Month: February 2017

(credit: TimothyJ / flickr)

An infamous "patent troll" called Eolas Technologies has continued to file against big companies, even after losing a landmark 2012 trial. But following an appeals court order (PDF) last week, Eolas will have to pursue its lawsuits in California—not its preferred patent hotspot of East Texas.

As of Friday, Eolas' lawsuits against Google, Amazon, and Wal-Mart have been transferred to the Northern District of California. The move could reduce Eolas' chances of winning a settlement or verdict since East Texas courts have been viewed by some as favoring patent holders.

To understand the context, let's briefly sum up the history of Eolas. The company was formed out of a patent filed by Michael Doyle, who was the head of IT at the University of California, San Francisco, campus in the 1990s. Doyle says that, while at UCSF, he created the first program that allowed users to interact with images inside of a Web browser. He claimed that patent entitled him to royalties on a vast swath of features related to the "interactive Web," including online video, user-manipulated images on shopping websites, and suggestions that pop up in search bars.

Enlarge (credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcxNHgYUz6s)

A maker of Internet-connected stuffed animal toys has leaked a database of sensitive customer data. The leak includes more than 2 million voice recordings of children and parents, as well as e-mail addresses and password data for more than 800,000 accounts.

The data was left in a publicly available database that wasn't protected by a password, according to a blog post published Monday by Troy Hunt. Hunt maintains Have I Been Pwned?, a website devoted to breach disclosure. He said searches using the Shodan computer search engine and other evidence indicated that, since December 25 and January 8, the customer data was accessed multiple times by multiple parties, including criminals who ultimately held the data for ransom.

The data was exposed by Spiral Toys, maker of the CloudPets line of stuffed animals. The toys record and play voice messages that can be sent over the Internet by parents and children. The MongoDB database of almost 2.2 million voice records was stored by a Romanian company called mReady, which Spiral Toys appears to have contracted with. Hunt said that, on at least four occasions, people attempted to notify the toy maker of the breach. In any event, evidence left behind by the ransom demanders made it almost certain company officials knew of the intrusions.

(credit: Andrew Turner)

The operator of a drone that knocked a woman unconscious was sentenced Friday to 30 days in jail, Seattle prosecutors said. The woman was attending a local parade when the drone crashed and struck her.

Paul Skinner, a 38-year-old man from Washington state, was charged with reckless endangerment in connection to the 2015 incident, in which an 18-inch-by-18-inch drone collided into a building before falling into a crowd. The authorities said the 2-pound drone struck the 25-year-old in the head and gave her a concussion. Her boyfriend caught her before she fell to the ground. Another man suffered a minor bruise. The accident took place during during the city's Pride Parade.

Skinner, who had turned himself in, plans to appeal the sentence. His attorney, Jeffrey Kradel, said the punishment was "too severe." His client remains free pending the appeal's outcome. A misdemeanor reckless endangerment charge—one that poses "substantial risk of death or serious bodily injury to another person"—carries a penalty of up to a year in jail.

One of the joys of good space opera, aside from the action, is the discovery of worlds that are meaningfully alien. In award-winning science fiction author Kameron Hurley’s latest novel, The Stars Are Legion, we get to slither into the fascinating, saliva-covered scenery of the biotech world-ships that make up the mysterious Legion. As civil war rips the Legion apart, Hurley draws us into an intense, Bourne Identity-style mystery about who our heroes are and why they’re fighting.

Zan awakens in a medical bay. She can speak, but she doesn’t know who or where she is. A doctor explains that Zan’s been recycled and reconstructed, hinting that she’s been in this situation many times before. But that’s all Zan knows—well, that and the fact that she has the kind of warrior instincts that let her fight like she’s about to enter the Octagon. Plus, she knows an awful lot about how to ride sentient space-motorcycles. The Legion flies these beasts from one ship to the other, trailing plumes of yellow exhaust like something out of a 1960s comic book.

Biotech worlds

A mystery woman named Jayd eventually visits Zan and tells her that she’s currently on a planet ship called Katazyrna. Jayd tells Zan that the time has come to get back to her mission to penetrate the defenses of another world called Mokshi. And it would be nice if she could do it without getting all her troops killed this time around. Apparently, whenever Zan goes to Mokshi, she’s completely destroyed and loses her memory. But Jayd and her mother, Lord Katazyrna, keep sending Zan back because she’s the only person able to breach Mokshi’s outer perimeter.