IBM Trying To Patent Cure For Obama's BlackBerry Woes

from the isn't-that-convenient dept

theodp writes "Appearing Thursday on The View, President Obama lamented that his BlackBerry was no fun anymore, noting that only about 10 people had his BlackBerry personal e-mail address. 'I've got to admit it's no fun because they think it's going to be subject to the Presidential Records Act so nobody sends me the juicy stuff,' he ruefully added. Coincidentally, the USPTO disclosed on Thursday that IBM has a patent pending for a Cellular Telephone Using Multiple Accounts, which provides multiple SIM card slots to address the problems faced by 'an elected official [who] may be under legal restraints regarding the nature of calls which may be made from a particular telephone.' Without its invention, explains Big Blue, 'an official may use one telephone for calls in an official government capacity; another for calls to a re-election committee; and another for purely personal use.' IBM ran to the patent office with details of the new 'invention' (image) just days after Obama was told he could keep his BlackBerry for personal use, but would have to use an NSA-approved phone for anything government related."

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Software Firms Overwhelmingly Against Patents

from the not-worth-it dept

There's been plenty of talk about whether or not software patents should be legal, and one of the "debates" we often run into in the comments is over whether or not the "software industry" really believes in patents or not. Some patent system supporters claim that most of the industry does, in fact, support patents, but it's a noisy bunch who is against them. Unfortunately for those who believe that, some new research is suggesting quite a different picture. It seems that a rather large majority of software firms don't seek patents and don't believe they're helpful or provide any real incentives:

Three-quarters of the D&B firms had no patents and were not seeking them. Because the D&B firms are, we believe, typical of the population of software startup firms in the U.S., their responses may be representative of patenting rates among software startups generally. It is, in fact, possible that the overall percentage of software startup patenting is lower than this, insofar as patent holders may have been more likely than other software entrepreneurs to take time to fill out a Berkeley Patent Survey.

For the most part, these firms just didn't think getting a patent was worth it. For all the talk of how patents protect companies and act as an incentive for investment in big projects, most software execs seem to disagree:

One of the most striking findings of our study is that software firms ranked patents dead last among seven strategies for attaining competitive advantage identified by the survey

Instead, they believe that a first mover advantage is a lot more important followed by "complementary assets," which is basically offering scarce services to complement the software.

The execs were also asked how much incentive patents provided for developing software, and the answer was about as close to none as you could expect. On a scale from 0 to 5, software execs said that patents were a 0.96 as an incentive for inventing something new and a 0.93 in commercializing a product and bringing it to market (innovating). And, before you say that this was skewed by people without patents, the report notes:

the results did not change significantly even when focusing only on responses from software entrepreneurs whose firms hold at least one patent or application. Even patent-holding software entrepreneurs reported that patents provide just above a weak incentive for engaging in these innovation-related activities.

The other interesting finding? If a firm is venture-backed, it's more likely to get patents, but this doesn't appear to suggest that the patents are valuable. It seems to indicate that entrepreneurs still believe the old claim that venture capitalists want to see patents, so they feel the need to get patents just to show to investors.

On the whole, it certainly appears that the vast majority of the software industry isn't interested in patents, don't find them useful or important, and certainly don't see them as creating an incentive. Even those who get patents don't see much value in them, and appear to only get them because they feel pressured to get the patents for external reasons. All in all, this is a pretty damning bit of research for those who suggest patents help the software industry.

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Reminder: 'What IT Needs To Know About The Law' Webinar Tomorrow

from the don't-miss-it dept

A reminder for folks that tomorrow, Wednesday May 26th, at 9am PT/noon ET, we'll be holding the next webinar in our IT Innovation series, What IT Needs To Know About The Law. I've been working on the content for this webinar with Dave Navetta and Larry Downes, and it's shaping up great, covering many of the issues we talk about here on a regular basis. In fact, there's so much good stuff, that we're down to figure out what we're leaving out -- perhaps to revisit at a future date. Either way, it should be chock full of good info that will be useful for any IT person, so don't miss it. Sign up now, and stop by tomorrow with questions ready. As with our past webinars, this one will be interactive. We'll be taking questions from attendees throughout the webinar. Please join us.

