Google got a bunch of press earlier this week for giving out “free voicemail accounts” to the homeless. I tried to ignore the story, but it keeps getting written about, and it seemed like there were a few points worth making. First of all, this concept isn’t new. Almost five years ago, we wrote about Cisco doing the same thing. There’s a whole organization, called Community Voicemail, that has done this for years. But, an even more important point: Google’s GrandCentral service is already free. For anyone. Whether you have a home or not. So, offering it for free to the homeless isn’t anything special. In fact, it would really only seem newsworthy if, for some reason, the company were not offering accounts to the homeless. So, yes, basically, this is a story about how Google is offering its already free service to the homeless, even though the homeless have already had free voicemail offerings for years. Next thing you know, we’re going to see a press release about how the homeless can now have use search engines for free too… Plus, I hear that the homeless can get free Gmail accounts!

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coondoggie points out a Networkworld story about plans for modular satellite technology which is intended to replace modern, “monolithic” devices. The project hopes to solve issues of scalability and reliability by separating the typical satellite systems and allowing the different modules to change function when necessary. Quoting: “According to DARPA such a virtual satellite effectively constitutes a “bus in the sky” – wherein customers need only provide and deploy a payload module suited to their immediate mission need, with the supporting features supplied by a global network of infrastructure modules already resident on-orbit and at critical ground locations. In addition, there can be sharing of resources between various “spacecraft” that are within sufficient range for communication. DARPA said … within the F6 network all subsystems and payloads can be treated like a uniquely addressable computing peripheral or network device. Such an approach can provide a long sought after “plug-n-play” capability, according to the agency.”

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Microsoft wants to bring the internet to our cars — oh, and advertising, too.

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For a while now, we’ve been pointing out that the captive audience is dead, and anyone who bases their business model on intrusive or annoying advertising to a captive audience is likely to be in trouble. However, Jeremy Wagstaff is pointing out one other unintended consequence of all of this: which is that companies are increasingly searching for that elusive captive audience. He notes that he used to be able to spend time on the bus just looking out the window and contemplating, but now there are strategically placed video screens that make contemplation difficult. These sorts of things are showing up everywhere. I find it increasingly rare to step into an elevator these days that doesn’t have a video screen with some sort of advertising on it. Hell, even urinals aren’t safe any more. Basically, companies are looking anywhere possible where they might be able to find a captive audience and are shoving some kind of advertising in the way, and that means fewer spaces where people can just be alone with their thoughts. Of course, in the end, this will simply contribute to ad blindness, making all of these efforts a waste of money.

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Look out, MySpace — Facebook Music adds cool ways for bands to promote themselves on the popular social networking site.

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Physicist Brian Cox played in a band that recorded what became the anthem of Britain’s Labour Party. Now he’s about to simulate the big bang at CERN’s super collider. A Wired.com Q&A from the TED conference in Monterey, California.

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An anonymous reader writes “Popular Mechanics has been getting some great access inside the labs at MIT all week, and they’ve gotten some interesting looks at developing technologies. Robot-assisted rehab with gaming-style controllers comes out of the biomechanics lab, blind and crash-proof UAV testing with F/X cameras is being done at the aerospace controls lab, and work on electric scooters with super-cheap assembly is proceeding at the Media Lab. Perhaps most exciting is a fight for funding while the holy grail of clean fusion power in reach at the plasma center. The article on fusion predicts, “We’d see economically feasible fusion power by 2035, at the earliest, and increasingly efficient commercial reactors somewhere in the middle of the century.”

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Patrick Dempsey, a former FBI cybercrimes investigator, stirred up controversy yesterday with a proposal to fix the ‘Net’s security problems by building a second one and by strengthening digital borders.

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What do you do when your own broadband offering is a speed laggard? If you’re AT&T, you say that other broadband services really aren’t as fast as advertised and don’t have the infrastructure capable of delivering advertised speeds.

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It would appear that the saga of MercExchange and its patents is finally over, as eBay has agreed to buy the questionable patents from the company effectively ending the longstanding lawsuit. The saga began quite a few years ago, when the patent office granted a patent on the concept of online auctions (no, seriously, don’t laugh… it happened) along with some other related patents for things like the concept of offering a “buy now at a set price” feature on an auction. Not surprisingly, the guy eventually got around to suing eBay over the patent. Luckily, a court tossed out the online auction claims as being too vague, but did proceed with a patent infringement case over eBay’s “Buy It Now” feature — eventually awarding the guy $30 million, even though the patent office was beginning to question the validity of MercExchange’s patents (yes, well after they had granted them).

