Month: December 2016

Enlarge / Software as a Service offerings are pushing further and further into territory companies would have never considered outsourcing. Just how much can a company practically put into cloud application provider's hands? (credit: Nicoelnino/Getty Images)

Everything old is new again. Software as a Service (SaaS) may seem like a recent innovation, but the basic concept stretches back half-a-century to IBM's mainframe timesharing of the 1960s. Even its most current incarnation pre-dates the "cloud computing" phenomenon by nearly half a decade.

SaaS supplanted the software-retail model by hosting distributed software as well the company's own data in the cloud, accessible via a Web browser. Enterprises pay for services, not software. After 16 years of SaaS, some companies have moved almost all their functions into the cloud, from enterprise software to productivity packages to telephony. According to IT research company Gartner, cloud office systems—like Office 365 and Google Apps—will achieve 60 percent total market penetration by 2018.

Despite that prediction, the majority of companies still maintain a significant portion of their software on site. Companies do this for a variety of reasons, including security and compliance concerns and the initial and long term costs of switching from software licenses they already own to a pay-as you go model. But there are also many cases in which companies suffer from decision inertia.

Enlarge (credit: ZM Yi/Flickr)

Nintendo has launched a new bug bounty programme that offers rewards of up to £15,000 ($20,000) in exchange for vulnerability information regarding its handheld console, the 3DS.

Hosted by San Francisco-based HackerOne—a bug bounty platform created by security staff from Facebook, Microsoft, and Google—the programme invites researchers to find and address security vulnerabilities in the 3DS. These include "dissemination of inappropriate content to children," cheating methods like "save data modification," and of course piracy via "game application dumping" and "copied game application execution."

Nintendo also lists potential areas of investigation, including system vulnerabilities via "ARM11 kernel takeovers," and hardware vulnerabilities via "security key detection."

After being unveiled in October, today marks the official launch of Google Wifi. Google Wifi is Google's second attempt at a Wi-Fi router, after the Google OnHub released last year.

The new feature for "Google router version 2" is mesh networking, while the OnHub's promised-but-never-delivered smart home features are dropped. You can buy multiple Google Wifis, and they'll all mesh together, offering (hopefully) better coverage than a single device. Google is pushing the mesh capabilities heavily with a $299 "3-pack" option or $129 for a single device.

Enlarge (credit: Frettie)

Facebook, Microsoft, Twitter, and YouTube have announced that they will be working together to curb the dissemination of terrorist material online. The Web giants will create a shared industry database of hashes—digital fingerprints that can identify a specific file—for violent terrorist imagery and terrorist recruitment materials that have previously been removed from their platforms.

According to a statement the four companies have jointly released, the hope is that "this collaboration will lead to greater efficiency as we continue to enforce our policies to help curb the pressing global issue of terrorist content online."

Once a hash has been added to the database, "other participating companies can then use those hashes to identify such content on their services, review against their respective policies and definitions, and remove matching content as appropriate." Matching content will not be removed automatically, the statement says, and other online services will be encouraged to join the scheme.

Enlarge (credit: Zach Gibson/Getty Images)

Here's a seemingly sure-fire way to avoid violating US patent laws: just don't make or use your product in the US. Pretty straightforward, right? Maybe not, in the age of modern supply chains and manufacturing. Today, the US Supreme Court takes up a case that will determine how much help an overseas manufacturer can get from the US without running afoul of US patent laws.

The case originates in a dispute between two competitors in the field of genetic testing. Both Promega Corporation and Life Technologies (selling through its Applied Biosciences brand) make DNA testing kits that can be used in a variety of fields, including forensic identification, paternity testing, medical treatment, and research. Promega licensed several patents to Applied Biosystems that allowed its competitor to sell kits for use in "Forensics and Human Identity Applications." The license forbade sales for clinical or research uses. In 2010, Promega filed a lawsuit in federal court, saying that Life Technologies had "engaged in a concerted effort to sell its kits into unlicensed fields," thus infringing its patents.

A Wisconsin federal jury found that Life Tech had willfully infringed and should pay $52 million in damages. But the district judge overseeing the case set aside that verdict after trial, ruling that since nearly all of the Life Tech product had been assembled and shipped from outside the US, the product wasn't subject to US patent laws.