Cloud Security Webinar Now Available; Just As New Report Warns Of Cloud Security

from the up-in-the-air dept

You may recall that, a couple weeks ago, we had a webinar on cloud security, with Jake Kaldenbaugh of CloudStrategies and Sam Quigley of Emerose, that was well attended and well reviewed (thank you!). The feedback on it was tremendous. If you happened to miss it, we've now made it available to watch, and also have put up the actual PowerPoint document for download as well. And... bonus time. The PDF file contains a series of extra slides, detailing some of the state of the cloud security market today -- as well as some details about Amazon's cloud security initiatives. Even if you caught the original presentation, there are probably some useful additional nuggets in there as well.

And, in the meantime, don't forget to sign up for our next Webinar, coming up this Wednesday at 9am PT/noon ET on What IT Needs To Know About The Law, with Dave Navetta and Larry Downes. The signups on this one have been through the roof and we've been working hard putting it together. The conversation should be very, very interesting, so definitely come ready with questions as well.

Is Telling People To Visit A Certain Website A Denial Of Service Attack?

from the seems-like-a-stretch dept

iamtheky sends in the story of a UC San Diego Professor, Ricardo Dominguez, whose focus of research is "electronic civil disobedience," (for which he received tenure and a fellowship from his university), but who is now potentially facing discipline or even criminal charges from the university for staging a "virtual sit-in" to protest budget cuts. It certainly raises questions about the line between telling people to visit a website and a hack attack to take down a website. It's difficult to see how just telling people to go to a website should ever qualify as any kind of attack, but the University is said to be contemplating criminal charges.

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New Webinar: What IT People Need To Know About The Law

from the putting-on-that-legal-hat dept

A few weeks ago, we had a post about why IT people need to be knowledgeable about the law, rather than just about technology. It was based on an excellent article by Dave Navetta on The Legal Defensibility Era (pdf). For years, IT folks have recognized that they often wear two hats, switching between a technology one and a business one, as they often have to explain or justify the business tradeoffs of the IT decisions they make. But these days, they also really need to add a legal hat.

Given the immense interest we received in this particular topic, we've decided that it will be the topic of our next webinar in our IT Innovation series: What IT needs to know about the law to be held next Wednesday, May 26th at 9am PT/noon ET. We're thrilled that Dave Navetta, who wrote the article that sparked the original discussion, will be participating and discussing this "era of legal defensibility" that IT people need to understand. Dave has built a career around bridging that gap between IT folks and legal folks, and is obviously perfect to be part of this discussion. With him will be Larry Downes, most recently the author of The Laws of Disruption, which is all about how the legal realm is hugely important to understanding business and technology in the world today, and how anyone looking to succeed in the internet age needs to understand some of these key legal principles. Larry's a well-known writer, speaker, pundit and consultant on this important intersection of the law and the technology world, and between David and Larry, the discussion should be quite a lot of fun. Once again, I'll be moderating.

I'm really excited about this particular topic and the two speakers. We've been preparing for the webinar over the past few days, and there are a ton of interesting topics to discuss, concerning how the law is impacting security, privacy and the wider IT world. Depending on timing, we may dip into some other areas, including intellectual property law, Section 230 and the like. Given the discussions we regularly have on this site, and how important legal issues have become in the IT world over the past few years, this is going to be a can't miss discussion, so sign up now. As with previous webinars, the discussion is designed to be interactive, and we can take questions from the audience via the web interface during the event, so please come ready with questions.

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UK Court Says Software Company Can Be Liable For Buggy Software

from the opening-the-floodgates? dept

For many, many years the debate has raged on whether or not software developers should be liable for bugs in software. Plenty of companies, sick of dealing with buggy software, have felt that developers should be legally liable, just as any other defective product. But many argue back that, with software, that's not really reasonable, since pretty much all software has bugs. That's the nature of software -- and making developers potentially liable for "defective" offerings, because the software has some bugs, opens up so much liability that it could cast a chill across all sorts of software development -- especially in areas where software is especially buggy. And, of course, there's a strong argument that those unintended consequences would do significantly more harm than good, such as driving good developers out of the business, because the liability is just too high.

