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A once-upon-a-time company called "BusCall" advertised its product in a video, pictured here. Its patents have become the basis for hundreds of lawsuits against companies that use vehicle and package tracking. (credit: BusCall)

The three biggest patent trolls of 2015 will all soon face new legal challenges to their most valuable "inventions."

Unified Patents, a company that focuses on invalidating patents through the use of the inter partes review (IPR) process, has filed challenges against patents belonging to the three most litigious "non-practicing entities" of 2015. In late June, the company challenged Uniloc's patent on DRM. Last week, it filed papers against a company called Sportbrain Holdings, which makes wide patent claims over fitness tracking devices. On Monday, Unified challenged Shipping & Transit LLC, formerly known as ArrivalStar, a company that has demanded payments from hundreds of small companies—and even city transit systems—for using GPS vehicle tracking or sending package tracking numbers in e-mail.

The IPR process, created in 2012, has proven effective at knocking out patents that the Patent Office says shouldn't have been issued in the first place. Many private companies have used IPRs, as have third-party organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which challenged the podcasting patent.

Enlarge / Surface Pro 3. (credit: Peter Bright)

Microsoft says that it is going to release a software update for Surface Pro 3 systems that should restore their battery life without requiring any hardware fixes.

Over the last few months, there have been scattered claims that some Surface Pro 3 systems are suffering from extremely poor battery life. Some amount of battery degradation over the lifetime of a system is to be expected, but some owners of Microsoft's tablet computer are saying that battery life has dropped to as little as one to two minutes, which is far below what it ought to be, even after many charging cycles.

Windows' own battery health reporting shows that the charge capacity of affected batteries has dropped precipitously, from the 42Wh they started with to, in some cases, less than 0.2Wh.

In comments that appeared to condone the hacking of sensitive US correspondence, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump on Wednesday said he hoped Russia locates missing e-mails sent by Hillary Clinton when she was US secretary of state.

"Russia, if you’re listening, I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 e-mails that are missing," Trump said during a news conference. "I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let's see if that happens. That'll be nice."

At the same event, Trump also said, "I'm not gonna tell Putin what to do. Why should I tell Putin what to do?... It's not even about Russia or China or whoever it is that's doing the hacking. It's about the things they said in those e-mails. They were terrible things." A video of the entire news conference is here.

Jacob Appelbaum is a former Tor staffer. (credit: SHAREconference)

The Tor Project said Wednesday that its internal investigation has been completed into allegations of sexual misconduct allegedly perpetrated by one of its most prominent staffers, who has since left the organization.

In a statement, Executive Director Shari Steele wrote that the inquiry concluded that "many people inside and outside the Tor Project have reported incidents of being humiliated, intimidated, bullied, and frightened" by Jacob Appelbaum, a now-ex-member of Tor’s "Core Team," adding, "and several experienced unwanted sexually aggressive behavior from him."

The Tor Project is the Massachusetts-based nonprofit that maintains Tor, the well-known open source online anonymity tool.

(credit: Virginia Tech)

As Verizon plans a fiber expansion in Boston, CEO Lowell McAdam yesterday said the company is talking to other cities about potentially building fiber networks.

Verizon stopped expanding its FiOS fiber-to-the-home Internet, TV, and phone service several years ago, making it a surprise when in April the telco announced plans to replace its copper network in Boston with fiber. In an earnings call yesterday (see transcript), McAdam said, "We are talking to other cities about similar partnerships."

Verizon's fiber expansion plans are as much about improving backhaul to its more profitable mobile network as they are about bringing wired Internet to people's homes. "We will create a single fiber-optic network platform capable of supporting wireless and wireline technologies and multiple products," McAdam said.