Apple using 'bogus' patents to make Android more expensive, says Google

Google lawyer accuses rival companies including Apple, Oracle and Microsoft of running an anti-competitive strategy to stifle innovation and push up prices

Google has accused iPhone-maker Apple of using 'bogus patents' to make Android phones more expensive. Photograph: Kimberly White/Reuters/Corbis

Google has accused Apple, Microsoft, Oracle and "other companies" of trying to make Android smartphones more expensive to consumers by running a "hostile, organised campaign" against it by using "bogus patents" acquired from the bankrupt Canadian company Nortel and their existing patent holdings.

Its chief legal officer, David Drummond, alleges that the companies are effectively imposing a "tax" to push up the price of Android devices. "Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other's throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what's going on," Drummond wrote in a blog post.

But Microsoft has hit back, with its general counsel Brad Smith claiming on Twitter that Microsoft invited Google to bid jointly for the Nortel patents – and was turned down. Representatives from Apple and Oracle declined to comment.

Drummond alleges that the rival companies are using an "anti-competitive strategy [which] is also escalating the cost of patents way beyond what they're actually worth" and using them to stifle innovation.

Drummond writes that "in this instance we thought it was important to speak out and make it clear that we're determined to preserve Android as a competitive choice for consumers, by stopping those who are trying to strangle it".

He asserts that: "Microsoft and Apple's winning $4.5bn (£2.7bn) for Nortel's patent portfolio was nearly five times larger than the pre-auction estimate of $1bn. Fortunately, the law frowns on the accumulation of dubious patents for anti-competitive means – which means these deals are likely to draw regulatory scrutiny, and this patent bubble will pop."

A consortium including Microsoft, Apple and RIM won the bid for the Nortel patents, which cover a number of communications technologies, against a consortium of Google and Intel. Google had made a preliminary bid of $900m before the auction, but was eventually outbid despite having large reserves of cash.

Drummond says: "A smartphone might involve as many as 250,000 (largely questionable) patent claims, and our competitors want to impose a 'tax' for these dubious patents that makes Android devices more expensive for consumers. They want to make it harder for manufacturers to sell Android devices. Instead of competing by building new features or devices, they are fighting through litigation."

Microsoft has sued HTC, Motorola, Samsung and Barnes & Noble, claiming that their use of Android infringes patents that it holds, while Apple has filed a number of similar suits asserting patent claims against other companies.

HTC has admitted that it is paying Microsoft a set amount for each Android device it sells. The amount has not been disclosed but it believed to be between $5 and $15.

Apple recently won a ruling in the US that HTC infringes patents covering the iPhone. And Oracle is currently suing Google in a multi-billion-dollar lawsuit alleging that Android infringes copyright relating to its Java programming language, acquired through the purchase of Sun Microsystems.

Google launched its Android mobile operating system at the end of 2007, with the first phones appearing about a year later. It makes it available for free to handset makers, unlike companies like Microsoft which charges around $15 per handset using its Windows Phone software.

Android phones have exploded in popularity, making more than a third of all smartphones sold around the world. The platform has displaced the former leader Nokia, which is abandoning its Symbian operating system in favour of Windows Phone. Apple and RIM have their own mobile operating systems which they do not license.

Google has been hampered by a lack of intellectual property in wireless telephony, which has exposed it to patent-infringement lawsuits from rivals such as Oracle.

Drummond says Google is looking to strengthen its patent portfolio; it recently bought more than 1,000 patents from IBM. It is also in talks to buy InterDigital, a key holder of wireless patents valued at more than $3bn, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The most valuable patent that it uses covers its "PageRank" search algorithm used for organising its search results: it has an exclusive license on that from Stanford University, where Sergey Brin and Larry Page developed it. Though the PageRank patent is now available for licensing, Google has the rights to determine who can license it.

Patent acquisitions are expected to accelerate, with IBM and Kodak often mentioned as shopping intellectual property on the market.