That said, software liability has been a hot topic in Europe lately, and now Slashdot points us to the news that the UK High Court has ruled that a software company can be liable for buggy software. More specifically, the court found that a clause in the license agreement, which said it would not be liable for defects was found to be an unfair contract term.

Of course, it also sounds like there were some special conditions here:

The judge said that the exclusion of liability was unfounded because of the particular way in which the software sale had been conducted. The fact that a full set of operating documents for the software had not been provided and the fact that Kingsway made its purchasing decisions largely based on Red Sky's claims for the software eroded Red Sky's ability to limit its liability, the Court said.

"Red Sky's' standard terms were predicated on the fact that a prospective customer would investigate Entirety [the software] and make up its own mind whether or not to purchase based on demonstrations and the Operating Documents which Red Sky had previously supplied," said the ruling. "It did not apply to circumstances in which the customer relied on Red Sky's' advice in deciding to purchase Entirety."

"The exclusions in clause 10.2 [of the terms and conditions] only applied where the Operating Documents as defined in Clause 1.1.6 were supplied to the customer before the contract was signed," it said. "In this case such documents were not supplied by Red Sky to Kingsway. Therefore, Clause 10.2 and the exclusions derived there from did not apply."

So, as the article notes, the issue here may be more about liability arising from the sales process, rather than just general liability, so it hopefully won't have the same sorts of chilling effects that general liability for bugs might have.

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Reminder: Cloud Security Webinar Tomorrow

from the don't-miss-it dept

Just a reminder that our webinar on "Cloud Security" is tomorrow at 9am PT/noon ET for those of you interested. Please register if you're interested in participating. This is a hot topic and an awful lot of you have already registered, so it should lead to a good discussion. You can read a bit more about what the webinar is going to cover, and who's involved, in our original post announcing it, but we've been working hard the past few days finalizing the presentation part, and it should lead to quite an engaging discussion. It is designed to be interactive, and the webinar system has a way for you to ask questions, so please come with question ready.

Why IT Security Guys Now Also Need To Be Legal Experts

from the welcome-to-the-modern-world dept

Every so often we get complaints from people who point out that this site is called "Techdirt," and yet quite frequently talks about the legal issues. There are a few different responses to this, but one of the key points is that, if you're in the tech field these days, you actually really do need to be pretty familiar with the law in a lot of ways. This is a point that I've been thinking about a lot lately, so it seemed like great timing when Michael Scott directed our attention to an article about how IT and security folks now need to recognize that legal risks are a big part of the security realm:

The era of legal defensibility is upon us. The legal risk associated with information security is significant and will only increase over time. Security professionals will have to defend their security decisions in a foreign realm: the legal world. This article discusses implementing security that is both secure and legally defensible, which is key for managing information security legal risk.

It certainly takes things pretty far outside the world where information security folks are used to living. And while there may be a sense of being able to defend the technological decisions should there be a security breach, reaching the level of "legal defensibility" involves a whole different set of issues.

The blog post linked above notes that we're still early in realizing this overlapping arena of security and law, and it's important to have folks from all of these disciplines work together:

Now is the time for legal, privacy and security professionals to break down arbitrary and antiquated walls that separate their professions. The distinctions between security, privacy and compliance are becoming so blurred as to ultimately be meaningless. Like it or not, it all must be dealt with holistically, at the same time, and with expertise from multiple fronts. In this regard we must all develop thick skins and be not afraid to stop zealously guarding turf. The reality is, the legal and security worlds have collided, and most lawyers don't know enough about security, and most security professionals don't know enough about the law. Let's change that.

Indeed. In fact, this is part of the reason that I made sure there was at least some legal discussion in our upcoming webinar on security in the cloud -- because it's an important aspect of security these days, and the cloud raises some serious legal questions (if you haven't registered yet, please do!). But making sure that legal and security/IT people are talking about this regularly is important. Otherwise, you can bet that the legal folks are going to make decisions that are going to come back to haunt those in the IT and security worlds...

