It's been three-and-a-half years since the EFF set up its patent busting project, where it lined up 10 awful patents with the hopes of getting them all rejected on review by the USPTO. The latest news is that the USPTO has now rejected all sixteen claims found in one of those patents, having to do with online test-taking. Yes, Test.com claimed that it was the first ever to think of online test taking back in 1999. Not surprisingly, the USPTO approved this patent on the first go-around, and it's only now that the review process has caused the patent to be rejected. Of course, Test.com could still respond and appeal, so this process is far from over.

While it's great to see the EFF busting patents, one of the things the EFF has really highlighted here is how incredibly difficult it is to bust bogus patents. We've had patent attorneys tell us that busting patents is easy, yet, here we are three-and-a-half years into the process and the EFF has only been able to get the USPTO to re-examine three of the ten patents. Even on this particular patent, the original re-exam was granted over a year-and-a-half ago, and the rejection has just come down. During all that time, Test.com was free to accuse anyone of violating its patent, potentially scaring off many companies (and universities) from being able to offer something as simple and obvious as online testing.

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Channel Guy writes "According to a report from CRN, Microsoft plans to allow users of the Web Server SKU in Windows Server 2008 to 'run any type of database software with no limit on the number of users, provided they deploy it as an Internet-facing front-end server.' The previous limit was 50 users. Microsoft's partners expect the changes to go a long way toward making Windows Web Server 2008 more competitive with the LAMP stack, against which Microsoft has been making headway in recent months."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A little over a week after Kaspersky's anti-virus software declared Windows Explorer was a virus, it appears that McAfee has had its own mistake, as an anti-virus update from the company started warning people to stay away from a bunch of popular sites, including ESPN, Friendster and Ars Technica. McAfee later admitted that it was a mistake on its end, but it seems that we're seeing these kinds of false positives on a fairly frequent basis these days. It's yet another sign that things need to change in how security software works -- but instead of real advances, it still seems like firms are bogged down with things like pointless patent battles.

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Several users have written to tell us that notorious spammer Alan Ralsky has been indicted along with ten others on 41 counts of spam-related illegal activity. Ralsky has had trouble with the law in the past, and the current litany of charges includes mail and wire fraud, money laundering, conspiracy, and violation of federal spamming laws. From the Detroit Free Press: "The 41-count indictment said Ralsky ... and others used unsolicited e-mail to pump up the price of largely worthless stock in Chinese companies and sold the stock reaping huge profits and leaving Internet subscribers who purchased it holding the bag. The operation also used illegal methods to maximize the amount of spam that could be sent while evading spam-blocking devices and tricked recipients into opening and acting on advertisements, prosecutors said."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Today on Boing Boing Gadgets we looked at this "Love Mattress" concept design which many rightfully pointed out would be a pain to keep clean, some boring earbuds with a slick birch wood shell, a new media streamer from Archos that can't quite do HD for some reason, a clever new conical power strip, an attractive, expensive new glass monitor from Dell (I know!), a tribute to Classic Space LEGO with extra greebles, a hot rock for cooking, coupons from the gubbermunt for digital TV convertor boxes, an upcoming game and guitar that lets you learn to play with a Guitar Hero-like system, Belkin's new RockStar headphone hub, and a brief notice that the new Indiana Jones-themed LEGO sets are now on sale. And some deals (although nothing special).

It's totally appropriate that the first public demo of FlickrFan will be at Yahoo in SF during MacWorld Expo. We have room for about 85 people, we'll have soft drinks and pizza, it'll go for an hour or so, including discussion to follow.

Yahoo's San Francisco office is at 500 Third St, near Bryant, the old Organic offices, in the same building as Wired.

If you want to come, leave a comment or sign up at Upcoming.

