Year: 2007

Still a Few Bugs in Consumer GPS Systems

No Comments

The directions they give may be no better than those of Cletus B. Hounddog, so take their advice with a grain of salt. Case in point, a woman, and her £96,000 Mercedes River Sence in Sheepy Magna*, Leicestershire.

Of course, someone who is willing to pay £96K ($US 195K) for a car, probably has more money than brains.

*Sheepy Magna????? Now that is a screwy name. A quick Google finds this:

Sheepy, (from the old english sceap + eg meaning ‘island or dry ground in the marsh where the sheep graze’), straddles the River Sence from Fieldon Bridge, the boundary with Atherstone and also the county boundary with Warwickshire. Sheepy is divided into two parts Great Sheepy or Sheepy Magna and Little Sheepy or Sheepy Parva, each with it’s own ancient manor. Sheepy Magna also includes the Hamlets of The Mythe and Pinwall, The Mythe may well have had it’s own manor but Pinwall was a Grange of Merevale Abbey. Newhouse Grange was also part of the Merevale estate and remained annexed to the parish of Merevale until 1885.
…..

Judge Says that Qualcomm Acted in Bad Faith, Loses Patent Rights

No Comments

The concealing of existing or likely future patents seems to be all to common in standards setting, and now a Judge has slapped down Qualcomm for engaging in “an organized program of litigation misconduct” in a patent suit against Broadcom.

This is big, and this is good. One of the more sophisticated methods of patent trolling out there is to concealed patented, or patent pending, product when one sits on standards making bodies, and when the standard is widely accepted, it’s time send out demand letters.

Then again, the ruling may be more narrow:

… in a patent case in San Diego, U.S. District Judge Rudi Brewster ruled that two Qualcomm patents related to video-compression technology can’t be enforced because the company deliberately concealed the patents from a standards-setting group. Qualcomm compounded its misconduct by withholding evidence and making false statements before, during and after a trial in the case that ended in January, the judge concluded.

Another possibility is that this is more an artifact of telling blatantly transparent lies to a judge, which tends to piss them off.

Then again, this is getting interesting:

But after the surprise discovery during the trial of an initial set of relevant emails, Qualcomm found and later shared more than 200,000 emails and other documents with the court. After reviewing the documents, Judge Brewster concluded that Qualcomm engineers had participated in the group well before May 2003. He also rejected Qualcomm’s suggestion that its failure to share evidence with Broadcom was an accident.

“The eventual collapse of Qualcomm’s concealment efforts exposes the carefully orchestrated plan and the deadly determination of Qualcomm to achieve its goal of holding hostage the entire industry desiring to practice the H.264 standard,” he concluded.

Broadcom, meanwhile, is pushing to find out more about whether senior Qualcomm executives knew of evidence that should have been disclosed sooner. It contends Qualcomm withheld information from other standard-setting bodies, too, a charge Qualcomm rejects.

“I think this is just a snapshot of their corporate behavior,” said David J. Rosmann, Broadcom’s vice president of intellectual-property litigation.

Pass the popcorn.

Of Course Fox is Screaming “Terrorism”

No Comments

I was exercising (stationary bicycle), and watching TV at the Gym. CNN was focusing the bridge collapse and the trapped miners, and on the next TV over, Fox News was screaming “run for your lives, and put your trust in Bush”, about the Foot and Mouth* outbreak in the UK.

Fox News is really into creating terror as a way to hold onto viewers.

Let’s be clear. This is not terrorism. The subvariant of the virus is not one commonly found, but it is very close to the one in the 1967 outbreak, which is used for vaccine manufacture at a laboratory in Pirbright, which is is within the 3- kilometer protection zone.

If someone wanted to do bio-terrorism with hoof and mouth, it would be easier to go to areas of Asia or Africa where the disease is endemic (the 2001 outbreak was the “Type O pan Asia” strain), collect samples, and cover most of the country in a car for multiple outbreaks in multiple locations.

I once priced it out, and you could probably do this for less than 50 grand.