Source : www.guardian.co.uk

Read more »

Second moon may have collided with our moon, say scientists

Artist's impression of a hypothetical collision between the moon and a companion moon. Photograph: Martin Jutzi/Erik Asphaug/Nature

The remnants of a second moon that orbited the Earth billions of years ago may be splattered across the far side of our moon, scientists claim.

The two moons are believed to have been created at the same time and followed a similar path to the moon we're familiar with today, but after tens of millions of years of peaceful co-existence, the two appear to have crunched together in a gentle collision that left the smaller, just a third of the size, spread across the larger like a cosmic pancake.

Researchers put forward the idea after computer simulations found that a collision with a second, sibling moon in Earth's early history might solve the longstanding puzzle of why the two faces of the moon differ so dramatically.

While the near side, which always faces the Earth, is low-lying and relatively flat, the far side is high and mountainous, with a crust tens of kilometres thicker.

The idea builds on what planetary scientists call the "big impact" model of the moon, in which a planet the size of Mars slammed into the Earth in the early days of the solar system and knocked out a vast shower of rocky debris, which later coalesced as the moon.

"The impact produced a disc of debris around the Earth and from this disc we got the moon, but there is no reason why only one moon would be formed," Martin Jutzi at the University of Bern in Switzerland told the Guardian.

Jutzi and his colleague, Erik Asphaug at the University of California in Santa Cruz, decided to simulate what might happen if a second moon was created from the rock and dust that fell into orbit around the Earth.

Computer models showed that a sister moon roughly 1,200km in diameter could have accompanied the larger moon around the Earth for tens of millions of years. But as the two moons' orbit moved further away from Earth, the balance of forces became unstable and they collided.

A high-speed impact would have punched a giant crater into the moon and kicked a shower of rock into space, but if the two bodies met at less than three kilometres a second, the smaller moon would have splatted onto the surface of the larger and stayed there. The study appears in the journal, Nature.

"A slower collision doesn't produce such intense shockwaves and causes much less damage than a high-velocity collision," Jutzi said. "It's kind of a gentle collision that doesn't form a big crater. The smaller moon gets more or less pancaked onto the larger moon."

If Jutzi is right, the impact thickened the moon's crust on the far side, creating the highlands and forcing subsurface magma to the opposite side. "It wouldn't matter where the impact happens, because after the collision, the moon would reorient itself so that the material left from the impact was on the far side," Jutzi said.

While speculative, scientists hope to find ways of testing the idea. The smaller moon would have formed before the moon we see today, so rock samples from the far side of our moon should be older than rocks collected from the near side.

Another approach under consideration is to compare Jutzi and Asphaug's simulations with details of the moon's internal structure, gleaned from lunar maps drawn up by Nasa's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, and high-resolution gravity maps of the moon, which will be obtained next year by Nasa's Gravity Recovery and Interior Laboratory (GRAIL) mission.

In an accompanying article, Maria Zuber, a geophysicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the study raised "the legitimate possibility that, after the giant impact, our Earth perhaps fleetingly possessed more than one moon. Furthermore, significant remnants of this long-departed member of the Earth-moon collisional family may be preserved today on the lunar far side."

The moon shows only one face to the Earth because its centre of mass is slightly off-centre – around 2km closer to our planet than the geometric centre. There is no dark side of the moon, though much of the surface spends 14 days in daylight and 14 days in darkness.

Last year, Ian Garrick-Bethell and Francis Nimmo at the University of California, Santa Cruz, published an alternative explanation for the different thicknesses in the moon's crust that suggested tidal forces rather than an impact were responsible.

"The fact that the near side of the moon looks so different to the far side has been a puzzle since the dawn of the space age, perhaps second only to the origin of the moon itself," said Nimmo. "One of the elegant aspects of [this] study is that it links these two puzzles together: perhaps the giant collision that formed the moon also spalled off some smaller bodies, one of which later fell back to the moon to cause the dichotomy that we see today."