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Will Cloud Computing Lead To Patent Liability For End Users?

from the promoting-progress-left-and-right dept

With so much focus on "cloud computing" these days, companies looking to leap into the cloud and to embrace the agility and flexibility it provides are being warned that there may be a looming problem on the horizon: patent litigation. Seriously. As with pretty much any hot area of technology these days, there's a pretty big patent thicket around cloud computing -- even if the basic technology really isn't all that different than what's been around for ages. But, of course, that won't stop opportunistic companies from claiming their patents cover new cloud services (or of having some players in the field attack competitors with patents). But where this becomes a bigger issue is that such patent lawsuits could bleed down to customers as well, meaning that they may take on more liability than they realize just in adopting a rather useful service:

"One model of enforcing patents says I can go after the manufacturer, but once I do I'm done because then all his sales are licensed," Goldberg said. "But if I keep going after all his customers, I can keep going forever and the customer is really not in the best position to fight back. So it creates increased risk."

Yes, this sounds ridiculous, but welcome to modern patent law. This is, clearly, a problem with patent law today. There are lots of really useful and valuable cloud services that provide much greater functionality than local offerings, but beyond questions concerning "outsourcing" certain important aspects of IT, the fact that it could also make companies liable for patent infringement is a big open question. Considering the threat, we'll actually be discussing this topic a bit in our upcoming Security in the Cloud Webinar, which is taking place Tuesday May 11th at 9am PT/noon ET.

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Does Storing Your Documents In 'The Cloud' Mean The Gov't Has Easier Access To It?

from the privacy-concerns dept

One of the more annoying things concerning the ever changing technology world is the trouble that the law has in keeping up. We're seeing that a lot lately. For example, a few months ago, we talked about 4th Amendment issues when it comes to cloud data. There are a few different camps on this, with a few different thoughts -- and so far, no one's exactly sure who's right. We predicted the issue was going to come up more frequently... and we're already seeing that. A few months after that post, we had a court ruling that (on a questionable basis) found no 4th Amendment privacy protections for emails once delivered, using similar logic to the debate over the cloud. And such cases are becoming more common.

The Citizen Media Law Project has a good discussion about the FBI getting access to documents stored in Google Docs as part of a spam investigation. In that case, the FBI did go through the process of getting a full search warrant (which should have satisfied some of the 4th Amendment concerns), but it's the first case on record of the FBI getting access to Google Docs.

Part of the problem here is that this sort of stuff is covered under a law that's nearly a quarter of a century old, and is not even remotely designed for a modern technology world:

The current federal statute on the issue, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), 18 U.S.C. § 2510, et seq., basically extended the rules regarding government access to older technologies like the telephone (e.g., wiretapping) to electronic communications. The USA Patriot Act, passed after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, modified these old rules a bit.  But the basic, underlying statute was passed in 1986, before the advent and widespread use of email, text messaging, social networking websites, and the myriad other means of modern communications.

As others have explained at length, ECPA creates an exceedingly dense and confusing statutory framework, and relies on a series of archaic distinctions, such as whether a communication is "stored" or "in transit."  This complexity creates uncertainty about what showing law enforcement has to make in order to access user materials stored in the cloud. Is a search warrant, a subpoena, or an informal request required?  Under what circumstances can service providers voluntarily cooperate with law enforcement?

What's interesting is how little attention these issues seem to be getting -- even though they can have a pretty large impact. And, even though this may seem like legal details, it applies well outside the legal field as well. While it won't be the key focus, we're even going to include a short section on these kinds of legal issues in the cloud in our upcoming webinar on cloud security (register here). While this might not seem directly like a security issue, if you're in charge of keeping data secure, it's pretty important to know what it means when the feds knock on your door... or the door of the third party "cloud" provider to whom you outsourced your company's data.