*Foot and Mouth and Hoof and Mouth are the same thing. The Brits call it the former, and we call it the latter.

Adventures in Thievery: Bear Stearns Caymans Bankruptcy Filing

No Comments

When people call for the unfettered free market, they are really calling for these sorts of larcenous behaviors.

One of the little observed parts of the 2005 bankruptcy law allows American firms to go venue shopping for places with phony tax laws, phony regulation and phony courts to avoid any consequences of their actions.

Creditors may argue that the main case should proceed in the U.S. To do so they must show the U.S. bankruptcy judge that the hedge funds had their “center of main interests” in the U.S, said Robin Phelan, of Haynes & Boone, who represented hedge fund InverWorld Inc. in its 1999 liquidation in the Caymans.

Because the two hedge funds were incorporated in the Cayman Islands, that’s presumed to be the center of main interests, according to Phelan.

Of course, the plaintiffs are not angels either, investing in predatory lending as a way to make money.

If there were only a way for both sides to lose.

If There Was Any Doubt that Christian Dominionists Were Settting the Stage for an Eventual Coup

No Comments

While the news that senior Pentagon officers seems like a stupid infraction of the rules, I see it as part of a larger, and more troubling picture.

Specifically, if one follows what is going on in the Christian Dominionist Movement, this is clearly a part of the pattern, along with things like the bigotry and harassment at the Air Force Academy, of the Religious Right create a military amenable to a Religious coup that would create a theocracy in the US.

They have been calling for this for years.

Four military generals, two in the Air Force, violated ethical standards by appearing or participating in a Christian fundraising video filmed inside Pentagon hallways, according to the Defense Department’s Inspector General’s office.

Maj. Gens. Peter Sutton and Jack Catton Jr. did not secure approval to promote the evangelical group Christian Embassy while they were in uniform, according to the inspector general. Two Army brigadier generals, Vincent Brooks and Robert Caslen Jr., are accused of the same.

Glenn Greenwald is 100% Correct

No Comments

He says America is plagued by a self-anointed, highly influential, and insular so-called Foreign Policy Community which spans both political parties, and this assesment is absolutely correct.

I’m not sold on Obama. I’m leaning towards Edwards in fact, but his statement that using a nuclear weapon to take out one individual, and in the process taking out a whole city, is counterproductive and ….well …. insane…is spot on.

Glenn Greenwald’s point about the general uselessness of the Washington foreign policy establishment is correct.

My only quibble is that it should not be limited to the foreign policy establishment.

Signs of the Apocalypse: The WaPo Editorial Page Gets it Right

No Comments

They cut the Democrats a new one for rolling over on warrantless surveillance.

Truth, the WaPo editorial page being what it is, which is to say only marginally more sane and truthful than the Wall Street Journal and New York Sun editorial pages, one wonders if this is more an attempt to cut the Dems a new one, like the rest of the beltway kool kidz krowd, and less of a real statement of values.

Evil Incompetent Executives Failing Up

No Comments

I see this as a classic market failure. Bob Nardelli being named head of Chrysler is an indication of how corrupt and self serving our “manager” class has become. (Full disclosure, I worked for this guy when I was at GE Transportation Systems working on locomotives, but I never met him).

Here is a guy who engineered massive stock losses at Home Depot, and walked away with bonuses as a result….Great steward of shareholder value there…huh?

He’s gotten the job because it’s a way for other managers to guarantee that they fail upward too.

This is corrupt, plain and simple.

He said he hoped his own compensation would not become an issue in Chrysler’s ongoing contract talks with the United Auto Workers union.

Yes, I sure you don’t want that to be an issue, you contemptible greedhead.

Nardelli said Chrysler’s established restructuring plan is adequate but added that as a private company the automaker will look to move quickly to monetize some assets, with a focus on cash flow rather than reported earnings.

That one’s pretty easy to read: Cerberus bought Chrysler for what amounts to a few magic beans, and they are going to treat it like a chop shop treats a Lexus.

Our system of values in the US is more f%$#ed up than Osama bin Ladens.