The case ended up getting plenty of national attention, but not for the main part of the case. Instead, one of the legal questions raised by the case — whether or not a judge should issue an automatic injunction preventing the use of patented technology when someone is found guilty of infringing — made it all the way to the Supreme Court, where a judge found (reasonably so) that automatic injunctions don’t make sense, and courts should look at a variety of factors in determining if an injunction is necessary. This was an important finding, and it meant that the judge back at the actual case didn’t force eBay to stop using its “Buy It Now” feature. However, eBay did still lose the case and was told to pay the $30 million. eBay was in the process of appealing the ruling, but by buying the patents, it’s now over. While no amount is given, you’d have to guess that they paid somewhere near $30 million as the ruling required, perhaps a little less as incentive to avoid having to pay lawyers’ fees during an appeal. While it still seems silly that eBay had to pay many millions of dollars for daring to let people buy a product at a set price, at least the Supreme Court did get a chance to set a precedent using a part of this case. Of course, now we need to hope that eBay doesn’t turn around and sue others for violating the same questionable patents.

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spikedLemur writes “Vladimir Vukicevic of the Firefox team stumbled upon some questionable practices from Apple while trying to improve the performance of Firefox. Apparently, Apple is using some undocumented APIs that give Safari a significant performance advantage over other browsers. Of course, “undocumented” means that non-Apple developers have to try and reverse-engineer these interfaces to get the same level of performance. You really have to wonder what Apple is thinking, considering the kind of retaliation Microsoft has gotten for similar practices.

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Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society has announced that it will head a task force to examine tools to make the Internet safer for children. MySpace, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! are just a few of the companies involved, and they hope that by next year, they will have identified some industry-wide tools.

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A 17-year old from East Boston, blind from birth, has nevertheless gained access to telephone company systems over and over again. It’s pissing off AT&T and Verizon and making him the target of federal prosecutors and the FBI.

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Julius Caesar figures out that those extra hours have added up, and he reforms the Roman calendar by adding an extra day every four years. Enter the leap year.

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After heating up on Usenet and relationship blogs, “responsible, consensual nonmonogamy” boils over into the mainstream. Commentary by Regina Lynn.

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Wired Staff Writer Steve Knopper guinea pigs himself by taking the SAT as an adult, and finds it just as grueling as was the first time.

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British scholar Susan Blackmore says that as memes — ideas or information that copy themselves from person to person through repetition — are evolving much like genes. In fact, Blackmore argues that humans are mere vehicles for the replication and evolution of memes.

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Malware has been a for-profit activity for some time, but there are signs that the industry is taking steps towards commercialize. Web security firm Finjan saw the first SaaS malware service in the wild this month, and there’s surely more to come.

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “It seems that SCO is never without a trick up its sleeve. In the new ‘$100 million’ reorganization plan, $5 million of which is cash and $95 million credit, one of the creditors is protesting because SCO is hiding the Definitive Documents until there’s no time to object. In their own words, ‘The debtors are proposing to file the Disclosure Statement 33 days before the hearing, in compliance with the requirement that it be filed at least 25 days before the hearing (F. R. Bankr. P. 3017). However, it is clear that this Disclosure Statement will be inadequate for evaluating the Plan, because it will not include any of the Definitive Documents. The Debtors are proposing to file the Definitive Documents separately, and to do so a mere five business days before the hearing, which is zero days before objections are due.’”

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Author Dave Hajdu tells the story of an infamous time in magazine history in the United States in his new book, The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. While today’s gamers eagerly await the latest version of Grand Theft Auto, we recall a time when the ten-cent comic book was about as titillating as it got, and what the U.S. did to try to purge it.

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Wired’s Lore Sjöberg dives into the Legend of Zelda universe for a look at Link’s boomerangs, swords, bombs and other tools of destruction. Join us each week for Lore’s cartoons and his insightful, slightly warped commentary.

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Got a bone to pick with an internet adversary? Peeved at a scofflaw organization or a shady political figure? Get revenge in proper geek fashion by crafting a Google bomb.

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One reason Blu-ray drives haven’t shown up in many notebook PCs may be that early versions of the drives are power hogs, eating up so much battery life that you might only get halfway through a movie before needing to plug in.