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As More Services Move To The 'Cloud' What Does It Mean For IT Security?

from the an-upcoming-webinar dept

While the term "the cloud" is still pretty loosely defined, there's no doubt that more and more services are being offered over the internet, and many of those are enterprise-type offerings. For example, lots of well known companies are using Google docs, and Salesforce.com has really become quite the standard in many, many places for any type of CRM/Salesforce automation. But what does that mean for IT folks, who are used to having full control over the technology being used by employees? How can they make sure that the services that employees are using are secure and protected? And, for companies building their own online services that they hope will be used in enterprises around the globe, how should they best prepare to build a system that meets the security requirements of in-house IT staff? On top of that, beyond traditional "technology" security, there are serious legal security questions as well. How protected, legally speaking, is the data stored in the cloud? Is it covered under different laws? And do the answers to these questions depend on if you're "webifying" legacy systems as compared to building entirely new systems?

Well, we're hoping to answer a bunch of these questions with a new webinar that we're putting on next Tuesday, May 11th at 9am PT/noon ET (register here), as a part of our ongoing IT Innovation series -- sponsored by Oracle and Intel. I'll be moderating the discussion, and the discussion will be led by two of the most knowledgeable folks I know on this topic: Jake Kaldenbaugh of CloudStrategies, and formerly an exec at NEC, where he drove early strategic efforts focusing on virtualization and cloud computing, and Sam Quigley of Emerose, a leading expert on cloud security, who previously was a founding member of EDS's security and privacy services group, an open source developer at security appliance vendor Astaro, the sole security person at Xign (which became JP Morgan Treasury Services) and Vice President of security and operations at Wesabe, the online financial startup.

The webinar will consist of a brief presentation, followed by discussion -- and we're hoping to make it as interactive as possible, so come ready with questions. If you'd like to attend, please register now!

Separately, it's worth noting that we recently refreshed the IT Innovation website, to reflect that it's sponsored by Oracle and Intel (Oracle taking over from Sun following the acquisition), and we've also refreshed the resource center with a series of new whitepapers, including (but not limited to):

• Best Practices for Managing Datacenter Costs via Application and Server Consolidation
• Why Solid-State Drives Usage Scenarios Are Expanding for the Datacenter
• New Blades and Networking Solutions Ensure Solid Return on Investment
• Reassessing Server Costs for Midsize Companies

Also, while there is plenty of overlap in posts between Techdirt's main site and IT Innovation, some posts are reserved just for folks following IT Innovation. So, if you're not following that site, you may have missed stories questioning what comes after silicon as we (perhaps) approach the limits of Moore's law and a discussion on the popularity of certain programming languages.

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Now That The Exaflood's Debunked, Fear The Exacloud!

from the looming-capacitastrophe dept

Cable and phone company lobbyists (and their army of PR, consultant and think tank friends) have long pushed the bogus concept of an "exaflood," or the idea that explosive Internet growth will result in the Internet collapsing any day now. The argument is generally used by telecom lobbyists to scare politicians and the public into supporting something (deregulation, subsidies, higher prices, fewer consumer protections) lest the Internet explode. The problem is that the argument has been debunked countless times by real network researchers like Dr. Andrew Odlyzko of MINTS -- who highlight that traffic growth is actually quite reasonable, and what growth there is can be easily dealt with by intelligent network engineers and modest network investment. If carriers aren't investing money back into the network, it has nothing to do with bandwidth bogeymen -- it's usually because they face limited competition.

The exaflood term itself was actually coined by Bret Swanson, formerly of the Discovery Institute -- the think tank hired by evangelicals to help push creationism into the classroom via "intelligent design." Under the employ of major carriers, Swanson first used the term in a 2007 Wall Street Journal editorial, and despite it being largely nonsense -- it quickly became a common phrase in modern telecom lexicon. Of course the exaflood never arrived because it doesn't actually exist, but that's not slowing Swanson down. With the FCC considering network neutrality rules, Swanson (now under his his own brand: Entropy Economics) has given the ungracefully-aging exaflood myth a botox injection, based on filings this week with the FCC (via Ars Technica):

"We are intrigued by one particular innovation just around the corner. Call it online gaming. Call it cloud streaming. We call it the "exacloud." It is cloud computing but of a scope and scale never seen before. . . This exacloud will transform video games, movies, virtual worlds, business software, and most other media. Piracy goes away. So do DVDs, game boxes, and maybe even expensive personal computers. New content and software subscription models open up. Based in the cloud instead of on your device, interactivity thrives."