A Very Good Insight Into the Group Mind of Economists

No Comments

Dan Rodrik has a very good post on a fundamental difference in the economist community.

Essentially, it comes down to those who believe that theory as it now exists explains how the economy behaves, and any divergence from the theory as noise, and those who who see the noise as significant to a degree that textbook theory cannot be realistically applied.

Speaking as a non economist, I would see Milton Friedman (he got a Nobel for monetary free market theory) falling in the first category, and Joseph Stiglitz (he got his for his descriptions of how information asymmetry distorts free markets) in the second category.

There is a third category I think that he missed between the “first-best economists” and “second-best economists”, those who will revisit their theory on the basis of real world observations, where I would put Keynes, who I admire far more than Friedman.

Guys Night Out

No Comments

My daughter had a concert this evening at her very frum1 summer camp.

It’s a girls only camp, and a female only concert, because it’s not tznius2 for women to sing for men not their relatives3.

This meant that it was guys night out for Charlie and me. So we got Pizza, and since the local Kosher place (there are at least 2 Kosher pizzerias in Ballmur4.

As luck would have it, they have introduced a Sicilian5 pizza, so Charlie and I shared one, half extra cheese, and half had mushroom and felafel6. It was his first exposture to deep dish pizza. I had to explain to him that its shape was because it was baked in a (square) pan.

We hung out, and chatted about this and that…The sort of things that an 8 year olds mind turns to…like microbiology7.

After gorging ourselves, we went to the bookstore and he looked at the fiction (didn’t find anything), and I looked at the aircraft magazines (I didn’t find anything either).

1 Meaning very old school Orthodox Jewish

2 Meaning modest

3 In fact, you could call it medieval with no objection from me.

4 Baltimore Maryland, hon.

5 Deep Dish pizza to the uniniated.

6 A poor substitute for sausage, but it’s what is available at a Kosher place, and corrupting my son would upset my beloved.
7Really…He’s discovered Giant Microbes dot com, so we were talking about things like the difference between Salmonella and Typhoid fever, the origins of Mitochondria, Organelles in the cells, the role of Adenosine-triphosphate and RNA in cellular function, etc. He’s scary smart. He used the word metaphor in proper context when he was 5.

Another Victory for the End User.

No Comments

The response of the record distributors to digital music has been punative and stupid, and they’ve just been slapped down by a Court in Germany.

They refused to force an ISP to turn over data of file sharers.

Under the European privacy regulations, this is typically restricted to criminal, not civil, matters:

The ruling follows the publication two weeks ago of an Advocate-General’s opinion prepared for the European Court of Justice (ECJ) which said that countries whose law restricted the handing over of identifying data to criminal cases only were compliant with EU Directives.

Advocate-General Juliane Kokott produced advice for the ECJ on a Spanish case in which a copyright holders’ group wanted ISP Telefonica to hand over subscriber details to it.

Kokott said that details did not have to be handed over in civil cases such as Telefonica’s, and that they only had to be handed over in criminal cases. The ECJ does not have to follow an Advocate-General’s advice, but does so in over three-quarters of cases.

Another German authority had made a similar decision earlier this year, according to Heise Online. The chief prosecutor’s office in Celle refused to offer a handover because it said that substantial damage had not been shown, and that it doubted that music industry representatives would use the evidence to bring a criminal case.

It would be nice if the US weren’t the 3rd world of privacy rights.

NBC Producer Owned at Def Con.

No Comments

It appears that an overzealous, and quite frankly not very bright Producer for the NBC program Dateline, Michelle Madigan, got outed at Def Con, the hackers convention.

Reporters are allowed, they are supposed to wear a press badge, and not to photograph or record without the subject’s consent.

Def Con is a bit of an odd bird, it resembles those “Christmas Truces” during the first world war, with white hats, black hats, and law enforcement all mingling in relative peace.

There is a hacking contest, and numerous demonstrations of security holes and hacking tools, which is why law enforcement shows up. This is just as useful to them as it is to the Nigerian spammers who attempt to get you to give them your bank account information.