Source : www.guardian.co.uk

Read more »

Governments, IOC and UN hit by massive cyber attack

IT security firm McAfee claims to have uncovered one of the largest ever series of cyber attacks.

It lists 72 different organisations that were targeted over five years, including the International Olympic Committee, the UN and security firms.

McAfee will not say who it thinks is responsible, but there is speculation that China may be behind the attacks.

Beijing has always denied any state involvement in cyber-attacks, calling such accusations "groundless".

Speaking to BBC News, McAfee's chief European technology officer, Raj Samani, said the attacks were still going on.

"This is a whole different level to the Night Dragon attacks that occurred earlier this year. Those were attacks on a specific sector. This one is very, very broad."

Dubbed Operation Shady RAT - after the remote access tool that security experts and hackers use to remotely access computer networks - the five-year investigation examined information from a number of different organisations which thought they may have been hit.

"From the logs we were able to see where the traffic flow was coming from," said Mr Samani.

"In some cases, we were permitted to delve a bit deeper and see what, if anything, had been taken, and in many cases we found evidence that intellectual property (IP) had been stolen.

"The United Nations, the Indian government, the International Olympic Committee, the steel industry, defence firms, even computer security companies were hit," he added.

China speculation

McAfee said it did not know what was happening to the stolen data, but it could be used to improve existing products or help beat a competitor, representing a major economic threat.

"This was what we call a spear-phish attack, as opposed to a trawl, where they were targeting specific individuals within an organisation," said Mr Samani.

"An email would be sent to an individual with the right level of access within the system; attached to the message was a piece of malware which would then execute and open a channel to a remote website giving them access.

"Once they had access to an organisation, they either did what we would call a 'smash-and-grab' operation, where they would try and grab as much information before they got caught, or they sometimes embedded themselves in the network and [tried to] spread across different systems within an organisation."

Mr Samani said his firm would "not make any guesses on where this has come from", but China is seen by many in the industry as a prime suspect.

Jim Lewis, a cyber expert with the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, was quoted by the Reuters news agency as saying it was "very likely China was behind the campaign because some of the targets had information that would be of particular interest to Beijing".

"Everything points to China. It could be the Russians, but there is more that points to China than Russia," Lewis said.

However, Graham Cluley - a computer-security expert with Sophos, is not so sure. He said: "Every time one of these reports come out, people always point the finger at China."

He told BBC News: "We cannot prove it's China. That doesn't mean we should be naive. Every country in the world is probably using the internet to spy.

"After all, it's easy and cost-effective - but there's many different countries and organisations it could be."

Mr Cluley said firms were often distracted by the very public actions of LulzSec and Anonymous, groups of online activists who have hacked a number of high-profile websites in recent months.

"Sometimes it's not about stealing your money or publicly leaking your data. It's about quietly stealing your information, which can have a very high political, military or financial value.

"In short, don't let your defences down," he added.

Source : www.bbc.co.uk

Read more »

20-million year-old ape skull found in Uganda

(Reuters) - Ugandan and French scientists have discovered a fossil of a skull of a tree-climbing ape from about 20 million years ago in Uganda's Karamoja region, the team said Tuesday.

The scientists discovered the remains on July 18 while looking for fossils in the remnants of an extinct volcano in Karamoja, a semi-arid region in Uganda's northeastern corner.

"This is the first time that the complete skull of an ape of this age has been found. It is a highly important fossil," Martin Pickford, a paleontologist from the College de France in Paris, told a news conference.

Pickford said preliminary studies of the fossil showed that the tree-climbing herbivore, roughly 10-years-old when it died, had a head the size of a chimpanzee's but a brain the size of a baboon's, a bigger ape.

Bridgette Senut, a professor at the Musee National d'Histoire Naturelle, said that the remains would be taken to Paris to be x-rayed and documented before being returned to Uganda.

"It will be cleaned in France, it will be prepared in France and then in about one year's time it will be returned to the country," Senut said.

