technology

Google patents its home page

Saw this on Slashdot

A week after new USPTO Director David Kappos pooh-poohed the idea that a lower patent allowance rate equals higher quality, Google was granted a patent on its Home Page. Subject to how the design patent is enforced, Google now owns the idea of having a giant search box in the middle of the page, with two big buttons underneath and several small links nearby. And you doubted Google’s commitment to patent reform, didn’t you?

Seriously!! A patent on a white background and two buttons? Forget that there is nothing innovative and nothing new about it, patenting a web page is counter intuitive. Just goes to show that software patents are become (have already become) a joke. Not very funny though.

Posted on by mklang

When clouds fail

From Sysomos comes a comment on yesterday’s major outage that struck GMail (on No Google day no less). The outage yesterday lasted 1.2 hours  comments on Slashdot

JacobSteelsmith was one of many readers to note an ongoing problem with Gmail: “As I type this, GMail is experiencing a major outage. The application status page says there is a problem with GMail affecting a majority of its users. It states a resolution is expected within the next 1.2 hours (no, not a typo on my part). However, email can still be accessed via POP or IMAP, but not, it appears, through an Android device such as the G1.” It’s also affecting corporate users: Reader David Lechnyr writes “We run a hosted Google Apps system and have been receiving 502 Server Error responses for the past hour. The unusual thing about this is that our Google phone support rep (which paid accounts get) indicated that this outage is also affecting Google employees as well, making it difficult to coordinate.”

Besides people being frustrated, disappointed and angry. The outage illustrated the weakness in cloud computing.

This is the third GMail outage this year (A major outage in February and 20 minutes in May) and after returning online Google said: “We’re still investigating the root cause of this outage, and we’ll share more information soon. Thanks for bearing with us.”

Despite the outage today, the sentiment (via Sysomos MAP) for “GMail” today from the social media landscape was 36% positive, 44% neutral and only 20% negative.

Below is the BuzzGraph generated from MAP that shows the major keywords today for “GMail”gmail buzzgraph.jsp

Posted on by mklang

Gikii 4 programme

Registration is now closed, but here is the programme for this year’s Gikii. The good news is that I am in the first session.

17 September

09:15-09:30 Opening

09:30-10:45 First morning session (3): Doomsday

  • Christopher Lever, Fortun@e 500: A Consideration of the Contract Law Consequences of Cache Poisoning
  • Clive Feather, Resilience of the PGP “web of trust” and the disruption of criminal networks (no abstract)
  • Mathias Klang, Strangelove and Salami: An illustration of the unintended consequences of technical solutions

10:45-11:15 Coffee Break

11:15-12:30 Second Morning session (3): Digital Identities and Legal Life After Death

  • Burkhard Schafer, ZombAIs and family law: technology beyond the grave
  • Lillian Edwards, Death 2.0
  • Wiebke Abel, Shawn H.E. Harmon, Future Tech: Governance & Ethics In The Age Of Artificially Enhanced Man (Or ‘Beware The Zombais At The Gate’)

12:30-13:30 Lunch (on location)

13:30-15:15 First Afternoon session (4): Robots and Interfaces with Humans

  • F.E. Guerra-Pujol, Blade Runner, Time Scarcity and the Optimal Lifespan of Robots and Clones’
  • Miranda Mowbray and Burkhard Schafer, EAT ME
  • Dr Richard Jones, ‘CyberTags: The third generation of electronic offender-monitoring systems’

15:15-15:45 Coffee Break

15:45-17:30 Second Afternoon session (4): Copyright: Take A Bite!

  • Bernt Hugenholz, ‘A Future of Levies: The Taxification of Copyright’
  • Ot van Daalen & Iris Kieft, Towards new methods for resolving the conflict between copyright and the free flow of information
  • Nicolas Jondet, France: the land of the Linux? The case of DRM interoperability and reverse-engineering

19:30 Sponsored conference diner.

18 September

09:15 Opening

09:15-10:30 First morning session (3): New Media Harms

  • Andrea Matwyshyn, Intended Data Beneficiaries
  • Arno R. Lodder, Is it possible to control personal information that was uploaded by others without the intention to harm or infringe?
  • Caroline Wilson, Twit or Tweet? Legal Issues Associated with Twitter and other Micro-Blogging Sites”

10:30-11:00 Coffee Break

11:00-12:30 Second Morning session (4): Making and Sharing

  • Maarten Brinkerink, Inge van Beekum, Incentives and Constraints for Dutch Public Broadcasters to Adopt Creative Commons Licensing
  • Melanie Dulong de Rosnay, Creative Commons licenses incompatibilities : when sharing needs to be rationalized
  • Steven Hetcher, Location, Location Still Matters: Pop Stars, User-Generated Popular Culture & The Dislocation Of Non-Location
  • Ray Corrigan, Protecting the public domain: a five point plan’

12:30-13:30 Lunch (on location)

13:30-15:15 First Afternoon session (4): The World Explained

  • Andrés Guadamuz, Luddism 2.0, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web
  • Peter K. Yu, The Crossover Point
  • Chris Marsden, Net Neutrality as a Debate About More Than Economics

15:15-15:45 Coffee Break

15:45-17:30 Second Afternoon session (4): Fundamental rights

  • Joris van Hoboken, Search Engine Censorship: New Metaphors for the Suppression of Findability
  • Judith Rauhofer, “Get out of my head, bloodsucker!” Notions of surveillance in the vampire mind
  • Martin Jones, Sousveillance: The Emergent Digital Eye Witness
  • TJ McIntyre, Won’t somebody please think of the children!?
Posted on by mklang

Mininova must remove infringing torrents

TorrentFreak reports that the torrent search engine Mininova:

…has lost its civil dispute with Dutch anti-piracy outfit BREIN. The judge ruled that Mininova is not directly responsible for any copyright infringement, but ordered it to remove all torrents linking to copyrighted material within three months, or face a penalty of up to 5 million euros.