It appears that the hopefully soon to be unemployed Ms. Madigan was attempting to create a bogus story about law enforcement folks being there.

While probably not factually false, it’s an attempt to create a scandal where none exists. Def Con is as valuable an asset to people combating hackers as it is for hackers, and any security professional who gets his undies in a bunch about people attending should not be in the field.

There is a description, with photos and video, of Ms. Madigan’s flight once she was outed here.

It appears that she was chased from the show by reporters looking for pictures and video once she was outed.

I love the irony.

Boeing, US Air Force Attempt to Rig Tanker Competition

No Comments

There has been a long history of Boeing and the Department of Defense attempting to cut a deal to avoid competition on this program. In fact, a DOD official went to jail over this.

They have now jointly come out with a statement that the tanker order should not be split, claiming that the logistics and development duplication would be prohibitive.

This is a lie. There are numerous airlines that operate both the B-767 and the A-330.

As to development costs, both manufacturers are making flying these tankers in preparation of delivery overseas customers.

What is true is that it would completely politically untenable to shut Boeing out of this deal, and by adding this sort of requirement, you make Boeing the only choice.

Japan Starts Toward Abolishing Pacifism in its Constitution

No Comments

Aviation Week has an article indicating that Japan’s interest in the F-22 is being driven by an turn toward a far more aggressive military policy.(subscription required)

If they just needed normal cruise missile defense, upgrading F-15 radars would do the job. The idea that that they want to acquire a large, long range, supercruising, and stealthy platform implies that they want to make preemptive strikes against cruise missile sites an integral part of this defense.

An air force must at least be able to attack the launch sites “to put an offensive ballistic missile capability at risk,” a senior U.S. Air Force official involved in the debate says. “You’ve got to get out in front of [cruise and ballistic] missile launches. Otherwise, some are going to get through.”

Of course, Scuds and their derivative (North Korea) are already mobile, and hence hard to strike and hard to hit, as evidenced by the problems in Desert Storm, when there was no threat to aircraft doing Scud hunting, and they could not reliably find the launchers.

But officials now say the fiscal 2008 budget may provide money for more upgrades. The reason is that the technology is a path to the world of network-centric warfare that has already been used by the U.S. Air Force. USAF first adopted the (v)1 radar but then upgraded it with a 21st century emitter and antenna—the 1,000-element, active electronically scanned array (AESA). That improvement, designated the APG-63(v)3, produces a radar with the ability to see small targets, such as cruise missiles, or to identify tactical ballistic missile launchers in their radar-generated ground maps. The radar also can transmit large files of imagery, electronically attack enemy sensors through jamming and insertion of false targets, and provide two-way digital connectivity to other aircraft and sensors in the battlespace.

“The Japanese could make that shift to (v)3 at any time,” the industry official says.

That shift would add another option to the decision about a new fighter for the Japanese air force. F-15s equipped with AESA would have a larger radar aperture than the F-22. As a result, in the defensive, anti-cruise missile role, the Eagle would have an advantage in detecting smaller objects at longer range because of its additional power and size. While attacking missile launch sites with the F-22 is a “strategically solid concept” for the long term, buying interim, AESA-equipped F-15Es or F/A-18E/Fs might be attractive to Japanese defense planners. So far, they have rejected the idea of a bridge aircraft.

This is the key phrase.

Aperture is the size of the antenna, and because the F-15 is non-stealthy, it has a larger antenna. The laws of physics dictate that the F-22 is inferior to the F-15 in this role.

When juxtaposed by the growing number militarist groups in Japan, and an increasing tendency toward those groups engaging in violence toward critics, this is a very troubling development.

Additionally, any problems in North Korea would handled by a the US Military, possibly with with F-22 sorties from either Korea or Japan, or F-35 sorties from a carrier.

This is intended to strike China.

Japan has never come to terms with the atrocities committed, including the only use of bio-warfare in modern military history, during its period of empire building, which is arguably the the worst of the 20th century.

Unlike Europe, where the militarism has largely been driven out of the public consciousness, in Japan it has been placed in a closet for later use.