A jury in San Francisco on Thursday cleared Google of copyright infringement in a case brought by Oracle over Google’s use of Java in Android.The jury of eight women and two men took three days of deliberation to reach its verdict. Oracle was seeking up to $9 billion in damages, making it a huge victory for Google and its legal team."Your work is done," Judge William Alsup told the jury after the verdict was read.Oracle's lawyers sat stoney faced after the verdict was read, but shortly afterward the company said it would continue the battle.+ BACKGROUND: Oracle cries foul over expert in Java case against Google +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For some companies, winning $625 million from Apple is not enough of a reward.On Wednesday, VirnetX asked a Texas judge to order Apple to shut down iMessage and FaceTime while their patent case goes to appeal. Previously, VirnetX was awarded $625 million in the case after it convinced the jury that Apple committed patent infringement. If the judge grants the injunction, Apple will be forced to either suspend iMessage and FaceTime or find a last-minute workaround to the patented technology.One of the patents in question involves establishing secure communications through Internet domain names. In asking for the injunction, VirnetX argued that although forcing a company to shut down two of its most popular services may seem excessive, it’s necessary because the infringement has done “irreparable harm” to VirnetX.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Virtual and augmented realities aren't just for gaming.Wayfair Inc. , a Boston-based, 14-year-old e-commerce company that sells home furnishings, is working on an app based on Google's Project Tango technology that would put augmented reality, and one day virtual reality, squarely in the enterprise.If all goes as planned, customers using Wayfair's app would go beyond looking at a photo of a love seat or table, reading the measurements and wondering how the piece would look in their living room.The app would use Project Tango's mapping, computer vision, depth-sensing, 3D-motion tracking and machine-learning technology to allow customers to see – on their Android smartphone or tablet – how a piece of furniture would look in their home.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
What are the fundamental limitations inherent in machine learning systems?That’s the central question of a potential new DARPA program known as the Fundamental Limits of Learning (Fun LoL) which according to the researchers will address how the quest for the ultimate learning machine can be measured and tracked in a systematic and principled way.+More on Network World: Not dead yet: 7 of the oldest federal IT systems still wheezing away+To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Juniper Networks’ Unite architecture is living up to its name, bringing more enterprise network gear into its system for simplified management and scaling.The latest additions to the lineup are entry-level and midrange access switches that also include other features for ease of use.Unite, introduced last year for the EX9200 core switches and other Juniper and third-party components, is designed to help enterprises turn their own infrastructure into private clouds and link those to public clouds in a hybrid architecture. It’s built around Junos Fusion Enterprise software, which collapses multiple network layers into one for simpler management. That gives administrators a single point of management.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The iGrill2, a Bluetooth Smart meat thermometer, aims to make grilling and smoking easier, more convenient, and smarter. The unit comes packaged with two probes, and can support up to four, making it possible to measure multiple areas at once with a min and max temp setting of -22 to 572-degrees fahrenheit. With a 150-foot range, the iGrill2 gives you the freedom to walk away and entertain your guests or watch the game while your grill or smoker cooks to perfection. It's compatible with iOS devices and most Bluetooth Smart Ready Android devices. The iDevices Connected app, powered by Bluetooth Smart technology, is the central hub for managing your iGrill. Monitor your temperature progression and get a more detailed view for each probe with customizable views that can be exported (because why not). The iGrill2 averages 4 out of 5 stars from over 550 customers (see reviews), and with this 20% off deal it's list price of $99.95 has been reduced to $79.96, just in time for Father's Day. See the discounted iGrill2 from iDevices on Amazon.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The two major international security agencies in Europe agree that building backdoors into encryption platforms is not the best way to secure systems because of the collateral damage it would do to privacy and the security of communications.“While this would give investigators lawful access in the event of serious crimes or terrorist threats, it would also increase the attack surface for malicious abuse, which, consequently, would have much wider implications for society,” says a joint statement by European Police Office (Europol) and European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), which focuses on cyber security.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Big data leaders at large companies are confident their big data strategies are headed in the right direction, but most also feel that they're struggling to operationalize them, according to a new survey."Big data is not going away. It's increasing in momentum. People are starting to understand the different types of use cases and move things from prototyping into production," says Stephen Baker, CEO of Attivio, a company that helps customers catalog and leverage all the data at their disposal. "But there are challenges for sure: Challenges in terms of hiring the right kinds of resources, challenges around organizationally changing the way people behave. There's this concept of Shadow BI."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's announcement yesterday that it would eat nearly $1 billion and lay off another 1,850 workers, three-quarters of them from its phone division, prompted analysts to call the company's consumer smartphone business dead, deceased, departed.They agreed that Microsoft's only remaining shot at phones is the enterprise, probably with a "Surface"-branded model that apes the Surface Pro as a design benchmark that struts Windows' capabilities."They've discarded consumer," said Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst at Moor Insights & Strategy, in an interview. "They just tossed out the Windows fan. It's now all about business."Moorhead and others based their opinions on statements made in mid-2015 by CEO Satya Nadella, who spelled out three markets for Microsoft's smartphones after he announced a retrenchment and a massive $7.6 billion write-off for the failed acquisition of Nokia under his predecessor, Steve Ballmer.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google may have finally had enough.According to a Bloomberg report, the company is thinking about turning to public shaming as a way to entice handset manufacturers to step up their Android updates. Google has apparently collected considerable data (something it’s very good at) regarding manufacturers and carriers’ update performance and shared this information with OEMs and carriers. A Sprint executive said he’d seen the details and had been feeling the pressure from Google to push things along.Even without access to this information, we can assure you it isn’t a pretty picture: only 7.5 percent of the current Android devices are running Marshmallow, which is the latest major version. This after about half a year on the market. Some are slower than others, while the wireless providers have also been known to hold things up for “carrier testing.” To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bob Ambrogi, who writes a terrific blog about technology and the law, today has posted remarkable details of a lawsuit settlement involving the head of a legal startup and a couple who allege he scammed them out of hundreds of thousands of dollars through, among other means, falsely claiming to be a lawyer, forging legal documents, fabricating court cases and even conjuring up a non-existent judge.