The courts attitude towards the site was very different to the Swedish Pirate Bay case since it was not BREIN’s intention was not to shut down the site. But they demanded a filtering of infringing keywords to ensure that copyright holders were protected.

The court agreed with BREIN’s assessment that Mininova is not doing enough to protect the rights of copyright holders, and ordered the site to remove all torrent files that link to infringing content within three months, or pay a penalty up to 5 million euros ($7 million).

The interesting thing is that the courts are demanding that Mininova do more than apply a takedown policy that allows copyright holders to remove infringing torrents but stop short from demanding the site is liable for everything straight away (which was the Swedish approach). The fact that “doing more” is extremely complex (and therefore costly) did not impress the courts.

Posted on by mklang

When robots kill

Not long ago I wrote about a worker who was “attacked” by an industrial robot. In the aftermath the role of the courts was to attempt to decide who was responsible for the industrial accident. But what will happens when robots become more autonomous.

The Royal Academy of Engineering has published a report on the social, legal and ethical issues surrounding autonomous systems. As one of the contributors, lawyer and visiting professor at Imperial College London, Chris Elliot says to the Guardian:

If you take an autonomous system and one day it does something wrong and it kills somebody, who is responsible? Is it the guy who designed it? What’s actually out in the field isn’t what he designed because it has learned throughout its life. Is it the person who trained it?

These are very cool questions which need to be discussed now as we stand on the eve of autonomous systems. Read the report here.

Naturally the whole autonomous systems brings to mind the whole Skynet (from Terminator) plot. From Wikipedia:

In the Terminator storyline, Skynet gains sentience shortly after it is placed in control of all of the U.S. military’s weaponry. When they realize that it has become self-aware, and what the computer control is capable of, the human operators try to shut the system down. It retaliates and believes humans are a threat to its existence, it then employs humankind’s own weapons of mass destruction in a campaign to exterminate the human race.

But if that happened I doubt that legal responsibility will be the most important thing to discuss…

Posted on by mklang

Another milestone for Wikipedia

There has been some suspense beforehand but now it’s official. In under nine years the English version of Wikipedia has created more than three million articles.

The site broke through the 3 million barrier early on Monday morning UK time, with the honours taken by a short article about Norwegian actor Beate Eriksen. (The Guardian)

This is indeed a milestone and also puts other recent news and controversies surrounding Wikipedia into perspective: written about those incidents here, here, here, here, and here.

Posted on by mklang

Friday fun

Here is a strange piece of news from Belarus – a country that usually makes this blog when censorship and oppression are discussed. Not much humor until today, via Foreign Policy:

A Belarusian textile company has developed a special school uniform that protects kids from… electromagnetic radiation emanating from their cellphones! The uniform features a dedicated pocket that can store the phone and make it safe for those who wear it. (Announcement only available in Russian)

Posted on by mklang

I unbroke my ubuntu

I have a confession to make: IANAP (I am not a programmer) so when my technology breaks I struggle to fix it with a mixture of duct tape and google! Well ok, so no tape. Despite my lack of competence I have made several forrays into the wonderful world of linux, lulled by a mix of political correctness, can-do spirit and a philosophy I believe in. But, none of this helps when technology fails. No amount of feel-good philosophy can help me read my email which is the real reason for me having technology.

So last week when I was practicing with my new toy, a Samsung Notebook with Ubuntu, I came upon a wall of desperation when the menus disappeared. When turned on all I got was a background. Since I had not made any changes to the default it was still the brown boring background – and nothing else.

So I guessed, pushed and prodded the computer but it stubbornly refused to divulge any clues as to how it could be fixed. But never fear, the internet is here! The wonderful post:How to Reset Ubuntu/Gnome Settings to Defaults without Re-installing fixed everything.

Open terminal. Type

mv .config .old_config

hit return, then type

rm -rf .gnome .gnome2 .gconf .gconfd .metacity

restart the computer and it was as good as new. All the menus are back again and I am a happy ubuntu person ready to go out and rebreak my computer – frustration is, after all, a learning experience.

Posted on by mklang

I'm a Gikii

It’s soon time for the Gikii 4 conference which will be held in Amsterdam during 18-19 September – this year it is organized by the Institute for Information Law (IViR). I am particularly happy since I will be attending with a paper of my own.

The program for the conference is here. Just to give you an idea of the type of stuff presented there here are a couple of papers being presented (full list here).

Luddism 2.0, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Web

ZombAIs and family law: technology beyond the grave

“Get out of my head, bloodsucker!” Notions of surveillance in the vampire mind

EAT ME

Robot Law?

Future Tech: Governance & Ethics In The Age Of Artificially Enhanced Man (Or ‘Beware The Zombais At The Gate’)

As you can see from this short list Gikii is definately on the bizarre side of technology law.

Posted on by mklang

Locational Privacy

The EFF have released a new report on the dangers between locational information and privacy: On Locational Privacy, and How to Avoid Losing it Forever (PDF). The short report by Andrew J. Blumberg and Peter Eckersley takes up issues that need to be taken much more seriously than they have been.

Posted on by mklang