Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

The alleged takeover of the City by the Bay may sound totally rare, but, unfortunately, it has happened before that disgruntled employees take to modern technology as a means for revenge.

City tech employee Terry Childs, allegedly modified the city system so that he was the only one with top level clearances. The city is still in a tizzy trying to regain control of their new fiber optic municipal network that handles everything from the mayor’s email to electronic court records. Childs, who was arrested on Sunday, is still being held on $5 million bail, after allegedly refusing to hand over the passwords. He at first did supply some, but they turned out to be bogus.

It isn’t even clear why he did what he did, although it’s been said that in days leading up to his arrest, his behavior towards his colleagues was becoming erratic. A new security chief had been brought in to oversee the group’s security, and over the past few weeks some evidence of tampering had been found. It was escalated to the police, who in turn brought in their own forensics team to investigate their network.

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It doesn’t look like the participants in the McAfee S.P.A.M. Experiment have received grand jury summonses in their inboxes yet, but it’s something they can look out for. According to the FBI’s press release about the email,

“At first glance, the e-mail appears authentic. It contains a court case number, federal code, name and address of a California federal court, court room number, issuing officers’ names, and the court’s seal. The spammer directs recipients to click the link provided in the e-mail in order to download and print associated information for their records. If the recipient clicks the link, a malicious code is downloaded onto their computer.
The e-mail also contains language threatening recipients with contempt of court charges if they fail to appear. Recipients are told the subpoena will remain in effect until the court grants a release. As with most spam, the content contains multiple spelling errors.”

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Swedish prosecutors have charged the founders of one of the most popular file-sharing torrent sites - Pirate Bay - with conspiracy to break copyright law.

On the basis that Pirate Bay does not host the ‘illegal’ material, just offering links a la Google to material that already exists on the internet, it does seem like their reputation is going against them as there must be hundreds of sites and blogs across the internet that do the same thing, maybe not to the same level sure.

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I am sure you will all remember back in 2006 when Hyperphrase Technologies issued a patent claim against Google. Truth be told it had somehow slipped my mind that they were claiming “that Google’s AdSense and the AutoLink function of its toolbar infringed claims in four Hyperphrase patents relating to the contextual linking and presentation of information”

Well looks like the court has “upheld the parts of the summary judgment relating to AdSense, and some of the claims against AutoLink, but overturned the part of the ruling dealing with AutoLink’s alleged infringement of two of the patents.” I think that what this means is that AdSense is free to go, but AutoLink has another trip to the courts ahead of it. This will be a disappointment as originally the courts cleared Google but the Court of Appeals overturned part of the judgment for “inappropriate interpretation” for “data reference,” “one of the terms used in the patent claims to describe the way a link is made between a fragment of text and an element in a database”, which I am sure we are all the better for knowing!

Via [Macworld]

If you haven’t been following all of the EchoStar and TiVo madness, here’s what you need to know… TiVo sued EchoStar (owners of Dish Network) for “willfully infringing patents that allow for the digital storage of TV programming.” In their August hearing, the Judge ordered EchoStar to pay TiVo $90.6 million in damages.  Now, EchoStar has made a statement about the merits of the Texas court injunction.

“We are pleased the Federal Court found that EchoStar has a ‘substantial case on the merits’ and blocked the Texas decision for the duration of the appeal. This action by the Federal Court reinforces our belief that the Texas court made significant errors during the trial process and we look forward to complete vindication of our position.

As a result of the Court action, our customers will not be disrupted and all of our DVR models will continue to be available through the EchoStar distribution system.”

So if you’re a Dish Network subscriber, have no fear - you’ve probably got another couple of months until your DVR box is shut off.  Enjoy it while you have it!