This miracle, piracy-curing super computing evolution Swanson references? It's just ordinary people using clients to access servers using networks. While Swanson throws out a lot of data points in his filing, none of them dispute the reality that Internet traffic growth remains reasonable and manageable. Amusingly, he even goes so far as to use the MINTs data that debunked his original claims -- as evidence supporting his "new" argument. It appears that all he's done is rename his imaginary bandwidth apocalypse for a more modern audience -- and hoped nobody would notice. He at least could have been a little more entertaining. How about the Tubeogeddon? BitTorrentialCollapse? The Tubeacalype? Capacitastrophe? The looming colocaust? Help us out...

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SCO Says Jury Didn't Really Mean What It Said... And Judge Should Order Novell To Hand SCO Unix Copyrights

from the good-luck-with-that dept

SCO really is quite the zombie of a company, isn't it? It just never dies. It's been a month since getting smacked down yet again and having a jury declare that Novell still owns the Unix copyrights, and they were never transferred to SCO (after a judge had already said the same thing). And yet, as Slashdot alerts us, SCO has now told the judge he should order Novell to hand over the copyrights anyway. Talk about getting desperate. When will SCO finally be put out of its misery?

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Have We Reached The Limits Of Silicon?

from the are-we-there-yet? dept

The growing demand for greater mobile computing power is rapidly transforming how the semiconductor industry needs to think about designing chips to meet the performance requirements for mobile devices. With GHz-level processor speeds and several GB of data storage, current smartphones have the computational power of high-end desktop computers from just ten years ago. As we move towards smaller and faster computing devices, the use of silicon in chips is making it increasingly difficult to uphold Moore's Law, not only in terms of the laws of physics, but also in terms of economics. However, it's worth mentioning that claims of the end of Moore's Law have been going on for years and are greatly exaggerated when you consider that Moore's Law keeps getting redefined as time passes. In the end, it really isn't as big a deal as the press makes it out to be.

Recently, TSMC's vice president of research and development, Chiang Shang-yi, said that current silicon chip technology should be able to sustain Moore's Law for another decade, but he also pointed out that Moore's Law could come to an end sooner due to economic rather than technological reasons, as it becomes increasingly expensive to develop and manufacture next-generation chips. Even so, he's not really that worried, as his take-home message is that after the end of Moore's Law (whenever that may happen), there are still many more years of what he calls "More Than Moore" technologies, and then even more years of system integration improvements.

Kevin Kelly has presented an interesting and compelling take on Moore's Law -- basically saying that the exponential progress is inevitable in technologies that scale down to microscopic or even nanoscopic sizes. He also points out that once the exponential growth of a technology starts to plateau, we will naturally shift our focus to other alternative technologies, which may subsequently experience their own exponential growth and establish new "laws." He even suggests that Moore's Law could be redefined as a larger trend that can continue indefinitely, encompassing several smaller, overlapping technology trends.

As "the end of Moore's Law" looms ahead, it would appear that people are beginning to shift some of their focus to new alternative technologies that could potentially replace silicon in chips. Here are just a few of the latest technologies that are being investigated for potential use in microelectronics:

In the past couple of years, graphene has been touted as a potential replacement for silicon. Graphene, a single-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms bonded together in a graphitic structure, has been widely studied for its interesting mechanical, chemical, and electronic properties. Graphene sheets have carrier mobilities that are hundreds of times greater than that of silicon, making them ideal for faster chips. However, a major problem with graphene is that it tends to get very hot when devices are operated at the saturation current limits.

Recently, it was demonstrated that memristors -- resistors with memory -- could perform logic operations, and it has even been predicted that memristor-based processors could one day replace the silicon in e-reader displays, as well as in computers.

Diamond, an excellent thermal conductor, can be turned into a semiconductor with the right impurities, and it could be used to make high-performance chips that won't need power-draining cooling systems. However, it is difficult to make diamond wafers large enough for mass production.

Of course, none of these technologies are close to being ready for commercialization yet, but they're a glimpse of what could be the continuation of Moore's Law in its broader sense. In the meantime, companies will try their best to stretch out current technology for as long as it makes sense to.

