it using your iPhone or Android. Looks like it could be interesting.

Quick Tour – Google TV.

Since then I have been contacted by Kevin of jofoandroid.com and he has a complete guide online https://joyofandroid.com/android-tv/Android TV: Everything You Need To Know

US demands right to snoop the world

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It’s throwing out the month old SWIFT (Financial) data mining agreement and has decided it not only wants to track and keep ALL financial data going in or out of  the country, but also any encrypted data needs to be fitted with a master key, so that they can read your facebook passwords, blackberry emails, etc. Privacy? Don’t think so. At least the EU is getting pissed off about it.

US demands right to snoop the world • The Register.

3D scanners now just being used for fun by airport officials

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This is hardly surprising – they’ve been emailing the pictures (which resolve into full colour when you put the ‘negative’ filter over them in photoshop) and been poking fun at colleagues and now they’re basically just using them to check you out naked. Anyone suprised?

Lagos — The 3D full-body scanners procured for thorough body check of passengers at the nation’s major airports for security reasons are now being abused by security officials from the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria FAAN, THISDAY can confirm.They use the machines, installed in the wake of the Farouk AbdulMutallab affair, to watch the naked images of female passengers for fun.The controversial body scanners have been dubbed “e-stripping” in advanced countries because of the way they expose the nakedness of those being screened.THISDAY discovered that during off-peak periods, the aviation security officials, who are trained on the use of the scanners, usually stroll from the cubicle located in a hidden corner on the right side of the screening area where the 3D full-body scanner monitors are located.They do so to catch a glimpse of some of the passengers entering the machine and immediately go back to view the naked images, in order to match the faces with the images since the faces are blurred on the monitors while passengers are inside the machine.The face that appears on the scanner’s monitor is usually blurred so that the operator viewing the full body will not recognise who passes through the machine.But by coming out to see the passenger in person and then going back to see his or her image, the objective of protecting the privacy of the passenger has been defeated.THISDAY observed this development first-hand when it visited the screening area, passed through the conventional screening machine at 3pm last Saturday and observed that passengers were reluctant to use the new 3D full-body scanner.To compel them to use it, one of the conventional scanners was put out of service, leaving the ones at the left end and another very close to the new scanner.

via allAfrica.com: Now Showing at MMIA: Nude Images of Passengers.

Netherlands starts it’s own China-esque firewall

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The freedoms we rapidly lose 🙁

The Netherlands now has it’s own blacklist of websites that it forces on providers to block. The list is confidential, the methods of enforcing the block are confidential, and just like ACTA – they’re trying to put it through without releasing any details, promising transparency ‘later’.

The problem is this: if we allow any government to decide what it is what we can and can’t read, we’re on the slippery slope of censorship. Now it’s paedophelia (the example they trot out worryingly often when they limit your freedoms), next it’ll be weapon making, then it’ll be anything containing a contrary political ideology. Our freedom of expression is a very serious thing indeed to take away from someone, especially if you’re being secretive about what exactly it is that you’re taking away and how you’re doing it, but sticking a generalistic post-it explanations ‘child porn’ [that should be good enough for anybody, right?] over it is completely unacceptable.

Openheid over kinderpornofilter, achteraf | Webwereld.