Thanks to Salim Ismail, Chad Dickerson and Bradley Horowitz of Yahoo for graciously hosting my humble product and self.

coondoggie brings us an article from Networkworld about a flood of new data for the SETI@home project. We discussed something similar a few months ago when a new telescope array went live. The vast amount of processing power required to handle the new data is prompting the SETI@home team to make a plea for more volunteers. Quoting the press release: "What triggered the new flow of data was the addition of seven new receivers at Arecibo, which now let the telescope record radio signals from seven regions of the sky simultaneously instead of just one. With greater sensitivity and the ability to detect the polarization of the radio signals, plus 40 times more frequency coverage, Arecibo is set to survey the sky for new radio sources."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It's well known that China goes to tremendous lengths to censor and block certain types of content online through a combination of tens of thousands of "internet police" combined with vague rules that are left up to various ISPs to enforce or face sanctions (meaning they tend to be even more quick to block than they may need to be). It appears that even that wasn't enough to deal with the rise of user-generated video sites in the country. The Chinese government has a new policy demanding that all video upload sites must get a license from the government, must be state-owned or state-controlled and (of course) must not allow any video that "involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography." As the article notes, this likely effects most Chinese YouTube clones (who are mostly private, rather than state-owned), though it's unclear how it will impact foreign sites, such as YouTube itself. The most likely outcome is that ISPs will soon start banning those sites completely in favor of the limited state-owned sites. Such is life on the internet behind the Great Firewall.

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Jeremiah Cornelius points us to Davis Freeberg's blog, where he discusses his "nightmare scenario" of losing access to his DRM-protected purchases by upgrading his PC monitor. "When I called them they confirmed my worst fears. In order to access the Watch Now service, I had to give Microsoft's DRM sniffing program access to all of the files on my hard drive. If the software found any non-Netflix video files, it would revoke my rights to the content and invalidate the DRM. This means that I would lose all the movies that I've purchased from Amazon's Unbox, just to troubleshoot the issue. Because my computer allows me to send an unrestricted HDTV feed to my monitor, Hollywood has decided to revoke my ability to stream 480 resolution video files from Netflix. In order to fix my problem, Netflix recommended that I downgrade to a lower res VGA setup."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ian Lamont writes "Mike Elgan has an interesting take on surveillance technology, and how audio and video recordings should be used in private and public life. He cites the case of a New York City Police Detective who was secretly taped by a suspect during an interrogation that the detective initially denied took place during the suspect's murder trial, as well as a case involving two parents in Wisconsin who slipped a voice-activated recorder in their son's backpack after suspecting he was being abused by his bus driver. In the first case, even though the detective was later charged with 12 counts of perjury, Elgan notes that the police interrogation probably would not have taken place had the suspect announced to the detective that he was recording the session. In the second case, the tape was initially ruled inadmissible in court because Wisconsin state law prohibits the use of 'intercepted conversations' (it was later allowed as evidence). Elgan argues that there should be no questions about members of the public being allowed to record such interactions."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Techblogger Robert Scoble has apparently been barred from Facebook for running a script from Plaxo to export his relationship information (or "social graph," as the kids say), in violation of the site's terms of service. On one read, this makes him a martyr to the cause of open social graphs. I'm a bit more ambivalent.

Intuitively, it makes sense for users to be able to make whatever use they please of information about their own social networks. But in a social network, "your" information is someone else's as well. And on a site like Facebook, much of that information will have been provided in the context of a set of individually calibrated privacy controls, by people who expected it to be used in that context by a limited audience. Exporting that information without permission, then, raises important privacy questions.

Within Facebook, users have a fair amount of control over who can access what information about them. I can choose to block particular users on Facebook, rendering myself wholly invisible to them, as though I weren't even on the network. I can decide how much of my profile information will be visible to friends, to people who live in my region, to the general Facebook membership, and to the Internet at large. I can even decide how aggressively public, so to speak, such information will be. Lots of Facebook users are happy to let friends view their relationship status, but disable those status notifications in their news feeds, to prevent everyone they know from being simultaneously blasted with the news that "Bob has gone from being in a relationship to being single." Automated data collection "liberates" information from those constraints, possibly against the wishes of the people who provided it.

It's true that a script can only sweep up information that would already have been visible to a particular user anyway. But privacy is not just a function of the publicity of your personal information, but of the searchability and aggregability of that information. Public closed-circuit surveillance cameras, for instance, typically capture the same information that a casual observer on the street is already privy to. But we recognize that being spotted by diverse random pedestrians, or even being captured on diffuse and disconnected private security cameras, is not intrusive in the same way as being captured on a citywide surveillance system that is searchable from a centralized location. By the same token, I may be unhappy with the possibility of someone forming an external public database full of data I've freely shared with more narrow communities—personal, regional, or whatever.