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Innovation By Imitation: Study Shows That Success Comes From Imitation

from the go-with-what-works dept

We've discussed in the past the differences between invention and innovation -- where invention is the creation of something new, and innovation is the actual process of putting it into practice. We've pointed out that the patent system is supposed to encourage the latter (innovation -- as seen in the command that the system "promote the progress") but in practice tends to promote the former at the expense of the latter. The problem is that people who aren't that familiar with the process of innovation think that the two things are the same. But, in reality, innovation is an ongoing process, whereby people have to keep trying out different ideas to make something useful. Anyone who's built a business learns this quickly: the original idea is usually meaningless by the time anything successful comes around. Real innovation is a process of continually trying out new ideas and tweaking them slightly until you figure out what really attracts the market's attention. Studies have shown that real innovation is this kind of ongoing process, rather than the "flash of insight" concept pushed by patent system supporters.

Of course, when innovation is an ongoing process, patents tend to hold back that process. That's because they make it so that only one player in the field -- who perhaps is not the one best equipped to innovate -- gets to run that process. Everyone else is held back. It also slows down the pace of innovation, since without competition, the patent holder has less incentive to keep trying out those new ideas to find what works best. As we've learned for years and years, competition breeds innovation -- but the patent system is designed to cut out competition for no particular reason.

Defenders of the patent system will often claim that the more socially beneficial result is for competitors to come up with something completely new, rather than building off the work of others. However, there is little evidence to support this particular interpretation. In fact, most research into true innovation shows that it is much more efficient for all parties to have access to as many possible solutions as possible -- and holding back those options results in sub-optimal social results.

Yet another new study has shown this to be the case. Some researchers ran a contest of sorts, where they asked various people to submit "programs" in a contest to produce the best results:

A group of researchers set out to answer this question, and published their results in Science last week. To tackle the issue, the researchers set up a computer-based tournament based on Robert Axelrod's 'Prisoner's Dilemma' competitions in the late 1970s. In this type of tournament, entrants submit computerized strategies that compete against each other in a virtual world. Individuals, or "agents," with the most successful strategies survive and reproduce, while less successful strategies die out.

In each round of the social learning tournament, automated agents could choose from 100 behaviors, each of which returned a certain payoff. The payoffs changed over the course of the tournament, simulating changing environmental conditions that might render a behavior more or less useful. In any round, agents could make one of three moves: use a behavior they already knew (Exploit), use asocial learning to test a new behavior by trial-and-error (Innovate), or learn socially by watching a behavior that another agent was performing in that round (Observe). Out of the three possible moves, only Exploit resulted in a payoff; the two learning moves would only return information about how profitable the behavior was in the current environmental conditions. Social learning was especially costly; if Observe was played when no other agent was performing a novel behavior, the agent learned nothing.

The results, however, showed that the runaway winners of the contest were those that used "social learning" the most. In other words, they were the ones who took what, on the face of things, appeared to be the most "costly" move -- and focused on what was working best for others and then using it successfully themselves. In other words, yet again, we see that the strategies that make the most sense for the greatest output tend to be those where participants in a market have the ability to copy others. Now, this upsets those who may have come up with the results first, but as other studies have shown, it's rarely the exclusivity of patents that leads to that invention in the first place. So if you don't need exclusivity to invent, and a more open solution of copying leads to greater overall output and social benefit... what, exactly, is the reason for creating these kinds of monopolies anyway?

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Who Cheers For C When It Wins A Popularity Contest?

from the we've-got-spirit,-how-'bout-you? dept

While there are a variety of ways to judge the popularity of various programming languages, the TIOBE Programming Community index has ranked C as the most popular language for the first time in 4 years. At the top spot, C has no official corporate sponsor behind it -- but it's still available for nearly every platform imaginable. And arguably, it has always been the most popular programming language if all of its variants (C, C++, C#, Objective C) are counted together.

Interestingly, though, other notable languages that have risen in popularity have done so under the direction of large corporations. For example, Apple is the main cheerleader behind the recent popularity of Objective C -- especially as this superset of C is now one of only 4 languages approved for coding iPhone/iPod/iPad apps. Also, Google's Go language has been getting noticed because it's a shiny new offering from everyone's favorite "do no evil" buddy -- and because it explicitly supports concurrent programming.