Uganda's junior minister for tourism, wildlife and heritage said the skull was a remote cousin of the Hominidea Fossil Ape.

Source : uk.reuters.com

Read more »

Internet Explorer users have lower IQ says study

Internet Explorer users have a lower than average IQ, according to research by Consulting firm AptiQuant.

The study gave web surfers an IQ test, then plotted their scores against the browser they used.

IE surfers were found to have an average IQ lower than people using Chrome, Firefox and Safari. Users of Camino and Opera rated highest.

The report has sparked anger from IE supporters, who have threatened AptiQuant with legal action.

Researchers gave over 100,000 web surfers a free online IQ test. Scores were stored in a database along with each person's web browser data.

The results suggested that Internet Explorer surfers had an average IQ in the low eighties. Chrome, Firefox and Safari rated over 100, while minority browsers Opera and Camino had an "exceptionally higher" score of over 120.

AptiQuant stressed that using IE doesn't mean you have low intelligence. "What it really says is that if you have a low IQ then there are high chances that you use Internet Explorer," said AptiQuant CEO Leonard Howard.

The findings have been treated with scepticism by Professor David Spiegelhalter of Cambridge University's Statistical Laboratory: "They've got IE6 users with an IQ of around eighty. That's borderline deficient, marginally able to cope with the adult world.

"I believe these figures are implausibly low - and an insult to IE users."

However, Mr Howard said he didn't feel threatened by a lawsuit: "A win in a court would only give a stamp of approval and more credibility to our report."

Source : www.bbc.co.uk

Read more »

Italy approves draft law to ban burqa

Law moves country closer to joining France, Belgium and parts of Spain in outlawing face-covering in public

Under the new Italian law wearing a niqab would be illegal. Photograph: Julien Warnand/EPA

An Italian parliamentary commission has approved a draft law banning women from wearing veils that cover their faces in public.

The draft, which was passed by the constitutional affairs commission on Tuesday, would prohibit women from wearing a burqa, naqib or any other garment that covers the face in such circumstances. It would expand a decades-old law that for security reasons prohibits people from wearing face-covering items such as masks in public places.

Women who violate the ban would face fines, while third parties who force women to cover their faces in public would be fined and face up to 12 months in jail.

Italy is the latest European country to act against the burqa. France and Belgium have banned the wearing of burqa-style Islamic dress in public, as has a city in Spain. The Belgium law cited security concerns.

The Italian law was sponsored by Souad Sbai, a Moroccan-born member of Silvio Berlusconi's conservative Freedom People party, who said she wanted to help Islamic women integrate more into Italian society.

"Five years ago, no one wore the burqa [in Italy]. Today, there is always more. We have to help women get out of this segregation ... to get out of this submission," Sbai said in a telephone interview. "I want to speak for those who don't have a voice, who don't have the strength to yell and say, 'I am not doing well.'"

The spokesman of an Islamic group said banning the Islamic veil "is unjust and touches individual liberty".

"This topic continues to be a sort of criminalisation and media dramatisation. In Italy, there aren't even 100 women who wear the niqab, and not even one who wears the burqa," Roberto Hamza Piccard, spokesman for the Union of Islamic Communities in Italy, was quoted by the news agency Ansa as saying. He said such a ban would isolate devout Muslim women, who would not be able to leave their homes.

Ansa said the main opposition party voted against the law. The draft will be forwarded after the summer recess to parliament, where Berlusconi's governing coalition has a narrow majority.

The preliminary approval was welcomed by lawmaker Barbara Saltamartini, vice-president of the Freedom People party caucus in the lower house.

"Final approval will put an end to the suffering of many women who are often forced to wear the burqa or niqab, which annihilates their dignity and gets in the way of integration," Saltamartini said.