None of this is to deny the initial intuition that it's desirable for users' social graphs to be portable to some extent. But as with all forms of intimacy, openness and privacy complement each other: We feel free to share information about ourselves to the extent that we have some assurances about how that information will be used. So while it's one thing to argue that Facebook should enable greater openness or portability in some particular way, subject to user control, it seems like quite another to criticize them for enforcing a rule about indiscriminate automated data collection.

Julian Sanchez is an expert at the Techdirt Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Julian Sanchez and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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Hugh Pickens writes "NASA's new Space Science Division Director, Dr. S. Alan Stern, appears to be making headway in keeping in space projects like the Kepler Mission at their original budgeted costs. The New York Times reports that Stern's plan is to hold projects responsible for overruns, forcing mission leaders to trim parts of their projects, streamline procedures or find other sources of financing. 'The mission that makes the mess is responsible for cleaning it up,' Stern says. Because of management problems, technical issues and other difficulties on the Kepler Mission, the price tag for Kepler went up 20% to $550 million and the launch slipped from the original 2006 target date to 2008. When the Kepler team asked for another $42 million, Stern's team threatened to open the project to new bids so other researchers could take it over using the equipment that had already been built."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Photographer Mark Story took photos of people who were born in the 19th century and are still alive in the 21th Century. My own grandmother comes close to making it. She'll be 107 in April.

The photographs for this portrait series were taken in various locations around the world between 1987 and 2005.

The Gerontology Research Group estimates there are 250,000 centenarians (people 100 years and older) currently living in the world. In rare instances, people live to 110 years and beyond, inspiring a new demographic label: supercentenarian. The Gerontology Research Group, through rigorous investigation of records, acknowledges about 65 supercentenarians, and estimates that about 350 are alive worldwide today.

The idea to photograph people who have lived in three centuries evolved over the course of the project. First, I was simply interested in taking portraits of people who appear worn beyond their years by living extraordinarily hard lives. Those experiences drew me to centenarians, and on to supercentenarians and their stories.

Link (Via Ursi's blog)

In this fascinating three-part story, Steve of "The Sneeze" looks into the history of a face that his father has been drawing for the last 60 years. Steve told Drawn!:

My father has been drawing this same ‘face’ on my birthday cards and cakes for as long as I remember. I recently started pressing him for info about this face that he’s been drawing for 60 years and it all unfolded with a completely unexpected and satisfying ending.

The interview with his father is funny and heart-warming. Link

Release 2.0 editor Jimmy Guterman was greeted by this helpful message after he upgraded to the latest version of Adobe Creative suite.

Adobe pushed out an upgrade of its Creative Suite. I installed it, as prompted. This is what happens when I try to run any element of the Suite after the install.

Click on the modal dialog box and the program closes. For extra redundancy, there's a second error message that reads "licensing for this product has stopped working." But I am impressed that I wasn't merely able to get the programs to fail, but that I got them to fail "catastrophically."

Link

Bob Staake is a talented and delightful children's book illustrator. I've written about him on Boing Boing before.

Staake once told me that he still draws with a mouse and an ancient copy of Adobe Photoshop 3.0 (on Mac OS 7, I seem to remember). Here's a video to prove it.

This is one guy who won't be switching to a Cintiq anytime soon. It reminds me of Hunter S. Thompson using his IBM Selectric and a fax machine to submit his stories in the 21st century.

No matter -- Staake is an absolute wizard at what he does, and watching his odd drawing process is really something to behold, at least for and Adobe Illustrator die-hard like myself. Link to Staake's website (Via Drawn!)

Dotnaught writes with word of an anti-trust lawsuit filed against Apple late last month. Information Week has the story, a suit charging the company with maintaining an illegal monopoly on the digital music market. "The complaint goes beyond software licensing politics and charges Apple with deliberately designing its iPod hardware to be incompatible with WMA. One of the third-party components in iPods, the Portal Player System-On-A-Chip, supports WMA, according to the complaint. 'Apple, however, deliberately designed the iPod's software so that it would only play a single protected digital format, Apple's FairPlay-modified AAC format,' the complaint states. 'Deliberately disabling a desirable feature of a computer product is known as crippling a product, and software that does this is known as crippleware.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I knew this was going to be heavy when I saw the title, and it sure was. Heart disease is serious, but you can live with it, as I've found out. I had bypass surgery in 2002, and I'm still here. You can also quit smoking, it's easy when you have motivation.



Om, when you're feel