But with no major company pushing for C, it may be getting a bit long in the tooth as multi-core processors inspire programmers to increasingly use multi-threading techniques. C will certainly never die, but the last revision of C was adopted as an ANSI standard in March 2000. So it's been quite some time since C has been updated. In fact, the ISO's proposals for C changes also appear to be pretty conservative -- which is a good thing for stability and eliminating any confusion over what is supported. But will C be able to evolve and stay relevant?

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Memristor Technology Beginning To Mature

from the still-just-a-toddler dept

A few decades ago, the memristor was a theoretical circuit element conceived by Leon Chua, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley. The "memory resistor" retains its memory even without power, and it joins the the resistor, capacitor and inductor as the fourth fundamental circuit element. Memristor technology became a reality in 2008 with a lab prototype that proved the existence of this basic electrical circuit. Following that breakthrough, a flexible memristor was developed in 2009, but despite the apparent progress in research labs, these devices are not exactly ready yet for commercial production.

Still, the potential for memristor technology is remarkable. Memristors promise to create a new type of memory that can mimic brain synapses in a way that could improve machine pattern recognition. More practically, memristors can be used in storage devices that would allow computers to boot up immediately -- since memristor-based memory doesn't have the same power or mechanical restrictions as conventional memory technologies. Recently, memristors also have been used to perform logic functions -- which could bring memory and logic functions closer together for more efficient computation. Given that a significant amount of energy is usually devoted to shuttling data around from storage devices to processors, memristor-based processors could also store data and reduce data retrieval inefficiencies.

The hurdles remaining for memristors lie in manufacturing challenges for introducing new materials into existing lithographic processes. Additionally, there are cost issues, scale up issues and questions about the reliability of new devices based on untested technology. Very optimistic labs are predicting commercial non-volatile memory based on memristors starting in 2013. However, given that flash memory was invented in the 1980s, and SSD storage has only recently become somewhat price competitive to hard drives, it may take a couple decades for memristors to really gain traction.

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Are Computers in Africa Really Weapons of Mass Destruction?

from the black-hats-on-the-dark-continent? dept

In recent months, a number of folks have argued that the arrival of high-speed bandwidth in Africa represents not an opportunity for economic growth, but a dangerous threat to the world. According to these Western pundits who are, incidentally, often promoting their cybersecurity services, computers and connectivity in Africa either pave the way for terrorists to unleash cyber-attacks or for botnet operators to gather millions of unprotected machines into their control. Although we've spent considerable time debunking the hysteria around cyberwar, this new version of the meme is even more unfounded.

Worrying that Africa is going to start producing top-notch hackers in any great quantity seems pretty absurd, when we're talking about a continent where basic literacy, not to mention programming prowess, is a challenge. When Franz-Stefan writes in one of the articles above, that "skillful cybercriminals operating out of an unregulated Internet cafe in the slums of Addis Ababa, Lagos, or Maputo" will create the world's biggest botnets, he shows that he has little understanding of those "slums." For starters, electricity is intermittent enough to make cyberwar a sputtering failure. Secondly, although there are pockets of terrorists on the continent, by and large, elsewhere terrorists have access to far better finances and bandwidth than their comrades in Mogadishu. The fact that those terrorists haven't used the Internet for these types of attacks with any regularity suggests that they place far more faith in tried-and-true methods of terrorizing, and there is every reason to believe that those in Africa will be the same.

Finally, as Miquel Hudin points out, it is ridiculous (and very likely offensive) to think that Africans are any more likely to keep their PCs insecure than anyone else. An American or European who points to Africa as the source of infected botnet computers is wildly hypocritical considering the enormous number of insecure computers that wealthy, educated Westerners have in their homes and offices. It seems quite unlikely that African computers are any more insecure than elsewhere.

Frantic articles painting Africa as just another threat, especially with regard to a great opportunity for the continent - connectivity - are reckless and miss both on-the-ground context and level-headed responses to the challenges of the continent.

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