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An anonymous reader brings us an Ars Technica report about a proposed bill in Tennessee which would require state-funded universities to enforce anti-piracy standards. The universities would be forced to “track down and stop infringing activity” or risk losing their funding. The U.S. Congress requested last year that certain universities do this voluntarily. Quoting: “Efforts taken by universities thus far to deter and prevent piracy have had mixed results. The University of Utah, for instance, claims that it has reduced MPAA and RIAA complaints by 90 percent and saved $1.2 million in bandwidth costs by instituting anti-piracy filtering mechanisms. However, the school revealed that their filtering system hasn’t been able to stop encrypted P2P traffic and noted that students will find ways to circumvent any system. The end result, some say, will be a costly arms race as students perpetually work to circumvent anti-piracy systems put in place by universities.”

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Filmmaker Brett Morgen mixes rotoscope animation with vivid archival footage from the ’60s into what he calls a “mythomentary,” radically repackaging historic political protests for the YouTube generation.

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The Chariot is NASA’s radically new design for a lunar rover. No doors, no windows and no seats — and each of its six wheels has independent steering.

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The “Wikileaks” shutdown situation continues. The Associated Press covered the story late yesterday, noting how Julius Baer’s lawyers were apparently unfamiliar with the concept of the Streisand Effect, and how the attempt to get Wikileaks taken offline would only get it — and the content the company was trying to hide — a lot more attention. Today, Julius Baer has finally made a statement on the matter, claiming a variety of contradictory things. It says that it didn’t want the entire site taken offline, but hasn’t asked the court to reverse its order shutting down the site. As Slashdot points out, the bank also seems to be claiming that the controversial documents in question need to be taken offline both because they’re forged and also because they reveal confidential info. While it is possible that a forged document would also have some legitimate confidential info, it does seem like a strange defense to bring up both of these things. At the very least, it certainly seems like the bank keeps digging itself a deeper and deeper hole. If it really was afraid that having this content out there would make things worse in its ongoing legal battles, things seem a lot worse now as many more people are aware of the documents.

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Intel launched five new 45nm Xeon embedded processors and a new, lower-power chipset this week. The new products are meant to push Xeon products in embedded markets where the company’s previous generation of parts may have been thermally constrained.

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Klatoo55 writes “Various artists are considering lawsuits in order to press for their share of the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars the RIAA has obtained from settlements with services such as Bolt, KaZaA, and Napster. According to TorrentFreak’s report on the potential action, there may not even be much left to pay out after monstrous legal fees are taken care of. The comments from the labels all claim that the money is on its way, and is simply taking longer due to difficulties dividing it all up.”

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “The European Parliament just passed a proposal to treat internet censorship as a trade barrier, in particular the ‘Great Firewall of China.’ If passed by the European Council, the issue would be raised in trade negotiations and could lead to economic sanctions and trade restrictions for those countries unwilling to remove oppressive Net censorship.” We have discussed some of the ways in which the EU, and its member countries, engage in their own brand of censorship.

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Dutch researchers have created a warmed sleeping suit that helps insomniacs and healthy people sleep better.

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The RIAA and its associated organizations certainly have a rather long history of not sharing the windfall from various lawsuits and settlements with the artists the RIAA likes to claim it represents — and now those musicians are getting angry. Torrent Freak points us to the news that various managers and lawyers representing some big name musicians are discussing filing a lawsuit against the record labels for keeping all of that money. The record labels claim either that they are distributing some amount (if required to contractually) or that they’re still trying to figure out how to “split” the money. Of course, they’re also giving the usual story about how “after legal fees” there really isn’t that much left to give out. Remember, though, when it comes to talk to the press or politicians, they’ll swear up and down that these lawsuits are all for the musicians.

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thorwil writes “Brainstorm is a new site where everyone can submit and vote on ideas for Ubuntu. It’s inspired by Dell’s Ideastorm. By default, you see the ideas submitted by the community sorted by popularity. Each idea is accompanied by arrows so you can vote it up or down (you have to log in first). You can only click once per idea. So this is an easy way to submit ideas and see what people are really wanting.”

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eBay has reached a settlement with MercExchange that will finally end a long-running patent dispute over eBay’s Buy It Now feature.

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Wired sits down with author and president of the Environmental Defense Fund, Fred Krupp, and discuss his new book, green technology and the state of the U.S. economy.