Source : www.guardian.co.uk

Read more »

NASA probe poised for launch to Jupiter

The planet Jupiter is seen in this image released by NASA, November 24, 2010, which is a composite of three color images taken on November 18, 2010 by the Gemini North telescope in Hawaii. The composite image shows a belt that had previously vanished in Jupiter's atmosphere which is now reappearing. Scientists see thermal emission arising from the tops of Jupiter's clouds, with the hottest emissions coming from the deepest atmosphere and signifying regions with minimal overlying cloud cover. The region inside the white box is the South Equatorial Belt with an unusually bright spot, or outbreak.
Credit: Reuters/NASA/JPL/UH/NIRI/Gemini/Handout
By Irene Klotz
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida | Thu Jul 28, 2011 2:08pm BST
CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A NASA satellite was hoisted aboard an unmanned Atlas 5 rocket at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station Wednesday in preparation for launch next week on an unprecedented mission to the heart of Jupiter.
The robotic probe called Juno is scheduled to spend one year cycling inside Jupiter's deadly radiation belts, far closer than any previous orbiting spacecraft, to learn how much water the giant planet holds, what triggers its vast magnetic fields and whether a solid core lies beneath its dense, hot atmosphere.
"Jupiter holds a lot of key secrets about how we formed," said lead scientist Scott Bolton, with the Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas.
Scientists believe Jupiter was the first planet to form after the birth of the sun, though exactly how that happened is unknown. One key piece of missing data is how much water is inside the giant planet, which circles the sun five times farther away than Earth.
Jupiter, like the sun, is comprised primarily of hydrogen and helium, with a sprinkling of other elements, like oxygen. Scientists believe the oxygen is bound with hydrogen to form water, which can be measured by microwave sounders, one of eight science instruments on Juno.
Jupiter's water content is directly tied to where -- and how -- the planet formed. Some evidence points to a planet that grew in the colder nether-regions of the solar system and then migrated inward. Other computer models show Jupiter formed at about its present location by accumulating ancient icy snowballs.
LARGER THAN SISTER PLANETS
However it grew, Jupiter ended up with a mass more than twice all its sister planets combined, giving it the gravitational muscle to hang on to nearly all of its original building materials.
"That's why it's very interesting to us if we want to go back in time and understand where we came from and how the planets were made" -- which Juno can help NASA do, Bolton said.
Juno's journey to Jupiter will take five years. Upon arrival in July 2016, Juno will thread itself into a narrow region between the planet and the inner edge of its radiation belt. The solar-powered probe will then spend a year orbiting over Jupiter's poles, coming as close as 3,100 miles above its cloud tops.
Only an atmospheric probe released by Galileo, NASA's last Jupiter spacecraft, has come closer, though that spacecraft was able to relay data for only 58 minutes before succumbing to the planet's crushing pressure and intense heat.
Juno's electronic heart is protected in a vault of titanium, but it too will fall to the harsh Jovian radiation environment after about a year. Juno's last move will be to dive into the planet's atmosphere to avoid any chance of contaminating Jupiter's potentially life-bearing moons.
Juno's launch is scheduled for August 5. The spacecraft was built by Lockheed Martin Astronautics of Denver, Colorado. The mission, the second in NASA's lower-cost, quick-turnaround New Frontiers planetary expeditions, will cost $1.1 billion.

Source : uk.reuters.com

Read more »

Magnificent England destroy India's resistance to take second Test

England's five-wicket hero Tim Bresnan, right, celebrates taking the wicket of Harbhajan Singh with Kevin Pietersen. Photograph: Tom Shaw/Getty Images

India's claim to be the foremost Test match side in the world lay in tatters in Nottingham on Monday evening. Defeat, by a huge margin of 319 runs with more than a day to spare – by a country mile the most humiliating they have suffered at the hands of England – followed their 196‑run loss in the first Test at Lord's. In the aftermath of that it was said they were slow starters and would pick up the pace.

A reassessment might be in order now, for this was little short of slaughter. England, who have not lost any of eight Test series and only four of 29 matches in more than two years since Andy Flower has been in full charge of the team, lead by two matches to nil in the four‑match series and have their eyes firmly on the official No1 ranking. Only the most fervent Indian optimist, of which there are many, will believe that their team can recover from this.

