Cody Taylor

Macworld is reporting that Apple and AT&T are being sued, again, for the lack of delivery on their 3G network. This follows a long line of other lawsuits in San Jose, San Diego, Alabama, Florida, Texas, and New York “The lawsuit charges the companies with Negligence, Breach of Express Warranty, Breach of Implied Warranty of Merchantability, Unjust Enrichment, Negligent Misrepresentation, Violation of the New Jersey Consumer Fraud Act and Other Similar State Statutes, and Breach of Contract. Dickerson is seeking to force Apple and AT&T to correct its labeling and advertising, as well as to recover compensatory, statutory and punitive damages.”

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The indispensible jamie found a report out of Kentucky of exactly the kind of shenanigans that voting-transparency advocates have been warning about: a circuit court judge, a county clerk, and election officials are among eight people indicted for gaming elections in 2002, 2004, and 2006. As described in the indictment (PDF), the election officials divvied up money intended to buy votes and then changed votes on the county’s (popular, unverifiable) ES&S touch-screen voting systems, affecting the outcome of elections at the local, state, and federal levels.

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I’ve never been particularly tech–savy, so you might think I’m unqualified to write a column comparing Dell’s computer repair customer service to Apple’s. But this is no tech-head review. Instead, I’m only reporting the events of my last week when a perfect storm of mishaps combined to break both my Dell Laptop and Mac Powerbook.

mellowdonkey writes “Last year’s CanSecWest hacking contest winner, Charlie Miller, does it again this year in the 2009 Pwn2Own contest. Charlie was the first to compromise Safari this year to win a brand spankin new Macbook. Nils, the other winner, was able to use three separate zero day exploits to whack IE8, Firefox, and Safari as well. Full detail and pictures are available from the sponsor, TippingPoint, who acquired all of the exploits through their Zero Day Initiative program.”

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eviltangerine writes “Twitter user stroughtonsmith was dickering around with the carrier bundle files for his developer version of the iPhone 3.0 OS and enabled the USB tethering options. Apparently he has even been able to use his laptop to access the internet over the USB tether. MacRumors comments that while Apple has announced the availability of tethering, it hasn’t hashed out the details with the mobile carriers (probably so they can charge more in fees). No word on connection speed, but here are some pictures of his phone while tethering.”

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Nvidia and ATI duke it out to see who offers better performance in Vista and in Windows 7.

An anonymous reader writes “Everyone has seen Apple’s clever ‘I’m a Mac’ ads, and Microsoft’s attempted responses, first with Jerry Seinfeld, and next with ‘I’m a PC.’ The Linux Foundation tries to fire back with its community-generated ‘We’re Linux’ video contest: all of the eligible videos have now been submitted and are ready to be voted on. Thankfully, the quality of Linux is much higher than the quality of some of these entries: entries range from the hilarious but inappropriate, to the well-made but creepy, to the ‘I’m sure it sounded good in your head.’ Thankfully, there are one or two that could actually be real commercials.”

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gandhi_2 writes “Sun Microsystems soared in European trading after a report that it was in talks to be acquired by IBM. The Wall Street Journal, quoting “people familiar with the matter,” reported Wednesday that International Business Machines was in talks to buy the company for at least .5 billion in cash, a premium of more than 100 percent over the company’s closing share price Tuesday. Officials of Sun and IBM could not immediately be reached for comment.”

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I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property writes “Discovery Communications, the parent company of the Discovery Channel, is alleging that Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader infringes upon their patent for DRM-encumbered e-books (Discovery’s complaint, PDF). The patent in question was filed back in 1999 and issued in 2007 — coincidentally one day after Kindle 1.0 went on the market — and has claims for DRM implemented with a great many particular symmetric key ciphers and key exchange algorithms, (the patent has 171 claims). Unlike most software patents, this one goes into quite a lot of detail about how the encryption is to be performed. But it will still be interesting to see if it can pass the ‘machine or transformation’ test now that In Re Bilski is being accepted as precedent. After all, it seems like all of these encryption and e-book distribution schemes could be run on a general-purpose PC, so is the ‘invention’ actually tied to a ‘particular machine or apparatus’ just because an e-book ‘viewer’ (not to mention ‘home system’, ‘library’, and ‘kiosk’) happens to be specified in the patent’s claims? Or can the encryption of an e-book be claimed as some kind of ‘transformation’ when the law in that area is especially murky — when no one knows how In Re Bilski may affect the precedent of In Re Schrader?”

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angry tapir writes “Diebold has released a security fix for its Opteva automated teller machines after cyber-criminals apparently broke into the systems at one or more businesses in Russia and installed malicious software. Diebold learned of the incident in January and sent out a global security update to its ATM customers using the Windows operating system. It is not releasing full details of what happened, including which businesses were affected, but said criminals had gained physical access to the machines to install their malicious program. Arrests have reportedly been made.”

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