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An anonymous reader writes “Researchers from the University of Cambridge have discovered flaws in the card payment systems used by millions of customers worldwide. Ross Anderson, Saar Drimer, and Steven Murdoch demonstrated how a simple paper clip can be used to capture account numbers and PINs from so-called ‘tamper-proof’ equipment. In their paper (PDF), they warn how with a little technical skill and off-the-shelf electronics, fraudsters could empty customers’ accounts. British television featured a demonstration of the attack on BBC Newsnight.”

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Brian writes in to let us know that Major League Baseball seems to be following the NFL’s rules on how reporters are allowed to report on games. In the MLB’s case, reporters can only post short video clips, can’t post more than 7 photos per game and all non-text content must be removed after 72 hours. It’s fairly amazing that news organizations agree to put up with these restrictions. The fact that news organizations caved into the NFL is what has allowed MLB to go down a similar path. Again, MLB has every right to set the terms by which it gives out press passes, but news organizations should push back against these policies, potentially buying tickets themselves, rather than getting team-approved press passes. It’s also not at all clear why a news report shouldn’t be allowed to post as many photos as they want on their site, or why they shouldn’t be able to leave them online for more than a few days.

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An anonymous reader writes “The military’s war on blogs, first reported last spring, is picking up. Now the Air Force is tightening restrictions on which blogs its troops can read. One senior Air Force official calls the squeeze so ‘utterly stupid, it makes me want to scream.’”

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Ars checks out Google’s new web-based productivity and collaboration product, which has Microsoft Office and SharePoint on its hit list. Google Sites’ success, however, will depend on how it evolves from its limited 1.0 offering.

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At the TED conference in Monterey, an unexpected technical glitch almost led to an embarrassing spot of silence — until comedian Robin Williams stood up from the audience and entertained the crowd with an impromptu riff on the day’s topics.

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Philips unveils a paint-by-LED art canvas and the G-Lab has its own home-brewed version.

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BaCa writes “Core Security has issued an advisory disclosing a vulnerability that could severely impact organizations relying on VMware’s desktop virtualization software. It involves directory traversal using VMware’s shared folders, and could allow an attacker access to the host system from a guest VM. Core also released an exploit for the vulnerability.”

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A new community website named Ubuntu Brainstorm aggregates user feedback about the popular Linux distribution. Visitors can comment on and rank the various suggestions and feature requests using a Digg-style voting system.

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Continuing my series of posts on the basics of “intellectual property” (which, yes, is a misnomer, but that’s the next post in the series…), I wanted to just do a quick post highlighting the major differences between the “big three” categories of intellectual property: patents, copyright and trademarks. This is not intended to be a complete description of the three, or a full listing of the differences between them. Just a quick breakdown. And, yes, there are some other things that some people include under the IP umbrella, but we’re going to avoid those for now. Too many people seem to mix up patents, copyrights and trademarks (even the popular press does it all too frequently), and it’s important to at least understand the basics. Also, on the specifics, I’m sticking to US law, rather than international law. There are some major differences across countries, though the key points are pretty similar.

• Patents: A patent is an exclusive right, or a monopoly, granted to someone for a limited time in exchange for publicly disclosing a new and non-obvious invention. The purpose of a patent, as discussed last week, is supposed to be to provide additional incentive for the invention to be created in the first place. While many insist that the purpose of the patent system is to force the disclosure of those inventions, that’s, at best an exaggeration, and at worst, a complete myth. Generally speaking, a patent lasts 20 years from the date of filing. Under current US law, patentable subject matter has expanded quite a bit over the years, and now includes things that at times were not considered patentable, including software and business models or methods.

  Getting a patent requires going through an application process, which can be rather involved. Given the current backlog, it can take quite a long time to get a patent approved. These days the percentage of patents being approved at the USPTO has dropped drastically from earlier in the decade. This is due to a few things, including changes in policies at the USPTO and in the US court system (basically forcing changes on the USPTO). Recipients of patents can assign those patents to other parties or license them, if they so choose. Patents are given to inventors, not companies, but are often assigned to companies (many employment agreements require employees to assign all patents to the company).

  Infringement over a patent can be for violating specific claims within a patent — even if the accused infringer came up with the same thing independently. Coming up with something independently is not considered a valid defense against a claim of infringement (though there is some effort underway to change this, and some believe that an independent invention should be evidence against obviousness towards a patent). Winning a patent infringement case can involve an injunction, forcing the infringer to stop producing the infringing product (even if the infringement is a small part of a larger product) as well as fines for the infringement.