England had begun the day in the ascendant, already with a lead of 379, almost certainly secure enough in itself, but added a further 103 in 19 overs in the morning, with Tim Bresnan making 90, thus setting India a notional 478 to win. They did not have a chance, for the new ball has proved dangerous throughout the game and England had the extra pace to exploit it. Inside 26 overs, two of the galácticos were gone for single figures, Rahul Dravid to Stuart Broad and VVS Laxman castled by an irresistible delivery from Jimmy Anderson and India were 55 for six, with Bresnan, the indefatigable Yorkie dreadnought, bustling in on Yorkshire Day, having dismissed the India captain, Mahendra Singh Dhoni, first ball to stand on the verge of following Broad with the second hat‑trick of the match. It did not happen but Bresnan still managed to take five for 48, his best Test figures, and with his robust batting ensured that a few cats have been set among the selectorial pigeons when it comes to the third Test in Birmingham which begins a week on Wednesday.

Bresnan has now played eight Tests and won them all, a 100% record bettered in the game's history only by the West Indian Eldine Baptiste, who played in 10 winning sides.

Only Sachin Tendulkar, batting flawlessly for two and a quarter hours while things tumbled around him, showed the technique and resolve to cope. But having made 56 he misjudged Anderson and was lbw offering no shot, the seventh time that the bowler has dismissed Tendulkar, just one behind the eight of Muttiah Muralitharan.

Beyond that Harbhajan Singh, in the middle of Broad's hat‑trick and preventing Bresnan's on Monday, threw the bat for 46, made with such vigour at times that it raised eyebrows as to the state of the damaged stomach muscles that prevented him from bowling during the England mayhem.

India, should they need it, can console themselves with the knowledge that they have twice been beaten by a team of astonishing depth and resilience. Twice Dhoni was won an important toss this series and put England under pressure and twice England have responded. On Friday, as the ball swung and seamed under leaden skies, they found themselves 88 for six, before Broad and the lower order rescued them. Then, on the second day, in better conditions, when Dravid's brilliance had helped take India to 267 for four, a lead already of 46, Broad conjured up his hat‑trick in a spell of five wickets at no cost. It shattered India. Thereafter, they were not in the game as England battered an inadequate attack into submission. In four innings now India have a top score of 288.

India now need desperately to regain some equilibrium but it is hard to see whence it will come. Virender Sehwag is expected to arrive in England on Tuesday but he has only one game against Northamptonshire this week in which to prepare.

The recovery of Zaheer Khan, should he get over his hamstring strain, will help but is not a game changer, and Gautam Gambhir, who in any case did not appear unusually discomfited in the nets before the game, ought to have recovered from his bruised elbow.

On the other hand, Harbhajan, taker of more than 400 Test wickets, has had such a miserable series with the ball – two for 287 thus far – that there is a strong case for him making way for the leg‑spinner Amit Mishra. On Monday, Yuvraj Singh suffered a nasty blow on his left index finger, from Bresnan, that may cause further problems. It is not just mentally that they are battered and bruised.

As with Lord's, though, England have not escaped the match entirely unscathed. The shoulder wrenched by Jonathan Trott while in the field on the second day had eased sufficiently for him to bat, and he now has a week of intensive treatment in which to get fit again with any replacement likely to be either Ravi Bopara or the new Lions captain, James Taylor, who has a chance to impress this week.

Monty Panesar would be a top‑class replacement for Graeme Swann should his injured hand not recover. But the pace bowling goes round in circles. Never give a sucker an even break, said WC Fields, but that is what Chris Tremlett's back and hamstring niggle has done with Bresnan. Anderson is the second‑ranked bowler in the world, Broad's comeback speaks for itself, and Bresnan has taken his first Test five-for and contributed 101 runs. Who would want to call that one?

Source : www.guardian.co.uk

Read more »