Recently posted comments

Of course, many websites prefer playing catching-up with their blacklists...

1 non-troll companies also act abusively with patents.
2 however you define it, it just seems to just invite creative ways of acting abusively with patent while avoiding being classed as a troll
3 it legitimises software patents by implying that they're not a problem except when trolls are involved
4 if you actually agree with software patents (I don't but some do) then selling your patent to some entity who is willing to do the leg work and take the risks is a perfectly legitimate way for an inventor to profit from their invention

The disease is patents, trolls are just the current symptom, if we make them go away, some other symptom will arise, there's too much money on offer for it not to.

Attacking the action (demanding money in bad faith, making them post bonds etc) does make a bunch of bad patents unprofitable and so attacks the disease (but only partially).

Google are strongly pushing people to use Drive.

Case in point: my Gmail account reached 95% capacity a few days ago, so now I have a permanent banner at the top of the page warning me about it. When I went to buy extra storage space, I discovered that they removed the ability to do so some months ago.

It used to be possible to buy Gmail storage space in sensible increments up to some crazy amount; now, the only way to get extra space is to pay for a Drive subscription, where they also throw in 25GB of Gmail space (no more, no less - it's a fixed amount no matter how much Drive space you pay for). Oh, and that costs 5 times as much, so that I can get something I will never, ever want.

I quite agree. The EFF did mention this at the end of their article; "While we admire these bills' creativity, the obvious takeaway from this fact is that there are a lot of areas of the patent system that are very, very broken. So let's take a step back and push for real, comprehensive change."

> I would personally like to see the definition of patent trolling in the legislature significantly expanded

I agree it is weird to call "bad faith" claims as properly addressing patent trolls. Undoubtedly it addresses a lot of what they do, but they can make a very good business out of making "reasonable" claims with the patents they've aquired. They are trolls by virtue of buying patents and using them to extort others, not by virtue of whether their infringement claims are applicable or not.

In this case it missed for several reasons. 1) This wasn't getting marked as untrusted user data. 2) The cross function tracking wasn't working. 3) The underflow check was ignoring if we capped the upper value. *eyeroll*

I haven't pushed all the Smatch changes yet, but it's sort of working now to the point where it would have found this bug. It did find a couple problems in ATM network drivers as well.

But if Google are encouraging developers to use Google Drive instead, they can't be too disuaded by DMCA letters and similar.

I wonder if this isn't some cynical attempt to force developers to use more varied parts of Google's infrastructure. It doesn't seem likely, but I can't see a convincing reason for this ridiculous change.

Anyone can go to the Google site at any time, click, and be licensed for all future _and_past_ uses. So the only time anyone would ever actually need to do that is if they had been sued, and doing it would make the lawsuit go away. I actually think this is a pretty cunning solution if it's not possible to have a sublicensable licence (I suspect, with no evidence, that MPEG-LA didn't allow that).

As for the field-of-use restriction, expecting MPEG-LA to allow Google to give free licenses to all these patents without such a restriction is basically expecting them to blow up a substantial part of their H.264 licensing business. That seems somewhat unlikely.

Finally, comparing patent license agreements to the OSD is a category error IMO.

Gerv

We only seem to be seeing action on this rather specific corner here & now because this behaviour is causing pain to organizations both large & small.

I mean, I would personally like to see the definition of patent trolling in the legislature significantly expanded. But we're not going to see that, because it would cover the way many large companies who have a lot of sway operate.

*cringe*

No more major revisions to the language, I beg you Python gods!

(But implicit concatenation *is* evil, maybe sneak it into a minor release)

Of course, in a privileged tracer there are lots of other ways to cause trouble inside the kernel, and there is not yet any DTrace port for Linux which implements unprivileged tracing -- but at least unprivileged tracing is implementable there. I don't see how it could be implemented in ktap without a crude timeout or something of that ilk. Nonetheless, ktap looks very interesting and I am cheering from the sidelines, since a bytecode interpreter is much more elegant than the module-compilation approach taken by SystemTap.

(one note: DTrace for Linux is available to everyone, not just paying customers, though you do need to use the UEK2 kernel. The source for the userspace component I work on is not available, though :( )