The executive, Derek Bluford – CEO of California Legal Pros and QuickLegal – says in the settlement document that he “does not admit that any of the allegations set forth in the complaint are true or valid.” Ambrogi made that point twice so I will, too. Bluford did agree to pay the plaintiffs, Changming Liu and Aimei Wei, $559,330. The couple had enlisted the services of Bluford and California Legal Pros in 2014 to help them evict a tenant. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The gold-standard for time measurement—the 500 or so atomic clocks in use—might be on its way out. The clocks' days, if not their hours or seconds, are numbered.Optical clocks are a better way to measure time, say researchers who published their findings in Optica, the Optical Society's journal. The scientists say the optical technology is more accurate than the previous best-tech, which uses microwave frequency atomic oscillations.“Clocks work by counting a recurrent event with a known frequency, such as the swinging of a pendulum,” the society explains in a press release. Atomic clocks use the natural movement of a cesium atom.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
This week SaaS giant Salesforce.com and IaaS behemoth Amazon Web Services codified a partnership that the two have been discussing for months.The move is a coup by Amazon in the public cloud market, particularly against Microsoft Azure, and could turn out to be a big kick in the pants to Oracle.+MORE AT NETWORK WORLD: Is Salesforce planning a post-Oracle future? +Salesforce and AWS actually have a long partnership that goes back years. In 2010 Salesforce.com bought an application development platform named Heroku, which was hosted in AWS and continues to be to this day. Salesforce could have chosen to bring Heroku’s underlying infrastructure in-house post acquisition, but it chose to keep its toe in AWS’s cloud through Heroku.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A new bill in Congress would require U.S. law enforcement agencies to obtain court-ordered warrants before demanding the emails of the country's residents when they are stored overseas.The International Communications Privacy Act, introduced Wednesday by three senators, would close a loophole that allows law enforcement agencies to request emails and other electronic documents without warrants. Congress has been working since 2010 to rework the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), a law that sets down rules for law enforcement access to electronic communications, but the focus has been on requiring warrants for emails and other communications stored in the cloud for longer than 180 days.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
The activity of Romanian hacker Guccifer, who has admitted to compromising almost 100 email and social media accounts belonging to U.S. government officials, politicians and other high-profile individuals, is the latest proof that humans are the weakest link in computer security.Marcel Lehel Lazar, 44, is not a hacker in the technical sense of the word. He's a social engineer: a clever and persistent individual with a lot of patience who a Romanian prosecutor once described as "the obsessive-compulsive type."By his own admission, Lazar has no programming skills. He didn't find vulnerabilities or write exploits. Instead, he's good at investigating, finding information online and making connections.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A team from Google’s fraud-detection group has started its own software as a service venture for spotting transaction fraud quickly based on rule sets and that also learns as it goes to improve its hit rate.Simility examines online transactions to identify indicators of foul play and assigns them risk scores from 0 to 1. Customers can use the information to shut down transactions it deems suspect.The Simility Fraud Prevention Platform service is available starting next week after a six-month private beta.
Rahul PangamTo read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Believe it or not, back in the 1990s, a lot of people thought CD-ROMs were going to the change the world.I was one of them. I was absolutely convinced that titles like Total Distortion, The Daedalus Encounter, Xplora 1: Peter Gabriel’s Secret World and Charlton Heston’s The Bible were going to redefine entertainment and information retrieval.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Anyone who's spent any time in IT has heard the call to partner with the business. Here's some advice on what that means, why it's crucial for IT going forward and how to do it.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
It’s easy to jump on a bandwagon and end up in a ditch. Nowhere is this maxim more evident than in agile development. Plenty of organizations jump into agile in pursuit of its advantages -- ease of embracing change, decreased cycle times, evolutionary architecture, and so on -- only to find their best agile practitioners leaving the company, and the uneasy remainder unable to fix a development process gone wrong.The problem with most approaches to agile is not a problem with agile; it's a problem with Agile, the Capitalized Methodology. Agile isn't a methodology. Treating it as one confuses process with philosophy and culture, and that’s a one-way ticket back into waterfall -- or worse.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
With Google's I/O developers' conference behind us, it's time to start looking forward to what's next in the world of Android.The most prominent thing is Google's rapidly approaching Android release, currently known only as Android "N." (The company has yet to reveal the full name or version number.) While the software itself isn't expected to arrive until sometime this summer, we're getting an increasingly clear picture of the fresh features and improvements it'll provide.I've been using the pre-release versions of Android N since Google's first developer preview back in March and all the way through the most recent update put out last week (which is available to anyone with an eligible device, though be warned that it isn't entirely stable). While the software is still in flux and its elements aren't guaranteed to remain unchanged, we've seen enough at this point to get a pretty good idea of what's in the works.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here