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(credit: Erik Mörner)

A patent trial has just kicked off in the patent hotspot of East Texas, and it's a big one. VirnetX, a patent-holding company that says it owns wide-ranging rights to Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), is facing off against Apple.

VirnetX says that Apple's VPN technology, as well as its Facetime video-messaging, both infringe the company's patents. A jury trial began today, and VirnetX is seeking $532 million in damages.

“Apple hasn’t played fair," VirnetX lawyer Brad Caldwell told the jury, according to a Bloomberg report on the trial's first day. "They have taken Virnetx’s intellectual property without permission."

Millions of online merchants are at risk of hijacking attacks made possible by a just-patched vulnerability in the Magento e-commerce platform.

The stored cross-site scripting (XSS) bug is present in virtually all versions of Magento Community Edition and Enterprise Edition prior to 1.9.2.3 and 1.14.2.3, respectively, according to researchers from Sucuri, the website security firm that discovered and privately reported the vulnerability. It allows attackers to embed malicious JavaScript code inside customer registration forms. Magento executes the scripts in the context of the administrator account, making it possible to completely take over the server running the e-commerce platform.

"The buggy snippet is located inside Magento core libraries, more specifically within the administrator's backend," a Sucuri advisory explained. "Unless you're behind a WAF or you have a very heavily modified administration panel, you're at risk. As this is a Stored XSS vulnerability, this issue could be used by attackers to take over your site, create new administrator accounts, steal client information, anything a legitimate administrator account is allowed to do."

An employee loads a truck at an Amazon.com Inc. distribution center in Phoenix, Arizona in 2012. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images (credit: Getty Images)

Eric Springer is an Australian developer who worked at Amazon as a software developer engineer. He left a few years ago to work on several Bitcoin projects, one of which he sold.

As a security conscious user who follows the best practices—using unique passwords, two-factor authentication, only using a secure computer, and being able to spot phishing attacks from a mile away—I thought my accounts and details would be pretty safe. I was wrong.

That's because when someone went after me, all those precautions were for nothing. That’s because most systems come with a backdoor called customer support. In this post I’m going to focus on the most grievous offender: Amazon.com. Amazon.com was one of the few companies I trusted with my personal information. I shop there, I am a heavy AWS user (raking up well over $600/month), and I used to work there as a software developer.

This curved keyboard provides thumb accessibility even on large screens. (credit: The Verge)

One of the enduring high points of Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile is the Word Flow software keyboard. It looks good and works well, with a generally sensible autocorrect algorithm and a good implementation of swipe-style typing. Earlier this month it was learned that Microsoft was planning to produce a version of this keyboard for iOS and Android, after e-mailed invitations were sent to some Windows Insiders.

Through The Verge we now have a good idea of what that keyboard will look like, and immediately we can see that it has a rather compelling feature not found in the Windows version of the keyboard: a curved one-handed mode that arcs the keyboard around either of the phone's lower corners. This neatly tackles a problem that a few of us here at Ars were pondering at lunch: how do you make a swipe keyboard work when the phone screen is so enormous that you cannot possibly reach both sides with your thumb. You'd have to hold the phone in one hand and then use your index finger, or something equally inconvenient.

The solution Microsoft has implemented in Windows 10 Mobile is to allow the keyboard to be scrunched down and pushed closer to one side of the screen or the other. The solution seen in the pictures of the iOS keyboard looks altogether neater: not only does it draw the very furthest keys in, so that they are within reach of the thumb, it also pushes the keys closest to the corner further out, away from the corner, so that you do not need to contort to reach those either.