• Copyrights: Copyright is a right given automatically to the creator of new content, granting them the exclusive right (with some exceptions) to reproduce, perform or display the work. There is no application process for a copyright. Any new work is automatically covered by copyright (this is a change from earlier copyright law). Despite the fact that copyrights are automatically granted after a work is created, you can still register a copyright, and doing so allows you to sue for statutory damages against infringers. Copyrights are officially for “a limited time,” though that limited time has been expanded repeatedly over the years, and currently stands at “life of the creator + 70 years.”

  Like patents, the purpose of copyright is solely to encourage the creation of new content. It’s an incentive system of sorts. Contrary to popular opinion, the purpose of copyright has nothing to do with preventing plagiarism or even making sure that someone gets proper “credit” for their works. It also is not designed as a system to guarantee a living for creators. It is merely an extra “right” granted to creators in the hopes that it will help incent the creation of additional content. Copyrights can be sold, and entities other than the original creator can (and often do) own copyrights.

  Copyright infringement is for actually copying the work. Unlike patents where something totally independently created can infringe, copyright infringement only covers copies of an existing work, rather than something similar, but different. There are various and important exceptions to copyright law, with “fair use” being a rather important one. These are uses of the copyrighted content that are considered perfectly legal without first requiring permission. There is also a “right of first sale” associated with copyright, which means that you have the right to resell copyrighted products you have purchased. That’s why you can resell a book or a CD that you legally possess.

• Trademarks: Trademarks are generally a company name, brand or logo that is used to distinguish the company and/or product from competitors. I take exception to the idea that trademarks should be lumped in with patents and copyrights, both of which really come out of the Constitutional clause we discussed last week, and are both designed as incentives for the creation of either inventions or new creative works. Trademarks, on the other hand, are really designed as a form of consumer protection. That is, they’re designed to make it so you know who is actually creating a product, and don’t get tricked into believing that a certain product was made by one company when it’s really made by another.

  There are common law trademarks, but for the most part, a trademark should be registered. Unlike patents and copyright, trademarks aren’t designed to expire and can last as long as they’re used in commerce and don’t become generic. Also, despite attempts to expand what trademark rights grant, they do not confer the same level of control over the mark. Others can make use of trademarks, just not in commerce in ways that are likely to confuse users. Competitors, for example, can use the mark in a comparison or an advertisement (this is sometimes disputed, but it tends to stand).

  Because of the risk of losing a trademark if it becomes generic, there’s a belief that trademark holders are required to police its use — which, again, is a bit of an exaggeration. Yes, trademark holders are required to take certain steps to keep a mark from becoming considered generic and potentially losing the mark, but that doesn’t mean threatening or suing anyone who uses the mark. As we’ve stated, there are many perfectly legitimate ways to make use of someone else’s trademark, and going after those uses is not necessary (though, it still happens all too frequently).

Hopefully that helps explain the key points between the three big types of “intellectual property” highlighting some of the similarities and differences between them. Again, this isn’t designed to be comprehensive — but just to highlight some of the key points, in order to avoid confusion in some of the later discussions. For the next piece, I’ll get into the phrase “intellectual property” itself, and whether it’s an accurate term, as well as look at some of the alternatives.

• On The Constitutional Reasons Behind Copyright And Patents

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A new web application for creating websites joins Google’s stable of browser-based tools. Google Sites is a free application that anyone can use to build a community-editable wiki.

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Astrophysicist Jason Steffen has found a way to get people aboard an airplane that’s at least four times more efficient than what most airlines are doing now. It will save you time and the airlines money.

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dtwood writes “The bank that got WikiLeaks.org erased from DNS finally hired a PR agency and issued a press release filled with half truths and non-statements. Tynan on Tech has it, along with some brief commentary. Worth a look.”

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Europeans, used to paying high prices for tech, aren’t as interested in paying up for digital music. Could one of the reasons be that there are simply too many small music services?

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The Software & Information Industry Association says that online auction sites like eBay are responsible for the sale of a huge amount of pirated software. The SIIA wants the sites to do more to fight counterfeits, but in the meantime, the group has filed a few lawsuits of its own.

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Toyota beware: Volkswagen’s jumping into the hybrid game with a 7-speed, twin-clutch diesel electric Golf that’s cleaner than the Prius. Europe gets it first, of course, but it meets California emissions and could come stateside.

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